Saludos Amigos.

 

                                                Saludos Amigos.

This was a ground breaking movie. Disney broke down the walls and 

included every race no matter who you are and this one proves just how 

great it can be including everyone and I hope every movie company goes 

back and watches this one cause it breaks down all barriers. I hope you 

all check it out for yourselves cause it really is a great movie. So, with 

that, lets get to the stories shall we: 

Saludos Amigos Spanish for "Greetings, Friends" is a 1942 American live-

action animated package featurette produced by Walt Disney and 

released by RKO Radio Pictures. It is the sixth Disney animated feature 

film and the first of the six package films produced by Walt Disney 

Productions in the 1940s. Set in Latin America, it is made up of four 

different segments; Donald Duck stars in two of them and Goofy stars in 

one. It also features the first appearance of José Carioca, the Brazilian 

cigar-smoking parrot. Saludos Amigos premiered in Rio de Janeiro on 

August 24, 1942. It was released in the United States on February 6, 

1943. Saludos Amigos was popular enough that Walt Disney decided to 

make another film about Latin America, The Three Caballeros, to be 

produced two years later. At 42 minutes, it is Disney's shortest animated 

feature to date. In early 1941, before U.S. entry into World War II, 

the United States Department of State commissioned a Disney goodwill 

tour of South America, intended to lead to a movie to be shown in the 

US, Central, and South America as part of the Good Neighbor Policy. This 

was being done because several Latin American governments had close 

ties with Nazi Germany, and the US government wanted to counteract 

those ties. Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters were popular in 

Latin America, and Walt Disney acted as ambassador. The tour, 

facilitated by Nelson Rockefeller, who had recently been appointed 

as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, CIAA, took Disney and a group 

of roughly twenty composers, artists, technicians, etc. from his studio to 

South America, mainly to Brazil and Argentina, but also to Chile and Peru.

The film itself was given federal loan guarantees, because the Disney 

studio had over-expanded just before European markets were closed to 

them by the war, and because Disney was struggling with labor unrest at 

the time including a strike that was underway at the time the goodwill 

journey began.

The film included live-action documentary sequences featuring footage 

of modern Latin American cities with skyscrapers and fashionably 

dressed residents. This surprised many contemporary US viewers, who 

associated such images only with US and European cities, and 

contributed to a changing impression of Latin America. Film historian 

Alfred Charles Richard Jr. has commented that Saludos Amigos "did 

more to cement a community of interest between peoples of the 

Americas in a few months than the State Department had in fifty years".

The film also inspired Chilean cartoonist René Ríos Boettiger to 

create Condorito, one of Latin America's most ubiquitous cartoon 

characters. Ríos perceived that the character Pedro, a small, incapable 

airplane, was a slight to Chileans and created a comic that could 

supposedly rival Disney's comic characters. This film features four 

different segments, each of which begin with various clips of the Disney 

artists roaming the country, drawing cartoons of some of the local 

cultures and scenery.

Lake Titicaca

In this segment, American tourist Donald Duck visits Lake Titicaca and 

meets some of the locals, including an obstinate llama.

Pedro

Pedro is about a small anthropomorphic airplane from an airport 

near Santiago, Chile, engaging in his first flight to retrieve air 

mail from Mendoza, with disastrous consequences. He manages to safely 

return to the airfield with the mail, which happens to be a single 

postcard. RKO Pictures released this particular segment as a theatrical 

short on May 13, 1955.

Chilean cartoonist René Ríos Boettiger known popularly as "Pepo" was 

disappointed with how the character Pedro represented his country. In 

response, he developed the character Condorito, who went on to become 

one of the most iconic comic magazine characters in Latin America.

El Gaucho Goofy

In this segment, American cowboy Goofy gets taken mysteriously to 

the Argentinian pampas to learn the ways of the native gaucho. This 

segment was later edited for the film's Gold Classic Collection VHS/DVD 

release to remove one scene in which Goofy is shown smoking 

a cigarette. This edit appears again on the Classic Caballeros Collection 

DVD. This sequence has since been restored as the unedited version has 

been much requested. The fully unedited version is available as a bonus 

feature on the Walt & El Grupo DVD release. When the film was released 

on Disney's streaming platform Disney+, the edited version of the 

sequence was used despite disclaimers of the film being presented in its 

original format with "outdated cultural depictions" and tobacco usage, 

but it has since been changed to the unedited version.

Aquarela do Brasil

Aquarela do Brasil Portuguese for "Watercolor of Brazil", the finale of 

the film, involves a brand-new character, José Carioca from Rio de 

Janeiro, Brazil, showing Donald Duck around South America, having a 

drink of cachaça with him and introducing him to the samba to the tunes 

of "Brazil" and "Tico-Tico no Fubá".