From the archive, 16 December 1966: The death of Walt Disney - folk hero
New York, December 15
Walt Disney, the Pied Piper of Hollywood, who made a mountain of money out of a mouse, died today in Burbank, California at the age of 65. There was very little in the early life of Walter Elias Disney to show that he would emerge by his twenty-fifth birthday as the most revolutionary motion picture talent after Chaplin. The vital statistics, padded out from newspaper files, suggest a boyhood as corny as Kansas in August.
A Midwestern upbringing, the son of a carpenter who tried his hand at farming (so as to introduce the young Walt to a menagerie of adorable animals), a full stretch of grade school, an incomplete spell in high school, a boy of little scholarship and lively appetite for games who picked up pin-money in winter as a newspaper delivery boy, in summer as a candy butcher (sweets salesman) of the Kansas City-Chicago train. It is the standard biography of many another American folk hero.
His first job was a commercial artist with an advertising company. He went from there to a cartoonist's job on a film weekly and began to experiment on his own with cartoon slides. He soon wanted to see them in motion and drew a series, of Kansas City doings, for local theatres. They bore the awful name of Laugh-o-Grams. That was in 1922. The next year the pioneer's legend takes up again with his flight to Hollywood - with borrowed capital of $40 and the sketches of a film which would set a living girl against a cartoon background. At last, in 1928, he was signed by a genuine, licensed studio, Universal, no less, to draw and direct its "Oswald the Rabbit" cartoons. At the end of two years, there was a violent artistic quarrel and Disney went on his own and brooded over a mouse he had drawn on his railroad runs.
After two efforts that were scrapped as amateur, he came through with "Steamboat Willie", which had the luck to make shrewd use of the new device of sound. Disney never had any further need to borrow money.
So long as he cherished his outrageous ducks and mice and wolves, he was the darling of the intelligentsia. But "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," with their sweetness, cuteness and light doomed him as a highbrow renegade. But it also doomed him to a world gross of $8 millions. Luckily for most of the world's moviegoers, Disney was a rollicking and uncomplicated soul, who never felt that his ardent sentimentality was at odds with the Marx Brothers anarchy of Donald Duck. He went ahead with his "Pinocchio," "Fantasia," "Bambi," "Peter and the Wolf"and all the other 18-carat whimsies of the pre-Beat children's world.
Alistair Cooke