Make Mine Music

Film segments

The film contains ten segments. The King's Men sing a story of a Hatfields and McCoys-style feud in the mountains, broken up when Grace Martin and Henry Coy fall in love; this segment was later censored from US video releases due to gun violence. A segment using animation originally intended for Fantasia, set to Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune, was replaced by the song Blue Bayou performed by the Ken Darby Singers, though the original version survives.

Benny Goodman and his Orchestra contributed to two segments, including one where hepcats are swept away by popular music; this segment features mild female nudity edited out in US and UK DVD releases but intact on Japanese home video. Andy Russell sings a ballad of lost love. Jerry Colonna recites Casey at the Bat, set in 1902 Mudville; a sequel short, Casey Bats Again, was released in 1954. Two rotoscoped live-action ballet dancers, David Lichine and Tania Riabouchinskaya, move in silhouette with animated backgrounds, accompanied by two putti, as Dinah Shore sings the title song.

Peter and the Wolf is an animated dramatization of Prokofiev's composition, narrated by Sterling Holloway, with each character represented by specific instruments: Peter by the String Quartet, Sascha the bird by the Flute, Sonia the duck by the Oboe, Ivan the cat by the Clarinet, Grandpapa by the Bassoon, the Hunters by the Kettledrums, and the Wolf by horns and cymbals. After You've Gone features Benny Goodman and The Goodman Quartet as six anthropomorphized instruments parading through a musical playground.

Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet tells the romantic story of two hats who fall in love in a department store window in New York City; the Andrews Sisters provide vocals. The finale, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met, is a bittersweet story about a sperm whale named Willie with incredible musical talent; impresario Tetti-Tatti harpoons and kills Willie, but the narrator explains Willie's voice will sing on in heaven. Nelson Eddy narrated and performed all the voices in this segment.

Release

Make Mine Music was initially released in theaters in 1946. It was never given a wide theatrical reissue; its segments were separated and released as short films or used in Disney television programmes. The film first appeared on home video in Japan on October 21, 1985. All segments except Without You and The Martins and the Coys had been released on US home video after airing on The Magical World of Disney or as shorts.

Casey at the Bat appeared on the VHS Disney's Tall Tales in 1985; Blue Bayou on Disney's Greatest Lullabies Part Two; All the Cats Join In, Two Silhouettes, After You've Gone, and The Whale Who Wanted To Sing At The Met (with Stokowski's Claire de Lune) on The Wonderful World of Disney: Music for Everybody in 1986. Peter and the Wolf was released on Storybook Classics VHS in 1982 and later on Walt Disney Mini Classics and Favorite Stories. Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet appeared on laserdisc in 1999 as part of The Disneyland Anthology.

The film was released on VHS and DVD on June 6, 2000 under the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection, with The Martins and the Coys removed and sexualized imagery edited from All the Cats Join In. Outside of North America, it has been available in Scandinavia on VHS (1983) and DVD (2006) and since 2013 on DVD in the UK (unrestored, with The Martins and the Coys intact but still editing out the sexualized imagery in All the Cats Join In). As of 2021, it is the only package film not available on Disney+.

Disney released Make Mine Music on Blu-ray through the Disney Movie Club on November 2, 2021, but the discs contained the 2000 censored version.

Reception

The film grossed $70,000 in its first week at the Globe Theatre in New York City, and earned $2,085,000 in theatrical rentals from the United States and Canada, with worldwide rentals of $3,275,000. Abel Green of Variety stated that 'the animation, color and music, the swing versus symph, and the imagination, execution and delineation—that this Disney feature (two years in the making) may command widest attention.'