January 5, 2011

Wednesday 5~~~~ This morning we drove to "The Walt Disney Family Museum". In the Walt Disney Family Museum the visitors will move through ten permanent galleries, arranged in chronological order, recounting the history of Walt Disney's life and career. It begins with his childhood, youth and early adulthood and his momentous discovery of animated cartoons. In 1923 Walt teams up with his brother Roy from silent movies to sound and best of all, the sensational success of Mickey Mouse and Walt's meeting and marriage to Lillian Bounds. In the 1930s Walt was world famous with his art work and animation and the arrival of his two daughters Diane and Sharon. Having redefined the the art of animation, Walt dares to produce a feature length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The world wide success of Snow White leads to a new studio in Burbank and to even more features, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi. The early 1940s bring new crises. Photos and union flyers from the 1941 Disney animators' strike, and samples of Disney propaganda and training films for World War ll are on display there, along with artifacts of Dumbo and Walt's Latin American-themed films. With the end of the war, Walt and Roy venture into live action production with an underwater camera used for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the 50s and 60s Walt branches out into the medium of television and creates an innovative theme park called "Disneyland". We really enjoyed looking at the detailed miniature of the park, everything is in the miniature. I have been to Disneyland twice and I saw a lot of things on the miniature that I never saw on either visit. Walt's death 1966 shocks and saddens the world, but his legacy continues to inspire other generations. They have the telegrams from all over the world and all the famous cartoonists sent their drawings of Mickey Mouse reacting to Walt's death with pictures of Mickey in different poses with tears and sadness on his face. Walt drew a lot of versions of Mickey over the years and he added Donald Duck when the time was ready for a change. This is a real neat place to visit and it is 3 stories high. You gradually walk from gallery to gallery( Ten gallery's) and you can look down and see where you were before, no steps to climb and there are seats in some area to sit and rest on. We again spent over 4 hours enjoying all the drawings and work of Walt Disney's lifetime. What a busy day and a lot of standing and walking, from here we drove home and I fixed us chicken fettuccine for dinner and we watched TV.