Adventureland Articles
Reflections From The Road: The Search For Main Street USA
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In July of 1995, I arrived in downtown Fort Collins, Colo., in search of clues to answer the questions that I always ask as a historical geographer: How and why did the townsfolk design and locate buildings, streets, and open spaces as they did? How did the resulting landscape fit into the broader pattern of the region and nation?
Since I am especially interested in how downtowns develop personalities ...
Indiana Jones Adventure Troop Transport
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I realize that most of you think of me as Dennis Simanaitis, Engineering Editor, R and T-if, indeed, you think of me at all. But the fact is, I have lot in common with Indiana Jones.
Consider. He is Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. And I myself used to be in academic life. A small, cluttered office in the archaeology department of a Midwestern college? Yes! I taught at Marietta College, in Marietta, ...
A Mickey Mouse Operation?
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Are Disneyland and Walt Disney World complex artifacts from the 1950s? University of Minnesota art history professor Karal Ann Marling that they reflect America's post-war culture. For instance the them parks targeted baby boom child-centered mobile families and used buildings that are uniform in color and design like a typical suburban subdivision. She likens them to a series of movies in which the ...
Here's Your First View Of Disneyland
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Walt Disney's imagination is running wild again. At Anaheim, Calif., 25 miles from Los Angeles, bulldozers are piling up miniature mountains for a new product of Walt Disney's fertile imagination - a fabulous playground called Disneyland. At present, Disneyland exists mainly in drawings, models and the color map on these pages. But already its four major areas (see map) are backdrops for the Disneyland TV ...
Disneyland
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It may be more than the kids can bear. It has an Adventureland from Tahiti, a Frontierland entered through the log gates of an old fort complete with a Davy Crockett museum, a Fantasyland full Snow White, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and all their associates, and a Tomorrowland with a Space Port. Walt Disney arranged it all, of course, and then named it Disneyland. Sprawled over 160 acres at Anaheim, Calif., ...
Mouse That Turned To Gold
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In real life, fame rarely leads to fortune--particularly if you are a mouse. But in Hollywood, almost anything can have a fairy tale ending. After more than a quarter-century of paw-to-mouth existence, Mickey Mouse finally is piloting his creator, Walt Disney, to the pot of cheese at the foot of the rainbow.
In some ways, the $17-million Disneyland amusement park that opens in Anaheim, Calif., July 18, ...
Small Boy's Dream Come True
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During World War II, Dad's artists designed thousands of insignia for planes, tanks and shoulder patches; over 4000 designs in all. I collected them in scrapbooks, so I ought to know. Uncle Roy figured that each of those insignia cost the studio about twenty-five dollars, and the studio did the work for nothing. That is a pretty big giveaway-$100,000. "How could you turn them down?" Dad asks. "It meant a ...
Sound Effects Add Realism To Disneyland
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Realistic sound effects provide a great deal of realism at Walt Disney's 160-acre "Disneyland" park at Anaheim, California, thus heightening the illusion of a simulated trip to the moon or a river cruise through the African jungle, hence the extensive array of audio equipment.
A full-time service crew consisting of six technicians is required to maintain 290 loudspeakers, more than 40 miles of wiring, ...
Steamboat 'round The Bend
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A summer vacation with pay. . . traveling down the rivers of America into the past . . . the exotic and the whimsical . . . this was my summer travel adventure.
Dozens of school teachers and college students shared this unusual tour, yet none of us traveled more than 50 miles. All of us met thousands of people from nearly every corner of the earth. We were part of the newest of Americana, Disneyland, ...
Through The Jungles Of Disneyland
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When Walt Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse and other animated film cartoon characters who have become household names, first viewed 160 acres of flat sandy land in suburban Anaheim, California, 25 miles southeast of Los Angeles, he envisioned what others would never have dreamed of--$17,000,000 Disneyland, which threw wide its gates to the public in mid-July of 1955. Before his magic hand began to mold it, ...
A Wonderful World
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The saga of the aging cinema star is a part of American folklore-the heady upward trajectory, the few brief seasons on the summit, and the swift descent to "B" pictures, guest appearances, and, of late, odd jobs on television. Next October the saga will be re-enacted again, but with one big difference. The old friend taking a job as TV master of ceremonies will have all his joints in top working order, and ...
Disneyland And Las Vegas
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This is written in Mexico, my home in recent years. I've just returned from a visit to the United States, and am now once more enjoying the taste of unfrozen orange juice and fresh fish, conversations lasting four or five hours in which all sorts of cabbages and kings are discussed, meetings with friends where no one asks if I watched TV last night to see Mickey Rooney do Oedipus Rex on the Benign ...
How To Make A Buck
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Once upon a time, in the magic realm of California, there was a grown-up heady boy named Walt Disney who set out to create the happiest place on earth. So he went into his counting houses and to his moneylenders, and he collected millions of dollars. Then he ordered his royal artists and carpenters to build a whimsical wonderland of spaceships to the moon and Mark Twain river boats, of mechanical monkeys ...
If You Plan To Visit Disneyland
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The wonderful world of make-believe called Disneyland is now two years old, and it continues to delight Westerners by the thousands-small children, teen-agers, adults alike. What's more, it doesn't lose it's luster in a day's visit, nor in two or three. Possibly it never will for a good many visitors.
We won't try to describe in detail this imaginative combination of playland and museum; but we do offer ...
Intrepid Kids Of Disneyland
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It was a normal Sunday afternoon at Disneyland. The Gay Nineties show had just broken at the Golden Horseshoe, a make-believe salon located in the Frontierland area. The tourist-packed Mark Twain, a scaled-down reproduction of a nineteenth-century Mississippi river boat, was sailing around Tom Sawyer's Island. Stagecoach passengers were jolting through the Painted Desert, which, until recently, had been an ...
Walt Disney's Mechanical Wonderland
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Take one creative genius with idea, engineers with mechanical know-how, a 160-acre orange grove in Anaheim, Calif., and mix thoroughly with $19,000,000. The result? Disneyland, U.S.A.
Walt Disney, the genius behind this playground, has a mind that is constantly busy with new ideas, In fact, he used to bemoan the fact that there was little to do on weekends.
But that was two years ago. Now, Walt has a ...
Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom
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Twenty years ago," Walt said as we drove toward Disneyland, some 25 miles southeast of central Los Angeles, "I was always trying to think of a place to take my two small daughters on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon - a place where I could have fun, too.
"At an amusement park the only fun provided for a father, besides having his bottom dropped out from under him on the roller coaster, was the same he ...
Keeping Disneyland In Proportion
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Gardening enthusiasts who visit Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., where adults outnumber youngsters four to one, are as fascinated by the wide variety of appropriate landscape plantings and colorful gardens as they are by the 50 or more major amusement attractions in this multi-million dollar center.
These horticultural period plantings include a tree-bordered Main Street of the early 1900's; ...
Magic Worlds Of Walt Disney
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Disneyland really started more than 20 years ago, when Walt got the idea for an amusement park that grownups as well as children would enjoy.
"I had all my drawing things laid out at home, and I'd work on plans for the park, as a hobby, at night."
At the time, amusement parks were dying all over the country, "I talked Disneyland but no one could see it," Walt recalled. "So I went ahead and spent my ...
Onward And Upward With The Arts
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One day last year in Los Angeles, as I was about to step aboard a helicopter that would take me to Disneyland with my teen-aged son and daughter, these two, smiling wanly, nodded toward a tourist poster that gave equal billing to our destination and to Forest Lawn cemetery. Their gesture reminded me that in earlier years they had wasted hundreds of child-hours vainly urging me to bring them on this very ...
Disney Version
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For all the natural grandeur of the west, its greatest tourist attraction is a synthetic creation: Disneyland-the subject, along with Disney's films and Disney himself, of Richard Schickel's The Disney Version (Simon and Schuster, $6.50). Those who remember Disney fondly may find this book discomforting or worse. Schickel's view is critical and frequently provocative, though not a diatribe of the sort that ...
Pirates May Be Pc Now, But Rest Of Disneyland Isn't
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A chubby Aunt Jemima slave woman no longer greets pancake-house patrons.
A cabin fire long blamed on marauding American Indians is now attributed to "carelessness."
And, as of last week, automated pirates at one Disneyland ride no longer pursue terrified maidens.
Finally, it seems, the forces of political correctness have caught up to the aging Anaheim theme park.
Or have they?
Disneyland ...
Disneyland To Unveil Toontown
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Forget Frontierland, Fantasyland and Adventureland, and be prepared for Disneyland's newest venture. Mickey's Toontown - the California park's first new "land" to open in 20 years - is coming Jan. 26.
Disney legend has it that Toontown, the "exclusive hideaway" of such Disney stars as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy et al., has existed since the 1930s.
Now non-Toons too can visit the "living, ...
Last Of A Disneyland Breed
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In two weeks, the last working member of Club 55 will depart Disneyland.
Bob Penfield, wrapping up a 42-year career at the Magic Kingdom on July 31, is the last of the Disneyland employees who worked at the park on opening day in 1955.
He is one of a swiftly dwindling number of employees who worked with Walt himself and, in Disney lore, an affiliation with the company patriarch is akin to having ...
It's A Small, Unnatural World
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I am here because of a promise to a child. It seemed so safe, 3000 miles from California, to be playing Lady Bountiful, perched on the side of my 9-year-old godchild's bed, saying munificently, "One Day, Auntie will take you to Disneyland."
But now here he is, thumbs plugging away at a Game Boy while our bus edges through the Los Angeles traffic, onto the freeway, onto another freeway. He looks up and ...
A Fantasy That Paid Off
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The place is surrounded by a berm, a high barrow of earth, that insulates it from the external world. There is a single gateway where admission is charged. This, the land of Disney, is more secure than ancient Troy. No Trojan horse will get into Disneyland. Guards at the main gate closely scrutinize all who enter. Not even an unseemly teenager will get past them, much less a Trojan horse.
Disneyland is ...
It's A Cool World After All
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A major upgrade to chilled-water systems at Disneyland is improving cooling capacity, increasing flexibility and reducing energy costs at the world-famous Southern California theme park. The project included updating equipment in the 85-acre park's two 30-year old chiller plants and drawing together the two formerly separate plants to allow load sharing.
Because the plants were constructed ...
Disneyland After Dark
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It's a typical scene in Anaheim: 18-wheelers shake up Fantasyland, the boats of the Jungle Cruise run the river backwards, and the Main Street sound system blares tunes by the Wallflowers. Disneyland in a parallel universe?
Not exactly. More like the overnight flip side of the theme park when crews tweak, polish, paint, scrub, and fine-tune the place to perfection. It's a job for an army that includes ...
Disneyland In One Day
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The First Hint that my mission will be daunting: I tell the cast member in Guest Relations the title of the article I'm researching, and she starts to giggle. Disneyland in a day? Who am I kidding? "It might be a little hard," she says, handing me my tickets, "to do it all in a day."
Disneyland has its own special feel, and nostalgia is only part of it. Yes, it's the only park Walt Disney lived to ...
A Talent For Topiary
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At Disneyland, you'll find several delicate swans, sculpted from plants, set amid the grassy slopes at Sleeping Beauty Castle. You'll see topiary Dumbos on location at the Flying Elephant ride. But perhaps the most famous Disneyland topiaries are set in the forecourt of Fantasyland's "It's a Small World."
The animals reflect the cultural diversity found inside: a 12-foot-tall giraffe shares the ...
Greetings From Disneyland
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If Imagineers David Mumford and Bruce Gordon have gained fame among Disney fans, it may be because they haven't forgotten their roots. Gordon spent his childhood building Disneyland models in his garage and went on to become a show producer on the park's new Autopia. Mumford, meanwhile, filled his early years with Disney memorabilia and worked his way up to his current stint as art director for the Mermaid ...
