A fan’s reflections on the generation-spanning House of Mouse …
I totally was a Disney kid.
As far back as I can remember, the creations of the studio first founded by Walt Disney and his brother 100 years ago this fall were a major part of my life.
I have fleeting memories of when my mother took me back to her hometown in Wales for an extended visit with my Gran. I celebrated my 3rd birthday while there and I particularly recall the swings in the town park where, as Mom used to tell me, everyone would point me out as “the little American.”
Of course, it probably wasn’t too difficult for them to spot me, what with the coonskin cap and fringed buckskin jacket I was wearing — two of the hallmarks of a kid growing up in 1955 America, thanks to Walt Disney.
Disney had started out making film shorts in the 1920s, then cartoons starring his new character, Mickey Mouse, before graduating to animated features such as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and then, in the 1950s, live action films.
Hollywood initially was scared of the latest entertainment medium, television, but Disney, always an innovator, was one of the first movie producers to embrace TV, launching a weekly program on ABC that, not coincidentally, also promoted his movies and his new California amusement park, Disneyland. And Walt himself became a part of our lives as the avuncular host of the program.
Disney’s first big TV success was a three-part miniseries about frontiersman Davy Crockett that debuted on his show (one episode a month) from December 1954 to February 1955, and then was edited into a feature film, “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.”
The TV version, seen by an estimated 40 million viewers, produced the first great pop culture merchandising phenomenon of the post-World War II era. Besides the coonskin caps, fringed jackets and two different hit singles of the show’s theme song, there was all manner of Davy Crockett memorabilia sold — an estimated $300 million worth during the eight-month craze in 1955, which would be the equivalent in today’s dollars of more than $3.3 billion.
Davy was played by Fess Parker, an actor with tons of homespun charm who was featured in a number of Disney movies and later would star in a long-running non-Disney TV series about another frontiersman, Daniel Boone. Crockett’s sidekick, Georgie Russell, was played by Buddy Ebsen, who eventually would become everyone’s favorite millionaire hillbilly on TV.
Parker, who at the time was making $350 a week in his Disney contract, asked Walt for a 10 percent share of Disney’s Crockett merchandising and was granted it. But that didn’t amount to nearly as much as you’d expect, because the bulk of the products rushed onto the market during the craze were not from Disney — since Crockett was a historic character not under copyright or trademark protection.
As for Ebsen, when I met him in the mid-1980s (I was a newspaper reporter covering television) and asked him whether he got a piece of the Crockett bonanza, he said he did not.
“Walt Disney was a fine fella,” Ebsen said with a smile. “He’d give you the shirt off his back. But he was smart enough to surround himself with lawyers who would stop him.”)
But even Walt, who’d already ridden several pop culture crests thanks to Micky Mouse and various hit movies, was surprised by the scope and speed of the Crockett phenomenon — if he’d known, he probably wouldn’t have killed Davy off in the third episode!
(Always the pragmatist, Disney brought the frontier hero back for two more episodes in late 1955 in what we’d now call a prequel. Like the first three Crockett tales, they also were stitched together into a feature film, “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.”)
I actually don’t remember watching the original run of Crockett in 1954-55, though I’m sure we did, since I was wearing the coonskin cap and jacket on the visit to Wales. I do, however, recall watching the shows when they were repeated in 1959. And I’ve watched them quite a few times over the years, including as an adult when I bought a Disney Treasures box set of Crockett DVDs.
My other early favorite on the Disney TV program was “The Swamp Fox,” an eight-episode miniseries airing from 1959 to 1961 about Revolutionary War Gen. Francis Marion (played by Leslie Nielsen) and the guerrilla warfare he led in South Carolina against the Redcoats and Tories. Years later, when I watched it with my kids on the Disney Channel, it still held up well.
My earliest Disney memories, of course, are of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and all the other anthropomorphized animated creatures who populated Disney’s cartoon shorts, many of which I grew to know through his prime-time series (originally called “Disneyland” and then “Walt Disney Presents”) and also the “Mickey Mouse Club,” a Monday-Friday children’s series that ran afternoons in 1955-59 on ABC.
Besides the nonanimated kid Mousketeers (including future beach movie queen and Skippy peanut butter mom Annette Funicello), the latter show included various live-action serials, the most memorable of which were a couple of Hardy Boys mysteries (long before I discovered the venerable book series in fifth grade) and “Spin and Marty,” about a couple of kids at a summer dude ranch out west. A costar of both those serials was Tim Considine, a regular among Disney’s kid actors. In the Hardy Boys story, he was paired with Tommy Kirk, another child actor who starred in many Disney features on into young adulthood.
Another early Disney experience came in 1956, when I was 4. My mother took me to the very first movie I ever saw in a theater — Disney’s animated musical, “Fantasia,” which included my favorite mouse in an unforgettable segment called “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
I also remember going the next year with Mom to see “Perri,” one of Disney’s so-called “true life adventures” films about real animals, this one a squirrel. She also took me to 1959’s “The Shaggy Dog,” the first of Disney’s live-action comedies, starring Fred MacMurray (along with Annette, Considine, Kirk and a young child named Kevin Corcoran whom I knew as “Moochie” from “The Mickey Mouse Club”).
The next year, Corcoran was the titular star of the Disney circus film “Toby Tyler,” to which my father took me one Sunday afternoon. After we got home, Dad took to calling Timothy, my baby brother, “Moochie of the Circus.”
Of course, in those days, the canny Disney regularly created a new young market for his earlier productions by reissuing them every few years, so I also got taken to see films originally released long before I was born, such as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio” (the segment where the puppet boy turns into a donkey scared me, I remember), “Dumbo” (never one of my favorites) and “Bambi,” which also had its scary moments early on when a hunter kills the young deer’s mama.
(By the time my own kids came along, only Disney’s biggest classics, such as “Snow White,” got the occasional theatrical reissue treatment, with most of them available to watch at home whenever you wanted, thanks to videocassettes and, later, DVDs.)
My father also took me to see “Tonka,” a live-action Western about a Native American boy and his horse (set around Custer’s massacre at the Little Big Horn), as well as “Kidnapped,” Disney’s adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, starring James MacArthur, another Disney regular who later would achieve “Book ’em, Danno” fame on the original “Hawaii Five-O.”
Getting to see Disney’s “Kidnapped” provided one of my favorite memories of my wonderful father. I was supposed to attend a showing of the film with some neighbors, but I got stood up. It was the last day the film was playing in town, and Dad got home late from a meeting, but turned right around and took me to the final showing of the movie, because he couldn’t bear to see me disappointed.
Of course, even those Disney pictures that my parents didn’t take me to see mostly aired in multi-part serial form on Walt’s weekly prime-time program, especially after the show moved to NBC in the fall of 1961, so that the series could be shown in color. (NBC was a color pioneer.)
By that point, the program was called “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” and was on Sunday nights. Frequently, after visiting my paternal grandmother for Sunday dinner, we’d lobby to stay at her house just a little longer to see the Disney show, because she had one of the earliest color TVs and ours at home was just black-and-white.
Among the Disney films that were released theatrically, but which I remember seeing first on the TV show, are the Irish leprechaun tale ”Darby O’Gill and the Little People” (the film’s costar, a brunette beauty named Janet Munro, was one of my earliest screen crushes), “Johnny Tremain” (a Revolutionary War adventure) and some of those early 1950s adventure flicks Walt had produced in Britain, such as “The Story of Robin Hood” and “Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue.”
Disney also had another prime-time TV series in 1957-59 — “Zorro,” starring Guy Williams as the masked avenger in old Spanish California. I absolutely loved the show and, for Halloween in 1957, Mom got me an official Zorro costume, which came with black hat, mask and cape (Mom dyed a shirt black to go with it and we used black jeans).
The neatest thing was the plastic sword that came with the costume — it had a place to put a piece of chalk in the tip, so you could do those three quick swooshes and leave the “mark of Zorro” (a Z) without doing any actual damage!
While I saw my first Disney pictures with my parents, it wasn’t long before I was going to the movies by myself — at an age that was surprisingly early by today’s standards. I remember when I was 8 years old being allowed to take a taxi from our house to a downtown theater to see “Swiss Family Robinson” (another one featuring Janet Munro!).
That became one of my all-time favorite films. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I sat through a second screening that afternoon (they didn’t clear the house between showings in those days). However, because I’d found the chief pirate so scary, I covered my eyes during his on-screen appearances the second go-round!
(A few years later, when I was in junior high, one of my Christmas presents was a little 8mm movie projector on which I could show 3-minute silent b&w reels, such as highlights from the previous Green Bay Packers season or the battle scene from “Swiss Family Robinson.” It was really fun running the latter in reverse, with the logs that the Robinson family unleashed on the horde of pirates tumbling up the hill!)
In addition to serialized versions of Disney’s box-office hits (usually split over two or three weeks), the studio’s weekly TV showcase included a lot of TV originals (quite a few of which were re-edited into films released theatrically in other countries). Among Disney’s TV miniseries were the westerns “The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca” and “Tales of Texas John Slaughter,” a couple of series showing Kevin Corcoran’s Moochie character playing Little League and Pop Warner football, “The Horsemasters” (shot in the U.K., but featuring Annette and Tommy Kirk, along with Janet Munro), the comedy “Sammy the Way-Out Seal,” the Civil War tale “Johnny Shiloh,” “The Horse Without a Head” (a kids mystery set in France), a comedy-western called “The Tenderfoot” (starring Brandon deWilde and Brian Keith, another Disney favorite), a comedy series starring Warren Berlinger as the title character “Kilroy” and a personal favorite, “Gallegher,” a 12-part series starring Roger Mobley as a copy boy/would-be reporter at a big city newspaper in the late 1800s. (In later episodes, Gallegher went out west for further adventures.)
The Disney TV show also had episodes mixing live-action and animation (frequently presented by Donald Duck’s scientist uncle, Ludwig Von Drake), true-life nature films, educational looks at science and lots of coverage of what was going on at Disneyland (and, later, Disney World).
Earlier, I mentioned a couple of Disney’s British-based productions, and the studio continued making films and series in the U.K. Among them is probably my all-time favorite Disney TV offering, “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh,” starring a pre-“Secret Agent” Patrick McGoohan.
I’ve written previously about the large role that Disney played in introducing British entertainment to American viewers before The Beatles. In fact, my family ended up having to switch back and forth between the three parts of Disney’s “Scarecrow” and the three February 1964 appearances the Fab Four made on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Shot on location in Kent, England, “Scarecrow” is a stirring adventure about a small-town church rector in the 1770s who has a secret life as a Robin Hood-like smuggler. Wearing a scarecrow outfit and cackling like a fiend, he does battle with the king’s tax collectors and troops. It features a great cast (especially McGoohan, one of my favorite actors) and one of Disney’s more memorable theme songs. The miniseries was edited into a theatrical film called “Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow” for release in other countries.
When McGoohan was doing a Broadway play 21 years later, I interviewed him in New York City. He’d recently done a dinosaur-themed big-screen Disney adventure called “Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend” that had not been one of his favorite experiences, because of trying conditions on location in the Ivory Coast and a balky mechanical dinosaur.
When I mentioned first seeing him in “Scarecrow,” McGoohan replied: “God, that was nearly 30 years ago! I did two Disneys together there. I did that one and a thing called ‘The Three Lives of Thomasina.’ And then I did my third Disney in Africa. … Walt wasn’t there! Walt was there for the other two, and that made quite a difference. He knew what he wanted, and he got it.”
As my brothers Jonathan and Timothy reached moviegoing age, I became the one who took them to Disney films playing local theaters — and, believe me, we rarely missed one! (I do remember, though, Mom accompanying us to “The Incredible Journey,” a live action Disney film about a trio of lost pets that make their way across the country to be reunited with their family.)
My brothers and I attended such reissued films as “Treasure Island” (with Robert Newton setting the template for movie pirates as Long John Silver — argh!), “Alice in Wonderland,” “Peter Pan” (whose supporting character, Tinker Bell, had become a regular part of Disney’s weekly TV show), “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Lady and the Tramp” (even with dogs, we thought the spaghetti-sucking romantic scene was “icky”) and “Old Yeller.”
The latter film became a sort of rite of passage for kids, as noted in the 1981 military comedy “Stripes” (not a Disney film, most assuredly) in which Bill Murray’s character tries to bond with his fellow recruits by asking, “Who saw ‘Old Yeller’? Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end?”
(I suppose the modern-day equivalent would be asking, “Who saw ‘Toy Story 3’? Who cried at the end?” I’d venture that most folks would have to raise a hand in either case.)
As the 1960s progressed, we also hit the newer Disney films, including the animated King Arthur origin story “The Sword in the Stone,” “The Absentminded Professor” (another special-effects-laden comedy with Fred MacMurray), “The Parent Trap” (young star Hayley Mills became another of my screen crushes), “Mary Poppins” (brother Tim had a 45 rpm single of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”), “Those Callaways” (another with Brian Keith), “The Monkey’s Uncle” (one of a series of campus comedies with Tommy Kirk), “That Darn Cat!” (Hayley Mills’ last Disney feature), Dick Van Dyke in the comedy “Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN,” the overly sentimental “Follow Me, Boys” (the first of a dozen films young Kurt Russell made for Disney) and one of Disney’s lesser offerings, “The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin” (a comedy Western starring Roddy McDowell).
I also took my brothers to the animated Disney musical “The Jungle Book,” which boasted very catchy songs and one of the greatest voice casts ever, including Phil Harris, Sterling Holloway, Louis Prima, George Sanders and Sebastian Cabot. (Trivia: Disney tried to get The Beatles to voice the film’s four vultures. When that gambit failed, the studio gave them Liverpudlian accents anyway.)
As I got older, of course, I started venturing to see movies that weren’t as family-friendly as Disney’s fare, which continued long after Walt’s death in 1966. However, I still made it to such Disney studio releases as “Blackbeard’s Ghost” and “The Love Bug,” two of a number of films comic actor Dean Jones made for the studio. “The Love Bug” was the biggest box office hit of 1969 and led to a slew of Disney films featuring the VW bug named Herbie in future years.
While I didn’t always make time for Disney’s 1970s films — missing such releases as the teen comedy “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” (with Kurt Russell) or the comedy Western “The Apple Dumpling Gang” (with Bill Bixby, Don Knotts and Tim Conway) — I still was a Disney kid at heart, even as I reached adulthood.
An example of that came shortly after I’d finished college, when a bunch of friends wanted to attend “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” but my future wife, Leslie, and I opted instead for “Island at the Top of the World,” a Disney version of a Jules Verne story starring a pre-“Good Morning America” David Hartman.
Leslie also has fond memories of watching Disney productions when she was growing up. Her favorites have a definite Haley Mills slant, with “The Moonspinners,” “Polyanna,” “The Parent Trap,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “Summer Magic” topping her list. (The latter film, I recall my family seeing on movie night at the lodge during a week we spent at a lake resort owned by the bank for which my father worked.)
Other favorites of Leslie’s include “Swiss Family Robinson” (a film almost every ardent Disney fan mentions) and the 1962 TV miniseries “The Prince and the Pauper,” which she still remembers featured Jane Asher (before she was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend) as Lady Jane Grey.
A week or so before we got married in November 1975, we went to an Atlanta area cinema for — you guessed it — a Disney film. It was “Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow,” which finally got its belated theatrical release in the U.S. that month.
As the 1980s came long, Disney still was doing popular sequels (like “Herbie Goes Bananas”) and big animated features aimed at kids (including “The Great Mouse Detective” and “The Little Mermaid”), as well as family-oriented adventures (“Never Cry Wolf”) and comedies (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”). But it also started doing co-productions with other studios, including “Popeye” (with Robin Williams as the sailor man) and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” (the latter done with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment).
Besides “Roger Rabbit,” some of the Disney films I caught in theaters during this period were “The Watcher in the Woods” (a supernatural horror film with Bette Davis), “Dragonslayer” (a dark, violent fantasy-adventure) and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (another dark fantasy, this one with Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce).
The studio also started trying to appeal more to adults with films released by its Touchstone Pictures and Hollywood Pictures divisions, some of which even were R-rated. Among the new divisions’ pictures were “Splash” (a sexy mermaid comedy starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah), “Good Morning Vietnam” (a wartime comedy-drama tour de force for Robin Williams) and “Dick Tracy,” with Warren Beatty as the comic strip detective.
By the time the latter film came out in 1990, I regularly was taking our son Bill to films, including Disney releases. I remember going with him to a 1988 reissue of “Bambi” that I believe was his first time ever in a movie theater. He was only 3 years old and, standing in his seat, he turned around and shushed the chatty crowd during the coming attractions.
(Bill went through a phase when he was 3 where he gave family members and friends cartoon nicknames. Mine was the non-Disney “Popeye,” but Leslie was “Daisy Duck,” and my parents were “Mickey and Minnie Mouse.”)
I also remember taking Bill to see “The Rocketeer” (a nifty comic book adventure set in the late 1930s and starring Bill Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin and Timothy Dalton) and “DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp.” The latter was based on the “DuckTales” animated TV series that was part of the “Disney Afternoon” block of children’s programming that played on one of our local TV stations, which young Bill watched regularly.
We also subscribed to the Disney Channel on cable and Bill got to see a lot of my childhood favorites through its “Vault Disney” blocks. (Back then, the channel also put on evening programming that appealed to boomers, such as a 1992 documentary on the making of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album and even a special featuring Ringo Starr taking one of his sons on a tour of his old haunts in Liverpool.)
This was the heyday of home video, too, so we supplemented the Disney Channel with frequent purchases of Disney classics on VHS. I have to admit, I still got quite a bit of enjoyment out of those tapes, too.
But, after all, I had a Mickey and Donald screensaver on my computer at work. And when Leslie and I bought a few individual stocks back in the 1990s, we decided to focus on companies that we patronized, so we had a stake in Coca-Cola, Turner, Apple and, of course, Disney.
Really, though, it was with the birth of our second child, Olivia, that Disney took over our household. Livvy really embraced being a Disney kid as she was growing up in the 1990s. She latched on to our collection of Winnie the Pooh cassettes early on, never tiring of watching them over and over, and also watched “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” on TV.
She also noted recently that the animated film “Cinderella” (which dates back to 1950) was one of her biggest favorites, judging by the fact that the VHS cassette of the film (which she still has) “shows considerable wear and tear.”
Livvy also remembers “Snow White” being the Disney film she watched over and over at her Grandma and Papa’s house. (When she stayed with my parents, she recalls, she began every day watching the morning programming block called “Playhouse Disney,” which my mom would let her stick with until it was time for the news and then “Days of Our Lives.”)
Being a Disney kid, Livvy naturally got Disney-themed presents. The Christmas that she was 5, one of her gifts was some Winnie the Pooh bedding that I had spotted in a store window in New York City. She still has it, she told me recently.
As she grew a little older and started school, Livvy continued her devotion to the House of Mouse, including some of the Disney Channel original TV movies — a particular favorite being “Get a Clue” with Lindsay Lohan.
When I asked my daughter the other day to name some of her other Disney favorites, it was an interesting mix of classics that predate her parents, movies Leslie and I grew up with and pictures released during Olivia’s and her brother’s childhoods. Among them: “Swiss Family Robinson” (of course!), “The Sword in the Stone,” “The Parent Trap” (the Haley Mills original version, not the Lohan remake), “The Aristocats,” “The Jungle Book,” “Beauty and the Beast” (the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar), “The Lion King,” “Hercules,” the “Toy Story” films from Disney’s Pixar computer-generated animation division and the more classically animated “Tarzan” and “Mulan,” both of which I took her to see in theaters.
(I still think “Mulan” is a terrific film, and I’m talking about the 1998 original, not the 2020 live-action remake.)
Livvy said another of her favorites is “The Fox and the Hound,” adding: “If you didn’t cry during ‘The Fox and the Hound,’ there’s something wrong with you.”
Sounds familiar.
Even during her teens — when Livvy was all about the “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” franchises — she still would watch her old Disney VHS collection, and one of her most memorable birthdays was her 18th, celebrated with a friend at Disney World in Orlando.
We continued to patronize Disney films in cinemas in the 2000s, including the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films with Johnny Depp and the “National Treasure” films starring Nicolas Cage and one of my adulthood screen crushes, Diane Kruger. On one spring break visit to my hometown, I even joined my daughter at a screening of Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews in “The Princess Diaries II.”
And, 10 years ago, Livvy and I made it a point to go see “Saving Mr. Banks,” a Disney film about the making of a Disney film (“Mary Poppins”), with Tom Hanks playing Walt. (I mean, talk about an actor and a role being a perfect match!)
More recently, Olivia has played an instrumental role in introducing our granddaughter to Disney. Last Christmas, Livvy gave her niece a book of 5-minute Winnie the Pooh stories, and she was pleased to find out recently that Nora now is obsessed with the book. And, Livvy added triumphantly, “apparently she will only look at the entire book and not just one or two stories; she’s all or nothing!”
I think we have another Disney kid in the making.
Of course, Disney isn’t just the House of Mouse anymore. In recent decades, the company has grown to include Pixar, ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox. And, as the Disney universe has expanded, it has gotten a lot more diverse, too, with a lesbian kiss in one of its “Star Wars” spinoffs, a gay romance in last year’s animated comedy-adventure “Strange World” and Black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in this year’s “The Little Mermaid,” one of those live-action remakes of classic animated features that the Disney company has undertaken in recent years. Others include “Alice in Wonderland,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” “The Jungle Book” and “Mulan.”
And, as our consumption of entertainment has started moving into the streaming world, Disney is there, as well. Of course, it was Olivia who signed us up for the Disney+ streaming service, which over the past year has become involved with my primary pop culture interest, The Beatles.
It was Disney+ that first presented us two years ago with Sir Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles Get Back,” the long-awaited documentary assembled from the many hours of footage shot during the recording of the band’s “Let It Be” album.
And, since then, Disney+ has presented “If These Walls Could Sing,” an excellent documentary about Abbey Road Studios directed by Mary McCartney (daughter of Sir Paul), and it was on that same streaming service that I recently watched “Now and Then — The Last Beatles Song,” a documentary short about the making of the Fabs’ current hit single.
Watching my favorite band, about whom I’ve published a magazine for 45 years, on a channel carrying the name of the movie studio I’ve followed since I was 3-years-old somehow seems just … perfect.
Happy birthday, Disney! Here’s to the next hundred years!
Bill King
Quick Cuts With Bill King 