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The 40th Anniversary Screening

The Failed Stage Musical

The 40th Anniversary Screening
-this article is by Liz (aka The Dung Lizard) and the original post can be found here

I went to the 40th anniversary screening of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure at Brooklyn Academy of Music today. It plays very differently on a big screen than it does on youtube, mostly in that it feels more like a movie made for children instead of a cavalcade of horrors. Host Jerry Beck described it more or less thusly: “This isn’t like, a Disney movie with a lot of…heart, and stuff, it’s more like a musical revue.” Here’s what I learned from the Q and A.

• It took them a whole year to animate The Greedy.
• Most of the people in charge were Broadway people who had never worked in film before, which explains A LOT.
• Assistant animator Dan Haskett confirmed that Richard Williams, the director, didn’t care very much about visual consistency or the characters being on model.
• In fact, Richard Williams wasn’t particularly well liked by some of the animators. When the fuckin…the single-nippled sea monster is snatching pirates off the boat at the end, the one it grabs when the king says “and fire him” is a caricature of Richard Williams. He left the film before it was finished but he still has his name on it.
• The assistant animators were aware of all the gay subtext and made a lot of jokes about it.
• Doug Crane, who animated all the water, is a real sweet guy. A bunch of his extended family flew in for the screening and they were all wearing custom made shirts with one of his drawings of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy printed on them. It was adorable. 
• This movie hasn’t (and probably won’t ever be) released on DVD for a number of reasons. The negative has been lost. Simon and Schuster owns the rights and they don’t know where it is. The licensing paperwork has also been lost! S and S doesn’t see it as profitable, but they also don’t want to sell the movie rights back to the Gruelle family, so Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure is stuck in limbo forever. 

There’s one last thing I want to mention but it’s so insane I felt the need to give it its own paragraph. So, this movie was financed by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, which was the publishing arm of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT). ITT wanted to put out a children’s movie as a PR move to make themselves look better after they were implicated as CIA collaborators in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure was financed by people who were complicit in the death of President Salvador Allende and the rise of the tyrant Pinochet. That is a strong contender for the strangest sentence I have ever typed. So, really, this movie was cursed before it was ever even made.

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The Failed Stage Musical
- this article can be read in its entirety here on the Lost Media Wiki

Raggedy Ann (also known as Rag Dolly), was a Broadway production written by William Gibson, with music and lyrics composed by Joe Raposo, and directed by Patricia Birch. The musical is loosely based off the animated film Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), and the Raggedy Ann and Andy books (1918-1977), but with a dark twist.

After the movie's initial release, Joe Raposo was approached by Patricia Snyder to adapt the film into a stage musical, bringing in playwright William Gibson to work alongside them. William wasn't interested in rehashing the animated movie and took inspiration from the real-life story of Raggedy Ann author Johnny Gruelle's daughter Marcella, who contracted diphtheria from an unsanitary smallpox vaccination and died at the age of 14.

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