Why I Wrote a Book About Disney and the Stories Behind the Movies

People ask me some version of this question a lot: why Disney, and why now, and how does this fit with everything else you do?

It’s a fair question. On any given week I’m running youth programs for a nonprofit, teaching a classroom of kids who’d rather be anywhere else, hosting a live sale on Whatnot, and editing a YouTube video about a thrift store find. Once Upon a Source doesn’t look like it belongs on that list. I’d argue it’s actually the thing that ties all of it together.

Where It Actually Started

My grandfather was at Disneyland on opening day, July 17, 1955 — the day the plumbing wasn’t finished and the asphalt was still soft and half of Southern California showed up anyway. I grew up hearing about it constantly. Not as a nostalgia trip, but as a kind of family origin story. Disney wasn’t just entertainment in our house. It was inherited.

What nobody handed down to me, though, was any sense of where the stories actually came from. I knew the movies cold. I didn’t know that Snow White was seven years old in the original, or that Hamlet is basically the Lion King with a body count, or that nobody has ever found the original manuscript for Aladdin. I had to go find that out myself, and once I started, I couldn’t stop.

The Question I Couldn’t Shake

The idea for the book came from one specific, kind of obvious question: what happens if you put a Disney movie next to the story that actually inspired it? Not a trivia fact. Not a footnote. The whole original, side by side with the film, chapter by chapter.

These stories came from somewhere. That somewhere is usually darker, stranger, and more interesting than the movie.

I couldn’t find a book that did this the way I wanted it done, so eventually I accepted that I was going to have to write it myself. That was a longer, harder process than I expected — years of digging through old fairy tale collections, mythology texts, and out-of-print translations, trying to get the comparisons right instead of just interesting.

Why This Fits Everything Else I Do

Here’s the part that took me the longest to see clearly: teaching, running a nonprofit program for kids, selling on Whatnot, making YouTube videos, writing this book — none of it is really a different job. It’s the same job wearing different clothes. In every version of it, I’m trying to get someone’s attention on something they’d otherwise scroll straight past, and then give them a reason to actually care about it.

A kid in my classroom who thinks he hates reading. A viewer deciding whether to keep watching a thrift-store video. A Disney fan who’s seen Snow White forty times and has never once wondered who wrote it. It’s the same move every time: here’s something you already like, now let me show you why there’s more to it than you thought.

The Dedication

The book is dedicated to my mom — “for my mom, who gave me her love of reading, writing, and Disney.” That’s not a formality. She’s the reason all three of those things live in the same sentence for me instead of three separate ones. This project is, in a lot of ways, just me finally getting to combine them on purpose.

Twenty-four chapters in, I still think it was the right thing to spend years doing. I hope you find something in it worth your time too.