December 25, 1950
Money Isn’t Everything…
… but it did build Disneyland.
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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Like most of his colleagues in the motion picture business after the war, Walt Disney was wary of the impact that the small, new screen was going to have on the big, old one.
Disney’s career began in the early 1920s, creating ads and title cards for the Kansas City Film Ad Company.
Walt took a reel of unfinished animation to Hollywood in 1923. With his brother Roy, he formed the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio and enjoyed some early success with The Alice Comedies, a series that combined live action with animation1. In 1927, the rechristened Walt Disney Studios accepted a commission from Universal Pictures to create their first animated character: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
In 1927 and ’28, Walt Disney Studios churned out 26 Oswald cartoons for producer Charles Mintz at Universal. When the Disney brothers discovered that Mintz had locked up all the rights to the Oswald character, Walt started sketching a new character that would be entirely his own. Only this time, instead of a rabbit, Walt started drawing a mouse.
Mickey Mouse made his debut as Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theatre in New York City. The eight-minute cartoon not only introduced one of the world’s most enduring characters, it was also the first cartoon with sound and music synchronized to the picture – just a year after Al Jolson broke the cinema sound barrier in The Jazz Singer.
Just as synchronized sound made Steamboat Willie a breakthrough in the art of animation, Mickey Mouse was also cast in an unheralded role in another new art: television.
By the time Steamboat Willie debuted, it had been more than a year since Philo Farnsworth had proven the essential principles of electronic video in his lab at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.
Sometime in 1929, Farnsworth and his “lab gang” rigged a motion picture projector to an Image Dissector, building what was likely the first “film chain” to convert motion pictures to television. Steamboat Willie served as one of the film loops that ran continuously through the new contraption as the lab gang experimented with the circuits and tubes.
Walt Disney had no idea of the role his first Mickey Mouse cartoon played in the development of television, but by 1950, he had decisions to make about how the new medium was going to fit into his expanding entertainment empire. He probably regarded television with the same suspicion as most Hollywood moguls: as a threat to their box office, giving away for free what people should be buying tickets for.
In 1950, Walt Disney Studios was putting the finishing touches on its latest release, Alice In Wonderland – the studio’s 13th animated feature, based on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s book. The film was scheduled for theatrical release in the summer of 1951 when Walt decided it was time to put a cautious toe in the electronic waters of television.
Disney chose to explore TV first as a promotional tool. Alice was already proving to be the most ambitious and expensive animation Disney had ever produced. Its budget more than doubled the $1.5 million cost of his previous biggest gamble, 1939’s Snow White.
The word “buzz” had not found its way into the cultural vernacular yet, but that’s exactly what Disney set out to generate with television.
Disney approached NBC with the idea of creating an hour-long special that would air the night of Christmas, 1950. When families would be looking for something to do after the gifts and feasts, Walt Disney figured to give them a preview of the Alice – a full seven months before its scheduled release.
NBC arranged for Coca-Cola to sponsor the program. The tie-in was a natural in light of both companies’ pursuit of a family friendly corporate image. Coke underwrote the cost of the broadcast; Disney provided product placement in return.
When One Hour In Wonderland aired at 4:30 PM on December 25, 1950, it announced the arrival of a cultural force that would feed – and be fed by – television for generations to come. It was Disney’s first production created specifically for the small screen; it was aimed squarely at families gathered around their TVs during Christmas; and it established Disney as a presence in TV-equipped homes across the entire country.
Even though Alice in Wonderland was still months from completion, Disney had enough footage in the can to show clips – most notably from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, one of the visual centerpieces of the film. A short film with Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy and a couple of classic, holiday-related Disney animated shorts like Pluto’s Christmas Tree filled up the rest of the hour.
And, perhaps most notable of all, Walt Disney himself served as the Master of Ceremonies, debuting in the avuncular role that he would reprise for decades to come.
With his first initiative into the new electronic firmament in the rear view mirror, Disney began to see the medium as less a threat than a megaphone. By the time Disney’s Peter Pan opened in 1953, Disney’s thinking about the two mediums had turned inside-out. Not only would the magic not end at the movie palace—it could begin in the living room.
But by the early 1950s, Walt Disney was pondering an ever bigger idea than any of his films or television.
He wanted to build a park, and populate it with his films’ characters and themes – a place where parents could bring their children to see stories brought to life.
To do that, he would need far more financing than even his most ambitious films had required. But his usual sources of funds like banks weren’t buying it: Amusement parks were risky, and the vision Walt was expressing for “Disneyland” was the riskiest venture imaginable.
So Walt turned, once again, to television.
In 1953, he approached the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) with an offer the fledgling network could hardly refuse: To fund the park’s construction, Disney offered ABC a one-third stake in the park venture for $500,000 in cash. T o get the network on board, he offered to produce a weekly TV series for ABC.
Construction of the Disneyland park started on July 16, 1954 in Anaheim, California. Disneyland the TV show premiered on the ABC-TV network three months later, on October 27, 1954.
Just like One Hour In Wonderland was a preview of the film, the TV show was a preview of the park. Each episode featured one of the park’s four sections: Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. And the man the nation would come to think of as “Uncle Walt” introduced each segment personally.2
YouTube offers a compilation from early episodes of Disneyland.
Needless to say, Disneyland the TV show was a hit for the network, and Disneyland the park was even bigger when it opened in the summer of 1955.
By 1960, Walt Disney was a 20th century’s version of Alexander The Great – ruling a vast empire with his park, his movies, his television shows – and the imagination of an entire nation.
In 1961, the TV show was rebranded as Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and jumped networks to NBC, a cornerstone of NBC owner RCA’s campaign to promote their expanding line of color television sets.3 The new show, airing in vibrant hues, featured documentaries, animated shorts, nature films, and serialized dramas like Davy Crockett and Zorro. The Wonderful World of Color gave Disney a weekly showcase for its entire catalog, and was a considerable factor in color TVs becoming commonplace by the end of the 1960s.
A heavy smoker, Walt Disney died in 1966, but his brother Roy survived him and continued to build the empire.*
In 1983, as cable became the way to tune into television, the company launched The Disney Channel, its own premium cable service. That toe-hold on the new frontier eventually spread to include ABC Family, Toon Disney, Disney XD, and more. Disney was now vertically integrated as a producer, distributor, and broadcaster.
Acquisition became central to the empire’s conquests, culminating in 1996 with the acquisition of ABC – the network that put Disneyland the park on the map and Disneyland the TV show on the air.
The expansion continued in the 21st century with the acquisition of vast film libraries to bolster Disney’s own, including the Marvel “cinematic universe,” Lucasfilm and its Star Wars franchise, and most of the 20th Century Fox catalog.
This Empire of Franchises sealed its dominion in 2019 when Disney launched Disney+, its long-anticipated streaming service. This king of the digital hill reached over 100 million subscribers within two years.
A century after his birth, Walt Disney had not just conquered television—he had helped invent its future. From a one-hour experiment on Christmas Day to a planet-spanning content empire, Disney’s role in the screen culture of the 21st century is unparalleled.
And, yeah, it all started with that damn mouse – that made its first appearance on a video screen at 202 Green Street in San Francisco in 1929.
1 The Disney Brothers Studio was established in Los Angles on October 16, 1923, the date now officially recognized by The Walt Disney Company as the date of its founding.
2 Though Walt himself passed away in 1966 at the age of 65, that persona returned in some form ever Sunday for decades to come.
3 In 1960, Disney bought out ABC’s stake in Disneyland for $7.5 million. ABC gained a 1,500% return on on its original $500k investment, and Disney restored full control of its properties, leaving it free to take Disneyland the TV show to NBC and rebrand it as Wide World of Color.
*For decades, Walt Disney reportedly went through multiple packs of unfiltered cigarettes every day. His cause of death was officially listed as acute circulatory collapse brought on by lung cancer. He died on December 15, 1966, at St. Joseph Hospital in Burbank, California, just across the street from the Disney studio lot at the age of 65. . The cancer was discovered only weeks earlier, after he was hospitalized in November 1966 for tests and surgery.
Roy delayed his retirement after Walt’s death to oversee the completion and opening of Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida. Roy died on December 20, 1971, at age 78, just a few months after the new park opened.
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