One of the most famous filmmakers of all time, Walt Disney’s story is larger than life
… and that’s thanks to some major myth-building, both good and bad.
Much of what we believe about Disney is just plain false, so let’s set the record straight.
Fans of Disney's theme parks know that he modeled Main Street, USA after his beloved
home town of Marceline, Missouri.
He wasn't born there, though.
According to popular legend, Disney spent his early childhood in the perfectly small
and idyllic small town of Robinson, Illinois.
The story goes that, while trying to earn enough money to reach Chicago, Disney's parents
temporarily settled in Robinson, where Mr. Disney found a job with a man named George
Walter, who also rented the couple a room.
Soon thereafter, Walt Disney was born, named for his father's generous boss.
It's a wholesome origin story.
But it's also completely wrong: according to Snopes, the idea that he was born in Robinson
came from a story published in the town's paper, the Robinson Argus, in 1982 which was
based on the unreliable memories of an elderly resident.
In fact, Disney was actually born in the big city of Chicago and he wasn't named after
some guy who gave a job and an apartment to his dad.
Walt Disney is synonymous with Mickey Mouse, a character so successful that it led to a
major animation studio, an entertainment conglomerate, and chain of theme parks, all linked by the
squeaky-voiced little guy.
He's the company's smiling mascot and a merchandising machine.
All of this was meant to be, implied by the official Disney line that Walt Disney came
up with Mickey during a train trip in 1928 when his attempts to break into the entertainment
business were woefully failing.
The truth of this story, though, is a lot murkier than legend would have it.
According to Jeff Ryan, author of A Mouse Divided, it's actually Disney's right hand
man Ub Iwerks who deserves a lot of the credit.
Iwerks, who had been working with Disney since 1919, was tapped by Walt to come up with a
replacement for their hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which had been taken from
them by a former business partner.
He tried several different animals, but none of them quite worked as a lead, though a couple
would become Disney supporting characters Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.
Disney then had the idea of doing a mouse instead, but Ryan claims it was Iwerks not
Disney who actually designed and drew Mickey.
Disney and Iwerks later had a professional falling out, which some believe is the reason
why Walt began taking all the credit.
Either way, Disney owned the rights to the character and thus controlled the story.
Of all of the hundreds of short cartoons produced in the early 20th century, it's the characters
featured in them that are famous Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry.
Very few individual cartoon titles are memorable, with the exception of landmark classics like
1928's Steamboat Willie.
It's almost a household name, with common knowledge holding that it was pioneering in
many ways.
For example, it's said that Steamboat Willie is the first Disney cartoon, the first cartoon
starring the immensely famous Mickey Mouse, and the first cartoon with sound.
The Disney company considers the toon such a turning point that it's got a spot in Disneyland
where it plays on a loop all day.
However, most of what the public thinks about Steamboat Willie isn't true.
It's not the first cartoon Walt Disney made: in 1921, Disney founded the animation studio
Laugh-O-Gram, and he produced short, cartoon takes on fairy tales like Cinderella and Red
Riding Hood.
However, the studio went bankrupt, and in 1923, Disney moved to Hollywood and directed
50 cartoons featuring Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland not to mention Oswald the Lucky
Rabbit.
It also wasn't the first Mickey cartoon, as he previously appeared in Plane Crazy, though
it didn't get wide release until after the success of Steamboat Willie.
And Steamboat Willie wasn't even the first cartoon with sound!
Rather, it was the first cartoon with a fully synchronized soundtrack that gained widespread
acclaim, thus popularizing the technology.
The 1994 Simpsons episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" is full of jokes at the expense of all
things Disney.
Bart and Lisa see a brief film about Itchy & Scratchy creator Roger Meyers Sr., a Walt
Disney stand-in whose cartoons included "Steamboat Itchy" as well as something a bit, well, less
savory.
"He in turn was beloved by the world, except in 1938 when he was critized for his controversial
cartoon, Nazi Supermen are our Superiors."
That's a nod to the common belief that Walt Disney hated Jewish people, a notion supported
by a speech Meryl Streep delivered at the 2019 National Board of Review Awards where
she also claimed Disney was anti-Semitic.
So where did this rumor come from?
It may all stem from a 1938 incident in which Disney gave a personal tour of his production
studio to Leni Riefenstahl official film documentarian of Hitler's Third Reich.
Disney turned down Riefenstahl's efforts to return the favor by showing him her films
of the 1936 Olympics held in Germany, but the association with the Nazis forever tarnished
his reputation.
However, Neal Gabler, who wrote Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, said
that he read through all of Disney's personal papers, and there's little proof of any virulent
Jewish hatred on Disney's part.
He told USA Today,
"I saw no evidence, other than casual anti-Semitism that virtually every gentile at that time
would have, that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite."
Sarah Colt, producer of the four-part PBS documentary Walt Disney agreed, telling Deadline
that she searched for any evidence of anti-semitism and found nothing.
"It’s not based on any truth so we saw no reason to bring it up in the film.
[...] it wasn’t relevant to who he was."
Walt Disney is a majorly formative figure in the motion picture industry and in how
films are produced, presented, marketed, and managed.
Disney's company churned out volumes of content from the 1930s to the 1960s not just classic
animated features but also many short films, both animated and live-action.
Disney absolutely dominated the world of shorts, and as such, routinely received Academy Award
nominations in the appropriate categories.
For example, between 1932 and 1963, Walt Disney was nominated for Best Short Subject, Cartoons
an astounding 38 times.
Not counting four special and honorary awards, Disney took home 22 Academy Award statuettes
overall, making him the most individually honored person in Oscars history.
That's led to the false impression that Disney did all the work on these films.
In fact, for most of those projects, he was the producer which for many Academy Awards
is the person who takes the trophy.
But not only was Walt not the artist on any of his films, he wasn't the director or writer
either!
Instead, he provided the overall vision, and had a great eye for recruiting incredible
talent.
But those Oscars?
Well, consider this fact: Walt won the animated short Oscar for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery
Day in 1969 even though he died in 1966!
There's a dark element that recurs throughout Disney's kid-friendly animated features: The
main character is often motherless, either having lost their mom by the time the events
of the movie begin or during the film itself.
Among the classic Disney movies with a mom-less protagonist, we've got Cinderella, Beauty
and the Beast, The Jungle Book, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Bambi.
"Mother!”
"Your mother can't be with you any more."
And according to Hollywood lore, there's a sad reason behind this.
See, after making it big in Hollywood, Walt fulfilled that age old dream of buying his
parents a brand new house.
But in 1938, his mother Flora died from carbon monoxide poisoning when a furnace in that
new house malfunctioned.
Because of this, many think that guilt over his mother's death led Disney to work out
his grief through his stories.
But there's really no evidence for this.
Many Disney features are based on pre-existing and seriously dark children's books and fairy
tales, where dead moms are a common factor.
Plus, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had already come out when Flora Disney died, and
Bambi was already well into production.
This legend just doesn't hold water.
Disneyland opened in July 1955, and like virtually every day since, the park was jam-packed on
day one.
Within a few weeks, more than a million people had visited, and Disney theme parks have since
become a worldwide cultural institution.
So it's easy to understand why people now think the creation of Disneyland was an obvious
sure thing.
In fact, the opposite was true.
Amusement parks had a reputation for being dirty, dangerous, and low class, so Walt’s
plan to build Disneyland was met with a great deal of skepticism.
He had so much trouble finding investment partners to put up the cash that he took out
a loan against his life insurance policy to fund building.
Even that wasn't enough, but luckily, Disney was a bit of a marketing genius.
He approached ABC, then a struggling new television network desperate to get a foothold in the
new medium.
He cut a deal to produce TV content for the network in the form of a new show called you
guessed it Disneyland.
Debuting in the fall of 1954, Disneyland featured Disney films and cartoons, along with Walt
himself giving updates on the building of the theme park.
Essentially he turned the entire enterprise into one of the most successful commercials
of all time, and by the time the park opened nearly a year later, the entire nation was
desperate to experience Walt's amazing theme park vision.
The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks details Walt Disney's personal wooing of author P.L.
Travers to adapt her Mary Poppins books into what would become a beloved, Oscar-winning
movie musical.
Emma Thompson portrays Travers as a curmudgeonly grump who holds on tenaciously to her intellectual
property, and she refuses to let Disney make anything treacly or sentimental out of her
books because they're actually a cathartic celebration and eulogy for her troubled father.
And beloved Hollywood nice guy of yore, Walt Disney, is played by beloved Hollywood nice
guy of today, Tom Hanks.
The legendary actor portrays the executive as endlessly patient and empathetic, and he
convinces Travers to sign over the movie rights after he tells her that he had a similarly
bad childhood.
However, according to Saving Mr. Banks screenwriter Kelly Marcel, Disney already had the film
rights to Poppins before Travers flew in to California to consult on the script.
And Disney historian Jim Korkis noted that it's highly unlikely that Disney and Travers
discussed their younger, more troubled days, especially since Disney didn't think he'd
had a troubled youth.
Plus, in real life, Travers proved so combative that Disney didn't stick around to see how
she was doing with her script adaptation.
Korkis told Orlando Weekly,
"Walt Disney got fed up after the first day and went to his vacation home in Palm Springs."
In December 1966, after suffering from lung cancer, 65-year-old Walt Disney died.
And then, according to urban legend, he was frozen using cryogenics so that he could be
revived at some point in the distant future.
Some versions of this legend even claim his frozen body or possibly just his frozen head
are secretly kept inside Sleeping Beauty Castle in the center of Disneyland.
All of that is, of course, nonsense.
It's true that Disney had a lifelong fascination with progress and technology.
And just two weeks after his death, the pioneering California Cryogenics Society froze its first
subject.
But in 1972, California Cryogenics Society president Bob Nelson said that while Disney
had shown at least an intellectual interest in cryogenics, he died before actually setting
anything up.
Instead, Disney's remains were reportedly cremated and interred after a private funeral
for just his family.
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