“The single most illuminating work on America and the movies” ( The Kansas City Star ) : the story of how a shy boy from Chicago crashed Hollywood and created the world’s first multimedia entertainment empire — one that shapes American popular culture to this day. When Walter Elias Disney moved to Hollywood in 1923, the twenty-one-year-old cartoonist seemed an unlikely businessman—and yet within less than two decades, he’d transformed his small animation studio into one of the most successful and beloved brands of the twentieth century. But behind Disney’s boisterous entrepreneurial imagination and iconic characters lay regressive cultural attitudes that, as The Walt Disney Company’s influence grew, began to not simply reflect the values of midcentury America but actually shape the country’s character. Lauded as “one of the best studies ever done on American popular culture” (Stephen J. Whitfield, Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University), Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version explores Walt Disney’s extraordinary entrepreneurial success, his fascinatingly complex character, and—decades after his death—his lasting legacy on America. “One of the best studies ever done on American popular culture. Consistently intelligent and eminently readable.” -- Stephen J. Whitfield, Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University “Schickel’s unauthorized biography of Walt Disney… may be the single most illuminating work on America and the movies.” ― The Kansas City Star “[ The Disney Version ] established the terms of interpretation and debate about Disney... [and] remains the most analytically and aesthetically penetrating portrait.” ― The Atlantic “ The Disney Version is a model of good judgment, exemplary in balance and impeccable in tone.” ― Commentary “The story of how Disney built an empire on corrupt popular culture… becomes a revealing part of American cultural history.” ― The New Yorker Richard Schickel was the longtime film critic for Time magazine and the writer-producer of a number of documentaries about Hollywood and the movies. His books include D.W. Griffiths: An American Life , His Picture in the Papers , The Men Who Made the Movies , Intimate Strangers , and The Disney Version . The Disney Version Foreword If one thing is more amazing than the warm, wonderful, heart-stopping motion pictures of Walt Disney, it is the man who made them. What kind of man is this who has won the Medal of Freedom—highest civilian award in the United States—29 motion picture Academy Awards; four TV Emmys; scores of citations from many nations; and some 700 other awards. Who has been decorated by the French Legion of Honor and again by the Art Workers Guild of London; has received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale and the University of Southern California; wears Mexico’s Order of the Aztec Eagle; and counts his citations from patriotic, educational and professional societies and international film festivals by the hundreds? On the surface, believe it or not, Walt Disney is a very simple man—a quiet, pleasant man that you might not look twice at on the street. But a man—in the deepest sense of the term—with a mission. The mission is to bring happiness to millions. It first became evident in the twenties, when this lean son of the Mid-West came unheralded to Hollywood [and] began to animate his dreams . . . —Promotion piece for The Wonderful World of Walt Disney, 1966 THERE WERE CERTAIN words—“warm,” “wonderful,” “amazing,” “dream,” “magical”—that attached themselves to Walt Disney’s name like parasites in the later years of his life. They are all debased words, words that have lost most of their critical usefulness and, indeed, the power to evoke any emotional response beyond a faint queasiness. They are hucksters’ words. This book is an attempt to penetrate somewhat beyond language of this order and beyond the unthinking but all too common attitudes it represents. The attempt here is at what might be called analytic biography. The hope is to create a balanced perspective on the man, his works and the society that created him and that he, in his turn and in his special way, both reflected and influenced. There are problems in any attempt to analyze the creators and the creations of popular culture. The most serious of these is in trying to choose which of the ill-shaped and slippery tools of understanding one wishes to apply to the task. Popular culture is an impure thing: it is commerce, it is sociology, it is sometimes art. But if the would-be analyst delves too deeply into the commercial realm, his work ends up reading like the report of a Wall Street research firm. If he indulges too heavily in the sociological mode, he finds a heavy and dubious mass of statistics and/or generalities weighing down his work. If he attempts to use the traditional language and style of literary criticism, he finds himself trying to apply fundamentally inapplicable standard