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Midway during a screening of Walt Disney's ABC-TV series (Walt Disney Presents) last fall the showman-genius turned to a friend and said in acute exasperation, "If I see another Indian or frontiersman or Western hero in one of these shows, I'm going to walk out." The friend thought that Disney meant he was going to leave the screening room where they were previewing upcoming shows for the Disney program. He was shocked a few weeks later when Disney walked a considerably greater distance – from ABC all the way across town to the rival network NBC.

The Disney switch was a shocker for the TV world, but the pressures for it had been building up for a long time. In fact, these few intimates who know Disney best are surprised that the split was so long in coming. Joe Reddy, Disney's close friend and public relations director, told me, "Walt was with ABC for seven years and I believe he was unhappy for the last three. Ever since he was a boy Walt has been in bad situations, but he always seemed to bounce out of them pretty fast into something better."
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An invitation from NBC made new man of Disney

Then, in the fall of 1960, with Walt Disney Presents still grinding out its Westerns, NBC asked him to come and play in their studio at the termination of his ABC contract in 1961. A friend says. "Walt signed the contract [for Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color] and I never saw such an over-night change in a man. Where he had been preparing the ABC programs almost automatically like a man in a dream, all his old enthusiasms returned. He began to work on NBC shows that can't possibly be shown until 1963. He began to think in terms of color, which he had pioneered with his cartoons in the 1930's, and one new idea after another came tumbling out of him. He kept saying over and over again, ‘Oh boy! Color – and no Westerns. I can do whatever I want. Do you hear me? I can do whatever I want.' "