Disney Trivia Quiz

Answer: False

Walt Disney came from a blue collar background. Living in Illinois and Missouri, he led the typical life of a diligent Midwestern U.S. child. He had an interest in art and earned some money from a local doctor by drawing pictures of the man's horse. He was also a newspaper delivery boy.

In his high school years, Disney took night courses at the Chicago Art Institute, which later became the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a respected and influential art school.

Answer: in a garage

Yes, Walt Disney had one of those rags-to-riches stories of people who started their careers in a garage. Considering the southern California climate, people can work in a garage for most (or all) of the year without needing heat or air conditioning, and thus saving money which might have gone to pay expensive rents. Originally, having an interest in cartoon drawing, Disney started an animation studio in Kansas City, Missouri called Laugh-O-Gram Studios. Though popular and with plenty of work coming in, Disney could not cover the cost of employees' salaries and went bankrupt within a few years. After moving to California, Disney started in his uncle Robert Disney's garage in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. He called it the "Disney Brothers Studio" after himself and his brother Roy.

Animation then was done by hand, one frame at a time. Artists (animators) would use India ink on a celluloid template to outline a scene; other artists (called "inkers" or "colorists") would then fill in the outlines and then each frame would be individually photographed to make a movie reel. To say it was labor-intensive would be a large understatement!

Answer: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Beginning in 1934, Disney started drawing the frames for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", based on a fairy tale by the Grimm brothers. It was the story of a vain, wicked queen who was jealous of her stepdaughter, princess Snow White. The tale works through betrayal, poison apples, talking mirrors and - of course - a handsome prince coming to the rescue. Work on it continued until mid-1937 when Disney's studio ran out of money. To be loaned further money, bank officers made Disney show a rough cut of the movie to a theater audience in December, 1937.

The audience gave it a standing ovation and Disney got his money. Released to general audiences in 1938, the movie earned over $8 million in its first release, the equivalent of $134 million today. To give you an idea of the work involved in a full-length animated movie, approximately 750 animators and colorists worked on more than two million cels drawn for "Snow White".

Answer: Donald Duck

In the cartoon "Der Fuehrer's Face", Donald Duck played a reluctant factory worker in Nazi Germany. The cartoon was named after a song of the same name written by Oliver Wallace. The cartoon won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1943. Because of the propaganda nature of the cartoon, Walt Disney kept it out of circulation after its release.

It finally became available on home video in 2004.

Answer: Nine Old Men

Disney called his nine trusted animators Nine Old Men, though they were mostly in their 30s and 40s. Some had worked on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and oversaw the work on "The Rescuers", "Lady and the Tramp", "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" and on and on through Disney's most famous movies. The last of the group died in 2008.

Answer: Mouseketeers

Put on your mouseke-ears kids and let's have our Mouseketeers roll call! The original version of the "Mickey Mouse Club" show ran from 1955 to 1960 on the ABC television network. Besides trying to teach good citizenship, the show had music and comedy segments and a daily appearance by Mickey himself (on film).

The show continued on and off until 1996. A number of entertainers got their start on the show, including Annette Funicello, Johnny Crawford, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

Answer: Electric Park in Kansas City, Missouri

While living in Kansas City, Missouri, Walt Disney and his sister Ruth often went to the Electric Park amusement park. Disney was impressed with the way the landscaping was kept in good order, and he noticed that park employees did much more than just pull levers to start rides and dispense refreshments.

Other parks gave him further ideas about what to offer in Disneyland, including the iconic Sleeping Beauty Castle, modeled after Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. As Disney told one of his animators: "I just want it to look like nothing else in the world".

Answer: Fantasia

"Fantasia" was Disney's third feature-length cartoon. It consisted of eight segments set to classical music. "The Rite of Spring" was about evolution; "Dance of the Hours" was a ballet performed by hippos and elephants. The most famous segment, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", which starred Mickey Mouse as a naive young magician, got some raised eyebrows, and the finale pieces ("Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria") were about the battle of good versus evil, featuring the character Chernabog as the devil.

It got many people riled up. The movie also received good ratings; years later "TV Guide" magazine called it the most ambitious feature ever produced by Disney studios. It was also the first movie to use stereophonic sound.

Answer: True

Deciding to try something different, Walt Disney proposed a ski area in Mineral King, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Several experts, including Willie Shaeffler, who worked on the development of Vail Ski Resort in Colorado and Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia, Canada, were called in to plan the trails and amenities. That was in 1965, but Disney died in 1966 before any physical work was done on the resort. Disney's death and opposition from conservationists brought the idea to a stop.

Answer: San Francisco, California

"I'm going home to my city by the bay," sang Tony Bennett in the song "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", and that's where the Walt Disney Family Museum is located. Why San Francisco? That's the center of the animation world: LucasFilm and DreamWorks are there, as is Pixar, which Disney bought from Apple in 2006.

The museum features artwork by Walt and some of the original Disney movie animators, as well as collections of their other work and that of up-and-coming artists.