This
book left me feeling sad in a way that not a lot of these books do. I remember
reading the Jefferson biography a year or so ago and having a similar feeling,
which I think means that the writer did a very good job with the death of their
subject. In Disney’s case, it left me especially sad being that he died of lung
cancer and very fearful of death. He was always seeking perfection and never
really was satisfied with anything he did, which must have left him feeling
incomplete. That sort of attitude drove him forward, but it also must have made
him feel like his life was so unfinished at his death as he was obsessing over
EPCOT.
Walt had
a really good and a really bad childhood. The really good part was in the small
town of Marceline, Missouri, where his father Elias was a farmer. However, the
really bad part was when the family moved to St. Louis after the farm didn’t
work out. Walt hated the city and was forced to work constantly and missed out
on a lot of childhood activities that he had in Marceline. Walt’s father Elias
was stern and sometimes violent, leading to an incident when he went to beat
Walt with a hammer and Walt stopped and disarmed him at 14 years old. After
working with the Red Cross in World War One, Walt moved to LA to follow his artistic
dreams. Though his first business, Laugh-O-Gram (which produced short cartoons
before movies), went bankrupt, Walt wasn’t bitter and continued to work hard.
With
Laugh-O-Gram, Disney had a successful character in Oswald the Rabbit, but lost
the rights to him in the bankruptcy. It was then that he created Mickey Mouse. Originally,
he was to be called Mortimer Mouse, but Walt’s wife Lillian made him change the
name. Mickey defeated his rival, Felix the Cat because Mickey’s shorts contained
sound, a major innovation. Not only did they have sound, but they were created
with sound in mind so that the action matched up. Felix the Cat’s creator,
however, only added the sound in afterwards, a sort of halfhearted attempt to
compete with Mickey.
When the
Depression came, Walt and his older brother Roy, who managed the finances, were
in a very good position. They had not invested in the markets, rather putting
all the money from their business back into their business. You could say that
the Depression saved the Disney company since they ended up with a lot of money
when nobody else had any. It led to the best talent moving into Disney Studios.
In the thirties, Disney’s new innovation was color cartoons, and when Snow
White premiered in color it was a sensation, earning $6.7 million, the most of
any film to that point.
One May
29, 1941, Disney’s workers went on strike, a very controversial event that
split the studio. At a time of unionization all across the country, the AFL put
Disney products on its “unfair” list and that meant that no Disney movies could
be shown since the soundmen were unionized. The lab technicians at Technicolor
wouldn’t even process Disney film. Walt meanwhile blamed the strike on
Communist infiltrators. The strike ended on July 30 with ten percent wage
increases for artists earning under $50 a week, backpay and reinstatement of
strikers and fired workers, and for future layoffs to be decided by a joint committee
of management and workers. The strike marked the end of the carefree days at
Disney studios when Walt was just one of the guys. Walt started to get meaner
and became a fearsome presence in Disney offices. At the same time, Disney
started to face greater competition from Hannah-Barbera and Looney Tunes.
I think
the author protests too much when discussing Disney’s racism and anti-Semitism.
While it seems like Walt was not a virulent, hateful racist, it is clear that
he harbored prejudices, even if they were not much more than most other powerful
white men at the time. I think that Gabler overdoes it when he tries to defend
Disney’s statements. I also wish that Gabler had spent more time on the Disney
World park, since that was a major reason that I picked up the book, but I
guess that was a project that was not occupying most of Walt’s time at his
death. I enjoyed this book and found the subject to be a very interesting guy.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Walt Disney was not frozen, but cremated.
- By the end of the 30’s, Disney Studios had a row of filing cabinets with 1.5 million jokes grouped under 124 classifications.
- Walt bought a house for his parents in California and sent one of his men to fix the heating system there. Tragically, the handyman made some sort of mistake and created a carbon monoxide leak that rendered his father unconscious and killed his mother. The guilt must have been terrible.
- Disneyland was built with a railroad at 5/8 scale. The buildings are built with the first floor at 9/10 scale, the second floors 8/10, and the third floors 7/10. Other parts were also built at different scales to emphasize and deemphasize certain parts of the park.
- Disney World was built in Orlando so that it wouldn’t have to compete with the gulf or ocean coasts.
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