This doozy comes courtesy of MiceChatter John Stearns. Thanks John!

Drug charge Disney Castle

Usually, I cover up the name and photo on these, to protect the innocent. In this case, this is Answers.com’s Disney Supervisor (expert, apparently). Looking at some of her other answers, I gather that she’s not so much an expert on Disney as a master at Google-fu. A couple of popular misconceptions that are all over Google are also in her answers, and some of them are verbatim.

(Image removed. Please see following post for longer explanation. Short version, heard from the website, they say it was a glitch and that the respondent was actually anonymous. ~Fab)

Where shall I start? New Hampshire, in 1929. Walt had just recently conquered the world with Steamboat Willie. A drug charge would have made International news, and would have been a scandal that could very well have ended the company.

So what WAS Walt doing in 1929? Quite a bit, actually. Disney historian Ken Polson has a complete chronology here, with references, even. Thanks for saving me a ton of work, Ken. You rock.

“Walt Disney Castle”, better known to all of us (except Walt himself, during the opening broadcast when he accidentally called it “Snow White’s Castle”) as Sleeping Beauty Castle, was based (in part) upon Mad King Ludwig II’s castle in Bavaria, Castle Neuschwanstein. It was also used in the non-Disney film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which I’m sure will get ONHD treatment sometime in the future.

Neuschwanstein

But wait…doesn’t that look like the BACKSIDE of Sleeping Beauty Castle? Yeppers. Herb Ryman told me and Jim a story, back in the day, when he had to remove the castle from the model to work on some small detail and accidentally put it back reversed. Walt liked it and told him to keep it like that. So the front of Sleeping Beauty Castle would have been quite different-looking had it not been for Herb’s slipup!

If you spot any doozies online, please send me a link here.

See you next time!

– Fab

Shelly Valladolid
Shelly Valladolid, aka Fab, has been writing about Disney and theme parks for about two decades. She has written for various fan and pop culture sites, Disney Magazine and OCRegister.com and participated in several books, including Passporter's Disneyland and Southern California and Disney World Dreams. She was co-founder and president of the Orlando, Florida chapter of the NFFC (now Disneyana Fan Club). She taught a class on theme park history at a Southern California University. She is creator and co-owner of Jim Hill Media, one of the creators of MousePlanet and was a consultant on MSNBC, The Motley Fool and others about Disney and various media matters. She was a Heel wrestling manager on TV and a voice artist on the radio in Honolulu, HI, where she grew up. She has a blog and a podcast with her daughter, Mission:Breakout Obsessive Alice Hill. She and her husband, MiceChat columnist Noe Valladolid, live in Southern California with Alice.