Why Disney Movies are Missing Mothers
Did you know that Walt Disney believed that he was responsible for his mother’s death? Even though it’s easy to prove he wasn’t, that didn’t stop one of the most widely believed myths from entering Disney legend. Watch the full story here!
The year was 1938. Snow White had an unbelievably successful release the year before and Walt was neck deep into Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia.
For their parent’s 50th anniversary, Walt and Roy had promised their parents a new home, but finding the perfect place took longer than expected. Roy finally found the perfect home at 4605 Placedia in the Hidden Village section of North Hollywood. It was brand new, and more importantly for their aging parents, it had a good heating system.
They moved their parents from their apartment on Commonwealth Street and right away the heating system had problems. “We better get this furnace fixed or else some morning we’ll wake up to find ourselves dead,” Walt’s mother Flora was quoted as saying.
The reason why isn’t clear, but Walt and Roy decided to dispatch a workman from the studio to try and repair the furnace, rather than hiring an outside contractor. On the morning of November 26th Flora went to the bathroom but didn’t return. Walt’s father Elias went to check on her and found her collapsed. Feeling off, he staggered into the hallway and fainted.
Downstairs their house keeper Alma Smith started feeling woozy and realized something was wrong. She tried to open the window, but it was stuck. She managed with the help of a neighbor to get Flora and Elias out of the house. Elias revived with artificial respiration, but Flora didn’t.
Walt was inconsolable. Roy ordered an investigation and discovered that carbon monoxide poisoning was the result of a slipped lid on the air intake of the furnace. “Installation of the furnace showed either a complete lack of knowledge of the requirements of the furnace or a flagrant disregard of the conditions if they were known.”
Walt felt personally responsible for giving them the house and for the repairman that they had sent from the Disney studio to fix it.
While Walt and Elias were forever crushed by the loss, this did not bleed into his films like the popular myth would suggest. People claim that the theme of missing or deceased mothers in Disney films is because of Walt’s experience. Not only does that not line up with the timeline of when the early films were made, but we also don’t have any recorded evidence of Walt making that kind of conscious choice.
