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🗓️ 11 October 2022
⏱️ 9 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hello, this is the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me, Josephine |
0:10.6 | McDermott. This week we're bringing you moments in history where workers have demanded |
0:15.8 | better rights. This programme is about the Walt Disney Animators' strike in Hollywood |
0:21.2 | in 1941. Disney's top cartoonist, Art Babbitt, led the fight for better pay and was interviewed |
0:28.1 | about it by the BBC in 1984. It was a dispute that would put him on a collision course with |
0:34.5 | one of the most famous men of the 20th century and change the animation industry. |
0:40.5 | Walt Disney was from a poor Midwestern family. He created Mickey Mouse in 1923, the character |
0:50.5 | that would change his life, and he built up his company with his brother Roy. In 1941, |
0:58.1 | Art Babbitt was Disney's top animator. He created Goofy and drew the queen in slow |
1:04.4 | white. Disney was revered at the studio. He liked to think of his firm as one big family |
1:11.4 | and the artists as his boys. It was a time when there was a national paranoia about communism |
1:19.0 | and the threat it posed to American law and order. Babbitt described a conversation he had |
1:24.5 | with Disney. Disney was an America firster. This is 150% American. You know, you cannot be |
1:33.8 | more patriotic and he found a communist under every bush. He called me in his office one |
1:39.7 | day and he says, Art, you know, my father was a socialist. I said, well, that's fine. |
1:47.9 | So is Mussolini and so is Hitler. In 1937, Disney released the first full-length animated |
1:55.0 | feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was a huge commercial success. It had |
2:01.8 | taken more than 750 artists three years to make. But the financial rewards of the film did |
2:08.6 | not make their way to all the workers. Tensions built, particularly among those artists who |
2:14.3 | were not big names, but were essential in the painstaking work where long hours were |
2:19.4 | required tracing and painting on celluloid sheets. Babbitt, who was one of Disney's highest-paid |
2:26.4 | employees, saw the work his assistant did and wanted him to have more money. I had tried |
... |
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