With the USA’s 250th birthday less than a month away, there’s a lot to celebrate about America these days. We may have our warts but there is still far more good in this country than anywhere else. And with the advent of summer, that triggers thoughts of those great American traditions such as baseball, apple pie, Mother’s Day and trips to Disneyland. Since there’s not much I can add to the canon of the first three, let’s talk about Disneyland … or more specifically, Disney collectibles. There are a heap of them.
To start with, there would be no Disneyland nor any other Disney stuff without Walt Disney (1901-1966). Born in Chicago and raised in the rural Midwest, he was a talented illustrator at a young age and moved to southern California in the early 1920s to make his fortune. In 1923, he and his brother Roy founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, and five years later they introduced the iconic character of Mickey Mouse. In between, there were some modest successes with a series of short films featuring Alice in Wonderland, but the funny little mouse with the big ears proved to be his gateway to the big time.
Flush with the success of Mickey, Disney took a giant leap into feature filmmaking with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a hugely expensive production that took 300 artists and animators nearly four years to complete. It was a staggering risk, but when “Snow White” opened just before Christmas in 1937, it proved to be an immediate blockbuster. Many more successful films followed that first one, and in 1955 Disney opened his first Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. That too proved to be wildly successful, but its namesake, a heavy lifetime smoker, died of lung cancer in1966 before seeing his empire spread around the world as it subsequently did.
Apart from his movies and theme parks, Disney was an early advocate of brand licensing and applied his moniker to a range of early products. In 1929, the Mickey Mouse Writing Tablet was the first, netting Disney a $300 fee for the use of his character name and image on that groundbreaking product. Today an original tablet, if you can find one, will cost you about 10 times that amount. Still, it was easy money for Disney at a time when his expanding business needed all the capital it could get. Other licensed products quickly followed, including dolls, toys, and the now famous Mickey Watch wind-up watch made by Ingersoll-Waterbury. Introduced in 1933 at a retail cost between $3 and $4, some 11,000 units were sold by Macys during its first day of availability.
Today, the Disney empire of licensed products is the largest in the world. The company holds more than 6,600 active trademarks, and Disney products are manufactured in nearly 40,000 factories across the globe. The most expensive Disney item sales of all time include a 1932 Mickey Mouse motorcycle toy ($222,000) and a Cinderella castle made of crystal ($285,000). Bully for you if you have either one of those!
Original Disney props also bring big bucks, as evidenced by the sale of Jose, one of four original animatronic talking birds from Disneyland’s legendary Tiki Room. He went for $425,000. All the same, those of us with lesser bank accounts can still find plenty to choose from. It’s a Disney-filled world, and we’re lucky to live in it.
Mike Rivkin and his wife, Linda, are long-time residents of Rancho Mirage. For many years, he was an award-winning catalogue publisher and has authored seven books, along with countless articles. Now, he’s the owner of Antique Galleries of Palm Springs. His antiques column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Want to send Mike a question about antiques? Drop him a line at silverfishpress@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Do you have any sought-after Disney items in your collection?
Reporting by Mike Rivkin, Special to The Desert Sun / Palm Springs Desert Sun
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