Oliver Wallace

Oliver George Wallace (August 6, 1887 – September 15, 1963) was an English composer and conductor. He was especially known for his film music compositions, which were written for many animation, documentary, and feature films from Walt Disney Studios. Wallace was born on August 6, 1887, in London. After completing his musical training, he went to the United States in 1904, becoming a US citizen ten years later. He initially worked primarily on the West Coast in Seattle as a conductor of theater orchestras and as an organist accompanying silent films. At the same time, he also made a name as a songwriter, writing tunes such as the popular "Hindustan". With the advent of the talking film era, he worked increasingly for Hollywood film studios in the 1930s. In 1936 he joined Disney Studios and quickly became one of the most important composers in the studio for animated short films. He provided the music for 139 of these shorts. One of his best-known pieces is the song "Der Fuehrer's Face" from the 1942 Donald Duck propaganda cartoon, though he was uncredited. This parody of a Horst Wessel song was, mainly through the version by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, one of the biggest hits during the Second World War. Other shorts he scored included Ben and Me (1953), about Benjamin Franklin and a mouse, and the Oscar-winning Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953), the first cartoon to use the new CinemaScope process. He also appeared in live action reference footage for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), posing as a live action model for two of the seven dwarfs that were stacked on top of each other, Dopey and Sneezy. He also did the whistling voice for Ichabod Crane as he’s riding home on his horse in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). Walt Disney also had Wallace score full-length films for the studios for over 27 years. He started writing the score for Dumbo (1941), for which he, together with Frank Churchill, won his first and only Oscar in 1942. He went on to score Victory Through Air Power (1943), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr.