I sat down with Jerry Beck earlier this week to learn more about what has him excited about this 60th anniversary screening of VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER and to talk about the significance of the film in the Disney canon.

Rhett Wichkam: Are your excited about this upcoming screening?

Jerry Beck: Yeah. Yeah I am! I haven’t seen this print - I’ve seen the film - but this is supposedly a restored print. Extra good for me, in addition to seeing VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER on a theatre screen, is that these cartoons are vault prints. You know you don’t see 35 millimeter prints of wartime cartoons in a theatre anywhere. I remember the old days in New York at the Film Forum when they showed those cartoons, but they were 16 millimeter. This is a rare way to see these films the way they were originally presented. I’m excited about that. It’s a great thing for Disney fans to see, it’s a great thing for anyone to see. The reason people haven’t seen it is that it’s not the traditional Disney film with a story. At the time, the powers that be didn’t take air power seriously. The book that Disney read and got enthused about was a radical thing. It was radical thinking at the time. And I wonder if post 9-11 it takes on anything. After all, this is a movie about the strategic use of aviation to defeat your enemy.

RW: So air defense of this magnitude was truly an untested approach, or at least not championed to the degree it is today.

JB: First of all it shows you something about Disney’s thinking, about Disney himself. His mind set. By the way I have to confess that as we’re talking I’m still formulating some of what I’ll say in introducing the film, since I’m not entirely done with my research.

RW: Great! Please formulate!

JB: We all know him from what he did with theme parks and animation and film - he was an innovator. He was somebody who looked ahead and was forward thinking. I think that’s something that appealed to him when he was read this book: that this was a radical, new, forward thinking idea.

This was a movie to convince our government and others that this is what we should be doing.

RW: How do you think the internal staff responded to his decision to make this film? Wasn’t it, for all intents and purposes the largest project after the strike?

JB: I don’t know exactly, but I do know that this was the last film that a lot of guys who left worked on. For instance this was curiously the last film that David Hand worked on. Keep in mind that the animation is as limited as it could be through most of the film. That’s still more than what we see today with say Anime or television animation, but very limited by Disney standards. There’s really only that one great sequence…

RW: With the Eagle and the Octopus

JB: …that’s fully animated, Yeah.

And that’s it. It really wasn’t a big budget picture. Plus something else that I find curious -- and I still have to research why this is -- but it went out through United Artists, not through the RKO deal. That was an unusual thing. Another thing that I find interesting about the film, and I don’t know if you remember this -- and it’s a minor point and I’ve never heard anybody say this -- but it’s sort of a template for the Disneyland show. Now here’s what I mean: look at this film - if you put Disney in the place of Major de Seversky it’s an episode of the Disneyland show. He’s in an office, he’s telling us about the history of aviation at the beginning of the film, and he’s going to a globe, and explaining through animation the point he’s trying to make. Disney did that…fifty percent or more of the Disneyland shows were that way. Disney talking to an expert, or Disney as the host educating us about something. Yes, it’s an unusual feature, but when you look at it in the context of the big picture of Disney and the Disneyland shows and also with what they did later with educational films, it’s really the beginning - the blueprint - for what they did later both with Disneyland and with the educational films. I almost feel that at one point in 1954 or something Walt must have said ‘well how do see the format of this show?’ and somebody said ‘Remember VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER? But you are him and we’ll explain how LADY & THE TRAMP was made or 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA is made, but it’s going to be you in the office and we’re going to film you the same way.’