An army of real estate agents fanned out over central Florida, working on behalf of a mystery client. They bought thousands of acres, sometimes offering as little as $100. Who was the buyer?
The buyer was Walt Disney, 50 years ago this month, and that's how the story of his most ambitious creation broke--"the greatest attraction in the history of Florida," as he called it.
Walt Disney World opened 44 years ago today. you can take a lot of inspiration from his story. Here are some of the most surprising and interesting facts:
He grew up poor.
Disney's was the fourth of five children, and his family had very little money--which is why they bounced from Chicago to a Missouri farm to Kansas City in search of a living. Two of his older brothers ran away when he was just 4, sick of the constant work and deprivations. Still, Disney persevered, in part because of the support of the family's neighbors.
If not for his neighbors, there'd be no Frozen.
When he was just a child, one of Disney's neighbors hired him to draw pictures of the man's horse. He also became friends with a boy named Walter Pfeiffer, whose family had been in vaudeville and theater and who introduced Disney to the world of the movies. Without them, he might never have developed his interest in animation and art to begin with.
He lied about his age to join the military.
Disney certainly had a spirit of adventure. He was 16 years old when the U.S. entered World War I, but he claimed to be old enough to serve and attempted to join the U.S. Navy. When he was turned down, he tried unsuccessfully to join the Canadian armed forces. Finally, he was accepted as a Red Cross ambulance driver--the same job Ernest Hemingway had. Disney trained with fellow enlistee Ray Kroc, the future founder of McDonald's, although the war ended before he made it overseas.
His first studio went bankrupt.
Back in Kansas City after the war, Disney landed a job at an art studio working on print advertisements. He and a co-worker left to start their own commercial company, and he ultimately wound that business down to start another studio focusing on animation, called Laugh-O-Gram. None of these businesses were big financial successes. Although Laugh-O-Gram's cartoons were popular, the company eventually went bankrupt. Maybe there's some alternative universe in which Kansas City winds up being the center of American entertainment--but Disney headed to Hollywood.
He created Mickey Mouse as a result of a bad business deal.
Disney's new California studio worked on an animated series called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was distributed by Universal Pictures and became very popular. However, instead of increasing Disney's production fee, his client tried to get him to take a pay cut, and when the dust settled, Disney had lost the rights to the popular character. Disney started work on another animated character: Mortimer Mouse. His wife suggested renaming him Mickey, which sounded happier.
He had to mortgage his house to create his first epic movie.
Disney's studio primarily created cartoon shorts that were to be shown before feature-length films, but he started to think about doing a full-length, animated movie. Almost nobody else thought this was a good idea. His brother (and business partner) Roy Disney objected, and Hollywood wags referred to it as "Disney's Folly." The cost approached $1.5 million--but when the movie, Snow White, was released, it was hailed as an "authentic masterpiece" by Time magazine and brought in $8 million. (That's about the same as $134 million today.)
He still holds the record for the most Academy Awards and Oscar nominations.
Disney had a string of acclaimed animated hits after Snow White in the early 1940s, including Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. he won 22 Academy Awards and was nominated 59 times. Both marks stand as records.
His studio went to war during World War II--and he almost lost everything as a result.
With the dawn of the Second World War, the European and Asian film markets disappeared, and when the U.S. entered combat, Disney's studio went to work creating training and propaganda movies for the U.S. Army. Disney's business suffered, also because many of his key employees were drafted into the military. It wasn't until 1950's Cinderella that his studio fully recovered.