Walt Disney's Chanticleer!

Never heard of it? Well, there's a reason for that. Walt never made it. But Vance Gerry and Larry Clemmons told me the story of how it came NOT to be made (you can also read Floyd Norman's first-person account here...) Round about 1960-'61, the Disney animation story department was toiling away on various properties, just like always. Just like now. One of those properties was "Chanticleer and the Fox," the French tale of the rooster who believed his crowing caused the sun to come up. Walt Disney Productions (per Charles Solomon) had purchased rights to the story twenty years before. Marc Davis and Ken Anderson -- fresh from their work on "101 Dalmations" -- were two of several Disney staffers developing the project. (Vance Gerry worked on story boards, and my father Ralph Hulett did visual development. One of his color studies for 'Chanticleer' is on display in Frank Thomas's and Ollie Johnston's "The Illusion of Life" -- p. 251.) Months were spent on story, design, dialogue and songs. Larry Clemmons, relatively new to the animation story department then (he had been shifted over from live action) told me years later: "Ken Anderson put his heart and soul into 'Chanticleer,' as did Marc. But Ken was really wrapped up in it. They were working on a big story presentation for Walt. Woolie Reitherman wasn't too keen on the idea. He started calling it 'the chicken picture,' and Walt picked up on that. It put kind of a bad image into his head. "I got invited to the big story meeting, even though I hadn't worked on it. The presentation lasted what seemed like hours. I wasn't crazy about it, and the songs were awful. The composer up at the front, banging away on a piano singing 'cockadoodle doo, cockadoodle doo.' Awful. Walt didn't say much. At the end of it he said: 'I don't know, guys. Nobody likes a chicken. See if you can come up with a different approach.'" When I told Vance Gerry about Larry's version of events, he said: "Yeah, the presentation probably didn't go that well. But I was young then, and stupid me, I thought it had been pretty good, pretty successful. When Walt said to work on a different approach, I thought all we had to do is come up with a few new ideas. "Ken and I worked a couple of weeks on new storyboards, working late, redoing a lot of it. But Walt still didn't like the project. And that was the end of the Chanticleer feature." Larry and Vance told me that Ken took the rejection hard, sulking and brooding in his office for weeks. (Knowing Ken, I find this easy to believe.) Others said that Anderson was so traumatized by the failure of 'Chanticleer' that he suffered a minor stroke and went home for a lengthy stretch to recover. (The stroke thing I find harder to believe, but who knows? Could be true.) One thing that IS true: "Chanticleer and the Fox" was never made by Disney. And maybe Walt was right about nobody liking a chicken. "Rockadoodle" didn't set the box office on fire, did it? ADDENDUM: Kevin here, horning in on Steve's post. There's a nice story relating to the above sketch by Marc Davis. As Steve wrote, Marc had really put his heart into the project, and was very disappointed when he realized it wasn't going to be made. When he came home and told Alice, his wife, about the turn of events, she realized he was crushed, and that her sympathy alone wouldn't be much comfort. She knew Marc had created a new character for the pitch, a Spanish fighting cock that Chanticleer would be tricked into fighting. So she handed him a used 5x7 Manila envelope that was handy, and asked him to sketch for her the Spanish rooster. He promptly did, meanwhile opening up a little about what the project could have been. I don't think it exactly cheered him up, but it was a bit of a tonic after a tough day. Alice always loved the drawing, and later they had some prints made from it, one of which I've scanned here. I love the grace and dignity in this matador rooster, sketched out in a few dark moments on a scrap of paper. In 1991 Disney published a children's book, Chanticleer and the Fox: A Chaucerian Tale, using Marc's viz dev sketches. It's worth seeking out.