Disney's Land by Richard Snow

Author:Richard Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

29 THE MOONLINER

Only one element of Tomorrowland came about with relative ease. The Los Angeles Times reported on July 6, “Early risers along a twenty-mile route between Hollydale and Anaheim were startled this morning to see an 89-foot rocket ship moving through the streets.” They were very early risers, because, in order to avoid an immense traffic jam, “the ‘Air Ship of Tomorrow’ was trucked before sun-up, from Hollydale where it was built to Disneyland where it will become part of the TWA exhibit as well as the theme of the Tomorrowland section of the park.”

C. V. Wood had sold a sponsorship to Trans World Airlines, which became “the Official Airline to Disneyland” and would put its name to a simulated trip to the moon (which was causing much grief) and this “Moonliner” (which was causing comparatively little).

The spaceship had been designed by John Hench, and it looked like the V-2 rockets launched against England by Germany late in World War II. That’s hardly surprising, as their father, Wernher von Braun, also worked on the Moonliner (interestingly, he declared Walt Disney the most intelligent man he had ever met). Von Braun, who would have gone on trial in Nuremberg had not the urgencies of the budding Cold War welcomed him into the American space program (when a movie about him called I Aim for the Stars came out, someone suggested a subtitle: But Sometimes I Hit London), took part in the Disneyland episode “Man in Space,” which aired that spring. Hench made the Moonliner look like the innocuous passenger vessel it was supposed to represent by adding portholes and a pilot’s cabin, along with three graceful twenty-two-foot pylons that curved out from the lower third of the ship to form a tripod that kept it upright.

“The building was actually kind of subtle,” Hench said. “We used the same methods they use to manufacture boilers at a boiler works. The hull didn’t have that elegant shape exactly, but we bridged with a lot of little changes. And it worked all right, particularly when we got the curved sections up where perspective helped.”

Bob Gurr disagreed with Hench about the subtlety of the structure: “They had this horizontal frame laying on the ground, with all these plywood rings, and all this aluminum. It was a crude way to build it, but it was built very quickly.” Seventy-six feet tall, the Moonliner was sheathed in fifteen thousand square feet of aluminum laid over a steel skeleton. Here again Mel Tilley’s favorite metal made some trouble, although less than it had with Gurr’s bumpers. “They got the entire rocket together in Tomorrowland,” Gurr said, “and then discovered what they had done wrong. As soon as they had it put in place, the aluminum started expanding in the sun, while the steel and the wood interior structure didn’t. You’d hear this thing going ‘bang, clunk… crack, crack’ all day long! And then at sundown, ‘bang… bang’ as it started cooling and shrinking back.”

The Times article mentions that the Moonliner was the theme of Tomorrowland, but it was more than that.

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