"Just remember, it all started with a mouse," Walt Disney said on television in 1954. His film production company had been in business for over 30 years and was one of the most successful in the United States — with cartoons! In addition to being a screen hero, Mickey Mouse appeared on T-shirts, footballs, and toothbrush cups. A year later, in 1955, the cartoon mouse came to life at California's first Disneyland. Here's a look at the journey of Walt Disney over the years.
The Beginning Of The Making Of Disney:
Walt Disney, who was born in 1901 and raised on a farm in Missouri, began his career as a commercial artist before discovering animated films. With only $40 in his pocket, he set off for Hollywood and founded the Walt Disney Company, which is now worth billions of dollars. "It's kind of fun to do the impossible," the cartoon pioneer believed.
Behind this carefree statement lurked an intense, almost manic work ethic and workload, as well as an unwavering faith in his own ideas. The farm boy was repeatedly on the verge of bankruptcy. His projects were deemed too daring, with cutting-edge film technology constantly being tested and perfected. Walt Disney, driven, was soon sleeping on a couch in his studios, hardly seeing his own children while working hard to enchant other, unfamiliar children with his on-screen fairy tales.
The First Success:
In 1937, Walt Disney released "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the first full-length animated film — Mickey Mouse and the company had previously only appeared in short films. Nobody could have predicted that 60 more feature-length films would be released to this day.
After all, Walt Disney, the daring producer, had made a dramatic miscalculation: instead of $250,000 (approximately €228,000), the film required $1.5 million to complete; instead of 18 months, his cartoonists worked for three years on an idea that was considered completely insane in Hollywood. A feature-length animated film? Who's going to line up for that at the movies?
After the film's release, it turned out that a lot of people did: "Snow White" grossed around $8 million — at a time when a movie ticket cost an average of 25 US cents.
After being translated into ten languages, the film was a box office success in 46 additional countries. Disney received an honorary Oscar the following year — or, to be more precise, eight: one regular-sized and seven miniature Oscar statuettes.
The Challenges It Faced Back Then:
Following "Snow White," Disney Studios released "Pinocchio" (1940), "Dumbo" (1941), and "Bambi" (1942). However, the films were unable to match the success of "Snow White": the anticipated revenues did not materialise, partly due to the collapse of the European sales market due to the Second World War.
Because few banks were willing to provide the necessary loans for new productions, the company went public. Today, the Walt Disney Company ranks sixth among the world's most successful media groups, according to the Institute for Media and Communications Policy, and is a component of the Dow Jones stock index, which includes the 30 most successful US corporations.
Many Oscars For Disney:
In the years following the Second World War, Disney capitalised on the success of his feature-length films, including "Alice in Wonderland" (1951) and "Peter Pan" (1953).
Walt Disney had another crazy idea in 1955: his fairy tale worlds would become a reality, and so the first Disneyland was built in the US state of California. Offshoots were later established in Florida, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Walt Disney received 26 Academy Awards during his lifetime, an unprecedented number. He died of lung cancer in 1966, so he did not live to see the premiere of his final film, "The Jungle Book" (1967).
The 'Disney Renaissance':
Despite a massive financial crisis in the early 1980s, the Disney brand survived. Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, took over management of the animation studio in 1986 and, along with Jeffrey Katzenberg, led a "Disney renaissance" that produced "The Little Mermaid" (1989), "Beauty and the Beast" (1991), and "The Lion King" (1994).
"I think when you relate Disney to anything, you relate it to magic, and imagination, and creativity, and I think that's what's so different about our company: It's that we tell stories and we make magic in everything that we do," Betty Cline, director of the Walt Disney Archive was quoted as saying by German news agency Deutsche Welle.
The former cartoon company began to focus on growth in the 2000s. It first purchased the successful animation studio Pixar (with whom it had previously produced films such as "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo"), then the numerous superhero films with Marvel, and finally the long-running box office hit company Lucasfilm with the "Star Wars" series. There were several TV series and prequels, sequels, and spin-offs that followed.
Of course, Disney, in the spirit of its founder, continues to keep up with technological advances. Despite the fact that its own streaming platform, Disney+, debuted late in 2019 and struggled at first, its quarterly figures for 2022 now place it third in the world behind Netflix and Amazon Prime.
'Disney 100':
The "Disney 100" international exhibition tour began on April 18, 2023, at the Kleine Olympiahalle in Munich, Germany; prior to that, it debuted on February 18, 2023, at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.