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At 7:30 P.M. next Wednesday, Walt Disney comes to television with his own regular weekly show. The milestone is well worth marking, for TV has been seeking Disney almost from the beginning, understandably anxious to get its hands on the vast Disney library. What they reckoned without, and may still be reckoning without, was Disney himself.

A canny Irishman who has a way of keeping his left eye on the drawing boards and his right eye on the cost sheets, the 52-year-old Disney long has been sitting atop as fabulous a career as Hollywood ever produced. “The Mouse” and “the Duck,” as he refers to Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, have become as much a part of American literature as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. That Disney is a recognized creative genius is an accepted fact. That he is also a shrewd (and amiable) realist is something not generally known outside Hollywood.

What finally prompted Disney to plunge into television with a weekly hour-long program of his own was not the money involved (actually, he will lose money on the show itself) but the existence of 160 barren acres of land in Anaheim, Cal., 15 minutes’ driving time from metropolitan Los Angeles. Disney bought the land last May. On 60 acres of it he will build, for $9,000,000, what will undoubtedly be the most magnificent amusement park ever constructed in this or any other country.
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