A little eleven-year-old boy sat in a Kansas City, Missouri, theater watching the enactment of a fairy story. He was so enchanted that he could scarcely breathe, and for nights thereafter his dreams were haunted by the colorful visions that had bewitched him.
He never forgot them, and today, twenty-five years later, he has given these childhood dreams back to the world.
For the boy was Walt Disney and the play he saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and if the world and the motion-picture business is in a state of adoring bewilderment at the success that Walt's cartoon interpretation is making, Walt isn't a bit surprised. He's known all along how marvelously he could, in his own way, make that story.
Not that you could ever get him to say that in so many words. He is definitely the most modest genius alive today. The word " I ” simply isn't in his vocabulary. It is all " we " at the picturesque little Disney studio, hidden away in an unfashionable part of Hollywood, but looking, when you come upon it, like a corner of fairyland. The doors of the studio have pig-Latin mottoes on them, and to the left, inside the gates, there is a tiny garage for Mickey Mouse's car (not that there is any Mickey Mouse or any car) and little green footpaths run hither and yon over the lot with no apparent sense to them.
It is as hard to believe that this is a plant where recently a million-and-a-half-dollar gamble was taken as it is to believe that slim, shy-eyed Walt is anything more than a nice young man, so unassuming is his manner. The very office boys around the studio call him by his first name; the turtle that was the model for the one in Snow White crawls contentedly around in the sun with "Traffic Department" lettered on its back, and the children in the neighborhood barge over every afternoon to see how things are going, knowing that their naive criticisms are always politely listened to.
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