Foreword

by Leonard Maltin

When I say I am a life-long Disney fan, I mean it. One of my prized possessions as a child was an illustrated book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. At the end of one chapter where there was blank space on the page I wrote in crayon: “A Walt Disney Production”.

My image of Walt’s world was not created by people in costumes parading through the streets. It came from a total immersion in Disneyana: addiction to the daily Mickey Mouse Club television show, attachment to a Davy Crockett coonskin cap, subscription to Uncle Scrooge comic books, and the firm belief that the arrival of each new Disney film at my local theater was “A Major Event”.

Most important, I watched Walt Disney himself on television every week, an affable man who might have been a favorite uncle sharing stories and taking me behind the scenes at his Magic Kingdom. I have a feeling that younger people who did not experience this blitz and only know of Disney as a corporate name, not a living person, might not understand the way so many of us feel about Walt and his work.

Was I brainwashed at the age of 5? I suppose you could say so … but I’ve never regretted it. Walt was my Pied Piper.

That’s why, on December 15, 1966, when I was home from school nursing a cold and heard the news that he had died, I knew I wanted to do something about it. Earlier that year I had taken on the roles of editor and publisher of a monthly magazine called Film Fan Monthly from its founder, who lived in Vancouver, Canada. I was 15 and bursting with energy and ambition. I knew how I wanted to pay tribute to Walt Disney: I would compile an annotated list of all his feature films.

I picked up my copy of the Manhattan telephone directory and made a cold call to Walt Disney Productions (as the company was then known). I asked for the publicity department and was connected to a nice young woman named Arlene Ludwig. I told her what I wanted to do and she immediately replied, “How can I help you?” I said I was going to do my own research but could use some stills, which she promised to provide—and did.

My local library in Teaneck, New Jersey, had the other resources I needed to build an accurate filmography, and that’s what I published in February of 1967. The last complete entry was for Monkeys, Go Home, which was about to be released. Other titles yet to come, which I listed, were The Happiest Millionaire, Bullwhip Griffin, The Gnome-mobile (which I mistakenly spelled Gnomobile), Blackbeard’s Ghost, and The Jungle Book, which I said was “one to look forward to”.

When the issue came out, I sent a handful of copies to Arlene in New York. She called me to say how pleased and excited she was. “We don’t have a list like this,” she explained, to my great surprise, and asked if she could purchase more copies. I said I could provide as many as she needed and wouldn’t think of charging for them.

Several years later, when I made my first trip to Los Angeles, Arlene arranged for me to get a tour of the Disney Studio in Burbank, California, which was arranged by their publicity chief, Tom Jones. It was an unforgettable day: the genial Mr. Jones arranged for me to meet animator Ward Kimball, walk onto a soundstage where Norman Tokar was directing a blue-screen shot for No Deposit, No Return, and get a private screening of a 35mm print of The Reluctant Dragon, which was impossible to see in those days.

At the end of the afternoon, Jones said how helpful my Film Fan Monthly filmography had been to him and his colleagues and asked if I had considered expanding it into a book. I hadn’t thought of it until then, but he planted a seed that soon began to grow in my mind.

I pitched the idea to Crown Publishers, which had just issued my first hardcover book, The Great Movie Shorts, and they said “yes”. I knew what I had to do next: screen every one of Walt Disney’s movies. My friend Arlene Ludwig (who, it turns out, was the daughter of Irving Ludwig, the head of Disney’s distribution arm Buena Vista) arranged for me to borrow 16mm prints from their local depository in Paramus, New Jersey, not far from where I lived.

Every Friday afternoon I would drive to a modest, unmarked building and take home one or two prints to screen over the weekend in my basement. This distribution center handled all non-theatrical prints for rent and also maintained a special cache of prints that were earmarked for VIP use. The label on one of the shipping boxes indicated that it had just been to Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City’s mayor.

A few key titles like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia were notably absent, but virtually every other Disney title was available to me in beautiful Technicolor copies. I decided to watch the films in chronological order, which would help me retain a sense of context as I made notes for my book.

I learned, early on, that there was no place where I could find complete credits for these movies, so I took to using my projector lens as a kind of loupe and laboriously copied down every name on-screen. (It was then that I came to believe that music editor Evelyn Kennedy possibly had more Disney credits than anyone else alive.)

In the early days of this process, my basement theater was full of friends as I screened Disney classics every weekend. When I got to the mid-1950s I borrowed a CinemaScope lens from a friend and hung a bedsheet in order to project the widescreen images of films like The Great Locomotive Chase. By the time I got to the later True-Life Adventures, my audience shrank and then disappeared altogether. Undaunted, I plugged away through the 1960s studio output.

When, after one year’s time, I finished my homework, I contacted Arlene again to take the next step: interviewing Disney staffers. It was here that I hit a major snag. Since we had last spoken the company had arranged to publish a coffee-table book, The Art of Walt Disney, with the prestigious art-book house Harry N. Abrams. Unbeknownst to Arlene, my project was considered a rival or spoiler. Thus began a long series of cross-country telephone calls with a man at the studio in Burbank who could have shut me down but instead let me plead my case.

I kept insisting that I didn’t need their permission to write about Disney, but I did want their blessing. I finally got it, with one proviso: I couldn’t have access to the studio archives or anyone employed by the company. (By this time, Dave Smith had been employed to create an official studio archive. Part of my bargain with the company was that he would vet my biographical chapter on Walt and correct any mistakes he found, which I’m glad to say were few.)

This left me to do my own research for The Disney Films. Fortunately, Walt’s career was well-documented, and fortuitously, many of his live-action features were directed by freelancers who were no longer employed by Disney and only too happy to respond to my queries.

After The Disney Films’ publication in 1973, I received corrections from noted Disneyphiles Peter Adamakos, Brian Sibley, and of course, Dave Smith, who sent me pages and pages filled mostly with errors in nomenclature. I was delighted to be able to update the book and make corrections in 1984, 1995, and 2000. It gives me great satisfaction that the book is still used as a reliable resource decades after its inception.

But, as I came to realize, there is no end to the research to be done on Walt Disney’s long, multifaceted career.

I have known Jim Korkis since the 1980s. I was a contributor to Gladstone’s magazine Cartoon Quarterly (1988), edited by Jim and his friend and then-writing partner John Cawley, where I discussed my concern about the re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the wrong aspect ratio (cropping the top and bottom of the image) and my response from Michael Eisner. I even contributed a foreword for their first book about animation history from Pioneer Books, The Encyclopedia of Cartoon Superstars (1990).

In that foreword I wrote, “I salute their efforts and applaud their work. I just wish this book had been around when I was young.”

Nearly a quarter of a century later, those same sentiments apply to this book where Jim has gathered some of the top Disney historians around the world to offer guidance, advice, and “secrets” of the trade to a new generation of Disney researchers. Jim has always been sincere in helping others with their research and has long since proven himself to be a knowledgeable Disney scholar in his own right.

I’m sure this book will introduce me to things I didn’t know. That’s the exciting part about diving into Disneyana: there’s always more to discover.

Introduction

Over the years, I have received a mountain of heartfelt and lengthy pleas from people I don’t know begging me to help them (or some relative) get a job as a Disney animator or Imagineer. It never seems to occur to any of them that if I had that type of influence, I would have gotten myself such a job long ago.

Several of them even suggest that they would be willing to sweep the floors for free, just to be in the same building as their Disney heroes.

“We would never hire any of them to do that job,” laughed a good friend who has worked for WDI for many years. “We would want someone who passionately cared about sweeping the floors and had some great skills in that area to do it and do it well. We wouldn’t want someone doing a mediocre job while they were trying to look over our shoulders, ask endless questions, or try to show us things they had drawn. We would never get anything done.”

In the last several years, I have been also receiving similar requests from people who want to be a Disney historian.

Many of my good friends and colleagues who write about Disney are the recipients of similar entreaties along with the usual assortment of “What is this torn and used paper plate of Mickey Mouse I found at a garage sale worth financially and is Disney interested in purchasing it from me for their archives?”

Some of these people who want to be Disney historians are truly sincere about wishing to spend their lives recording Disney history, and those of us who have been researching and writing about Disney history are not getting any younger.

In fact, several notable chroniclers have already passed away in recent years, namely Dr. Robin Allan (who received a PhD for his studies on Disney from Exeter University in the UK) in 2014 and John Culhane (the inspiration for the characters Mr. Snoops in The Rescuers and Flying John in Fantasia 2000) in 2015, leaving behind boxes and boxes of notes for things that now will never be written by them.

I decided it was time for those of us who have continued to blaze a trail in an occupation that is just a little over a quarter-century old needed to share some “tricks of the trade” to help and encourage others.

Too many self-proclaimed Disney historians merely cut and paste material from the internet with little regard to its accuracy or even its source. Like the flim-flam con artists of old, they have been able to dazzle an unsuspecting but eager audience into believing that they are experts who have some mysterious and can-never-be-revealed source of information.

Unless something is done, these charlatans will overshadow the hard work done by true researchers who have justly earned the right to be called Disney historians and will flood the world with urban myths, false “facts”, and other misconceptions that unsuspecting people will accept as true treasures coming from so-called “experts”.

This book is to be used as a guide for those seriously interested in exploring Disney history. These are not the Ten Commandments of Disney History but merely a selection of advice and suggestions from veterans to get people started and point them in the right direction. Everything from technical to philosophical information has been shared to provide a firm foundation for the budding historian.

This is not a text book. It is a conversational and anecdotal coaching seminar filled with personal experiences. It is also filled with tools that have been hewn over many years and unfortunate experiences. Pick the tools that are most useful to you.

I grew up in Glendale, California, a city adjacent to Burbank, the home of the Disney Studio.

My first-grade teacher at Thomas Edison Elementary School was Mrs. Margaret Disney, the second wife of Walt Disney’s older brother Herbert who spent most of his life working for the U.S. Post Office.

When I learned of this Disney connection, I immediately took a large sheet of easel paper and proceeded to create a full-figure drawing of Jiminy Cricket, my favorite character at the time for a number of reasons, including that his first name was similar to what I was called in elementary school: “Jimmy”.

I also liked that Jiminy knew so much about things, as demonstrated by his appearances in short animated segments on the original Mickey Mouse Club television show.

One day, after much labor and much erasing, I proudly gave the drawing to Mrs. Disney in the hope that she would rush to the Disney Studio where I would without a doubt be instantly offered a job and I would not have to learn my multiplication tables (which I still do not know to this day). Apparently, portfolio review was backed up for a couple of decades, because I did not start working for the Disney company officially until 1995.

At the age of twelve, I was enthralled by the weekly Disney television program, especially the episodes devoted to animation, since I maintained hopes of being a cartoonist until I became a good enough artist to fully appreciate how bad I really was and that I wouldn’t get much better.

I later realized I was more interested in writing about animation than actually doing it, although my brief experience with the art form helped me to better understand the process and the answers I got from the animators I interviewed.

Diligently, I scribbled down the names in the credits at the end of those television shows. At that time, I still didn’t know the difference between an animator and a background artist or a special effects person.

I went to the Glendale-Burbank phone book (the cities were then small enough to have just one book to cover them both), looked up the names I had written down, and called those people.

“I saw your name on the Disney TV show. How did you make things move?” I innocently but firmly inquired.

Eighty percent of the people I talked to were incredibly patient and kind and invited me over to watch them draw and listen to stories about working at Disney. About fifteen percent thought that it was some type of gag, being perpetrated by one of their work cronies, having a twelve year old phone and say he liked the way they did cartoons. Five percent were wrong numbers.

Fortunately, the first person who agreed to talk with me was the legendary Jack Hannah who had animated, done story work and directing assignments at the Disney Studio, and was currently teaching classical animation at the California Institute of the Arts.

He also lived in Glendale, but in the richer part about fifteen minutes away. I arranged an appointment for a Saturday afternoon since I still attended school during the week. My mom dropped me off at the address about an hour early, at my request, because I was fearful of being late or Mom getting lost driving to an unknown location.

I was dressed in the same black suit I wore to church with a clean white shirt and thin black tie, looking very much like a teenaged undertaker. I had a bulky tape recorder, several school notebooks, and my shirt pocket was filled with multiple ballpoint pens for fear that they might all somehow run out of ink.

To kill time, because it would be rude to show up so early, I walked slowly around the block in the California heat. That was not enough, so I walked around the block the other way and then finally once more. It was now about ten minutes before my scheduled interview. I walked up the steps on the hilly incline to the front door.

A kindly older woman opened the door. I explained that I was Jimmy Korkis and that I had an appointment with Mr. Jack Hannah.

She turned to the living room and yelled, “You were right, Jack. It IS him.”

Jack came to the door wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He laughed, “We’ve been watching you from the front window for about an hour. We were wondering when you might come in.”

He ushered me into his living room. It was a pleasant, homey room, and he sat in an overstuffed chair by the front window. Near it was a coffee table with a lamp. I set up my tape recorder and sat in a straight chair that was on the other side. Mrs. Hannah left to do something in the kitchen.

I think we both expected that the interview might be a half hour. It lasted for over three hours, so I was lucky I had brought several extra blank cassette tapes.

Fortunately, Jack was enthusiastic about talking about the good old days to an appreciative and awestruck teenager. It was as if the doors to Wonderland had been opened wide to me as he rattled off unfamiliar names, interesting stories, and patiently explained some animation concepts.

Jack was 64 years old when I first interviewed him. He embraced what he was then doing as an instructor in the animation department of the California Institute of the Arts rather than nostalgically living in the past. In that first interview, his statement that “nobody seems old in this business” was never truer than when applied to Hannah himself.

It took me over two weeks to transcribe the interview, something I had never done before in my life. Then I typed it out using my dad’s old manual typewriter. I mailed it to Jack and in a few days he told me to come up again so we could go over some changes.

It was my first experience of having someone I interviewed remove things that they had said, not because I had misquoted them but because they felt such things didn’t need to appear in print.

“It doesn’t add to the knowledge of animation to attack guys who can no longer defend themselves,” he told me as I pleaded with him to let me include some of the stuff he cut out about Ben Sharpsteen. “Sometimes you get in a mood and days later you start thinking a little clearer. I think you’ve got enough stuff here.”

An edited version (for space) of that first interview appeared in the animation fanzine Mindrot #11 (July 1978) published by David Mruz in Minneapolis. Jack even did a quick sketch of Donald painting a painting for me to include in the piece. Other contributors to that issue included Jerry Beck, Mark Kausler, Ron Hall, and Jeff Missine.

With Jack’s help, I was even able to put together a filmography of his work at Disney. It was the first time Jack received published recognition outside of Disney.

At the end of that meeting, Jack smiled and said, “You know, you should also be talking to Kimball,” and he picked his phone and called Disney animator Ward Kimball to explain that there was this nice kid interested in animation and that Ward should talk with me sometime. That is another much more interesting story.

Little did I realize it at the time, but it was that encounter with Jack Hannah when I became a Disney historian. Quotes from that interview have appeared in several Disney books including John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters (HarperCollins 1987).

So, for the next few years, thanks to living in the Los Angeles area, I got to talk with other Disney animators and Imagineers and write about it for my school newspaper and local newspaper, as well as “fanzines” (non-professional magazines self-published by fans) that were focused on the world of Disney. In college, I wrote for professional magazines and newspapers as well.

I spent many, many hours in different libraries, haunted used book stores for books and magazines and pressbooks, attended local events like the ASIFA-Hollywood show and sales, and ran up huge phone bills talking to people in other parts of the United States trying to find any information I could about animation and Disney.

Fortunately, I took notes or recorded the conversations and transcribed them, because most of those wonderful folks who then already seemed ancient to a teenager are no longer around to share their stories.

In the last few years, I have felt an obligation and urgency to tell those stories that never seem to appear elsewhere. Those stories were a great gift and they needed to be shared and not hoarded.

When I think back, I also recall how patient, generous, and helpful all those people were to a much too eager kid. In the last few years, I have felt an obligation to pay back those kindnesses to a new generation as well as share the stories they shared with me.

I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, but I also worked hard and made mistakes. I have boxes of index cards, school notebooks, and decaying cassette tapes in my storage unit, and my house looks like a library and a toy store exploded and I decided to live amid the debris.

I have done many different jobs over the decades, from being a professional performer to a newspaper cartoonist to a public school teacher to even cleaning toilets (which can prove to be a wonderful Zen experience), but nothing has given me greater satisfaction than researching, writing, and sharing Disney history.

No one has ever written a book on this topic, and I doubt anyone else ever will. This book may never be a best-seller, but hopefully it may inspire people to be better Disney historians both now and in the future. Even I have learned valuable new things from the contributions of others in this book.

When I was younger, one of the books I most frequently checked out from my local library was entitled Tips from the Top Cartoonists. A wide variety of cartoonists including Mort Drucker, Doug Wildey, and VIP Partch were each given two pages to explain what they did and how they did it. They had to communicate complex ideas clearly in a limited space, and I used that same format as the model for this book. Tips was a helpful and revealing book for me as an aspiring cartoonist as I hope this book will be for those interested in Disney history.

For those not interested in being a Disney historian, I think the material is still fascinating and imparts good advice that will be valuable to people in whatever endeavor they decide to do or at least to better appreciate what a really good Disney historian does.

Just go ask Alice:

I give myself very good advice. But I very seldom
follow it. Will I ever learn to do the things I should?

— Alice from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951)