Sometimes it feels like it’s Disney‘s world and we’re just living in it. From movies and streaming to theme parks, the so-called House of Mouse has dominated the entertainment industry for decades. Well, 10 of them to be exact, as you can’t have failed to miss the fact that 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of The Walt Disney Company. Watch any Disney film released during this calendar year and it will begin with the specially-created “Disney 100” logo.
Disney has been making cinema a more magical place (or a more monopolized one, depending on your point of view) for so long now, it’s easy to imagine the studio was just created “once upon a time,” like many of the fairy tales Disney is so fond of adapting. And yet this fairy tale does actually have a very specific origins story. You may think that it begins with a monochrome mouse whistling cheerfully on a boat, but actually our story begins with two brothers…
Walt Disney made cinema history by creating the company 100 years ago
Simply put, The Walt Disney Company was founded on Oct. 16, 1923. On the surface it seems somewhat ironic that the king of our childhoods was born out of spooky season, but when you remember it’s been terrifying young ‘uns from the moment the Evil Queen transformed into a hideous hag in 1933’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — Disney’s mythical first full animated feature — onward, it starts to make more sense.
10 years before Snow White foolishly accepted a snack from a suspicious stranger, though, a 22-year-old Walt teamed up with his brother, businessman Roy O. Disney, to kickstart what was initially called Disney Brothers Studio — it morphed into Walt Disney Studio in 1926 and then finally The Walt Disney Company in 1986. In 1927, Walt Disney finally made his first fully animated films, producing 26 shorts starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit until 1928. Once he realized that Universal Pictures retained IP rights to Oswald, Disney elected to create a new character to be the face of his and Roy’s company — Mortimer Mouse. Well, that was until Walt’s wife thankfully urged him to go with the name Mickey instead, and the rest is cinema history.
Fast forward 100 years, and the House That Mortimer Mickey Built is in ruder health than ever. Here’s to the next century.