The park means a lot to me. In that, it's something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing. A thing I can keep building as long as I can get some money to build it with. And, I felt all along through my career, instead of talking to somebody about something, if I could, I'd go ahead and make something and then show it to them.
The people of this country are about to see and hear a new adventure in entertainment. It will come upon the American scene shortly under the title of Disneyland.
Walt Disney is the greatest creative genius in the entertainment business. He's brought new concepts to the theaters and entertained millions and millions of people.
That was quite a build up there.
Well, that's what worries me, you know.
Walt had decided in his own mind that if he was going to make this thing work, he would have to have financing and was willing to do some TV shows in order to help get the financing.
He's now going to try his luck on home television, and I'm sure the same impact will be made on the home audience as Walt has made in the theater audience.
Well, I just want to assure you that we're not taking it lightly, that it's not going to be just a little stepchild of the Disney organization. It's going to be one of our major enterprises.
Now on a site of 240 acres near the city of Anaheim, we've begun to build Disneyland, the place.
When Walt described this great park, I knew that this was not a good idea, because who is going to drive 30 or 40 miles?
The opening date for the park has been set for mid-summer of 1955. We could never meet this deadline without the complete cooperation of everyone who works here.
Most people in Hollywood thought Disneyland would be a Hollywood spectacular, a spectacular failure. So Roy Disney said, 'What do you mean, most people in Hollywood?' He says, 'That's what I thought.'
We want you to see and share with us the experience of building this dream into a reality.
Once the area was picked out, everything started really congealing because Walt, in his own mind, set a deadline that was impossible to make. An opening of July of 1955. And I still don't see how it was ever done.
One day he called me up and said, 'Remember I was talking about having some kind of a Disney affair here in Southern California?' And so, I got in a car with him and we rode and we rode and we rode and we rode. I thought, where the hell is he taking us to? And we got down to those orange groves. He said, 'This is all top secret stuff.' And I said, 'Yeah, that's right.' And I didn't bother to tell him, I thought he was out of his mind.
This is our progress report from Disneyland. On our first television program, we showed you a blueprint for a dream. Well, this is the blueprint. And the dream is Disneyland. The park that we're constructing near Anaheim, California. We promised to keep you informed, as our dream became a reality. So, for a firsthand progress report, let's visit Disneyland now.
One of our naturalist photographers is Stuart Jewell, an expert in time-lapse photography. We don't have these cameras up here just for fun. They keep a daily record of the growth and development of Disneyland. Now, an ordinary camera takes 24 pictures a second. But these take one picture every 15 seconds. And of course, that makes things look a lot faster on your screen.
Disneyland is divided into four cardinal realms, the four different worlds from which our television shows will originate. Adventureland. Tomorrowland. Fantasyland. And Frontierland.
Walt, even at that time, had in the back of his mind how he wanted to move people. He was anxious to just get all the ideas possible together. It was helping him to gel his concept, which I think, at the time, was loose and fluid and all over the place.
Roy always hated to be in debt. And Walt seemed to revel in the idea, because we were continually in debt. And, it did take that extraordinary blind faith, you know, to follow Walt because he had a rough time with banks, and they couldn't see it either. And he was always off in left field somewhere. There was nothing he could say about something, except that he had a hunch it was going to work.
Believe it or not, it wasn't too easy to sell people on the success of Disneyland because there were a lot of doubting Thomases.
And finally the ball began to roll and it began to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And you think, well, now what if this fails? What if the people don't like it? What if it's too far away? What if they go once and never come back? But that's Walt's problem. If he fails, then it's his failure.
We could go by car, of course. It's a pleasant 50-minute trip across town. But let's be different. Let's take to the air. Let's go by helicopter.
In order for Walt to take his guest by the hand and take him on a hike through a Missouri wilderness or anything, what he doesn't need is a high rise building, or a transmission tower or freeway interchange in the background. So number one, we build a berm because it takes a berm to shut out sound. Now, you're in Walt's world. That's an important function from the landscape standpoint.
Walt, he didn't want just small trees. He wanted big trees. He says trees have no scale. So, he wanted a real show in there. And he used to ride herd on Bill Evans to get bigger and better trees.
Walt didn't want to have to wait five years to get the landscape to harmonize with the architecture. We could do that up to a point, but we ran out of dollars. We're striving for instant maturity within the constrictions of a budget. And our budget was very, very meager.
I did a quick sketch of where we were going to put berms and where we were going to put boulders, and where we were going to put trees, but no dimensions or anything. I planted it all by the seat of my pants.
With so much activity and so much heavy equipment, there's bound to be an upset now and then. But the operators take these things in stride. And fortunately, we've had no serious accidents. Here's the beginning of Main Street, a composite of all the small towns in America at the turn of the century. Here, you can take a ride in a horse car, past the old town hall, the opera house, the firehouse. And if you stay on to the end of the line, you will reach the hub of Disneyland, where this camera tower now stands.
The budget in starting was four and a half million dollars. In August, it was seven million. In December, it was 11 million. By the springtime, it was anybody's guess.
And we ran out of money and almost had to stop construction at 17 million. That's what happens when you try to make a thing as special as Disneyland in a short time.
I haven't invested money in ranches. I haven't got anything here. I have a home. That's all. But this thing, I put my own money in. And I borrowed on the insurance that I've been paying on for 30 years.
Walt and I would be walking around the enormous foundation for the railroad station and the underpass coming into Disneyland. And he turned to Dick Irvine and said, 'By the time Joe gets through burying all our money underground, we won't have anything left for a show.' He was really sincerely worried about the situation.
In Wilmington, California, construction was going forward on two steam locomotives, vintage of 1900, probably the last of their type ever to be built in the United States.
Walt just loved miniatures of almost everything, I think. And the trains were probably a kind of a personification of childhood to him. You know, it's what you grew up around. Walt was eight years younger than Dad, so he was kind of the little kid around the trains. And they were around the railroads a lot. And they had an uncle who was an engineer. Both of them used to talk quite a lot about the thrill of going down and standing there by that great big locomotive and seeing their uncle.
I learned about trains by building one for Walt. The one that we built that ran around his house. We had the drawings for what is known as the Lilly Belle. By having all the drawings for the little train, we got started and manufactured the locomotives, the cars. So, all we had to do was expand the gauge from one eighth scale to the 36 inch gauge track.
Back at the studio, the working models of our rides had been perfected and we were well into construction on the real thing.
The Peter Pan ride, for instance, they had one whole warehouse building over there filled up with overhead rails and the cars. And, we did the dips and the swirls. This was something that's completely new too. I don't think there's ever been an overhead suspended ride in any amusement park, to my knowledge.
In nearby Newport, we were building and assembling miniature Autopia racing cars. These will speed along the Tomorrowland freeway. Our most difficult problem was to build them to fit the varying sizes of growing youngsters. And to give it that authentic real life feeling, our freeway will be patrolled by miniature police cars.
Every job that you work on with Walt is different, and you figure out what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, just as you get started on it. We had no project managers. Therefore we didn't need any coordinators. The Xerox machine hadn't been invented yet, so we didn't publish anything. All we did was just do the work. Walt never gave a thought that he was overloading people. It was like, well, okay, we're just doing it. So you do all this stuff sort of at once. You didn't dilly dally on decisions. And it's up to Walt to run around and catch you, that it's not going the way he wants it. That's his problem.
And there were a lot of people that said, he's done. If it had gone down, the studio would have gone down with it because everything was tied up and in the park.
They had a lotta problems getting the place opened by that opening day. They dug out the Rivers of America and filled it up with water one night and came back the next morning, and it was totally dry. It was a sandy soil and the water just plain disappeared.
We started to experiment with the waterway for the big river, Rivers of America. First of all, we used Bentonite or whatever it was. It was a gooey thing that was supposed to make a waterproof bottom. And that didn't work too well.
Everything wasn't sweetness and light and beautiful during the construction. Walt always came down on Sunday morning and he looked all around, all over everything. And he took a couple of big sighs. And he turned to me and he said, 'Do you know something?' And he says, 'I just got some figures today.' And he said, 'We've spent a little over half the money that we have to spend on this park.' And he says, 'There isn't one thing there or there or there or there, but holes in the ground and piles of dirt. There isn't one thing that any human being would spend 15 cents to come and see.' And he said, 'I'm scared.' And he was. You couldn't believe that you spent half this. It seemed like an enormous amount of money, and there was nothing there that anybody would give a darn about. He just sat there. He didn't say anything for a long time. And it really impressed upon me what responsibility was and what worry was, because I was worried about little things, about whether this was going to get done or whether this and that. But this is something that hadn't occurred to me because I didn't know anything about it. But this is, this is what worry is. And that was brought home to me that day.
Inside stage three nearby, we started construction on a 105 foot American riverboat, the sternwheeler Mark Twain. Since the deck slopes from one end to the other, each piece of wood had to be individually cut and fitted. Constructing such a large boat inside a building 50 miles from water caused a lot of raised eyebrows. But unlike the fellow who built a boat in his basement and couldn't get it out, we had a plan. Well, we fooled nearly everyone, for it was designed to come apart in sections for shipping.
Walt, right from the beginning, made up his mind that he would have something different. He would have the concept of a family amusement park. And, we were highly criticized at the beginning by some of the old time operators of amusement parks, spending too much money, going into too much detail.
Before the park opened, we went to various key amusement parks in the country and manufacturers to see if they would be interested in manufacturing things that we had designed. Almost invariably, the manufacturers would say, 'Well, that would be pretty hard to do. Why don't you buy one of our things?' So, the typical amusement park rides, they were for sale. But with Walt, we can't do this. And so these beautiful things were all made and they were not practical, and he knew they were not practical.
The idea for a Disneyland lay dormant all those years. It came along when I was taking my kids around to these kiddie parks. And I'd take them around. We used to go out every Saturday and Sunday. Their mother wouldn't go with us. We'd be gone. I took them to zoos. I took them everywhere. And they used to love to go with me in those days and those were some of the happiest days of my life.
All my life I heard him talk about doing this kind of a park. And as the years went on, from the time I was five and until he finally did it when I was 21, the dream just grew. From this humble little thing that maybe would be contained on the studio lot to something quite grand. I think everyone thought he was crazy like they did when he said he wanted to do a feature length cartoon.
You have to look at this in some respects as a kind of a, it was a huge experiment. This was the genesis of that kind of park. What Walt started out to do, for heaven's sake, was to do something as radically different from Coney Island as he could dream up.
Walt knew everything that went into that park. He knew where every pipe was. The only thing that he didn't realize, and it was hard for him to learn, was the necessity of building concrete. He thought we could build it like a motion picture set on a temporary basis. So he never got over and was awfully mad at the Adventureland waterfall because of all the concrete that went into it.
Up river, other workmen were just as busy solving the problem of how to build a rock. Creating beautiful rock formations is nothing for Mother Nature, but it wasn't so easy for us.
I was supposed to look at the cost sheets when they came in every day, but I had never... I failed arithmetic in high school. And I didn't know whether we were in the black or in the red. But if nobody had come over and said you were running over, I didn't say anything. And Walt would come in, and he would say, 'How much money have you spent so far?' And I'd say, 'Well, let me see.' He'd say, 'I'll tell ya.' And he'd tell me exactly.
When Disneyland was under construction, there were so many people at the studio all working on this crazy idea for an amusement park. In one way, it seemed crazy, and in another way, it seemed completely natural. We really didn't have what you would say, administrative offices, we just had people everywhere.
You kind of hated to go home at the end of the day because you'd have to go home, go to bed and then get up the next morning to drive all the way back and keep going again. So it was kind of an inconvenience to stop and have to go home.
Well, here we are inside Disneyland. Yes, we're in the park, all right, but we haven't left our problems behind at the studio. We're just concentrating a lot of them in one place here.
When we started out, Walt didn't know how to read a plan. And he would never say so. But we used to try and fool him about it, so it wasn't soon until he not only could read a plan, he could read it better than all of us, and he had a better feeling of proportion than any of us did, because he knew exactly what he wanted in the way of a scaled down version of Main Street.
We built Disneyland with probably not 10% of the plans to start with. The plans were developed as we went along.
