On this day in 1963, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color received the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences greatest honor, when it won an Emmy® award. Richard Sherman recalled his contribution to the premiere episode of the series, saying, “Walt said, ‘We want to have an opening show where we’re going to introduce this character who’s a rather articulate character named Ludwig von Drake, who is very understandable.’ He was voiced by Paul Frees, who happened to be a brilliant, brilliant, funny guy. ‘He’s going to tell about the history of color and everything.’ So Bob and I, we wrote the ‘Spectrum Song’ and a thing called ‘Green with Envy Blues,’ a descriptive of the uses of color in language and the uses of color visually. The one special thing he said was, ‘I want to have one song that’s kind of pretty, something about the beautiful things about color and how wonderful it is. We’ll have that as a finale of the piece.’ We never dreamed at that time that it was going to become the theme song for so many years.” Sherman also recalls how Walt Disney sparked an amazing phenomenon. “What happened is they just had an explosion of sales… color television was in from that time on. It just exploded, the market opened up. RCA was trying to sell color sets, that was the whole new wave of entertainment and with Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color it turned the corner. They were going through the roof with those sales. It was fantastic.”
