This Thursday I finally got the chance to start my Disney Exploration class Disney Heritage. Since it is one of the more popular ones it fills up pretty quickly with people trying to get into it. However,  I was happy that I was able to secure a spot especially because my friend Caroline and I were able to link up in the same class so we can go together. Disney Heritage meets every Thursday from 4-6pm at the Commons Classroom for 4 weeks (2-week break halfway through for Spring Break season).

For those of you doing the Disney College Program or curious about what the class intitles, the Disney Exploration series are 2-hour long classes that briefly cover topics in a variety of different industries within the Walt Disney Company. Disney Heritage is one of those classes and it explores the history of the Walt Disney World company and how everything today came to be. The greatest emphasis in this class is that Cast Members of the company never want to forget where they started from, their heritage, so it is incorporated into a lot of the things they do today.

The first class of this seminar explored Walt’s Early Years with his childhood, his move to California to start a business, and his relationship with his brother Roy.

• Marceline, MO 

Marceline, Missouri is the childhood home of Walt Disney and it’s said to have left an imprint on his imagination and be the source behind a lot of Walt’s great ideas. According to Walt himself, “More things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since or are likely to in the future.”

If you look closely at the Magic Kingdom, you can see that Main Street USA looks like an old-fashioned town at the turn of the century. Walt Disney was shaped by this town and in return, he never forgot about it. Today, it is the only place in the world that is allowed to fly the company flag outside official Disney properties. Also, the school was gifted artwork to hang up in the school by Walt himself of copyrighted characters that still reside in the school today. Click here to learn more about The Magic of Marceline from D23 magazine.

• Walts Dream

Ever since he was little, Walt Disney was always sketching: pictures of animals on the walls of his hometown barn, drawing cartoons in his school newspaper, and even when joining the Red Cross during World War I sketching on the side of hospital vehicles. It wasn’t long after getting back from the war that he and a friend decided to go into business together in the animation field. Laugh-O-Grams Studios was the first business that Walt Disney created with his friend Ube Iwerks. The company produced the Alice Comedies which combined live action and animation into cartoon shorts that were based on the story Alice in Wonderland. However, the company failed to provide enough income and soon went bankrupt. According to Walt later in life this failure was something that was important to him and he stated:

“I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something.”

With this, Walt packed his suitcase and set out to Hollywood where he would be able to find work in animation and to meet up with his brother Roy who was living in Los Angeles.

• Walt & Roy

Called one of the best collaborations of all time, Roy & Walt Disney were the dream team behind the creation of the Walt Disney company. Everyone knows about Walt Disney, but not a lot know about his brother Roy. Roy Disney was the business side of the company and was Walt’s older brother who he looked up to most of his life. Even though the brothers were super close, they couldn’t be any more different. Our presenter described it as oil & water and two different sides of a teeter-totter. Whereas Roy was the level-headed businessman of the two and saw things practically, Walt was the visionary with an idea and didn’t care what it cost to get it to how he saw it. Even though they didn’t always see eye to eye, Roy always looked out for Walt and got him the finances to create whatever he dreamed up

That was all we covered in the first session, stay tuned for the next class where we will learn all about the Walt Disney brothers first feet into Showbusiness with the history of Animation and Television!