Holding Their Banner High

Michael Eisner says he was raised in Manhattan, but he must have meant on Mars. What earthling could claim that he never saw a Disney movie until his mid-20s?

From 1937, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered, until, say, the mid-'60s, Walt's entertainment edifice was a unique institution -- a cathedral of popular culture whose saints were mice and ducks, virgin princesses and lurking sprites, little boys made of wood and little girls lost in wonderland. Virtually every child attended this secular church, took fear and comfort from its doctrines, and finally outgrew it. The achievement of the Walt...