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 …
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 y..
