Acquired
02:30:34 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:30:34] S1: Yeah. There's a great quote from the animator Frank Thomas who worked on Cinderella. We planned Cinderella more carefully and shot it all in live action first so we could judge it. This was without costumes or a set. Just go on a soundstage and see whether that scene's going to work. Walt said, we can't afford to animate it and then change it. The animation has to be right the first time. Yeah. Not the mindset that they took into Snow White. [02:30:58] S0: And this basically flips the, like, live action animation thing from a source of inspiration and study to a crutch. So they were filming every scene and then rotoscoping, effectively, like, tracing the live action footage out of the camera Right. To make it animated, which can lead to this much more rigid feeling animation. Also, once you film it, you are completely locked into that view. It's not like you can move the theoretical camera because you haven't really built the muscle to animate in that style for the film. Yep. So you're you're kinda stuck with this, like, how it looked in the camera is how we trace it on paper. It just had less of the, like, lavish detail that they put into Pinocchio and Bambi. All this ultimately leads to, like, Walt's hard is just not in it. He he kinda helps kick start the whole thing, but then is not engaged during the production of this film. It does end up being a critical and commercial huge success, though. [02:31:54] S1: Yes. I believe it makes basically the same amount of money as Snow White. I think it does $8,000,000 in film rentals in the first year.
02:31:54 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:31:54] S1: Yes. I believe it makes basically the same amount of money as Snow White. I think it does $8,000,000 in film rentals in the first year. [02:32:03] S0: Yep. On a cost of 2,200,000. Yep. So, really, this is the first big financial success for the company since before the war. It's the biggest success since Snow White. It got the company back on sound footing after a pretty gnarly [02:32:17] S1: time Gnarly decade there. Yeah. But yeah. So Cinderella is is a huge bright spot. It was a onetime financial boost to the studio that didn't solve all the company's problems, but it did get animation back on the right foot creatively. Even though Walt was no longer, you know, as deeply involved as he was in the Snow White era, it did turn things around enough that, like, at least they were making quality work again. And, like, obviously, those films still hold up today. [02:32:46] S0: Over the next few years, they then released Alice in Wonderland, which surprise ballooned over budget and did not pay back. That is in part because a lot of historians say it's a film that Walt felt like he should do because of his reverence for the source material [02:33:02] S1: Yep.
02:33:02 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:33:02] S1: Yep. [02:33:03] S0: But never quite had a clear idea on exactly what to do with it. So it's it's hard to put together these sort of disjoint vignettes into one cohesive film, but artistically, beautiful. So put a pin in that. We'll come back to it. But interesting comment on Alice from the 1951 annual report from Roy. Alice has not performed as well at the box office as Cinderella because of these circumstances, which were generally poor attendance at theaters. He actually blames the macro, which is interesting. And because Alice in Wonderland is our highest cost feature, it is not expected to produce a profit from its first release. However, it is a classic property, which should be a valuable asset to the company indefinitely. [02:33:46] S1: And, hey, he was right. Yep. Alright. So we've talked about Walt being disengaged here. What is he doing? [02:33:55] S0: So Walt is playing with trains. I mean, I Yes. [02:34:04] S1: He is. [02:34:05] S0: That's about the best way that I can frame this is he's getting really into trains and really into miniatures. Yes. [02:34:12] S1: Trains specifically model trains and miniatures like miniature furniture and, like, rooms in homes in miniatures.
02:34:12 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:34:12] S1: Trains specifically model trains and miniatures like miniature furniture and, like, rooms in homes in miniatures. [02:34:22] S0: Yeah. I mean, gosh, I said we weren't gonna dive into Walt's psyche on this episode, but I kinda think about this. This is me editorializing as this, like, soul searching half decade where he's just looking for what is he gonna get passionate about next, because he's sort of bored. Like, animation isn't doing it for him the way that it used to, and he's, like, reaching back into his childhood for inspiration. [02:34:50] S1: And the way Walt would frame this is that he was developing these hobbies to keep his mind off of the problems at the studio. That's what he would
02:34:50 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:34:50] S1: And the way Walt would frame this is that he was developing these hobbies to keep his mind off of the problems at the studio. That's what he would [02:34:57] S0: always say. Right. That these were nice things to do after a hard day at work. Yep. But they became obsessions. Yes. When I said reaching back to his childhood, there was a train that ran through Marceline, which is why Marceline existed. And there's this, like, deep seated psyche around trains in small town America. He and some of the other senior animators developed this interest in large scale model trains, which are one eighth the scale of an actual railroad train. So, like, big, like, ones you could ride around sitting on top of. There's amazing old footage of of Walt, like, riding around on these these one eighth scale trains. Yep. So Walt took this extremely seriously. He ends up traveling to the 1948 And 1949 Chicago Train Fair, and he kinda dove into this community of fellow train enthusiasts. I was thinking this was strange. Like, I kept reading about this, and I was like, this is wild. There were 6,000,000 train enthusiasts, like model train enthusiasts at the time. This was actually, like, a pretty big thing. [02:36:00] S1: Yeah. This isn't like billionaire hobbies today. This is like a Wald is hanging out with other enthusiasts, kinda man of the people style.
02:36:00 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[02:36:00] S1: Yeah. This isn't like billionaire hobbies today. This is like a Wald is hanging out with other enthusiasts, kinda man of the people style. [02:36:08] S0: Yes. And it was something that was really tangible for him to do with his hands. I mean, he was building some of the train cars himself. He he actually had a workspace in the machine shop in Burbank where he was building with the machine shop staff. There was a guy, Roger Brogi, who sort of led the machine shop team who would go on to build a serious, serious model train for Walt. Roger would also become, just to foreshadow here, the first Imagineer. [02:36:34] S1: Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, just to foreshadow even more, all of this would lead to Imagineering. [02:36:42] S0: Yes. So this team in the machine shop, and Walt end up building this train. And and, David, you were saying, like, man of the people style. In a very not man of the people style thing, he ends up sinking $50,000, which is like a giant amount of money at the time and a huge amount of his personal liquidity in 1950, into building a train in his backyard. There was a half mile of track that went through a tunnel. That tunnel, that which he dug under his wife's garden, on its own was 90 feet long. [02:37:17] S1: Yes. When Walt gets obsessed with something, he he goes to an unreasonable extremes.