Tom Oreb deserves some love!

So I picked up the Sleeping Beauty Blu-Ray yesterday and it is MINDBLOWING! The images and colors are absolutely beautiful. The transfer is flawless. However, there's one huge oversight on the disc that I want to bring attention to.

There's a pretty cool documentary on the dvd about the history of the film. They show tons of cool artwork and photos, including color film of Tom Oreb himself hangin' out with some animators. The thing that got my dander up was that they don't mention Mr.Oreb's name once. Oh, they show his artwork and talk about the evolution of the film's style; but they give all the design credit to Eyvind Earle. Now don't get me wrong, I love Eyvind Earle's work, but you can't really talk about the design of Sleeping Beauty without mentioning Tom Oreb. However, this is exactly what the producer's of this documentary did.

I get to hear how Mary Costa "painted" with her voice. I get to hear about how they used live action reference. I get a discourse on how Walt gave absolute design authority to Eyvind Earle, because he felt the studio had missed something by not staying faithful to a designer's work. The example used was Mary Blair. I love me some Mary Blair, but it seems like they wedged her into this documentary just to talk about her work, AGAIN. As far as I know, she had nothing to do with this film.

On the other hand, Tom Oreb, the guy who is responsible for the character styling of the film, get's no mention, no discussion... nothing. Also, they've omitted much of his work from the gallery section of the disc. The previous dvd has tons of model sheets and designs created by Mr.Oreb. Why they wouldn't keep this artwork for this disc I have no idea.

Anyway, I had to get on my soapbox a little bit. I'm glad that Disney released this disc, but it's really awful that they don't even mention Tom.

Tom, wherever you are, cheers to you man! Thanks for the beautiful work and the inspiration.