The Disney Family Legacy w/ Roy P. Disney | Destination D23 A Journey Around the Worlds of Disney

First of all, I'm honored and humbled to be here. Thank you very much.

So let's go back in time before this. By the way, my grandfather was the shorter one there. Thank you very much. The fact was that Elias Disney, Walt's father's father, was a loving man but an extraordinarily tough man. And the reality was that in 1916, 17, 18, all four of the boys, Roy basically ran, and Walt went out on his own. Of course, he had a very unformed but obsessive vision in his head, and he didn't know how to accomplish it. So he went out first in Kansas City and then, partly through the persuasion of Roy, to Hollywood where the action was, but struck out repeatedly. He did things like standing on the side of a set hoping to be cast as an extra, if you can imagine that. He tried carpentry. He tried loading camera. He tried everything he could do and failed repeatedly. And then he went with the help of his uncle Robert, Elias's younger brother who lived in Hollywood. They just dedicated this house, by the way, in Kingsville, and my cousin Joanne restored it. He set up the garage. It's an animation studio essentially, and he created products like the Alice Comedies. But then Hollywood is in business, and he lost everything. He lost his artist, which he finally got back. Anybody else?

But every morning he would go to his brother, who had done World War I and gotten tuberculosis through the war and was convalescing at that point at the center of the hospital. And he would go to him every night. I remember it, I was 8 years old, and would tell Roy the story of, you know, how he lost. And his brother was a no-nonsense bank anchor from Kansas City, and I mean no-nonsense. And the reality was that Roy finally checked himself out of the hospital against his brother's advice or his doctor's advice, and the two of them went into business, the Disney Brothers.

So if you know, half the company is built on foreign business, and in those days it was marketing and product that we were producing. And remember, we're the first character, so we also worked with that. But he would go to Europe every other year. The distributors in every company, he knew their families, he knew their kids' birthdays. And every other year he would fly them to his house, which is the house I live in, and the families. And that's what I grew up with as a kid. And so he built the company until World War II on that, and then of course World War II. So he had to start over again. But just to give you an idea of one of the famous trips he did, in 1946 he flew to London to meet P.L. Travers in London to start negotiating Mary Poppins, which is crazy to think that it was in production in 1964 and we still didn't have a contract. But he was a great man. I'm just saying, I'm not saying that he wasn't a good negotiator, but yeah, he traveled the world. And my dad, who had access to cameras at 3 years old, photographed a great deal of it. So, I'm lucky to have some of his photos.

Okay. That's enough. And secondly, I will tell you that my dad had access to every toy we ever made and broke them all. So, he and I have never quite worked that out, but that's your grandfather holding the hand of your father. Yep. I think that's Lyric Avenue if I'm correct. Yes. And it's really remarkable that we have all this stuff. I still have some of his stuff, but not a whole lot.

Correct. We're all on your part. They used to call that Irish twins or I don't know if I can say that. I don't know how much my brother would say about that. But anyway, this photo of my dad and my younger sister and younger brother is probably one of my favorite Disney moments of all time just because it is the classical family Disney moment. That was my mother in the Dumbo, my grandmother in the Dumbo ride. She was fearless. She was the first person to sit on Space Mountain at 80 years old. She was the first person to sit on the PeopleMover, the Rocket Rods ride if you remember that. This, there's my grandmother on the left-hand side of the bench, the Madam at Disneyland. They don't do that anymore. And this is my aunt who was a tour guide. And that's the outfit they made.

Yes. And by the way, this is how I had to dress because we had to represent. And I have a great story about that. When we were kids back in the day, my parents let us just free-range the park. And they said, 'I want you back at City Hall at 12:30, and if you can't make it to City Hall, ask a security guard and they will help you.' So, I did one day just to find out how that worked. I'm not saying I didn't know how to get to City Hall, but I am saying I thought it was cool to talk to a security guard. And the first thing he said to me is, 'What's your name?' And I of course said Disney. And he of course said, 'Oh, yeah.' And then you said Roy Disney, that made it even worse. Yeah. Okay.

So, I spent more time in Walt's outer office when I would go visit my grandfather. My grandfather was an essentially so boring outer office. But Walt had the outer office that wouldn't quit. It had every cabin in the morning. It had all new toys in it. And we would sit out in that other office for hours. But Walt slept two hours. He never stopped. Never stopped. But I do have one special moment that I can remember so clearly. When I was probably about 7 years old, we used to have a ride at the park, and that's not a ride, it's a show. But a guy on the jet was sponsored by Helicopter.

Yeah. So, this was the loudest, silkiest ride we ever did, as you can see. But Walt picked me out of the crowd that day and he had two chairs set up on top of this little one-story control tower that they had around that little circle. And he put the chairs up there and he and I sat up there and watched this event. And I, the king of the world, I felt like the most important person on earth. And he had a way of doing that to every single child we ever ran into at that park. God bless him.

October 23rd, 1971. And was anybody there? Congratulations. That's great. Cuz I'm only 39. So, yeah, you know, it swapped land to Florida. And I grew up in my childhood, we drove from California to Key West, and one of my dad's jobs was to reconnoiter the state of Florida in 1966 just to see what the entertainment industry in the state looked like. And it was alligator farms, Busch Gardens, Cypress Gardens, and that was it. And some cats at the Hemingway House. But in any event, when we drove up to this park in the week before it opened, every tree that you see on the property was still in a box. They had not even planted the trees. The rooms of the Contemporary were still being plugged in by frames. And you asked, why didn't we get it perfect before we opened it? And I thought to myself, this thing kind of had a momentum and it kind of had to open. So, and that said, if you see the picture of my grandfather, who never gave a public speech, speaking, standing next to Mickey and Lily and my grandmother, they had Meredith Wilson conducted a 1,076-piece marching band that came. We were standing on the top of the train station. They came out from underneath us. They went around the main street circle and they went up, I think, six wide, and they went up Main Street and up to the castle. And at that point they were still coming out from underneath the train station. It's one of the most profound moments in my life.