False Things You Believe About Walt Disney

How many businessmen and corporation founders are known by their first and last name by billions of people? And how many people start off as humble artists and go on to start one of the most influential, powerful, and profitable companies in the world? Not too many — and Walt Disney is probably the only person in both categories. 

The Walt Disney story is a classic, only-in-America, 20th-century success story. He rose from artist in a Midwestern ad agency to become an animator, filmmaker, theme park builder, studio boss, tastemaker, and creator and defender of wholesome family entertainment. Walt Disney is certainly legendary, but with such larger than life and deeply important figures (the man made animated feature films a thing with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and amusement parks classy and magical with Disneyland), they're often prone to — or guilty of — some major myth-building. Much of what we believe about Disney — a man so beloved that his nickname is "Uncle Walt" — is just plain false. Let's set the record straight.

Walt Disney is synonymous with Mickey Mouse, a character so successful that it led to a major animation studio, an entertainment conglomerate, and chain of theme parks, all linked by the squeaky-voiced little guy. He's the company's smiling mascot and a merchandising machine. All of this was meant to be, implied by the official Disney line that Walt Disney came up with Mickey during a train trip in 1928 when his attempts to break into the entertainment business were woefully failing. 

However, according to Jeff Ryan, author of A Mouse Divided (via the New York Post), Walt Disney didn't invent the Mickey Mouse character, nor draw him for the first time — Ub Iwerks did. Disney first connected with Iwerks while both were working as artists in Kansas City in 1919, ultimately forming their cartoon studio. In the late 1920s, a bad business deal led to the loss of their moderately successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. So they got to work, and Iwerks drew some cartoony images of a cow, horse, dog, and frog. Disney didn't like any of them and suggested Iwerks draw a mouse. 

Before long, Iwerks had developed the basic design of the character that would come to be known as Mickey Mouse. After Disney and Iwerks' creative partnership later dissolved in a non-amicable way, Disney started telling a false tale about how he'd created Mickey on a train, leaving Iwerks completely out of the story.

The 1994 Simpsons episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" is full of jokes at the expense of all things Disney. Bart and Lisa see a brief film about Itchy & Scratchy creator Roger Meyers Sr., a Walt Disney stand-in whose cartoons include "Steamboat Itchy" and "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors." That's a nod to the idea that Disney hated Jewish people, a notion supported by a speech Meryl Streep delivered at the 2014 National Board of Review Awards where she said the man "formed and supported an anti-Semitic lobbying group."

This may all stem from a 1938 incident in which Disney gave a personal tour of his production studio to Leni Riefenstahl — official film documentarian of Hitler's Third Reich — a tour which came just a month after Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized terrorist attack that destroyed synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses and left nearly 100 Jewish people dead. 

Disney turned down Riefenstahl's efforts to return the favor by showing him her films of the 1936 Olympics held in Germany, but the association with the Nazis forever tarnished his reputation. However, Neal Gabler, who wrote Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and claims to have read all of Disney's personal papers, says there's little proof of any virulent Jewish hatred on Disney's part. "I saw no evidence, other than casual anti-Semitism that virtually every gentile at that time would have, that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite," he told USA Today.

There's a unique but dark element that recurs throughout Disney's kid-friendly animated features: The main character is motherless, either having lost their mom by the time the events of the movie begin or during the film itself. Among the classic Disney movies with a mom-less protagonist, we've got Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, The Jungle Book, Bambi, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. According to Hollywood lore, there's a sad reason behind a plot line so common that it feels like a Disney directive. As the story goes, Walt Disney's mother, Flora, died in 1938 after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning from an improperly working furnace in her brand new home. Because he'd bought the house, Disney blamed himself for his mother's death, and the guilt led him to make movies about motherless figures.

The connection is weak, at best. Many Disney features are based on pre-existing and seriously dark children's books and fairy tales, where dead moms are a common factor. It's a powerful literary device that can characterize a protagonist as a sympathetic underdog. Besides, as Snopes points out, Disney's mother died after the pattern of semi-orphaned Disney characters had been established. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs hit theaters a year before Flora Disney's death, while Bambi (featuring the traumatizing death of Bambi's mom by a hunter's bullet) was in production at the time of the Disney family tragedy.

Disneyland opened in July 1955, and like virtually every day since, the park was jam-packed on day one, with about 20,000 guests. Within a few weeks, more than a million people had visited. It was a rousing success, leading the world to forget about all the pre-opening troubles and skepticism that Walt Disney faced. 

However, Disneyland wasn't some crowning achievement after a successful career making animated blockbusters. In fact, in the early 1950s, Disney didn't necessarily have the universally known and loved brands yet to make a theme park work. And besides, the perception of amusement parks at the time was that they were dirty, dangerous, and low-class. But according to American Heritage, Walt Disney was so desperate to create Disneyland and so convinced that his unique vision would be successful that he took out a loan against a life insurance policy to fund the planning. He supposedly only had around $1,000 in the bank at the time.

To further bolster the coffers for the Disneyland project, Walt Disney turned to television. While other movie studios saw TV as a competition and a threat, Disney embraced the medium, authorizing a weekly showcase of Disney films and cartoons on ABC called Disneyland. Disney hosted the show himself, where he also gave updates on the building of the Disneyland park. In other words, these were ads, which got the public very psyched by July 1955.

In December 1966, after suffering from lung cancer, 65-year-old Walt Disney died ... but only for the time being, according to one of the most bizarre and persistent myths to ever circulate. Disney was keenly and publicly fascinated with futuristic, utopian technology, as evidenced by the "Tomorrowland" section and use of animatronics at Disneyland. That interest in what the future offered also transpired in an interest in cryogenic storage — the act of freezing a dead body (or just a head) at subzero temperatures to be thawed out later and restored to life. Well, when the technology to do that is perfected, of course. Thus, there's this urban legend that Disney had his body or head placed in an extremely cold chamber in a secure facility immediately after his death.

The rumor likely originated from statements made in 1972 by Bob Nelson, president of the pioneering California Cryogenics Society (CCS), who claimed that Disney had shown at least an intellectual interest in cryogenic freezing, but that he died before he could make any stipulations in his will telling his family to put his body under ice. Also helping to spread this fake news? The CCS froze its first subject just two weeks after the death of Disney. But as for the animation legend himself, his remains were cremated and interred after a secret, private funeral for just his family.