December 5 - Walter Elias Disney

On this day, in 1901, Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois. Volumes could (and have) been written on the life of Walt Disney. This entire first year of my blog is, in some way, linked to his life (or at least his legacy). Most of the people and things I've talked about up to this point were unknown to me and, I suspect, unknown to most of my readers as well. Walt is different. Partly because a large swath of the population has at least heard his name and partly because in the years since his death, the myth of Walt Disney has taken over the reality.

When the company that bears his name ever brings up Walt (and those mentions really do seem to be getting fewer and farther between), he's spoken of as is if he was a character in a book rather than a human being. Walt's story has been corporately Disneyfied. Not in the "let's sing and dance through this story" way of The Little Mermaid, but in the "nothing bad ever happened, nothing to see here folks" way of Song of the South. The truth is he was such a control freak, he drove his employees to strike and then resented them for it. He smoked like a chimney and swore like a sailor. He went before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and threw people under the bus. I'm sure the list could go on and on.

I'm not trying to bash the man here, or tarnish his image. He is a personal hero of mine, after all. I mention these things because while I respect him and believe in the things he stood for, I am also well aware of his flaws. And the fact that he accomplished so much in spite of them. And, love him or hate him, he did accomplish things. He pushed animation out of the seven slapstick minutes before a feature into the feature itself. He elevated the fledgling medium of television to a viable creative outlet. He brought amusement parks out of the shady, carny filled slums and made them environments that people feel safe enough in to forget about their cares for a while. In short, Walt completely changed the entire face of entertainment in America. We could argue for a month whether that change was good or bad but it would be a moot point. The change has occurred and we are not going back.

Before I ramble on too long (I know some of you are thinking "Too late!"), let me share the two ideas Walt expressed that I try to keep a firm grasp on. The first is that it is your duty as an entertainer to give the audience everything you possibly can. Some days that is going to be more than others, but at the end of every day you should feel like you could not have performed any better than you just did. The second is an almost dangerous idea: if you want anyone to listen to what you have to say, you'd better be really entertaining. You could have the greatest message in the world but if you're boring in your presentation, no one will hear it. What makes this idea dangerous is that the opposite is also true. A terrible message presented in a fun, engaging manner will get listened to almost every time.

So today Walt would have been 117. What would he think about our world of today? We'll never know. I think he would have found the internet fascinating and reality television repulsive. He probably would have had some salty language for the folks currently running his empire while at the same time marveling that it now stretches around the entire globe. And, as always, he would have his eyes on the next big thing in entertainment and how he could use it to his advantage. Happy birthday, Walt. You were one in a billion.