Richard Sherman left a grand legacy behind after his recent passing; along with his brother Robert, he made the blueprints for what Disney music would become. But he left some surprises too, as we’ll soon hear on Disney: A Recorded History.
Veteran Disney music historian and the studio’s supervising producer for music, Randy Thornton, hosts the podcast, which will take cinema audiophiles on a journey through Disney’s history. And he received quite a gift from Richard Sherman, as he told Variety, of taped conversations between Sherman and his brother and songwriting partner Robert B. Sherman with infamously grouchy Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers (as we saw and heard in Saving Mr. Banks) during behind-the-scenes sessions for the film. Excerpts from these tapes will be heard for the first time on Disney: A Recorded History on the podcast’s final trio of episodes.
Thorton described that Sherman handed the tapes over from his private archives, “a stack of seven-inch tape reels—story meetings between P.L. Travers, Bob and Dick, and screenwriter Don DaGradi.” Disney never had the tapes, which had been in Richard Sherman’s collection for six decades.
“This is ‘fly on the wall’ stuff,” Thornton said. “A snapshot in time, capturing a moment in history, behind the scenes with creative minds. Richard never listened to them; it was such a difficult time for him.”
The 12-part series can be found on Apple, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. The first three episodes are out now and provide some incredible recordings of Walt Disney and his creative collaborators. The first episode focuses on Steamboat Willie becoming the first synchronized sound in an animated short; the second on Silly Symphonies: The Skeleton Dance (a spooky fave); and the third around the story of The Three Little Pigs’ catchy ear worm “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
Here’s the first episode available on Spotify:
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