Walt Disney
Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966), known as Walt Disney, was an American animator, film producer and entrepreneur who co-founded The Walt Disney Company with his brother Roy O. Disney and created Disneyland, the park that established the modern theme park form. Beginning as a cartoon producer in the 1920s, he moved into feature animation, live-action film and television, and then into parks, where his insistence on cleanliness, controlled environments and storytelling set standards that Walt Disney World and later resorts still follow.
Early life
Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Elias Disney and Flora Call Disney. The family moved to Marceline, Missouri, when he was a young child, and the small farming town later provided a reference point for Main Street, U.S.A. in his parks. After further moves to Kansas City and back to Chicago, he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in France after the First World War armistice.
Returning to Kansas City, he worked in commercial art before forming Laugh-O-Gram Studio. That business failed in 1923, and Disney moved to Los Angeles, where his brother Roy was living while recovering from tuberculosis.
Animation and the studio
In October 1923 the brothers founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Hollywood. Early work included the Alice Comedies and, from 1927, the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series for Universal. When Disney lost the rights to Oswald and most of his animators in 1928, he and animator Ub Iwerks developed a replacement character, Mickey Mouse.
Mickey first reached audiences in Steamboat Willie (1928), one of the first cartoons with fully synchronised sound, with Disney himself providing Mickey's early voice. The studio followed with the Silly Symphonies, used to test colour and new techniques, and then with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first American feature-length animated film. Its success funded a new studio in Burbank and features including Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
Disney received more Academy Award nominations and wins than any other individual, including a special award for Snow White presented as one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones. After a difficult wartime period and a damaging animators' strike in 1941, the studio returned to features with Cinderella (1950) and expanded into live-action production.
Television and Disneyland
By the early 1950s Disney was planning a park where parents and children could ride together, an idea he associated with watching his daughters on a merry-go-round and finding existing amusement parks dirty and unwelcoming. To help finance and promote it he entered television. The anthology programme Walt Disney's Disneyland, launched on ABC in 1954, promoted the park's lands weekly, and ABC took an investment stake in the park.
Disneyland opened in Anaheim on July 17, 1955 — see Opening day of Disneyland. Disney retained close personal oversight, keeping an apartment above the fire station on Main Street, U.S.A., and walking the grounds in the early mornings. Attractions developed under his direction in the following decade included the Matterhorn Bobsleds, the Monorail, It's a small world and Pirates of the Caribbean, the last of which opened after his death.
The Florida project and EPCOT
In the 1960s Disney began a larger eastern project on land assembled secretly near Orlando, Florida. At its centre was to be EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a planned city that would test new systems for transport, housing and urban services. Disney recorded a film explaining the Florida plans in October 1966, presenting the theme park as only one part of a broader development.
Disney, a long-time heavy smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1966 and died in Burbank on December 15, 1966, ten days after his 65th birthday. He did not live to see construction begin in Florida. Roy O. Disney postponed retirement to complete the first phase, which opened as Walt Disney World in 1971.
Legacy
Disney is the only person to have personally planned and opened a Disney park, and Disneyland remains the reference against which later parks are measured. His name is carried by the company, the Florida resort and statues in several parks, including the Partners statue of Disney holding Mickey Mouse's hand, first installed at Disneyland in 1993. His central role in linking animation, television and place-based entertainment is widely recognised as the foundation on which the present parks business was built.