In Part 1 of my Walt Disney biography we looked at his early life. Here’s what I wrote about his career:
Walt Disney was still in his teens when he began his animation career. With his friend Ubbe (later Ub) Iwerks, he formed a company called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists – Iwerks’ name came first because the friends decided “Disney-Iwerks” sounded too much like an optometry practice. The money did not roll in quickly enough, so Walt began working at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, and Iwerks followed suit not long after.
The two friends made cutout animation for the company, whose owner allowed them to borrow a camera on the weekends. Before long, Walt decided to branch out on his own and hired a coworker named Fred Harman to animate with him. Their short films, called Laugh-O-Grams, gave the studio its name.
The Laugh-O-Grams became popular around Kansas City, and Walt hired three additional artists, including Iwerks. But the profits from the shorts could not cover the high salaries Walt insisted on paying his employees. Walt closed the studio when the debts piled too high, and he went to California to join his brother Roy.
Walt had begun making his silent Alice Comedies in Kansas City, so he already had a product to sell when he and Roy set up the Disney Brothers’ Studio. The Alice Comedies featured a live action girl, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice, whose adventures the animators drew around her. The brothers found a distributor, and the Alice Comedies continued until 1927.
Distributor Charles Mintz asked the Disney brothers to create a new character for a series of animated shorts. The series featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit became a success, and when Walt went to New York to negotiate a new contract, asking for more money, Mintz responded by taking the character and much of the studio’s animation staff to Universal with him. (Disney finally gained back the rights to Oswald in 2006 in a trade with NBC for sportscaster Al Michaels.)
Reeling, Walt scrambled to create a new character. Bob Thomas explains:
The birth of Mickey Mouse is obscured in legend, much of it created by Walt Disney himself. He enjoyed telling the tale of how he dreamed up the mouse character on the train trip back from the Oswald disaster and how [Walt’s wife] Lilly objected to the name Mortimer Mouse so he made it Mickey Mouse instead. He also hinted that the character originated with a pet mouse that played around the drawing board in Kansas City. Both stories had basis in fact, but the real genesis of Mickey Mouse appears to have been an inspired collaboration between Walt Disney, who supplied the zestful personality and the voice for Mickey, and Ub Iwerks, who gave Mickey form and movement.
The Mickey Mouse shorts became a runaway success, leading the studio to create the Silly Symphonies series which allowed for more artistic experimentation. Walt added tremendous innovations to these animated shorts – sound, Technicolor, and totally new inventions like the multiplane camera, which added dimension to animation by photographing different elements of a scene on different cels. But Walt wasn’t satisfied with shorts, despite winning awards hand over fist.
The studio branched out into uncharted territory, creating feature-length animated films beginning with the revolutionary Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. The company released 18 animated features during Walt’s lifetime, each with varying degrees of artistic and financial success. During World War II, the military took over the studio, and Walt and his team made training movies and propaganda shorts and designed logos to get through the lean war years.
After the war, Walt branched out yet again into live action films. The 55 live action features – from the quasi-documentary The Reluctant Dragon to the controversial Song of the South to the sentimental Follow Me, Boys! – again varied in terms of their success. The studio also created the True-Life Adventures series of nature documentaries – the 14 entries in this series won eight Academy Awards and became wildly popular. But Walt wanted to do even more.
Several of Walt’s ideas – miniature dioramas containing scenes from Disney films, Walt’s fascination with model railroading, the idea of a small theme park across from the studio – coalesced into the ultimate entertainment experience: Disneyland. The success of Disneyland and encroachment of tacky tourist culture around it led Walt to take his theme park concept to another level.
Walt searched throughout the eastern half of the United States for the perfect location for a new project. He and his team examined sites in St. Louis, Niagara Falls, Ocala, and Palm Beach – and even considered buying the old Disney family farm in Marceline, Missouri – before finally settling on the Orlando area in Central Florida as the destination for what the company called Project Future. Walt’s associates surreptitiously grabbed up land under assumed names in order to keep land prices down, and they soon had acquired a parcel twice the size of the island of Manhattan.
Walt’s grand idea contained much more than a theme park. Project Future included hotels, a campground, a state of the art airport, and industrial park, and what Walt considered his crowning achievement: a city of the future. He outlined his dream in a short film just two short months before his death:
But the most exciting, by far the most important part of our Florida project—in fact, the heart of everything well be doing in Disney World—will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow. We call it E.P.C.O.T, spelled E-P-C-O-T: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow…
E.P.C.O.T will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.
I don't believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities.
But where do we begin? How do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we’re convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community. So that's what E.P.C.O.T is: an Experimental Prototype Community that will always be in the state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future where people actually live a life they can’t find anyplace else in the world.
Everything in E.P.C.O.T will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here, and those who come here from around the world to visit our living showcase.
We don't presume to know all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on the cooperation of American industry to provide their very best thinking during the planning and the creation of our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And most important of all, when E.P.C.O.T has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it’s our hope that E.P.C.O.T will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community.
Unfortunately, Walt did not live to see his dream come to fruition. He spent the last half of 1966 at a series of medical appointments, where doctors discovered he had lung cancer. Surgery to remove the cancerous lung took its toll on Walt, and he lost his battle with cancer on December 15, 1966, just ten days shy of his 65th birthday.
Stay tuned for Part 3, where I talk about one particular aspect of Walt Disney’s legacy that’s important to me.
Orange County Archives, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons