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Concertinas in cartoons


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There's something drawn like a concertina in "The Aristocats". Unfortunately, the sound is an accordion.

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That seems to be par for the course. Presumably the film-makers like the look of the things but can't find anyone to play the music they actually want on a concertina, and an accordion is 'close enough'. It probably is too, for the vast majority.

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That seems to be par for the course. Presumably the film-makers like the look of the things but can't find anyone to play the music they actually want on a concertina, and an accordion is 'close enough'. It probably is too, for the vast majority.

 

Heh. I figured it something more like they want some accordion music, but the animators don't want to draw a melodeon, and they figure nobody will really know the difference anyway.

 

Whatever the exact line of reasoning, the approximate form factor of a concertina has become a visual symbol for any kind of squeezebox.

 

Speaking of Disney movies with anonymous concertina-shaped musical instruments in them, there's a pirate singing a song in Peter Pan. Captain hook shoots him, and Smee upbraids him for "shooting a man in the middle of his cadenza". I don't have the resources to check right now, but it seems like the fellow was accompanying himself on some sort of instrument, and I wonder if it wasn't another "concertina".

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Speaking of Disney movies with anonymous concertina-shaped musical instruments in them, there's a pirate singing a song in Peter Pan. Captain hook shoots him, and Smee upbraids him for "shooting a man in the middle of his cadenza". I don't have the resources to check right now, but it seems like the fellow was accompanying himself on some sort of instrument, and I wonder if it wasn't another "concertina".

 

Thanks

Leo B)

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Leo,

According to this, pirates apparently did play the concertina - but not for long! laugh.gif

 

I must say, as musical pirates go, I prefer Gilbert and Sullivan. Speaking of whom: Sullivan didn't score for a concertina in "The Pirates of Penzance", did he? He composed it in 1879, and there would have been no problem finding a competent professional concetinist to play the part in those days, so it wasn't because of "staffing problems".

 

I suppose it just never occurred to Sullivan to put a concertina in the hands of a pirate because it was then a thoroughly modern instrument closely associated with the drawing-room and the music-hall stage, and pirates were already a thing of the romantic past. The anachronism would have been too obvious.

 

For the American cartoonist of the late 20th century, however, the historical perspective foreshortened the gap betweeen the pirate era (around 1700) and the clipper era (Sullivan's and the concertina's time), making concertina-playing pirates credible (at least for some people). tongue.gif

 

Cheers,

John

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