In my personal collection, I have video copies of Fifties commercials where Dumbo is shilling for Canada Dry, Alice in Wonderland (in Kathyrn Beaumont’s voice) is proclaiming the joys of Jello, B’rer Rabbit hawks American Motors cars and Jiminy Cricket urges viewers to drink Baker’s Instant Chocolate. The Tinker Bell commercials for Peter Pan Peanut Butter deserve a special column of their own especially since Miss Bell is celebrating her 50th birthday this year.
One of the greatest Disney storymen of all time, Bill Peet, tells a wonderful story in his autobiography of how when he butted heads with Walt Disney on a segment of SLEEPING BEAUTY, Peet discovered that the “next day, I was sent down to the main floor to work on Peter Pan Peanut Butter tv commercials, which was without a doubt my punishment for what Walt considered my stubbornness. I toughed it out for about two months on peanut butter commercials then stubbornly decided to return to my room on the third floor whether Walt liked it or not.”
Some Disney fans are aware of those commercials and may even be aware that doing commercials helped keep the Disney Studio financially solvent after the World War II years and provided some of the money for the building of Disneyland.
Disney veteran Harry Tytle who worked at the Studio for over forty years in a variety of capacities including producing the weekly television program stated in his autobiography: “Commercial work answered our prayers, as it supplied badly needed capital. Advertising work clearly helped keep the studio intact. But while the studio made money with this type of product (and I mean BIG money)it was not a field either Walt or Roy were happy to be in. Their reasoning was sound. We didn’t own the characters we produced for other companies; there was absolutely no residual value. Worse, we were at the whim of the client; at each stage of production we had to twiddle our thumbs and await approval before we could venture on to the next step.”
Wait a minute. What does Tytle mean when he says “we didn’t own the characters”? Didn’t I just write about famous Disney characters appearing in television commercials? And that listing didn’t even include Donald Duck who sold Cheerios and Donald Duck Orange Juice along with dozens of other products.
Well, a little known Disney secret is that the Disney Studios added money to its sadly depleted bank account by creating characters and commercials for other companies. Today, let’s look at two of the most popular ones.
At Disney in the Fifties, veteran animator and director Charles Augustus “Nick” Nichols was in charge of the studio’s television commercial unit, developing such original characters as “Bucky Beaver” for Ipana Toothpaste, “Fresh Up Freddie” for 7-Up and Tommy Mohawk for the Mohawk Carpet Company.
Nichols (1910-1992) began as an animator on the Disney shorts and had most of the responsibility as a director on the Pluto cartoons from 1944-1951. He animated the coachman in PINOCCHIO. He was the co-director of TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953). He later worked at Hanna-Barbera from 1959 through the Eighties on everything from their features like THE MAN CALLED FLINTSTONE to their Saturday morning series like Secret Squirrel, Scooby Doo Where Are You, Herculoids, Mighty Mightor, and many others. From 1988 until his death in 1992, he was a director with Disney TV on The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Goof Troop and Bonkers.
Commercials provided much needed income for the Disney Studios. “They (7-Up) spent two and a half million dollars on their tv commercials, ” remembered Paul Carlson, who was Nichols’ assistant in the unit, when he talked with animation historian Michael Mallory. “I think they did 26 one-minute commercials at $100,000 apiece. And we usually handed out the animation to the staff artists at Disney, but they would do the work at home.”
Seven Up was introduced in 1929 as “Bib Label Lithiated Lemon Lime Soda”. It was called the “Uncola” because it lacks the brownish coloring used in Coca-Cola/Pepsi Cola.
Fresh Up Freddie was the mascot created by the Disney Studios for the soft drink company. He was a cocky animated rooster who looked like a mixture of Panchito the Mexican rooster and the wacky Aracuan bird who both appeared in THE THREE CABELLEROS (1945). Freddie demonstrated how to plan successful parties and picnics by having plenty of 7-Up on hand. He dressed in a variety of different human clothing depending upon the commercial including a bow tie, vest, slacks, and soda jerk hat when necessary. Leo Burnett created the Fresh-Up Freddie ad campaign in 1957.
By 1958, Freddie made his debut in the commercials in the popular Disney TV series, ZORRO. He spouted phrases like “Fresh Up with 7-Up”, “You Like It, It Likes You” and “Nothing Does it Like 7-Up”. Freddie was supposedly named in honor of Seven-Up bottler Fred Lutz Jr. In the beginning, Freddie didn’t have a name but with his connection with the successful ZORRO, television series, the rooster became a celebrity and 7-Up began merchandising the character and featuring him in their monthly ZORRO newsletter to their dealers. They printed nearly 10,000 copies of their newsletter a month. In the newsletter and print ads, Freddie sometimes dressed in a Zorro costume or posed with stars from the series.
Merchandise included a Fresh Up Freddie Figure (mail order painted vinyl figure), a Fresh Up Freddie Ruler (promotional printed clear plastic 6 ¼” by 2″ ruler with bicycle safety rules), a pinback button and a Fresh Up Freddie Stuffed figure. Many of these items pop up in eBay auctions today.
Bill Cotter, the author of the terrific book THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY TELEVISION (and you should immediately go to his website www.billcotter.com to order a very reasonably priced CD he has put together of 256 additional pages about Disney television that do not appear in his extensively researched book), states on his outstanding Disney Zorro website that:
“Zorro had two sponsors, the 7-Up soft drink company and the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors. Walt had gone all out in his effort to obtain 7-Up’s backing, including an appearance in a film made for the soft drink bottlers and their distributors. Cracking Zorro’s whip for emphasis, Walt explained the premise of the series, using models of the as-of-yet unbuilt outdoor sets, as well as samples of the costumes. The sales pitch was successful and 7-Up agreed to participate in a series of joint promotions with Disney, not all tied in with Zorro. For example, Annette and Roberta Shore were seen promoting The Shaggy Dog with a toast of 7-Up.”
“Although there were two sponsors, each had wanted to be specifically identified with the series, so Disney took a unique approach. Instead of having commercials from both firms each week, the sponsors alternated weeks, with a brief word from “your alternate sponsor” making sure that each company shared in the weekly success. Almost forgotten today are the AC characters, Alan Cranbroke and Cynthia Aldrich. This animated couple was joined by live spokesperson Gordon Mills, who settled their domestic arguments and just happened to throw in a mention of AC’s products in the process.”
In my video collection, I have three different one minute Fresh Up Freddie commercials. In one, Freddie wears a party hat and is setting up for a big party with a table and decorations. Then the commercials cuts to a live action segment with a woman who looks like she stepped out of the DONNA REED show preparing 7-Up for her party guests. Then it cuts back to Freddie who urges viewers to get the twenty-four bottle pack. The second commercial is more inventive where Freddie dressed as a soda jerk does a soft shoe shuffle with a live action male teenager before it cuts to a boy and girl teenager enjoying the delights of the soft drink. The third commercial has Freddie as a tv sportscaster asking “What does a sports champion drink?” and then various versions of Freddie as a prize fighter, a female swimmer (with a mermaid tail) and a lanky basketball player attribute their success to 7-Up.
Tommy Mohawk was another commercial character created by Disney. Walt signed a contract in 1951 to produce a series of eight animated commercials for Mohawk Carpets. Since its beginning in 1878, Mohawk is one of the most recognized carpet brands in history. The Fifties were a time of expansion for Mohawk with the construction of new manufacturing facilities and then the merging with Alexander Smith, Inc. to form Mohasco Industries which made it the largest carpet manufacturer in the world.
The contract refers to the character as “Tommy Hawk” so the name (or close enough to it) was already decided fairly early in the creation process. The spots themselves were all animated in 1952. The Mohawk Carpet Company on its website states that “we consider Tommy’s birthday to be 1955 when the commercials ran on television”.
The commercials were directed by Nichols. Most of the animation was done by Phil Duncan, Volus Jones and Bill Justice. Duncan and Jones left the studio shortly after working on the Mohawk commercials and joined a new animation studio called UPA which would make animation history. Disney Legend Bill Justice was very well respected at the time for his animation on the Donald Duck and Chip ‘n’ Dale cartoons.
The titles of the commercials from the Disney production files were: Tommy Tests Carpets, Tommy Supervises Weaving, Tommy Plants Carpet Seeds, Tommy Designs Carpets, Tommy Falls for Minnie, Tommy Gives Animals Sleeping Carpets, Birds Use Waterfall for Loom, Tommy Harvests Carpets.
Apparently the Disney Company files doesn’t have a copy of what the Disney version of Tommy looked like which is slightly different than the version that appears on the Mohawk Carpet website. Thanks to Mark Kausler who is the best friend animation scholarship has ever had and whose generosity of his knowledge and resources have added significantly to every important book about animation written in the last two decades, I was able to see about four years ago a Xerox of a Xerox of a stat of a model sheet that was in the collection of the late Amby Paliwoda. Paliwoda, who passed away at the age of 89 in June 1999, worked as a Disney animator from 1933 up through the early Sixties (one of his last Disney credits was as a character animator on 101 DALMATIANS). He later found work at other animation studios including Hanna-Barbera, Filmation (where he worked on Superman and Batman cartoons), Sanrio, Bakshi-Krantz, Duck Soup and many others.
On Paliwoda’s stat from 1952, it is labeled “Mohawk Tommy, Chatter and Minnie”. Tommy is roughly three heads high and his expression is very similar to other young Disney characters of this time period like the young Pecos Bill. Tommy has a high forehead with a Mohawk haircut with a lone feather stuck into the back of it. He also has two parallel horizontal stripes of warpaint on his forehead. He has a square loincloth that reaches to just above his feet, wears moccasins and carries a tomahawk that looks like a triangular piece of rock with two crisscrossing straps holding it to a simple wooden handle. From his positions on the model sheet, he is obviously a very enthusiastic young boy.
Minnie, by contrast, is a demure Indian maiden with two dark haired pigtails, a plain headband and a single feather. She wears a plain dress with rounded fringe on the arms and bottom which reaches to her knees. Chatter looks like Dale from Chip ‘n’ Dale except with a smaller nose and a squirrel tail. He also wears a plain headband and a single feather and the oversized headband keeps dropping comically over his eyes. Obviously, Bill Justice’s experience on Chip ‘n’ Dale helped him animate the character.
The character of Tommy does not look like Little Hiawatha from the Disney 1937 Silly Symphony although there are some superficial similarities which probably helped the animators. Little Hiawatha had a series of comic book adventures in the back pages of the comic book Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories until well into the 1950s so that design may have helped influence the animators on Tommy.
Walt loved the character of the little Indian boy and even though he never liked doing sequels, he allowed his artists to develop some possible story ideas for other uses of the character. One of those artists was Walt Kelly who later went on to create the well loved POGO comic strip. He even helped design a cute little girlfriend named Minnehaha for Little Hiawatha for a possible sequel and that design may have influenced the design for Tommy’s Minnie.
On e-bay, in the Disney section, someone auctioned off nine 30 second radio spots made by Mohawk Carpets in 1957. In those radio commercials, Tommy Mohawk invited listeners to visit Walt Disney’s new magic kingdom in Anaheim which had only been open for a year and a half. The final purchase price of those radio commercials was fairly outrageous and I have never seen them offered for resale.
I have never seen an animated Tommy Mohawk commercial and I know for a fact that none exist in the either the Disney or the Mohawk Company archives. While some homemade videotapes of animated commercials popped up at various conventions in the Eighties with at least two volumes devoted solely to the output of Jay Ward and Bill Scott and several volumes devoted to animated characters promoting breakfast cereal, there was no videotape devoted to Disney commercials. Perhaps someday “Ed Finn” might produce one if Duane is a reader of this website. Commercials were simply another disposable commodity and I suspect it never occurred to Walt that almost fifty years later anybody would be talking about them. Officially the Disney Studios closed its TV commercial division in the late Fifties. However, when Walt Disney World opened in 1971, it got involved with having Bob Moore design the Orange Bird who is fondly remembered by early visitors to the park.
And perhaps the next time Jim Hill and Nancy come down to this neck of the woods to visit, we can all visit where they make Donald Duck Orange Juice in Lake Wales. It is the oldest surviving Disney participant and maybe we can all try to figure out what a duck has to do with citrus drinks.