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CoF: […] Were you ever interested in working with Walt Disney?
PAL: We were very good friends, and he asked me many times to come over and I just didn’t feel like it at the time — probably I should have.
CoF: What did he want you to work on?
PAL: There was nothing in particular — his was like any major studio; he said work on anything you want, science-fiction, whatever. I had 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, but Paramount wouldn’t make it; they would say, who the hell is interested in an old submarine, you know? You see, after DESTINATION MOON, I wanted to go back that way instead of the future, and I had it and Paramount said “No!” They said, make an “atomic submarine” film. I said no. I’m interested in 20.000 LEAGUES. I worked about two weeks with a writer trying to make an atomic submarine story and I gave up. And then Disney called me, Walt Disney himself, and just to tell you how nice a person he was, he said: “George, there’s somebody here with the rights to 20.000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA and I recall that you were interested in it — I won’t buy it unless you tell me that you are not going to do it.” I told him, “God bless you, Walt, go ahead and do it because Paramount won’t make it.” And he did the same film that we had. The only difference was that he spent about $4-million on it and my budget was $1-million — and still Paramount wouldn't make it! Isn’t that idiotic, though? And Disney's film was very good. He told me that he had a sequence with the octopus that he didn't like, the way it turned out. and he redid it at a cost of $400,000 extra! That's the kind of person he was. He didn't mind spending the extra money to do it right. Of course he had the money to do it, but he felt it should be done right.
CoF: Some people have been spreading stories that Disney was a money-grabber.
PAL; Not at all, just the opposite, in my experience anyway. He was always trying to do what he thought was the best. When I came over just with a bag of puppets from Europe, I got acquainted with him and he helped me all the time. I didn’t know very much then and needed all the help I could get. He was very unselfish. Many people today are telling some bad stories about Walt, but I cannot tell a bad story about him... I’m sorry, but he was really very nice, a wonderful person.
CoF: It's just possible that Walt Disney's experience back in the 1920’s, where Walter Lantz had grabbed the Oswald Rabbit character away from him, had so hardened Disney to being sure that he owned all the rights to anything he produced that he gave off an acquisitive impression: this may have later prompted stories of his fanatical protectiveness.
PAL: Well, I was really nobody at that time; I just had these Puppetoons that I had started to make and he was interested all the time. Either I called him or he called me to say. “Let’s have lunch." And we would have lunch. He was smoking like a chimney and I would say, “Why do you smoke so much, Walt?” But he kept on smoking, and that was unfortunately his downfall. He was practically a chain-smoker.
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