614. Walt Disney: The Great American Storyteller

31:21So Walt's idea of storyboarding is to get all his animators together. He stands on a stage and he basically acts it out with all the characters, the Wicked Witch, the various dwarves, Snow White herself. And it's so vivid in the memories of the animators that that basically is what the storyboard that they're then working from. And the pressure on them to meet Walt's vision is unbelievably intense. But I think what makes it fun for them, what makes it exciting, is the sense that they have complete license to experiment. So they might work on a sequence for months and then Walt will say, no, let's not have that, we'll bin it.

32:02And that might seem dispiriting, but they know that the next sequence might be something completely groundbreaking. They will sit there kind of throwing bricks through windows just so that they can see how glass smashes and draw it. I mean, I think the most amazing one, they find it very difficult to give Snow White the right kind of colour in her cheeks. She always kind of ends up looking a bit like a clown when they do it, you know, with the actual, on the actual plates. So every plate, a makeup artist gives her a kind of little dusting of rouge on the cheeks. It's just unbelievable attention to detail.

32:38And just the drawings alone, I mean, we're talking about thousands upon thousands, just an unbelievable, a mind-boggling number of original drawings produced for every frame of this film. I mean, on a scale that would have stupefied people even a few years earlier. But also, I mean, just for the listeners, if you go onto YouTube and you watch clips of mid-1930s films, obviously largely black and white films, and then you watch Snow White, Right. The difference is mind blowing. It's almost psychedelic in its impact, I think. And just one other thing to mention about the impact of the animations, that the human characters are stunning.

33:19They basically, humans haven't been portrayed like that in animation before. And that again is kind of part of the process of what's being worked out. And so it's not surprising that its impact is completely overwhelming for people. And Neil Gabler, I mean, he's very into the idea that what Disney is about is kind of creating self-contained world. So he writes about Snow White, whatever else the film does. This most deliberated upon movie in the history of film conveys a sense of control, a sense of a fully fabricated world. And you do get a sense of it as a kind of fairy tale that's existing in a state of suspended animation, something that's apart from the world.

34:01but i think also that on the on the animated the people who made it that imposed its own sense of pressure so six months after the release of the film disney holds a a delayed rat party the result is is what has come to be known by historians of of disney as the snow white orgy doesn't sound as bad as that might suggest but i think by the standards of walt it's pretty wild So the artist who'd been in charge of animating the seven dwarfs, he's going for a pee from the third floor. He falls out of the window, ends up in a tree, which is a motif that will later reappear in the film Dumbo. I think what is very Studio 54 is somebody rides a horse into the house.

34:44And that's quite good. And Walt arrives at the party expecting that it's going to be family values and all of that. And he finds naked couples cavorting in the swimming pool. and one of the animators said well you know something just snapped we couldn't help it and i guess that there you do have a kind of theme that again will run throughout um the future of of walt's career which is every so often he gets wake-up calls reminders to him that reality can't always be kept at bay that sometimes events beyond his control will intrude um and of course in the late 1930s all kinds of things are are menacing on the horizon yeah so the storm clouds of war no less are looming overhead and on that note we'll take a break and we'll come back and find out what happens to Walt Disney during and after the second world war this episode is brought to you by Uber now do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most We all need that sometimes.

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36:51Welcome back to The Rest is History. So Walt Disney has become immensely rich and immensely successful. Snow White has made his name not merely as an animator, but as a genuine cinematic artist. And the question, Tom, is where does he go from here? What worlds are there left to conquer? Well, what he does is he plows it back into the Walt Disney Company because all he really wants the money for, as we said before, is to make films and specifically to push at the absolute limits of what can be achieved in animation. So to help him fulfill this ambition, he builds an entirely new studio complex in Burbank in Los Angeles.

37:32and this is dominated by a three-story state-of-the-art animation building which dominic we've actually entered and toured haven't we yeah we went to um to explore disney a few weeks ago and while this complex is being built he's greenlit three new feature-length animated films pinocchio is one of them we've talked about that uh the second one is fantasia which essentially is kind of mtv for classical music it's waltz attempt to go highbrow and then there's bambi and bambi really is perhaps the biggest challenge of all because it requires his animators to draw anatomically correct animals which simultaneously have features that are human enough to make them appealing to children and this proves to be an enormous challenge it takes kind of years and years of experimentation to get there and all this experimentation basically rich though snow white had made walt it doesn't stop him from burning through all the money he's made and so it's not long before he has to start borrowing you know millions from the banks and the banks lended him because they think oh it's all going to be fine you know he's a genius he'll you know these films will make enormous amounts of money but obviously that's a huge source of pressure And on top of all this, his family life, it's been marked both by a terrible tragedy and by new responsibility.

38:58So the tragedy, he's bought his parents a lovely state-of-the-art house in Los Angeles. And there his mother dies of carbon monoxide poisoning in the house that he, Walt Disney, had bought for her. And to make it worse, he had sent around Walt Disney engineers to make sure that the heating system was all fine. So he feels crippled with guilt about that. Also, by this point, he has two daughters, one of them adopted. And he's a good father when he's around, but he's basically never around because he has just got so much on his plate. So a lot with these films, I mean, he's obviously the presiding genius of them.

39:37He has the overall vision. He's obviously a massive attention to detail man. We'll see that in the next episode when we're talking about Disneyland. So, for example, with Fantasia, he's constantly arguing with the conductor about the music they're going to have. You know, he wants to be over every last detail. And he's also, he's still a great innovator, isn't he, technologically? I mean, he's still a man for a wheeze and a man for a fancy camera and a kind of, you know, a clever way of solving a problem, all of that kind of thing. If he could make a massive camera that kind of stretches up to the ceiling and has loads of different plates and gizmos and things, he's all over that.

40:15um i think what he's not doing is any of the actual animation he never actually i think really admits this so part of the publicity is always pictures of him drawing mickey but he he you know he hasn't been drawing mickey for a very very long time and actually the people who did draw mickey were often very offended by this weren't they because he never quite i mean if i have a criticism of disney it is that he never was completely candid with the public about the fact that he didn't do the drawings. I mean, he does the voice. He does the voice for Mickey. Hi there. Yeah, but I mean, drawings are the thing that really, I mean, people, when they think of Mickey Mouse, they think of the drawings first and not the sound, surely.

40:53Yeah, they do. I think that the films clearly reflect his vision. And as you say, he's always hands-on. Key aspects of the films that people always remember, they are basically down to him. So I guess a classic example would be in Bambi, probably one of the most traumatic moments in the whole history of cinema, when Bambi's mother gets killed. Huge debates about how this is to be done. It's Walt who says, well, we'll do it off screen like a Greek tragedy. And I guess, you know, people have often said, well, what exactly is Walt's role? What exactly is the Disney studio? We've met, it's a bit like a Renaissance studio, you know, studio where the Grand Master has all his, you know, people who are kind of working on different paintings and things like that.

41:30It's also kind of like an Ivy League campus. And, you know, it's very like the early days of Apple, I think. You know, it's a kind of mixture of all those things. Yeah, a team, a great team. Well, it is a great team to begin with, and it's a happy team, but it doesn't necessarily stay happy. So to look at the way in which the relationship of the animators to Walt changes, let's zoom in on one of those animators. He is a Jewish artist originally from Nebraska, Arthur Art Babbitt. Of course he's called Art Babbitt. I think this is the great thing about American history, isn't it? the names are always perfect.

42:10So Art Babbitt, he joins the Disney studio in July, 1932. So pretty much at the beginning. And he rises very rapidly through the ranks. He is fundamental to the look of Disney films. So he develops the character of Goofy, the dog. You will recall, Tom, that I asked the head of Disneyland, Bob Iger, to explain the relationship of Goofy and Pluto, a subject that has been perplexing Theo for years. Because Goofy's a dog and Pluto's a dog. Yeah, but one of them is a kind of anthropomorphic dog and the other is just a dog. I honestly think you're overcomplicating things. I don't think I'm overcomplicating.

42:46I mean, Disney have overcomplicated it. I haven't overcomplicated it. I'm trying to get answers. I went to the top man and he didn't know. Well, maybe there's a slight degree of edge there, which I think is possibly reflective of Art Babbitt's personality. So it's notable that he is the person who is charged with animating the Wicked Queen in Snow White. very difficult challenge. We said how hard it is for people, for animators at this point to bring human beings to life. He does it superbly and then he moves on to do Geppetto in Pinocchio. So he's very important to the Disney Studios cultural heft, but he is always rubbing Walt up the wrong way.

43:22So he's very loud. He's very obstreperous. He's also a massive womanizer and he absolutely appalls Walt by having an affair with the woman who has served as the kind of human model for Snow White, who's a woman with the glorious name of Marjorie Belcher. Yeah, another brilliant American name. Come on. And obviously, very offensive for Walt, that basically he's, you know, he's shagging Snow White. Walt doesn't want that at all and would have sacked him for it had he not ended up marrying Marjorie Belcher. Okay, well, that's not so bad. I think Art Babbage is the kind of man who resents this slightly Victorian degree of paternalism.

44:01I think he feels it's up to him who he, you know, who he hangs out with. And I think that reflects more broadly a sense that Walt, who initially had been one of the boys, is increasingly becoming a boss. He's becoming distant and imperious and autocratic. Listeners may remember I mentioned that he came back from the Western Front with a hacking cough. The sound of that hacking cough and Walt's clicking heels coming down the passageway, it's capable of generating terror in animators. So Gabler, again, there was a fear of Walt now, a fear that had always been latent in the sweaty palms and nervous silence at the story sessions, a fear of displeasing him.

44:40And Gabler quotes one animator who says that she would vomit after making a presentation to him. Yeah, he's slightly, by this point, he's definitely changed, hasn't he? The sort of boyish inventor has become much more autocratic and he remains more autocratic for the rest of his life. Yeah, well, it's interesting that the piece of music that kind of gestates fantasia is the sorcerer's apprentice, where Mickey is an apprentice who generates a labor-saving device in the form of a magical broomstick that ends up kind of overwhelming the sorcerer's palace. It's interesting that Walt was interested in that story, the sense that he's the sorcerer and the apprentices are creating chaos and turning his own creations against him.

45:24I mean, it may not have been conscious, but I think it must have been there subliminally because Art Babbitt is typical of the animators who are not prepared to be intimidated by him. And so he pushes for workers at Disney to unionize. And Walt is absolutely appalled by this and refuses point blank to allow any union into Disney. And I think this isn't initially out of political principle, although it will become so. Because actually Disney's father had been a self-proclaimed socialist. So to the degree that Disney had any political leanings, it was probably to the left. But I think the reason he's so appalled by it is that he thinks of the Disney studio as a kind of paradise.

46:02And if you're in paradise, you don't need unions. Yeah, we're all a happy family. What do you need? Imagine if Theo and Tabby wanted to unionise against us, Tom. Yeah. How would we feel? I think we would be correctly appalled and betrayed. And so that's how Disney feels when on the 28th of May, 1941, several hundred of his employees start a strike. And so he, as we would be, is convinced that this must be caused by a Bolshevik conspiracy. And this guy who's the son of a left wing socialist ends up, you know, reds under the bed, Bolsheviks everywhere. So on the morning of the strike, Walt very ostentatiously crosses the picket line and Babbitt is on the picket line.

46:44And he's got a loud speaker and he yells out, Walt Disney, you should be ashamed of yourself. And Walt is furious. The crowd are cheering, Babbitt, not him. So Walt gets out of his car. He legs after Babbitt, who's running away. And he has to be physically restrained. And it's all very undignified. And it's not a good look at all for Walt. And the whole thing, the strike is an absolute public relations disaster for him. And after a couple of months, he recognizes that he's not going to win, that he's going to have to call in mediation. and he recognizes that mediation is going to go against him.

47:16And so rather than stay around for that humiliation, he decides to go off on a promotional tour of South America. That's Paul from Wilt. I think he should have stayed to face the music. But actually, it's a transformative moment in the history of Wilt and his company, isn't it? Because after this point, the sort of happy family spirit never quite returns as it had before. And Wilt himself definitely changes, doesn't he? So he basically has the trajectory of Ronald Reagan. He started out sort of vaguely center left, and he's going to end up becoming actually pretty right wing as a result, partly as a result of this strike.

47:54Yeah, well, Reagan retains his sunniness. I think in this period, Walt becomes quite gloomy, quite bitter, quite suspicious. And there's one of the animators, you know, he'd been there with him throughout the glory days. he said the esprit de corps that made possible all the brilliant films of the 1930s was dead as a dodo so that's not looking good but there are other problems as well that are pressing on the disney studio in the in the 40s pinocchio fantasia bambi they're all huge critical hits um people think they're they're stupefying but they all lose money and the main reason for this is that war has broken out in Europe.

48:36And so Disney has lost a vast part of its potential market. And this in turn by 1941 is directly impacting on Walt's ability to maintain his perfectionism. He just can't afford it. And it's suggestive that the only film in this period that makes a profit is Dumbo. So the story of a baby elephant with giant ears ends up flying. It's very stylistically pared back and so that's the one that um that that makes a profit and we will be looking at a dumbo and all these great classics in much more detail in next week's bonus so very exciting great so december 1941 pearl harbor a date that will live in infamy the united states enters the war and presumably this is disastrous for the disney enterprise in fact it is disastrous isn't it because Disney really, in his lifetime, the studio never really recovers from the shock of the Second World War.

49:34Yeah, so it's massively in debt to banks. Its audience has been cut off by the war and the company just about stays afloat by making propaganda films for the US military. So, I mean, particularly thrilling sounding one is Four Methods of Flush Riveting, which they haven't made a ride out of that at Disneyland. and it leaves Disney very precariously placed. So by 1944, the company owes the Bank of America$4 million, which at the time is a huge amount. And it means that when the war ends, Disney emerges from it. The company can't afford to make animated films anymore. And even when in 1950, Roy Disney has kind of, you know, he's been paring back.

50:16He's been imposing austerity and all that kind of thing. Can raise just enough money to make Cinderella. the animation of Cinderella is incredibly basic compared to you know the films that they've been making earlier and I think that Walt himself basically loses interest in making films um and although the the company is busy cranking out live action films and then in due course he's rather pared back cartoons yeah he he makes no great claims for them he he says that most of them are what corn he calls he means that that's a bad thing right well kind of I mean that nutritious, but not kind of a cuisine, I guess, would be the idea.

50:57And you compared him to Reagan. I mean, he does now seem to lots of people a pretty conservative figure, definitely conservative in his politics. He's hostile to unions. He's all in with McCarthy, the idea that there are reds under the beds and all that. And I think also he is identified with a kind of cultural conservatism now. So whereas in the thirties, German intellectuals were all over him now he's identified with apple pie and white picket fences and all of that and one of the reasons for that you know you mentioned how mickey in the 30s seemed a very subversive figure now mickey too seems very um very kind of dated very pretty boring really compared to other kind of animated figures that are coming out at this time so tom and jerry you know bang each other over the head with hammers and running into nails and all of that or bugs bunny that kind of thing yeah i never thought we'd be doing bugs bunny on the rest is history but here we are because it's the Warner Brothers, isn't it?

51:51Warner Brothers, Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera and stuff like that. They're very subversive. They're very madcap and zany. And by comparison, Disney's cartoons just feel a little bit stayed in the 50s. They feel bland. They're boring. They're kind of white bread. And again, to pursue the Elvis analogy, it's like Walt has been drafted into the army. Or it's like Apple has that kind of incredibly fallow period between the first computers and then when they invent the iPod. so maybe it's written into the life cycle of iconic American cultural figures I don't know but important to emphasize the company does not go under Walt and Roy between them managed to keep it afloat and Walt does continue to innovate so one striking example of this in the post-war years is he basically invents the nature film and Walt had always loved wildlife since he'd been a boy in Marceline.

52:44And there's this very weird story that he always used to tell that he'd been haunted by something that happened when he was a seven-year-old boy. He'd watched an owl fly and land on a tree in an orchard and said to Quote, well, I don't know why, but I wanted to catch that owl. So I snuck up behind it and I grabbed it. Well, he immediately began to claw and fight, and I threw him on the ground. In my excitement, I stomped on him and I killed the owl. That thing haunted me for a long time afterward. So he's got the voice of Ronald Reagan and the sentiments of the fox murdering lawyer, Julian Maugham.

53:22Well, but Julian Maugham, I think, has shown less contrition, hasn't he, over his murder of wildlife. So animals in the classic films, from Snow White through to Dumbo, are seen as friends of those who are persecuted, those who are menaced. So the woodland creatures in Snow White, the crows in Dumbo. And famously, notoriously, even if you're a hunter, in Bambi, man is portrayed as a creature so evil that the hunting lobby in America, they end up condemning it as the worst insult ever offered to American sportsmen. So I think Walt is, you know, his devotion to animals is clearly very deep rooted.

54:03And so when in 1948, he sent filmmakers to kind of shoot stuff in Alaska and the footage comes back and all the kind of human interest stuff is incredibly boring. But there are loads of seals. And so Walt says, well, we'll just make a film about seals. And so it's called Seal Island. It wins an Oscar. The wildlife is massively anthropomorphized. So as in the animations, it's all that. Hello, little fellow. All that kind of come along. Oh, mommy's cross with you. all of that. I quite like that. I like that in an 80 documentary. I did as well. I always remember them from when I watched them as a child.

54:39I quite like them too. I mean, obviously it's gone very, very out of fashion, but you know, there's no question that without Disney is bathing a path there that David Attenborough and so on will pick up on. And I think it's another example, much less high profile one of how far reaching Disney's influences. So that's in the cultural dimension. He's still innovating on the kind of commercial and technological level as well. and I think it's really telling that he is pretty much unique among movie executives in seeing television not as a challenge not as a threat but as a huge opportunity yeah so we'll get into this a little bit in the next episode when we're talking about Disneyland but basically he signs this deal with ABC doesn't he ABC which is still associated with Disney today he signs it in 1954.

55:26And the first show they make is called Disneyland. And it's a massive, massive success. I mean, it, it goes right to the top of the charts and it remains there for as long as it runs. Yeah. And it's presented by Walt himself, who by this stage is kind of has become uncle Walt, uncle to the nation. And he appears on the television screens and, you know, it's very Reagan, very Reagan. And they have one particularly massive hit, which is Davy Crockett. Born on a mountain top of Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free. All of that. Davy Crockett wears a coonskin cap with a kind of long tail.

56:04Americans love this hat. But I mean, I think non-Americans are totally indifferent to it and bewildered by it. But in America, Davy Crockett provides Disney with a marketing bonanza that is comparable to kind of Mickey mania. And at one point, a quarter of the entire country is watching it. And so this is great. It means that for the first time since the release of Snow White, Disney is able to pay off its debts and get the banks off its back. So Walt is now flush again. And Walt being Walt, he uses the money to fund a new obsession, which, Dominic, is a theme park, which will come to be called Disneyland.

56:42Yes. So we will be telling the story of that in the next episode. And it's a cultural achievement, I would argue, just as important and influential as Mickey Mouse and Snow White. and of course listeners to the rest of the history club um our very own little you know what do they call the mouseketeers yeah um they can hear that episode right away can't they they absolutely can but let's continue with um the films let's just tie up the story of the films so walt is now terribly interested in trains and rides and yeah all of this stuff so actually the truth is he finds that he's a bit bored of the films he's not as interested in them as he once was yeah i mean absolutely the days when he would obsess over you know every every frame that's long gone and i think that as the 60s you know counterculture is clicking in 60s are swinging the animations put out by disney so that would be 100 world armations or sword in the stone these have recognizably become the product not of a kind of auteur as disney had once been but of a corporation and walt himself recognized that so he said in the 60s i'm not walt disney anymore walt Disney is a thing.

57:50It's grown to become a whole different meaning than just one man. And people may wonder, well, did he really care? I think not massively, but a bit. And so perhaps it's suggested, but he dies of lung cancer on the 15th of December, 1966. So all those cigarettes he's been puffing on since the war, they basically catch up with him. But when he dies, he's immersed in an animated version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. And he hasn't been as committed to an animation since Bambi. And it really shows because actually The Jungle Book, I think, is brilliant. And it goes on to earn a fortune. So it suggests that perhaps had he lived, he might have returned to producing animations of the quality of those early films.

58:37But in the wake of his death, 1967, 1968, it's a kind of revolutionary period in the United States. And his critics on the left, on the kind of countercultural wing of American culture, identify him, I think, both as a symptom and a cause of very deep flaws in American culture. So it's commercialization. It's infantilization. The sense that Disney has infantilized the country and the fact that he's kind of degraded high culture. And this was something that Disney had been very paranoid about. It's why he'd made Fantasia, but Fantasia had bombed. And so he'd kind of basically parked that. And the most venomous attack on Walt Disney as an individual comes in 1968 when the film historian Richard Schickel published a book called The Disney Version.

59:28and Schickel accused Disney of having created a world that was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood, its secrets and its silences, thus forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams. Schickel says that Disney had become a rallying point for the subliterates of our society. This is where American critics have got to in the late 60s. But of course, in Europe, critics have got there a lot earlier. So back in the 30s and 40s, we've said, you know, intellectuals in Europe love Disney. You've got Thomas Mann, Eisenstein, Dali, they all think he's brilliant. But by the 50s, Disney has already come to seem to intellectuals and artists outside America as the great exemplar of American cultural imperialism.

1:00:17And I'll quote one novelist. She's an Australian, but she lived in London so long that she's come to have a very British accent. She's called Pamela Travers, P.L. Travers. And in 1961, she described Disney as so coarse, so uncouth, so wrong in every way. And specifically, Dominic, she was responding to a script of her most famous novel, which was the story of a strict, magical, practically perfect, one might say, practically perfect nanny called Mary Poppins. And those who haven't read the novel, she gets blown in by a strong east wind. She arrives at number 17 Cherry Tree Lane in London, and there she becomes nanny to two children, Jane and Michael Banks.

1:01:03And in the novel by P.L. Travers, dark and wild and fantastical and faintly menacing adventures ensue. And in California, Walt's two daughters had adored the book. It had come out in in the 1940s and walt had been trying to buy the film rights to the book since 1943 but pamela travis held out didn't she because she basically you know she believed as lots of more highbrow people did that disney meant dumbing down and it meant commercialism and sentimentality and so on but basically because she needed the cash in 1961 she decides well maybe i will sell mary poppins to Disney but there's still a bit of toing and froing isn't there which is what is captured in the film what's it called Saving Mr Banks Saving Mr Banks so that's Tom Hanks as Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L.

1:01:55Travers it's a very good film very quite funny um moving but um the whole that the kind of the history behind it the actual story is brilliantly explicated in a new book that's actually out next week by Todd James Pierce called Making Mary Poppins And he goes into some detail about exactly why P.L. Travers hated the script. So as you suggested to quote Pierce, she believed that Disney had replaced elements of truth and insight central to her books with a saccharine sentimentality. She loathed the way in which the script had Americanized what Travers saw as absolutely an English story, all kinds of social solacens in it.

1:02:32So the script describes Mr. and Mrs. Banks as hiring a nanny rather than employing one. Unforgivable. Right. That's shocking. And also it showed the servants in the Banks household speaking slang, which Travis pointed out to the scriptwriters, unacceptable for hired help in England. Hired help? Surely employed help. She didn't want any songs. She didn't want any animated sequences. And I think her real worry was that she knew from previous Disney films that they end up obliterating the literary works that they were based on. It's just not, I mean, who reads Mary Poppins now? Nobody. Absolutely.

1:03:08And so this is exactly, you know, as Pierce says, at some point in the future, the public might think of Mary Poppins more as a Disney character than as a character she herself had created in her books. And as you say, Dominic, she is absolutely right about that. But I think as Pierce's book demonstrates, all the aspects of the script she disliked were precisely the ones that would make Mary Poppins an absolutely massive smash. And it becomes the most critically lauded, the most commercially successful Disney film since Snow White. And it is also, I think, the film that is most pointedly and most movingly about Walt Disney himself.

1:03:46Because at the heart of the plot, the script that has been adapted from P.L. Travis's book and which he's so sniffy about, is the emotional journey that is taken by the father of Jane and Michael Banks, Mr. Banks. And Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins is a man who spends all his time in the office, so therefore neglecting his children. He works in a bank, but he is essentially the slave of a bank. And he feels the burden of the bank on his back so profoundly that he neglects to perform simple acts of kindness, such as, for instance, buying food for the birds. And Mr. Banks in the film even has a little pencil moustache, exactly like Disney does.

1:04:28He's David Tomlinson, isn't he? Very good British character actor. Excellent. But yeah, there is a definite Walt Disney quality to him, isn't there? Yeah. Travis hates it because it's basically become something that she doesn't recognise. You know, that all the kind of the sadness and the darkness she thinks has gone. And that it's basically become a kind of story about a family discovering its heart. as she sees it as schmaltzy and sentimental. But I think that to anyone who's familiar with Walt's life and my sense of Mary Poppins as a great film was massively enhanced by kind of reading up about Walt Disney's life.

1:05:05You know, his obsessional drive, his neglect of his family, his lifelong struggle with banks and debt and so on. The kind of the redemption that Mr. Banks has at the end of Mary Poppins because Mary Poppins herself essentially succeeds in restoring to him joy and kindness and love for his children. Actually, I don't find it sentimental. I find it very moving. I think that the ending of Mary Poppins, Disney has won that ending. And so at the end of Mary Poppins, Mr. Banks leads his children out into the park and he's made a kite and as he goes he sings oh oh let's go fly a kite up to the highest height let's go fly a kite and send it soaring up through the atmosphere up where the air is clear oh let's go fly a kite and with that dominic her job done mary poppins can depart on the wind that has just changed well that was really lovely i'm sure everybody enjoyed that so the story of disney is not yet over because in the next episode we'll be looking at perhaps his most enduring creation which is disneyland and we'll be digging into the prehistory of theme parks and indeed of rides where do they come from were people really going on rides in the 18th century the answer is that they were but also we have a very special bonus for our rest is history club members because tom will be looking in great detail at disney at war and the story behind some of those great films of the golden age snow white pinocchio fantasia Dumbo and Bambi so a pretty exciting prospect if you like Disney which we do and Dominic also we have some extra content which will be available for everyone coming out on Friday and so on that suitably commercial note for now bye bye bye bye

1:07:25Thank you.