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Chapter 1: How did Walt Disney's early life influence his career?
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So if you're still with us, that was When You Wish Upon a Star, which is, of course, the official company anthem of Disney. Now, Disney, which effectively began as a young man tinkering, basically pursuing a hobby, is now a business worth $200 billion. Everybody knows the name of Disney.
It's the owner of Star Wars franchise, of Marvel, of course, of theme parks everywhere on the planet, most famously Disneyland and Disney World in America. It is an organization that has an almost unparalleled grip on the world's imagination, particularly of children, which is when the imagination is most formative. Now, Tom,
You were very keen to kick off with this song, partly because you were desperate to do those vocals because you'll have any opportunity to sing on the show for some reason. But also, I think, because the song captures something of the nostalgia and the sentimentality that is at the core of Disney.
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Chapter 2: What was the significance of Mickey Mouse in Disney's success?
But it's Disney who gets there first. So to quote Neil Gabler 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. And 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 kind of global power that it had even then.
But I think part of what Khrushchev very reluctantly has fallen in love with, it's not just the cultural kind of resonance of Disney, it's also the technological one, So, again and again, when I was reading Gabler's biography, I was reminded not just of Elvis or someone like that, a kind of cultural innovator, but of Steve Jobs, who was a great technological innovator.
So, if you think of Disney and Steve Jobs, both of them are complete perfectionists, absolutely kind of 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 kind of tinkering In Steve Jobs' case, famously in a shed, but Disney, his early animations are made in garages and so on.
And both of them end up becoming the public face of a vast and wealthy company. And I would say that in the 21st century, Apple and Disney. They're globe-spanning behemoths 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. So it's a nice comparison. All right. But Walt Disney's own career, he's born in December 1901. And 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. 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. 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. And actually, if you look at his ancestry, it's almost kind of comically, it contains within it so many different threads of history.
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Chapter 3: How did Disney revolutionize animation in the 1930s?
absolutely hand in hand so we said you know he's been hiring the best animators in the business training those who aren't necessarily proficient so he it's like a kind of renaissance workshop he has the best artists available to him and the effect of this is that they can start drawing animations that have kind of color and depth and weight in a way that no one had ever done before
And this is what feeds into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But it's also why it comes to be called Disney's Folly, because obviously this is massive, massive capital investment. And the whole way in which Snow White is made, it's an enormous process of experimentation. So Walt's idea of storyboarding is to get all his animators together.
He stands on a stage and he basically acts it out, you know, with all the characters, the Wicked Witch, the various dwarves, Snow White herself. And it's so vivid in the memories of the animators that that basically is what the storyboard that they're then working from. And 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. So they might work on a sequence for months and then Walt will say, no, let's not have that, we'll bin it. And that might seem dispiriting, but they know that the next sequence might be something completely groundbreaking.
They will sit there kind of throwing bricks through windows just so that they can see how glass smashes and draw it. I mean, I think the most amazing one, they find it very difficult to give Snow White the right kind of color in her cheeks she always kind of ends up looking a bit like a clown when they do it, you know, with the actual, on the actual plates.
So every plate, a makeup artist gives her a kind of little dusting of rouge on the cheeks. It's unbelievable attention to detail.
And just the drawings alone. I mean, we're talking about thousands upon thousands, just an unbelievable, a mind boggling number of original drawings produced. So for every frame of this film, I mean, on a scale, that would have stupefied 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. And just one other thing to mention about the impact of the animations. that the human characters are stunning. They basically, humans haven't been portrayed like that in animation before. And that again is kind of part of the process of what's being worked out. And so it's not surprising that its impact is completely
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Disney face during World War II?
He'd watched an owl fly and land on a tree in an orchard and said quite well, 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 afterward. So he's got the voice of Ronald Reagan and the sentiments of the Fox murdering lawyer, Julian Maugham.
Well, but Julian Maugham, I think, has shown less contrition, hasn't he, over his murder of wildlife? Because So 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.
And 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. So I think Walt is... you know, his devotion to animals is clearly very deep rooted.
And so when in 1948, he sent filmmakers to kind of shoot stuff in Alaska and the footage comes back and all the kind of human interest stuff is incredibly boring, but there are loads of seals. And so Walt says, well, we'll just make a film about seals. And so it's called Seal Island. It wins an Oscar. The wildlife is massively anthropomorphized. So as in the animations, it's all that
Hello, little fellow. All that kind of... 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. I mean, obviously, it's gone very, very out of fashion. But there's no question that without... Disney is bathing a path there that David Attenborough and so on will pick up on. And I think it's another example, much less high profile one, of how far reaching Disney's influence is.
So that's in the cultural dimension. He's still innovating on the kind of commercial and technological level as well. And 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.
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