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Not one to rest on his laurels, Walt Disney soon produced another series-the Silly Symphonies-to go with the Mickey series. It featured different casts of characters in each film and enabled the animators to experiment with stories that relied less on the gags and quick humor of the Mickey cartoons and more on mood, emotion, and musical themes. Eventually the Silly Symphonies turned into the training ground for all Disney artists as they prepared for the advent of animated feature films. Flowers and Trees, a Silly Symphony and the first full - color cartoon, won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon for 1932, the first year that the Academy offered such a category. For the rest of that decade, a Disney cartoon won the Oscar every year.
While the cartoons were gaining popularity in movie houses, the Disney staff found that merchandising the characters was an additional source of revenue. A man in New York offered Walt $300 for the license to put Mickey Mouse on some pencil tablets he was manufacturing. Walt Disney needed the $300, so he said okay. That was the start of Disney merchandising. Soon there were Mickey Mouse dolls, dishes, toothbrushes, radios, figurines - almost everything you could think of bore Mickey's likeness. The first Mickey Mouse book was published in 1930, as was the first Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip.
In 1934, Walt Disney informed his animators one night that they were going to make an animated feature film, and then he told them the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There were some skeptics in the group, but before long everyone had caught Walt's enthusiasm, and work began in earnest. It took three years, but at Christmas time, 1937, the film was finished, and it was a spectacular hit. Snow White soon became the highest grossing film of all time, a record it held until it was surpassed by Gone With the Wind. Now Walt Disney's studio was on a firmer footing. The short cartoons paid the bills, but Walt knew that future profits would come from feature films.
Work immediately began on other feature projects, but just as things were looking rosy, along came World War II. The next two features, Pinocchio and Fantasia, were released in 1940. They were technical masterpieces, but their costs were too high for a company losing most of its foreign markets because of the war. Dumbo was made in 1941 on a very limited budget, but Bambi, in 1942, was another expensive film, and caused the studio to retrench. It would be many years before animated features of the highest caliber could be put into production.
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