A Tale of Two Titmouses: A Cartoon Brew Investigation
Cartoon Brew Will Livestream the Annie Awards on February 4th
"Open Letter to Nickelodeon" by Vi Hart
The Animated Trailer of "Irma La Douce"
Follow @CartoonBrew on Twitter
YouTube
Vimeo
RSS
Follow Cartoon Brew on Facebook
|
|
|
Steve Martin in Disneyland Dream
January 8, 2009 6:00 pm
A postscript to my post last week on the Library of Congress selection of the home movie Disneyland Dream to the National Film Registry. Apparently comedian/actor Steve Martin, a former Disneyland cast member and Disneyland buff, appears in the home movie itself! Says Martin, in a letter to filmmaker Robbins Barstow, published in The Hartford Courant: “At age eleven I worked at Disneyland. I sold guidebooks at the park from 1956 to about 1958. I am as positive as one can be that I appear about 20:20 into your film, low in the frame, dressed in a top hat, vest, and striped pink shirt, moving from left to right, holding a guidebook out for sale.” |
ADVERTISEMENTS
EVENTSValentoons RECENT BREW TV EPISODES By Sitji Chou. A man tries to understand the futility of creating human connections when they’ve been impeded by the microcosmic void between material particles.  By Nikolas Ilic. A story of a Scottish sheep farmer who shears his sheep and tosses them cliff side…  By Dylan Hayes. Lesson 1: Everyone gambles, not everyone loses. Lesson 2: The world is full of traps. Lesson 3: You cannot win if you don’t take risks.  By Jean Yi. A personal and humorous exploration of being the ‘Nice Girl’ and coming to terms with the label and all its different meanings.  By Ferg Brennan. A lonely fisherman catches an unusual fish, which he decides to keep as a pet. |
Man, that is really cool!
Woah, Steve Martin really gets small!
That film is a true gem. And what a sweet thing for Steve to find himself in it. I’ll bet he flipped. Pretty darn cool.
That’s awesome! Hard to recognize because his hair wasn’t gray yet. :)
I actually thought about Steve Martin possibly being in the film, but the narration and story line distracted me. I was thinking he might pop up in a visit to a magic shop, which never happened, but he had not gotten that far in his DisneyLand career yet.
Martin also worked at Knotts Berry Farm as well, which is in the film. I spent a considerable amount of my youth at parks set up similarly to Knotts Berry Farm. In those days, Western Themes went a long way, and often, kids were encouraged to shoot injuns from the train.
Absolutely wonderful, I honestly had never heard of DisneyLand Dream but it was a great bit of info! Even stranger for me was to go onto Cartoonbrew and see a post with a reference to the Hartford Courant, I grew up in Enfield, Connecticut about 10 minutes highway drive from Hartford. It’s not necessarily a significant connection to the main plot of the post but definitely odd for me to see the title of a newspaper I grew up with 3000 miles away. Small world it is
Ha! I just read Steve Martin’s BORN STANDING UP. He talks a lot about his Disneyland years. It seems that if Disneyland was never built there would be no Steve Martin as we know him today. I highly recomend this book. It is very inspirational.
It could be Steve….or it could be Bigfoot.
I think it was that Magic Shop in which he discovered the arrow-through-the-head novelty.
I’ll bet the odds are pretty good that young Steve got a glimpse or two of Walt Disney at the park, since Walt spent a lot of time there in the early years.
11 years old? Wow, I guess there were no child labor laws back then!
Steve Martin often credits Wally Boag from the original Golden Horseshoe Revue as his inspiration for working in comedy. Anyone who never got to see Wally Boag perform at Disneyland can see his act at YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-YfnKA476o
Wally Boag talks about Steve in his recently released biography, “Wally Boag, Clown Prince of Disneyland.” Hired on a two week contract in 1955 to open The Golden Horseshoe Revue in Disneyland’s Frontierland, he stayed for 27 years. Not only does this book chronicle his extraordinary career as a performer it also provides a first person account of Disneyland’s earliest days. It can be ordered at
wallyboag.com.
Not to rain on the parade, but isn’t it possible that Disneyland had more than one junior high school kid in their employ selling guidebooks in the park and wearing the same outfit? That might be the one and only Steve Martin or it might be the one and only Steve Martin’s co-worker.