Disney Tidbits

[crashbunny]

I know that Disney presents Winsor McCay Awards to important Disney personalities, but I cannot find any info as to the connection to Disney. Did he have an influence on Uncle Walt? Anyone know?

The awards are sponsored by Disney not given out by Disney - they are part of the ANNIE awards ( animation awards)

Jiminy I found this on IMDB:

Like many pioneers, the work of 'Winsor McCay' has been largely superseded by successors such as Walt Disney and Max Fleischer but he more than earns a place in film history for being the American cinema's first great cartoon animator. He started out as a newspaper cartoonist, achieving a national reputation for his strips 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' and 'Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend'. Inspired by his son's flick-books, he spent four years and produced four thousand individual drawings in making his first animated cartoon 'Little Nemo', completing it in 1911. But his biggest cartoon success was 'Gertie the Dinosaur' (1913), which was the centrepiece of a vaudeville act in which the live McCay would interact with his cartoon character. For this, he single-handedly produced ten thousand individual drawings, laboriously re-drawing the background every time. It is often wrongly cited as the first animated cartoon, but it was certainly the first successful one, and influenced dozens of imitators. His 1918 production 'The Sinking of the Lusitania' was even more ambitious: comprising 25,000 drawings, it was the first feature-length American cartoon, and the second one made anywhere. He retired from film-making in the 1920s, but would subsequently describe himself as "the creator of animated cartoons". This honour, strictly speaking, belongs to the Frenchman Emile Cohl - but McCay was certainly the first to bring them to a wide audience.

[tiggerguy]

September 19

Snow White was the first film ever to have a complete merchandising campaign ready to roll on the day the movie opened. Movie fans were able to purchase Snow White mementos from Sears and Woolworth's

[tiggerguy]

Disneys "Alice" series were live-action films combined with animation that placed a young girl within a cartoon world.

[tiggerguy]

Fantasia premiered at the Broadway Theater in New York in 1940 ... the same theater previously known as the Colony, where Steamboat Willie had opened.

[tiggerguy]

The five-millionth Mickey Mouse watch was sold in 1949.

[tiggerguy]

In July 1953, Walt Disney hired the Stanford Research Institute to scout a location in Southern California for Disneyland. By August a site in Anaheim had been found.

[TrendyMagic]

The five-millionth Mickey Mouse watch was sold in 1949.

Do you by chance know how many have been sold as of today oh great one of the facts?

[tiggerguy]

Do you by chance know how many have been sold as of today oh great one of the facts?

In my best Carl Sagan voice "Billions and billions"

[tiggerguy]

Walt Disney was selected to be in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1960 Winter Olympics (held in Squaw Valley, California).

[tiggerguy]

In 1961, the monorail track was expanded in Disneyland to connect the park with the Disneyland Hotel.

[tiggerguy]

. In its earliest stages of planning, Disney World was regarded as a top-secret project and was given code names like Project Winter and Project X.

[tiggerguy]

The United States Government, through the Library of Congress, has each year since 1989 named 25 films it deems as "culturally, historically, or esthetically important." So far, 5 Disney films (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Steamboat Willie, and Beauty and the Beast) have been added.

[tiggerguy]

Walt Disney grew his famous mustache at age 25.

[tiggerguy]

Actress Jodie Foster made her motion picture debut in Disney's
1972 film, Napoleon and Samantha.

[tiggerguy]

Artist Floyd Gottfredson drew the Mickey Mouse comic strip for 45 years. He retired in 1975.