A Disney Version
Something completely different...
Richard Schickel's The Disney version came out in 1968, and I read it in 1980. I read it in one go - and then could not remember anything.
I know several people who will say "you didn't miss much, then..."
Like Neil Gabler's bio, it does not give a very positive picture of the man Walt Disney. At least Schickel had met Walt, as can bee seen on this picture, from an in-house publication of 1966...
This image shows Walt, in the last months of his life, aware of the importance of PR until the end.
If you want to read a good book on Walt Disney, read Mike Barrier's The Animated Man. Mike knows that Walt the man and his work are not to be contemplated separately!
As I write this, some of my friends are attending the NFFC sales show in Garden Grove. Although I hear that there has been better "stuff" many years ago, I still wish I could have been there, as I have found some nice things there at the previous shows...
Richard Schickel's The Disney version came out in 1968, and I read it in 1980. I read it in one go - and then could not remember anything.
I know several people who will say "you didn't miss much, then..."
Like Neil Gabler's bio, it does not give a very positive picture of the man Walt Disney. At least Schickel had met Walt, as can bee seen on this picture, from an in-house publication of 1966...
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If you want to read a good book on Walt Disney, read Mike Barrier's The Animated Man. Mike knows that Walt the man and his work are not to be contemplated separately!
As I write this, some of my friends are attending the NFFC sales show in Garden Grove. Although I hear that there has been better "stuff" many years ago, I still wish I could have been there, as I have found some nice things there at the previous shows...
Labels: Other Disney
posted by Hans Perk at 12:00 PM
2 Comments:
Actually, the best biography of Walt Disney is "Walt Disney and the American Way of Life" by Steven Watts. Blows both the idiotic Gabler book and the dry (and thankfully bare of his usual simplistic commentary) Barrier version out of the water.
Check it out.
To each his own!
For three years I have had Steven Watts' 1997 book "The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life", which was published by the University of Missouri Press. And in those three years, I have taken it up to read it several times and, well, it never "caught" me.
Barrier has so much interesting new material that his book is a joy to read, while Gabler just is working your way through the data (correct or incorrect). But Watts' book has few things not in previous publications and it re-heats these in a way that I just have a hard time concentrating on. The names of the chapters alone make me doubt if I want to read further.
If you are happy with it, good for you, and for Steven Watts. Of course everyone needs the book in his/her bookcase. But will they read it?
Hey, what's with the anonymous?
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