Jim Korkis recently returned from being a guest lecturer at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa where he talked about everything from the creation of the Disney Brand to Disney in a Global Society to the Three Business Innovations that Walt used to position his “mom and pop” company for growth.

On the plane flight to and from Iowa, Jim read the book The Monster Show by David Skal, a well respected writer about Hollywood’s early horror films.

Here are two Disney gems Jim discovered in the book:

“Along with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, another favorite, King Kong, occupied a place of honor in (Adolf) Hitler’s private cinematic pantheon….(and Hitler had) an abiding affection for the Disney tune ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’ which he liked to whistle.”

Skal is using for reference Robert G.L. Waite’s The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books 1977) as the source of this information.

“(Actress and wife of Charles Laughton, star of Island of Lost Souls) Elsa Lanchester recalled several years later that Island of Lost Souls was banned for twenty-five years in England , on the basis that its theme was a challenge to natural law. ‘Of course, it’s against nature,’ quipped Lanchester. ‘So’s Mickey Mouse.’”

Skal used the book Charles Laughton and I by Elsa Lanchester (Doubleday, 1976) as the source for the quote.

This just in from Jim Korkis:

[The wonderful and frustrating thing about doing research is you run across items that are completely unrelated to what you are trying to research but they are too good to be tossed aside. Here are two quotes I ran across this weekend that I didn't remember ever reading although I must have since they were in my files:

"We thought we were always going to be twenty-one years old. We thought we would always be putting goldfish in the bottled drinking water, balancing cups of water on the light fixtures, changing the labels on cans of sauerkraut juice. We were twenty-one years old. Walt was thirty, leading the pack. Working there was more fun than any job I could ever imagine." --Ward Kimball from the book "Donald Duck" by Marcia Blitz (1979)

At Imagineer Claude Coat's 54th anniversary with the Disney Company in 1989, he told a group of cast members: "Walt was real easy to work for, if you did exactly what he wanted the first time. He had a funny way of using the word 'Disney'. He'd say, 'You've got to get more Disney in it', and he didn't mean that he wasn't necessarily going to do it, but he meant that something had to happen to make it better than it was." Coats did background and color styling for Snow White, Song of the South, Peter Pan and more and then in 1955 was moved to WED to work on Disneyland dark ride attractions.]