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.So that s where we shot it.Onthe first day of shooting I was on the set and Walt came up, tapped me onthe shoulder and asked, What s it doing out there? Sure enough, it was rain-ing.Walt just had good common sense judgment about everything. 7Except, Hibler might have added, about The Ugly Dachshund itself, a filmlet s never not be a s i lly company 3 21 that comes to life only during three episodes of canine destruction.In oneof those episodes a Great Dane and a supporting cast of dachshunds wreckan artist s studio and the artist is not a pretentious comic figure but thefilm s leading man, an earnest and amiable sort played by Dean Jones.Dis-ney would no doubt have found such a disaster heartrending rather thanamusing if it had happened to an artist on his staª, but in his later years helet his movies fill up with well-trained animals whose destructiveness is sup-posed to be funny.Hibler and the other Disney live-action producers couldnot break themselves of the habit of reaching for such easy answers, and sotheir films made after Walt Disney s death are like his own most unfortunateproductions, only worse.Thanks largely to the dreariness of the studio s live-action output and itsincreasingly poor reception in theaters Walt Disney Productions passedthrough a traumatic change in management in 1984.That change resulted inthe ouster of Disney s son-in-law Ron Miller, who had succeeded him as ex-ecutive producer, the ultimate decision maker where films were concerned,and had then become the company s president.Michael D.Eisner becamechairman and chief executive officer.He was at the center of similar turmoilbefore the ascension of Robert Iger to the CEO s job in 2005.Roy Disney sson, Roy Edward Disney, rallied opposition to the incumbent in both episodes.The Walt Disney Company, as it now exists, is huge compared with theWalt Disney Productions that Walt and Roy Disney knew, and it has changedin countless ways (who could have guessed in 1954 that the ABC televisionnetwork would become a Disney property?).And yet, remarkably, its foun-dations are still those that Walt Disney laid.The company that bears his nameis still strongest at the points where Disney s own interest was keenest.Inthat respect, the noisy changes at the top of the company have simply notmade much diªerence.Forty years after Walt Disney s death, when Disney parks have spread notjust to Florida but to Europe and East Asia, the original Disneyland remainsthe template for each new version of the Magic Kingdom.All those parksmake sense only when they seem to be striving for perfection on Walt Dis-ney s terms.Poorly conceived rides, indiªerent employees, unkempt rest-rooms consciously or not, park visitors experience such things not just asannoyances but as defiance of Walt Disney s clearly expressed wishes.It is, however, through his animated films that Walt Disney retains hisfirmest grip on the company he founded.In the parks not just rides but cos-tumed employees evoke the cartoon characters, and they are otherwise every-where that Disney s writ extends.More than anything else, Disney means3 22 afterword characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and feature films like SnowWhite and Dumbo.The Disney animated features made since Walt Disney sdeath have always competed sometimes successfully, more often notagainst memories of the films he produced himself, and their makers havesquirmed inside the luxurious prison that Walt constructed, the one builtof expectations that animated features will always be, if not films made es-pecially for children, then films readily accessible to them.That prisonconfines even the makers of today s best animated features, the computer-animated films made by the Pixar studio and released by the Walt DisneyCompany.The power of Disney s art was harnessed to commerce first by Disney him-self and then by his successors.Transforming his best films into durable com-mercial properties has meant the loss of their emotional immediacy thusthe heavy-handed repetition of words like happy and magic in sellingthem, to make up for what is missing.Distinguishing what is genuine andvaluable, among the many things that bear the Disney name, from what isflimsy and synthetic has been a task building since long before Disney s death.That task is extraordinarily difficult now because so many people whetherthey are critics or apologists have acquired a vested interest in conflatingeverything Disney. Walt Disney has since his death become a sort of Disney character him-self.In 1981, Walt Disney Productions exchanged $46.2 million in its stockfor all the stock of Retlaw Enterprises, the family company that owned notjust Disneyland s narrow-gauge railroad and monorail but also the rights toDisney s name.8 There was never any question about the use of Disney s namein the name of the company itself, or on those films and TV shows that heproduced, but Retlaw got a 5 percent share of Walt Disney Productions roy-alties on licensed products that bore Walt Disney s name.Walt Disney, as a name and a person, is a far more visible part of his com-pany s activities than, say, Henry Ford is at the company that bears his name. Disney has not become as generic as Ford, or, for that matter, the namesof many other company founders, and appropriately so, considering that WaltDisney s presence in his company s products is still so large.His name is rou-tinely invoked in ways that would be unusual at other large corporations.Said CEO Michael Eisner in 2001: You ask what is the soul of the companyand what is our direction? I m trying to be the bridge from what Walt Dis-ney made and created to whoever will be the next person after me that main-tains that same philosophy of Let s put on a show. Let s be silly.We re a sillycompany.Let s never not be a silly company. 9let s never not be a s i lly company 3 23 Curiously, those repeated invocations of Walt Disney s name, and inces-sant praise for his dreams and his vision, have made him seem less like areal person. When I talk to school groups, Michael Broggie said in 2003, I ll ask for a show of hands.who was Walt Disney? Was he real? Was hefictional? They answer overwhelmingly that he was a fictional character, andthat he never really lived. 10 The Disney family, in voicing its loyalty to WaltDisney s memory, has contributed to the sense that he is as much a fabrica-tion as Betty Crocker.Disney s surviving daughter, Diane Disney Miller, hassponsored a film, a book, a CD-ROM, and a Web site about her father thatare occasionally illuminating but more often devotional; Roy Disney s son,Roy Edward Disney, has glorified his uncle ( The Great One ) as one meansof denigrating Walt s successors at the head of the Disney company, includ-ing his cousin s husband.*Disney seems no more real in the growing body of academic critiques ofthe man and the company that bears his name.Many of these critiques arevaguely if not specifically Marxist in their methodology, and they display theusual Marxist tendency to bulldoze the complexities of human behavior inthe pursuit of an all-embracing interpretation of Disney s life and work.Whatfatally cripples most academic writing about Walt Disney is simple failure toexamine its supposed subject
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