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Posted Sunday 15 November 2009 at 9:09 pm
Filed in: Cats, Personal, Pop Culture
Tags: DisneyFriday night I surprised Debbi by taking her to dinner at Sundance The Steakhouse, which we’d last (and first) visited for my birthday this year. It was as good as it was the first time!
Saturday we took the cats to the vet, Debbi taking hers in for a 2 pm appointment, then me taking mine in half an hour later. She was in-and-out and ran into me as I was arriving. It took longer for my guys to get their check-ups. Newton seems to be doing well enough given that he’s taking thyroid medication. Jefferson, however, has some really crummy teeth and his gums are looking pretty bad, including a spot that’s bleeding. He’s lost 3 pounds in the last year, and it could be because he’s having hyperthyroidism himself, or it could be because eating has been difficult because of his mouth. And the vet said there’s a chance that he could have a tumor which is bleeding. So both cats are getting blood tests, and we’ll see where to go from there. My bet is that Jefferson “just” needs some dental surgery.
Still, for 15-year-old cats, that’s not really too bad.
We had a more exciting day today, since I wanted to go up to the city for Borderlands Books‘ 12-year anniversary sale. We left early and got breakfast in San Carlos, but realized that we’d be getting to the bookstore well before their sale started, at noon. We tried going into Golden Gate Park to visit the botanical gardens, but there was no parking. However, we saw a sign on the way for the Disney Family Museum, which recently opened in the Presidio, and decided to go check that out.
Even with a $20 entry fee, I figured there was still some chance that it would be little more than a few trinkets that Diane DIsney Miller had inherited from her famous father, perhaps with some notes on his life. But in fact it was much more than that, and we spent more than two hours going through it (and could have spent more time than that).
There’s not much left inside that looks like an old Presidio building – they clearly spent plenty of money to make it a modern venue, with computerized displays in addition to the memorabilia, and even a theater in the basement. The reception area has hundreds of awards that Disney was given during his lifetime (including most of his Academy Awards) on display. Inside is an impressive collection of photos of Walt and his family, and many DIsney memorabilia, including a polo cup he won, one of the trains he built for his home, the fiddle his father played, and many of his early drawings (some the originals, most reproductions). The earliest known drawings of Mickey Mouse are among he collection.
The narrative is well-written, although the layout of the individual rooms makes it sometimes difficult to know where to start, so sometimes you experience things out-of-order. While it admirable grapples with a few of Disney’s less shining moments (such as the early 40s animators’ strike), it oddly glosses overt the construction of Disneyland, which occupied Walt for several years and was one of his greatest accomplishments.
While some have cautioned that the museum is more about Walt and less about Disney, anyone interested in either the man of his company ought to enjoy the museum. It’s a good companion experience to the biography of Disney I read a few months ago.
After the museum, we stopped for sundaes at Ghirardelli Square, and then headed to the bookstore, where I picked up a few things, and we got to see Borderlands’ two hairless cats, Ripley and Ash, the latter of whom I hadn’t met before.
The only blemish on the day was having trouble getting dinner cooked (stuffed pork chops from the supermarket that took about 25 minutes longer to bake than advertised), and watching the Patriots mysteriously hand the Sunday night football game to the Colts by not punting the ball on 4th-and-2 at their own 30, leading by 6 with 2:30 left in the game. WTF??? The Pats lost 35-34. Gah.
But that aside, it was a day of pleasant surprises, so I can’t really complain.
Posted Tuesday 16 June 2009 at 8:59 pm
Filed in: Nonfiction, Reviews
Tags: Disney
Since my girlfriend is a huge Disneyland fan, I was finally motivated to pick up this biography of the man behind the mouse. I chose this book rather than a smaller volume because I figured if I was going to read a biography of Walt Disney, I’d rather get all the story, rather than something which made me want to go read another book with all the story. And on that score, Gabler mostly delivers.
It’s always a little awkward reading an extended sequence about the childhood of a famous man, since it’s rare that the childhood is truly interesting, but in Disney’s case, his youthful experiences seemed to inform his later life considerably. Gabler traces Disney’s childhood from his pastoral days in the small town of Marceline, to his teen years in Kansas City where he worked almost non-stop to help his hard-luck father keep food on the table. His two pleasures as a teen were drawing, and being a jokester and prankster. Following a turn with the Red Cross after World War I, he went into commercial art, where he soon was exposed to the nascent art of animation, and formed his own studio, which went under, and then he formed another one when he moved to California.
Gabler’s theory is that Disney’s efforts were largely dedicated to two goals: First, to form a community of friends and like-minded individuals to replace the family and friends he’d left behind when he moved to California, and later, to recapture and recreate the idyllic feel of small town America at the turn of the century. So he was driven to form and maintain his animation studio, and later to turn it to produce films and TV shows about the American past as he saw it.
Disney turned out to be at the right place at the right time, of course, innovating in the animation field when it was still brand new. But he was also a strong storytelling, idea man, and frequently had his finger on the pulse of popular culture, even if he didn’t really understand himself how he did it. But he was also a strong control freak, wanting the final word over everything his studio did, obsessively reviewing minute details and sending his staff back to the drawing board, and being unwilling to delegate authority, to the point of reorganizing the company whenever someone else started to accumulate too much power. To the extent that Disney could do it all himself, it worked, but in later years it became clear that much of the company’s success was due to the unheralded employees who worked on the features.
Still, Gabler doesn’t stint on crediting Disney himself and his studio with being innovators in their time, being among the first to adopt color and sound in their cartoons, transforming the prevailing style of animation in the early 30s with “The Three Little Pigs”, turning their properties into marketing gold mines, and of course practically inventing the animated feature film in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as being the first Hollywood studio to fully embrace television in the 1950s and to create the modern theme park in Disneyland. In this way, the book reads like an early history of animation in America.
But Gabler also points out Disney’s flaws – and he had many, as a man and a manager, not least his tendency to lose interest in older projects when his studio was still on the hook for them, and turn to newer things while leaving his employees on their own without his guiding hand. Later in life he began to believe his own proverbial press releases, feeling he could change the world when in fact he was not quite an entertainer so much as the man behind the true entertainers (although he still did motivate some true innovations right up to his last years of life).
The book reads fairly quickly, for all that it’s a large tome of a book. It feels well-balanced, although I have little to compare it to. Its biggest failing is that after World War II it goes into less depth than I’d have liked, such as the nuts and bolts of building Disneyland (the opening day was a disaster, but little is said about it), or the studio’s later films. Relatively little about the nature of Disney’s legacy is said, as the book ends shortly after his death.
Nonetheless, it’s an insightful and informative book, and I’d recommend it to learn more about Walt Disney the man, as opposed to the myth behind the giant company.
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