Two Brothers, One Garage, and the Birth of Disney
On October 16, 1923, Walt and Roy Disney founded a tiny cartoon studio in Los Angeles — the company that would become the most famous entertainment empire on earth.
In the summer of 1923, a twenty-one-year-old from Kansas City stepped off a train in Los Angeles with almost nothing to his name. His cartoon studio back home had gone bankrupt. He had one unfinished film in his suitcase — a strange little reel combining a live-action girl with animated characters — and a brother in California recovering from tuberculosis who believed in him anyway.
The young man's name was Walt Disney. His brother was Roy. And on October 16, 1923, together they founded a tiny company that would grow into the most famous entertainment empire on earth.
The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio began about as humbly as a business can begin: in their uncle Robert's garage. Walt was the dreamer, the artist who had been drawing since childhood and had taught himself animation by devouring every book and film he could find. Roy, eight years older, was the steady one — the numbers man who would keep his brother's flights of fancy tethered to something resembling a budget. It was a partnership of opposites, and it worked.
What made the whole thing possible was a stroke of luck that arrived just as Walt did. A New York film distributor named Margaret Winkler had seen Walt's unfinished pilot, "Alice's Wonderland," about a little girl named Alice — played by four-year-old Virginia Davis — who tumbles into a cartoon world. Winkler liked it enough to offer the brothers a contract: $1,500 to produce a series of "Alice Comedies" mixing live action and animation. It wasn't much money, but it was a start — a real order from a real distributor, signed before the studio even had a proper roof.
So on October 16, 1923, the Disney brothers made it official. From the garage they graduated to the back of a real estate office on Kingswell Avenue, where Walt drew, Roy kept the books, and the Alice films trickled out to theaters. Nobody involved could have guessed what the little studio would become — though Walt, characteristically, probably did.
The road from there is the stuff of legend, with plenty of near-disasters along the way. The Alice series ran its course by 1927. Walt created a new star, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — then lost the rights to him in a brutal contract dispute in 1928, along with most of his animators. Broke and betrayed, he sketched a mouse on a train ride home. That mouse, Mickey, debuted in "Steamboat Willie" later that year, the first cartoon with synchronized sound, and changed everything.
What followed reads like a highlight reel of the twentieth century: the Silly Symphonies, Donald Duck, and then the gamble of all gambles — "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, the first full-length animated feature, which the industry had sneeringly called "Disney's Folly" right up until it became one of the biggest hits in movie history. Then came the theme parks, the television, the acquisitions — Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars — until the garage startup became a global colossus.
On October 16, 2023, the company celebrated its 100th anniversary — a century to the day after two brothers hung out their shingle. Every empire has a founding date, and this one's is worth remembering: not the day of some grand opening, but the day two young men with one contract and no money decided to bet on each other.
Photo: Walt Disney, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons) — a 1924 poster for the Alice Comedies short "Alice in the Jungle," the series that launched the studio.
