One of the most well-known and widely believed of all of Hollywood's urban legends is that, although Walt Disney died in December 1966, he might still just make a comeback.
The story goes that uncle Walt arranged to have his body cryonically frozen, so that he could be brought back to life once medical science had got past the whole death thing. The rumour I heard at school was that it was actually just his head that was preserved - which, I suppose, would take up less space in a freezer.
Another variation is that Walt - or Walt's head - is now hidden beneath Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which opened three months after his death. Not a very practical place to keep a canister of human remains and liquid nitrogen, but the idea does add a certain frisson to an already spooky ride. Disappointingly, though, there is zero evidence that Walt Disney ever wanted to put himself in the deep freeze. Some say that the rumour was started by a few of the animators that worked for him, but there are documents to verify that he was cremated, and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial
Park in Glendale, California. Walt's daughter Diane said in 1972 that she doubted her father had even heard of cryonics. Mind you, the fact that she commented on the rumour just goes to show how rife it was, even then. So, what makes it the most popular Disney fairy tale since Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? For one thing, it is just about plausible: Walt was a massively wealthy and ambitious tycoon with a passion for futuristic technology, such as the monorail at Disneyland, so the big freeze might have been tempting.
For another thing, around the time of Walt's death, cold storage was a hot topic. Robert Ettinger's book about cryonics, The Prospect of Immortality, was published in 1964. That inspired a former TV repairman called Bob Nelson to become president of the Cryonics Society of California. And it was Nelson who told the Los Angeles Times in 1972 that Walt really wanted to be frozen, but that the pair of them couldn't quite sort out the paperwork in time. It's up to you whether you believe Nelson, or whether you think he was just promoting his business, but he definitely helped to link Walt
Disney to cryonics in the public's imagination. In fact, the rumour is so persistent that it has sparked another even crazier one - that the smash hit cartoon Frozen was made specifically so that when people Googled Disney and Frozen they would no longer get any results about Walt's non-existent scheme to turn himself into a human ice cube. All I can tell you is that, if that was the plan, it didn't work.
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