DizBiz: One World One Disneyland

First published May 26, 2003

By C. W. Oberleitner

C. W. Oberleitner continues his series about the coming 50th Anniversary of Disneyland and why it means so much to people all over the world.

One day in 1797, an English horseman turned showman led his employees down the city streets of Philadelphia. On a June morning in 1914, a confused chauffeur made a wrong turn in Sarajevo and delivered his passengers into the waiting sights of an angry young man with a gun. And, in 1920 a fourteen-year-old Idaho farm boy tilling a potato field turned up more than spuds.

These three people, a showman, an assassin and a farm boy, set into motion a series of events that would roll through history and change the way people all around the world lived their lives. The repercussions of their actions would eventually collide and come together early one October evening at precisely the right moment in time to help insure the success of what up to that point most experts believed to be the greatest folly of Walt Disney's career. The events these men set in motion would forever embed in the hearts and minds of people all over the world the magic of Disneyland.

Smarter to Be Lucky

There is an old adage that says that it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart. If that's true then Walt Disney was doubly blessed. He was lucky and he was smart. Perhaps his greatest stroke of luck was to be Roy Oliver Disney's younger brother. Virtually every Disney biographer credits Roy with saving his brother from financial ruin. Roy was the solid foundation upon which Walt was able to build his dreams.

Of course that didn't mean things always ran smoothly. Walt's ideas were often ahead of the times and his determination to "lick'em with product" rather than cut back at the studios as his bankers often wanted would lead to some tense times between the brothers. Walt's thought process for new ideas didn't help either.

Disney Studio old timers are found of telling stories about befuddled visitors asking questions about the progress of various feature animation projects they had heard about from Walt. These guests were often surprised to find out that Walt had basically been thinking out loud in their presence. He would often talk about a possible project to gauge people's reaction to certain ideas. In the end if he wasn't completely satisfied with the idea he would abandon it. And some ideas were harder for him to conceptualize than others.

In the early 1930's Walt Disney and his wife Lillian bought a lot and built a house on Woking Way in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. It was in this house that they began raising their two daughters Diane and Sharon. Los Feliz is located to the northwest of downtown Los Angeles and sits on the southern border of Griffith Park. It was in this park that Walt would take his young daughters for rides on the park's historic carousel. He and the other parents would sit on the benches that ringed the carousel and watch for hours as their children circled round and about. These trips became the genesis of the idea that would eventually become Disneyland.

Walt's idea, however, that families should have some place to go where the parents could enjoy themselves as much as the kids, was not the only idea that lead to Disneyland. During the 30s as the company prospered and began construction on a new studio in Burbank, Walt was inundated with requests for visits and tours.

This was not unprecedented in the motion picture business. Universal City home of Universal Studios located less than a mile to the east of the new Disney Studios in Burbank had been conducting tours since the day it opened. The problem for Walt was that there just wasn't anything for people to see at an animation studio. Beside that, how would his animators be able to get any work done with dozens of people constantly looking over their shoulders?

The two problems, one of creating a place for families and the other of providing fans of Disney films with a place to visit merged and the idea of creating some type of park to solve these problems began to take shape. The idea may have been taking shape in Walt's mind but events would prevent him from taking any steps to turn that idea into a reality. And, in this too he was very lucky.

Nexus

In high school I had a history teacher whose favorite expression was:

How can you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been?

Like most high school boys, I thought the man was a bit daft. I never really did know what he meant by this. To me history was nothing more than memorizing an endless string of dates, the beginnings and endings of various wars and the signing of all sorts of treaties and documents.

All of that changed when I ran across the work of Oxford educated scientist, author, lecturer and television producer James Burke. Mr. Burke is probably best known to Americans for his two PBS/BBC series based on his books, Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.

In his books and on his television programs Mr. Burke makes a compelling case for the idea that all human invention and endeavor is interrelated. It is his contention that there are, "moments in the process of change in which things come to a nexus." That is when one event or discovery crosses paths with another and the number of possible outcomes increases dramatically. For example in Connections Mr. Burke traces the history of the evolution of the water wheel into the present day computer.

And it is this connection to things that have come before us that brings us back to our showman, assassin and farm boy. The showman was Philip Lailson. In 1797 Mr. Lailson led the members of his traveling circus in full costume through the streets of Philadelphia. This was the first circus parade. Later as the practice caught on and it became grander other master showmen like P.T. Barnum refined and adapted it until the circus parade evolved into what we know it as today, a preview of coming attractions. Promos, teasers, trailers, whatever you choose to call them, they are all descendents of those first circus performers parading down the streets of Philadelphia.

Skipping the assassin for a moment our farm boy was Philo T. Farnsworth an extraordinarily gifted and bright young man. Phil, as he was known, solved the riddle of the television picture tube at the age of 14. While tilling a field back and forth he realized that an electron beam could scan an image in much the same way by moving back and forth line by line. The beam would in effect read an image the same way you and I read a book.

It took Phil Farnsworth another seven years to assemble a team of assistants and enough investors to test his theory. On September 7, 1927 the first "image dissecting tube" was successfully tested in the loft of a San Francisco warehouse. On that occasion one of his investors was quoted as saying, "The damned thing works!" Television was born.

I've saved the assassin for last because technically he didn't invent anything. He did, however, set in motion the greatest sequence of events to take place in the twentieth century. These events in turn caused the most rapid and radical upheaval in human behavior in the history of the world.

On the morning of June 28, 1914 Gravrilo Princip, joined six of his friends on the streets of Sarajevo. Their goal was as odd as their intended victim's reason for pursuing what would be his ultimate folly. Princip and his friends did not set out to start a war they just wanted a greater role for their fellow Serbs within the Austro Hungarian Empire. The Archduke Ferdinand, after years of chaffing under his uncle the Emperor Francis Joseph's disapproval of his wife Sophie, wanted greater recognition and acclaim for her, hence her place in the car beside him that day in Sarajevo.

In the end, after several botched attempts by his colleagues, it was Gravrilo Princip who fired the shots that ended the lives of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. In so doing he unleashed the forces that would shape the destinies of everyone on Earth for the remainder of the century.

Meanwhile Back In Burbank

Walt Disney had seen the tail end of World War I as an American Ambulance Corpsman. He arrived in France just days after the armistice ending the war had been signed. When he returned to America he would continue to experience the effects the war was having on people's lives.

Prior to World War I both Europe and America were fairly hierarchical societies. Despite the growth of a middle class brought on by the Industrial Revolution the cultural and social life of the day often followed a strict and seemingly arbitrary set of rules. All of that began to change after the war.

The lyrics of a popular song of the era asked,

How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paree?

The answer was you couldn't. What we now call the Roaring Twenties was the direct result of tens of thousands of young men returning home after the war. Horrid as it was war had opened their eyes to new ways of thinking and doing things and made them impatient to begin having those experiences. Opportunities abounded and the world's economies flourished.

The 20s afforded a young Walt Disney the opportunity to try and even fail at business in a way that no one would have dreamed of a generation earlier. More than that it afforded he and his brother Roy time to learn their chosen business so that when the bubble burst in 1929 and The Great Depression set in they had a set of skills that would still prove marketable during the down turn of the economy.

Despite the world wide economic hardship that surrounded the Disney Studio the 30s were good to Walt. He was able to advance the art and craft of animation and achieve his greatest success to date with the creation and release of the studio's first full-length feature animated film, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. This was also the time he began toying with ideas for his family park.

The effects of Gravrilo Princip's gunshots continued to roll through the world. The crippling depression that followed the collapse of the world's economies at the end of the 20s proved to be fertile ground for ultra conservative right wing extremists. The rise of Fascism, the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler sent the world back into chaos and war.

World War II put on hold virtually all of Walt's ideas including plans for his park. In fact he and Roy had to struggle to keep the studio going during the war years. But even this delay would ultimately benefit Disneyland.

The development of the idea that was to become Disneyland wasn't the only thing held back by World War II. Philo T. Farnsworth's television was virtually put on hold during the war as well.

Setting The Stage

By the end of World War II Walt was once again able to turn his attention to projects he wanted to do. But there were still a few hurdles he had to overcome before Disneyland would become a reality.

Thanks to a trip with animator Ward Kimball to the 1948 Chicago Railroad Fair he finally had settled firmly on the idea of an amusement park. Mickey Mouse Park, as he referred to it, would feature a live steam train traveling around a town complete with village green and Town Hall. Roy remained skeptical. The studio still had a great deal of debt. Roy believed that going into the amusement park business was pure folly.

Part of the problem was that while Walt knew his park would be unlike anything anyone had ever seen or experienced he was being confounded by the image that came to mind when people heard the words "amusement park." With few exceptions by the end of World War II amusement parks were pretty run down affairs. The rides and attractions were poorly maintained, the grounds generally littered and the employees just a step or two above incarceration. The clientele of the establishments was most often thought to be randy, rowdy, drunken servicemen out for a good time with the "loose" women who accompanied them. Not a very pretty or very Disney like picture.

Walt relentlessly pursued his amusement park plans and eventually settled on the name Disneyland. Despite forming his own company, WED Enterprises, to develop Disneyland it soon became obvious that if Disneyland was to be built it would require all the resources of Walt Disney Productions. Roy came on board and following an emotional presentation by Walt the company's board of directors authorized Walt and Roy to pursue both Disneyland and a regularly scheduled television show to help fund and preview the park.

In 1950 the Disney Studio had experimented with television and Walt learned that the new medium was an excellent means for promoting his films. While extremely entertaining to the audiences of the day this first Disney television show was technically a one hour infomercial -- something else Disney may deserve credit for popularizing if not inventing -- for the studio's soon to be released feature Alice In Wonderland. Walt had now joined Philip Lailson's parade of coming attractions with Philo T. Farnsworth's image dissecting tube television. There was just one more piece to fall in place.

Walt Disney's animated films always cost a great deal of money to make. This meant they required large audiences before they could turn a profit. But, during the depression birth rates had fallen and family size had contracted significantly. Things stayed this way throughout the war.

The end of World War II saw a repeat of the same phenomenon that followed World War I, the return of servicemen not content to return to life, as they knew it, prior to the war. There were, however, some significant differences. Controls were now in place to prevent the same type of financial excesses that led up to the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent depression. And, while tens of thousands of men tragically lost their lives in World War II a higher percentage of men returned safely from this war than any previous conflagration in U.S. history.

Beginning in 1945 one of the single greatest outcomes from those shots fired by Gravrilo Princip back in June 1914 began to occur. Returning servicemen ran into the waiting arms of the women they had left behind. They began doing what men and women who have been separated for a great deal of time do when the finally get back together. The years between 1946 and 1964 saw an explosion in the number and size of families in the U.S. The stage was now set for Disneyland.

519 Days And Counting

The Walt Disney Company marks July 17, 1955 as Disneyland's official birthday. For me 7:00 PM Eastern Standard time Wednesday October 27, 1954 is the moment that Disneyland came to life. It was at this moment that the outcome of Lailson's first circus parade, Princip's savage act of brutality and Farnsworth's discovery all came together with Walt Disney's vision. It was the happiest collision on Earth.

By the time the words "Walt Disney's Disneyland" erupted from television sets across the country for the first time the first Baby Boomers were turning eight. Their parents had already caused an explosion in the suburban housing market. The difference between suburban life then and now was that commercial development hadn't caught up with residential development. There was very little for people to do in those new suburbs but watch television. There were only three channels to choose from and at that time Disney had the only brand name known for family entertainment on any of those channels.

Tens of millions of children and their families grew up together watching Uncle Walt first build then add on to his favorite toy Disneyland. So powerful was the image of Walt's original park in the mind of Americans that for years after the opening of Walt Disney World people planning a Disney family vacation would often say to their friends, "We're going to Disneyland. The one in Florida."

The impact of Disneyland on people's hearts and minds is a worldwide phenomenon. When the Oriental Land Company first approached the Walt Disney Company about building a Disney theme park in Tokyo they insisted that it be called Disneyland. And when Euro Disney ran into financial difficulty because it had overbuilt hotel space part of the restructuring included remaining it Disneyland Paris.

Ask any child what Disney park they most want to visit and they will likely tell you Disney World, because it has more rides. Ask family members of all ages, which is their favorite Disney theme park, as I have done on numerous occasions, and you'll likely hear them say Disneyland, because it's more magical.

"Everything is where it belongs." A mother with two small children once told me. By which she meant that if you've watched the old Disneyland and Wonderful World of Color television shows you came to develop an intuitive knowledge of Disneyland. "The attractions in Florida (at The Magic Kingdom) aren't in the right places."

Several years ago I asked a long time Disney Imagineer why some people might find The Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World less magical than Disneyland. "It's the scale." He replied. "In Florida they went crazy because they had all that space. Everything's bigger and that makes things more intimidating to children which in turn makes them more apprehensive."

I began this series by saying there is one word recognized anywhere on Earth that is likely to bring a smile to all who hear it and occasionally a tear to the eye. That word is Disneyland. We grew up with it and it has grown along with us. It is as much a part of our families and our lives as our brothers, sisters and the family pet. It will forever be the only park that Walt Disney himself ever walked or more importantly played in. It is the single greatest achievement of a lifetime full of works of wonder, magic and imagination. It is Walt Disney's Disneyland.

Next: What's The Buzz - Tell Me Whatsa Happenen

We take a look at all the stories circulating about what The Walt Disney Company will and will not be doing to celebrate Disneyland's 50^th anniversary.

C'ya real soon!