The Walt Disney Family Album - Ward Kimball (1984)

The Walt Disney Family Album was a monthly series on the recently launched Disney Channel that showcased the people Walt Disney collaborated with on many of his creations. The development of this series was a perfect storm. The brand new Disney Channel needed new content, there were a bunch of young people recently starting out at the studio learning from these masters, and many of these people were working on the lot or retiring and wanted to share their stories with the world. At the time people had their entire careers at Walt Disney Productions. Not so today.

The series was produced on a shoestring budget. Pretty much the crew was sent out with cameras to interview various people and put these shows together. It was a pet project of former Disney CEO Card Walker who'd been at the studio since the 1938 when he started as a mail clerk and personally knew all of these people and their important contributions to the studio. Walker cared very much about history and understood the importance of the Walt Disney legacy being preserved.

Walt's friend and Disney Legend Buddy Ebsen narrates the series. He starred in several Walt Disney films including Davy Crockett and The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. He was also the first live action reference model for what became audioanimatronics. The theme song was written by future film score composer John Debney. His father had been a producer on the lot for decades and John started out his music career with Disney. The opening title was put together by John Lasseter in one of his final projects for Walt Disney Feature Animation. He was trying to get computer animation in at Walt Disney Productions and was eventually fired for he. He would eventually become one of the driving forces behind Pixar and would return to head Walt Disney Feature Animation in 2006.

In the long run, the Walt Disney Family Album proved to be a tremendous historical record as many of these people passed away shortly after being interviewed. There were plans to continue this series but when the Eisner regime took over, they shut it down because it was a Card Walker project. It's a great tragedy because who's stories never got to be told because they were robbed of this opportunity...There needs to be a revival of this series to chronicle the careers of the people at Disney in the 80's and 90's as they're retiring and could be gone in the coming decades.

The Walt Disney Family Album aired on the Disney Channel in reruns off and on up through the early 2000's when it aired on Vault Disney. It hasn't been seen since but sometimes interviews have been excerpted in other documentaries.

This second episode focuses on Disney animator and imagineer Ward Kimball. Kimball was one of Walt's legendary Nine Old Men. Most of the Nine started with the studio in 1934/35 at the height of the Great Depression. These became the core group of animators Walt would rely on from the 1940's on. Each one specialized in a different type of animation performance. Ward was known for his zany comedy sequences and gags. One of his more well known gags is when the Dwarfs' noses pop over the bed in Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs.

After his animation scene in Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs was cut, the infamous Soup Sequence, Walt made Ward the lead animator on a main character in the next film, Pinocchio. That character was Jiminy Cricket. Some of Ward's other famous performances include the crows in Dumbo, the title song in the Three Caballeros, Pecos Bill, the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, the Indians in Peter Pan, the mice in Cinderella, and many others.

Like all of the Nine Old Men, Ward did scenes in Song of the South as well and, like most of the Nine, he animated Professor Ludwig von Drake (one of the few characters most of the Nine had a hand in.) Interestingly, many of Ward's scenes are the ones the woke most frequently target today. In his day, Ward was regarded as being a radical liberal yet that term didn't mean then what it means today.

Ward was also the leader of a jazz band comprised of Disney artists, the Fire House Five Plus Two. They frequently played at studio events and functions but were a legitimate popular mainstream band for over two decades. Often Ward would sleep in his office all week then quickly bang out his animation on Fridays, much to the resentment of his fellow artists. Ward was talented enough that his animation always came out great as he burned the candle at both ends. He was the only person Walt Disney ever called a genius but they could have a love/hate relationship at times.

Ward was also an expert on transportation history. In this, he was a kindred spirit with Walt Disney in having a foot in the past and a foot in the future. Ward and his wife, Betty, were the first private citizen to own a real working locomotive engine and railroad in their backyard. They called it the Grizzly Flats Railroad. (In the 2000's, some of this railroad was bought and incorporated into the railroad on John Lasseter's property.) They also owned numerous other forms of antique transportation vehicles. Ward sometimes rented his machines out to the studio for the live action films, much to the disgust of Walt Disney.

In the 1950's, Walt put Ward in charge of a series of films about Man in Space that aired on the Disneyland TV series. It was because of these films NASA was able to get the momentum to launch the space program and eventually go to the moon. Ward was set to direct Babes in Toyland when a studio conflict had him removed from the picture.

After Walt passed away, Ward kicked around the studio for a few years before retiring in the early 1970's. It was no fun for him anymore and he'd made too many enemies. Always the practical joker, it was Ward who originated the urban legend that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen. This persistent rumor has stuck to this day.

Ward was asked to return to the studio to work with the imagineers on a History of Transportation attraction for the under construction EPCOT Center. Both his knowledge of the history and his skill as a gag man provided some humorous scenes in the ride.

In 1989 Ward Kimball was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio. Ward passed away in 2002.

Original air date July 1, 1984

Posted for historical purposes. This channel is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company.