This month, as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Disneyland, I wanted to take a moment to explore the inspirations for the world’s first theme park.
How does someone come up with an idea for something that had never existed before? In Walt’s case, he did what he always did. He studied what already existed and used it as a foundation to tweak it for his own purposes.
He had done the same thing when he introduced synchronized sound, Technicolor and feature-length running time for his animation. In those cases, he looked at what was being done in live-action film which he considered his main competition, not other animation studios that seemed to lag further and further behind the innovations that the Disney Studios was introducing.
Disneyland came out of that same process where Walt spent roughly two decades observing other entertainment venues and selecting what he liked as well as changing things he didn’t.
When his wife, Lillian, asked why he wanted to get involved with something so cheap and dirty as an amusement park, Walt was quick to answer that his version would not be like those other parks. He had studied them, not just what rides were available but what people liked about them, how they moved about the area, complaints that people commonly had about the experiences and more.
The Canadian Broadcasting Company introduced Telescope in 1963 as a 30-minute television program that would “examine, reflect and project the Canadian image” and for 10 years this half-hour documentary series covered a wide range of subjects pertaining to Canadians.
Generally, the show featured a personality profile of a Canadian (national figure, international celebrity, or notable unknown citizen). Since Walt's father, Elias, was born in Canada, Walt was invited to be interviewed by Fletcher Markle on September 25, 1963.
At the time, the affable Markle, who was born in Winnipeg, had just finished directing the Disney live-action film The Incredible Journey (1963) which was filmed in Calgary, Canada. Markle died from heart failure at the age of 70 in 1991 in Pasadena, California.
During that interview, Walt famously shared the story of the birth of Disneyland that has been often repeated over the years:
“Well, it came about when my daughters were very young and Saturday was always Daddy’s day with the two daughters. So we’d start out and try to go someplace, you know, different things, and I’d take them to the merry-go-round and I took them different places and as I’d sit while they rode the merry-go-round and did all these things…sit on a bench, you know, eating peanuts.
“I felt that there should be something built, some kind of an amusement enterprise built, where the parents and the children could have fun together.
“So that’s how Disneyland started. Well, it took many years. It was a period of maybe fifteen years developing. I started with many ideas, threw them away, started all over again. And, eventually, it evolved into what you see today at Disneyland. But it all started from a Daddy with two daughters wondering where he could take them where he could have a little fun with them, too.”
As a teenager, Walt first announced his interest in building a different kind of amusement park. It was a dream that he kept coming back to several times during his life, even occasionally making tentative planning attempts over the years, before Disneyland became a reality in 1955.
“When we consider a new project,” Walt Disney stated, “we really study it—not just the surface idea, but everything about it.”
When Walt Disney traveled the United States and Europe, he visited many outdoor attractions, zoos (to see how live animals were displayed and whether they were caged or seemingly roamed free), museums, county fairs, state fairs, circuses, arcades, shooting galleries, carnivals, amusement parks, and national parks.
When he did so, he wasn’t just enjoying a well-deserved vacation. He was studying the attractions and how they worked and what made them appealing. He talked with people to find out what entertained them and what frustrated them in these venues. He sometimes took notes.
He visited with amusement park owners and with people who made rides and bombarded them with a seemingly endless stream of questions. His curiosity seemed insatiable.
He eventually assembled a team consisting primarily of Bill Martin, Bill Cottrell, Bruce Bushman, Harper Goff, Ed Schott, and George Whitney, and they were assigned to a variety of tasks, including measuring the walkways at Knott’s Berry Farm and how the audience flowed from one attraction to another and what caused that flow to get jammed up.
Goff recalled that the summer and fall of 1954, “Walt sent us all around to every amusement park in the country. We would take pictures and come back and tell Walt all about what they were doing. One of the things we tried to get was their ‘gate’…how much they charged, how many people came through, and how much they made. Also what kinds of operating problems they had, such as dishonesty.”
Goff personally visited New Orleans during Mardi Gras, Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, the Erie Canal, the Lincoln Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Colonial Williamsburg, Marineland, and the Steamboat Museum in St. Louis, among many other sites during a two year period.
Walt’s team visited Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, Palisades Park in New Jersey, Playland Park in New York and other amusement venues, including replica historic towns and small museums across the country,as well as places like Forest Lawn Cemetery that attracted large numbers of tourists.
They visited New Orleans, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and other cities and reported back on their amusement venues not only on the rides, but attendance, food, amount of money spent, layout of the area and similar factors.
Some of the best information came from studying the San Diego Zoo, which had year-round attendance of 2 million. Because it was open all year, unlike some of the other venues which were only open seasonal because of weather or vacation time, a pattern of month-to-month visits could be plotted, calculating the average attendance of the 15 highest days as a reasonable yardstick for the size of Walt’s park.
All of these reports helped Walt formulate what he wanted and what he did not want in his park.
Walt Disney Productions stockholders did not agree that the company should be getting involved in such a project. When Walt was prepared to buy property in a beautiful valley in Calabasas for the project, the stockholders filed a lawsuit to prevent him from doing so.
In an impassioned and tearful address to the stockholders, Walt stated:
“I don’t want this company to stand still. We have prospered before when we have taken chances and tried new things. This is our golden opportunity—a chance to move into an entirely new field.
“You say we are not in the amusement park business. No, we’re not. But we are in the entertainment business. And amusement parks are entertainment.
“I know it is difficult for you to envision Disneyland the way I can. This kind of thing has never been done before. There’s nothing like it in the entire world. I know, because I’ve looked. That’s why it can be great because it will be unique. A new concept in entertainment, and I think…I KNOW…it can be a success!”
Even Walt’s older brother, Roy, was not thrilled with the idea and limited the studio’s initial investment to just $10,000.
Walt raised $100,000 by borrowing on his life insurance policy, and then also sold his home in Palm Springs in order to finance his own separate design company, WED Enterprises (now known as Walt Disney Imagineering).
WED Enterprises was a separate business entity from the Disney Studio, but utilized some of the same employees and its function was to create Disneyland. All of those employees were paid by Walt, not the Disney Studios, even though some costs were getting charged back to the studio.
In 1952, Walt established Walt Disney Incorporated with himself as president. Roy was concerned that stockholders would be upset about the use of Walt’s name in a different company, so the name was changed in 1953 to WED Enterprises to reflect the initials of Walter Elias Disney.
For years, people assumed the company must have something to do with weddings. In 1965, Walt Disney Productions purchased WED and its assets. It was rechristened as Walt Disney Imagineering in 1987.
Despite all the research and initial planning, it was not until the ABC television network signed on as an investor that Walt got the cash and credit-line needed for going ahead with actually building Disneyland.
Some visits made to certain locations may have been more influential than others in the final version of Disneyland and here is a quick glimpse at those venues.
Electric Park
In 1911, Disney’s parents moved the family to Kansas City, Missouri that had the amusement park, Electric Park. A previous amusement park of the same name had burned down and a new one was built in May 1907.
This new one was located about 15 blocks north of the Disney home and Walt often walked there and looked through the fence. Not having the money to buy admission, a 9-year-old Walt and a friend of his sometimes snuck under the fence to get in to the horror of Walt’s younger sister. In 1911, the park attracted one million people, averaging 8,000 paying customers per day.
The trolley park was inspired by the 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair where Walt’s father found work as a carpenter. Electric Park was illuminated at night by 100,000 lights. A train ringed the park and there were daily fireworks at closing time. There was a wide variety of entertainments from concerts, alligator farm, penny arcade, scenic railway, boats, circle swing, shooting gallery, carousel, fortune telling booths and more. Advertisements proclaimed it “Kansas City’s Coney Island.”
This amusement park also burned to the ground like its predecessor in 1925.
Coney Island
Coney Island was home to multiple amusement parks over the decades, and from 1880 to just after World War II, it was the largest amusement venue in the United States attracting millions of visitors each year. Unfortunately, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it fell into a decline that it never fully recovered from with factors like fires, neglect, street gangs and audiences finding other safer and cleaner entertainments.
Walt said he was almost ready to give up the idea of an amusement park after seeing Coney Island in the early 1950s, years after its heyday.
After a day visiting Coney Island in the early 1950s with his wife, Lillian, Walt was downhearted. He told her, “I’m almost ready to give up the idea of an amusement park after seeing Coney Island. The whole place is so run-down and ugly. The people who run it are so unpleasant. The whole thing is almost enough to destroy your faith in human nature.”
In August 1953, Walt made a trip to Coney Island in New York with the specific intention of gathering information to apply to Disneyland. He was accompanied by actor Richard Todd who was in the city as part of a promotional tour for the Disney live-action film, The Sword and the Rose (1953), in which he was the star.
In an interview with animation historian and author Michael Barrier, Todd said, “[Walt] rang me up one day and said, ‘Come to Coney Island with me.’ I could feel my face falling. It wasn’t my ideal place, but, anyhow, I said, ‘Yes, yes, thank you’. We had a hell of a good day, actually. That was the beginning of Disneyland. He was going to see what the things were that people liked doing. We did everything—the switchbacks [roller coasters], the horses, everything. We ate the fluffy stuff [cotton candy]. We had a lovely day, thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.”
Griffith Park
Griffith Park is a large municipal park located in the Los Feliz neighborhood in Los Angeles, California where Walt lived for most of his life. In December 1896, Colonel Griffith donated five square acres of his Rancho Los Feliz estate to Los Angeles to be used as “a place of recreation” for “the plain people.”
During Walt’s lifetime, there were several attractions located on the park grounds, including an observatory, a zoo, a theater, and pony rides, as well as a special section dedicated on December 1952 called Travel Town, an outdoor museum to preserve and celebrate Southern California railroads with actual vehicles that people could explore.
More important, there was the Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round. Built by Spillman Engineering Company and brought to Griffith Park in 1937, the Merry-Go-Round has 68 horses with finely carved with jewel-encrusted bridles, detailed draped blankets and decorated with sunflowers and lion's heads. A Stinson 165 Military Band Organ, reputed to be the largest band organ accompanying a carousel on the West Coast, plays more than 1,500 selections of marches and waltz music.
Walt would take his two young daughters on the weekend to ride the carousel and supposedly sitting on a nearby bench decided to build a place where parents and children could have fun together.
One of the benches from that time period is in the personal collection of Imagineer Tony Baxter and another is displayed at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.
Henry Ford’s Museum and Greenfield Village
The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village began as just a personal collection of American historical objects obtained by entrepreneur Henry Ford. Greenfield Village was founded on October 21, 1929, as an educational and historic landmark, maintaining the buildings and stories of America’s past for future generations.
Greenfield Village houses nearly 100 historic buildings in a village setting including the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, a replica of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, and Noah Webster’s Connecticut home. In addition there was a 1913 Dentzel merry-go-round and an operating stern-wheeler riverboat.
Walt first visited Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, on April 12, 1940 and spent the day enjoying himself. He visited a second time on August 23, 1948, with Disney Legend Ward Kimball when they took a trip to visit the Chicago Railroad Fair. Disney wrote a memo dated August 31, 1938 to Disney Studios production designer Dick Kelsey about his ideas for an amusement venue. He described a main village with a train, an opera house, movie theater, horse car, magic shop, and kids' clothing store and more that he had seen in Greenfield.
Children’s Fairyland
On April 17, 1954, Walt flew to San Francisco on some unspecified company business and toured Fairyland located in Oakland since 1948. He invited its executive director Dorothy Manes to visit his park if she found herself in Southern California. In January 1955 she did come down to visit, and was hired as the head of Disneyland’s youth activities, a position she held until 1972.
According to legend, Walt asked to contribute a cartoon to a wall of the park and, when given permission, drew Mickey Mouse. Guests enter the park through the Old Mother Goose Shoe. There is a train, an attraction inspired by Alice in Wonderland, a scaled down enclosed ferris wheel, and a pirate ship where children could play among many other opportunities for young children.
Disneyland Inspirations Part Two will cover 10 other locations Walt studied closely and personally before designing his Disneyland. One of the biggest inspirations for Disneyland was Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
