Holding Their Banner High

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Then TV arrived, and Walt really revved up his marketing genius. He named his first prime-time series Disneyland -- a recurrent plug for the Anaheim theme park -- and filled it with old cartoons and his avuncular presence. When a Disneyland serial about Indian Fighter Davy Crockett stoked a brief frenzy for coonskin caps, the studio quickly sutured the three episodes together and released them as a theatrical feature. Minimal expenditures, more revenue. Then Disney launched an afternoon program, The Mickey Mouse Club, which introduced the Mouseketeers, a troupe of child stars who cavorted like stagestruck Cub Scouts and intoned the show's anthem-hymn ("Who's the leader of the club/ That's made for you and me?/ M-I-C! K-E-Y!/ M-O-U-S-E!"). Disney had invented yet another addictive rite of passage, especially for all those preteen boys who avidly monitored the progress of young womanhood stirring under the Mouseketeer sweater marked ANNETTE.

In 1939 Film Historian Lewis Jacobs saluted Walt Disney as the "virtuoso of the film medium." Twenty years later, this Hollywood Paderewski was playing mostly Muzak. His studio's artistic growth had been stunted, by both the | demand for new product in two mediums and the creeping conservatism that afflicts almost any burgeoning corporation. Yet Disney was always a visionary entrepreneur; he still had magic to do. In the 1950s Disney made three business decisions that would sustain his company until the Eisner years. Decades later, they would profoundly affect the movie business.

-- In the early '50s, as television usurped film's place as the most pervasive popular art, most movie studios sold TV rights to their pre-1948 films. Disney knew better; he knew his pictures had a shelf life. So he hoarded his booty, doling out the old animated features to movie theaters while airing the cartoon shorts on his own shows. When the pay-cable era finally arrived, the Disney Channel had a vintage supply of no-cost programming -- all thanks to Walt's farsightedness.

-- In 1959 Disney released The Shaggy Dog, the studio's first live-action comedy feature. The film -- about a teenager transformed into a talking sheepdog -- wasn't much, but it grossed $9 million on a $1 million budget (while the more costly animated feature Sleeping Beauty was earning only $5 million on a $6 million budget). The same elements of domestic fantasy, special effects and easy laughs were cloned over and over for Disney hits from The Love Bug to Splash. Hollywood's future auteurs were watching too. When they grew up they adapted the Shaggy Dog comedy-fantasy into one of the '80s' most reliable genres. What is Michael J. Fox's time-traveling De Lorean in Back to the Future, after all, but a retooling of Fred MacMurray's airborne Model T in The Absent Minded Professor?