Episode 2 Walt Disney

Bambi, quick, the thicket!

GUNFIRE

Faster!

'Every time Walt walked down a hallway, he would give a loud cough.'

Keep running!

It was a warning sign so we would know that the boss was in the area.

GUNSHOT

'In Bambi, there's a line, "When man is in the forest,

'"there was danger, you have to be worried."

'We'd hear Walt coughing, coming down the hall.'

One of the guys would say, "Man is in the forest."

And you'd all get ready for Walt.

Oh, he'd walk through the door and, you know, pins would drop.

You couldn't hear anything.

His personal power walked right with him.

There was no joking around.

He would sit down, he'd say, "OK, guys, what you got?"

And I would say, "I've got a great idea," and Walt would say,

"We'll tell you if you have a great idea.

"You have an idea."

Supper!

SHE BANGS POT

From the earliest days, Disney had pushed the boundaries of what

was possible in feature length animation.

Snow White invented the genre,

telling a complete story for the first time.

-ALL:

-Soup! Hurray!

THEY CHATTER

Hello!

Pinocchio's ground-breaking underwater effects took

animation to a new level.

Can you tell me where we can find Monstro?

Gee.

They're scared.

Bambi went beyond the cartoon and into the realms of the

realistic portrayal of nature.

In all its beauty and peril.

By the time he was 40, Walt Disney had established himself as

a household name in families across the world.

His studios were a hive of creativity.

But in mainstream Hollywood, Walt had still not achieved the

recognition he believed he deserved.

Even as his studio was starting work on Bambi,

he was determined to change all that.

Whatever it took.

MUSIC: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach

In 1940, Disney tried something new.

Fantasia is pure abstraction.

No characters, no nothing that is recognisable in the natural world.

Which gets the movie off in a very interesting vein.

MUSIC: The Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky

'Fantasia is wildly ambitious.'

You can feel it in every scene, but it's very uneven.

'When the movie worked, it's spectacular.

'When it didn't work, it's sort of dumb.

'The critical reaction was

'extremely divided.

'Some people thought Disney had

'pulled off this alliance of

'visual art and music, and created something new and compelling.

'Other critics thought that it was a disaster,

'and they slammed the movie very, very hard

'for dragging classical music traditions down into the dusts.'

Walt Disney made his reputation in the intellectual community as

being unpretentious.

And when he makes Fantasia, guess what.

He's pretentious.

He didn't handle criticism very well, ever.

And the criticism over Fantasia I think really rankled.

'And what it did was to encourage a kind of anti-intellectualism

'that was always there with Disney, but I think increasingly

'he drifts in the direction of, "These are eggheads,

'"they don't know anything about ordinary people," and, "to hell with them."'

For 12 years Walt Disney had stood atop of the animated feature industry,

but his expedition into cartoons as an art form was a disaster.

His trademark insistence on creative ambition above all else had

once again brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy.

And his decision to move the entire organisation into expensive

new studios in Burbank was threatening the very

creativity on which his company thrived.

There was something unmistakably soul-destroying at the heart

of Walt's new workplace utopia.

People were segregated by task as at an industrial plant.

Company hierarchy was more rigid,

more obvious and more carefully policed by Disney administrators.

When animator Don Lusk started doing friends a favour,

by picking up the slack on lower-level jobs like

clean-up and in-between, somebody above took note.

I came into the room on a Monday morning,

and all that was in there was a desk.

The rug was gone.

The cold closet was gone.

My easy foldout chair was gone.

Everything was gone excepting...

my desk and a chair.

I called up and I said, "What the hell's going on?"

They said, well, "I'm not animating,

"so you don't get a rug on your floor."

The salaries were all over the place, you know, I mean, there were

people making 200 and 300 a week and people making 12 a week.

I think Walt Disney's attitude was, "The master animators, that's one

'"thing, but doing in-between work?

'"Why am I going to pay them top dollar?

'"They're not artists."'

Workers at the bottom of the Disney ladder were starting to grumble,

and now Roy, Walt's brother and business partner,

had taken the company public to finance its massive debt,

everyone knew the boss was making five or ten times more than

the highest paid members of his creative team.

And more than 100 times that of the women working in ink and paint.

Disney, who still insisted that all his employees call him Walt,

was oblivious to the complaints at his new studio.

Disney didn't see the problem and certainly didn't want to hear about it.

He was incensed when he learnt that the Screen Cartoonist's Guild

was trying to organise his shop.

He was certain he had the right to run his own company as he saw fit.

In February of 1941, Walt decided to make his case, personally,

to the men and women working for him.

He gathered the staff in the only auditorium at the studio big

enough to hold all 1,200 of his employees.

'Some people think that we have class distinction in this place.

'They wonder why some get better seats in the theatre than others.

'They wonder why some men get spaces in the parking lot and others don't.

'I have always felt, and always will feel,

'that the men who contribute the most to the organisation should,

'out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges.

'If you're not progressing as you should,

'instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it.'

MURMURING

Much of the staff left the auditorium infuriated.

This speech recruited more members for the Screen Cartoonist's Guild

than a year of campaigning, reported one left-wing magazine.

When Disney sacked his top animator, Art Babbitt,

citing as cause, "union activities," they decided to go on strike.

APPLAUSE

On May 29, 1941, nearly half of his art department walked out and

took up positions on a picket line.

When he drove up to his studio gate,

the picketers were already on the march.

Walt Disney was forced to wend his way through more than 200 of his striking workers.

'Walt Disney could deal with anything creative.

'He could yell and scream.

'That's where he wanted his energies to be devoted.'

But he didn't want to be devoted to this and he couldn't understand it.

The strike demonstrations got bigger in the first weeks,

and louder, and so did the threat to the already shaky studio.

Disney's last two feature films had both lost money,

and investors were fleeing.

Walter Disney needed a box office hit soon.

And his own workers seemed intent on derailing

the studio's only two hopes - Dumbo and Bambi.

"The entire situation is a catastrophe," he wrote to a friend.

"The spirit that played such an important part

"in the building of the cartoon medium has been destroyed.

"I have a case of the DDs - disillusionment and discouragement."

The next day, Disney left town

for a ten-week working tour of South America

and left the headaches to Roy.

By the time Walt finally returned at the end of October,

Roy had resolved the strike.

The workers had been granted almost everything they had asked for.

The Disney art department was back on track.

But to Walt, the studio would never feel like family again.

The gal I married was a secretary in personnel.

She was called up to Walt's office to help on the files

and she would go through and find people that were out on strike.

And they were moved from here to this...this file.

Walt came in and said, "How's it going?"

She just said, "What are we doing this for?"

And he said, "Well, these are the people that are true to Disney.

"These are the people who, at one time or one day, will not be here."

Just a few months after the bruising strike,

World War II arrived at the Disney Studios,

much of which was commandeered as a base for anti-aircraft troops.

Walt kept up a happy front, especially for his two daughters.

But things were not great on the Disney lot.

By the summer of 1942,

funding for feature film production had dried up.

The company was limping along on revenue generated

by government contracts for propaganda and training films.

SIGHS

Winter sure is long, isn't it?

It seems long.

But it won't last for ever.

Walt was counting on a big box office hit

to revive his faltering studio,

and he believed Bambi could fill that bill.

He had nurtured the film for nearly five years,

kept the project alive through the worst of the strike.

Bambi?

Bambi, come here.

Look.

New spring grass.

When it was finally released in August of 1942,

Bambi stood out as the most ambitious feature-length film

in the history of the studio.

The first time a cartoon had attempted

to portray the world as it really is.

Bambi, quick, the thicket!

GUNSHOT

Faster! Faster, Bambi!

Don't look back.

Keep running.

Keep running!

GUNSHOT

We made it!

We made it, Mother!

We...

Mother!

Mother!

Mother, where are you?

Mother!

Mother!

'Bambi is a triumph for Disney

'in the sense that it probably

'extends realistic animation'

as far as it had gone up to that point.

'But by the time the film came out,

'it was almost as if Disney,

'in the course of a couple of years, had become passe.'

Bambi did not make back its costs in its initial run.

Disney could tell his investors, as he could tell himself,

that the war was to blame for the deficit.

But that failure, coming so close on the heels of the strike,

made it impossible for him to deny the obvious.

He had invested too much

in animated features -

money, energy,

effort, his own heart.

And what did he have to show for it?

A crippled company filled with people who had turned on him,

a mountain of debt,

scorchings from the political press,

the art world, film critics.

'One of the things that was lost

'was the great period of Disney experimentation.'

The first five Disney features

is known in the business as the Big Five.

# Hi-ho, hi-ho... #

'The Big Five was Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia,

'Bambi and Dumbo.'

# Hi-ho, hi-ho... #

'Now, if you look at those films individually,

'they don't look anything like one another.

'When you talk about the Disney style,

'there was no Disney style back then.

'Pinocchio looks nothing like Bambi.

'Bambi looks nothing like Dumbo.

'The paradise that Disney had at Hyperion

'and into the early days of the Burbank studio is gone.'

Disney decided to break away from the European fairy-tale

as the foundation of his narratives.

Instead, he turned to a piece of American folklore,

the Uncle Remus stories.

He also went back to the techniques that had got him started

in the business 20 years earlier -

mixing live action sequences with animation.

Disney took a cost-conscious approach on Song Of The South,

and for good reason.

His bankers were no longer willing to risk their money

on the Disney Studio's full-length animated features,

even after the war was over.

Many of the first generation of Disney animators had left Burbank.

By Walt's reckoning, the studio now had only one reliable

and undiminished asset from its prewar glory days -

his own instincts about what story to choose and how to tell it.

Disney had been thinking about

the Joel Chandler Harris stories for years.

He had optioned them during his 1939 spending spree,

following Snow White.

The Uncle Remus stories were uncomplicated.

The politics were not.

Harris had set the action on a plantation in the Deep South

just after the Civil War,

which meant Disney's adaptation would have to negotiate

the questions of slavery and race in America.

Walt Disney has never been, up until this point,

really concerned about social issues.

And to present the black body in the South

the way he wanted to, through a folk tale

which was going to rely very heavily on stereotype,

he was going to need to vet that from some source.

Disney solicited opinions from

well-known African-American intellectuals.

One scholar told Disney

he could do wonders in transforming public opinion,

but only if he avoided the most hurtful stereotypes,

like scenes of former slaves

belting out happy songs on Southern plantations.

Disney didn't like what he was hearing,

so he decided to trust his own instincts.

As usual, when Disney got advice, he often didn't pay much attention

to it, he just sort of went ahead with how he envisioned things.

Disney chose to celebrate opening night of Song Of The South

in Atlanta, Georgia.

The actors who played the major white roles were all there.

But not James Baskett who played Uncle Remus.

Georgia law barred the movie star

from entering the segregated theatre.

# Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay

# My, oh, my, what a wonderful day!

# Plenty of sunshine heading my way

# Zip-a-dee-doo-dah Zip-a-dee-ay... #

It is as if Walt has divorced himself from social contexts.

'It's sort of stunning.'

# It's the same old thing Want to get a bite of something

# For that hungry look, look up... #

Critics were split.

"The whole film is beautifully produced," wrote one.

"The plantation is traditional Deep South,

"a dream place of magnolia blossoms and darkies singing all day long.

"Don't let the children miss it."

# Havin' trouble with the weevil... #

I sure is sorry, Miss Sally.

No, it's my fault.

I should have known you couldn't stop telling your stories.

I don't like to say this, Uncle Remus,

but from now on I want you to stay away from Johnny.

Do you understand?

Completely away.

Others, like the usually friendly New York Times, hit Disney hard.

"The master and slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your yarn

"that one might almost imagine

"that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake.

"The truth was, Uncle Remus's tongue lashing

"would have been a real lashing at the very least."

Disney was utterly dismayed

by the negative reaction to Song Of The South.

He very much believed in the narratives that it was offering.

He believed that these were American stories finally getting

an opportunity to be on the big screen and in a feature film.

And so Walt is sort of shocked and disheartened

by the responses that he's getting.

Walt Disney beat a hasty retreat from the political battlefield.

He had no stomach for an ongoing fight over ideology,

and no interest.

He just wanted to get back to work.

By 1948, Disney was producing more than ever.

But he was literally all over the map

in search of the studio's next big thing.

He travelled to England to launch a series of live-action films,

starting with the pirate story, Treasure Island.

He spent a week holed up in a hotel room in New York watching television

to see if there was anything to be done in the new medium.

He took his daughter Sharon on a trip to Alaska,

scene of his first attempt at making a nature documentary - Seal Island.

-SEAL ISLAND NARRATOR:

-Yes, here they are at last, right on schedule,

swimming and diving playfully as though glad their journey is over.

But they don't seem in any great hurry to go ashore.

'He has to diversify, he has no money.

'It was really cheap to shoot, you know, the seals don't go on strike.'

-SEAL ISLAND NARRATOR:

-..Having a final fling of single blessedness.

Seal Island won an Academy Award

and launched Disney's new and profitable line

of nature documentaries -

True Life Adventures.

But Walt missed the excitement of feature animation,

and by 1949 he was ready to start anew.

He put his studio to work on a new animated feature - Cinderella.

But once production on the new film was up and running,

Disney was uncharacteristically distant

from his studio's signature undertaking.

That old Snow White feeling

of excitement and new possibilities eluded him.

He seemed wary of fully investing himself in the film

and left most of the hard work to his staff.

Walt Disney is at a low ebb.

He said, "I realise that I am never going to make

"anything as good as Snow White."

When you think of Walt Disney as the guy who was always looking at

the next horizon, the guy who was always trying to break a new path,

the guy who's lived for excellence...

..and then he can say, not only to himself, but publicly,

"I'm never going to make anything as good as Snow White."

You want to hear a man in crisis?

That's a man in crisis.

HORN BLARES

Finally, in the autumn of 1948,

he followed doctor's orders and took a break.

He went on vacation to a railroad convention in Illinois.

The break rekindled his enthusiasm for life.

By the time they arrived in Chicago,

a new vision was forming in his mind.

Disney arrived home with a new obsession -

having his own large-scale model train.

And he ordered one built at the studio in Burbank.

He made it his business to stop by the studio machine shop most days

just to check in on the progress.

He was soon spending three or four hours at a time in the shop

and then more hours in the evening.

And then all day on Saturday.

The head machinist had assigned Disney

his own bench and tool set by then and put him to work.

Walt Disney was building these trains with his own hands.

Manual labour.

The great Walt Disney was now devoting his energies to toy trains.

When a film critic from the New York Times visited

during production on Cinderella,

he found Disney, as he wrote, "wholly, almost weirdly concerned

"with a miniature railroad engine and his cars."

All of his zest for invention, for creating fantasies,

seemed to go into this plaything.

When Walt's oft-neglected progeny Cinderella finally premiered

at the beginning of 1950,

critics hailed it as the long-awaited return

of the classic Disney form and a must-see.

Now, let's see, dear. Your size and the shade of your eyes.

Mm-hm. Something simple.

But daring too.

Oh! Just leave it to me - what a gown this will be!

Bibbidi-bop, bibbidi-bop! Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

Oh, it's a beautiful dress!

Roy optimistically told Walt that Cinderella would gross

5 or 6 million after those first reviews.

It made nearly 8 million.

Why, it's like a dream!

-A wonderful dream come true!

-Yes, my child...

Walt was happy to have the financial cushion the film provided his studio

and happy to have the good reviews.

But he saw all the movie's imperfections and every corner cut.

It was no Snow White, as far as he was concerned.

His interest remained elsewhere.

Hey, I'm coming through.

In early 1952, Lillian Disney could sense something big brewing.

It was one of those moments, she would say,

"When Walt's imagination was going to take off

"into the wild blue yonder and everything will explode."

Walt, Lillian noted, was liquidating long-held family assets.

Her husband sold their Palm Springs vacation home

and borrowed 100,000 against his life insurance policy.

He even sold rights to his own name to Walt Disney Productions.

Then he started an entirely new company

for an entirely new enterprise.

He gets a little building at the back part of the studio lot

and he creates this organisation called WED, which were his initials.

Walter Elias Disney.

Walt Disney had one very specific vision in mind,

and he had already drawn up plans for building this new project

on a vacant lot he owned next to his studio.

Actually, Disney had been kicking around the idea for years.

When he had his girls and they were very young,

he wanted to take them to places they would have fun.

But every time he'd go to see a carnival or something else,

the men were all filthy, dirty looking, and the place was filthy.

And he said, "I want a place where people can take the family

"and have a good time."

Disney first dubbed the park "Mickey Mouse Village",

but then hit on "Disneyland."

By the end of 1952, the plans for Disneyland

had outgrown the little eight-acre lot next to his studio.

He started culling talent from the Disney production team

and sending them to WED.

"I want you to work on Disneyland",

he told one slightly confused layout artist.

"And you're going to like it."

Roy thinks it's a nutty idea.

An amusement park? You know...

And an amusement park that's going to cost

tens of millions of dollars, and...

You know, it's not going to work.

'Amusement parks were carnivalesque places.

'These were places where you went to have your sensations stimulated

'by very, very fast rides...

'..by carnival barkers inviting you in to see

'Tom Thumb or the giant lady.'

These were places where you went to have the rules not apply.

When Walt told Mrs Disney that he was going to start a park...

'..she said, "Why would you want to do that?

'"They're not safe,

'"the people in them are not people you want to be around."'

Walt said, "Mine's not going to be like that."

Disney's newest notion was not unlike

his very first commercially successful idea.

Just as he had inserted the real Alice into a cartoon world,

Walt thought he could put real people inside a new adventure.

Live, and three-dimensional.

Disney has this great idea for building Disneyland.

Now, one problem - where's the money going to come from?

So, you see this is the result of being a good boy for 30 years.

-Santa finally came across.

-Aww!

-See the little throttle in there?

See that thing there?

And this up here, this is the...

-WHISTLE BLOWS

-..whistle.

Disney had been looking for the best way to exploit

the new medium of television since the late 1940s.

He had even taken it for a test drive in 1950,

hosting a one-off Christmas special, One Hour In Wonderland,

to promote one of his films.

The Disney programme drew 90% of the viewing audience,

and gushing reviews.

"Walt Disney can take over television any time he likes",

the New York Times suggested.

Bibbidi!

Bobbidi!

-ALL:

-Boo!

The three major networks had been asking Disney

for more shows ever since.

And by the summer of 1953,

Walt was hot to make a deal.

Roy travelled to New York to make an offer

to each of the major television networks.

The Disneys were willing to produce a weekly show,

but for a price.

The network that got the show would have to provide much

of the 5 million the brothers needed

for the construction of Disneyland.

American Motors - builders of Nash automobiles,

Kelvinator home appliances,

and Hudson Motor Cars...

..present Walt Disney's Disneyland.

# When you wish upon a star

# Makes no difference who you are... #

Each week, as you enter this timeless land,

one of these many worlds will open to you.

Shooting out from here, like the four cardinal points...

The Disneyland TV show featured a different

hour-long offering every week,

each show mapping on to one of the four realms

of the theme part Walt was building.

They are...Adventureland...

..Tomorrowland...

..Fantasyland...

..and Frontierland.

It was a Frontierland offering,

Tall Tales And True From The Legendary Past

that became the talk of the playground.

Now, in our TV series from Frontierland,

we're going to tell about these real people who became legend.

Like Davy Crockett...

Davy Crockett aired on three separate Wednesdays

from December of 1954 to February of 1955.

'Davy Crockett was homespun,

'plain-spoken, tough,'

enterprising.

He was the rugged individual

'who triumphed over everything.

'He really embodied a nostalgic,

'idealised view of American male values.'

'Davy Crockett is incredibly anti-authoritarian'

in a way no other Western hero for kids were

at that time.

When Davy Crockett arrives at Andrew Jackson's camp,

'first thing he does is disobey orders.'

Excuse me, General.

-Well, what do you want?

-Well, nothing much.

Dropped in to say goodbye.

Goodbye? Where do you think you're going?

-Home.

-You're going after Red Stick with the rest of my command.

This war isn't over yet.

I ain't quitting the war. Me and my neighbours will be back directly.

You see, General, we only volunteered for 60 days,

and that's long since up.

Catching Red Stick's lot will take up the rest of the year.

We got to see our families is took care of before we start out

on anything like that.

Well, Major...

Desertion is a serious crime in the army, Crockett.

We ain't quitting the war. I told you we was coming back.

You're confined to this camp. That's an order.

My missus would worry about me.

Sorry, General.

# Off through the woods we're a-marching along

# Making up yarns and... #

Hey, Ma. Pa's home. Pa.

Pa's back. Pa's home.

-Oh, Davy, you're back!

-Hello, Pa.

-Hi, Pa.

The ratings just went through the roof. And as the serialised segments came on,

they got bigger and bigger and bigger.

By the time the final episode of Davy Crockett aired,

a quarter of the entire American population was tuned in.

Back in Disneyland, the theme park Davy Crockett was helping to fund,

work was progressing apace.

Walt was down in Anaheim almost every day.

He would walk every inch of the construction site, barking orders.

"Move that gazebo, it's blocking the view of the castle."

"Can we make that lake bigger?"

"Move the train wreck 50ft."

"That tree's too close to the walkway.

"How about moving it?"

Never mind it weighed 15 tons.

'Walt is interested in every blade of grass.

'He's interested in every leaf on a tree.

'He's interested in where everything is placed.

'There's not an attraction that Walt Disney isn't deeply involved in.'

Disney's constant demands

stretched the entire operation to its limits.

As did his stubborn insistence on getting Disneyland

up and running in a hurry.

Six weeks from his announced opening date,

panic was starting to set in.

The entrance plaza was not yet landscaped.

Main Street was unpaved,

the castle unfinished.

The Jungle Cruise boats were moving,

but the robotic animals had yet to be installed.

As opening day approached,

fewer than half of the planned attractions

were ready to receive visitors,

and members of the WED staff were pleading to push back the opening.

Walt was uninterested in the naysayers.

He just kept pushing harder.

The construction crew tripled in the final weeks

to 2,500 men,

many of whom were working 16 hours a day.

Costs climbed to more than 17 million,

more than three times the estimate made

when construction began.

'So many things were finished at the last minute.'

There was a plumbers' strike in Orange County

which was settled about a day before Disneyland opened.

'So Walt had the choice of finishing the bathrooms or the drinking fountains.

'And of course he chose the bathrooms.'

The park was abustle the day before the opening.

ABC was setting its cameras and running rehearsals for the next day's broadcast,

which was planned as the biggest and most ambitious live telecast ever.

One work crew was frantically trying to dig out the 900lb mechanical elephant

that was sinking into the jungle river.

Another was adding lead weights to the front of the train engine

to make sure it didn't tip backwards.

Painters were settling in for an all-nighter.

Walt himself put on a mask and helped spray-paint

backdrops for the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea exhibit.

He was still at Disneyland at three o'clock in the morning,

walking the grounds barking orders.

"We need new murals for the trains. Get me an artist."

July 17 1955 dawned unusually hot in Anaheim, California.

The temperature was already nearing 38 Celsius when word came

that traffic into the park was backed up for seven miles on

Harbor Boulevard.

When the gates opened that afternoon, people flooded in.

Many of them waving counterfeit tickets.

You are now in the press room of Disneyland,

which is equipped to service over 1,000 members of the worldwide

press here to cover this truly great event.

And to start the proceedings we take you to the entrance of Disneyland

and your host, Art Linkletter.

Well, this job in the next hour and a half's going to be a delight.

I feel like...

Well, I feel like Santa Claus with a 17 million bundle of gift

packages all wrapped in whimsy and sent your way over television

with the help of 29 cameras,

dozens of crews and literally miles and miles of cable.

Now, of course, this is not so much a show as it is a special event.

Hello, Walt!

-Hello, Governor!

-Hi, Art.

Hi!

-How did the run go?

-Oh, fine, fine.

The Governor headed round through Frontierland and then,

Fred there, he took her round.

I picked her up and brought her in...

'They have dozens of cameras all through the park,

'and the hope is that they will go from this scene to that and

'here to there and show all parts of the park.

'And about half of it worked and half of it didn't.'

Technology, of course, in the TV age in that period was very crude.

It was live TV and there were a lot of screw-ups.

Sure, Bob Cummings up in the pirate ship, we're back to you, boy.

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEECH INDISTINCT

Oh, you're waiting for me? Oh, thank you.

Everybody is waving at Bob Cummings over here, so I guess I'm back on.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's Bob Cummings again back with you,

and like the Peter Pan fly-through...

I'd like to read these few words of dedication.

"A vista into a world of wondrous ideas.

"Signifying man's achievements..."

I thought I got a signal.

Newspaper reporters crawled all over the park that day,

filling their notebooks with mishaps and misadventures for

their next day's stories.

Walt didn't care. His daughter Diane said she had never seen him happier.

Disneyland was thrown open to the public the day after the gala

opening, and people began lining up at two o'clock that morning

for the chance to be the first ones through the gate.

The park drew a million visitors in its first ten weeks alone.

Americans were enticed to this new vacation destination by

a simple promise -

a day's escape from the cares and concerns of everyday life.

'What people find there is a perfection that you can't

'find in real life.

'It's odd to say that something's better than real,

'because after all what's better than real?'

But Walt Disney was the man who helped discover things that

are better than real.

There were a handful of early critics.

"The whole world, the universe and all man striving for dominion over self and nature,"

wrote a journalist, "have been reduced to a sickening blend of cheap formulas packaged to sell.

"Life is bright-coloured, clean, safe, mediocre, inoffensive."

Walt Disney wanted bright and clean and safe.

He loved the place.

By 1960 Walt Disney stood atop one of the world's most

profitable entertainment enterprises.

The steady stream of revenue from Disneyland meant Walt was

free from interference from his bankers for the first time in his 40-year career.

But by now, whether making improvements on his theme

park or overseeing his TV shows and the half a dozen

movies his studio was producing every year,

he was always thinking about protecting his legacy.

"Disney is something we've built up in the public over the years,"

he explained to one young writer.

"Disney stands for something."

-ANNOUNCER:

-Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse present the Mickey Mouse Club.

# M-I-C-K-EY

# M-O-U-S-E

-# Mickey Mouse!

-# Quack, quack, quack!

-# Mickey Mouse!

-# Quack, quack, quack!

# Forever let us hold our banner high

# High, high, high! #

'He starts to internalise that sense of he's standing for something more.

'And it's not shareholders.

'Those are not who he feels responsible to.'

-ALL:

-Yay, Mickey! Yay, Mickey Mouse!

'As he solidifies as a brand,'

you don't have that risk-taking

that you felt in the early years of his career.

One more thing we want you always to remember...

-ALL:

-# M-I-C... #

See you real soon.

-ALL:

-# K-E-Y... #

Why? Because we like you.

'It is entertainment

'that is bounded by

'Walt's ethics and his aesthetics,

'and his perception of what a family audience wanted and needed.

You're going to see the happy ending.

You're going to see a film or a theme park, or a place to go,

where it shows the hope

of the human spirit excelling

and winning at the end of the day,

cos that's who he was.

Disney made no apologies for his work,

whatever his private misgivings.

He would sometimes say,

with more than a little revisionist history,

that he had never thought of his movies as art,

but as show business,

and could point

to his huge box office take

as proof that he was serving

an appreciative public.

At the age of 61,

he had won more Academy Awards

than any other film producer in history,

but it irked him that he had never won even a nomination

for the most coveted prize -

the Oscar for Best Picture.

In 1963,

his increasing engagement in one particular film

in the Disney pipeline

started to create a buzz around Burbank.

Mary Poppins was based on a favourite children's novel

of Disney's daughters

and a project Walt had started thinking about 20 years earlier,

back in that long-vanished era of limitless possibility,

after the worldwide success of Snow White.

And memories of that formative era seemed to be tugging at him.

There was no animation in Mary Poppins.

I'll never forget, one time,

we were going over a scene and Walt said,

"By the way, Ron, would you look up Song of the South

"and reel two, 100 feet into it?

"Put it in the projection room,

"I would like to run it for the guys."

They looked at each other, "What the hell is this all about?"

Then we went into the room

and it was live action and animation,

and he got up and left.

Didn't say a word.

Then, about three weeks later,

the same thing happened.

"Ron, will you put that reel up again?"

And the lights came on,

and that's when he told the boys,

"I have an idea for animation in this."

MUSIC PLAYS

'He's basically a story man.'

He wanted the song moving story, developing story,

pushing story and that was very, very important to him.

# The children must be moulded

# Shaped and taught that life's a looming battle

# To be faced and fought... #

'Mary Poppins is not a children's story,

'it's a story about a dysfunctional family that was not paying attention

'to the most important thing they had and that was their children.'

And Walt knew that and that's what the story was.

# It's time they learned to walk in your footsteps

# My footsteps

# To tread your straight and narrow path with pride

# With pride

# Tomorrow, just as you suggest pressed and dressed

# Jane and Michael will be at your side. #

Splendid, you've hit the nail right on the... At my side?

Where are we going?

-To the bank, of course, exactly as you proposed.

-I proposed?

-Of course.

Now, if you'll excuse me, tomorrow's an important day for

the children, I shall see they have a proper night's sleep.

Mary Poppins opened in the summer of 1964 and became

a box-office smash hit.

The film was Walt Disney's most deliberate refashioning

of the hard-hearted father story, a miraculous parental transformation.

# With tuppence for paper and strings

# You can have your own set of wings

# With your feet on the ground, you're a bird in flight

# With your fist holding tight

# To the string of your kite

# Oh, oh, oh

# Let's go fly a kite

# Up to the highest height... #

"You have made a great many pictures that have touched the hearts

"of the world," wrote legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn.

"But you have never made one so completely the fulfilment of

"everything a great motion picture should be."

He is able to produce a film on his terms, that has a narrative,

that is very much about family.

'About the healing of the family.'

# Up to the highest height... #

'So he's staying true to what he believes personally,

'that has woven itself into all of his films.'

Mary Poppins was nominated for 13 Oscars,

including Walt Disney's first and only nomination for Best Picture.

Mary Poppins is validation for Walt Disney.

'He's finally being embraced by those whose validation he's always sought.'

# Oh, let's go

# Fly a kite. #

CHEERING

Mary Poppins premiered into a very different America than had

Mickey Mouse, Snow White and Pinocchio.

American teenagers were discovering The Beatles and Bob Dylan

and James Brown

and beginning to worry about a growing war in

a place called Vietnam.

CLAMOUR

The entire country, meanwhile,

was convulsed by momentous new civil-rights laws.

Riots in New York and Los Angeles and segregationist

intimidation in the Deep South were beamed into television sets

in living rooms across the country.

'The gap is growing wider and wider between Disney's version of

'America and what's really going on in the country,'

which is all of these fissures being exposed.

# Oh, beautiful for spacious skies... #

Walt's defenders pointed to his movies as sanctuaries of

decency and health in the jungle of sex and sadism created by

Hollywood producers.

How lovely it is. Makes you feel proud, doesn't it?

Hi, down there.

Oh, no! Look out!

Critics slammed him. "Genuine feeling is ignored," said one.

"The imagination of children bludgeoned with mediocrity."

In 1965, word started to get around that Walt Disney was buying up

enormous tracts of land in central Florida.

By the time Disney was ready to go public,

the company already owned 27,000 acres,

giving him a building site bigger than the island of Manhattan.

Welcome to a little bit of Florida here in California.

This is where the early planning is taking place for our

so-called Disney World project.

On October the 27th 1966,

Walt Disney spent the day on the studio sound stage shooting

his part in a promotional film about his new pet project.

The most exciting, by far the most important part of our Florida

project, in fact, the heart of everything we will be doing in

Disney World, will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow.

We call it Epcot.

The effort exhausted the 64-year-old so badly,

he needed oxygen between takes.

He didn't look good. He didn't feel good.

He just seemed

to be almost permanently grumpy.

The word round the lot was, "Well, he's not feeling too well."

The diagnosis was cancer. The prognosis was bad.

Doctors told him he had two years at most.

On the night of December the 14th 1966, Walt sent

a worried Lillian home from his hospital bedside to get some rest.

He promised her he was feeling stronger.

He asked Roy to stay behind, who sat at the bedside while his kid

brother, flat on his back, pointed up to the ceiling tiles trying to

explain the vision of Disney World and Epcot that shimmered before him.

Trying to make Roy see it as he did.

"Now there is where the highway will run," he explained.

"And there is the route for the monorail."

Walt's vision was never built. After his death,

the project was abandoned and turned into an attraction.

-ARCHIVE:

-'Walt Disney is dead tonight at the age of 65.'

'..had undergone surgery last month for removal of part of his left lung after...'

'..29 Oscars, four Emmys, the Irving Thalberg Award...'

'Walt Disney, Hollywood's prince of fantasy...'

Walt Disney's death was front-page news the next day,

across the country and around the world.

'Of his success, Disney has said there is no magic formula.

'Children all over the world have one thing in common, love of laughter.'

In the year after he died, nearly 7 million people visited Disneyland.

Tens of millions around the world bought Disney licensed merchandise

or tuned into Walt's television show.

Hundreds of millions saw one of Walt Disney's movies.

'Walt Disney represented more than just a guy.

'He was an ethos, he was a way of approaching life.'

And whether you hated him or loved him, there was no-one that

could argue with his effect on 20th-century culture.

'He's either the man who ruined American culture and brought

'all of this fakeness into our lives or he's the man who inspired

'us and gave us hours and hours of entertainment.'