KANSAS CITY, Mo. – As the song goes "When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true." For Walt Disney, the king of the entertainment empire, those dreams started right here in Kansas City. For the past 10 years, a group has been working to preserve that history through Thank You Walt Disney, Inc.
“This is great history,” Founder Butch Rigsby says strolling through the memorabilia that fills the lobby of his Screenland Theatre. “This is really the place where all of the Hollywood animation pioneers... that means Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, the guys who started Warner Brothers and Looney Tunes... all of these were a bunch of young guys working around the corner of 31st and Troost, or 31st and Forest.”
In that old building that still stands just a block off of 31st and Troost, Disney started Laugh-O-Gram Studios, in 1922 at the age of 20.
Rigsby, a huge film buff, saved the building from demolition about 10 years ago. He bought it with a group of friends and they formed Thank You Walt Disney Inc.
“We put stilts on it for a long time to hold it up and dollar by dollar, bit by bit, over a decade, we've been slowly saving that building,” Rigsby says.
Rigsby and his organization have collected memorabilia that will one day be housed in the old Laugh-O-Gram Studios, along with interactive exhibits. While most of the pictures in their exhibits show good times, there were tough times in Kansas City before Disney moved to Hollywood and achieved his ultimate success.
“Walt Disney went bankrupt in Kansas City,” Rigsby explains. “Most people don't know that. But he took a bankruptcy here. He went to California and he thought to himself 'I guess I'll be a film director because I'm way too far behind. Everybody's ahead of me in animation.' And of course, he would go out there and find out differently.”
