A gentle and wise grey spider with a flair for promotion pledges to save a young pig from slaughter for dinner food.
Directors: Charles A. Nichols (as Charles Nichols), Iwao Takamoto
Stars: Debbie Reynolds, Henry Gibson, Paul Lynde.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070016/
Watched on AmazonPrime.
9 songs in the Soundtracks.
It's a children's story, so I shouldn't expect to be enthralled. And I wasn't totally bored until around the 1hr mark. Then with 15 min to go, I put it on pause, and left the house. When I came back, I picked up with the barbershop quartet singing a bad song with all the webbed words about the pig; the song didn't even exploit barbershop harmonies all that well. No wonder I left.
I felt like the spider got short-changed here. Everyone praised the pig because the first words spun were "some pig". The spider was trying to save the pig's life, but a spider who can write is just a little more remarkable than a pig who wants to live.
When accepting his special award at the fair, I was expecting the farmer to mention that the pig had been the runt of the litter, almost killed, but raised by the farmer's daughter.
I did like that the spider babies who stayed were the runts, just like the pig. It was logical on a couple of levels.
The songs were ok, but shrug-worthy. They're by the Sherman brothers, who wrote the Mary Poppins ('64) and the "other" songs in The Jungle Book ('67), among other films. (They did not write The Bare Necessities.)
Hanna-Barbera, Paramount & more, dir. Nichols & Takamoto; 6-
