Transcript of 614. Walt Disney: The Great American Storyteller

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I don't mean those things, pejoratively, because, of course, they're tremendously appealing for a lot of people, aren't they?

Yeah, it's the great anthem of Disney. It's a reminder as well that Disney has its origins in the golden age of Hollywood. But more specifically, it's a reminder of the company's origin in the dreams and the distinctive personality of the man that you just mentioned. The filmmaker who founded Disney, gave it his name, the figure who, probably more than any other, I would say, embodies American culture in the 20th century, and that is, of course, Walt Disney.

Oh, definitely. He's one of the most important cultural figures globally of the 20th century, I would say.

Yeah, absolutely. The lyrics of When You Wish Upon a Star, which you read rather than sang, but you read it very beautifully, Anything your heart desires will come to you. I mean, that may seem very schmulzy to people, but I would argue that it is up there with Rock Around the Clock, so the Bill Haley classic that really ushered in rock and roll as a song that marks a key turning point in the culture of 20th century America.

Totally. I think anybody who's tempted to listen to this show and say, Oh, Disney, why are they doing Disney? It's just a thing for children. I think completely misses the impact that Disney had in shaping the imaginations and therefore the cultural-political choices of hundreds of millions of people ever since Disney really broke through in the what? The 1930s, I suppose.

Yeah. That song, it's the first song in history to have been done by a talking insect, for instance. That's definitely a first. Obviously, it's not literally song by a talking insect. It was song by an actor called Cliff Edwards. He was ventriloquising a cartoon character called Jiminy Cricket in a film called Pinocchio. I'm sure lots of people will have seen Pinocchio, but those who haven't, Pinocchio is a puppet, a puppet of a boy who's carved by a toy maker called Gepeto. Gepeto, as he's going to sleep, wishes upon a star, wishes that this puppet he's made will come to life. Sure enough, a blue fairy appears and brings Pinocchio to life. Jiminy is the cricket that's appointed by the blue fairy to serve of Pinocchio as his conscience. Over the course of the film, they have all kinds of adventures. Pinocchio, he ends up basically enslaved to a villain papeteer who locks him up in a cage. They visit Pleasure Island. Dominic, you love a Pleasure Island. I do like Pleasure Island. It's a very sinister theme park where Pinocchio narrowly avoids being turned into a donkey, and they get swallowed up by a whale.

I think we are so used to animation, bringing stories like this to life today, that it can actually be incredibly hard to recapture the sense of stuperfaction, of absolute wonder that greeted a film like Pinocchio. Just jaw-dropping for people to see this.

Walt Disney, even if he never made a single theme park, or indeed, if he'd done nothing after the Second World War at all, if he'd been knocked down by a bus or something, he would still have a very high place in the cultural annals of the last century, because he, more More than anybody, is the person who establishes animation as a mass media art form, isn't he? Yeah.

Basically, his career up to Pinocchio is a series of massive cultural landmarks. So 1928, you have Steamboat Willy or rat on a boat, as Theo calls it, which introduces Mickey Mouse to a mass audience. It's crucial in the history of animation and indeed a film, because it's the first cartoon with fully-synchronized sound, sound that is coming directly from the characters, so from Mickey and so on. It's the jazz singer of animation, really. It's the one that fuses animation and audio. Then five years later, 1933, you have a cartoon called Three Little Pigs. Again, amazing innovations in that. The color, perhaps, particularly, very vibrant, very true to life. People's minds are absolutely blown by this. They've never seen anything like it. But also the characterisation, the fact that these are animated characters who are not just tools for a gag or something. They seem to have distinct personalities. The three little pigs, they will have their various characteristics. And of course, anticipating When You Wish Upon a Star, it has a classic theme song, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. And this absolutely bores itself into the consciousness of depression era America. And to quote Neil Gabbler, who's definitive biography of Disney drawing on all kinds of previously untapped sources by biographers, we're going to be referring to a lot over the course of this episode.

He describes that song as, It indisputably became the nation's new anthem. It's cheerful, woop, hurled in the face of hard times.

Yeah. Then you've got, I mean, the biggest film, I would argue, Disney's Supreme Cinematic achievement is Snow White. That's 1937, I think. That's the first full length animated feature, isn't it? Up to that point, the idea of doing animated feature at all just seemed, A, impossible and almost mind boggling. It would be such an extraordinary enterprise, so time consuming, so expensive that it had never occurred to anybody to do it.

The tradition is that People are so gobsmacked when they learn what Disney's planning, that they call it Disney's folly. But it's all very Gepetto. Disney's clearly Wished Upon a Star, because when it's released, it's a massive global hit. In fact, at one point, I was a I'm going to read this, it was the most successful sound film ever released. It's a huge box office hit then, but it's also a critical hit. In 1944, in a war-torn Britain, the great British film director, Michael Powell, as in Powell and Pressberger, sums up why Snow White and Seven Dwarfs is a cultural landmark. He said, In that film, Disney abolished naturalism, established stylistic settings and backgrounds, controlled his design of color and sound, a feat not yet in the power of any other producer and held audiences enraptured all over the world. You can see there that it's obviously absolutely massively influential on animation, but also on other films as well. You can see it in Pal and Pressburger's films.

You look at the other films of 1937 and 1938. I'm just looking at the list now. Saratoga, Maytime, The Good Earth, 1938, Boys Town, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Testpilot. You can't take it with you, Sweethearts. Nobody watches those films. Nobody has even heard of most of those films. I guess the vast majority. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Even if you've never seen it, you're familiar.

You still got it in your head.

Yeah, it's absolutely living in your head.

It's a massive success, and Pinocchio is the follow-up. It's the second feature-length film that Disney makes. I guess it sets the seal on his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of the age. When you wish upon a star, which sounds very, very syrupy to us, it serves as the anthem for everything that makes him cutting edge. I mean, that's the amazing thing about it. It goes on to win the Oscar for best film in 1941. It's really important to emphasize how mad that is. An animated character, an animated insect winning an Oscar. I think, again and again, when you look at Disney, you've got to think, what is it like for people to listen or to see this for the first time? I think that one of the issues with getting a proper sense of Disney's cultural importance is that he's really the first great example of of what becomes a classic 20th century American phenomenon. He's an innovator whose influence is so profound that today you tend to take it for granted. On the cultural level, he's a massive innovator. We've been describing that he develops, he shapes, an entire new art form. I guess that the closest parallel in the second half of the 20th century to that would be Elvis, who in a similar way makes an emergent genre his own and then broadcast it to the world.

But it's Disney who gets there first. To quote Neil Gabbler again, it's Disney who helped establish American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world.

Well, in the next episode, we'll be describing Nikita Khrushchev and his wife and how they loved Disney films. Nikita Khrushchev's wife had first seen them in the 1940s. The fact that somebody in the Soviet Union has fallen in love with Disney's vision, a very American vision, gives you some sense of the global power that it had even then.

But I think part of what Chris Jeff, very reluctantly has fallen in love with, it's not just the cultural resonance of Disney, it's also the technological one. Again and again, when I was reading Abel's biography, I was reminded not just of Elvis or someone like that, a cultural innovator, but of Steve Jobs, who was a great technological innovator. If you think of Disney and Steve Jobs, both of them are complete perfectionists, absolutely obsessed by the opportunities that they've been given by a technology that's still in its infancy. Both of them are very Californian figures, and both of them start off tinkering, in Steve Jobs' case, famously in a shed. But Disney, his early animations are made in garages and so on. Both of them end up becoming the public face of a vast and wealthy company. I would say that in the 21st century, Apple and Disney, they're globe-spanning beer moths who, for most people across the world, are part of the public face of America.

Totally. Actually, Steve Jobs ended up on the board of Disney, didn't he? After he sold Pixar to Disney. It's a nice comparison. All right. But Walt Disney's own career, he's born in December 1901. In some ways, I think he's a quite 19th-century figure. Many years ago, I wrote about Samuel Smiles, the great self-help guru of the Victorian period, who wrote a book called The Lives of the Engineers. He was Samuel Smiles was fascinated by all these people who… They started tinkering with James Watt and Matthew Bolton and steam engine people and people like that. And Walt Disney always feels to me like one of those kinds of figures. There is something very backward-looking about him, I think, very nostalgic. He's somebody who would completely have been at home 20 or 30 years earlier.

I think a classically American version of that. Actually, if you look at his ancestry, it's always comically. It contains within it so many different threads of history. So, I mean, amazingly, I wasn't expecting to bring up the Norman Conquest in an episode on Walt Disney, but Disney claimed, and I gather that genealogists say it's not a completely mad idea, that he was descended from a Norman who came over from the Norman town of Isny, so Disney. In that case, his Four Bears were Norman aristocrats. But they seem to have migrated from England to Ireland, and then from Ireland in 1834 to the New World. And Disney's grandfather, this guy called, brilliant name, Keppel, Keppel Disney. Basically, he engages in everything you would expect a prospector in a 90th century America to do. He works as a farmer. He works as a gold prospector. He drills for oil. None of these ventures really pays off for him. He's a bit of a drifter. He ends up in Florida, and there his son Elias meets a 16-year-old girl called Flora. Flora, again, brilliant. She's the living embodiment of American mythology. She's the descendant of a pioneer who traveled to America in 1636.

She's almost within touching distance of the Pilgrim Fathers. Elias and Flora marry on New Year's Day in 1888 in Florida. But Elias is like his dad. He is never a man for staying in one place. In 1890, he upsticks, he moves from Florida, and he and his wife head off to Chicago. In Chicago, he works as a carpenter It is in Chicago in the dead of winter, in late 1901, that Walt Disney is born. That was nice.

His childhood is quite Dikenzian, isn't it? Because his father is pretty tough. Neil Gabbler says he's this hard, driven, devout.

He worked hard, lived modestly, and worshiped devoutly.

But he's also moving around the whole time because he never really settles, never makes a success of anything. The most obvious place where they live is in Missouri, small town, Missouri, a place that becomes absolutely embedded in Walt Disney's imagination. And you could argue in the world's imagination because it's the inspiration for the main street that you find in Disney's parks. And this is a place called Marceline in Missouri. If anyone's seen or heard the Philip Glass opera about Walt Disney, it's all about him trying to get back to Marceline and his memories of Marceline. And he has this romantic fantasy as he, doesn't he? A small town in America.

But for Elias, it's actually pretty tough because he's trying to scratch a living as a farmer, and he fails. So in 1911, he moves to Kansas City, and he buys a newspaper delivery route, as Americans would put it, a route Essentially, this means he has to get up very early in the morning and shove newspapers through people's letter boxes. He gets Walt and his elder brother, Roy, to help him. Walt, by this point, is nine years old. He's having to get up at 4: 30, even when it's winter, They're absolutely freezing in Kansas City in the dead of winter, wading through thick snow drifts. And unsurprisingly, it affects his schoolwork. He's often too tired to concentrate. So that is quite Dekensian. I think there is an element of the Blacking factory about that. It doesn't go brilliantly well. But the whole time, Elias has been saving up money. And in 1917, he moved back to Chicago, and he invests his savings in a jelly factory. Do Americans call it Jell-O? I think they do, don't I think when they call it Jell-O, they're talking about jam.

But when they're talking about Jell-O, they're talking about jelly. Is it Jell-O or is it Jell-O or jam?

It's Jell-O.

Come on, make your minds up, Americans. Sort yourselves out. But it's not all grim, right? So there is actually genuine jelly amid the mustard. I don't know where I'm going with that metaphor because there's light as well as dark in Disney's childhood.

Well, yeah. Elias is a very hard man. We said that. But his mother, Flora, is very gentle, very nurturing. And the key role that she plays in Walt's development is that she encourages him with his great obsession, which has become drawing and specifically, cartoons. And reading about Walt as a child, you get this sense of him as being simultaneously dreamy and obsessional. And I guess that those are characteristics that will accompany him throughout his life. And there's a famous Tom Sawyer-style episode where Walt draws cartoons in Creosote all over a white fence. And even Flora is crossed with him about that. But in general, she's very supportive. Another very supportive figure in the family is his elder brother, Roy, who is very practical, very hard-headed. He gets a job in a bank that enables him to buy Walt toys that otherwise Walt wouldn't have. I think he, in a way, he's more of a father figure, perhaps even than Elias is. He's always looking out for Walt. There is security amid all the the uncertainty, the constant moving. I think also the other thing that the constant moving does is that it does give him a very precocious feel for America.

You've mentioned how Marceline will haunt his imagining. But I think it Also, he's been in Kansas City, he's been to Chicago. He has a sense of what makes America tick. That, again, will be crucial to his ability to give form to the fantasies and dreams of America.

Yeah. Kansas City has given him a sense of the big city, but he's also got a sense of the small town. He's got a sense of the landscapes. He's been on trains. All of that world, that Midwest world, has taken root, hasn't it? It's put down roots in his imagination. Yeah.

By the time he's 16, he's got his great passion, he's got his drawing, he's got an absolute work ethic. Elias has absolutely instilled him with that. He's not an intellectual, he's not got a brilliant education, but he does have a very broad range of experiences, of memories, of dreams, basically. Then in September 1918, of course, the First World War has been raging. America has finally decided to join in the fun. He has one final adventure before adulthood claims him. He enlists for service with the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in France. He's so young when he does so that he has to lie about his age on his enlistment form. Actually, by the time that he and his valley volunteers reach France, they have to go to Le Havre because the port they're originally going to is full of bombed ships. The war is actually over, but he's going into a shattered France. He sees scenes of devastation and death everywhere. Undisputably, this broadens his horizon massively, as does his introduction to the architecture of Europe. He's stationed at one point near Versailles, at another point near the Louver. He is billeted in a town called Neufchateau, which gives him a feel for the architecture of the old continent.

All the time, he's continuing to draw his cartoons, and he's turning his hands to making props. In And by the way, what he's doing there is he's improving reality. So with one of his friends, he pillages German helmets from local rubbish dumps, and he scuffs them up in dirt, he shoots bullet holes through them, and then he sells them as souvenirs from the front to tourists. So again, you can see elements of the Disney story.

Definite hint of Disneyland about that. So he goes back to Kansas City in the autumn of 1919, doesn't he? So he's not on the Western front for a very long time, but he's changed quite a lot. He's a much bigger heavier person. Hello, mom.

I mean, you can imagine all that.

He's taken up smoking, and he smokes all his life, doesn't he?

He has a terrible hacking cough.

And he's much more self-confident. He's much more... Like so many people, he's gone to the war and he's come a man.

Yeah. He's not going to do what his father wants, which is to invest his career in Jello. He's turning his back on the Jello. He wants to follow his dreams. And obviously, his dream is to draw cartoons. But being Walt, a man who is never content with what he's got, the scope of this ambition becomes steadily ever more sweeping. From just drawing static cartoons, he moves into animation, and then from animation into the production of animation, and from production into something, the dream of an ambitious young man in 1920s America. He sets up a studio in Hollywood Walt had moved to Los Angeles in July 1923, partly because, obviously, it's the center of the movie business, but partly also because his brother, Roy, who had also been serving in the First World War and had actually seen action, He's there, and he is recuperating from TB in a hospital. Roy, he's the practical Disney as opposed to the visionary Disney, which is Walt. They form a good team, and The studio that they set up is called the Disney Brothers Studio. But I think there's never really any doubt where the center of gravity in that business is.

Sure enough, by 1926, when they obtained their own studio lot on Hyperian Avenue in Los Angeles, the name is no longer Disney Brothers. It is now Walt Disney.

And just on Hollywood, Hollywood has only been going really since the mid-1910s. So Hollywood in itself, and indeed, the city of Los Angeles, of which it's a part, is a great experiment. It's a great innovation. And everybody there has come from somewhere else, as Walt has. So he's part of this incredible generation of people who are creating something new.

Yeah.

Or All the time.

Yeah. I think that just as Los Angeles has pulled itself up from its bootstraps, so has Walt. I mean, that's what makes him an absolute paradigm of a guy living out the American dream. Throughout the 1920s, while he's trying to make his way, He's in terrible poverty. He's basically subsisting on baked beans. There are times where he can only afford a weekly shower. There are times where he looked so thin that people who are concerned about him, worried that he's got TB as well, like his brother, Roy. He's living on the absolute edge in the early years of his career. But by 1928, he's looking pretty established. He's got his studio, which he's named after himself, and he's got growing numbers of animators who are working with him, and Disney has a real eye for brilliance in animation. He's married, so his wife, Lillian, married her in 1925, and he has a breakout cartoon character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Oswald is notable both for very phallic ears, which are always either slumping or very tumescent. But also Oswald, and this is a prefiguring of what will happen with the three little pigs and Mickey Mouse, he's a character.

Yeah, he's got a personality.

Yeah, he's not just a vehicle for visual gags. This makes him a very, very popular figure. But there is an absolute disaster because the Disney Brothers are very naive in business, even Roy. And they've got imbriled with an absolute shyester in New York.

Charles Mince. His name is Mr. Mince.

Very sinister. First of all, he poaches the Disney animators. And then the absolute bombshell, he reveals they don't actually own the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Their distributor does. And Walt is massively in debt. He can't afford to keep them. So basically, Basically, Oswald, this fallaceared rabbit, he's lavished all his time, all his money, all his creativity on it. Now he finds he doesn't even own it. It's an absolutely devastating moment that might have destroyed a lesser man. But it doesn't destroy Walt, and he vows two things. Firstly, he is never again going to lose control of his characters and his animations. They are always going to remain his. Secondly, he is determined to create a new character who will be bigger and better than Oswald had ever been.

And this is Mickey Mouse. Actually, the birth of Mickey Mouse is one of those moments. It's a bit like JK Rowling on the train coming up with the idea of Harry Potter, because actually, there's a train in this, isn't there? The claim is that Disney has gone to New York and he's discovered that Mr. Mince has stolen his animators and has stolen Oswald, and he's getting the train back to Los Angeles. Very long journey. And it's on the train that he comes up with the idea for Mickey Mouse, and he sketches the character. But I think you're going to say, aren't you, Tom, that this isn't true?

Mickey Mouse, you could say, is the most famous movie star of the 20th century. It's not surprising that there are lots of myths that surround him. They're a bit like King Arthur, who Disney will go on to make a film about. The story on the train, or that he's been keeping mice as pets while he was in Kansas City. There are all kinds of stories, and I think it's impossible to know the truth it. What does seem to be true is that initially, Walt had been planning to call this mouse he's got in his imaginings Mortimer. And Lillian, his wife, says that Mortimer's too sissy, and so that's how they come up with Mickey.

I think Mortimer Mouse would have been even more successful.

I don't know. I'm not sure about that. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Mickey has this breakout role in Steemboat Willy, the jazz singer of animation. And this sets Walt on one of the great creative spikes in the history of Hollywood, in fact, in the whole history of American culture. Key to this is the fact that Disney's development of animation, we've said how it's culturally innovative, how it's technologically innovative, it is also commercially innovative. And by the early '30s, Mickey is not just an American phenomenon, he is an international phenomenon. And for the first time, you start to get European intellectuals enthusing over Disney. So there's a German critic who describes Mickey as, The preeminent personality of the screen today and the only artist who exemplifies in his work and technique the pure form of talking films. And because of this reach, it's a perfect opportunity for Walt and Roy to put the shock of losing Oswald behind them because they're determined to exploit this Mickey mania that's sweeping the world to the absolute full. They do this by commercializing him on a scale that no one in American culture has ever witnessed before.

And again, this is absolutely ground-breaking.

And just on the Mickey mania, Mickey comes really of age at the very end of the 1920s, beginning of the 1930s. In other words, the period when the Great Depression has seized America and Central Europe. You can see why a fun escapist, cheeky, anti-authoritarian character, which Mickey is at the beginning. Actually, at the beginning, he's much more subversive and less conservative than he becomes. You can see why that would appeal to people, can't you? At a time when everything else This is pretty grim.

Also, you can see why slapping him on just about every item that gets sold in a shop would also work because by buying these things, you can invest in the spirit of defiance and the jolly that Mickey represents. The New York Times in the mid '30s is stunned by this. Shoppers carry Mickey Mouse satchels and briefcases bursting with Mickey Mouse soap, candy, playing cards, bridge favors, hair brushes, Chinaware alarm clots, hot water bottles wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper, tied with Mickey Mouse ribbon and for out of Mickey Mouse purses with savings hauled in Mickey Mouse banks. So Disney is making money not just from the films themselves, but from the commercial opportunities. And again, this is an insight that Disney, and indeed, basically everyone, will carry forward into the 21st century. So Walt starts becoming very rich for the first time. But it's interesting because he's not actually very interested in money for his own sake.

No, he's not a luxurious person. Is he not a big spending person?

No, he wants money because he's a perfectionist. And perfectionism, if you're being an animator, requires vast amounts of dollars. Walt uses all the loot that's been generated by Big Mouse, not just to produce the best animations ever seen, but to reinvent the very art of animation. Again, it's that sense of cultural and technological innovation going absolutely hand in hand. We said he's been hiring the best animators in the business, training those who aren't necessarily proficient. It's like a renaissance workshop. He has the best artists available to him. The effect of this is that they can start drawing animations that have color and depth and weight in a way that no one had ever done before. This is what feeds into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But it's also why it comes to be called Disney's Volley, because obviously this is a massive massive, massive capital investment. The whole way in which Snow White is made, it's an enormous process of experimentation. Walt's idea of storyboarding is to get all his animators together. He stands on a stage, and he basically acts it out with all the characters, the wicked witch, the various dwarf Snow White herself.

It's so vivid in the memories of the animators that that basically is what the storyboard that they're then working from. The pressure on them to meet Walt's vision is unbelievably intense. But I think what makes it fun for them, what makes it exciting, is the sense that they have complete license to experiment. They might work on a sequence for months, and then Walt will say, No, let's not have that. We've been it. That might seem dispirating, but they know that the next sequence might be something completely ground-breaking. They will sit there throwing bricks through windows just so that they can see how glass smashes and I think the most amazing one, they find it very difficult to give Snow White the right color in her cheeks. She always ends up looking a bit like a clown when they do it on the actual plate. Every plate, a makeup artist gives her a little dusting of rouge on the cheeks. It's unbelievable attention to detail.

And just the drawings alone, we're talking about thousands upon thousands, Just an unbelievable, a mind boggling number of original drawings produced for every frame of this film. I mean, on a scale that would have stupified people even a few years earlier. But also, just for the listeners, if you go onto YouTube and you watch clips of mid-1930s films, obviously largely black and white films, and then you watch Snow White, the difference is mind-blowing.

It's almost psychedelic in its impact, I think. Just one other thing to mention about the impact of the animations, that the human characters are stunning. Basically, humans haven't been portrayed like that in animation before. That, again, is part of the process of what's being worked out. It's not surprising that its impact is completely overwhelming for people. Neil Gablea, he's very into the idea that what Disney is about is creating self-contained worlds. He writes about Snow White, whatever else the film does. This most deliberated upon movie in the history of film conveys a sense of control, a sense of a fully fabricated world. You do get a sense of it as a fairy tale that's existing in a state of suspended animation, something that's apart from the world. But I think also on the animator, the people who made it, that imposed its own sense of pressure. Six months after the release of the film, Disney holds a delayed wrap party. The result is what has come to be known by historians of Disney as the Snow White Orgy. It doesn't sound as bad as that might suggest, but I think by the standards of Walt, it's pretty wild.

The artist who'd been in charge of animating the Seven Dwarfs, he's going for a P from the third floor. He falls out of the window, ends up in a tree, which is a motif that will later reappear in the film Dumbo. I think what is very Studio 54 is somebody rides a horse into the house. That's quite good. Walter arrives at the party expecting that it's going to be family values and all of that, and he finds naked couples cavorting in the swimming pool. One of the animators said, Well, Something just snapped. We couldn't help it. I guess that there you do have a theme that, again, will run throughout the future of Walt's career, which is every so often he gets wake-up calls, reminders to him that reality can't to always be kept at bay, that sometimes events beyond his control will intrude. Of course, in the late 1930s, all kinds of things are menacing on the horizon. Yeah.

So the storm clouds of war, no less, are looming overhead. And on that note, we'll take a break, and we'll come back and find out what happens to Walt Disney during and after the Second World War. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most?

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Walt Disney has become immensely rich and immensely successful. Snow White has made his name not merely as an animator, but as a genuine cinematic artist. The question, Tom, is where does he go from here? What worlds are the left to conquer?

Well, what he does is he plows it back into the Walt Disney Company because all he really wants the money for, as we said before, is to make films and specifically to push at the absolute limits of what can be achieved in animation. To help him fulfill this ambition, he builds an entirely new studio complex in Burbank, in Los Angeles. This is dominated by a three-story state-of-the-art animation building, which, Dominic, we've actually entered and toured, haven't we? Yeah. We went to to explore Disney a few weeks ago. While this complex is being built, he's green-lit three new feature-length animated films. Pinocchio is one of them. We talked about that. The second one is Fantasia, which essentially is MTV for classical music. It's Walt's attempt to go high brow. Then there's Bambi. Bambi really is perhaps the biggest challenge of all because it requires his animators to draw anatomically correct animals which simultaneously have features that are human enough to make them appealing to children. This proves to be an enormous challenge. It takes years and years of experimentation to get there. All this experimentation Basically, rich though Snow White had made Walt, it doesn't stop him from burning through all the money he's made.

It's not long before he has to start borrowing millions from the banks. The banks lended him because they think, Oh, It's all going to be fine. He's a genius. These films will make enormous amounts of money. But obviously, that's a huge source of pressure. On top of all this, his family life, it's been marked both by a terrible tragedy and by new responsibility. The tragedy, he's bought his parents a lovely state-of-the-art house in Los Angeles, and there his mother dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in the house that he, Walt Disney, had bought for her. To make it worse, he had sent round Walt Disney engineers to make sure that the heating system was all fine. So he feels crippled with guilt about that. Also, by this point, he has two daughters, one of them adopted. He's a good father when he's around, but he's basically never around because he has just got so much on his plate.

With these films, he's obviously the presiding genius of them. He has the overall vision. He's obviously a massive attention to detail man. We'll see in the next episode when we're talking about Disneyland. So for example, with Fantasia, he's constantly arguing with the conductor about the music they're going to have. He wants to be over every last detail. And he's still a great innovator, isn't he, technologically? I mean, he's still a man for a wheeze and a man for a fancy camera and a clever way of solving a problem, all of that thing.

If he could make a massive camera that stretches up to the ceiling and has loads of different plates and gizmos and things, he's all over that. I think what he's not doing is any of the actual animation. He never actually, I think, really admits this. So part of the publicity is always pictures of him drawing Mickey, but he hasn't been drawing Mickey for a very long time.

Actually, the people who did draw Mickey were often very offended by this, weren't they? Because he never quite... I mean, if I have a criticism of Disney, it is that he never was completely candid with the public about the fact that he didn't do the drawing.

I mean, he does the voice. He does the voice for Mickey. Hi there.

Yeah, but I mean, drawings are the thing that... I mean, people, when they think of Mickey Mouse, they think of the drawings first and not the sound, surely.

Yeah, they do. I think that the films clearly reflect his vision. As you say, he's always hands-on. Key aspects of the films that people always remember, they are basically down to him. I guess a classic example would be in Bambi, probably one of the most traumatic moments in the whole history of cinema, when Bambi's mother gets killed. Huge debates about how this is to be done. It's Walt who says, Well, we'll do it off-screen, like a great tragedy. I guess people have often said, Well, what exactly is Walt's role? What exactly is the Disney studio? It's a bit like a renaissance studio where the grandmaster has all his people who are working on different paintings and things like that. It's also like an Ivy League campus, and it's very like the early days of Apple, I think. It's a mixture of all those things.

Yeah, a great team.

Well, it is a great team to begin in with, and it's a happy team, but it doesn't necessarily stay happy. To look at the way in which the relationship of the animators to walk changes, let's zoom in on one of those animators. He is a Jewish artist originally from Nebraska, Arthur Art Babbit.

Of course, he's called Art Babbit.

I mean, this is a great thing about American history, isn't it? The names are always perfect. Art Babbit, he joins the Disney Studio in July 1932, so pretty much at the beginning, and he rises very rapidly through the ranks. He is fundamental to the look of Disney films. So he develops the character of Goofy, the dog.

You will recall, Tom, that I asked the head of Disney, Loeys, Bob Iger, to explain the relationship of Goofy and Pluto, a subject that has been perplexing Theo for years.

Because Goofy is a dog and Pluto is a dog.

Yeah, but one of them is a anthropomorphic dog, and the other is just a dog.

I honestly think you're overcomplicating things.

I don't think I'm overcomplicating. I mean, Disney is overcomplicating. I haven't overcomplicated it. I'm trying to get answers. I went to the top man and he didn't know.

Well, maybe there's a slight degree of edge there, which I think is possibly reflective of Art Babbit's personality. It's notable that he is the person who is charged with animating the Wicked Queen in Snow White. Very difficult challenge. We said how hard it is for animators at this point to bring human beings to life. He does it superbly, and then he moves on to do Geppetto in Pinocchio. He's very important to the Disney studio's cultural heft, but he is always rubbing Walt up the wrong way. He's very loud, he's very obstreperous, he's also a massive womanizer, and he absolutely appalls Walt by having an affair with the woman who has served as the human model for Snow White, who's a woman with the glorious name of Marjorie Belcher, another brilliant American name. Obviously, very offensive for Walt, that basically he's shagging Snow White. Walt doesn't want that at all and would have sacked him for it had he not ended up marrying Marjorie Belcher.

Okay, well, that's not so bad.

I think Art Babbit is the man who resents this slightly Victorian degree of paternalism. I think he feels it's up to him who he hangs out with. I think that reflects more broadly a sense that Walt, who initially had been one of the boys, is increasingly becoming a boss. He's becoming distant and imperious and autocratic. Listeners may remember, I mentioned that he came back from the Western front with a hacking cough. The sound of that hacking cough and Walt's clicking heels coming down the passageway, it's capable of generating terror in animators. So Gabbler, again, there was a fear of Walt now, a fear that had always been latent in the sweaty palms and nervous silence at the story sessions, a fear of displeasing him. And Gabbler quotes one animator who says that she would vomit after making a presentation to him.

Yeah, he's slightly, by this point, he's definitely changed, hasn't he? The boyish inventor has become much more autocratic, and he remains more autocratic for the rest of his life.

Yeah, well, it's interesting that the piece of music that just states Fantasia is the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where Mickey is an apprentice who generates a labour-saving device in the form of a magical broomstick that ends up overwhelming the Sorcerer's Palace. It's It's interesting that Walt was interested in that story, the sense that he's the saucer and the apprentices are creating chaos and turning his own creations against him. It may not have been conscious, but I think it must have been there sublimately Because Art Babbit is typical of the animators who are not prepared to be intimidated by him. And so he pushes for workers at Disney to unionize. Walt is absolutely appalled by this and refuses point blank to allow any union into Disney. And I think this isn't initially out of political principle, although it will become so, because actually Disney's father had been a self-proclaimed socialist. So to the degree that Disney had any political leanings, it was probably to the left. But I think the reason he's so appalled by it is that he thinks of the Disney Studio as a paradise. And if you're in paradise, you don't need unions.

Yeah, we're all a happy family. What you need... Imagine if Theo and Tabi wanted to unionize against us, Tom. Yeah.

How would we feel? I think we would be correctly appalled and betrayed. And so that's how Disney feels when on the 28th of May, 1941, several hundreds of his employees start a strike. And so he, as we would be, is convinced that this must be caused by a Bolshevak conspiracy. This guy who's the son of a left-wing socialist ends up reds under the bed, Bolsheviks everywhere. On the morning of the strike, Walt very ostentatiously crosses the picket line And Babbit is on the picket line. He's got a loud speaker, and he yells out, Walt Disney, you should be ashamed of yourself. And Walt is furious. The crowd are cheering Babbit, not him. So Walt gets out of his car. He legs after Babbit, who's running away, and he has to be physically restrained. And it's all very undignified. And it's not a good look at all for Walt. And the whole thing, the strike is an absolute public relations disaster for him. And after a couple of months, he recognizes that he's not going to win, that he's going to have to call in mediation. He recognizes that mediation is going to go against him.

Rather than stay around for that humiliation, he decides to go off on a promotional tour of South America.

That's Paul from Wnt. I think he should have stayed to face the music. But actually, it's a transformative moment in the history of Walt and his company, isn't it? Because after this point, the happy family spirit never quite returns as it had before. And Walt himself definitely changes, doesn't he? So he basically has the trajectory of Ronald Reagan. He started out vaguely center left, and he's going to end up becoming actually pretty right wing, as a result, partly as a result of this strike.

Yeah, well, Reagan retains his sunniness. I think in This period becomes quite gloomy, quite bitter, quite suspicious. There's one of the animators, he'd been there with him throughout the glory Days. He said, The esprit de corps that made possible Well, all the brilliant films of the 1930s was dead as a dodo. That's not looking good. But there are other problems as well that are pressing on the Disney studio in the '40s. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, they're all huge critical hits. People think they're stupifying, but they all lose money. The main reason for this is that war has broken out in Europe, and so Disney has lost a vast part of its potential market. This, in turn, by 1941, is directly impacting on Walt's ability to maintain his perfectionism. He just can't afford it. It's suggestive that the only film in this period that makes a profit is Dumbo, so the story of a baby elephant with giant ears ends up flying. It's very stylistically paired back. That's the one that makes a profit. We will be looking at Dumbo and all these great classics in much more detail in next week's bonus. So very exciting. Great.

December 1941, Pearl Harbor, a date that will live in infamy. The United States enters the war, and presumably this is disastrous for the Disney enterprise. In fact, it is disastrous, isn't it? Because Disney, really, in his lifetime, the studio never really recovers from the shock of the Second World War.

Yeah, so it's massively in debt to banks. Its audience has been cut off by the war, and the company just about stays afloat by making propaganda films for the US military. Particularly thrilling-sounding one is Four Methods of Flush Riveting, which they haven't made a ride out of that at Disneyland. It leaves Disney very precariously placed. By 1944, the company owes the Bank of America $4 million, which at the time is a huge amount. It means that when the war ends, Disney emerges from it, the company can't afford to make animated films anymore. Even when in 1950, Roy Disney has been paring back, he's been imposing austerity and all that thing, can raise just enough money to make Cinderella, the animation of Cinderella is incredibly basic compared to the films that they've been making earlier. I think that Walt himself basically lose his interest in making films. Although the company is busy cranking out live-action films, and then in due course, he's rather paired back cartoons, he makes no great claims for them. He says that most of them are corn.

He means that that's a bad thing, right?

Well, nutritious, but not a cuisine, I guess, would be the idea. You compared him to Reagan, he does now seem to lots of people a pretty conservative figure. Definitely conservative in his politics. He's hostile to unions. He's all in with McCarthy, the idea that there are reds under the beds and all that. I think also he is He's identified with a cultural conservatism now. Whereas in the '30s, German intellectuals were all over him, now he's identified with apple pie and white picket fences and all of that. One of the reasons for that, you mentioned how Mickey in the '30s seemed a very subversive figure. Now, Mickey, too, seems very dated, pretty boring, really, compared to other animated figures that are coming out at this time. Tom and Jerry bang each other over the head with hammers and running into nails and all of that, or Bugs Bunny, that thing.

Yeah, I never thought we'd be doing Bugs Bunny on the rest of history, but here we are. Because it's the Warner Brothers, isn't it? Warner Brothers Looney tunes and Hannah Barbera and stuff like that. They're very subversive. They're very madcap and zany. And by comparison, Disney's cartoons just feel a little bit stayed in the '50s.

They feel bland, they're boring, they're white bread. And again, to pursue the Elvis analogy, it's like Walt has been drafted into the army, or it's like Apple has that incredible Probably fallow period between the first computers and then when they invent the iPod. So maybe it's written into the life cycle of iconic American cultural figures. I don't know. But important to emphasize, the company does not go under. Walt and and Roy between them managed to keep it afloat. Walt does continue to innovate. One striking example of this in the post-war years is he basically invents the nature film. Walt had always loved wildlife since he'd been a boy in Marceline. There's this very weird story that he always used to tell that he'd been haunted by something that happened when he was a seven-year-old boy. He'd watched an owl fly and land on a tree in an orchard and said, well, I don't know why, but I wanted to catch that owl. So I snuck up behind it and I grabbed it. Well, he immediately began to claw and fight, and I threw him on the ground. In my excitement, I stomped on him and I killed the owl.

That thing haunted me for a long time afterwards.

So he's got the voice of Ronald Reagan and the sentiments of the fox murdering lawyer, Julian Morm.

Well, but Julian Morm, I think, has shown less contrition, hasn't he, over his murder of wildlife. Because animals in the classic films, from Snow White through to Dumbo, are seen as friends of those who were persecuted, those who were menaced. So the woodland creatures in Snow White, the crows in Dumbo. Famously, notoriously, even if you're a hunter, in Bambi, man is portrayed as a creature so evil that the hunting lobby in America, they end up condemning it as the worst insult ever offered to American sportsmen. I think Walt, his devotion to animals is clearly very deep rooted. When in 1948, he sent filmmakers to shoot stuff in Alaska, and the footage comes back and all the human interest stuff is incredibly boring. But there are loads of seals. Walt says, Well, we'll just make a film about seals. It's called Seal Island. It wins an Oscar. The wildlife is massively anthropomorphised. As in the animations, it's all that, Hello, little fellow All that. Come along. Oh, mommy's cross with you. All of that. Yeah, I quite like that.

I like that in a nature documentary.

I did as well. I always remember them from when I watched them as a child. I quite like them, too. Obviously, it's gone very, very out of fashion. But there's no question that without Disney's bathing a path there that David Attenborough and so on will pick up on. I think it's another example, much less high-profile one, of how far-reaching Disney's influence is. That's in the cultural dimension. He's still innovating on the commercial and technological level as well. I think it's really telling that he is pretty much unique among movie executives in seeing television not as a challenge, not as a threat, but as a huge opportunity.

We'll get into this a little bit in the next episode when we're talking about Disneyland. But basically, he signs this deal with ABC, doesn't he? Abc, which is still associated with Disney today. He signs it in 1954. The first show they make is called Disneyland, and it's a massive, massive success. I mean, it goes right to the top of the charts, and it remains there for as long as it runs.

It's presented by Walt himself, who, by this stage, has become Uncle Walt, Uncle to the Nation. He appears on the television screens, and it's very Reagan, very Reagan. They have one particularly massive hit, which is Davy Crockett, Born on a mountain top, in a sea, green estate in the land of the free, all of that. Davy Crockett wears a coon skin cap with a long tail.

Americans love this hat, but I think non-Americans are totally indifferent to it and bewildered by it.

But in America, Davy Crockett provides Disney with a marketing bonanza that is comparable to Mickey Mania. At one point, a quarter of the entire country is watching it. This is great. It means that for the first time since the release of Snow White, Disney is able to pay off its debts and get the banks off its back. Walt is now flush again. Walt being Walt, he uses the money to fund a new obsession, which, Dominic, is a theme park, which will come to be called Disneyland.

Yes. We will be telling the story of that in the next episode. It's a cultural achievement, I would argue, just as important and influential as Mickey Mouse and Snow White, and of course, listeners to the Rest of History Club. Our very own little, what do they call them? Mouse-gateers. Mouse-gateers, yeah. They can hear that episode right away, can't they? They absolutely can. But let's continue with the films. Let's just tie up the story of the films. Walt is now terribly interested in trains and rides and all of this stuff. Actually, the truth is, he finds that he's a bit bored of the films. He's not as interested in them as he once was.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The days when he would obsess over every frame, that's long gone. And I think that as the '60s, counterculture is clicking in, '60s are swinging. The animation is put out by Disney, so that would be Hundred World Armations or sword in the Stone. These have recognizably become the product not of a auteur as Disney had once been, but of a Corporation. Walt himself recognized that. He said in the '60s, I'm not Walt Disney anymore. Walt Disney is a thing. It's grown to become a whole different meaning than just one man. People may wonder, Well, did he really care? I think not massively, but a bit. Perhaps it's suggested, but he dies of lung cancer on the 15th of December, 1966. All those cigarettes he's been puffing on since the war, they basically catch up with him. But when he dies, he's immersed in an animated version of Roger Kippling's, The Jungle Book. He hasn't been as committed to an animation since Bambi. It really shows because actually, The Jungle Book, I think, is brilliant. It goes on to earn a fortune It suggests that perhaps had he lived, he might have returned to producing animations of the quality of those early films.

But in the wake of his death, 1967, 1968, it's a revolutionary period in the United States. His critiques on the left, on the countercultural wing of American culture, identify him, I think, both as a symptom and a cause of very deep flaws in American culture. It's commercialization. It's infantilization, the sense that Disney has infantilized the country, and the fact that he's degraded high culture. This was something that Disney had been very paranoid about. It's why he'd made Fantasia, but Fantasia had bombed, and so he basically parked that. The most venomous attack on Walt Disney as an individual comes in 1968, when the film historian Richard Schickl published a book called The Disney Version. Schickl accused Disney of having created a world that was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood, its secrets and its silences, thus forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams. Schickl says that Disney had become a rallying point for the subliterates of our society. This is where American critics have got to in the late '60s. But of course, in Europe, critics have got there a lot earlier. Back in the '30s and '40s, we said intellectuals in Europe love Disney.

You got Thomas Mann, Eisenstein, Dali. They all think he's brilliant. But by the '50s, Disney has already come to seem to intellectuals and artists outside America as the great exemplar of American cultural imperialism. I'll quote one novelist. She's an Australian, but she lived in London so long that she's come to have a very British accent. She's called Pamela Travers, P. L. Travers. In 1961, She described Disney as so coarse, so uncouth, so wrong in every way. Specifically, Dominic, she was responding to a script of her most famous novel, which was the story of a strict, magical, practically perfect, one might say, practically perfect nanny called Mary Poppins. Those who haven't read the novel, she gets blown in by a strong east wind. She arrives at number 17 Cherry tree Lane in London and there she becomes nanny to two children, Jane and Michael Banks. In the novel by PL Travis, dark and wild and fantastical and faintly menacing adventures ensue. In California, Walt's two daughters had adored the book. It had come out in the 1940s, and Walt had been trying to buy the film rights to the book since 1943.

Pamela Travis held out, didn't she? Because she basically believed, as lots of more high-brow people did, that Disney meant dumbing down, and it meant commercialism and sentimentality and so on. But basically because she needed the cash, in 1961, she decides, Well, maybe I will sell Mary Poppins to Disney. But there's still a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, isn't there? Which is what is captured in the film. What's it called? Saving Mr. Banks.

Saving Mr. Banks. So that's Tom Hanks as Disney and Emma Thompson as PL Travis. It's a very good film, quite funny moving. But the history behind it, the actual story, is brilliantly explicated in a new book that's actually out next week by Todd James-Pierce called Making Mary Poppins. And he goes into some detail about exactly why PL Travis hated the script. So as you suggested to quote, Piers, She believed that Disney had replaced elements of truth and insight central to her books with a saccharide sentimentality. She loathed the way in which the script had Americanized what Travis saw as absolutely an English story, all kinds of social solicions in it. So the script describes Mr. And Mrs. Banks as hiring a nanny rather than employing one. Unforgivable. That's shocking. And also, it showed the servants in the Banks household speaking slang, which Travis pointed out to the scriptwriters, unacceptable for hired help in England.

Hired help? Surely employed help.

She didn't want any songs. She didn't want any animated sequences. I think her real worry was that she knew from previous Disney films that they end up obliterating the literary works that they were based on.

It's just not... I mean, who reads Mary Poppins now? Nobody.

Absolutely. As Pierre says, at some point in the future, the public might think of Mary Poppins more as a Disney character than as a character she herself had created in her books. As you say, Dominic, she is absolutely right about that. But I think as Piers' book demonstrates, all the aspects of the script she disliked were precisely the ones that would make Mary Poppins, an absolutely massive smash. It becomes the most critically lauded, the most commercially successful Disney film since Snow White. It is also, I think, the film that is most pointedly and most movingly about Walt Disney himself. Because at the heart of the plot, the script that has been adapted from PL Travis's book, and which he's so sniffy about, is the emotional journey that is taken by the father of Jane and Michael Banks, Mr. Banks. Mr. Banks, in Mary Poppins, is a man who spends all his time in the office, so therefore neglecting his children. He works in a bank, but he is essentially the slave of a bank. He feels the burden of the bank on his back so profoundly that he neglects to perform simple acts of kindness, such as, for instance, buying food for the birds.

Mr. Banks, in the film, even has a little pencil mustache, exactly like Disney does.

He's David Tomlinson, isn't he? Very good British character actor. Excellent. But yeah, there is a definite Walt Disney quality to him, isn't that?

Yeah. Travis hates it because it's basically become something that she doesn't recognize, that all the the sadness and the darkness that she thinks has gone, and that it's basically become a story about a family discovering its heart, as she sees it as schmulzy and sentimental. But I think that to anyone who's familiar with Walt's life, and my sense of Mary Poppins as a great film was massively enhanced by reading up about Walt Disney's life, his obsessional drive, his neglect of his family, his lifelong struggle with banks and debt and so on. The redemption that Mr. Banks has at the end of Mary Poppins, because Mary Poppins herself essentially succeeds in restoring to him joy and kindness and love for his children. Actually, I don't find it sentimental. I find it very moving. I think that the ending of Mary Poppins, Disney has won that ending. At the end of Mary Poppins, Mr. Banks leads his children out into the park, and he's made a kite. And as he goes, he sings, Oh, oh, let's go fly a kite up to the highest height. Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring up through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear.

Oh, let's go fly a kite. And with that, Dominic, her job done. Mary Mary Poppins can depart on the wind that has just changed.

Well, that was really lovely. I'm sure everybody enjoyed that. So the story of Disney is not yet over, because in the next episode, we'll be looking at perhaps his most enduring creation, which is Disneyland. And we'll be digging into the pre-history of theme parks and indeed of rides. Where did they come from? Were people really going on rides in the 18th century? The answer is that they were. But also we have a very special bonus for our Restish history club members because Tom will be looking in great detail at Disney at War and the story behind some of those great films of the Golden Age: Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. So a pretty exciting prospect, if you like Disney, which we do.

Dominic, also, we have some extra content which will be available for everyone coming out on Friday. On that suitably commercial note, for now, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hello, history fans.

It's Richard Osmond and Marina Hyde here from the Rest is Entertainment podcast.

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