75 Fascinating Facts About Walt Disney Part 2
This article was broken up into two parts in order to save on load time because slow websites are no fun. You can check out part one here if you haven’t read it yet.
39. The sorcerer’s crooked eyebrow in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a short in Fantasia, was based on Walt’s famous crooked eyebrow. The Sorcerer’s name was Yen Sid, aka Disney backwards. (295)
40. Came up with the idea of giving screen credit to actors for their voice work (potentially first person to do so in animation) because he believed it made the roles more important and would allow them to get better actors to do the roles. (304)
41. The sad story of his mother’s death. (303)
Walt and Roy promised their parents, Elias and Flora, a house in Los Angeles for their fiftieth-anniversary present. They bought a new house whose old owner had suddenly died, so the widow was selling it.
Here is what happened after they moved in.
“On the morning of November 26, 1938, Flora went to the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. When she didn’t return, Elias got up to investigate and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor. Feeling overcome himself, he staggered out into the hallway and fainted. Downstairs in the courtyard Alma Smith was emptying a dustpan of oatmeal that she had spilled when she felt herself getting woozy and realized that something was amiss. She rushed back into house and raced up the stairs, found Elias on the floor, called a neighbor, and then phoned Roy. Meanwhile she tried to open the window, but it was stuck. Then she and the neighbor dragged Flora and Elias down the stairs and outside, and the neighbor administered artificial respiration. Elias revived. Flora did not. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the defective heater; a lid on the air intake had slipped, recirculating the exhaust into the house.” (303)
This was a horrible thing to have happen. I can’t even imagine the pain Walt and Roy must have felt. They bought their parents a new house and his mother died upon moving into it. That’s brutal. “Walt never spoke of her death to anyone thereafter.” (304)
42. Created one of the first amenity filled business campuses. (323)
Many people know of places like Google, Facebook, and such, where they have a ton of amenities on the “campus.” Walt Disney did this way before any of those companies came into existence.
His new studio in Burbank had an elaborate commissary, a snack bar, and a buffet. “Anyone who wanted a sandwich or a milk shake could simply order one, and it would be delivered by a traffic boy to the office. There was a barbershop for anyone needing a haircut. Walt also provided a gymnasium on the top floor, where a Swedish exercise trainer named Carl Johnson led workouts and a roof deck where animators could and did sunbathe nude.” (323)
Pretty swanky, but though the new campus was awesome, “many employees would, in time, come to think of the move to Burbank as, in the words of one, a ‘line of demarcation in the era of good feeling’ and the beginning of a loss of morale.’” (325)
43. Pinocchio was a failure when it was released, putting the company into serious debt and would cause Walt to do something he never wanted to do. (327)
44. In 1940, with the studio back in serious debt and needing cash, “the studio arranged to issue 155,000 shares of preferred stock worth $3.875 million at 6 percent interest, convertible into common stock when the price of a share of the preferred stock reached 30.4 percent of the value of a share of common stock.” (331) No longer did the Disney family own all of Walt Disney Studios.
45. Fascinating Fact about the filming of Fantasia. (339–340)
Walt wanted a “220-foot tracking shot” into a Gothic cathedral. It took the crew around six days with the crew working 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts to get it done. “When Walt heard that production was going to slow down briefly because one of the camera operators was going to get married, he offered to get Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra to play at the man’s ceremony if he and his bride would take their vows on the soundstage and keep the film in production.”
The crew managed to finish the shot and the film a day before the New York premiere of the film.
46. Animators and the people working on the film use to not get credit on Disney movies and it created hostility among the employees. (354–355)
47. Many of the animators went on strike in 1941, which lasted three and a half months. Walt put some of the blame on Communist sympathizers. The camaraderie that was there between Walt and the animators during Snow White was now gone. (364–374)
48. Disney made multiple films for the government during World War II ranging from training videos to propaganda. (383–390)
Here is a propaganda film they made called Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.
49. During the war Walt received a story from a young Royal Air Force Lieutenant. After a year and a half of attempting to figure out how to break the story, Walt decided not to do it. The English Lieutenant had been Roald Dahl — the man who would go on to write James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and other famous stories. (395–396)
50. By the end of 1942, over “75 percent of the studio’s output was now targeted for the government.” In 1943, “Ninety-for percent of the output” went to the government, meaning that Walt Disney Studios essentially became an arm of the government. (401, 406)
The war business helped Walt Disney Studios stay sustainable and even lowers its debt, which it needed because “In October 1944 the studio business office calculated that Pinocchio, Fantasia, The Reluctant Dragon, Bambi, and Victory Through Air Power had lost a total of $2,396,500.” (410–411)
51. The production of Mickey and the Beanstalkin 1947 was when Walt passed the mantle of the voice of Mickey Mouse over to someone else. (426)
52. After the war, the studio started having trouble again. There were layoffs in 1946, and “only an emergency loan of $1 million from RKO in late 1946 rescued the company from insolvency.” (440)
53. In 1948, Walt couldn’t get a distributor for a film he had made about seals that was 28 minutes long. So instead, he arranged it to play at a theater for a week, which qualified it for an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, which it then went on to win. It was then easy to get a distributor. (446)
Here is a clip from the film.
54. Walt testified at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about Communism in Hollywood. (453)
According to the biography, Walt was so against Communism that he enforced a blacklist at his studio and was a subscriber to Alert, a “weekly report on Communism in California.” (454)
55. In the late forties, when the studio was in a precarious position, Walt became obsessed with trains. (467–468)
In 1950, at his new house, he built a big train track around the property and would ride his mini-train around his property. (474–475)
56. The fate of the future of the studio rested on Cinderella. (478)
If the film had failed it “would have sunk the Disney studio,” instead it lifted it dramatically because it would end up grossing $7.9 million, not including sales of merchandise.
57. In July 1950, Walt Disney Studios released Treasure Island, Walt Disney’s first all-live action feature, which Walt had pushed to make. It returned a profit of $2.2 to $2.4 million. The studio was on the rebound after dancing so close to failure. (471–472)
58. Walt originally planned to have Disneyland be in Burbank (Los Angeles County), but eventually they decided to have it in Orange County. (494–501)
59. Walt didn’t come up with the idea for the famous television program The Mickey Mouse Club. Bill Cottrell had. (506)
60. Most of the financing for Disneyland came because Roy and Walt decided to get into the television industry. (507–511)
The move was a huge success. One of the shows called Disneyland, which was there to help sell Disneyland before it opened, started in October 1954 and it “consistently attracted over 50 percent of the audience in its time slot.” There were a whole lot less television stations to choose from back then, but that is still a siginificant amount of people. (511)
61. Walt didn’t have enough money to completely finish the landscaping job of Disneyland before the opening, so he had the landscaper “put Latin names on the weeds, as if they were specimen plants.” (528)
62. The opening of Disneyland was broadcasted on television (Ronald Reagan was one of the hosts) and “was viewed by an estimated seventy million Americans, or roughly half the population.” (532)
This shows how much of a cultural impact Walt had during his time. To get half of America to tune in for the opening of an amusement park is an impressive feat.
63. Walt had an apartment above the Main Street Fire Station at Disneyland, and he would often stay there when he visited Disneyland, especially when the place was being worked on. (532)
64. Disneyland was a success from the start. (537)
It received its “ten-millionth visitor less than two and a half years after its opening.” The company “had a gross revenue of $24.5 million in 1955, against $11 million the previous year.” So the park was a huge financial success, and Walt proved all of his doubters wrong.
One random fact is that “one African president continued his visit even after his public relations officer keeled over and died of a heart attack while dining at the park’s Plantation restaurant.” (565)
65. Not the most romantic person with his wife.
“One year, Lillian said, he handed her a catalog of furs and said, ‘Here’s your Christmas present.’ Similarly, when Lillian asked for a radio, Walt had a large box of radios delivered to the office.” (544)
66. In an interview, Walt said that women “were not particularly good at cartooning and that they lacked a sense of humor.” (550)
This was in 1946, so it was a different time back then, and yet, he was still criticized for it. I can’t even imagine how people would respond to a person of his stature saying something like that in today’s world. The Internet would go berserk.
67. Walt and his staff created a robotic Lincoln for the World’s Fair. It didn’t work well, but it goes to show that he was constantly about pushing the boundaries of what was possible. Disneyland would end up having a lot of robotic lifelike machines. (579–585)
The below is a video of the current Lincoln robot that is at the Opera House on Main Street at Disneyland.
68. Walt Disney was the founder of Cal Arts. (592)
69. The development of Mary Poppins (596–600)
Walt became intrigued with Mary Poppins during WWII and Roy told P.L. Travers, the author, about his interest, and “suggested that she consider working with the studio on an adaption of the book.” The contact was sporadic between them though until after the end of the war.
In 1946, the studio and Travers reached an “agreement on the rights for $10,000 — or at least Roy thought they had reached an agreement. The deal fell apart when Travers insisted on script approval, something Walt Disney was not about to grant anyone.”
Thirteen years would pass before they would talk again about the rights. “This time her agent wanted $750,000.” When Walt met Travers two months after the initial talks, “she was now demanding 5 percent of the profits” and “a guarantee of $100,000 and an additional $1,000 for the treatment.”
Walt eventually signed a contract that “stipulated unconditional approval of the script” for Travers. The biography states that Walt signed the contract “knowing full well he wouldn’t honor it.” In fact, “Walt had been working on the film for nearly two years before Travers finally signed the contract.”
Walt decided he wanted Julie Andrews for the part after he saw her in the musical Camelot that was playing on Broadway. He originally wanted Cary Grant for the male part, before settling on Dick Van Dyke.
The film cost $5.2 million to make and would end up grossing around $50 million worldwide. It was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, winning five.
70. He secretly sent people to Florida to buy land for him for Disney World, publically saying that he wasn’t interested in Florida for Disney World. He did this so the price of land wouldn’t shoot up. Eventually the media found out and he made a public commitment to the area. (605–607)
71. Walt’s original plan for Disney World, besides making it a theme park, was for it to be a truly unique community. The community was to be called EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). (609)
He wanted to create a futuristic city. “‘It will worry about pre-school education,’ he said, ‘home environment, employment.’ It would have a teen center in an effort to prevent delinquency and a nearby center for senior citizens. It would have recreational zones and areas of worship.”
Joe Fowler said that Walt “expected a house that would be completely self-sufficient.” It seemed like he wanted it to be a futuristic utopia.
Sadly, the dream of EPCOT would die when Walt died. Instead, Disney World would just be an amusement park with hotels around it.
72. Walt Disney was a Republican. “He was involved in the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964.” (612)
73. Walt outlined the story for LT. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., one of the last films that would come out during his lifetime. “The original story was attributed to ‘Retlaw Yensid’ — ‘Walter Disney’ backwards.” (618)
74. Walt Disney was a producer (sometimes uncredited) on 87 feature-length films. He won 22 Academy Award on 59 nominations. He holds the records for most Academy Awards wins by one person.
75. On December 15, 1966, Walt Disney died of cardiac arrest because of lung cancer. He was 65 years old. (631)
This was a huge fascinating facts article, but it is fitting for a man who imposed his will on the world. The Disney brand is known throughout the world because of him. He was an eccentric, brilliant, yet complicated man whose company nearly failed multiple times. There were multiple times in his life where if things had gone differently, Walt Disney Studios would have died. His impact on the film industry is truly impressive.
I hope that you enjoyed these fascinating facts about Walt Disney that were acquired while I read Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. I highly recommend the book.
If you aren’t a big reader of books, then you can also check out this documentary done recently by PBS called American Experience: Walt Disney. The trailer is below.
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Enjoy.
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