Dumbo, the Flying Elephant (partially found Roll-a-Book precursor book to Disney animated film; 1939)

The book's cover.

Status: Partially Found

Dumbo is an animated movie released by Walt Disney Productions in 1941, telling the story of a baby elephant with oversized ears who learns to fly. The film was a monumental success and became a classic, however, the original book that the film was actually based on a has been long forgotten and is lost.

Roll-a-Book

The Roll-a-Book was a device intended as a new way to read books- instead of the traditional method, the book was held in a small cardboard box and pages would be flipped through vertically by turning a knob on the side.

The Roll-a-Book company only produced one actual book, The Lost Stone of Agog, with Dumbo intended to be the second book. However, it was never released.

Plot

^{*The following plot synopsis was provided by the website michaelbarrier.com:}

The story told in the Dumbo galley proofs is essentially another version of "The Ugly Duckling," and much simpler and cruder than the eventual film version. Dumbo is not a baby elephant, but rather "a midget elephant whose ears were EXTRA BIG and EXTRA PINK." He botches his one appearance in the big top, when he falls off a box while trying to balance a big rubber ball on his trunk, but there is no general catastrophe. He is then befriended by a robin named Red, the original story's equivalent of Timothy the mouse. When Dumbo tells Red that he wishes he could fly away from the circus, the robin takes him to "Wise One," an owl, to find out if that is even possible. The owl recognizes Dumbo's ears as a potentially fine pair of wings, and under Wise One's tutelage Dumbo soon learns to fly. He keeps his newly acquired skill a secret until the circus comes to Madison Square Garden in New York. Just after all the other elephants have entered the ring, he flies into the arena, triggering general astonishment, followed by universal acclaim.

Availability

As aformentioned, the book never saw a release, and very few prototypes were released. The copy that Disney used to create the movie is no longer in their archives, and only very early proofs from early in the movie exist in relation to the Roll-A-Book story. Fortunately, few artworks and texts from the book survived and are from libraries and can be viewed online