Walt Disney

BEHIND THE BOOK

Fascinating facts from the life of Walt Disney:

• Contrary to rumors, he is not frozen. In fact his body was cremated, and his ashes are interred at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, near his studio.

• Of the classic animations of the 1930s and 1940s, only Snow White and Dumbo returned any profits on their initial release. The others—Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi—each lost enormous sums of money and were deemed failures.

• From the early 1940s to 1955 when he opened Disneyland, Walt Disney was in dire economic straits, always forced to tighten the studio's belt.

• Walt Disney can be credited not only with re-inventing animation by introducing much more sophisticated techniques, by enforcing the concept of personality in cartoon characters and by making the first feature-length animation (Snow White).

• Walt Disney was responsible for the creation of the first synergistic entertainment company.

• Walt Disney was responsible for the first nature documentary and was one of the prime movers of the conservation movement—first through Bambi and then through the studio's "True-Life Adventures."

• Walt Disney was only twenty years old when he founded his first animation studio, which subsequently went bankrupt, and that he was only twenty one when he founded Disney Bros., which later grew into Walt Disney Productions.

• In 1928 Walt Disney lost all of his animators in a coup staged by his distributor Charles Mintz. He was forced to re start his company again from scratch.

• Walt Disney claimed to have created Mickey Mouse while he was riding the train back from New York to Los Angeles after his showdown with Mintz and that he chose a mouse because it was one of the few animals that had not yet been animated as a starring character.

• Mickey's original name allegedly was Mortimer. Walt's wife Lillian objected because she thought it too sissified.

• Walt Disney never drew another animation after 1924, even though he was a skilled commercial artist. Many fans assumed that he drew all the cartoons by himself.

• The number of children who enrolled in the Mickey Mouse Clubs in the 1930s, when the studio and exhibitors promoted them as an activity for children on Saturday mornings, was larger than the number of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts combined.

• Walt Disney received honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale on consecutive days in 1938.

• Walt himself provided the voice for Mickey Mouse until 1946.

• Walt was known at the studio for acting out the cartoon characters at story meetings and providing his animators with a guide.

• Among the names considered for the dwarfs in Snow White were Deafy, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Burpy, Gabby, Puffy, Stuffy, Nifty, Tubby, Biggo Ego, Flabby, Jaunty, Baldy, Lazy, Dizzy, Cranky and Chesty.

• Snow White took four full years and virtually all the resources of the studio to complete. It would have taken a single man or woman 200 years to have made the film.

• Walt had great foresight about television—he refused to sign a contract extension with his distributor United Artists in 1936 because UA would not grant Disney TV rights.

• Walt Disney suffered a nervous breakdown in 1931. He descended into depression after the war, concentrating his attention on model trains rather than on motion pictures; he had a large model train installed to run around his home in Brentwood.

• Walt Disney Productions was the first motion picture studio to sign an agreement with a television network (ABC) to provide programming. Walt concluded the agreement only because ABC provided financing for Disneyland in return for the show.

• The success of the “Davy Crockett” programs on the “Disneyland” TV show caught the studio completely offguard—they had already filmed Crockett's death when the first program aired.

• "Crockett" was so successful, it was watched on nearly half the television sets in America. Its star, Fess Parker, was greeted by crowds of 20,000 when he made a promotional tour.

• Fantasia was the result of a chance meeting between Walt Disney and symphony conductor Leopold Stokowski at Chasen's restaurant.

• Walt Disney's mother died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective heating system in a brand new house that Walt and his brother Roy had bought for his parents in Los Angeles.

• During World War II the Disney studio became a war factory with well over 90% of its production in the service of government training, education, and propaganda films.

• Walt Disney dramatically increased the sale of color television sets when he moved from ABC to NBC for his series “Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color,” which was the very reason NBC lured him.

• The studio stopped production for six months on Pinocchio because Walt felt the title character wasn't likable enough. During this time he devised the idea of introducing Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's conscience.

• The “Man in Space” series on the “Disneyland” television program was instrumental in building a constituency for the American space program. President Eisenhower advised members of his administration to watch it.

• Walt Disney received more Academy Awards than any other individual—thirty two.

• Walt Disney testified as a “friendly” witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. He mistakenly accused the League of Women Voters of being a communist organization, for which he later had to recant.

• When the studio made its first public stock offering in 1940, the underwriter insisted the company take out a large life insurance policy on Walt payable to the stockholders because Walt was regarded as indispensable to the studio's success.

• Walt Disney founded the California Institute for the Arts, intended as a school to train artists for motion pictures.

• Walt Disney's original concept for EPCOT was as a fully-functioning modern city in which the workers for Walt Disney World, as many as 100,000 of them, would live and test new concepts in urban design.

• Walt Disney was an avid polo player until his horse fell on an opponent during a match; the man, a contract player at MGM, subsequently died from the injury.

• Walt modeled Mickey Mouse on Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin actually assisted the Disneys wtih financial advice in helping them determine what kind of proceeds they should be getting from their distributor on Snow White.

• Shortly before his death, Walt huddled with General Electric executives with the idea of selling the studio to that company.

• Even though Walt Disney's alleged signature remains the company's logo, his real signature was in fact much more flamboyant and artistic.

• Many of the animations were filmed first entirely in live action to aid the animators in drawing.

• Walt was once asked by several movers and shakers to run for mayor of Los Angeles, but he declined saying that he couldn't settle for being a mayor when he was already king.

• Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened nuclear war when he was denied a request to visit Disneyland during an American visit.

• Once the studio was in financial straits, Walt had everything focus-grouped, including the storyboards for prospective animations.

• MGM head Louis B. Mayer once rejected the opportunity to distribute Mickey Mouse cartoons shortly after Walt had invented the character because Mayer said that pregnant women would be frightened by a giant mouse on screen.

• Despite his status in Hollywood, Walt seldom socialized and spent nearly all his time outside the studio with his family.