The Vault of Walt: Volume 3: Even More Unofficial Disney Stories Never Told by Jim Korkis

Author:Jim Korkis [Korkis, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: walt disney, lady and the tramp, jiminy cricket, disneyland, hidden mickeys
Publisher: Theme Park Press
Published: 2014-09-25T21:00:00+00:00

Part Three

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Disney Park Stories

Sixty years ago, Walt Disney came up with a template for a new amusement park, later labeled a theme park, that has served as the inspiration for many of the entertainment enterprises that exist today.

Fletcher Markle interviewed Walt on September 25, 1963, for the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Telescope television series about the birth of that concept:

Markle: Where did you originally get the first notion for Disneyland?

Walt: Well it came about when my daughters were very young and I…Saturday was always Daddy’s day with the two daughters. So we’d start out and try to go someplace, you know, different things, and I’d take them to the merry-go-round and I took them different places and as I’d sit while they rode the merry-go-round and did all these things…sit on a bench, you know, eating peanuts…I felt that there should be something built…some kind of an amusement enterprise built where the parents and the children could have fun together.

So that’s how Disneyland started. Well, it took many years…it was a…oh, a period of maybe 15 years developing. I started with many ideas, threw them away, started all over again. And, eventually, it evolved into what you see today at Disneyland. But it all started from a Daddy with two daughters wondering where he could take them where he could have a little fun with them too.

Fletcher: Who goes to Disneyland? What is the ratio of adults to children as part of the plan of fathers and daughters?

Walt: Oh, it’s four adults to one child. That is we are counting the teenagers as adults. But of course, in the winter time, you can go out there during the week and you won’t see any children. You’ll see all the “oldsters” out there riding all these rides and having fun and everything. Summertime, of course, the average would drop down. But the over all…the year-round average…it’s four adults to one child.

From the beginning, Walt had definite ideas about how Disneyland should be handled differently than the traditional amusement park. It would be clean, safe, and friendly. In a 1956 interview with writer Pete Martin for the Saturday Evening Post, Walt stated:

Chewing gum sticks up things so we don’t sell it. And peanut shells. We sell the unshelled. But shelled peanuts, they just crumble them and throw them all over the place. And nothing with round sticks. People trip on them. The ice cream bars got flat sticks and I won’t sell any of this spun candy because the kids get it and get it all over everything and people get it on their hands.

No liquor, no beer, nothing. Because that brings in a rowdy element. That brings people that we don’t want and I feel they don’t need it. I feel when I go down to the park I don’t need a drink. I work around that place all day and I don’t have one. After I come out of a heavy day at the studio sometimes I want a drink to relax.

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