The Disneylands That Never Were

THE DISNEYLANDS THAT NEVER WERE

Shaun Finnie

The rights of Shaun Finnie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988.

Copyright 2006 Shaun Finnie

Smashwords edition first published September 2012.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – From the Drawing Board

Chapter 2 – The Birth of Disneyland

Chapter 3 – Disneyland’s Other Main Streets

Chapter 4 – All The World’s A Fair

Chapter 5 – The Happiest Plans on Earth

Chapter 6 – The Undiscovered Bay

Chapter 7 – The Mouse Moves East

Chapter 8 – One Man’s Final Dream

Chapter 9 – The Rest of the World

Chapter 10 – The Disney Decade

Chapter 11 – California Dreaming

Chapter 12 – La Souris Arrive en Europe

Chapter 13 – The American Dream Expands

Chapter 14 – A Global Enterprise

Chapter 15 – Beyond the Florida Four

Chapter 16 – The Disney Hotels That Never Were

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Introduction

The Disney theme parks and resorts are favourite holiday destinations on three continents, with people travelling to visit them from every corner of the earth. There are currently eleven major Disney parks worldwide and there will most certainly be more built in the future.

For fans of this particular kind of entertainment, no-one does it better than Disney. The rides, the shows, the hotels, and their associated amenities are some of the best in the world.

But if the attractions that the Walt Disney Company have actually produced are this good, just imagine what other delights the Disney designers might have dreamed up, what wild fantasies they’ve come up with that have never seen the light of day.

Just imagine...

Imagine no more. It’s time to step inside The Disneylands That Never Were.

Chapter 1 – From the Drawing Board

Disneyland was one man’s dream. He was a middle-aged businessman dreaming of a place where his entire family could enjoy themselves. He dreamed of a playground where everything would fit together in a consistent theme.

That dream of course belonged to Walt Disney, and he called his vision Mickey Mouse Park.

Disney’s success had come from a long and popular series of short cartoons. After years of building the company only to lose everything when he discovered he didn’t own the rights to the characters he’d created, Walt hit upon an idea for a mouse. He called this new character Mortimer. At the prompting of his wife Lillian, Mortimer became Mickey and Mickey, the little scamp who sang and whistled in what was mostly still the silent movie era, became an overnight sensation.

Emboldened by the success of Mickey Mouse and all the other characters in his short films, Walt dared to think the unthinkable. He decided to make a film the likes of which Hollywood had never even dreamed of before. Disney created a full length animated movie. Despite being called Disney’s Folly by the rest of movie land and almost bankrupting the company, the film was eventually completed in 1937 and it was an immediate massive hit. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs brought fame, acceptance and financial security to the studio.

Walt famously liked to say of his accomplishments, It all started with a mouse. But speaking specifically of Disneyland, he also claimed, It all started out from a daddy with two daughters wondering where he could take them where he could have a little fun with them too.

Like many people Walt worked long hours, often not getting home until after his daughters were asleep. The only real time he had with them was on Sundays. Sunday was Daddy’s Day. Walt would take his girls to the park, put them on the swings and roundabouts and watch them enjoying themselves. The trouble was that it always irked him that the equipment was too small for him to ride alongside his daughters. There was nothing that the three of them could enjoy together. He would sit on a bench eating peanuts with the other fathers, all watching their children have fun. While that was nice, it wasn’t enough. The eternal kid in Walt wanted to join in with them. I was always trying to think of a place to take my two small daughters on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, a place where I could have fun too, he said.

Other film companies were hosting tours of varying sizes around their facilities, and while this might have appealed to Disney it was obvious that visiting a room full of animators painting cells in Los Angeles would be nowhere near as exciting for visitors as seeing real live film stars, or at the very least some actual movie sets. Nevertheless Walt was also beginning to receive letters from children asking if they could come to visit the place where Mickey Mouse lived. He remembered how he felt with nowhere to take his daughters and combined this problem with the request in those children’s’ letters.

On the 31st of August 1948 Walt circulated a memo around the staff in his studio detailing his ideas for what he called Mickey Mouse Park. Walt had already been considering providing his employees and invited guests with a quiet, leafy park where they could rest a while during their breaks. Initially the plan started out as little more than a field for picnics and perhaps baseball, though even the very first formal design was to include a whimsical singing waterfall. But his vision broadened after he visited the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village, Michigan, and was struck by its layout. It combined plenty of attractions with a sense of space and old-time charm. This opened up all kinds of possibilities to him, but unfortunately when Walt had an idea that took his fancy, he often got carried away with it. In his mind the park rapidly grew to include a railway and even a little village. At other times his dreams would feature an old Western style settlement adjacent to an Indian encampment.

As these ideas began to take shape, Walt said, I want it to be very relaxing, cool and inviting. However his older brother Roy, the company’s money man, refused to finance the deal thinking that Walt would soon tire of it. Roy claimed of Walt, He is more interested, I think, in ideas that would be good in an amusement park than in running one himself.

In the early 1940s Walt had moved his animation studio to a twenty-five building complex at Burbank’s Riverside Drive. While this site was being constructed he realised that it contained enough ground for him to finally build the little park that children were writing for, the place where Mickey and the others characters lived.

Despite misgivings from Lillian (who, Walt liked to say, would ask him, Why do you want to build an amusement park? They’re so dirty!), her husband gave serious consideration to a Burbank Entertainment Centre, to be situated on Riverside Drive, south of the Disney film studio.

This particular park never came to pass, and the plot of land where it was supposed to go now hosts California’s Ventura Highway. The idea of the visitor’s centre however was far from over.

Artist Harper Goff was working at the Warner Brothers Studio when Walt hired him to help design the theme park. Goff’s first concept drawing for the park in 1951 included an old mining town, a water mill, a paddle steamer, bandstand, and a small settlement of Indian teepees. Goff was one of the very first Disney Imagineers. This was a word created by the Disney Company and refers to the designers, engineers, artists, architects, technicians etc involved in taking a ride, attraction, hotel or other theme park concept from its first little spark of imagination to a completed physical work fit for public presentation. It is a combination of the words imagination and engineer and represents, as Walt himself put it, the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how.

The people who work under this title are usually employed by Walt Disney Imagineering, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation. Walt had become increasingly frustrated at not always getting finance for his theme park ideas, so in December 1952 he created WED Enterprises, a completely separate company funded with his own money. Named after the initials of its founder, Walter Elias Disney, WED had complete freedom to develop the technology necessary to create the rides and attractions he had in his mind. Prior to WED this collection of artists and engineers was called Walt Disney Inc. but changed its name almost immediately. Since 1986 this division of the company has been known as Walt Disney Imagineering. Its manufacturing arm, incorporated in 1965, was known as MAPO. MAPO took its name from MAry POppins, a movie which had forced some serious technological advances in order to get the action just as required. The film was such a huge financial success that it allowed the formation of WED’s own full-time manufacturing team.

But that was all to come much later. Back at the birth of Imagineering Walt and Goff were beginning to map out Mickey Mouse Park in earnest. One of their earliest designs shows two small linked villages. One settlement would have included a town hall, bandstand and old-style department stores, much the same as we know Disneyland’s Main Street today. The adjoining smaller village would have been in an older, Western style, complete with pony and stagecoach rides.

The visitor’s centre would also have featured a corridor with glass walls so that the public could indeed look over the shoulders of animators, inkers and painters as they went about their daily tasks. Walt had originally thought that this would be boring for the visitors, but as more and more attractions were added to the park, watching the animators at work became seen as an acceptable option for guests to extend their stay.

Mickey Mouse Park would have also featured statues of the Disney cartoon characters, models of Gepetto’s workshop, Snow White’s cottage and a dwarf sized playhouse. Walt had already built a replica of the dwarves’ cottage in his own back garden as a playhouse for his daughters, Sharon and Diane, and knew that this was the kind of thing that visitors to his park would be expecting to see.

And right from the very earliest designs the area available to the public would have featured one of Walt’s passions – steam trains. The park was to have featured a small scale railroad which would carry authentic replicas of famous trains from history such as George Stevenson’s Rocket.

Walt Disney was a self-confessed lifelong steam train fanatic. Since his earliest days in Kansas City he had seen the railroad as providing the path to excitement and adventure, and he wanted to bring that feeling into any studio tour or theme park he might create. He would even go as far as building his own small railroad, named the Carolwood Pacific, in his own considerably sized back garden.

A 1953 design map of Mickey Mouse Park shows an island marked Mickey Mouse Club after the famous Mickey Mouse Club TV series of the day. The television show was an entertaining and educational series for children, and a theatre to be located on the island was intended to replicate that format. It was hoped that some broadcasts of the actual show could come from this location too.

A concept drawing of the park from the following year depicted a Ferris wheel based on The Old Mill, Disney’s Oscar winning Silly Symphony short featuring life in and around a decaying windmill. This idea resurfaced some four decades later when a small version of The Old Mill was built to hold a sandwich and snacks kiosk in Disneyland Paris.

As Walt and his team of Imagineers came up with more and more ideas for his new venture, the name Mickey Mouse Park was starting to sound more and more restrictive. It had initially been dreamed up as simply a fictional home for his famous cartoon characters, but Walt soon had bigger ideas for the place he was now calling Disneylandia. This latest version of his dream project had now grown to include full sized models of buildings representing the values that made America great for Walt; values like hard work, family, and home. The first of these buildings would be the ramshackle rustic cabin that had featured in his 1949 movie So Dear to My Heart. It was important to Walt that he combined education with the sense of fun that he hoped visitors would get from a visit to his park. I don’t just want to entertain kids with pony rides and swings, he said. I want them to learn something about their heritage.

The park would also feature a small dancing figure in the little town’s Opera House. Walt brought in famous song and dance man of the day Buddy Ebsen, who was filmed performing against a grid lined background so that the animators could track the dancer’s moves more easily. They constructed a little figure based on the entertainer and, using a series of rods hidden beneath the small stage, the small model man could be made to perform a crude but passable imitation of Ebsen’s dance routine. This basic audio-animatronic technology was also to be used for a barber shop scene where a mechanical quartet would be seen singing Down by the Old Mill Stream in close harmony. As well as installing these figures in his park, Walt also had the idea of creating a succession of these miniature scenes, placing them in railroad cars and touring them around the country.

By this time the Disneylandia concept had grown to include a petting farm, skull rock, a fairground complete with carousel, a wild bird sanctuary on an island in a lagoon, and a canal boat ride which would wind past model scenes from Disney Animation classics. Walt also dreamed of a space ship and a submarine ride, but was adamant that there would be No roller coasters or other rides in the cheap thrill category. Disneylandia would also include an old fashioned circus in a candy-striped tent. And in a hand written note on another of Harper Goff’s maps, in what looks very much like Walt’s handwriting, is scrawled a single word ringed in red pencil.

Castle.

The concept of a central castle was something that changed many times over the park’s evolution. A design based upon Cinderella’s castle from the animated Disney movie was considered, as was a wooden Robin Hood castle from the 1952 Richard Todd film. Some designs did away with the castle completely, while others had a completely different fantasy design.

As the scope of the park grew Walt knew that if he wanted to produce it as he imagined it, then he would need a lot of extra capital. All the banks that he approached refused to loan him the money, so he negotiated a partnership deal with the television company ABC. Disneylandia was the name that he went to ABC with to secure additional funding for the park’s construction. His innovative idea of tying Disneylandia to a weekly series of the same name appealed to the TV people but they had one suggestion. They disliked the name, considering it confusing and too exotic. Walt accepted their money and also their suggestion for a new, simplified name; Disneyland.

Disneyland would be split into a series of smaller themed areas Lands, all arranged like spokes around