Who is Walt Disney?

Walt Disney on the ABC deal: the network needed the show so badly they effectively bought Disneyland with it.

“Walt's line on this was that ABC needed the show so badly that they bought the amusement park with it.”

David Rosenthal on Walt Disney setting up a rival operation inside his own company to build Disneyland.

“He has gone full crackpot like Colonel Kurtz style and started his own separate company on the Disney campus where he is poaching and recruiting some of the best Disney animators and artists to come over and stop doing animation and start working with him building a theme park. That is what is happening here.”

The Epcot theme park has no relation to Walt Disney's original vision. Walt's Epcot was designed as a real functioning city, not a theme park. The current park is simply named after the unrealized concept.

“What if the next time we build an entire city? Maybe like an experimental prototype community of tomorrow, you And if you think you know what we're talking about because you've been to Epcot, that's not it. >> That's not what we're talking about. >> That's a theme park named Epcot. But Walt had this insane vision that never got built.”

The famous Disney flywheel napkin sketch was not drawn by Walt Disney. It was created by a Disney studio artist as an illustration for a Wall Street Journal article.

“The legend that's out there that everybody believes is that this was a napkin sketch that Walt himself drew. No, it was actually created by a Disney studio artist as an illustration for this Wall Street Journal piece.”

Ub Iwerks, not Walt Disney, most likely drew the first Mickey Mouse.

“Most likely is the one who first draws Mickey, not Walt on the Train.”