I love the Disney Treasures set and I especially love that they devoted an entire tin to Walt Disney himself, Your Host, Walt Disney, featuring two items I have never seen before despite all my research efforts.
On his Web site, Leonard Maltin, who puts together the Disney Treasures series discussed those two items:
“The set also features a show that the Disney studio considered lost for several decades: it’s a kinescope of a live, 90-minute broadcast called Kodak Presents Disneyland ’59, a rededication of the Anaheim park four years after its opening. There are dignitaries, parades, and guest stars galore, who range from TV stars of the period (including Irish McCalla, aka Sheena, Queen of the Jungle) and such future stars as Dennis Hopper and Clint Eastwood! Meredith Wilson leads seventy-six trombones on Main Street and Richard Nixon and his daughters attempt to cut the ribbon to open the Monorail. Disney archivist Ed Hobelman even located the original black & white negatives of the filmed segments prepared for this show, and spliced them into the kinescope for our DVD presentation. It was also Ed who uncovered an amazing piece of film that Walt shot, in CinemaScope and color, for one-time use at Radio City Music Hall in the early 1960s.”
Now, some Disney fans may be underwhelmed by “Kodak Presents Disneyland ’59”, especially since edited excerpts from the event have been seen before in color in the featurette Gala Day at Disneyland (released to theaters January 21, 1960).
Kodak was the sole sponsor of the ABC television show from June 15, 1959 entitled “Kodak Presents Disneyland ’59” that introduced to the world the new Tomorrowland attractions of the monorail, the submarine voyage and the Matterhorn bobsleds. There was even a banner that stretched across Main Street announcing Kodak presenting Disneyland ’59. Several years ago, I spent time with some top Kodak executives trying to track down a copy in their vaults without luck. Apparently, neither Disney nor ABC had a copy, either. So the discovery of this “lost” piece of Disneyland history is very exciting for those of us who spend our lives researching Disney.
Walt considered this event the “second opening of Disneyland” since he was never satisfied with the Tomorrowland that existed the original opening day of Disneyland. Walt even diverted funds that were planned for another project, Liberty Street and Edison Square, in order to make this dream a reality.
The connection between Walt’s Disneyland and Kodak is a long one.
When Walt Disney built Main Street, he was very specific that it should represent the time period of 1890-1910 because that was an exciting time of transition and invention for America.
It was the time that George Eastman resigned from his job at the Rochester Savings Bank and went into business creating the very first Kodak camera (1883) choosing that word simply because he liked the letter “K.” It weighed nearly three pounds and the film had 100 exposures. “You push the button and we do the rest.” After customers took their photos, they shipped the entire camera back to Kodak for developing.
In 1900, he introduced the Brownie camera for a dollar. Average salary then was $13.00 a week for 59 hours of work. Kodak cameras made photography available to everyone. Up to that time if you wanted to save a special memory, you relied on things like drawings or snow globes to remember places you had been or wanted to go.
The turn of the century was also the birth of Walt Disney, who loved cameras. As a child, he loved performing and he put together a comedy act that he performed in such places as small vaudeville houses, talent competitions, women’s clubs called “Fun in a Photography Gallery.”
Walt’s family was poor so they couldn’t even afford a Brownie camera. Walt made for his act a prop camera from wood and cardboard and he would invite a volunteer up on stage. Squeezing the ball would not take a picture but shoot out a stream of water at the volunteer. A bird would fly out of the camera. Finally, Walt would reach into the camera and pull out a caricature he had done of the victim and hold it out to the audience proclaiming “Looks just like him, doesn’t it?”
The story of Walt Disney is not just the story of drawing but the story of cameras because as he became a teenager, all of his drawings were to be filmed for short ads run in movie theaters. Kodak film was developed into film stock that could be run for projection.
In California, Walt teamed with his brother, Roy, and opened the Disney Brothers Studio in 1923. And while they were successful, what made them memorable was the release of the first cartoon with synchronized sound, “Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie.” Kodak had released the first motion picture film designed for sound recordings earlier that same year. Soon after, Kodak introduced the three-strip Technicolor film stock just in time for Walt to make the “Flowers and Trees,” the first cartoon to be filmed in that process and the first to win an Academy Award.
Walt used his home Kodak film camera to shoot footage of his family, including his daughters enjoying a Snow White-like cottage Christmas gift in the back yard. While he was in South America in the 1940s, he also took some home movies. And thanks to the quality of that Kodak 16mm stock, the Disney Studio was later able to blow up his home movies and use them as bridging segments in the film Saludos Amigos so that the live action was the transition from live action to cartoon segments.
Remember the True-Life Adventures photographers used Kodak cameras and film to record those innovative shorts.
Of course, when Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt insisted that Kodak have a place on Main Street along with Coca-Cola and Hallmark Cards. When he was asked why he wanted these companies represented on Main Street with their logos large enough to be clearly seen, he replied, “They make the fantasy real.” These were the companies people would have expected to see at a turn of the century Main Street and they represented the thing that was most important to Walt: high quality.
There was even a “Fun Foto” location where guests could stick their heads through wooden cut-outs of Disney characters and have that moment recorded on Kodak film and placed in a special Disneyland matte to take with them. How many also remember that Kodak put up markers for photo locations so that amateur photographers might be guaranteed a great shot and composition?
When Walt’s first grandson was born shortly before the opening of Disneyland, his daughter said that the proud grandfather was hovering over little Christopher snapping pictures… with Kodak film.
For the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Disney created four pavilions. They didn’t create the Kodak pavilion which was one of the ten largest buildings at that International Exposition. The Tower of Photography featured the largest outdoor color prints ever exhibited.
The Kodak Pavilion was located next to Pepsi’s “it’s a small world” attraction and the Tower of the Four Winds and was the only place where you could get your picture taken with the Disney characters. This was the first time Disney had taken its characters out of Disneyland and “on the road” and they needed the safety of the Kodak Pavilion where the characters wouldn’t be attacked or pushed down to the ground.
On his weekly television show in an episode entitled “Disneyland Goes to the World’s Fair” May 17, 1964, Walt tells millions of viewers about how the development of Kodak cameras made it possible for people to record their World’s Fair memories and plugs the Kodak pavilion.
Walt smiles at the camera and says, “If you can’t find Disney, look for Kodak… and if you can’t find Kodak, just look for Disney… “
The death of Walt didn’t end the Kodak Konnection. In fact, it will take another column to cover that history including the Imagination pavilion at Epcot with Figment and of course one of my favorite Sherman Brothers songs, “Making Memories.” Making memories… taking pictures is making memories… catching little pieces of time… making them yours and making them mine…
As excited as I am that the Kodak special has been discovered and released, it also makes me yearn for other memorable Disney moments that should have been captured on Kodak film like Walt’s acting out the story of Snow White for his animators or even another even more memorable event.
On September 13, 1929 at noon at the Fox Dome Theater in Ocean Park, California, there was an incredible show for parents and their children. The flyer states: “Mickey Mouse’s Daddy! The man who originated the world’s most popular sound cartoon character, Walt Disney, assisted by Carl Stalling at the piano and U.B. Iwerks Cartoonist. They’ll show you how they do it and introduce ‘The Mickey Mouse Theme Song’.”
Imagine just one year after the birth of Mickey Mouse, seeing Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks showing you how they create a Mickey Mouse short cartoon and Carl Stalling who provided music for those early cartoons as well as inspiring the Silly Symphony series singing “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo.” That would have been a Kodak memory I would have really treasured.
