LIFE Inside the Disney Parks: The Happiest Places on Earth

123 Pages·2018·9.78 MB·English

by  The Editors of LIFE

Inside the Disney Parks
KELLY VERDECK
Twilight descended over Spaceship Earth, the 180-foot-tall geodesic sphere that forms the centerpiece of
Walt Disney World’s EPCOT theme park.
Contents
Introduction: Walt’s “Screwy” Idea
The Beginnings
The California Years
The World After Walt
Tokyo and Beyond
Just One More
JAY L. CLENDENIN/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY
The World of Color nightly light and water show at Disneyland’s California Adventure, built on the site of
the park’s former parking lot.
Introduction
Walt’s “Screwy” Idea By J.I. Baker Walt
Disney spent his life dreaming
impossible dreams—and usually
realizing them. In 1928, he created the
first animated short with synchronized
sound (Steamboat Willie), which turned
Mickey Mouse into an international
superstar. Less than a decade later,
Disney released the first full-length
animated feature (Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs), which became the most
successful American film up to that
point. And in the early 1950s, Walt
dreamed the most impossible dream of
them all: an amusement park to end all
amusement parks. He would call it
Disneyland.
Though it’s hard to believe now, the park’s success was anything but certain. In fact,
Roy Disney—Walt’s brother and financial partner—thought it was yet another one of
“Walt’s screwy ideas,” and bankers refused to lend the company a dime. “When he
started Disneyland, he didn’t have a friend in the world,” one colleague said. But Walt
persevered, as always. “Sometimes I wonder if ‘common sense’ isn’t another way of
saying ‘fear,’” he said. “And fear too often spells failure.”
In the face of enormous obstacles (record rainfall, labor strikes), a ballooning budget
(total price tag: $17 million), and a disastrous opening day (women’s high heels sunk
in Main Street’s still-drying asphalt), Disney prevailed. His “screwy idea” quickly
became an enormous hit—and eventually changed popular culture forever.
Of course, he kept dreaming, making plans for an even more ambitious park (Walt
Disney World) that would include a place that he felt would transform the country’s
future (EPCOT). Sadly, he didn’t live to see these become a reality, but the spread of
Disney parks throughout the world (Tokyo, Paris, and Shanghai among them) and the
astronomical ongoing success of the company he founded proves beyond a doubt that
Disney’s “impossible” dream endures.
LOOMIS DEAN/LIFE/THE PICTURE COLLECTION
The Mad Tea Party ride, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, in Disneyland’s Fantasyland, circa 1955.
The Beginnings
How Walt Disney’s midlife obsession with miniatures and
trains led to the creation of the world’s greatest theme
park
DAVID F. SMITH/AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Walt Disney crossed the drawbridge that serves as the entrance to Sleeping Beauty Castle in the heart of
Disneyland, circa 1955. The original site of the castle proved to be overrun with feral cats, which animal
lover Disney took pains to save.
It was June 1955—only six weeks before Disneyland was scheduled to open—and
Walt Disney was worried. His risky new park in Anaheim, California, was still a work in
progress—hardly more than the orange groves it had been built on. From the start,
construction had been plagued with problems, including a record deluge of rain. Now
Main Street wasn’t paved; Sleeping Beauty Castle—the centerpiece of the park—
wasn’t finished; and Tomorrowland barely existed. Plumbers told Disney that, because
of a strike, they couldn’t make both the drinking fountains and the bathrooms work.
Walt, of course, opted to fix the bathrooms. “People can buy Pepsi-Cola,” he said, “but
they can’t pee in the street.”
The project itself had repeatedly gone over its original budget of $4.5 million. Two
months after construction began in July 1954, the cost had risen to $7 million. Then it
skyrocketed to $11 million. “We were still talking $11 million in April when I was
walking down Main Street with [Disney’s older brother] Roy and a representative from
Bank of America, who scanned the project and said it looked closer to $15 million,”
said Joe Fowler, the former Navy rear admiral who had been put in charge of the park’s
construction.
By opening day, the investment had risen to a whopping $17 million—largely
because Disney himself was never satisfied, a personal characteristic that led to a
process he called “plussing.” As he did with his films, the 53-year-old wanted
everything to be bigger, better, more surprising, and more innovative. At the last
minute, for instance, he decided that he wanted to create an attraction featuring the
giant squid from his 1954 hit 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which he helped spray-
paint on the night before the opening—even as he continued to micromanage
everything else. At three a.m., he was demanding new murals: “Get me an artist!” he
shouted.
But Walt ultimately let go—well, he had to—and on the morning of July 17, 1955,
Disneyland opened to an overflowing crowd of 28,000 people. Despite the
considerable flaws, it was a revolutionary moment in American culture—and the
fulfillment of a dream that had begun less than a decade before with, of all things, a
model train.
On December 8, 1947, Walt wrote a letter to his sister: “I bought myself a birthday
present—something I’ve wanted all my life—an electric train . . . I have set it up in one
of the outer rooms adjoining my office so that I can play with it when I have a spare
moment. It’s a freight train with a whistle, and real smoke comes out of the smokestack
—there are switches, semaphores, stations, and everything. It’s just wonderful!”
The filmmaker had been fascinated by trains ever since his boyhood in Marceline,
Missouri, the small town where his father, Elias, moved his family in 1906, having failed
as a carpenter in Chicago. Little more than a whistle stop between the Windy City and
Kansas City, Missouri, Marceline was nevertheless a bucolic paradise for little Walt,
who spent his four short years there prowling Main Street, sketching the animals that
populated the family farm, and, not least, marveling at the locomotives. The experience
exerted an enduring influence on nearly everything Disney did—from homey films like
Pollyanna to Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. It was, in fact, “the most important part
of Walt’s life,” his wife, Lillian, later said.
The youthful idyll didn’t last. Times were hard, and Elias was not cut out for farming.
In 1911, he once again uprooted his family and moved to Kansas City, where he was
reduced to running a paper route. His principle employees were, not surprisingly, his
four sons. Little Walt, the youngest, would rise in the predawn darkness and work all
day—often in freezing cold and snow so deep it sometimes reached his neck. Now and
then he fell asleep, exhausted, in apartment foyers. But the beleaguered boy nurtured
big dreams that reflected the two things that would end up defining his life: escape and
control.
Eventually he found both of them in Hollywood. In the 1920s, having embarked on
an unsuccessful career as an animator, he traveled west—by train, of course—to join
his brother Roy, who had sought relief from chronic respiratory ailments in the warm
desert air. “I packed all of my worldly goods—a pair of trousers, a checkered coat, a lot
of drawing materials, and the last of the fairy-tale reels we had made—in a kind of
frayed cardboard suitcase,” Walt said later. “And with that wonderful audacity of youth,
I went to Hollywood, arriving there with just $40.”
He and Roy, his business partner, found little opportunity at first, but after years of
struggle, he finally hit upon the idea that would make his career—a creature that one of
his colleagues characterized thusly: “Pear-shaped body, ball on top, couple of thin legs.
You gave it long ears and it was a rabbit. Short ears, it was a cat. Ears hanging down, a
dog . . . With an elongated nose, it became a mouse.”
At first Walt called his new character “Mortimer Mouse,” but Lillian Bounds, the
Disney studio worker who had become the boss’s wife in 1925, thought the moniker
was “too sissy.”
Instead, she suggested “Mickey.”
The plucky little rodent became an instant star—thanks to Steamboat Willie, the first
cartoon short to use synchronized sound. But Disney quickly sought new challenges—
notably the creation of the first animated feature-length film, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs, in the 1930s. The project was so audacious, so expensive, and so risky that it
came to be called “Disney’s Folly.” Like Disneyland nearly two decades later, the
project kept going over budget, but after the film opened on December 21, 1937, it
became the most successful American film to date.
Things mostly went downhill from there—financially, at least. Of Disney’s first five
classic cartoon features, only two (Snow White and Dumbo) were hits (the others were
Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi). By the late 1940s, the Disney brand was in the
doldrums—defined by pleasantly unexceptional fare like Fun and Fancy Free (1947)
and Melody Time (1947). There were a few high points (commercially, at least) in the
years that followed. In 1948, a faked live-action documentary, Seal Island, became the
first in a series of successful True-Life Adventures—a precursor to today’s reality TV.