Acquired
03:54:19 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[03:54:19] S0: Let's go. [03:54:25] S1: If only. So in October 1966, Walt records a film of a pitch, a full reveal for the Epcot Vision. We'll link to it in the show notes. You should absolutely go watch this movie. It is the second to last recorded appearance that Walt makes in his life, and he has no idea. The last one, think, is a day or two later. And he ends the video with speaking for myself and for the entire Disney organization. We're ready to go right now. Unfortunately, he dies about two months later. His death is both incredibly fast, incredibly unexpected, and, of course, kind of a slow motion disaster that's been brewing his whole life ever since he started chain smoking in France when he was 17 years old. [03:55:27] S0: I mean, he was notorious for his hacking cough. That is how people knew that he was approaching if you were in a building on the Burbank Campus.
03:55:27 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[03:55:27] S0: I mean, he was notorious for his hacking cough. That is how people knew that he was approaching if you were in a building on the Burbank Campus. [03:55:34] S1: Yeah. You'd hear him hacking. So that summer in 1966, Walt had started experiencing pains in his body. He assumes that it's all the stress from, you know, all these new projects that he's working on, or maybe it's old polo injuries that he has, or maybe it's this nagging cough. But obviously it's cancer eating away at him. Finally, in November 1966, so right after recording the Epcot pitch video, he checks himself into the hospital where doctors find a pretty massive tumor in his lungs. They do emergency surgery to remove it. He comes back to the studio afterwards, and the company announces publicly that Walt is back. They say he's gonna recover, but the cancer has metastasized, and the doctors tell him, hey. You probably only have a couple weeks or months to live. His health goes downhill quickly, and on 12/15/1966, just ten days after his 60 birthday, Walt Disney passes away. Right in the middle of this Epcot thing. I mean, like [03:56:42] S0: The thing is What [03:56:42] S1: a sliding door moment. [03:56:44] S0: He was always escalating bigger and bigger and bigger. It would have always been right in the middle of the biggest thing he's ever done. [03:56:53] S1: That's such a good point.
03:56:53 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[03:56:53] S1: That's such a good point. [03:56:55] S0: Mickey with synchronized sound, Snow White with the first animated feature film, the Burbank campus, plowing cash into all the expensive failures after Snow White, Disneyland. Every point in his life, he was betting the farm over and over and over again, and he always pushed all his chips in. It would have always felt like this. [03:57:10] S1: That's such a good point. [03:57:11] S0: If they had pulled off the Florida project, what would he have done next? [03:57:14] S1: Right. Like a colony on the moon? Like [03:57:16] S0: Yeah. I gotta be honest, though. I will say, I don't have the faith after watching a lot of videos and documentaries and reading about the Florida project. It just doesn't make sense to me. Mhmm. And it may have protected his legacy that he didn't live another ten or twenty years to see this through. [03:57:37] S1: Mhmm. Yep. I mean, even just building a domed city. Like, how would you actually do that? [03:57:43] S0: And look. I could be completely wrong. They invented, you know, amazing thing after amazing thing, but this one felt nuts. [03:57:54] S1: I mean, it was. I think it's a totally fair point. So immediately after Walt's death, Roy renames the whole Florida project Walt Disney World in his honor, and Roy postpones his own retirement to dedicate himself to finishing this project. And in fact, just a couple months later, in May 1967, Roy gets full approval from the Florida state legislature to build Epcot, to build Walt Disney World.
03:57:54 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[03:57:54] S1: I mean, it was. I think it's a totally fair point. So immediately after Walt's death, Roy renames the whole Florida project Walt Disney World in his honor, and Roy postpones his own retirement to dedicate himself to finishing this project. And in fact, just a couple months later, in May 1967, Roy gets full approval from the Florida state legislature to build Epcot, to build Walt Disney World. [03:58:26] S0: And importantly, to carve out the Reedy Creek Development District, which gave the company a lot more autonomy over the area containing the land that they purchased than they ever had in Anaheim. And famously, Walt was very regretful that they didn't buy up all the land around Disneyland too because he just hated all of the, you know, hotels and restaurants and crummy stuff around there. And, they run the show there in Florida. [03:58:55] S1: That they do. But Roy is not Walt, and he's not willing to bet the company like Walt was. So he does see Walt Disney World through, but he dramatically scales it back mostly because he doesn't wanna take on any additional debt for the company. So he sets a goal that he's gonna get this thing constructed without raising debt for the company. [03:59:25] S0: Which is unbelievable. They built the Magic Kingdom, the Walt Disney World [03:59:29] S1: The theme park. [03:59:30] S0: Copy paste of Disneyland in Florida for $400,000,000 with two hotels and no debt.
03:59:30 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[03:59:30] S0: Copy paste of Disneyland in Florida for $400,000,000 with two hotels and no debt. [03:59:37] S1: Yes. That is an incredible achievement. Yes. And it is absolutely not what Walt would have done. Nope. So it's just the Magic Kingdom. There's no city. There's no Epcot. There's no airport. There's no [03:59:48] S0: industrial park. It's more or less like, hey. We've got all this land, and we're extremely confident that Disneyland is gonna work here, so we'll build it. [03:59:56] S1: And it was extremely successful. Yep. But it's not betting the company, and it's not blazing a new trail. I mean, look. Like, how could you say Disney World isn't a success? Like, it's an incredible success. And there's, like, [04:00:11] S0: so much cool innovation there. The underground tunnels. They they took everything about Disneyland and and made it better. Yes. Okay. Now we don't have to have people wandering around carrying trash bags. Okay. We don't have to have characters appearing in the wrong land because the only way for them to, you know, come, quote, unquote, on stage is through a door that's inconveniently placed. We've got this network of underground tunnels where we can all do it exactly the way that we would have wanted to. I'm pretty sure the underground tunnels are actually street level, and all of Disney World is up one story. [04:00:39] S1: It's it's this, like, [04:00:40] S0: whole insane concept of what if we could do Disneyland over again, but not as cowboys, as as real planners and builders and engineers and a much bigger budget.
04:00:40 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[04:00:40] S0: whole insane concept of what if we could do Disneyland over again, but not as cowboys, as as real planners and builders and engineers and a much bigger budget. [04:00:51] S1: Which may actually be, to your point, it's probably just as likely, if not more likely, that Walt Disney's death, when it came, preserved his reputation. And that this this might have actually been the better path for the Florida project. [04:01:07] S0: May have been. [04:01:08] S1: Regardless, though, what it is not is shooting for the stars. And after Walt's death, the company basically stops doing that in every dimension. Roy himself tragically dies two and a half months after opening Disney World at the end of nineteen seventy one. [04:01:30] S0: It's kinda poetic. It seems like he he said he was gonna see this thing through, and he did. [04:01:34] S1: And he did for his brother. Yeah. And then what follows is basically kinda thirteen years of Disney becoming a parks company. [04:01:46] S0: Yeah. I mean, if you look over at the film side of things, the last film that Walt worked on was Jungle Book, which ended up coming out after his death in 1967. He was deeply involved in this one. It was a smash hit Yep. Grossing $23,000,000. 23,000,000 in its first box office run, which implies a cut of about $11,000,000 for Disney in Buena Vista on a budget of just $4,000,000. This, though, would be Disney's most successful film for the next two decades.