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Feature of the Month

You’d think that everything that could or should be written about Walt Disney was already in print. And yet, every now and then along comes an article or a book that adds something important and new to the mix. Most recent among these contributions to a good Walt Disney library is a book called "Walt Disney’s Missouri." It’s published by Kansas City Star Books and was written by Brian Burnes, Robert W. Butler and Dan Viets.

The beautifully illustrated book combines familiar stories about Walt’s early years with material that will be new even to people who have read all the mainstream biographies. Following are a couple of excerpts, featuring episodes from Walt’s Missouri years that influenced his later work. If you’re interested in ordering a copy, you can do so online at the following URL:

www.thekansascitystore.com

You can also call 816-234-4636, and say "Star books," when the recording asks you for a department name.

Snow White

Snow White

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is now considered the first feature-length animated film. Walt Disney risked his company to produce it. Made at a cost of $1.4 million over about three years, the film was derided by Hollywood insiders as "Disney’s folly." Many of the same insiders, upon its Hollywood premiere in 1937, wept at the sight of Snow White in a deathlike trance and then stood to applaud her romantic return to life.

Money poured into the Disney Company. For a while, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," was the highest grossing motion picture of all time, until it was surpassed by "Gone With the Wind."

To judge from Disney’s own remarks, the choice to produce "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," was an almost casual one.
"I don’t know why I picked "Snow White,’" he said many years later. ‘It’s a thing I remembered as a kid. I saw Marguerite Clark in it in Kansas City one time when I was a newsboy." Disney’s recollections don’t convey the scale or novelty of the presentation of the black-and-white, live action silent film version of "Snow White" in Kansas City in January 1917.

Over the weekend of January 27-28, some 67,000 people saw the movie for free at five separate showings in the Kansas City Convention Hall. The Kansas City Star sponsored the screenings and all the newsboys came. "It was the biggest thing ever done in Kansas City in motion pictures," an official with the amusement inspection bureau of the city’s public welfare department said at the time. Congratulatory telegrams from Clark, the film’s star, as well as from Adolph Zukor, head of the film’s production company, appeared in The Star. The turnout was judged sufficiently news-worthy that a newsreel camera positioned outside the Convention Hall doors filmed one audience in the act of leaving.

Yet there was additional novelty in the film’s physical presentation. The film was displayed on a four-sided screen by four projectors stationed in the upper reaches of the hall. From his particular perch, Disney followed the action on two screens at once. The film consisted of seven reels and 100 feet before the end of each reel, a gong sounded at the arena’s south end. It was a signal to the other projector operators that they, too, should be the same distance from the end, allowing them to increase or slow down their projectors.

Still, on occasion, one reel would jump a half-beat ahead of another or lag an instant behind. The effect of seeing this ­ as well as the subsequent ripple of audience reaction across the filled arena ­ apparently was memorable. "A large number of the people were able to see two screens at once and some would clap their hands at some fortunate development in the action, first for one screen and then for the other," The Star reported.

This "instant deju vu," according to Disney biographer Richard Shickel burned the experience into Disney’s memory. "He could not forget the story because he could not forget the oddity of projection." Disney also saw "Snow White" from still another unique perspective ­ his own age at the time.
In January 1917, Disney had recently turned 15. It’s possible that his reaction to the film was less like the exuberant cheering from the children who dominated most of the screenings and more like the enchanted reserve exhibited by the adults who outnumbered the children during the film’s Saturday evening presentation.

There was a difference in this crowd. Grown-ups, The Star said, monitored every move on the screen "In almost absolute quiet."
The unfolding drama of Snow White was followed with a feeling somewhat akin to reverence, The Star added. "People unconsciously tiptoed when obliged to move about during the action." The idea that adults could invest any interest or emotion in a fairy tale could perhaps be an unexpected result of the new motion-picture technology, The Star noted. "Magic is quite possible now," the newspaper said. "It is easily placed in the hands of the scenario writer. And so those old unused brain paths which responded to the appeal of the fairy story long ago are awakened and the bridge of decades is spanned in a single night."

Electric Park

Before television, before radio and even before recognizable movie theaters, Kansas City had Electric Park.
In pre-World War I Kansas City, the amusement park defined diversion. It’s easy to understand how Kansas City residents, at the end of gaslight era, were charmed by the sight of an estimated 100,000 electric lights outlining the various buildings and towers of the park, which opened in 1907 near 46th Street and the Paseo. Electricity was employed in a variety of ways, most notably with the "Living Statuary" attraction. Every hour after 9 p.m., young women appeared on a platform rising out of a fountain, posing while being washed by multi-colored lights.

The effect of all this upon 9-year-old Walt Disney who arrived in Kansas City with his family in 1911 can be imagined. The family’s first home on East 31st Street stood only 15 blocks north of the park, not all that far by streetcar.
The similarities between Electric Park and the Disney theme parks are several. At Electric Park there were fireworks at night. A train encircled the acreage. And just as brothers Walt and Roy Disney later built Disneyland Park, a trio of brothers ­ J.J., Mike and Ferdinand Heim, operators of Kansas City’s Heim Brewing Co. ­ built Electric Park

The park burned in 1925. Though it was never rebuilt, a swimming pool and lake beach continued to operate into the 1930s.

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