J On The Spectrum - Disney's 100th Anniversary - Loss of Focus and Expansion GUEST STAR: Willie Ito

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.

By 1955, there would come not only a radically different Disney, but a radically different America. In the post war era, Americans had a bunch of disposable income that they could blow on a new thing from Disney, a monument to Disney, namely Disneyland. They could spend to see a new kind of Disney movie in theaters, namely one made in live action instead of animation. They now had television, which was taking the Western world by storm, so they could now watch Disney shows in their own living rooms, and with the post war optimism, Disney promised a bright future as seen from a mid-century perspective. Yet the animated films still remained, and to stand out from the competition, Disney animation would now have to provide an experience consumers could not get in their own homes. Lady and the Tramp would be the first animated feature in CinemaScope, or in layman's terms, WIDESCREEN!

CinemaScope was a widescreen process invented by 20th Century Fox for a movie called The Robe, and it proved to be so successful that other movies and other studios wanted to shoot in CinemaScope as well, so Fox began licensing CinemaScope out to other studios, Disney included. As our special guest star Willie Ito recalls, the animation paper was rather large to accommodate the new widescreen format, 16 field paper to be precise.

Both Lady and the Tramp and Disneyland Main Street U.S.A. have the same time and place setting, a turn of the century Midwest American town where the gas lamp is giving way to the electric lamp and the horse cart is giving way to the automobile. This was an era and place Walt Disney fondly remembered from when he was growing up in the small town of Marceline, MO. He wanted to provide that same experience for future Americans because going forward, America was only gonna expand and not be what it once was. Even the youth was starting to rise up. They were starting to own cars, to the dismay of their own parents, they were dancing to a new kind of music, rock and roll, and they were also beginning to feel disconnected from their own parents who fought the war for them to be free in a post war America, a reality that was captured well in the 1955 classic, Rebel Without a Cause starring James Dean.

By the time Disney started going onto television to talk about Disneyland and stuff, they pretty much stated in the first episode of the Disney show that Sleeping Beauty was going to be the next movie in production, and that the epicenter of Disneyland would be Sleeping Beauty's castle, which is an absolute monument to this very day. Though for Sleeping Beauty, CinemaScope wasn't enough, Walt Disney had to go bigger.

Next week, Disney makes the first animated feature in Super Technirama 70 or, umm... let's just say he made the first animated feature in IMAX.