The Walt Disney Family Album - Ollie Johnston (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 fifteenth episode focuses on Disney animator Ollie Johnston. 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. Thomas was known for the personality relationships of the characters in his animation. He often collaborated with his best friend Frank Thomas.

Ollie started at Disney animating shorts as an assistant but eventually graduated to features with Pinocchio. It was Ollie's approach to the personality of Pinocchio as a naive little boy that influenced the other animators on how to handle the character. Other characters Ollie handled were Bambi & Thumper, Peter in Peter & the Wolf, the Stepsisters, Alice, Merlin, Baloo & Mowgli, Prince John & Sir Hiss, and more. Mr Smee is a self caricature of Ollie.

Johnston had a model train in his backyard that people could ride on. This inspired Walt to build a similar train of his own in his backyard too.

In the 1970's, Ollie began mentoring the next generation of animation artists. After retiring, he co-wrote the definitive textbook on hand drawn animation with Frank, The Illusion of Life. The two friends wrote a series of animation books together. In 1995 he was the subject of a documentary film, Frank & Ollie, created by Frank's son Theodore. Frank and Ollie also had cameos in the Brad Bird films The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

In 1989 Ollie Johnston was named a Disney Legend along with the other Nine Old Men and Ub Iweks. They were the bedrock of the animation studio. Thomas passed away in 2008. He was the last of the Nine Old Men to die.

Original air date August 4, 1985

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