The anthology series originated as a way for Walt Disney to secure funding for the Disneyland amusement park, with his brother Roy Disney pitching all three major networks before ABC (merged with United Paramount Theatres) agreed to a deal on March 29, 1954, after CBS and NBC had rejected the idea.

Walt Disney had already shot many of the early 1950s episodes in color, in a display of foresight, which allowed them to be easily rerun when the series moved to NBC in 1961 and was rebranded Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color to showcase the network's color broadcasting capability.

The three-episode Davy Crockett storyline starring Fess Parker sparked a massive 1955 merchandising craze and produced the hit theme song 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett'; the TV episodes were later re-edited into two theatrical films.

The 1959 episode 'The Peter Tchaikovsky Story', made to promote Sleeping Beauty, was broadcast as one of the earliest three-channel stereo simulcasts on American television, with FM radio stations carrying the left channel, AM stations the right channel, and the TV broadcast itself serving as the mono center channel.

Following Walt Disney's death in 1966, the studio initially kept airing introductions he had already filmed, but ultimately removed the host segment entirely after his final pre-recorded appearance in the episode 'A Salute to Alaska', believing his persona was irreplaceable.

When reviving the show in 1986 as The Disney Sunday Movie, Disney considered several potential hosts including Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, Cary Grant, Tom Hanks, Walter Cronkite, Roy E. Disney (who closely resembled his uncle Walt), and even Mickey Mouse, before settling on new CEO Michael Eisner, who had to film multiple takes of a test video and hire a political-ad director to coach his on-camera performance.

CEO Michael Eisner has been one of only two hosts in the show's history, the other being Walt Disney himself.

A long-standing policy on the program meant that films from the core Disney animated features canon were essentially never aired, with only Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo as exceptions during the 1970s.