The Disney cartoon Johnny Fedora & Alice Blue Bonnet (1954) features a delightful song written by Allie Wrubel & Ray Gilbert (they also co-wrote "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah").

It frequently carries the date 1954, when it was re-released as a singel cartoon, but was initially part of a collection of cartoons, Make Mine Music (1946).

It's performed on the soundtrack by the harmonious Andrew Sisters. The lyrics tell a tale we watch enacted by two hats in a department store window.

Johnny & Alice fell in love in the department store window & vowed to be together forever, & raise a couple little hats & make themselves a home of stacked hatboxes. But then one day Alice Blue Bonnet got purchased by a beautiful young woman, & Johnny was desparately alone.

Ah, but it's a Disney cartoon after all, so eventually a handsome young man purchases Johnny Fedora, & out into the world he's worn.

The amount of personality the animation invests in the romantic hats is nothing short of genius.

Scenes of Johnny seeking Alice from atop his owner's head throughout the streets of Old New York, being blown off his owner's head, found by a poor man, trampled in a police raid of a speak easy, cold & homeless blowing through the steets of the city...

Seasons change, Johnny experiences the vaguaries of homelessness & harsh weather, is crushed by traffic, is even washed down a gutter into the sewer.

When an ice man finds the worn-out Johnny, he cuts some ear-holes in the hat & sticks him on the head of one of the horses that pulls the ice wagon. "It was done without malice/ And beside him was Alice" on the other horse's head. United forever!

A charming, charming tale that has already delighted generations of children & adults, & is apt to do so for quite some generations yet to come.



The Sunshine Makers (1935) was made by Van Beuren Studios, but funded by the Borden Milk Company, which also made Elsie the Cow cartoon commercials. This one, however, you could watch not realizing it's a milk promotion.

The setting almost indistinguishable from the Lilliput village in the Max & Dave Fleischer Gabby & the Liliputians cartoons has dwarves coming out of their homes in the morning to worship the sun with a song & some callisthetics.

The song "Hail His Majesty the Sun" is just awful, but a catchy enough jingle that two or three generations of children in the '30s through '50s knew it by heart: "The Sun is above/ Who fills you with love/ And gives your blues away/ And we are the ones/ Who welcome the Sun/ And we do it every day."

Though made for theatrical showings, it became a standard for early b/w television childrens' programs -- when kids wouldn't know it really was in full color. That this cartoon possesses nostalgia for oldsters is understandable, but it's offbeat enough that it might well win over younger generations of animation fans.

The dwarves have a sun-operated electrical laboratory that produces liquid sunlight in milk bottles, which they load on a grasshopper-drawn cart for home deliveries.

The cart driver sings another spastic song about "Sunshine, Sunshine, I could love the good old fashioned sunshine," & leaves bottles of sunshine on each doorstep (a nostalgic event in itself for anyone who remembers ye olden days when milk was home-delivered in glass bottles).

A rival group of dark-clad dwarves hate the sun. They stay in shadows & sing, "We're happy when we're sad." They come out at night when the sun-dwarves are sleeping. But one of the dark dwarves got the sunlight-milk spilled down his back & his back is glowing through the night.

His fellow dark dwarves won't go near him until he buries his stained coat. Then they come out from underground lairs & fill their sprayers with liquid from the pool of darkness & head off to destroy the well-lit part of the land.

In response the sun-dwarves begin shooting & bombarding bottles of sunshine at the dark part of the forest scattering the dark dwarves or turning them bright against their wills. The gloomy dwarves are finally converted & brainwashed & lose their culture entirely, so now they can all be equally happy about such fun things as the war.

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