Question

what is the history of "The Walt Disney Company."

Answer 1

The history of "The Walt Disney Company."

The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney, is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California.On October 16, 1923, Walt Disney and his brother Roy found the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Hollywood, California. The studio, now known as the Walt Disney Company, has had an oversized impact on the entertainment industry and is now one of the largest media companies in the world. Walt Disney arrived in California in the summer of 1923 with a lot of hopes but little else. He had made a cartoon in Kansas City about a little girl in a cartoon world, called Alice’s Wonderland, and he decided that he could use it as his “pilot” film to sell a series of these “Alice Comedies” to a distributor. Soon after arriving in California, he was successful. Walt Disney made his Alice Comedies for four years, but in 1927, he decided to move instead to an all-cartoon series.To star in this new series, he created a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Within a year, Walt made 26 of these Oswald cartoons, but when he tried to get some additional money from his distributor for a second year of the cartoons, he found out that the distributor had gone behind his back and signed up almost all of his animators, hoping to make the Oswald cartoons in his own studio for less money without Walt Disney.

Throughout the 1930s the company, renamed Walt Disney Productions in 1929, produced cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse and his regular supporting players Donald Duck, Pluto, and Goofy, as well as the Silly Symphonies series—semiabstract cartoons featuring animation set to classical music or to the music of Carl Stalling, the brilliant musician who scored many of the best Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Disney launched into the production of live-action features and television programs. The Studio lot was subsequently expanded during the 1950s, to include sound stages and production craft facilities.

Disney suffered a major setback in 1941 when the studio’s animators went on strike for three months. Disney took the action personally, and many of the studio’s top animators were compelled to resign. The enthusiastic mood within the studio had been permanently dampened, and the studio produced little on the level of Pinocchio or Dumbo for the next decade, concentrating instead on short cartoons, nature documentaries, and features that combined live action and animation such as The Three Caballeros (1945) and Song of the South (1946)..

Since the 1980s, Disney has expanded its influence over a wider market, beginning with the debut of the Disney Channel on cable TV. The company established several subdivisions and studios, such as Touchstone Pictures, to produce films outside its standard family-oriented fare and gain an even broader footing in the entertainment industry. Eisner and executive partner Frank Wells proved to be a successful team to lead Disney into the new century.

In 2005, Bob Iger took over the CEO role from Eisner. In 2006, Disney purchased Pixar as it began to focus on digital animation. Pixar had previously produced film hits such as "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," and "The Incredibles." Under the Disney umbrella, Pixar Animation Studios has continued earning prestigious awards for movies like "Moana" and "Coco."

In 2009, Iger steered the company's focus back to more family-oriented products as it sold Miramax Studios and downsized Touchstone Pictures. Roy Disney, the last member of the Disney family active in the company, died on December 16, 2009.

In 2012, Disney entered into an agreement with Netflix to bring all of the studio’s films exclusively to Netflix, including Disney’s live-action films and Pixar’s franchises. The new partnership served as a reliable cash stream for Disney, bringing in, by Analyst estimates, approximately $325 million for the right to stream its content.

At the end of 2017, Disney announced it would acquire the majority of 21st Century Fox's assets including its movie studio, TV production company, cable channels and regional sports networks. If approved, the deal would give Disney the scale and content to develop its own streaming service by 2019, when its contract with Netflix expired.

Since it was initially founded, the Walt Disney Company has maintained a high level of appeal for fans that span multiple generations. Its domestic and international success seems to correlate with its ability to adhere to its vision and to promote its core values through its employees and all of its products.

The Walt Disney Company has locations across the globe, but they use a central casting center to ensure that all employees receive clear and consistent information about the Disney culture and values. The gaps in the research are global in nature. While much research has been done on Disney’s domestic culture in the United States, not much has been published on Disney’s efforts to ensure that their organizational culture and values are reinforced internationally.