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- [00:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Thank you for listening to the Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com.
- [00:20]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by Hive.
- [00:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
You know history is full of transformations. The Romans shifted from republic to empire. The Tudors transformed monasteries into country houses. And you know what? Hive has had one of its own. Everybody knows Hive for smart thermostats, but now they've evolved into something much greater.
- [00:43]
Tom Holland
Solar panels that help you to power your home with clean energy. Heat pumps that pull warmth from thin air. EV chargers that charge your car while you're asleep. All managed through a single app.
- [00:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
This is all about giving people the power to transform their homes from waste to efficiency, from dependence to control, from consumption to contribution.
- [01:08]
Tom Holland
So history's next great transformation may not be happening in parliaments or palaces. It may be happening in your home. A quiet revolution minus guillotines.
- [01:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
Hive know your power. Visit hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability Hive app compatible with selected heat pumps.
- [01:35]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by TikTok. Believe it or not, history isn't just in textbooks.
- [01:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
It comes to life every day. On TikTok. Millions of people are exploring the history of music, fashion, food, and art and discovering new facts about the things they love.
- [01:56]
Tom Holland
One scroll could take you from the roots of jazz to the flavors of ancient kitchens, and the next might reveal a quirky fact about how modern traditions came to be.
- [02:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Discover the past in new ways on TikTok, where curiosity never gets old.
- [02:15]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.
- [02:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. Admin Mobile Their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS.
- [02:34]
Tom Holland
Just premium wireless service on the nation's largest 5G network. Make the switch@mintmobile.com history Upfront payment of.
- [02:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
$45 required, equivalent to $15 per month Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees. Mint Mobile for details when you wish upon a star Makes no difference who you are Anything your heart desires will come to you if your heart is in your dream no request is too extreme when you wish upon a star as dreamers do so if you're still with us that was when you wish upon a star, which is, of course, the official company anthem of Disney. Now, Disney, which effectively began as a young man tinkering, basically pursuing a hobby, is now a business worth $200 billion. Everybody knows the name of Disney. It's the owner of Star wars franchise, of Marvel, of course, of theme parks everywhere on the planet, most famously Disneyland and Disney World in America. It is an organization that has an almost unparalleled grip on the world's imagination, particularly of children, which is when the imagination. Now, Tom, you were very keen to kick off with this song, partly because you were desperate to do those vocals. Cause you love any opportunity to sing on the show, for some reason. But also, I think, because the song captures something of the nostalgia and the sentimentality that is at the core of Disney. I don't mean those things pejoratively because, of course, they're tremendously appealing for a lot of people, aren't they?
- [04:42]
Tom Holland
Yeah. It's the great anthem of Disney. And it's a reminder as well that Disney has its origins in the kind of the golden age of Hollywood. But more specifically, it's a reminder of the company's origin in the dreams and the distinctive personality of the man that you just mentioned, the filmmaker who founded Disney, gave it his name. The figure who, probably more than any other, I would say, embodies American culture in the 20th century. And that is, of course, Walt Disney.
- [05:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, definitely. He's one of the most important cultural figures globally. Of the 20th century, I would say.
- [05:19]
Tom Holland
Yeah, absolutely. And so the lyrics of when you wish upon a Star, which you read rather than sang, but you read it very beautifully, Anything your heart desires will come to you. I mean, that, you know, that may seem very schmaltzy to people, but I would argue that it is up there with Rock around the Clock. So the Bill Haley classic that really kind of ushered in rock and roll as a song that marks a key turning point in the culture of 20th century America.
- [05:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
Totally. I think anybody who's tempted to listen to the show and say, oh, Disney, why are they doing Disney? It's just a thing for children, I think completely misses the impact that Disney has had in shaping the imaginations and therefore the cultural political choices of hundreds of millions of people ever since Disney really broke through in, what, the 1930s, I suppose.
- [06:09]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And that song, I mean, it's the first song in history to have been sung by a talking insect, for instance. So that's definitely a first. I mean, obviously, it's not literally sung by a talking insect. It was sung by an actor called Cliff Edwards, and he was ventriloquizing a cartoon character called Jiminy Cricket in a film called Pinocchio. And I'm sure lots of people will have seen Pinocchio, but those who haven't, Pinocchio is a puppet, a puppet of a boy who's carved by a toy maker called Geppetto. And Geppetto, as he's going to sleep, wishes upon a star, wishes that this puppet he's made will come to life. And sure enough, a Blue Fairy appears and brings Pinocchio to life. And Jiminy is the cricket that's appointed by the Blue Fairy to serve Pinocchio as his conscience. And over the course of the film, they have all kinds of adventures. So Pinocchio, he ends up basically enslaved to a villainous puppeteer who locks him up in a cage. They visit Pleasure Island. Dominic, you A pleasure island?
- [07:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
I do like a pleasure island.
- [07:11]
Tom Holland
It's a very sinister theme park where Pinocchio narrowly avoids being turned into a donkey and they get swallowed up by a whale. And I think we are so used to animation bringing stories like this to life today, that it can actually be incredibly hard to recapture the sense of stupefaction, of absolute wonder that greeted a film like Pinocchio. I mean, nothing, you know, just jaw dropping for people to see this.
- [07:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And Disney, Walt Disney, even if he'd never made a single theme park, or indeed if he'd done nothing after the Second World War at all, if he'd been knocked down by a bus or something, he would still have a very high place in the kind of cultural annals of the last century because he, more than anybody, is the person who establishes animation as a mass media art form, isn't he?
- [08:01]
Tom Holland
Yeah. So basically, his career up to Pinocchio is a series of massive cultural landmarks. So 1928, you have steamboat Willie, or Rat on a Boat, as Theo calls it, which introduces Mickey Mouse to a mass audience. And it's crucial in the history of animation and indeed of film, because it's the first cartoon with fully synchronized sound. Sound that is coming directly from the characters, so from Mickey and so on. And it's kind of. It's the Jazz Singer of animation, really. It's the one that fuses animation and audio. Then five years later, 1933, you have a cartoon called Three Little Pigs. And I mean, again, kind of amazing innovations in that. So the color, perhaps, particularly very vibrant, very true to life. People's minds are absolutely blown by this. They've never seen anything like it. But also the characterization, the fact that these are animated characters who are not Just kind of tools for a gag or something. They seem to have distinct personalities, you know, the Three Little Pigs. They will have their various characteristics. And of course, anticipating when you wish upon a star, it has a classic theme song, who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? And this absolutely bores itself into the consciousness of depression era America. And to quote Neil Gabler, whose definitive biography of Disney, kind of drawing on all kinds of previously untapped sources by biographers we're gonna be referring to a lot over the course of this episode, he describes that song as it indisputably became the nation's new anthem. Its cheerful whoop hurled in the face of hard times.
- [09:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, and then you've got, I mean, the biggest film, I would argue Disney's supreme cinematic achievement is Snow White. That's 1937, I think. And that's the first full length animated feature, isn't it? And up to that point, the idea of doing animated feature at all just seemed a impossible and almost, you know, mind boggling as sort of, it would be such an extraordinary enterprise, so time consuming, so expensive that it had never occurred to anybody to do it.
- [10:09]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And so the tradition is that people are so gobsmacked when they learn what Disney's planning that they call it Disney's folly. But it's all very Geppetto. Disney's clearly wished upon a star because when it's released, it's a massive global hit. In fact, I mean, at one point I was astonished to read this. It was the most successful sound film ever released. And it's a huge box office hit then. But it's also a critical hit. So in 1944, in a war torn Britain, the great British film director Michael Powell, as in Powell and Pressburger, sums up why Snow White and Seven Dwarfs is a cultural landmark. So he said in that film, Disney abolished naturalism, established stylistic settings and backgrounds, controlled his design of color and sound, a feat not yet in the power of any other producer, and held audiences enraptured all over the world. So you can see there that it's obviously absolutely, massively influential on animation, but also on other films as well. I mean, you can see it in Palin Pressberger's films.
- [11:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
You look at the other films of 1937 and 1938, I'm just looking at the list now. Saratoga, May Time, the Good Earth, 1938, Boys Town, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Test Pilot. You can't take it with you, sweethearts. Nobody watches those films. Nobody's even heard of most of Those films, I guess the vast majority, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Even if you've never seen it, you're.
- [11:31]
Tom Holland
Familiar, you've still got it in your head.
- [11:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it's absolutely living in your head.
- [11:35]
Tom Holland
It's a massive success. And Pinocchio is the follow up. It's the second feature length film that Disney makes. And I guess it kind of sets the seal on his reputation as the most innovative filmmaker of the age. And so when youn Wish Upon a Star, which sounds very, very syrupy to us, it kind of serves as the anthem for everything that makes him cutting edge. I mean, and that's the amazing thing about it. You know, it goes on to win the Oscar for best film in 1941. It's really important to emphasize how mad that is. An animated character, an animated insect winning an Oscar, I think, again and again, when you look at Disney, you've got to think, what is it like for people to listen or to see this for the first time? And I think that one of the issues with getting a proper sense of Disney's cultural importance is that he's really the first great example of, you know, what becomes a classic 20th century American phenomenon. He's an innovator whose influence is so profound that today you tend to take it for granted. So on the cultural level, you know, he's a massive innovator. We've been describing that. He's been, he develops, he shapes an entire new art form. And I guess that the closest parallel in the second half of the 20th century to that would be Elvis, you know, who in a similar way makes a kind of an emergent genre his own and then broadcasts it to the world. But it's Disney who gets there first. So to quote Neil Gabler, again, it's Disney who helped establish American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world.
- [13:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, in the next episode, we'll be describing Nikita Khrushchev and his wife and how they loved Disney films. Nikita Khrushchev's wife had first seen them in the 1940s. And the fact that somebody in the Soviet Union has fallen in love with Disney's vision, a very American vision, gives you some sense of the kind of global power that it had even then.
- [13:25]
Tom Holland
But I think part of what Khrushchev very reluctantly has fallen in love with, it's not just the cultural kind of resonance of Disney, it's also the technological one. So again and again, when I was reading Gabler's biography, I was reminded not just of Elvis or someone like that kind of Cultural innovator, but of Steve Jobs, who was a great technological innovator. So if you think of Disney and Steve Jobs, both of them are complete perfectionists, absolutely kind of obsessed by the opportunities that they've been given by a technology that's still in its infancy. Both of them are very Californian figures and both of them start off kind of tinkering in Steve Jobs case, famously in a shed. But Disney, you know, his early animations are made in garages and so on, and both of them end up becoming the public face of, you know, a vast and wealthy company. And I would say that in the 21st century, Apple and Disney, they're globe spanning behemoths who for most people across the world are part of the public face of, of America.
- [14:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
Totally. Actually, Steve Jobs ended up on the board of Disney, didn't he, after he sold Pixar to Disney. So it's a nice comparison, all right. But Walt Disney's own career, he's born in December 1901 and in some ways he's a 19. I think he's a quite 19th century figure. You know, many years ago I wrote about Samuel Smiles, the great self help guru of the Victorian period, who wrote a book called the Lives of the Engineers. And he was. Samuel Smiles was fascinated by all these people who, you know, they started kind of tinkering the James Watt and Matthew Bolton and kind of steam engine people and people like that. And Walt Disney always feels to me like one of those kinds of figures. There is something very backward looking about him, I think, very nostalgic. He's somebody who would completely have been at home 20 or 30 years earlier.
- [15:15]
Tom Holland
I think a classically American version of that. And actually if you look at his ancestry, it's like it's almost kind of comically. It contains within it so many different threads of history. So I mean, amazingly, I wasn't expecting to bring up the Norman conquest in an episode on Walt Disney, but Disney claimed, and I gather that genealogists say it's not a completely mad idea that he was descended from a Norman who came over from the Norman town of Isney. So is Knee. So in that case, his forebears, you know, were Norman aristocrats. But they, they, they seem to have migrated from England to Ireland and then From Ireland in 1834 to the New World. And Disney's grandfather, this guy called brilliant name Keppel. Keppel Disney, I mean, basically he engages in everything you would expect a prospector in, you know, 19th century America to do. So he works as A farmer, he works as a gold prospector, he drills for oil. None of these ventures really pays off for him. He's a bit of a drifter. He ends up in Florida and they're his son. Elias meets a 16 year old girl called Flora. And Flora again, brilliant. You know, she's the kind of living embodiment of American mythology. So she's the descendant of a pioneer who traveled to America in 1636. So she's almost within touching distance of the Pilgrim Fathers. And Elias and Flora marry on Neo's day, 1888, in Florida. But Elias is like his dad. He is never a man for staying in one place. And in 1890 he upsticks. He moves from Florida and he and his wife head off to Chicago. And in Chicago he works as a carpenter. And it is in Chicago, in the dead of winter, in late 1901, that Walt Disney is born.
- [17:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, that was nice. So his childhood is quite Dickensian, isn't it? Because his father is pretty tough. Neil Gabler says he's this sort of hard, driven, devout.
- [17:19]
Tom Holland
He worked hard, lived modestly and worshiped devoutly.
- [17:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
But he's also moving around the whole time because he never really settles, never makes a success of anything. The most obvious place where they live is in Missouri. Small town Missouri. A place that becomes absolutely embedded in Walt Disney's imagination. And you could argue in the world's imagination because it's the inspiration for the main street that you find in Disney's parks. And this is a place called Marceline in Disney. If anyone's seen the, or heard the Philip Glass opera about Walt Disney, it's all about him trying to get back to Marceline and his memories of Marceline. And he has this sort of romantic fantasy, doesn't he, of small town America.
- [17:58]
Tom Holland
But for Elias, it's actually pretty tough. Cause he's trying to scratch a living as a farmer and he fails. So in 1911, he moves to Kansas City and he buys a newspaper delivery route, as Americans would put it, a route. And essentially this means, you know, he has to get up very early in the morning and shove newspapers through people's letterboxes. And he gets Walt and his elder brother Roy to help him. And Walt by this point is nine years old. So he's having to get up at 4:30, you know, even when it's winter, absolutely freezing in Kansas City in the dead of winter, you know, wading through thick snow drifts. And unsurprisingly, I mean, it affects his schoolwork. He's too often too tired to concentrate. So that is quite Dickensian. I think there is an element of the blacking factory about that. And it doesn't go brilliantly well. But the whole time Elias has been saving up money and in 1917 he moves back to Chicago and he invests his savings in a jelly factory. Or do Americans call it Jell O? I think they do.
- [18:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think when they call it jelly they're talking about jam. But when they're talking about Jell O, they're talking about jelly. Is it Jell O or is it. Is it jelly or jam?
- [19:05]
Tom Holland
It's Jello.
- [19:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Come on, make your minds up, Americans. Sort yourselves out. But it's not all grim, right? It's not all. So there is actual genuine jelly amid the custards. I don't know where I'm going with that metaphor. Because there's light as well as dark in Disney's childhood.
- [19:19]
Tom Holland
Well, yeah, because. So Elias is a very hard man. We said that. But his mother Flora is very gentle, very nurturing. And the key role that she plays in Walt's development is that she encourages him with his great obsession, which has become drawing and specifically cartoons. And reading about Walt as a child you get this sense of him as being simultaneously dreamy and obsessional. And I guess that those are characteristics that you know, will accompany him throughout his life. And there's a famous Tom Sawyer style episode where Walt draws cartoons in creosote all over a white fence. And even Flora is cross with him about that. But in general she's very supportive and. And another very supportive figure in the family is his elder brother Roy, who is very practical, very hard headed. He gets a job in a bank that enables him to kind of buy Walt toys that otherwise Walt wouldn't have. And I think he in a way is kind of. He's kind of more of a father figure perhaps even than Elias is. You know, he's always looking out for Walt. So there is security amid all the kind of the uncertainty, the constant moving. And I think also the other thing that the constant moving does is that it does give him a very precocious feel for America. You've mentioned how Marceline will kind of haunt his imagining. But I think also he, you know, he's been Kansas City, he's been to Chicago. He has a sense of what makes America tick. And that again will be kind of crucial to his ability to give form to the fantasies and dreams of America.
- [20:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, Kansas City has given him a sense of the big city, but. But he's also got a sense of the small town. He's got a sense of the landscapes, he's been on trains, you know, all of that kind of world, that Midwestern world is kind of. Has taken root, hasn't it? It's put down roots in his imagination.
- [21:10]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And so he's, you know, by the time he's 16, he's. He's got his great passion, he's got his drawing, he's got an absolute work ethic. I mean, Elias has absolutely kind of, you know, instilled him with that. And he's, you know, he's not an intellectual, he's not got a brilliant education, but he does have a very broad range of experiences, of memories, you know, of dreams, basically. And then in September 1918, of course, the First World War has been raging. America has finally decided to join in the fun. He has one final adventure before adulthood claims him. He enlists for service with the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in France. And he's so young when he does so that he has to lie about his age on his enlistment form. And actually, by the time that he and his valet volunteers reach France, they have to go to Le Havre because the port they're originally going to is full of bombed ships. The war is actually over. But, you know, he's going into a shattered France. He sees scenes of devastation and death everywhere. And undisputably, this broadens his horizon massively, as does his introduction to, you know, the architecture of Europe. So he's stationed at one point near Versailles, at another point near the Louvre. He is billeted in a town called Neufchateau, which gives him a feel for the architecture of the old, you know, the old continent. And all the time he's continuing to draw his cartoons and he's turning his hands to making props. And in a way, what he's doing there is he's improving reality. So with one of his friends, he pillages German helmets from local rubbish dumps and he scuffs them up in dirt, he shoots bullet holes through them, and then he sells them as souvenirs from the front to tourists. So again, you can see elements of the Disney story.
- [23:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Definite hint of Disneyland about that. So he goes back to Kansas City in the autumn of 1919, doesn't he? So he's not on the Western Front for a very long time. But he's changed quite a lot. He's a much bigger, heavier person.
- [23:12]
Tom Holland
Hello, Mum. I mean, you can imagine all that.
- [23:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's taken up smoking and he smokes all his life, doesn't he?
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Tom Holland
He has a terrible hacking cough and.
- [23:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
He'S much more self confident. He's much more, you know, by like so many people, he's gone to the war and he's. He's come back a man.
- [23:26]
Tom Holland
Yeah, he's not going to. He's. He's not going to do what his father wants, which is to invest his career in Jell O. He's turning his back on the jello. He wants to follow his dreams. And obviously his dream is to draw cartoons. But Walt being Walt, a man who is never content with what he's got, the scope of this ambition becomes steadily, ever more sweeping. So from, you know, just drawing static cartoons, he moves into animation and then from animation into the production of animation and from production into something, you know, I mean, the kind of the dream of an ambitious young man in 1920s America. He sets up a studio in Hollywood. And Walt had moved to Los Angeles in July 1923, partly because obviously it's the center of the movie business, but partly also because his brother Roy, who had also been serving in the First World War and had actually seen action. He's there and he is recuperating from TB in a hospital. And Roy, you know, he's the practical Disney, as opposed to the visionary Disney, which is Walt. You know, they form a good team. And the studio that they set up is called the Disney Brothers Studio. But I think there's never really any doubt where the center of gravity in that, that business is. And sure enough, by 1926, when they obtained their own studio lot on Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, the name is no longer Disney Brothers, it is now Walt Disney.
- [25:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
And just on Hollywood. Hollywood has only been going really since the mid-1910s. So Hollywood in itself, and indeed the city of Los Angeles, of which it's a part, is a kind of great experiment. It's a great innovation. And everybody there has come from somewhere else, as Walt has. So he's part of this incredible generation of people who are, you know, creating something new. Yeah, all the time.
- [25:26]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And I think that just as kind of, you know, Los Angeles has pulled itself up from its bootstraps, so has Walt. I mean, that's what makes him an absolute paradigm of a guy living out the American dream. And throughout the 1920s, while he's trying to make his way, you know, he's in terrible poverty. He's basically subsisting on baked beans. You know, there are times where he can only afford a weekly shower and there are times where he looks so thin that, you know, people are concerned about him, worry that he's got TB as well, like his. His brother Roy. So he really, you know, he's living on the absolute edge in the early years of his career. But by 1928, he's looking, you know, he's looking pretty established. So he's got his studio, which is named after himself, and he's got growing numbers of animators who are working with him. And Disney has a real eye for brilliance in animation. He's married to his wife Lillian. Married her in 1925. And he has a breakout cartoon character called Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit. And Oswald is notable both for very phallic ears, which are always kind of. They're kind of either slumping or very tumescent, but also Oswald. And this is a kind of prefiguring of what will happen with the Three Little Pigs and Mickey Mouse. He's a kind of character.
- [26:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, he's got a personality.
- [26:47]
Tom Holland
Yeah. He's not just a vehicle for visual gags. And this makes him, you know, this makes him a very, very popular figure. But there is an absolute disaster because the Disney brothers are very naive in business, even Roy. And they've got embroiled with an absolute shyster in New York, Charles Mintz.
- [27:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
His name is Mr. Mintz.
- [27:08]
Tom Holland
Yeah, very sinister. And he, first of all, he poaches the Disney animators. And then the absolute bombshell, he reveals they don't actually own the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Their distributor does. And Walt is massively in debt. He can't afford to keep them. So basically, Oswald, the, you know, this phallic rabbit, he's lavished all his time, all his money, all his creativity on it, and now he finds he doesn't even own it. And it's an absolutely devastating moment that might have destroyed a lesser man, but it doesn't destroy Walt. And he vows two things. Firstly, he is never again going to lose control of his characters and his animations. They are always going to remain his. And secondly, he is determined to create a new character who will be bigger and better than Oswald had ever been.
- [27:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
And this is Mickey Mouse. And actually, the birth of Mickey Mouse is one of those moments. It's a bit like J.K. rowling on the train coming up with the idea of Harry Potter. Because actually, there's a train in this, isn't there? The claim is that Disney has gone to New York and He's discovered that Mr. Mintz has stolen his animators and has stolen Oswald and he's getting the train back to Los Angeles. Very long journey and it's on the train that he comes up with the idea for Mickey Mouse and he sketches the character. But I think you're going to say, aren't you, Tom, that this isn't true.
- [28:30]
Tom Holland
I mean, Mickey Mouse, you could say, is the most famous movie star of the 20th century. And so it's not surprising that there are lots of myths that surround him. A bit like King Arthur, who Disney will go on to make a film about. So, yeah, the story on the train, you know, that he's. Or that he's been keeping mice as pets while he was in Kansas City. There are all kinds of stories and I think it's impossible to know the truth about it. What does seem to be true is that initially Walter had been planning to call this mouse he's got in his imaginings Mortimer and Lily. And his wife says that Mortimer's too sissy. And so that's how they come up with Mickey.
- [29:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think Mortimer Mouse would have been even more successful.
- [29:11]
Tom Holland
I don't know. I'm not sure about that. You know, whatever the truth, the fact is that Mickey has this breakout role in Steamboat Willie, the Jazz Singer of animation. And this sets Walt on one of the great creative spikes in the history of Hollywood. In fact, in the whole history of American culture. And key to this is the fact that Disney's development of animation. We've said how it's culturally innovative, how it's technologically innovative. It is also commercially innovative. And by the early 30s, Mickey is not just an American phenomenon, he is an international phenomenon. And for the first time you start to get European intellectuals enthusing over Disney. So there's a German critic who describes Mickey as the preeminent personality of the screen today and the only artist who exemplifies in his work and techniques. It's a pure form of talking films. And because of this reach, it's a perfect opportunity for Walt and Roy to put the shock of losing Oswald behind them. Because they're determined to exploit this Mickey mania that's sweeping the world to the absolute full. And they do this by commercializing him on a scale that no one in American culture has ever witnessed before. And again, this is absolutely groundbreaking.
- [30:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
And just on the Mickey mania. I mean, Mickey comes really of age at the very end of the 1920s, beginning of the 1930s. So in other words, the period when the Great Depression has seized America and Central Europe. And you can see why. A fun, escapist, cheeky, anti authoritarian kind of character which Mickey is at the beginning and actually the beginning he's much more subversive and less conservative than he becomes. You can see why that would appeal to people, can't you, at a time when everything else is pretty grim.
- [30:56]
Tom Holland
And also you can see why slapping him on, you know, just about every item that gets sold in a shop would also work. Because by buying these things, you can. You can invest in the kind of spirit of defiance and jollity that Mickey represents. So the New York Times in the mid-30s is stunned by this. Shoppers carry Mickey Mouse satchels and briefcases bursting with Mickey Mouse soap, candy, playing cards, bridge favours, hairbrushes, chinaware, alarm cloths, hot water bottles wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper tied with Mickey Mouse ribbon, and PA out of Mickey Mouse purses with savings hoarded in Mickey Mouse banks. So Disney is making money not just from the films themselves, but from the commercial opportunities. And again, this is an insight that Disney, and indeed the whole, basically everyone will carry forward into the 21st century. So Walt starts becoming very rich for the first time. But it's interesting because he's not actually very interested in money for his own sake.
- [31:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, he's not a luxurious kind of person, is he? Not a big spending person?
- [31:55]
Tom Holland
No, he wants money because he's a perfectionist. And perfectionism, if you're being an animator, requires vast amounts of dollars. And so Walt uses all the loot that's been generated by Big Mouse not just to produce the best animations ever seen, but to reinvent the very art of animation. So again, it's that sense of cultural and technological innovation going absolutely hand in hand. So we said, you know, he's been hiring the best animators in the business, training those who aren't necessarily proficient. So he. It's like a kind of Renaissance workshop. He has the best artists available to him. And the effect of this is that they can start drawing animations that have kind of color and depth and weight in a way that no one had ever done before. And this is what feeds into Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. But it's also why it comes to be called Disney's Folly, because obviously this is massive, massive capital investment. And the whole way in which Snow White is made, it's an enormous process of experimentation. So Walt's idea of storyboarding is to get all his animators together. He stands on a stage and he basically acts it out, you know, with all the characters, the wicked witch, the various Dwarves, Snow White herself. And it's so vivid in the memories of the animators that that basically is what the storyboard that they're then working from. And the pressure on them to meet Walt's vision is unbelievably intense. But I think what makes it fun for them, what makes it exciting, is the sense that they have complete license to experiment. So they might work on a sequence for months and then Walt will say, no, let's not have that. We'll bin it. And that might seem dispiriting, but they know that the next sequence might be something completely groundbreaking. They all sit there kind of throwing bricks through windows just so that they can see how glass smashes and draw it. I mean, I think the most amazing one, they find it very difficult to give Snow White the right kind of color in her cheeks. She always kind of ends up looking a bit like a clown when they do it, you know, with the, with the actual. On the actual plates. So every plate a makeup artist gives her a kind of little dusting of rouge on the cheeks. Unbelievable attention to detail.
- [34:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
And just the drawings alone, I mean, we're talking about thousands upon thousands, just an unbelievable, a mind boggling number of original drawings produced. So for every frame of this film, I mean, on a scale that, you know, would have stupefied people even a few years earlier. But also, I mean, just for the listeners, if you go onto YouTube and you watch clips of 1930s, mid-1930s films was obviously largely black and white films, and then you watch Snow White, the difference is mind blowing.
- [34:52]
Tom Holland
It's almost psychedelic in its impact, I think. And just one other thing to mention about the impact of the animations, that the human characters are stunning. They basically, humans haven't been portrayed like that in animation before. And that again, is kind of part of the process of what's being worked out. And so it's not surprising that its impact is completely overwhelming for people. And Neil Gabler, I mean, he's very into the idea that what Disney is about is kind of creating self contained world. So he writes about Snow White. Whatever else the film does, this most deliberated upon movie in the history of film conveys a sense of control, a sense of a fully fabricated world. And you do get a sense of it as a kind of fairy tale that's existing in a state of suspended animation, something that's apart from the world. But I think also that on the animators, the people who made it, that imposed its own sense of pressure. So six months after the release of the film, Disney holds a delayed wrap party. And the result is what has come to be known by historians of Disney as the Snow White orgy. Doesn't sound as bad as that might suggest, but I think by the standards of Walt, it's pretty wild. So the artist who'd been in charge of animating the seven Dwarfs, he's going for a pee from the third floor, he falls out of the window, ends up in a tree, which is a motif that will later reappear in the film Dumbo. I think what is very Studio 54 is somebody rides a horse into the house, right? And that's quite good. And Walt arrives at the party expecting that it's going to be family values and all of that. And he finds naked couples cavorting in the swimming pool. And one of the animators said, well, you know, something just snapped. We couldn't help it. And I guess that there you do have a kind of theme that again will run throughout the future of Walt's career, which is every so often he gets wake up calls, reminders to him that reality can't always be kept at bay, that sometimes events beyond his control will intrude. And of course, in the late 1930s, all kinds of things are menacing on the horizon.
- [37:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, so the storm clouds of war, no less, are looming overhead. And on that note, we'll take a break and we'll come back and find out what happens to Walt Disney during and after the Second World War. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most?
- [37:32]
Tom Holland
We all need that sometimes, and Uber knows it.
- [37:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
Uber isn't just a ride or a meal delivered. It's showing up no matter what.
- [37:41]
Tom Holland
Like for your long distance friends. Bringing soup when they're sick, sending flowers when they're down.
- [37:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
When it really matters, whatever it is, you show up where there's a will.
- [37:53]
Tom Holland
We're on our way. Uber on our way. Download the app today. This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs.
- [38:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
The American Revolution is usually staged like theater. Washington center stage, redcoats marching in step, liberty delivering its lines on cue.
- [38:16]
Tom Holland
In reality, it was messy and uncertain, shaped by arguments over what kind of country America might become.
- [38:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
Ken Burns new series shows it in that light. Not as polished legend, but as lived experience. Rank and file soldiers, women, enslaved people and Native Americans may not have signed the Declaration, but their decisions carried weight in the struggle for independence.
- [38:42]
Tom Holland
What makes this story gripping isn't only the speeches or the battles. It's how the questions that gave birth to the United States continue to shape American life. Two and a half centuries on, the.
- [38:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Revolution was never frozen in time. It was restless, conflicted, unfinished. Which is precisely why it still matters.
- [39:02]
Tom Holland
As the United states nears its 250th year, the revolution is not a relic under glass, but a mirror still reflecting the soul of a country back at itself.
- [39:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app. This episode is brought to you by the Swedish clothing brand ascat.
- [39:26]
Tom Holland
Now, Dominic, in our episode on tailoring and the history of the suit, one of the most salient things you get a real sense of while stood in a tailor's on Savile Row is that historically, clothes were made with love and care hair so that they would last for a very long time indeed. And I think it's a shame in today's age of fast fashion that it is hard to come by clothes that stand the test of time.
- [39:49]
Dominic Sandbrook
But Tom, honestly, you don't have to go to the lengths of getting a bespoke suit tailor made to own clothes that are made with that same sense of love and pride. There are very few companies left that have that real focus on quality and longevity. But one of them is ascat. They work almost exclusively with organic and natural materials milled in Italy and Portugal and made in factories built on generations of craftsmanship. Every product is worn for months by the two founders, stress testing every stitch and seam before it's approved for production.
- [40:22]
Tom Holland
And as a result, they have just one single permanent collection. It's around 50 garments offered in three lengths for every regular size that are meant to be around forever.
- [40:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
And there are no discounts ever. If you don't need anything, then don't buy. If you're considering something though, visit asket.com or go to their recently opened store on Brewer street in London. Welcome back to the Rest Is History. So Walt Disney has become immensely rich and immensely successful. Snow White has made his name not merely as an animator, but as a genuine cinematic artist. And the question, Tom, is where does he go from here? What worlds are there left to conquer?
- [41:09]
Tom Holland
Well, what he does is he plows it back into the Walt Disney Company because all he really wants the money for, as we said before, is to make films and specifically to push at the absolute limits of what can be achieved in animation. So to help him fulfill this ambition, he builds an entirely new studio complex in Burbank in Los Angeles. And this is dominated by a three story state of the art animation building which, Dominic, we've actually entered and toured, haven't we? Yeah, we went to explore Disney a few weeks ago. And while this complex is being built he's greenlit three new feature length animated films. So Pinocchio is one of them. We've talked about that. The second one is Fantasia, which essentially is kind of MTV for classical music. It's Walt's attempt to go highbrow. And then there's Bambi. And Bambi really is perhaps the biggest challenge of all because it requires his animators to draw anatomically correct animals which simultaneously have features that are human enough to make them appealing to children. And this proves to be an enormous challenge. It takes kind of years and years of experimentation to get there. And all this experimentation basically rich though Snow White had made Walt, it doesn't stop him from burning through all the money he's made. And so it's not long before he has to start borrowing millions from the banks. And the banks lend to him because they think, oh, it's all going to be fine. He's a genius. These films will make enormous amounts of money. But obviously that's a huge source of pressure. And on top of all this, his family life is. It's been marked both by a terrible tragedy and by new responsibility. So the tragedy, he's bought his parents a lovely state of the art house in Los Angeles. And there his mother dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in the house that he, Walt Disney, had bought for her. And to make it worse, he had sent around Walt Disney engineers to make sure that the heating system was all fine. So he feels crippled with guilt about that. Also by this point, he has two daughters, one of them adopted. And he's a good father when he's around, but he's basically never around because he has just got so much on his plate.
- [43:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
So a lot with these films. I mean, he's obviously the presiding genius of them. He has the overall vision. He's obviously a massive attention to detail man. We'll see that in the next episode when we're talking about Disneyland. So, for example, with Fantasia, he's constantly arguing with the conductor about the music they're gonna have. You know, he wants to be over every last detail. And he's also. He's still a great innovator, isn't he? Technologically, I mean, he's still a man for a wheeze and a man for a fancy camera and a kind of, you know, a clever way of solving a problem, all of that kind of thing.
- [44:07]
Tom Holland
If he could make a massive camera that kind of stretches up to the ceiling and has loads of different plates and gizmos and things, he's all over that. I think what he's not doing is any of the actual animation. He never actually, I think, really admits this. So part of the publicity is always pictures of him drawing Mickey. But he, you know, he hasn't been drawing Mickey for a very, very long time.
- [44:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
And actually, the people who did draw Mickey were often very offended by this, weren't they? Because he never quite. I mean, if I have a criticism of Walt Disney, it is that he never was completely candid with the public about the fact that he didn't do the drawings.
- [44:44]
Tom Holland
I mean, he does the voice. He does the voice for Mickey. Hi there.
- [44:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, but I mean, drawings are the thing that really. I mean, people, when they think of Mickey Mouse, they think of the drawings first and not the sound, surely.
- [44:52]
Tom Holland
Yeah, they do. I think that the films clearly reflect his vision. And as you say, he's always hands on key aspects of the films that people always remember. They are basically down to him. So I guess, you know, a classic example would be in Bambi. Probably one of the most traumatic moments in the whole history of cinema when Bambi's mother gets killed. Huge debates about how this is to be done. It's Walt who says, well, we'll do it off screen like a great tragedy. And I guess, you know, people have often said, well, what exactly is Walt's role? What exactly is the Disney studio? We've met. It's a bit like a Renaissance studio, where the grandmaster has all his people who are kind of working on different paintings and things like that. It's also kind of like an Ivy League campus. And, you know, it's very like the early days of Apple, I think. You know, it's a kind of mixture of all those things.
- [45:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, the team. A great team.
- [45:40]
Tom Holland
Well, it is a great team to begin with, and it's a happy team, but it doesn't necessarily stay happy. So to look at the kind of. The way in which the relationship of the animators to Walt changes, let's zoom in on one of those animators. He is a Jewish artist originally from Nebraska. Arthur Art Babbitt.
- [46:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Of course he's called Art Babbitt.
- [46:04]
Tom Holland
I mean, this is the great thing about American history, isn't it? The names are always perfect. So Art Babbitt. He joins the Disney Studio in July 1932. So pretty much at the beginning. And he rises very rapidly through the ranks. He is fundamental to the look of Disney films. So he develops the character of Goofy the dog.
- [46:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
You will recall, Tom, that I asked the head of Disneyland, Bob Iger, to explain the relationship of Goofy and Pluto. A subject that has been perplexing Theo.
- [46:34]
Tom Holland
For years, because Goofy's a dog and Pluto's a dog.
- [46:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, but one of them is a kind of anthropomorphic dog and the other is just a dog.
- [46:42]
Tom Holland
I honestly think you're over complicating things.
- [46:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
I don't think I'm over. I mean, Disney have overcomplicated. I haven't overcomplicated it. I'm trying to get answers. I went to the top man and he didn't know.
- [46:50]
Tom Holland
Well, maybe. I mean, maybe there's a slight degree of edge there, which I think is possibly reflective of Art Babbitt's personality. So it's. It's notable that he is the person who is charged with animating the wicked queen in Snow White. You know, very difficult challenge. We said how hard it is for people, for animators at this point, to bring human beings to life. He does it superbly. And then he moves on to do Geppetto in Pinocchio. So he's very important to the Disney Studios cultural heft. But he is always rubbing Walt up the wrong way. So he's very loud, he's very obstreperous. He's also a massive womanizer. And he absolutely appalls Walt by having an affair with the woman who has served as the kind of human model for Snow White, who's a woman with the glorious name of Marjorie Belcher. Yeah, another brilliant American name. Come on. And obviously very offensive for Walt that basically he's shagging Snow White. Walt doesn't want that at all and would have sacked him for it had he not ended up marrying Marjorie Belcher.
- [47:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Okay, well, that's not so bad.
- [47:55]
Tom Holland
I think Art Babbitt is the kind of man who resents this slightly Victorian degree of paternalism. I think he feels it's up to him who he, you know, who he hangs out with. And I think that reflects more broadly a sense that Walt, who initially had been one of the boys, is increasingly becoming a boss. He's becoming kind of distant and imperious and autocratic. Listeners may remember I mentioned that he came back from the Western Front with a hacking cough. The sound of that hacking cough and Walt's clicking heels coming down the. The passageway it generates, it's capable of generating terror in animators. So Gabler, again, there was a fear of Walt now, a fear that had always been latent in the sweaty palms and nervous silence at the story sessions, a fear of displeasing him. And Gabler quotes one animator who says that she would vomit after making a presentation to him.
- [48:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, he's slightly. By this point he's definitely changed, hasn't he? The sort of boyish inventor has become much more autocratic and he remains more autocratic for the rest of his life.
- [48:54]
Tom Holland
Yeah. Well, it's interesting that the piece of music that kind of gestates Fantasia is the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where Mickey is an apprentice who generates a labor saving device in the form of a magical broomstick that ends up kind of overwhelming the Sorcerer's palace. It's interesting that Wart was interested in that story. The sense that, you know, he's the sorcerer and the apprentices are creating chaos and turning his own creations against him. I mean, it may not have been conscious, but I think it must have been there subliminally, because Art Babbitt is typical of the animators who are not prepared to be intimidated by him. And so he pushes for workers at Disney to unionize. And Walt is absolutely appalled by this and refuses point blank to allow any union into Disney. And I think this isn't initially out of political principle, although it will become so. Cause actually Disney's father had been a self proclaimed socialist. So to the degree that Disney had any political leanings, it was probably to the left. But I think the reason he's so appalled by it is that he thinks of the Disney Studio as a kind of paradise. And if you're in paradise, you don't need unions.
- [50:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, we're all a happy family. What you need. Imagine if Theo and Tabby just wanted to unionize against us. Tom?
- [50:11]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [50:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
How would we feel?
- [50:12]
Tom Holland
I think we would be correctly appalled and betrayed. And so that's how Disney feels when on 28 May 1941, several hundred of his employees start a strike. And so he, as we would be, is convinced that this must be caused by a Bolshevik conspiracy. And this guy, who's the son of a left wing socialist, ends up Reds under the bed, Bolsheviks everywhere. So on the morning of the strike, Walt very ostentatiously crosses the picket line. And Babbitt is on the picket line, he's got a loudspeaker and he yells out, walt Disney, you should be ashamed of yourself. And Walt is furious. The crowd are cheering Babbitt, not him. So Walt gets out of his car, he legs after Babbitt, who's running away, and he has to be physically restrained. And it's all very undignified and it's not a good look at all for Walt and the whole thing. The strike is an absolute public relations disaster for him. And after a couple of months, he thinks. He recognizes that he's not going to win, that he's going to have to call in mediation, and he recognizes that mediation is going to go against him. And so rather than stay around for that humiliation, he decides to go off on a promotional tour of South America.
- [51:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's Paul from Wait. I think he should have stayed to face the music. But actually, it's a transformative moment in the history of Walt and his company, isn't it? Because after this point, the sort of happy family spirit never quite returns as it had before. And Walt himself definitely changes, doesn't he? So he basically has the trajectory of Ronald Reagan. He started out sort of vaguely center left, and he's going to end up becoming actually pretty right wing as a result. Partly as a result of this strike.
- [51:53]
Tom Holland
Yeah. Well, Reagan retains his sunniness, I think, in this period. Hawke becomes quite gloomy, quite bitter, quite suspicious. And there's one of the animators who'd been there with him throughout the glory days. He said the esprit de corps that made possible all the brilliant films of the 1930s was dead as a dodo. So that's not looking good. But there are other problems as well that are pressing on the Disney studio in the 40s. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, they're all huge critical hits. People think they're stupefying, but they all lose money. And the main reason for this is that war has broken out in Europe and so Disney has lost a vast part of its potential market. And this, in turn, by 1941, is directly impacting on Walt's ability to maintain his perfectionism. He just can't afford it. And it's suggestive that the only film in this period that makes a profit is Dumbo. So the story of a baby elephant with giant ears ends up flying. It's very stylistically pared back. And so that's the one that makes a profit. And we will be looking at Dumbo and all these great classics in much more detail in next week's bonus. So very exciting.
- [53:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Great. So December 1941, Pearl Harbor, a date that will live in infamy. The United States enters the war. And presumably this is disastrous for the Disney enterprise. In fact, it is disastrous, isn't it? Because Disney really, in his lifetime, the studio never really recovers from the shock of the Second World War.
- [53:33]
Tom Holland
Yeah. So it's massively in debt to banks, its audience has been cut off by the war, and the company just about stays afloat by making propaganda films for the US military. So, I mean, a particularly thrilling sounding one is Four Methods of Flush River Tingling, which they haven't made a ride out of that at Disneyland. And it leaves Disney very precariously placed. So by 1944, the company owes the bank of America $4 million, which at the time is a huge amount. And it means that when the war ends, Disney emerges from it. The company can't afford to make animated films anymore. And even when in 1950, Roy Disney has kind of, you know, he's been paring back. He's been. Been, you know, imposing austerity and all that kind of thing can raise just enough. Enough money to make Cinderella. The animation of Cinderella is incredibly basic compared to, you know, the films that they've been making earlier. And I think that Walt himself basically loses interest in making films. And although the company is busy cranking out live action films and then in due course, these rather paired back cartoons. Yeah, he. He makes no great claims for them. He. He says that most of them are. What? Cor.
- [54:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
He means that that's a bad thing, right?
- [54:49]
Tom Holland
Well, kind of. I mean, that nutritious, but not. Not kind of a cuisine, I guess, would be the. The idea. And, you know, you compared him to Reagan. I mean, he does now seem to lots of people a pretty conservative figure. Definitely conservative in his politics. You know, he's hostile to unions. He's all in with McCarthy, the idea that there are reds under the beds and all that. And I think also he is identified with a kind of cultural conservatism now. So Whereas in the 30s, German intellectuals were all over him. Now he's identified with apple pie and white picket fences and all of that. And one of the reasons for that, you know, you mentioned how Mickey in the 30s seemed a very subversive figure. Now Mickey, too, seems very, very kind of dated. Very pretty boring, really, compared to other kind of animated figures that are coming out at this time. So Tom and Jerry, you know, bang each other over the head with hammers and. And running into nails and all of that. Or Bugs Bunny, that kind of thing.
- [55:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I never thought we'd be doing Bugs Bunny on. The rest is history, but here we are. Cause it's the Warner brothers, isn't it? Warner Brothers, Looney Tunes and Hanna Barbera and stuff like that. They're very subversive. They're very madcap and zany. And by comparison, Disney's cartoons just feel a little bit staid in the 50s.
- [56:01]
Tom Holland
They feel bland. They're boring. They're kind of white bred. And again, to pursue the kind of the Elvis analogy, it's like Walter's been drafted into the army or it's like, you know, Apple, Apple has that kind of incredibly fallow period between the first computers and then when they invent the ipod. So maybe it's written into the life cycle of iconic American cultural figures, I don't know. But important to emphasize, the company does not go under. Walt and Roy, between them, managed to keep it afloat. And Walt does continue to innovate. So one striking example of this in the post war years is he basically inventing the nature film. And Walt had always loved wildlife since he'd been a boy in Marceline. And there's this very weird story that he always used to tell that he'd been haunted by something that happened when he was a seven year old boy. He'd watched an owl fly and land on a tree in an orchard and said, quote, well, I don't know why, but I wanted to catch that owl. So I snuck up behind it and I grabbed it. Well, he immediately began to claw and fight and I threw him on the ground. In my excitement, I stomped on him and I killed the owl. That thing haunted me for a long time afterward.
- [57:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
So he's got the voice of Ronald Regan and the sentiments of the fox murdering lawyer Jolyon Maugham.
- [57:21]
Tom Holland
Well, but Jolian Maugham, I think, has shown less contrition, hasn't he, over his murder of wildlife? Because so animals in the classic films from Snow White through to Dumbo are seen as friends of those who were persecuted, those who are menaced. So the woodland creatures in Snow White, the crows in Dumbo, and famously, notoriously, even if you're a hunter in Bambi, man is portrayed as a creature so evil that the hunting lobby in America, they end up condemning it as the worst insult ever offered to American sports. So I think, I think Walt is, you know, his devotion to animals is clearly very deep rooted. And so when in 1948 he sent filmmakers to kind of shoot stuff in Alaska and the footage comes back and all the kind of human interest stuff is incredibly boring, but there are loads of seals. And so Walt says, well, we'll just make a film about seals. And so it's called Seal Island. It wins an Oscar. The wildlife is massively anthropological, amorphosized. So as in the animations, it's all that, hello little fellow, all that kind of come along, oh, mommy's cross with you. All of that quite like that.
- [58:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
I like that. In a nature documentary I did as well.
- [58:36]
Tom Holland
I always remember them from when I watched them as a child. I quite like them too. I mean, obviously it's gone very, very out of fashion. But you know, there's no question that without Disney is bathing a path there that David Attenborough and so on will pick up on. And I think it's another example, much less high profile, one of how far reaching Disney's influence is. So that's in the cultural dimension. He's still innovating on the kind of commercial and technological level as well. And I think it's really telling that he is pretty much unique among movie executives in seeing television not as a challenge, not as a threat, but as a huge opportunity.
- [59:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, so we'll get into this a little bit in the next episode when we're talking about Disneyland. But basically he signs this deal with abc, doesn't he? Abc, which is still associated with Disney today. He signs it in 1954 and the first show they make is called Disneyland. And it's a massive, massive success. I mean, it goes right to the top of the charts and it remains there for as long as it runs.
- [59:36]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And it's presented by Walt himself, who by this stage is kind of has become Uncle Walt, uncle to the nation. And he appears on the television screens and you know, it's very Reagan, very Reagan. And they have one particularly massive hit which is Davy Crockett. Born on a mountain top of Tennessee Greene estate in the land of the free. All of that. Davy Crockett wears a coon skin cap with a kind of long tail.
- [60:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Americans love this hat. But I mean, I. I think non Americans are totally indifferent to it and about bewildered by it.
- [60:09]
Tom Holland
But in America, Davy Crockett provides Disney with a marketing bonanza that, you know, it's comparable to kind of Mickey mania. And at one point a quarter of the. Of the entire country is watching it. And so this is great. It means that for the first time since the release of Snow White, Disney is able to pay off its debts and get the banks off its back. So Walt is now flush again. And Walt being Walt, he uses the money to fund a new obsession which Dominic, is a theme park which will come to be called Disneyland.
- [60:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. So we will be telling the story of that in the next episode. And it's a cultural achievement, I would argue, just as important and influential as Mickey Mouse and Snow White. And of course, listeners to the rest is History Club, our very own little, you know, what do they call them? Mouseketeers? Yeah, they can hear that episode right away, can't they?
- [61:00]
Tom Holland
They absolutely can.
- [61:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
But let's continue with the films. Let's just type the story of the films. So Walt is now terribly interested in trains and rides and, yeah, all of this stuff. So actually, the truth is he finds he's a bit bored of the films. He's not as interested in them as he once was.
- [61:19]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The days when he would obsess over, you know, every frame that's long gone. And I think that as the 60s, you know, counterculture is clicking in, 60s are swinging the animations put out by Disney. So that would be 101 Dalmatians, or sword in the Stone. These have recognizably become the product not of a kind of auteur, as Disney had once been, but of a corporation. And Walt himself recognized that. So he said in the 60s, I'm not Walt Disney anymore. Walt Disney is a thing. It's grown to become a whole different meaning than just one man. And people may wonder, well, did he really care? I think not massively, but a bit. And so you. Perhaps it's suggested, but he dies of lung cancer on the 15th of December, 1966. So all those cigarettes he's been puffing on since the war, they basically catch up with him. But when he dies, he's immersed in an animated version of Rudyard Kipling's the Jungle Book. And he hasn't been as committed to an animation since Bambi. And it really shows because actually the Jungle Book, I think, is brilliant and it goes on to earn a fortune. So it suggests that perhaps had he lived, he might have returned to producing animations of the quality of those early films. But in the wake of his death, 1967, 1968, it's a kind of revolutionary period in the United States. And his critics on the left, on the kind of countercultural wings of American culture, identify him, I think, both as a symptom and a cause of very deep flaws in American culture. So it's commercialization, it's infantilization, the sense that Disney has infantilized the country and the fact that he's kind of degraded high culture. And this was something that Disney had been very paranoid about. It's why he'd made Fantasia, but Fantasia had bombed, and so he'd kind of basically parked that. And the most venomous attack on. On Walt Disney as an individual comes in 1968, when the film historian Richard Schickel published a book called the Disney Version. And Schickel accused Disney of having created a world that was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood, its secrets and its silences, thus forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams. And Shickle says that that Disney had become a rallying point for the subliterates of our society. This is where American critics have got to in the late 60s. But of course, in Europe, critics have got there a lot earlier. So back in the 30s and 40s, we said, you know, intellectuals in Europe love Disney. You've got Thomas Mann, Eisenstein, Dali. They all think he's brilliant. But by the 50s, Disney has already come to seem to intellectuals and artists outside America as the great exemplar of American cultural imperialism. And I'll quote one novelist, she's an Australian, but she lived in London so long that she's come to have a very British accent. She's called Pamela Travers. P.L. travers. And in 1961, she described Disney as so coarse, so uncouth, so wrong in every way. And specifically, Dominic, she was responding to a script of her most famous novel, which was the story of a strict, magical, practically perfect, one might say practically perfect nanny called Mary Poppins. And those who haven't read the novel, she gets blown in by a strong east wind. She arrives at number 17 Cherry Tree Lane in London, and there she becomes nanny to two children, Jane and Michael Banks. And in the novel by P.L. travers, Dark and wild and fantastical and faintly menacing adventures ensue. And in California, Walt's two daughters had adored the book. It had come out in the 1940s, and Walt had been trying to buy the film rights to the book since 1943.
- [65:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
But Pamela Travers held out, didn't she? Because she basically, you know, she believed, as lots of more highbrow people did, that Disney meant dumbing down, and it meant commercialism and sentimentality and so on. But basically, because she needed the cash in 1961, she decides, well, maybe I will sell Mary Poppins to Disney. But there's still a bit of toing and froing, isn't there? Which is what is captured in the film. What's it called? Saving Mr. Banks.
- [65:50]
Tom Holland
Saving Mr. Banks. So that's Tom Hanks as Disney and emma Thompson as P.L. travers. It's a very good film, very quite funny, moving, but the whole. The kind of, the history behind it, the actual story is brilliantly explicated in a new book that's actually out next week by Todd James Pierce called Making Mary Poppins. And he goes into some detail about exactly why P.L. travers hated the script. So, as you suggested to Quote Piers. She believed that Disney had replaced elements of truth and insight central to her books with a saccharine sentimentality. She loathed the way in which the script had Americanized what. What Travers saw is absolutely an English story. All kinds of social solicits in it. So the script describes Mr. And Mrs. Banks as hiring a nanny rather than employing one. Unforgivable.
- [66:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. That's shocking.
- [66:38]
Tom Holland
And also, also it showed the servants in the bank's household speaking slang, which Travers pointed out to the scriptwriters. Unacceptable for hired help in England.
- [66:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
Hired help surely employed help.
- [66:50]
Tom Holland
She didn't want any songs. She didn't want any animated sequences. And I think her real worry was that she knew from previous Disney films that they end up obliterating the literary works that they were based on.
- [67:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's just not. I mean, who reads Mary Poppins now? Nobody.
- [67:06]
Tom Holland
Absolutely. And so this is exactly. You know, as Piers says, at some point in the future, the public might think of Mary Poppins more as a Disney character than as a character she herself had created in her books. And as you say, Dominic, she is absolutely right about that. But I think, as Pierce's book demonstrates, all the aspects of the script she disliked were precisely the ones that would make Mary Poppins an absolutely massive smash. And it becomes the most critically lauded, the most commercially successful Disney film since Snow White. And it is also, I think, the film that is most pointedly and most movingly about Walt Disney himself. Because at the heart of the plot, the script that has been adapted from P.L. travers book, and which he's so sniffy about, is the emotional journey that is taken by the father of Jane and Michael Banks. Mr. Banks. And Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins is a man who spends all his time in the office, so therefore neglecting his children, who, you know, he works in a bank, but he is essentially the slave of a bank, and he feels the burden that of the bank on his back so profoundly that he neglects to perform simple acts of kindness, such as, for instance, buying food for the birds. And Mr. Banks in the film even has a little pencil moustache, exactly like Disney does.
- [68:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's David Tomlinson, isn't he? Very good British character actor. Excellent. But, yeah, there is definite Walt Disney quality to him, isn't there? Yeah.
- [68:35]
Tom Holland
Travers hates it because it's basically become something that she doesn't recognize. You know, that all the kind of the sadness and the darkness she thinks has gone and that it's basically become a kind of story about a family discovering its heart as she sees it as schmaltzy and sentimental. But I think that to anyone who's familiar with Walt's life and my sense of Mary Poppins as a great film was massively enhanced by kind of reading up about Disney's life, Walt Disney's life, you know, his obsessional drive, his neglect of his family, his, you know, his lifelong struggle with Banks and debt and so on. The kind of the redemption that Mr. Banks has at the end of Mary Poppins, because Mary Poppins herself essentially succeeds in restoring to him joy and kindness and love for his children. Actually, I don't find it sentimental. I find it very moving. I think that the kind of the ending of Mary Poppins, Disney has won that ending. And so at the end of Mary Poppins, Mr. Banks leads his children out into the park and he's made a kite. And as he goes, he sings, oh, oh, let's go fly a kite up to the highest height let's go fly a kite and send it soaring up through the atmosphere up where the air is clear. Oh, let's go fly a kite. And with that, Dominic, her job done, Mary Poppins can depart on the wind that has just changed.
- [70:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, that was really lovely. I'm sure everybody enjoyed that. So the story of Disney is not yet over because in the next episode we'll be looking at perhaps his most enduring creation, which is Disneyland. And we'll be digging into the pre history of theme parks and indeed of rides. Where do they come from? Were people really going on rides in the 18th century? The answer is that they were. But also we have a very special bonus for our rest is History Club members, because Tom will be looking in great detail at Disney at war and the story behind some of those great films of the Golden Age. Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. So a pretty exciting prospect if you like Disney, which we do.
- [71:01]
Tom Holland
And Dominic, also we have some extra content which will be available for everyone coming out on Friday. And so on that suitably commercial note for now, bye bye.
- [71:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Bye bye.