So do the oprhans, Goofy, and Horace!

I am the forum's resident non-anime animation nerd, obviously:

Disney's employee stratification system was basically a system of patronage and rewards of fealty to Walt himself. Those who remained "loyal" were rewarded with access to a private lunchroom and choice of assistants, as well as more freedom to dink around on Walt's dollar.

The remake of "Orphan's Benefit" coincided with the strike, wherein scab labor from various other studios was hustled in and various projects were hamfistedly wedged into production to prove the point that the studio was going to continue production with or without Babbitt and his union supporters. This cartoon involved literally TRACING a previous cartoon, just to keep the scab labor occupied.

Eventually, Walt had a very well suppressed nervous breakdown during the strike, during which time he actually hired one of Capone's ex-goons to muscle the ringleaders and threaten them to come back to work. The cartoonists were driven out to the desert and threatened at gunpoint to end the strike. When they got back, they decided that it was just bluff, and kept striking. Walt snapped and Roy had him shipped off to South America to publicize the Three Caballeros pictures, during which time Roy solved the damn strike in less than 48 hours.

When he returned, Walt was a crushed man who moped around for a decade, hanging out with Ronald Reagan and finally he started planning Disneyland, at which point he mentally checked out of the animation business altogether. This is why Disneyland is as Freudian as it is.

I knew he was an iron-fisted old curmudgeon, but dang.

Also explains his penchant for shorts about happy and harmoniously productive workers (although I guess Warner Bros. were into those for a while as well).

That's not even going in to Walt's crazy revenge schemes that sprang up during the McCarthy witch hunts. The guy basically threw some of the main instigators of the original strike to the wolves by sicking McCarthy and his goons on them.

That reminds me: I have to check to see if anyone's uploaded that documentary about all this before...

Youse mugs are gonna draw da duck and da mouse for Disney, see! Or else I'm gonna plug ya! Nyahh!

Oh man, the McCarthy moments were pretty classic. He was one of the most deeply evil men in history, AND YET I don't think of him as a villain. The similarities in personal life between Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney are quite remarkable: World War I vets who fancied themselves "artists" yet required other, more talented people to do their work for them, both of them deeply autocratic and increasingly grandiose as the years went by.