This week’s inspirational entrepreneur is the powerhouse entrepreneur and business magnate that was Walt Disney. He was a pioneer in animation. Walt Disney has influenced all of our lives in one way or another since his first sound animation Steamboat Willie. An entrepreneur of many talents including screenwriting, producing, acting, theme park design, and directing. He founded Walt Disney Productions with his brother Roy Disney. That company is now known as The Walt Disney Company with revenues in 2010 of $36 billion. Did you know that he was the original voice of Mickey Mouse and up until his death used to re-record his voice for the Mickey Mouse Club children’s television programme.
Walt Disney is a very unique individual as he successfully married his creative skill to business acumen and this resulted in him receiving 59 Academy Award nominations in his lifetime, winning 22 and a further 4 honorary Awards, making him the most awarded individual in history to date. You may have experience his work personally in the form of his theme parks, Disneyland, Walt Disney World Resort, Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disney Resort and Hong Kong Disneyland.
He was born to an Irish Canadian father (Elias Disney) in 1901. In a twist that would delight our #CREATEKilkenny #crafters, his great grandfather Arundel Elias Disney, had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny.
Walt Disneys first company Laugh-O-Gram Studio went bankrupt due to his inability to fund the high salaries he was paying his employees. He moved lock stock and barrel to Hollywood, California which was the industry’s headquarters. Following a few successes with silent animations, he produced the first sound animation Steamboat Willie following businessman Pat Powers supplying him with distribution and a sound synchronization system called Cinephone. In 1932 Walt Disney negotiated a two-year deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use their three-strip process. This meant his cartoons were now in glorious techni-colour. Incidentally this period also saw the arrival of the Three Little Pigs, whose theme song “Who’s afraid of the big bad Wolf” became a hugely popular anthem for the Great Depression era.
In 1934 Walt Disney proved he was entrepreneurial steel once again when everyone around him begged him not to sink his company with the production of his first ever feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He believed in the project profoundly and employed Chouinard Art Institute professor Don Graham to start a training operation for the studio staff. All of this meant that the staff working for Disney were now hugely talented, efficient and masters at quality control. Disney did run out of money on the project requiring him to present a rough cut of the project to loan officers. He received his money and business started again. On its release Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs took in over 8 million dollars. It became the most successful film of the year (1938). With the profits Walt Disney built a new campus at Burbank. Pinocchio, Fantastia and Bambi followed.
He opened his first themepark masterpiece Disneyland in 1955 and it was a huge success. By the 1960’s Walt Disney had now established his company as the leader of family entertainment and he was the head of pageantry for the Winter Olympics.
Walt Disney passed away from lung cancer (he had smoked all his life although never around children) in 1966 ten days after his 65th birthday. However the spirit of the #entrepreneur still lives on, we see it on our television screens, movie theatres, and his various theme parks. He had a “pure” vision for his theme parks that is immortalized in the plaque that hangs above the entrance to Disneyland. He was a noted philanthropist and his image appeared on a US postage stamp in 1968.
