ColdFusion - How BIG is Walt Disney? (The Story of Disney)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. What comes to your mind when I say Walt Disney? Some of you might think of classic cartoons and modern-day movie masterpieces. Others, a grand theme park or a mass media holding company, and others still a man. All of these are accurate. But what's the story behind the Walt Disney Company and how big are they today? As we all know, it started with a man named Walt Disney, a sure genius, but the details

Starting point is 00:00:40 of his life and the aspects that made him different from others are hazy to most. Walt Disney was an ambitious innovator who seemed to never give up. He also had another side. He was a perfectionist who was particularly stern to those he worked with. In this video, we'll learn all about Walt and the company he created, which is still relevant a better part of a century later. Begin. Born in Chicago, 1901, Walt was a pretty regular kid of the day and one of five children. During primary school, he expressed an interest in drawing and would practice sketching by copying

Starting point is 00:01:15 the front page of his dad's newspaper. After a while, Walt's dad got the boy some drawing lessons, and he would subsequently draw for his high school paper. But the thing was, nobody thought of him as a particularly great artist. At age 17, Walt decided to send some of his drawings to magazines for publication, but they were all rejected. Rejection and persistence would be all too familiar to Walt over the next few years. In 1919, Walt finally got a job at the Pessman-Ruban commercial art studio, but was laid off a year later. After a failed attempt at starting an animation studio of his own with an ex-co-worker, Walt landed another job at the Kansas City Film Company. This is where Walt was first introduced to animated cartoons. His eyes were opened to a

Starting point is 00:02:04 New World. The 1920s was when animation really started taking off in the form of silent short comedy sketches. Waltz saw what was going on around him and took inspiration. He borrowed a book on animation and a camera and began to start shooting his own cartoons in a shed behind his house. During his work in the shed, Disney came across a superior animation technique to the one that was used at the Kansas Ad Company where he worked. After failing to persuade his boss to To use the better animation method, Disney continued to work on his own cartoons by himself and would call these cartoons Laughagrams. Laughagram would end up being the name of Walt's first animation studio, which he created

Starting point is 00:02:47 shortly after at the age of 20. Most people would be conservative with their first business venture, but Walt was passionate. He went out and spent all of his investment money on hiring animators for a film called Alice's Wonderland based on the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This project was one of the first instances of Walt's creative genius. Here's why. You see, all the experimental films of the day combined live-action backgrounds with an animated character in top.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Walt reversed this for Alice's Wonderland, putting the live-action character within an animated world. Unfortunately, Walt's grand plan didn't catch, and halfway through production in 1923, the studio went into bankruptcy. But Disney still knew where his passion lay. He wanted to be an artist. He sold his camera and went to Hollywood, the centre of the cartoon industry at the time. Walt would later state that it's important to have a failure when you're young.

Starting point is 00:03:46 While in Hollywood, the starry-eyed young man asked all the big studios to take him on. They all said no. Walt finally got lucky when he managed to sell a half-finished version of Alice's Wonderland to a New York film distributor, landing a contract for two seasons. To make the short episodes of the Alice films, Walt teamed up with his brother, Roy, who was living in Hollywood at the time, and formed the Walt Disney Company. By 1927, Disney had gotten sick of the Alice series and wanted to make some purely animated pieces. His first project was a series of short films about a rabbit called Oswald. Surprisingly, the Oswald episodes got distributed by Universal and made its way into major theatres.

Starting point is 00:04:30 In 1928, when it came time to renew the contract of Oswald the Rabbit, Universal refused and decided to produce the character themselves. This was actually a common practice at the time as the distributors owned the complete rights to the characters. Disney, once again, was left out in the cold, but instead of calling it quits, he decided that he needed a new character. On the train home, with some of his family members, he was brainstorming. I think he'll be a mouse, and I'll call him Mark. He stated. Walt's mother strongly recommended that the name of the character should be Mickey. Walt still struggled to find a distributor for this new character and he knew that he needed to do something revolutionary here. He capitalized on a brand new technology that had just been incorporated into the film

Starting point is 00:05:21 industry. Sound. Walt knew that he had to do it better than anyone else to succeed and here's how he did it. Then we used to put the sound on afterwards and in those days you couldn't do what we called dubbing today where you could mix a lot of tracks. It wasn't yet science that you could get away with. So we used to have to do everything at one time and we used to have to run the cartoon. We'd have the fellas with the sound effects. We had the people with the voices. We had the orchestra going and everybody had to synchronize. Back in 1928, this was revolutionary. People wouldn't been able to comprehend that an animated character could whistle, sing and have corresponding sounds on film. Disney had just pioneered fully synchronized sound for cartoons. Many herald

Starting point is 00:06:11 this as the start of the Disney we know today. Audiences had seen cartoons would sound before, but never synchronized, yet alone as perfectly as this. They were blown away. Mickey and a synchronized sound had made Walt famous. After this revolutionary innovation, Disney kept pushing the boundaries of animation and when 1934 came around he and his team got to work on the biggest animation project ever undertaken the first full-color feature animated film costing 1.5 million dollars it was called snow white after snow white came many meticulously animated masterpieces like pinocchio Fantasia and Bambi despite all of this Disney wasn't going to stop at just film in the 1950s he would focus his attention on something completely different.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Theme parks. Traditionally, amusement parks were only for children, leaving tag-along parents with nothing to do. Disney envisioned a place where both children and parents could share fun experiences together. This place was Disneyland and it was opened on July 17th of 1955. Over the next few decades, Disney would break new ground in many areas of film, animation, TV and even technology. In 1959, it was Disney would also pioneer 360 video. The technique then called Circle Vision 360 used nine cameras to stitch together a 360 video for nine screens in a custom theatre. In 1963, Disneyland featured electromechanical robots.

Starting point is 00:07:49 This was the first time people had ever seen such life-like technology. Some early visitors thought the robots were actually actors. By this stage, the creative direction of the company was unstoppable. 92 years after its founding, Disney is a massive media powerhouse. It's absolutely huge, but of course, we're here to find out exactly how big. Let's start with the physical size. Disney World, located in Orlando, Florida, covers 43 square miles. That's about twice the size of Manhattan, or roughly the size of San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:08:56 Epcot, which stands for experimental prototype community of tomorrow, is the biggest of the four theme parks in Disney World and was actually envisioned by Walt to be be a livable futuristic city. Recently, Disney also opened a Disneyland in China, making it their largest foreign investment ever. In terms of media, here's a selection of some well-known companies owned by Disney. We have Walt Disney Pictures, Disney Nature, Disney Tune Studios, Lucasfilm, which brought us Star Wars, of course, and it was purchased by Disney in 2012 for 4.06 billion, and then

Starting point is 00:09:36 Pixar Animation, which actually grew out of Lucasfilm's graphics department. in 1979 and was bought by Disney in 2006. Marvel Studios, bought in 2009 for $4 billion. Touchstone Pictures, which gave us movies like Sister Act, Who Frame Roger Rabbit, and The Dead Poet Society. We also have Hollywood Records, American Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as ABC. We have ESPN, A&E, Lifetime, The History Channel,

Starting point is 00:10:03 and the YouTube multi-channel network, Maker Studios. Disney also partly owns Vice Media in collaboration, with 21st Century Fox. So I'm just going to ask some of you guys a quick question. Did you know that Disney owned all of those media companies? I knew that they owned some of those, but not that much. And I think it's a little unnerving that one company can own so much. But I guess it is what it is.

Starting point is 00:10:26 Next, let's take a look at the financials. Last year, Disney made $52.46 billion in revenue with a net income of $8.38 billion, and it currently owns $88 billion in assets. The number of employees, 180,000. For comparison on the net income front, Microsoft comes in at about 12.2 billion, Alphabet comes in at 16.3 billion, ExxonMobil, 22 billion, and Apple, 53.4 billion. Alright, so we're near in the end of the video, but before we finish off,

Starting point is 00:10:58 let's take a look at 10 crazy facts about the Walt Disney Company. Number 10. Sully from Monsters Inc. has more than 2.3 million individual hairs, A single frame of Sully took an average of 12 hours to produce. Number 9. Disney pioneered the storyboarding technique for live action film. Number 8. At Disney World, every year, the park finds an average of 6,000 cell phones, 3,500 digital cameras,

Starting point is 00:11:27 and 18,000 hats. Since 1971, 1.6 million pairs of sunglasses have been lost. Number 7. Walt Disney actually decided to do the voice of Mickey Mouse himself, because because he couldn't find anyone else to do it the way he imagined. In 1929, Mickey was the first animated character to ever talk. His first words, hot dog. Number six.

Starting point is 00:11:50 Steve Martin used to work in the magic shop at Disneyland in Los Angeles. Number five. It would take 68 years to sleep in every single one of the rooms at Disney World. Number four, Man in the Forest was a code used by animators to warn colleagues to get back to work, when Walt Disney was coming down the hallway. Number three. Disney World flew its flags at half-mast on the day that Steve Jobs died. Jobs was Disney's largest single shareholder at 7% and was on the board of directors.

Starting point is 00:12:23 Number two, Disney World is second only to the US military when it comes to purchasing explosives in the United States. Number one. The ideas for Wally, Monsters Inc., are Bugs Life and Finding Nemo, came from a single lunchtime brainstorming session in 1994. This was before the first toy story movie had even been finished. So there you have it. That's the history, size and a few fun facts about the Walt Disney Company. But when you think about it all, if Walt himself had given up when the Hollywood Studios had told him no, or when his character got stolen, or at the failure of his first two companies, or when people didn't think of him as a good drawer in high school,

Starting point is 00:13:06 and refused to publish his drawings, none of this would have ever happened. People told him repeatedly that he just wasn't a good artist, but he knew where his passion lay, and you've just seen the end result of his work. Okay, so that's the end of the video, thanks for watching. Feel free to give this a thumbs up, subscribe if you need to the channel, and leave a comment below, sharing your thoughts. If you want to see some more cool stuff, look around on this channel, there's a bit of stuff for everyone. This has been to go-go, you've been watching Cold Fusion, and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Thanks guys, have a good one.

ColdFusion - How BIG is Walt Disney? (The Story of Disney)

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