Analysis: The Walt Disney Monopoly

In the past decade, The Walt Disney Corporation has dominated the entertainment industry and has purchased popular and recognizable properties in the entertainment business (“Mouse-Opoly”). Disney has a great understanding of what the audience wants before they even dream of it themselves. However, with Disney’s recent purchases consumers have become concerned that Disney is monopolizing the entertainment industry. Before continuing it is important understand the definition of monopoly that I am using to make my claim. According to Merriam-Webster, a monopoly is corporation that has “complete control of the entire supply of goods or services in a certain area of market” (“Mouse-Opoly”). The Walt Disney Corporation is a monopoly, otherwise

To start off the owner and founder of the company and theme parks, Walt Disney was born the fourth of five children to a poor family who owned a farm in Marceline, Missouri (Nix). It was in this small town that he was encouraged to pursue his interest in drawing from his aunt and his neighbor. But due to his family’s poverty his father had to sell the farm and relocated the family to Kansas City (Nix). Due to several circumstances Walt’s father sold his newspaper route in Kansas and moved to Chicago to work in a jelly and fruit juice company. It is here that Walt dropped out of high school at age 16 because he drew constantly and did not pay attention in class. He proceeded to forge his birth certificate in order to join the Red Cross Ambulance Corps during World War I (Nix). After the war Disney found work creating advertisements for magazines and movie theaters (Hongmei). During this job he began to be interested in animations and opened a film studio in 1922, but due to financial reasons, it shut down shortly

It is here that the brothers began producing various short animated cartoons and developed new characters. One of the character developed is one originally know as Mortimer Mouse who is now known as Mickey Mouse (Hongmei). From there Disney’s company expanded and flourished. To a point where during World War II Disney created educational and training films for agencies and departments of the government. They encouraged Americans to pay taxes to support the war effort. Driven by his patriotism, propaganda films were created using his famous animated characters that defined the enemy (Hongmei). After the war, in addition to animated films, Disney began to produce a series of live-action films in the 1940s (Walt Disney). Disney’s success economically only continued when he decided to build a theme park. He did not originally intend to build a large-scale theme park. However, the plans soon grew to a 16-acre plot of land, now called Disneyland. Within just one month of being open Disneyland had hosted more than half a million visitors (Hongmei). From that point on Disney began to expand and create more sources of income and have become an economic powerhouse owning many major