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With the approaching première of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on NBC this fall, Walt Disney reminds me of the old heavyweight champion Joe Louis in his prime. Joe would sit back and let young challengers come up, and when he was good and ready he'd take them on and flatten them. Disney's attitude seems to be: "All right, boys, you've had your fun while I was boxed into a black-and-white, scant-cartoon situation on ABC. But now let's get into the ring for the showdown. The champ is ready to take you on."

In the TV cartoon field several challengers have come along during Disney's hiatus at ABC. Chief among them have been Mister Magoo. The Flintstones, Quick Draw McGrow, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear. Their makers have achieved a degree of production speed which Disney never attempted to attain, but therein, says the Champ, lies their weakness. "Mister Magoo," Disney told me, "was based on a single gimmick. Magoo's nearsightedness, and unless you're Jack Benny you can't sustain one gag like that on TV for very long.

"The rest," says Disney, "use a technique which we tried and discarded many years ago. We cartoonists call it ‘cheating' – and that's a technical, not a derogatory term. Instead of our painstaking process in which we use hundreds of frames of film to portray a single sequence of motion – say, Donald Duck running into a stone wall – they give the illusion of motion with just a few frames. They move only the character's feet and not the rest of his body. Also, instead of showing the details of their character's crash into the wall, they'll give you the sound of the crash off screen and then cut to the character at the base of the wall.
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So, in his 60th year, Walt Disney is girding for one of the most important fights of his life, against a multiplicity of challenges. Like all great champions, he professes disinterest in the ensuing battle, believing implicitly that he'll win. When I asked him what had worried him most about the upcoming NBC series, he snorted, "The time."

Startled I asked, "What do you mean by that?"

He replied, "Until NBC settled on our 7:30-8:30 spot on Sunday evenings, I was afraid that the show would go on later and that I'd never get to see it. I'm in bed by 9 o'clock every night."