Walt Disney Company

Walt Disney Company

• Founder: Walt Elias Disney.
• Distinction: Made family entertainment entertaining, and profitable.
• Primary products: Movies, videos, television, software, resort properties.
• Annual sales: $23.402 billion.
• Number of employees: 117,000.
• Major competitors: Fox Entertainment, Time Warner, Viacom.
• Chairman and CEO: Michael D. Eisner; vice chariman: Roy E. Disney.
• Headquarters: Burbank, Calif.
• Year founded: 1923.
• Web site: disney.go.com.


The story of the Walt Disney Company is certainly one of impressive corporate and technological achievement. But at its heart, it is really a tale of two men. One gave the business life, the other steered it in promising new directions. One was blessed with uncanny imagination, the other with uncommon vision. One leaned on Steamboat Willie; the other, Millionaire Regis.

Walt Disney. Michael Eisner. Any corporation laying claim to just one of these formidable figures would be worthy of attention. Having both elevated this firm into rarefied air, which it has used to amass substantial stakes in virtually all of today’s hot entertainment venues: live-action and animated films, network and cable TV, music and video, books and magazines, theme parks, sports teams, licensed merchandise, Internet portals, electronic games, computer software—the list goes on. Disney built the foundation, Eisner engineered the expansion. And the influence has always been felt far and wide.
Walt Disney Studios opened in 1923 as an animation studio. The studio pioneered commercial applications of the art form (and has been its most successful practitioner ever since). Disney has continually expanded in more recent years and is now the second-largest media conglomerate in the world. The beat continues, despite occasional missteps that fleetingly tarnish its paternal image and temporarily dull its Wall Street luster. For example, during the past few years, Disney was forced to hand out very public multimillion-dollar settlements to a couple of high-profile former executives. At the same time, it was actively using the 1996 acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC to cement its place as the top production and distribution company in the business. Regis Philbin’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire has benefited its owner far more than the host or any of its contestants.
On occasion, the firm itself can surely prove as interesting as the stories that it peddles. Overall, though, Disney remains a tale of two men—a strikingly similar yet distinctly different duo that, together in spirit but quite separate in reality, has combined over the past eight decades to build the most consistently dominant company in its field.

Walter Elias Disney kicked off his career as a professional artist at the age of seven when he first offered his drawings for sale to neighbors in Marceline, Mo. He launched his legend as a visionary some 15 years later when in 1923 he left for Los Angeles with just $40 and his art supplies. On the West Coast, he and older brother Roy borrowed $500 from an uncle and opened their own animation studio. Walt concentrated on the drawing and Roy handled the finances. Within a few short years they had created Mickey Mouse (who is still the world’s most famous cartoon character) along with a film to introduce him. When Steamboat Willie debuted in 1928 as the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, Mickey’s falsetto was provided by Walt himself.
Innovations continually sprang from Disney’s bountiful imagination and his unwavering willingness to take risks. He was the first to use Technicolor in animation. He also invented a system that added stunning three-dimensional depth to his drawings. His first feature film to utilize these advances, the revolutionary Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was also Hollywood’s first full-length animated musical. It cost an astonishing $1.5 million to produce (roughly one-third of rival Columbia Pictures’ entire budget for that year). But the movie paid its creators back handsomely with huge box-office receipts and widespread public acclaim. Disney used proceeds to build a new state-of-the-art animation studio in Burbank, and a remarkable series followed that was both stylistically revolutionary and commercially popular. Pinocchio, Bambi,Cinderella, and Peter Pan are among those instant classics that remain popular to this day.
But Disney was not content. His drive to develop even more trailblazing forms of family entertainment took him first to live action films such as Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Davy Crockett, and then to youth-oriented comedies such as The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, and The Parent Trap. In 1954, he moved to the fledgling medium of television, where he initially presented The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro. He later hosted one of the first weekly shows not broadcast in standard black-and-white, the aptly named Wonderful World of Color. In 1955, he opened Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., and this real-life magic kingdom immediately lifted his name and empire to previously unimaginable heights. It also unwittingly launched the ongoing theme park craze—which took a giant step forward in 1971 when his successors introduced Florida’s Walt Disney World, which is still being tinkered with by them and others in various forms—from Paris to Tokyo to Las Vegas.
In 1965, Walt Disney turned his attention to the problems of urban life in America. He personally began directing the design of his “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” or EPCOT, which would serve as “a living showcase for the creativity of American industry.” He directed the purchase of 43 square miles of orange groves, scrub, wetlands, and vegetable farms—an area twice the size of Manhattan. It was only known as the “Florida Project” up to Disney’s death. (The Walt Disney World complex opened in 1971 and his EPCOT center followed 11 years later, although the focus of the entire project had obviously shifted since its initial planning.)
The land purchases that led to the project were made by a quiet anonymous buyer who was almost finished snatching up more than 30,000 acres in scattered parcels when his association with the Walt Disney Company leaked out. The state of Florida, which was boggled at the thought of turning the sleepy Orlando area into a tourist mecca, eventually sanctioned the site as its own independent government with the power to build roads, operate sewage and water-treatment plants, run police and fire stations, administer planning and zoning, and so forth. This kept Orlando or any other municipality from obtaining precious income or property taxes, and also permitted Disney to float bonds and tax itself. It could even deduct some of its capital expenditures from its corporate income tax, rather than amortizing them. Surprisingly, all this was legal.
But the successes have been far more numerous: groundbreaking computeranimated family films including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and Dinosaur; television ratings leadership through its ABC network and cable channels like ESPN; affiliation with the Miramax studio and its stylish adult fare such as The Cider House Rules and Shakespeare in Love; launches of a national radio network for kids and a crafts-and-travel magazine for their parents; creation of an Internet unit that amalgamates all of the above.
Disney’s litany of major hits remains as substantial as ever. Yet its story is still really the story of two men—one who dreamed it up, and one who upped the dream.