Walt Disney and His Family-Entertainment Empire

Walt Disney and His Family-Entertainment Empire

from Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time by Daniel Gross, et al.

Walt Disney suffered a devastating setback in 1928, a blow so harsh that his career seemed about to disintegrate. The twenty-six-year-old animator lost his first successful cartoon creation, “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,” because he had naively signed away the ownership rights in a production deal with his New York distributor. Emerging empty-handed from the debacle, Disney didn’t quit. In fact, the man who was called “the most significant figure in graphic art since Leonardo,” by the British political cartoonist David Low, learned a great lesson from the early disappointment. Within the year he would take the entertainment industry by storm. Armed with a comprehensive understanding of intellectual property rights, and blessed with a natural genius for creating memorable characters and beguiling fantasy worlds, Disney masterminded a new kind of business empire. As the head of his own studio, Disney not only used his own imagination but also created an atmosphere in which others could use theirs. He began with Mickey Mouse, the perky character who became an international phenomenon. By relying on a wide range of children’s stories and fairy tales, like Pinocchio and Snow White, and by endowing his own characters with realistic human attributes and emotions, he appealed to adults and children alike. But Disney didn’t rely solely on ticket sales for revenue. He mined his creations for maximum commercial advantage and found ways to cross-promote his characters in new media. Then, when it seemed he had fully exploited all existing means of distribution, Disney invented yet a new one: Disneyland. Walt Disney was a complex man, not merely the genial “uncle” that he seemed to be as the host of his television series. Disney worked himself to the point of exhaustion, and yet he never reached the limit of his ambition. In nearly a half century, he created...