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"Disneyland" I Captured the King of the Leprechauns (1959)

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Elaborate promo for Walt's upcoming "Darby O'Gill", 19 April 2007

Author: WoodrowTruesmith from Los Angeles

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

For a TV episode, very well-produced (in black-and-white -- unlike the expensive Technicolor feature "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" which it was promoting.)

The episode is included on the "Darby" DVD, and it's a revelation. Pat O'Brien was well used, and Walt himself was a pretty good actor. The story is wonderfully nonsensical: O'Brien convinces Walt to go to Ireland and use actual leprechauns, rather than have his artists draw them. In Ireland, Walt meets a Dublin librarian who talks about the legends, then he sits in on a storytelling scene with the "real" Darby (Albert Sharpe). Later Darby leads Walt to the old ruins to meet leprechaun Phadric Oge (Jack McGowran) and then King Brian himself (Jimmy O'Dea), where he decides to film both Darby and Brian as characters in his film. There are also scenes lifted from the movie, featuring Sean Connery, Janet Munro, Estelle Winwood, Kieron Moore and others...all of which Walt speaks of as if he had filmed them for a documentary. He then returns to California, where O'Brien has the temerity to act shocked and disbelieving that Walt actually met the little people.

All in all, an elaborate promo episode of Walt Disney Presents, featuring Walt in the same painstaking camera set-ups used in the movie to blend the full-sized Darby and the foot-high leprechauns -- a process done all in one shot without optical work, using forced perspective, as explained on an excellent featurette on the same DVD.

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