January 27 - Kay Kamen

Image courtesy CBC.ca

On this day, in 1892, Herman Samuel Kominetzky was born in Baltimore, Maryland. The youngest of four children of Russian Jewish immigrants, Kay (as he became known) started his long career in sales and advertising selling mink hats in Nebraska. By his early thirties, he had started his own marketing company in Kansas City, the Kamen-Blair Company. His firm's specialty was developing products for movies. In 1932, Walt and Roy Disney contacted him with the opportunity of a lifetime.

Kay barely responded with interest to the Disney Brother's proposal before he went to the bank, withdrew his entire life savings and hopped a train to Los Angeles. When he arrived at the Disney Studio, he laid the cash on Walt's desk and suggested that the brothers take it plus half of the revenue derived from products based on their characters. Walt and Roy agreed and Kay became the exclusive merchandiser for Disney for the next two decades, an agreement that would benefit both parties beyond their wildest dreams.

Image copyright Ingersoll

In 1933, Kay introduced the Mickey Mouse watch, which quickly became the top selling watch in the country. From there, Kay's genius at merchandising ran wild. Producing everything from stuffed toys to cookie jars, Kay built the Disney account into a $100 million a year enterprise by 1948. The studio's share of that revenue is basically what kept it alive during the lean war years. It's also why every attraction in a Disney park empties out into a gift shop, but you have to take the bad with the good sometimes.

Unfortunately for Kay, his enjoyment of his relationship with Disney would be cut short. In 1949, the Air France airliner he was travelling on crashed into a mountain side in the Azores, killing everyone on board.

October 23 - Dumbo

On this day, in 1941, Walt Disney Studio's fourth animated feature, Dumbo, had its world premier at the Broadway Theater in New York City. With war raging in Europe, the studio had hit hard times. No foreign markets meant that both Pinocchio and Fantasia had failed to turn a profit. In desperate need of money, Walt decided to go cheap and simple. It was a gamble that paid off, both in the short and the long run.

In 1939, Kay Kamen, the head of the licensing department, showed Walt a prototype of a new toy, the Roll-A-Book. The scroll on the toy was a story by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. The entire scroll consisted of eight pictures and a few words of text. It was enough for Walt to want to buy the rights. He originally intended to turn it into a short, but as development of the story proceeded, it became a feature.

When it came time to start animating Dumbo, Walt instructed his team that they had to make this picture on the cheap. Gone were the lush details of the studio's earlier films. The backgrounds were done in watercolors instead of oils. Character designs were simpler and more cartoony. Exacerbating costs was the fact that rough animation was barely finished when the animators went on strike for five weeks starting in May of 1941. The strike was finally settled (not terribly amicably) and the film was finished that fall. The final cost of Dumbo was a mere $950,000 (about 15.8 million dollars today), half of Snow White and a third of Pinocchio.

When Walt went to turn Dumbo over to RKO Radio Pictures, his distribution company at the time, they didn't want it. At just 64 minutes, Dumbo remains one of the studio's shortest features. RKO wanted it either lengthened or cut down to a short or they'd release it as a B-movie. Walt refused all of that and RKO begrudgingly released it as it was. Naturally that turned out to be the best choice.

Dumbo would be the most financially successful Disney film of its decade, grossing 1.6 million dollars (about 26.6 million dollars today). The simple, charming story resonated with movie goers even with (or perhaps because of) the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war. Dumbo would be nominated for two Oscars, winning for its score created by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace. It currently enjoys a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's spawned two attractions, a television series in the Eighties and a new live action version set to come out next year. I don't think the story of the little elephant who gets bullied, finds an unlikely friend who gives him confidence and ends up saving the day will ever go out of style and might just be needed more today than ever.

Also on this day, in American history: Op Art