Walt Disney: nace la magia
“Ask yourself if what you’re doing today brings you closer to where you want to be tomorrow”: Walt Disney.
Only one person is able to go back to the word “magic” so easily; Only one man managed to create more than an empire, a world full of joy, laughter and fantasy: Walter Elias Disney. He is who we all know as Walt Disney and it was that daring man who built parks, characters, stories and much more that make up the largest and most important entertainment company of all time.
My memories of Walt Disney go back to that TV show that showed us “The Magic World of Color” with innocent, entertaining stories and a great message. Each chapter was presented by Walt and between short and short he let us see a little bit of Disneyland (Disneyland), that park that we all wanted to go to and that had been devised and created by him, despite having a lot of opinions against it.
Who was going to tell all those pessimists that this park would become the most famous in the world and that it would turn 60 in 2015, because time will pass but there will always be children and adults who take our children as a pretext to go to Disney parks.
But who was Walt? Walter Elias Disney was born on December 5, 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, and his parents were Elias and Flora Disney, who had five children. They say that their childhood was not honey flakes, because the family went through hard economic shocks, in addition to the fact that Walt’s father was very severe and that caused a harsh relationship between them. Fortunately Walt always had the support of his mother and his older brother Roy, who was very important in the Disney company from its beginnings.
At an early age, Walt showed interest and skill in drawing, helped his father in the jobs that he imposed on him and was a newspaper delivery man. After a time the family moved to Kansas City, where Walt enrolled in the Art Institute.
In adolescence he discovered cinema and from that moment he became passionate about the seventh art, also around that time he met Ubbe Iwerks, who would be his friend and partner for a long time, together they founded their first and very modest company called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists , which was short-lived, but later formed another company: Laugh-O-Gram Films where they dedicated themselves to creating productions based on traditional stories.
In 1923, at just 22 years old, Walt emigrated to Hollywood, which was the promised land for those who were dedicated to cinematography. On October 16, 1923, the company formed by his brother Roy, Disney Brothers Studio signed their first major contract and a year later Ubbe Iwerks joined them. On July 13, 1925, Walt Disney married Lillian Bounds, with whom he had Diane Marie and adopted Sharon Mae, by then his long list of film productions and character creation was going quite well, although of course he also had some ups and downs.
Walt Disney was a man of big dreams and one of them was to produce the first animated feature film in history: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , which was an immediate success.
On the other hand, they say that Mickey Mouse, the iconic character of Disney was conceived during a train trip and that the original name that Walt thought for him was Mortimer; However, his wife Lillian told him that he did not have the image of being Mortimer, who could rather be called Mickey, so it was she who baptized him.
Another of the great works of Walt Disney was the Disneyland park, for which it received infinite criticism, because the owners of other parks thought it would be a resounding failure. He followed his intuition and on July 17, 1955 the most famous park in the world opened its doors, which recently reached its 60th birthday and is still more current than ever before.
Disneyland Park was the only one that Walt knew and the one that he traveled countless times, since he died on December 15, 1966, years before seeing his other great dream come true: Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida.
Today, it is impossible to list the large number of products, productions and spaces that make up the Disney company, the one that was born with the dream of a man who believed in himself, in magic and fantasy: Walter Elias Disney.