HOLLYWOOD - This is going to come as a shock to all those intellectual snobs of show business, but five years after his death Walt Disney lives on bigger and brighter than ever in the materialistic milieu of Hollywood.
Walt Disney's death on Dec. 15, 1966, occasioned possibly the greatest outpouring of expressions of grief —- and tribute —- in Hollywood annals. Among them was one from veteran producer Samuel Goldwyn: "The world has lost a genius in the truest sense of the word ... But in a larger sense, Walt Disney has not died because he will live for all time thru his work."
Probably little did Sam Goldwyn or anyone else realize how literally prophetic those words were.
For even in death the Disney name is about the liveliest thing Hollywood has going these days. In the chaos and confusion of the so-called "new" Hollywood, with its mod mores and hippie ways and far-out flicks, the most durable product seems to be the clean family entertainment of a family man who really never considered himself a part of even the "old" Hollywood, who shunned Hollywood parties and Hollywood night life, and preferred to keep his working base in Burbank, or "out in the cornfields," as he called it.
Walt, who made "Mary Poppins" a household word, synonymous with wholesomeness once said, "Every time other nims get dirtier, our ooxorfice goes up."
Thus, with all the garbage currently cluttering up the movie screens, 1970 was the best year in history for Disney revenues, and 1971 is starting off even better.
In an aura saturated with sex, pot and perversion, Disney's clean family films have cleaned up at the boxoffice.
And at a time when other studios are folding or crying the blues, the studio Walt Disney founded is robust and thriving.
At a time when industry-wide economy cuts have made most Hollywood sound stages as soundless as a dead mackerel, Disney's sound stages are steaming full tilt ahead with TV and movie features.
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