[Julie Andrews speaking] They say that Hollywood is a town built on dreams and one of its greatest
dreamers was Walt Disney. Walt believed that any height could be scaled if you
knew the secret of making dreams come true. Well, he certainly knew that secret -
he touched the hearts of millions of people around the world. The story of
Walt's life is truly an amazing one and no one can tell it better than Walt
himself. [Walt speaking] My dad worked as a carpenter in the World's Fair buildings, he eventually
ended up in Chicago as a contractor and he was doing that when I was born.
December 1901... My dad made some money as a contractor and he wanted to get
back to the farm. They finally ended up buying this farm in Marceline, Missouri.
It was a beautiful farm. But it was not the kind of farm to make a living with.
Things got pretty tough on the farm and my dad had a sickness. So my dad sold the
farm, took the money and went to Kansas City. And my dad bought this Kansas City Star route...
They gave me a route, I was about 9 or 10 when they started that. Winter we'd go
out at 3:30 in the morning right after a blizzard or in a blizzard or in pouring
rain, it didn't matter... I did that for six years, it was tough.
[Julie Andrews:] It seems that everywhere Walt's father turned, he found failure
and the constant struggle took its toll on the family. One by one the children began to leave home, then came
the day Walt woke up to find his best friend, his brother Roy, had gone as well.
My brother had joined the Navy, so I wanted to join it - but I was still a
year too young, i was 16. One day this kid come in to me very excited, he said there's
something, something just forming here, that you and I can get in! I said: What is
it? He says: An ambulance unit. I was in Paris, 3rd of September.
Paris which had been this exciting thing, with all the soldiers and things, and suddenly
there was no soldier to be seen... and I suddenly became very lonesome. So
then I went in, put a request in to be discharged.
I hit chicago, that´s where my parents were living and I told dad: I wanna
be an artist. And my dad, he just wouldn´t buy that. So I pulled stakes and moved to
Kansas City. Roy was in Kansas City working at a bank. One of the fellows
working with Roy said: Say, I have a couple of friends that have an art shop...
I went up with these samples and they were all these corny things I've done in
France. Well, my gosh, they hired me, i mean, right down the spot. So i took the camera
home and then I started experimenting...
But then I went into this Kansas City film ad company,
that was where I got started in the animation business. I was thinking if I had something with a novelty, I
might crack the market. But I still couldn't get anywhere with it, I'd failed.
I learned a lot out of that and I think it's important to have a
good hard failure when you´re young. I packed all my worldly goods, you know, cardboard and suitcase.
I went to Hollywood, driving there with just 40 dollars in my pocket from my
Kansas City ventures. Now my brother Roy was already in Los Angeles,
both of us were unemployed. We solved the problem by going into business for
ourselves. We established the first animated cartoon studio in Hollywood.
[Julie Andrews:] Walt's dream was finally coming true, he had his first commercial success: Oswald
the Lucky Rabbit. And Walt himself was lucky enough to
marry the girl of his dreams: Lillian a pretty ink and paint girl who
worked at his studio. Then he was dealt a tough blow... On a trip to New York City he
learned that through a contract loophole he had lost ownership of Oswald. And to
make matters worse, the distributor had signed away all of Walt's artists.
Devastated he headed back home to California, but something happened along
the way that would change his world forever...
[Walt:] Mickey Mouse came into our life. He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad
on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when the business
fortunes of my brother Roy and myself we're at lowest ebb and disaster seemed
right around the corner. His first actual screen appearance was
at the Old Colony Theatre in New York in "Steamboat Willie".
He was the first cartoon character to stress personality and I thought of him
from the first as a distinct individual. I did the voice: "Hang on pal, here we go!"
Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter.
Mickey fitted the need exactly. He brought in the money which saved the day,
enabled us to explore our medium and he paved the way for our more elaborate
screen ventures... By nature I'm an experimenter so I had another idea which
was plaguing my brain. It was the "Silly Symphonies". It was a series without a
central character, everyone was a new type of subject to give us something
to reach out and accomplish something different. Then we started
distributing both Mickey Mouse and the "Silly Symphonies". It was niff and tough getting them out.
[Julie Andrews:] Walt began to push himself and his
artists, he worked day and night. And when he wasn't working he was worrying about
the future. Then the inevitable happened: In 1931 he suffered what he
called "a heck of a breakdown". So he took Lillian on the first vacation
they had ever had! By the time he got back, he was a new man and
ready to get back to work. [Cartoon Music]
[Walt:] I saw the handwriting on the wall there that the short subject was just a filler on any program. Now if I could crack the feature
field then I could do things. I had done a little story research of different
fairytales that might do and Snow White was one of them. I thought it was a perfect
story. I had the "Haggy"... "It´s some magic wishing apple! Now, make a wish!"
I had the prince, then the girl, the romance... I had the
sympathetic dwarfes and things... We started snow white some time late ´35
and for around two years of the making we had the family fortune, we had everything wrapped
up in Snow White! In fact the banker I think was losing more sleep than I was...
We had a big premiere at the Carthay Circle theater, big grand Hollywood premiere,
all of Hollywood brass turned out for a cartoon!
The day that Snow White and the 7 dwarfes is going to be presented this beautiful statue.
[Historical Oscar broadcast with Shirley Temple]
With the profits of Snow White I built the studio...
Two years later I was almost broke, but I had all these pictures in work:
Pinocchio...
Bambi...
Fantasia...
That was when the war came. The whole world was collapsing then...
So many of my boys went to service...
So I just practically stopped my feature production, that's all I could do...
But after the war there's quite a problem picking up the pieces...
I knew that diversifying of the business would be the salvation of it. Well, I
tried various things, I wanted to go beyond the cartoon. And I thought if I could get
into the live-film that there's things I could do.
[Live films montage]
I wanted enough different types of things that I could say: I could fall on
my nose with one of these pictures but I had another one right behind it
that would hit! [Film song]
After a long concentration on live-action and cartoon films we decided
to try something that would employ about every trick we learned in the making of
films... [Mary Poppins montage]
We would combine cartoon, live-action and enormous fantasy... MARY POPPINS!
As the original Mary Poppins budget of five million dollars continued to grow, I
never saw a sad face around the studios.
If my brother Roy was happy, this made me nervous and a horrible thought struck me:
Suppose the staff had finally conceded that I knew what I was doing!
[Julie Andrews:] Once again Walt Disney reinvented family entertainment, creating many of the
classics we still enjoy today. But even then he wasn't finished. He had a bigger
dream in mind. [Walt:] Well it came about when my daughters were very young and on saturday
was always "daddy's day" with the two daughters. So we'd start out and try to
go someplace, you know, different things and I would take him to the merry-go-round
and I took them different places... And as I'd sit there while they
rode the merry-go-round and did all these things, I felt that there should be
something built, some kind of amusement enterprise built where the
parents and the children could have fun together. So that's how Disneyland started.
It takes a lot of money to make these dreams come true, we had everything
mortgaged, including my family.
We started with many ideas, threw them away, started all over again.
Eventually it evolved into what you see today as Disneyland.
But it all started from a daddy with two daughters, wondering
where he could take them, where he could have a little fun with them too. The park means
a lot to me... It is something that will never be finished, something that I can
keep developing and adding too... Not only can I add things but even the trees
will keep growing, that thing will get more beautiful every year.
And i knew if did a thing like the park, I had to have some kind of a medium like television to let the people know about it.
[World of Colour Theme Music]
Today I want to share with you some of our ideas for Disney World.
Here in Florida we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland: The
blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can
possibly imagine.
Everything in this room may change time and time again as we move ahead. But the
basic philosophy of what we're planning for Disney World is going to remain very
much as it is right now. We know what our goals are, we know what we hope to
accomplish. And believe me, it's the most exciting and challenging assignment
we've ever tackled at Walt Disney Productions. Well, after 40 somewhat years
in the business, my greatest reward I think is that I'd had the public
appreciate and accept what I've done all these years. That is a great reward and I
think by this time, my staff, my group of executives are convinced that Walt is
right, that quality will out. And I think that'll hang on after... after Disney.
[Julie Andrews:] Walt Disney once said: I hope that we never lose sight of one thing: That it
was all started by a mouse. But we know it was really all started by a man -
a man with a dream... and a mouse!
[When you wish upon a star]
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