The Genius of Walt Disney part 2

The Genius of Walt Disney - part 2

    So in the last installment I followed Walt Disney's life up until 1955.  1955 saw the release of Disney's first widescreen animated feature, Lady and the Tramp.  It also saw the opening of Disneyland that July.  The film was a success, but yet again, with the theme park idea people were thinking Walt's dream would fail.  You'd think they'd have learned by now.  But they were almost right.   Disneyland had a pretty disastrous opening day.  The park's dedication day was supposed to be just for people invited, but then the tickets were counterfeited, and 28,000 people showed up.  The asphalt wasn't yet sufficiently hardened, so ladies high heels got stuck in it, there was a gas leak in Fantasyland, one of the ferryboats sank from having too many people on it, and there was a plumbers' strike on, which meant that Disney had to decide whether he wanted the water fountains to work or the toilets.  He chose the toilets.  (Wise decision.)  And it was 100 degrees out that day and rides kept breaking down.  The press were not taken by Disneyland.  So they tried a new opening day a few days later that went smoothly.  

(and yes, that is Ronald Reagan as the host)

   The park had a good set of attractions to open with, but most of the rides you likely think of when you think Disneyland weren't there yet.  Disney had run out of money and had to put some of his attraction ideas off for a few years.  Popular attractions that opened with the park included The Jungle Cruise, Dumbo, King Arthur's Carrousel, the Autopia, a train ride encircling the park, and 3 dark rides themed to Peter Pan, Snow White, and Mr. Toad.  None of the coasters were built yet, and Tomorrowland was basically a sort of State Fair exhibition hall dedicated to the future.  However, over the years the park improved, as Disney intended.  Parks at the time let attractions stay exactly the same from opening to close, but Disney wanted returning customers.  The Jungle Cruise would get new scenes and get rid of ones that didn't work.  Tomorrowland would try to stay ahead of the times as the present became the future.  New modes of transportation around the park would be added like the skyway.  Also, the park up until the early 1980s used ticket books instead of just general admission.  The ticket books had A,B,C,D, and E tickets in them.  E tickets were for the most popular and major attractions.  A tickets were for minor things like going through the centerpiece Sleeping Beauty Castle. 

   Walt was paying more and more attention to TV and Disneyland, often relegating the time and effort he had spent on the animated films to the directors of the films.  Sure, he still oversaw production and had the final say, but he had other things on his mind too.  I should point out that in 1954, as Disneyland was being built, Walt started an anthology show on ABC called Disneyland.  It showed cartoon shorts, updated people on the newest Disney products including the animated features, and most of all it advertised Disneyland.   And it worked.  Within 7 weeks of it opening, Disneyland welcomed a million guests.  Special stories were made for the show too.  That's where Davy Crockett got popular, actually.  And the show was hosted by Walt Disney himself quite often.  It was the ultimate in salesmanship.  Few would have the guts to do that now.  And the show ran even after Disney's death.  

    In 1959, Disneyland was adding a lot of attractions each year.  By 1960, the park's first rollercoaster, and the first steel coaster ever made opened.  The Matterhorn Bobsleds.  The now popular snack, Doritos, made their debut at a Disneyland restaurant.  The Alice in Wonderland dark ride opened, Tom Sawyer's Island, the mine train (not Big Thunder Mountain, but a slow mine train with a man made desert/mountain to go through)...  And the park's centerpiece, the Sleeping Beauty Castle, was about to be the subject of a film.  Sleeping Beauty was released in '59.  It cost $6 million and four years to make.  And it only made $7.7 million.  The film was also not graced with great reviews, the slower pace and odd art design part of the reason.  Walt had to lay off some more animators due to costs that year.  Walt was starting to think maybe animation was at the end of it's life.  But he was continuing to improve Disneyland and was enjoying making his TV show.  He saw TV as the future, but that film could coexist along side it, while others were predicting the demise of film. Ub Iwerks, Walt's old friend from Kansas City who still worked for him in animation, started experimenting with a process called Xeroxing.  Using this process, animation could be streamlined to get rid of the inking department.  This saved the animation department at Disney as the drawings by animators could now be put directly on animation cels by xerox.  This was of great use in the next Disney animated film, 101 Dalmations, which took only 2 years to make unlike the 4 it took for Sleeping Beauty.

    Walt also brought the first monorail to the western hemisphere... and he put it in Disneyland.  He saw it as a future for city transportation, but it never caught on in America.  Still, whenever we think of monorails now, we think of the Disney parks....  How can you not love the things?  They look so futuristic and cool, even today!  And they've continuously upgraded the vehicles since the opening of the parks.  As I said before, Walt believed in continuous improvement to attractions.  (Not movies like George Lucas.)  

     With 101 Dalmations being a hit, animation was now safe again.  Walt spent more and more time on other projects, and he had even less involvement in the next animated film, 1963's The Sword In The Stone, leaving the project to the veteran animators and his favorite animation directors.  Yet again, another hit film.  And this animated film was the first one with songs by the Sherman brothers, whom Disney had bought the services of for The Parent Trap in 1961 and decided to keep.  They would go on to write songs for most Disney films from here on out up through the 1970s, including Disney's next big project, Mary Poppins.  To see the trials of the making of that film, go see Saving Mr. Banks.  Let's just say it was no picnic even before cameras started rolling.  The film would go on to win a few Academy Awards and revolutionize special effects.  It was also the biggest money maker of 1965. 

    That was one of the last projects Disney saw completed.  He died in December of 1966 of lung cancer, being a heavy smoker all his adult life.  (He never smoked in front of children, though, to his credit.)  At the time of his unexpected death (the cancer moved quickly), The Jungle Book was well into production.  Most importantly, Walt had started a new project in Florida.  Something much bigger than Disneyland.  Something more forward-looking.  Something to bring people into the future.  To better humanity.  This project was the Walt Disney World project.  The original plans being much different than what we have there now.  More on that tomorrow, but first, here's the video he made talking about the project.  It's well worth a watch all the way through.  Quite fascinating.  In fact, this video was not shown until shortly after his death, being shot just months before he died.

Tomorrow, Walt's legacy.  Walt's shortcomings.  My thoughts on his work and life.

The Genius of Walt Disney Part 1

The Genius of Walt Disney - Part 1

     I'll be quite honest here.  When it comes to being an entrepreneur, Walt Disney is my idol.  He built his company pretty much all by himself.  (Ok, his older brother Roy helped a bit.)  He made the first truly successful theme park.  He introduced the world to the full-length animated feature.  He changed the whole film industry as we know it, and even launched the careers of some great actors along the way.  He introduced children to numerous fictional characters that are some of the most well known in the world.  Sure, there's some darkness to Walt Disney.  Being a quite conservative man, he opposed unionization by his animators.  He named names to the House Unamerican Activities Committee during the McCarthy era.  There are rumors of racism and anti-semitism...  But we'll get to those later.  First, a little history.

   Walt Disney was born to Elias and Flora Disney on December 5, 1901.  Elias worked his sons hard, and apparently he was a man of short temper.  He would keep the money his children made, thinking his children too young to know how to save or spend money wisely.  Walt was the fourth of five children, and the youngest of the four boys.  He worked as a newspaper boy in Kansas City and attended the Kansas City Art Institute until his father packed the family back up to the Chicago area in 1917.  There, he continued his art training at the Chicago Art Institute and then joined the Red Cross just after World War I ended.  By 1919, Walt decided to move back to Kansas City to pursue his art further.  A few years later, he started to make Laugh-O-Grams, which were cartoons he did himself that were shown in a local movie theater.  These became quite popular in Kansas City; enough so that Walt made his own company, which used the same name as the cartoon series.  This didn't last long, as the company was financially insolvent.  Of course, a move to Hollywood was needed.  Roy decided to join Walt and combine their money to start a studio there.  He made a deal with Universal and started making Oswald the Rabbit shorts with Ub Iwerks and some other animators.  They were successful and when Disney went to New York to try to up the fee per short, Walt found out that Universal had screwed him.  Behind his back they had taken all but one of his animators (Ub Iwerks) and told him that the fee per short would be less or they'd take his creation, Oswald, without him since they owned it.  He let them have it.  And this was a good turn of fortune, actually, as Disney needed a new character to call his own.  Enter Mickey Mouse.

     Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon to be released with sound.  It was also the first Mickey Mouse cartoon distributed.  In 1998, the short was added to the National Film Registry for preservation.   One year later in 1929, Silly Symphonies were introduced.  Following the musical short idea of Steamboat Willie, these short cartoons were all set to music.  In 1932, Disney gave us another milestone in film.  Flowers and Trees was the first commercially released film shot in three-strip Technicolor.  It also won the first Academy Award for Animated Short Subject.  From 1932 to 1939, every winner of that award was one of Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, winning over the likes of Betty Boop, Felix the Cat, Popeye, etc.

  Fast forward a few years and we get to Disney planning a full length cartoon.  It had never been done before.  People thought it was a horrible idea.  Cartoons were supposed to be short 5 minute things that, along with newsreels and previews, came before a live action movie.  Well, Disney put his crew to work for years on Snow White, starting in 1934.  His wife and his brother tried to talk him out of it.  He was putting all he had worked on for years on the line.  Finally in 1937, the film was complete.  (After Disney ran out of money and had to show lenders a rough cut to get more money.)  December 21, the movie premiered.. and got a standing ovation.  The public and critics (who had derided the idea before) loved it.  The movie made 4 times as much money as any other film in 1938.  The money he received from the film's success gave Walt the chance to expand his studio in Burbank.  Sadly, the success was short lived.  The following three projects, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi lost money, despite pushing animation further along and now being considered great classics.  Then came World War II... and the animators' strike during the making of Dumbo.  After the Warner Bros. animators were successful at unionizing, Hollywood expected Disney to allow it too.   Disney didn't want to, but when asked by Nelson Rockefeller to go to South America on a goodwill mission and cool off, federal mediators came in and gave the guild everything they asked.  The Disney Studio staff was cut in half with Walt laying off those he considered malcontents.  Walt never forgave his staff for "committing mutiny", especially as he had considered them family before the strike.  But at least the inexpensive Dumbo was a success.  The money from that and the shorts kept Disney going during the lean WWII years.

     During and right after WWII, Disney didn't make any feature-length animated films.  He made what are called package pictures.  That means they were films made up of short cartoons, sometimes with live action pieces in the films as well.  So we got films like The Three Caballeros, Saludos Amigos, Adventures of Ichobad and Mr. Toad, Fun and Fancy Free, Make Mine Music, and Melody Time.  The studio also made films for the war effort, educational films, and propaganda shorts.  All the studios did this during WWII.  By 1950, Walt was back to making animated features again, starting with the first big success in 7 years, Cinderella.  It was a good time for Disney to make a new animated feature, as the shorts were not as popular anymore, most people preferring the Warner Bros Bugs Bunny shorts to Mickey Mouse.   Alice In Wonderland followed, and not only was Disney disappointed in it, it wasn't a great moneymaker and the critics hated it.  (It wasn't until the late 60s when people started watching it on drugs that it became very popular.)  Then came Peter Pan in 1953, this time being a financially successful film.  It was around this time that the anti-communism of the Second Red Scare started in the United States.  Disney joined/helped to start a anti-communist/conservative group, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.  (What a mouthful.)  People like John Wayne, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Cecile B. DeMille, Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable, and Ayn Rand were part of this group, which Disney later left, feeling the group was a bit too conservative.  Disney also testified before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1947, saying the earlier strike was caused by communists in the Screen Cartoonist Guild, and he named some of the people in that strike that were now working for rival studios.  Not Disney's finest hour.  Especially since the charges didn't end up sticking.  Still, Disney would soon abandon politics for the most part after the McCarthy era, and in a way leave animation too.  After Peter Pan, Disney began to get more serious on his theme park plans which he had started dreaming up in the 1940s after visiting a trashy amusement park with his daughter.  He thought people deserved a place where people could have a good time together as a family.  A clean place.  A place he could test out new ideas and new technologies.  A place like no other.  That no one had ever seen the likes of before...  Disneyland.

Stay tuned for Part II, coming up tomorrow.