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If you’re at all interested in Disney history, or even just that of film or animation, there’s something going on right now that you really ought to know about. A group called “Thank You Walt Disney” is currently trying to raise enough money to preserve the Laugh-o-Gram building in Kansas City, MO. Local news site Ozarks First has the details.
The Laugh-o-Gram building is the site in which Walt Disney did his first professional animation work around 90 years ago, before he moved out to Hollywood and built the company that would bear his name. The studio was on the second floor of the building, which is at 1127 East 31st Street in Kansas City.
Don’t worry, the Laugh-o-Gram building is not in danger of being torn down or converted into luxury condominiums or anything like that, which is what I originally thought. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, which is enough to save it from destruction or from being turned into something unrecognizable.
What the group “Thank You Walt Disney” wants to do is convert it into an historic museum/interactive site. Something like that takes a lot of renovation, and that means money the group doesn’t have. “This was more than just fixing up an old building,” group chairman Butch Rigby said to Ozarks First. “It was lifting up the walls, recreating the floors, preserving, lifting Walt Disney’s old office and keeping it intact on the second floor.”
Rigby’s verb tense is a bit weird, given that the work he describes above hasn’t actually been done yet. It’s what “Thank You Walt Disney” is looking to do for the site. The group has currently raised $350,000 and they need $100,000 to reach their goal for the restoration project.
I have to stop falling for exaggerated headlines (a common practice in journalism), because when I first read the stories about “Save the Laugh-o-Gram,” I thought the old studio was in danger of being torn down or effectively destroyed by an unrelated project. Instead, there’s just a group that wants to make it into a Disney museum.
Saving the building from destruction would have galvanized many Disney fans, and I believe “Thank You Walt Disney” could have quickly raised the money they require. It might be a bit harder for them to reach their goal when the building’s already safe, but they just want to create a museum there, especially because a place like the Walt Disney Family Museum already exists.
In some ways I think it would have made more sense to put something like the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Laugh-o-Gram building, where it all started. I understand why they didn’t; the location is better in California, people are already there for Disneyland, and Disney did the vast majority of his work in California. I wonder if at least the Walt Disney Family Museum might enter into a sort of partnership with the Laugh-o-Gram, sharing some of their materials/exhibits.
I volunteer at an historic museum so I know how difficult it can be to raise money and awareness of a museum’s struggles. Here’s to hoping that “Thank You Walt Disney” is able to get the attention and funds it needs to preserve the Laugh-o-Gram into something worthy of Walt’s legacy.
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(*This image by Iknowthegoods at en.wikipedia is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).
