The Walt Disney Family Album - Eric Larson (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 eighth episode focuses on Disney animator Eric Larson. He was Walt Disney's Keeper of the Flame. Larson 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. Eric was known for his sincerity in character personality sequences and we have him to thank for passing the touch on to the next generation.

What Eric is known for is the sincerity in his animated characters. Although he was often cast on different animal characters, he always gave them human personality traits so that the audience could relate to him. Some of his more memorable characters are Figaro and Cleo, Thumper and Friend Owl, the Aracuan Bird, Little Toot, Peter from Peter & the Wolf, the Caterpillar and Queen of Hearts, Peg, Merlin and Archimedes, Bagheera, and many others.

In 1973 it was realized that a new generation of artists would need to be trained soon or the knowledge discovered at the Walt Disney Studios would die and Eric was put in charge of this training program. A low point for Eric was when he'd developed the Small One to be a featurette to train the young animation staff on and it was taken away from him without a word and given to Don Bluth.

After his wife, Gertrude, passed away in 1975, it was the animation training students at the studio that almost became like his family. Passing the flame on to the next generation is what he's most remembered for today. You get to see some of his students here. Among them are future director Robert Minkoff who'd go on to do the Lion King, Stewart Little 1 and 2, Peabody & Sherman, and others. Mike Gabiriel (the student talking about the animation test with the dog putting on his pants) would be the future co-director of such films as The Rescuers Down Under and Pocahontas. Ace Storyman Joe Ranft who worked on a plethora of animated features and was one of the foundations of the Pixar Animation Studios.

Larson was the perfect member of the Nine Old Men for this position to teach because he genuinely cared about his students as people and they genuinely loved him. When the Eisner regime took over Walt Disney Productions and made it into the Walt Disney Company, the animators were kicked off the lot from the building Walt had built from them. Eric was upset by the new management and concerned for his young students warning them that in the long run these changers were bad for the studio and these executives were not their friends. He was proven to be correct.

He stayed on to consult on animated films through The Great Mouse Detective before retiring in 1986. Some say he left with a broken heart over what was happening to the studio and to the students who'd come to be like his family.

In 1989 Eric Larson was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio

He passed away in 1988. He didn't live to see the heights his former students would eventually achieve but his mentorship was instrumental in the animation renaissance of the early 1990's.

Original air date January 7, 1985

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