The Darkest Chapter In Walt Disney’s Legacy

The Darkest Chapter In Walt Disney’s Legacy

It’s you, huh? Yeah, it’s me, I guess. After the wild success of Snow White, Walt Disney bought his parents the most expensive gift he could think of. He didn’t realize that in doing so, he had sealed his beloved mother’s disturbing fate. An American titan and a worldwide icon, as more and more of his questionable dealings and troubling associations come to light, Walt Disney’s story has gotten a lot more complicated in recent years. He brought so much joy into the world, but the chilling darkness behind his magical persona is always looming.

Born in Chicago in 1901, Walt would go on to enjoy a quintessential American upbringing, something that would color much of his future work. He spent his childhood on the move from his birth to the age of 15. His family uprooted three times. First to Marceline, Missouri, then to Kansas City before finally returning to Chicago with his family in 1917 where he would finish high school. There he was the cartoonist of his school paper, often drawing patriotic images as World War I raged overseas. By mid 1918, he was no longer satisfied with watching the conflict from the sidelines. As he was too young to enlist, he forged his birth certificate and successfully applied to join the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in September 1918.

After a year in France, Disney returned to Kansas City and became an apprentice artist at the Pezman Rubin Commercial Art Studio, starting a friendship with fellow artist Ub Iwerks. By January 1920, they’d both been laid off as business declined. As a result, the pair began their first joint venture, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Young and inexperienced, they failed to drum up any reliable business for their fledgling company. Disney left first, getting a job at the Kansas City Film Ad Company as an illustrator to provide temporary funds the pair could put back into their own company. Iwerks tried to carry on by himself but eventually joined Disney a month later. It was at the Film Ad Co that Disney caught the bug for animation. Borrowing a book and a camera, he began experimenting on his own time. He came to the conclusion that handdrawing every frame of animation known as cell animation was the ticket to success. However, the Film Ad Co didn’t agree. They wanted to create stop-motion cutout animations. So Disney struck out on his own again. Next, Disney and his new partner Fred Harman created short cartoons for the local Newman Theater. Their success there allowed them to create Laugh-O-Gram Studio. There Disney hired his old friend Ub Iwerks along with several other animators in 1921. But this was another false start.

Laugh-O-Gram produced Alice’s Wonderland, a 12 and a half minute combination of live-action and animation. The company went bankrupt before they were able to release it. Following Laugh-O-Gram’s bankruptcy in 1923, Disney moved to Los Angeles where his brother Roy was recovering from tuberculosis and he brought Alice’s Wonderland with him. Margaret J. Winkler was a recognized distributor of animation and she was losing the rights to the Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat cartoons and needed something new to survive. In October of 1923, the Disney brothers signed a contract with Winkler to produce six Alice comedies. Walt and Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio and by July 1924, Walt had also persuaded Iwerks to move from Kansas City and join the team. By 1926, Winkler had retired and turned the company over to her husband, Charles Mintz, and the Alice series was on its way out. Mintz wanted new material he could distribute to Universal Pictures, and Disney wanted to switch from the mix of animation and live action he’d used with Alice to full animation. Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a figure that bears a striking resemblance to Disney’s most famous mouse, and for good reason. In February 1928, Disney and Mintz were at a crossroads. Disney had ambitions to negotiate a larger fee for producing the Oswald series, and Mintz wanted to pay less. Then Disney discovered that Universal, not himself or Iwerks, owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Finally, Mintz gave him an ultimatum. He informed Disney that if he didn’t accept his reduced rates, he’d create his own studio and produce the series himself, cutting Disney out entirely. Walt declined. The majority of his animation staff went with Mintz except Iwerks. The old friends were still together, but they had nothing to produce. They needed a new idea and quick.

Enter Mortimer Mouse. It was Walt’s wife, Lillian, who thought Mortimer was too pompous and suggested another name, Mickey. Despite taking the credit for Mickey Mouse, Disney had less to do with the creation than most realize. Although he drew the initial sketch, it was Iwerks who revised it, making the character easier to animate and creating Mickey as he’s known today. At this point in his career, Disney was distancing himself from the animation process. He did however provide Mickey’s voice from creation until 1947. Hey Puddle, here she comes. One Disney employee said, Iwerks designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul. Mickey had life, but he needed a contract to survive. Mickey’s first appearances didn’t actually gain any traction. It wasn’t until Disney created Steamboat Willie that Mickey found his fame. Inspired by The Jazz Singer, the original sound film, Steamboat Willie used synchronized sound and was the first post-production produced sound cartoon. This was when Disney partnered with former Universal executive Pat Powers, a partnership that would both help him and ruin him. Working with Powers and distributing through his company, Celebrity Pictures, Disney created both films with Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphony series. But despite the success of these pictures, Disney and his brother Roy felt they weren’t receiving their fair share of the profits. At the same time, trouble was brewing with Iwerks as well. Despite playing a key role in the production of Mickey Mouse as well as being the main animator for every one of Disney’s projects, Iwerks felt that he wasn’t getting the recognition that he deserved. So when Powers offered to sign him to create his own company in retaliation for Disney demanding more money, Iwerks planted the knife in his friend’s back and agreed. Walt Disney was once again on his own and the cracks were showing.

By October of 1931, the pressure of his feud with Powers, as well as the additional work created by the loss of Iwerks, led to Disney having a nervous breakdown, prompting him and his wife Lillian to take an extended holiday to Cuba. Disney returned from his break stronger than ever. He signed with Columbia Pictures to continue distributing Mickey Mouse and began creating new stars like Pluto, Goofy, and Donald Duck. In 1932, he produced Flowers and Trees in three-strip Technicolor. Despite half a decade of success, Disney became dissatisfied with producing cartoon shorts by 1934. He felt that the future of animation was going to be something bigger. With that in mind, he began production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first ever attempt at a full-length animated feature film. The industry nicknamed it Disney’s Folly, predicting the time and work required to produce a full-length animated movie would bankrupt the company. And to their credit, the cards were stacked against him. During the three years that it took to produce Snow White, Disney’s animators also revolutionized animation with the development of the multiplane camera. The different elements in the scene were separated according to their varying distances from the viewer. This cutting-edge technology added depth to animated pictures by allowing creators to place drawings on different pieces of glass at various distances. Despite the industry’s doubts, Walt Disney had the last laugh. Not only did Snow White premiere in December 1937 to critical acclaim, it became the highest-grossing film of 1938.

But while his career was soaring, his reputation was about to take an irreparable hit. The world premiere of the million-and-a-half-dollar fairy tale fantasy Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Replicas from the first feature cartoon thrill thousands. That same year, Walt agreed to give Leni Riefenstahl, a propagandist for the Nazi party and ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler, a tour of his studio just a month after Kristallnacht shook the world. He didn’t realize it, but this one decision would leave a stain on his reputation forever. In truth, most historians believe that the tour was more likely financially motivated as his films were at the time banned in Germany or just plain ignorance. But the damage to his name was done. By 1940, his company was in dire straits again. Neither Pinocchio nor Fantasia, both released in 1940, performed well at the box office, and the Disney company began to quickly find themselves sinking into debt. On the one hand, Iwerks’ studio folded in 1940 and he returned to Disney. On the other, the Disney company was in debt and the conditions for their employees were rapidly deteriorating. Many animators took pay cuts following the failures of their most recent releases and they were about to hit back.

In 1941, led by animator Art Babbitt, who openly disliked Walt Disney, the company’s animators went on strike, demanding that Disney unionize his studio. He refused and fired several employees who had joined the Screen Cartoonists Guild. At no point during or after the strike, which lasted five weeks, did Disney take any responsibility. He blamed those who were striking for their own unhappiness. In a speech to his 1,200 employees, he said, If you’re not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it. This failed to inspire his workers. In the end, the strike was resolved, though Disney wasn’t present for much of the negotiations. Despite the agreement, many of the animators refused to return to work for him, and the studio was left with fewer than 700 employees. Perhaps in response to the strike against him, Disney’s views became increasingly more conservative as the 1940s went on. In 1946, he was a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization committed to preserving the American way of life against the threat of communism, fascism, and kindred beliefs. In 1947, Disney’s grudge against those who led the 1941 strike action clearly hadn’t diminished. He testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee that three former animators and labor union organizers were communist agitators, stating that the strike they led was an attempt to gain communist influence in the film industry. These men were subsequently blacklisted from working in Hollywood.

The 1950s began to see the Disney company shift from animated features to live action. Walt, however, was focused on a bigger passion project, building a clean, unspoiled park where the entire family could have fun. For exclusive perks like early access to new videos, priority replies to your comments, and to have your say on future content, consider becoming a Factinate member. On top of that, your support helps keep the channel going. Click the link in the description for more details. Inspired by Denmark’s Tivoli Gardens, Disney purchased land in 1952 and began work with his imagineers to create his vision. Disneyland opened in July 1955, its opening ceremony broadcast on ABC to 70 million viewers. The American public were enchanted by Disneyland’s themed parks connected by Main Street USA, which was modeled after the Main Street in Marceline, Walt’s childhood home. After a roller coaster of ups and downs, Disney had returned to a roaring success, and the best was yet to come. Throughout the remainder of the 1950s and early 1960s, Disney continued to produce feature-length films and television shows, many of which remain as popular today as they were then. In 1964, Disney produced Mary Poppins after trying since the 1940s to gain the rights from author P.L. Travers. The film would be one of Disney’s crowning glories. However, it would mark the end for Disney himself.

Walt Disney was a lifelong smoker. When the dangers of smoking became more widely accepted, Walt promised his daughter that he would switch to filtered cigarettes, which he did. He just removed the filters before smoking them. In early November 1966, Walt Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer. Although treated immediately, by the end of the month, he’d been hospitalized. He died in hospital on December 15th. Walt Disney was gone, but his legacy lived on. Disney was working on projects right up until the day he died. In the end, he played a role in 81 feature films. He received 59 Academy Award nominations, winning 22, making him the record holder for both. His success is undeniable, even if his reputation is altogether murkier. Despite all his success, one tragic mistake haunted Walt Disney until the end of his days. Flushed from the success of Snow White, Walt and his brother Roy bought their parents a modern home in California, including a state-of-the-art heating system using the newest technology, natural gas. Almost immediately, the Disneys began to have problems with the home’s fancy new heating system. The brothers sent over a repairman from their studios to fix the malfunctioning system. However, the system was too new and the repairman would make a mistake with dire consequences. On November 26th, 1938, Flora and Elias Disney’s housemaid discovered the couple unconscious on the floor of their new home. With the aid of some neighbors, the maid dragged them both out of the house, but only Elias recovered. By then, it was already too late for Flora. Walt’s mother succumbed to carbon monoxide inhalation in the house that he’d bought for her, and it was a loss that he never fully recovered from.

In the years since Disney’s passing, the Disney company has only continued to grow. It’s also been repeatedly scrutinized for the choices it made both during and after Walt’s reign. As an animator in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, many of his creations are products of their time, colored with ingrained prejudices. However, whether you believe him to be an American icon or a symbol of the problems of the time, you cannot deny that Walt Disney created magic that lives long after him. If you enjoyed this Factinate video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more incredible stories. If you want a say in who we cover next, join our membership program through the link in the description for exclusive perks. Your support means everything to us. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next one.