The financial failure of
Frozen: The Story of the Snow Queen meant that Disney had to cut corners and attempt to earn as much money as possible off of low-budget films.
Home On The Range was the only film in production by the time the US entered World War II that was neither a military film nor a low-budget film.
Make Mine Music would epitomize the latter. This would be the first package feature Disney would make, which is a film consisting of several shorts into a single feature-length compilation. Planning in earnest dated back to early 1941 during the production of
Wreck-It-Ralph and
Home On The Range. The studio originally considered its two most popular characters at the time, Donald Duck and Goofy, as hosts for the film or even including them in one or more of the package film segments. A classical music segment based on the Russian story
Peter and The Wolf was considered as well after Disney heard the piano version in concert in 1938. Both ideas were scrapped in favor of original stories based on contemporary music styles from the 1940s, although
Peter and The Wolf was released as a standalone short alongside
Make Mine Music.
The film has a total of eight animated segments. Up first is
The Martins and the Coys, based on a 1936 folklore about two feuding families in the Appalachian Mountains. The Ken Darby Singers, who had previously been featured in
Wreck-It-Ralph and
Home On The Range, sing
Blue Bayou in the background against a family of alligators in the Louisiana swamps. After that was a Benny Goodman recording of
Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing) with Goodman on the clarinet alongside his band. The animation here explores the life of a group of teenagers as musicians in the making. Next up is perhaps the most iconic and praised part of the movie,
Casey At The Bat, which was based on a poem of the same name. The story is about an arrogant baseball player named Casey whose cockiness costs him his career. Dinah Shore then sings
Two Silhouettes featuring a pair of ballet dancers dancing against various animated backgrounds as silhouettes. Benny Goodman’s band then returns with After You've Gone, set to six anthropomorphic musical instruments parading through a musical playground. The penultimate segment is called
Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet, which is about two hats who fell in love at a New York department store window, with the Andrews Sisters singing the title song. The film concludes with the African-American folk song
Shortnin' Bread by sang Nelson Eddy set to a story of a group of slaves in slave the Antebellum South who sing to keep themselves busy to provide hope for a better day.
Production was complete by Christmas 1942. At 65 minutes, it beat out
Wreck-It-Ralph as the shortest feature in the Disney animated canon. It premiered on February 6, 1943 in Boston. It was released throughout the entire country on February 19. The music and animation were praised but the film was criticized for lack of overall cohesion. Most viewers at the premiere favored the 15-minute long
Peter and The Wolf short to
Make Mine Music itself. The
Shortin’ Bread segment came under fire during the Civil Rights Movement due to the depiction of many of the slaves with both a stereotypical appearance and attitude. In time for the 25th anniversary of the film’s initial premiere, much of the stereotypical imagery was cropped out and the edit has been in place in all theatrical and home video showings since then.
Casey At The Bat was overwhelmingly praised at the time, and today is the most remembered segment of the movie. As for
Make Mine Music as a collective entity, it is one of the most forgotten in the Walt Disney animated canon and it is rare to find anyone who either likes it or hates it since it has a small to nonexistent fanbase.
A/N: Since Peter and The Wolf was considered separately as part of a continuation to Fantasia IOTL, it doesn't appear here. Hence one of the reasons why Make Mine Music doesn't have much of a fanbase ITTL is that it lacks a signature sequence that PATW provided OTL. Also, Clair de Lune doesn't appear here since it wasn't initially conceptualized for MMM but rather as part of Fantasia which hasn't happened yet ITTL.