“To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land.” With this greeting Walt Disney opened America’s first theme park on July 17, 1955. For millions more viewers outside of Anaheim, California, celebrity hosts Art Linkletter and Ronald Reagan chronicled Walt’s festivities on a special “Dateline: Disneyland” program. Together, parents and children suspended their collective disbelief, stepping together into the technicolor, utopian – charmingly artificial – home to beloved Disney creations: a magic kingdom, that fittingly for the 1950s, was also a hit television show.
So, forever hold your banner high, Mouseketeers. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
Walt’s original – modest – idea for the park was a standard Hollywood backlot tour of the Disney studios. Then his visionary genius harnessed three powerful postwar forces: cars, togetherness, and television. Thanks in part to the new interstate highway system and booming economy, 1950s Americans embraced mass recreational mobility; igniting a love affair with vacationing in the family car. By 1957, Disneyland attendance topped 10 million. Forty percent came from outside California; virtually all drove. And by design, Disneyland invited parents to actively have fun with their baby boomers, not just passively sitting on a bench watching kids ride a merry-go-round.
Television, that virtual third parent, served as a running Disney advertisement, giving audiences a vested interest in the park. Disneyland – the TV show – premiered on ABC in October 1954 – and along with the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955 effectively paid for the park’s $17 million construction. Every Wednesday night, Disneyland (or what Gen X remembers as the Wonderful World of Disney on Sundays), highlighted the park’s themes using Walt’s old, animated films, nature documentaries, Davy Crockett, and a three-part science series anticipating the space race.
Disneyland – the 160-acre place – was divided geographically into separate “lands,” each with its own theme featuring 22 rides designed by the company’s Imagineers.
Guests enter through Main Street USA, an idealized replica of small-town America circa 1900. The Victorian era commercial buildings were deliberately built to a forced perspective scale, meaning that shops are a fraction of an actual building’s size in order to capture the nostalgic feeling of returning to your hometown and finding everything just a little smaller than you remember.
Beyond the Santa Fe and Disney Railroad, toward Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, is Fantasyland where adults introduced their kids to characters from their own youth in the 1930s and ‘40s: Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. Peter Pan’s Flight – based on the 1953 movie – remains one of just a few attractions still operating since opening day in 1955.
Adventureland featured the Jungle Cruise, a tropical safari complete with cheesy fake crocodiles inspired by the movie The African Queen.
The steamboat Mark Twain plied the waterways of Frontierland, home to one of the era’s bona fide pop culture phenomena: Davy Crockett and his coon skin cap.
Tomorrowland, the least developed initially, was built primarily around the 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea but with a heavy emphasis on space. Besides the walkthrough Space Station X-1, Tomorrowland hosted Disney’s series “Man in Space,” “Man and the Moon,” and “Mars and Beyond.”
When later asked which Disney enterprise was superior, Walt maintained that of all his creations it was the Disneyland, because it would never be truly completed.
