Today's Video Link

The other day here, I posted a link of Richard Sherman playing the piano in Walt Disney's office on the Disney lot. This video is a little tour of that office. You'll briefly see Richard in it. In the same scene, the lady wearing the black blazer is his wife of over sixty years, Elizabeth. Often when Richard performs "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" — which he does a lot — he gets to the line about "…and now me girl's me wife" and he points to Elizabeth and yells, "And she's sitting over there!"

Walt's office is actually two offices, connected. One has the desk he sat behind — and no, if you tour it, they won't let you sit there — and the other was a "working office" with tables and low chairs so he and associates could sit around and look at plans and artwork and discuss them.

Both were repurposed and redecorated after he died in 1966. Both have been restored back to the way they were the day he went to that big Carousel of Progress in the sky. This was possible because Dave Smith, who I believe was the first Disney archivist, went into Walt's rooms right after Mr. Disney died and Smith photographed every single detail.

The offices are not open to the general public but if you have an "in" with someone high in the Disney organization — say, Mickey or Donald or even Huey — they can arrange for you to join one of the tours which are conducted several times a day. There's a wait list for folks who work for the studio and they get selected by some kind of lottery.

A friend there got me in last September and I took along Maggie Thompson, who was in town visiting and working on Pogo stuff with me, and my assistant John Plunkett. It was kind of amazing if you stood in there and thought about the history that occurred in there. In case you never get to visit the Mouse Mecca, here's a little peek…