Saludos Amigos

[osprey_archer]

Disney’s Saludos Amigos is an odd little film. It came about (quoth Wikipedia) after the US State Department sent a plane full of Disney animators on a goodwill tour of South America, hoping that this would help in some small way to counteract the close ties that many South American countries had with Nazi Germany at the time.

The result is a film that is actually four separate animated shorts, stitched together with documentary footage with a voiceover that sounds like the voiceover from every educational documentary that I watched in elementary school, which made it a very welcome-back-to-fourth-grade experience.

The only short that is all original material is about a little airplane who flies over the treacherous pass through the Andes to deliver the mail (“Oh no,” said Julie. “It’s Cars.” We have discussed doing a Pixar rewatch once we’ve gotten through Disney, but Cars 2 and 3 may prove insuperable obstacles.)

The other three are about established Disney characters, but Latinized: cowboy goofy becomes gaucho Goofy, while Donald Duck rides a llama (largely unsuccessfully) and befriends a Brazilian parrot, Jose Carioca, who went on to become a minor but recurring character in the Disney pantheon: he reappears in Melody Time and also, apparently, Ducktales, which may explain the vague sense of familiarity I felt for him, having been a minor Ducktales afficionado in my youth - although really my heart was given to Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers.

Otherwise, how is it? Honestly, I’m struggling to think of something to say about it. There’s a reason this movie has drifted out of the popular memory, and that’s because it’s just not super memorable.

Comments

[kore]

Is that the one with The Three Caballeros in it, or was it also called The Three Caballeros? Because someone in the film society at my undergrad (do colleges still even have those anymore) got us a copy back in the late eighties, and everyone was just kind of mildly baffled by it. (I don't remember anything but the "We're three caballeros, Three gay caballeros...." song.)

[evelyn_b]

The Three Caballeros is a sequel, sort of. Donald Duck reunites with Jose Carioca and a Mexican chicken, and they have some hallucinatory adventures.

A quick check shows that university film societies still exist, though they may not exist everywhere. The university local to me has one that is specifically focused on recent foreign films

[osprey_archer]

Yes, as evelyn_b says, The Three Caballeros is the other short film compilation that Disney animators made after their government-sponsored trip to South America. It also is completely whack, although in a less "this is a documentary... with random infusions of Donald Duck!" kind of way.