As the 2023 Super Bowl television commercial for the Walt Disney Company's centennial anniversary played on 12 February, emotions soared. The advert showed children dressed up as princesses, waving lightsabers and hugging Mickey Mouse mascots. With its vast array of cartoon characters, classic movies and superhero franchises, the Walt Disney Company has proven to have extraordinarily broad appeal. On its centenary, it's hard to imagine a world without Disney – yet the history of the media giant is far more complicated than you might imagine.
“It was all started by a mouse,” Walt Disney explained in the 1950s, attributing the colossal success of Walt Disney Studios to one simple cartoon character: Mickey Mouse, first drawn in the late 1920s. Before creating that game-changing mouse, the young Disney, son of a businessman and farmer, had worked as a Red Cross driver in France, before trying his hand at animation for a range of Midwest companies. Eager for success, Disney helped set up the Laugh-OGram studio in Kansas City and got paid $500 for a dentistry cartoon, (1922). He also began work on the , an innovative series that combined cartoon with live action. When the studio financially collapsed, a bankrupt yet determined Disney, still only 21 years old, headed to California to begin his business ventures anew.
