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things looking black
Roy Disney asked his brother Walt to come to his office on an urgent matter. It was 1940 and customary in those days for Roy to visit Walt at the studio when the news was good. So when Walt entered his brother's office he knew the news was going to be bad.
Roy explained that all the profits made from their first feature-length cartoon, SNOW WHITE & THE 7 DWARFS, had been eaten by the making of PINOCCHIO, BAMBI and FANTASIA. Roy thought Walt would really be concerned, maybe shocked, when he told him that they were in debt $4 1/2 million. Walt just laughed. "I was just thinking back," he managed to say thru his laughter "Do you remember when we couldn't borrow $1000? And now we owe $4 1/2 million! I think that's quite an improvement!"
disney is dizzying
THE BLACK HOLE, released at Xmas, is the biggest investment the Disney organization has ever made in a single film ... $17.5 million!
But gambling has never been anything new to the company, especially to Walt Disney. He bet that sound movies were going to be more than a fad back in 1928 when he put everything he had into a cartoon called STEAMBOAT WILLIE which made it the first sound cartoon. His FLOWERS & TREES was the first Thchnicolor cartoon. Disney was forever putting his money & energy into new ways of improving his product, even when he was told by everyone, including his friends, that what he was trying to do was a waste of time.
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