Being a studio composer seems to be pretty solid work. From John Williams to Carl Stalling to my own beloved Richard Bellis, writing for movies and TV pays the bills in a way that not a lot of other composing does these days. If you get an in with a studio or director, you can keep going for pretty much ever. Oliver Wallace may have started by conducting theatre orchestras in Seattle, but he moved to Disney in 1936 and worked there for nearly three decades; his career was ended only with his death.
You do have to be kind of deep into this sort of thing to know who Wallace was by name. This I freely admit. However, you don’t to know his work. He was initially hired as a live-action model for Sneezy and Dopey for Snow White. Why, I can’t tell you; he’d already composed a few popular songs, not to mention the music for various movies. (1935’s Murder by Television is one I’d love to track down, I cal tell you that!) Indeed, he was composing for shorts even before Snow White came out. He wrote for a couple of the features, too, before ending his career with documentaries.
So okay, yes, his career included music for “Sammy, the Way-Out Seal.” Fair enough. But he won an Oscar for Dumbo. He was nominated four more times, for Victory Through Air Power and Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland before finishing up with a nomination for White Wilderness. Frankly, his losses are almost as impressive as his win. He lost to Dimitri Tiomkin, An American in Paris, and Annie Get Your Gun. (And Alfred Newman’s score for The Song of Bernadette.) That his score was recognized for two of those is impressive because of the works they’re associated with; the first and last are not works that you’d expect to get score nominations.
It’s true that he didn’t write “Baby Mine.” On the other hand, one of the songs he did write was “Der Fuehrer’s Face.” Personally, I’d thought Spike Jones wrote it, but no. Oliver Wallace. He did write two songs for Darby O’Gill and the Little People, including “Pretty Irish Girl,” sung in the movie by Sean Connery. He wrote others, such as “A Pirate’s Life” and “Following the Leader” from Peter Pan and almost all of the not-“Baby Mine” songs from Dumbo. “Casey Jr.”? Wallace did the music. “Pink Elephants on Parade”? Ditto.
His music has come up quite a lot in the Disney column. He’s one of the most prolific composers of the Disney studio. Dozens of shorts. Multiple animated features. Enormous numbers of documentaries. Some of the TV shows. And even the voice of Mr. Winkie and the whistling for Ichabod Crane in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. And the band leader in Toby Tyler. Which he didn’t even score, so it’s kind of an odd choice, if an understandable one.
Make the understandable choice of supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!
