While on a vacation cruise a couple of months ago, my wife and I were playing cards in one of the more isolated areas of the ship (and if you've ever been on a cruise, you know those are hard to find).

Suddenly, over the loudspeaker comes an announcement: In five minutes, Disney's "Destino" will be shown in the Shall We Dance lounge.

Say what?

I was familiar with "Destino" — a six-minute animated short created by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney in 1946. Dali did concept drawings and Disney animator John Hench worked on storyboards, but the production was abandoned before reaching the animation stage.

Then, in 2003, Roy Disney pulled Dali's "Destino" drawings out of the archives and once again commissioned an animated short. The resulting cartoon received an Oscar nomination in 2004, and in the years since, it has been screened at film festivals and a few other specialty showcases. But it's never been available to the masses, despite occasional announcements of a pending DVD release.

In fact, during an interview with Roy Disney to promote the multiple DVD release of Disney's "True Life Adventures" — those award-winning Disney documentaries of the 1950s — I brought up "Destino" and was told it would be coming out within a few months. That was in 2006.

Most recently, "Destino" was supposed to be attached to "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" during that film's initial release last October. Didn't happen.

You can get a taste of it in the 39-second trailer for "Destino" that can be found on YouTube, but at this writing, that's all you can see. (If you watch it, ignore the "related videos," a number of hand-held camcorder pirated recordings of the entire short whose visual and aural quality are dreadful.)

Anyway, it was quite a surprise to be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and hear that "Destino" would be shown on this cruise ship. It wasn't on the daily schedule. There had been no earlier announcements. Now it was going to be shown! In five minutes!

So, we gathered up our stuff, ran through another area where some friends tried to flag us down to help them with a "team trivia" game — sorry, guys! — and we got to the lounge just in time to hear someone explain that the short was being shown because an art auction by Park West Galleries the next day would include beautifully framed copies of some of Dali's work for "Destino."

The works were on display in the lounge — abstract, off-the-wall Dali art, his one collaboration with Walt Disney, from the only American film that was entirely his concoction. (You can't count Dali's brief sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound.")