Saludos Amigos
Saludos Amigos
Main page

Saludos Amigos

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Saludos Amigos

Saludos Amigos (Spanish for "Greetings, Friends") is a 1942 American live-action/animated anthology film produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Set in Latin America, it is made up of four different segments; Donald Duck stars in two of them and Goofy stars in one. It also features the first appearance of José Carioca, the malandro Brazilian parrot. Saludos Amigos premiered in Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1942. It was released in the United States on February 19, 1943.

The film was a success, helping launch the international popularity of Donald Duck and leading Disney to produce The Three Caballeros (1944), another government-funded film aimed at Latin American goodwill.

In early 1941, before U.S. entry into World War II, the United States Department of State commissioned a Disney goodwill tour of South America, intended to lead to a movie to be shown in the US, Central, and South America as part of the Good Neighbor Policy. This was being done because several Latin American governments had close ties with Nazi Germany, and the US government wanted to counteract those ties. Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters were popular in Latin America, and Walt Disney acted as ambassador. The tour, facilitated by Nelson Rockefeller, who had recently been appointed as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), took Disney and a group of roughly twenty composers, artists, technicians, etc. from his studio to South America, mainly to Brazil and Argentina, but also to Chile, Bolivia and Peru.

The film itself was given federal loan guarantees, because the Disney studio had over-expanded just before European markets were closed to them by the war, and because Disney was struggling with labor unrest at the time (including a strike that was underway at the time the goodwill journey began).

The film included live-action documentary sequences featuring footage of modern Latin American cities with skyscrapers and fashionably dressed residents. This surprised many contemporary US viewers, who associated such images only with US and European cities, and contributed to a changing impression of Latin America. Film historian Alfred Charles Richard Jr. has commented that Saludos Amigos "did more to cement a community of interest between peoples of the Americas in a few months than the State Department had in fifty years."

The film also inspired Chilean cartoonist René Ríos Boettiger to create Condorito, one of Latin America's most ubiquitous cartoon characters. Ríos perceived that the character Pedro, a small, incapable airplane, was a slight to Chileans and created a comic that could supposedly rival Disney's comic characters.

Plot

The film features segments of 5 countries in South America: Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. Each country has its own segment except for Bolivia and Peru, because both countries are represented in the Lake Titicaca segment.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.