(December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966)
The man who invented Mickey Mouse
DO YOU love watching Disney films? Is a
visit to Disneyland an adventure you dream of?
Do you want to draw cartoons when you grow up?
Walter Elias Disney, who’s made millions of
you dream of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and his other characters coming alive,
was once a child like you. Born in Chicago in
1901, he grew up on a farm at Marceline in Kansas. At 16, he returned to Chicago to study art.
By 1923, he moved to Los Angeles to unsuccessfully try his hand at
films. So, he set up his first cartoon film studio in a garage, but struggled
for years to pay his bills. Fame came his way only in 1928, when his short
films featuring Mickey Mouse became a hit. Guess who spoke for Mickey? None
other than Disney.
As a five-year-old, Walt picked up a farm
creature to ride on his own. Guess what it was? Porker, the biggest sow in the
herd of pigs on the farm. What a strange charger to choose! Walt leapt onto her
back, grabbed the snorting animal by the ears and was carried away on a wild,
noisy ride, whooping all the way across the farmyard.
But did Porker enjoy the ride as much as
her piggyback rider did? Not at all. Within minutes, the angry sow ploughed
into a duck pond and tossed Walt into the mud! Can you imagine Walt’s face when
he dragged himself back to the farmhouse to clean up?
Did Walt give up on piggyback rides just
because Porker tossed him off? No way. Instead, he took to riding Porker almost
every day. He must have been very stubborn. Does he sound like someone you
know?
Once, when Walt fell ill, Porker came to
the porch of the farmhouse and honked as if her heart would break. She refused
to stop until Walt, the patient, was sent out to calm her down. “I never did
learn to stay on Porker’s back,” Walt later said. “And I always ended up the
same way, covered in duck feathers and mud.”
“I think Porker got as much of a kick as I
did,” he added. “She used to stand there in the pond after she’d tossed me in
the slime, her curly tail whirling away like a watch spring and her piggy eyes
streaming with water and what used to look like tears. Tears of laughter, I
always used to think. She just loved throwing me into the mud.” What a comic
sight that must have been!
Of course, Walt’s first drawings were of
the farm animals ~ Porker, the ducks, chickens and pigeons.
Would you believe it if I told you that one
of his farm favourites was a hen called Martha? What made her special? You’ll
never guess.
Whenever Walt hollered for her, Martha
would appear ~ and lay an egg right on Walt’s palm! Isn’t that cool?
Disney’s Mickey Mouse celebrated his 70th
birthday in 1998. His lisping, twit-brained, often-cranky Donald Duck reached
the same landmark more recently on June 10. Billions of us around the globe
read Disney books or magazines. Over 25 million people have visited Disneyland to date.
How come? Perhaps because Disney had “that
precious, ageless something in every human being which makes us play with
children’s toys and laugh at silly things and sing in the bathtub and dream,”
as his brother Roy
recalls.
Today, when Tokyo
has a Disneyland and Paris
a Disney theme park, the legend of the man behind Mickey continues to
grow. What would the world’s most
original cartoonist, who died in 1966, have said to that? Perhaps just “Aw,
phooey! Nothin’ to it,” like the sailor-suit clad snow white duck with outsize
eyes and a golden beak that he created.
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