Talk:Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince

I am shocked that such a controversial subject has received no discussion and no arguements over neutrality. PhilipDSullivan (talk) 05:30, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

This article is simply describing a book that made these claims. The article itself is rather even handed. Ph0t0phobic (talk) 18:56, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

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BetacommandBot (talk) 15:30, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

"Many of the claims are poorly documented, and the book also contains outright errors"

Could we have an example of an outright error? The provided reference links to an article on the Snopes.com website, that says that Disney wasn't illegitimate, and that statements to the contrary are "FALSE" ... but Snopes aren't offering any countering information to support their claim that it's false. They simply say that the varying claims from different authors disagree, rubbish the idea that Disney could have been born in 1890, and conclude that "That Walt Disney was born in 1901, not 1890, is beyond dispute".

But they don't offer any evidence that he was born in the US, in 1901, so it's not beyond dispute. According to Eliot, Disney thought that he had a birth certificate, but Hoover told him that it was a fake. The "testable hypothesis" associated with the claim that the certificate was fake, and that it was faked to conceal a different date and/or place of birth, would be that if we then checked up on Walt's birth records for the supplied place and date, there shouldn't be any record of the birth. And apparently, there isn't.

So, if Walt did have what he thought was an official birth certificate, then yes, it would seem to have had to have been a fake.

There are other possible explanations, of course, but the issue isn't laid to rest by the Snopes article. Guys do sometimes have sex with people who aren't their wives. Families do sometimes cover up an embarrassing pregnancy by saying that someone else was the mother. The fact that a man is outwardly strictly religious doesn't necessarily mean that he'd never have sex with a prostitute when he's lonely and away from home. We know that these things happen, and we know that sometimes the deceptions go uncovered for decades, until someone actually thinks to check the records. And this probably says more about Walt's dad then it does Walt, except that, if true, it means that Walt probably grew up in a slightly unfortunate miasma of family undercurrents, that may have informed some of his later actions as an adult.

I think I'll change the wording about "claims" from "containing outright errors" to something more like "claims, some of which are disputed", and leave in the Snopes link.

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The claims in the book that do seem to be pretty outrageous seem to be confirmed. The idea (apparently uncovered for the first time by the book's author) that Disney was an FBI informer or agent seems to be supported by FBI records, although Walter Disney's index and online documents on the FBI online FOIA website no longer seem to work. The NYT site confirms that when the book came out they'd checked the author's documents against government files and had been satisfied that they were genuine.

The information in the book about Disney and Ub Iwerks was a little shocking to me in that I'd never heard of it, and had always been told that Disney himself had invented Mickey Mouse - to question that seemed outrageous. And yet ... Disney have since amended their official histories and admitted that it was Iwerks who actually designed and drew Mickey Mouse "with Walt at his elbow". So that part of the book is now the new "official" history

The last "outrageous" claim, that Disney essentially ripped off Felix the Cat, then amended the design by changing the ears to make it a rabbit (Oswald), then lost control of the Oswald character and had to redesign again, changing the ears a second time to produce what later became their iconic Mickey Mouse ... finding documentary evidence to support that idea might have been difficult a few years ago, but now, thanks to the 'net, users have managed to scrape together a few surviving contemporary images that show the progression of the character, from Felix the Cat [[1]], to an identical-looking character in a Disney feature, that's presumably Disney's "Julius": [[2]], to "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit", [[3]], who is essentially Mickey Mouse in all but ears.

The Walt Disney page supports the HDP's chronology regarding these characters and the HDP story that Disney's company lost ownership of Oswald, and the picture of Oswald in the poster "Universal Presents ... Oswald ... by Walt Disney" shows a character presumably drawn by Disney's team at around the time they "lost" Oswald, that's startlingly similar to the "new" character that Iwerks then created to replace Ossie, which ended up as the flagship character for their business (and later, the inspiration for the corporate logo).

The book paints Walt as a bit of a bastard. This may come as a shock to people who grew up with "Uncle Walt" on their tv screens, but it's not improbable. It almost seemed to be an essential survival strategy for becoming a successful industrialist at the time. Edison had been arguably even more of a bastard, as were some of the powerful people who Walt dealt with. Antisemitic? Again, not unlikely, considering the times. Henry Ford was apparently a fan of Adolf Hitler. Anti-union? Well, considering that his business depended on the work of a pool of "creatives" who could in theory all "up and leave" at any point (and he'd been badly burned by artists doing just that), the idea that the workers had to be kept in their place and prevented from getting organised isn't unlikely. An anti-communist who infiltrated meetings and reported those present to the FBI as potential traitors? Well, Ronald Reagan did this too. And in Disney's case, removing "commies" from the workforce meant removing people who might incite his workforce to take action for better pay or conditions, or recognition. Keeping their names off the end credits meant that it was harder for them to use their time at Disney as a way of getting a job with a competing company. They had no "Disney" portfolio.

Disney does seem to have been an individual with "issues" ... and we know this without depending on the book, from his slightly insane edict that he should effectively be the only male at Disney with facial hair. That's just mad, isn't it? The suggestion about his possible illegitimacy (and its circumstances) offers an explanation of how and why he might have ended up like this. Certainly, as a producer, he tapped brilliantly into the audience's childhood fears of being different, or different to your brothers and sisters (e.g. "Dumbo"), and if he'd grown up in a situation where there were dark family secrets, and an unspoken sense that "little Walt" wasn't quite like his other siblings, than that might have helped shape his personality, and helped him to produce some of the most successful animations of his career.

So while it doesn't paint him as a very nice man, in some ways the book's portrayal is quite sympathetic. It shows him as the "anti-coloureds" all-american guy who finds out that his real mother is fairly dark-skinned and that he's not even really an American. He's the pompous moralistic kid from the strictly religious family who finds that his puritanical dad slept with a hooker, and he's the result. And the hooker was the family maid. Who he'd then hired. This was the guy who becomes famous for originating a character that he didn't actually draw, and whose mother refused to watch any of his cartoons, and after being eventually persuaded to watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon, commented contemptuously that Mickey sounded like a girl ... when the voice of Mickey was the only thing that poor Walt had contributed. This is the guy who spends years carefully culturing a fake public persona and keeping up a front, only to find that even his birth certificate isn't real. This is a guy with issues.

So the picture painted by the book is of a guy who treats other people badly, but somehow ends up none the happier for it, lurching from one nightmare situation to another. Even though you come away not particularly liking the guy, there are moments in the book where you can't help feeling a little sorry for him as his life plays one dirty trick on him after another. Especially the bit with the promotional hired dwarves on the hotel roof getting drunk before their publicity appearance, getting naked, and peeing over the side into the audience. That's getting into "Fawlty Towers" territory. ErkDemon (talk) 20:02, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

removed text, referring to a different Walt Disney biography

removed text:

Neal Gabler wrote another, more balanced but still critical Disney biography in 2006, which Business Week characterized as "A rich narrative of a sometimes-troubled genius.")

I'm not sure that a book's page is usually the correct place to start posting 'reviews' of a different book on the same subject. Perhaps if there are a few notable books, competing books might be listed here under "Other biographies of Walt Disney". And then, if any of those other books are deemed sufficiently notable to have their own wikipages, the list entries could be turned into wikilinks. Otherwise, the correct place to tell people about books on Walt Disney would seem to be at the bottom of the Walt Disney page ErkDemon (talk) 22:57, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree. That's tacky. Cite the bio you wrote in the main Disney article. Guinness4life (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 23:39, 29 September 2009 (UTC).

Contradiction?

Does anyone else see the inherent contradiction in the synopsis that Disney was a "lifelong Anti-semite" yet wore a "Goldwater pin" when receiving the medal of Freedom? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjamin.walker (talk • contribs)

Exactly, if "Goldwater" or rather "Goldwasser" is not a Jewish name, then my name must be Japanese. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.10.152.66 (talk) 15:03, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

The book is a sensationalist hatchet job republishing urban legends as facts, and per the author's own home web page, apparently his main meal ticket. Life-long anti-Semite? Sorry, idiots who allege Mickey has a "Jewish" nose{[mdash}}and I've even read such claptrap in course synopses for college courses. Disney hired actors like Ed Wynn when the rest of Hollywood wouldn't touch anyone who even "looked" Jewish. Anyone can write anything about a dead person. VЄСRUМВА  ♪  17:00, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

It's absolutely a sensationalist hatchet job. Still, a good portion of it is true. Disney couldn't draw, credit for work at the studio was non-existent, and the FBI files are, insofar as I've been able to tell, real. Like you, I kind of doubt he was any more anti-semitic than anyone else who was a Hollywood outsider. He was too much of a businessman to be otherwise.

The abundance of pop psych that permeates the book is all nonsense. Disney might not have been a nice guy. That doesn't mean he wasn't responsible for some wonderful cartoons. Also, you have to respect a guy going from renting a room in his father's garage to owning one of the world's largest media empires. Guinness4life (talk) 23:31, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

The cake is a lie

Reverted some rather entertaining vandalism where someone posited this book contained the rumor that "the cake is a lie." Surprised this hadn't been caught sooner... it apparently went unnoticed for almost a week. 67.174.98.77 (talk) 22:22, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Fixed the article

The old article was very poorly written with lots of errors so i have now fixed it to make it a much better article and i now wish for people to do their best work to remake the page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.162.177.96 (talk) 09:15, 2 September 2015 (UTC)