Walt Disney Studios (Burbank)

The Walt Disney Studios is a 51-acre (20.6 ha) studio lot which serves as the global headquarters for The Walt Disney Company media conglomerate. Featuring several sound stages, a backlot, and other filmmaking production facilities for the company motion picture production, the complex also houses the offices for their many divisions, with the exception of the 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox), which remains on its namesake lot in Century City.
As the only major film studio out of the Big Five that does not currently offer regular tours of their studio lot to the general public, Walt Disney used the earnings from the successful release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to finance its construction. The Studio's production services are managed by their Disney Studio Services unit – along with Golden Oak Ranch, The Prospect Studios, and KABC-7 Studio B. Disney has a secondary location at Grand Central Creative Campus, where Walt Disney Imagineering and some other units are located with Disney Imagineering managing the studio.
==History==
The current Walt Disney Studios, located at 500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank, was made possible by the revenue from the 1937 release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Walt Disney and his staff began the move from the old studio at Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake from December 1939 to January 1940. Designed primarily by Kem Weber under the supervision of Walt Disney and his brother Roy, the Burbank Disney Studio buildings are the only studios that have been owned by The Walt Disney Company to survive from the Golden Age of filming. A bungalow, the Shorts building and other small buildings that were located at the Hyperion Avenue location were moved to Burbank.
Disney purposely planned his new Burbank studio around the animation process with the large Animation Building standing in the center of the campus. Additionally, adjacent outlying buildings were constructed for the ink-and-paint departments, the camera and editing departments, and the other various functions of the studio. Tunnels linked some of the buildings to allow movement of animation materials without exposing them to the outside elements with a movie theatre, a sound stage, and a commissary. The 1941 Disney feature The Reluctant Dragon, which combined live action with animated sequences and starred Robert Benchley, served as a tour of the then-new studio. 
500 United States Army soldiers of the 121st Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) Gun Battalion occupied Walt Disney Studios the day after the attack for eight months in the period of the West Coast invasion scare, earning Disney as the only Hollywood studio to come under military occupation in history. During the war, Disney regularly produced propaganda and training films for the U.S. government including its armed forces to increase morale among Americans that the fight against the Axis powers was waged for a just cause. In the years after the war, the studio began regular work on live-action features, as they needed the money and the necessity to build live-action facilities still arose. Lacking the capital to do it themselves, Jack Webb offered to put up some of the money to build live-action soundstages in exchange for the right to use them and kept the backlots for exterior shots standing there until after a major change in management in 1984.
In 1986, after the corporate restructuring of Walt Disney Productions into The Walt Disney Company, the studio lot was remodelled to accommodate more live-action production space and administrative offices. Bounded by South Buena Vista Street on the west, West Alameda Street on the north, South Keystone Street on the east, and West Riverside Drive on the south, the studio lot is now home to multiple offices and administration buildings and seven soundstages. Even though the studio lot sits in an area of Burbank where the street grid is offset at a diagonal, most of the original buildings and roads within the campus itself were laid out in alignment with the cardinal directions. In 1990, Disney chairman Michael Eisner announced the construction of the Team Disney building and the company gained city approval for its expansion master plan, which included the Riverside Building. The building, located next to the Feature Animation Building at 2300 Riverside Drive, opened in 2000 for ABC executives and employees.
The Michael Eisner building was used as the US Covert Operations in the Hollywood Pictures film Spy Hard, and parts of the complex were used in Saving Mr. Banks.
== Gallery ==
File:Disney Water tower in Burbank Disney.jpg
File:Disney Water tower.jpg
File:Disney Water tower in Burbank.jpg
File:Walt Disney Studios (Burbank) Disney.jpeg
File:Walt Disney Studios in burbank.jpeg|Michael D. Eisner Building
Roy E Disney Animation Building.jpg|thumb|The Roy E. Disney Animation building
==Videos==
Walt Disney Studios Lot Full Tour - Disney Files On Demand
==See also==
*A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios
==References==
==External links==
*Walt Disney Studios Website
*Walt Disney Studios Website (Go.com)
*A look at the history of Walt Disney studios Burbank back lot as used for Follow Me Boys! and other films.
Category:Disney production studios
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Category:Walt Disney Studios
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