615. Disneyland: The Modern American Utopia

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Rest Is History

Episode 615 – Disneyland: The Modern American Utopia

Hosts: Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook
Release Date: November 6, 2025

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Overview

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook explore the origins, cultural impact, and enduring legacy of Disneyland. Far from a trivial subject, the episode frames Disneyland as a revealing lens on 20th-century America, the changing nature of leisure, and the pursuit of utopia. Blending storytelling, historical analysis, and their signature humor, the hosts dive into the surprising European roots of amusement parks, Walt Disney's personal obsessions, and why Disneyland remains a potent symbol of American optimism, nostalgia, and control.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Disneyland as History

• Disneyland's Symbolism:
  Even just four years after opening in 1955, Disneyland had become a powerful icon recognized not only in America, but also by global leaders like Nikita Khrushchev, who famously tried—and failed—to visit the park during his 1959 US visit.
  • Quote – Nikita Khrushchev, recounted (04:30):
    "I have just been told I cannot go to Disneyland... The American authorities cannot guarantee your safety... This development causes me bitter regret and I cannot but express my disappointment."
• Why Study Theme Parks?
  • They're windows into postwar America's anxieties and ambitions.
  • They connect to deeper histories of parks, pleasure gardens, and the architectural shaping of fantasy and nostalgia.
  • Disneyland, in particular, has shaped modern culture as much as iconic Disney films.

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2. Prehistory of Amusement Parks: European Roots

• Early Parks:
  • Bakken near Copenhagen (opened 1580s) – the world's oldest amusement park, begun as a site for spring-watching, later expanded with entertainers, food stalls, and amusements.
    [23:51] Dominic Sandbrook: “The oldest park is in Copenhagen... it had its first visitors in the 1580s.”
  • Tivoli Gardens (opened 1843) – Influential for combining gardens, restaurants, theatres, fireworks, and rides.
    "Most writers agree Tivoli is the single biggest inspiration for Disneyland... It had a very strong fairy tale element, thanks to Hans Christian Andersen." (26:33)
• British Influence:
  • Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (founded c.1662, London) – admission price keeping out "riff-raff," featuring entertainments and architectural follies.
  • The design and naming of Tivoli Gardens was itself inspired by Paris and Vauxhall—making Disneyland's roots trace originally to South London.
  • Quote – Tom Holland (28:14):
    "The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens— the most influential pleasure park, I would say, in human history."

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3. The Technology of Fun: Rides & Roller Coasters

• Carousels:
  • Originated as tournament training for knights (carousels/ring-spearing), transformed in France, then mechanized in England.
  • Steam-powered carousels by Thomas Bradshaw and Fred Savage (King’s Lynn) – key British innovators in ride mechanics.
• Roller Coasters:
  • Began in 18th-century Russia as "Katalnaya Gorka" (sliding mountains): toboggan rides on ice, then wheeled carts on tracks.
  • Spread to France (Montagnes Russes, 1817), then to the US (the "Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway" in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania).
  • By the 20th century, roller coasters proliferated—culminating in steel coasters like Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds (1959).

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4. Walt Disney's Obsessions: Trains, Nostalgia, & Control

• Personal History:
  • Post-WWII, Disney’s animation studio in decline; Walt lost interest in films, poured creative energy into trains and models.
  • Quote – Walt Disney via Neil Gabler Biography (10:41):
    "We are through with caviar. From now on, it is mashed potatoes and gravy."
  • Disney’s perfectionism extended to vast model railroads and the desire to build a miniature "ideal American small town" based on his childhood in Marceline, Missouri.
• Total Control:
  • The train set becomes a key to understanding Disneyland: a world that's exciting, nostalgic, but completely controlled—offering reassurance in an anxious, rapidly changing country.
  • Quote – Tom Holland (17:56):
    "Trains… have to stay on the tracks that have been laid down by the person who's built them. They can't just go off piste."

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5. The Making of Disneyland: America’s Utopia

• Location:

  • Moved from Burbank to Anaheim (Orange County), a symbolic heartland for postwar American conservatism.
  • Financed through an innovative TV deal with ABC, which made Walt a household name.

• Immersive Experiences:

  • “Cast members” (not employees), strict appearance and behavior standards, a relentless focus on detail and cleanliness.
  • Quote – Dominic Sandbrook (58:24):
    "They are playing a part... always smiling, incredibly polite! There’s a very strict dress code and no facial hair..."

• Opening Day Chaos (60:43):

  • "Invitation-only" opening day marred by counterfeit tickets, surging crowds, melt-in-the-heat tarmac, water shortages (“drinking fountains or flushing toilets?” – they chose toilets), food shortages, and a chaotic live TV broadcast (with Ronald Reagan).
    • Quote – Tom Holland (61:29):
      "To all who come to this happy place, welcome... Disneyland is your land… dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America..." (Walt Disney’s opening speech)

• Immediate Success:

  • 160,000 visitors in the first week; by 18 months, more popular than America’s great natural parks.
  • Disney moved into an apartment above the fire station to observe his "live, breathing" creation.

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6. Meaning & Influence: Disneyland’s Cultural Legacy

• A New Kind of Space:

  • A land, not just an amusement park; total narrative immersion; every detail meticulously crafted, even the size of buildings engineered for nostalgia over grandeur.
    • Quote – Walt Disney (paraphrased, 73:27):
      "Big buildings are for dictators. Big buildings make you feel small. I want people to feel empowered."

• Architectural & Intellectual Impact:

  • Considered the height of postmodern design by figures like Umberto Eco (“the Sistine Chapel of America”) and Jean Baudrillard (“the supreme example of hyperreality”).
  • Modeled on British/European garden cities; Walt aspired to create not just parks but utopian communities (EPCOT).
  • Quote – Robert Venturi (81:14):
    "The best thing about Disney's parks is that they have come nearer to what people really want than anything that architects have ever given them."

• Wholesomeness and Control:

  • Meticulous order, banishment of unpredictability or “naughtiness,” a space of innocence and nostalgia amidst atomic-age anxieties.
    • Quote – Walt Disney’s ethos (77:52):
      "When you enter Disneyland you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy. Nothing of the present exists in Disneyland..."
  • Compared to euro theme parks (Tivoli, Vauxhall), Disneyland is uniquely, inimitably American in its optimism and narrative control.

• Pop Culture Reflections:

  • The potential dark side of total control reflected in sci-fi (e.g., Westworld, Jurassic Park).
  • Endless inspiration for theorists, critics, and the wider entertainment industry.

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7. Personal Reflections & Top Moments

• Best Moment at Disneyland (56:52):
  • Tom and Dominic recount the joy of seeing “Theo be arrested by Stormtroopers” in the Star Wars area:
    • Quote – Tom Holland:
      "For me, the single best moment in the whole visit."
• On American vs European Parks:
  • American parks are deeply identity-driven; even rides with British themes are infused with Americanness.
  • Quote – Dominic Sandbrook (74:35):
    "There is no way you could go to Disneyland in California and doubt that you're in an American creation. The Americanness is everywhere."
• Parenting Contrasts:
  • Dominic fondly recommends Disneyland as a place of shared happiness, safety, and delight for parents and children.
  • Tom, in characteristic fashion:
    • "Something that I denied my own children... Hadrian’s Wall is so much more fun. What can I say?" (68:50)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Khrushchev’s Disneyland Tirade (04:30–05:24)
• Walt Disney’s “caviar” quote (10:41)
• On the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (28:14)
• Walt Disney’s Opening Day Speech (61:29)
• Walt’s approach to scale and empowerment (73:27)
• Umberto Eco and Baudrillard on Disneyland (67:05)
• Robert Venturi on Disney’s revolutionary urban planning (81:14)
• Dominic on order OR “wholesomeness” (77:52)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 04:30 — Khrushchev’s Disneyland speech
• 09:40 — Walt Disney’s postwar creative crisis
• 17:13 — The dual symbolism of trains
• 23:51 — The world’s oldest amusement parks
• 31:16 — Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens’ 18th-century peak
• 36:12 — Invention of rides (carousels, roller coasters)
• 52:48 — Selecting Orange County and the conservative symbolism
• 58:24 — Disneyland’s cast member ethos and strict codes
• 60:43 — Opening Day chaos
• 61:29 — Walt’s iconic dedication speech
• 67:05 — Eco and Baudrillard on Disneyland as concept
• 73:27 — Building scale, nostalgia, and control
• 77:52 — Disneyland as the land of nostalgia and fantasy, not reality
• 81:14 — Urban design legacy and human scale

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Conclusion

Disneyland is not simply a theme park; it is a living, evolving utopia that crystallizes American ideals—optimism, order, nostalgia, and the promise of tomorrow. The park’s DNA can be traced through centuries of European pleasure gardens, British populism, Russian engineering, and, ultimately, the restless, perfectionist imagination of Walt Disney. In an age of uncertainty, Disneyland offered—and still offers—a carefully constructed world of happiness, fantasy, and total control. Its legacy, the hosts argue, reaches far beyond entertainment, shaping how modern people understand the possibilities and pitfalls of both urban design and utopian thinking.

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For visuals of Tom and Dominic’s recent Disneyland visit (including a ride on Pirates of the Caribbean), check YouTube as teased at [64:25].

Transcript

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Thank you for listening to the Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to thereestishory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com.

[Tom Holland]

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[Tom Holland]

The Rest Is History. We are visiting Disneyland and we are exploring the backstory of theme parks. Because, Dominic, you love a theme park, don't you?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So I actually do because I'm an adrenaline junkie, as you know, Tom. So I really enjoy doing this episode and actually the deeper we went into it, the more fascinating it is. So, you know, the first roller coasters, Tsarist Russia, the age of Catherine the Great. Serfs building great hills of ice and aristocrats going tobogganing down them. And then you get into the 19th century, you have gravity switchback, railroads, people traveling on these kind of mad railways against a painted background. But there's other predecessors to Disneyland, aren't there? So I know you love a Vauxhall pleasure garden.

[Tom Holland]

Well, yes, because it's nice to know that ultimately the origins of Disneyland lay in South London, where I live. That was a revelation for me.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, fountains, fireworks, houses made of glass, all that kind of thing. So that's all great. And then we end by talking about Disneyland itself. A mad story, actually, when it opened in 1955, basically, Walt Disney faced one of history's most difficult and most perilous dilemmas. He only had enough water to. To have Drinks fountains or flushing toilets. And only on this podcast will people find out what he chose.

[Tom Holland]

It's an extraordinary episode, great fun, and we hope you enjoy it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely we do.

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

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[Nikita Khrushchev]

I, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, have come to you as a guest. But I have just been told I cannot go to Disneyland. Why not? I asked. Is it by any chance because you now have rocket launching pods there? No, they told me you cannot go there because just listen to this. The American authorities cannot guarantee your safety. What? Has cholera or plague broken out there that I might catch it? Or has Disneyland been seized by bandits who might destroy me? But your policemen are such strong men. Surely they could deal effectively with such bandits. I said I should like to go.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

To Disneyland just the same and see.

[Nikita Khrushchev]

How Americans spend their leisure. But I am told it is impossible. This development causes me bitter regret and I cannot but express my disappointment.

[Tom Holland]

So that, amazingly, was not a South African, although I may have given you that impression. It was in fact a Russian, and specifically Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Soviet Union, who was speaking at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles on the 19th of September, 1959. And he was halfway through the first state visit ever made by a Soviet leader to the United States. It was a massive media circus. And when he came to la, he wanted Hollywood, the work. So he met Gary Cooper and Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, all the stars. But what his wife Nina wanted was to go to Disneyland, because Dominic Nina had been a huge fan of Disney films since the 1940s, and she'd specifically requested to visit the park. And Walt Disney had agreed to meet them personally, escort them round. But it gets cancelled.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Why so slightly unclear, actually. Some accounts say that there were security concerns from the Los Angeles police. Some say that there were Soviet security concerns, some that the visit was canceled on the orders of the U.S. state Department. Whatever the truth, and it's really hard to get at the truth, Khrushchev was furious about it and upset. In his memoir, Khrushchev remembers In the late 60s, I think it is early 70s, he talks about this, he draws attention to it, and he says the visit to Disneyland was cancelled because the American authorities were worried about right wing anti communist demonstrations. Of course, the irony is that Walt Disney himself at this point was right wing and anti communist.

[Tom Holland]

He hated Bolsheviks.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. But he was prepared to welcome Khrushchev and show him around. Anyway, the visit was cancelled. And I thought it was a fun way to set up an episode about.

[Tom Holland]

Disneyland, if challenging for someone who can't do a Russian accent.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Which is also an attraction because this is 1959. Disneyland has only been open for four years. But even at this point, to somebody like Khrushchev, the Premier of the Soviet Union, Disneyland is an extraordinary draw. It's a symbol of America, as he says, I want to go and see how the American people spend their leisure time. So even at this point in 1959, four years old, it's a symbol of America, of childhood fantasy, of small town nostalgia and of kind of mid century futurism. All the things that we associate with Disneyland today and people who think, gosh, a history podcast, really? I mean, Disneyland is a project conceived in the 1940s, built in the 1950s, in the early Cold War, it's still a hugely important place. It's one of the most visited places on the planet. So if you look at the stats, almost 800 million people have been to Disneyland in the 70 years that it's been open. And if you ask, I would guess most children in the world, most people under the age of, let's say, I don't know, 15, 13 or something, what's the one place you would most like to go? If you could go anywhere, Disneyland would probably, I guess, be top of the list.

[Tom Holland]

I don't think so. Hadrian's Wall.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes. There were some interesting chats when we were at Disneyland with your daughter about your childhood holidays.

[Tom Holland]

Really?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I think it's fair to say the scars are still quite raw. Anyway, I think it's a really good subject for a history podcast for three reasons. So, first of all, because it's a great window into 1950s America, into the anxieties and ambitions of Eisenhower's America when it is built. Secondly, I think it's an opportunity for us on the rest is history to dig into the history of things that most people probably don't think of as historical artifacts, which are to say parks, carousels, rides, the first roller coasters under Catherine the Great, I mean.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, so maybe that's why Khrushchev wanted to go. It's a great Russian invention.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

A great Russian invention, exactly. Well, we'll come back to this. And of course, Disneyland itself is a remarkable thing for me. And we'll discuss this in the second half. It is one of the most influential architectural creations of the mid 20th century. And of course, because of its hold on the imagination of so many people, it has become a massive cultural enterprise in its own right. Just like Snow White or Mary Poppins or any of the films, Tom, that you talked about in the previous episode.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So to explore where it comes from, let's get back to Disney himself, the guy who you described so brilliantly in Monday's episode. So after the Second World War, as we discussed, really, some of the fun has gone out of the Disney studio. The studio, the animators, they've been decimated by the war and they never really recover. And the great biography by Neil Gablet, he talks about how in the 1940s and early 1950s, there's a real sense of Disney losing interest and losing confidence in his animated films. He's quoted as saying to one of his friends, we are through with caviar. From now on, it is mashed potatoes and gravy. In other words, everything is going to be a little bit cheaper, a little bit blander, just not as good, basically. And Walt Disney is looking for outlets for this sort of tinkering genius and creative enthusiasm that we described last time. And the most obvious one of these, which plays a huge part at Disneyland and indeed at most modern day theme parks or kind of, you know, amusement parks, is trains. So in the summer of 1948, Disney goes with his animator, Wally Kimball, of.

[Tom Holland]

Course he's called Wally, of course he is.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

To a railroad fair in Chicago for a break. And on the way they ride on the Santa Fe railroad and the people find out that Walt is there and they say, would you like to ride in the engine and to pull the whistle cord? You know, very American kind of sound, the whistle of a train. And Kimball said that after Walt had done this, he sat there staring into space, smiling and smiling. I had never seen him look so happy.

[Tom Holland]

Well, do you know, Dominic, I think trains are Wonderful things. And I say that as someone who has officially named a train.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You named it the Athelstan, didn't you?

[Tom Holland]

The King Athelstan.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There was a brilliant photograph. What of you looking with a gaggle of sheepish grey haired men. There was like some sort of bishop, some priest. I always assume you're gonna be hanging around with a priest. And Ed Davy, the leader of the.

[Tom Holland]

Liberal Democrats, the local mp. And they all look like variants of you, which I thought was interesting.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I thought it was very amusing.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah. But Dominic, when I actually launched the trade in King Athelstan to mark the 1100th anniversary of the coronation of King Athelstan in Kingston, I was actually surrounded by fans. No, by men in chain armour. The local Kingston fyrd. And that's quite Disney as well, because there's a lot of dressing up.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay, well, so Disney's had his own train ride. Not on the Athelstan. He goes to Chicago. And this moment when he goes to this railroad fair is, I think, a transformative moment in his life. He is asked to run some of the old engines, which he does, and he loves that. But also the fair has special exhibits which are called. Some people at the fair call them lands. There's a Giza, there's an Indian village, some Native American village. And there is a replica of the French Quarter in New Orleans. So something that you can see effectively at Disneyland. Anyway, he comes back and he's completely obsessed. He buys this massive train set and he fills half of a double garage with it. So he's got two trains, he's got tunnels, he's got bridges, he's got all this.

[Tom Holland]

Like Rod Stewart.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Like Rod Stewart, exactly. Another somebody else who you've hung around with. No. Rod Stewart.

[Tom Holland]

Yes, I have met him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

This is just a massive name dropping exercise, this show. So then he says, well, a model train's not enough. I want a life size train. And he actually builds his own life size train in the Disney studio machine shop. So by Christmas 1948, he's actually organizing test runs on the Disney soundstage of this train that he has built himself.

[Tom Holland]

You know, I love that about him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's fun, you know, because we.

[Tom Holland]

Were saying in the previous episode how he. He didn't really wasn't interested in money. Yeah, but I like to see him spending money in such a wholesome and fun way. I think if I was a billionaire, I would set up a massive train set.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So when he buys a new house in the late 1940s, you know, lots of Hollywood moguls would say, I'd like a massive cinema. I'll have a sort of a sex dungeon or whatever, would they?

[Tom Holland]

Where does that come from?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He says, no, no, no, I must have room for my railroad. And he, he spends tens of thousands of dollars on this railroad with 2,500ft of track that go around the property. And he has a 90 foot tunnel that will take the train underneath his wife's flower garden.

[Tom Holland]

His wife isn't tremendously keen on this news.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, she'd rather have the dungeon, frankly. Then he decides, well, I'd like, you know, why stop there? Why stop with trains? He becomes really interested in the idea of artificial worlds. And he goes to miniature shops when he goes to Europe on holiday to buy little miniature fixtures for his little train set. And he starts obsessively collecting furniture and kind of, even little kind of liquor bottles and groceries and stuff like this.

[Tom Holland]

But the thing that's fascinating about that is that it's such a feature of his great animations as well. Well, the obsessive interest in bottles and pots and pans and things. I mean, he obviously loved all that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he's just a massive, massive collector, I think. And he wasn't Walt Disney. He'd be the kind of person who absolutely had a shed with a giant train set or a model, you know, a model village or something. And as always with Disney, his enthusiasm, you talked about last time about him being a perfectionist, his enthusiasm runs completely out of control. So by 1950, he's basically working on this model American small town, if you remember Marceline, the place where he had grown up in Missouri. He basically wants to create this kind of Lilliputian Marceline. And he has an idea that he could create a traveling exhibition called Disneylandia. And Disneylandia would be this kind of idealized, miniature version of an American small town. And it would have painted backdrops in the style of the hugely popular mid century artist, Norman Rockwell. Now Rockwell was by far the most popular painter with the masses in America in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and so on.

[Tom Holland]

More than Jackson Pollock.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So critics said, oh, Rockwell is so sentimental and so kitsch and corny and whatnot, but ordinary people loved him. And that of course is an interesting parallel with Disney and indeed with Disneyland. Anyway, people in the film industry, when they saw, when they came to see Disney in the late 40s and early 50s, they thought he'd gone completely bonkers. You know, they would turn up expecting to talk about films and he'd just Be messing around with miniature bottles, bottle trains and stuff. So there's a. The great critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther. Of course he's called Bosley Crowther. He arrives and he says, you know, I felt really sad when I saw what had become of Walt Disney, that all of his zest for invention, for creating fantasies, was going into these sort of silly little playthings and toys and whatnot.

[Tom Holland]

Do you know, I don't think that Bosley Crowther can have been that great a critic if he couldn't have seen the parallels between the train set and the films.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, well, I think you're right. And actually the fact that it's trains, I think, is really revealing and interesting, and I think it's a clue to Disneyland's appeal. Trains in the 1940s and 1950s have a kind of a slightly unusual image. People still see them as emblematic of speed and excitement and modernity, but of course, they're already being overtaken by air travel and by the car.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So they are simultaneously exciting. Who doesn't like riding on a train and pulling the whistle and seeing the landscape whistling past? But at the same time, they're slightly backward looking where.

[Tom Holland]

Well, they're kind of iconic, aren't they? Of buffalo. Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Late 19th century. The railroad, all of that. Exactly. Casey Jones and I think you mentioned before Neil Gabler's definitive, really Life of Walt Disney. He sees the theme of Disney's life as a craving for kind of total control. And by creating a little train set or a model train or an artificial world, he's creating his own private world, a world that is exciting, but is also nostalgic and. And is a refuge from the pressures of the present.

[Tom Holland]

And also, of course, the same thing about trains is they have to stay on the tracks that have been laid down by the person who's built them.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

They can't just go off piste.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There's no unrulyness to a train set. Right. A train set is perfectly ordered and harmonious. And you can see why this actually would have a wider appeal in the 1940s and 1950s. So the second World War, with all its horrors, is only just over. By the early 1950s, the Korean War is raging at a cost of at least 36,000American lives. A war actually is largely forgotten today, but very traumatic at the time. There's huge anxiety about communism and the Cold War and the shadow of the bomb. So this is the heyday of McCarthyism, of the kind of hunt for traitors and Enemies within and so on and so forth.

[Tom Holland]

Which Disney's a part of.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Which Disney is a part of. Exactly. And at the same time, America itself, the sort of urban and geographical fabric of America is changing so rapidly. You know, this is the age of suburbanization, of interstate highways. Lots of new technology, big new corporations. Lots of talk at the time about the new age of the kind of mass man and mass bureaucracy and the individual, the small scale, the backward looking and the traditional. All these things are being crushed by this sort of new new age of the kind of mad men, IBM, big.

[Tom Holland]

Corporations and also, I suppose, cars.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, of course.

[Tom Holland]

And I guess one of the interesting things about Disneyland is that it is one of the few places where you can't take a car and you actually have to walk.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly, yeah. A lot of people there surely have never walked before.

[Tom Holland]

They all looked exhausted.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So how do we get from there to the amusement park? Well, Disney's friends and family all have their own theories about where the idea for an amusement park came from. So his daughter Diane said, he used to take me to Griffith park in la, to the Merry Go Round at the weekend. His brother Roy said, oh, I'm sure that all this came from the trains. I think that's probably wrong. I think the trains were always, you know, I think the park was always in his imagination and the trains were always a step towards that.

[Tom Holland]

Well, I mean, it's in Pinocchio. I mean, that's what's so interesting. You know the Fantasy Island Park.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, of course, the Pleasure island, which.

[Tom Holland]

Is a nightmarish vision of a park that's kind of, that's the first manifestation of a park, as far as I'm aware, in, you know, Disney Sinking and it's a nightmare.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Walt had always enjoyed parks. So a friend of his from Kansas City said they had been to a park called Electric park in Kansas city in the 1910s. Now, Electric Park, I looked this up. Used to get a million visitors a year.

[Tom Holland]

God, that's a lot, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It was nicknamed Kansas City's Coney Island. And he said, I remember going to Electric park with Walt. And Walt saying, gosh, as basically a teenager, Walt saying, God, I'd love to build a park one day, wouldn't you? In Gabler's biography, he says, you know, there's loads of occasions in the 1930s and 1940s where he mentioned to his animators, wouldn't it be fun one day to have a little park? You know, maybe we could have something across the road from our studio in Burbank, across Riverside Drive. We could have a train, we could have a model village, we could have a couple rides. I mean, if people ever wanted to come and visit the studio because Disney is becoming a household name, we'd have something to show them and something for them to have fun with. And actually, when he went to that Chicago railroad fair, he was talking about what that would look like. He was saying, well, you could have a hot dog stand and you could have a riverboat and you could have a merry go round and all this. By the time he comes back from this railroad fair, he's really excited. And he has a tremendous sense of mission, which I think it's the first time he's had that sense of vision and idealism and an esprit de corps since working on Snow White in the late 1930s. And in 1951, he assembles his team and he says, right, I want you to go out across the country and I want you to get ideas for a park. How would this work? They go to the Lincoln Museum in Chicago. They go to all sorts of colonial museums in New England. They go to all kinds of railroad and steamboat museums. They even go to a place I've actually been to, which is the open air museum in Colonial Williamsburg, where everybody pretends like sort of.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, people dress up in costume, don't they? And talk in the oldie English.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. They talk in what they consider old English. And they, they, they, they bang anvils in blacksmiths shops.

[Tom Holland]

Well, that's what they did in the 17th century.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. And actually, American history, it's always a massive element of Disneyland's appeal. I mean, actually, you know, even now, there is a kind of just the hall of the Presidents and there's kind of an animatronic Lincoln and all of this. And that's exactly how Walt always imagined him. But interestingly, he doesn't just send them to America, he sends them to Europe. Hooray. And in the autumn of 1951, he sends Roy Disney, his brother, to Europe. And he says, I'd like you to go to Europe and see how they do things there and investigate buying amusement rides from Europe. Now, some of our listeners may be quite surprised at that because they will think of Disneyland as quintessentially American, and they probably will think of amusement parks as quintessentially American. But this is wrong, Tom.

[Tom Holland]

Is it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. Disneyland is effectively European, as I will now explain.

[Tom Holland]

So Euro Disney?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Really? Was it. Was the park coming home?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I guess so, yeah. Euro Disney, which initially wasn't very successful because it turned out their biggest market, which was in Britain. People associated the word euro not with cosmopolitanism, excitement and sophistication, but with committees of people deliberating on the length of sausages or similar.

[Tom Holland]

The Maastricht Treaty ride.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

Thrills and spells Jean Claude.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It was a Junker experience. An animatronic, I don't know what's his name? Herman Rompuy, or whatever his name is, will now answer your questions about subsidiarity. Brilliant.

[Tom Holland]

Love it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All right, so let's get into the prehistory. What's the oldest park in the world? The oldest park is in Copenhagen, and it's the world's longest operating amusement park. It is a place called Bakken, which was originally just outside Copenhagen, kind of to the north, I think. And Bakken had its first visitors in the 1580s.

[Tom Holland]

So what are they going on kind of merry go rounds, roller coasters?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They were not going on rides at all. They were excited by the possibility of a spring.

[Tom Holland]

So what way is going to look at a spring?

[Nikita Khrushchev]

What?

[Tom Holland]

How does that count as a theme park?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So they would go to the spring.

[Tom Holland]

Right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

People go out on the spring for a day out and everyone was very excited by this spring. They thought, brilliant. God, it's 1580s, nothing else to do. Uh, so back in the. The area, kind of at various points, it's made a royal hunting ground. And then the royals, the Danish royals will say, oh, let's throw it open again. People love that spring.

[Tom Holland]

But in what way is that an amusement park?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Because, as so many people are going to see this spring, it attracts. You get entertainers, you get musicians setting up shop there, you get people selling food. It becomes basically a place that you go on a weekend, for example, on a feast day or fair day, you go for a day out from the city, you know, it's always there and there's all kinds of attractions. So there might be some amusing Danish juggler, there might be a man selling a meat pie. There might be an animal, an amusing animal being tortured in some hideous manner.

[Tom Holland]

Those long Danish days just flown by.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So it becomes, you know, an escapist tourist destination.

[Tom Holland]

But that's not the most famous amusement park, is it, in Copenhagen?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So it's still going today, but in 1843, Bakken got a rival, and this was a much more famous park, but much closer to Copenhagen, though at the time, just outside the city walls. And it's a park I've been to actually many times.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, I love it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The tivoli Gardens. So Tivoli was developed by a former Danish army officer called Georg Kartensen, and it had lots of elements, rock, right from the beginning, from the 1840s, that are very familiar at Tivoli today and indeed at many amusement parks today. It had flower gardens, it had a restaurant, it had cafes, it had a theatre, it had a bandstand, it had fireworks displays. And the general vibe, which will be. If you've been to Tivoli, you will recognise it's slightly exotic and kind of orientalist.

[Tom Holland]

Because they're opening. Disney are opening a new park, aren't they, in the Gulf, they.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And I wonder whether there will be an orientalist vibe there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Maybe there'd be an occidentalist vibe. That would be an interesting twist.

[Tom Holland]

It'd be quite fun, wouldn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. Timber framed cottages or something.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Anyway, Tivoli from the beginning had rides, so Tivoli had a merry go round and it had a scenic railway. We'll come back to the rides and the history of rides in a second. But most writers who have discussed the history of Disneyland agree that Tivoli is the single biggest inspiration. It is by far the most obvious model, and Disney sent his staff there multiple times. And one of the things that makes it such an obvious model is that Tivoli from the beginning had a very strong fairy tale element to it, and that's down to Hans Christian Andersen. Hans Christian Andersen was a friend of Georg Kartensen. He visited Tivoli during its very first season and he was inspired by Tivoli's Chinese pavilion to write his fairy tale, the Nightingale. And there's actually now Hans Christian Andersen rides actively. And you can't really miss his influence.

[Tom Holland]

When you go, well, I mean, this is all very interesting. We've had quite a lot of America, we've had quite a lot of Denmark. But I feel what is lacking so far in this episode, no offense.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Is Britain. Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You're not wrong.

[Tom Holland]

Surely there's some British influence. Of course there is, isn't there?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Because we are a patriotic podcast and I'm very pleased to tell the listeners that Disneyland is effectively British. It's a British creation because Disneyland is modelled on Tivoli and Tivoli's original name was actually Tivoli and Vauxhall. Now, the Tivoli bit alludes to the Jardin du Tivoli in Paris. A public park, a garden. But Vauxhall is Britain. South London. The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, the most influential pleasure park, I would say, in Human history.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it's great to have Vauxhall, which is the tube station that serves the Oval, on the podcast. Great to get the Oval back on. The rest is history.

[Nikita Khrushchev]

Right.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's the last time we'll be mentioning the Oval in this podcast. So Vauxhall. Vauxhall began as the new Spring Gardens on the south bank of the Thames. The date that it opened is unclear, but it was almost certainly around the time of the Restoration in 1662. Samuel Pepys describes a visit to what he calls Foxhall, where I had not been a great while. And he and his wife collect flowers and he says, we had cakes and salt beef and ale and so home again by water with much pleasure. So they've obviously been for an outing in 1667. Five years later, the great sort of biographer and antiquarian John Aubrey records that the Restoration era spy and double agent and inventor Samuel Moreland built a house in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens made of looking glass and fountains, very pleasant to behold. And there are all these sort of little trace descriptions of something going on in Vauxhall on the south bank of the Thames in the late 17th century. That's fun.

[Tom Holland]

That's basically.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's the point, yeah, that it's fun and people are going there for a day out and it's hard to pin down exactly what they're going for because there aren't really detailed descriptions until the 18th century. And by the 18th century we do have a very clear sense of this as one of London's great tourist attractions. So now it has a proper sort of Walt Disney style entrepreneur in charge of it called Jonathan Tires. And the reason I compare him with Walt Disney is that like Disney Tires is a kind of mid market populist. So he's interested in throwing it open to as many people as possible, but. But with caveats. So he charges a shilling to get in. Doesn't sound like much, but I looked it up the academic website measuring worth in relative income terms. A shilling is the equivalent of about £150 today. A lot of money, but exactly, almost exactly the same as what you would pay for a one day ticket to Disneyland in Anaheim right now.

[Tom Holland]

So it's keeping Riff Raff out.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You know, it's a proper event. You know, you don't go lightly. You go because it's a, a long, you know, conceived trip, very exciting moment. And it will appeal to respectable people because the price of a shilling means you can be pretty confident there will.

[Tom Holland]

Not be the likes of the young Emma Hamilton.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Correct. There will not be thieves and footpads and ruffians. Yeah. And people of easy virtue.

[Tom Holland]

So what is it that they've got there?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They've got musicians, they've got entertainers, there's lots of fireworks. There are Chinese lanterns. The Chinese lanterns are a huge part of this, actually. People would often comment on the excitement of walking down the kind of the darkened paths illuminated at every turn by these lanterns.

[Tom Holland]

This then inspires a theme park in Russia in St. Petersburg, and there's a railway station next to it called Vauxhall. And so the Russian word for railway station is Vauxhall Voxel.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, exactly.

[Tom Holland]

Amazing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So they have more and more attractions by the early 19th century. There are organs, there are multiple orchestras, there's a theater, there are hot air balloons. You would go and you would see high wire acts, jugglers, there'd be puppet shows. The price has now gone up to three shillings, so it's pretty expensive.

[Tom Holland]

I think it's where the first giraffe is to see displayed in England.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Is that right?

[Tom Holland]

I think so.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You love. You love a giraffe?

[David Olusoga]

Yeah, I do.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Great to get a giraffe back on the show. Dickens went, it features briefly in Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, and so on and so forth. However, the temptation is always to go down market, and that's exactly what happens. So chasing profits in the middle of the 19th century, Vauxhall's new proprietors, they basically lost some of the respectability. It got a reputation for bawdy behavior, for drinking, for late night parties, and ended up basically being threatened with losing its licenses. And it closed in 1859.

[Tom Holland]

Well, now, I mean, you mentioned Sex Dungeons. There was a. There's a club there, I think, called Dungeon or something like that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right, well, that's nice to know. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

So you see, every time you drive, you know, across from North London, going down to Brixton, it always used to be there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right, well, have you ever been?

[Tom Holland]

No, I haven't, but I always kind of wondered.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right, well, that's a lovely possible destination for rest is history. Christmas outing, maybe for the stands, so. Yeah, exactly. So there's one thing obviously that Vauxhall is missing that actually Backhand didn't have either, as you pointed out, which is rides. Now, the thing is, I'm guessing most. I'm guessing everybody listening to this podcast has been on a ride at some point in their life. If Only is a very small child.

[Tom Holland]

I think if my father is listening, he's never been on a ride. But apart from him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Surely he's been on a roundabout or some sort of.

[Tom Holland]

I can't imagine it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, but I'm also guessing that almost nobody has ever thought, gosh, rides have a history. Where do rides come from? No, because you just take them for granted and you think of them as frivolous. So let's start with the first ride that most people ever take, the first sort of sophisticated ride. And that's normally, I would say probably a merry go round or a carousel. You know, the horses going up and down. So the word carrousel, French word, and it originally meant this sort of test of skill during a tournament. So the claim is that you read everywhere, is that this began, this was imported from the Saracens during the Crusades. They would ride on their horses and they would basically spear with a lance a ring that was hanging from a post or a tree. It's a kind of standard element of a. Of tournament activity in a children's history book. And in early modern Europe, this activity evolved into a much more formalized kind of display. So it's a little bit like dressage or something. So we know that, for example, in 1662, in the summer of 1662, Louis XIV held a big kind of carousel occasion in the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace. And people were kind of riding up and down and they were trying to collect these rings with their lances. And to this day, that square is called, which is now by the Louvre, is called the Place du Carrousel. The game spread, or the sort of the exhibition spread in popularity by the 18th century. People are doing it in fairs all over Europe. And people have developed, basically, I suspect, because it's cheaper, a sort of very primitive mechanical dimension. So you will sit on a kind of a wooden horse. Their wooden horses are suspended in a circle from a kind of axis and a central pole, rather like on a modern carousel. But they are rotated, obviously, not by electricity or whatever. They're rotated by animals or basically by people just pulling on a rope. So there's some poor bloke sweating profusely, pulling you while you're going round and round.

[Tom Holland]

It suddenly struck me in John Wesley's house in London, he, you know, he rode around everywhere preaching and all that stuff, and that he had a mechanical horse. It was kind of the equivalent of an exercise bike. So he'd sit on it in the morning, it would go up and down, up and down, and it would exercise his thighs and give him the strength to continue riding. So that is also part of the carousel, isn't it that the horses go up and down. So presumably that's where that is coming from.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. So that idea of, I mean, that's such an 18th century thing, isn't it? The idea of, you know, some mechanical contraption that you'll exercise on.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And some mad inventor has, has developed the basic. And you don't think of that being the ancestor of, you know, the roller coaster at Alton Towers or something, but that's exactly what it is.

[Tom Holland]

No, it hadn't crossed my mind when I saw it, but now you have enlightened me.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, that's wonderful.

[Tom Holland]

For which, many thanks.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the first proper mechanical carousel comes from the Napoleonic wars. And this was a creation, quite literally of Merlin, of a man called Jean Joseph Merlin, who was an inventor who had moved from Liege to London in the 1760s. And he was a big name at the time. I mean, he's completely forgotten today, but he was a very big name in the late 18th century. He was nicknamed the Ingenious Mechanic. And he made clocks, he made automata, kind of, you know, robotic machines of various kinds. He made organs and pianos. He invented a self propelled wheelchair, he invented a pedal operated revolving tea table. And this is an amazing fact, he invented rollerblades. So he was the first person to invent the line of wheels, the thin line of wheels on a shoe or boot. And he opened a mechanical museum in Hanover Square, which in the 1780s and 1790s was a very fashionable place to go for coffee. And we know from travelers accounts, there's one From I think 1804, looking back at a journey he made, a German Traveler in 1803 and this bloke said, I went to this place, I couldn't believe it. I went in, there was a carousel. It was completely mechanical. You'd go in with your coffee and you'd sit on this horse. It would kind of go round and round while an organ played a concerto. So yeah, that basically is the experience of going on a merry go round. However, it was just a private toy. It was only for people who went to Merlin's museum. The man who made carousels for the masses was a Lancastrian, like our co founder of Gohanger, Tony Pastor, so another great populist. And this was a bloke called Thomas Bradshaw, who was an inventor from Bolton. And he built a carousel with a steam engine, which is a big innovation. And he probably unveiled it in Bolton on New Year's Day 1861. And then we have the first full account two years later. He took it to Halifax. And the local paper described it as, and I quote, I was going to do the accent. Maybe I will do the accent. Hey, hey, hey. It's a roundabout of huge proportions driven by a steam engine which whirled around with such impetuosity that the wonder is the daring riders are not shot off like cannonballs and driven half into the middle of next month.

[Tom Holland]

They're not drinking coffee by this point.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No, definitely not. So that's Bradshaw with his steam powered carousel. Now he's actually just preparing the way for an even greater man. And this is the Walt Disney of King's Lynn, Fred Savage. Are you familiar with Fred Savage's life and career, Tom?

[Tom Holland]

I think he clearly invents Disneyland, doesn't he? It should really be called Savage Land.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It should. So he was born into a family of Weavers in 1828. He never really learned to read and write. His father was transported to Tasmania for poaching and he began work as a, as a farm laborer when he was 10. But after his father disappeared, he needed more money. So he was apprenticed to a local machine maker and he proved to be very good at making machines. He sets up his own business making farm machinery and then he diversifies into, into steam powered fairground machinery. And Fred Savage becomes, by the 1880s, he is without doubt the most innovative and influential maker of rides in the world. So if I give you just three examples of his great rides. There was a roundabout called Sea on Land where you'd sit in like a boat and it would pitch and toss as though you're on the waves. I mean, this is basically like you see at most fairgrounds, right? They, they have this ride. There was a steam driven carousel, which was kind of the definitive carousel. It was called the Platform Gallopers. He had the idea of having you go up and down on colored poles, you know, the bright colors and stuff and the organ playing. And this then was copied all over the world, the Platform Gallopers. And then the most influential ride. So we at Disneyland have been on a ride very like this. It was called Switchbacks and It was in 1888. And this had you sat in a kind of gilded car in a carriage and the cars raced around an undulating track. So the car's ride at Disneyland is basically just an updated version of the Switchbacks ride.

[Tom Holland]

Amazing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And he was a huge figure in King's Lynn. He became the mayor of King's Lynn.

[Tom Holland]

Brilliant.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There is a statue of him in King's Lynn to this day. So that's very exciting.

[Tom Holland]

No one Would pull that down. No, he sounds great. Do you know who actually who'd love him is my cousin Simon, who. He makes Victorian fairground attractions and paints them. He's an innocent artist and kind of tinkerer.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, that's exciting. Maybe he already knows about Fred Savage. I like to think he does.

[Tom Holland]

Probably does. I'll ask him.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But there's one thing that Fred Savage can't take credit for, and in fact, I'm sorry to say that we in Britain can't take any credit for at all, and that's the roller coaster. So the roller coaster has a mad history, a very unexpected history. Roller coasters originated in 18th century Tsarist Russia. So basically how it worked was in palaces outside St Petersburg, in the age of Catherine the Great, serfs and servants would build these kind of undulating hills of ice so that their masters and mistresses could go to bogening, because it's.

[Tom Holland]

All very flat, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is flat. So that's why they'd build these mountains. And the mountains were called Katalnaya Gorka, Sliding Mountains, and they'd sometimes be 80ft high and they would be sort of buttressed with wooden supports. And over time, the Russian ability say, well, I enjoy this so much. I'd like to do in the summer when there's no ice. So they build summer versions and they do them not with toboggans, but with carts with wheels that roll down grooved tracks. So the most famous one was a ride called the Riding Mountain. It was built at Tsoskoje Selo, the country retreat of the Tsars, and under Catherine the Great by Rastrelli, the architect who did the Winter Palace.

[Tom Holland]

What's the health and safety?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Listen, if Catherine the Great comes off that ride, you're in massive trouble. You cannot take any, any risk.

[Tom Holland]

I am not going to go on a ride that's been built in 18th century Russia. No way.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What about 19th century Paris? So by the early 19th century, these have been copied in Paris and they're called. The first one is called the Montagne Russes, Russian mountains. And there's also one called Promenade, and they were both installed in an amusement park in 1817 off the Champs Elysees. And again, these had these wheeled cars running in grooves. You would tow your car to the top of a slope, you'd release it, it would whiz around the track. Louis the 18th came to see it. He came to see it, but he refused to ride in it.

[Tom Holland]

I very much doubt he could have fitted in it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, he's A very large man. Yeah, he would have.

[Tom Holland]

The whole system would have crashed, splintered into timber beneath it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Unlike you at Disneyland. He thought it was beneath his dignity. Whereas you did not.

[Tom Holland]

I piled in.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. And what turns these things into a proper roller coaster is the addition of steam. And that, I have to say, is an American innovation.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, that's a shame.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So this place, you couldn't make this up. I mean, American names is just absolutely insane. So the first railway that does this was called the Mork. The Mork Chunk Switchback Railway.

[Tom Holland]

Sounds like a pet food.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And if you think that's bad, the town that it was, that it was built was called. The town that it was built in.

[Tom Holland]

Was called Jim Thorpe, who founded the town of Jim Thorpe. Dominic.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Who could possibly say?

[Tom Holland]

Very modest. Very modest man.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The town is called Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. And it's the Mork Chunk Switchback Railway. It was a sort of mining railway, but they called it the Gravity Road because it went so steeply downhill. And by 1870, the company that ran the Mork Chunk Railway decided that instead of. Instead of using it for its proper purpose, they would throw it open to tourists who were visiting. Jim Thorpe.

[Tom Holland]

Where are you spending your vacation? Jim Thorpe? Not again.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

No less a person than Ulysses S. Grant.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, the corrupt and boring president.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, the corrupt and boring president of the United States. He traveled on it. So people hear the news of this gravity railway, they're like, brilliant. Love it. And this bloke, another man who was called Lamarcus Adler Thompson, where the hell.

[Tom Holland]

Did he come from?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

God knows. He built his own version called the Gravity Switchback Railway at Coney island in the 1880s. And it was Lamarcus Adna Thompson who came up with the idea of you will travel against painted backdrops. So you basically pretend you're in the Swiss Alps or something, and from there you soon get moved towards having loops. So in other words, going upside down again, Coney island leads the way on that. So the amusingly named Flip Flap Railway, which opened in 1895, has a loop so that you go upside down. And then there are basically versions in amusement parks all over the world in the next 30 to 40 years. Which is kind of the golden age of roller coasters. Actually, we think of it as now, but there are probably more roller coasters in the 1920s than there are right now. They all have one thing in common, and they have that in common with Catherine the Great's riding mountain, which you distrust. They are all made of wood. Said the very first steel roller coaster was not opened until 1959. It is called the Matterhorn Bobsleds. I believe Tabby has ridden on it because where does it open? Tom? It opens at Disneyland.

[Tom Holland]

Disneyland. Do you know, I'd completely forgotten about Disneyland. Well, finally got back on track, as it were. So let's have a quick break now and when we come back, we will be in 1950s California and we'll be finding out what has happened to Walt Disney. Walt Disney's theme park. This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The American Revolution is usually staged like theater. Washington center stage, redcoats marching in step, liberty delivering its lines on cue.

[Tom Holland]

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

Ken Burns new series shows it in that light, not as polished legend, but as lived experience. Rank and file soldiers, women, enslaved people and Native Americans may not have signed the declaration, but their decisions carried weight in the struggle for independence.

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What makes this story gripping isn't only the speeches or the battles. It's how the questions that gave birth to the United States continue to shape American life. Two and a half centuries on, the.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Revolution was never frozen in time. It was restless, conflicted, unfinished. Which is precisely why it still matters.

[Tom Holland]

As the United states nears its 250th year, the revolution is not a relic under glass, but a mirror still reflecting the soul of a country back at itself.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The American revolution premieres Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app.

[Tom Holland]

This is an advertisement by BetterHelp. As the days turn colder and the shadows stretch longer, it's easy to mistake hibernation for harmony. But winter is when people need warmth most, a season for reaching out, not closing in.

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[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's betterhelp.com resthistory this episode is brought to you by the Swedish clothing brand Asket.

[Tom Holland]

Now, Dominic. In our episode on tailoring and the history of the suit, one of the most salient things you get a real sense of While stood in a tailor's on savile room grow is that historically clothes were made with love and care so that they would last for a very long time indeed. And I think it's a shame in today's age of fast fashion that it is hard to come by clothes that stand the test of time.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But Tom, honestly, you don't have to go to the lengths of getting a bespoke suit tailor made to own clothes that are made with that same sense of love and pride. There are very few companies left that have that real focus on quality and longevity, but one of them is is ascat. They work almost exclusively with organic and natural materials milled in Italy and Portugal and made in factories built on generations of craftsmanship. Every product is worn for months by the two founders, stress testing every stitch and seam before it's approved for production.

[Tom Holland]

And as a result, they have just one single permanent collection. It's around 50 garments offered in three lengths for every regular size that are meant to be around forever.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And there are no discounts ever. If you don't need anything, don't buy. If you're considering something though, visit askette.com or go to their recently opened store on Brewer street in London.

[Tom Holland]

To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past. And here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. I don't know if that's how Walt Disney spoke, but in my version it is because that was Walt Disney and he was unveiling his park to the world's press on 17 July 1955. And Dominic, in those words, are lots of the themes that we would associate with Disneyland today. So kind of looking backwards, lots of sepia tinged nostalgia, but also the excitement of the future. And there's, there's idealism and there's this kind of patriotic sense that American history is something to be celebrated.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. Yeah. So we've finally got back to Disneyland and before we get to the opening day, let's backtrack a little to explain how we got to 1955. So we left the story with Walt sending his emissaries to Europe to get inspiration from Tivoli and indeed from Vauxhall, if only indirectly. And they have returned full of ideas and they get down to work in the early 1950s. The plan is going to have to change a because it's much grander than before. Walt wants something huge, but also because the city authorities in Burbank say, look, we don't want to. We don't want a children's entertainment park via the studios. You're going to have to look somewhere else. So Walt commissions this study to find a new site. And they report to him in the summer of 1953. And they say, look, Greater Los Angeles, because of the huge suburbanization in Eisenhower's America, is expanding at a vast rate. And the highest rate of growth is expected to be in suburban Orange county, which is just south of Los Angeles. Now, there are a couple of interesting things about Orange County. One, it already has a theme park called Knott's Berry Farm, which lots of our American listeners will have heard of, which is basically a farm shop that's built its own ghost town. Fake ghost town as an attraction.

[Tom Holland]

When you mean a ghost town, a town with ghosts like Scooby Doo or.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

A sort of abandoned, like western town.

[Tom Holland]

Miners town.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, Saloon and stuff. But I think there was also a more spectral element to it. Yeah, I mean, now there's loads of rides and things. It's very popular.

[Tom Holland]

So with sinister janitors who turn out to be faking ghosts, that kind of thing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. I mean, I have to say an absolutely preposterous name for a theme park. Knott's Berry Farm.

[Tom Holland]

It's not that scary, is it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But very popular in America. The other thing about Orange county is a hugely symbolic place in post war American politics because it's the birthplace of Richard Nixon, but it is the heartland of kind of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, conservatism. There's a whole book called Suburban warriors by historian called Lisa McGirr, all about orange county as the sort of petri dish in which modern American conservatism was made. Anyway, it's here that Walt Disney decides he'll have his park. He buys 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim. And he says, right now we have to pay for it. Now, the budget for Disneyland ends up ballooning to $17 million. That's the equivalent of about $620 million today in terms of a construction project. So he doesn't have anything like this money. And the way he does it, which you described last time, is, is tv. He signs a deal with abc. They will pump cash effectively into his park and in return he will make programs, 26 programs a year for them. And this is, as you said before, it's the first time a Hollywood studio, rather than seeing television as the enemy, has got into Bed with them. And that show Disneyland, which is the first show. It's a brilliant advert for his new park and it's a colossal, colossal hit. The only show on TV that is more popular than its repeats is I Love Lucy, the Lucille Ball sitcom. And as you described last time, this is the show that makes Walt himself a public personality. So people get to see kind of Uncle Walt. Now, meanwhile, his team are racing to finish this park. And the timescale is bonkers by modern standards. So they broke Ground on the 17th of July, 1954, and Walt basically said to them, I think a year should do it.

[Nikita Khrushchev]

Wow.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You know, you've got 365 days, loads of problems. They're problems with the soil, they have problems with the unions.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, those pesky unions again.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he hates the unions. Problems with plumbing, all of this. Walt is always changing his plans. So he's always saying, why don't we put this here? Why don't we build something else here?

[Tom Holland]

Well, exactly. Like Snow White.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Why don't you spend seven months working on a entertaining thing involving teacups? Nah, I'm not gonna have that. Let's cut it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. We should actually give a shout out to the person who really runs the project who's ended up being airbrushed from Disney's history. And this was the general director who was called C.V. wood, and he had run the study. He'd basically be in charge of the research institute that did the study that said, do it in Orange county, in Anaheim. And he was brilliant at organizing the project, but he fell out with Walt and he was fired. And. And he was basically erased from Disney's history, which is very sad.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, so something that Disney would have had in common with Khrushchev.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Erasing people from history.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's true. I hadn't thought of that. It's a nice. Yeah, the comments are vanishing. So we'll get into later on what the design of Disneyland is and what it kind of means. But some of the themes of its history are there from the very beginning. So, first of all, Walt is always really clear that it is not just an amusement park. It's basically a. A theme park. And the difference is, if you go to an amusement park and you don't go on any rides, you know, you're in for a very boring time because there's nothing else to do. Whereas, as we know having been, you can go to Disneyland and actually spend the day without going on a single ride because you can see all the other attractions you can go to the shops, you can go to the cafes. You can just relax, enjoy yourself. There's parades, there's fireworks.

[Tom Holland]

So we went to the Star wars area, didn't we? And there was a kind of. There was a bar.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Like the one in Star Wars. And we were entertained by watching Theo be arrested by a couple of Stormtroopers.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Tom Holland]

Which I thought was actually, for me, the single best moment in the whole.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Visit and the whole of the history of the rest of history. No, and actually, we will return to that moment in a second.

[Tom Holland]

Excellent.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So it's a land, it's. It's place unto itself in a way that Vauxhall and Tivoli never were. And it's immersive. So every detail has to be right. There's an argument at one point whether they're going to use cut glass or stained glass.

[Tom Holland]

Stained glass, obviously. Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And Walt says it's got to be stained glass. Every detail has to be perfect. Who cares how much it costs? So that's what partly explains the commercialism that we associate with Disney and Disneyland. So the sponsorship, for example, he's got sponsorship deals with American Motors, with Richfield Oil, with the Swift Meatpacking Company, because he needs to pay for all of this attention to detail.

[Tom Holland]

And Dominic, who's he going to get to work in this?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, this is crucial. So I think this is one of the most inspired things, actually, about Disneyland, Disney. Walt Disney said, you know, this is not just a park. I want people to think of this as a movie set, which we'll get onto later. And so the staff are not employees, they are cast members. And that term is still used entirely unironically by Disney today.

[David Olusoga]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

So we saw Mary Poppins when we were walking around. But also, famously, there's Mickey Mouse and Theo's friend Goofy and all these kind of characters.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. And the Stormtroopers or whatever.

[Tom Holland]

So they're obviously actors, but all the kind of the people who are there to help, they are cast as actors as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. And they are playing a part as well, in a way, because they have to be perfectly turned out. They have to. They're always smiling, they're incredibly polite. There's a very strict dress code and no facial hair.

[Tom Holland]

That's the mad thing, because Walt has a moustache. And also, there's no smoking. And if there's one thing everyone knows about Disney, he loves a cigarette.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, yeah. And also no fat people. So the very first manager of Adventureland, which is part of the park, you said later, Walt was really mean to me and basically made it very clear that he didn't really want me in his park because I was so large. Walt doesn't like fat guys. Well, so the other thing is the slight suspicion that's hung over Disneyland is did they all have to be white? And that's not really true. So Walt Disney had always employed Asian American artists and illustrators. But that said as late as 1963. So civil rights groups are still petitioning the Disney organization and saying to them, can you please guarantee that there will be more black employees? And the Disney organization said, yeah, we'll think about it. But it's actually not clear whether that really had an impact and actually how much changed and how long it took. Anyway, back to the story. The big day approaches, the 17th of July. Massive excitement. Walt has been promoting it on ABC. ABC themselves have taken out expensive full page adverts in the newspapers right up to the deadline. Walt is tinkering with his park.

[Tom Holland]

Of course he is.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He's riding the train. He's saying the shops need to be different and all this kind of thing. Four days early. He has his 30th wedding anniversary and he uses that as a very, very soft opening. He invites his closest friends and some big Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Gary Cooper to a party at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, which is still there actually. And then 17th of July, the big day dawns. And the funny thing about it is that in many ways it's total and utter chaos. So first of all, CV Wood has sent out 15,000 invitations because it's invitation only. But loads of people print out counterfeit fake invitations and get in. And loads of other people basically lean ladders against the fence, climb over the ladder to get in, much like people used to do at rock festivals and things. There's a heat wave in Southern California, so The temperature hits 101 degrees Fahrenheit.

[Tom Holland]

Wasn't there some issue with the water supply? And Walt had to choose between flushing toilets and fountains. And he opts for the toilets, I think correctly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But then people complain and they say the water fountains aren't really working cause there's been a plumbing strike.

[Tom Holland]

Oh, it has unions again. Pesky unions.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

There's a gas leak, the refreshment stands run out of food and drink. Famously, the newly laid asphalt, the tarmac melts. So people, if you're wearing high heels, they get stuck. Which is very funny. The TV broadcast, which is watched by a colossal number of people. Neil Gabler reckon 70 million Americans. The TV broadcast is a Bit of a disaster. Ronald Reagan is one of the three presenters.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah, well, Reagan introduces Disney when he makes that thing with which we opened this section. Yeah, yeah. And now Walt Disney will step forward to read the dedication of Disneyland.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So Ronald Reagan is very Disney. He in his. In his appeal, isn't he? In his ethos? So Disney, he misses his line, he forgets his lines. It all goes horribly wrong. However, Walt is absolutely delighted with the day. Everybody says at the time, you know, he seems so happy.

[Tom Holland]

Well, happiness is the word, isn't it? Because in that opening speech, he says to all who come to this happy place, welcome.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

And that's. That's the essence of it for him. He wants people to be happy.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The happiest place on Earth. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And actually, the press coverage, although the, you know, some of the press said there were quite a few, you know, missed cues and things that went wrong, most of the press coverage was pretty admiring. And people said, this is an extraordinary place, an extraordinary achievement. And actually, if you look at the stats the first week, 160,000 visitors by mid August 1955. So it's been open now for probably a month. It's had half a million by the end of September, 1 million by its first anniversary. So it's been open 12 months. July 1956, 4 million. By the end of 1957, 10 million. And at that point, by the end of 1957, it's been open for 18 months. It is a bigger attraction than Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. It is already, after just 18 months, taken its place in the kind of the wonders of the United States. A place that everybody dreams of going.

[Tom Holland]

And it's fascinating. All the. All those sites that you listed are parks. They're natural wonders. And of course, the essence of Disneyland is its complete artificiality.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. So we'll get onto, just in the final minutes of the episode, its meaning, but just on Walt Disney himself, he never stopped. He spent day after day at the park. He had this special apartment built over the fire station, this kind of pastiche of Gilded Age America, kind of lots of velvet, lots of lace. And he would stand there at the window looking out, and people would see him, and they'd say he often looked kind of visibly moved, even tearful, as he watched these crowds.

[Tom Holland]

And there's a lantern kept alight there to this day, isn't there?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They're kind of a very Disney detail. He said to interviewers, you know, it's not finished. It will never be finished. It's a project that, you know, it's a live, breathing thing. He's always thinking of new. Of gondolas and monorails and new rides, so of the iconic rides that are still there today. The Tom Sawyer island that opened in 1956, the Matterhorn was 1959. And the Pirates of the Caribbean, which inspired the films. So that was the last ride that Disney designed, and it opened in 1967, a year after his death. So he never got to ride on it. Tom. But we have.

[Tom Holland]

We did, didn't we? And before the park could actually open. Doesn't get more Walt Disney than that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't want to excite people too much, but there may be a piece of content arriving on YouTube that actually shows us riding the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. So that would be fun for people to see. Now, I don't want to tantalise people too much, but if you look on YouTube tomorrow, so Friday, you will see a thrilling footage of me and Tom and a special guest riding the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. And wasn't that fun, Tom?

[Tom Holland]

Amazing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

One of the great moments in your life.

[Tom Holland]

Surely it was all about happiness.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It was. So by the end of the 50s, Disney's ambitions have got even greater. He's thinking about something even bigger. A city. Not just a theme park, a city. And he gets his executives to buy 27,000 acres of land in Florida. And to put that into context, that is an area the size of Manchester, England, an area twice the size of Manhattan America. Yeah, Manhattan America.

[Tom Holland]

Just to clarify for people who may.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Be geographically confused for Australian listeners, and that is what becomes Disney World. So his plan for Disney World is, you know, he says, well, I suppose they'll have to have another amusement park, but really, my heart isn't in the amusement park. Yeah.

[Tom Holland]

Cause he's moved on now. He's done his amusement park. So now he wants to do his urban planning.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He wants a utopian city for his workers. And it will be modeled, once again, I'm happy to say Disney World, like Disneyland, is essentially British because it is modeled on the garden cities of the Edwardian planner, Sir Ebenezer Howard. So if you want to see an example of Disney World, merely go to Letchworth or Wellingarden City, which are the Garden cities based on Howard's ideas, because that's what Walt Disney was all about.

[Tom Holland]

The epcot of the home counties.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The epcot of the home counties. So unfortunately for him, he died. And then his vision was dialed down and we ended up being dialed down to one of the lands of Disney World, which is Epcot.

[Tom Holland]

That's such a shame, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And then Epcot. Now, basically, it lingered because it was a massive kind of educational World's Fair and nobody wanted to really go. They wanted to go on the road. So now it does have rides. It has a Ratatouille ride, a frozen ride and a Guardians of the Galaxy ride. So that's much more exciting. Anyway, Disney World is much bigger, but there's always something very special about Disneyland. It has always fascinated postmodern theorists, especially.

[Tom Holland]

In Europe, isn't it?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. So part of this, I think, is because of its eclecticism, but also because of the emphasis on kind of fantasy and stuff.

[Tom Holland]

It kind of basically invents the idea of postmodernism, different architectural styles mingling together.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It does. So Umberto Eco, the author of the Name of the Rose, the great Italian sort of postmodernist theorist, he wrote at length about Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which we've been on, and the Haunted Mansion ride, which I think Tabby may have been on, and he said of Disneyland that it was the Sistine Chapel of America, an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, a place of total passivity. Then you have Jean Baudrillard. Oh, brilliant.

[Tom Holland]

A French philosopher on the Rest Is History. We love it.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Pile in, let's get Baudrillard on the show. He said Disneyland is the supreme example of hyperreality. And the point of Disneyland, he said, basically, with its artifice and its fantasy, it's to trick us into thinking that the rest of America is real.

[Tom Holland]

So French.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact, all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. And it continues at great length. I'm not entirely persuaded by Baudrillard's argument. I think Los Angeles probably is real, and also I'm not persuaded that Disney visitors are passive, as we shall see.

[Tom Holland]

It's expressive of, I guess, something that's been characteristic of Europeans looking at Disney's films and then of his theme parks for ages, which is a kind of absolute fascination intermingled with a kind of snobbery as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, a snobbish contempt. A snobbish contempt, which I think I certainly don't share myself.

[Tom Holland]

Well, you're a man of the people.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, having been to Disney World as a punter and as a parent and a punter, I have to say it was an extremely enjoyable holiday and I heartily recommend it to people.

[Tom Holland]

Something that I denied my own children.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he did. What does that tell you?

[Tom Holland]

Hatredsville is so much more fun. What can I say?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So just a couple of aspects of Disneyland that struck me on our recent trip. First of all is if you went as we did, having immersed yourself in the story of Walt Disney, in the biographies of him and so on, when you get there, it's very obvious how much this is based on one man's personal story and one man's personal genius. So as Neil Gabler points out in his biography, when you enter the park, you arrive in kind of Main street, usa and this is very obviously an idealized vision of Walt Disney's boyhood in small town Marceline, Missouri. And you walk down the main street and you get to Sleeping Beauty's castle. And that's the kind of architectural embodiment of fantasy. The idealism, the ambition that's always drawn him on. And then at the castle you have a choice of paths, different lands. So there's Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland. And those are all, in their different ways, Hollywood, pop cultural genres of the 1940s and 1950s. The Western, the adventure story, the fantasy, the science fiction story and so on. So I think that takes us to the next point, which is that the park is very obviously, as we've already mentioned, a Hollywood film set. A lot of the attractions, even the older attractions, to a way that we don't really notice now, are modeled on films of mid century America. So the western saloon is directly copied from a saloon in the Doris Day film Calamity Jane. The Jungle Cruise that you can go on is modeled on the Humphrey Bogart film the African Queen. And the point is you're meant to feel like you are in a film. So that moment, the greatest moment in the history of the rest is history. When Bob Iger got his staff to tell the Stormtroopers to arrest Theo Young Smith for loitering, and the Stormtroopers told Theo off and he looked really sheepish and guilty.

[Tom Holland]

Well, he was obviously running guns for the whatever it is, the resistance.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And they say something like to him, they say, don't you want to. Do you want to get in trouble again? And Theo says very weakly, no.

[Nikita Khrushchev]

That.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Was the best thing I've ever.

[Tom Holland]

Freedom fighter. But he lives to fight another day, to be fair. And don't. I guess the other thing just to emphasize is you say it's like being in a film set. You cannot See, outside the park, once you're in the park, you are surrounded by sets.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Total immersion.

[Tom Holland]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The rides themselves are stories. This will surprise people who haven't been to Disneyland. The rides are not like the rides in normal parks, especially when you do the Q, you know, there's a whole series of kind of tableau. So the rise of the Resistance. The Star wars ride, which we. We didn't do, but the Star wars ride, for example, that we did. The rise of the Resistance. You feel like you're in a story, right? I mean, I remember things saying to me afterwards, I've always wanted to be in Star wars, and now I am. That's the whole point of the. Of the show. The other interesting thing, just as in a film set, they're doing all kinds of tricks with the proportions. So on the main street, the shops on the bottom floor are 9/10 of normal size. And then as you go up, they are 8/10, 7/10, and so on and so forth. Now, this was really deliberate. Walt said to his designers, I want it to feel a little bit like you're in a toy, you know, that you have. I want to heighten the sense of nostalgia because the past always feels smaller and quainter. He says at one point to his designers, he says, big build. I don't want big buildings. Big buildings are for dictators. Big buildings make you feel small. I want people to feel empowered. And when I read that, I had a look at other buildings built at the same time. And as luck would have it, five days after Disneyland, one of the absolute emblematic buildings of the Communist bloc in the Cold War was opened in Warsaw. This was a building called the palace of Culture and Science. It kind of towered over Warsaw. People said it was Stalin's gift to the people of Poland. The people of Poland hated it. And it wasn't entirely dissimilar in ethos from Disneyland because it had a swimming pool, it had a cinema, it had theaters, it had a museum. It was meant to be a kind of palace of leisure, but the effect could not have been more different. So this building, this very Orwellian building, completely dominated the landscape and the sort of cityscape, and it completely dwarfed the individual. You felt intimidated and crushed by it. Disneyland never has that effect on you.

[Tom Holland]

No. And so confirming Walt's darker suspicions of Bolsheviks.

[David Olusoga]

Dominic.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Quite right. Well, see, Walt, this is the other thing. Disneyland is nothing if not a heartfelt tribute to American patriotism.

[Tom Holland]

So there's the animatronic Abraham Lincoln and.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

All that Abraham Lincoln, yeah. The ethos of Disneyland, I feel, is very Eisenhower era. It's the nostalgic small town conservatism on one hand and the sort of innocent faith in the possibilities of the future on the other. And it wears that kind of Eisenhower era Americanism so heavily. So if you go to Tivoli. We've both been to Tivoli. You can go to Tivoli and you can kind of forget you're in Denmark. I mean, I know there's Hans Christian Andersen, but in all other respects it could be in the Netherlands or in Sweden. Or Vauxhall. In Vauxhall, exactly. There is no way you could go to Disneyland in California and doubt that you're in an American creation. I mean, the Americanness is everywhere. Almost every ride, even the ones with British themes, you know, reek of Americanness, American patriotism and so on.

[Tom Holland]

So that's why P.L. travers hated it when Walt took her there.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And so to go back one more time to the Cold War era, I think in the smallness, in the individualism and the American patriotism, it's very much a product of that time. But there's also the sense of order and harmony and reassurance that I think reflects the values of the day as well. So to compare it once again with Vauxhall, the Vauxhall Pleasure gardens in the 18th and 19th centuries, the organizers tried to keep kind of 10 disorder and the lower orders obey by charging a shilling and they three shillings. But there was always a suspicion that kind of, you know, reality was breaking in. You know, there were darkened corners where people were drinking or they were sneaking off for erotic assignations. There was always the possibility of hedonism and unruliness. And that's true, I think, with a lot of parks, gaggles of teenagers who've been, you know, necking gin or something.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it's why, I suppose, when Euro Disney opens, there's no alcohol on sale because that has to be guarded against.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Right, the wholesomeness. Yeah. I mean, Coney Island, Blackpool, Pleasure beach, those are places where you go and you have fun. And there's always a suspicion that naughtiness may ensue.

[Tom Holland]

Naughtiness may ensue.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That's never gonna happen at Disneyland. So the future American ambassador to Britain, Nixon's ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, who was a publisher when he went to Disneyland, he said, if there's one word that sums it up, that word is wholesomeness. And he's not wrong. So, for example, the cleanliness is a huge part of Disneyland's ethos. Walt Disney used to go around picking up litter himself. And actually when we were there, Tom, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Bob Iger, the head of Disney, stopping, reaching into the kind of gutter or something and picking up a bit of litter and putting it in the bin. You know, there's sort of almost as an instinctive kind of reflex. And I think what that reflects is that there is an ethos of total order. Nothing unexpected can ever happen at Disneyland. You know, people always say, if you're ever going to lose your child, lose your child at Disneyland. Because there's absolutely no way that anything bad can happen. And you know, your child will be returned to you. And that, of course, is what more highbrow critics always dislike. Because highbrow critics tend to like disorder. You know, they kind of privilege unruliness and hedonism and all those kinds of things. And they find Disneyland too managed and too perfect. But of course, that's what ordinary punters like about it. There's a collection of essays by somebody called Carol Ann Marling. And she talks about the Disney parks. She says it's the architecture of reassurance. You know, there's no right angles, it's all loops, it's all kind of curves.

[Tom Holland]

Like Mickey's ears.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, like Mickey's ears, exactly. It all feels kind of comforting. It feels like there is a gentle sort of paternalistic order that is governing everything. And some people find that cloying and off putting. But frankly, if you go there with a 8 year old or something, you absolutely crave, maybe you don't because you take them to Adrian's Wall where they look miserable in the rain. But I loved going to Disney World as a parent. Cause I thought it was the one place where I could kind of switch off and know that nothing would ever possibly go wrong.

[Tom Holland]

Well, it is. Again, that idea of total control also requires banishment of things that might threaten that control. So there's the slogan, isn't that when you enter Disneyland you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy. Nothing of the present exists in Disneyland. And so you're escaping the news, you're escaping the chaos of the headlines and all of that. And I assume that that is why it's been a kind of perennial theme of science fiction since Disneyland opened, to imagine what would happen if a theme park goes wrong. So in 1973, the novelist Michael Crichton wrote script for a film called Westworld, which was set in a western theme park. And you have animatronic gunslingers, and one of them is played by Yul Brynner, and it all goes wrong. Gunslingers start shooting the guests. And then, of course, in 1990, Michael Crichton published another book on a similar theme called Jurassic park, which was then made into the film by Steven Spielberg. And I have to say, we got taken by Bob Iger behind the scenes at Disney World, which I thought, in a way, was the kind of the biggest privilege I felt going there, because you get to see what normal visitors don't see. And I have to say that walking behind, you know, the Star wars ride or whatever, down these gantries and up ladders and things, the whole time I was waiting for a velociraptor to leap out of a tree and attack us.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, surely you're waiting for that the whole time, though, aren't you, whether you're at Disneyland or not?

[Tom Holland]

I think it felt very Jurassic park behind the scenes.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, but the difference is that, you know, that's not going to happen at Disneyland because it's basically the ultimate safe space, isn't it?

[Tom Holland]

Correct.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Now, some people, I think, will find that a hellish prospect, frankly. I think those people have got no souls, because I love Disneyland, and I say that even before I'd gone with Bob. And actually, I think this is the most enduring thing that Disney created, even more than the films, because I know the films are great. Snow White is a great film, a landmark in Hollywood filmmaking, but not that many people watch those films today. They're period pieces.

[Tom Holland]

They are. But they do establish the kind of the animated tradition, which is, you know, frozen and all of that.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I don't disagree with you at all. But millions of people visit the parks as living kind of breathing things.

[Tom Holland]

Probably billions of people have children who watch films, Disney films on video, and.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

They have been enormously influential architecturally. So as early as 1963, at a conference at Harvard, a developer called James Rouse, who was actually the father of the modern shopping mall, he addressed his audience, who were architects and critics, and he said to them, you know, you may be shocked by this, but my view is that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland in its respect for people and it's functioning for people. Disneyland has more to teach modern planners than any other single piece of physical development in this country.

[Tom Holland]

Well, just to reiterate, it has no cars. I mean, I think that's absolutely crucial to it. Yeah, it's what American tourists to Europe, like when they go to Lucca or Florence or Whatever.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes.

[Tom Holland]

And it's also what they like when they go to Disneyland that you do actually have to walk. I'm amazed American urban planners don't kind of factor that in a little bit more.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I think it's because it's on a human scale. I'll give the last word to a guy called Robert Venturi. So he's the massively influential postmodern architect and he designed the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. He was a massive fan of Disney's parks, and he argued that Disney's parks were the ultimate expression of the kind of city on a hill, American utopian impulse. And he said the best thing about Disney's parks is was that they have come nearer to what people really want than anything that architects have ever given them.

[Tom Holland]

Well, on that laudatory tone, thank you, Dominic. That was fantastic. And coming out tomorrow, as you mentioned, Dominic, an extra special treat for our beloved listeners that may well feature Dominic going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I don't know because I haven't actually seen the film yet, but it'll be very, very good. Very entertaining, I think. Thank you so much. Next week we have one additional Disney bonus. We will be going back to the great films. We'll be placing them in the context of the age that produced them. So that is Snow White through to Bambi. So I hope you enjoy that. And next week, we are going back in time to the young Elizabeth, the girl who will grow up to become Elizabeth I. Her adventures, her scrapes with danger before she became queen. So we will see you then, I hope. But for now, bye bye.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Bye bye. Hi there.

[David Olusoga]

It's David, or the Shoga from Journey Through Time. And here's that extract from our Gunpowder Plot series that I mentioned earlier. The person who's not rejoicing is Guy Fawkes in the Tower. King James himself came to the Tower to question Fawkes. That's quite an astonishing fact that Fawkes and the King looked into each other's.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Eyes at that moment.

[Sarah Churchwell]

And of course, interrogations at this time. I mean, we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned. But interrogations are brutal violence events.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[David Olusoga]

And it's gonna get much, much more violent. Fawkes stands up to the King in a way that actually even impresses the King. He's open that they plan to blow up Parliament. He said that the aim had been to blow King James and the other Scots back to their Scottish mountains. He says that to the King.

[Sarah Churchwell]

It takes guts, but it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the person you've just tried to murder and your fate is in his hands.

[David Olusoga]

Yeah, well, I think Fawkes knows what's going to happen. I mean, the King was impressed by his obstinacy, that he would not reveal the names of his co conspirators, that he was willing to insult the King to his face. And you have to say about Guy Fawkes, a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years, my God, he had guts. I mean, he is a bad man. He is a religious fanatic. He's not somebody I admire. But my God, he was brave. You know, you can be brave and wrong, you can be brave and involved in things that are evil at the same time. And he was all of those things. But this willingness to stand up to the King, this is before the torture.

[Sarah Churchwell]

If you want to hear more about gunpowder, treason and plot, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Olusoga]

Hello, I'm David Ulisoga.

[Sarah Churchwell]

And I'm Sarah Churchwell.

[David Olusoga]

This week on Journey Through Time, we are exploring the story of of the gunpowder plot of 1605, the story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history.

[Sarah Churchwell]

The plan was ruthless. Blow up Parliament, King James I and most of his family all in a single blow.

[David Olusoga]

The series will tell the story of treason and traitors of a group of men led by the charismatic Robert Catesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics was the violent destruction of the Stuart state.

[Sarah Churchwell]

We look at the story of Guy Fawkes, the nation's most famous traitor, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being tortured and killed.

[David Olusoga]

Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Hello history fans. It's Richard Osman and Marina Hyde here from the Rest Is Entertainment Podcast now. If your group chat's buzzing with celebrity traders, fan theories, Alan Carr Gifts and Claudia Winkelman outfit inspiration, then our podcast is the place for you. Every week we've been reacting to new episodes of the biggest show of the year immediately after they air. And this Thursday's final will be no different. Join us for a live Stream debrief at 10:15pm from the ultimate set of.

[Sarah Churchwell]

Traitors fans us just search the rest.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Is entertainment on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Big dogs only.