THEHYPERIONYEARS

Nothing much is known about Carl Barks' years as an employee in the field of short cartoons at the Walt Disney Studios from 1935 to 1942 (see more HERE). At the time he was not a particularly outstanding employee, and when he became famous decades later, people tended to ask him questions about his comic book work instead. At any rate, by that time, Barks would have had trouble reminiscing that far back in time.
We know that he first worked for Disney at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, California (the corporation moved into the new premises in Burbank in 1941). Luckily, it is possible to dig up a few interesting photos and titbits about Barks' connection with the Hyperion plant, although they are not necessarily focused on him.

PROLOGUE

Walt Disney's first official and 'real' studio was situated at 2719 Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, California. He and his brother Roy bought the vacant lot in 1925 and they immediately began constructing the studio building.
They moved in during the spring of 1926 and in the next 5 years several interior alterations took place mostly due to the installation of more equipment and an increase in staff.
In the spring of 1931 a new two-storey building for sound and animation was added behind the original building, and later the studio annexed an organ factory across the street.

As time went by the necessity for more space forced the two brothers to expand by building smaller buildings as well as moving into adjacent vacant houses around the original site, and they soon realized that they had to make a major decision - the Disney empire grew at a rapid pace and they needed much more room than they could possibly acquire on the overcrowded lot. So Walt began looking for somewhere else to settle.

GALLERY This is a small selection of diverse photographs spanning the years from 1931 to 1941
1931: The early spread	1931: Front view of the studio building	1931: Broadcasting neon sign on the roof
1939: Aerial view of the now widespread plant	Mickey Mouse animation department	Ink and paint department
Transfer of finished drawings onto celluloids	Walt in the sound stage monitor room	Ca. 1931: Walt with a few staff - and Mouses
1932: The entire staff (see more HERE)	Ca. 1938: Some of the animators (see more HERE)	1941: Picketers at the main gate (see more HERE)
Walt in his initial office	Ca. 1938: Walt in his renovated office	An extremely rare sight: Walt actually drawing...

TITBITS

Barks started with full-time training in drawing learning to draw the Disney way. Then he moved on to the tedious and ungrateful job of an in-betweener for the cartoon shorts. This means that he produced the many drawings between the few frames that the 'real' animators had finished. Luckily, he was soon placed in the story department where the filmscripts were dreamt up. Here he wrote stories and drew sketches for several cartoons.

This is a 1928 interior layout of the main building. Seen clockwise:
A: Walt's office, B: Mickey Mouse department, C: Silly Symphonies department, D: Darkroom, E: Camera, F: Facilities, G: Storage, H: Ink and paint department, I: Roy's office.

Today the premises consists of a supermarket with a parking lot. The size of Disney's initial building lot was so small that it could have easily been contained within today's parking lot and still not even reach the front of the supermarket.

The plant had been an organ factory before, but Walt remodeled it with fiberboard walls thus dividing the premises into cells that housed the animators.

For years Disney World in Florida had a signpost bearing the names of two walkways; Hyperion Blvd. (should have been Avenue!), and Barks & Nash referring to Carl Barks and Clarence Nash, who for decades was the voice behind Donald Duck on the silver screen (see more HERE).

The Disney film makers headed by Ted Sears invented an important step in motion pictures - the storyboard. The Disney artists would draw sketches of every moment in the plot of a cartoon and pin all the sketches on large boards. They were then able to see the entire film in a graphic format. Changes could be easily made by moving, adding or deleting inexpensive sketches. This way of doing things proved extremely educational to Barks and he used that concept to build up a story in a smooth way and tighten it to contain the essentials.

By 1934 the studio had grown to more than 200 people. When Barks joined up a year later he was first ordered to attend a training class in the technics of animation, and he wound up as number two in that year's class.

The ink and paint department consisted exclusively of girls headed by Sue Bristol. It was known as The Nunnery.

In this humourous sketch by animator Jack Kinney (featuring Walt Disney and Roy Williams hard at work) you are presented to a fraction of the animators' work environment, in which they were drawing on sloping boards.
The in-betweeners - such as Barks for a while - sweated over hot, transparent light tables as they made the many drawings between the characters' main movements.

At lunchtime several of the animators (they were called The Inmates!) hurried over to the vacant lot across the street (it was later purchased and developed by Disney) to play softball. It was more of a dump filled with debris, where the left side was a slope while the right side was covered in knee-high weeds. Walt occasionally joined the two established teams (called The Marrieds and The Singles), and though he was not an outstanding athlete he played for full - and expected to win! Being the paymaster and employer he often did...

THE UNSUNG EMPLOYEES

Many of the employees such as animators, writers, and musicians are fairly well known through their outgoing work, but the company also had a considerable non-artistic staff that was not publicly known. Here is a small selection of staff members with emphasis on the more unusual and interesting ones:

Bill Garity, head engineer
Retta Scott, first female animator
Laurie Vejar, free-lance film editor
Jane Kinney, research and development
Hazel George, nurse and well-liked gossiper
Bob McCormick, checker and assistant director
John Rose, expediter (gofer) for the story department
Don Graham, art teacher and head of the training school
Clarence Nash, animal imitator and the voice of Donald Duck
Raymond 'Ray' Disney, brother of Walt and Roy who sold insurance at the premises
Carolyn Shafer, Walt's secretary (under the alias Clara Cluck she ran the company's internal gossip magazine)
Joseph 'Joe' Rogers (always called Mister Rogers), maintenance man and carpenter
Lillian 'Lily' Bounds, inker who became Walt's secretary and later Mrs. Walt Disney
Marcellite Garner, inker and first voice of Minnie Mouse
Charlie Rivers, studio barman and unofficial bootlegger
Mary Flanigan, receptionist and snack shop runner
Jim Lowerre, sound and cutting engineer
Cy Young, head of special effects
Gunther Lessing, studio attorney
George Drake, studio manager
Bob Cook, sound engineer