by Martin Sklar
As recently as 2008, as the word ride became an easy crutch for publicity and advertising writers, I wrote a memo to my successors, the leaders of Walt Disney Imagineering: Craig Russell and Bruce Vaughn, and their principal creative advisor, the great storyteller John Lasseter of Pixar. Here’s what I said in part:
When we only describe our attractions as “rides,” we fall into the category of Six Flags, Knott’s, Universal, etc. describing their stuff. We should rise above them (because our stuff does!) and describe what we do as “attractions, adventures, immersive experiences, and of course stories”… When you are creating Disney Magic, the words to describe it should support the magical experiences!
I sent a similar memo to Jay Rasulo, then chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts. He supported my view—but I’m afraid it’s a losing battle. With all the shortcuts the digital world has wrought, I imagine I’ll still be advocating this concept until the day I ride off into the sunset. Besides, the adventures, attractions, and experiences the Imagineers create today for the parks around the world are so “signature Disney” that they need no other description than: “New!”
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Three projects from the 1950s and 1960s at Disneyland were personal favorites: first was Vacationland Magazine. The publication originated as a way to communicate the Disneyland story, new attractions, hours and days of operation (remember, the park was closed for maintenance on Mondays and Tuesdays until 1985), special events, and other information to tourists visiting California. The Disneyland News, even as a tabloid reduced in size from a daily newspaper, was too big and cumbersome. We needed a magazine-sized publication. So in the spring of 1957, we created Disneyland Holiday. As editor, my job was to produce the stories, photos, and information content. The strategy developed by our PR division director, Ed Ettinger, and advertising manager, Jack Lindquist, was to determine where and how to distribute it. They decided that the prime outlets would be through hotels and motels within a one-day drive of Disneyland. This meant Santa Barbara to the north, Las Vegas and Phoenix to the east, and San Diego to the south. They hired our own distributor, whose job was not just to deliver magazines, but to become a welcomed visitor to the hotel and motel staffs, many of them mom-and-pop operations in the 1950s.
Over time, we were blessed to employ two people who fit the role perfectly: Frank Forsyth and Bill Schwenn. They were more than distributors—they were traveling salesmen who established friendships with owners and managers who saw that our information was prominently displayed for their guests.
From the beginning, Disneyland Holiday was a hit. By the third issue in the spring of 1958, it had grown from twenty to thirty-two pages, and contained not just Disneyland stories and photos of VIP guests (actress Shirley Temple Black, Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, Vice President Richard Nixon), but was also full of advertising for other attractions: Knott’s Berry Farm, Catalina Island, Apple Valley Inn, even Forest Lawn Memorial Park (a cemetery). We had a major hit on our hands. There was only one problem: Holiday magazine threatened a lawsuit if we did not “cease and desist using the name immediately!”
Thus, in the fall of 1958, Vacationland Magazine was born. Same Disneyland stories and operating information; same publication dates; same publisher, editor, and distributor; and same result: a big hit with tourists and the hotel industry. Today, it has even become a collector’s item. If you can find one of those early issues on eBay or Amazon, you will pay handsomely.
My next favorite undertaking came in 1959, a watershed year in the growth and popularity of Disneyland. The fulfillment of Walt’s opening-day promise that “Disneyland will never be completed, as long as there is imagination left in the world” had begun, with the most important expansion in the park’s history. With one fell swoop, Walt added these iconic attractions:
The Disneyland Monorail—the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere.
The Submarine Voyage, which allowed people to explore “liquid space” aboard “the eighth largest submarine fleet in the world.”
Two new Autopia Freeways, giving even more young drivers their very first opportunity to drive and steer an individually powered vehicle on a freeway scaled to their size, and simulating a real driving experience.
Two new motorboat cruises—one of which continued to operate until 1993.
Matterhorn Mountain, with its two bobsled runs—the first roller coaster in the world to employ tubular steel and an electronic dispatch system, enabling more than one vehicle to be on the track simultaneously. The Disneyland Skyway attraction had opened three years earlier (and closed in 1994), and carried visitors on an aerial journey right through the Matterhorn. When King Baudouin of Belgium visited Disneyland and rode the bobsleds with the queen and Walt, he asked why the mountain “had holes in it” [for passage through by the Skyway vehicles]. “Because,” Walt responded, “it’s a Swiss mountain!”
For me, this expansion meant that I got to ghostwrite Walt Disney’s message for a twenty-four-page section that appeared as a supplement in the Los Angeles Times. The copy was pretty simple and straightforward. He reminded readers about his promise that “there will always be something new and different for you and your family to enjoy.” He concluded by stating:
Since our opening four years ago, Disneyland has played host to millions of Southern California families, as well as additional millions of other Americans and foreign visitors from all over the world. All of us at Disneyland appreciate this privilege, and it is my sincere hope that you will find as much pleasure and enjoyment in Disneyland’s new adventures this summer as we had in creating them for you.
I also enjoyed producing a 1965 supplement for the Los Angeles Times. Even though I had moved to Imagineering, I continued to handle the most important writing assignments for Disneyland—especially if Walt was involved. These stories were some of the best from my Disney writing days: “The Many Worlds of Disneyland,” emphasized that the Magic Kingdom was “many different worlds”; “Daytime Fun—Nighttime Magic” had an opening paragraph that I liked very much: “A popular Disneyland story tells of the Texan watching the Fantasy in the Sky fireworks, and boasting, ‘Nice, but we have ’em bigger down home.’ And the lady nearby quietly asking, ‘Every night?’”
In addition, I wrote two “Walt articles.” Under a cover photo of Walt in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, Walt showed his respect for the public—the fifty million visitors who had already experienced his Magic Kingdom. “This Tencennial Souvenir Edition is really a ‘birthday card’ in reverse—from all of us at Disneyland to all of you, saying ‘thanks’ for helping make our first decade so wonderful. We’ve had a lot of fun playing host to you and your family.”
The piece titled “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” described the addition of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln to the Opera House in Town Square. It ended with these words:
The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It’s something we can keep developing and adding to. A motion picture is different. Once it’s wrapped up and sent out for processing, we’re through with it. If there are things that could be improved, we can’t do anything about them anymore. I’ve always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing. We’ve got that in Disneyland.
I’ve always thought that those lines truly expressed Walt Disney’s vision, his restless sprit of creativity, and his enormous pride in what he and his team had already achieved in Disneyland’s first decade. It was also a repledging to the public that—as Walt told his Disneyland and Imagineering staffs when celebrating those first ten years: “We’re just getting started—so don’t any of you start resting on your laurels!”
Disneyland was a much simpler place in those early days, especially for its marketing and operating staffs. As Jack Lindquist has said, “We were willing to try anything, because there were no precedents.” If it worked, it became a tradition. If it failed, we dropped it and moved on. And we could test out new ideas. I wrote
the first script for Disneyland’s Guided Tours, which began in 1962. I also got to be the first tour guide for that tour. That way, I could see what worked, and what needed revision or punching up in the script. The second and third tours were led by Dick Nunis, director of park operations, and by Jack Lindquist. I received plenty of suggestions—which was great, because even before we started charging guests ($3 for adults, $2 for children under twelve), I had input from the “how it functioned” and the “how to sell it” sides of the house.
Practically from the beginning, as one newspaper reported, Disneyland became “almost an instrumentality of American foreign policy.” There are great photos of Walt touring Disneyland with Prime Minister Nehru of India, the Shah of Iran, and King Mohammed of Morocco. One visit he missed was with President Suharto of Indonesia. Although the park worked closely with State Department security for all of these visits, somehow the “Western bad man” in Frontierland—who performed fast-draw duels daily with the sheriff using pistols that made a loud noise when blanks were fired—did not get the word about the head of state’s visit. When “Black Bart” started to go into his act, and reached for the gun in his holster, he realized just in time that there were at least half a dozen weapons pointed at him—and none of them had blanks.
Distinguished visitors included many national leaders, such as former presidents Eisenhower and Truman and Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. I loved the reaction of Harry Truman when the media wanted him to take a ride on Dumbo. “Not me,” he insisted, refusing to board the elephant—symbol of the Republican Party.
Even though only part of my head is visible, I treasure a 1959 photo taken of presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy emerging from Disneyland’s City Hall. He had used one of our offices for a meeting with President Sékou Touré of the African nation of Guinea. Indeed, it was a much simpler time.
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After that 1965 newspaper supplement came eighteen months of writing for Walt…in the company’s annual reports, as well as the script for “Walt’s Epcot Film.” Then in 1966 he was gone. A new world was germinating on the other side of the country, in a place even more pristine and sleepy than Anaheim. As Walt would say in the film about our Project X, “It’s the most exciting project we have ever tackled at Walt Disney Productions.”
But first on deck was the New York World’s Fair, a stepping-stone to that new Walt Disney World yet to be Imagineered.
“TWENTY-SIX! YOU’RE YOUNGER THAN MY SON!”
Mott Heath, the Ford Motor Company executive assigned to welcome the Imagineering team to Dearborn, Michigan, did not seem happy. The success of the Ford Pavilion at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair would be a feather in the cap of anyone seeking to promote their company. But mediocrity would stunt anyone’s career growth. Ford had already lost one opportunity: the potential partnership between Walt Disney and the Imagineers and architect Minoru Yamasaki, whose Federal Science Pavilion had drawn critical raves at the 1962 Seattle Century 21 World’s Fair. But after an initial meeting, Yamasaki determined his building design, and Walt Disney’s shows and exhibits, would likely compete rather than complement each another. Yamasaki turned down the commission, leaving Walt and the Imagineers to handle all pavilion design. (Yamasaki would later become famous for another New York design: Towers 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center, which vanished from the New York skyline on 9/11/2001.)
Now, with the arrival of the Disney team, Mott Heath’s confidence had been shaken by a member of Walt’s entourage—me! I was twenty-six years old—younger than Mott’s own son. Perhaps Mott did not know the history of The Walt Disney Company. Walt was only twenty-one when he came to California from Kansas City and convinced his brother Roy to create The Disney Brothers Studio. It may explain why Walt never hesitated to interweave age and experience with youth and exuberance—as he did on that Ford project team.
Our arrival in Dearborn in January 1961 was the beginning of my maturation process. I was assigned to be one of the key storytellers in creating the second largest pavilion at the Fair. Only GM’s Futurama (a follow-up to their exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair) was larger, handling 70,000 people per day.
The 1964–65 World’s Fair was opened by President Lyndon Johnson on April 22, 1964, and celebrated the three hundredth birthday of the city of New York. Built on the same Flushing Meadows site where the iconic Trylon and Perisphere marked the entry to the 1939 World’s Fair, it continued the dream of the Fair’s president, Robert Moses—inimitable parks commissioner for the city—to create a permanent park in that location.
The Fair’s theme, “Peace Through Understanding,” attracted fifty-one million people to its sprawling 646 acres during its two six-month schedules. The optimistic attitude that permeated the Fair’s fare—someone called it “an Olympics for Industry”—was perfect for Walt Disney-style entertainment. In many ways, it reflected the “anything is possible” point of view Walt strived for. At the same time, in retrospect, it was almost the last major fortress of an “age of innocence.” Ahead lay the the turbulence of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, leading to the decision by President Johnson not to run for reelection, which was followed by the violence at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. Even as early as 1964, the opening of the World’s Fair was punctuated by demonstrations by CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, whose leader, James Farmer, was at the forefront of civil rights activism.
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My teammates on the Ford Pavilion trip were Vic Green, an architect best known for designing the Matterhorn; Jack Sayers, vice president of corporate sponsorships; and John Hench, Disney Legend and designer of park iconography—and much later, my “partner” in the creation of Epcot.
Because Ford, in a push to diversify, was soon to acquire the electronics maker Philco and its aerospace subsidiaries, we were soon en route to Philco’s headquarters in Philadelphia; Western Development Labs in Palo Alto, California; and Aeroneutronics (later Ford Aerospace), the satellite designer and builder in Newport Beach, California. The Detroit-to-Philadelphia leg of the trip is etched forever in my memory. Not only was it my first and only ride aboard a DC-3 (a Ford company aircraft ready to retire after years of service in South America), but I have never experienced a more tumultuous flight, as the DC-3 pilots bounced their way through a thunderstorm. It was not a great prelude to our dinner that night at the renowned Bookbinder’s Restaurant.
As our Ford traveling companion, John Sattler, said in introducing our team at each stop, it was my job to take copious notes. The purpose of all this barnstorming was twofold. First, we were to learn as much as we could in as short a time possible about the Ford Motor Company. The reason was soon obvious: no one at Ford could simply sit us down and tell us. This period was the aftermath of the changes wrought by the ten so-called “Whiz Kids” who joined Ford after World War II, including Robert McNamara, who served as Ford’s president before joining President John F. Kennedy’s administration as secretary of defense. The Whiz Kids are credited with bringing modern planning, organization, and management control systems to Ford in the postwar period. But even John Sattler, a real PR pro in Ford’s New York City office, could not give us a complete picture of the company; he had never been to most of the places we visited, nor had he met the people we encountered in Dearborn, Philadelphia, Palo Alto, and Newport Beach.
The second objective of our travels to Ford’s outposts (I admit that occasionally we wished we could “See the USA in your Chevrolet!”) was to provide background for the ideas the Imagineering design staff would develop for the Ford Pavilion. In that sense, it was a very productive trip for these reasons:
We were told that Ford wanted to present an international image. Our solution: all guests entering the pavilion passed through an area where Ford cars were displayed in settings of miniature villages from around the world. It was inspired by the small-scale Pinocchio’s Village and other exquisite models, based on Disney films, in the S
torybook Land canal boat trip at Disneyland.
Ford wanted the pavilion to create “a bridge from yesterday to tomorrow.” Walt’s belief in the use of nostalgia for a once-treasured past, as a way to engage an audience, led us to Henry Ford’s Model T, which of course had revolutionized automaking in the early part of the twentieth century. Using the “Pepper’s Ghost” technique displayed later for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ballroom scene, our special effects whiz Yale Gracey depicted an infinity of Model T’s as guests were carried past on a moving ramp. You could almost count every Model T that ever came off the assembly line.
The assembly line—or rather all the parts that come together to form a car—inspired Rolly Crump to design the Ford Parts Orchestra. He used stylized hubcaps, crankshafts, pistons, windshield wipers, and other car parts to create an animated “orchestra” that played music specially arranged by Disney composer George Bruns.
The true stars of the show were the Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury automobiles. In his continuous quest to move people in our parks more efficiently, Walt had been developing, with the mechanical talents of Roger Broggie and Bob Gurr, a transit system in which there were no moving parts on the vehicles. The so-called WEDWay Transit System propelled its vehicles along a prescribed guideway by using one-half to one-horsepower drive motors set three to four feet apart in the elevated guideway. The rubber wheels ran continuously, and as they rotated, they engaged a flat metal “platen” on the underside of each vehicle, thus propelling the vehicle along the guided surface. This system, introduced as the WEDWay PeopleMover in Disneyland in 1967, became the power source for moving cars through Ford’s eight-minute Magic Skyway. For this ride, moving at an average of 4.5 miles per hour, I recorded Walt’s voice describing the cavemen, dinosaurs, and City of Tomorrow that people were viewing.