Walt Disney’s 5 Greatest Innovations
Today marks the 110th anniversary of Walt Disney’s birth. Disney started with little more than talent and ambition and built one of the most powerful entertainment empires known to man. Many people think of him as simply the man who created Mickey Mouse, or as a television host or studio head, but Disney played a vital, hands-on role in his company’s success.
Disney won 22 Academy Awards, an Emmy, and countless other honors for his work. He was also a visionary like few others in history, and he belongs on the list of true American innovators along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs.
In honor of Disney’s birthday, here is a list of five of his greatest innovations. Some of them are obvious, while others aren’t as well known. But all changed the way we view entertainment and art.
(Author’s note: I relied on two books about Walt Disney for this column. Bob Thomas’ Walt Disney: An American Original is more or less his “official” biography, while Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph Of The American Imagination is a recently published account. Both books are comprehensive and well-written, and I highly recommend them.)
“Just after World War II, when the studio began to branch out into live action films, Disney had the idea to blend live action and animated sequences for Song of the South (1946).”
Actually, this is where Disney STARTED. His original shorts were the “Alice Comedies” that had a live-action Alice interacting with various cartoon creatures. Disney and Ub Iwerks started the series in Missouri and Disney continued it after he moved to California.
– Freedom!
I had heard that when they started Disneyland it took so many investors that the family lost controlling interest in the company. They systematically bought back enough shares via the “Retlaw” company (Walter spelled backwards) that they were back in command of the empire.
Also, it took about five years to buy the land for Disneyworld in Florida, one parcel at a time, under a series of names, before it was announced who really owned it and what they were going to do with the property.
Disney and his associates were the smartest guys in the room for many years.
Disney controlled his 7 min. cartoons right out of history. Today the legacy of cartoons from that era is carried by Warner Bros., Tom and Jerry and Tex Avery cuz every prole has seen them a million times.
Well, his shorts weren’t that good anyway, despite the technical superiority. We all know about Warners but some of those Fleischer cartoons will have you awestruck. Look at the backgrounds. Just astonishing.
One correction. Davy Crockett was not a series, it was three loosely related episodes of the Disneyland series detailing major events in the Colonel’s life.
From those three episodes, with movie quality production values, stemmed the Disney merchandising empire (I should know, I inveigled my parents, aunts, and uncles to buy a lot of Davy Crockett stuff).
The next season, two more episodes were produced, but didn’t do so well, because Walt had already killed off the Colonel at the Alamo.
Good points all, but I can’t agree that animation was junk before Walt came along. Nothing from his studios in the 20s matched what Winsor McCay had done ten years before, and much of the pre-Mickey work doesn’t hold up too well. No one ever sits down for an “Alice” marathon, and for good reason.
The best stuff from the 30s is really remarkable – the multiplane changed animation, just as computers would a half-century later. That was one of the things I love about the guy: he was fascinated by new technology. Walt was a geek.
How many jobs did this 1% create :>
I worked for Six Flags Over Texas for 4 years in the ’70′s; 2years in landscape as the “tree & chemical guy” (trimming,liquid fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides,larvacides, etc). We always thought of Disneyland/Disney World as the gold standard. While we were proud of the work we did in the landscape department, we always envied the Disney operations.
Before I went to Disneyland for the first time (in my mid-twenties!) , I scorned the Disney thing. My husband and I took our foreign exchange student there as kind of a gag (for us; he was beside himself with excitement), and I was instantly in awe, as if I were six years old again – I had no idea I would love it, nor that it really would be magic. Then, years later, my husband went to Disneyworld for several days as part of a B-school class and came back astonished by the totality of it – how EVERY SINGLE THING is planned, checked, double-checked, post-mortemed… And just a month or so ago, I met with a woman who’d worked for Disney for some years, and she reminisced about the many weeks or more of specific training in customer interactions she’d had to do before she was allowed to say one word to anyone without a supervisor at her elbow. I’d say that customer service was a dramatic Disney innovation, if the approach had actually caught on anywhere else.
I don’t want to live in Disney-anything all the time – I like a little less total control as a general rule, a little roughness around the edges – but it sure is an awesome place to visit, whether we’re talking about a physical place or a mental one.
You forgot one. The promotional films for space exploration. Promoting Von Braun’s early designs and so on at just the right time helped crystalize the space age of shuttles, moon landings, and space stations we built in the decades that followed.
Ah! Von Braun
I aim for the stars…but I keep hitting London.
How could you forget Annette!
Disneyland and mice and rockets were fine, but what I really wanted was to grab that pleated skirt of hers and,.. and I was only five at the time.
Very prescient – of course, that may be because I agree with your list.
I worked for an animator who worked on Donald Duck for years. Milt Neil. He also did training films for pilot’s at Disney studios during world war 2. He had nothing but admiration for Walt. He was a genius. During the depression, Walt would pick up his animators and give them a ride. During lean times, they sometimes got paid with potatoes. They believed that strongly in the art they were creating. Walt was an ambulance driver in ww1. A true American icon and hero, it is absurd when people try to say he was anything less than patriotic.