from 2007
RUSSELL SCHROEDER
talks about his book "Disney's Lost Chords," and some
 of the songs that never made it to Disney's films

by Scott Wolf

Back in the early 90s when Russell and I were both working for Disney, we were working in the same building and yet it wasn't until the year 2007 that I ever sat down and really talked to him about his impressive career as a Disney artist. Now Russell also has a book out, "Disney's Lost Chords," with a subject that is so dear to me... the songs that never made it into Disney films. I'm pleased to share this interview with you!

Scott Wolf: Why did you create "Disney's Lost Chords"?

Russell Schroeder: I did it because I feel the book should be out there, I wanted to see the composers recognized for their creativity and I knew there would be a lot of Disney fans that like this kind of thing.

SW: Well, you know for a long time I've loved the music that never made it into the films and attractions.

RS: There obviously are people that are interested in it because the DVDs now that come out, they're always looking for unused songs and things that they can find demos on, that they can do special bonus material, because people really like to learn about that.

SW: For those who don't know, what is "Disney's Lost Chords?"

RS: It's a collection of 77 songs that were written for the films as part of the creative process, because music writing at Disney went hand in hand with coming up with character designs, coming up with visual development art and trying to develop a storyline. Each element kind of fed on the other during the creative process, so in exploring characters they wrote songs for characters, they wrote for story points that they were considering and when that aspect of the film changed, either characters dropped out or the storyline changed or in the case of "Sleeping Beauty," when the art direction changed and it finally got settled into Eyvind Earle's hands and he came up with these very elaborate stylized designs for the film, the original music score no longer fit the look of the film. That's from Walt Disney himself.

One of the songs that Sammy Fain and Jack Lawrence had written for "Sleeping Beauty" for the processional at the beginning was "Holiday." It was fully storyboarded by Joe Rinaldi in color pastels or color chalk. It went through full arrangements, the music director had arranged it, he had done the choral version of it. I assume it was recorded but I have not heard a recording so I can't say positively, but since it went that far I'm going to assume there was a demo to run against the storyboards even if it was a temporary track demo. So it was part of the film, but like the Joe Rinaldi storyboards picking up on this "Holiday" song are very close to the people in the town when he has a line that says, "It's a holiday for honest men in scallywags." And Joe Rinaldi has a merchant locking up his shop and a man in the stocks being punished and he's released from the stocks, so you get this close up of people dancing to go along with a lyric line about dancing and finding romance. So it's all this fun and intimate stuff and of course then we come to Eyvind Earle's stuff which is pulling you back and it's very formalized, if you think of that procession, going up to the castle in the film. It's austere with just a few little Disney whimsical touches with the juggler going through this very staid group of people going to the christening. Walt himself said "Holiday" doesn't fit the look of the film anymore, so it was he who actually changed the musical direction on the film.

SW: None of Sammy Fain's songs ended up in the final film, right?

RS: The only thing that remains of Sammy Fain's is that he had adapted the Tchaikovsky "Sleeping Beauty" waltz to "Once Upon A Dream." But other than that, all of his other music was original. He had a song for the fairies during the christening, he had a song for Aurora which is the same purpose as "I Wonder" in the film, called "Where in the World," it does exactly the same thing as "I Wonder" does and it leads into "Once Upon a Dream." He had a song for the enchantment of bringing Aurora to the spinning wheel called "Mirage," and then there was a title song that wasn't Sammy Fain, it was Victor Young. That title song had a lyric line that was going to be repeated during putting the castle to sleep, so they had a full score.

SW: Wasn't there a song called "Go To Sleep" that also didn't make it?

RS: "Go To Sleep" was adapted from Tchaikovsky, so even when they decided to use Tchaikovsky melodies there were a lot of songs written that weren't used.

SW: In your book, there's also some great artwork.

RS: You know, in deciding to do the book, I could have just written the text and told people about the songs and why they were written and what their titles were and who the composers were but I thought how frustrating to read about a song and not be able to go and read the lyrics, or even play the melody if you have that capacity. So I knew you had to have the music in. To do a book with only the music would not put the songs into the context of why they were written in the first place. So I needed to balance music and text and then I wanted to find as much artwork as I could that related to either the time period or to the songs themselves. That's why I tried to find storyboard sketches that dealt with the songs or at least visual development art that related to the songs. That's why there are only a few actual scenes from movies, film frames, in the book. Most of it is all visual development and storyboard art.

SW: Which is just as fascinating because just like the songs, this is the artwork you never see.

RS: I tried as much as possible to get artwork that has not been reproduced before. In some cases I had to repeat because that was all that was available to me to go with the song, but I did try for a lot of things that had not been put out in book form before.

SW: There's also some surprises, like you had "Jiminy Cricket in "Wind in the Willows."

RS: Right, when that was still being considered a feature film he was going to be the narrator. For some reason, they knew very early on that they wanted a narrator in that story and so they had chosen Jiminy and he goes to a book shelf and pulls off the "Mr. Toad" book and starts to tell the story as we go in, and he actually had a couple introductory songs. There was a song called "The Wind in the Willows." Then he starts the song "Tea Time at Four O'Clock" which is picked up by Ratty and Mole and is finished off as they actually get into the story. That artwork that was Jiminy's introduction to the film was reused for "Fun and Fancy Free."

SW: You also have some songs from "Song of the South."

RS: Yes. Originally "Song of the South" was going to be a full animated feature. Uncle Remus was going to be an animated character and songs were being started in about 1939 to '40 or so for that film as an animated feature. What I thought was interesting about some of these early songs was we know that Uncle Remus stories of course are based on African tales, folk tales from Africa, but the songwriters even picked up on the music of the south in that there's such spiritual aspects to some of these songs. Even in their titles, one of them is called "A Ridin' Horse Spiritual" for the story about Br'er Rabbit riding Br'er Fox to a party.

SW: I love the whole spiritual aspect of it, too.

RS: I don't know if you got to read through the song "Walkin'" or not, which is very much like a spiritual with concrete images of walking down a road and ends up where you know they're really talking about walking to the promised land. That's kind of strong stuff for a Disney animated film.

SW: Do you have a favorite song from your book?

RS: It's very hard to pick a favorite. If you ask me to pick a favorite in the book I'll pick ONE of my favorites because it's a beautiful melody line and that's the "Mock Turtle Soup Song" by Frank Churchill. The lyrics are Lewis Caroll's lyrics so they're not original lyrics to Disney, but the melody is just beautiful. It's a surprisingly beautiful melody for such odd lyrics, singing about soup and crackers shining like diamonds in soup. When I gave a talk at the studio about the songs I said it's almost as if Churchill was having a musical joke by writing this gorgeous melody, but when you think about it, he's just being true to the character who is rhapsodizing about the subject that he is just in love with. So the melody is very appropriate to the characters point of view even though a singer having to sing this beautiful melody line with these lyrics is probably a little taken aback. But, it's hard to pick just one song.

There were hundreds of songs that I could've chosen and my first idea was to have the book start from the earliest days up to present days because in working in animation I became aware of why songs were dropped out of films after they had gone through full storyboard development and recordings. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. I couldn't do justice to individual films by trying to include something from every one, so I limited it to films that Walt Disney was involved in and I tried to choose songs that would be fun in themselves or pretty in themselves but also songs that would be very revealing about character approaches. That's why there's the song from "Cinderella" in there that's called "Horse-Sense" that was meant for Bruno the dog and Major the horse to sing. They were actually going to have vocal abilities in the movie so I thought that's very interesting and the song is catchy, too, so it's an okay song on its own, but I thought that shows you something about characters. That's also why I included the Jabberwock song because there's a character that was planned for "Alice," was storyboarded and everything, a demo was recorded for it but that character got dropped out of the film.

There are a lot of songs in there for that reason, but that's why I had to limit that book to seventy seven songs. I'm working on volume 2 right now. I'm not only bringing it up to date, but I'm also doing a backward look at some of the ones from the earlier films that I wasn't able to get in this book.

SW: Do you play the piano?

RS: Yes.

SW: So you were able to play all these songs on your own to see if you like them.

RS: Well, my research took about ten years, Scott. I was still a Disney employee when I started doing the research and I was allowed to make copies of these lead sheets as I found them so I had them all at home and I'm playing them myself. In some cases, the lead sheets were full piano arrangements which was great, sometimes they were just the singing line with chord symbols, and sometimes they just gave you the singing melody line and they didn't even tell you the chord symbols. So I had to try to figure out a lot of this stuff on my own. I'm not a trained musician but I could muddle through a lot of these, so I actually had to come up with arrangements for a lot of these songs. I bought a music writing program for my computer so I could, I'll call it engrave because I think they still use that term even though you're doing it on a computer, I had to arrange and engrave all of the music myself, too, in addition to designing the book.

SW: What's so great is that until now if a demo didn't even exist we can now hear them.

RS: And I'm hoping it might encourage some people to record some of these songs.

SW: I know that years ago there were some records made with various songs that were intended for the films but never made it in, like for "Pinocchio" there was one called "Jiminy Cricket" and "Three Cheers for Anything."

RS: Yes. You know, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" had such a wonderful score. There were eight songs used in that film and just about every single one of them became a hit song and what the industry calls an "evergreen" like "Heigh Ho" and "Someday My Prince Will Come." Songs that remained in publication as sheet music and in demand by recording artists throughout the years. "Pinocchio" did not have that kind of a score. Obviously we have "When You Wish Upon a Star," one of the most memorable songs in the whole Disney list of music, but then when you think of other songs from the film you've got like "Give a Little Whistle" and "Hi Diddle Dee Dee," they had some popularity, but when compared with eight songs from "Snow White," Pinocchio does not have a lot of songs. They published a song for the music box music which was not sung in the film, called "Turn On The Old Music Box," so they did have lyrics for it that they put out there that did make it to recordings. They expanded the "Little Wooden Head" song with a verse to make it more accessible as a popular song, but it was really a throw away song, basically.

SW: Was that common? I know they did the same with "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf."

RS: Oh yeah, they added a lot to "Big Bad Wolf" and even the "Snow White" songs like on "Someday My Prince Will Come" there's a verse that's not heard in the film, they even would change the lyrics of the chorus sometimes just so it would fit more for singers on the outside to increase its salability as a popular song. So yes, a lot of changes would be made and verses always got added to these pieces, whether they were there as part of the original concept or not i can't tell you, but they definitely got included when the music came out for the public.

SW: You included some songs from films that never even happened, like "Rainbow Road to Oz." I've seen the special where the Mouseketeers perform a lot of those songs. What was the story with that?

RS: Walt presented that, gave us a preview of that on the "Fourth Anniversary Show." At first it was going to be a television special and then they might have thought it was going to be too expensive and do it as a film, and then they dropped it. When Walt did the television special which came on in the fall of '57, when he did that preview he had every intention of moving forward. He wasn't just using up some material and making a little bit of money out of it by putting it on television because they were still writing songs in "Rainbow Road to Oz" in December of that year. Some of the story treatments were actually done by Bill Walsh who goes on to do "Mary Poppins," but he was the producer of the "Mickey Mouse Club." So all these people that were working on "Rainbow Road to Oz" actually have a connection with the Mouseketeers via the "Mickey Mouse Club." You have Buddy Baker whose writing the music, being the musical director of the show. You have Sid Miller who directed some of the Mouseketeers, writing some of the lyrics for the songs as well as Tom Adair who wrote material for the "Mouse Club." So it was very centered around the Mousketeers in that television show.

SW: And it would have been starring the Mouseketeers?

RS: And it would have been starring the Mouseketeers. It was very intriguing because there were over a dozen songs written for that. It really would have been interesting to see what they could have done with it but I think once they probably decided it would be so expensive for television that they might have to do it as a movie they probably became fearful of how comparisons would be with the Judy Garland version which was starting to be shown on television and getting popularity all over again through TV exposure.

SW: That great cover art on your book was actually done by Mary Blair. What was that done for?

RS: Disney often lent the services of their artist and their characters for charitable events and this was done in the late 1940s for musicians that had been in World War II, this was a benefit for them that this artwork was done. In my little blurb at the end where I explain about the artwork, it said, "People today may think Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy for the military?" But, we have to remember those character were on insignia for the services. They were very much a part of the World War II serviceman's experience. So now in peacetime, to put them in another role for servicemen was a very natural step, so that painting was done for that event.

SW: Where can people buy "Disney's Lost Chords?"

RS: They can order it from Voigt Publications, 2055 Lower Tuskeegee, Robbinsville, NC, 28771. If people ask for an autograph I can usually sign one for them. Personal checks are fine, and it's $75 + $8.95 for shipping.

SW: I highly recommend it!