THE FOLLOWING IS AN UPDATED ENCORE TIM MOORE BLOG:
Yesterday was the 56th anniversary of the opening of the original theme park—Disneyland! Located on 160 acres of what used to be orange groves in Anaheim, California, it cost $17 million dollars to build the entire park, but back in 1955, that was an enormous amount of money!
Parlaying the success of Mickey Mouse and the other Disney cartoon characters into an experience for families, the original Disneyland was less than an absolute success on Day One.
First of all, thousands of counterfeit passes were printed-and Disneyland admitted hordes of uninvited people. The food and drink ran out and the Mark Twain steamboat nearly capsized from too many passengers. A woman’s high heel shoe got stuck in the still-wet asphalt of Main Street USA—and a gas leak forced a partial evacuation.
Needless to say, the bugs were worked out-and Disneyland became enormously popular-and successful! So much so that Walt Disney began a project even more ambitious-the construction of Disney World in Orlando, Florida, which began in 1965. Disneyworld opened in 1971, five years after the death of its namesake. The addition of Epcot,Disney-MGM have helped make Disneyworld Florida’s number one tourist attraction. Disneyland Tokyo opened in 1983 and EuroDisney opened in 1992. The newest Disneyland-in Hong Kong-opened in 2005.
Below is a clip of the opening day in 1955 of the original! Notice one of the young MC’s to come on camera with Art Linkletter-a guy by the name of Ronald Reagan!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rHjoimz5XI
An entirely new category of business was pioneered—the “theme park”—and once again, Walt Disney was at the epicenter of innovation and vision. As is the case with most creative geniuses, Disney’s motivation was never money. It was all about creating the experience, all about taking his audiences on excursions of imagination. Having achieved the on-screen goals of taking both young and old on incredible escapes of fantasy, Disney was now ready to bring those experiences to life-literally!
He did it—and paved the way for other operators to follow suit!
If you’d like my blog in your box, let me know! Tim.moore@citcomm.com
Have a great weekend!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment