The happiest place on Earth

Disney staff and studios were drafted into army use during the Second World War, leading to a string of now-controversial animations, live-action movies and propaganda films, some of which featured racist caricatures.

Cinderella was the studio’s first animated feature in eight years on release in 1950. But by this point Walt was leaving most of the animation to Disney’s senior artists, referred to as the Nine Old Men. He was too busy making live-action films and planting the seeds of his next big project amid the orange and walnut groves of Anaheim, south-east Los Angeles.

Disneyland had been a dream of Walt’s since watching his daughters ride the carousel in LA's Griffith Park. Sitting on a bench at the side, he imagined a place where “parents and the children could have fun together.”

Desperately short of funds to build it, he sold his family home and signed a deal with television network ABC for a series called Disneyland in 1954, showing life inside the in-progress park. Disney had made the jump from big screen to small.

The TV show was a hit, and spawned the Mickey Mouse Club some months later. But the opening day for the Disneyland park, in mid July 1955, was a disaster. Tens of thousands showed up in the sweltering heat, many with counterfeit tickets. Rides and plumbing broke, roads and restaurants were overwhelmed. High heels reportedly sunk into the fresh asphalt.

Nevertheless, the live broadcast of the day reached 90 million people across the US. The park would go on to double Disney’s earnings for the year.

By 1959, Walt was looking for another, bigger location. One which could house his vision of a futuristic city - a utopia where citizens would commute by monorail and Disney engineers would upgrade your kitchen appliances for newer models while you were at work. And of course there would be a theme park too.

The 27,000 acres secured in Florida, an area slightly bigger than French capital Paris, would be under development for over a decade before Walt Disney World opened. But it was a project Walt would never see completed.

He died from lung cancer in 1966, aged 65. His brother Roy, already 73, delayed retirement to help finish Disney World in his brother’s honour. He retired the day after its opening in October 1971 and died just two months later.

Despite the brothers' passing, Disney films and TV were still dominant, the company had parks on both US coasts, and there was more to come.

Disney’s dark ages

With parks and live-action films dominating the business, the Disney company’s animation staff dwindled from 500 to 125. The Nine Old Men were reaching retirement age but blocking experienced, younger animators, who left for rival studios or set up their own.

Executives, meanwhile, saw film, not animation, as the way of the future. With half the leadership stuck in the past and new CEO Ron Miller determined to take a new, edgier approach to cinema, the era has been dubbed the “dark ages” for Disney animation by fans. Yet the rest of the empire was growing.

Already popular in Japan, Mickey Mouse featured in one of the earliest handheld gaming consoles, a version of Nintendo’s LCD Game & Watch device, in 1981.

In 1982, Walt’s dream of a “City of Tomorrow” was finally realised as the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or Epcot, at Disney World, the biggest construction project on the planet at the time. However, the version that opened was more of a science-focussed theme park than the bustling metropolis he had imagined.

Disneyland Japan became the first Disney park outside the United States when it opened in Tokyo in 1983, the same year as Walt Disney Television first broadcast along with the Disney Channel.

Miller opened Touchstone Pictures as a subdivision of Disney to release content for adults in 1984 and the studio’s first film — Splash, starring Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah — was a runaway hit. So was The Golden Girls, a TV sitcom Touchstone produced in 1985 which would run for seven seasons and spawn spin-offs, international remakes, restaurants and stage shows.

There was no avoiding the failures of the animation division, however. The Black Cauldron, released in 1985, was the most expensive animated film ever produced at the time. It went down in history as a dud which lost Disney millions. Something had to give.

From Broadway to the Bahamas

If Disney needed a renaissance, new CEO Michael Eisner delivered it, bringing a Broadway-musical style and computer technology to the animated films.

The Little Mermaid won Oscars for its songs and score, Disney's first Academy Awards for a full-length animated feature since Dumbo in 1942, nearly 50 years prior. The new team repeated the feat with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas and Tarzan over the next decade. These films, with their ready-made showstoppers, went to Broadway itself to become smash-hit musicals.

Next came sports. The Disney Company founded the Mighty Ducks ice hockey team in 1993, following the success of the Mighty Ducks film. It bought sports TV network ESPN in 1996, as part of a bigger takeover of TV network ABC, and then the California Angels baseball team in 1997.

Euro Disney joined the list of parks in 1992 in a cloud of controversy, accused by public figures and intellectuals in France of “cultural imperialism”. It took three years, a name change and the decision to serve wine at some park restaurants before Disneyland Paris turned a profit.

Still, executives always had one eye on the future. With Pixar in the late 1980s, Disney developed new technology which would power the production of every animated Disney feature in the ‘90s. After the success of Pixar’s Toy Story in 1995, the two companies entered a 10-year partnership to share the costs and profits of Pixar’s films.

As Pixar’s star rose and Disney films faltered again, the company brought more companies into its orbit. The House of Mouse entered the Internet era with the purchase of search engine Infoseek in 1998, then launched its own web portal called Go.com. Having failed to enter agreements with established cruise lines, Disney simply built its own boats and bought a private island in the Bahamas.

Still, the company entered the 21st century making a loss. The sports teams were sold along with the global chain of Disney Stores.

While Pixar won Oscars, the few traditionally-animated features Disney produced were disappointments, and spin-offs and sequels of some of their most-beloved stories went direct to video or DVD. There was much soul-searching to be done.

If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em

Despite the losses elsewhere, Disney knew it was on to a good thing with Pixar. Once the distribution deal had run its course, new CEO Bob Iger wasted no time bringing the Finding Nemo studio under the ever-growing Disney umbrella.

It had already bought Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppets from Jim Henson when the Pixar deal went through in 2006, beginning a new age in TV and film entertainment for the company, largely secured through buying up the competition.

After Pixar came Marvel, bought for $4 billion in 2009 for its long history of popular comic books and Hollywood movies. Three years later Disney bought Lucasfilm, founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas, bringing the full Star Wars franchise under Disney control, as well as the Indiana Jones films and subsidiary graphics and video game companies.

The next decade also brought a new approach to cultural representation in film. Jennifer Lee, who won an Oscar for Frozen, became chief creative officer of the animation studio. Where the last 90 years of Disney animations had largely focussed on European folk tales or animals, this new wave explored Hawaii and South America, New Orleans and South East Asia. The profits came pouring in.

In 2019, in one of the biggest corporate business acquisitions of modern times, Disney bought 21st Century Fox from media magnate Rupert Murdoch, for more than $70 billion. Even Homer Simpson was now a Disney character.

When Disney+ launched later that year, it had films and TV shows from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and National Geographic available on demand. Within a day it had 10 million subscribers.

One hundred years after its foundation in a small backroom office in Hollywood, Disney has a physical presence in 30 countries and its channels reaches 100 more.

It might all have begun in a house, with a mouse, but now the whole world is Disney's kingdom.