Spencer Tracy and Walt Disney visit between chukkers at a Motion Picture Relief Fund Polo Match fund raiser, ca. 1945.

Disney Legend Blaine Gibson, who knew and worked with Walt Disney closely during the last years of his life, was chosen to sculpt the permanent memorial to a man and his mouse.

While Disney fans are quite familiar with the famous iconic monument in the Disney parks, that perfect pose was not the first choice.

There were several different compositions that were considered. One featured a young Mickey running ahead and pulling Walt along. It was rejected because it seemed awkward for Mickey to be dragging Walt forward. Another featured Walt with the rolled up blueprints of Epcot in his right hand and using them to point forward. Yet another had Walt with an opened handed wave (at the suggestion of Marty Sklar who didn’t like the concept of Walt pointing) while in Mickey’s hand was a small black globe with two mouse ears. One image that popped up in several sketches was Mickey with a one-scoop ice cream cone. Gibson liked that composition so much that he went so far as to make a finished maquette of it. He recalled the story in an interview with the Janzen brothers in 1995:

“Marty [Sklar of Imagineering], [Disneyland President] Jack Lindquist, [Imagineer] John Hench and I had a meeting about the ice cream cone and there were two concerns. First, we felt that it made Mickey appear a little too immature, and, second, we felt it might favor one lessee, like the Nestle Company or Carnation. John and the rest of us finally agreed to have Mickey’s arm at his side.I liked the way it came out…and design-wise it worked with more emphasis on Walt.

“Color was very important to me, for Walt, because even when he died, he still had dark hair, dark eyebrows, dark mustache and extremely dark eyes. His eyes were something that I felt you really had to get. It’s easy for us to think of the things that were obvious about Walt…like his strong features, his bent nose, his eyebrow that would go up…those are things that are important, but to me it was his eyes that could look through you, and you could look deep into them.

“This was something that I had to think out some way, sculpturally, to do, and I’m doing it with shadow…even though there is color in there, the way the form slopes back gave me a chance with shadow to give that darkness to his eyes. And the hair…I didn’t want it to look like hair. In the first place, you can’t make sculpture look like hair. So I made these deep textural grooves to pick up color so that they would become dark. I did it the same way with his eyebrows and his mustache, so that we would pick up a little bit of color value in there.

“Now with today’s techniques of foundry work, we were able to actually vary the colors with chemical oxidization on the bronze. You see, we were able to retain the darkness of the hair, and the darkness of the suit and tie and so forth. Now, I’m not happy with this patina, but I think we did get enough of that contrast in the one at Disneyland to maintain the fact that Walt had dark hair and eyes.”

Blaine did the clay model in Sedona, Ariz., where he moved after he retired from the Disney Company, working carefully on the head and body, but his young assistant helped “because that’s a lot of clay to put up.”

Gibson made the figure of Walt larger than life, roughly 6-feet, 5-inches tall. In real life, Walt was barely 5-feet, 10-inches tall.

The size of Mickey Mouse was chosen based on a brief moment from the animated short The Pointer (1939). A frightened Mickey as a hunter is overshadowed by a growling, threatening bear. Mickey tries to calm the beast by nervously stuttering: “Well, I’m, uh, Mickey Mouse. You know? Mickey Mouse? I hope you’ve heard of me, I hope.”

“When he recorded the voice, [Walt] couldn’t help but feel like Mickey and he added all these little gestures that were spontaneous with him. At one point [during that speech], he put out his hand like this (to indicate that Mickey was about 3 feet tall), it was the only time we knew how big Walt thought Mickey was,” animator Frank Thomas recalled.

Marty Sklar remembers being amazed seeing Gibson and John Hench spending hours discussing just exactly how Walt’s five-fingered hand should hold Mickey’s four-fingered one. It was finally decided to base it on the one time that an animated Mickey held the hand of a real person. In Fantasia (1940), Mickey shakes the hand of conductor Leopold Stokowski.

The attention to detail on the statue is amazing, if sometimes confusing to guests who may not be as familiar with Walt Disney. For instance the “STR” logo on Walt’s tie refers to the Smoke Tree Ranch vacation area in Palm Springs where Walt had a home. On Walt’s right hand is the Irish Claddagh wedding ring that he and his wife wore in addition to his regular one on his left hand. Walt bought them in 1948 on a trip to Ireland where his ancestors once lived.

The entrance foyer of the Walt Disney Elementary School in Marceline, Missouri has changed little since its inception more than fifty years ago.  Disney Legend Bob Moore created the cutout mural that adorns the wall.  Additional murals can be found in the school’s gymnasium.  The school also features an original flagpole from the 1960 Winter Olympics, of which Walt served as Chairman of Pageantry

Television is only a few years old, but already a number of traditions have been founded which make it a bit more enjoyable around Christmas time. One of the most delightful traditions to be set up is the annual appearance of Walt Disney before the television cameras. Because Christmas is basically children’s holiday, this year, as last, Walt leaves his studio and produces for television on the “Walt Disney Christmas Show.”  And what a show he has lined up for this year. Disney will devote more time to his cartoon characters. There will be the Uncle Remus Tar Baby sequence from “Song of the South.” a scene from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Bambi,” plus previews from Disney’s next big feature, “Peter Pan,” now in production, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Goofy and others will, of course, contribute their comedy cavorting. Live talent will include Bobby Driscoll, Kathryn Beaumont, Hans Conried, Bill Thompson, Don Barclay, all of whom have taken part in Disney films. The show, according to advance notices, will open in the convalescent ward of a children’s hospital on Christmas morning, with Dr. Miller, played by Don Barclay, entering as Santa Claus. This should be a wonderful afternoon for the kiddies as well as adults, especially for Christmas. Ann and Lyn, our two little “Indians.” are already talking about the Disney show and look to Christmas with great expectations. Why not? What more could you want, Santa Claus and Walt Disney on the same day.

The Walt Disney Christmas Show on TV yesterday was still entrancing even when the color of the movie production had been lost.  Anything so well done originally as Disney’s Bambi, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Uncle Remus, can still get under the skin of young and old alike.  One solid hour of Disney classics went out over 57 stations of the CBS-TV network with Walt Disney himself acting as emcee before a gathering of enthusiastic children.

The program’s sponsor, Johnson and Johnson provided $250,000 to produce the special, a figure unprecedented in the medium’s then short history.  CBS, embarrassed by not running the 1950 show, quickly lined up the 57 stations that sealed the broadcast agreement with Johnson and Johnson.

The special is notable in that it included an appearance by Bobby Driscoll dressed as Peter Pan, the character he would voice in the 1953 animated feature.
 
The show itself is generally inaccessible, but curiously it was included on the UK version of the Peter Pan Platinum edition DVD, but not on the comparable US edition.