On this day, the twenty-sixth day of the sixth month, in the year nineteen hundred fifty nine, the one hundred, twenty fifth Donald Duck short was released, although Donald in Mathmagic Land was longer than the typical cartoon short, running 28 minutes. ADDITIONally, Mathmagic Land was one of Disney’s most masterful education-through-entertainment pieces. This Academy Award®-nominated short subject was released with Darby O’Gill and the Little People, and art assistant Stan Jolley, who recently summed up his thoughts about getting to work on both films, says, “Luckily for me, in my early years in college and everything, I loved all the mathematical things, I got up through trigonometry and all that, but when I went in the service, my whole persona changed. Having seen people around the world and different things, my interest shifted to writing and art direction and away from mathematics, but as you learn in the short, you don’t get away from mathematics. Most Art Directors graduate from colleges of architecture, so I graduated from the college of architecture at USC, and mathematics of course comes in with engineering. The film talks about triangles and all, that all has to do with architecture. So luckily when it came time to do the movie, I was very well versed in math.”
