Disneyland on a Deadline

Summary

HISTORY This Week – "Disneyland on a Deadline" (Feb 23, 2026)

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode of HISTORY This Week, host Sally Helm takes listeners behind the scenes of Disneyland’s frantic creation and high-stakes opening in 1955. The episode dives into Walt Disney’s risky vision to build a new kind of amusement park—one that would transform entertainment forever—and the obstacles, innovations, and near-disasters that made Disneyland possible. Through interviews with historians, Disney insiders, and filmmakers, listeners get an intimate look at the ingenuity, chaos, and magic that made Disneyland a reality—ending with the chaotic, barely-holding-together live televised opening day.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Walt Disney’s Vision and Risk-Taking

• Inception of the Idea (04:48–07:44)
  • Walt dreamed about a “movie-like theme park” since the 1930s, frustrated with the grimy fairs and uninspired amusements of the era.
  • His vision: “something more interesting than a carnival or a trash covered fairground…” (05:32, Sally Helm).
• Personal and Financial Risks (07:44–09:31)
  • “He was a risk taker as a young man. He went bankrupt... he risked everything many times.” (07:44, Becky Klein)
  • To finance Disneyland, Walt sold his vacation home, borrowed against life insurance, and scraped together every dollar from friends and loans: “He felt very strongly about this project.” (09:05, Becky Klein)
  • The initial budget: just under $1 million, with land alone costing $879,000.

Partnering with Television and ABC

• Innovative Funding via TV (09:54–12:10)
  • Realizing that TV was the future, Walt proposed a show to ABC (“Walt Disney’s Disneyland”) in exchange for their investment in the park.
  • “Most of Walt’s fellow film producers hate [TV], but he sees opportunity.” (10:10, Sally Helm)
  • The Disneyland TV show became both a marketing engine and a funding source. “Each week... one of these many worlds will open to you” (11:36, Disneyland opening narration).

Building Disneyland: Creative and Engineering Challenges

• Recruiting the Team & Inventing the Medium (15:59–17:43)

  • Walt first approaches architects, but quickly learns they don’t understand his vision—so he turns to set designers, animators, horse trainers (like Owen and Dolly Pope), and other creatives from Hollywood.
  • “He is gobbling up so many of his own employees… that people left behind in Burbank start calling Disneyland 'Hannibal Island.'” (16:45, Sally Helm)
  • Every attraction had to be custom designed for its Land (e.g., all horses on the carousel must be ‘jumpers’, requiring a massive retrofitting project).

• Wild Solutions for Wild Problems (18:19–20:17)

  • With money running out, Walt’s team scavenged for exotic-looking plants, buying trees from local neighborhoods and even burying tree roots upside down for a “jungle” effect.
  • Physical engineering glitches: “The riverbed was empty… Anaheim soil is especially porous… it soaked all the water up.” (19:34, Sally Helm)
  • Fix: line the riverbed with clay—a solution born from quick learning and innovation.

• Engineering Mishaps and Last-Minute Fixes (20:46–22:00)

  • Attractions like the Alice in Wonderland teacups spun out of control and had to be welded back together nightly.
  • The Peter Pan ride’s innovative flying track was borrowed from factory cranes, but was at first distractingly noisy. Only after much tinkering did it glide “silently through the air.”

• Pressure Cooker Atmosphere (22:24–22:53)

  • “Mayhem and time pressures and mud and weather delays and financial delays… can’t imagine Walt slept much that whole year.” (22:39, Leslie Iwerks)
  • Even as the budget ballooned from ~$10M to $17M, Walt refused shortcuts—insisting on perfection, down to the gold leaf on castle spires and the size of the rock ballast for the miniature railroad.

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• Walt Sleeps in Disneyland and Gets Painted Shut (24:53–25:14)
  • On the eve of opening day, Walt falls asleep in his Main Street apartment—only to wake up sealed inside, as someone painted the door overnight.
  • “Walt is sealed in on one of the most important days of his life.” (25:14, Sally Helm)

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Disneyland Opening Day: Chaos and Magic

Catastrophic Yet Triumphant Opening (27:19–29:40)

• Overcrowding and Disasters

  • Expected attendance: 11,000. Actual: nearly 30,000—thanks to forged tickets and enterprising locals charging $5 to boost people over the fence.
  • Temperatures soared above 100°F; fresh asphalt stuck to visitors’ shoes; drinking fountains didn’t work due to a plumbers’ strike (Walt chose working bathrooms instead).
  • Rides broke down, cars crashed, the Mark Twain riverboat ran off course, and guests had to wade through water to escape unplanned detours.

• TV Magic Hides Chaos

  • Despite the mayhem, 90 million Americans watched the polished ABC broadcast.
  • “This is not so much a show as it is a special event … if you were covering three volcanoes all erupting at the same time…” (29:01, Art Linkletter)

• Next-Day Media Reaction

  • Headlines: “Walt’s dream is a nightmare.” (29:49, Sally Helm)
  • Yet the next day, the parking lot was full—a sign the public craved Disney’s unique vision and attention to detail.

Legacy and Ongoing Creativity

• Disneyland as a Living Creation (30:30–31:42)
  • “It’s all about creating a sense of reassurance… you leave your worries behind… a place full of wonder and magic.” (30:30, Leslie Iwerks)
  • Walt saw Disneyland as an ever-evolving project, never “finished,” always open to improvement.
  • “The beauty of the medium… it’s a living show.” (31:19, Tom Fitzgerald)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “He was a risk taker as a young man. He went bankrupt… he risked everything many times.”
  — Becky Klein (07:44)
• “He sold his vacation home. He took loans out to the extent that he could personally… he really felt strongly about this project.”
  — Becky Klein (09:05)
• “He is gobbling up so many of his own employees for this project that the people left behind in Burbank start calling Disneyland ‘Hannibal Island.’”
  — Sally Helm (16:45)
• “You know, the water drained in the river is okay. We have to put more of a clay. You know, we’re learning. We’re solving problems…”
  — Tom Fitzgerald (20:06)
• “Mayhem and time pressures and mud and weather delays… I can’t imagine that Walt slept very much that whole year.”
  — Leslie Iwerks (22:39)
• “Walt is sealed in on one of the most important days of his life.”
  — Sally Helm (25:14)
• “The rehearsal went about the way you’d expect a rehearsal to go if you were covering three volcanoes all erupting at the same time. And you didn’t expect any of them.”
  — Art Linkletter (29:01)
• “It’s all about creating a sense of reassurance that once you enter those gates, you leave your worries behind, you leave the real world behind, and you are now into a new place full of wonder and magic.”
  — Leslie Iwerks (30:30)
• “The beauty of the medium… it’s a living show.”
  — Tom Fitzgerald (31:19)

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Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:48–07:44 | Walt’s dream for a new kind of park; roots of Disneyland vision | | 07:44–09:31 | Walt’s risk-taking history and personal financial investment | | 09:54–12:10 | Funding Disneyland via creative ABC television deal | | 15:59–17:43 | Recruitment of Imagineers and custom creation of attractions | | 18:19–20:17 | Improvising solutions to construction/material and landscaping problems | | 20:46–22:00 | Ride engineering issues and rapid-fire fixes | | 22:24–22:53 | Pressure during final construction weeks | | 24:53–25:14 | Walt’s all-night preparations; story of being sealed in | | 27:19–29:40 | Chaotic opening day, crowd issues, and televised launch | | 30:30–31:42 | Disneyland’s evolution as a “living show”; legacy of creative change |

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Final Thoughts

“Disneyland on a Deadline” reveals the untold drama, constant innovation, and relentless optimism that brought Walt Disney’s vision to life. Listeners are treated to both calamity and genius: last-minute engineering, creative problem-solving, and near-disaster turning, ultimately, to triumph. As the episode closes, the park—and its culture of never-ending improvement—embodies Walt’s belief in a “living show”: a place where the magic is always being remade, not just for 1955, but for all generations to come.

Transcript

[Sally Helm]

Hey History this Week listeners, we have something very exciting to share. This podcast has been going since 2020, but for the first time ever, we are taking it live. If you are in the New York City area, please join us for a live episode at the Tenement Museum in downtown Manhattan. On Wednesday, March 4th at 6:30pm, I will be in conversation with historian Tyler Annbinder exploring the history of Irish immigration to the United States, cutting through some of the most common myths and looking closely at how Irish immigrants actually navigated life, work and assimilation in America. This is history where it happened in one of the most meaningful spaces in the city and we would love to see you there. We will drop a link with all the details in the episode description and you can also find the [e-mail] Hope to see you there.

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[Sally Helm]

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[Sally Helm]

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[Sally Helm]

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[History Channel Announcer]

The History Channel Original Podcast

[Sally Helm]

history this week, March 1st, 1951. I'm Sally Helm. Owen and Dolly Pope aren't sure why Walt Disney has invited them to lunch. Walt, of course, is a world famous filmmaker. His Cinderella was released last year to great acclaim. He's been nominated for at least one Oscar every year since 1942. Owen and Dolly are from a different world. They are horse trainers from Texas, well known in their own right, though not on anything like Disney's scale. But he has heard about them and he has a proposition. When they sit down to lunch, Owen and Dolly think maybe he wants to use some of their horses in a movie. Movie. But Walt has something very different in mind. And Owen and Dolly will be among the first people in the world to hear about it. For years now, Walt has been dreaming about something that really only he can imagine. Not a movie, something movie like in the real world. A park. What we would now call a theme park. Walt first started dreaming this up back in the 1930s when his daughters were young and he'd sit on a bench eating peanuts while they were on a merry go round. He was like, there should be something better than this. Something more interesting than a carnival or a trash covered fairground or an amusement park with its prefab rides. As of this lunch in 1951, it is still just a dream in his head. But he is already imagining every detail. And he knows he's gonna want horses to pull stagecoaches in a part of the park that'll be like the frontier, Frontierland. And to pull carriages down a beautiful version of Main street usa. Walt will end up hiring Owen and Dolly Pope to train the horses for his park, Disneyland. And this is just one example of the way that Walt Disney envisioned every detail of this project. He wanted it to be perfect. But by the time he is actually building the park a few years later, he will find himself over budget, understaffed and racing to finish construction. And if his experiment fails, it'll bring his animation empire down with it. Today, a tale of magic and marketing. Why was Disneyland such a gamble? And how did Walt essentially invent a whole new form of live entertainment? Santa Monica, California, around 2017. It's been about 50 years since Walt Disney died. Producer Mark Catalina and director Leslie Iwerks are at work in their editing room. They're screening footage for a project they're working on about the Disney Imagineers. That's what they call the team that designs their theme parks and other attractions. And in between, shots of animatronic Abe Lincoln and a hidden network of pneumatic Trash chutes. They come across something else. Over 50 hours of rarely seen footage documenting the construction of Disneyland up close. Here's Mark Catalina. Like putting the camera on the ground and having the earth movers drive over it. Or, you know, getting inside that little cage where the construction crane swings them around. Director Leslie Iwerks couldn't believe the gold mine they'd stumbled upon.

[Leslie Iwerks]

I'd be like on my phone in my office next door and I'd hear this, oh my God, oh my God, no way. And then I'd run out and the guys would show me some random fun footage of time lapse or gag reels or things like that.

[Sally Helm]

Like a time lapse sequence showing the park's famous castle going up in the blink of an eye. There was footage of bulldozers digging the artificial riverways for rides like the Jungle Cruise. One shot shows a dump truck rolling down the side of a dirt mound as its operator leaps to safety. It's chaotic, unpolished, and Iwerks decides it belongs in a film of its own. She directs the new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted, about the brutal year long race to the park's opening day. Like many of Walt Disney's visions, the park was expensive and risky. Becky Klein, director of the Walt Disney archives, said that was kind of his style.

[Becky Klein]

He was a risk taker as a young man. He went bankrupt. You know, he had several financial problems when he was young and he risked everything many times.

[Sally Helm]

He'd been dreaming about his own amusement park since the 1930s. And by the 1950s, Disney Animation is doing solid business. Walt is a heavy smoker with dark hair and a neat mustache. He's not the kind of boss who's afraid to get his hands dirty. But he does have high expectations for the people around him. His employees have learned to watch out for his left eyebrow because if he raises it, somebody's in trouble. Middle aged Walt can be grumpy and exacting, but he still has a young man's appetite for risk and a simple philosophy about money. It's meant to be.

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[Sally Helm]

In 1952, he decides it is finally time to bring his long imagined park to life. The thing is, he doesn't have a ton of money just sitting around for this. Because whenever a project goes well and he makes money, he pours it right into the next thing. So to make Disneyland even remotely possible, Walt has to get creative with finances right from the start.

[Becky Klein]

By the time he got to where he was able to actually announce that he was building the park in the 50s, he was really taking a big chance on everything that he had done to date. I mean, he sold his vacation home. He took loans out to the extent that he could personally. He borrowed, you know, against his life insurance, and he got his friends involved and all those things because he really felt strongly about this project.

[Sally Helm]

Walt manages to scrape together a little less than a million dollars for Disneyland, and the clock on these loans is already ticking. So he gets to work finding a location. Initially, he's like, I'll just use an empty backlot at the studio in Burbank. But when he starts really planning, he's like, oh, that is going to be way too small. Here's Leslie Iwerks.

[Leslie Iwerks]

And then it ends up becoming this big property in Anaheim, and they're going to have to clear 160 acres or so of orange groves and turn it into this entire city, In a sense.

[Sally Helm]

Anaheim, out southeast of Los Angeles, it's kind of isolated at the time. Mostly farmland, a lot of orange groves. But Walt and his team know that more Californians are moving to this region, Orange county, every year. And soon Anaheim will be connected to the rest of the state through a new freeway system. So he takes a gamble and decides to put his enormous park out there. The land costs him $879,000, which is most of his money. But he's got an idea. It comes from his uncanny ability to sense where entertainment is heading. In this case, tv. Most of Walt's fellow film producers hate it, but he sees opportunity. He ends up striking a deal with the struggling TV network abc. They need a guaranteed hit, and they want a show from Disney. He sells them on a show about Disneyland, A kind of advertisement slash exclusive. But there's a catch. He tells them they also have to invest in the park. If they want this deal, then ABC says okay. So in July 1954, with that money in hand, Walt and his crew finally break ground in Anaheim. And in October, ABC airs the first episode of Walt Disney's Disneyland.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

Each week, as you enter this timeless land, One of these many worlds will open to you. Frontierland. Tall tales and true from the legendary past. Tomorrowland. Promise of things to come. Adventureland. The wonder world of nature's own realm. Fantasyland. The happiest kingdom of them all.

[Sally Helm]

Walt is thinking of the park as a kind of movie in 3D. He has this idea that it'll have four immersive lands. Each of them tells a story that works really well with the whole TV marketing plan. Each episode of the show features a story based around one of the Lands like Treasure island for Adventureland or Davy Crockett for Frontierland. It's an immediate hit and Walt also uses it to drum up excitement about his parks.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

We hope that it will be unlike anything else on this earth. A fair amusement park, an exhibition, a city from the Arabian Nights, metropolis from the future, in fact, a place of hopes and dreams, facts and fancy all in one.

[Sally Helm]

For now, though, it's still a vacant lot. And Becky Klein told us the project had a lot of doubters.

[Becky Klein]

There was a lot of people that didn't think it was going to happen. A lot of people thought it was a bad idea. They didn't understand Walt's vision or why his park would be different.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah, why would anyone drive over 30 miles to Anaheim for a Coney island knockoff? Even people in Walt's inner circle aren't convinced. But as he breaks ground in Anaheim, he takes an early step that announces what is to come. He has his builders put up a big berm around the lot, essentially a 20 foot mound of packed earth. It'll block out the sights and sounds of the outside world, making Disneyland its own private place where his imaginative vision can flourish. It's the first subtle step towards building the illusion that he has in mind. Now there are just about a thousand steps left. She loves it hot, he loves it cold. However you sleep the pod by 8 Sleep adapts to you. Get up to $350 off with code deep [e-mail] Go behind the scenes of

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[Sally Helm]

Even after Walt Disney has broken ground in Anaheim, the park is little more than a series of sketches. And he needs to find the right people to help him bring them to life.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

He initially started by reaching out to architectural firms, which seems very logical, right?

[Sally Helm]

Tom Fitzgerald, chief storytelling executive at Disney

[Tom Fitzgerald]

Imagineering, he said, I'm doing a physical thing. I'm building real buildings, you know, walkways, things. I need to go to architects.

[Sally Helm]

But Walt is trying to build a castle and a jungle and an 89 foot rocket ship. The architects are a little stumped.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

He wasn't happy with the initial work that he was getting back from the architects. It wasn't what he was looking for.

[Sally Helm]

Walt is trying to create the feel of a living 3D story. So he starts reaching out to other movie studios to hire people like set designers who might get what he's going for. He finds landscapers and engineers and mechanics. He brings in his trusty horse trainers, Owen and Dolly Pope. He's also recruiting visual artists and producers, mostly people from his own animation studio. One staffer recalls Walt walking up to him and saying, I want you to work on Disneyland, and you're gonna like it. He is gobbling up so many of his own employees for this project that the people left behind in Burbank start calling Disneyland Hannibal Island. Walt's team has to design Disneyland essentially from scratch. It's not going to have regular carnival rides like the Scrambler or the Tunnel of Love. Every attraction will be tailored to fit the theme of its particular land.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

They were pioneering almost everything other than maybe the carousel.

[Sally Helm]

Actually, even the carousel is kind of custom. Walt buys a vintage model, but he's like, this isn't quite right. All the animals should be horses. No bears or lions or pigs. And they should all be jumpers. The kind of horse on a carousel that doesn't stand still but leaps up and down. He sources 85 additional jumpers from Coney island and San Francisco's Playland and has the carousel retrofitted to accommodate them. Becky Klein said building so much from scratch means that the team is good. Constantly running into problems. Like sometimes every hour.

[Becky Klein]

There's all kinds of obstacles. There's, you know, structural obstacles. You know, how much concrete do you

[Sally Helm]

have to pour in the ground?

[Becky Klein]

But you're also trying to bring in plants to make it look like a jungle.

[Sally Helm]

Walt wants the jungle trees in Adventureland to look like they've been growing in anaheim for thousands of years. But that is expensive, and he's quickly running out of money. So his team gets creative. They get the state to donate trees that are being cut down. They drive around rich neighborhoods in southern California and offer to buy rare plants in cash. They even take some of the existing trees and bury them upside down, Roots up, to make them look more exotic. Luckily, he does finally have people around him who understand the vision he had.

[Becky Klein]

Sculptors who knew how to create mermaids and waterfalls and made castle bricks look like medieval castle bricks. And they had done so much for walt over the years. They were his guys, and he knew they could do it, and so they didn't need somebody breathing over their shoulder or drawing it all down on paper. He gave them the vision, he told them the story, and then he let them go.

[Sally Helm]

But some problems cannot be solved by artistry alone. Walt's crew digs a riverbed for the mark twain riverboat and the jungle cruise. Then, naturally, they fill the bed with water. But when they come back a few hours later, no water. The riverbeds are empty. Apparently, the Anaheim soil is especially porous. Porous. And it soaked all the water up. Imagineer Tom fitzgerald says to him, this kind of hiccup Is a really recognizable part of the job.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

You know, the water drained in the river is okay. We have to put more of a clay. You know, we're learning. We're solving problems throughout the entire course of a project.

[Sally Helm]

In this case, line the riverbed with more clay. Phew. Problem solved. But fitzgerald said watching this kind of thing in the documentary did kind of stress him out.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

Having lived through many years of doing projects here at imagineering, I was so tense watching this, because you can just feel the sand running out of the hourglass and how much needs to be done and finished to get it open.

[Sally Helm]

There is a lot to do before the park is ready for visitors. Take the teacups from alice in wonderland. When the crew runs their first test, it's amazing. A beautiful dishware ballet. But after a few more runs, the teacups start spinning faster and faster until they spin right off their platform. For this one, the crew is moving so fast that they kind of just scotch tape a solution. Nearly every night, A crew member climbs underneath the ride and welds the cups back into place. They decide to just keep that up right through opening day and beyond. The dumbo ride is in trouble, too. Thick shaving cream, like foam keeps pouring out of the machinery. That was not part of the movie. Some of the rides are doing a bit better, like Peter Pan's flight, which suspends riders from the ceiling in custom made pirate ships, flying them over a miniature London at night.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

He wanted a flying ride for Peter Pan. Well, that didn't exist, so that had to be created.

[Sally Helm]

They use a ceiling track that had been designed to haul material around factories. It is extremely noisy at first, so. So they fiddle with the system until the riders can glide silently through the air. The park is coming together, which is a good thing because the plan is to open it on live tv. Here's Becky Klein and even Walt.

[Becky Klein]

I think, you know, halfway through the construction project, he was getting scared. I think he actually was very frightened at a certain point. Everything was riding on this.

[Sally Helm]

Leslie Iwerk said the final months were chaos.

[Leslie Iwerks]

It's like mayhem and time pressures and mud and weather delays and financial delays and, you know, last minute changes and all these things that were happening. I can't imagine that Walt slept very much that whole year.

[Sally Helm]

When Walt did sleep, it was often in a special apartment that had been built for him on Disneyland's Main Street. Everyone is working around the clock. The cost of the project has ballooned from around 10, 10 million to $17 million. But still Walt refuses any shortcuts. Sleeping Beauty's castle gets gold leaf on its spires. When Walt decides a given tree would look better somewhere else. It's dug up and replanted. When he notices that the rock ballast beneath the 5, 8 scale steam train is too big, he has it re crushed into smaller pieces to match the size of the train. Finally, it's July 16, 1955 and opening day is tomorrow. 11,000 guests and media people will be at Disneyland for the opening. Plus millions will be watching live on abc. Workers are running around with wires and putty knives to put the finishing touches on anything they can. The landscaping crew spirit spray paints the dead grass green. Their budget is totally gone by midnight. Walt himself steps in. He grabs a brush and starts painting the backdrop for one of Tomorrowland's few exhibits. Remember, he was an artist before anything else. The man who thought up Mickey Mouse. Over a quarter century later, in the theme park that bears his name, Walt is working on an ocean scene featuring the giant squid from the 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Around 4am he looks up at his hand painted ocean. It at least is finished. He drops his paintbrush and heads to his Main street apartment to get some sleep. When Walt wakes up a few hours later, it's officially opening day. He freshens up and heads for the door, but when he turns the knob, nothing happens. Walt tries again, but the door still won't budge, and he thinks he can smell. Why, when he was asleep, somebody came by to slap on a fresh coat of paint. Walt is sealed in on one of the most important days of his life.

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[Sally Helm]

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[Sally Helm]

It's opening day at Disneyland and the park's namesake is trapped. Walt Disney calls and calls out the window for someone to come and free him. And finally they do. But opening day only gets worse from there.

[Becky Klein]

The park was three times as full as they intended it to be. You know they only gave out 11,000 tickets and almost 30 showed up.

[Sally Helm]

Some guests have forged tickets. Others show up with a huge entourage and try to bring them all in. One guy rigs up a ladder near the back of the park. And charges people $5 to climb over. The crowd is so massive that most people can't get anywhere near a ride. To make things worse, it's extremely hot. Over 100 degrees. Visitors are thirsty. But a plumbing spot strike had forced Walt to choose. Between installing drinking fountains for the opening and bathrooms. He picked bathrooms because it's so hot. And the asphalt on the park's pathways had just been poured. Women's high heels get stuck in the muck. That happens to Frank Sinatra's date. The park runs out of food. And some of Walt's custom rides aren't doing so well under real world conditions. The toy cars on the other Utopia Freeway slam into each other. More than one kid loses some teeth banging into the steering wheel. And with hundreds of guests piled onto the Mark Twain riverboat. The ship slides off its track and gets stuck. The guests have to wade through two feet of dark green dyed water to escape. But shockingly, opening day looks pretty good on tv. Most of the chaos still stays hidden off screen. Host Art Linkletter reports.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

Now, of course, this is not so much a show as it is a special event. The rehearsal went about the way you'd expect a rehearsal to go. If you were covering three volcanoes. All erupting at the same time. And you didn't expect any of them.

[Sally Helm]

If you don't know Linklater. You might recognize one of his co hosts. A young actor named Ronald Reagan.

[Narrator/Voice Actor]

And this is Frontierland. Inside this stockade, Walt Disney has created a. A frontier village. That could have been carved out of the wilderness 100 years ago by the pioneers themselves.

[Sally Helm]

90 million viewers tune in to watch this first day. And they see Disney himself leading the audience through the park.

[Becky Klein]

And you could see the delight on Walt's face. When he comes steaming in on the train at the beginning. And he was just delighted. You can tell. And the people around him were delighted.

[Sally Helm]

The next day, the press issues their verdict on Disneyland. And it is bad. One headline reads. Walt's dream is a nightmare. Reports say it's too crowded. Way too expensive. But that same day, Disneyland's second day in operation. The parking lot is packed. Even with the bad press, people are drawn to the park's promise. Its bespoke rides and the high level of detail. Just as much Walt had predicted. And after opening day, Walt can focus on improving everything that went wrong. But he also takes note of what his team got right. Here's Leslie Iwerks.

[Leslie Iwerks]

It's all about creating a sense of reassurance that once you enter those gates, you leave your worries behind, you leave the real world behind, and you are now into a new place full of wonder and magic.

[Sally Helm]

That's what all the little details were about. And Walt Disney never saw opening day as some kind of finished product. Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald says Disneyland is still not finished. They're still tweaking and building things all the time and hoping people like it.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

You go and stand at the exit and listen to people when they come out, and what is the reaction? Are they laughing at the places you thought? Are they applauding at the end? Are there things we still need to go and adjust?

[Sally Helm]

But that constant work and change, that's kind of the beauty of the medium.

[Tom Fitzgerald]

Walt's frustration with motion pictures was that he eventually there came the time where he had to deliver the negative to Technicolor to make the prints, and it was done. And he was a pluster and a perfectionist, and so there were always things he wanted to make better. But what was so great about the parts to him and the reason why Walt loved it so, so much, it's that it's a living show.

[Sally Helm]

A living show that's still coming to life every morning in a former orange grove in Anaheim. Thanks for listening to History this Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this week, Sign [e-mail] and follow us on Instagram History this Week podcast if you have any thoughts or questions, you can also send us an [e-mail] Special thanks to our guests. Leslie Iwers, director of Disneyland Handcrafted, Mark Catalina, producer of Disneyland Handcrafted, Becky Klein, Director of the Walt Disney Archives, and Tom Fitzgerald, chief storytelling executive and senior creative Executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. This episode was produced by Corinne Wallace. It was also produced by me, Sally Helm, Sound design and mix by Tyler Morissette for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producer is Ben Dickstein from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow rate and review History this week, wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week.