King of the Wild Frontier : Disney’s influential vision of the American West goes on display at the Autry.

Asked to free-associate to the term Walt Disney, you probably wouldn’t first think of Wild West.

The unparalleled animated films that are Disney’s greatest legacy have little to do with the American West. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio” and most of Disney’s other classic films are more redolent of Europe than of Texas or Montana.

But as a groundbreaking new exhibit at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage reveals, Disney was fascinated by the American West throughout his long career, and, inevitably, the Disney version of the West has helped to shape our own.

Called “Walt Disney’s Wild West,” the show, which opens Saturday, documents the way Disney and the Walt Disney Co. that survives him have used Western themes in everything from live-action films to theme parks and, in so doing, have given a decidedly Disney-esque spin to our views of the frontier and other Western icons.

As Michael Duchemin, curator of the show and the museum’s curator of history, points out, Walt Disney was himself a pioneer in the traditional Western mode. Born in Chicago in 1901, transplanted to Kansas City, Mo., he moved to Southern California in the 1920s to reinvent himself in the infant field of animation. Hollywood had been obsessed with the West from its earliest days, and Disney did his own comic take on the conventions of the Hollywood oater, casting the world’s most famous mouse as a gunslinger in such classic cartoons as “Two-Gun Mickey” (1934).

But Disney’s West really came to the fore in the 1950s. The exhibit suggests that the West with the most emotional resonance for Disney was not the stark Southwestern landscape that galvanized John Ford but the rural frontier of Kansas and the other prairie states at the turn of the century. Disney used to say that his own favorite film was his “So Dear to My Heart,” a nostalgic live-action feature set in that recently vanished West and released in 1949.

One of the most important artifacts in the Autry show is “Granny Kincaid’s Cabin,” a miniature-filled model of the cabin from that film, which Disney built with his own hands. As David Mumford, a designer at Walt Disney Imagineering who helped put together the exhibit, explains, “Granny Kincaid’s Cabin” (1951) is the modest seed that grew into Disneyland.

Disney had dreams of turning the model into a traveling exhibit that would allow the world to share his vision of the frontier, until he realized he needed something on a far grander scale. The cabin has been exhibited publicly only once before--at a home show in Los Angeles’ Pan-Pacific Auditorium in 1952.

The West played a complex and important role in the creation of the world’s first theme park 40 years ago. Once Disney set his heart on creating something entirely new in family entertainment, he turned to his brother and partner, Roy Disney, to help him get the financing for what would become Disneyland.

According to Leonard Mosley and other Disney biographers, Roy believed the project would ruin the company and did everything possible to discourage Walt, including enlisting Walt’s wife, Lillian, among the naysayers. Walt stood firm. To pay for the project, he made a deal with ABC--the least powerful of the young television networks that most movie moguls regarded as their archenemies--to provide it with Disney programming in exchange for support.

The first TV-oriented project Disney undertook was a series of shows on the life of frontiersman Davy Crockett. Until Disney’s “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter” appeared on the new “Disneyland” TV show Dec. 15, 1954, hardly anyone in the United States could have told you who Crockett was, let alone the details of his life, legend and death at the Alamo in 1836. But by 1955 (the year Disneyland opened), the entire country was belting out the musical version of Crockett’s biography, from his birth “on a mountaintop in Tennessee” to the unlikely claim that he “kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3.”

No one, including the visionary Walt Disney, could have predicted the Crockett frenzy that marked that year. The face of the star, Fess Parker, who had been cast in the role in part because James Arness would have cost too much, became as familiar as that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The demand for replicas of Davy’s signature coonskin cap caused the price of raccoon pelts to surge from 25 cents a pound to $6 (it’s estimated that Crockett ultimately became a $300-million industry).

Before the third show, “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” aired Feb. 23, 1955, Americans expected Disney to do no less than rewrite history. According to Persistence of Vision, a Utah-based journal devoted to Disneyana, the public was not resigned to an accurate ending to the miniseries. One viewer advised the studio in no uncertain terms: “If you don’t get Davy Crockett out of the Alamo unharmed, the Bonniwell family will go back to Arthur Godfrey next week.”

Margaret J. King, who analyzed the Crockett craze in a doctoral dissertation for the University of Hawaii in 1976, believes the madness was a watershed in American popular culture.

In King’s view, it proved the power of the relatively new medium of television to shape the behavior of the nation. Moreover, it marked the emergence of the baby-boom generation as a major economic force in America--the first child market--and one that remains the largest target for U.S. advertisers to this day. The craze also showed how a sufficiently gifted popularizer could give radical new shape to a historic figure, she says. Thanks to Disney, Daniel Boone was permanently displaced as America’s premier frontiersman, at least in the minds of non-historians.

Crockettmania died as mysteriously as it had been born. King’s theory as to why rings true to everyone with more than one child. “The craze began to wind down when the younger children began to pick it up, and the older kids didn’t want to be identified with them,” she says.

But by the time the bottom fell out of the coonskin market in 1956, Disney’s brand-new theme park was in the black, Roy Disney was telling people he had been behind it from the beginning, and ABC was the nation’s No. 1 TV network.

King, who now makes her living analyzing popular culture as a consultant to the Walt Disney Co. and other organizations, thinks it was no accident that Disney, however unwittingly, managed to make the country crazy for Crockett. “It’s not a matter of advertising,” she says. “Disney has an intuitive understanding of who we are and what’s important to us.”

Fess Parker rode in the parade at the opening day of Disneyland, where Frontierland was one of the major attractions. The Autry exhibit will include the original stagecoach that visitors to Frontierland clambered onto, as well as a canoe from the “Friendly Indian Village” that was part of the new Anaheim attraction.

The show also includes such major Disney artifacts as one of his pioneering multi-plane cameras, which gave unprecedented depth to animated scenes. Of more recent vintage is the Pecos Bill costume from this year’s “Tall Tale,” contributed by star Patrick Swayze.

Van Romans, director of cultural affairs for the Walt Disney Co., says the Autry exhibit is a first for the corporation. “We’ve never had an exhibit that talked about the popular culture aspect and Walt Disney’s impact on the West and vice versa,” he says. Romans says that the Walt Disney Co., whose headquarters in Burbank is near the Autry, has a long association with the museum. Its Imagineering division helped design many of the museum’s permanent exhibits.

Disney’s Mumford says he is looking forward to the show, as a fan as well as a contributor. “I don’t know when so many items from different parts of the company have been brought together for one exhibit.”

Although Walt Disney was identified with political conservatism, his projects often had a decidedly liberal cast. As Duchemin and others point out, Disney anticipated by 30 years the sympathetic treatment of Native Americans in “Dances With Wolves,” in such live-action features as “Tonka” (1958), which tells the story of the Little Big Horn from the Sioux point of view. Disney also produced one of the first popular films with a Mexican American hero--”The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca” (1959), which starred a young and roguish Robert Loggia.

And Duchemin agrees with those who argue that the modern environmental movement may have been inspired by Disney’s Academy Award-winning True-Life Adventure films, which anthropomorphized the natural world but also underscored its preciousness and fragility. The Autry show will include such utterly Disney-esque wonders as an audio-animatronic marmot.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Walt Disney’s Wild West” exhibit.

Location: The Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, across from the Los Angeles Zoo.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday, beginning Saturday, through Sept. 17.

Admission: $7 general, $5 for seniors and students with ID, $3 for children ages 2 to 12.

Call: (213) 667-2000.