A Mickey Mouse Kind of Historian : Memorabilia: Burbank librarian dreamed up his own post as the first and only Disney Studios archivist.

It’s all right to call scholarly David R. Smith a Mickey Mouse kind of guy.

For 21 years this Burbank resident has been the keeper of all that is Disney. He spends his days with cartoon characters and toys, but his is the serious work of keeping track.

He is often the final authority on everything the Disney organization has ever said, made or done.

He is the first and only archivist the Burbank-based Disney empire has ever had, and according to his peers, the first and only archivist ever employed by a major studio.

A former Library of Congress intern and the son of two Pasadena librarians, Smith did not get this job as one of three wishes from a bottled up genie.

He simply made it up himself.

“I was working at the UCLA research library when a call came to the university from the people at Disney,” Smith recalls over lunch in the studio’s small, pleasant dining room.

“Walt had died several years before and they wanted someone to come over to his offices and catalogue his things,” he says of Walt Disney.

The things--including personal objects, drawings and plans for future projects--had been virtually untouched since the studio founder’s death in 1966, primarily because no one knew what to do with it all.

Smith did.

During his summer internship in Washington, he had become familiar with evaluating and cataloguing special collections. At 29, possessing a master’s degree and solid experience, he felt able and confident.

Still, he said, walking into Disney’s office and organizing the man’s personal papers, drawings and belongings was an eerie experience.

“Walt had been a very informal person and insisted that everyone call him by his first name,” Smith says. But Disney, he adds, was a genuine genius, with a towering intellect and explosive imagination, so Smith was understandably awed.

The task went well, but once he had completed the job, he didn’t want to stop.

“The studio was a treasury of animation cels, historical correspondence and merchandise from the earliest Disney productions dating back to 1932. Everything was all over the place,” he says. “No one had made much of an effort to get it together and preserve it.”

The quiet, studious Smith, in what seems to be an uncharacteristic burst of chutzpah, wrote to the studio executives and suggested he be hired on a full-time basis to do the job right.

That was in 1970, and he’s been at it ever since.

Smith now oversees, from his office in the Roy O. Disney Building on Mickey Avenue, a massive collection of Disneyana.

He oversees the care of 36 years of Walt Disney correspondence, including some early files dating back to the Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City in 1922; a library of the more than 2,000 titles of Disney books; a collection of the 1,500 phonograph records put out by the Walt Disney Music Co.; newspaper and magazine clippings dating back to 1924; a photo library with more than 1 million negatives; catalogues of all merchandise chartered by Disney as well as a representative sampling of the items; production files of all Disney live-action films; materials on all theme parks; oral histories from Walt Disney and other key executives, as well as millions of dollars worth of animation art from all Disney cartoons, including the original cels from “Steamboat Willie,” Disney’s first animated cartoon with sound.

Smith points out that one privately owned cel recently sold at auction for $286,000.

On display outside Smith’s office, in giant showcases, are shelves and shelves of historic merchandise, including the first Mickey Mouse watch with the $2.95 price tag still intact.

Some of the memorabilia in the Disney Building as well as other storage facilities include Annette Funicello’s Mouseketeer outfits, the carousel horse from “Mary Poppins,” a helmet from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and the magic doorknob from “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.”

Smith, conducting a postprandial look at this storehouse of collectibles, checks the treasures with the obvious enjoyment of a born collector. He has, in addition to the responsibility for all Disneyana, a private collection of manuscripts and autographs. Included in his collection, begun some 40 years ago, are autographs of every President of the United States, Smith said.

He also serves as a past director of the International Manuscript Society, which met this spring in Dublin, Ireland, with Smith very much in attendance.

Smith, who is known and respected among his peers, is acknowledged to have done an extraordinary job at Disney, according to Linda Mehr, head librarian of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library in Beverly Hills.

“In fact, he is unique,” says Anne G. Schlosser, director of research at Warner Bros. who was a colleague at UCLA 21 years ago when Smith first got his Disney job.

“There is not another studio archives of its kind anywhere,” says Schlosser, who set up the American Film Institute research library.

“Several studios and organizations have research libraries that support filmmakers in designing sets, props, costumes and that sort of thing,” she explains, “but David heads up the only fully active motion picture studio archives anywhere, meaning he is in charge of collecting corporate history.”

In collecting Disney Studios film memorabilia, as part of the overall studio corporate history, Smith now supervises a staff of six, including researchers and support staff.

The library-cum-mini-museum is open only to serious scholars, according to a Disney spokesman, but Smith takes a generous view as to who is a serious scholar.

“If someone calls and seems to have a real interest and knowledge, we try to make room,” Smith says. Time permitting, he will also tell people if their Disney items are genuine, but he will not evaluate the price, leaving that to auction houses or other collectors.

Because the Disney empire has grown so much, Smith is always getting questions about Disney characters or story lines from people at the theme parks or merchandising outlets, he said. “The people in those new Disney ventures are not as familiar with the history and characters and often need filling in.”

What Smith doesn’t know, he knows where to find out. Basically, however, he himself is the archives’ greatest resource.

In more than two decades on the lot, he has also acquainted himself with of all the major players, past and present, as well as the history of every one of the buildings.

In a stroll around the lot, he tells how Disney’s original studio was on Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood and how, when Walt bought the Burbank location, he had many buildings lifted off their foundations and trucked to their new locations.

For what must be the 100th time, Smith looks at the huge building where short subjects are created and wonders how Disney managed to have something that size driven through the Cahuenga Pass, which was a very narrow road at the time.

“That was 1939 and there were no freeways or anything like that,” Smith muses. “Even through you can see where Walt had it cut in half, and then put back together again, it still must have been quite an operation.”

Passing the animation buildings, Smith explains why the structures are at an angle to the other buildings. “Walt wanted each one built so every office would have the most favorable, natural, north-south light for the artists. He also had all the buildings air-conditioned, which at that time was unusual.”

As Smith walks through or by each structure, he tells a story. How Stage 1 was where the “Fantasia” orchestra scenes were shot, and how Stage 2 was built for Jack Webb’s television program “Dragnet” and then was used for the “Mickey Mouse Club.” Stage 3 is where they filmed “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” in a huge tank. The cavernous Stage 4 is where “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” was filmed; because the actors playing leprechauns were normal size, all of the furniture and other props had to be made enormous to dwarf them.

After coming out of the Disney back lot--where, among other structures, there is the house where “The Absent-Minded Professor” was filmed--Smith comes face to face with the changing times.

There, looming in all its bizarre glory, is the now infamous orange office building with the 19-foot-high Seven Dwarfs standing in bas relief.

Smith’s guest wonders aloud what Walt would have thought of this recently built architectural aberration. “I don’t really know,” says Smith with a small smile that gives nothing away.

The studio that Walt built looked like a college campus and had an air of gentleness about it, Smith says. In a time when studio heads were often rude dictators who rode roughshod over the assembled writing and production talent, Disney created a haven for artists of all kinds.

But then, Smith adds, Disney Studios has always been a unique place, out of step with the bottom line mentality of other studios.

The times may be changing, Smith admits. But there is still something magical about the house that Walt built.