Walt Disney
Converting research into a written product is a key part of the Brotherhood project (and a Common Core key focus). The essay (like the presentation) should reflect the depth of the research. I have included here an example of a lengthy essay that I will use with the students as an example of structure and information selectivity. At the end of our research phase, I will ask the students to compare their notes with what I included in my essay.
For this unit, I was drawn to Disney as a research subject due to the students' familiarity with Walt Disney, the plethora of information available, and Disney's happy, pure Americana persona.
Using the resources available to the students and a few others, my biography of Disney helps me explain the man in the photograph on the front cover of Gabler's book. This picture stands in contrast to the hundreds of others that show Disney as a jubilant, happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Why did Gabler choose this photo? Is it that there is more to the story than the smiling man and his mouse? I tried to use all that I had learned about a biography. I have included pieces of information I found to be particularly relevant and yet omitted other pieces of information because they were not germane to my understanding of the man in the picture. 31 As I was researching I consistently asked myself if this information helps me tell the warts and all story of the man in the picture; is there residue?
Example of a Biography of Walt Disney
Walt Disney provided the soundtrack of my life. The first two albums I bought (at the ripe old age of eight) were Brer Rabbit and a collection of popular Disney songs. For Christmas that year, Santa brought me the Disney songbook so I could learn to accompany myself as I sang and lived "It's a Small World". Every afternoon I would rush home from school so I could tune in to sing along with Annette, Darlene, Karen and Cubby and I could learn what ever life lesson they were teaching that episode. Tuesdays were always my favorite day because there was a special guest (At 44 I can still sing the song that introduced the special guest.) My first actual theater movie was Disney's The Rescuers Down Under. At dinner each night, I ate off of the Donald Duck plate and drank out of the Donald Duck glass. 32 During second grade my mother made my sister and me ponchos out of an old blanket and put Donald Duck on mine and Mickey on my sister's. The works and images created by Disney permeated my life; in a strange way, they still do.
In the Disney world the good guys always won, people were happy, and life was as it should be. A far cry from my reality. Whether it be the music, the tv show or the movies, Disney provided my escape. Through his short cartoons, feature-length animations, live-action films, comic books, records, television shows and theme parks, Disney spent a lifetime working to refashion the world in the image of his own imagination and prevent reality from eradicating the genuine innocence and purity of childhood, a feeling Walt experienced for only a brief time in his own childhood but would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture.
Disney and Mickey Mouse were definitely not an overnight success story. Walt did not just wake up one day, draw Mickey and the rest is history. Walt's success from the cartoons up to the theme parks are all a direct result of the lessons he learned from his ancestors and from his childhood.
Disneys come to America
Walter Elias Disney was born December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois on the second floor of a house that his father Elias built. Walt was the fourth of five children born to Elias and Flora. It was a family story that Walt got his name from a "pastoral bargain". 33 Walt's mother Flora and the wife of the minister were pregnant at the same time. Supposedly, Elias and the minister struck a deal that if their wives both gave birth to sons that each son would be given the first name of the other man. The minister's name was Walter Parr. 34 For most of his life Walt felt as if he were a square peg in the Disney family, however Walt would prove through his inexhaustible ambition that he was a Disney through and through.
The Disney family originally hailed from England. Arundel Elias Disney (Walt's great grandpa) was opportunistic and ambitious. He consistently sought a better life for him and his family so in July of 1834, he sold his holdings and along with his brother Robert and Robert's family set sail for America. The family actually ended up settling on 149 acres in Ontario, Canada. A few years later Arundel's oldest son Kepple and his wife Mary purchased 100 acres in the Ontario area with the intent to farm, but Kepple had the Disney wanderlust. When he first heard of the oil strikes, he left Mary to live with her sister for two years while he joined a drilling crew only to never find oil. Kepple returned home only to leave again for a year to drill for salt wells. No salt was ever found. In 1877 he left again along with his two oldest sons, Ellis and Robert, to search for his fortune in California gold; he only got as far as Kansas where he was enticed to purchase 300 acres of farmland in Ellis County. 35
Life in Kansas was extremely difficult. The climate was dry and cold – seemingly inconducive to farming. Snow drifts could be as high as a man's chest. In addition, the Disneys were under constant threat of Indian massacres, so Kepple and Elias left for Florida in search of a more hospitable living environment for the family. While in Florida, Elias met Flora Call. Their marriage in 1888 merged the fearless determination of the Disney family with the soft intellectual temperament of the Call family, 36 a merging that will truly manifest itself in their youngest son, Walt.
Elias inherited the Disney wanderlust and economic adversity of his father and grandfather. While in Florida, Ellis bought an orange grove but a freeze killed all of his crop, forcing him to take a job delivering the mail. A death in the Call family encouraged Elias to move himself and Flora to Chicago where his younger brother Robert had found some success. Elias supported his growing family by being a carpenter.
The Influence of Marceline
When Walt was three, Elias became disillusioned with life in the big city so he moved the family to somewhere more idyllic, Marceline, Missouri. Marceline was incorporated as a terminal point along the Santa Fe Railroad route between Chicago and Kansas City. In its early days, the town boasted several saloons, a post office, two banks, a theater, a newspaper, a few retail shops, and seven various religious institutions. Marceline was the exact opposite of Chicago; it was a small, simple, stable community. Walt would later reminisce that Marceline appeared and behaved exactly the way a small town should and that the citizens of Marceline were kind, tolerant, and caring people who helped citizens in need. While the Disneys only lived in Marceline for three and a half years, the time Walt spent on the farm in the cramped and crudely constructed home with the white-washed siding and the green trim was to be the most vivid memories of his life and the model for how he came to believe life should be lived. 37
Interest in drawing
Walt became interested in drawing at a very early age. Every time his Aunt Maggie would come to visit she would bring him a Big Chief drawing tablet and pencils. To Walt, every gift of tablet and pencils equated to an affirmation of his talent and encouragement to continue. In addition to Aunt Maggie, Walt received encouragement from Doc Sherwood. Doc Sherwood asked Walt to sketch his horse, Rupert. In one story Walt was paid five cents for the drawing. In another Doc put the drawing up on his office wall for all to see. The barber, Bert Hudson, would offer Walt free haircuts in exchange for Walt's drawings. 38
Walt would draw on anything he could find. His first cartoons occurred on the corners of the pages in his textbooks. He would draw an animal in the corners and then quickly flip the pages so it looked as if the animal was moving. One time outside their barn, he and his sister Ruth found a bucket of some black liquid that Walt thought was paint. He reassured Ruth that it was ok to use and then painted a picture on the side of the barn. Much to his dismay, the black liquid was tar. Needless to say, Elias was less than thrilled.
Lessons from Elias and the Paper Route
Living in Marceline was a picturesque time that came to an end way too soon. Just as what had happened with the orange groves, the farm defeated Elias so he moved his family to Kansas City. Elias purchased a paper route and enlisted his children to help sell and distribute the papers. For the Disneys, the route was more than a way to make a living, it became a way of life. Every decision and activity centered around the completion of the route each day. 39
Walt was nine years old when he began the paper route. According to Walt, the carefree days of his childhood had vanished. For the first year after the move, Walt delivered the newspapers by foot and after that by bicycle. Every morning Walt would get up at 3:30am. He would go get his assigned 50 newspapers and deliver them to his customers. He would return home by 5:30 or 6:00, take a short nap and then eat breakfast before heading off to school. Every day he would leave school a half hour early so that he could make the afternoon run. On Sunday he had double the amount of papers to deliver.
In the beginning, Walt was excited about the paper route, but the excitement was short-lived. In the winter Walt would have to deliver the papers in the cold and snow, often slipping on the icy steps. Sometimes he would be so cold and so tired that he would inadvertently fall asleep on the route. He would awake with a start and have to hurry to get the route completed. Nothing got in the way of completing the route. Things got worse when his brother Roy got another job and Walt had to do both his and Roy's routes 40. For the remainder of his life the route would serve as a touchstone in Walt's life. He knew what hard work really was.
Due to his time on the route and his father's frugal ways, Walt experienced the tenuous connection between work and compensation and he learned how to work for what he wanted. Elias was not willing to pay Walt for his efforts on the route arguing that the route was the family business and since Walt was a member of the family, it was incumbent upon him to work without monetary compensation. Walt would often take an extra stack of newspapers to sell, deliver medicine for a pharmacy while also delivering the newspapers, or work in a candy store during school recess so that he could have some spending money of his own. Later on, the desire to be properly compensated would ultimately lead Walt to create Mickey.
According to Walt, he and his father were opposites. Whereas Elias was grim, Walt was jocund, cheerful. Whereas Elias plodded along, Walt was enthusiastic. 41 Elias did not believe his children should be wasting time on frivolous endeavors such as drawing and performing which put he and Walt at odds more often than not. Due to their differences, Walt felt he often took the brunt of his father's temper, which flared often enough to make a long lasting impression. 42
Beginning of a Career in Art
Channeling the wanderlust of his ancestors, seven years after moving to Kansas City, Elias decided it was time for the family to move back to Chicago. It was there that Walt's drawing went from being a pastime to the gateway to a career. Walt dropped out of high school after a year. 43 In lieu of high school, Walt started some serious art classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. It was here that Walt realized that he would never be a fine artist, but that his talent lay in caricature. Walt would later refer to this time as the turning point in his career. 44
After Walt returned from serving in France with the Ambulance Corps at the conclusion of WWI, Walt moved to Kansas City instead of back to Chicago. He was old enough to now be out on his own and yet again, his father had refused to give Walt the money Walt had rightly earned while in the Ambulance Corps believing that Walt would just be wasting his money. 45
This second time in Kansas City, while seemingly riddled with failure, would lay the foundation for Walt's future success. He would land a series of art jobs. At each job, Walt would learn the trade and then strike out on his own to do it better. However, each time Walt would form his own business, it would fail not because of the product but because lack of a financial foundation. Walt knew how to work due to his years on the route; he did not know how to manage the financial aspects of a business. But Walt was not to be deterred. He studied every aspect of making cartoons. He was a student of the genre. He even set up a shed studio in his backyard where he experimented with, perfected, and created new animation techniques. It was the creation of the Laugh-O-Gram cartoons that set Walt on his path to Mickey. 46
In his studio shed he made a series of short, silent, slap-stick comedies called Laugh-O-Grams that were moderately successful 47 as well as a short movie, Alice's Wonderland, in which he created the technique of using a human figure (six year old Virginia Davis) in a cartoon setting. 48 Unfortunately, the movie took three years to make, resulting in Walt's bankruptcy. He needed to do something different if he was to have any success making animated cartoons and movies.
Hollywood, Alice, and Oswald the Rabbit
Walt realized that Kansas City was not the center of movie making, so he picked up stakes in true Disney fashion and struck out to find someplace more suitable, Hollywood. When Walt moved out to Hollywood he could not get a job at a studio, so he went back to what he knew, making cartoons. He made a brazen ploy to Margaret Winkler, a distributor in New York. He informed her that he was no longer connected with Laugh-O-Gram Films Inc. of Kansas City, but that he was establishing a studio in Los Angeles with the express purpose of creating more Alice cartoons. He said that some of his staff had traveled with him and that he had access to production facilities and would soon be back on track making the Alice cartoons. All of which was a complete fabrication. Walt was not above manufacturing the truth if it suited his purposes. Winkler bought the ploy and ordered six new Alice films. Walt convinced his brother Roy to be his business partner and asked his uncle Robert to lend him $500 to get the movies going. Disney Brothers Studio was born. 49
Walt procured an office and a camera and persuaded Virginia Davis and her family to come to Hollywood. At first Walt did everything: thought up the story for the Alice movies, directed the movies, drew the cartoon characters, and put the live action and animation together. But it was too much for one person, so Walt and Roy hired three men to operate the camera and help with the animation. They hired three women to ink and paint the black and white cartoon drawings. Walt convinced Ub Iwerks 50to move to Hollywood and join the studio. Ub was talented and fast, just what they needed. 51
The Alice short movies proved to be very successful. With the increase in staff, Disney Brothers Studios were able to turn out twelve Alice shorts in 1924, 18 more in 1925 and 26 in 1926. By the end of 1926, however, in true Disney fashion, Walt was ready to move on to the next adventure. Walt negotiated with Alice Winkler's husband, Charles Mintz, for the studio to create another animated film series. What they created was a playful, funny, and energetic rabbit named Oswald. The film series soon became very popular and Walt believed that for the first time he had vocational and financial stability. 52
However, Mintz grew tired of Walt's consistent bargaining for more money and greater control of the Oswald movies. 53 Mintz came to believe that he could make the Oswald cartoons cheaper if he just had the staff from the Disney Brothers Studio. After all, they were the ones who did all of the drawing anyway (Walt was the thinker of the operation. He did very little of the day-to-day drawing on the cartoons.) So, Mintz did not renegotiate the Oswald contract with the Disney Brothers Studio and he lured away a healthy percentage of the staff at the studio. 54 Walt was crushed! He felt betrayed. Most of all he felt like he was a chip off the old block, just like his father and grandfather, having to start over time-after-time.
Despite the apparent setbacks (losing the staff and the Oswald cartoons), this was also the time when Walt met Lillian Bounds, the future Mrs. Walt Disney. Lillian was one of the original women hired to ink the black and white drawings for the Alice movies. Except for when he was performing for others, Walt was very shy and had never had a serious relationship. He liked how Lillian's short bobbed hair would bounce when she laughed, so he took advantage of driving her home from work to get to know her better. Eventually he asked her out for a date. Walt and Lillian were married July 13, 1925. 55
Mickey is Born
On the train home from New York and Walt's final meeting with Mintz, Walt's wife Lillian 56 recalled that Walt kept repeating that he would never work for anyone else again as long as he lived; he would never again allow anyone to have control over his decisions. Many have criticized Walt for his almost obsessive need later to control everything about the business (the criticism probably justified) but Walt felt he could no longer allow his work to be subjected to another's volatility. 57 On this same train home to Los Angeles, Walt sketched out the plot for a cartoon called Plane Crazy that starred a mouse who builds himself a plane to impress a lady mouse. 58 Walt was going to name the mouse Mortimer but Lillian thought the name sounded too fancy, so she suggested Mickey. 59 The original Mickey had skinny stick legs, a long tail, and a sharp face. He was not as nice as Mickey of today. He played mean tricks on the other characters.
Mickey was not an immediate success. Initially, Walt had difficulty selling Mickey to any theaters. Ever the innovator, he realized he needed to do something different to set Mickey apart from Oswald. Walt decided to add sound to the third Mickey movie, Steamboat Willie. The manager of the Colony Theater in New York City agreed to show Steamboat Willie. 60 And the rest, they say, is history.
Mickey quickly became a huge hit. Mickey Mouse Clubs began forming all over the country, a Mickey cartoon strip began appearing in 40 newspapers throughout the country and Mickey merchandise like dolls, buttons, pencils, toothbrushes and books began flying off the shelves, metaphorically speaking. 61
Walt the Innovator
By the time Mickey came along, Disney Brothers Studios had changed their name to Walt Disney Studios. Walt was the idea man of the operation, the one who compelled the Studio to be innovative and push the technological envelope. With the creation of the Three Little Pigs cartoon, Walt added a more complex plot than previous Disney movies and he added a theme song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf". Much to Walt's surprise and joy, people came out of the theater singing the song. Coincidentally, the rise of animated movies coincided with the advent of color film for movies produced by a company called Technicolor. Walt created Flowers and Trees, the first cartoon in full color, for which he won an Academy Award. 62
When Walt first started making cartoons, they were short (no more than a few minutes) and were shown before the full-length feature. Walt had the idea to create a full-length animated movie. Walt knew he could not count on slapstick gags as he had previously; he needed a complete plot with drama and romance. So, Walt chose the story Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to use as his first full-length animated feature. It took over 750,000 drawings and three years to make the 83 minute movie. Walt's goal was for each character to seem as real as a live actor. He wanted to make people laugh, cry, and hold their breath in fear and anticipation. He used a special multi-plane camera to make the background as three-dimensional as possible. The movie opened on December 21, 1937 in true Hollywood style complete with red carpet. Again, Walt won an Academy Award. This one had the golden Oscar statue surrounded by seven small Oscars 63.
Conclusion
Walt was at the top of his game. No longer would he have to justify to his father whether drawing could be a viable career. No longer would he have to move from place to place to find his success; he MADE his success frame-by-frame. Due to the success of Snow White, Walt and Roy bought 51 acres in Burbank and built a new studio that would eventually house hundreds of employees. Walt continued to be a technological innovator and to push the imagination with the creation of Disneyland, fashioned much like his beloved Marceline. In order to pay for it, Walt came up with the idea of putting on a Disney television show. He could use the revenue generated by the television show to pay for the amusement park. His idea worked like a charm. ABC Studios decided to put on a show that would feature Walt Disney himself as the host, Disney cartoons and live-action skits. In 1955, Walt also created a 5 day per week Mickey Mouse Club Show which featured a group of young actors called mouseketeers. Initially, television was not looked upon favorably, as a threat to the movies, but Walt made television cool and profitable. 64
Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955 in Anaheim, CA. Walt fashioned many of the sets to be reminiscent of his idea of the idyllic place, Marceline, Missouri. Walt even had his employees go to Disney University so that they could learn how to properly work at Disneyland and treat guests as the citizens of Marceline would. 65
Walt Disney passed away on December 15, 1966 from lung cancer. In his 65 years, Walt Disney was arguably one of the most influential people in American history. The New York Times eulogized Walt as "probably the only man to have been praised by both the American Legion and the Soviet Union." 66 It is estimated that in 1966, 240 million people went to see a Disney movie, 100 million viewers tuned into a Disney television show, 80 million people read a Disney book, 50 million listened to a Disney record, 80 million bought Disney merchandise, 150 million read a Disney comic strip, and 7 million visited Disneyland. 67 All this from a little boy who just wanted to draw and to make his father proud.
So, out of the hundreds of photos of Walt Disney that Neal Gabler could have chosen for the cover of the biography of Walt Disney, he selected the picture that shows for the real Walt, the Walt that could not sit still in school yet could stay up for several days to finish a cartoon; the Walt that could not manage a successful business on his own yet was the head of one of the world's largest conglomerates; the Walt that despite his conflicted feelings towards his father, moved him to California, bought him a house and cared for him until his death. Gabler chose this picture to make his central assertion – Walt Disney is so much more than the kindly grandfather type of my youth and yet…At 44 I am still that little girl who would run home from school, grab her snack and listen raptly to all that the Mouseketeers had to teach her. I still believe that a dream is a wish your heart makes, that if I wish upon a star my wish will come true, and that it truly is a small world after all. The simple purity of Walt Disney is a key component of what makes me…me, and for that I will always whistle while I work.
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