December 1, 2025 • 44 mins
Why is socialism spreading in our country? To find the answer, we tell the story of perhaps the greatest American storyteller that’s ever lived…Walt Disney. His journey shows how socialism has become so popular in our country…and what we need to do to reverse the trend.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
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Speaker 1 (00:45):
Join the Fanbam and help us save America one story
at a time. This episode was originally broadcast on July
twenty third, twenty twenty one. Vladimir Lenin gets credit for
saying the goal of socialism is communism. Socialism was once
(01:06):
a dirty word in America, but today it's gone mainstream.
The establishment is terrified of that word socialism.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Are we seeing more and more people identifying as socialists?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Absolutely?
Speaker 4 (01:18):
And we've seen this increase in candidates identifying as democratic socialists.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
You have to see, yes, the socialism to the word
and everything.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
There's no doubt about it. Socialist ideas are spreading in America.
Universal health care, free college, guaranteed basic income, free housing.
It's undeniable that these Marxist ideas are growing in popularity,
which has to make you wonder, how is socialism spreading.
I'm Patrick Currelci.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
And I'm Adriana Cortez.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
And this is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We are all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
The media marks stories about everyday Americans of the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
You could think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we've promised only one thing, the truth.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Welcome to Red Pilled America.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Openly desiring socialism was once taboo in America, and for
good reason. The goal of socialism is communism, and communism
is antithetical to the American system because it forfeits our freedom.
Is Anne Randwin said quote.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
There is no difference between communism and socialism except in
the means of achieving the same ultimate end. Communism proposes
to enslave men by force socialism by vote. It is
merely the difference between murder and suicide.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
These Marxist ideologies are about enslavement, the opposite of American liberty.
So how on earth is socialism spreading in our country.
To find the answer, we're going to tell the story
of perhaps the greatest American storyteller that's ever lived, Walt Disney.
His journey shows how socialism has become so popular in
our country and what we need to do to reverse
(03:21):
the trend. Walt Disney was on the front lines of
America's culture War before most of you were even born.
The cartoonists could see that Marxists were infiltrating Hollywood, and
(03:44):
he did something that is near extinct today in that
god forsaken company town. He took action to expose them.
Speaker 6 (03:51):
And I feel that they really ought to be smoked
out and shown up for what they are, so that
all the good free causes in this country, all the
liberalisms that really are American, can go out without.
Speaker 7 (04:02):
This ain't a communism. That's my sincere feelings on it.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Walt Disney was one of the most prominent anti communists
of his time. He not only resisted their attacks on
his company and American culture, but he went on offense,
promoting Middle American values as the cornerstone of a healthy society.
Speaker 7 (04:20):
The one thing is that, to me, the important thing
is the family, and if you keep that family together
with things, and that's in the backbone virable business catering
to the families.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Unlike most studio heads that came to Hollywood via New York,
Walt was from the heartland. He had the kind of
tenacity that you can't teach. Walt's early failures would have
broken most men. He was a mediocre artist and even
less skilled businessman, but he never gave up, and he
stuck around long enough to become a master storyteller, perhaps
(04:54):
the best America has ever produced.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Well.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Disney was born on December fifth, nineteen oh one, in
a northwest Chicago community called Irmosa. He was the fourth
of four boys. A sister would follow two years later.
It wasn't long before the Chicago neighborhood started getting rough,
so Walt's father, worried that the area would rub off
on his sons, began searching for a better environment to
(05:23):
raise his family, and he found it on a farm
in Marsolene, Missouri. In nineteen oh six, when Walt was
barely four years old, they packed up and made the move.
Marsolene deeply impacted Walt's future American ideals. He loved the farm.
He thought of it as a paradise, and much of
(05:43):
the aesthetic found in his future films and even Disneyland itself,
find their roots in Marsolene. It was there that Walt
took an interest in drawing. His father, a Christian socialist,
subscribed to a socialist newspaper called Appeal to Reason. Every
week when the paper arrived, Walt would copy the illustration
on the front cover.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
They always had a front page cartoon of capital and labor.
Walt recalled, when I was trying to draw, I had
them all down pat.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
In nineteen eleven, the family moved again to Kansas City, Missouri,
where Walt took an art course. While in Kansas City,
he helped with the paper route that his father purchased.
Walt had to wake up at four thirty am every
morning before school to deliver the Kansas City Star and
the Kansas City Times. As a result, he'd often fall
asleep in class because of the early hours. The Disney
(06:39):
family bounced around. In nineteen seventeen, they moved back to Chicago,
and that's where Walt finished school. He became a cartoonist
for his high school newspaper and added another art class
to his belt. At a young age, he'd already found
his thing. A year later, in mid nineteen eighteen, Walt
(07:00):
made a move rarely seen in modern America. With World
War One still in progress, he wanted to join the
fight against the Germans, so he attempted to enlist in
the Navy. They rejected him because of his age he
was only sixteen, but that didn't stop him. He got smart.
A few months later, after his mother notarized his birth certificate,
(07:21):
he changed his nineteen oh one birth date to read
nineteen hundred and then enlisted in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.
It worked. Within a few months, he was shipped off
to France to catch the tail end of the conflict.
But while he was overseas, Walt never gave up his
love for cartooning. He would decorate the side of his
ambulance with drawings and even had some of his work
(07:43):
published in a military publication. When he returned from service
in October nineteen nineteen, his father offered him a job
at a jelly factory in Chicago, of which he was
part owner. Walt declined he wanted to go a different route.
He made his way back to his high school town
of Kansas City, Missouri, and this is real Uille where
Walt started his epic career.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Walt wasn't sure if he wanted to be an actor
or an artist. He turned to his brother Roy for advice.
Nine years a senior, Roy was working as a clerk
at a bank in downtown Kansas City. Apparently Roy's colleague
had heard about a local advertising company looking for an
art apprentice. He told his kid brother he should give
(08:37):
it a shot. Walt applied and got the job. He
started in October nineteen nineteen and quickly met one of
the most consequential people in his life, a talented artist
by the name of ubb Eyeworks. Good luck at guessing
the origin of that name. Well. The job was short lived,
as the story goes, the company lost an account and
laid Walt off after just six weeks. But in that
(09:01):
brief time, he learned a few few tricks of the
commercial trade and He also connected with the artists that
would help him create one of the most prolific characters
in American history. A few weeks after Walt was laid off,
ubb Eyeworks was canned as well. Walt proposed that the
two should start their own art shop. Ubb signed on.
(09:21):
They quickly got their first gig, producing art for a
restaurant industry publication. The company proposed paying them just ten
dollars a week, but would also give them office space.
It sounded like a deal, but when the two showed up,
they were shown to their desks that were in a
used bathroom. Yes, Walt Disney's first studio was in the latrine.
(09:46):
Ubb and Walt quickly got some jobs, but after a
few months, Walt was offered employment at a company that
created advertisements for theaters. It paid thirty five dollars a week,
over double what he was making in his two men studio.
He'd be illustrating theater ads as well, producing both animated
and live films. He decided to give it a try.
(10:08):
The films they produced were crude. Walt would create two
dimensional puppets with joints that moved. He'd take pictures of
the characters in different positions, then ran those pictures together
to simulate movement. It was amateurish, but he was still
getting his feet wet in animation. A few months in,
Walt successfully lobbied for a job for UBB. At this
(10:28):
film ad company, Walt wrote the scripts and would sometimes
even appear in the commercials. In one instance, a car
crashed in front of the company building, so the team
had an idea. Walt followed a cameraman too the scene
of the accident. He stood in front of the broken car,
and the camera recorded Walt looking days near the wreckage.
They then used the footage for an insurance company advertisement.
(10:52):
It was around this time that he really fell in
love with animation. He'd spend much of his spare time
in dark movie theaters watching the animation that accompanied the
feature films. The art form was relatively new, and all
the innovators were based in New York City. Cartoons like
Felix the Cat and Coco the Clown were taking animation
into exciting new directions, and Walt wanted to learn everything
(11:15):
that he could about it. He grabbed a copy of E. G.
Lutz's influential nineteen twenty book Animated Cartoons. He devoured the
contents of this book. Walt also found another seminal book,
Animals in Locomotion, which included animals and humans photographed frame
by frame in activities such as walking, jumping, and running.
(11:40):
He was fascinated by the process of making things look
like they were moving through a series of pictures. After
about a year at the ad Company in early nineteen
twenty one, Walt started experimenting at home on his own.
From his job at the Film ad Company. He had
some money in his pocket and began channeling those funds
into personal projects. This moonlighting led to the creation of
(12:01):
his first real animation cartoon. It was a two minute
and twenty five second cartoon he called Local Happenings that
featured a Kansas City police incident in a comical way.
He showed the film to a local theater purveyor that
owned three Kansas City movie houses.
Speaker 7 (12:17):
I like it.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Is it expensive, the owner asked Walt halphazardly responded no, sir,
I could make it for thirty cents a foot a
foot meaning a foot of film. The owner quickly jumped
on the deal, saying he could buy one a week.
Walt was elated, but about an hour after the sale,
(12:38):
he realized that he forgot to add in profit. Thirty
cents a foot was actually the cost of producing the cartoon. Nevertheless,
he had his first cartoon distributor. On March twentieth, nineteen
twenty one, Walt's first cartoon premiered in a Kansas City theater.
He was just nineteen.
Speaker 7 (13:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Walt was doing all of this as a moonlighting gig.
He hadn't yet left the Film Ad Company, who was
itching to break out on his own, but he wanted
to build a small nest egg before taking the plunge.
By the spring of nineteen twenty two, he decided to
leave the filmad job to start his own animation studio.
He cobbled together some investors, raised twenty five hundred dollars,
(13:22):
and formed his company, laugh Ogram Films, Incorporated on May eighteenth,
nineteen twenty two. He brought on a team of people
he met in the industry, but Ubieworks wasn't yet ready
to leave his decent paying job at the Film Ad Company. Now,
Walt's idea was to take fairytale stories that were in
the public domain and modernize them. He planned on creating
his own cartoon shorts of Little Red riding hood Jack
(13:44):
and the Beanstock, Goldilocks, Cinderella, and you get the picture.
Within a matter of a few months, he landed his
first deal with a Tennessee outfit called Pictorial Clubs. The
agreement was that Walt's Laughogram Films would deliver cartoons to
be shown in schools and non theatrical venues. He thought
he worked out a sweet arrangement because it still left
(14:06):
him the opportunity to lease cartoons to theater chains to
increase the profit on each film. In September nineteen twenty two,
the Tennessee company agreed to pay Walt eleven thousand, one
hundred dollars for six animated cartoons. But again Walt showed
(14:26):
signs of being more creative than a shrewd businessman. He
agreed to take only one hundred dollars as a down payment,
with the remaining eleven thousand dollars to come on January first,
nineteen twenty four, over a year after he delivered the
six cartoons to the company. Maybe he figured he'd also
be able to license them to theaters to bridge the gap,
(14:46):
but to this day, his reasoning behind the deal is unclear.
Walt went to work on the project. He convinced his
buddy of Eyeworks to come on board to help produce
the cartoons.
Speaker 7 (14:59):
In those days, we didn't have very much money, and
we had to find the very simple way to do
these drawings so that we could get them out.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
He was learning the process at lightning speed, he'd later
reflect on the job of an animator.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
An animator is an artist who makes the drawings move.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
He puts them through their paces.
Speaker 5 (15:16):
He's a combination of many things. First he has to
be a real student of art. Next, he has to
be a clever draft one. Then he must have the
soul of an actor and the understanding of a director.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
He was making progress on the cartoon, but within a
few months his bank account was approaching zero, and he
was still over a year away from being paid the
remaining eleven thousand dollars from the Tennessee outfit. Things got
incredibly tight for the young entrepreneur, so tight that he
began to miss payroll. To make the matter even worse,
(15:51):
Walt received some devastating news. The Tennessee outfit that hired
Walt to make the six cartoons went bankrupt. Walt was
out the eleven thousand dollars the business quickly began to unravel.
Bills went unpaid, and collectors started circling the company. He
missed payroll for weeks. For some employees it was even months.
(16:11):
They began to walk out in early nineteen twenty three.
Walt tried to find other investors in his firm, but
aside from a few sporadic loans, there were no takers.
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Speaker 2 (17:49):
Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So the company that
hired Walt to create cartoons went bankrupt. The young cartoonist
was out the eleven thousand dollars he was owed. The
business quickly began to unravel. He missed payroll for weeks.
For some employees it was even months. They began to
walk out. Things were getting dire. At one point, he
(18:11):
connected with the dentist who wanted to hire Walt to
create a film to educate children about dental care. The
dentist agreed to pay him five hundred dollars. One night,
the dentist called Walt, I've got the money, Come over
and we'll set the deal, stated the dentist. Walt said
he couldn't. When the dentist asked why, Walt responded, I
(18:32):
haven't any shoes. Apparently, Walt's only pair of shoes were
falling apart and he couldn't afford new ones, so he
left them with the shoemaker to be fixed. The problem
was that by the time they were mended, Walt didn't
have the dollar and a half to pay for the work.
The shoemaker refused to give them to Walt until he
received payment, so Walt was now shoeless. The dentist quickly
(18:55):
went to the shoemaker, paid Walt's bill, delivered the shoes
to Walt, then finalized their film deal. But with creditors
piling up, the five hundred dollars payment went fast, Walt
could no longer afford his three dollars a month apartment
and was evicted, so he slept at the studio for
a while and took showers once a week at a
local train station. Things were getting so bad that he
(19:19):
couldn't even afford to eat three square meals a day.
It was his darkest time. He had to rely on
the generosity of a local inn to allow him to
eat on credit. At one point, the innkeeper, who took
a liking to Walt, informed him that his business partner
was forcing him to cut Walt off. By chance, the
(19:39):
innkeeper caught Walt rummaging through leftover scraps from a photography studio.
The site shook the innkeeper enough to override his business partner,
and he told Walt to come over to his place
to get something to eat. Walt decided to make a
(20:01):
last ditch effort for his company. In May nineteen twenty three,
he sent a letter to a woman named Margaret J. Winkler,
one of the biggest distributors of cartoons in New York.
Walt wrote, quote, we have just discovered something new and
clever in animated cartoons. It's a new idea that will
appeal to all classes, and it is bound to be
a winner because it's a clever combination of live characters
(20:24):
and cartoons, using a cast of live child actors who
carry on their action on cartoon scenes with cartoon characters
end quote. He said he'd send her a copy when
it was done if she'd like. Margaret Winkler responded saying, quote,
if it is what you say, I shall be interested
in contracting for a series of them end quote. The
(20:47):
response excited Walt. This was a major distributor of animation.
He teamed up with Ubbi Works, one of the few
artists that stayed with him in his rough time, and
the two went to work on the cartoon he entitled
Alice's Wonderland. Walt made an apparents as the illustrators, showing
Alice through the weird cartoon world. Ub and a few
(21:07):
of the other artists made cameos as well, and so
did a cartoon mouse that we'll get to that later.
As they progressed on the cartoon, bill collectors began to
clamp down on Walt. He ultimately lost his office space.
Alice's Wonderland would go unfinished. His hail Mary failed to
get some advice, Walt turned to his brother Roy, who
(21:29):
was living in Los Angeles. Roy suggested he come out
to California and lived with their uncle that recently bought
a home in Hollywood. Walt agreed. He sold some equipment
and bought a train ticket heading west.
Speaker 7 (21:41):
Well, I came to Hollywood and arrived here in August
nineteen twenty three with forty dollars in my pocket and
a coat and a pair of trousers that didn't match.
One half of my suitcase had my shirts and underwear
and things. The other half had my drawing materials.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Even after everything he'd been through, he felt happy and free.
He had a rare quality that kept him confident in
his ability. Walt still believed he'd make it big, but
he did think his animation days were over.
Speaker 7 (22:14):
Well, I tried to tried to get a job doing
anything I could in the studio so I could learn.
I was a little discouraged with the cartoon at that time.
I felt at that time that I was getting into
it too late. In other words, I thought the cartoon
business was established in such a way that there's no
chance to break into it. So I tried to get
(22:36):
a job in Hollywood, working in the picture business so
I could learn it. I would like to be a
director or any part of that, and there was nothing open.
So before I knew it, I had my drawing board
out and I started back to the cartoon.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And he was pulled back for a reason. Shortly after
he arrived in Hollywood, he reconnected with the New York
animation distributor Margaret Winkler, who was still interested in the
Alice's Wonderland cartoon he pitched her. Walt sat Margaret his
only copy. She reviewed it, and on October fifteenth, nineteen
twenty three, Walt received a telegram from her offering him
(23:22):
a contract for an Alice's Wonderland series.
Speaker 7 (23:25):
And I was able to secure a contract for twelve
of these short films.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
She'd pay fifteen hundred dollars per cartoon for the first
six and eighteen hundred dollars per cartoon for the second batch.
And most importantly, she agreed to pay him on delivery
of each film. There'd be no waiting period like the
Tennessee company that stiffed him. That's all he needed to hear.
(23:51):
Walt and his older brother Boy formed the Disney Brother
Studio the next day. Now, of course, they had to
deliver the cartoons to Margaret before they got paid, so
they had to get creative to the gap.
Speaker 7 (24:04):
In fact, the government helped subsidize us. And I'll explain
that to you. My brother was a veteran of the
First World War, and he would have been hospitalized in things,
and so he was receiving a certain disability compensation. It
mounted to about eighty five dollars a month, and we
lived on that while we established the studio.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Walt went to work on the Ali.
Speaker 7 (24:27):
Series and I did all the drawing myself. I had
no help at all. I was all alone, but I
made the first six practically alone. Then at that time
I was able to get some of the boys that
had been with me in Kensidy to come out.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Up I Works would eventually travel west to join his team.
Speaker 7 (24:43):
So on from the seventh on, I had some help,
and I got by the first year and they were
fairly successful, and that led to other things.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
By mid nineteen twenty four, the demands of production forced
Walt to make a decision.
Speaker 7 (24:57):
And it reached a point that I had so many
well working with me, and there's so much time and
attention demanded that I had to drop the drawing end
of it myself.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
He'd leave the drawing to talented artists like up Walt
would focus on writing, directing, and producing.
Speaker 7 (25:14):
But I've never regretted it, because drawing was always a
means to an end with me. So through these other
boys who were good draftsmen and artists in many different
phases of the business, very talented people. I've coordinating their
talents is what has built this business. And if I
hadn't dropped the drawing end of it myself, I don't
(25:35):
think I'd have built this organization.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
While the team worked on the Alice comedy series, the
business was growing. In nineteen twenty five, he had a
small staff of half a dozen people. One was an
inker and secretary named Lillian Bounds. She was a few
years older than Walt. By midyear, they were married. The
following year, Walt and Roy moved the operation to a
(26:00):
studio on Hyperion Avenue in so A Borough of Los Angeles.
Walt was building a family atmosphere within his company.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
No one becomes a part of the group that isn't
in simply with our ideals.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
He loved the camaraderie of the business. Animation mainly attracted men,
but women were also brought on board to help with
inking and coloring. Around the move, they changed the name
from Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio to the Walt Disney Studio.
Walt was rightfully becoming the face of the organization, a
position he didn't shy away from.
Speaker 5 (26:38):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
One thing that we should highlight here is Walt's relationship
with his distribution partner in New York, Winkler Pictures. Margaret
Winkler's company was just a middleman. The big cahoun in
this whole operation was Universal Pictures, who contracted with Winkler
Pictures to supply them cartoons, who then turned to Walt
(27:00):
to actually create them. By nineteen twenty seven, and Winkler
Pictures thought the Alice comedy series was too expensive and
time consuming to produce, and they wanted something that could
be turned around faster and cheaper, so they told Walt
to come up with a new idea. Walt decided on
a purely animated series.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
And I'd been doing a rabbit. It was called Oswald,
the Rabbit I did and started for him.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Winkler and Universal liked it, and Walt Disney Studios went
to work. The first Oswald cartoon was released in September
nineteen twenty seven, and it was an immediate hit, and
of course with success comes a whole new set of problems.
You see, the middleman in the production of Oswald Winkler
Pictures got greedy. Walt may have been the creator of
(27:44):
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but Universal actually owned the character.
So Winkler decided they were going to take advantage of
that loophole.
Speaker 7 (27:51):
And he was a rather unscrupulosus character, and he thought
he could cut in and move in a little better.
And I pulled away from him, and I was left alone,
and he happened to own the car. He had a
right to the character.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Winkler signed another contract with Universal Pictures in February nineteen
twenty eight to deliver Oswald cartoons and then decided to
cut Walt out. A representative for Winkler began secretly contacting
Walt's artists, offering them a pay raise to jump ship
and come to Winkler to produce oswaldt up I Works
got the call as well. The ub was loyal to Walt.
(28:29):
He promptly turned to his friend to inform him that
trouble was brewing.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Jonje Fassi LaVey, Jenny den Fassi LaVey.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Walt had a hard time believing his team would leave him,
and this was also a touchy time financially. Disney Studios
had a staff of nearly a few dozen people and
had moved to a bigger office. If they were to
lose their biggest project, it would thrust Walt into financial
peril again. So he hopped on the train to New
York to meet with Winkler Pictures, and sure enough, Ubb
(29:06):
was right. Winkler informed Walt they were not going to
be renewing the contract. Walt was stunned.
Speaker 7 (29:13):
So that was one of the one of the big
lessons I learned, And from then on, I said, there's
no middleman. He contributed nothing. We did everything. So I
had to get a new character.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
On March thirteenth, nineteen twenty eight, Walt and his wife
Lily boarded a train in New York for the long
trip back to Los Angeles, determined to come up with
a new idea. Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Max, Disney Plus, Apple TV,
Amazon Prime, Showtime, Paramount, Paramount Plus, and on and on.
(29:48):
What are the streaming services have in common? They are
all storytelling platforms. Which of these platforms are you supporting
with your hard earned money? Now ask yourself if the
story's being told on those platforms truly align with your worldview,
and if they don't, ask yourself where you go to
get entertainment in the form of storytelling that does align
with your worldview. Red Pilled America is that show. We
(30:12):
are not another talk show covering today's news. We are
all about telling stories. We remain the only show of
our kind. And why aren't there more shows like ours?
Because it's expensive to create this kind of content. That's
why we need your support. Without your support, this show
doesn't survive, and more importantly, they'll be zero changed to
the monopolistic environment of storytelling. Please visit Redpilled America dot
(30:36):
com and click support in the topmenu. Support what you
love or it goes away. The choice is yours. Welcome
back to Red Pilled America. So what was told by
his New York distributor that they were no longer going
to be working with him to produce Osweald the Lucky
(30:58):
Rabbit cartoons. He was stunned by the news. On March thirteenth,
nineteen twenty eight, Walt and his wife Lily boarded a
train in New York for the long trip back to
Los Angeles, determined to come up with a new idea.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
So I had to have a new character and always well,
I'd fool around a lot with little mice, and they
were always cute characters, and they hadn't been overdone in
the picture field. They'd been used but never featured. So
I decided it would be with a mouse. Oh, and
then the name came. What would you call him? In
the Eupheny there, Mickey Mouse? And I had a mortemer first,
(31:33):
and my wife shook her head, and then I tried
Mickey and she nodded the other way, and that was it.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
When Walt returned, he had up Eyeworks draw up the mouse.
It looked strikingly similar to Oswald the Rabbit, but instead
of long, droopy ears, the mouse had circular ears and
a more protruding nose. About two months after his fallout
with Windler Pictures, Walt introduced the first Mickey Mouse cartoon,
(32:00):
called Plain Crazy. It wasn't well and he couldn't find
a distributor. He created another, and again couldn't find a distributor.
It was looking like deja vous. Walt needed a new idea.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
It just so happened that two years earlier, one of
his main competitors produced a cartoon called My Old Kentucky Home.
The animation included for the first time synchronized sound. The
following year, the first American feature length movie with sound,
The Jazz Singer, was released. The success of the film
pushed most US theaters to install sound systems. The technology
(32:36):
was ripe to be exploited. Walt decided he needed something
to make Mickey Mouse stand out. That was it sound.
So he worked with Ubbi Works to produce a new
Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie, and this
one found a distributor. On November eighteenth, nineteen twenty eight,
(33:04):
Steamboat Willie debuted in New York. The audience was mesmerized
by Walt's new cartoon. One person from the crowd even
(33:24):
asked the projectionist to delay the feature movie so that
they could replay the cartoon. The verdict was in and
Walt Disney immediately knew what direction to take the young company.
Speaker 7 (33:38):
So we decided that there's no sense in making anything
more silent, and we immediately switched to sound. And we
didn't have any sound equipment or anything else, but we
went ahead and made him for sound, and we eventually
got sound on him, and of course it I think
played the big part in establishing Mickey Mouse.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
In nineteen twenty nine, they added a voice to Mickey,
and of course Walt stepped in.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
Well, it's fifth the false set man. We were fooling
around and trying to get a voice for a mouse,
and nobody knew what a mouse it'd sound like. So
I said, well, it's kind of like this, and the
guy said, well, why don't you do it? I knew
it'd always be on the payroll, so I did it.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Mickey Mouse quickly became a phenomenon. By early January nineteen thirty,
the first official theater based Mickey Mouse Club commenced at
a California theater. Two months later, sixty theaters were operating
Mickey Mouse clubs. A few months after that, the club
expanded to hundreds of theaters. By mid nineteen thirty two,
(34:41):
membership to the theater based Mickey Mouse Clubs in the
US reached one million. Walt Disney's cartoons were exploding in popularity,
and this was all happening in the midst of the
Great Depression. Not even the biggest financial crisis in America's
history could slow his creativity down. Walt would go on
to make other Mickey Mouse shorts, and in nineteen thirty
(35:02):
two he began I'm producing his musical cartoons, Silly Symphonies,
and Technicolor Now. Cartoons at the time were all short,
six to eight minute animations that were typically played before
a feature length live action film. The success of Walt
Disney's short cartoons presented him with a new opportunity. Walt
wanted to create America's first feature length cartoon, snow White
(35:25):
and the Seven Dwarfs. In nineteen thirty seven, he talked
about this monumental undertaking.
Speaker 7 (35:30):
We've been at us for the past two years.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
We won't be finished completely with snow White until sometime
or the next year. You see else that's going to
run ten reels, which means the showing time of one
hour and a half. No cartoon production has ever run
that long. Before.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
It was one thing to produce a six to eight
minute cartoon, it was a completely different endeavor to make
a feature length animated film that holds the attention of
an audience. Won't discuss the challenges.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
Well, we have to create personalities out of line drawings.
For example, if we were making snow White with living actors,
we could turn the story over to them and each
actor would introduce bits of business which would build up
the character he was playing.
Speaker 7 (36:20):
But with our little.
Speaker 5 (36:20):
Characters, we have to plan out every movement that they make,
even to the wink of the eye. In other words,
we have to literally pull everything out of the air
and then with a pencil and paper we start building
a picture. Well, how many people do you have working
at your studio? Five hundred, two hundred and fifty are
working on snow White and the rest of them are
working on the short subjects.
Speaker 7 (36:45):
So when we get into things like snow White and
these feature cartoons where you have the human anatomy to
contend with, we do use models, and we do put
them in the wardrobe and things. We do photograph them,
but it's more to oh to set a guide. It's
(37:07):
like any artist using a model, except we're using them
in motion. Now it's awful hard to visualize the graceful
maneuvers of a say the female figure. For my artists,
we used to sit down there and they would go
through the actions, look at themselves in the mirror, you see,
And I said, I've got to get away from that
(37:28):
because they were poor actors.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
You see, Now, by having a model and everything, she
will go through the gestures and things but we don't copy,
we don't trace.
Speaker 7 (37:43):
That is more an inspiration. Then we take our own
latitude from that. But it is sort of a thing
that stimulates the imagination of the artists. It can be
like giving you an idea of what this character ought
to do too, you see, because we got a problem
of starting with blank piece of paper and then we've
(38:05):
got to take these with our pencil. We've got to
make them have personality and life and proper movement. Well,
that's an awful lot for you to sit down in
the room and think about and try to work out.
You know.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
The extraordinary cost for the feature length cartoon led critics
to dub the film Disney's Folly before it was even released.
But when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on
December twenty first, nineteen thirty seven, the naysayers went silent.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Slave in the magic mirror, come from the father's space,
ruin and donness.
Speaker 7 (38:50):
I summon these, Let me see these I face? What
wouldst thou know?
Speaker 3 (39:01):
My queen, magic mirror on the wall, Who is the
fairest one of all.
Speaker 7 (39:10):
Famed? Is thy beauty, majesty? But hold a lovely maid.
Speaker 6 (39:16):
I scene rags cannot hide that gentle grace alas she
is more bad.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Than the.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
It was a massive critical success. The New York Times
actually thanked Walt Disney, and a few days after its release,
snow White and the Dwarfs appeared on the cover of
Time magazine. It also broke box office records, becoming the
most successful sound movie of all time, and it was
a smash hit with international audiences as well. Walt garnered
(39:50):
global fame. He became an accidental Hollywood tycoon, yet the
film industry didn't really know how to handle his work,
showing the industry's early bias towards live action. Snow White
was not nominated for the nineteen thirty eight Academy Awards
Best Picture. Instead, the Academy gave the movie an honorary oscar,
which was presented to Walt Disney by Shirley Temple.
Speaker 7 (40:13):
I'm through the boys and girls from the whole room.
Speaker 8 (40:15):
I'm going to be very happy when they find out
Daddy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mickey Mouse,
Ferdinand and all the others. He's going to get This
beautiful statue is Judy.
Speaker 7 (40:26):
It's beautiful.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
I'm so proud of Mister Disney, I'm so proud, I
think I'll bust.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
With the success of Snow White, Disney's Hyperion studio was
becoming too small. The staff was bursting at the seams.
During production of snow White, some artists were packed six
people deep into an office. So Walt scoped out of
place in Burbank, California, just north of the Hollywood Hills,
to accommodate his growing empire. Walt wanted to create a
worker's paradise by building a studio from the ground up.
(40:56):
He envisioned a place that workers would almost never have
to leave, with a gym, baseball diamond, barbershop, and cafeti
that offered delivery service. It was an ambitious idea fraught
with problems. Because the Hyperian location still had a family
style vibe. The Burbank studio would be something different. Unlike Hyperion,
(41:19):
where all facets of animation production were co located, that
Burbank Studio would dedicate entire buildings to just one department
of the animation process. Nevertheless, the studio was growing so
quickly that Walt and Roy needed a larger facility, and
they needed it yesterday. So they moved forward with building
the grounds. On the day after Christmas nineteen thirty nine,
(41:40):
some of the Disney staff began the move from Hyperion
to Burbank. Walt Disney had become a major player in Hollywood.
He bumbled around for several years trying to find his
way in the growing art form of animation. Walt faced
some unscrupulous characters that plunged him into debt. Things got
(42:04):
so bad for Walt that he had no shoes and
resorted to eating leftover scraps. He was forced to close
shop and move west to his uncle's Hollywood home. He
thought he'd missed the boat in the burgeoning animation industry,
but he kept to it and finally landed a financially
rewarding deal in the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
He faced near extinction again when a distributor plucked his
(42:26):
staff to create the Oswald character without him, but his
storytelling genius proved to be his saving grace. He created
Mickey Mouse that became an international phenomenon. Walt innovated again
with America's first feature length animated film, Snow White. He
was becoming a master storyteller, the likes of which the
world had never seen the boy from Missouri had made it.
(42:48):
But what Walt couldn't have seen when opening his Burbank
studio in nineteen forty was that trouble was brewing. A
political force had been quietly infiltrating Hollywood. This Unamerican movement
was inspired by a utopian novel, a novel that provided
a roadmap for a socialist takeover of America, and Hollywood
(43:09):
was one of their biggest targets. Next time on Red
Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
That's when Walt Disney formed a conservative group to stop
the socialist takeover of Hollywood, and.
Speaker 7 (43:18):
He evidently heard that.
Speaker 6 (43:20):
I had called him all a bunch of communists, and
I believe they are.
Speaker 7 (43:23):
I would move to the state of Texas if it
ever came here, because I think the Texans would kill
them on site.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
They have been eminently successful in preventing them from their
usual tactic of trying to run a majority of an
organization with a well organized minority.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
And that's how they've done it. That's how the far
left has taken over American culture. But there's a way
to stop them.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's produced
by me Adriana Cortez and Patrick Carelchi for Informed Ventures. Now,
our entire archive of episodes is only available to our
backstage subscribers. To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and
click support in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
This is Red Pilled America. If you want to join
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(00:25):
black forty at checkout. That's black and the number forty.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Also, if you love Red Pilled America, please consider supporting
the show. You can buy one of our one hundred
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or you can just make a donation to support the show.
Please visit Redpilled America dot com and click support or
shop in the topmenu.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Join the Fanbam and help us save America one story
at a time. This episode was originally broadcast on July
twenty third, twenty twenty one. Vladimir Lenin gets credit for
saying the goal of socialism is communism. Socialism was once
(01:06):
a dirty word in America, but today it's gone mainstream.
The establishment is terrified of that word socialism.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Are we seeing more and more people identifying as socialists?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Absolutely?
Speaker 4 (01:18):
And we've seen this increase in candidates identifying as democratic socialists.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
You have to see, yes, the socialism to the word
and everything.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
There's no doubt about it. Socialist ideas are spreading in America.
Universal health care, free college, guaranteed basic income, free housing.
It's undeniable that these Marxist ideas are growing in popularity,
which has to make you wonder, how is socialism spreading.
I'm Patrick Currelci.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
And I'm Adriana Cortez.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
And this is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
This is not another talk show covering the day's news.
We are all about telling stories.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Stories. Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
The media marks stories about everyday Americans of the globalist ignore.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
You could think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries,
and we've promised only one thing, the truth.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Welcome to Red Pilled America.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Openly desiring socialism was once taboo in America, and for
good reason. The goal of socialism is communism, and communism
is antithetical to the American system because it forfeits our freedom.
Is Anne Randwin said quote.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
There is no difference between communism and socialism except in
the means of achieving the same ultimate end. Communism proposes
to enslave men by force socialism by vote. It is
merely the difference between murder and suicide.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
These Marxist ideologies are about enslavement, the opposite of American liberty.
So how on earth is socialism spreading in our country.
To find the answer, we're going to tell the story
of perhaps the greatest American storyteller that's ever lived, Walt Disney.
His journey shows how socialism has become so popular in
our country and what we need to do to reverse
(03:21):
the trend. Walt Disney was on the front lines of
America's culture War before most of you were even born.
The cartoonists could see that Marxists were infiltrating Hollywood, and
(03:44):
he did something that is near extinct today in that
god forsaken company town. He took action to expose them.
Speaker 6 (03:51):
And I feel that they really ought to be smoked
out and shown up for what they are, so that
all the good free causes in this country, all the
liberalisms that really are American, can go out without.
Speaker 7 (04:02):
This ain't a communism. That's my sincere feelings on it.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Walt Disney was one of the most prominent anti communists
of his time. He not only resisted their attacks on
his company and American culture, but he went on offense,
promoting Middle American values as the cornerstone of a healthy society.
Speaker 7 (04:20):
The one thing is that, to me, the important thing
is the family, and if you keep that family together
with things, and that's in the backbone virable business catering
to the families.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Unlike most studio heads that came to Hollywood via New York,
Walt was from the heartland. He had the kind of
tenacity that you can't teach. Walt's early failures would have
broken most men. He was a mediocre artist and even
less skilled businessman, but he never gave up, and he
stuck around long enough to become a master storyteller, perhaps
(04:54):
the best America has ever produced.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Well.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Disney was born on December fifth, nineteen oh one, in
a northwest Chicago community called Irmosa. He was the fourth
of four boys. A sister would follow two years later.
It wasn't long before the Chicago neighborhood started getting rough,
so Walt's father, worried that the area would rub off
on his sons, began searching for a better environment to
(05:23):
raise his family, and he found it on a farm
in Marsolene, Missouri. In nineteen oh six, when Walt was
barely four years old, they packed up and made the move.
Marsolene deeply impacted Walt's future American ideals. He loved the farm.
He thought of it as a paradise, and much of
(05:43):
the aesthetic found in his future films and even Disneyland itself,
find their roots in Marsolene. It was there that Walt
took an interest in drawing. His father, a Christian socialist,
subscribed to a socialist newspaper called Appeal to Reason. Every
week when the paper arrived, Walt would copy the illustration
on the front cover.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
They always had a front page cartoon of capital and labor.
Walt recalled, when I was trying to draw, I had
them all down pat.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
In nineteen eleven, the family moved again to Kansas City, Missouri,
where Walt took an art course. While in Kansas City,
he helped with the paper route that his father purchased.
Walt had to wake up at four thirty am every
morning before school to deliver the Kansas City Star and
the Kansas City Times. As a result, he'd often fall
asleep in class because of the early hours. The Disney
(06:39):
family bounced around. In nineteen seventeen, they moved back to Chicago,
and that's where Walt finished school. He became a cartoonist
for his high school newspaper and added another art class
to his belt. At a young age, he'd already found
his thing. A year later, in mid nineteen eighteen, Walt
(07:00):
made a move rarely seen in modern America. With World
War One still in progress, he wanted to join the
fight against the Germans, so he attempted to enlist in
the Navy. They rejected him because of his age he
was only sixteen, but that didn't stop him. He got smart.
A few months later, after his mother notarized his birth certificate,
(07:21):
he changed his nineteen oh one birth date to read
nineteen hundred and then enlisted in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.
It worked. Within a few months, he was shipped off
to France to catch the tail end of the conflict.
But while he was overseas, Walt never gave up his
love for cartooning. He would decorate the side of his
ambulance with drawings and even had some of his work
(07:43):
published in a military publication. When he returned from service
in October nineteen nineteen, his father offered him a job
at a jelly factory in Chicago, of which he was
part owner. Walt declined he wanted to go a different route.
He made his way back to his high school town
of Kansas City, Missouri, and this is real Uille where
Walt started his epic career.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Walt wasn't sure if he wanted to be an actor
or an artist. He turned to his brother Roy for advice.
Nine years a senior, Roy was working as a clerk
at a bank in downtown Kansas City. Apparently Roy's colleague
had heard about a local advertising company looking for an
art apprentice. He told his kid brother he should give
(08:37):
it a shot. Walt applied and got the job. He
started in October nineteen nineteen and quickly met one of
the most consequential people in his life, a talented artist
by the name of ubb Eyeworks. Good luck at guessing
the origin of that name. Well. The job was short lived,
as the story goes, the company lost an account and
laid Walt off after just six weeks. But in that
(09:01):
brief time, he learned a few few tricks of the
commercial trade and He also connected with the artists that
would help him create one of the most prolific characters
in American history. A few weeks after Walt was laid off,
ubb Eyeworks was canned as well. Walt proposed that the
two should start their own art shop. Ubb signed on.
(09:21):
They quickly got their first gig, producing art for a
restaurant industry publication. The company proposed paying them just ten
dollars a week, but would also give them office space.
It sounded like a deal, but when the two showed up,
they were shown to their desks that were in a
used bathroom. Yes, Walt Disney's first studio was in the latrine.
(09:46):
Ubb and Walt quickly got some jobs, but after a
few months, Walt was offered employment at a company that
created advertisements for theaters. It paid thirty five dollars a week,
over double what he was making in his two men studio.
He'd be illustrating theater ads as well, producing both animated
and live films. He decided to give it a try.
(10:08):
The films they produced were crude. Walt would create two
dimensional puppets with joints that moved. He'd take pictures of
the characters in different positions, then ran those pictures together
to simulate movement. It was amateurish, but he was still
getting his feet wet in animation. A few months in,
Walt successfully lobbied for a job for UBB. At this
(10:28):
film ad company, Walt wrote the scripts and would sometimes
even appear in the commercials. In one instance, a car
crashed in front of the company building, so the team
had an idea. Walt followed a cameraman too the scene
of the accident. He stood in front of the broken car,
and the camera recorded Walt looking days near the wreckage.
They then used the footage for an insurance company advertisement.
(10:52):
It was around this time that he really fell in
love with animation. He'd spend much of his spare time
in dark movie theaters watching the animation that accompanied the
feature films. The art form was relatively new, and all
the innovators were based in New York City. Cartoons like
Felix the Cat and Coco the Clown were taking animation
into exciting new directions, and Walt wanted to learn everything
(11:15):
that he could about it. He grabbed a copy of E. G.
Lutz's influential nineteen twenty book Animated Cartoons. He devoured the
contents of this book. Walt also found another seminal book,
Animals in Locomotion, which included animals and humans photographed frame
by frame in activities such as walking, jumping, and running.
(11:40):
He was fascinated by the process of making things look
like they were moving through a series of pictures. After
about a year at the ad Company in early nineteen
twenty one, Walt started experimenting at home on his own.
From his job at the Film ad Company. He had
some money in his pocket and began channeling those funds
into personal projects. This moonlighting led to the creation of
(12:01):
his first real animation cartoon. It was a two minute
and twenty five second cartoon he called Local Happenings that
featured a Kansas City police incident in a comical way.
He showed the film to a local theater purveyor that
owned three Kansas City movie houses.
Speaker 7 (12:17):
I like it.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Is it expensive, the owner asked Walt halphazardly responded no, sir,
I could make it for thirty cents a foot a
foot meaning a foot of film. The owner quickly jumped
on the deal, saying he could buy one a week.
Walt was elated, but about an hour after the sale,
(12:38):
he realized that he forgot to add in profit. Thirty
cents a foot was actually the cost of producing the cartoon. Nevertheless,
he had his first cartoon distributor. On March twentieth, nineteen
twenty one, Walt's first cartoon premiered in a Kansas City theater.
He was just nineteen.
Speaker 7 (13:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Walt was doing all of this as a moonlighting gig.
He hadn't yet left the Film Ad Company, who was
itching to break out on his own, but he wanted
to build a small nest egg before taking the plunge.
By the spring of nineteen twenty two, he decided to
leave the filmad job to start his own animation studio.
He cobbled together some investors, raised twenty five hundred dollars,
(13:22):
and formed his company, laugh Ogram Films, Incorporated on May eighteenth,
nineteen twenty two. He brought on a team of people
he met in the industry, but Ubieworks wasn't yet ready
to leave his decent paying job at the Film Ad Company. Now,
Walt's idea was to take fairytale stories that were in
the public domain and modernize them. He planned on creating
his own cartoon shorts of Little Red riding hood Jack
(13:44):
and the Beanstock, Goldilocks, Cinderella, and you get the picture.
Within a matter of a few months, he landed his
first deal with a Tennessee outfit called Pictorial Clubs. The
agreement was that Walt's Laughogram Films would deliver cartoons to
be shown in schools and non theatrical venues. He thought
he worked out a sweet arrangement because it still left
(14:06):
him the opportunity to lease cartoons to theater chains to
increase the profit on each film. In September nineteen twenty two,
the Tennessee company agreed to pay Walt eleven thousand, one
hundred dollars for six animated cartoons. But again Walt showed
(14:26):
signs of being more creative than a shrewd businessman. He
agreed to take only one hundred dollars as a down payment,
with the remaining eleven thousand dollars to come on January first,
nineteen twenty four, over a year after he delivered the
six cartoons to the company. Maybe he figured he'd also
be able to license them to theaters to bridge the gap,
(14:46):
but to this day, his reasoning behind the deal is unclear.
Walt went to work on the project. He convinced his
buddy of Eyeworks to come on board to help produce
the cartoons.
Speaker 7 (14:59):
In those days, we didn't have very much money, and
we had to find the very simple way to do
these drawings so that we could get them out.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
He was learning the process at lightning speed, he'd later
reflect on the job of an animator.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
An animator is an artist who makes the drawings move.
Speaker 7 (15:15):
He puts them through their paces.
Speaker 5 (15:16):
He's a combination of many things. First he has to
be a real student of art. Next, he has to
be a clever draft one. Then he must have the
soul of an actor and the understanding of a director.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
He was making progress on the cartoon, but within a
few months his bank account was approaching zero, and he
was still over a year away from being paid the
remaining eleven thousand dollars from the Tennessee outfit. Things got
incredibly tight for the young entrepreneur, so tight that he
began to miss payroll. To make the matter even worse,
(15:51):
Walt received some devastating news. The Tennessee outfit that hired
Walt to make the six cartoons went bankrupt. Walt was
out the eleven thousand dollars the business quickly began to unravel.
Bills went unpaid, and collectors started circling the company. He
missed payroll for weeks. For some employees it was even months.
(16:11):
They began to walk out in early nineteen twenty three.
Walt tried to find other investors in his firm, but
aside from a few sporadic loans, there were no takers.
Things were getting dire. Licorice Licorice, Where art thou licorice?
(16:34):
If you listen to Red Pilled America, you know that
I love licorice, and there is no licorice in America
better than the delicious, gourmet licorice made by the Licorice Guy.
The Licorice Guy is simply the best. What sets their
licorice apart is its flavor and freshness. They have a
great selection of flavors to choose from, like red blue, raspberry, black,
(16:55):
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of the Licorice Guy is unlike anything you've ever tasted
in licorice before. Seriously, if you haven't tried licorice from
the Liquorice Guy yet, then you ain't living life right.
Trust me, you will not regret it. It's time to
dump that store bought liquorice but so hard it'll break
your teeth, and get yourself the soft, fresh stuff from
(17:16):
the Licorice Guy. What I also love about the Liquorice
Guy is that it's an American family owned business. It's
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(17:37):
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Speaker 2 (17:49):
Welcome back to Red Pilled America. So the company that
hired Walt to create cartoons went bankrupt. The young cartoonist
was out the eleven thousand dollars he was owed. The
business quickly began to unravel. He missed payroll for weeks.
For some employees it was even months. They began to
walk out. Things were getting dire. At one point, he
(18:11):
connected with the dentist who wanted to hire Walt to
create a film to educate children about dental care. The
dentist agreed to pay him five hundred dollars. One night,
the dentist called Walt, I've got the money, Come over
and we'll set the deal, stated the dentist. Walt said
he couldn't. When the dentist asked why, Walt responded, I
(18:32):
haven't any shoes. Apparently, Walt's only pair of shoes were
falling apart and he couldn't afford new ones, so he
left them with the shoemaker to be fixed. The problem
was that by the time they were mended, Walt didn't
have the dollar and a half to pay for the work.
The shoemaker refused to give them to Walt until he
received payment, so Walt was now shoeless. The dentist quickly
(18:55):
went to the shoemaker, paid Walt's bill, delivered the shoes
to Walt, then finalized their film deal. But with creditors
piling up, the five hundred dollars payment went fast, Walt
could no longer afford his three dollars a month apartment
and was evicted, so he slept at the studio for
a while and took showers once a week at a
local train station. Things were getting so bad that he
(19:19):
couldn't even afford to eat three square meals a day.
It was his darkest time. He had to rely on
the generosity of a local inn to allow him to
eat on credit. At one point, the innkeeper, who took
a liking to Walt, informed him that his business partner
was forcing him to cut Walt off. By chance, the
(19:39):
innkeeper caught Walt rummaging through leftover scraps from a photography studio.
The site shook the innkeeper enough to override his business partner,
and he told Walt to come over to his place
to get something to eat. Walt decided to make a
(20:01):
last ditch effort for his company. In May nineteen twenty three,
he sent a letter to a woman named Margaret J. Winkler,
one of the biggest distributors of cartoons in New York.
Walt wrote, quote, we have just discovered something new and
clever in animated cartoons. It's a new idea that will
appeal to all classes, and it is bound to be
a winner because it's a clever combination of live characters
(20:24):
and cartoons, using a cast of live child actors who
carry on their action on cartoon scenes with cartoon characters
end quote. He said he'd send her a copy when
it was done if she'd like. Margaret Winkler responded saying, quote,
if it is what you say, I shall be interested
in contracting for a series of them end quote. The
(20:47):
response excited Walt. This was a major distributor of animation.
He teamed up with Ubbi Works, one of the few
artists that stayed with him in his rough time, and
the two went to work on the cartoon he entitled
Alice's Wonderland. Walt made an apparents as the illustrators, showing
Alice through the weird cartoon world. Ub and a few
(21:07):
of the other artists made cameos as well, and so
did a cartoon mouse that we'll get to that later.
As they progressed on the cartoon, bill collectors began to
clamp down on Walt. He ultimately lost his office space.
Alice's Wonderland would go unfinished. His hail Mary failed to
get some advice, Walt turned to his brother Roy, who
(21:29):
was living in Los Angeles. Roy suggested he come out
to California and lived with their uncle that recently bought
a home in Hollywood. Walt agreed. He sold some equipment
and bought a train ticket heading west.
Speaker 7 (21:41):
Well, I came to Hollywood and arrived here in August
nineteen twenty three with forty dollars in my pocket and
a coat and a pair of trousers that didn't match.
One half of my suitcase had my shirts and underwear
and things. The other half had my drawing materials.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Even after everything he'd been through, he felt happy and free.
He had a rare quality that kept him confident in
his ability. Walt still believed he'd make it big, but
he did think his animation days were over.
Speaker 7 (22:14):
Well, I tried to tried to get a job doing
anything I could in the studio so I could learn.
I was a little discouraged with the cartoon at that time.
I felt at that time that I was getting into
it too late. In other words, I thought the cartoon
business was established in such a way that there's no
chance to break into it. So I tried to get
(22:36):
a job in Hollywood, working in the picture business so
I could learn it. I would like to be a
director or any part of that, and there was nothing open.
So before I knew it, I had my drawing board
out and I started back to the cartoon.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
And he was pulled back for a reason. Shortly after
he arrived in Hollywood, he reconnected with the New York
animation distributor Margaret Winkler, who was still interested in the
Alice's Wonderland cartoon he pitched her. Walt sat Margaret his
only copy. She reviewed it, and on October fifteenth, nineteen
twenty three, Walt received a telegram from her offering him
(23:22):
a contract for an Alice's Wonderland series.
Speaker 7 (23:25):
And I was able to secure a contract for twelve
of these short films.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
She'd pay fifteen hundred dollars per cartoon for the first
six and eighteen hundred dollars per cartoon for the second batch.
And most importantly, she agreed to pay him on delivery
of each film. There'd be no waiting period like the
Tennessee company that stiffed him. That's all he needed to hear.
(23:51):
Walt and his older brother Boy formed the Disney Brother
Studio the next day. Now, of course, they had to
deliver the cartoons to Margaret before they got paid, so
they had to get creative to the gap.
Speaker 7 (24:04):
In fact, the government helped subsidize us. And I'll explain
that to you. My brother was a veteran of the
First World War, and he would have been hospitalized in things,
and so he was receiving a certain disability compensation. It
mounted to about eighty five dollars a month, and we
lived on that while we established the studio.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Walt went to work on the Ali.
Speaker 7 (24:27):
Series and I did all the drawing myself. I had
no help at all. I was all alone, but I
made the first six practically alone. Then at that time
I was able to get some of the boys that
had been with me in Kensidy to come out.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Up I Works would eventually travel west to join his team.
Speaker 7 (24:43):
So on from the seventh on, I had some help,
and I got by the first year and they were
fairly successful, and that led to other things.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
By mid nineteen twenty four, the demands of production forced
Walt to make a decision.
Speaker 7 (24:57):
And it reached a point that I had so many
well working with me, and there's so much time and
attention demanded that I had to drop the drawing end
of it myself.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
He'd leave the drawing to talented artists like up Walt
would focus on writing, directing, and producing.
Speaker 7 (25:14):
But I've never regretted it, because drawing was always a
means to an end with me. So through these other
boys who were good draftsmen and artists in many different
phases of the business, very talented people. I've coordinating their
talents is what has built this business. And if I
hadn't dropped the drawing end of it myself, I don't
(25:35):
think I'd have built this organization.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
While the team worked on the Alice comedy series, the
business was growing. In nineteen twenty five, he had a
small staff of half a dozen people. One was an
inker and secretary named Lillian Bounds. She was a few
years older than Walt. By midyear, they were married. The
following year, Walt and Roy moved the operation to a
(26:00):
studio on Hyperion Avenue in so A Borough of Los Angeles.
Walt was building a family atmosphere within his company.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
No one becomes a part of the group that isn't
in simply with our ideals.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
He loved the camaraderie of the business. Animation mainly attracted men,
but women were also brought on board to help with
inking and coloring. Around the move, they changed the name
from Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio to the Walt Disney Studio.
Walt was rightfully becoming the face of the organization, a
position he didn't shy away from.
Speaker 5 (26:38):
Now.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
One thing that we should highlight here is Walt's relationship
with his distribution partner in New York, Winkler Pictures. Margaret
Winkler's company was just a middleman. The big cahoun in
this whole operation was Universal Pictures, who contracted with Winkler
Pictures to supply them cartoons, who then turned to Walt
(27:00):
to actually create them. By nineteen twenty seven, and Winkler
Pictures thought the Alice comedy series was too expensive and
time consuming to produce, and they wanted something that could
be turned around faster and cheaper, so they told Walt
to come up with a new idea. Walt decided on
a purely animated series.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
And I'd been doing a rabbit. It was called Oswald,
the Rabbit I did and started for him.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Winkler and Universal liked it, and Walt Disney Studios went
to work. The first Oswald cartoon was released in September
nineteen twenty seven, and it was an immediate hit, and
of course with success comes a whole new set of problems.
You see, the middleman in the production of Oswald Winkler
Pictures got greedy. Walt may have been the creator of
(27:44):
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but Universal actually owned the character.
So Winkler decided they were going to take advantage of
that loophole.
Speaker 7 (27:51):
And he was a rather unscrupulosus character, and he thought
he could cut in and move in a little better.
And I pulled away from him, and I was left alone,
and he happened to own the car. He had a
right to the character.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Winkler signed another contract with Universal Pictures in February nineteen
twenty eight to deliver Oswald cartoons and then decided to
cut Walt out. A representative for Winkler began secretly contacting
Walt's artists, offering them a pay raise to jump ship
and come to Winkler to produce oswaldt up I Works
got the call as well. The ub was loyal to Walt.
(28:29):
He promptly turned to his friend to inform him that
trouble was brewing.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Jonje Fassi LaVey, Jenny den Fassi LaVey.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
Walt had a hard time believing his team would leave him,
and this was also a touchy time financially. Disney Studios
had a staff of nearly a few dozen people and
had moved to a bigger office. If they were to
lose their biggest project, it would thrust Walt into financial
peril again. So he hopped on the train to New
York to meet with Winkler Pictures, and sure enough, Ubb
(29:06):
was right. Winkler informed Walt they were not going to
be renewing the contract. Walt was stunned.
Speaker 7 (29:13):
So that was one of the one of the big
lessons I learned, And from then on, I said, there's
no middleman. He contributed nothing. We did everything. So I
had to get a new character.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
On March thirteenth, nineteen twenty eight, Walt and his wife
Lily boarded a train in New York for the long
trip back to Los Angeles, determined to come up with
a new idea. Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Max, Disney Plus, Apple TV,
Amazon Prime, Showtime, Paramount, Paramount Plus, and on and on.
(29:48):
What are the streaming services have in common? They are
all storytelling platforms. Which of these platforms are you supporting
with your hard earned money? Now ask yourself if the
story's being told on those platforms truly align with your worldview,
and if they don't, ask yourself where you go to
get entertainment in the form of storytelling that does align
with your worldview. Red Pilled America is that show. We
(30:12):
are not another talk show covering today's news. We are
all about telling stories. We remain the only show of
our kind. And why aren't there more shows like ours?
Because it's expensive to create this kind of content. That's
why we need your support. Without your support, this show
doesn't survive, and more importantly, they'll be zero changed to
the monopolistic environment of storytelling. Please visit Redpilled America dot
(30:36):
com and click support in the topmenu. Support what you
love or it goes away. The choice is yours. Welcome
back to Red Pilled America. So what was told by
his New York distributor that they were no longer going
to be working with him to produce Osweald the Lucky
(30:58):
Rabbit cartoons. He was stunned by the news. On March thirteenth,
nineteen twenty eight, Walt and his wife Lily boarded a
train in New York for the long trip back to
Los Angeles, determined to come up with a new idea.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
So I had to have a new character and always well,
I'd fool around a lot with little mice, and they
were always cute characters, and they hadn't been overdone in
the picture field. They'd been used but never featured. So
I decided it would be with a mouse. Oh, and
then the name came. What would you call him? In
the Eupheny there, Mickey Mouse? And I had a mortemer first,
(31:33):
and my wife shook her head, and then I tried
Mickey and she nodded the other way, and that was it.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
When Walt returned, he had up Eyeworks draw up the mouse.
It looked strikingly similar to Oswald the Rabbit, but instead
of long, droopy ears, the mouse had circular ears and
a more protruding nose. About two months after his fallout
with Windler Pictures, Walt introduced the first Mickey Mouse cartoon,
(32:00):
called Plain Crazy. It wasn't well and he couldn't find
a distributor. He created another, and again couldn't find a distributor.
It was looking like deja vous. Walt needed a new idea.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
It just so happened that two years earlier, one of
his main competitors produced a cartoon called My Old Kentucky Home.
The animation included for the first time synchronized sound. The
following year, the first American feature length movie with sound,
The Jazz Singer, was released. The success of the film
pushed most US theaters to install sound systems. The technology
(32:36):
was ripe to be exploited. Walt decided he needed something
to make Mickey Mouse stand out. That was it sound.
So he worked with Ubbi Works to produce a new
Mickey Mouse cartoon with sound called Steamboat Willie, and this
one found a distributor. On November eighteenth, nineteen twenty eight,
(33:04):
Steamboat Willie debuted in New York. The audience was mesmerized
by Walt's new cartoon. One person from the crowd even
(33:24):
asked the projectionist to delay the feature movie so that
they could replay the cartoon. The verdict was in and
Walt Disney immediately knew what direction to take the young company.
Speaker 7 (33:38):
So we decided that there's no sense in making anything
more silent, and we immediately switched to sound. And we
didn't have any sound equipment or anything else, but we
went ahead and made him for sound, and we eventually
got sound on him, and of course it I think
played the big part in establishing Mickey Mouse.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
In nineteen twenty nine, they added a voice to Mickey,
and of course Walt stepped in.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
Well, it's fifth the false set man. We were fooling
around and trying to get a voice for a mouse,
and nobody knew what a mouse it'd sound like. So
I said, well, it's kind of like this, and the
guy said, well, why don't you do it? I knew
it'd always be on the payroll, so I did it.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Mickey Mouse quickly became a phenomenon. By early January nineteen thirty,
the first official theater based Mickey Mouse Club commenced at
a California theater. Two months later, sixty theaters were operating
Mickey Mouse clubs. A few months after that, the club
expanded to hundreds of theaters. By mid nineteen thirty two,
(34:41):
membership to the theater based Mickey Mouse Clubs in the
US reached one million. Walt Disney's cartoons were exploding in popularity,
and this was all happening in the midst of the
Great Depression. Not even the biggest financial crisis in America's
history could slow his creativity down. Walt would go on
to make other Mickey Mouse shorts, and in nineteen thirty
(35:02):
two he began I'm producing his musical cartoons, Silly Symphonies,
and Technicolor Now. Cartoons at the time were all short,
six to eight minute animations that were typically played before
a feature length live action film. The success of Walt
Disney's short cartoons presented him with a new opportunity. Walt
wanted to create America's first feature length cartoon, snow White
(35:25):
and the Seven Dwarfs. In nineteen thirty seven, he talked
about this monumental undertaking.
Speaker 7 (35:30):
We've been at us for the past two years.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
We won't be finished completely with snow White until sometime
or the next year. You see else that's going to
run ten reels, which means the showing time of one
hour and a half. No cartoon production has ever run
that long. Before.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
It was one thing to produce a six to eight
minute cartoon, it was a completely different endeavor to make
a feature length animated film that holds the attention of
an audience. Won't discuss the challenges.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
Well, we have to create personalities out of line drawings.
For example, if we were making snow White with living actors,
we could turn the story over to them and each
actor would introduce bits of business which would build up
the character he was playing.
Speaker 7 (36:20):
But with our little.
Speaker 5 (36:20):
Characters, we have to plan out every movement that they make,
even to the wink of the eye. In other words,
we have to literally pull everything out of the air
and then with a pencil and paper we start building
a picture. Well, how many people do you have working
at your studio? Five hundred, two hundred and fifty are
working on snow White and the rest of them are
working on the short subjects.
Speaker 7 (36:45):
So when we get into things like snow White and
these feature cartoons where you have the human anatomy to
contend with, we do use models, and we do put
them in the wardrobe and things. We do photograph them,
but it's more to oh to set a guide. It's
(37:07):
like any artist using a model, except we're using them
in motion. Now it's awful hard to visualize the graceful
maneuvers of a say the female figure. For my artists,
we used to sit down there and they would go
through the actions, look at themselves in the mirror, you see,
And I said, I've got to get away from that
(37:28):
because they were poor actors.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
You see, Now, by having a model and everything, she
will go through the gestures and things but we don't copy,
we don't trace.
Speaker 7 (37:43):
That is more an inspiration. Then we take our own
latitude from that. But it is sort of a thing
that stimulates the imagination of the artists. It can be
like giving you an idea of what this character ought
to do too, you see, because we got a problem
of starting with blank piece of paper and then we've
(38:05):
got to take these with our pencil. We've got to
make them have personality and life and proper movement. Well,
that's an awful lot for you to sit down in
the room and think about and try to work out.
You know.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
The extraordinary cost for the feature length cartoon led critics
to dub the film Disney's Folly before it was even released.
But when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on
December twenty first, nineteen thirty seven, the naysayers went silent.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Slave in the magic mirror, come from the father's space,
ruin and donness.
Speaker 7 (38:50):
I summon these, Let me see these I face? What
wouldst thou know?
Speaker 3 (39:01):
My queen, magic mirror on the wall, Who is the
fairest one of all.
Speaker 7 (39:10):
Famed? Is thy beauty, majesty? But hold a lovely maid.
Speaker 6 (39:16):
I scene rags cannot hide that gentle grace alas she
is more bad.
Speaker 4 (39:26):
Than the.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
It was a massive critical success. The New York Times
actually thanked Walt Disney, and a few days after its release,
snow White and the Dwarfs appeared on the cover of
Time magazine. It also broke box office records, becoming the
most successful sound movie of all time, and it was
a smash hit with international audiences as well. Walt garnered
(39:50):
global fame. He became an accidental Hollywood tycoon, yet the
film industry didn't really know how to handle his work,
showing the industry's early bias towards live action. Snow White
was not nominated for the nineteen thirty eight Academy Awards
Best Picture. Instead, the Academy gave the movie an honorary oscar,
which was presented to Walt Disney by Shirley Temple.
Speaker 7 (40:13):
I'm through the boys and girls from the whole room.
Speaker 8 (40:15):
I'm going to be very happy when they find out
Daddy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mickey Mouse,
Ferdinand and all the others. He's going to get This
beautiful statue is Judy.
Speaker 7 (40:26):
It's beautiful.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
I'm so proud of Mister Disney, I'm so proud, I
think I'll bust.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
With the success of Snow White, Disney's Hyperion studio was
becoming too small. The staff was bursting at the seams.
During production of snow White, some artists were packed six
people deep into an office. So Walt scoped out of
place in Burbank, California, just north of the Hollywood Hills,
to accommodate his growing empire. Walt wanted to create a
worker's paradise by building a studio from the ground up.
(40:56):
He envisioned a place that workers would almost never have
to leave, with a gym, baseball diamond, barbershop, and cafeti
that offered delivery service. It was an ambitious idea fraught
with problems. Because the Hyperian location still had a family
style vibe. The Burbank studio would be something different. Unlike Hyperion,
(41:19):
where all facets of animation production were co located, that
Burbank Studio would dedicate entire buildings to just one department
of the animation process. Nevertheless, the studio was growing so
quickly that Walt and Roy needed a larger facility, and
they needed it yesterday. So they moved forward with building
the grounds. On the day after Christmas nineteen thirty nine,
(41:40):
some of the Disney staff began the move from Hyperion
to Burbank. Walt Disney had become a major player in Hollywood.
He bumbled around for several years trying to find his
way in the growing art form of animation. Walt faced
some unscrupulous characters that plunged him into debt. Things got
(42:04):
so bad for Walt that he had no shoes and
resorted to eating leftover scraps. He was forced to close
shop and move west to his uncle's Hollywood home. He
thought he'd missed the boat in the burgeoning animation industry,
but he kept to it and finally landed a financially
rewarding deal in the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
He faced near extinction again when a distributor plucked his
(42:26):
staff to create the Oswald character without him, but his
storytelling genius proved to be his saving grace. He created
Mickey Mouse that became an international phenomenon. Walt innovated again
with America's first feature length animated film, Snow White. He
was becoming a master storyteller, the likes of which the
world had never seen the boy from Missouri had made it.
(42:48):
But what Walt couldn't have seen when opening his Burbank
studio in nineteen forty was that trouble was brewing. A
political force had been quietly infiltrating Hollywood. This Unamerican movement
was inspired by a utopian novel, a novel that provided
a roadmap for a socialist takeover of America, and Hollywood
(43:09):
was one of their biggest targets. Next time on Red
Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
That's when Walt Disney formed a conservative group to stop
the socialist takeover of Hollywood, and.
Speaker 7 (43:18):
He evidently heard that.
Speaker 6 (43:20):
I had called him all a bunch of communists, and
I believe they are.
Speaker 7 (43:23):
I would move to the state of Texas if it
ever came here, because I think the Texans would kill
them on site.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
They have been eminently successful in preventing them from their
usual tactic of trying to run a majority of an
organization with a well organized minority.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
And that's how they've done it. That's how the far
left has taken over American culture. But there's a way
to stop them.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's produced
by me Adriana Cortez and Patrick Carelchi for Informed Ventures. Now,
our entire archive of episodes is only available to our
backstage subscribers. To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and
click support in the topmenu. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Adryana Cortez
Patrick Courrielche
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