Word: walts
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Then TV arrived, and Walt really revved up his marketing genius. He named his first prime-time series Disneyland -- a recurrent plug for the Anaheim theme park -- and filled it with old cartoons and his avuncular presence. When a Disneyland serial about Indian Fighter Davy Crockett stoked a brief frenzy for coonskin caps, the studio quickly sutured the three episodes together and released them as a theatrical feature. Minimal expenditures, more revenue. Then Disney launched an afternoon program, The Mickey Mouse Club, which introduced the Mouseketeers, a troupe of child stars who cavorted like stagestruck Cub Scouts and intoned...
...Film Historian Lewis Jacobs saluted Walt Disney as the "virtuoso of the film medium." Twenty years later, this Hollywood Paderewski was playing mostly Muzak. His studio's artistic growth had been stunted, by both the | demand for new product in two mediums and the creeping conservatism that afflicts almost any burgeoning corporation. Yet Disney was always a visionary entrepreneur; he still had magic to do. In the 1950s Disney made three business decisions that would sustain his company until the Eisner years. Decades later, they would profoundly affect the movie business...
...pictures had a shelf life. So he hoarded his booty, doling out the old animated features to movie theaters while airing the cartoon shorts on his own shows. When the pay-cable era finally arrived, the Disney Channel had a vintage supply of no-cost programming -- all thanks to Walt's farsightedness...
...most dramatic innovation was the theme park, a spiffy, sanitized version of the old amusement park. Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World, were dazzling essays in salesmanship. The rides (such as Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Scary Adventures) promoted the films. The Disney characters strolling through the parks served as free commercials for the Mickey Mouse back scratchers, Goofy bikinis, "Totally Minnie" fashions and Donald Duck notepaper (with the warning READ MY LIPS) on sale in the parks' stores. And in creating roller-coaster rides with a story line, Disney helped shape the course of movie narratives...
...mouse named Minnie "with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse, ten times bigger than the biggest rat." This was mild stuff compared with a 1967 parody that Mad Alumnus Wallace Wood drew for Realist magazine. In the cheerfully scabrous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy," Walt's creatures behaved exactly as barnyard and woodland denizens might. Beneath dollar-sign searchlights radiating from the Magic Kingdom's castle, Goofy had his way with Minnie, Dumbo the flying elephant dumped on Donald Duck, the Seven Dwarfs besmirched Snow White en masse and Tinker Bell performed a striptease for Peter...