Understanding Disney. Janet Wasko
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process, producing the first full-color cartoon, Flowers and Trees, a Silly Symphony that won the Academy Award for the Best Cartoon for 1932.22 Another of the Silly Symphonies that attracted special attention was the Disney version of The Three Little Pigs, released in 1933. The film not only grossed approximately $125,000 during its first year of release but also became a national sensation.
Other characters emerged from the company’s films to become part of the Classic Disney stable, including Minnie Mouse, Mickey’s dog Pluto, Goofy, and, to a lesser extent, Clarabelle Cow, Horace Horsecollar, and the villain Pegleg Pete. Donald Duck appeared in one of the Silly Symphonies in 1934 and became one of the company’s most popular characters, with his own line of merchandise, including Donald Duck bread, Donald Duck peanut butter, and Donald Duck orange juice.
By 1934, the company employed about 200 people at its Hyperion Avenue location, which was continually expanding with the addition of offices, stages, and labs. By all accounts, the company had become successful.
Hooray for Hollywood
Only a few of Walt Disney’s biographers attempt to establish any context for the company’s achievements. Indeed, many profiles give him so much credit for animation innovations that one would think that animation originated with Walt Disney.23 But, as Watts suggests:
Disney’s success cannot be understood as an isolated event. It unfolded as part and parcel of much larger cultural changes in the early twentieth century. Shaped by the rise of consumerism in the economic realm, bureaucracy in the social structure, and corporate liberalism in politics, an enormous historical transformation had reworked the meaning of entertainment and the definition of success.24
Indeed, motion pictures in general and Disney in particular represented examples of these changes. The Disney company was part of the growing motion picture business that had emerged in the Los Angeles area from about 1910. What is also overlooked in many of the Disney histories is how small the Disney company actually was by comparison with the corporate giants that controlled the film industry at the time. In the early 1930s, the industry was dominated by five fully integrated corporations – Fox, Paramount, Loew’s, RKO, and Warner Brothers – that produced and distributed motion pictures to their theater chains around the country. Meanwhile, three smaller companies – United Artists, Columbia, and Universal – produced and distributed films in cooperation with the Big Five.25
Although the Disney studio received an enormous amount of public attention and was proclaimed to be an amazing success, it was only a pint-sized midget compared to these other incorporated giants that produced hundreds of films each year and amassed sizable revenues and profits. Under its distribution agreement with United Artists, the Disney company produced between 20 and 25 short films annually, for about $50,000 each, with expected revenues of about $120,000 each. However, distribution costs reduced the ultimate profits for the Disney firm. During the 1930s, the Disneys rarely made a profit of more than $500,000 per year, and this was poured back into production.
Gomery reminds us that the Disney brothers were able to survive for three reasons: (1) distribution deals with some of the major film companies (Columbia, 1929–31, United Artists, 1931–36, and RKO, 1936–54); (2) product differentiation, including short subjects which took advantage of technological innovations such as sound and color; and (3) revenues from merchandising contracts (the company received 2.5 percent royalties on inexpensive products, 5 percent on expensive items).26 For these reasons, the Disneys were able to hang on as a small Hollywood independent in an industry controlled by much larger, integrated corporations.
Hollywood’s Horatio Alger
In spite of the company’s small size, the Disney legend grew to become larger than life. The company’s success was magnified because of the widespread popularity of its products, as well as the abundant praise heaped upon its leader. Bryman describes Walt Disney as one of those rare charismatic leaders “who dream up a vision about the need for a product, attract others to that vision and build the organization into an enthusiastic group of adherents.”27 Bryman further characterizes him as extremely ambitious, with a perpetually positive attitude and a strong belief in hard work and high-quality products.
But even the most laudatory biographies point out that Disney was also authoritative, moody, and demanding. Some of his employees called him a benevolent dictator and reported various scare tactics that he used to get his way. The more critical histories reveal that “Uncle Walt” (as he became known in later years) was extremely controlling and obsessive in various ways.28
There is no doubt, however, that Disney’s attributes included a “remarkable capacity to sell his product and himself.”29 He was especially adept at projecting his own image as someone who had become successful through hard work and perseverance. The press picked up his story and ran with it, repeating endlessly the saga of “the Horatio Alger of the cinema” and the self-made-man image that Disney cultivated. In 1934, Fortune observed that “Enough has been written about Disney’s life and hard times already to stamp the bald, Algeresque outlines of his career as familiarly on the minds of many Americans as the career of Henry Ford or Abraham Lincoln.”30
In spite of his image as a talented artist, Disney actually did little drawing after 1924, when he started working with Ub Iwerks.31 Disney is reported to have been more than a bit frustrated when asked to sign autographs, as he struggled to duplicate the famous Disney signature that the public came to recognize and expect. However, most accounts agree that Disney’s talent was in story editing and development; he seemed to have an innate sense of what would entertain the public and an ability to communicate his ideas to his staff.
Above all, Disney was committed to mass culture. He explained, “I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with ‘expressing’ myself or obscure creative impressions.” His attitude, as well as his products, were well-suited to the era described above. For Disney’s products incorporated elements of other commercialized forms of entertainment and mass culture: “music, mischief, dance, comedy and heroic melodrama” drawn from popular music, vaudeville comedy, and dance.32
Disney’s driving passions have been summarized especially well by Watts:
The imperatives of success and mass culture always directed Disney’s path. From the earliest days of his career, he repeatedly confessed the great passions of his life: he was in love with his work and in love with the idea of entertaining a mass audience. His meteoric rise in the 1920s and early 1930s had made him a dynamic success story and a wildly popular entertainer for millions of American consumers.33
Disney’s Folly
The Silly Symphonies set the stage for animated feature films, an innovation that was accompanied with the usual fanfare and praise for Walt’s foresight and ingenuity. As the official history tells us, “Walt Disney was never satisfied with what he had already accomplished.”34
Actual work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the company’s first animated feature, began in 1936, with an estimated budget of $150,000. By the time it was completed in 1937, the cost was $1.5 million. Before its release, the film was also known as “Disney’s Folly,” as many in the film industry were not convinced that audiences would sit through a feature-length cartoon. Nevertheless, by some accounts, Disney persevered primarily because he was convinced that the introduction of the double bill would eventually squeeze out short cartoons, and that the only profitable future for animation was in features that would attract more revenues.
Snow White was an immediate hit, setting attendance records around the United States, with box-office grosses of $8.5 million within its first three months of release. The film industry was pleased as well, awarding Disney a special Academy Award in 1939. The film was also reissued