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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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<text>
<title>
(1950s) Father Goose:Disney
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
December 27, 1954
Father Goose
</hdr>
<body>
<p> Along a mud track in the Belgian Congo, a district officer
peacefully cycled on his rounds. All at once he heard shrieks
of terror, and a horde of natives plunged past him, screaming
a word he had never heard before. "Mikimus!" they cried in
horror, "Mikimus!" Drawing his revolver, the officer went
forward on foot to investigate. At the entrance to the village
he staggered back, as out of the depths of the equatorial
forest, 2,000 miles from civilization, came shambling toward him
the nightmare figure of a shaggy, gigantic Mickey Mouse.
</p>
<p> It was only the local witch doctor, up to his innocent
tricks. His usual voo had lost its do, and in the emergency, he
had invoked, by making a few passes with needle and thread, the
familiar spirit of that infinitely greater magician who has cast
his spell upon the entire world--Walt Disney. Indeed, not
since the Age of Fable, not since Mage Merlin and Lob-Lie-by-
the-Fire has such power of pixilation been granted as this son
of North Chicago carries in his thumb. From the magic hand of
Disney has come hippety-hoppeting, tippety-squeaketing,
quackety-racketing the most cheerful plague of little animals
that has ever been visited on humankind.
</p>
<p> New Mythology. By the hundreds they have swarmed across a
hundred thousand movie screens from Aliquippa to Zagazig--mice that talk and grubs that chain-smoke, squirrels wearing
overalls, bashful bunnies, sexy goldfish, tongue-tied ducks and
hounds on ice skates, dachshunds bow-tied, pigs at pianos,
chickens doing Traviata--even worms that do the cootch. In the
last few years there has been added to all this hilariously
unnatural history a beautiful and often tender and serious
attempt, in a series of camera essays on plant and animal life,
to see the natural world as it really and painfully is. Aesop
on the assembly line, mythology in mass production--whatever
it may be called, Disneyism has swept the world.
</p>
<p> In the last 25 years an estimated one billion people--more than a third of the world's population--have seen at
least one of Disney's 657 films, most of which are dubbed in
14 languages. And one taste of a Disney picture makes millions
of moviegoers cry for more. Disney takes pleasure--and
enormous profit, of course--in gratifying this hunger. Thirty
million 10-cent copies of Walt Disney Comic Books are bought in
26 countries every month, and 100 million copies of more
expensive editions (from 25-cents to $2.95) have been bought
since 1935. Songs from Disney pictures sell $250,000 worth of
records and sheet music annually. Since 1933 more than $750
million worth of merchandise featuring the Disney characters--740 companies currently make 2,928 items, from Mickey Mouse
weathervanes to Pluto paper slotties to Donald Duck toidy seats--has crossed the counters of the world.
</p>
<p> New Directions. Measured by his social impact, Walt Disney
is one of the most influential men alive. He has pushed the
bedtime stories of yesteryear, the myths that all former races
of men teethed on, off the nursery shelf, or amalgamated them
into a kind of mechanized folklore. It's Walt Disney's Snow
White now, and Walt Disney's Cinderella. The 20th century has
brought forth a new Mother Goose, or, rather, a Father Goose.
The hand that rocks the cradle is Walt Disney's--and who can
say what effect it is having on the world?
</p>
<p> Last week, moreover, there were four major pieces of
evidence that Walt Disney is dramatically enlarging his sphere
of influence. Items:
</p>
<p>-- With a bang that blew Wednesday night to kingdom come for
the two major networks, Disney burst into television. Nine weeks
ago Disney's first program, an hour-long (Wed. 7:30-8:30, ABC)
flight on electronic wings over the panorama of Disneyland's
coming attractions, won a phenomenal Nielsen rating of 41, was
watched by some 30.8 million people, and, as ABC's President Bob
Kinter put it, "cut Godfrey, the best in the business, down to
size." In the next two months Disney was never out of the "first
ten." ABC believes that "Disney has the biggest family audience
in show business today."
</p>
<p>-- In 60 big movie houses all over the U.S. this week, Disney
is offering a major effort in "live action," a $4,200,000
production of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
starring Kirk Douglas as the harpooner and James Mason as the
sinister Captain Nemo. The picture has its faults, but they are
not the kind that will make Disney any box office trouble.
</p>
<p>-- Disney's first full-length nature films, The Living Desert
(which cost $300,000) and The Vanishing Prairie ($400,000), are
bulling toward world grosses of $5,000,000 and $4,000,000
respectively. And all over the world, holiday revivals of old
Disney favorites are flourishing; in Rio de Janeiro six movie
houses are running a seven-day "Festival do Disney", and the
main department stores have based their Christmas decorations
on Disney characters. Said one merchant: "Disney will soon be
to us what Santa Claus is to the U.S."
</p>
<p>-- Work was rushing ahead last week on Disney's particular
hobbyhorse ("The world's biggest toy," one of his friends called
it, "for the world's biggest boy"); an $11 million "permanent
World's Fair" set on 160 acres in Anaheim, just 30 minutes from
the center of Los Angeles. "Disneyland," opening next July, will
be able to handle 10,000 cars and 40,000 people a day. The park
will be divided into four areas: 1) Fantasyland--a guided tour
through the Disney imagination, during which the visitor takes
a ride in an airborne pirate galleon, pops through the rabbit
hole into Alice's Wonderland, hops on a mining cart for a trip
to the diamond mines of the Seven Dwarfs; 2) Adventureland--an outdoor museum of natural wonders, designed to complement the
True-Life Adventure Films, which will offer a Tahitian village
populated by real live Tahitians (peddling papaya juice), and
a trip down a tropical river past nattering monkeys, gnashing
crocs and yawping plastic hippos; 3) Frontierland--"a glimpse
into America's historical past" that will give its young
customers all the sensations of starring in a horse opera; and
4) Tomorrowland--a showplace for science, where audiences can
peer into a simulated atom furnace or jump aboard a rocket ship
and fly to the moon.
</p>
<p> "Why, every kid in the country," gasped one East Coast
parent, "will be hounding his father for a trip to California."
</p>
<p> Cash versus Quality. "Disney hasn't expanded," said a
moviegoer last week, "he has exploded." And as the fiscal dust
settles, it is clear that in business terms as well as in public
estimation Disney has become a major power in the entertainment
world. The Disney lot today is the busiest in Hollywood, and one
of the most shrewdly managed. Its production is cautiously
diversified. "Eighty percent of it, right now, is television,"
says Disney, "but we'll soon be back in balance." Two major
cartoon features--a story about dogs called Lady and the
Tramp, which is scheduled for July release, and a version of
Sleeping Beauty--are on the drawing boards, as well as six
short cartoons.
</p>
<p> But Disney knows from expensive experience that the
cartoons, which cost about $500 a foot to produce (twice as much
as a live-action feature), take a long time to pay for
themselves. He will use them as loss leaders for the Disney
merchandise (which in 1954 has brought him some $2,000,000 in
profits), for one annual, big-budget, live-action spectacle
(Conrad Richter's Light in the Forest will be next), and for a
series of full-length True-Life Adventures. A new company, set
up by Disney during 1954, will distribute these pictures at a
20% saving to the studio. These facts have been duly noted in
Wall Street. In the last nine weeks, since Disneyland went on
the air, Disney stock has gone up from 14 3/8 bid to 24 bid.
"This year," says Disney with satisfaction, "has been our best."
</p>
<p> The success, in short, is plain to see; but the secret of
it, like the motive force in a Rube Goldberg invention, is
hidden in the depths of an astonishing psychological
contraption. For though he seems doomed to make millions,
Disney is not a businessman; and though occasionally he is
capable of fine folk art, he is not an "artist." Furthermore,
though he has probably tickled more risibilities than Charlie
Chaplin, he does not really have much sense of humor. Walt Disney
is a genuine hand-hewn American original with the social
adze-marks sticking out all over; he is a garage-type inventor
with a wild guess in his eye and a hard pinch on his penny, a
grassroots genius in the native tradition of Thomas A. Edison
and Henry Ford.
</p>
<p> Like most self-educated men, Disney pulled himself up from
nowhere by grabbing the tail of a runaway idea and hanging on
for dear life. Even now, in middle life (he is 54) he seems to
most acquaintances a "cheerful monomaniac." He works at least
14 hours a day, never takes a vacation ("I get enough vacation
from having a change of troubles")--though he does have a
hobby, a miniature train named Lilly Belle (after his wife), and
a half-mile of track to run it on. Lacking a formal education--he quit school in the ninth grade--Walt has few formal
habits of thought. He cannot bear to read a book (I'd rather
have people tell me things"). (Once, during the production of
Fantasia, Walt sat through a screening of the centaur sequence
set to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. When it was over, he
turned to one of his assistants and said earnestly, "Gee!
This'll make Beethoven!") Yet his intellectual weakness only
throws him back the more strongly on his principal
strength; a deep, intuitive identification with the common
impulses of common people. A friend explains that he is really
"a sort of visionary handyman, who has built a whole industry
out of daydreams. He has that rarest of qualities, the courage
of his doodles."
</p>
<p> Simpers and Innocence. Like many who came up the hard way,
Walt is a hard man to work for. "Walt puts up this mild front,"
says his brother Roy, "but underneath it there's drive, drive,
drive." He runs a one-man studio. "When you work here," an
employee punned, "you're all Walt in." The studio atmosphere,
says a former executive, is one of "compulsory democracy." The
lowliest ink-girl calls Walt by his first name. "If we didn't,"
says one employee, "we'd get fired." Says another: "If you
contradict him, you're out. Even the top creators at the
studio have to be careful. Nothing is really funny until it's
proclaimed funny."
</p>
<p> The Disney magic, says Salvador Dali, who once worked with
Walt for three months, is "innocence in action. He has the
innocence and unself-consciousness of a child. He still looks at
the world with uncontaminated wonder, and with all living things
he has a terrific sympathy. It was the most natural thing in the
world for him to imagine that mice and squirrels might have
feelings just like his."
</p>
<p> Up to a point, Walt himself might agree. He admits that he
likes children and animals better than grown-up people. Some of
the most fascinating people I have ever met," he once said, "are
animals." He has, understandably, a special feeling for mice.
No mousetraps are permitted in his home, and once, when he heard
one of the animators call Mickey Mouse a four-letter word, he
fired the man on the spot.
</p>
<p> Through his feeling for animals, says a friend, Walt is
related to nature and to the mother warmth of the earth. Out of
this earthiness, Walt feels, there sprout whatever seeds of
creativity he has. "I'm an earthy guy, all right," he says. Some
of Disney's detractors disagree. The cartoon animals bear almost
no relation to real animals. Nature in them is not idealized,
she is at best played for pratfalls and at worst she is simpered
over and over-sanitized. Indeed, the man whom all the world
knows as Mother Nature's right-hand man has hardly ever lived
outside city limits.
</p>
<p> A Mouse in School. Walter Elias Disney was born on December
5, 1901 on the North Side of Chicago, the fourth of five
children. His father was a small building contractor who argued
Debs Socialism all week and on Sunday played fiddle in St.
Paul's Congregational Church. When Walt was about six, the
family moved to a farm in Marceline, Mo. There, on the day when
the old man down the road gave him a dollar for drawing a
picture of a horse, Walt decided he wanted to be "an artist."
A few years later, father Disney bought a newspaper route in
Kansas City and the family moved there. Walt and brother Roy got
up at 3:30 every morning to deliver papers. The two brothers,
who are now partners in Walt Disney Productions, Inc., were very
close from the first. In school Walt was chiefly noted for
sleeping, for squiggling doodles in the margins of his books,
and for the time he brought a mouse to class.
</p>
<p> Walt was in his teens and back in Chicago, where his father
had bought a jam factory, when he got the camera bug and bought
a $70 movie camera on the installment plan. Girls, he recalls,
were a nuisance. "I was normal," he says, "but girls bored me.
They still do. Their interests are just different." Besides,
Walt was busy. After school he worked as a gateman on the Wilson
Avenue elevated line, got a Christmas job in the local post
office. During summer vacations he worked as a candy butcher on
the Katy Railroad.
</p>
<p> Actor or Artist? When he was 16 the U.S. entered World War
I, and he decided to go to France as an ambulance driver. He
managed to get his mother to sign his father's name on a
parental permit, then he forged the date of his birth, and was
off. Home again, he was no longer interested in the ninth grade.
"I tried to decide," he says, "was I going to be an actor or an
artist?"
</p>
<p> Walt heard of a job in a commercial art shop at the
princely salary of $50 a month, and that decided it. Pretty soon
he was getting $35 a week from an outfit that produced animated
advertisements to run before the feature at local movie houses.
In a few months, Walt thought he knew enough to start a studio
of his own in the family garage. At 19 he had hit the main drag
of his career.
</p>
<p> In short order Walt turned out four cartoons burlesquing
contemporary politics, and sold them to a New York distributor.
The distributor went broke before he paid off, and Walt soon did
the same. But for six months after that, he tried to keep the
business going. Some days he had nothing to do but sit and play
with the mice that infested the studio. Walt kept a few in a
cage in the office, and some of them became quite tame. One
mouse, known as Mortimer, showed no desire at all to escape, so
he was made a trusty and lived on Walt's desk.
</p>
<p> Before long Walt ran out of both money and credit. One day
he realized that he had missed at least three meals in a row.
He borrowed a camera, photographed some babies, took the $40 he
earned and headed for Hollywood. Brother Roy, who had just been
released from a TB sanitarium in Arizona, met him there, and
they set up shop in the $5-a-month corner of a Hollywood real
estate office. In the next four years, the Disney studios
produced 24 cartoons in a series called Alice in Cartoonland,
and 52 more about Oswald the Rabbit. At first, each cartoon took
eight people one month to make, and sold for only $750, "with
the result," says Walt, "that there was many a week when Roy and
I ate one square meal a day--between us." In July 1925, Walt
married a girl named Lillian Bounds, who worked in his office;
they now have two grown daughters.
</p>
<p> Mickey Is Born. After an argument with his financial backer
in 1927, Walt was out of business. On a train trip, he thought
and thought about a new cartoon character to market. Cats, dogs,
cows, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, apes, elephants, and even
dinosaurs--they had all been used before. And then, as the
train clacked along somewhere between Toluca, Ill., and La
Junta, Colo., Walt suddenly remembered Mortimer.
</p>
<p> "Mortimer Mouse!" he shouted.
</p>
<p> "Not Mortimer," said Mrs. Disney. "How about Mickey?"
</p>
<p> When the train rolled into Los Angeles, the first sketch
of the historic rodent was tucked safely in Walt's pocket and
the roughs of his first cartoon, Plane Crazy, were drawn. Plane
Crazy, however, was not the first to reach the public. Sound came
roaring in just then and silent pictures silently expired. Walt
rushed to New York, recorded a sound track for a new Mickey
Mouse cartoon called Steamboat Willie, and released it in
Manhattan. "It's a wow!" cried one critic after another, and the
public came piling in. Man was about to be conquered by a mouse.
</p>
<p> In the next few years Walt made a Mickey Mouse cartoon
every month. His staff quickly grew from 20 to 50 to 150 (he now
employs almost 1,000 people at his studio). Dozens of dazzling
offers were dangled before him, but Walt declined to sell out;
he knew he could not be happy except as his own boss. With a
foresight remarkable in a man only 28 years old, Walt set about
strengthening his organization for a long creative haul. He
started the Silly Symphonies, even though there was every sign
that they would not be very popular, because he felt that he and
his staff, already weary of drawing Mickey Mouse, needed
"something to grow on."
</p>
<p> And grow they did. Hands became more skillful and
inventions multiplied. ("Those madmen over at Disney's" became
a Hollywood byword. One Disney animator, for instance, was found
lying flat on his back on the sidewalk in a pouring rain. As a
policeman dragged him off to the station house, the fellow
protested that he had been "studying lightning.") So Pluto fell
off a cliff--what next? His ears whirled around like
propellers, his front legs spread like wings, and back he roared
to safety. In Disney's hands the laws of physics turned to
taffy. Shadows walked away from bodies, men got so angry they
split in two. Trains ate cookies, autos flirted. People
stretched like rubber bands.
</p>
<p> But it became harder and harder to outwit the public.
Disney gags got downright erudite. In one cartoon Donald Duck
might walk over the edge of a cliff and keep right on walking--on air. In the next he would keep walking, suddenly notice
where he was--and then fall. In the next, he would run back
to safety without falling, or fall and catch the edge of the
cliff with an arm that was suddenly 30 feet long.
</p>
<p> A Hit, a Flop. Three Little Pigs (1933) and The Country
Cousin (1936), a technical masterpiece in the new Technicolor,
proved that Disney was ready at last for the task he had set
himself; to make a full-length cartoon feature. It had long been
his heart's desire, but by this time is was a business
necessity. Cartoon costs had risen so high that it was no longer
possible to make a profit with shorts. So he borrowed $1,500,000
and made Snow White. Released in 1937, it was one of the biggest
hits that Hollywood had produced since The Birth of a Nation.
It grossed $9,000,000 on its first release (it has since earned
$5,000,000 more), produced seven top tunes, won eight (one for
each dwarf and one for the picture) of Disney's 22 Academy
Awards, sold more than $10 million worth of merchandise. It also
made Dopey, the seventh dwarf, the darling of millions, (In
France, one observer tried to account for Dopey's popularity by
explaining that he resembled so many French Premiers.) and
Disney himself more than ever the darling of the intellectuals.
Harvard and Yale awarded him degrees. People called him "the
poet of the new American Humanism," and drew Chaplinesque morals
about Mickey as "the symbol of common humanity in its struggle
against the forces of evil."
</p>
<p> To these siren songs, Walt lent half an ear. Encouraged by
Leopold Stokowski and Deems Taylor, he made the biggest boner
of his career: Fantasia. Its basic idea, to illustrate music
with pictures, was depressing enough to anyone who loves either
form of art. Its declared intention to bring "culture" to the
"masses" turned out to be silly; it had nothing to do with
culture, and the "masses" would have nothing to do with it.
Fantasia has never earned back what it cost. Worse yet, though
Walt learned a lesson from Fantasia, he learned the wrong one;
mistaking for culture what Stokowski and Taylor had offered him,
he decided that culture was not for him.
</p>
<p> The Strike. The decision did not solve all Walt's problems.
The day Pinocchio was released, Germany marched into Poland. The
foreign market--in which Disney expects to make about half his
take--was cut at least in half. The same problem met Dumbo and
Bambi. Meanwhile, Disney had his famous strike. Whatever the
rights of the affair--Walt maintained that he was being
persecuted by the Communists, the union leaders said he was
running a sweatshop--Walt handled it badly and lost the
decision gracelessly. The studio was closed down for two weeks.
Except for the war, it would probably have closed down for good.
For the next four years, the U.S. paid Disney's bills while he
made educational and propaganda films. On the side, Disney's
artists designed insignia for the Armed Forces.
</p>
<p> After the war, Walt definitely decided: "We're through with
caviar. From now on it's mashed potatoes and gravy." His first
four postwar features--Make Mine Music, Song of the South,
Fun and Fancy Free, and Melody Time--looked like mashed
potatoes all right, but they didn't bring in much gravy.
Disney's next big picture, however, made plenty; Cinderella may
eventually outgross Snow White. And though Alice in Wonderland
was a flop, Peter Pan was another smash hit, which exchanged
Barrie sentiment for Hollywood slapstick and almost made the
crocodile the hero.
</p>
<p> Yet the wolf was still haunting Disney's door. Production
costs on cartoons were rising so fast that they gobbled up the
profit as it came in. Walt turned to another source of income.
With funds blocked in Britain, he made four live-action features
between 1950 and 1953; Treasure Island, Robin Hood, The Sword
and the Rose, Rob Roy. They were all amazingly good in the same
way. Each struck exactly the right note of wonder and make-
believe. The mood of them all was lightsome, modest. Nobody was
trying to make a great picture. The settings in the British
countryside were lovely--wide swards and sleepy old castles
and glens full of light. Best of all, Disney was careful to
choose his principals--Richard Todd, Glynis Johns, Joan Rice,
Bobby Driscoll--not for their box-office rating or sexual
decibel, but rather as friends are chosen, for their good human
faces and pleasant ways. As a result, each of the pictures was
just what a children's classic is supposed to be: a breath of
healthy air blow in from the warm meadows of faraway and long
ago.
</p>
<p> It was a promising start, and the new 20,000 Leagues, for
all its mechanical clank and ponderousness, is something of a
continuation. If Disney goes on at this rate, he will soon have
compiled a film library of live-action legends to match his
collection of animated fairy stories, and the one should be
quite as suitable for periodic redistribution as the other.
</p>
<p> Pearls into Marbles. Most exciting of Disney's new
developments, however, are the nature films, for with them he
has opened up a new world of intense experiences and
possibilities. In them, as in few films of recent years, there
is the sense that the camera can take an onlooker into the
interior of a vital event--indeed, into the pulse of life-
process itself. Thus far Disney seems afraid to trust the
strength of his material; he primps it with cute comment and
dabs at it with flashy, cosmetical touches of music. But no
matter how hard he tries, he cannot quite make Mother Nature
look like what he thinks the public wants; a Hollywood glamour
girl. "Disney has a perverse way," sighed one observer, "of
finding glorious pearls and then using them for marbles."
</p>
<p> The fact is, however, that he does find the pearls; and,
all things considered, he plays a pretty good game of marbles.
He plays it like a healthy boy--knuckles down and fire away!--and trust to luck for a hit or a miss. He has no mind or time
for the niggling refinements of taste. There is too much to be
seen and done, too many wonderful things in the world that might
be made into movies; and away he rushes, with his intellectual
pockets full of toads and baby bunnies and thousand-leggers, and
plunges eagerly into every new thicket of ideas he comes across.
Often enough he emerges, in radiant triumph, bearing the
esthetic equivalent of a rusty beer can or an old suspender.
They are treasures to Walt, and somehow his wonder and delight
in the things he discovers make them treasures to millions who
know how dearly come by are such things as wonder and delight.
Besides, there is always the chance that when he comes bursting
out of the next bush, face all scratched and lumberjacket full
of stickers, he may be clutching in his hand some truly precious
thing; perhaps, who knows, as precious as--a mouse?
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>