Walt Disney the Futurist

Already you've exposed my knowledge of the Disney franchise. Well, anyway, the myth is that's somewhere underneath one of these magical cities that composed this Magical Kingdom. They're like robot tendered vaults, and there you will find Walt Disney's frozen body that it's in. It's being preserved until such time as we can bring him back to life so that he can save us from the uh, the harsh realities that faces in the future. That's right, he's just waiting for technology

to catch up and and reanimate him. Yeah. Plus, somebody's gonna make fantage of three. So yeah, yeah, So I mean this is of course an urban legend. This is complete um who whoie if you will, I mean, for for starters. Just an important factor is that Dr James Bedford, seventy three year old psychology professor, was the first person frozen in this matter through Ennis, and that was on January twelfth, nineteen sixty seven. Walt Disney died December fift

nineteen sixty six. You know, so we got roughly a year there before it was even really possible. Um So, so there's that, all right, right, So the confluence of events helped perpetuate this myth, not to mention the fact that he was highly private and actually his funeral arrangements were not publicized, and so people started to stir up

all of these rumors. Yeah, and people, you know, people generally like the idea of a of of rich people being kind of crazy and Richard Branson yeah, or or also, I mean the whole um Howard Hughes, uh deal, you know, the millionaire And I think that that's part of it too, Like people think of Howard Hughes and they think of Walt Disney, and they kind of they kind of bring the two together in their mind into some um um

version of like an an eccentric billionaire from the past. Yeah, and then there's those this whole thing too about Walt Disney being like a guide in the wool futurists. Yes, the real deal, And that's what we're really going to talk about in this podcast now that we've swept the

urban myth out of the way, because that's the thing. Disney, um, you know, mostly is known for Disney World, Mickey Mouse maybe more becoming more affiliated with Pixar today and you know, and some of these are great products, but the man himself was was so much more interesting than any of these one things and for a while was a really powerful force, uh as far as futurist thinking goes, and just in contemplating and just advocating how technology can can

shape the course of our future and and better everyone's life. Well not it's just not just the future, but public opinion, um, even even our government. And we'll talk a little bit about that later, but um, you know, I mean this is a guy who was an absolute optimist when it when it comes to technology, and he kind of felt like you could solve any problem with technology, you just had to put it in place, so which you have this guy with a lot of money, a lot of imagination,

and this absolute faith in the future right now. He was born in NT one to give you a little um, you know, time for nineteen o one through nineteen sixty six, and he indeed started off with the whole animation thing, uh, drawing. Um. I forget what the first character was, but it looked at There are a couple of characters that he came out with, one of which ended up getting taken away from him due to to some rights issues. But then he settled on nicky Um. But he was not he

was not really a gifted artist per se. I've heard I've read some descriptions what they said. He could really barely draw Mickey, you know, But but he had all these ideas, you know, and he'd get this idea and he'd be like, all right, here's Mickey, Let's get some talented people to make this happen. Let's get some some high end production stuff lined up, and will will produce

this thing. So he was he was big. I've also seen that as one of his criticisms, that he was more of an idea starter, you know, that someone that's like, all right, guys, I got this idea for a party. We're gonna have X, Y and Z go do it and then I'll show up, you know, kind of a thing. Um and he uh so he was, but he was

a big idea man. And he left the money stuff to his brother Roy, who and there was also this kind of older brother younger brother dynamic there because Walt was the younger brother, so he was the wild imagination kid and Roy was the older brother who looked after Walt. Okay, so you've got the pragmatic part, you've got the kid

with moxie. Yeah. And apparently throughout I was reading about this in the book Reality Land by this guy David Cone, and it's a it's really good, but it goes into a lot about that, Like there were basically like two factions within Disney, uh for for for a long time, and there was like Roy's guys and Waltz guys. Wow. Yeah, this is like gangs. Yeah, it was like rival gangs, one with calculators and the other, um, I don't know, dream goggles. I was gonna dream goggles. That's nice standard

issue in corporate Disney back in the day. Yeah, Um, but I mean it's interesting to look at it from the historical perspective and realized that Disney was sort of fed um on futurism from the get go or future futuristic is m I guess that you could say there's sort of a difference. UM. And you know, here's this guy born in nineteen o one, as you say, died

in nineteen sixty six. He saw a tremendous amount of progress and he again he had the imagination, he had the moxie, he had a vehicle, Mickey, and he the

money to to do what he wanted to do. And at the same time, you have all of these things happening in in the United States concerning space race right right, which is really sort of fueling his own ambition, not to mention you know, national pride being part of this equation, and you actually look at the timeline and you can see where Disney is starting to think that he needs

to take this issue on himself. UM. And certainly it was actually one of his animators who came up with some of the ideas about space exploration as a topic. But you know, he was a big proponent of of UM making this sort of technology known to people, and and really big into planning and designed to UM, which which a part of that apparently came out of when

they when they established Disneyland in California. UM he began to notice that, like they didn't really plan out hotel arrangements and so like it went from after Disneyland was built and went from there being like eighty available rooms in the in the area surrounding area to just you know, countless hotel to the point where they're they're having to worry about skyscrapers rising up to where you don't really have like the pristine because because they have the different

areas of Disneyland are are broken up to be like periods of the past, and so there's gonna be a skyscraper peering over, you know. And uh, and he wasn't he wasn't happy with the city planning going going around outside the park so part so he had this idea, It's like, hey, well even if we start start fresh, start new, then we'll plant everything out. And you know, I have this idea that if you if you plan it, if you design it enough, then then humans can do it.

You know, we can. We can we can start fresh, and we can create a system that absolutely works well. And that's what I really love about you know, part of his vision is that you know, you employee technology so that humans can have easier lives, they suffer less, And that really is sort of the crux of UM where he was coming from. But just to talk a little bit more about the conditions during the nineteen fifties, UM, because yeah, this is this is crucial. It's really big,

and you've got the space race is heating up. You've anxieties about overpopulation, technology, atomic warfare, the environment. All of these different problems are sorting or straightening and come up. And again, space race really important because I think of the timeline ninety seven fruit flies were launched into space by the US UM and then in nineteen fifty seven,

ten years later, you have the first artificial satellite spot Nik. Okay, well, and we know that was launched space by other than USS ARE And this is important to to keep in mind that, I mean, it's easy to forget even reading about it, and in knowing you know about just how

polarized our ideas were during the Cold War. I mean, this was a time where if you were if you were if you were an American and and you knew about the Cold War because there's also a huge chance you were just preoccupied with everything else in life, and you know, the lightening weren't reading all the papers. But if you were, you were tuned into what the Cold War was and what was going on, then you had this very very stark, stark idea of what the Soviet

Union was. I mean, they were, uh, in many people's minds, this great enemy that represented just tyranny and the loss of the individual and the loss of freedom and and uh and you know the kind of polarization you see in uh in some of these uh, these fantasy works that came out of out of Disney studios, right, and so you know, to your point, then all of a sudden, you see that, you know, the USSR is making big strides here in the space race, especially this butt Nik

starts to freak everybody out on a national level. They start to say, this is something that we need to be doing as well. We need to have a space program. So here you have Disney who began to produce TV shows to help support the opening of Disneyland. Um so

a very smart move. Right a year in advance of Disneyland opening, he starts to decide, okay, well, I've got these four different parts of Disneyland that I really need to get people on board with and and you know, take the time and money to come in is at us. So I'm going to promote promote Fantasyland, Frontier Land, adventure Land, and tomorrow Land. And tomorrow Land. Is this sort of like his brain child, right, And he's able to assemble

what he calls imagineers, which I kind of love. Um, he's got a top animator, Walt Kimball, who actually pitched the whole tomorrow Land to him. You've got rocket scientists and other experts who get to craft space exploration futurist programs that promote these technologies that the US hasn't fully adopted yet. Just really fascinating. Oh and I had to jump in there real quick talking about the different sections

of Disneyland. This is great quote where a parent was like over the gates to Disneyland that said, here you leave today and into the world of yesterday tomorrow in fantasy And there was a promotional brochure that to the park had nothing of the present, like nothing of the present exists in Disneyland, which which is in a way it's awesome because it's like, you know, it's like we're sold, you know, forget about what you're facing right now. We're just gonna focus on how awesome the past was and

how super awesome the future is going to be. But it's also kind of like the most anti Buddhist statement I could I could possibly imagine, because because you know, the whole you know, like meditation, as we've we've spoken about, you know, it's all about like, stop worrying about the past, stop worrying about the future, and just live in the moment. While Disney was like, stop living in the moment. Yeah,

come to this, don't be here now. Um. And actually in the opening to uh when it opened, Disney said to all who come to this happy place, welcome, Disneyland is your land. He didn't really sound like this, but here age relives fond memories of the past as you spoke about, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be it will be

a source of joint inspiration to all the world. So you see these things coming out children future, this sort of manifest destiny which is hidden a bit in in his agenda, that comes out in Space X where shan that certainly comes out in frontier Land when he talked about David Crockett so uh so in a way, it was kind of like and identifying that the the children, the use of that day and age kind of had it. We're facing this identity crisis of who they were. There

were all these different forces going on. There's all this fear about the future, and he saying that hold on, look at these past models. This is who you are, this is your heritage. And then look at this model of the future. This is what you can accomplish with technology.