One of the best friends of Disney history scholarship is my good friend on the other side of the country, Jim Korkis. He wrote to thank me for reprinting the 1937 RKO Biographical Sketch about Walt. Those who know Jim know that one of his favorite philosophies is that history is like a giant jigsaw puzzle and everybody has a piece or two. By sharing those pieces, rather than hoarding them, the full picture comes into better focus as more and more people share their pieces of the puzzle. Both Jim and I have some sad experiences with people who hoard their information which sometimes never appears for others to use to help with their research.
Well, Jim had in his personal files (which if I remember correctly was 10,000 pounds of books and magazines when he moved to Florida eight years ago) a copy of the RKO Biographical Sketch of Walt Disney from March 1951! Not only did he have it but he graciously sent me a copy so I could share the additional information with the readers of JimHillMedia.
As Jim pointed out it is printed on the same yellowed, dog-eared, occasionally scotch taped pages as my 1937 version. It is twenty pages long. Five of those pages are devoted to an impressive year by year listing of Walt’s awards beginning in 1932. (The listing of the awards stop at March 1951 which is one of the ways Jim was able to date the document.) One page is devoted to Walt’s feature length pictures to date including two yet to be released. The other fourteen pages are devoted to a “Biographical Sketch of Walt Disney”.
The first eight pages are very similar (often word for word) to the ones I reprinted from the 1937 version with some interesting trimming like the opening paragraphs that in 1937 assumed that little had ever been written about Walt that no longer appear in this later version. This 1951 version also makes the corrections that I indicated in my notes like Walt arriving in Hollywood with forty bucks in his pocket rather than zero and that it was Uncle Robert and not the wrongly identified Uncle “Herbert” who helped Walt.
It still mistakenly identifies ALICE IN CARTOONLAND as a “fairy tale” but it does include an additional paragraph that states:
“There is a story in one of these early projects that shows the consistent reasoning of Disney, over a long period of years. Today, experts credit Walt with an entirely new diversion in films, the combination of cartoon and live action on the same screen. Yet twenty-seven years ago, in the dank little room at the back of a the real estate office, Walt Disney had used the cartoon-live action technique for a film titled ‘Alice in Cartoonland’. It was abandoned for technical and acute financial reasons, but Walt kept it in mind all these years, ready to spring on the movie going public at a propitious moment.”
Unfortunately that paragraph opens up a lot of misunderstandings. Most animation and Disney fans can spot the misleading information in that paragraph. First, Walt didn’t invent cartoon-live action interaction. In fact, Walt was quite public about crediting one of his top competitors, Max Fleischer, and the Ko-Ko the Clown cartoons (which combined an animated clown with live action) as an inspiration for the ALICE COMEDIES. Also ALICE IN CARTOONLAND was made in Kansas. The first Hollywood made ALICE COMEDY was ALICE’S DAY AT SEA and that was followed by nearly fifty other installments of the series.
The additional six pages are a very brief and quick overview of Walt’s contributions during the fourteen years since 1937 and aren’t nearly as detailed or interesting as those first eight I reprinted. However, there was a section that concentrated on Walt himself that I feel is of interest in sharing with the readers of JimHillMedia. Here is that section:
“As everybody knows, Mickey Mouse got a grand welcome from the public, and his popularity grew with each subsequent release by leaps and bounds. The Studio and the Disney business grew in proportion. Now Walt was able to expand as he wished, to experiment with the money which was coming in, to better his product. He didn’t even have time to think of ‘going Hollywood’ and still drove around in an old Ford and lived in an unpretentious bungalow.
“Walt thinks one reason people like his films is because so much effort is made to give them adult as well as child appeal. Children, he says, laugh at entirely different things from those which amuse grown people. Where the subject matter is a little deep for children, amusing action must be injected to hold their interest.
“It seems strange to learn that just a few years ago, this young man, who has been so successful in making grown-ups chuckle and children scream with laughter, learned to play. And yet, when you think back over his short life of activity and achievement, you will see that there was not time for much of anything but concentration on an idea. Something very close to a nervous breakdown taught him that life is sweet and work is not everything. He realized then that he had forgotten to play.
“But after he rediscovered the joys of swimming, riding, and badminton, he knew the old saying about all work and no play was true.
“Hollywood night life does not appeal to him. It takes too much energy, he claims-and besides, he likes a good night’s sleep so his mind will be fresh for work. He is a firm believer in the five-day week for people of the creative or industrious type. He knows from his own experience that folks of his type work too hard.
“The Disneys’ married life has been ideally happy. They have two teen-age girls-Diane and Sharon. Both Walt and his wife enjoy moving pictures, and in his Holmby Hills home he has complete projection equipment and runs pictures three and four nights a week. He reads topical and scientific as well as literary magazines. He enjoys reading the great amount of fan mail which comes to the studio, some of it from the motion picture industry itself, and from admirers all over the globe. Many letters are simply addressed to ‘Mickey Mouse, Hollywood, California’. Since Walt entered the feature-length field in 1937 with ‘Snow White’, the studio mail has grown to great proportions, as each new feature leaves a new group of characters that remain permanently in the hearts of Disney fans-whether it be Dopey, Jiminy Cricket, Dumbo, Bambi, Thumper and Flower from ‘Bambi’, or Gus & Jaq from ‘Cinderella’.
“Walt Disney is also one of the nation’s foremost and most ardent railroading fans. His interest in this diversion ranges from miniature equipment to scale model operation on track laid around his Holmby Hills estate. Railroading elements often are incorporated in his pictures.
“Nowhere else are the Disney characters such real people as they are around the Disney studio. They have distinct personalities which their stories must always fit. This naturally narrows down the choice of stories for Mickey and his friends.
“It is hard to believe that Walt Disney, who has created something so unique and imaginative, so truly beautiful, thinks he has only begun and can see ‘wonderful new expansions in the cartoon industry…is the greatest medium of fantasy’. He speaks of it thus, as naively as if he had not already made it so. ‘The possibilities are absolutely unlimited,’ he says.
“It pleases him that artists, some of the best draughtsmen in the trade, seem to want to work for him. He understands the problems that confront a creative person, and is therefore a sympathetic employer. He is always interested in the ideas of everyone around the studio, unless they pertain to business affairs, which are entirely supervised by his brother Roy.
“Because Disney and his fellow workers characteristically live and work in plans for the future, rather than the achievements of the past, no picture of the Disney establishment would be complete without a glimpse of the outline of things to come. Among them are an all-cartoon musical version of ‘Peter Pan’ and an elaborate musical animation of ‘Sleeping Beauty’.”
So as always, thanks Jim Korkis for sharing this additional information from your personal archive and thanks Jim Hill for providing a forum where this information can be shared! (Jim K. also mentioned that he probably picked up his copy from that same long forgotten dealer at either the Mouse Club or NFFC convention.)