Date
Monthly Rotations
Location
Awards Lobby
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Walt Disney Company, The Walt Disney Family Museum is showcasing objects from the museum’s collection which highlight important moments in Walt’s career. These objects, which include recent acquisitions and fragile materials that have never been publicly displayed, will rotate periodically throughout the year.
May 2024
Miniature Vase with Dragon
On view in May 2024.
Walt collected, crafted, and curated a breadth of miniatures, including ceramics, glassware, silver cutlery, paper books and magazines, wooden furniture, musical instruments, dolls, faux fruits, candelabras, checkers and playing cards, and working firearms. This vase—which stands at just one-and-a-quarter inches tall—is finely crafted of porcelain, enamel, and gilding. Some of the hand-painted brushstrokes are the width of a human hair. This is part of a set of miniature porcelain vessels by the same artist, each with a different shape and design.
April 2024
EPCOT Sketches
On view in April 2024.
The centerpiece of Walt’s ambitious plan for Walt Disney World Resort as we know it today was EPCOT—an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—which was to be a master-planned city based on modernist ideas in urban planning. These early concept drawings show Walt’s thinking as he developed ideas for this utopian planned community. This napkin was found—crumpled in the trash—by Walt’s gardener, who stored them in a safe deposit box for many years.
March 2024
Academy Award® for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1969)
On view in March 2024.
This Academy Award® was awarded posthumously to Walt Disney in 1969 for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968). A sequel to Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), this featurette was one of the final animated films produced by Walt prior to his death in 1966.
January–February 2024
Jimmie Dodd's Mousegetar
On view in January–February 2024.
Actor, songwriter, and Disney Legend Jimmie Dodd was the host of the Mickey Mouse Club television show during its first four seasons, appearing with the show’s ensemble cast from 1955 to 1959. Dodd wrote more than 400 songs, including the “Mickey Mouse March,” the show’s popular theme song, and numerous other compositions for the program.
December 2023
Margaret Kerry's Ballet Slippers
On view in December 2023.
Actress and dancer Margaret Kerry (b. 1929) wore this pair of ballet slippers while serving as the live-action reference model for the character of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan (1953).
Since the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney Studios artists would used live-action references to help capture lifelike motion. Filming human actors—often with costumes and props—allowed animators to study and reproduce the movement of actors’ bodies and clothing in animated form.
November 2023
Mrs. Davis Letter
On view in November 2023.
On October 16, 1923—the same day he signed the distribution contract with Winkler Productions—Walt penned this letter to the mother of Virginia Davis, the child actress who portrayed the titular character in Alice's Wonderland.