Music: Piglets’ Tune

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, big

bad wolf, big bad wolf?

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Tra la la la la.*

Three months ago all unbeknownst to themselves three little pigs turned song-pluggers. Their behavior was revolutionary so far as the song industry was concerned. Song-plugging had been left before to such shrewd and experienced performers as Rudy Vallée, Al Jolson, Helen Morgan. The three little pigs were neither shrewd nor experienced. They were pink and new-looking with pudgy behinds and ridiculous tails. Two were so imprudent that they built their houses of straws and sticks, fiddled and danced and tootled on the flute all day, mocking their serious pig-brother who built a brick house and plastered it with wolfproof cement.

“Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?” sang the cocky little pigs in Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony, the technicolor short which, held over in Manhattan ever since its appearance last spring (TIME, June 5), is still talk-of-the-town. The big, bad wolf came, a frightful shaggy fellow with dripping chops and a chest as big as a barrel. He huffed & he puffed & he blew down the houses of sticks and straws, sent the foolish piglets scuttling to the wise piglet’s house where they hid under a bed, yet like professional pluggers kept repeating their song until audiences knew it by heart.

“Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?” The absurd, sprightly little song is whistled on thousands of U. S. street corners this autumn, one of the leading catch tunes of 1933. And the two little pigs have had their song published, the first of the Disney creatures to accomplish so much. They have established a market for future Disney tunes with a contract, signed last week, whereby Irving Berlin’s publishing house will have the sheet-music rights over Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies.

According to the contract Irving Berlin and Walt Disney (whose income already amounts to $400,000 a year) will share the profits. But Disney will give half his share to his staff composer and conductor, Frank Churchill, a tall shy Rumford, Me., native who is responsible for all the tunes that Mickey Mouse and the Disney animals jig to. Disney gives him a story in terms of line drawings and film frames. Churchill works out a score which must have a definite number of beats for each of the frames so that the sound-track will synchronize perfectly with the movies, which the chances are he never has seen.

*Reprinted by permission of Irving Berlin, Inc.