Walt Disney the Futurist

When you hear Walt Disney's name, chances are you think of cartoons and theme parks. But do you know about Walt Disney the futurist? Join Robert and Julie as they examine Disney's dreams for the future and his "conditional optimism" for the human race.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And Julie we
need we need to kick off by talking about a
little urban legend. Yeah, concerning one Walt Disney, and that,
of course, is the idea that buried in the secret
high tech vaults underneath Disney World and Epcot Center. The
Magic Kingdom, the Magical Kingdom's laity is that the Magic Kingdom?

(00:22):
It is California, the Magic Kingdom? Are they the Magic Kingdom?
Already you've exposed my knowledge of the Disney franchise. Well, anyway,
the myth is that's somewhere underneath one of these magical
cities that composed this Magical Kingdom. They're like robot tendered vaults,
and there you will find Walt Disney's frozen body that

(00:45):
it's in. It's being preserved until such time as we
can bring him back to life so that he can
save us from the uh, the harsh realities that faces
in the future. That's right, he's just waiting for technology
to catch up and and reanimate him. Yeah. Plus, somebody's
gonna make fantage of three. So yeah, yeah, So I
mean this is of course an urban legend. This is

(01:06):
complete um who whoie if you will, I mean, for
for starters. Just an important factor is that Dr James Bedford,
seventy three year old psychology professor, was the first person
frozen in this matter through Ennis, and that was on
January twelfth, nineteen sixty seven. Walt Disney died December fift

(01:27):
nineteen sixty six. You know, so we got roughly a
year there before it was even really possible. Um So,
so there's that, all right, right, So the confluence of
events helped perpetuate this myth, not to mention the fact
that he was highly private and actually his funeral arrangements
were not publicized, and so people started to stir up

(01:49):
all of these rumors. Yeah, and people, you know, people
generally like the idea of a of of rich people
being kind of crazy and Richard Branson yeah, or or also,
I mean the whole um Howard Hughes, uh deal, you know,
the millionaire And I think that that's part of it too,
Like people think of Howard Hughes and they think of
Walt Disney, and they kind of they kind of bring

(02:10):
the two together in their mind into some um um
version of like an an eccentric billionaire from the past. Yeah,
and then there's those this whole thing too about Walt
Disney being like a guide in the wool futurists. Yes,
the real deal, And that's what we're really going to
talk about in this podcast now that we've swept the
urban myth out of the way, because that's the thing. Disney, um,

(02:33):
you know, mostly is known for Disney World, Mickey Mouse
maybe more becoming more affiliated with Pixar today and you know,
and some of these are great products, but the man
himself was was so much more interesting than any of
these one things and for a while was a really
powerful force, uh as far as futurist thinking goes, and

(02:57):
just in contemplating and just advocating how technology can can
shape the course of our future and and better everyone's life.
Well not it's just not just the future, but public opinion, um,
even even our government. And we'll talk a little bit
about that later, but um, you know, I mean this
is a guy who was an absolute optimist when it

(03:20):
when it comes to technology, and he kind of felt
like you could solve any problem with technology, you just
had to put it in place, so which you have
this guy with a lot of money, a lot of imagination,
and this absolute faith in the future right now. He
was born in NT one to give you a little um,

(03:40):
you know, time for nineteen o one through nineteen sixty six,
and he indeed started off with the whole animation thing, uh, drawing. Um.
I forget what the first character was, but it looked
at There are a couple of characters that he came
out with, one of which ended up getting taken away
from him due to to some rights issues. But then
he settled on nicky Um. But he was not he

(04:02):
was not really a gifted artist per se. I've heard
I've read some descriptions what they said. He could really
barely draw Mickey, you know, But but he had all
these ideas, you know, and he'd get this idea and
he'd be like, all right, here's Mickey, Let's get some
talented people to make this happen. Let's get some some
high end production stuff lined up, and will will produce
this thing. So he was he was big. I've also

(04:24):
seen that as one of his criticisms, that he was
more of an idea starter, you know, that someone that's like,
all right, guys, I got this idea for a party.
We're gonna have X, Y and Z go do it
and then I'll show up, you know, kind of a thing.
Um and he uh so he was, but he was
a big idea man. And he left the money stuff
to his brother Roy, who and there was also this

(04:45):
kind of older brother younger brother dynamic there because Walt
was the younger brother, so he was the wild imagination
kid and Roy was the older brother who looked after Walt. Okay,
so you've got the pragmatic part, you've got the kid
with moxie. Yeah. And apparently throughout I was reading about
this in the book Reality Land by this guy David Cone,

(05:06):
and it's a it's really good, but it goes into
a lot about that, Like there were basically like two
factions within Disney, uh for for for a long time,
and there was like Roy's guys and Waltz guys. Wow. Yeah,
this is like gangs. Yeah, it was like rival gangs,
one with calculators and the other, um, I don't know,
dream goggles. I was gonna dream goggles. That's nice standard

(05:27):
issue in corporate Disney back in the day. Yeah, Um,
but I mean it's interesting to look at it from
the historical perspective and realized that Disney was sort of
fed um on futurism from the get go or future
futuristic is m I guess that you could say there's
sort of a difference. UM. And you know, here's this

(05:48):
guy born in nineteen o one, as you say, died
in nineteen sixty six. He saw a tremendous amount of
progress and he again he had the imagination, he had
the moxie, he had a vehicle, Mickey, and he the
money to to do what he wanted to do. And
at the same time, you have all of these things
happening in in the United States concerning space race right right,

(06:10):
which is really sort of fueling his own ambition, not
to mention you know, national pride being part of this equation,
and you actually look at the timeline and you can
see where Disney is starting to think that he needs
to take this issue on himself. UM. And certainly it
was actually one of his animators who came up with
some of the ideas about space exploration as a topic.

(06:32):
But you know, he was a big proponent of of
UM making this sort of technology known to people, and
and really big into planning and designed to UM, which
which a part of that apparently came out of when
they when they established Disneyland in California. UM he began
to notice that, like they didn't really plan out hotel

(06:53):
arrangements and so like it went from after Disneyland was
built and went from there being like eighty available rooms
in the in the area surrounding area to just you know,
countless hotel to the point where they're they're having to
worry about skyscrapers rising up to where you don't really
have like the pristine because because they have the different
areas of Disneyland are are broken up to be like
periods of the past, and so there's gonna be a

(07:13):
skyscraper peering over, you know. And uh, and he wasn't
he wasn't happy with the city planning going going around
outside the park so part so he had this idea,
It's like, hey, well even if we start start fresh,
start new, then we'll plant everything out. And you know,
I have this idea that if you if you plan it,
if you design it enough, then then humans can do it.
You know, we can. We can we can start fresh,

(07:36):
and we can create a system that absolutely works well.
And that's what I really love about you know, part
of his vision is that you know, you employee technology
so that humans can have easier lives, they suffer less,
And that really is sort of the crux of UM
where he was coming from. But just to talk a
little bit more about the conditions during the nineteen fifties, UM,
because yeah, this is this is crucial. It's really big,

(07:58):
and you've got the space race is heating up. You've
anxieties about overpopulation, technology, atomic warfare, the environment. All of
these different problems are sorting or straightening and come up.
And again, space race really important because I think of
the timeline ninety seven fruit flies were launched into space
by the US UM and then in nineteen fifty seven,

(08:19):
ten years later, you have the first artificial satellite spot Nik. Okay, well,
and we know that was launched space by other than
USS ARE And this is important to to keep in
mind that, I mean, it's easy to forget even reading
about it, and in knowing you know about just how
polarized our ideas were during the Cold War. I mean,
this was a time where if you were if you

(08:40):
were if you were an American and and you knew
about the Cold War because there's also a huge chance
you were just preoccupied with everything else in life, and
you know, the lightening weren't reading all the papers. But
if you were, you were tuned into what the Cold
War was and what was going on, then you had
this very very stark, stark idea of what the Soviet

(09:00):
Union was. I mean, they were, uh, in many people's minds,
this great enemy that represented just tyranny and the loss
of the individual and the loss of freedom and and
uh and you know the kind of polarization you see
in uh in some of these uh, these fantasy works
that came out of out of Disney studios, right, and

(09:21):
so you know, to your point, then all of a sudden,
you see that, you know, the USSR is making big
strides here in the space race, especially this butt Nik
starts to freak everybody out on a national level. They
start to say, this is something that we need to
be doing as well. We need to have a space program.
So here you have Disney who began to produce TV

(09:42):
shows to help support the opening of Disneyland. Um so
a very smart move. Right a year in advance of
Disneyland opening, he starts to decide, okay, well, I've got
these four different parts of Disneyland that I really need
to get people on board with and and you know,
take the time and money to come in is at us.
So I'm going to promote promote Fantasyland, Frontier Land, adventure Land,

(10:05):
and tomorrow Land. And tomorrow Land. Is this sort of
like his brain child, right, And he's able to assemble
what he calls imagineers, which I kind of love. Um,
he's got a top animator, Walt Kimball, who actually pitched
the whole tomorrow Land to him. You've got rocket scientists
and other experts who get to craft space exploration futurist

(10:27):
programs that promote these technologies that the US hasn't fully
adopted yet. Just really fascinating. Oh and I had to
jump in there real quick talking about the different sections
of Disneyland. This is great quote where a parent was
like over the gates to Disneyland that said, here you
leave today and into the world of yesterday tomorrow in
fantasy And there was a promotional brochure that to the

(10:48):
park had nothing of the present, like nothing of the
present exists in Disneyland, which which is in a way
it's awesome because it's like, you know, it's like we're sold,
you know, forget about what you're facing right now. We're
just gonna focus on how awesome the past was and
how super awesome the future is going to be. But
it's also kind of like the most anti Buddhist statement
I could I could possibly imagine, because because you know,

(11:09):
the whole you know, like meditation, as we've we've spoken about,
you know, it's all about like, stop worrying about the past,
stop worrying about the future, and just live in the moment.
While Disney was like, stop living in the moment. Yeah,
come to this, don't be here now. Um. And actually
in the opening to uh when it opened, Disney said
to all who come to this happy place, welcome, Disneyland
is your land. He didn't really sound like this, but

(11:32):
here age relives fond memories of the past as you
spoke about, and here youth may savor the challenge and
promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals,
the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America,
with the hope that it will be it will be
a source of joint inspiration to all the world. So
you see these things coming out children future, this sort
of manifest destiny which is hidden a bit in in

(11:57):
his agenda, that comes out in Space X where shan
that certainly comes out in frontier Land when he talked
about David Crockett so uh so in a way, it
was kind of like and identifying that the the children,
the use of that day and age kind of had it.
We're facing this identity crisis of who they were. There
were all these different forces going on. There's all this

(12:18):
fear about the future, and he saying that hold on,
look at these past models. This is who you are,
this is your heritage. And then look at this model
of the future. This is what you can accomplish with technology.