5 Things I Learned While Visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum

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Earlier this year when I attended the #InsideOutEvent media trip, we finished our adventure at the Walt Disney Family Museum. The family museum was a very humbling, but inspiring place to be. I was able to walk through and walk away with some important Disney history. So without telling too much about the museum, because you need to visit, I want to share the 5 things I learned.

5 Things I Learned While Visiting the Walt Disney Family Museum

Film distributor Charles Mintz contracts Walt Disney Studios to create a new series of animation films based on an undeveloped character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. As the distributor for the cartoons, Mintz owns rights to it. When the series succeeds and Walt asks for a larger budget, Mintz asserts trademark rights and tries to take over Walt Disney Studios. Walt abandons the character.
Walt creates Mickey Mouse. He joins the vanguard of the talking-picture revolution when he produces Steamboat (Willie, an innovative cartoon that synchronizes sound and animation. During the next year, Mickey becomes a national sensation.
Disney Studios develops a sophisticated multiplane camera that simultaneously shoots several levels of cels and backgrounds and gives depth to its films.The Studio uses it in a “Silly Symphony,” The (Old Mill, and then in Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Disney Studios releases Dumbo, which is a modest commercial success. The animators at the studio strike and unionize.
Walt Disney Studios purchases land in Orlando, FL for EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a foreshadowing of the New Urbanism movement, which also leads to the creation of Walt Disney World.

Overall, as I was walking through the museum you could get this vibe that Walt was a progressive thinker, or visionary. It is unfortunate that Walt Disney left us before finishing his last grand piece of Tomorrowland.

Disney Tomorrowland – May 22nd

From Disney comes two-time Oscar® winner Brad Bird’s “Tomorrowland,” a riveting mystery adventure starring Academy Award® winner George Clooney. Bound by a shared destiny, former boy-genius Frank , jaded by disillusionment, and Casey (Britt Robertson), a bright, optimistic teen bursting with scientific curiosity, embark on a danger-filled mission to unearth the secrets of an enigmatic place somewhere in time and space known only as “Tomorrowland.” What they must do there changes the world—and them—forever.