Arthur's Sword

Fifty-five years ago this date, Walt Disney Productions released Sword in the Stone, an adaptation of T. H. White's novel of the same name.

The (relatively) well-known wizards' duel between Merlin an Mad Madame Mim

Bill Peet was the Disney story man after the success of 101 Dalmations an animated feature on which he had been a driving force. Sword in the Stone was the next property he adapted, writing a script that, after revisions, Walt Disney approved and on which Bill did much of the storyboarding.

The film did not win unanimous raves when it was initially released, but went on to make more than ten times what it cost. Though highly successful, it came between two films more vividly remembered, Dalmations and the later Jungle Book and is less well-remembered than the two features that bookend it.

For Bill Peet, an old Disney pro who had been at the studio since the 1930s, it was the last film on which he worked from beginning to end. Peet's darker vision of Jungle Book, the property in work after Stone's completion, clashed with the way Disney thought the new film should go, and Bill left the studio a month after Sword in the stone's release.