The Walt Disney Family Album - Marc Davis (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 sixteenth episode focuses on Disney animator Marc Davis. He was Walt's renaissance man and one of his 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. Davis was known as "the ladies man" for many of his most memorable animation performances were women.

As a boy, Davis' family moved around a lot and he had attended 26 different schools before reaching high school. Since he was always the new kid, he was often bullied but soon learned he could make friends with his drawings. After studying art at three different colleges, Davis was hired at the Walt Disney Studios for his skill at drawing animals. Walt knew he'd need him for Bambi. However, because Marc was so skilled at drawing humans, he soon found himself cast more frequently on those roles.

On Cinderella he and Eric Larson did most of the scenes of the title character where they clashed on the approach. Larson wanted her to be more average back home while Davis saw her as more of a sophisticated woman. You can see the different approaches in the final film. Some of Marc's most memorable performances include the animated characters of Song of the South, Alice, Tinkerbell, Cruella deVille, and on Sleeping Beauty he was the lead on both Maleficent and Princess Aurora. The film took so long to make that he was able to do both.

After 101 Dalmatians, Marc developed an animated feature with Ken Anderson based on a property Walt had long had in development, Chanticleer & Reynard. The story was about a foolish rooster who believed his crowing made the sun rise while the fox would manipulate the other residents of the barnyard against him. When it came time to make the film, the money people would only allow Walt to make one film at a time and the choice came between The Sword in the Stone and Chanticleer & Reynard. The money people rejected Marc's film and Walt moved him over to Imagineering.

Known as a lifelong bachelor, Davis met his wife Alice when he was a professor at Chouinard Art Institute in 1947. Years later, Davis approached her to create a human reference skirt of Briar Rose in Sleeping Beauty that would do the things he needed and the two became a couple and got married. Alice eventually joined her at Disney and would cloth many of the characters he designed to attractions.

At WED, Marc added gags to the Jungle Cruise and Mine Train attractions. He also designed characters for the 1964-65 World's Fair attractions, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion, The Country Bear Jamboree, America Sings, and others. One of his unproduced projects was for Walt Disney World's Frontierland in the vein of Pirates of the Caribbean but about America's Wild West called Western River Expedition.

In 1989 Marc Davis was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio. Davis passed away in 2000. Alice was named a Disney Legend herself in 2004 and passed away in 2022. They're the only married couple named Disney Legends.

Original air date October 4, 1985

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