Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales | |
---|---|
Author(s) | Various |
Illustrator(s) | Various |
Current status/schedule | Concluded |
Launch date | July 13, 1952 |
End date | February 15, 1987 |
Syndicate(s) | King Features Syndicate |
Genre(s) | Funny animals |
Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales is an American Disney comic strip, which ran on Sundays in newspapers from July 13, 1952, until February 15, 1987. [1] It was distributed by King Features Syndicate. Each story adapted a different Disney film, such as Darby O'Gill and the Little People , Peter Pan , or Davy Crockett . It was run in relatively few papers, with 58 in 1957 [2] and 55 in 1966, [3] and was principally a vehicle for promoting new and re-released Disney films. [4]
From March 8 to June 18, 1950, Disney distributed a limited-time Sunday strip adaptations of their new animated feature Cinderella , written by Frank Reilly, with art by Manuel Gonzales and Dick Moores. [5] The same team followed the next year with Alice in Wonderland, which ran from September 2 to December 16, 1951. [6] Judged a success, the experiment was turned into an ongoing feature in 1952, beginning with The Story of Robin Hood .
The strip featured a wide variety of Disney stories. The animated features adapted for the strip include Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1958), The Sword in the Stone (1963) and The Jungle Book (1968). Classic Tales also featured animated shorts, including Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1956) and Ben and Me (1953), and featurettes like Peter & The Wolf (1954) and Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966).
Treasury of Classic Tales also adapted live-action films like Old Yeller (1957–58), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), Mary Poppins (1964) and The Love Bug (1969). The strip transitioned from historical dramas like The Sword and the Rose (1953) and Kidnapped (1960) to comedies like The Shaggy Dog (1959) and The Parent Trap (1961).
The 1979–80 adaptation of The Black Hole was particularly notable for featuring pencil art by comics icon Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer inking.
Some of the stories created toward the end of the strip's run in the 1980s were original stories featuring characters from different Disney animated movies, including The Return of the Rescuers (1983), Dumbo, the Substitute Stork (1984) and Cinderella: Bibbidi-Bobbodi-Who? (1984).
Most stories ran for thirteen weeks. A total of 129 stories were created between 1952 and 1987.
In 2016, IDW Publishing and their imprint The Library of American Comics (LoAC) began to collect all the Treasury of Classic Tales stories in a definitive hardcover reprint series. [7] As of 2019, three volumes have been published, reprinting all the stories from Robin Hood (1952) through In Search of the Castaways (1962). In April 2018, it was announced that, due to the sales goal of the series not being met, the third volume may be the last one to be published. [8] [9]