Walt Disney

Walt Disney

Walt Disney

 Born on December 5, 1901 , Walter Elias Disney or better know as Walt Disney started out his career at a very small age sketching rabbits. When he was 16, he was in the Red Cross and he served in World War I as an ambulance driver. Being an ambulance driver, he customized the ambulance that he drove with his own cartoon drawings. Realizing his talent for art and drawing, upon his return from the war, he worked as an advertising cartoonist in Kansas City, Missouri, but since this did not work really well in his favor, Disney decided to move to California, where he joined forces with his brother, Roy to continue their passion for art. 

As Walt handled the creative aspects of partnership, Roy focused on the business and financial end of the overall business. The Disney brothers borrowed some money to set up a studio in their uncle's garage. From a very humble beginning, a series of black-and-white cartoons with sounds featuring a rabbit named Oswald. It was produced under Universal Studios. It was a big commercial success. After the success when Walt asked Universal for a raise, they balked. His demands were not met and on the 1928, Disney quit drawing Oswald and to make matters even worst since the studio retained the rights to the character, Disney also lost the first cartoon character that he had created. The series continued however with a different cartoonist featuring Oswald but it was never quite the same.

Disappointed, Disney went back to the drawing board. Still with the determination and passion for drawing cartoons he created a silent cartoon called Plane Crazy that featured a new character named Mickey Mouse. But the use of sound in animation films has changed everything in Hollywood. It was the best thing in Hollywood and to satisfy that demand Disney delayed Plane Crazy and instead produced a second Mickey Mouse cartoon, this time with sound. Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, was the first animated film to feature fully synchronized sound. Despite the film's international success and recognition, Walt and Roy still needed cash to license Mickey Mouse's image. Learning from the mistake made previously, for a fee of $300, Mickey Mouse was used on newspapers on the comic column solely for children.

Disney became fixated on the use of technology. He wanted to apply those advances to his films and make them visually stunning. Obtained exclusive rights to use Technicolor in animated films for two years, He won his first Academy Award in 1932 for the animated short Flowers and Trees. That was also the first full-color cartoon ever produced. Over the course of his career he won 26 Oscars, the most number of awards given to any individual. During the next few years, Goofy, Donald Duck and several other memorable characters joined Mickey. But Disney believed the future of company was in feature-length films, and having that in mind he released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. It was the first feature-length animated movie to be produced in Technicolor, and cost nearly $1.5 million to make, but that movie made Disney and his company stand out from the rest as a pioneer in the animated entertainment business.

As the company grew, Disney diversified production beyond cartoons and animated movies.Treasure Island, released in 1950, was the studio’s first live-action film, and the company formed Buena Vista Distribution a few years later. The popular Mickey Mouse Club debuted as a TV series in 1955.But it was the TV program called Disneyland, which debuted in 1954 that showed Walt Disney, had even bigger plans for the company.

Disney established WED Enterprises as a separate company and began drawing up plans for Disneyland, a giant theme park. Because the park was technically part of a separate corporation, Disney was able to develop it in secret and Disneyland opened in 1955 as a theme park unlike any other the world had seen. He solicited several corporate sponsorships to subsidize costs, and outsourced food and merchandise within the park. Once Disneyland was earning revenue, the company repurchased those rights and kept the revenue internally. Plans for a second park, which ultimately became Walt Disney World, began with the acquisition of land in Florida in the 1960s. This second park would contain Disney's vision of what the future urban community would look like; he called it the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow", now commonly known as Epcot Center. This unique strategy of Disney to made the theme park very successful in a very short time

Walt Disney died in 1966, five years before Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida, and 16 years before Epcot Center opened in 1981, leaving behind a legacy that started with a mouse.