"It started with my taking my two kids around to zoos and parks. While they were on the merry-go-round riding forty times or something, I’d be sitting there trying to figure out what you could do that would be more imaginative."
-- Walt Disney on the origins of Disneyland
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Walter Elias Disney (1901-1966) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and became interested in drawing at an early age. He dropped out of high school to join the Red Cross during World War I. He spent a year overseas driving an ambulance and chauffering Red Cross officials, drawing cartoons all the while. After the war, he became an advertising cartoonist in Kansas City, creating and marketing his first original animated cartoons in 1920.
In 1923, he left for Hollywood with $40 in his pocket to join his brother, Roy, who was already in California. By pooling their meager resources and borrowing $500, the Disneys were able to construct a camera stand in their uncle’s garage and sell their first featurette. The brothers soon opened a production operation in the rear of a nearby real estate office.
Mickey Mouse made his debut in 1928 in the world’s first fully synchronized sound cartoon, "Steamboat Willie." The 1932 film "Flowers and Trees" won Disney the first of his 32 personal Academy Awards. 1937 saw the premiere of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", the first full-length animated musical feature and a milestone in motion picture history. Other classics such as "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Dumbo," and "Bambi" followed. A firm believer in education through entertainment, Disney pioneered "True-Life Adventure" live-action films that promoted conservation of natural resources. He was also one of the first to present full-color TV programming with the "Wonderful World of Color."
The Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, Calif., opened in 1955, followed by Walt Disney World and Epcot Center in Florida in 1971 and 1982, respectively. Disney also helped found the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, Calif., a college-level professional school of all the creative and performing arts.
Described as a "modern Aesop," Disney is universally recognized as a giant of the motion picture industry and one of the 20th Century’s great creative talents.
The two most highly respected sources on Disney are Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (Avon, 1969) and Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Houghton-Mifflin, 1998). The Disney version of Disney’s biography can be found on the Disney website: www.disney.com. Go to "Disney Insider,” click on "Corporate Information,” then click on “Disney History." There you’ll find information on the corporation as well as Walt Disney.
--Contributed by Albert Greenstein, 1999; reviewed by Steven Watts, 2006. |
