Showing posts with label Disneyland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disneyland. Show all posts

July 17 - Happy Birthday, Disneyland!

 Posted on July 17, 2021


This is an update of my post published on July 17, 2010:



Born on this day in 1955 (the date it was dedicated during a televised press preview), Disneyland is 55 years old today. The park is located in Anaheim, California.

Walt Disney designed and supervised the building of Disneyland. Today the Walt Disney Company has lots more theme parks (including California Adventure, next to Disneyland; Magic Kingdom and Epcott Center, at Disney World in Florida; and Disneylands in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Paris). But the original Disneyland is the only one designed and supervised by Walt Disney himself.

Disneyland has the most cumulative attendance (total attendance from all years) of any theme park in the world, with close to 600 million guests so far since 1955. In 2019, Disneyland was the second most visited theme park in the world, with more than 18 million visitors. And it was. in second place compared to Disney's Magic Kingdom, in Florida!

But this major success story was not without its birth pains:

Apparently July 17, 1955, was not as smooth a dedication day as could have been hoped. An affair for invited celebrities and press only, including TV host Art Linkletter and then-actor Ronald Reagan, there were more visitors with counterfeit tickets than with real tickets (11,000 people were expected, and 28,154 people came)!



It was hot (101 degrees Fahrenheit), and the fresh asphalt got gooey. There was a plumbers' strike that meant that the drinking fountains didn't work, a gas leak closed part of the park for part of the day, and some vendors ran out of food.

The park got quite a bit of bad press. 

Disney and others later referred to the day as “Black Sunday.”

Still, the opening of the park to the public was scheduled for the very next day, and crowds began to line up at 2 a.m. for tickets. Around 50,000 people attended on Monday, July 18, 1955.

I can't quite imagine how much fun those people had, with 50,000 people trying to ride the 20 original attractions!

For sure, there can be problems and discomforts with a visit to D-Land, but I have been there bunches of times, and for my family it has been, as billed, one of the Happiest Places on Earth!





Do the Theme Park Thing

Design an amusement park around a theme. 
How about a Percy Jackson and the Olympians Park? Or a park called Planets of the Universe?

 


 
Play a video game in which you build a virtual theme park. Check out these games.

Do the Disney Thing with a Disney movie marathon.









(Third Saturday in July)




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July 26 - Wonderland Premiere!

Posted on July 26, 2020

The world met Alice of Wonderland fame in 1865, when an Oxford (England) mathematics scholar and teacher named Charles Dodgson published his children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He used the pen name Lewis Carroll and later wrote a sequel called Through the Looking-Glass.

What a lot of success those Alice books had! Never out of print; translated into more than 90 languages; adapted for movies, plays, art, radio, board games, computer games, rock songs (!), and even amusement park rides!!!

The Alice in Wonderland ride at Disney.
Above, outdoors. Below, inside scene from the ride.

One of the big-time favorite adaptations of the Alice books is Walt Disney's classic "all-cartoon Musical Wonderfilm," Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland. On this date in 1951, the "wonderfilm" made its world premiere in London.

But this beloved film had a bumpy start! Disney first tried to make a feature-length movie that was live-action (an actress playing Alice) combined with animation (the talking animals and bizarre Wonderland setting) in the 1930s. However, Paramount made a live-action movie of Alice in Wonderland in 1933, so Disney decided to work on another favorite story, Snow White.

Tenniel's Alice
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was such a huge hit that Disney was able to buy the film rights for Alice - complete with the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel - in 1938. He hired a storyboard artist to develop the story and concept art for the film, but that artist's vision for the movie was too dark and the Tenniel-like characters were too difficult to animate, in Disney's opinion. At that point World War II had begun, and Disney was in the middle of projects like Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. 

So Alice was put aside...

After the conclusion of WWII, Disney approached another writer (an author now known for the dystopian Brave New World, Aldous Huxley) to write a script adapting Alice. Huxley wrote a complicated story that involved the author and the child who inspired the Alice books both being misunderstood and persecuted after the books came out - but the happy ending was that Queen Victoria liked the books and so then everyone else followed suit! Wow, what a switcheroo from writing a movie version of the books themselves!

Around that time, maybe in 1946, an artist named Mary Blair submitted her ideas for Wonderland - illustrations that were quite, quite different from Tenniel's black-and-white images. In fact, Blair's Wonderland was whimsical and brightly colored. 

Blair ended up providing the direction that Disney decided to take for a fully animated movie.



As I said, the movie finally premiered on this date in 1951. But...it was pretty much a flop! Critics didn't love it; some British critics said that Disney had "Americanized" the beloved book, hinting that such Americanization had ruined it. Disney wasn't too fazed by the critics, but families didn't show up to the box office, either. I mean, obviously, a lot did - but the movie ended up being a loss of about a million dollars, on that first release.
However: television. Walt Disney was getting into TV-biz, and he released a drastically shortened version of Alice on his television show, and it did really well.

And then, of all things, the college market. Alice became the most rented film in some cities, with lots of sold-out screenings on college campuses. It turned out that Jefferson Airplane had released a song "White Rabbit" and folks who were into all things "psychedelic" loved the bright and unreal settings. 


Speaking of rentals, Alice in Wonderland was one of the first Disney titles released on VHS videotape, in 19181, for rental and retail sale, and it was popular enough to launch a Gold Classic version with extra content. 

By the way, a theatrical re-release also occurred in the U.S. in 1981, and had occurred a few years earlier in the U.K.

With all of that action in the 1970s and 1980s, you'd better believe that reviewers gave the movie - which was now a classic - some pretty big thumbs up!





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