The Sherman brothers were icons of the earworm. Never mind The Song That Will Not Be Named Here; for my money, the most earwormy song they ever wrote was “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.” Or maybe I’m particularly susceptible to it for some reason. Our own Anthony Pizzo knows that the easiest way to get me to yell at him is to post images from the Carousel of Progress, because that’s all it takes. I liked Tomorrowland except for the part where it got the song stuck in my head for literally days. Meaning I spent days hearing the mellifluous voice of Rex Allen.

Allen was initially part of the singing cowboy boom. I don’t think I’ve seen any of those movies. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen any movies where you can see his face at all. Apparently, he was a white-hat sort, the kind of hero you could let your kids watch because you’d want them to grow up to be like that. They were pretty much all like that. Gene Autry? I’ve seen several of his movies, and they were like that, too. Ridiculously wholesome.

Equally wholesome, for the most part, were the many places from which I am familiar with him. Specifically, he narrated a crapton of Disney stuff. He’s so familiar that he was parodied on Animaniacs once. I’m not going to tell you the name of the short that IMDb lists as the first one he did for Disney, because what’s a little ethnic slur among friends (thank you, 1957), but the next one was our old favourite “The Hound That Thought He Was a Raccoon.” And then he was off and running.

As always, I’m going to go ahead and assume that IMDb is incomplete. He’s only got something like a dozen credits in his acting list there. There are a few more under “Self,” but only a few. And, of course, they don’t include his theme park credits. Allen was a busy, busy man for Disney. For a long time. Probably I could spend hours tracking down his credits across multiple websites, meticulously reading the narrator names on every single episode of The Wonderful World of Disney and every single hokey live action theatrical release, and with all the love in my heart, I’m not going to do that for you all. Suffice it to say that you know his voice.

It’s worth mentioning that he was the real thing. He was born on a ranch in Willcox, Arizona, where the youngest Earp brother is buried. I would’ve passed through there while visiting my grandparents if I flew into the Tucson airport; both Willcox and Safford, where they lived, are real middle-of-nowhere places to this day. His father played fiddle, getting young Rex started in music. Some of the Hollywood cowboys were Midwesterners who looked good on a horse. Rex may’ve been a musician before he was a cowboy, but he seems likely to have known at least a little about being a cowboy.

I got that song stuck in my head again for you people; reward me by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!