"Roger Myers Sr., the beloved genius behind Itchy & Scratchy, loved and cared about almost all the peoples of the world."
"From all of us at Stark Industries, I would like to personally introduce you to the city of the future!"
— Howard Stark, Iron Man 2
A No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Walt Disney; expect him to be the animator of a world-famous cartoon character (frequently a Mocky Mouse) and/or the founder of Souvenir Land. Also expect an exaggerated interest in planned communities and/or creating a utopia, possibly with sinister undertones. He'll present said utopia in the form of a World's Fair
-like exhibition, usually in his parks. Oh, and, expect Human Popsicle or Brain in a Jar jokes, many of them.
Many of these characters go beyond parodying just Disney and fuse him with Howard Hughes, another mustachio'd early/Golden Age of Hollywood impresario and futurist. Hughes gradually became debilitated by severe mental illness (OCD and agoraphobia) and eventually was reduced to living in seclusion, obsessively carrying out odd habits such as urinating in jars, wearing tissue boxes on his feet, and refusing to cut his nails. While Disney endured a fairly normal, if still ultimately fatal, bout with cancer, Hughes' eccentricities dovetail well enough with the prevailing Urban Legend about Disney going into hiding in order to cheat death that perhaps it's not surprising that many writers can't resist the conflation when writing this type of character.
See also: Fountain of Expies, Howard Hughes Homage. Overlaps with Expy Coexistence if Disney is also acknowledged as existing In-Universe as well.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- An episode of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! has King Dedede start his own animation company, hiring a famous animator named "Dis Walney" ("Owalt Dezney" in the original Japanese version) who turns out to be a monster in disguise to help him.
- Mi-chan and Fancy Yankeeland in the Papuwa anime. The author skates a lot closer visually in the manga but censors any actual names in dialog bubbles.
- A truly heartbreaking version of this appears in Ergo Proxy. He just wants to be left alone, and not killed like all the other Proxies.
- The fake Chuck Culkin in Billy Bat, who took over the titular comic and gave him some major Bad Ass Decay after original author/artist Kevin Yamagata disappears. He rapidly built such a large empire around the character that he easily gets away with pretending he started it.
- William Borise in the second volume of Genkaku Picasso.
Comic Books
- Wade Dazzle, a billionaire cartoon and amusement park mogul who sought the secret of Amazon immortality in Wonder Woman Volume 1.
- The DCU:
- Winston Keever Sr., creator of Winky Blink and Friends and founder of the Winkyworld theme park chain in Chuck Dixon's Batman and Green Arrow comics. He briefly appears in Green Arrow as a dying old man, horrified by how ruthlessly his son runs the company.
- The Elseworld Batman: Dark Allegiances reinvents the Dark Knight's villains as parodies of real people from the 1930s suspected of Nazi sympathies. So Oswald Cobblepot becomes Milt Biggsley, the creator of Peter Penguin, and founder of the Biggstown amusement park (allowing a Mythology Gag with a giant prop typewriter). His inviting Adolf Hitler to Hollywood is likely an allusion to Walt Disney infamously providing a tour of the production of Fantasia to Nazi actress Leni Riefenstahl.
- Elias McFadden in the middle story of the comic anthology The Eternal Smile.
- One story in the Fantastic Four had a crazy Disney-alike try to use the Human Torch's powers to 'reignite the Earth's core'. The reason his employees went along with such a blatantly insane plan (Lampshaded as such, even by comic-book science standards,) was that they were all Ridiculously Human Robots he'd built.
- Fission Chicken once had to beat the cryogenically-preserved brain of "Walt Ditsey".
- In the black-and-white Howard the Duck magazine, Wally Sidney was a failed animator turned wealthy haberdasher. He imposed a new code of decency on the title character, forcing him to wear pants. This was because Disney had sued Marvel over the character, claiming similarity to Donald Duck. Marvel's lawyers instantly caved and as a part of the settlement Disney was allowed to redesign Howard's look any way they saw fit, which included making him wear pants. And now Disney owns Marvel.
- The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip "Welcome To Tickle Town" featured eccentric animator Tobias Tickle, who artificially prolonged his life into the 24th century and then built Tickle Town theme park, and trapped its visitors to protect them from the horrors of the After the End world outside which existed entirely in his head.
- The Dylan Dog story "Pink Rabbits Kill" (#24) has animation studios CEO Sandy Sidney, whose surname is a straight up anagram of "Disney" in case you were wondering who he might be the Captain Ersatz of. Also happens to be an Expy Coexistence since Groucho brings up Snow White in one of his jokes and other Dylan Dog stories verbally and visually reference Disney movies.
- An unpublished Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi story had the girls trying to take a vacation at Dizzyland ("the sickest place on earth") but are chased persistently by their fans.
- The Golden Age MAD parody "Mickey Rodent!" had Walt Dizzy, an Unknown Character whose rules everyone had to live by, including wearing White Gloves at all times. His Disney-like signature appeared on every page until a conspicuous Art Shift (all of this being pointed out by the characters). His name was always printed like his signature when it appeared in dialogue bubbles.
- X-Men villain Bolivar Trask, creator of the Sentinels, was visually based on Walt Disney, and inherited his interest in futuristic technology and his purported bigotry.
- Cyberella, a lesser known comic written by Howard Chaykin, was built around the titular character starting off as a hybrid of Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse created by blatant Disney parody Kelton Mosby. The first two issues explore the development of Cyberella, starting when she was Li'l Ella and before that her inspiration, child actress Ella Fiscus. There's a sanitized version that makes Mosby seem like an adoring father figure and man ahead of his time, and the more cynical, actual version revealing Mosby was just an extremely lucky opportunist who strong-armed unions among other sordid details. It's also implied the real Ella was actually an adult midget (based on the infamous untrue urban legend about Shirley Temple) he was having an affair with before she died. They found Mosby's dead body in a hotel room with several underage prostitutes dressed like Li'l Ella.
Films — Animation
- Bigweld from Robots, according to the filmmakers. Even though he's in a completely different industry — his company sells robotic gadgets as well as spare parts for the robotic inhabitants of his world — he has the friendly demeanor, the big-dreamer mentality, and his own TV show. By the time the protagonist arrives at Bigweld HQ, where he'd dreamed of working someday, the company has been taken over by a sleazy executive who's only interested in making money and has no interest in offering jobs to small-timers like him. (As this was an animated film made by a studio that is not Disney, it's probably a bit autobiographical as well.)
- Queer Duck: The Movie has an unflattering example in theme park Happyland's founder Fritz Happy. His son claims that their real surname is Hitler (spelled with two T's) and he is shown to be cryogenically frozen and set to thaw out in the year 3066, referencing the famous urban legend that Walt Disney was frozen.
Films — Live-Action
- Abel Edwards from the sci-fi movie Able Edwards, with the twist that Abel is cloned in the future to help to bring the joy from his old cartoons.
- Roy Walleynote on National Lampoon's Vacation, with Marty Moose and Walley World. In the original magazine story it really was Walt Disney, who was (non-fatally) shot by a pushed-over-the-edge Pop.
- Howard Stark in Iron Man 2 is very much based on the futurist side of Walt, with his Stark Expo film being very similar to Disney's promotional film for EPCOT, though it's shown in Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter that in his earlier days he was more of a pre-breakdown Howard Hughes Homage. Funnily enough, Iron Man 2 just so happened to be the first MCU film released after Disney bought Marvel.
- Uncle Dave from Beverly Hills Cop III is Mister Rogers as Walt Disney.
- Jurassic Park (1993): John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park. In the book, he's a greedy and uncaring executive who author Michael Crichton described as "the dark version of Walt Disney". However, the film makes him a more sympathetic Cool Old Guy (i.e., Disney played straighter), since Steven Spielberg identified with his like for showmanship.
- Bill Plympton's Mockumentary Hitler's Folly makes Adolf Hitler himself into one, expanding on Hitler's art career and love of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which led to the real-life production of Armer Hansi) by reimagining him as having unfulfilled dreams of creating an animation empire and wanting to build the Disneyland-esque park "Nazi-land".
- V. A. Vandemere, the villain in Dumbo (2019) who runs an Art Deco-inspired theme park called Dreamland, is based in equal parts on Disney, P. T. Barnum, and Thomas Edison. Given that the film was made by Disney as it was in the process of buying out 20th Century Fox, and that the plot of the film revolved around Vandemere buying out the protagonists' smaller circus, many critics read it as Biting-the-Hand Humor.
Literature
- Raymond Dieterling, founder of Dream-a-Dream Land, in the James Ellroy novel L.A. Confidential. (This character doesn't appear in the film version).
- Ralph Mimsey in several novels by Dave Stone, including the Judge Dredd tie-in novel Wetworks and the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel Burning Heart; the latter has Mimsey's cryogenically-preserved head as a minor character. His creations include Barnabas the Magic Ocelot and Mickey Monkey.
- Uncle Sam Beasley from a few of the Destroyer books tried to conquer Cuba and turn it into an amusement park. His first book features the song, "It's a Short Life After All."
- The unnamed creator of the Happy Mouse Kingdom theme park in Orlando, Florida, as featured in The True Meaning of Smekday.
- The Saruman counterpart in Bored of the Rings, Serutan. He was running an half-abandoned theme park centered around a character called Dicky Dragon. At one point in the past, Goodgulf (the Gandalf equivalent) was his business partner, but their relationship soured due to Serutan becoming more greedy (at least, according to Goodgulf).
- President Toydream of The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is the eccentric, mega-rich founder of the Toydream franchise and cities-slash-theme parks (yes, they're that big). The setting being what it is, he is also a peerless occultist who has collected stories and relics from around the world so he could adapt them into blockbusters someday.
- "The Gypsies in the Wood" features "Uncle Satt", a Victorian-era entrepreneur who has made a pile on a fairy-tale cartoon-character franchise and is about to open his first Souvenir Land. There's a conversation about what exactly Uncle Satt actually does, given that all the words and illustrations that appear under his name were created by underlings, which echoes a story told about Uncle Walt.
- InCryptid has Michael Lowry, the founder of the Disneyland coexisting expy Lowryland, though he's long dead by the time the series takes place, and most of the focus is on the theme park.
Live-Action TV
- Charles Dingo in iCarly, with its theme park, the dingo as the beloved cartoon animal and even its own version of Disney Channel. And his frozen head in the bowels of the Dingo Studios.
- Milt Appleday from Out of Jimmy's Head, creator of Golly Gopher and the Gollywood Theme Park
Radio
- The Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Zagreus, featuring the Eighth Doctor, has several characters played by the actors who play earlier incarnations of the Doctor. Sylvester McCoy's character is a futuristic Walt Disney analogue named Uncle Winky.
Tabletop Games
- Walter Rand in the Halt Evil Doer! setting for Mutants & Masterminds. His "Rand Utopias" are parodies of Disney's "planned community" Celebration combined with the comic book concept of the Mad Scientist having a hidden community as his own sociology experiment. (The real Disney also existed in the HED! setting, and got irritated at Rand constantly stealing his ideas. The last straw was when he started "poaching" Mouseketeers to join Sneckles the Snake's Young Pioneers.)
Video Games
- Cave Johnson from Portal 2 seems to have a lot of this to his character; especially with regards to his plans to cheat death.
- Fallout:
- Mr. Robert House in Fallout: New Vegas is this mixed with a Howard Hughes-type paranoiac. His goal is to run New Vegas as The Theme Park Version: safe, clean, secure, and under his totalitarian control, aided by an army of robots. His portrait bears more than a little resemblance to Disney, and his actual body is effectively somewhere between Human Popsicle and Brain in a Jar.
- Fallout 4 has John-Caleb Bradberton, the creator of Nuka-Cola who built a theme park dedicated to his drink. Unsurprisingly, his head is found frozen and kept alive by pre-war technology underneath the park. For bonus points, his name is a mashup of John Pemberton and Caleb Bradham, inventors of Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola respectively.
- Andrew Ryan from BioShock is basically a Libertarian Walt Disney bent on building a utopia, much like Disney's original vision of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). He also has a mustache that is similar to Disney's. Like Robert House, he is also based on Howard Hughes.
- April 2015's Item-Of-The-Month in the Kingdom of Loathing was an airplane charter to Dinseylandfill, the world's most popular amusement park that, due to a city planning mistake, was also zoned as a landfill. Deep within the maintenance tunnels of the park, armed with the four keycards to unlock his cryo-stasis chamber, one can discover Wart Dinsey himself, complete with numerous Walt Disney quotes, slightly altered with sinister intent...
"That's the trouble with the world:" says a monotone voice, "too many people grow up. I'll make sure you don't make that mistake."
- Joey Drew from Bendy and the Ink Machine is at least partly based on Walt Disney. His most famous character appears to be the titular Bendy, a demon reminiscent of Mickey Mouse. Joey also has his own animation studio where he encourages people to follow their dreams. This being a horror game, Joey is also an All Take and No Give kind of boss who took credit for all of his worker's accomplishments. He seems to have made as much of an effort to go straight as he can after realizing it hasn't done anything but leave him almost entirely alone: aside from trying to mend bridges with his co-workers, like Wally and Allison, Joey also asks for Henry's help to destroy Bendy once and for all once it's clear that he's done nothing but cause everyone misery.
- Nathaniel Winter of The Secret World and The Park is portrayed as a mad cross between Walt Disney and Howard Hughes during both games. A millionaire construction mogul, he set out to build a spectacular amusement park on a relatively obscure island off the coast of Maine, and was careful to portray himself as benevolently as possible in the advertising; he even has a small cuddly mammal as the park's mascot - namely Chad the Chipmunk. For good measure, he's revealed to be secretly contemptuous of the locals, knowingly exposing workers and guests to dangerous conditions, and bribing the government to keep the park open. Then, when the park is finally shut down, he abandons his family and retreats into the abandoned property to spend the rest of his life in seclusion. It turns out that Atlantic Island Park was secretly his means of securing immortality, and has ultimately transformed him into the Bogeyman that still haunts the property.
Webcomics
- Bruno the Bandit briefly gives us the fame vampire Valdzny, brother of Nosferatinx and "father of all fame vampire animals". He perfected a serum of distilled fame vampire blood that when injected, redesigns the animal to be more pleasing to children and gives them Barbie Doll Anatomy. According to Ella, his first test was on a lab mouse who's suspiciously familiar ears barely poke into the bottom of the frame here. He even creates "Valdzny-Ville" from a rancid mountain of half-digested Rothland villages puked up by an injected Leviathan.
- Linnie Bygone from Klunscomic is essentially a Gender Flip version of Walt Disney. She created Toona, a Mocky Mouse, and she even has her own theme park named "Bygoneland".
- An early Schlock Mercenary arc featured Newt Sidney, owner of Sidneyland. Very obvious - they even mentioned that he started his career with a talking mouse. Interestingly enough, he's the villain of the piece, enforcing "a near-monopoly" through underhanded dealings, threats, criminal connections, and similar - all of it impossible to trace back to him, meaning that he winds up as a Karma Houdini. The arc is started when one of his competitors hires the titular mercenaries to safeguard the opening of his new 'Magic Dream-Land' (next door to Sidneyland), after Sidney threatened to prevent the opening even if he had to commandeer a Kill Sat and nuke them from orbit.
- Waldo Frizzy from 70-Seas, creator of Toby Terrier and Toby Town.
- Dr Collodi in Skin Horse, the founder of WhimsyCorp and the Little House of Wonders theme park.
Web Original
- The @EpcotCentre Twitter spoof account imagines Epcot as a standalone theme park built by one Robert Alan Epcot — with a Twitter account run as a hobby by a staffer in her spare time.
Western Animation
- Roy Brisby from The Venture Bros., creator of Bizzy Bee and Brisbyland.
- Roger Meyers Sr. from The Simpsons, thief of Itchy and Scratchy note , which eventually spawned Itchy and Scratchy Land (albeit after his death). While the cartoon is generally a parody of Tom and Jerry and Herman and Katnip, the historical installments of the series produced under Meyers Sr. depicted in various episodes include parodies of Steamboat Willie, Pinocchio and Fantasia. Myers was also known for his "controversial" 1938 film Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors, referencing the urban legend of Disney's anti-semitism. The episode "The Day The Violence Died" also references the urban legend about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen, when Roger Meyers Jr. goes bankrupt and shows that he can no longer afford to preserve his father's head in cryo-conservation... cue leaking icebox.
- The Fairly OddParents! provides an example from a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot episode. The mogul is Mr. Walt Kidney, whose theme park, Kidneyland, happens to reside within the kidney of Vicky.
- Grant Walker from the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Deep Freeze". The focus is less on him as a cartoon mogul and more on the animatronics part, and his design of an underwater utopia with no crime (wait...). His attempt to work with Mr. Freeze to gain immortality does succeed, but ultimately results in him becoming a Human Popsicle (combined with And I Must Scream, since he's still conscious) when his city is brought down around him.
- Lemuel Stewartson on the Atom.com cartoons about The Golden Age of Animation; his creation was a raccoon called Mortimer Koon (in a universe of Animated Actors). Alas, the ill-fated theme park Koonland was ruined by its name.
- Walt Fleishman in The Real Ghostbusters (the episode "Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional?") is probably an amalgam of Disney and one or two of his contemporaries.
- Uncle Wizzly of My Life as a Teenage Robot has an animatronic theme park that runs amok.
- The "Sleeping Beauty" parody on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (one of the "Fractured Fairy Tales" segments) portrayed the prince as an obvious parody of Walt Disney who, rather than wake her with a kiss, builds a theme park ("Sleeping Beauty Land") around her. Walt was reportedly not amused. (Possibly explaining a reference during one of a handful of shows where NBC experimentally had a live-action Bullwinkle puppet, also voiced by Bill Scott, hosting. At the end of one show, the puppet explains that they have to go because "Mr. Disney just came into the studio with a baseball bat.")
- At around the same time, Beany and Cecil had an episode "Beanyland", where they build a theme park on the moon - Dishonest John, mining green cheese at the time, sabotages their work and christens it "Meanyland". Standards and Practices suits raised objections to the 'unflattering caricature of Disney', apparently unaware that was Dishonest John, as he usually looked.
- Dalt Wisney in Henry's Cat.
- In an episode of Garfield and Friends, Garfield goes to an amusement park called Wonderful World and meets its founder Wilson Wonder, who lives behind a Fun House mirror. Serial con artist Al Swindler took over the park and had Wonder locked away inside one of his own attractions so he wouldn't cause trouble.
- The American Dad! episode "Familyland" has the titular theme park's evil founder Roy Family, who was cryogenically frozen and anti-Semitic. Klaus mentions Walt Disney by name, but Steve doesn't know who he is.
- Hieronymus Glove from SpongeBob SquarePants, an anthropomorphic shark with a fondness for gloves to the point he founded the glove-themed amusement park "Glove World", and still runs it despite being frozen in a block of ice.
