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Childhood
Disney was born in Chicago to Elias Disney and Flora Call. He was named after his
father and after his father's close friend Walter Parr, the minister at St. Paul
Congregational Church. In 1906, his family moved to a farm near Marceline,
Missouri. The family sold the farm in 1909 and lived in a rented house until 1910,
when they moved to Kansas City. Disney was nine years old at the time.
According to the Kansas City, Missouri, Public School District records, Disney began attending the Benton
Grammar School 1911, and continued his formal education there until he graduated on June 8, 1917. During this
time, Disney also enrolled in classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. In the fall of 1917, Disney rejoined his
family. He left school at the age sixteen and became a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, after he
changed his birth certificate to show his year of birth as 1900 in order to be able to enlist in the service. He
served as a member of the American Red Cross Ambulance Force in France till 1919.
In 1922 Disney started making longer shorts based on well known fairy-tales like "Cinderella". In 1923 Disney
also started experimenting with shorts combining live-action and animation. Few of the shorts that Disney worked
on during these years have survived but they were locally successful at the time and Disney was getting
ambitious.
Disney was now working on his own company again along with Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising and
Carmen Maxwell but the Laugh-O-Grams weren't satisfying him any more. Though reasonably popular near
Kansas City they weren't truly financially successful.
Disney and his team put all their efforts on creating Alice's Wonderland. The young actress playing Alice in this
film was Virginia Davis, who had worked for the Kansas City Film Ad Company. Unfortunately for them, their
profits from Laugh-O-Graphs weren't enough to cover the expenses and the company went bankrupt in July,
1923. But Disney had his finished project in his hand and he left for Hollywood in hopes of finding interested
distributors. Reportedly he had only 40 dollars left at this point. Ub followed him. But Ising, Harman and Maxwell
decided to follow their own separate path. They would form Arabian Nights Cartoon Studio and later Harman-
Ising Studio.
In 1926, Margaret Winkler married Charles Mintz and retired from business. Disney now had to deal with one
distributor who felt that the series was declining. By this time Ub Iwerks was in charge of the animated films and
Disney just supervised and dropped some ideas. The animation was getting better, the gags increased, but the
live-action sequences were becoming less important and the scenarios tended to be repetitive. But the series was
still successful enough. During the year, the name of the company changed from "The Disney Brothers Studio" to
"The Walt Disney Studio". From then on Roy would still play an important part in the Company's financial
department but had little to do with the films. Disney was now the head of the Studio, which moved to Hyperion
Avenue. Disney felt that his youthful appearance (he was 25 years old) worked against him during contract
negotiations and grew a mustache in an attempt to look older and more serious.
But Disney had other plans. Charles Mintz's own employer Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios was
interested in a new animated series starring a rabbit. Mintz assigned this to Disney and his company. They
developed the new character and named him: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Poor Papa was produced by Spring of this year but Laemmle was less than pleased with the character. They
wanted a likeable character like Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, Felix the Cat or even Julius from the Alice Comedies.
What they got was a rabbit looking old, fat, sloppy and scruffy with a hooligan's personality.
Poor Papa would be released on August 6, 1928 when the character's popularity was at its height but this wasn't
the introduction of the character to the public that Universal wanted. The Disney studio had to redesign the
character. But the next short they produced was what Universal wanted. Trolley Troubles featured a younger,
slimmer, better Oswald with the personality of a naughty young boy. The film's release on September 5, 1927
made the character instantly successful.
Nine shorts featuring Oswald were released during the year and the character became popular. Oswald
merchandise appeared though Disney had nothing to do with it. Black Pete was now used as a recurring
antagonist to Oswald. Disney had success at his hands... or so he thought.
One of the more famous Disney quotes has been, "Remember, it all started with a mouse." But it more likely
started with the Rabbit. Disney was successful enough to be able to hire his old colleagues Hugh Harman and
Rudolf Ising, who hadn't been so successful on their own but had improved in skills. Seventeen of Disney's
Oswald cartoons were released during 1928, the final being Hot Dog, released on August 20, 1928.
Oswald moves on
Disney was quite confident when he went to negotiate with Charles Mintz in New York. He wanted his fee to
increase from 2250 dollars per short to 2500 dollars per short. Instead Mintz wanted Disney's fee to decrease to
2000 dollars per short. When Disney refused, Mintz had some announcements to make. He didn't need Disney
anymore. He had secretly met with a number of Disney's employees including Harman and Ising and had signed
them on contracts of their own. As the distributor Universal held the rights to Oswald and they could make their
own cartoons with him if they wanted to, Disney returned to his Studio in defeat and along with Ub Iwerks and
the remaining employees he started working on a new project to replace Oswald as Disney's star.
This meeting was very important for the history of animation because of its consequences in the long run. It is
well known that Disney's next project was Mickey Mouse but there were other developments spawned from the
meeting. Charles Mintz wasn't idle either. He continued to provide Universal with Oswald cartoons, produced now
in a new Studio under his brother-in-law George Winkler. Thanks to Harman and Ising, now chief animators, the
25 shorts produced till mid-1929 were of the same quality as those produced by Disney's Studio.
But then Carl Laemmle decided to create an animation department for Universal and hand the rights to Oswald to
it. The new Studio would be run by Walter Lantz and would later spawn even more famous characters like Woody
Woodpecker. Ozzie of the Circus, released on January 5, 1929 was the first in a long series of shorts produced by
Lantz' Studio. As for Mintz and Winkler, their Studio and their careers were over.
But Harman and Ising weren't even started yet. They found employment again creating a partnership with
producer Leon Schlesinger. Together they created an animation Studio on behalf of Warner Bros.. The short
Sinkin' in the Bathtub, released on April 19, 1930 was the first of a long series of cartoons called Looney Tunes
that would spawn more famous characters like Bugs Bunny.
Ironically enough, Oswald, the reason for these developments, has long been obscured by characters later
created by the Studios formed as a result of his creation.
Discovering Mickey
Returning to Disney's new project, his company claimed that it was the blowing of a train's whistle that inspired
him to create Mickey Mouse. Apparently the whistle blowed "A moooouse! A mooouse!" It seems likely that
Mickey evolved from a more pragmatic conversation between Disney and Iwerks. Mickey in fact was little more
than a truncation of Oswald, round ears instead of long ones, and so forth.
It has also been said that the name Mickey came from Disney's wife Lillian who disapproved of Disney's choice of
Mortimer. The name itself came from an occasion when a young Mickey Rooney walked into Disney's office whilst
on a visit; Disney showed Rooney some pictures of Mortimer Mouse (as he was called at the time), and it
occurred to him that the name Mickey would have a better ring to it. A tall, strapping Mortimer would appear
later in a Disney cartoon attempting to woo Minnie away from Mickey.
He continued this inventive film making with Mickey Mouse. Mickey's first cartoon was Plane Crazy, in a story
inspired by Charles Lindbergh. The best-remembered today, however, was the first "talkie" cartoon, Steamboat
Willie.
Disney found out that his distributor was stealing from him, so he broke away from them. Lessons learned from
this experience would later prompt him to distribute his films with his own distribution company, Buena Vista. But
Disney's distributor persuaded Iwerks to leave Disney and work for them. Iwerks owned one third of the Walt
Disney Studios. He eventually returned to Disney and worked for him in R & D creating such historic inventions as
the multi-plane camera which created three dimensional backgrounds in animated films. But his choice back then
to leave the studio and sacrifice his percentage of the company cost him countless millions of dollars. While
Iwerks's contribution may be overlooked by most people, among Disney historians his name is as well known as
any Disney character.
Mickey's films were successful, but it was in merchandising the studio became truly lucrative. Starting out with
Mickey Mouse pencils and then expanding into watches, comics and toys, the Mouse created a true financial
empire.
The shorts also had success with their musical scores. The Three Little Pigs was so successful when it was
released in theaters that it was actually billed above the features. The title song, composed by Frank Churchill,
was a huge popular hit, subsequently covered by other artists like Benny Goodman.
To compensate for the diminished resources, Disney came out with movies like The Three Caballeros and Melody
Time that were less complicated and relied upon short musical segments. Learning from the lack of success he
had with Fantasia, Disney used music from artists like Dinah Shore and Nelson Riddle as opposed to Johann
Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky. There might have been even more of these films if not for World War II. The
Army occupied part of Disney's studio. Perhaps the most important Disney film from this time would be Victory
Through Air Power. Disney agreed to make training films for the United States Armed Forces. In these, the Seven
Dwarfs would demonstrate how to set up camps and so forth. But Victory Through Air Power, in which an eagle
defeats an octopus, was used by the military to explain the strategy behind D-Day.
In the months before his death, Disney dreamed of building EPCOT, an Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow. He passed away before he could make that dream a reality. While the Walt Disney World theme park
was built, the EPCOT, also known as the "Florida Project", was translated by Disney's sucessors into the EPCOT of
today, essentially a living world's fair. The Epcot park that currently exists is a far cry from the actual living city
that Disney envisioned. However, the Celebration, Florida new town built by Disney Corporation adjacent to Walt
Disney World harkens back to the EPCOT vision.