The Walt Disney Family Album - Milt Kahl (1985)

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 fifth episode focuses on Disney animator Milt Kahl. He 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. Milt was known for being the best draftsman at the studio, perhaps in the entire industry.

Milt's big breakthrough was when Pinocchio shut down for six months due to the unappealing nature of the title character. The animators had relied on puppets for inspiration but Kahl made him more of a little boy who happened to be a puppet. As a reward, Milt became supervising animator of the Pinocchio character. Milt would become the character designer for most of Walt's films because he understood what was animatable. He often translated the concept art of Bill Peet and Ken Anderson into what would work for a feature film. This was a role he provided up through The Black Cauldron.

Because he was the studio's master draftsman, Kahl was usually assigned the princes as the human male is the hardest type of characters to animate. He also did a range of characters such as Tigger, Merlin, Shere Kahn, King Louis, supporting characters, leads, and more. Unlike today, animators had to be able to draw a variety of characters rather than specialize in only one. Milt had quite a range.

Milt was an outdoorsman and a rugged individualist. This part of his personality is why he's regarded as the Michelangelo of animation. Some found his high standards to be impossible to reach and his competitive nature to be off putting but he just wanted to do quality work. It was because of his high standard that he was one of the few people who could refuse Walt on orders. You can see Milt's influence in the animation of people who mentored under him like Don Bluth, Richard Williams, Glen Keane, Brad Bird, and others.

Milt's first wife was said to have killed herself in a suicide with a gun Milt had bought her for protection. It was a tragedy in his life he never accepted believing it must have been an accident.

Milt's final character was Madame Medusa in The Rescuers. He based the character on his second wife who was also Walt's niece. The divorced a year after the film was released. His third wife stayed with him the rest of his life.

In 1989 Milt Kahl was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio. Kahl passed away in 1987.

Original air date October 2, 1984

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