You’d expect the company he left behind, which loves nothing more than to stage all-star tributes to itself, would make a big deal about the old guy’s 100th.
We could go on about the ironies of a guy whose name became synonymous with fetishistically squeaky-clean entertainment, who worked and smoked himself to death at age 65. (And no, he’s not frozen somewhere.) But there are more interesting things to ponder about his contributions to world pop-cult, for good and/or ill.
The first thing to remember is Mr. Disney began his career in Kansas City. Anyone who saw last year’s PBS Jazz series knows KC in the ’20s was a rollicking center of official corruption, wide-open nightlife, and the closest thing to race-mixing you’d get in the pre-WWII upper midwest. Disney’s early studio films (many of whose artists came to LA with him) clearly reflect the brash jazz-age aesthetic of old KC.
But his studio style changed, and for specific reasons. His first niche was in animated short subjects, a “block-booked” aspect of the movie biz that offered a steady income (as long as you didn’t spend more than you expected to make) but little or no chance at the big money available on the feature side. To become anything more than a big fish in a tiny pond, Disney embarked on a multi-year strategy.
First, he made sure (after losing the rights to his silent-era star Oswald the Rabbit) that his company would wholly own everything it produced, no matter who financed or distributed it. At first, that allowed him to produce his shorts at a deficit and make the profits from the character merchandising, . Later, that led to today’s Disney company being one of the most aggressive promoters of copyright expansions.
As Disney strove to have the slickest, biggest-budgeted films in the cartoon field, his artists had to phase out the charmingly aggressive behavior and barnyard humor of his earlier shorts. Mickey Mouse was given eyeballs with pupils and ears that had sides and backs. Multi-page memos circulated among the staff, detailing how the studio’s star characters would move and react in different story situations. The studio also made one-shot cartoons without recurring characters but with increasingly elaborate production values.
The latter films were warm-ups for Disney’s big move into animated features, his ticket into Hollywood’s big leagues. Whole books have been written about where and how the Disney features departed from the original stories, toning down the healthy horror aspects of fairy tales in favor of an ultimately scarier “wholesomeness.” That helped make the films marketable around the world forever. Their specific unreality made them placeless and timeless. (The studio’s WWII-themed shorts were pulled from release, even in historical-context presentations, years ago.) And every feature introduced a new cast of merchandisable characters to be endlessly cycled through toys, T-shirts, record albums, lunchboxes, comic books, etc. etc. From the financial backwaters of the cartoon-shorts market, Disney had forged one of entertainment’s greatest profit machines.
But Disney was a lot more than just an aggressive marketer. He put cash, passion, and careful planning into every aspect of his spreading empire. His theme parks (and his unbuilt, original EPCOT model community) were total-immersion experiences, clearly showing the hand of someone used to devising 90-minute movies one frame at a time. He remained a tinkerer, a basement inventor with a whole lab of “Imagineers” to perfect his concepts.
The movie side of the Disney empire has had its ups and downs since Walt’s demise. Currently, its in-house animated features have been overshadowed in commercial and critical acceptance by the computer-drawn films supplied to it by Pixar. While Walt did more for the craft of drawn animation than anybody, he undoubtedly would’ve loved the possibilities of digital characters walking through hyper-realistic, pseudo 3-D spaces. He was a computer geek who lived before computers as we know them existed; so he had to channel his obsessively-detailed mind into other disciplines.
Indeed, perhaps nobody in the entertainment industry was as simultaneously adept at the creative, mechanical, and business sides of his trade. I can think of only one such multi-skilled exec in any industry today.
But somehow, I doubt there will be coffee-table books 60 years from now capitalizing on the public’s continued fascination with MS Windows 3.0.
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