The world of make-believe has always delighted and absorbed me, ever since I was a little boy. And I know exactly how my interest started. It began when I was a child, one of five in our family. Every evening after supper, my grandmother would take down from the shelf the well-worn volumes of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen. We would gather around her, the two youngest children on her knees and listen to the stories that we knew so well we could repeat them word for word.
After my grandmother's death, my mother continued the evening story hour. It was the best time of the day for me and the stories and the characters in them seemed quite as real as my schoolmates and our games. Of all the characters in the fairy tales I loved Snow White best, and when I planned my first full-length cartoon, she inevitably was the heroine.
Next to Snow White, I cared most for Peter Pan. He did not come from our well-loved story book, but my introduction to him was even more exciting. We were living on a farm, and one morning as we walked to school, we found entrancing new posters on the barns and fences along the road. A road company was coming to the nearby town of Marceline and the play they were presenting was Peter Pan with Maude Adams.
It took most of the contents of two toy saving banks to buy our tickets, but my brother Roy and I didn't care. For two hours, we lived in Never Land with Peter and his friends. I took many memories away from the theater with me, but the most thrilling of all was the vision of Peter flying through the air.
Shortly afterward, Peter Pan was chosen for our school play and I was allowed to play Peter. No actor ever identified himself with the part he was playing more than I—and I was more realistic than Maude Adams in at least one particular: I actually flew through the air! Roy was using a block and tackle to hoist me. It gave way, and I flew right into the faces of the surprised audience.
When I began producing cartoons, Peter Pan was high on my list of subjects. In fact, after talking it over, Roy and I bought the rights with the idea of making the second full-length feature for our company.
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