Today in Disney History, December 5, 1901, the creator of Mickey Mouse and founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney World was born.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, in their families two-story cottage at 1249 Tripp Avenue in a newly developed section of the city. His father, Elias Disney, was an Irish-Canadian and his mother, Flora Call Disney, was of German-American descent. He is the fourth Disney son and is named to honor the family’s pastor and friend Walter Parr, a preacher at St. Paul Congregational Church. His siblings were Herbert, Ray, Roy, and Ruth. Roy later helped his brother make the Disney Company a success.
Raised on a farm near Marceline, Missouri, Walt became interested in drawing early, selling his first sketches to neighbors when he was only seven years old. At McKinley High School in Chicago, Disney divided his attention between drawing and photography, contributing both to the school paper. At night he attended the Academy of Fine Arts.
Walt started McKinley High School in 1917 and he began to draw for the student newspaper. During the fall of 1918, Disney attempted to enlist for military service. Rejected because he was only 16 years of age, Walt joined the Red Cross and was sent overseas, where he spent a year driving an ambulance and chauffeuring Red Cross officials. His ambulance was covered from stem to stern, not with stock camouflage, but with drawings and cartoons. After the war, Walt returned to Kansas City, where he began his career as an advertising cartoonist.
Early on, Walt decided to pursue a career in commercial art, which soon lead to his experiments in animation. He began producing short animated films for local businesses, in Kansas City. By the time Walt had started to create The Alice Comedies, which was about a real girl and her adventures in an animated world, Walt ran out of money, and his company Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupted. Instead of giving up, Walt packed his suitcase and with his unfinished print of The Alice Comedies in hand, headed for Hollywood to start a new business. He was not yet twenty-two.
The early flop of The Alice Comedies inoculated Walt against fear of failure; he had risked it all three or four times in his life. In August of 1923, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with nothing but a few drawing materials, $40 in his pocket and a completed animated and live-action film.
Walt’s brother, Roy O. Disney, was already in California, with an immense amount of sympathy and encouragement, and $250. Pooling their resources, they borrowed an additional $500, and set up shop in their uncle’s garage. Soon, they received an order from New York for the first Alice in Cartoonland (The Alice Comedies) featurette, and the brothers expanded their production operation to the rear of a Hollywood real estate office. It was Walt’s enthusiasm and faith in himself, and others, that took him straight to the top of Hollywood society.
On July 13, 1925, Walt married one of his first employees, Lillian Bounds, in Lewiston, Idaho. They were blessed with two daughters — Diane, married to Ron Miller, former president and chief executive officer of Walt Disney Productions; and Sharon Disney Lund, formerly a member of Disney’s Board of Directors. The Millers have seven children and Mrs. Lund had three. Walt’s wife, Lillian suffered a stroke on December 15, 1997, exactly 31 years after his death and she passed away the following morning.
Mickey Mouse was created in 1928, and his talents were first used in a silent cartoon entitled Plane Crazy. However, before the cartoon could be released, sound burst upon the motion picture screen. Thus Mickey made his screen debut in Steamboat Willie, the world’s first fully synchronized sound cartoon, which premiered at the Colony Theatre in New York on November 18, 1928.
Walt’s drive to perfect the art of animation was endless. Technicolor was introduced to animation during the production of his “Silly Symphonies.” In 1932, the film entitled Flowers and Trees won Walt the first of his 32 personal Academy Awards. He still holds the record for most individual Academy Awards won. In 1937, he released The Old Mill, the first short subject to utilize the multiplane camera technique.
On December 21 of that same year, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated musical feature, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. Produced at the unheard of cost of $1,499,000 during the depths of the Great Depression, the film is still accounted as one of the great feats and imperishable monuments of the motion picture industry. During the next five years, Walt completed such other full-length animated classics as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.
In 1940, construction was completed on Disney’s Burbank studio, and the staff swelled to more than 1,000 artists, animators, story men and technicians. During World War II, 94 percent of the Disney facilities were engaged in special government work including the production of training and propaganda films for the armed services, as well as health films which are still shown throughout the world by the U.S. State Department. The remainder of his efforts were devoted to the production of comedy short subjects, deemed highly essential to civilian and military morale.
Disney’s 1945 feature, the musical The Three Caballeros, combined live action with the cartoon medium, a process he used successfully in such other features as Song of the South and the highly acclaimed Mary Poppins. In all, 81 features were released by the studio during his lifetime.
Walt’s inquisitive mind and keen sense for education through entertainment resulted in the award-winning “True-Life Adventure” series. Through such films as The Living Desert, The Vanishing Prairie, The African Lion and White Wilderness, Disney brought fascinating insights into the world of wild animals and taught the importance of conserving our nation’s outdoor heritage.
Disneyland, launched in 1955 as a fabulous $17 million Magic Kingdom, soon increased its investment tenfold and entertained, by its fourth decade, more than 400 million people, including presidents, kings and queens and royalty from all over the globe.
A pioneer in the field of television programming, Disney began production in 1954, and was among the first to present full-color programming with his Wonderful World of Color in 1961. The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro were popular favorites in the 1950s.
But that was only the beginning. In 1965, Walt Disney turned his attention toward the problem of improving the quality of urban life in America. He personally directed the design on an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, planned as a living showcase for the creativity of American industry.
“I don’t believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that is more important to people everywhere than finding the solution to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin? Well, we’re convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a community that will become a prototype for the future.”, said Disney.
Thus, Disney directed the purchase of 43 square miles of virgin land — twice the size of Manhattan Island — in the center of the state of Florida. Here, he master planned a whole new Disney world of entertainment to include a new amusement theme park, motel-hotel resort vacation center and his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It would be his brother Roy who would helm the project and see it through after Walt’s passing. One week after Walt Disney died, Roy spoke to a group of Disney Company executives and creative staff in a projection room at the Disney Studio. He was going to postpone his retirement. “We are going to finish this park [in Florida], and we’re going to do it just the way Walt wanted it,” Roy firmly stated. “Don’t you ever forget it. I want every one of you to do just exactly what you were going to do when Walt was alive.” After more than seven years of master planning and preparation, including 52 months of actual construction, Walt Disney World opened to the public as scheduled on October 1, 1971. Epcot Center opened on October 1, 1982.
One of his first decisions was that the Disneyworld project would be officially renamed “Walt Disney World.” Roy was insistent that people be reminded that this was Walt’s project. Very few others in the company agreed with that choice because of marketing reasons. In a meeting, someone referred to it as “Disneyworld” and Roy’s hand went to his glasses as he focused on the offending word: “I’m only going to say this one more time. I want it called ‘Walt Disney World.’ Not Disneyworld, not Disneyland East, not anything else. Walt Disney World.”
Walts optimism came from his unique ability to see the entire picture. His views and visions, came from the fond memory of yesteryear, and persistence for the future. Walt loved history. As a result of this, he didn’t give technology to us piece by piece, he connected it to his ongoing mission of making life more enjoyable, and fun. Walt was our bridge from the past to the future.
During his 43-year Hollywood career, which spanned the development of the motion picture industry as a modern American art, Walter Elias Disney established himself and his innovations as a genuine part of Americana.
Walt Disney passes away on December 15, 1966 at the age of 65. He made so many amazing contributions in the fields of art, animation, film and theme parks that it would be impossible to list them all here. He was a visionary whose pioneering spirit and inimitable creativity made the impossible possible, turning dreams into reality and building the foundation of The Walt Disney Company of today.
