75 Fascinating Facts about Walt Disney Part One
Note: This post is broken up into two parts in order to speed up the website loading for the reader.
Disney is a global massive behemoth of a company in today’s world. Some of the things that Disney owns are Marvel, Star Wars, ABC Networks, Pixar, and so much more. There are Disney amusement parks around the world, Disney cruises, and Disney products spread throughout the world.
All of this wouldn’t have been possible without Walt Disney. The above realities are part of the reason of why I decided to research fascinating facts about Walt Disney. The man is a legend and I wanted to see what he was about. Most of the facts are about Walt Disney himself, but some of them are about Disney Studios in general, which is fitting because Walt Disney lived and breathed his studio. It was a part of him.
All the facts below were jotted down while I read Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neil Gabler. It is a huge book and I highly recommend it. The numbers in parentheses are the page numbers on where the information can be found.
***Please note that we are assuming that the author of the biography was correct with their research.***
I am sorry if any of the videos in this post are no longer showing. I am not hosting them. They are from Youtube.
Thank you and I hope you enjoy reading these facts about Walt Disney as much I enjoyed learning about them.
1. Starting at 9 years old, he helped run his father’s paper route for 6 years, waking up at 3:30AM every day to deliver newspapers. (21)
There are two amazing things about this. One is that this was in Kansas City, so he had to deliver paper by foot in the winter when it snowed.
Second is that “in six years on the route he missed only five weeks — two with a severe cold, a third on a visit to his aunt Josie in Hiawatha, Kansas, in 1913, and two more in 1916, when he kicked a piece of ice with a new both he had just gotten for Christmas and was stabbed by a nail hidden in the chunk.”(21)
2. In 7th grade Walt took domestic science instead of manual arts. He was the only boy in the class. (28)
3. On September 4, 1918, a bomb went off in the Chicago Federal Building, killing four people and injuring many others. Walt Disney was in the building at the time of the explosion because he worked at the Post Office. (This was shortly after he had left Kansas City). (35)
The significance of this is fascinating to think about because if Walt Disney had been among those killed (a man “who had worked two desks from Walt’s” was part of the four killed), we would have never gotten Walt Disney Studios. How different would the world be now without Disney? Who would have filled the void? Just an interesting thing to think about.
4. He enlisted in the Red Cross Ambulance Corp when he was 16 so he could help out with World War One. The story of how he joined is fascinating. (36–37)
Walt and his friend first tried to enlist in the Navy and were rejected for being too young. They then tried to join the Canadian forces, but his friend was rejected for poor eyesight, and Walt didn’t want to enlist without him, so they decided to try to join the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.
The Ambulance Corp’s age requirement was 17, and a 17 year old was required to get their parents’ signature. Walt’s parents didn’t know about the age requirement, but it didn’t matter because when Walt asked his father for his signature, his father said no.
That didn’t stop Walt though. He secretly asked his mom to sign it, and she also forged his father’s signature. Then “after his mother had the certificate notarized” (37), he changed his birth date to make himself 17 before turning it in.
The kicker for this fascinating story is that the war ended before he made it to Europe. He still ended up being shipped to France though so he could be of aid after the war. He stayed and helped out for a while before asking for a discharge.
5. Walt Disney never finished high school. (46)
6. Started his first business, an advertising type business, with Ubbe Iwerks when he was 18 years old. It lasted two months. (46–50)
Shortly after starting the business, Walt took a job as an artist at Kansas City Slide Company while Ubbe ran the shop. The business didn’t last long, and Ubbe joined Walt at KC Slide Company. This was the place where Walt first started experimenting with animation.
7. Started creating Laugh-O-Grams short animations/live-action films while still working at Slide Co. (56–58)
One of the first animation projects he did in his free time was with Fred Harman. He was able to contract the finished product out to a small theater chain in Kansas City.
I believe the below is one of the first ever Laugh-O-Grams because it says “Newmans Laugh O-Grams.” Newman’s was the name of the theater chain that the Laugh O-Grams played at. The more advanced Laugh-O-Grams don’t have the “Newmans” name attached to them.
8. At 20 years old he created his second business. The name of the business was Laugh O-Grams Films, Inc.. Yes, he had it officially incorporated. (61)
He hired multiple people onto the staff, but no one he hired really had any experience with animation, so they learned as they went along. (65–66)
The company quickly got into debt and the employees were basically working for free, since Walt’s checks kept bouncing. The situation became so dire that Walt was sleeping at the company’s office space, subsisting on “cold beans he ate from a can” and “took his baths once a week at Union Station, where he paid a dime for the privilege.” (68–71)
As you can probably guess, the company failed and had to file for bankruptcy. Walt sold most of what he owned to try to pay back investors. He promised to pay back everyone when he could ( he eventually did). He then left Kansas City with the little he had and went to Hollywood to meet up with his brother Roy. (74)
The below is a video of a cartoon made by his Laugh-O-Gram company. The music had to be played by someone as the cartoon ran on screen. Sound films weren’t around by then. The cartoon below is much better than the previous one I showed above.
9. Walt and his brother Roy would end up starting a business called Disney Bros in the months after Walt’s move. The first work they were tasked to produce were Alice films, which had live action with animation tacked on. The films were first produced by Walt’s Laugh O-Grams company. (83–89)
The business first started as a two-man operation. “Walt conceived the stories, directed the live action, drew the animations, and timed the exposures so that the movements were smooth. Roy did the books, occasionally manned the camera, and even washed the cels so they could be reused.” (85)
The production quickly escalated and they were forced to hire others. One of the first people Walt convinced to join them was Ubbe Iwerks, who was his partner in his first business. Many of the new hires were also people who had worked with him at Laugh-O-Grams.
Like most new businesses, the start of Disney Bros was unstable. The “cartoons cost nearly as much as to make as he received in compensation.” Throughout 1924, they were borrowing money from their uncle to stay afloat.(89)
Here is one of the Alice films.
10. When Walt Disney first met the woman he would end up marrying, there “was no attraction, much less romance” between them at first. They would stay married throughout his life. (93)
11. Disney Bros became Walt Disney Studios when the company moved office locations and Walt said he wanted a sign that said Walt Disney Studios. Roy didn’t argue with him about it, so Walt Disney Studios became the new name of the company. (98)
12. The success of Oswald the Rabbit cartoons the studio created in 1927 allowed the studio to grow, and it finally gave Roy and Walt enough money to build homes for themselves.
13. When Walt and his wife would get ice cream cones, he would also get one for their dog and feed it to her. (105)
The above may not be fascinating to you, but I find the mental image of Walt Disney feeding an ice cream cone to his dog silly, so I decided to include it.
14. In March 1928, Walt’s distributor went behind Walt’s back and essentially planned a coup with a bunch of Walt’s animators. Walt would end up losing most of his staff. (106–110)
The whole ordeal was, according to Walt, “one of the most devastating” episodes in his life, especially because it meant “he would have to begin all over again.”
One of the worst parts about the coup was that the traitors remained in the studio for a while in order to fulfill the Oswald contracts. (114)
15. It was in the days after the coup that Walt Disney came up with the idea of Mickey Mouse (110–115)
Since the traitors were still in the studio working, Ubbe Iwerks had to secretly work on developing Mickey. He was the only animator who worked on the first Mickey cartoon.
They couldn’t find a distributor for the first Mickey cartoon, so they decided to do something that hadn’t been done before, and that was produce a cartoon with a post produced soundtrack. (118)
16. Steamboat Willie (118–131)
In order to keep the studio running while trying to find a distributor for Steamboat Willie, both Disney brothers took out mortgages on their houses and got a loan from the bank.
Walt, before he got a distributor for the film, worked with a Broadway theater owner to play Mickey for two weeks starting on November 18, 1928. The reception was ecstatic. Distributors then wanted to buy the studio, but Walt declined.
Instead, his new sales agent, the notorious Pat Powers worked with state and regional distributors to show the cartoon. The studio would end up getting screwed over by the contract with Powers; a contract that Walt had signed without talking to Roy.
17. Walt didn’t create the famous Mickey Mouse Club, a club which would help spread the popularity of Mickey across the nation. (139)
Harry Woodin started the first Mickey Mouse Club. Walt found out about it and got a kick out of it, and then Woodin convinced him that he could do it on a national scale. Walt agreed; it would end up being a huge success. At the club’s peak, it was estimated that it had one million members. (140)
18. A second betrayal happened in January 1930. (143–148)
The Disney studio had a terrible time with Pat Powers near the end of their contract. One of the things Pat did was spur a second betrayal. He convinced Ubbe Iwerks to leave Disney and create his own studio with Pat’s backing.
Years later, Ubbe Iwerks after failing miserably, would return to Walt Disney Studios. He stayed for a long time and would eventually become head of a department called Special Processes and Camera, whose purpose was to develop new effects. (352–353, 419)
19. According to Walt, Mickey Mouse’s movements were partially based on Charlie Chaplin. Mickey Mouse’s other creator, Ubbe Iwerks, thought of Mickey in terms of Douglas Fairbanks. (153)
20. Walt Disney was the voice of Mickey Mouse for many years. (155)
21. Turning back the clocks. (162)
This is an interesting story that made me chuckle, so I decided to include it. In the early years of the studio and his marriage with Lillian, him and Lillian would often end up at the studio most nights because of Walt’s obsession with work. She would fall asleep and wake up intermittently, asking how late it was, and Walt would reply, “Oh, it’s not late.”
Walt would admit years later that “he would turn back his office clock while Lillian slept so that she never knew how late he had worked.”
22. In June 1931, Walt’s wife had a miscarriage. As you can imagine, they were devastated. (163)
23. In 1931, Walt had an emotional breakdown because of all the stress he had endured. He was told by a doctor to leave the studio for a while, so he left on a multi-week vacation. (164–166)
24. Walt pressed his animators to make animation “believable in motion and emotion.” He cared deeply at the time about personality in animation. The result of his pressing would radically change animation, since no one had focused on emotional depth in animation before. (172)
25. The studio’s Flowers and Trees was the first ever cartoon to use the full Technicolor method. Once again, Walt was a trendsetter and the film won an Academy Award for best short animated film. (178)
From then on, Walt was all about color in animation, though Roy was edgy about it because it was a lot more expensive. (179)
26. In 1933, Three Little Pigs swept across the nation to great acclaim and helped Walt win another Academy Award. (181)
27. In the mid 1930s Walt became obsessed with playing polo, aka that game where people ride horses and hit a ball around. (192)
He bought multiple horses and had people from the studio play with him and others outside of work time. Polo was a big fad during the thirties, and Walt would play with other famous people. He went so far with his obsession that he had a polo champion come to the studio and talk to his staff about the game.
His interest waned in 1935 after an accident during a match where his horse collided with another man’s horse. The other man in the accident would die three days later, and Walt would have pain from the injury for the rest of his life. He would end up quitting polo completely in 1938. (280–281).
28. Walt’s wife had a second miscarriage. At the end of 1933 though they were finally successful on their third try and Walt became a parent to Diane Marie Disney
29. Walt was a chain smoker throughout his adult life.
His smoker’s cough became so bad that his daughter “had once asked him not to attend a school play she was acting in because she said if she heard him cough, she would forget her lines.” (626)
30. It took two years to decide the names of the dwarfs from Snow White and how they would act. (249)
Here is the list of names they tried out at one time or another, “Scrappy, Cranky, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Silly, Daffy, Flabby, Jaunty, Biggo Ego, Chesty, Jumpy, Baldy, Hickey (‘always hiccoughing at the wrong moment’), Gabby, Shorty, Nifty, Wheezy, Sniffy, Burpy, Lazy, Puffy, Dizzy, Stuffy, and Tubby, along with Grumpy, Happy, Doc, Bashful, and Dopey.” (220)
I decided to include this one just because of the fact that one of the dwarfs could have been named Biggo Ego. WHAT!?
Also, Dopey was the hardest of the dwarfs to figure out. A “breakthrough came when they decided to think of Dopey not as an elf or as an innocent or as a child but as a ‘human with dog mannerisms and intellect.’”(252)
31. It took three years of “incessant tinkering, after the training sessions, ongoing recruitment, expansion of the studio, and establishment of the bonus system” before the animation of Snow White even began. Walt was so dedicated to the picture that he had a hand in everything. (244)
32. Animators working on Snow White were so stressed out by Walt Disney’s perfectionism and constant demands that they found release by doing sketches of a nude Snow White surrounded by tumescent dwarfs………..(264)
33. Snow White barely completed production on time. (268)
They finished it “six days before the first scheduled sneak preview.”
34. Walt once again was a trendsetter. Snow White was the first full-length cel animated movie and it was a huge success. It also had a huge merchandising operation to go with the movie, which was possibly a first too. (277)
“By May 1939, with $6.7 million in receipts, it would become the highest-grossing American film to that point, eventually surpassing the previous record-holder, The Singing Fool with Al Jolson, by nearly $2 million.”
“There were by one account, 2,183 different Snow White products, and 16.5 million drinking glasses alone were sold. It was reported that a few months after its release that ‘$2 million worth of Snow White toys had been sold and another $2 million worth of Snow White handkerchiefs.’”
The studio was able to pay off the $2.3 million they had borrowed from the Bank of America through the process. If Snow White had tanked, the Walt Disney Studio probably would have been done. (283)
35. Walt and Lillian tried to have another child, but she miscarried again (third time), so they decided to adopt instead. On December 31, 1936, “Walt and Lillian received their new six-week-old daughter, Sharon Mae.” (280)
36. Walt Disney didn’t seem to have close friendships throughout his life, especially during the years of Snow White. He was a workaholic. (281–282)
“Most of his associates felt that he was close to no one.”
“Another employee described Walt as ‘friendly, but a man who didn’t appear to accept close friendships.’ Lillian agreed. Asked by an interview to name Walt’s closest friends, she said, ‘He really didn’t have time to make friends…Walt had too much to do. He had to have a clear mind for work the next day.’” (281–282)
37. Gave out $750,000 in bonuses to his employees after the success of Snow White. He was very generous at times. (284)
38. He was the first person in the film industry to ever be awarded an honorary degree from Harvard, which he received after Snow White. (285)
Please go to Part Two for the rest of the facts.
- *Note the links that lead to Amazon are part of the Amazon Associates Program. The NonFiction Zone is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites and blogs to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com
