Walt Probably Wouldn’t Fit In at Disney Today

What would Walt have thought?

Since Disney’s death in 1966, the question popped up whenever changes were afoot within the Disney realm. For a while, says Marty Sklar, vice chairman of the Walt Disney Co.’s think tank, that’s all you heard in the studio corridors.

“After a while we stopped wondering what Walt would have thought,” Sklar said.

Along the way, the Disney company changed from Walt’s source of personal pleasure to the stockholders’ source of personal wealth. Michael Eisner came aboard as chairman and chief executive officer and soon, the bottom line started sagging under the weight of immense profits.

“They weren’t hired to be creative, they were hired to rejuvenate the company, which they’ve done in spades,” said one Disney studio alumnus.

“Walt’s concern was always doing something that interested him personally. He liked money, but it was the second priority. That’s not the type of person that would even fit into the company now.

“Today, they’d probably fire Walt.”

There was no “they” on Sept. 23, 1953, when Disney hurriedly summoned sketch artist Herb Ryman to the studio and told him he needed a sketch of something called Disneyland by Monday to show financial backers.

There were no drawings to work from. Everything was in Disney’s mind, where it had been brewing for decades. Disney stood over Ryman all weekend, feeding him details.

The sketch, the first depiction of Disneyland, is recognizable to anyone who has visited the park. Although “Lilliputian Land,” “Holiday Land,” “The Mickey Mouse Club” and other attractions were never built, the backbone features of the park were there--a train around the perimeter, Main Street leading toward a castle and a hub at the center of various “lands.”

Consultants would suggest location and construction details, but no one but Walt put his hands on creative decisions. “In those days,” said Sklar, “no one--no other executive--dealt with creative design.”

“Disney considered his company an extension of himself, and he did what he wanted,” said Steven Hulett, a “Disney brat” whose father joined the studio in 1937 as an artist. Hulett worked there for a decade as a writer .

“He wanted to get into areas and create things. It was his sandbox.”

Ward Kimball, formerly one of the Disney animation supervisors known as the “Nine Old Men,” says Disney more than once remarked that “I can’t take it with me; it’s the fun of doing it that counts.”

Because Disney depended on his instincts to make creative decisions, “nobody could really predict what he would say or do,” Kimball said. “If you liked something a lot, he just might be against it. Nobody could really figure him out.”

But viewed a different way, Disney was predictable throughout his career, says David Koenig, author of “Mouse Tales,” an unauthorized history of Disneyland.

“He was always trying something new and always something bigger than what he’d done before. If he was in a field that was beginning to take steps back, he would pull out. When animation started getting too expensive and everything was getting scaled back, that’s when he lost interest and went on to something else.”

“He went from doing shorts to animated features, then live action, then an amusement park,” Hulett said. “At each step he’d get bored and concentrate on something new.”

Disney made the point himself in a rare speech to film exhibitors in the early 1960s, Sklar says. He remarked that after the huge success of the 1933 cartoon “Three Little Pigs,” exhibitors demanded a sequel, which Disney produced. Now he was asking whether any of them remembered it. No one did. See, he said, “you don’t follow pigs with pigs.”

Hemmed in at Anaheim, where motels and hotels blocked park expansion and made money he believed should have been his, Disney looked to Florida. He insisted that a huge amount of land be bought to keep outsiders away. He wound up with 43 square miles outside Orlando, “twice the size of Manhattan,” he liked to say.

But in a 1966 promotional film to enlist Floridians’ support--his last film appearance--Disney hardly mentions the amusement park planned for the property. He’d moved on.

He was on fire for EPCOT, a “prototype community of tomorrow.” It was to be a real city in which 20,000 people would live, work, shop and go to school using the latest in urban planning and technology. It was, he said, “the heart of everything” he planned for Florida. He wanted take technology to ordinary people and improve their lives.

EPCOT would have a 50-acre hub of high-rise office buildings and shops enclosed in a dome. High-density housing would ring the hub. Monorails and “people movers”--small, automated trains that moved continuously--would lead to and from the “park-like” neighborhoods at the outside. Industrial parks would be outside but nearby, reached by monorail. Automobiles would be unnecessary.

And EPCOT would never grow larger than its ideal size. Instead, other EPCOTs would be built nearby, but not too close.

Then Disney died. His EPCOT plan died with him, because “there had to be a Walt Disney who could sell the investments and philosophy that was bound into the whole idea,” Sklar said. “Without Walt, nobody could do it.”

There were additional, unspoken reasons, Hulett said. “Disney had a sweet deal; they could control the area like a kingdom. But if people lived on the property, they might vote. They might get uppity and do something the company didn’t want.”

(Disney is now building a community called Celebration on the Florida property, but it has none of Walt Disney’s original concept. Houses look old fashioned on the outside but are technologically up-to-date inside.)

Sklar said it took a long time for Disney executives to take up the reins and run the company without Uncle Walt to lead.

“After Walt died, they started to lose the audience,” Koenig said. “Instead of making the ‘family’ movie, they made kid movies. If you could read, you were too old for them. You know the type: ‘Herbie Goes Bananas’ or ‘The Cat from Outer Space.’

“There were few changes in the park because the films were so bad and unsuccessful they had no new characters to make attractions out of. You can’t have a ‘Tron’ ride. You can’t open a ride based on a movie that bombed. That’s why they finally went to George Lucas and Michael Jackson.

“Walt Disney was into ‘new,’ but Disney now is into ‘if it works, do it again and again and again,’ ” Koenig said.

Walt Disney might have expanded Disneyland, Koenig says.

But the latest plan is too much like what’s gone before to have aroused Disney’s enthusiasm, he says. “Walt personally wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Man Behind the Mouse

Before Mickey, merchandising and the movies was the man. Walt Disney liked ideas and had plenty of them. A brief encounter with the pioneer visionary:

“He liked money, but it was the second priority. . . . Today, they’d probably fire Walt.”

--Disney studio alumnus

“You don’t follow pigs with pigs.”

--Walt Disney explaining the evils of sequels to film exhibitors; none could remember his sequel to “Three Little Pigs”

“I can’t take it with me; it’s the fun of doing it that counts.”

--Walt Disney on why he continually took financial risks to do something new

“Disney considered his company an extension of himself, and he did what he wanted. . . . It was his sandbox.”

--Steven Hulett, former Disney writer

****

A Disney Life

Walt Disney was born in Chicago on Dec. 5, 1901, had three brothers and a sister

His middle name, Elias, was his father’s name

Interested in drawing as a child, he sold sketches to neighbors when he was only 7 years old

He served as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I

His career began in advertising cartooning in Kansas City, where he created his first animated cartoons

He moved to Hollywood in 1923 and with brother Roy began producing features in the rear of a real estate office

Realizing the direction of things, Walt did none of the drawing for his animation after 1924; rather, he concentrated on creating, organizing and directing

One of his early employees, Lillian Bounds, became Mrs. Disney in 1925; they had two daughters

Mickey Mouse made his screen debut in 1928 in “Steamboat Willie,” the first cartoon with fully synchronized sound; Walt furnished the voice for the early Mickey

His first of 32 Oscars was for the 1932 movie “Flowers and Trees”

During World War II, his studio produced training and propaganda films for the government, perfecting the combination of live action and cartoons

Disney recognized TV’s potential, and his “Zorro” and “Davy Crockett” series were immensely popular and furnished the base for early merchandising efforts

Disneyland, a $17-million amusement park, opened in 1955; to date it has had more than 300 million visitors

The year before his death in 1966, Walt began creating his answer to America’s urban ills, EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow); a version of it opened in 1982, joining the Walt Disney World complex

Sources: Walt Disney Archives, Encyclopedia Britannica, World Book Encyclopedia