Disneyland Handcrafted (2026) Movie Script
1
[train horn blowing]
[bell chimes]
[Walt] 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 that all along
and all 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.
[airplane passing overhead]
[Huntley] 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.
[Kintner] 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 and, uh...
[Kintner] You deserve it.
Well, that's what worries me, you know?
[whirring]
[Irvine] Walt had decided in his own mind
that if he was going
to make this thing work,
he'd have to have financing,
and was willing to do some TV shows
in order to help get the financing.
[Kintner] 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.
[helicopter whirring]
Now on a site of, uh, 240 acres,
near the city of Anaheim,
we've begun
to build Disneyland, the place.
[Burns] 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?
[Walt] 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.
[Sklar] 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.
[crickets chittering]
[tractors rumbling]
[Davis] 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.
[Linkletter] 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, um, I got in a car with him,
and we rode, and we rode,
and we rode, and we rode.
- [interviewer laughs]
- [Linkletter] I thought, "Where the hell
is he taking us to?"
And we got down to his 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.
[Walt] 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.
[film projector whirring]
[Walt] Disneyland is divided
into four cardinal realms,
the four different worlds from which
our television shows will originate.
Adventureland...
Tomorrowland...
Fantasyland...
and Frontierland.
[Irvine] 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, uh, helping him
to gel his concept.
Which I think at the time was loose
and fluid and all over the place.
[Hench] 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.
[motor whines]
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.
[Ryman] 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.
[hums, rattles]
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?"
[whirring]
But that's Walt's problem.
If he fails, then it's his failure.
[flies buzzing]
[chattering]
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.
[Evans] In order for Walt
to take his guest by the hand
and take him on a hike through
the Missouri wilderness or anything,
what he doesn't need is
a high-rise building,
or a transmission tower
or freeway interchange in the background.
[helicopter whirring]
So, number one, they 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.
[Irvine] 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.
[Evans] Walt didn't want to
have to wait five years
to get the landscape
to harmonize with the architecture.
Well, 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... 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.
["Crazy Man Crazy" playing]
Crazy man crazy
Oh, man, that music's gone, gone
When I go out and I want a treat
[apparatus whirring]
I find me a band with a solid beat
Take my chick and we dance about
When they start rockin'
Boy, we start to shout, we shout
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go
[no audible dialogue]
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
Said crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
They play it soft
They play it strong
They play it wild
And they play it long
They just keep playin'
Till the break of day
To keep them rockin'
All you gotta say is
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go
[music ends]
[Walt] 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.
[helicopter whirring]
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 horsecar
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.
[film projector whirring]
[tools clattering]
[Fowler] The budget in starting
was four and a half million dollars.
In August, it was seven million.
In December, it was 11 million.
In the springtime, it was anybody's guess.
[Albright] 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.
[Walt]
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.
[Fowler] 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... the situation.
[metal clanking]
[chattering]
[thudding]
[Hibler] 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.
[mechanism humming]
[Roy] 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.
And so, he kind of
was 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, you know, seeing their uncle.
[Broggie] 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.
Having all the drawings
for the little train,
we got started and manufactured
the, uh, locomotives, the cars.
So all we had to do was expand the gauge
from 1/8th scale
to the 36-inch gauge track.
[horn blows]
[Hibler] Back at the studio,
the working models of our rides
had been perfected and we were
well into construction on the real thing.
[Davis] The, uh, Peter Pan ride,
for instance,
they had one whole
warehouse building over there
filled up with the 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.
[Hibler] 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.
[Gurr] Every job that you work on
with Walt is different,
and you figure out what you're gonna do
and how you're gonna 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, uh, publish anything.
All we did was just do the work.
Walt never gave a thought
that he was overloading people.
[no audible dialogue]
[Gurr] 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.
[tools pounding]
[Albright] And there was
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 in the park.
[thudding, pounding]
[Ridgway] They had a lot of problems
getting the place opened
by that opening day.
They dug out the Rivers of America,
and they 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.
[Irvine] We started to experiment
with the waterway for the, uh, big river,
Rivers of America.
First of all, we used, uh...
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.
[Goff]
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... he took a couple of big sighs...
and, uh, he turned to me
and he says, "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,
but holes in the ground and piles of dirt.
There isn't one thing that any human being
would spend fifteen cents
to come and see."
And he said, "I'm scared."
And he was.
[helicopter whirring]
And it 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 long.
And it really impressed upon me on 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 what worry is,
and it was brought home to me that day.
[film projector whirring]
[Walt] Inside stage three nearby,
we started construction
on a 105-foot American riverboat,
the stern-wheeler, 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.
[Fowler] 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, uh, we were highly criticized
at the beginning by some of the old-time
operators of amusement parks,
because of spending too much money,
going into too much, uh, detail.
[whirring]
[Cottrell] 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 there's the typical
amusement park ride 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.
[chattering]
[rattling]
[Walt] 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, uh, they used to love
to go with me in those days,
and it was some of
the happiest days of my life.
[Miller] 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 very 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.
[chattering]
[Evans]
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.
[Irvine] 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,
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.
[Hibler] 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.
[chattering]
[Goff] I was supposed to look
at the cost sheets...
[chuckling] ...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'd say,
"How much money have you spent so far?"
And I'd say, "Let me see."
And he'd say, "I'll tell ya."
And he'd tell me exactly.
[Gurr] 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, in another
way, it seemed completely natural.
[horn honking]
We really didn't have, what you would say,
administrative offices.
We just had people everywhere.
["Tweedle Dee" playing]
Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dee
I'm as happy as can be...
[Gurr] You kind of hated to go home
at the end of the day because, oh, gosh,
you'd have to go home and go to bed
and then get up the next morning
and drive all the way back
and keep going again.
So it was kind of an inconvenience
to stop and have to go home.
Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dot
How you gonna keep that honey you got?
Hunkies, hunkies fishes bite
I'm gonna see my honey tonight
Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dot
Tweedlee dum, tweedlee dum
Give it up, give it up
Give your love to me...
[song ends]
[Hibler]
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.
[Irvine] 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 a way of scaled down
version of Main Street.
[Fowler] We built Disneyland with probably
not 10% of the plans to start with.
The plans were developed as we went along.
[tools pounding]
[Evans] I think Walt was convinced
that if his guests
were exposed to good taste,
good quality, good design,
they would sort of
subconsciously perceive this
not as a consequence
of being educated in landscape design
or in architecture or anything else,
but they would, subconsciously,
know the difference between good and bad.
[Shellhorn] They were bringing in
various landscape architects
to do different projects,
and then Walt Disney became worried
that, because so many people were in it,
it wouldn't hang together,
and so that's the way I started.
So, I made a plan
of the Main Street and the Hub.
And they called a meeting
of all the art directors,
and Walt was there, and they approved it.
Roy Disney said,
"Don't ever bother him with a problem.
If you have a problem, come to us."
[laughs] "Let him dream."
So, every Saturday he would come down
and we'd go around
with all the art directors
and he would have new ideas
of something to be done.
And he did, he wanted to
start it Monday morning.
He didn't want plans Monday morning.
So, many weekends, I'd work till midnight
getting out sketches or something
and that's the way it went.
[Linkletter]
The thing that I remember about it is,
while Walt had a temper
and he could demand things to be done
because he expected
everybody to do what he did.
[film projector whirring]
[Fowler] In, uh, Disneyland,
we had very acute problems there.
I was advised by two or three
of my major assistants.
Under no circumstances
should we try to continue to open in July.
We should postpone until September.
But we said no.
[chattering]
[engine rumbling]
[Fowler] It was so important,
in the minds of the public,
we were going to open in July,
and as a matter of fact,
if we had waited until September with all
of our problems financially and so forth,
we might never have gotten off the ground.
[chattering]
[Broggie] It was a learning process
all the way through,
and the thing I liked
the most about those days
was it was a great thing
to have somebody say, "Well, let's do it."
[Hibler] By now, all over the studio,
hammers and saws were quickly
being replaced by paint and brushes
for the deadline was drawing near.
The hurry-up, paint-up,
finish-up campaign began in earnest.
[Hench] Well, it seems
as if there's always pressure.
I suppose it's part of the nature,
I guess, of show business.
And, of course, part of it is opportunity
and part of it
is sensing the moment has come.
And, Walt being the intuitive man he was,
of course,
sensed it was the time for this.
And he did put pressure
on us and we did do it.
[Ryman] This was our big bugaboo.
What were you gonna do
with this Tomorrowland?
We had to have it.
You couldn't say we didn't want it.
And we struggled so hard.
[chattering]
[Ryman] One day, Walt and I
drove down together to Disneyland
and he said, "Well..." he said,
"Herbie..." he said,
"You know the worst thing
that could happen to us, don't you?"
And I said, "Well, what do you mean
the worst thing that could happen?"
He said, "Well, the worst thing that
could happen would be that I'd go broke."
And I said,
"Yeah, I guess that would be pretty bad."
And he said, "Well..." he said,
"I've been broke five times in my life
and one more won't hurt."
[machinery ticking, humming]
[Hench] If your team is sympathetic
and you all have the same goals,
why, you arrive at something
that's greater
than the sum of the parts, of course.
And, uh, I think it's well known
that this kind of thing works that way.
You build a kind of an enthusiasm
and you share something.
Sometimes it becomes a little ridiculous
and you just end up with fun.
But most of the time, you turn over
things by a mutual stimulation
that, uh...
that you'd never arrived at by yourself.
Walt was a... was a real master
at provoking that type of atmosphere.
[Walt] Here on the shores,
we come upon the realm
of the creatures of the Serengeti plains.
Towering above them all, the giraffe.
To reproduce these animals
requires the combined efforts
of the finest designers,
sculptors and master mechanics.
[Goff] I was determined
that I was gonna have the first ride
when the first boat
got in the ride with water in it.
I was gonna ride first
and find out if the person got wet...
because I had conceived the idea
of going behind the waterfall.
So I went slow around
and looked at everything,
and looked back
to see the clearance and everything.
And, uh, as I started under the waterfall,
I got right in it.
And then I looked back
to see where the stern was...
[chuckling]
and there was Walt sitting there.
My heart stopped beating.
I was clear through the waterfall
before I came to.
He stepped on board very carefully,
just as I left, and I didn't know it.
[announcer] Presenting this week,
the pre-opening report from Disneyland.
In our first television show last year,
we described to you our hopes
and plans for a place called Disneyland.
A few months ago, in a progress report,
we showed you
the actual start of construction.
In our mail recently, a lot of you
have shown interest in our progress.
And so this week,
just a matter of days away
from the formal opening of Disneyland,
we want to bring you up to date
on what's been happening,
and let you share with us the joys
and anxieties of our race against time.
In this, our final report
on building a Disneyland,
I want to pay tribute to the many
studio artists, craftsmen and engineers
whose untiring efforts
helped bring this dream to a reality.
Without their skills and imagination,
Disneyland would not have been possible.
[Linkletter]
Those last few days were frantic.
I saw gardeners spraying bushes
and flowers and things with paint
because they had died.
So, instead of with water,
they were painting grass, bushes, trees.
[Nunis] Prior to the opening,
there was a plumbing strike.
So, the decision was, should we have
drinking fountains or restrooms,
because there literally
wasn't enough time to get both done.
And Walt said, "Well, you know,
we've gotta have restrooms.
And people can drink Coke and Pepsi,
but they can't pee in the street."
[Martin]
We had a gas leak under the castle,
and you could see little blue flames
coming all around the perimeter
and the foundation of the castle.
I was unaware of this,
of course, at the time, but...
So I was smoking my pipe as usual,
and walking up from the Hub.
All of a sudden, the fire chief at
the time came running out and grabbed me.
We waltzed
all the way back down to the Hub.
He said,
"Don't you know there's a fire out there?"
He figured I'd blow up the castle.
[motor whirring]
[thudding]
[apparatus grinding]
[no audible dialogue]
[Irvine] Well, the pressures
were tremendous on everybody.
We all lived down there, and we worked
from early morning to late at night.
We were on a 48-hour week.
Walt used to come over on Saturday,
and we'd all go to lunch together
and come back and work some more,
and he was right on top of us.
[Martin] As far as the opening period,
it was very hectic.
I know at the time we lived down there,
we lived over the... the City Hall.
We did all our last drawings, uh,
on the second floor of the City Hall there
and were right on the spot.
[Linkletter] It was just like
a great big panic all the time.
It was a miracle that it ever went on.
And just as it was a miracle
that Disneyland ever got opened on date.
[uplifting music playing]
- [film projector whirring]
- [music fades]
[hopeful music playing]
[Walt] People, uh, looked at me
in many ways and said,
"Well, I mean, look,
the guy has no regard for money."
That's not true. I have regard for money.
There's some people
that sit and worship money
as something you've got to have
piled up in a big pile somewhere.
I've only thought of money in one way.
And that is to do something.
I don't think there's a thing that
I own that I'll ever get the benefit of,
except through doing things with it.
[Linkletter] "We were learners,"
Walt said,
"and I didn't have enough money
to do any more than that.
I had to borrow, as you know, from ABC
and my insurance, and mortgage the house."
There were delays by suppliers,
and there were breakdowns
and threatened strikes.
[machinery rattling]
[Linkletter] But Walt was daring. He put
everything on the line, and his beliefs.
How many guys would do that?
[ship horn blows]
[Broggie] Tenth of July,
we had a party at Disneyland.
And the first time we were allowed to run
the train around the park was that day.
And also, the riverboat ran that day.
[all cheering]
- [music continues]
- [bell tolling]
[whistle blows]
[whistle blows]
[train rattling]
[Irvine] Walt was living down there,
and he was out there early, early morning,
seeing how everything was going.
Just before opening, we...
Tomorrowland wasn't finished,
and we had to get in
and do a quick and dirty dressing job.
[Joerger] Before Disneyland opened,
everything was in utter turmoil.
And in Tomorrowland,
we had these big buildings on both sides,
but nothing in them.
[announcer] We hope you all
will be listening and watching
next Sunday, July 17th,
when we present
the formal opening of Disneyland,
in an hour-and-a-half show
over most of these stations.
[film projector whirring]
[announcer] These are just some
of the sites that ABC undertook
to show a waiting nation
on the world's largest live telecast.
It all started
when Mr. Kintner said to Mr. Disney,
"How about ABC televising
the opening of Disneyland?"
Mr. Disney thought it was a fine idea.
After all the preliminary planning,
the camera crew
started rehearsing their moves.
Calls were sent out all over the nation,
rounding up equipment.
Getting 85,000 feet of cable,
including 16,000 feet of coaxial,
was no easy task in itself.
Thirteen hydraulic forklifts
were brought in
and were set about building
special camera platforms
and mounting them onto these lifts.
The forklift operators
had to be rehearsed.
There was always the danger
they wouldn't stop the lifts in time
and pull the cables out of the cameras.
[Broggie] My work at the time
was getting Casey Jr. running.
And I was testing it before opening,
and the train started up
to the first lift and started going over.
We shut the ride down, of course,
to find out why this happened.
We discovered, well, there was
no safety rail around the track,
so we couldn't open the ride.
But I was to run the locomotive once
around the track for the TV show.
[chattering]
[exclaiming, chattering]
[singing indistinctly]
[announcer]
All the time we were trying to rehearse,
the workmen
were still building Disneyland.
Another one of our small problems.
That's asphalt, not sand.
We did manage to get some work done,
in spite of all the frantic
last-minute construction,
and men and material and trucks
kept passing through
in a frantic effort to finish on time.
This kept rehearsal
virtually at a standstill.
[chattering]
[announcer] Just before showtime,
the last preparations were being made.
And then, ready,
Fantasyland, Frontierland,
Adventureland, Main Street, Tomorrowland.
Stand by. Five seconds.
And here's the show.
["When You Wish Upon a Star" plays]
When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
[Weaver] How do you do, everyone?
This is Hank Weaver.
For the past year,
this signature has announced
the opening of Disneyland, the show.
Now it announces
the opening of Disneyland, the place.
The people and eyes around the world
are focused on these 160 acres
here in Anaheim, California.
This afternoon, Disneyland,
the world's most fabulous kingdom,
will be unveiled before an invitational
world premiere, and you, our guests.
And to start the proceedings,
we take you to the entrance of Disneyland
and your host, Art Linkletter.
[Linkletter] I'm standing here
on the railroad tracks,
and I'm in front of the big Disneyland
and Santa Fe railroad station,
and down these tracks in just a couple
of seconds will come Walt Disney himself,
barreling in on a railroad train
built to 5/8th miniature size.
[whistle blows]
How did the run go?
Oh, fine. Fine.
The governor had her around
till Frontierland
and then Fred Gurley there,
he took her round.
I picked her up and brought her in.
Highballing in, boys.
- Hello, Governor.
- Hello. Glad to see you, Art.
Governor Knight of California,
ladies and gentlemen,
and Walt Disney, of course, and
Mr. Gurley, the President of the Santa Fe.
And of the Santa Fe
and Disneyland, if you please.
That's right.
Thousands are coming in.
They're going through the magic tunnel
on foot because no car can enter here.
And, like Alice in Wonderland,
as you go on through that tunnel
past the Disneyland Santa Fe,
you find yourself in a bygone time,
another world.
The clock has turned back
a half a century,
and you're in the main square
of a small American town.
The year: 1900.
[Roy] I was just one of the sweaty people
trying to find our way through the...
Oh, it was a rat maze down there.
Everybody had been out
celebrating a little the night before,
so there were more than a few hangovers.
It was not the best of all days.
[chattering]
[Ridgway] Most people remember
the opening day as a total disaster,
because they had almost twice
as many people as they had planned for,
they ran out of food... Almost every
imaginable thing that could, went wrong.
[Burns] Women had to wear high heels
all the time and hose in hot weather,
like the beginning...
opening of Disneyland.
It was, uh, a ferocious day.
But you had to give Walt credit
for a most impressive idea,
all the way. [chuckles]
You couldn't knock a man
who thought like that.
All activity on Main Street has ceased.
Walt Disney will step forward
to read the dedication of Disneyland.
- [applause]
- [person] Yay!
Yay!
To all who come
to this happy place, welcome.
Disneyland is your land.
Here, age relives
fond memories of the past.
And here, youth may savor
the challenge and promise of the future.
Disneyland is dedicated
to the ideals, the dreams,
and the hard facts
that have created America
with the hope that it will be a source
of joy and inspiration to all the world.
Thank you.
[marching band playing]
[applause]
Standing here has been one of the most
exciting moments of my life.
I think, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone
who's been here today will say,
as the people did many years ago when they
were at the opening of the Eiffel Tower,
"I was there."
I'm very proud to say
I was at the opening of Disneyland.
It's a fabulous thing to happen,
ladies and gentlemen.
[Gibson] We didn't lack faith in the idea
that it was going to be something good.
It was other people that were sure
that it was not going to be a success.
I don't think it was true with the people
in the creative departments.
[chattering]
[Davis] Walt, he says, "All I want is that
when people walk through or ride through
or have access to anything
that you design,
I want them, when they leave,
to have a smile on their face."
And he says, "You just remember that,
and that's all I ask of you as a designer.
Make it pretty, but make it
so that the people come out smiling."
[Linkletter] The press was not very
complimentary to the... of our opening,
but that's part of the cost
of this business,
of being in show business in Hollywood.
And that is, they're looking
for any kind of little cracks
or any kind of things they can magnify.
[chattering]
[horn blows]
[Linkletter] Right now, it's my pleasure
to introduce the lovely lady
and famous star who Mr. Disney
has asked to christen the Mark Twain.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Irene Dunne.
- Hello, Irene.
- Hello. How are you?
My, it's listing. [chuckles]
It's listing a little
because it'll be shoving off in a moment.
And there the boat is christened,
and it starts on its daily trips
up and down the rivers of the world.
Of America, that is.
- Thank you, Miss Dunne.
- [Irene] Have a good journey.
[Linkletter] And now, ladies and
gentlemen, I've got other places to go.
And the commodore, Admiral Joe Fowler,
up there in the wheelhouse.
Looks like they're getting ready
to shove off, so I better...
Goodbye, Irene.
Goodbye, everybody. Have a good ride.
- [steam whistle blows]
- There goes the whistle.
Take her away, Admiral.
Bye.
[uplifting music playing]
[Walt] Before our preview of Tomorrowland,
I'd like to read
these few words of dedication.
"A vista into a world of wondrous ideas,
signifying man's achievement.
A step into the future, with predictions
of constructive things to come.
Tomorrow offers new frontiers
in science, adventure and ideals.
The atomic age,
the challenge of outer space
and the hope
for a peaceful and unified world."
[Cummings] Those doves are,
ladies and gentlemen, I hope,
the harbingers of peace,
for the world of tomorrow.
[Hench] I think it comes back
to the way people feel.
They feel better about themselves.
I think if we give people confidence,
if we make them feel
that they can handle anything,
it seems to me it not only
reduces their fear,
but it makes them better people.
And there is hope.
[uplifting music continues]
Walt, you've made a bum
out of Barnum today.
- [laughs]
- But we've got to go.
I know, but I just want to say
a word of thanks to all the artists,
the workers and everybody
that helped make this dream come true.
Let's go into Fantasyland
and have some fun.
- [Walt] Let's go.
- [Linkletter] Goodbye, folks.
[film projector whirring]
[train horn blowing]
[bell chimes]
[Walt] 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 that all along
and all 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.
[airplane passing overhead]
[Huntley] 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.
[Kintner] 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 and, uh...
[Kintner] You deserve it.
Well, that's what worries me, you know?
[whirring]
[Irvine] Walt had decided in his own mind
that if he was going
to make this thing work,
he'd have to have financing,
and was willing to do some TV shows
in order to help get the financing.
[Kintner] 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.
[helicopter whirring]
Now on a site of, uh, 240 acres,
near the city of Anaheim,
we've begun
to build Disneyland, the place.
[Burns] 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?
[Walt] 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.
[Sklar] 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.
[crickets chittering]
[tractors rumbling]
[Davis] 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.
[Linkletter] 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, um, I got in a car with him,
and we rode, and we rode,
and we rode, and we rode.
- [interviewer laughs]
- [Linkletter] I thought, "Where the hell
is he taking us to?"
And we got down to his 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.
[Walt] 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.
[film projector whirring]
[Walt] Disneyland is divided
into four cardinal realms,
the four different worlds from which
our television shows will originate.
Adventureland...
Tomorrowland...
Fantasyland...
and Frontierland.
[Irvine] 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, uh, helping him
to gel his concept.
Which I think at the time was loose
and fluid and all over the place.
[Hench] 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.
[motor whines]
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.
[Ryman] 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.
[hums, rattles]
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?"
[whirring]
But that's Walt's problem.
If he fails, then it's his failure.
[flies buzzing]
[chattering]
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.
[Evans] In order for Walt
to take his guest by the hand
and take him on a hike through
the Missouri wilderness or anything,
what he doesn't need is
a high-rise building,
or a transmission tower
or freeway interchange in the background.
[helicopter whirring]
So, number one, they 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.
[Irvine] 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.
[Evans] Walt didn't want to
have to wait five years
to get the landscape
to harmonize with the architecture.
Well, 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... 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.
["Crazy Man Crazy" playing]
Crazy man crazy
Oh, man, that music's gone, gone
When I go out and I want a treat
[apparatus whirring]
I find me a band with a solid beat
Take my chick and we dance about
When they start rockin'
Boy, we start to shout, we shout
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go
[no audible dialogue]
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
Said crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
They play it soft
They play it strong
They play it wild
And they play it long
They just keep playin'
Till the break of day
To keep them rockin'
All you gotta say is
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Crazy man crazy
Man, that music's gone, gone
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go everybody
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go
[music ends]
[Walt] 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.
[helicopter whirring]
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 horsecar
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.
[film projector whirring]
[tools clattering]
[Fowler] The budget in starting
was four and a half million dollars.
In August, it was seven million.
In December, it was 11 million.
In the springtime, it was anybody's guess.
[Albright] 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.
[Walt]
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.
[Fowler] 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... the situation.
[metal clanking]
[chattering]
[thudding]
[Hibler] 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.
[mechanism humming]
[Roy] 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.
And so, he kind of
was 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, you know, seeing their uncle.
[Broggie] 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.
Having all the drawings
for the little train,
we got started and manufactured
the, uh, locomotives, the cars.
So all we had to do was expand the gauge
from 1/8th scale
to the 36-inch gauge track.
[horn blows]
[Hibler] Back at the studio,
the working models of our rides
had been perfected and we were
well into construction on the real thing.
[Davis] The, uh, Peter Pan ride,
for instance,
they had one whole
warehouse building over there
filled up with the 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.
[Hibler] 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.
[Gurr] Every job that you work on
with Walt is different,
and you figure out what you're gonna do
and how you're gonna 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, uh, publish anything.
All we did was just do the work.
Walt never gave a thought
that he was overloading people.
[no audible dialogue]
[Gurr] 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.
[tools pounding]
[Albright] And there was
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 in the park.
[thudding, pounding]
[Ridgway] They had a lot of problems
getting the place opened
by that opening day.
They dug out the Rivers of America,
and they 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.
[Irvine] We started to experiment
with the waterway for the, uh, big river,
Rivers of America.
First of all, we used, uh...
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.
[Goff]
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... he took a couple of big sighs...
and, uh, he turned to me
and he says, "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,
but holes in the ground and piles of dirt.
There isn't one thing that any human being
would spend fifteen cents
to come and see."
And he said, "I'm scared."
And he was.
[helicopter whirring]
And it 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 long.
And it really impressed upon me on 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 what worry is,
and it was brought home to me that day.
[film projector whirring]
[Walt] Inside stage three nearby,
we started construction
on a 105-foot American riverboat,
the stern-wheeler, 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.
[Fowler] 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, uh, we were highly criticized
at the beginning by some of the old-time
operators of amusement parks,
because of spending too much money,
going into too much, uh, detail.
[whirring]
[Cottrell] 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 there's the typical
amusement park ride 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.
[chattering]
[rattling]
[Walt] 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, uh, they used to love
to go with me in those days,
and it was some of
the happiest days of my life.
[Miller] 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 very 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.
[chattering]
[Evans]
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.
[Irvine] 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,
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.
[Hibler] 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.
[chattering]
[Goff] I was supposed to look
at the cost sheets...
[chuckling] ...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'd say,
"How much money have you spent so far?"
And I'd say, "Let me see."
And he'd say, "I'll tell ya."
And he'd tell me exactly.
[Gurr] 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, in another
way, it seemed completely natural.
[horn honking]
We really didn't have, what you would say,
administrative offices.
We just had people everywhere.
["Tweedle Dee" playing]
Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dee
I'm as happy as can be...
[Gurr] You kind of hated to go home
at the end of the day because, oh, gosh,
you'd have to go home and go to bed
and then get up the next morning
and drive all the way back
and keep going again.
So it was kind of an inconvenience
to stop and have to go home.
Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dot
How you gonna keep that honey you got?
Hunkies, hunkies fishes bite
I'm gonna see my honey tonight
Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dot
Tweedlee dum, tweedlee dum
Give it up, give it up
Give your love to me...
[song ends]
[Hibler]
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.
[Irvine] 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 a way of scaled down
version of Main Street.
[Fowler] We built Disneyland with probably
not 10% of the plans to start with.
The plans were developed as we went along.
[tools pounding]
[Evans] I think Walt was convinced
that if his guests
were exposed to good taste,
good quality, good design,
they would sort of
subconsciously perceive this
not as a consequence
of being educated in landscape design
or in architecture or anything else,
but they would, subconsciously,
know the difference between good and bad.
[Shellhorn] They were bringing in
various landscape architects
to do different projects,
and then Walt Disney became worried
that, because so many people were in it,
it wouldn't hang together,
and so that's the way I started.
So, I made a plan
of the Main Street and the Hub.
And they called a meeting
of all the art directors,
and Walt was there, and they approved it.
Roy Disney said,
"Don't ever bother him with a problem.
If you have a problem, come to us."
[laughs] "Let him dream."
So, every Saturday he would come down
and we'd go around
with all the art directors
and he would have new ideas
of something to be done.
And he did, he wanted to
start it Monday morning.
He didn't want plans Monday morning.
So, many weekends, I'd work till midnight
getting out sketches or something
and that's the way it went.
[Linkletter]
The thing that I remember about it is,
while Walt had a temper
and he could demand things to be done
because he expected
everybody to do what he did.
[film projector whirring]
[Fowler] In, uh, Disneyland,
we had very acute problems there.
I was advised by two or three
of my major assistants.
Under no circumstances
should we try to continue to open in July.
We should postpone until September.
But we said no.
[chattering]
[engine rumbling]
[Fowler] It was so important,
in the minds of the public,
we were going to open in July,
and as a matter of fact,
if we had waited until September with all
of our problems financially and so forth,
we might never have gotten off the ground.
[chattering]
[Broggie] It was a learning process
all the way through,
and the thing I liked
the most about those days
was it was a great thing
to have somebody say, "Well, let's do it."
[Hibler] By now, all over the studio,
hammers and saws were quickly
being replaced by paint and brushes
for the deadline was drawing near.
The hurry-up, paint-up,
finish-up campaign began in earnest.
[Hench] Well, it seems
as if there's always pressure.
I suppose it's part of the nature,
I guess, of show business.
And, of course, part of it is opportunity
and part of it
is sensing the moment has come.
And, Walt being the intuitive man he was,
of course,
sensed it was the time for this.
And he did put pressure
on us and we did do it.
[Ryman] This was our big bugaboo.
What were you gonna do
with this Tomorrowland?
We had to have it.
You couldn't say we didn't want it.
And we struggled so hard.
[chattering]
[Ryman] One day, Walt and I
drove down together to Disneyland
and he said, "Well..." he said,
"Herbie..." he said,
"You know the worst thing
that could happen to us, don't you?"
And I said, "Well, what do you mean
the worst thing that could happen?"
He said, "Well, the worst thing that
could happen would be that I'd go broke."
And I said,
"Yeah, I guess that would be pretty bad."
And he said, "Well..." he said,
"I've been broke five times in my life
and one more won't hurt."
[machinery ticking, humming]
[Hench] If your team is sympathetic
and you all have the same goals,
why, you arrive at something
that's greater
than the sum of the parts, of course.
And, uh, I think it's well known
that this kind of thing works that way.
You build a kind of an enthusiasm
and you share something.
Sometimes it becomes a little ridiculous
and you just end up with fun.
But most of the time, you turn over
things by a mutual stimulation
that, uh...
that you'd never arrived at by yourself.
Walt was a... was a real master
at provoking that type of atmosphere.
[Walt] Here on the shores,
we come upon the realm
of the creatures of the Serengeti plains.
Towering above them all, the giraffe.
To reproduce these animals
requires the combined efforts
of the finest designers,
sculptors and master mechanics.
[Goff] I was determined
that I was gonna have the first ride
when the first boat
got in the ride with water in it.
I was gonna ride first
and find out if the person got wet...
because I had conceived the idea
of going behind the waterfall.
So I went slow around
and looked at everything,
and looked back
to see the clearance and everything.
And, uh, as I started under the waterfall,
I got right in it.
And then I looked back
to see where the stern was...
[chuckling]
and there was Walt sitting there.
My heart stopped beating.
I was clear through the waterfall
before I came to.
He stepped on board very carefully,
just as I left, and I didn't know it.
[announcer] Presenting this week,
the pre-opening report from Disneyland.
In our first television show last year,
we described to you our hopes
and plans for a place called Disneyland.
A few months ago, in a progress report,
we showed you
the actual start of construction.
In our mail recently, a lot of you
have shown interest in our progress.
And so this week,
just a matter of days away
from the formal opening of Disneyland,
we want to bring you up to date
on what's been happening,
and let you share with us the joys
and anxieties of our race against time.
In this, our final report
on building a Disneyland,
I want to pay tribute to the many
studio artists, craftsmen and engineers
whose untiring efforts
helped bring this dream to a reality.
Without their skills and imagination,
Disneyland would not have been possible.
[Linkletter]
Those last few days were frantic.
I saw gardeners spraying bushes
and flowers and things with paint
because they had died.
So, instead of with water,
they were painting grass, bushes, trees.
[Nunis] Prior to the opening,
there was a plumbing strike.
So, the decision was, should we have
drinking fountains or restrooms,
because there literally
wasn't enough time to get both done.
And Walt said, "Well, you know,
we've gotta have restrooms.
And people can drink Coke and Pepsi,
but they can't pee in the street."
[Martin]
We had a gas leak under the castle,
and you could see little blue flames
coming all around the perimeter
and the foundation of the castle.
I was unaware of this,
of course, at the time, but...
So I was smoking my pipe as usual,
and walking up from the Hub.
All of a sudden, the fire chief at
the time came running out and grabbed me.
We waltzed
all the way back down to the Hub.
He said,
"Don't you know there's a fire out there?"
He figured I'd blow up the castle.
[motor whirring]
[thudding]
[apparatus grinding]
[no audible dialogue]
[Irvine] Well, the pressures
were tremendous on everybody.
We all lived down there, and we worked
from early morning to late at night.
We were on a 48-hour week.
Walt used to come over on Saturday,
and we'd all go to lunch together
and come back and work some more,
and he was right on top of us.
[Martin] As far as the opening period,
it was very hectic.
I know at the time we lived down there,
we lived over the... the City Hall.
We did all our last drawings, uh,
on the second floor of the City Hall there
and were right on the spot.
[Linkletter] It was just like
a great big panic all the time.
It was a miracle that it ever went on.
And just as it was a miracle
that Disneyland ever got opened on date.
[uplifting music playing]
- [film projector whirring]
- [music fades]
[hopeful music playing]
[Walt] People, uh, looked at me
in many ways and said,
"Well, I mean, look,
the guy has no regard for money."
That's not true. I have regard for money.
There's some people
that sit and worship money
as something you've got to have
piled up in a big pile somewhere.
I've only thought of money in one way.
And that is to do something.
I don't think there's a thing that
I own that I'll ever get the benefit of,
except through doing things with it.
[Linkletter] "We were learners,"
Walt said,
"and I didn't have enough money
to do any more than that.
I had to borrow, as you know, from ABC
and my insurance, and mortgage the house."
There were delays by suppliers,
and there were breakdowns
and threatened strikes.
[machinery rattling]
[Linkletter] But Walt was daring. He put
everything on the line, and his beliefs.
How many guys would do that?
[ship horn blows]
[Broggie] Tenth of July,
we had a party at Disneyland.
And the first time we were allowed to run
the train around the park was that day.
And also, the riverboat ran that day.
[all cheering]
- [music continues]
- [bell tolling]
[whistle blows]
[whistle blows]
[train rattling]
[Irvine] Walt was living down there,
and he was out there early, early morning,
seeing how everything was going.
Just before opening, we...
Tomorrowland wasn't finished,
and we had to get in
and do a quick and dirty dressing job.
[Joerger] Before Disneyland opened,
everything was in utter turmoil.
And in Tomorrowland,
we had these big buildings on both sides,
but nothing in them.
[announcer] We hope you all
will be listening and watching
next Sunday, July 17th,
when we present
the formal opening of Disneyland,
in an hour-and-a-half show
over most of these stations.
[film projector whirring]
[announcer] These are just some
of the sites that ABC undertook
to show a waiting nation
on the world's largest live telecast.
It all started
when Mr. Kintner said to Mr. Disney,
"How about ABC televising
the opening of Disneyland?"
Mr. Disney thought it was a fine idea.
After all the preliminary planning,
the camera crew
started rehearsing their moves.
Calls were sent out all over the nation,
rounding up equipment.
Getting 85,000 feet of cable,
including 16,000 feet of coaxial,
was no easy task in itself.
Thirteen hydraulic forklifts
were brought in
and were set about building
special camera platforms
and mounting them onto these lifts.
The forklift operators
had to be rehearsed.
There was always the danger
they wouldn't stop the lifts in time
and pull the cables out of the cameras.
[Broggie] My work at the time
was getting Casey Jr. running.
And I was testing it before opening,
and the train started up
to the first lift and started going over.
We shut the ride down, of course,
to find out why this happened.
We discovered, well, there was
no safety rail around the track,
so we couldn't open the ride.
But I was to run the locomotive once
around the track for the TV show.
[chattering]
[exclaiming, chattering]
[singing indistinctly]
[announcer]
All the time we were trying to rehearse,
the workmen
were still building Disneyland.
Another one of our small problems.
That's asphalt, not sand.
We did manage to get some work done,
in spite of all the frantic
last-minute construction,
and men and material and trucks
kept passing through
in a frantic effort to finish on time.
This kept rehearsal
virtually at a standstill.
[chattering]
[announcer] Just before showtime,
the last preparations were being made.
And then, ready,
Fantasyland, Frontierland,
Adventureland, Main Street, Tomorrowland.
Stand by. Five seconds.
And here's the show.
["When You Wish Upon a Star" plays]
When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
[Weaver] How do you do, everyone?
This is Hank Weaver.
For the past year,
this signature has announced
the opening of Disneyland, the show.
Now it announces
the opening of Disneyland, the place.
The people and eyes around the world
are focused on these 160 acres
here in Anaheim, California.
This afternoon, Disneyland,
the world's most fabulous kingdom,
will be unveiled before an invitational
world premiere, and you, our guests.
And to start the proceedings,
we take you to the entrance of Disneyland
and your host, Art Linkletter.
[Linkletter] I'm standing here
on the railroad tracks,
and I'm in front of the big Disneyland
and Santa Fe railroad station,
and down these tracks in just a couple
of seconds will come Walt Disney himself,
barreling in on a railroad train
built to 5/8th miniature size.
[whistle blows]
How did the run go?
Oh, fine. Fine.
The governor had her around
till Frontierland
and then Fred Gurley there,
he took her round.
I picked her up and brought her in.
Highballing in, boys.
- Hello, Governor.
- Hello. Glad to see you, Art.
Governor Knight of California,
ladies and gentlemen,
and Walt Disney, of course, and
Mr. Gurley, the President of the Santa Fe.
And of the Santa Fe
and Disneyland, if you please.
That's right.
Thousands are coming in.
They're going through the magic tunnel
on foot because no car can enter here.
And, like Alice in Wonderland,
as you go on through that tunnel
past the Disneyland Santa Fe,
you find yourself in a bygone time,
another world.
The clock has turned back
a half a century,
and you're in the main square
of a small American town.
The year: 1900.
[Roy] I was just one of the sweaty people
trying to find our way through the...
Oh, it was a rat maze down there.
Everybody had been out
celebrating a little the night before,
so there were more than a few hangovers.
It was not the best of all days.
[chattering]
[Ridgway] Most people remember
the opening day as a total disaster,
because they had almost twice
as many people as they had planned for,
they ran out of food... Almost every
imaginable thing that could, went wrong.
[Burns] Women had to wear high heels
all the time and hose in hot weather,
like the beginning...
opening of Disneyland.
It was, uh, a ferocious day.
But you had to give Walt credit
for a most impressive idea,
all the way. [chuckles]
You couldn't knock a man
who thought like that.
All activity on Main Street has ceased.
Walt Disney will step forward
to read the dedication of Disneyland.
- [applause]
- [person] Yay!
Yay!
To all who come
to this happy place, welcome.
Disneyland is your land.
Here, age relives
fond memories of the past.
And here, youth may savor
the challenge and promise of the future.
Disneyland is dedicated
to the ideals, the dreams,
and the hard facts
that have created America
with the hope that it will be a source
of joy and inspiration to all the world.
Thank you.
[marching band playing]
[applause]
Standing here has been one of the most
exciting moments of my life.
I think, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone
who's been here today will say,
as the people did many years ago when they
were at the opening of the Eiffel Tower,
"I was there."
I'm very proud to say
I was at the opening of Disneyland.
It's a fabulous thing to happen,
ladies and gentlemen.
[Gibson] We didn't lack faith in the idea
that it was going to be something good.
It was other people that were sure
that it was not going to be a success.
I don't think it was true with the people
in the creative departments.
[chattering]
[Davis] Walt, he says, "All I want is that
when people walk through or ride through
or have access to anything
that you design,
I want them, when they leave,
to have a smile on their face."
And he says, "You just remember that,
and that's all I ask of you as a designer.
Make it pretty, but make it
so that the people come out smiling."
[Linkletter] The press was not very
complimentary to the... of our opening,
but that's part of the cost
of this business,
of being in show business in Hollywood.
And that is, they're looking
for any kind of little cracks
or any kind of things they can magnify.
[chattering]
[horn blows]
[Linkletter] Right now, it's my pleasure
to introduce the lovely lady
and famous star who Mr. Disney
has asked to christen the Mark Twain.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Irene Dunne.
- Hello, Irene.
- Hello. How are you?
My, it's listing. [chuckles]
It's listing a little
because it'll be shoving off in a moment.
And there the boat is christened,
and it starts on its daily trips
up and down the rivers of the world.
Of America, that is.
- Thank you, Miss Dunne.
- [Irene] Have a good journey.
[Linkletter] And now, ladies and
gentlemen, I've got other places to go.
And the commodore, Admiral Joe Fowler,
up there in the wheelhouse.
Looks like they're getting ready
to shove off, so I better...
Goodbye, Irene.
Goodbye, everybody. Have a good ride.
- [steam whistle blows]
- There goes the whistle.
Take her away, Admiral.
Bye.
[uplifting music playing]
[Walt] Before our preview of Tomorrowland,
I'd like to read
these few words of dedication.
"A vista into a world of wondrous ideas,
signifying man's achievement.
A step into the future, with predictions
of constructive things to come.
Tomorrow offers new frontiers
in science, adventure and ideals.
The atomic age,
the challenge of outer space
and the hope
for a peaceful and unified world."
[Cummings] Those doves are,
ladies and gentlemen, I hope,
the harbingers of peace,
for the world of tomorrow.
[Hench] I think it comes back
to the way people feel.
They feel better about themselves.
I think if we give people confidence,
if we make them feel
that they can handle anything,
it seems to me it not only
reduces their fear,
but it makes them better people.
And there is hope.
[uplifting music continues]
Walt, you've made a bum
out of Barnum today.
- [laughs]
- But we've got to go.
I know, but I just want to say
a word of thanks to all the artists,
the workers and everybody
that helped make this dream come true.
Let's go into Fantasyland
and have some fun.
- [Walt] Let's go.
- [Linkletter] Goodbye, folks.
[film projector whirring]