Grubstakers - Episode 126: Walt Disney and the Disney Company (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

In our final episode of the decade we run down the 2nd largest media conglomerate in the world, the Walt Disney Company. In this first of three parts we start with Walt Disney's birth in Chicago in 1901 and continue all the way up to his company introducing another death star as if its an original plot device. Along the way we learn about a man and an empire that has abused copyright law, bought the US government wholesale to change said copyright law, flirted with Nazism, busted unions, snitched to Joseph McCarthy, and offered family cruises to Jeffrey Epstein's private island. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that former Disney chairman Richard Cook was on the flight logs. Check our patreon for Parts 2 & 3. Here's the referenced Paste article about Walt's Nazi links: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/walt-the-quasi-nazi-the-fascist-history-of-disney.html

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. In five, four, three, two... I got the loot, Steve! Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here by... Steve Jeffries.

Andy Palmer. Yogi Paiwa. And so we're coming to an end of the year, of the decade, and we thought probably the best way to close out this decade is... Well, okay, we're um kind of in a weird mood i i hate that this is the second episode that we have to do this but we just i mean some of the early numbers are coming in and it's starting to look uh we're recording this on friday december 20th and from the early results it's starting to look like uh the rise of sky Skywalker sucked ass. And we're all trying to deal with that.

We're all trying to come to terms with it. The Rise of Skywalker is sitting at 57% on Rotten Tomatoes. But look, it's still early. That's just the exit polls. So it might actually improve once we get the real results from the weekend showings. There might be some regional differences. I mean, I know 57%, it may seem low because Disney likes to wine dine

and everything short of bride, every reviewer that they can and still can't break the not rotten rating. But 57 is still, that's more than 50. So that's... is this because of the anti-semitism charges yeah but i mean yeah as we're alluding to here we're gonna have a three part episode on disney and walt disney and merry christmas you fox yeah so you might be aware that disney bought the star wars franchise and now we just have the rise of skywalker opening to uh really

awful reviews because it turns out when you get like a committee with a billion dollars together and like seven fucking venture capital funds to make a star wars movie uh not always a great art is is produced out of that but you know can you really even call it art at this point right mass market bullshit well it's interesting because you know we're going even call it art at this point right mass market bullshit well it's interesting because you know we're going to divide this into three parts and you know part one will kind of start and go through the biography of the man walt disney himself and you know parts two and three maybe we'll focus more on the business of disney which has become you know one of the major media conglomerates in the united states and around the world but you know the story of walt

disney is like a guy drew a cartoon mouse which would set in motion a chain of events which would ultimately destroy a space sci-fi franchise created 10 years after his death yeah i mean it's like imagine they fly now imagine fucking scott adams of dilbert fame ran a fucking 60 billion dollar media empire you have to explain in this bio we have to get a sense of the man who would go on to produce the vision that would make Steamboat Willie and Tron. Yeah. But we'll get into all that.

Because Walt Disney is a very fascinating character. Clearly he had creative talent, but he was a psychopath, as many creatives are. He was wildly anti-union, at least modestly anti-Semitic, affiliated with the American Bund, which was the American Nazi Party in the lead up to World War II, turned on basically all the animators who made him a millionaire

and denounced them to the House Un-American Committee because they organized a union and he said they were all communist infiltrators for doing that. You know what he said they were all communist infiltrators for doing that um you know what he said when they uh walked out for the first time what is that a one hour loop what is that drop it's from the trailer for that awful fucking movie i mean people have pointed it out but you know it's again this is you know art by billion dollar committee where there's there's seven fucking jokes in hollywood

that people are like yeah this this doesn't offend anybody so this is how this is how the jokes work now it's like the inverse of george carlin's seven dirty words you can't say on tv it's the seven jokes we're only allowed to do. Number one being Epstein didn't kill himself. I'm just imagining if you walk into the theater and like Darth Maul unsheathes the double lightsaber

and then they go like, so that's a thing. So, I guess that's a thing now. We've been able to reduce comedy down. Disney scientists have reduced comedy down to seven jokes. And everything is just a combination of those seven.

Baby Yoda trips and spills his mug. And you hear in the background. So this is really complicated because I'm a socialist. Han Solo's being lowered into the pit to be frozen in carbonite and Leia goes I love you and he goes I mean this is kind of an awkward time

because we can't I mean I want to say I can't do anything about it right now just a straight Woody Allen and walks in on like Darth Vader force choking somebody to death and goes oh I guess I'll come back later. Yeah, a lot of those stock jokes really are just like distilled Woody Allen bits.

Right. Yeah, everything is, you know, a watered down version of something pretty decent. Not to say I... Yeah, the first time. Yeah. Yeah, right. Of course. Right. Pretty decent. Not to say I... Yeah, the first time, yeah. Yeah, right. Of course, right. But I mean, it is...

Like, I remember when Don Rickles died, and I don't know how you guys feel about Rickles, but I know most white people I know, especially comics, love him. Especially the dirty people. Like, oh, Rickles is amazing. I didn't really think he was that funny, but I liked the racism. So, like, that's a very good point, Sean, is that for me, every old person in media was slightly racist. I think almost akin to Rickles is pretty good on-the-cuff riff racism. And so by the time I saw Rickles in his glory, I was like, I've seen a billion of these stupid pieces of shit.

So that is akin to what's going on in Hollywood right now. We're seeing the same thing recycled over and over again. I mean, I don't know. We shouldn't really be shocked. Awkward. Luke Skywalker being like, Leia is so hot. She's standing right behind me, isn't she?

It's the same 10 fucking jokes. But, you know, and we'll get to that. But, you know, with the... They fly now? They fly now! They fly now! The only thing I wish is, I wish we got Kanye West saying that he's the next Walt Disney. That's the only rub I wish we had.

Walt Disney? I was just imagining, like, when the French soldiers in World War II saw the Stucco dive bombers for the first time. They're like, they fly now! The Nazis fly now! They fly now the nazis fly now they fly now um but so you know uh this uh we're gonna divide it again three parts uh this part one that you're listening to we're gonna talk about the original trilogy three parts we'll do prequels yes precisely we're gonna come back later for the prequels uh to talk about We're going to start episode four for some reason. We should just have this be part four, part five and six behind the paywall. That's when we do George Lucas.

Yeah. We do the prequels and then we do the sequels and they're somehow worse than the prequels. But yeah, so on this part one on this part one we're going to talk about the biography of walt disney kind of life to death and uh you know we'll see if uh if we don't quite get through it uh maybe we'll continue that in part two but part two and three is mainly more going to be focused on the company itself because it is interesting where you know walt does create this um multimedia empire within his lifetime then it kind of falls apart but it has since then reconsolidated into one of the what is it four or five major media companies in the world yeah um like uh disney disney corp the overall parent

company has a market capitalization of about 266 billion jesus christ yeah it's fucking insane too but it's one of the largest in the world right they you know they own esbn where like there's so much fucking money in that and then you know now they have disney plus star wars it would take you days to go through all of their holdings that matter to people right right you know how like if like you're like a bus boy at a diner and you work your way up to an owner? To do that in the Disney fucking multiverse, you would need multiple lifetimes to go from the guy that cleans up trash at Disneyland all the way to CEO of Disney, going up through ABC and then ESPN, up through Fox and Marvel, working your way up through the fucking Disney corporate.

Working your way up as a stock boy at a Chinese software company that is owned by a venture capital firm. That is owned by GoPro. That is owned by Disney. Yeah, exactly. I'm just imagining. So you're being the janitor and you burst into the boardroom meeting. And they're like, security, stop it. And he's like, no, no, you got to hear me out.

They fly now go on and that janitor was joss whedon um but so you know we'll start this episode though i actually before we start the actual chronological biography of walt disney one other thing i want to say that we'll get into more on parts two and three is um there's something inherently creepy to me about children's entertainment companies under capitalism like you know if you uh spend some time on google or bing looking at nickelodeon uh dan schneider you might hear some allegations uh you might see some tweets that he uh hid the replies to so people couldn't see, which is actually just draws more attention to the accusations against him. But, you know, there is something where there is a lot of serious cases of pedophilia within the Disney Corporation.

And Sean told me, look into a labor union violations and started there. And then it morphed into the amount of people that have passed away in Disney locations and how they've covered it up. And then it literally went to pages upon pages of pedophilia involving Disney executives, Disney managers, Disney employees, and it made me physically sick. We've covered so much dirt on this stupid podcast, and this is the shit that made me fucking want to hurl at a certain point i found so much disney pedophile stuff that will be on later parts of our disney yogi has a legal pad but it's completely full with dog-eared cages before you guys came here i had fucking red yarn and three whiteboards set up and boy all the connections are there yeah i don't know how you got uh push pins into this aluminum trim in your apartment but you pulled it off it took a lot of work but i got it so it's

it's one of those vans with a free candy written on it but it's got jet engines on the side and the kids go they fly now this laughter hides literally thousands of kids being raped. Well, it's fucked up because, like, look. Woo-hoo. Yeah, I mean, there is something very, like, look, obviously children need entertainment, but when you get to. Do they? Yeah, well.

Do they need entertainment, Sean? When you get to, like, the incentives of capitalism, which is to use entertainment to turn children into walking advertisements, to beg their parents to buy them things, which the parents will in turn buy them out of love for their child that has been unknowingly conscripted into, you know, an advertisement. There's that element of it. And then there's just the fact that it's like if you are a shady fucking person, usually a dude, and you are involved in children's entertainment, that is a good way to gain access to children. And Walt Disney himself, as far as I know, was not directly linked to pedophilia, but the corporate entity he's set up seems to basically operate as a giant Epstein conspiracy. He did have, there are a lot of parallels in his life to Michael Jackson. It's just that there hasn't been the HBO documentary or the lawsuits. But to kind of start from the beginning of, you know, the Walt Disney um uh we watched this uh pbs documentary the american experience they

do bios on various uh prominent people in u.s history they have like what is it a three hour four hour one on walt disney that we watched that was you know it was pretty good though it hid some of the darker stuff but overall a good uh good overview yeah ford for some reason got a much harder lashing on American Experience. But they both followed the same trajectory where it's like, you know, a hard-working farm boy goes into the city with an idea, works his way in, makes it big,

and then slowly becomes more bitter and detached from reality and dies trying to build out an idealized version of his childhood. Man, it's crazy how every fucking billionaire of that era turns into like a howard hughes type every single one at some point just do you have an example of another one howard hughes um oh yeah that's yeah yeah and i'm trying to think though but i mean like you know it's like they go from like i'm a man that's trying to help the world to I'm peeing in bottles watching highlights of my life at some point. Yeah, yeah. Like, Henry Ford, like, Walt Disney built Disneyland and Henry Ford kind of did the same thing, but without like inviting without inviting people well yeah he he built it you remember he built his own little disneyland in his old hometown and made it into this idealized uh turn of the century town which

is exactly what disneyland uh or at least the the main hometown stretch of disneyland was meant to be yeah disneyland is like i mean first of all we'll talk about this more on parts two and three but disneyland and disney world operate as towns, which is why you constantly hear about these labor disputes because they all get carve outs from local government to be like, yeah, you can just be like Walt Disney's vision, it was this fucking psychopath who viewed his employees as his children and felt it was a betrayal when they unionized and struck against him in 1941. And he never got over that. So he sets up Disney World as this like idyllic place where there's no unions and no homelessness and shit.

And that's carried on to the present day. And they try to make, in a lot of biographical takes I was reading for this research, they try to make it out, the more, like the more kid-gloved ones, the main way they protect him is by saying, oh, he's a product of his own time. So he's actually no worse in his racism. Right, right, right. They can't track a fingerprint's views. Kidnapped.

Than an average person. Yeah. I mean, it's a great cop-out to be like, well, I mean, we don't know exactly how people at the time weren't always saying the N-word. Why'd you go with Cosby for that one? I just felt like it would be appropriate. Well, the only difference with him is he ended up being a millionaire and later a billionaire. Yeah. And he had the power to destabilize unions

and not allow black people to work at Disney World for a while, or at least abhor it publicly. Oh, it'll be your word against mine and my lawyers will destroy you. And I mean, to Palmer's point about the Ford getting a bit more of a beatdown in the dock, it's like, well, the outcome product of Disney's designs are making kids happy.

So to be against that on principle is like, you know, just seems shitty, even though, you know, one of the main reasons why I push hard for this episode was because I saw the amount of people that were posting about Disney Plus. And I was like, these fucking mooks don't understand. They're fucking licking the dick of Big Brother. And it just made me so goddamn mad. I'm like, I'm going to take this motherfucker down a peg. Every fucking Baby Yoda meme.

I had to mute Baby Yoda on Twitter. And you can't mute the fucking picture. Sure. Like, it's... Facial recognition isn't that advanced yet. It's like, look, it's the thing that was made in a laboratory to trigger your deep sense of affection for cute things so that you don't kill your baby.

It's that thing that was specifically engineered to get clicks and everyone's just fucking eating it up. But it's actually 50 years old, so he's not really a baby. Fucking idiots. But you know, they modeled that on like hundreds of live Honduran children that they kidnapped.

Well, they were alive when they kidnapped them. Yes. And then they were killed for trademark infringement for looking like Baby Yoda. Look, it's the law. well and again one more thing we'll talk about more on parts two and three is copyright law in this country in particular benefits disney because uh when trademarks were set up by the first u.s congress in 1789 you had a 14-year trademark of intellectual property, which I think is perfectly fair. You think of an idea, you've got 14 years to make money off it, and then it goes into the

public domain. Star Wars should be in the public domain. Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain. But what has happened is, you know, Disney, among other corporations, has heavily lobbied to make it so that they can just have, you know, an idea that some dead person came up with and then seek rent off it forever. Because they're the only ones who can use this idea a dead person came up with. Right. They've made characters that are based off fables that existed for hundreds of years. And then they now own the copyright of their version of it.

But that's the version most people know now because it's the most modern version. So they own Cinderella. Even though you could make a Cinderella that's like black or you know black or something and it'd be like this is cinderella and people would be like i mean it's not it's not the disney cinderella it's right it's like fucking trying to make a new band-aid and people being like well that's not it's a medical adhesive that's not as you know it's fucking bullshit well you know there there are just so many smart writers out there who you know let's just take the star wars franchise which i think the original trilogy is great and there are a lot of smart there are a lot of smart writers who could do very cool things with that ip but instead you know this multi-billion dollar corporation

owns it and they write it by committee so we get they fly now and you just have to accept that because this is the fucking law and it's stupid as hell and you know if anybody has a problem with intellectual property expiring after 14 years just create some new shit it only benefits society to say that stale old ideas pass into the public domain and if you got a problem with that just think of something new and i wasn't even going to bring this up but sean said the word ip and that's kind of like my trigger word today but fucking Kumail Nanjiani's fucking buff bitch ass getting fucking goddamn cut to be a Avenger

or whatever the fuck he's in the new Marvel movie doesn't make any fucking sense we're gonna take a comedian that's pudgy and force him to spend a year plus of his life to look like a superhero because if we don't people might not watch the movie he's in not to fucking discount the fact that the movie he's in. Not to fucking discount the fact

that every movie he's in franchise dies a fucking horrible death. You can't go from Lego Batman to Lego Ninjago and see that fucking die and not be like, hey, maybe Kunimail Nanjiani's a part of the reason why that movie fucking sucks. But the reality is,

is that they could make a person... He is actually the reason that I was like, oh man, there's a new Twilight Zone and then the very first sequence is him being a failed stand-up comedian and I'm like do not care could not I don't need to see I mean he's probably going to be like a

struggling open mic-er who moonlights as a cat man yo but like this would be like you know Apple wanting to do a commercial with Taylor Swift writing a jingle for it they want her in the commercial to be like I don know, Apple wanting to do a commercial with Taylor Swift writing a jingle for it. They want her in the commercial to be like, I don't know, a biochemist. And like, hey, Taylor, would you mind getting a fucking doctorate at Harvard for this commercial?

And her being like, I don't spend six years of my life in college. It's like, we'll give you half a billion dollars. And you're like, well, looks like Taylor Swift is going to MIT now. Like, it doesn't make any fucking sense. And the notion that we're this goddamn committed to a corporation choosing what we watch or don't watch. What hero is he playing? Who gives a fuck is the point I'm trying to make. Nobody knows or gives a shit.

I have no idea what he plays. But if you look at the comic book, it doesn't look like it's going to work. He plays Wins the Lantern. I do just like that Kumail getting buff is the perfect story to set off all of Yogi's trigger a Pakistani hack becoming buff is literally all three of my goddamn fucking this guy sucks now people like him cuz he's buff name one of his jokes you like. That's what I thought. Hindu nationalism intensifies. Modi was right.

Just do the heroin one. That's pretty good. That's it. Yeah, the cheese one's not bad. Yogi sees the picture and is like, you know what, you guys, I'm reconsidering this citizenship bill. I think Modi has a lot of good ideas.

We have to keep these people out of our country. No, I mean, you know, regardless of my... We can't let them in. They're too strong. Regardless of my opinion on Karachi-born Pakistani comedian Kumail Nanjiani... Pedophile. Well, here's the thing. A corporation that protects pedophiles

now pays Kumail Nanjiani to work out right so you might be like oh you can't blame Kumail for taking you know fucking rape money yeah yes I can anyway we've done nearly 30 minutes of me ranting about this and uh we said we'd start with this episode with Walt Disney's bio which we've done absolutely zero so far because of Kumail Nanjiani I've heard that's awesome dude in an Ur Nanjiani, I've heard, that's awesome, dude, in an Urdu accent more than I've heard actual Urdu. The fucking Men in Black movie that came out, his ass was a fucking voice in that.

The bullshit game that he did for Clueless Gamer, his ass was a voice in that. Kumail Nanjiani is creative death. The fact that he did an Oscar nomination is only because fucking liberal white Oscar voters are sympathetic to brown victims and I'm fucking tired of it. Taking Kumail into the Disney back room like,

Kumail, we'll make you buff, but the first question is, can you keep a secret? Now you're gonna see something with some Honduran children and that will determine whether or not we make you buff. They fly now. They shoot the kids out of the cannon and then they say that.

They fly now. They fly now. They fly now. Oh, man. All right. Well, so we'll start the chronological bio of Walt Disney, the man himself that set in motion all of these different chains of events that we're all still feeling the impact of today. It all starts in Chicago, Illinois, 1901. He's born in Chicago, Illinois.

Also where Kumail Nanjiani started doing stand up. So Chicago is the center of Illinois. He's fucking mad about dumb shit now all right john i apologize let's let him say the s i think it's funnier uh but so he uh apparently when he's a child uh he's born in chicago when he's a child the family moves to uh his uncle owned a farm at uh marceline missouri it was kind of like a small town in missouri and um walt disney you know we talked about how you know henry ford and walt disney spent their later life trying to recreate their childhood so walt disney grows up on this farm when he's a young child and he has all this

nostalgia for it because you know being with the animals being near nature and all that bullshit one of the only americans with fond memories of missouri um and then uh so he grows up on this farm initially apparently they sell it uh later in 1911 when walt disney is 10 years old uh he they moved to kansas city missouri and um just according to wikipedia just according to wikipedia walt disney's father elias uh purchased a newspaper delivery route for the kansas city star and kansas city times so another billionaire with a paper route um yeah again just worker yeah quoting from wiki uh disney and walt disney and his brother roy woke up at 4 30 every morning to deliver the times before school and repeat

the round for the evening star after school the schedule was exhausting and disney often received poor grades after falling asleep in class but he continued his paper route for more than six years i really love how billionaires skirt the whole being good at school scene thing sometimes because it like it it only qualifies anyone that's bad at school for the wrong reasons because i certainly remember being like bad at school for various reasons but some of it was my own laziness and being like well einstein was bad at school so i'll be okay you know what i will say it was actually very good at school not not according to the few books i read at that time but clearly i didn't finish them. Yeah, Einstein is at one point, he's like, that shit is just a myth.

I was fucking running shit in math class. Yeah, that makes sense. Mastered calculus when he was like 12 or something. He would also expose his robe to women as a hit on move. That's cool. Cancel Einstein. We'll just go back to the paper route thing. I think what I've learned doing this podcast is if you were to go back in time to the start of the 20th century and spend 50 years murdering every paper boy you saw, you would actually take out half of the most evil billionaires in existence.

Now, wait. So he had a paper route. Do you know what time frame that was? This is around 1911, before World War I. Okay, so that was when a couple of brothers in Kitty Hawk were starting their thing, right? Yes, I guess so.

So, probably one of the headlines that he was delivering. Murder. Good. murder god uh that was found on the piece of paper uh that he left at his residence when he died the wright brothers like three employees are saying that as he flies for like 30 seconds right right orville wilbur yeah if you go to the uh um the rise of skywalker on the credits it has walt disney as a writer because he's the one who contributed that line you know i think you're mentioning about paper boys and how they sometimes end up becoming billionaires i was watching a thing on dame dash jay-Z's Mad Dog, and Dame Dash talks about as a kid he had more money than some of the adults he was growing up around. And it made him feel like they ain't shit.

So the added financial ego that you get from making a couple of dollars a week or whatever, having a paper route, gives you a fucking emboldened ego to be like, man, fuck everything. I'm the shit. And at a young enough age, that's like, that's poison. I mean, like it can turn you into an egomaniac, I think. Or he does. Yeah. And, you know, again, it should be noted like, so his dad, Walt Disney's dad, has all these various small businesses.

Apparently most of them fail. That's actually why I think that we should just have a permanent group of families that stay wealthy. Oh, really? So that way you never have someone permanent group of families that stay wealthy. Oh, really? So that way you never have someone working their way from the top and getting a big ego about it. You just have a permanent aristocracy. Right, right, right. And I think that's the ideal society.

Okay, just cap it at like 50 rich families or something? Yeah. As long as I'm one of those families, I like this plan. Okay. Just construct like a rich ghetto. Just stay in your part. Right, right, right. The town.

Yeah. It will be awkward. Attract their movements. Yeah. It will be awkward when we start licensing grub stakers and have to reverse ourselves on this intellectual property shit. Like, look, you guys, I know it's been 70 years, but we need that Grubstaker's watch money.

So we will come and kill you if you try to bootleg it. But anyway, so he has this paper route. Apparently in 1917, this is Walt is 17 years old or 16 years old, his dad buys part ownership in a Chicago jelly producer, the Ozel Company, and the family moves back to Chicago in 1917. So his dad is the co-owner of a jelly factory. It's like jams and jellies? We're talking about jelly? Yeah.

I think it's like spread for toast and this kind of bullshit. I just want to make sure it wasn't like jelly beans or gelatin or, you know. Well, possibly gelatin. I mean, it's not worse, but it's intriguing. Yeah, he got his first animation experience drawing the horses as his dad murdered them. Do you know much about his dad beyond his life when his son was alive? I mean, according to the American Experience documentary, his dad was kind of a stern, withholding father

who didn't believe in the Disney Corporation, thought he should get a real job. And, you know, because his dad, like we said, he had this paper route. He was working on his uncle's farm. He had this co-ownership in this jelly factory, which would later fail. So his dad had a bunch of businesses fail and that kind of like broke his spirit.

And he took that out on his son and, you know, Walt had a lot of anxiety about, uh, business failure and not wanting to end up like his father and this kind of shit. Yeah. Apparently his,

his dad, like when they first started Disney and they had a little bit of success, he was like, yeah, that's not going to last. And it's sort of why Disney had kind of a reputation, at least around the people that he knew best and earlier in his career before he became rich and bitter he he was known as a very kind of like childlike um uh figure uh very playful and a lot of people figure is kind of like a a rebellion against his dad in that way right because his dad was so stern and strict and all that bullshit um do you guys buy into that you guys think that if your parents are strict you end up becoming more friendly not necessarily but i think it's a possible reaction it i mean it's it's he it's uh like i said there are actually like parallels with michael jackson where you have

kind of the peter pant sure the joe jackson beating up michael yeah yeah like you know and all of the raped children yeah yeah that is a parallel yeah that is a parallel and we don't know but uh walt disney's skin now black um but so uh he apparently as far as art uh training walt disney spends a few months at art school in chicago he takes a court course at the kansas city art school so he does get a bit of you know cartooning training um initially but um when he's less than 18 years old he wants to enlist in world war one around 1917 the united states enters world war one uh and you know gives a generation ptsd to keep the british empire going for another 20 years um but so walt he wants to go over there but he's actually too young to enlist. So apparently he forges a birth certificate and he's able, Walt Disney is able to enlist

in the Red Cross where he's an ambulance driver, but he gets sent over in September, 1918. So by the time he makes it to France, the November armistice is signed. So he doesn't see any combat. He just kind of drives an ambulance around for a few months at the end of the war after the shit's all over.

And then he comes back in 1919 um with according to american experience he had banked 500 dollars uh in 1919 money and he had a job waiting for him at his father's chicago jelly factory steven how much is 500 1919 what we got there oh look it up in In 2019 dollars, that is $600. But so Walt, he works at his father's jelly factory for a bit, but he doesn't want that life for himself. So he actually moves back out to Kansas City. He moves into a house with two of his older brothers, and he gets a job as a commercial artist for a local ad company uh which is apparently a well-paying job you know he was like a little cartoonist and he would do these you know cartoons for various advertisements in the uh roaring 20s so the calculator i use doesn't go back to to oh really that far but uh let's see in 1923 wait what what year is this? 1919? 100 years ago.

That's about $8,000. Jeez. That's more than I thought it was. Yeah, that sounds about right. He's a young man. Yeah. Pretty normal. How old is he in this, Sean?

20 years old? Yeah, he's like 18 when he gets back from World War I. 8 grand, 20 years old. Just hot. But so yeah, no, I mean he has like a fair bit of savings. He works at his dad's jelly factory for a minute, but then he goes out to Kansas City, moves in with his brothers. And the job as a commercial artist for a local ad company was well-

I found a gold watch in a Jerry's body. What you do is you go out in the Where the trenches are You go out in no man's land after the war's over And you look for the corpses that kind of shine in the sun And that's where you find the wedding rings You know the ones who got shell shock are weak No one thinks to look in the teeth

But there's gold there uh but so this is a walt disney gets a well-paying job at this local ad company uh he's able to afford you know uh restaurants uh but he also is able to make nightly trips to the local movie houses this is 1919 1920 around this time and it's really when he starts making these night almost nightly trips to the movie houses that he really gets interested in animation because you know around this time the way it would work is you would go to the movie theater they would have the feature film but before the feature film they would have a newsreel and they would often uh sometimes a short film and often an animated cartoon or two.

Such as the classic Man Looks Through Door. But yeah, so he's going to the theater every night. He really gets into this stuff. And, you know, he's working at the ad company. He's paying him well, but it's, you know, not very creatively fulfilling to kind of do what other people tell you. So the way the American Experience documentary tells the story is he actually goes to the public library

and he gets books on, he gets the book Human Figures in Motion by Edward Mubridges. And he gets also some books on animation and filmmaking. And so he just kind of goes to the public library on nights and weekends and he learns the basics just from library books, which, again, you know, well, I don't have to tell you if you're listening to this that libraries are a good thing. These libraries are good. Yeah. I mean, you know, again, these myths of these self-made men, it's, again,

where did they get the inspiration? They accidentally aided a child of the wealthy. Shut them down. Yeah. It's funny because I actually, a couple years ago, picked up an animation book from the Brooklyn Public Library that was written by a guy who worked on Pinocchio, and I'm realizing now that it was like,

oh, this is probably a guy who had to go on strike. Yeah, right. Write this book. As a product of like disney doing this shit yeah actually the uh striking animators uh during the disney strike some of them had um signs with pinocchio on them said like no strings on me or something yeah i gotta say i saw some of the protest footage of the animators and they had some of the best protest signs yeah yeah it is true yeah they had all their signs would protest signs. Yeah. Yeah. It is true.

They had all their signs would line up to make like one long animal. It's pretty neat. I mean, like don't have people that are very creative protest what you're doing because you're going to get wrecked in the sign business. Yeah. Labor disputes with visual artists are very difficult for management. Just,

just from a PR perspective. This is why everything's graphic. They just keep going viral it's very hard to deal with that kind of sign game this is literally my job and you're making me go out on the street and make signs against you very dangerous um but so yeah so he's uh he kind of learns from these library books the basics, which at this time is, you know, to make a basic animation, you might have done this in school when you were growing up,

each frame of this animation is like an individual piece of white linen paper, and these are put on pegs, and you shoot one frame at a time to create the illusion of motion. I think it's 24 frames per second is the standard at the time. Might have even been a little less than that. So what Walt Disney is doing is he's working at this ad company. But on nights and weekends, he borrows a film camera from his boss at the ad company who apparently has one. And he starts shooting his own cartoons.

He works on them in his free time but he's able to make a few of these cartoons which he actually sells to a local kansas city theater chain these are called the newman's uh newman laughagrams and you can watch them on youtube just very basic uh cartoons um and so he's he's selling some of these and he makes some money doing it, but he also gets his first taste of local celebrity because, you know, everybody in Kansas City, they go to the theater, they see his fucking cartoons. Yeah, I mean, it is one of those

things where you gotta think about how much a movie would cost in that era. And so to be like, oh, we need, you know, an extra three minutes worth of content, well, this guy's gonna sell us a cartoon and I will pay him anything. It doesn't fucking matter. And so it just was an easy risk to take on

because it's just a medium that you wanna pay into because it's just so much cheaper than the movies themselves. And again, according to American Experience, at the age of 20, he's doing this enough that he has enough money saved up. He quits his day job at the ad company and he starts uh laughagrams incorporated he hires four animators he hires a salesman and he

hires a business manager so he's got enough money by this point to start his own business and full-time try to sell these fucking short cartoons to local theaters and you know that's what he's doing his parents moved to kansas city because the jelly factory failed they live with him for a bit he gets a contract for six animated shorts but uh the distributor shifts him stiffs him at the time and uh then he he has this idea to save his little studio by creating what's called Alice in Cartoon Land, which is another kind of, to me, creepy thing that he does, which is an animated short with like this little girl filmed as like a real participant in it, where they actually, he bets this entire studio on this cartoon of this little girl interacting with the cartoon world.

And it's completed, but the studio still goes bankrupt by the time it's completed. In 1923, his first company goes bankrupt. So I'm watching the Newman's Laugh-O-Grams now. They suck. The innovation with, not those, but things that Sean was talking about just now,

was that most things were cartoons in reality but this one was the flip goal because it was someone that was in reality in a cartoon but so you know um his laughagrams incorporated company goes bankrupt in 1923 and walt disney he still has enough money to buy himself a first class train ticket to los angeles because essentially what he thinks is all right well i failed as an animator but now i'm He still has enough money to buy himself a first-class train ticket to Los Angeles. Nice. Because essentially what he thinks is, all right, well, I failed as an animator, but now I'm going to go out to Hollywood and be a director. Right. Like he wants to leave cartoons behind him, but he still wants to, you know, be in show business. It is the move that some of the billionaires we've covered do, which is that when a business enterprise fails, you go to your next thing and go, hey, listen, this thing I used to do,

pretty cool, not around anymore, but you could invest in it. He has enough money to uproot and just totally move like that? Yeah. Well, again, it's like a thing we've talked about ad nauseum is you're kind of a failed stand-up in Seattle and then you uproot, you move to New York and you're like, I'm going to be a podcaster now.

That's right. You use the N-word on stage and you go you know what i gotta get out of this town uh yeah i mean just people who uh have the money and the resources to fail and then buy themselves a first class ticket to los angeles where you know walt disney and so many american billionaires will emphasize the poverty of their upbringing story. You know, they'll say, I grew up on a farm, traditional, you know, hand-to-mouth Americana existence. But clearly this guy had enough money to fucking not only hire six people, who another thing we should just mention here is Walt Disney.

Well, he didn't spend much money hiring those six people. I mean, yeah, so he had the money to fail and then buy himself a ticket and then live in Los Angeles and do all right, which we'll get to. But another thing we should just mention here is Walt Disney as an animator was kind of mediocre. So it was actually the people he hires in Kansas City who really create what will become his best products as far as animation goes. Yeah, he gets his loyal crew to make sure that they build the genius that is what he will be known for, but him as

his own entity, not that good. Yeah, and that's kind of the common thread amongst the most mythologized billionaires, the ones who are portrayed as the quote, singular genius, is just very early on. They, the person themselves isn't actually that much that,

you know, they're clever, but they're not like a singular genius with a vision. They just can get enough really talented people around them and then not pay them as much as they're really worth, but still managed to exert a level of control over them that they can take credit for their work and ideas and build a name for themselves

and a mythology around themselves. Right, so Ub Iwerks, that's his name, he was one of Walt Disney's earliest Kansas City animators who would come with him to Los Angeles and was really the person who drew Mickey Mouse. You know, Walt Disney did the voice and they kind of collaboratively came up with the idea. But this guy, Ub Iwerks, was the animator who made Disney.

And then later on, they would hire more and more animators. But it is something, in particular with the creative fields, where they even talk about this in American Experience, Walt Disney is able to sell very well to these people, hey, we're making art here. We're making magic. And if you are making art and making magic, you know, it's a fulfilling enough experience that you're kind of willing to work nights and weekends doing it and kind of willing

to let somebody violate labor laws and, you know, take the lion's share of the profits that come from it because you feel creatively fulfilled doing such a thing. And we're in it together, you know? We're all only going up. So the creative fields are, as we would not know, doing stand-up comedy, rife for exploitation. Wait, you said Disney did the voice for Mickey originally? Originally for Mickey Mouse.

I didn't know that. Walt did the voice. I remember with the Steamboat Willie, I don't know if we're there yet in our story necessarily, but all of the sound had to be done in one take. So the sound effects, the music, and the voices had to be

recorded at the same time because they couldn't do multi-track recordings. Well, he couldn't... I don't think there was any... I haven't seen all of Steamboat Willie, but from what I can tell, there isn't any, there's whistling, but there isn't. No, there's sound effects. There's the train noise and there's like. No, but I mean, there's no like voice.

There's no dialogue. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But apparently Walt Disney, yeah, he did Mickey and it was his, this is something that covered Walt also in the American experience was that he said it was his alter ego. And so then he would would have conversations with himself where he's like, Hey, how's it going, Walt? Oh, you know, it's going okay.

Yeah, this week's been pretty rough. We're going to shoot it. The rest of his staff is just in the corner, like afraid, but fascinated. Listen, I'm not going to scold you, but Mickey might say something about your work this week. Yeah, let's definitely keep this segment in, because if they sue us for calling Walt Disney a pedophile,

we're going to need this. He talked to himself as the mouse, and you're telling me he didn't molest children. Allegedly. Yeah. But yeah, so he moves to Los Angeles, Waltalt disney does and um his brother his older brother roy uh who we'll talk about a bit more had also moved to los angeles for health reasons so his his brother roy is out there in la selling vacuums and he originally tells walt like hey just

you know let's get us get a square job selling vacuums and walt like spends months trying to get a theater job trying to work his way into the movie studios and he doesn't really have success so he's almost at the point where he'll go all right I'll sell vacuums with with my brother but actually what happens is that um that cartoon that he managed to make uh before uh his previous company went bankrupt, Alice's Wonderland. Alice in Cartoon Land. Alice in Cartoon Land. So that actually gets seen by an L.A. distributor,

a cartoon distributor named Margaret Winkler. Right. Or sorry, a New York cartoon distributor named Margaret Winkler sees that one and gets in touch with Walt about Alice in Cartoon Land. And she offers him $1,500 per episode for 12 short cartoons. So Walt, you know, all of a sudden, even though his company went under, he has still this intellectual property that he can sell to her and use as a highlight reel and then get a contract to, like, if you can make me 12 more of these, will give you 1500 dollars a piece what year is this roughly uh this is probably 23 24 1924 around that time so he's

like mid-20s at this point and he's making 1500 an episode well the first thing he has to do is he convinces his brother roy to go into business with him and this is actually pretty important because his previous company roy was not involved in and roy is um kind of he he ends up handling most all the financial side of disney because you know walt is more of like an all over the place creative type whereas roy does actually put it on so with this deal in today's dollars he's making about 20 000 per episode i don't know what his costs are yeah so this is what his studio is getting right so he has to pay his employees and whatnot. Well, I feel like at this time, because he's underpaying everyone and kind of just making shit happen,

I don't know if he's keeping all the money, but he's certainly spending it on first-class train tickets. And it's like, buddy, fucking go coach. Yeah, I mean, so and he also gets Ub Iwerks, we mentioned. Walt convinces him to move from Kansas City to Los Angeles. He hires him to be the top animator, who, again, is much more skilled at the actual business of animation than Walt is. And he hires some of the old Kansas City crew to move to L.A. I don't know.

I'm watching one of these Laugh-O-Grams, and there's an old man in a picture, and he's looking left and right, and then there's a cat with a gun shooting dough. And it's literally a minute of that just going between the cat shooting dough. And then the old man looking left and right out of a picture frame. And then he's laughing. And the cat's shooting dough again. Is it a cat?

Isn't it Oswald? No, no, this is pre-Oswald. Yeah. The reason Oswald happened is because this woman that Sean's talking about marries some dude and he takes over the contract

to pay Disney for these cartoons and he's like, I don't like this cat shit. I want a fucking rabbit. Right. Yeah, because Felix the Cat was the big thing and so everyone was doing cats and then they were like, let's stop doing cats.

Taylor Swift didn't get that message. Right. So, you know, like Walt, Disney company is selling these little shorts that again, they're showing at the start of movie theaters, but there are also competing cartoons, which include Felix the Cat, which we uh get to in a second here um but so you know walt actually is able with this contract from margaret winkler to you know hire his old kansas city animators hire some

locals he has about a dozen employees by 1925 and in 1925 he gets married to his wife lillian who was an inker what's called an inker at his company, where the only jobs at his studio at this time and for most of his studio's existence, as long as he's alive, for women are inkers. Where, you know, the men will do the drawings and then the women will ink in the drawings because, you know, again, you need hundreds or thousands of frames to make an actual animation. So there's a lot of tedious grunt work in that. And Walt throughout his entire life would really look down on everybody who does this grunt work. Whereas he just thinks, you know, the actual original illustrators are the creatives. I mean, Lillian Starr is an inker, but she didn't end up inking, if you know what I mean. But so she did some more grunt work, if you know what I mean, huh? But so...

She did some more grunt work, if you know what I mean. Louie and his wife. Oh. What are you, not paying attention to the show we're doing? Don't answer that honestly. For a three-minute... How long are these anyway? Usually about three minutes.

Three minutes? So that's like 4,300 frames. Jesus, really? For a three-minute... How long are these anyway? Usually about three minutes. Three minutes? So that's like 4,300 frames. Jesus, really? Yeah. At 124 for a second. Right. What?

That's fucking nuts. Well, there were women who were just losing their eyesight making Snow White. Inking became even more crucial once everything became colorized. Right, right. And so women who were just seen as doing menial labor were, you know, losing their eyesight, scraping together pennies because it was the Great Depression. Right, because Snow White comes out like 1937, I think.

So yeah, it's like, I don't know how long they spent developing that movie, but yeah, it is right after the Great Depression. Yeah, yeah. There was even a story of one woman who, she had a kid or a couple of kids and then her husband ran off and just, I don't know, to look for work

because he didn't want to support the family in the Depression. And so she was not eating her lunches that she could save food to bring home to her kids and like passed out during a break once like that's how hard they were working them and it's like if you if if you say it like if she went on to become a walt disney like that would be the horrible tale of hardship right right that she had to overcome but instead it's like well that was the cost of uh walt disney doing business like it's just a side story to like his path to greatness oh yeah and i mean you know that's a story we know there's probably countless amount of tales of people that just suffered horrendously to make it so that we have fucking snow white

yeah right and you know we'll get to all that but it like those stories are exactly why in 1941 there would be the disney strike which really changes the trajectory of the company and of walt disney's life but it was something where um uh according to various sources i found up until about 1936 he would actually actually, Walt Disney would cut the animators in on about 20% of the profits as like a bonus. But in 1936, he stops this practice. And then, you know, by the late 30s, early 40s, there is huge wage disparity in his company where he, again, he thinks all these anchors and people are just grunts or anybody can do that shit. Who cares? uh, are just grunts or anybody can do that shit who cares. So they are making, you know, like $12 a week, whereas his highest paid animators are making $300 a week and he's making,

you know, a thousand, a thousand, $500 a week in, um, uh, contemporary money. So there is huge wage disparity eventually in this company. Um, but even before we get to all that by 1926 they're making these alice uh shorts alice in cartoon land um they're making a new one every 16 days at the start of 1926 so they're they're making good money doing that and around the same time they uh they changed the name from disney brothers studio to walt disney studio which you know i guess now that we know it it's more memorable but it is kind of dickish to uh apparently the way it worked was walt just took his brother aside and said yeah so we're changing the name from walt from disney brothers to walt disney studios yeah like clearly you know megalomaniacal personality who's older roy or walt do we know

roy yeah roy's the older brother oh man dude just getting cut out of the name by your younger brother hard apparently like roy was uh well i mean he was he was the much more buttoned down guy but got kind of a thrill from like walt's antics and so yeah i can see that that makes sense you kind of follow him around in these things. Hey, Walt. Show up at the club together. Where are the bitches at? I totally understand the aesthetic of, hey, little bro, go do this crazy shit.

Fuck it, I will. It was like the square, like, oh, Walt, you can't kidnap those Honduran children. Watch me, bro! Whoa! I own the mayor! You can't touch me! Roy goes to the studio

and he tells him that he's playing with the Honduran kids. He's like, uh, I don't think you can do that. He's like, I can't! I am the law! I can't! I am the one that knocks! Cool!

But yeah, so like we were saying, they're making this new Alice in Cartoon Land every 16 days or so but felix the cat is their main competitor as far as you know other cartoons and walt would apparently go and watch all the competition and study all the competition so masayoshi-san he's got all of his competitors products in his office exactly um but yeah so uh he uh creates feeling or sorry he creates oswald the rabbit or walt disney's studio comes up with oswald the rabbit this is their competition to felix the cat because it's

all cats so they're like let's have a rabbit right and so apparently the laughogram cat that was shooting doe with a gun wasn't the runaway hit he hoped it would be so i watched the thing on oswald the rabbit on um youtube and uh it talked about how like it was in partnership with universal and basically universal was calling the shots on uh what the rabbit would look like and what it would be named as well and that was because lily um who's a you know what i don't know if anything i'm saying is true but all i'm trying to get at is that uh oswald the rabbit was in partnership with another company i think it was universal and that it was what led to its demise and walt disney being fired from the entity because they wanted

to cut him out right yeah it's funny too because some of his biggest business failures early on were just that he was too much of an asshole. Like the big thing that caused this collapse and caused him to cut it out was that no one wanted to work with him anymore because he was just such a dick. Right, all the animators signed a contract to be like, yeah, we'll work for you without Walt basically.

And Walt warned the guy firing him being like, well well if they can do that to me they'll probably do it to you too and that did technically happen a few years later but the fact that walt had the foresight to be like listen they might be fucking me now but if you give them enough power they'll fuck you later well so in fairness with this story what actually happens here is margaret winkler we mentioned is his original distributor she marries a new husband who's named Charles Mintz is her new husband. And he has the idea to cut Walt out because his distributors own the intellectual property to Oswald the Cat. So at some point they're like, we don't need Walt here. He's just taking up a fat salary.

We could just take his animators and make Oswald the cat without him. And the only reason that happens, according to the American Experience documentary, is a ton of Walt's animators are frustrated at this point because a bunch of the old Kansas City hands who had helped him get started had moved out there to LA and worked without pay in order to, you know, help him get off the ground by just you know working uh nights and weekends working into the night throughout the weekends um and initially again working without pay and walt was taking most of the money and all of the credit right he was being i am the fucking genius so it was just entirely him treating his animators like shit to the point

where and you know underpaying them and exploiting them to the point where they uh took this offer from his distributor who said to them hey i'll hire you out we can cut out walt uh let's do this and make oswald the cat ourselves and so walt gets cut out rabbit there was yeah oswald the rabbit as i said biggest challenges early on were just being too big of an asshole for people to want to work with them. Small feeling. So Disney eventually got Oswald the Rabbit back. And I'll quickly mention this and then we'll go back to his bio.

But in 2006, Bob Iger traded the football host of ABC, Al Michaels, to NBC. Because Al Michaels wanted to work with John Madden. And so for this trade, Bob Iger was like, we'll give you guys Al Michaels if you can give us Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. And the NBC people were like, who? He's like, oh, it's a cartoon from 80 years ago. It's really important for the Disney Corporation. Like, yeah, we don't give a fuck about an entity

we're never going to use. And so once they did that, they started selling Oswald the Lucky Rabbit merch at Disney in 06. And to Iger's credit, the Disney heiress was like, the one thing Bob Iger said he would do was bring back Oswald the Rabbit,

and he did that. Yeah, you know that rabbit that was originally drawn in 1926 it's really important to our property rights that nobody be able to draw that without permission from the disney corporation yeah i mean intellectual property law is just such fucking bullshit well and disney is bolstered every uh you know 20 40 60 you know 80 every every time there's shit's about to come up that they can't own mickey mouse anymore they're like we're gonna give politicians 150 grand to make sure that we can

own this shit longer yeah get a new mouse you fucking parasites they also like just the the jump from oswald to mickey is so small they're like talking about how it was just such a a breakthrough to make mickey mouse and it's all that they really did is they gave him a longer snout and round ears. Right, right. And I guess they made his body more circular, and that was it. And that's literally what happened the first time, is he lost Oswald the rabbit, so he just remixed it as Mickey the Mouse, and it was much more successful.

Mortimer the Mouse, and then someone was like, no. His wife, apparently. Yeah, Waltney called it mortimer the mouse and his wife was like no that's stupid let's call it mickey um and then that was of course much more successful but it's like okay so what if we just struck down the mickey mouse copyright like okay let's disney you have what 200 billion dollars in assets i think you can think of a new fucking mouse once you once you go back to a cat I'm sure you'll think of something hey cue up that drop you know listen here's my new pitch it's a mouse and it's got wings and trust me this mouse it can fly now they fly now they fly now they fly now they fly now God, what a fucking abomination.

Weird. He's whistling in the sky with wings. It's not sailboat Mickey. This is abhorrent. It's blimp rat binky i think it's the uh the two greatest moments in mickey history in disney history but so um ub iworks was one of his old kansas city animators who actually stuck with him. Many of the others left when they were bought out by the distributor. But he has a small crew of loyalists around him. Ub Iwerks is the one who draws Mickey Mouse.

Walt Disney does The Voice. We mentioned his wife, Lillian. Walt's wife comes up with the name Mickey Mouse. And so they put together actually two of these Mickey Mouse shorts. But it's really adding sound is, you know, the innovation that, uh, to Walt's credit, he does come up with where the movie, the jazz singer comes out in 1927, which, you know, up until that point, racism was silent

and they, there was actually a turning point in America when they added an audio dimension to discrimination against African Americans. You know, back in the day I had to imagine the N-word. Now I can hear it. They didn't say N-word though, obviously. Right. No, it was like a transformative experience because all of the illiterate people

now knew what that word on the screen was because a guy was saying it instead of just putting it on the subtitles oh it's that word i say all the time they didn't need the audience didn't have to say it when the right appeared on the screen anymore they didn't have to like in the silent movie era they would have to bring a black man to the front and point at him when that word came on the screen oh okay now i get the context it was the theaters could save so much money

because they didn't have to hire a black man to call the N-word when they were... Hire's a strong word. I mean, let's be honest here. That man was there, but he was not paid for that job. But yeah, so the jazz singer with Al Jolson in Blackface comes out in 1927, and this is the first wildly successful uh

talkie movie you know sound movie that would be a great you know not job but position for a black person of that era all i gotta do is stand at the front of the theater and people say the n word at me and i don't get beat up every day i might take it yeah it's like when uh when when they're screening birth of a nation you you can make like $5 a week if you just stand in like one of those cages they use to protect divers from sharks. You got audience members coming up to him after a show like, hey, man, I love your performance, man. Every time I come here, you stand and I think to myself, I finally get what they're putting

on that damn screen. And he became the mayor they're like we told you don't put let them put their hands through the cage it is very dangerous oh man after we screen this movie about reconstruction um but yeah so uh the jazz singer comes out and walt has the idea to add sound to the Mickey Mouse cartoons. And so they make two Mickey Mouse cartoons, which don't really go anywhere. But then they actually spend all their money. Apparently, Walt and his brother Roy had bought some nice cars when their studio was initially successful.

Boss. Yeah. Boss. Yeah, so they bought these nice cars, and Walt actually flies out to New York and finds one of the most advanced sound studios at the time and calls his brother and says, hey, we have to do sound for this Mickey cartoon. You know, sell my car, sell your car, let's put everything in this. So, yeah, Walt goes out to New York, and he goes to the sound studio, and they spend, you know, all their their remaining capital and they make Steamboat Willie is the first Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound and Steamboat Steamboat Willie premieres at a New York theater in November 1928 when they're sorry when they're making Steamboat Willie like he already knows it's going to fucking found their house basically and like just that okay they're making it and suddenly like lose yourself comes on if you had one moment with the whistle in the background one opportunity

and yeah so they walt spends three months in new york city trying to find a distributor but what they actually do manage to do is find a local theater to screen uh steamboat willie and it's such a hit with the audience apparently the audience like tries to demand they delay the feature film to like screen stream steamboat willie again because it is innovative my cartoons weren't good they were just first uh it was innovative in that you know they um incorporated sound effects into these visual gags of a cartoon where you know they have the train whistles and all that other bullshit or the steamboat whistles excuse me right um so the steamboat willie is such a success that within months of its November 1928 debut, Mickey Mouse is a celebrity. Um, so, you know, and this really pays the bills from this point on because what they do, uh, uh, Walt and Roy Disney, they learn their lesson about getting fucked out of Oswald the rabbit or Oswald the cat or whatever he was. It's a rabbit. It was a rabbit. So they learned their lesson about getting fucked out of that.

So they hired this guy, Kay Kamen, to be in charge of all licensing and distribution rights for Mickey the Mouse. Mickey the Mouse is a celebrity by 1929. So Kay Kamen is very sharp and actually makes them an assload of money by going around and licensing Mickey Mouse very strategically including these Mickey Mouse watches which apparently become the most popular watch in the United States and you know very popular worldwide Mickey Mouse lunchboxes all this other bullshit that pops up 1929 1930 it's why the Apple watch has the Mickey Mouse fucking

face put face type because that's interesting. Yeah, because that entire partnership between Apple and Disney is through that Pixar connection. But it's like, I don't know about Steve Jobs, but Mickey Mouse was so iconic that Apple wants to maintain that iconic level of genius that they don't have. Yeah, just 12 years later, Woff and SS members would get to take them off the hands of the soldiers they executed at Malmedy. They inspired the sequel, Screamboat Willie. But yeah, so and also these Mickey Mouse clubs start springing up where, you know, people will get together and go to the theater for these Mickey Mouse clubs, but really just very quickly demand explodes for Mickey Mouse shorts. So they're making a lot of these Mickey Mouse short cartoons, but also the licensing. This is what really makes them millionaires. And, you know, again, Ub Iwerks is the main animator. Kay Kamen is the licensor. So, you know, Walt and Roy Disney

certainly did some work, but it is just, the mythology is always just rewritten as one man had a vision, Walt Disney did everything, and the actual reality is a lot of smart people

around him did the vast majority of the work. One man yelled at a lot of people around him. Actually, that makes sense that the apple watch then had the mickey mouse thing on it because that's more or less what happened ended up happening with the iphone as well where they're like steve jobs had a vision and a lot of chinese

slaves um but so you know by uh 1931 this is the studio's full-time job is making these mickey cartoons for the most part um and walt transitions uh more from leaving the creative side to being an overseer where everything that comes out of walt disney studios he will have final sign off on but it's more just independent teams of animators are coming up with shit and then showing it to walt and he's saying oh that's good i'll take credit for that yeah i'll make you know uh 99 of the profits on that um but also it should be noted apparently in 1931 his wife has a miscarriage and he has a nervous breakdown and he's able to treat his nervous breakdown by going on a cruise to Panama and Cuba which again 1931 is the height of the Great Depression

so these kinds of breakdown treatments were not available to all Americans at this time yeah and the American experience like it's the first time Disney got to take a real vacation it's like if that's a real vacation I have never had a real

vacation and I don't think I ever will be able that's a real vacation, I have never had a real vacation. And I don't think I ever will be able to have a real vacation. And so, you know, because of these Mickey Mouse cartoons, they're able to hire, you know, an animation staff of about 200 plus people. And in 1934, Walt Disney will pitch to this animation staff the idea for Snow White. Snow White will debut at the end of 1937, but it's basically he takes one of the grim fairy tales and remixes it, which he will do throughout his life, the idea of Snow White. But he has this animation team of more than 200 people, and the story of Snow White is basically they make over 200,000 separate drawings on this thing.

Jeez. And Snow White, you know, it holds up. I remember watching it as a child. You have to imagine watching it in the theater in 1937. It is a leap of technology beyond anything people had seen up to that point. Now, the version that you saw, though, Sean, and I haven't seen the movie for no real reason,

but is that an updated version? Are these remasters that we've seen growing up? Well, no, the original was like a real, even a remaster, all that means is that they went back to the original frames. Right, they updated the colors and stuff. Like, I know it's the original, like, drawings and all that stuff, but is it brighter, the versions that we saw growing up?

It's probably, yeah, I mean, well, the versions that we saw growing up were in, like, VCRs, and so, you know, the versions we saw were probably much shadier than what they actually saw in the original theater at the time. Oh, really? Oh, interesting. And one other thing to keep in mind though, is it's not just 200,000 pictures. It's 200,000 pictures in the movie.

But one of the things that if you ever do animation really gets driven home is that you're not going to have the whole movie, uh, all, you're not going to be able to come up with the whole movie beginning to end and just start drawing things and move linearly like you're you've got to do like uh practice scenes cut things move things around you know there's there's uh probably i don't know 10 times more the number left on the cutting room floor yeah 10 times. I mean, not of like the whole process of finalizing all the frames themselves.

But like until you get to a perfect frame, you got to fucking practice doing the arm a billion times. I mean, not a billion, but every frame must have at least five trials. So you think they had two million individual drawings? Certainly in terms of like certainly in terms of like from character drawings concept drawings

oh yeah absolutely apparently this is why some of the animators would sneak like nudity and other bullshit in there it's so fucking tedious doing like all these frames for every single thing that you could just like sneak a little naked picture in there and nobody will notice it until DVD pause is invented.

Wasn't that an urban myth? Or it was like they just put it in one frame for something Disney was looking over and then he caught it? Because they just wanted to test how sharp his eye was? No, there was... I'm spacing on the name, but there is... Who's the right mind would want to challenge this man?

This way. I mean, maybe this was like when things started to really go sour nah that sounds like like a myth dog that sounds like animators would do it

they'd be like oh they did it so they could test his bowl I mean when they were like previewing it to him and then he was like never do that again

but you know I never would have caught it if it weren't a naked woman in a Vulture article about whether or not Disney was racist sexist and or froze his head there

they're the talk about this book that uh gabler wrote i don't know exactly the name of the book but gabler cites a meeting in which disney referred to snow white dwarves as a n-word pile and another in which he used the term pick a ninny you guys know what pick a ninny means uh it's a slur for african-american children well would you look at that uh yeah i don't know why sean's the only one that knew that in this room but uh i think we all know why sean's the only one that knew that in this room um but anyways i wanted to before we run out of time on part one i will just say for snow white you know it has its debut in december 1937 apparently clark gable was weeping at the premiere. It was like a real thing.

It was, up until that point, the highest grossing movie of all time, even though it ran like six times over the original budget. And Roy, Walt's brother, had to keep telling Bank of America, who lent them the money, like, hey, we just need a little more time. You know, it was kind of, people thought it was going to fail, but he actually did manage to make it all work together. And it should just be noted from Snow White, he made a lot of promises to the animators about, you know, bonuses. And again, he just canceled shares of the profit in 1936, made a lot of promises to the animators about bonuses, which he never delivered on. According to the animators, they were working 12 hour days. The Ink Girls were working 12 hour days, 8 AM to 8

PM. And a lot of the other animators said they were working even more than that 7 AM to 10 PM. So this is, you know, just to get the movie done. So, uh, another animator, I watched his like talk about the strike on YouTube where he says that Walt, because in the new deal, they finally introduced the 40 hour work week right walt would tell his animators hey just say you worked 40 hours so they would work 50 hours or 48 hours or whatever and then they would just mark that they worked 40 hours so they made all of these sacrifices to make snow white and then as we'll talk about on part two that phrase isn't completely unfamiliar to me i'm sure i've heard some variant of that before um but we'll talk about on part two phrase isn't completely unfamiliar to me i'm sure i've heard some variant of that before

um but we'll talk about on part two the december or the 1941 strike at uh disney which is a day that will live in infamy yeah the uh but a lot of that is just grievances that build out of snow white where they do all of this fucking work for him and he gives this he takes all his animators into an auditorium and gives a speech that is basically like if you don't like the way your life is going you just gotta work harder perfect

he gives like a Jordan Peterson speech we'll read some of it on the next part this sounds so much like a Silicon Valley oh yeah like startup it was such the most dickish, just baiting speech that caused union agitation to spike and union membership to just go through the roof.

I mean, it really does feel like Adam Neumann WeWork-esque. It's just a huge fucking startup on a gamble that is, we're going to make cartoons for kids. Okay, Walt. Yeah. Well, it's like, and so by this point, by the point of the strike, the Disney studio had become very stratified into a hierarchy

where they had a private gym and a private spa for all the highest ranking people. And in the speech, Walt says something to the effect of, you know, I think uh ranks and privileges are distributed based on how valuable you are to society in the company and so it makes sense that you know the people with the more privileges are much more valuable to the organization but of course it wouldn't function without all the people doing the so-called grunt work but and if you want to experience that today work for microsoft that is exactly how it was when i was there yeah um but so you know we're we're running out of time on part one here so we will pick up in part two with the um the story of the um the

strike of 1941 which i think is a turning point and then we will keep going until walt's death from lung cancer uh in 1966 and then continue in part three with the history of the Disney company after that. But before we run out of time on part one here, I did just want to mention Walt Disney's connection to the Nazi party. Oh. Because it's worth talking about. I guess most people have maybe the image in their head that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite, you know, these sorts of things. maybe the image in their head that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite,

you know, these sorts of things. And the story is a little complicated, but just according to Paste Magazine, Art Babbitt is an illustrator we'll talk a bit more about next time. He was one of the highest paid illustrators who eventually joined the Strikers against Walt Disney. But according to him, he said that, quote, in the immediate years before the U.S. entered World War II, there was a small but fiercely loyal, I suppose legal, following of the Nazi party.

There were open meetings anybody could attend, and I wanted to see what was going on myself. On more than one occasion, I observed Walt Disney and Walt Disney's lawyer there, along with a lot of prominent nazi affiliated hollywood personalities disney was going to these meetings all the times all the time and this was of course the german-american bund which is also called the american nazi party and they were particularly prominent before the united states entered world war ii um on the side of the Allies. That seems totally legit.

I don't see anything wrong with that. You know when you and your lawyer roll up to a German gang of people saying white nationalism is a good thing? And also, according to the same Paste article, Walt Disney personally hosted Nazi filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl when she came to promote her film Olympia in 1938, a month after the infamous assault on jews known as kristallnacht the night of the broken glass in which a pogrom was initiated against german jews which uh again even this visit with lenny reifenstahl was condemned by

large segments of the american press at the time. Wow. Because, again, it came a month after a massive pogrom against Jews in Germany had just been carried out. Was she allowed to use the gym? She was there promoting her film Olympia, which she made in 1938 to glorify Hitler's Nazi Olympics in 1936. Apparently they traded notes as filmmakers and all that other bullshit. But just according to the same Paste article, Walt gave her a grand tour of his studio and Reifenstahl even commented that,

it was gratifying to learn how thoroughly proper Americans distance themselves from the smear campaigns of the Jews, unquote. Yeah. And so apparently a possible explanation, well, one explanation the Paste article offers is that Disney wanted to get his films back into Germany after in 1938 Hitler had banned American films from Germany because Hollywood was, quote, controlled by the Jews.

But you can imagine if he attends Nazi meetings, he probably has some sympathy for Leni Reifenstahl and her style of filmmaking, as well as the Third Reich in general. So this is Zippity-Doo-Dah from, as we mentioned, a film that never quite made it to Disney Plus called Song of the South. And when it premiered in 1946 in Atlanta, the star of it, the man who is singing Zippity-Doo-Dah iconically, was not allowed to attend the premiere because it was a segregated theater

and the song went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. That guy get union wages though? I doubt it. The black actor in that, did he get union wage? Did he get SAG? Just put down 30 hours.

Do you get fucking residuals? Do you get royalties on that song? You know, to compliment Sean's... Oh, his name's James Basket, by the way. To compliment Sean's Hitler, I mean, Nazi Disney connections, if you look up all the world is a stage, Walt Disney was Hitler,

oh boy, that's a rabbit hole you're not going to get out of because it's literally people that believe that Walt Disney is Hitler not there's Hitler and Walt Disney that Walt Disney is Hitler Joseph Goebbels is actually Roy Disney and that

they could figure this out because their ears are the same and their teeth are kind of similar and I love when people do like side by side ear comparisons because their ears are the same. And their teeth are kind of similar. Oh, I love when people do side-by-side ear comparisons. Oh, yeah, and they've got the fucking letters and the numbers. And so if you look up all the world's stage, Walt Disney was Hitler. Boy, that's three hours of your life you're never going to get back.

Well, two great artists. I think we can agree on that. but it is something where you know two two people who were never that who who wanted to be great artists but weren't that good so they had a bunch of other people do all the parallels are there they uh they paid their employees the wages of destruction yeah i mean listen conspiracy theories are fun but they're like quicksand. You can get stuck in them. But, you know, so Walt Disney was, at least for a time, affiliated with the Nazi Party. After the war, he would testify to the House Un-American Activals, which we'll talk about a bit more on part two.

But it should just be noted that during World War II, actually, Disney is kept in business partly by the United States government because he does make propaganda films for the U.S. government and against the Nazi government. Against himself. Yes. Throws people off the trail. But we will pick up on part two with the animator strike against him and some of the labor concerns, and then we will finish out up until the 1966 death of Walt Disney, and then we'll talk a bit more about the Disney Corporation itself, all the various labor violations,

the, let's say, underage network that Yogi has volunteered to stay up all night researching because we want to get the full Rust Coal effect. So we're recording this Friday night. We will come back tomorrow, Saturday morning. And Yogi has promised us he will not sleep at all before we're recording this Friday night we will come back tomorrow Saturday morning and Yogi has promised us he will not sleep at all before we begin recording boil up

some Mountain Dew it's gonna be a long night but is there anything else before we end this particular part of the Disney story Palmer this is one of my favorite parts in Fantasia oh yeah

this is Palmer This is one of my favorite parts in Fantasia Oh yeah Those fucking brooms And with that That's been Grubstickers I'm Yogi Poliwal I'm Andy Palmer I'm Stu Jeffers I'm Sean P. McCarthy Parts 2 and 3 of Disney are going to be on the Patreon. We will be skipping one free SoundCloud episode

for the new year and for Yogi's wedding. But look for us to resume the regular schedule January 7th, 2020. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting and have a wonderful new year. Happy holidays. Boil up some Mountain Dew.

It's gonna be a long night.