Walt Disney on Founding and Origins

Roy Oliver Disney, eight years older than Walt, co-founded the Disney Brothers Studio in October 1923 and ran the business side of the enterprise for the rest of his life. He was convalescing from tuberculosis at the Sawtelle Veterans Home in Los Angeles when Walt visited late at night to ask for help launching the cartoon studio after securing the Winkler distribution deal; Roy agreed, left the hospital the next morning, and never suffered a relapse. While Walt led the creative side, Roy guided business and finances as an equal partner in all facets of the production company, became the company's first chief executive officer in 1929, and shared the chairmanship with Walt from 1945 until Walt dropped the title in 1960 to concentrate on creative work. After Walt's death from lung cancer in December 1966, Roy postponed retirement to oversee construction of Disney World, renamed it Walt Disney World in tribute to his brother, and opened the resort five years later at a cost of about four hundred million dollars without additional debt, before dying weeks after the dedication.

The Laugh-O-Gram Studio, founded by Disney in Kansas City and operating from June 28, 1921 until October 16, 1923, occupied the second floor of the McConahay Building and became the training ground for pioneers of American animation including Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng. Disney incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films in May 1922 at twenty years old, using the remaining assets of the defunct Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists and money raised from local investors. He had been contracted by Milton Feld to animate twelve cartoons called Newman's Laugh-O-Grams for the Newman Theater and produced nine of the requested twelve with little income. Encouraged by the shorts' popularity with local audiences, he invested six months in his own modernized fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, betting that he could own a series rather than merely execute commissions. The studio's collapse instead became the founding trauma of his career.

The Alice Comedies paired a live-action girl, originally Virginia Davis, with an animated cat named Julius in animated landscapes, and became the first series of what ultimately grew into Walt Disney Animation Studios. Disney, Iwerks, and their staff made the pilot, a one-reel 1923 short titled Alice's Wonderland, while still running the failing Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City; it showed Alice visiting a cartoon studio and dreaming her way into the cartoon world, and though never released theatrically it pioneered the live-action animation combination alongside Bray Productions' Out of the Inkwell. After the bankruptcy, Disney raised money working as a freelance photographer, bought a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles to live with his uncle Robert and his brother Roy, and shopped the series until Winkler Pictures, which needed a replacement for Felix the Cat after a falling out with Pat Sullivan, signed the deal. Disney directed all fifty-seven films in the series, with four successive actresses playing Alice.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created in 1927 by Disney and Ub Iwerks for Universal Pictures after distributor Charles Mintz, learning that Universal wanted into the cartoon business, asked Disney for a new rabbit character because the market was crowded with cats like Felix and Krazy Kat. Winkler signed a contract with Universal in March 1927 guaranteeing twenty-six Oswald cartoons. Universal's executives rejected the first short, Poor Papa, for poor production quality and the sloppiness and age of its rabbit, but Trolley Troubles, released September 5, 1927, launched the series and became Universal's greatest success to date, rivaling Felix the Cat and Koko the Clown. The series allowed the Disney studio to grow to nearly twenty staff, paid Walt a weekly salary of one hundred dollars and Roy sixty-five, and earned the brothers five hundred dollars per short plus a year-end profit split of sixty-forty in Walt's favor. Oswald was Universal's first major cartoon hit and the proof of the studio's ambition.

The concept for Disneyland began when Disney sat in Griffith Park in Los Angeles watching his daughters Diane and Sharon ride the merry-go-round and imagined a place where parents and children could have fun together. The earliest documented draft was a memo to production designer Dick Kelsey on August 31, 1948, describing a Mickey Mouse Park, informed by notes from that month's Chicago Railroad Fair trip with Ward Kimball and a stop at Henry Ford's Museum and Greenfield Village, with its Main Street and steamboat rides. When letters from fans asking to visit the movie studio convinced him that a working studio offered the public little, the idea grew into a play park concept for a sixteen-acre plot across Riverside Drive from the Burbank studio, drawing on Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Knott's Berry Farm, Colonial Williamsburg, and the world's fairs of 1933 and 1939. The project quickly outgrew every site he could obtain in Burbank, and the search moved outward.

Walt Disney formed Walt Disney, Inc. on December 16, 1952, with an engineering division tasked with designing Disneyland, then renamed it WED Enterprises in 1953 after objections from his brother Roy and from potential stockholders to a personal company carrying the Disney name; the initials stood for Walter Elias Disney. Formed to carry the park's design work outside the studio's formal structure, WED became the creative unit where a staff of illustrators, architects, engineers, lighting designers, show writers, and graphic designers planned the park, a group that became known as Imagineers. Headquartered in Glendale, California, the unit grew so integral to operations that Walt Disney Productions purchased it on February 5, 1965, acquiring the WED Enterprises name with it, and it was renamed Walt Disney Imagineering in January 1986. Disney filed for a trademark on the term Imagineering in 1989, claiming first use in 1962. The organization remains the research and development arm that designs and builds every Disney park and attraction worldwide.

Walter Elias Disney, born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, and raised largely in Missouri, became the pioneer of the American animation industry and, with his brother Roy, built what grew into one of the world's largest mass media and entertainment conglomerates. He took a job as a commercial illustrator at eighteen, moved to California in the early 1920s, and established the Disney Brothers Studio with Roy in 1923. With Ub Iwerks he developed Mickey Mouse in 1928 and provided the character's voice in the early years. As a producer he holds the record for Academy Awards won by an individual, twenty-two, from fifty-nine nominations. He introduced synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, feature-length animation, and major camera innovations, then expanded into television and theme parks, opening Disneyland in July 1955 and planning the Florida Project and its experimental city of tomorrow until his death from lung cancer on December 15, 1966.

Disney was born at 1249 North Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa neighborhood, the fourth son of Elias Disney, a Canadian-born father of Anglo-Irish descent, and Flora Call. In 1906 the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where Disney was paid to draw a retired doctor's horse and practiced by copying front-page cartoons from the Appeal to Reason newspaper his father subscribed to; he called the Marceline years the happiest and most formative of his life and later used the town as a model for Main Street, U.S.A. In 1911 the family moved to Kansas City, where Disney and Roy delivered the morning and evening papers on a route their father bought, waking at 4:30 every morning for more than six years. He took Saturday classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and a correspondence course in cartooning while a schoolmate's theater-loving family introduced him to vaudeville and the movies.

Laugh-O-Gram's fatal blow came from its distributor. The studio secured a contract for six shorts with Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee, but the distributor paid only a small advance before going bankrupt, and the loss of income crippled the studio. Disney lived in the office and bathed weekly at Union Station while the payroll went unpaid. A final commission, a dental hygiene film called Tommy Tucker's Tooth, funded production of Alice's Wonderland, a live-action and animation hybrid designed as a last-resort franchise to save the company. Instead the studio filed for bankruptcy in July 1923, and Disney sold his movie camera and moved to Hollywood carrying an unfinished reel of Alice's Wonderland as his only asset. He later recalled that the idea for Mickey Mouse traced to a tame mouse he kept at his desk in Kansas City. A nonprofit organization, Thank You, Walt Disney, has since worked to restore the derelict McConahay Building.

Returning to Kansas City in October 1919 after Red Cross ambulance service in France, Disney apprenticed at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, where he befriended Ub Iwerks. Laid off in January 1920 when revenues fell after Christmas, the two briefly ran their own firm, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, before both joined the Kansas City Film Ad Company, which produced commercials using cutout animation. Experimenting at home with a borrowed book and a borrowed camera, Disney concluded that cel animation was more promising than the cutout method. Unable to persuade his employer to switch techniques, he opened a business with coworker Fred Harman producing shorts for the local Newman Theater, sold as Newman's Laugh-O-Grams, and studied Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables as a model. The first six were modernized fairy tales, and their local success in 1921 led directly to the founding of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio.

When Laugh-O-Gram collapsed, Disney moved to Hollywood in July 1923 at twenty-one, drawn less by the cartoon industry, then centered in New York, than by his brother Roy's convalescence from tuberculosis and his own hope of directing live-action films. His efforts to sell Alice's Wonderland were in vain until New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who was about to lose both the Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat series and needed replacement product, answered his letter and signed a contract in October 1923 for six Alice comedies. Disney and Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio to produce them, moved child actress Virginia Davis and her family west on a contract of one hundred dollars a month, and persuaded Iwerks to relocate from Kansas City in 1924. The first official Walt Disney Studio opened at 2725 Hyperion Avenue in 1926, the physical origin of the company that still bears his name.

By 1926 distribution of the Alice series had passed to Margaret Winkler's husband, Charles Mintz, and after Mintz asked for new material to distribute through Universal, Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character Disney wanted peppy, alert, saucy, and venturesome. The series became a critical and commercial success that positioned the studio as a major force in American animation. In February 1928 Disney traveled to New York to negotiate a larger production budget, only to discover that Mintz had persuaded several of his artists, including Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng, to work directly for him, and that Universal, not Disney, owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Mintz threatened to produce the series himself unless Disney accepted reduced terms. Disney refused the ultimatum, lost most of his staff except Iwerks, and returned to California carrying the lesson that would define the company: own what you create.

To replace Oswald, Disney and Iwerks developed Mickey Mouse, possibly inspired by a tame mouse Disney had kept at his desk in the Laugh-O-Gram studio, although the character's origins remain unclear. Disney's original choice, Mortimer Mouse, was rejected by his wife Lillian as too pompous in favor of Mickey. Iwerks revised Disney's provisional sketches to make the character easier to animate, and Disney, increasingly removed from the drawing board, provided Mickey's voice until 1947; one employee later described the division of labor as Iwerks designing the body while Walt supplied the soul. Mickey first appeared in a May 1928 test screening of Plane Crazy, but it and The Gallopin' Gaucho failed to find a distributor. After seeing The Jazz Singer, Disney bet on synchronized sound for the third short, Steamboat Willie, creating the first post-produced sound cartoon and launching the character who became the company's icon.