The influence of previous generations has become so pervasive that we take for granted that many of the doors we walk through, were opened by them. It is difficult to imagine, for instance, that our collective version of traditional American values would be the same without Walt Disney. There are no antiheroes in Disney films. No cynicism. In a Disney film there is no ambiguity between right and wrong, or good and evil. Even when the queen in Snow White falls to her death we feel no sense of remorse or compassion for her—only a satisfying sense of justice. Afterall, she was evil. Through the lens Disney has fixed upon our heads from childhood, we believe that the world has an order, and in that ordered world justice will always prevail. The good guys always win. Villains are always punished. The cultural wiring for this belief was installed in us long ago.

I have come face to face with my Disney wiring more concretely than most. A few years ago I was doing photo research at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. I was talking with one of the employees when I noticed a poster hanging on the wall that looked strangely familiar. It was a logo for a Marine fighter squadron. On it was a cartoon bulldog with angel wings sitting on a cloud throwing lightning down on the enemy—the good guys vanquishing the bad guys. At first I thought somebody out there was emulating me — or at least my artwork. I had been doing similar unit logos for Marine units since my platoon sergeant ordered me to create a design for our platoon when I was a lance corporal. As I got closer to the poster, I saw in the right hand corner the famous signature of Walt Disney. The poster had been created almost thirty years before I was born.

As it turns out, during World War II the Walt Disney company did over 1200 unit insignia for military units. Growing up, watching Disney films influenced my artistic development, and the work of the Disney Company made Disney’s style culturally pervasive throughout the military. Hence, Walt Disney had a hand in creating my ability — and in the military I create art for — the demand for it. I was not so original as I once thought. Disney left his mark first.

Disney had a lot of firsts. Disney was the first to make cartoons in sound, the first to make cartoons in color, the first to make a full-length animated feature, the first to bring storyboarding into cartoons and to bring the same discipline to live action features, the first to bring a color program to TV, and the first to bring documentaries into the mainstream. During World War II, the Walt Disney Company made training films and propaganda films to help the war effort, as well as the aforementioned unit insignias. The Disney films and TV shows have become so ubiquitous in America that millions of children from every generation since the forties have grown up on Disney.

We are the projection of the past. Disney illustrates that fact in a collective way, as our relatives do for us in individual ways. Take the image below, for instance, which is the result of both kinds of projections. The picture is a unit logo we did this week for the Seabees. I feel a special attachment to the Seabees through my grandfather who served as a Seabee alongside Marines in WWII on Tarawa and Iwo Jima. It is because of the stories he told of the Marines during his service, that my father, two brothers, and I all served in the Marines. His crackerjack uniform hangs in my closet adorned with the Seabee patch designed by another artist influenced by Disney, Frank J. Iafrate. When I look at it I am reminded of what I owe to those who have paved the way.