Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Gabler Neal
Title : Walt Disney The triumph of the american imagination
Year : 2006

Link download : Gabler_Neal_-_Walt_Disney_The_triumph_of_the_american_imagination.zip

Introduction. He was frozen. At least that was the rumor that emerged shortly after his death and quickly became legend: Walt Disney had been cryogenically preserved, hibernating like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, to await the day when science could revive him and cure his disease. Though it is impossible to determine exactly, the source of the rumor may have been a tabloid named National Spotlite, whose correspondent claimed to have sneaked into St. Joseph’s Hospital where Disney had expired, disguised himself as an orderly, picked the lock on a storage room door, and spotted Disney suspended in a metal cylinder. The story also surfaced in 1969 in a French publication, Ici Paris, which said it based its report on individuals close to Disney, and it was repeated in The National Tattler, an American scandal sheet, which added that Disney had instructed doctors to thaw him in 1975. Yet another supermarket tabloid, Midnight, under the headline “Walt Disney Is Being Kept Alive in Deep Freeze,” quoted both a studio librarian who remembered Disney accumulating a vast file of filmed material on cryogenics and an acquaintance of Disney’s who said that the producer was “obsessed” with these movies. A writer for The Mickey Mouse Club television show, produced under Disney auspices, seemed to corroborate the librarian’s recollection by recalling that Disney had once asked him about cryogenics and that the writer had then had the studio library staff research the subject. Ward Kimball, a puckish animator at the studio, took some pride in keeping the rumor afloat. And Disney himself may have lent it credence. According to one account, just weeks after his death studio department heads were invited to a screening room with nameplates on the seats, then watched a film of Disney sitting at his desk and eerily pointing to and addressing each of them on future plans. He concluded by smiling knowingly and saying that he would be seeing them soon. In truth, Disney’s final destination was fire, not ice; he had been cremated and his ashes interred in a mausoleum in a remote corner of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, not far from his studio. But the persistence of the rumor, however outlandish, testified not only to the identification of Disney with futuristic technology late in his life but to a public unwillingness to let go of him, even to the point of mythologizing him as an immortal who could not be felled by natural forces. ...