Disney After Walt Is a Family Affair

"The financial fellows think we're going to fall on our faces without Walt," said his brother Roy O. Disney a few months after Walt Disney died in 1966.

"Well, we're going to fool them." By Jiminy Cricket, fool them they did. Seven and a half years later, Walt Disney Productions has become the only blue-chip stock in show business. The company's revenues have soared, from $116.6 million to $329 million, and so have profits, from $ 12.4 million to a record $40 million. In fearing that the Disney empire would founder after the death of its founding genius, the financial fellows forgot to reckon on one thing: the continuing presence of Walt Disney.

That presence is palpable throughout the sprawling terra cotta studio he built in the first flush of Snow White's astounding success in 1937. Until this spring, his office in the animation building at the corner of Mickey Boulevard and Dopey Drive was left exactly as it was the day he died. In April, it was dismantled and painstakingly reconstructed at Disneyland--the notes where he left them on the low black desk, the scripts he was reading tucked neatly in the rack behind. Disney executives reverentially continue to invoke Walt's philosophy; often in discussing projects or plans, they will offer the ultimate approval: "Walt would have liked it."

"We haven't gone in any new directions," admits President and Chief Operating Officer E. Cardon Walker.

"The name has become a guarantee. If it says Walt Disney Productions, a fam ily can be assured that they're not going to be shocked in any way--bored maybe sometimes, but never shocked."

The company remains essentially a tightly knit family affair. The heirs of Walt and Roy O. Disney (who died in 1971) retain the largest single block of the stock. President Walker, 57, and Chairman Donn B. Tatum, 60, both joined the Disney brothers in the '30s; Executive Producer Ronald W. Miller is Walt's son-in-law, and Roy Disney's son Roy E. Disney heads T.V. projects.

But the 50-year-old small-family firm, launched on $40 and the scrawny figure of a four-fingered mouse, has grown to encompass two of the country's major tourist attractions--Disneyland and Disney World; motion-picture-and television-producing Buena Vista studios; WED Enterprises, an engineering and design group that is fondly known as the "imagineers" and is responsible for many of the technological wonders of Disneyland and Disney World; several hotels, a travel service, a record company, a music-publishing corporation and a touring company; toy-manufacturing and merchandising operations; the governments of two legally constituted municipalities within Disney World; and, through Disney endowments, the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif.

Of all these fiscally prescient pipe-dreams come true, by far the most profitable have been the amusement parks.

Disney World, the giant, technologically pure preserve in central Florida which company executives unflinchingly refer to as "The Magic Kingdom," far exceeded original estimates with an attendance of 10 million in 1972, its first full year in operation. In the first few months of this year, attendance jumped another 8.6% as millions more plunked down an average $10 a head to trundle down superclean "Main Street" into the most audacious melange of futuristic urban planning and nostalgic cutsie-poo kitsch ever conceived.

Nevertheless, one-third of the company's revenues still come from the cornerstone of Disney's original vision --reissues of old Disney classics, many of which are currently being rerun in a month-long retrospective at Manhattan's Lincoln Center (sec box). Company executives estimate that their primary audience turns over every seven years; so periodically, like a clockwork bubble-gum machine, one or another of the animated features is offered up again to a whole new crop of moppets.

Many of the old films have been more successful in re-release than originally. Bambi, considered a failure when it grossed only $1.5 million in 1943, has vindicated Disney's vision by drawing an impressive $15.5 million to date. Cinderella, presently in rerelease, has grossed $17.5 million in four circuits. A few years ago, one Disney employee confessed that Alice in Wonderland had never been re-released because latter-day misinterpretations might tarnish the Disney image; the Caterpillar, for instance, loftily puffing on his hookah, now looks suspiciously--well, stoned.

The mind-tripping Fantasia, however, has quietly played to a new "youth" audience for several years.

Only two animated features have been produced since 1966: The Aristocats, already in preparation when Walt Disney died, and Robin Hood, to be released this fall. Disney pictures now tend to be the live-action variety; animation has become prohibitively expensive, and the Disney studio suffers from a shortage of good animators. The average age of the key animation staff is now 55, and energetic recruiting among young artists has not filled the gap. "They're trapped in a cozy formula," complains one disgruntled refugee from the mouse factory. "They're not doing any original work."

Other young artists are unwilling to conform to the imperious (although recently somewhat modified) Disney dress and hair codes, or to go through the Mickey Mouse employee indoctrination at the "universities" at Disneyland and Disney World. At these "universities," most of the company's 20,000 clean, neat and good-looking employees are schooled in Traditions I, II, III and IV in the Way of Walt. (In the late 1950s, one of those employees was future Presidential Press

Secretary Ron Ziegler.) The first lesson in Tradition I begins: "What do we do? We create Happiness."

"All you have to do," said Tinker Bell, "is believe." Thus far, Walt Disney Productions' belief in its founder's formula--and in what Roy Disney called the "ten-year plan" he left behind --has been enough. The next logical step, says one executive, would be an outdoor recreation facility along the lines of the Mineral King project in California, now suspended because it brought the Disney vision of progress into a head-on collision with conservationists. And always, off in the future, is EPCOT (for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), the perfect city Disney hoped to build adjacent to Disney World, complete with a climatic umbrella to regulate the weather.

Author Ray Bradbury, convinced that only the man who invented Disneyland could organize the urban chaos of Los Angeles, once asked Walt Disney to run for mayor of that city. Disney only smiled. "Why should I want to be mayor," he inquired, "when I'm already king?" The king is not dead; he may live as long as the ten-year plans keep working.

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