On October 16, 1923, brothers Walt and Roy Disney signed a contract with a New York distributor to produce a series of short animated films. The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, capitalized with $500 from Walt and $1,500 borrowed against Roy’s life insurance, had begun — and over the next century it grew into the largest entertainment empire in history.
From the Garage to Laugh-O-Gram
Walter Elias Disney was 21, a high-school dropout from Marceline, Missouri, who had spent his teenage years drawing ads and cartoons for Kansas City businesses. His first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt in 1923, leaving him so poor he reportedly ate beans from cans and survived by selling his camera. He moved to Hollywood — following his brother Roy, who was recovering from tuberculosis — and the two set up shop in a rented room behind a real estate office, then in a garage. Their first character was not Mickey: it was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Universal owned the rights, and when Walt tried to renegotiate in 1928, his distributor hired away most of his animators and kept the rabbit. Out of that betrayal, Disney vowed to own everything he made.
Mickey, Color and Snow White
Mickey Mouse arrived in 1928 (“Steamboat Willie”), sound arrived in 1928 (“The Jazz Singer” having just revolutionized film), color arrived in 1932 (“Flowers and Trees”), and in 1937 Disney bet the entire studio on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — the first feature-length animated film — which Hollywood mocked as “Disney’s Folly” until it grossed $8 million in the Depression. Disneyland opened in 1955 (covered in our July 17 article); Walt died in 1966 with EPCOT unfinished, but the company never stopped compounding.
The One-Hundred-Year Studio
A century on, the Walt Disney Company is an entertainment colossus: Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and 20th Century Fox absorbed; theme parks on four continents; a streaming service with over 150 million subscribers. The signature — two circles and three smaller ones — is recognized as widely as any symbol on Earth. On October 16, 1923, a bankrupt 21-year-old and his ailing brother borrowed life-insurance money to draw a cartoon. The mouse they eventually built became the most famous character in human history — and the garage they started in became the blueprint for every dreamer’s origin story ever told.
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