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    LIFE Inside the Disney Parks: The Happiest Places on Earth
    LIFE Inside the Disney Parks: The Happiest Places on Earth
    LIFE Inside the Disney Parks: The Happiest Places on Earth
    Ebook140 pages58 minutes

    LIFE Inside the Disney Parks: The Happiest Places on Earth

    By The Editors of LIFE

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    About this ebook

    Walt Disney spent his life dreaming impossible dreams, and achieved the most impossible dream of all - the amusement park to end all amusement parks: Disneyland!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLife
    Release dateMar 30, 2018
    ISBN9781547841875
    LIFE Inside the Disney Parks: The Happiest Places on Earth

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      Book preview

      LIFE Inside the Disney Parks - The Editors of LIFE

      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

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