The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

The next film alphabetically on Disney Plus is "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad" which is more interesting than truly successful. The Wartime effort left Disney short on resources and with many films and ideas too short to be cinematic releases, two of which were then glued together here and released as a feature. This is the first time I've ever seen these two films, as opportunities to see if have been scarce - They've almost never been on network TV and a VHS version didn't appear to be available when I was age appropriate.

Basil Rathbone narrates an animated and abridged version of Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in The Willows" in which the rich and excitable Mr Toad loses his ancestral home to a pack of Weasels and must count on the guile of his friends to help him retrieve it. Then Bing Crosby introduces Washington Irvine's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow". A schoolteacher moves to a New England town and falls for the town's most eligible maiden, but he has a rival for her affections, Brom, who comes up with an intriguing way to use a local legend to his advantage.

The animation for both stories is really good, as you might expect from this period of Disney. Crosby's narration is a little livelier than Rathbone's but he has more to do as the "Sleepy Hollow" half of the feature has very little other dialogue. I found that both stories struggled to hold my attention but of the two I enjoyed "The Wind in The Willows" a little more. Maybe it's just that I've seen more adaptations of that one and was more familiar with the narrative, but it actually worked as a story - whereas the Sleepy Hollow aspect is a romantic slapstick comedy that just suddenly switches on a dime when it introduces its most famous character.

It's interesting from a completist standpoint but ultimately there's a reason that it hasn't been dragged back into the light, prior to its residence on Disney Plus - it's just not that entertaining.