Saturday, March 03, 2007

Bonus Pucture!


Another paint job on the Charging Tiger Wagon.
Hagenbeck-Wallace 1934.
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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mickey Mouse? You mean Feld didn't invent the GSOE Disney tie-in?

GaryHill said...

Looks like a Mickey Mouse outfit to me?

Dick Flint said...

But it was no Mickey Mouse artist who decorated this wagon, though it was not Disney himself. This is one of three tableau wagons (numbers 75, 71, and 41) with canvas paintings attached to the sides drawn by Emmett Kelly in the Peru quarters during the winter. This is wagon 41 and shows the side illustrating “Mouseville” while the other presented “Mickey Mouse’s Circus.” Number 75 tableau painted by Kelly portrayed Red Riding Hood and Humpty Dumpty, one on each side, while number 71 similarly depicted Mother Goose and Little Bo Peep.

Dick Flint
Baltimore

Anonymous said...

I wonder if there was a Disney association. Disney started to license his characters early, and also go after businesses that used them without his permission.

Dick Flint said...

More telling, and more likely to be documented, would be the use of Disney characters such as the Seven Dwarfs in the Ringling specs. I would be quite surprised, however, if this wagon or clown walkarounds of Goofy, Donald Duck, and other characters would have been concern either to Disney or the show's clowns. By the 1950s-60s, the big ice shows do have licensing arrangements with Hollywood and Broadway for their themed elements. Such arrangements are credited in the programs and a check of the appropriate circus programs might answer any questions for the curious (though LACK of credit is no proof).

Dick Flint
Baltimore

Anonymous said...

Richard REynolds says - -

RBBB's 1938 spec did include the seven dwarfs (of Disney's Snow White fame) in the walkaround. They be seen in the foreground of the Kelty shot of the spec as posed in the Garden.

Just what sort of arrangement was made with Walt D., if any, I do not know. At the time the Snow White characters were red hot in popularity.