I understand you not liking Walt just because maybe you didn't like who he was as a person, but there a few things I think need correcting that contradict him being racist and sexist. Floyd Norman was one of the first African-American storymen/animators hired when he worked for the company on from Sleeping Beauty in the 1950s to Robin Hood in the 70s. Norman still writes columns today on his history of animation and has repeatedly expressed that Walt treated him equally as any other storyman at the studio. Also the fact that Walt was close friends with famous jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, who performed at Dixieland At Disneyland nights every night at the park in the 1960s.Beast_enchantment wrote:Because I believe him to have been a very unpleasant man. A clever man but like so many people who grew up in the early 20th century he had some very offensive tendencies i.e racism, homophobia and even sexism in some cases. Still I commend him for the creation of Disney.
There's also Tyrus Wong, a Chinese American artist whom Walt personally picked to be head background designer for Bambi. Not to mention Harriet Burns and Leota Toombs (who were some of the first Imagineers for WED/WDI) and worked on any projects that a man could do, female animators Bianca Majolie and Sylvia Moberly-Holland who worked as animators on Fantasia, Bambi, and some of the features in the early 1940s. Not to mention the fact that the Sherman Bros are also Jewish and Walt treated them as family. So I think all of these rumors of Walt being racist, sexist, anti-semitic himself are bogus for the most part. There might be a few racial stereotypes in his early films, but that doesn't sometimes reflect how a person might treat others.
Wow, that turned out to be a long rant. I'm not trying to rant at you directly beast_enchantment. I just like to try and rectify many misconceptions some people have about Walt and what he was like from all the biographies I've read of him.
Anyway a secret I never shared before...there's two actually I can think of. Before I came out of the closet, in middle school I had at least three crushes on my other guy friends that I never mentioned to anybody before. Also, as you can probably tell from my new banner, I'm big into researching Greek mythology (especially Apollo since he was openly bisexual and had many male relationships, was the god of light, music, poetry, and healing, and was the most compassionate and loving of the gods in his relationships and music), but I also consider some of it my belief as well, along with a mixture or Christianity. I was always afraid of telling people that because I know many highly religious people at my school would just tell me I'm going to hell for liking to think my belief is a mixture of the two.
(well, I haven't head his opinion on Bedknobs and Broomsticks or The Happiest Millionaire yet)
