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.