How They Started (38 page)

“Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious.”

By February 1928, it really looked as though the company, recently renamed Walt Disney Productions, was starting to make an impact. Walt convinced Roy that his name alone on the cartoon credits would make for a more trusted brand. Roy agreed that a single name would convey more confidence: audiences would associate the enjoyment they gleaned from the cartoons with one entertainer, as opposed to a factory-style corporation churning out commercial entertainment.

But the company was heavily reliant on its Oswald contract with Mintz, a contract that was up for renewal. Walt set off for New York to negotiate a new deal. He left with high hopes, but what was to follow was one of the darkest periods in the history of the Disney organization.

Walt had been working his staff hard over the preceding few years, and the fortnightly collections of the Oswald reels meant he had to make tough leadership choices. He joked, “Every once in a while I just fire everybody, then I hire them back in a couple of weeks. That way they don’t get complacent. It keeps them on their toes.”

However, some of the staff did not appreciate his methods. The animators began talking in secret with Winkler, who was working on behalf of her husband, and she offered them better pay to come and work for Mintz directly.

When Walt arrived in New York to meet Mintz, he asked for an increased fee of $2,500 per cartoon—what Disney thought was a fair increase as the cartoons were so popular—but Mintz had other plans. He offered a mere $1,800, which Walt immediately rejected. However, it was too late. Mintz had hired almost all of Walt’s animators out from under him. Ub Iwerks was the only animator to remain loyal. But the company had not only lost its staff, it lost Oswald, too. The terms of the original contract clearly stated that Walt Disney Productions did not own the rights to the cartoon, Mintz did.

With no cartoon character, no distributor and virtually no animators to come home to, Walt returned to Hollywood. He sent a telegram to Roy from New York, insisting that it would all be OK and that he would tell him all the details when he returned. But the reality was stark, and even he could not have predicted the eventual turnaround in the company’s fortunes.

There are several versions of what came next for the company. One version is that Walt began doodling a new character on the train back home from New York. However, the more accepted version of the story is that the studio’s next creation was the result of crisis meetings back home in LA with Ub and Roy.

Stung by the disloyalty of his staff, Walt kept the ideas quiet for some time, holding secret meetings and idea sessions with his brother and loyal friend. Even the drawings for the new cartoon were hidden under Oswald sketches if others entered the room. This new character provided the inspiration Walt needed to get back on his feet and put the Oswald fiasco behind him.

The character was a little mouse, dressed in white gloves and buttoned pants. He was named Mortimer Mouse, but Walt’s wife, Lilly, eventually persuaded her husband to rename him Mickey.

In 1928, Ub began creating two new Mickey Mouse cartoons. But 1928 was a groundbreaking year for motion pictures, and the first film with synchronized sound,
The Jazz Singer
, was released. Walt was impressed and poured all the studio’s resources into a third cartoon that would have fully synchronized sound. They decided to scrap the first two creations and concentrate their efforts on this film, entitled
Steamboat Willie
.

While Ub produced the drawings, Walt provided the voice of Mickey. A Disney employee at the time described how “Ub designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.” Walt continued to be the voice of Mickey until 1946.

Walt partnered with businessman Pat Powers, and with his help
Steamboat Willie
premiered at the Colony Theater in New York on November 18, 1928, and was a roaring success. Mickey Mouse proved to be a worldwide hit, and Walt released the first two Mickey cartoons after adding a soundtrack.

The success of Mickey Mouse did not mean easy sailing for the business, however. In 1929, Walt Disney Studios released the Silly Symphonies, a series of comedy animations, each one containing different characters. During this time, Walt was becoming increasingly annoyed by Powers, who he thought was taking too large a cut of the distribution profits. In 1930, he struck a new deal with Columbia Pictures. Disgruntled, Powers persuaded Ub to leave Disney and open his own studio, thus poaching Disney’s chief animator.

“Ub designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.”

Mickey’s popularity rocketed throughout the 1930s, overtaking silent film- era cartoon character Felix the Cat in popularity, but the Silly Symphonies were not as popular as Walt hoped. In 1932, Walt was approached by engineer Herbert Kalmus, who persuaded him to redo one of the Symphonies using new technology that would allow the black-and-white animations to be in full color.
Flowers and Trees
proved a phenomenal success and won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon in that year. Disney Studios went on to win this category for the rest of the decade.

From then on, all Silly Symphonies would be produced in color, and the series grew in popularity. The most famous Symphony of all,
Three Little Pigs
, was released in 1933 and contained the classic song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” which became the anthem of the Great Depression; it ran in theaters for many months.

Faced with the popularity of a new character, Popeye the Sailor, from a rival studio, Walt turned Mickey colorful in 1935 and soon launched the familiar spin-off characters, Donald Duck, Pluto and Goofy. Never one to rest on his laurels, Walt announced plans to create a feature-length full-color animation of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. This would take years of production, and Roy and Walt’s wife Lilly both tried to persuade Walt against it.

Meanwhile, competitors dubbed the project “Disney’s Folly,” and were sure this would be the end of the Disney success. They were nearly right, as by 1937 the studio had run out of money and had to show a rough version to Bank of America to get a loan to finish the animation.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, and received a standing ovation from the audience. It went on to become the most successful motion picture of 1938 and earned over $8 million from its original release.

When Harland Sanders opened a small roadside restaurant
in the 1930s specializing in fried chicken, he could not have predicted the legacy he would create. That one site, in Louisville, Kentucky, has today grown into Kentucky Fried Chicken (more recently renamed KFC), a business with 16,300 company-owned and franchised restaurants in more than 100 countries. The business has expanded from its humble origins into a global superbrand and is as famous now for its chicken as it is for its tagline—“finger-lickin’ good”—and the snow-white bearded image of its founder, more commonly known as Colonel Sanders.

Harland was born in Indiana in 1890, with a taste for fried chicken honed from an early age. He enjoyed cooking the food his mother had taught him to make, including pan-fried chicken, country ham, fresh vegetables and homemade biscuits.

But it was some time before he could put these homegrown skills to use. Harland left school at the tender age of 12 and displayed his entrepreneurial bent by trying all kinds of jobs—including stints as a farmhand, railroad worker, insurance salesman and even justice of the peace. He also gained experience by starting two companies: one, a steamboat ferry company that operated on the Ohio River between Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, and the other, a manufacturing business.

His real love, however, was for what he knew best: cooking. In 1930, despite the fact that America was in the grip of the Depression, he opened his first restaurant in the front room of a gas station he had acquired in Corbin, Kentucky. It was a modest set-up, consisting of one table and six chairs. The idea came from conversations with his customers: Harland had spotted an opportunity after customers who stopped for gas asked if they could get food nearby. He named the site Sanders Court & Café, and his entrepreneurial skills were put to good use as he juggled several roles, including station operator, chief cook and cashier.

Word soon spread about his cooking, so much so that in 1935, Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon made Harland an honorary Kentucky colonel in recognition of his contributions to the state’s cuisine. Customers were soon turning up in droves for the food alone, which prompted Harland to expand to bigger premises across the street, a building that housed a 142-seat restaurant as well as a motel and gas station. He enrolled in an eight-week course in restaurant and hotel management at Cornell University to learn more about the business, and forged ambitious plans to start a restaurant chain by expanding to two additional locations. However, both of the new sites failed soon after opening, so he concentrated on improving the existing business.

Some might say that Harland was a late bloomer: it wasn’t until 1940, when he was 50 years old, that he created the recipe for which the business is so famous today. But as he said in his autobiography,
Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin’ Good
(Creation House, 1974), “no hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that was in me.”

Fried chicken, too, might not have been a new concept, but Harland proved that not all successful ideas need to be new by coming up with his own original recipe of herbs and seasoning. It gave a new twist to fried chicken, one of the nation’s favorite foods. He claimed that the 11 herbs and spices he used “stand on everybody’s shelf,” ensuring the chicken had that home-cooked feel about it. “I hand-mixed the spices in those days like mixing cement,” he once said, “on a specially cleaned concrete floor on my back porch in Corbin.”