“Saludos amigos, a fond greeting to you!” Those lyrics were sung in the 42-minute feature film Saludos Amigos, which had its grande World Premiere in Rio de Janeiro on this day in 1942. Four mucho entertaining animated segments were introduced, Lake Titicaca, Pedro, El Gaucho Goofy, and Aquarela do Brasil, which featured Donald Duck and a newcomer to Disney animation, Brazilian parrot José Carioca. Live-action footage of a South American goodwill tour with Walt Disney and some of his staff tied together the animated segments. The film was produced at a time when Nelson Rockefeller’s agency, the Coordinator for Inter-America Affairs, asked filmmakers to include Latin-American themes in their films as part of a Good Neighbor Policy. Ted Thomas, writer/director of the film Walt & El Grupo, is a qualified expert on the subject, and explained to us, “The Rockefeller request to make films with Latin-American themes came in the fall of 1940. By the spring of 1941 the government asked Walt if he would make a South American trip. Walt agreed to it on the condition that the journey would be a true research trip to develop films that the Studio would then produce.” The story continues in Walt’s own words, as he discussed Saludos Amigos in a CBC interview, “I took a staff and we set up headquarters in Rio and we also went and set up a studio in Argentina. We went over to Chile and some of my artists, we divided our party, and some of them went up to Peru, and when we came back I made these four short subjects… These four films were more or less put together and they went out in the theatre. It was one of those things that they thought Disney needed a subsidy, but fortunately that little thing went out and it did a heck of a business and the United States Government didn’t have to put up one nickel.” Adios!
