Today in Billund, Denmark, the LEGO House has announced the next set in their exclusive limited series, available for purchase only at the LEGO store on-site. LEGO House 40505 LEGO Building Systems is 1,211 pieces celebrating the LEGO system of play with representations of its three pillars: Duplo, System, and Technic. And while we could go on with our usual statistical analysis of the new set, as we have done for past sets in this series, The Brothers Brick was provided a copy of the set for review and an opportunity to talk with one of the set’s designers: LEGO House Master Builder Stuart Harris. So instead, we’ll get to talk more about this set announcement as we build it below. And for those headed to the LEGO House in search of this set, it’ll be available in their exclusive LEGO store only starting March 1st for a price of 699 DKK (around $100 USD | $140 CAD | £80 GBP | €94 EUR) and a limit of 3 per household.
The unboxing
The front of the box is emblazoned with the graphics of the LEGO House and a picture of the final model. In the right upper corner, a gold box denotes the limited nature of this set, as well as its order in the series. While the age range identifies the set being for those 10 or older, the subject matter of the set is definitely geared toward those wizened in the history of The LEGO Group. The copy that was sent for review was autographed by the designers LEGO House Master Builder Stuart Harris and LEGO Set Designer Markus Rollbühler. Frequent TBB readers are likely already familiar with Markus’s unofficial creations featured on the site.
The back of the box shows all five of the LEGO House sets. Stuart and Markus have worked together on four of these kits, developing a strong working relationship that has turned out some terrific models. There’s also a blurb talking about the inspiration for this set and the three historical LEGO sets featured in the build. Oh, and there’s also a shot of the back of LEGO Building Systems here. But we’ll talk much more about that when we get to building it later on.
Within the box, we find 16 numbered bags of clear plastic, two unnumbered bags, and the instruction manual. We’ll take a look at the bags as we build the set, but for now we should focus on that booklet. There are several pages dedicated to LEGO House and it’s mission, the history of the LEGO System in Play, the sets that serve as inspiration for this build, and those lesser-known building systems that aren’t represented here like Primo, Bionicle, and Modulex.
The build
The build begins with construction of the central section, dedicated to LEGO System bricks. Bages 1-3 are cracked open and combine with some additional pieces from the unnumbered ones. These quickly come together to form a base for the first micro model. Tiles with a few exposed studs are employed to allow the mini-model to separate from the stand, and exposed Technic axles portend connections to the neighboring sections.
The dark gray background with gold highlights not only offers a great contrast to the bright colors of the micro models, but it also has ties back to the LEGO House. So much of what this set represents comes back to the History Collection, the section of the House that acts as a LEGO museum. More than the other sets in this series, 40505 LEGO Building Systems is using the examples from the history of the toy to depict the larger concept of interconnectivity, the system that first allowed the plastic bricks to “grow up” with a child from Duplo up to Technic. Stuart talked about walking through this section of the House every day to and from his office. And who wouldn’t be inspired with so much history at their fingertips. Below is a shot from inside the History Collection (from the LEGO House’s website) for comparison with the model’s backdrop.
Getting back to the build, bags 4 and 5 combine together to make the base of our first mini-model. This collection of tiles, plates, and jumpers starts laying the plans for the rest of this System representation.
With bags 6 and 7, the Town Plan finally takes form. This lovely layout represents the first spark of a building system from within The LEGO Group back in the late ’50s. Acting as a subtheme, Town Plan offered individual buildings that could be added to a larger map, along with trees and vehicles to create a singular “mega-toy” from all these smaller models. It was the start of what would become a long history of interconnectivity between sets. This representation is well-thought-out and instantly recognizable. As a huge fan of microscale, I adore all the intricate representations via a minimal brick count. And of course, a Town Plan layout holds a place of honor at the LEGO House’s History Collection.
Bags 8 and 9 form up the Duplo section to the left of System. The biggest question here is why we have a recreation of a Duplo brick from System pieces instead of the part itself. During our interview, Stuart was kind enough to inform me of product safety standards that must be honored, which leads to a wedge between Duplo the other systems, at least as far as their appearance in sets is concerned. Still, the parts will always work with one another, with a 4x4x2 square of LEGO bricks equaling one Duplo 2×2 block, as shown in the backdrop on this section.
When it came time to pick the iconic set to represent Duplo, the LEGO House once again delivered with its giant kid-sized Duplo train. While the one we build from bags 10 and 11 looks far more like 1046 Train Set than the LEGO House version, it nonetheless remains an icon of the system. This is quite a deceptively-intricate portion of the build, going to great lengths to get the right number of wheels on the locomotive with the proper spacing, a functional tipper-car, and a track that appropriately fits the wheels while still showcasing those standard Duplo rail bends. For as few parts as it uses, it’s quite the train, and it all connects to the base on a single jumper element as shown below.
Finally, we come to the Technic section off to the right of the model. Bags 12 and 13 bring the base to life, this time with a blue color scheme.
With bag 14, the Technic representation in this historic tour of LEGO system development. Harkening back to 1977, 853 Car Chassis is the fundamental representation of any Technic car. Even recent models still boil down to the fundamentals displayed here, though the parts and complexity have changed significantly. This was the logic in selecting the Car Chassis for the third section on this model. There’s no actual connection here holding the car in place. Instead, it rests between two 1×1 round bricks at an angle. They do a great job of adding X/Z stability, just no flipping the model over!
Now, as much as I adored making those 3 mini-models, its with these last 2 bags of parts that the fun really begins! Those who have read my coverage of microscale creations before know that I absolutely love at particular medium. Cobbling together a nanoscale facsimile in LEGO is one of the great challenges of this hobby, in my opinion. So when I found out the back of this model houses 19 nanoscale sets from the history of LEGO, my heart skipped a beat. Let’s crack open bags 15 and 16 and get to work, shall we?
The designs on these nano-models are phenomenal! Working without illegal connections, Markus has given us a tour of LEGO history, with some specific highlights that are quite meaningful to me (looking at you, Bionicle and canister). You probably also noticed the empty space at the end, but we’ll talk more about that later.
These last bags also have two printed 1×8 tiles, with the model name and “LEGO House” on them. These pats go on the front, and are a standard addition to all models in the LEGO House series. I’ve included a shot of the printed pieces on their own, along with the other printed 1×1 tile used as a crosswalk in Town Plan.
The finished model
With everything together, this display piece is ready for the shelf. As the sections have come together, they’re “connected” by a loose axle in a Technic pin hole. While this technique can tend to create gaps if trying to abut the system representations in a straight line, I would much rather have the loose connection to prevent the abrupt jerk that sometimes happens when trying to remove an axle from an axle hole. It’s important to note that the modularity of this set is just begging for more sections honoring the other LEGO systems. After talking with Stuart, I see a Bionicle representation being added to my copy in the near future. But the real question is, who will dare to take on Galidor?
Completing the model
“But Kyle,” you say, “How can you complete the model after you finish building it?” As the model was first presented, and reinforced by Stuart during our interview, that blank spot on the back of the model is for you, the builder, to fill in. Dip into your collection, spin up a nanoscale set from your personal LEGO history, and add it to the collection. Talking with Stuart, he’s got a Fabuland build to work on for his mini-museum. I’ve decided to add a rendition of one of my most memorable sets from my childhood: 6959 Lunar Launch Site. The Christmas I found that set under the tree has remained one of my most vivid childhood memories, and the Spyrius LEGO Space faction continues to be my favorite theme. I’ll be honest, the importance of this set didn’t fully hit me until I placed my mini-LLS among the other nano builds.
Conclusions and recommendations
It’s hard to provide real recommendations on a set that’s only available from one LEGO store in the world. If any of us LEGO fans are lucky enough to make it to Billund, Denmark and take in all the experiences at the “Home of the Brick,” of course we’re going to take advantage of all the limited edition sets that are there. If you’re not walking out with all 5, you may never get another chance to collect them. Independent of any recommendation I provide, opportunity will be the driving factor. And as far as recommending a trip to LEGO House, I’m afraid I can’t comment on that, as I’ve never been.
But I can comment on the quality and ingenuity of the set I just built, which are both outstanding! There is no better homage to the history of The LEGO Group available in a box. It’s a symphony of LEGO’s basic colors, coming together in familiar forms to tell the story of how we all got here, both the company and its fans. And while other sets in this series may represent specific points in time (the company’s entry into toys, theme parks and model making, engineering advancement, and iconic pieces), 40505 LEGO Building Systems wants to take you on a journey through it all. For that reason, Stuart and Markus can chalk this up as a big success! So while I know you’re buying all 5 of these LEGO House exclusives when you visit Billund, maybe put this one in the cart first.
With 1,211 bricks, and available exclusively at the LEGO store at the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, LEGO House 40505 LEGO Building Systems is hits the shelves starting March 1st and retails for 699 DKK (about $100 USD | $140 CAD | £80 GBP | €94 EUR)
Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.
Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.
Here's how they did it.
For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.
These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.
Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.
Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.
It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."
Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:
Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):
Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.
Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:
After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:
The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:
The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.
How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!
But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.
In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
Oof yeah, I get why people enjoy that word and Cory has the further excuse of coining it/popularizing it. It’s an ugly word (intentionally) and we could do better collectively.
I have been saving this post for this day because it is a special day, the anniversary of my experiencing the Silicon Valley dream; the IPO! Been there, done that, and literally got the T-shirt. What else can I say? Well, a lot of things it seems.
My wife ironed it a bit
30 years ago today Global Village went public and was availble for trading on the NASDAQ exchange under the GVIL ticker.
Everybody who worked at Global Village on that day got one of those T-shirts. Mine has been sitting in a frame for more than 20 years now. It used to be on the wall in my office at work, back when I was important enough to warrant an office, and it has sat in my home office since then.
Stock options and going public are the things that Silicon Valley dreams are made of… though being bought out by Google used to come pretty close on that front. There are legendary tales of invididuals who got in early, worked hard with the promise of their stock options being worth something some day, and who were able to retire when the magic moment hit. (And equally legendary tales of people who gave up their shares only to later find that they have abandoned riches.)
There is a long standing story of old hands at Microsoft with stickers on their badge reading “FYIFV,” which stood for “fuck you, I’m fully vested” meaning that they could take the money and run any time they pleased.
I know people who have hung around Apple for ages who are worth millions due to stock options they were given over the years, especially options handed out at very low valuations during the bad days between Scully and the return of Steve Jobs.
My story is perhaps less dramatic. It is certainlty less lucrative.
When I started in tech support at Global Village in 1992 I made $28K annually, was given 2,500 options valued at 25 cents each, that being the estimated value of shares when I was hired, and the choice of a better computer if I opted to sit in an interior cube versus a window cube.
And you only need to look out the window if your computer is slow, right?
As with most people, my stock options vested over time. For some reason they decided to set the vesting period for five years, so after working there a year 500 shares would be available for me to purchase at the initial valuation. I would then accrue more shares on a monthly basis until I hit five years, at which point I would be fully vested.
Most places considered four years enough, but somebody at GV got five years in the head. Later, when I moved on to Big Island I complained to Rick that I was going to have to leave behind more than 500 shares of stock because I wouldn’t be fully vested until mid-1997. The stock still had value then. By 1997 it has lost much of it.
As I worked my way out of support and upstairs into engineering, the company was harnessing its success and building towards going public. One of the things that happened was the VCs started putting people in place to run the company, people who would follow their instructions for preparing the company for an IPO.
Our CEOI was one of the marketing executives from Apple who were on the PowerBook project, and the CFO… I forget where he was from, though I recall he later left in disgrace due to some ethical lapse.
But that wouldn’t make him alone in the board room I guess.
We needed two things to go public back then. The first was that we had to have two successful product lines. We already had the Macintosh modem market sewn up pretty well. But modems were all viewed as a single product line. That was where the OneWorld network fax, modem, remote access server line came in.
The Global Village OneWorld
It didn’t have to be super successful, it just had to prove that we had two product lines.
Then we had to show a continuous pattern of growth. This meant that every quarter had to exceed the past quarter for revenue. That mean cutting off some quarters early when we had made enough revenue in order to carry it forward into the next.
This was, of course, unethical and probably unlawful. But our CEO told us they were doing it at a company meeting, so it isn’t like they were hiding it.
And, of course, we had to be profitable. But that was no problem. The Mac modem market was lucrative, the PowerBook segment especially.
This all changed not too far down the line. The rules changed when the VCs decided they wanted to cash out on Netscape about a year and a half later. Netscape didn’t need to make money or have a long term plan, they went public on hype and a pomise that there must be SOMETHING of value in the company because we were all using the Netscape Natigator browser… you were supposed to pay for it, but almost nobody did… and a company that had something on damn near everybody’s computer had to be wise and powerful.
It set the pattern for the dotcom boom, the idea that you just had to have a lot of users, that butts in seats, as it was called, was more important that making a profit or having a business plan that made any sense.
I happened to live at an apartment at Whisman and Middlefield Road, at one end of the series of buildings that would soon have the Netscape name on them. They, somewhat ironically, even had the old Cisco Systems building on Middlefield, a company that was the target model for many startups in the 90s.
As sure as Marc Andreesen provided the spark that made Netscape possible, he also provided most of the very dumb ideas that kept it from being anything beyond a brief flash in the pan. If Steve Case, head of AOL, hadn’t been a sucker, hadn’t believed the hype, he might have saved himself the effort of dismantling the failure that was Netscape rather than buying it in 1998. Instead he bailed out Andreesen and made him even richer. Case was smart enough to only buy Netscape with AOL stock, and he managed to turn around and sell AOL to Time Warner in 2000, so he wasn’t a complete chump.
Anyway, if you see me dismissing Marc Andreesen as somebody who was simply in the right place at the right time, I submit as evidence pretty much everything he has done since the Netscape IPO… and doubly so that he and his current firm are all in on crypto, though they clearly want to be the scammer in that equation, the rent seeking landlord, the house that wins no matter what happens.
But I digress.
So the day came, February 24, 1994, and Global Village went public. GVIL was listed on NASDAQ. I think the CEO got to ring the opening bell on Wall Street that day. We were all going to be rich!
Right? RIGHT?
Well, no. Or maybe. I certainly was not.
The stock opened up at $8 a share. If I had been able to exercise and sell ALL my shares on that date, it would have been worth $20,000. That wasn’t going to buy me a house, much less let me retire, even in 1994. But it could have been a down payment on a nice condo.
Except, of couse, I couldn’t sell all of my shares on that day. I had only hit about a year and a half of vesting, so I only had some shares available. 791 I think.
But still, if I could sell those, it would still net me more than $6K after fees and such.
I could not, however, sell ANY shares because when a company does an IPO employee shares are generally locked out from being sold for a period of time in order to let the VCs and other favored investors cash out in the initial frenzy. We had to wait six months.
And in six months, after the big cash out, the stock was down to $5 a share. That was even less interesting than $8 a share. But our time was not done yet.
The inetrnet was becoming a thing. While I disdained Netscape just a few paragraphs back, a company with no plan and no proven track record that went public on hype alone, the hype was not reserved for Netscape alone.
The market itself was rising. We were past the post Cold War recession, the peace dividend was a thing, Bill Clinton was president, and the internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular were suddenly the most interesting thing for Wall Street. We all wanted to get online, to the point that I wrote about the great dial tone drought a while back. Netscape was a symptom, not a cause of the hype, and any company that was involved with getting online was suddenly viewed with a great fondness beyond anything Lord British ever felt. (If anybody gets that call back reference I will be amazed.)
Among the beneficiaries was GVIL, which was pulled out of its $5 doldrums and began to rise with the internet tide. It passed $8, then $12, then $16 a share. Maybe we would be rich!
The price peaked just past $21 a share at one point. I remember this vividly as I had my shares with a broker and the day it hit that I put in a sell order. I could have sold at market, which would have just gotten me the money. That was in early 96 I think, which would have given me nearly 2,000 shares to play with. That many shares at $20… well, again, I wasn’t going to be rich, but that was a down payment on a real house or maybe a new car paid for in cash, with money set aside for the taxes on the sale.
But I did not put in the sell order at market price. I put it in at $22 a share to eke out just a little bit more cash. And it never got there. I then chased the price down the drain for the next two years. I would set a sell order at a price… because it wasn’t in constant decline, it would bounce back up a bit, before settling down to a lower plateau than before… hoping to catch an uptick, only to have the price drop, never to return.
It fell through $18, $12, $10, $8, $5 and was mucking about around $4 a share, at which point I was hardly paying attention. The modem market had collapsed… modems were becoming a commodity and Apple was at its nadir, that period when it was bouncing around between $12 and $18 a share, when Michael Dell was quipping about the company just giving them investors their money back and calling it a day… and Global Village sold off its modem business and its name.
San Jose Mercury News – April 1, 1998
By that point Big Island was in its own spiral and I was a Cypress Research and had an offer from a company called Edify, that would change my path into enterprise software.
The company became One World, and its stock ticker changed to OWLD. Lots of grandious promises were made and hamfisted attempts to create a pump and dump scam out of the stock were rife in the Yahoo finance forum for the stock.
I sold most of my stock before it turned to OWLD at somewhere around $3 a share. I went from a new BMW to a new PC in value. And I didn’t even sell all of it. Before the pre-IPO I had exercised my first vesting of shares. I have a stock certificate for 500 shares of Global Village in a drawer with my name on them.
Exercising shares before the IPO was a dumb thing to do, and I blame my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm for this lapse. When you buy shares like that, before the IPO, they become directly registered shares. You may have heard reference to directly registered shares as part of the dumbassery around the GameStop stock bubble, where the amateur investors, the “apes,” built up a whole fantasy around direct restistered shares. (If you haven’t heard about that, Folding Ideas has an excellent video about the whole thing. Worth watching, or at least listening to.)
The reality is that such shares are just a pain in the ass to sell because you have to do transactions through physical mail, with all the delay that incurs, to do anything with them. By the time I wanted to do something with them, the stock was already sinking.
Meanwhile, the company stayed in steady decline. OWLD would fall below $1 a share, with delisting threatened, before the company folded up shop in 1999.
It could have been worse. The story was one of the early hires held onto their 25,000 shares until the place went out of business. They believed in the company, and emotional investment in something like a tech company is never a good idea.
But I did learn my lesson. When I took my vested Edify options… a merger caused them all to vest early, which changed the ticker to SONE, a company we’ll get to later… and sold them because my wife and I wanted to buy a house. I set a sell order at market value and cashed them all out at $130 a share. The stock closed over $131, and touched close to $134 before the bell that day, at what was the absolute peak of the dotcom boom. It was literally the bubble just before it burst. I was a bit disappointed that I had sold below the days high and wondered if I had called in too early, if the next day would see the market climb even higher.
It did not. The next day the stock fell to $128. And it fell a bit more the day after that, and more every day for many days to come. I had the good fortune and amazing luck to have sold at just a couple of bucks below its ultimate peak price point. We bought the house and, as it turns out, buying real estate in Silicon Valley in 2000 had a better return than most investments.
Nobody has ever offered me stock options again. It stopped being as much of a thing after the dotcom bubble. Taxes and accounting laws were tightened up and the executives decided that only they deserved stock options for all of their hard work.
I closed my brokerage accounts and have not since invested directly in any stock, avoiding anything like the stock purchase plans that some companies have offered now and then, where twice a year they buy stock for you with money they have held back from your paycheck at the market price less a discount for being in the program… usually 15%.
And at every buy date the stock in question would spike up, much more than the 15% discount, and then fall back the next day, ensuring that the whole thing was a screw job for those who bought in on it.
I have money in a 401k for retirement, in an index fund. But investing in stock as an individual retail customer with an eye towards increasing your money… that is just gambling. And, as with any form of gambling, the house wins and the individuals lose. The index fund is only allowed to “win” because somebody on Wall Street earns their bonus based on that. You’re allowed to win a bit while they win big… though somehow they win big even when you lose.
I’d like to say it wasn’t always like that. But then I think about the 1920s and the great depression that the market caused while people like Joe Kennedy got rich. Even in the calm periods, where the market seemed focused on dividends and stability, the house always won in the end.
I’m feeling a little retrospective and nostalgic today, so if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to acknowledge a couple of personal milestones.
1. Today marks 19 years of me doing <a href="http://kottke.org" rel="nofollow">kottke.org</a> as a full-time job. What. The. Actual. F? I kinda can’t believe it. Before this, the longest I’d ever stayed at a job was about two years…and the average was closer to 9-12 months. Aside from dropping out of grad school to bet my life on the World Wide Web, choosing to turn this website into my job is the best decision I’ve ever made.
Some of you may not know this, but when I went full-time, I ran a three-week “pledge drive” to fund my activities on the site. In 2005, this was an almost unheard-of thing to do — people did not send money to strangers over the internet for their personal websites. But it worked: that initial boost sustained me that first year and allowed me to build this career sharing the best of the internet with you. Those brave folks got a pretty good return on their risky investment, I’d say.
Several years ago, I circled back to the idea of a reader-funded site and since then, the membership program has completely transformed the site and my engagement with the work I do here. Incredibly, some of the folks who supported me back in 2005 are still supporting me today — a huge thank you to them and to everyone else who has supported the site along the way.
2. This is a less-obvious milestone with diffuse edges but one that came to mind this morning as I looked back at some photos from a couple of years ago. When I announced I was taking a sabbatical in May 2022, I wrote about my fiddle leaf fig and the metaphorical connection I seem to have with it:
I’d brought this glorious living thing into my house only to kill it! Not cool. With the stress of the separation, my new living situation, and not seeing my kids every day, I felt a little like I was dying too.
One day, I decided I was not going to let my fiddle leaf fig tree die…and if I could do that, I wasn’t going to fall apart either. It’s a little corny, but my mantra became “if my tree is ok, I am ok”. I learned how to water & feed it and figured out the best place to put it for the right amount of light. It stopped shedding leaves.
I went on to explain that my tree was not doing that well…and its condition was telling me that I needed a break. Well, what a difference the last two years have made. On the left is a photo I took two years ago today of my fig and on the right is from this morning:
Oh, there are a couple of janky leaves in today’s photo (the product of some inattentive watering earlier this winter as I failed to adjust to the winter dryness), but the plant is happy in a bigger pot and there are several new leaves just from the past two weeks (as the amount of daylight increases). There are also two other fiddles in the house that are descended from cuttings I took from this one — they’re also thriving and both have new leaves coming in right now.
I still have not written a whole lot about what I did (or didn’t do) during the seven months I was off, but after more than a year back, it seems pretty clear that the sabbatical did what I wanted it to. I feel like I’m thriving as much as my tree is. In recent months, I’ve launched a couple of new features (including the comments, which I’ve been really pleased with) and added another voice to the site. There’s a new thing launching soon (*fingers crossed*) and I have plans for more new features, including improvements to the comments.
More importantly, the site feels vital and fun in a way that it hasn’t for quite awhile. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops (nothing is — I’m looking at you, tax season), but I’m having a blast, am engaged with the work, and am feeling pretty fulfilled lately. So another huge thanks to everyone for hanging in there while I sorted my shit out — I appreciate you.
I started working on MetaFilter in the Fall of 1998, but just before launching it I realized the new blog I built was for a community, not just me. So I built a little blog engine to power my personal domain starting in Summer of 1999.
By early 2000, I moved things to Blogger (remember the joy of FTP?) and off my own custom blogging engine, and eventually I got lucky enough to work at Blogger, on Blogger. Good times.
When my time at Blogger ended in early 2001, I bought the cheeky self-deprecating domain "wholelottanothing.org" and built a new blogging system in one night out of spite for the previous CMS, and launched this very site here at the new domain a.wholelottanothing.org.
I loved this first version of this blog. Since I built it completely myself, I made my own posting page and it was just a blank white page with a title and a big blank area for the content of a post and nothing more and I loved the focus and simplicity. I also loved doing custom stuff like having this top/bottom design where only my latest post was above the fold in the white area, with the rest of the page below (something Blogger couldn't do at the time).
Fast forward a few years and I was getting tired of maintaining my own code and I was loving Movable Type for every other blog I wrote on, so I created a hybrid site where Movable Type handled all my blogging entires, but it spit out files I could include in custom templates, letting me make my site do anything I wanted.
This 2004-era version of the site was probably my absolute favorite. I spent months working with various APIs to build the right sidebar dynamically.
This was the early era of Web 2.0 where anyone could finally create things on the internet by just clicking buttons and filling out forms on web apps. But as I used these services, I got kind of bummed when thinking how I was posting but not on my personal site. To combat this, I used all the data sharing features of Web 2.0 to pull in my recent music listens, upcoming events I was attending, longer essays I wrote, my daily photo, a blogroll, my Flickr photos, and even links to comments I made on other sites.
I called this iteration "The Temple of Ego" and it felt like the ultimate expression of what a personal blog could do for the owner. If you wanted to know who I was, you could scroll down the sidebar and get a pretty complete picture of every single thing I was doing online at the time.
(plus: how cool was it to use old timey wallpapers on a modern blog?)
A year or so later, I got tired of fiddling with my own code again so I moved this site to TypePad, which was a hosted version of Movable Type. This was huge for me, because it was the first time I ever used an outside service for hosting all my content. I still made my own custom templates at Typepad, but I didn't have to run my own server, and I instantly felt relieved.
Around 2010, I grew tired of Typepad's stagnant features and decided to finally go all-in on Wordpress. I'd played with Wordpress since the early days but didn't move my personal site to it until I felt like it was miles ahead of everything else.
And that's what I've used for the last 15 years to maintain this blog. Until today, as I've moved to Ghost.
Picking a blogging system in 2024
Blogging is in a pretty weird place these days and while there are a ton of small blogging engines on GitHub just a few giant players remain on the hosted side. I felt like Wordpress has grown long in the tooth, and I was no longer having fun with the extremely-locked-down nature of Wordpress.com so I began to look for other options.
You could say blogging is going through a bit of resurgence, in the form of newsletters. And while I would never touch a service like substack, or even move to only sending email newsletters, I was interested in finding tools that could combine blogging and email in modern ways as I admit there really isn't much difference between a blog post and a blog post delivered via email newsletter.
The big thing that made me slap down a credit card and spend three days importing 3,500 posts from the past 25 years was seeing their posting page, which looks like a modern version of the very same thing I built for myself in 2001.
Today I finished importing all the old posts (thanks Greg and Mark) and got copies of every photo and image for all those posts. I also imported my old pieces from Medium.com, which you might spot in archives.
💡
If you want to follow along and get all my new posts over email, hit the subscribe link on the front page of this site.
Ghost so far has been fun and I like the design of most templates. I'll probably start working on my own custom layout that brings back archives and UI the way I like to see them, and somehow incorporates my Mastodon content.
Fun new software means I'm happy to write more often, so expect to see a more regular posting cadence here.
My goal was to preserve some never-before-heard recordings of an incredible Dixieland jazz band made up of mostly Disney employees, the Firehouse Five Plus Two.
But along the way, I accidentally discovered an incredible lost song that was cut from Walt Disney’s Cinderella.
And you’re about to hear it too. Let’s go.
Firehouse Five Plus Who?
Here’s the backstory. In the early 1940’s, a bunch of talented folks in the powerful orbit of legendary Disney animator Ward Kimball, which naturally included plenty of folks from the Disney animation and sound departments, discovered that they shared a common love of jazz.
During World War II, they started a studio band called the Huggajeedy Eight, and mostly played as part of Disney “camp shows” — vaudeville-style programs put on by studio personnel for soldiers at local military bases. Then, around 1945, Ward met a local trumpeter, Johnny Lucas, and together they started the San Gabriel Valley Blueblowers, playing frequently around LA.
With that foundation, here’s how Ward likes to tells it:
“Some of us used to gather in my office at lunchtime to listen to my records of jazz legends. We decided to really get into the spirit of the music by playing along with the records. Then one day the phonograph broke down right in the middle of ‘Royal Garden Blues’. Undaunted, we kept right on playing and found to our amazement that we sounded pretty good all by ourselves!”
The group included also-legendary animator Frank Thomas on piano, assistant director Danny Alguire on cornet, designer and Imagineer Harper Goff on banjo, and more. Interestingly, folks like Goff and Alguire were band members first, and were later hired at Disney, sometimes through the intervention of Ward (like Alguire) and sometimes on their own merits (like Goff).
These lunchtime listening sessions became lunchtime jam sessions. Soon, they were being asked to play parties and dances. And before you know it, the Firehouse Five Plus Two was born.
“When the band was asked by the local Horseless Carriage Club to play for its auto tour to San Diego, I quickly found and restored a 1914 fire truck and with the group now uniformed as firemen, we logically changed our name to the Firehouse Five Plus Two.”
Why the Plus Two? Simple. “The ‘Plus Two’ was added so that people who hired us would know that they were getting seven musicians!” Duh.
As the band’s popularity grew, their day jobs remained.
“Walt always liked music and he was very proud of us. He couldn’t get over the fact that some of the guys who worked for him as animators and artists were all of a sudden the toast of the music world.”
It was inevitable, then, that the Firehouse Five Plus Two would also work their way into the Disney canon. The band made an iconic appearance in the (very strange, very Charlie McCarthy-heavy) Alice In Wonderland-promoting television special One Hour in Wonderland (1950).
Of course, it was shot on a soundstage, not in a real animation office, but what great set dressing:
They appeared in an episode of the Mickey Mouse Club:
The band also makes an animated, hilariously-caricatured cameo in the Goofy short How to Dance (1953):
The Firehouse Five Plus Two became, if you’ll forgive me, white hot. Ward summarizes:
“We made movies at MGM and Universal Studios, played for Bing Crosby’s golf tournaments and radio shows, appeared on national television with such diversified luminaries as the Disney Mouseketeers, Milton Berle, Ed Wynn, and Lawrence Welk, culminating with over 15 years of summer appearances at the Golden Horseshoe at Disneyland. By the time we decided to retire the band in 1971, we had managed to record 12 albums which have sold worldwide. All this in our spare time.”
Eventually, Ward — and the Firehouse Five Plus Two — fell out of favor with Walt. Ward had a string of unfortunate conflicts, including a promotional ad for “Babes in Toyland” that put Ward front and center as director and angered Walt so much he had him removed from the picture entirely, and the band got caught up in the fray.
“I remember [Walt] was having a picnic at the Golden Oak Ranch, [but] I had to leave at 2 o’clock and drive to San Diego to play at the Hotel Coronado with the band. So I went over and asked them if I could have a plate of food earlier.
Walt walks up, while I’m sitting all by myself, with Betty [Kimball’s wife], and I’m eating, and he says to Betty, ‘Don’t you feed him at home?’ I said, ‘Gee, Walt, I have to go and play a job in San Diego.’ He made some sarcastic remark: ‘Don’t we pay you enough?’ You see, this fed the way he was feeling. Walt couldn’t understand why I would leave a Disney party that he planned, desert it at 3 in the afternoon, and go to San Diego and play with the band.
He was so proud of that band for years. When these things all got added up, the band got thrown in the hopper, too.”
Still, even today, the Firehouse Five Plus Two remains a culturally important part of Disney. Maybe you spotted this familiar logo in The Princess and the Frog (2009)?
Even better, this great homage just made it into the real world — at Tiana’s Palace at Disneyland, in 2023.
There’s one other reason I’m fascinated by this band.
Firehouse Five Plus Two perfectly captures a kind-of longing and nostalgia for a something I wish I could’ve experienced: a very special, early, creative, just-a-group-of-friends time at the Walt Disney Company. Just think: nobody got fired for this side project. This was Ward’s idea with no studio affiliation or investment. He didn’t have to CC:’d and BCC: this dream across huge teams of PR folks or lawyers. They practiced at lunch — during work hours. They were even allowed to sell their albums on a non-Disney music label. And yet, Walt even appreciated and leveraged the group to his benefit. A lot of this was simply the power of Ward, but still, could this happen today? It’s maybe not impossible, but it feels unlikely.
Hey… wait a second! That was a lot of blabbering.
Do you want to hear what the Firehouse Five sounds like?!
Here are a handful of Firehouse Five albums on your favorite streaming services! Click on any cover to enjoy. (There’s more, but these ones are available everywhere.)
(Also, a Cabel reminder to always buy the music you want to keep forever — these albums can, and will, disappear from streaming services at some point in the future.)
Ok, you’re caught up. That’s the Firehouse Five Plus Two.
Then, The Auction
Let’s just say… it caught my eye immediately.
The auction listing read:
Lot #: 452
Description: (ca. 1947) Collection of rare, unique live master recordings by The Firehouse Five on (6) original 78rpm records. These early direct-to-78 recordings capture the group as their swinging Dixieland sound began to coalesce.
Each record includes multiple tracks, and retains a Walt Disney Productions label hand written (presumably by Kimball) with cheeky titles. An incredible, one-of-a-kind relic of underground Disney history.
Mysterious acetate wafers that might contain one-of-a-kind, never-heard moments from this incredible band?!
I had to get and/or hear these.
So, I bid — and $1,000 later (once again, welcome to the world’s least profitable blog), a package showed up.
I opened this vintage “His Master’s Voice” record folio as carefully as possible…
…and when I took a look at that first label…
…I knew I was in for something special.
It began to sink in that what was in front of me was literally one-of-a-kind — and contained recordings that, most likely, nobody has heard in 70 years.
And then I told myself:
“Cabel you really can’t screw this up.”
Getting Them Saved
I needed a way to get these archived. Folks, I wasn’t about to slap them on an Urban Outfitters USB Turntable.
That’s where Bryce Roe comes in.
I emailed the Northeast Document Conservation Center, which I found via some Googling (“old records safe digitize no destroy important”, probably). They’re a non-profit conservation and preservation center in Andover, MA, that offers book, paper, photograph, and audio conservation, digital imaging, and more. Bryce replied:
“We would be delighted to work with you to preserve your valuable recordings. These appear to be lacquer instantaneous discs, and they are quite fragile compared to vinyl — you were wise to be cautious about handling and playback! We offer traditional stylus playback reformatting for discs that are in stable condition, and we also offer a ‘non-touch’, optical scanning method using IRENE for discs that are too damaged to be played via a contact method or as a safer alternative for playable discs.”
—Bryce Roe, NEDCC
Ok, yeah, NEDCC seemed like a good lead. So after spending even more money on this post (someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my blog is dying), I put the records safely in the mail.
If you want to get technical — and I do! — Karl Fleck, who did the archiving work, shared with me some process notes:
“There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to transferring audio from a disc. Many of those parts have to deal with the lack of standardization in the characteristics of disc recording. So before I began the actual transfers, I ran a couple tests. First, I played the disc and captured some audio with different sized styli because the groove dimensions on discs were not standardized at the time and varied depending on the original disc cutting machine. Then, I compared the test audio and listened for which stylus produced the cleanest audio, or, the audio with the least amount of noise and distortion. Another technical setting was the playback equalization – AKA EQ. This setting determines the overall frequency balance of the audio content. Similar to the stylus selection, I listened to many EQ settings and determined which one was most appropriate for the time period and which had the most natural frequency balance.”
—Karl Fleck, NEDCC
Eventually, the work was done, and some digital files arrived at my doorstep.
I took a deep breath, put on my headphones, and hit play.
Firehouse Five: The Lost Rehearsals
Let’s listen to these records together!
But before we start, I want to note that I spoke with some wonderful people who helped me here. Theodore Thomas is a talented filmmaker — and also the son of Frank Thomas, Disney animator and Firehouse Five pianist. Don Hahn is a Disney legend, historian, and producer (Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Atlantis, etc.) Stacia Martin is an encyclopedic source of Disney knowledge, an equally incredible artist (just watch her draw Figment — while talking!!), a 40+ year Disney employee and true delight.
So, here we go:
1. Yes Sir! That’s M’Baby
Go on, hit play!
The first thing I have to mention, of course, is that Ward Kimball couldn’t help himself — on this label, he’s temporarily renamed the band to the “Outhouse Oaters”. (In modern terms, I think this loosely translates to “Crappy Western”.)
This song is a Firehouse Five classic, but what’s interesting is that it’s surprisingly slow for them — I think what’s happening here is that we get to be in the room as they’re finding their footing and learning the song, playing it slow to get it under their belt.
Also, this is clearly recorded with a single microphone — this isn’t a professional mixed record. This was almost certainly a lunch-time, skunkworks deal.
2. Shake That Thing
First, omg, “Outhouse Oaters” was just the beginning. Now, the band’s temporary name is the “Farthouse Fuckheads”!!
Every time I look at that label, I laugh. Every time.
(It’s also funny, because we don’t really imagine folks in the ‘good old days’ using this kind of language, do we? Maybe because it’s not in that media. But, oh, they did.)
Second, this disc is particularly special to me —I think this song isn’t available on any Firehouse Five record! It was normally just part of their live set. Now it’s saved!
I’m also delighted by the strikethrough on “Walt Disney Productions” (“no copyright intended”) and the “throw away when finished”. Whoever didn’t do that — thank you.
3. Everybody Loves My Baby (Warm-up)
This mysteriously-labelled disc contains a very short snippet of the band getting up to speed on Everybody Loves My Baby. There’s a much longer version a few discs down.
4. Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
Good lord. Just when I thought we’d reached the alternate-name comedy peak, here come the “Jackoff Jackrabbits”!!
This recording is starting to feel a little bit more like the pace of a Firehouse Five song.
Also, at the beginning there’s a little bit of dialog, that to me sounds like “Five foot two with a Charleston gimme, hey Johnny, what is the beat?” After that you can hear trumpet-player Johnny Lucas exclaim “A-wat-dat!” and stomp out a six-count for tempo. It’s like being there.
5. Brass Bell (Frank’s Rag)
More great chatter up top: “This is called Frank’s Rag, that title’ll have to do for now. Frank wrote it himself, right Frank?” I love this, because it captures a brief moment right before the song was formally known as “Brass Bell”, another Firehouse Five classic, as it was labelled.
Again, it feels so dang slow! But I guess that’s what practice is all about?
The song ends with a fantastic Ward “How do ya like it?!”
6. Everybody Loves My Baby
No funny band name here, just a really nice recording of a great song with a fun Frank piano solo in the middle.
7. Silver Threads Among The Clinkers Gold
It was inevitable. Our beloved band has another new, temporary name, via Ward Kimball: the “Whorehouse Five”.
(And once again I thank whoever ignored the “Please Destroy” instructions written on the disc.)
This is another song I don’t believe was ever released on a Firehouse Five album! And I love the coin-operated player piano gag at the beginning — it’s all played so straight until it starts to swing half-way through!
The end of the song, though, is a treat. (Skip to 3:45). If you listen closely, there’s great real-life band discussion that takes place. My best transcription:
“What’s the idea, Ed?”
“Yeah, let’s hear this idea!” (That’s Ward talking to Ed Penner, Tuba player.)
“Well, so you know [unknown venue] has a kitty at the front?”
(Ted Thomas reminds me a kitty was a container — a barrel, a basket, a jar — to collect money and tips for the band.)
“Yeah…”
“Let’s make a kitty barrel and let’s rig it up so that if anybody [puts money in?], a firecracker goes off, a smoke bomb, bells ring, lights, I mean really…”
“I suppose I’m going to have to make it?” (Ward, of course.)
“You know, Lucas hates kitties!”
“You know I made [a barrel] for a kitty up there in Pasadena, and no one put anything in it…”
(Ward’s referring to one of the earliest jobs the Firehosue Five ever had as a band in Pasadena.)
“But you know at the Cavern…”
(Ted also notes that the Cavern might be the Beverly Cavern, a club on Beverly near Normandie that was a mainstay of the New Orleans revival, and is now a Karaoke joint. Kid Ory, Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, and the Firehouse Five all played there. The band ended up playing there regularly through the 1950s.)
“…they had one where lights would go off, electric bell would ring, and really…”
“Give ’em a show!!”
Rigging up a donation jar to shoot off fireworks and ring bells is a perfect distillation of the fun vibes at play.
I wonder if they ever did it.
Our Firehouse Five Rehearsals have now ended. I hope you enjoyed listening to that as much as I did!
So, Why Do These Records Exist?
Ted Thomas gave me his thoughts:
“These recordings of the proto-FH5 are definitely rehearsal discs, likely done in 1948, as the band was starting to gel into a professional unit. At the end of ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ there is mention of a gig in Pasadena, where they played many of their early jobs, even before they were officially the FH5. Also, the rendition of ‘Brass Bell’ has the flavor of it being fairly new to the band, and Frank wrote it after they played a house party in Beverly Hills early on. He originally titled it ‘Lullaby for Penny’, named for actress Penny Singleton who lived next door to the party and called the host repeatedly complaining that the band was too loud for her to sleep.”
And Don Hahn added:
“My hunch is that these were recorded on B Stage. It was the dialogue stage [at Walt Disney Productions] and although they could do multiple mics, it would be most often just one mic set up for dialogue. My guess is that they did this at lunch, which was a normal time for them to play and they just used the mono mic set up that was common on B Stage. I speak from total ignorance, though — my two cents, worth every penny!”
It all adds up.
They’d meet up at lunch (or whenever), sneak into B Stage, setup a microphone, and play their hearts out.
Hang On… What Was That?
I’m not sure if you listened to all of those tracks to the end (it’s ok if you didn’t), but did you notice anything?
Let’s listen closely to the very end of Shake That Thing:
You hear someone… calling some… chickens, right?
That’s not just my imagination?
Stacia Martin thought it sounded just like Ilene Woods, a.k.a. Cinderella. Remember this scene?
Wouldn’t those calls fit perfectly here? Is it possible this was an earlier idea they tried?
Hmmmm.
And what about the very end of Everybody Loves My Baby?
That’s right — after the band plays, there’s a little snippet of Cinderella herself, humming “A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes”! Remember this scene?
What the heck is going on here?
What are these random bits and pieces of Disney sound history doing at these end of these Firehouse Five tracks?
And that’s when I realized…
The Firehouse Five weren’t using fresh, blank acetates to record their practice. That’d be a waste of company resources! Ward was simply recycling acetates lying around his office, anything with a little bit of blank space.
What was on these discs before they recorded on them?!
Some Wonderful Surprises
Let’s start with a vinyl side labeled, simply, “Samba”.
8. Blame It On the Samba (Novachord Tests)
Ok, this is wild and amazing! What is it?!
Stacia Martin figured this one out immediately — it sounds like an alternate idea for a sequence in the middle of “Blame It On The Samba”, a part of Melody Time (1948).
Hear for yourself! It’s totally the same Samba beat in the background, right?
I’m really enjoying imagining what they would’ve animated to these bizarre and funny keyboard lines.
And the label notes “Novachord”, which means some of these weird notes were played using the world’s first polyphonic synthesizer! (1939… 72-voice polyphony… 163 vacuum tubes and 1,000 capacitors!)
What a treat to get to hear this snippet of lost history.
9. Two! Three! Four!
This mysterious, unlabelled disc really surprised me.
I love listening in on any recording session.
But what was this strange count-off for?
Who were these people?
Stacia Martin — who, once again, is the greatest — cracked this one immediately. This is a count-off used in the Mickey short Nifty Nineties (1941) — and that’s Ward Kimball himself counting, along with animator Fred Moore!
I love hearing them get more and more intense as they go.
(And I wondered, is this the only surviving recording of a Ward Kimball voice session?)
10. The Apple Song (Demo)
I warn you in advance: once you listen to this track, there is no coming back. It’s in your head forever. Enjoy.
The label says everything, really: this vinyl flip-side contained a charming demo recording of The Apple Song, used in the Johnny Appleseed sequence in Melody Time (1948). That’s Dennis Day singing both parts!
I really appreciate the simple piano accompaniment. It’s really shockingly close to the finished product:
The common thread to all of these discs is Ward Kimball. We’re pretty confident that’s Ward’s handwriting (and absolutely sure that’s his sense of humor). He animated on Blame It On The Samba. He was a voice in Nifty Nineties. He worked on Johnny Appleseed.
He also designed Gus & Jaq, the mice, in Cinderella.
Then… The Lost Cinderella Song
When I flipped over my last Firehouse Five rehearsal track, I came across the most interesting label of all.
It was crossed out multiple times in pencil. But unlike all of the other discs, the label was typewritten, so it felt significantly more important.
“Work Fantasy”, it read.
Dated 5/2/49.
And it was five minutes of something truly special.
11. Work Fantasy (A Lost Cinderella Demo)
Cinderella had a long and complex development, and one of the hardest sequences for the team to crack was called the “Work Fantasy” sequence. The basic idea: right after the stepmother tells Cindy that she can go to the ball — but only if she finishes her chores — Cinderella fantasizes about cloning herself. Having an army of Cinderellas would be the only way she could ever truly finish the task.
While many attempts were made, the sequence never made it into the film. And as I listened to this disc, it hit me.
On this acetate was a long-lost, never-released attempt to make the Cinderella “Work Fantasy” sequence work!!
And to think it was just hiding there on the other side of the Firehouse Five playing “Brass Bell”!
Go on, hit play. And as you listen, take a moment to let it sink in that you’re one of the first people to hear this music in nearly 75 years.
One version of this sequence was fully storyboarded, so please consider this imagery as you listen!
The whole track is incredible.
The mice dialog at the beginning. The beautiful “how happy I would be…” transition melody. The marching piano inserts from “Ollie” — that’s Oliver Wallace, who did the music. The hilarity of Cinderella essentially bossing herself around. And her exasperation after waking up.
But the real treat for me was three minutes in: Ilene Woods as Cinderella singing an incredible, complex three-part harmony with herself. Amazingly, this was also one of the first uses of overdubbing in film.
So, what happened to this “Work Fantasy” sequence?
Stacia Martin suggested I read the book “Disney Legend Wilfred Jackson” by Ross Care, which includes a day-by-day diary of his work at Disney, including on Cinderella.
Using it, we can piece together a pretty good timeline:
March 1st – Wilfred wrote “Meeting with Walt and Ollie on Work Fantasy”, as it was deep in development.
March 22nd – “Storyboards for Work Fantasy”.
April 28th – “Shooting live action on Work Fantasy”.
May 2nd – This recording was made.
May 10th – One week later, a big meeting with Walt: “running entire picture and discussing changes.”
May 20th – “Recording mice singing Work Song”
Did you notice what happened?
Whatever occurred in that May 10th meeting with Walt, the song had changed dramatically — it was quickly rerecorded, was now sung by the mice, and became what you probably know as “Cinderelly, Cinderelly”. The “fantasy” was gone.
And, lucky us: we got to hear one step on that journey.
The rest is history.
(And some bonus full-circle trivia: the voice of Gus and Jaq, the mice, was James MacDonald, who played drums in the Firehouse Five Plus Two. And one last fascinating footnote: this “lost song” was actually rewritten, without the fantasy/cloning part, then released as promotional record for the movie, sung by a super-jazzy Ilene Woods. You can hear it on YouTube.)
There, You Have It
So that’s my little musical adventure.
We just got to hear the Firehouse Five find their footing. We got to hear some demos and recording sessions from Disney history. And we got to hear a song from Cinderella we’ve never heard before.
I had a lot of talented help with this one. Starting with former-Imagineer Tom Morris, who introduced me to Stacia Martin, who introduced me to Don Hahn and Ted Thomas. World-class composer Chris Willis who helped me confirm Cinderella was singing three-part harmony. Bryce Roe, Karl Fleck, and NEDCC for their disc preservation. And finally, Amid Amidi for his amazing Ward Kimball knowledge. (His upcoming book is going to be a must-have.)
Extra special thanks for LostTurntable for cleaning up audio gunge in the recordings, and my old friend Louie Mantia for the beautiful cleaned-up label artwork.
I’m extremely happy to have saved these wonderful little snippets of Disney audio history. Side quests like this give me infinite energy and make my life feel worthwhile.
I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I did.
Best, Cabel
PS: the Apple Song will never leave your head
PPS: if you really, truly liked this post, I’ve set up a Stripe so you can send me some thanks-bucks (thucks®) and fund this kind of madness, but it’s a very optional test.