Foreword

by Brian Sibley

I have something to get off my chest: despite having spent a disproportionate part of my life collecting and writing about all things Disney: my earliest encounter with the Mousetro’s work proved deeply traumatic for me and acutely embarrassing for my parents.

What ended as a nightmare had begun as a treat for my fourth birthday: a visit to a now-long-gone British institution, the News Theatre on London’s Waterloo Station. Open daily, from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., the News Theatre screened a continuous program of newsreels, comedy one-reelers, and cartoons.

On this particular day, the bill featured the vintage 1938 Disney short, Brave Little Tailor, in which Mickey Mouse, in the title role, tackles an enormous giant in order to win the hand of the Princess Minnie.

At a crucial point in this drama, Mickey hides in a cart laden with pumpkins and, when the giant grabs a handful as a snack, Mickey finds himself being hurled into the giant’s mouth. Dodging the pumpkins as they hurtle by him like bowling balls, he only avoids being swallowed by hanging onto the giant’s uvular.

These antics were, naturally, greeted with hilarity by every other youngster in the cinema—but not, unfortunately, by me! Terrified at the mouse-threatening scenario unfolding before me in the dark, I screamed and screamed until my humiliated parents bundled me out of the theatre and rushed me off to the nearest café to pacify me with tea and buns.

I make this confession as it may help to explain the fixation with Disney that has obsessed me virtually ever since that harrowing day. Without that shock to my young system, that jolt to my nascent psyche, would I have co-authored several books on Disney topics (from Mickey Mouse and Snow White to Mary Poppins) or made several dozen hours of radio programmes for the BBC about Uncle Walt, his company and movies? Probably not.

One of the by-products of this career (of which I’ve only provided the sketchiest of detail since I’m taking up space in somebody else’s book on Disney) is the occasional invitation to write a foreword such as the one I’m just about to get down to writing here.

Within the annals of cinema history there is a small but growing coterie of dedicated scribes who are dubbed Disney historians. There is an urgent imperative to chronicle the life and times of Walt Disney and the achievements of his studio because it is the story of many people, most of whose contributions have only begun to be recorded in the past 50 years since the death of the man whose internationally recognized signature came to represent the combined talents of an army of artists, writers, musicians, and technicians.

Some of us of a certain age can still recall when there were scarcely more than a handful of books about the art and industry of Disney. Today there are shelf-loads of such books—representing a wide range of approaches from the academic and authoritative via the critical to the anodyne and scurrilous.

Nevertheless, there are still first-hand recollections needing to be recorded and new chapters of the story waiting to be written—not to mention the tedious task of correcting inaccuracies and remedying misconceptions.

One of the most prolific of these Disney historians is the indefatigable Jim Korkis (“At last!” you say, “This foreword is finally getting to the point!”) whose Disney vault you are about to enter.

I first met the vault keeper sixteen years ago, on December 5, 2001 (Walt’s hundredth birthday). We were in the VIP lounge of the Norway pavilion in Epcot and, whilst I no longer recall the reason for that choice of venue, I mention it since the fact that Epcot has a Norway VIP lounge will be, for some, an irresistible piece of Disney park trivia eagerly learned.

After signing a book of mine for Jim (despite my protestations that the only valuable copies are the unsigned ones), he gave me a cracking interview for one of my radio shows as a result of which I immediately had the measure of Jim’s talent: he was, like Shakespeare’s clown Autolycus, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” by which I mean that he collected a wealth of information that others had overlooked or disregarded and stored it away in his vast memory bank—or, you could say, vault!

Korkis books are always filled with these discoveries, fashioned together so as to create a series of diverse narratives of varying—but satisfyingly appropriate—length where the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.

Jim is a born teller of tales, able to engage, excite, intrigue, and amuse us with stories that reveal not just his talent for research but also his gift of infectious enthusiasm. If something fascinates Korkis, he will make sure we share his fascination.

This is not surprising since he has met and talked with dozens of Disney animators and those theme park wizards known as “Imagineers” and has been writing about them and their genius boss for three-and-a-half decades.

Looking through the table of contents I can’t quite decide where I’ll start: maybe with the stories about Walt’s enthrallment with Abe Lincoln and Charlie Chaplin; or, perhaps, with the appreciation of Disney park dinosaurs; or, possibly, with the articles on the Oscar-winning documentary Seal Island, and the zany comedy that introduced the world to Car 53—Herbie, the Love Bug. Wherever I start, I can guarantee to be riveted and end up knowing immeasurably more than when I started.

In view of the distressing recollection with which I began this foreword, I was wondering if an essay on Disney giants might be on offer; but it really doesn’t matter because Jim can always add it to the possible contents list for his next foray into the Disney vault; meanwhile (since I’ve detained you far too long already), you can start enjoying this one.

Right, then! Off you go…

Introduction

Where do the stories come from? That was the title of an episode of ABC’s Disneyland weekly television show that originally aired on April 4,1956.

Walt said at the beginning of that show:

We have often been asked where do we get the ideas for our stories. Potential story ideas exist all around us and our story men have been trained to closely observe every day happenings with the thought of twisting a common occurrence into a story.

During the show, Walt explained how books, songs, personal experiences, and hobbies could springboard the development of an entertaining story.

I’ve often been asked a similar question about the stories that appear in The Vault of Walt series of books. Sometimes these books are the only place where a reader can find information about Walt Disney’s involvement in the DeMolay organization or the educational films made featuring Figment or Walt’s mother’s recipe for apple pie.

How do I know all these things if they don’t appear elsewhere? For nearly forty years I have been writing stories about Disney history that have been shared in a variety of media. At one point, I even worked for the Disney company and had access to people and material that others did not and wrote articles and did historical presentations for the company.

Growing up in the Los Angeles area near the Disney studio, I had the opportunity to personally interview animators, Imagineers, executives, theme park cast members, Disney family, and others who knew and worked with Walt. I also was able to attend countless events where people shared their Disney stories, and got to interact with them afterwards.

I spent time and money acquiring a personal library of documents, from vintage newspaper and magazine clippings to private letters, publicity material, and obscure books. All of this was my foundation to begin writing. However, just because someone says something or it appears in print does not make it true.

Sometimes people had faulty memories, only saw their part of the project, had a personal agenda they wanted to assert, wanted to promote something aggressively, simply repeated stories that “everyone knows” but no one ever really checked, or other things that obstruct the truth.

So, while having this rich foundation of information to begin work, it was only just the beginning. The hardest work was to try to verify it through several independent sources.

When more and more people began writing about Disney history, it quickly became apparent that they were concentrating on the same familiar stories and sometimes just repeating falsehoods that had previously appeared somewhere without doing any original research to confirm or debunk. Even today those falsehoods often crop up with alarming regularity.

No one seemed to be writing about the stories that I knew. I began to feel an obligation to share the stories that had been so generously shared with me, especially from people who were no longer around to share them with others.

When I wrote the first volume in this series, I fully believed there might be enough interest in these out-of-the-ordinary stories to sell a few copies. However, those stories proved so popular that right now I am writing this introduction to the sixth volume in the series and preparing a file folder of material for a possible seventh.

Some of the stories that follow are particular favorites of mine and have been greatly enhanced with new discoveries I and others have made over recent years. For now, there seems still to be some interesting stories left to share.

As always, I hope you enjoy these stories and will share them with others.