The odds are pretty good though that not many will say, “Roy E. Disney? He was involved in some pretty decent films”.

Perhaps it’s time we all had our memories jogged...

Roy Edward Disney is of course the son of Roy Oliver Disney and the nephew of Walt. As the only son born to either man, it was perhaps inevitable that he would enter the family business, even if he describes his father’s reaction as “less than enthusiastic”.

As a young man, Roy started his working life at the Disney studios as assistant editor on the TV series Dragnet. It wasn’t made by Disney, but they had hired out studio space to NBC. He found he was quite good at the job, and when he was laid off at the end of the series in 1953 he simply wandered into the Disney editing suite to see if there was any work he could do there.

Fortunately he found editor Norman Palmer, who was just completing work on The Living Desert, the first feature length True-Life Adventure. At the same time, Lloyd Richardson was beginning the editing work on another film in the series, The Vanishing Prairie, so Roy was drafted in for editing duties on that movie as well. Roy found that he loved working on both these titles, and continued with the series.

Eventually he began to write scripts for Disney's nature films. He took a couple of his early attempts to Walt, who in his usual forthright manner flat-out rejected them. However Roy’s third attempt pleased his uncle enough to get the go-ahead, and Roy began work on An Otter In The Family. It was well received, so Roy continued to write four more True-Life Adventures before Walt’s death. Roy was also responsible for some of the writing on the TV’s Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and the much loved Zorro.

By now he was also working as a cameraman in the field, spending many hours waiting for the animals that were to be the stars of his movies. One of the films he helped shoot was Perri, the only film (to date) in Disney’s True-Life Fantasy series.

Roy’s work was finally rewarded when in 1959 he received an Oscar nomination for the short Mysteries of the Deep. Four years later he formed his own production company. It was responsible for 35 TV and cinema releases including Pancho, the Fastest Paw in the West; The Owl That Didn’t Give a Hoot; Mustang! and Varda, the Peregrine Falcon. Though Roy joined the Disney board in 1967, he continued to write, produce and direct a total of 35 of Disney’s nature programs for both television and theatrical release up until 1978. In the mid-eighties he was instrumental in bringing Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to the company, and he returned to the board as vice-chairman and head of animation.

Between 1984 and 2003 Roy was Head of Animation at Disney, and during this time the company produced some of its finest ever work - The Little Mermaid, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast - still the only animated movie to be nominated for the Best Picture academy award. But when Roy took over there was a film about to be released that wasn’t in the same class as these Disney classics.. For many people The Black Cauldron was the low point of Disney animation. It was also a movie that Roy Disney tried to redeem. When it became clear that the movie wasn’t working as it should, he wrote additional dialogue and did some new vocal work to try and tie the various parts of the film together. It can’t honestly be said that he was successful, but we can only shudder to think how bad it could have been.

One film that didn’t get made however was the controversial Wild Life. This was a kind of My Fair Lady tale, with the main character played by an elephant. Roy took objection to what he saw as it’s smutty humor and pulled it from production in September 2000.

In more recent times, Roy has been involved in the completion of two of his Uncle Walt’s unfinished projects. The first of these was Fantasia / 2000. Walt had always wanted Fantasia to be an ever-changing series of scenes and Roy finally made this happen with the release of the 2000 edition. And the Fantasia story is set to continue with the currently in production Fantasia / 2006.

The other of Roy’s special projects was the six-minute Destino, the classic art movie that had been begun in 1946 by Walt and the celebrated artist Salvador Dali. Starting with their storyboards, notes and a few precious seconds of test animation footage, Roy made it a personal campaign to get this short film finished. His work was rewarded with another Oscar nomination.

Roy’s exploits in the boardroom and on the financial pages may be more newsworthy these days, but there should always be a place in Disney history to say that he was involved in the making of some simply wonderful Disney movies.