In 1941, U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and his administration had growing concerns about
the rise of Nazi and Fascist influence within the nations of
Latin America. And so,
naturally, they looked to the movie industry for help.
As the rest of the world continued to slip further into war,
the White House called on Hollywood to help shore up
relations between the Americas and, in August of that year,
Walt Disney and a handpicked mini-studio embarked on a
goodwill tour that included the ‘A-B-Cs’ of South
America—Argentina, Brazil and Chile—as well as other nations
of the region. As FDR put it in his recorded address played
during the year’s Academy Awards® ceremony, “We have been
seeking to affirm our faith in this Western World of ours,
through a wider exchange of culture and
education and thought of free expression among the various
nations of this hemisphere.” (The artists gave themselves
the moniker “El Grupo” during their stay in Rio de Janeiro,
when bellboys would announce meetings and events for “O
grupo Disney”—the Portuguese “o” later changed into the
Spanish “el.”)
The trip couldn’t have come at a more critical time in Walt
Disney’s life. Within just three short years after the
phenomenal success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the
studio that he had built experienced a chain of financial
challenges that ultimately dominoed, leading to the infamous
animators strike. Despite worries of financial ruin and
feelings of personal betrayal, Walt, his wife Lillian, and
16 of the best and most creative minds at the studio
traveled for nearly 10 weeks as
part of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, although Walt
himself saw it primarily as an opportunity to look for “new
songs, dances, plots and personalities for our cartoons.”
© Walt Disney Pictures. All
rights reserved
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