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krpalmerA book titled Disney’s Land, with a cover illustration of a castle a bit squatter than and perhaps just a bit less familiar now than the one built in Florida about a decade and a half later, caught my eye at the local library. I have the general understanding there’s more or less a “fandom” for “Disney theme parks” (although given some of the things I’m always interested in “finding out more about,” I shouldn’t look askance at it), but I was willing to see Richard Snow’s book as something a little bit different than “one more enthusiastic product of a cottage industry.” I went ahead and signed it out.
I’ve never been to the original Disneyland in California, although I’ve visited Walt Disney World in Florida three times, twice as a child and once in the vacation days I’d booked as a slim buffer against one of the last space shuttle launches not happening on schedule. However, I have seen a reasonable amount of information about the building of the first theme park and its reconfiguration of Walt Disney’s career. Snow went into further detail, describing early on his own childhood visit at the end of the 1950s and also offering a quick history of earlier amusement parks and how they’d gone seedy during the Great Depression. Beyond descriptions of the subcontractors and assistants often overshadowed by Walt, there was an interlude about the Davey Crockett phenomenon. (I did notice one volume of “The Complete Peanuts” having the developing characters go Crockett-mad, even if Schroeder continued to insist Beethoven could lick the frontiersman and Charlie Brown eventually buried his coonskin cap after realising how much other merchandising had started his day, a few years in advance of Peanuts getting its own merchandising...) After a detailed description of the live TV opening (there’s a comment at the back of the book the broadcast can be found on YouTube) and working through the rough early patches, the park filled in by the end of the 1950s and the narrative more or less closes with the death of Walt Disney.
Snow does quote bits of the criticism of the park’s structured reality, although his own take seems cheerful and appealing. It could be that one of the things that most surprised me about the book was descriptions of some smaller attractions not carried over to Florida; I started up my now long-in-the-tooth “Complete National Geographic” application to check the 1963 article about Walt Disney that included a detailed tour of the park. Along the way I also turned to my copy of Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and noted some of Snow’s anecdotes were there in more condensed form even if Gabler was a little more ambiguous about the park meaning “control” for Disney. Snow did mention Gabler’s biography in the back of his own book, and also offered a brief recommendation of Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, which I’d signed out of the library years ago (although I did muse at the time about Barrier seeming to pick Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as Disney’s greatest accomplishment, then finding something to criticize about every animated feature that followed.)
I’ve never been to the original Disneyland in California, although I’ve visited Walt Disney World in Florida three times, twice as a child and once in the vacation days I’d booked as a slim buffer against one of the last space shuttle launches not happening on schedule. However, I have seen a reasonable amount of information about the building of the first theme park and its reconfiguration of Walt Disney’s career. Snow went into further detail, describing early on his own childhood visit at the end of the 1950s and also offering a quick history of earlier amusement parks and how they’d gone seedy during the Great Depression. Beyond descriptions of the subcontractors and assistants often overshadowed by Walt, there was an interlude about the Davey Crockett phenomenon. (I did notice one volume of “The Complete Peanuts” having the developing characters go Crockett-mad, even if Schroeder continued to insist Beethoven could lick the frontiersman and Charlie Brown eventually buried his coonskin cap after realising how much other merchandising had started his day, a few years in advance of Peanuts getting its own merchandising...) After a detailed description of the live TV opening (there’s a comment at the back of the book the broadcast can be found on YouTube) and working through the rough early patches, the park filled in by the end of the 1950s and the narrative more or less closes with the death of Walt Disney.
Snow does quote bits of the criticism of the park’s structured reality, although his own take seems cheerful and appealing. It could be that one of the things that most surprised me about the book was descriptions of some smaller attractions not carried over to Florida; I started up my now long-in-the-tooth “Complete National Geographic” application to check the 1963 article about Walt Disney that included a detailed tour of the park. Along the way I also turned to my copy of Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination and noted some of Snow’s anecdotes were there in more condensed form even if Gabler was a little more ambiguous about the park meaning “control” for Disney. Snow did mention Gabler’s biography in the back of his own book, and also offered a brief recommendation of Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, which I’d signed out of the library years ago (although I did muse at the time about Barrier seeming to pick Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as Disney’s greatest accomplishment, then finding something to criticize about every animated feature that followed.)