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Podcast: PastMaster: Reshaping History
Episode: Saving Walt Disney (ft Verbal Diorama’s Em McGowan)
Description: Kansas City, 1920. Walt Disney is a young artist with big dreams, a pack of cigarettes, and absolutely no idea that his smoking habit will kill him at 65 and send his company spiralling into two decades of creative decline. Em McGowan from film-history podcast Verbal Diorama is here to fix that, one intervention at a time.
The thesis is specific: when Walt died in 1966, the studio lost its creative leadership and didn't recover until The Little Mermaid in 1989. Two decades of mediocrity caused by one man's cigarette habit. Em's plan is part healthcare intervention, part corporate restructuring, part...