Disney’s Land by Richard Snow (review)

The phrase is ubiquitous. It is the subject if numerous memes. It adorns construction barriers in Disney’s theme parks. Walt speaks it in “Celebrate the Magic,” a short series of clips that used to precede the fireworks at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. I came across it an article published just today.

Moving from the singular first-person to the plural, the line encapsulates the usual mythos of Disney’s theme parks: in the 65 years since Disneyland first opened, Walt Disney’s unique theme park has become a part of our national cultural heritage.

But according to Richard Snow’s Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World, it wasn’t Walt Disney who first used the phrase “it was all started by a mouse.” Jack Sayers, the director of public relations, had uttered the remark in passing, and Van Arsdale France used it the training sessions he developed for the men and women who would soon work in the park.

One could interpret this as the kind of appropriation of which Walt Disney is often accused. At least since Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version (1968), scholars and biographers have criticized Walt Disney’s tendency to include only his own name (very prominently, at that) on works that are by nature a collaborative effort.

A different criticism of Disney has arisen in the last six months, as Disney World in Florida has become a metonym for misplaced priorities during the pandemic. 2020 was only the third time in Disneyland’s history that the park shut its doors (the first two were on a day of mourning for John F. Kennedy and on September 11, 2001). Last week the company laid off 28,000 workers, in what some suggest is a political move to pressure California governor Gavin Newsome to relax the restrictions that keep Disneyland closed. Disney has opened its other parks, in Florida and around the world, and it’s plausible to read that decision, and the pressure on California, as merely a grab at profits.

But Snow’s book (published just before the pandemic) is a history, not a critique. Reading Disney’s Land reminds us that the famous theme park is more than one man’s dream. Snow credits Disneyland’s success to a range of individuals, from business consultants and landscape architects to animal trainers and engineers.

An exemplary instance of the collaborative efforts that went into Disneyland is the decision about the park’s location.

Walt Disney originally wanted to build the park across the street from the studio, in Burbank, and he hired two architects, Charles Luckman and William Pereira, who at the time were working on Marineland, the world’s largest oceanarium. He worked with them only briefly, unable fully to convey the narrative continuity he hoped his park would achieve. He soon determined that the set designers from his own studio were better positioned to bring it to life. But his ideas kept expanding beyond the small property he had initially considered. Luckman had put him in touch with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and two SRI consultants, the economist Harrison “Buzz” Price and the Texan salesman C. V. Wood, were tasked with finding an appropriate location and gauging its “economic feasibility.” They finally settled on Anaheim, but two initial attempts to surreptitiously purchase enough land were foiled by real estate agents who caught wind of the plan and outbid them. Finally, Disney’s representatives enlisted the help of city manager Keith Murdoch, who maneuvered to close a public road, ensuring Disney could purchase continuous tracts. He also managed to incorporate into Anaheim portions of the property which had previously been part of Orange County (with a higher tax rate).

Disney’s Land is filled with stories like this, about the men and women who made Disneyland possible. Snow doesn’t omit well-known names like John Hench and Marty Sklar, but he devotes ample pages to Roger Broggie, who worked on many attractions as head of the studio’s machine shop; Herb Ryman and Bill Walsh, who produced (respectively) the aerial drawing and the mission statement that Disney used to pitch his park to television networks; Rear Admiral Joseph W. Fowler, who would be responsible for Disneyland’s riverboat; Jack and Bill Evans, the gardeners who took charge of the landscaping; Edward Morgan and Karl Bacon, whose Arrow Development Company would produce many of Disneyland’s rides; Harriet Burns, the first woman imagineer, who built scale models of the park; Bob Gurr, initially hired for Autopia but eventually building, so the legend goes, everything at Disneyland with wheels; Ruth Shellhorn, the landscape architect who created the transitions between the different lands; and many more.

Diehard fans may know these names, many of whom are listed as Disney Legends, but the strength of Snow’s book is how he weaves their contributions together into a fascinating narrative. 

The individuals whose stories Snow tells are just a few among the tens of thousands of employees (the Florida property is the largest single-site employer in the world). And besides the content of his compelling narrative, Snow’s tone of undisguised admiration reminds us that mass gatherings and popular entertainments will be a thing of the future.

Some day, the current pandemic will be another example of the funding roadblocks, mechanical failures, and negative press coverage that (as Snow tells us) have been part of Disneyland’s history since its inception. Some day, we will have fun again. And until then, there are worse ways to spend quarantine than reading this book.