Walt's Era - Part 17: Walt's Last Years (1965-1966)

The end of an era is upon us, in more ways than one. With bizarre prescience, Walt Disney sold WED Enterprises to Walt Disney Productions, finally bringing the future "Imagineering" department into the Disney fold proper. To handle the royalties from his name and the Disneyland Railroad, Walt created the company RETLAW. Yet just as Walt Disney Productions acquired WED, there was talk of General Electric or Westinghouse purchasing the company. And oddly enough, as an ironic footnote, the original Hyperion Rd. studio used by Disney way back in the early days, the studio in which Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was created, was bulldozed to clear space for a supermarket. 

Yet it was also a time of beginnings. The New York World's Fair closed in 1965, and over the course of that year and the next, attractions would slowly begin their migration to Disneyland. It's a Small World opened in Fantasyland with a brand new, more dramatic exterior. Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln took up the Main Street opera house. The dinosaur scenes in Ford's Magic Skyway were excised and placed alongside the DLRR as the Primeval World diorama. In 1967, the Carousel of Progress would become one of the keynote attractions of the 1967 "New Tomorrowland." New Orleans Square would also open in 1966, though absent either of its headline attractions. 

Outside of the original Magic Kingdom, newspapers rooted out that Disney was buying up property in Orlando and Uncle Walt was forced to publicly announce the Florida Project on October 25, 1965. Disney also made its ill-fated bid for the Mineral King Resort and began conceptual work. One of the concepts was an animatronic stage show of musical bears designed by Marc Davis. The last time Davis saw Walt, he had come by to look at these sketches. One particular image - a rotund bear wrapped in a tuba - sent Walt into fits of laughter, and as he finally stepped out of the door, he uncharacteristically bid "goodbye" to Davis. It was more customary for him to say that he'd see you next week or come by tomorrow or something along those lines. Parting with Walt was never final.

On November 7, 1966, Walt was diagnosed with cancerous tumours in his left lung. Even though surgery could remove the consequences of a lifetime of smoking, he was given only six months to a year to live. He didn't even make it that long. On November 30 he collapsed at home and was taken to the hospital adjacent to the studio. On December 15, at 9:30am, at the age of 65, Walt Disney passed away. 

Walt's Era - Part 16: Disney's Peak? (1964)

Did Disney reach its peak in 1964?

On the WED Enterprises side of things, this year was the start of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, with its four WED-designed exhibits: Carousel of Progress, It's a Small World, the attraction that would become Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and Ford's Magic Skyway which would add Primeval World to Disneyland and pioneer advancements leading to the Peoplemover and omnimover system. This was also the year that Marc Davis applied his hand to improving the Jungle Cruise, land was secretly being bought up in Florida, and the original plans for an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow were being drafted. On September 14 of this year, Walt also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not bad.

A tram shuttles passengers past It's a Small World and Rolly Crump's
Tower of the Four Windsat the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. 
Progressland, home of the Carousel of Progress, sits in the background.
Photo: Disney.

In film, 1964 was the year of the big one... Disney's best film of the period and, indeed, one of the best Disney films of all time. After years of production, Mary Poppins finally graced movie screens to universal acclaim (except by the book's author, of course). After it's 1960-61 reorientation, which had already produced a goodly sum of classic films, Disney released one that is widely regarded as Walt's own magnum opus.

Yet unlike what I considered the best year of "Walt's Era", 1954-55, the New York World's Fair and Mary Poppins were about all that happened. The remainder of the films released in 1964 are okay, generally... Decent, but not exceptional, which has been a bit of a running theme for this period. And if Mary Poppins was Walt's peak cinematic accomplishment, then what's left? It has been argued that Walt at least appeared to have lost interest in film by this point. With this film in the can, was there anything more he could do with the medium, especially in a period where the studios slipped into a reliance on relatively inexpensive live-action films? If we take Mary Poppins out of the equation, are we taking a cold, hard look at an unexceptional future for the Disney Studios?