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When his brother Roy and the studio's bankers refused to fund an amusement park, Walt borrowed against his own life insurance and formed a private company, WED Enterprises, to develop it. He then traded a weekly 'Disneyland' television show to ABC in exchange for investment and loan guarantees.
In 1928 Disney went to New York to renegotiate his contract for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He found that his distributor, Charles Mintz, and Universal legally owned the character and had quietly hired away most of his animators. On the trip home he developed Mickey Mouse, and from then on he insisted on owning his characters outright. A distributor's betrayal turned into a lasting rule: never create value on property someone else controls.
Gabler argues that Disney's creative impulse was fundamentally a desire to build worlds more orderly and obedient than reality. Animation let him command every frame, but the studio's growth, its debts and its staff kept escaping his control. Disneyland was the fullest expression of the impulse: a physical environment where every sightline, surface and emotion could be engineered and continually 'plussed.'
After Snow White, Disney's studio had a wide gap in pay between favored and junior artists, arbitrary screen credits, and layoffs. Animators led by Art Babbitt struck in 1941. Disney had seen himself as the benevolent father of a creative commune, so he took the strike as personal betrayal. He blamed communist agitators, grew withdrawn from animation, and the studio's collaborative golden age never fully returned.