Format: DVD from Plano Community Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.
When it comes to horror movies, I don’t typically think of Disney. I’m guessing most people don’t. Oh, certainly there are some horrific elements in plenty of Disney films; the transformation sequence in Pinocchio, for instance, is pretty traumatizing for young children. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow isn’t really that scary, but it certainly has a clear connection to the horror genre. In truth, this is only half a film. It’s the back half of a feature called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The first half is a truncated version of Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” while the second half is a musical version of Washington Irving’s story.
The two stories are very different, not just in that one is British and the other American or that one is based on a children’s book and the other a classic folktale. No, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has virtually no dialogue. Instead, the story is more or less entirely narrated by Bing Crosby. The closest we get to dialogue throughout are some songs, and in this respect, Bing is going to play both our hapless main character Ichabod Crane and his rival, Brom Bones.
