WHAT WENT WRONG - Walt Disney. A Primer

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

In this atypical episode, Chris takes you down the Walt Disney rabbit hole, setting the table for our episode on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". Join us for an exploration of the childhood and early career of the man who created the House of Mouse, up until he decided to create his first animated feature-length film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a medium-defining foray into a pioneering new art form. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, and since my fearless co-host, Lizzie Bassett, is still on maternity leave, we're going to be doing things a little bit different today. In support of our coverage of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, we've decided to release this companion episode, ideally you'll listen to it first, that serves as a primer on the upbringing and early professional career of Walt Disney up until he decided to make his first feature film. We hope that this will show you both what a risky and revolutionary film Snow White really was. If you're interested for some direct links to many of the short films that we'll discuss in this episode,

head to our Patreon, www.com slash what went wrong podcast, and search for Snow White, extra credit, and you will find a breakdown of many of the short films discussed here. Again, this is free. It's in our public page. That's www.patryon.com slash what went wrong podcast. All right. Now let's dive in to the story of Walt Disney,

read by me, but given a very helpful and necessary assist, With sound and music by David Bowman. Once upon a time, far from the forests of Germany, across the Atlantic Ocean, in the American Midwest, there lived a young boy who loved to draw. Walt Disney, born in Chicago, Illinois on December 5, 1901, was the fourth of five children, and his childhood was, well, Disney-esque. He'd lived in Missouri for a spell on a farm, and he spent time with the animals roaming the countryside, drawing, always drawing. It was clear. He was very talented. In fact, a neighbor

paid him a quarter for a portrait of himself and his horse. In 1910, Walt's family headed to Kansas City, and there Walt fell in love with vaudeville theater and Charlie Chaplin. He wasn't much of a student, but he honed his art skills drawing caricatures for a local barber in exchange for free haircuts. Being the early 20th century, by nine, he had multiple jobs. He delivered newspapers, prescriptions, and he sold concessions on trains. He completed one year of high school back in Chicago and dropped out. So take that, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Disney dropped out his freshman year of high school. In 1918, a then 16-year-old Walt lied about his age so he could join the American Ambulin Corps, the Red Cross. The war ended before he shipped up.

off, but ship off he did to France, where he drove around military officials and delivered food, and in his spare time, he drew and sent cartoons back to the United States. But no one wanted them. In the fall of 1919, Walt returned home. He shacked up with his brothers in Kansas City, that's Roy and Herbert, along with Herbert's very kind and patient wife at their parents' house who had moved out of state. Now, Walt wanted to be a political cartoonist, but that didn't pan out, So he worked as a commercial artist doing ad work. And here he formed what would become arguably the second most important relationship in his early professional life after his brother Roy,

and that's with Ub iWorks, born the same year as Walt and a Kansas City native, Missouri, that is, and Walt's foil. Where Walt was outgoing and extroverted, a colleague described Ub by saying, where two words would barely suffice, he used one. The two opposites attracted and they got along swimmingly. In December of 1919, Disney and IWorks were laid off, so they started their own business. IWorks Disney commercial artists. Because if they said Disney IWorks artists, somebody might think they were a commercial optical company.

Now, this didn't take off, and soon they were back at more steady jobs within the Kansas City Slide Company. And this is where they discovered something far more interesting than just cartoons. Cartoons that moved. Now, simultaneous to Walt's coming of age, animation is coming of age. In 1906, humorous funny faces, a blackboard stop motion film showing two humorous funny faces, a gentleman and a lady, is released. In 1908, French animator Emil Cole's Fantasmagmaigory, which featured stick figures coming in and out of the frame in funny situations, was released.

But no one was doing it quite like Windsor McKay. His films, including Little Nemo from 1911, How a Mosquito operates 1912, Gertie the Dinosaur, 1914, and The Sinking of the Lucitania, bit of a tone shift on that one, from 1918, was highly technical and very naturalistic. But these were all short films, very short films. And most films were. The first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, at a mere 60 Minutes, had only been released in 1906.

This was a very, very new movie. medium. But the world was warming up to animation. Mickey Mouse's predecessor in a lot of ways, Felix the Cat, was introduced to the world by Otto Mesmer and Pat Sullivan by way of an animated short called Feiline Follies in 1919. The character was compared to Charlie Chaplin, and it became the first animated character to be licensed for commercial products, and commercial products needed animation. So Ub and Walt worked on one-minute ads that were shown at movie theaters created using stop-motion animation of paper cutouts with riveted joints. But they were interested in something far more sophisticated.

Cell animation, or celluloid animation, was taking off in New York. Now, if you're unfamiliar, cell animation uses a still static background, let's say a painting, and then transparent celluloid sheets were laid on top. The moving elements of the image were drawn on the transparencies, overlaid across the background, and then a frame was captured. You then rotated in a new transparency and drew the character one frame later. Rotated, next movement. Thus, you only had to redraw the elements that moved.

Now, Ubb and Walt learned everything they could about the technique, including obsessing over a particular book that you can still check out. Animated cartoons, How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development by E.G. Lutz. Walt wasn't just an animator, and as we'll learn, he'll smartly see the limits of his skills as an artist, but he was an incredible entrepreneur. He'd done work for Frank Newman, a local theater owner, and so he made the Newman laughograms and convinced Frank to show them locally. These are locally relevant comedy shorts, one poked fun at how the streetcar service was super slow, by showing a waiting character grow a beard in the meantime. Now, Newman loved them, and he paid Walt

$150 for the first and commissioned more. They were the perfect filler between coming attraction slides and an intermission. They ran one to two minutes tops, and Walt mistakenly priced them at cost, something he would continue to do for quite some time, so he didn't make a dime. Walt was also seeing the limitations of his job at the slide company. He tried to rope them in on the animated shorts business, but they weren't interested. But Walt wasn't satisfied with one-off jokes. He wanted to tell stories.

So he decided to attempt a longer short. aiming for six or seven minutes, inspired by the work of New York animator Paul Terry. You can see Paul Terry's work on YouTube, and you can really see the influence that they had on early Disney. In the early to mid-1920s, Terry was animating spoofs of Aesop's fables. It's important to note that his characters often included mice, and in the coming months and years, Walt and his colleagues would actually trade for copies of Terry's old prints and physically cut them apart to study them more closely. So Walt recruited three teen boys to basically work as his interns and apprentices.

He couldn't pay them, but he trained them. Together, over the course of six months, they created a six-minute short called Red Riding Hood. And this was proof enough to Walt. Animation was the future. He quit his day job, and he founded a company called Laugh-O-Gram Films. He raised $15,000 in funding, and expanded his team. He hired Rudolph Eiling, Hugh Harmon, Carmen Maxwell, and Otto Wallaman, who joined, of course, Walt and of iWorks.

His brother Roy, meanwhile, shipped off to Arizona because he'd come down with tuberculosis. They cut a deal with a New York-based company to deliver six animated films for $11,000. They grinded. Five films in a year. The four musicians of Bremen, Goldilocks and the Three Bears,

Puss in Boots, Jack the Giant Killer, and Cinderella. Unfortunately, that New York company went bankrupt. Lafogram films got a measly $100 deposit out of them. So Walt broke, bags, borrows, and nearly steals, trying to raise money to keep his company afloat. He tried baby photography, secured $2,500 in funding from one of his OG backers, who was a local doctor and fixer, apparently. But it didn't matter. The company was falling apart. He was living at the office, bathing at the railway station and eating on credit at the restaurant downstairs.

But guys, as we've learned, whenever a filmmaker is truly down, there's always dentist money. A local dentist paid Walt $500 to animate a short on dental hygiene. Now, take this with a grain of salt, but Walt claimed that he couldn't even make the walk to the dentist's house to collect the money because his shoes were at the cobbler and he owed him $1.50 that he didn't have. So the dentist had to come to him. Regardless of the truth of that fact, Walt had some money and he was able to hire back some of his staff. And they got working on the next big thing. Alice's Wonderland, released in 1923, it was an animated short that featured a live-action Alice, played by then six-year-old

Virginia Davis, in a cartoon world. It was inspired by Fleischer Studios' out of the Inkwell series, which used a similar technique in which you see the animator drawing the main character, that drawing comes to life and interacts with the animator and elements of a live-action world. So in May of 1923, Disney approached a New York distributor by the name of Margaret J. Winkler of the famous M.J. Winkler Productions. It was one of, if not the, first female-run film distribution companies. They had distributed Felix the Cat and out of the Inquo. M.J. wrote back, she liked Walt's work. Unfortunately, Walt once again ran out of money before he could complete the film, so he declared bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Roy had continued West and moved to Los Angeles.

Walt, with $40 in his pocket, decided to join his brother. He felt he'd failed at animation. He was done. it was time to find a real job, like directing or cinematography. But when that didn't work out, Roy suggested to Walt, why don't you try animation again? But Walt was adamant. No, I'm too late. I should have started six years ago. I don't see how I can top those New York boys now. For reference, I think he was about 23 years old at this point. His career was over. He thought about acting. He almost took a job as an extra, but he was spared due to a rain delay. And with nothing left to lose, he wrote and

MJ Winkler one last time. He convinced his creditors to release Alice's Wonderland, what they had of it for her to review, and she loved it. In October of 1923, Winkler agreed to distribute six Alice comedies at $1,500 each, then six more at $1,800 each with an option for two more series.

Walt was in the money. She insisted that the shorts used the same actress, so Disney convinced Virginia Davis' family to move to California to make this happen. No remote recording back then. Meanwhile, Roy took up the business side of things. As the story goes, Roy was back in the hospital, tuberculosis, Walt snuck in at midnight, woke him up, showed him the contract with Winkler. The next day, Roy claimed that an exam showed that the spot on his lung had healed and he left to start working with his brother. The blemish may have been removed from Roy's lung,

but it was not removed from animation as a business. Banks said it was too risky, and so they couldn't get a loan for their new company. And even Disney's relatives were skeptical. They'd given him a bunch of money to start his Lafogram's company back in the day, and they'd never recouped their investments. So, Roy and Walt's Uncle Roger, who was also in L.A. at this point, gave them $500 to get the ball rolling. Through the first half of 1924, the Disney Brothers Studio, as it was called, created the four first series of Alice comedies in the back of a real estate office and a rented outdoor lot near Hollywood Avenue. Walt Drew, Roy handled the business, and sometimes operated the camera, and they hired two young women to ink and paint cells. Uncle Rogers' German Shepherd even joined in to play Peggy,

Alice's dog. They slowly built out their team and hired their first animator, Rollin Hamilton. But Walt needed his old partner. He wanted to focus on gags and story. and he worried that his drawing skills weren't up to snuff. But Ubs were. So he convinced his old buddy, Ub Iworks, to leave Kansas City and come to Los Angeles and risk it all on animated shorts. With Ubb on the team,

the focus of the Alice comedies shifted. It was time for the animated characters to become the stars. Now, unfortunately, Walt could not keep his costs down. He was always pushing for higher quality, which meant they were always strange, or breaking their budgets. It also didn't help that M.J. Winkler wasn't the most reliable partner, and she didn't always pay on time or even in full. Things seemed to have been more or less stable until MJ got pregnant,

which left Walt to deal with her husband, Charles Mintz. Walt and Charles did not get along, and the relationship between the animation studio and the distributor soured quickly. The Disney brothers had to go back to Uncle Roger for more funding, and by the end of the year, they had to work out a new contract with Winkler. But the pace was even more demanding. The Winklers wanted 13 cartoons every three weeks, then 13 more every two weeks. Walt hired back Hugh Harmon and Rudy Eiling

from Kansas City to stay afloat. By the summer of 1925, it felt like they were in a rhythm. The Alice comedies were making money, receiving positive reviews, and there were discussions of a book tie-in. In his personal life, Walt even got married to Lillian Marie Bounds, who'd been a bridesmaid at Roy's wedding and now worked at their studio as an anchor. But good things don't last, and by the fall of 1925, things were again tense with Charles Mintz and

MJ Winkler. Money was tight, and Disney was trying to expand. The Disney Brothers studio became the Walt Disney studio, and Walt began to exercise more and more creative control. A new clause in the contract with M.J. Winkler stated that, quote, all matters regarding the nature of the comedies are to be left to me, end quote. Walt had been known to be gregarious and relentlessly optimistic in public, but his colleagues described him at this time as obsessive and impatient. It all came to a head in February of 1928. The time had come to negotiate a new contract with Mince and Winkler following the success

of a new character named Oswald the Rabbit. He had been created for Universal, and he was a huge step forward. in personality animation. The gags rose organically from him, and this should have, in Disney's opinion, yielded a raise for Walt Disney Studios. It seems like Walt's confidence blinded him. Before he left for New York to negotiate this new contract,

his old friend, Ubb Iworks, tried to warn him, telling him that some of the other animators had already signed new contracts behind Disney's back directly with Minson Winkler to continue. continue working on Oswald for Universal without Disney. Walt didn't believe him, deeply offending his friend and confidant. So Walt traveled to New York and he asked for a 10% raise per cartoon. Mintz counters offering $1,000 less per cartoon than what he'd been paid before, almost a 50% pay cut. Walt couldn't believe it. He left the room, called his brother Roy,

and told him to lock down their animators with new contracts. But the animators refused, and suddenly Walt knew. Ub had told them the truth. It was a coup. Walt tried to go straight to Universal to cut Mince and Winkler out, but they'd already inked a year-long deal with the studio. He tried finding another studio, but nobody else wanted animation. The sharks circled, Mince raised his offer to $1,800 per cartoon,

but some say that it included a caveat that he would take over Disney's studio. Walt refused Mince's offer. He left New York, and with it, lost control of his first character creation, Oswald the Rabbit. His wife Lillian later said of the train ride back to Los Angeles, all he could say over and over

was that he'd never work for anyone again as long as he lived. Walt had suffered his first strategic defeat, It was not a lesson he'd take lightly. According to Walt, it was on that train ride home to Los Angeles that he came up with the character that would serve as the keystone for his studio. Mickey Mouse. Now, Ubb Iworks calls bullshit on this story

and says that they developed Mickey together back in L.A. In fact, Mickey wasn't originally called Mickey. As a lot of people know, his name was supposed to be Mortimer, until Lillian smartly suggested Mickey. Regardless of the exact moment of conception, Walt knew he needed to make something new that he owned completely. So he and Ub developed Mickey in complete secrecy. They kept their own artists in the dark.

After all, many of them had signed contracts with the enemy behind their backs and wouldn't be out of the building until the last Oswald contract was completed. It should also be noted that it was primarily Ub who was drawing Mickey. According to one story, years later, a young child asked Walt to draw Mickey for him on a piece of paper or napkin. He told Ub to do it and said he'd then sign it because he couldn't draw Mickey as well as Up could. In May of 1928, Mickey was ready for his debut.

It was a short film called Plain Crazy and distributors weren't crazy about it. But Walt pushed on. He made another short film, Gallup and Gaucho. And nobody was galloping to go see it, but he pushed on and decided to add sound to his cartoons. The first feature with sync sound, the jazz singer, had been released less than a year earlier.

This was a new frontier. Before Sync Sound, silent movies were often accompanied by live music or sound effects. Sometimes they even tried to use phonograph records to try to make something consistent from screening to screening. But Sync Sound, this was new. And this is when Mickey broke through, with the film that you probably remember, Steamboat Willie. It was actually the third Mickey Mouse short that Disney made, but it was the first with Sink Sound. Now, it was not the first animated film with Sink Sound.

Paul Terry's Dinner Time and several films by Max Fleischer came earlier, but Steamboat Willie was set to make an impression. Unfortunately, Walt couldn't find a distributor for the film. So, screw it. He premiered Steamboat Willie at a friend's theater, and audiences loved it. And once they knew that audiences loved it, the distributors came calling.

The only problem? Every studio wanted to own Disney and his creation. And Disney knew he was never going to work for somebody else again. Enter Pat Powers. Pat Powers was a New York-based producer who had helped Walt with the sync sound on Steamboat Willie. Now, Walt himself once said, you know, my greatest weakness is that I'm a lousy judge of people. And that seems to be true with Pat Powers, who, despite being a successful producer, was also an infamous crook not well regarded in the industry. But sensing an opportunity, he made Walt an interesting proposition. As he put it, you should remain independent, and I am willing to help you. I want to promote Cynophone, that was Pat Powers' sound equipment company. That's my only interest. promoting Cynophon. Your Mickey Mouse can do it for me. I'll make you a better deal than any of the majors. I'll sell rights to the cartoons in each state, and I'll pay for the salesman and the expenses.

I'll advance you the money you need to make the cartoons, and I'll only take 10% of the gross. It was an offer that Disney couldn't refuse, and so a few months later, he signed this contract with powers. But there was a catch. The contract required him to pay between 13,000 and $13,000. $26,000, depending on the source, per year for 10 years to use Powers' sound equipment. Powers had effectively locked him into a 10-year lease that was valued at more than the value of his shorts. Needless to say, Roy was furious. And it wouldn't help that Walt signed this contract right before the United States entered the Great Depression. Now, in a odd, form of saving grace, the main reason Disney remained afloat during the Depression was because

all of their money was tied up in their studio, not the stock market. Despite the success that Mickey brought, Walt felt stuck and not just stuck because of the terrible contracts he'd just signed with Pat Powers. He was still tied to one character. He wanted to be diversified. So again, he decided to make something new. Carl Stalling, a Kansas City theater organist, an early backer of Walt, who now scored some of his films, suggested that Walt animate dancing skeletons. Carl had seen an early ad of dancing skeletons getting loose to Edvard Grieg's March of the Dwarves. Walt loved it. In August of 1929, the skeleton dance premiered. It was the first of a new line of cartoons, silly symphonies. Each would feature their own

unique characters. Walt loved them. Distributors hated them. Powers hated them even more. He even sent Disney a telegraph. Quote, they don't want this more mice. But audiences and critics alike couldn't get enough of the silly symphonies. Walt signed a distribution deal with Columbia. He was learning to diversify. Meanwhile, Pat Powers realized that Walt was growing too strong. So he withheld payment. Walt confronted him in New York to discover that Powers was attempting a hostile takeover by way of Walt's closest collaborator, Ubb Iworks. It turns out, Ub had been unhappy for quite some time. Walt's focus on efficiency had prevented Ubb from working the way that he liked. Plus, despite the fact that he'd done much, if not most,

of the drawing, in particular on Mickey Mouse, Ubb received none of the credit. It was no longer the IWorks Disney Company. Ubs' name was nowhere to be found on the Mastead. He received none of the credit relative to Walt. In a terrible blow, Ubb left Disney, followed by Carl Stalling, who had composed the music for over 20 animated films for Disney. Stalling would join IWorks at the IWorks Studio in California. We won't get to it in this episode,

but IWorks would return to Disney in 1940. But for now, Walt would be going it without two of his closest collaborators. And there was no way that he was going to continue to work with Pat Powers. So he broke off from Powers, made a new deal with Columbia. They would get to distribute Mickey and the Silly Symphonies after they bought Pat Powers out, of course, and that was after Pat Powers and Walt Disney had had a protracted legal battle. Sometime around early 1931, Disney signed a secret deal with United Artists.

Now, different sources cite different reasons. Columbia wouldn't increase rates to match the inflating costs of making cartoons. Columbia wouldn't promote Disney films to Walt's satisfaction. Columbia were known as penny-pinchers. United Artists was the home of the stars. President of United Artists Joseph Schneck at the time told the Disney brothers, You are producers. We are a company of producers. We will sell your cartoons on their own. We don't sell any other shorts, so your product won't be released with a bunch of others in block booking.

We'll give you $15,000 advance on each cartoon. We also have a close connection with Bank of America, and we can help you get financing. Walt, for his part, said that this was the first good contract that they had ever signed. Despite this turn of good fortune, the stress finally got to be too much for Walt, and according to some sources, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He stepped away from his work for the first time in years,

took up sports, took a vacation with his wife, and returned to the studio refreshed. Now, in July of 1932, Disney released its 29th silly symphony, and it was a particularly important one, called Flowers and, trees, it was Disney's first film to win an Academy Award, and it was also its first film to be released in Technicolor. It was the first Oscar ever to go to an animated cartoon. Walt had long dreamed of coloring his cartoons, and Technicolor had finally developed a method to do so. But it was

expensive, so Roy was hesitant. But the brothers shrewdly made a deal with Technicolor that gave Disney exclusive rights to the technology for two years. By 1933, Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney were household names. There were more than a million members of the Mickey Mouse Club around the world. The character had his own wax figure at Madame Tussauds in London. Eleanor Roosevelt had even written Walt a letter thanking him for his work. And it wasn't just popular. This was praised by the art world.

One art critic at the time said, Walt Disney has at last given the world what should have come through established art channels. The creative exploit of the animated cartoon in color, probably the first genuinely American art since that of the indigenous Indian. Not that the work wasn't controversial at times. Ohio banned the shindig, a silly symphony, for showing a cow reading a famous erotic novel called Three Weeks.

Denmark barred the skeleton dance for showing, well, skeletons dancing, and Germans said nine to the barnyard battle because the wearing of German military helmets by an army of cats which opposed a militia of mice is offensive to national dignity. My sincere apologies to our German friends for sitting through that. Now, Disney's success was not going unnoticed in Hollywood. The other studios realized that they could make money off of short cartoons. So they started poaching Disney animators.

One cartoon producer apparently lured away Disney artists after each success saying, quote, let Disney win the awards and train the artists. I will hire them away and make them away. make the money. It was a fine idea in theory, but it never seemed to work, and they could never rival the Disney quality, because candidly, it doesn't seem like they had someone at the helm, that new story, the way that Walt did. But Walt wasn't satisfied with the silly symphonies. As he said, I knew the diversifying of the business would be the salvation of it. I tried that in the beginning because I didn't want to be stuck with the mouse. So I went into the silly symphonies.

The symphonies led to the features, without the work. I did on the symphonies, I never have been prepared to even tackle Snow White. And that concludes our primer on Walt Disney and his life up until he began working on Snow White. We hope you enjoyed this deviation from our normal format. And if you'd like to let us know what you thought, drop us a line on social media. Or you can head to our website, www. www.what went wrongpod.com use the contact us page to send us an email and give us your thoughts. All right, don't waste another beat. Go listen to our coverage of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

We hope you enjoy the episode and the film as much as we did researching it. Until next time. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer. Credit to Walt Disney, Hub iWorks. Jackson and Bert Lewis for that short clip from Steamboat Willie and to Edvard Greig for a section of his composition, March of the Dwarves.