Disneyland in construction

hi this is tony baxter with walt disney imagineering and we have got some amazing footage here today i've got two people with me i want you to meet that are going to share this journey into a disneyland that no one has ever seen before i'm ed hobelman and i'm with the studio inventory group that helped bring this footage to light and it's a pleasure to be here with tony and one of our newest employees walter magnuson it's great to be here gentlemen right in the middle of us working on this project we had already put about 150 hours into it we found this one very unique reel called waltz reel this was a compilation just of walt disney and his special team he had assembled and what's amazing about that plan that's very accurate to what was actually there on opening day outstanding walt's right is admiral joe fowler and dick irvine and marvin davis they're joining walt they actually broke ground a year ahead of time from the opening day from the time somebody walked through the turnstiles most of the construction though happened within seven months that's seven months to build this entire project roy disney there's a rare glimpse of walt's brother roy he was very very camera shy and smiling yeah he must have known it was gonna work out in the end now this footage everybody has seen on various promotional pieces that the studio did but what you're about to see in this rare footage we have for you coming up is truly amazing what you're going to be seeing today is examples of several areas of disneyland being built through the lens of a time-lapse camera this is amazing this shows how eager walt was to get into the action and see just about every possible angle on what was going on and i think he had kind of a photographic mind that he was able to keep the view of whether it was a motion picture or the park in his head in all the different views anyone would see who would have ever thought of building these massive towers to shoot footage those were the towers erected to put the stop-motion photography on to record the building walt had tremendous experience in doing the nature films recording the blooming of blossoms and the changing of seasons so it was kind of a natural outgrowth of the magic that he knew existed in that time-lapse camera that he was able to take it down to disneyland and take something that if you watched it in real time would have been rather pedestrian but to see these things grow is truly an amazing sight if you look at the trees on the site now except for the jungle cruise area there which is off to the left all the other trees are actually part of the orange groves and orchards that were in the area which were walnut and oranges at the time and then the larger trees on the site are eucalyptus that were used as wind breaks for the santa ana winds which are quite gusty in this area of the orange county we're looking down now i believe towards the parking lot which is now california adventure from the hub so we're looking down main street you're watching now the first steel going up for the buildings that we know as main street off to the far far left of the picture you can see the what is known as the lincoln opera house and at this time it was the staff shop where all the ornamentation and detail was created for disneyland this is a shot of city hall going up so as you enter the park look to your left that is the first building that you'll see city hall and the firehouse with walt's apartment and the jungle cruise foliage had to go in well in advance of everything because they needed to get a growth season in the spring on all that foliage so that was literally done a good six months out compared to everything else in the park for example this construction that's going on right now would have been done just four months prior to the opening and you can see in what raw state it's still in it's really being for me interesting to see how quickly things were done in those days that you went from breaking ground to opening in one year today it would take us that long to do the drawings and so it's extended out with all the rules and regulations that you know are in modern construction as we go through i'll tell you some of the fun stories that i've been told by the people that did this as to how the construction process actually unfolded tony how long did disneyland paris take well we began we opened that park in 92 and it actually began to be designed in about 88 87 so it's five years tomorrow yeah one of the things that's amazing to me about this is that a lot of this would not have been seen if it wasn't for some of the diligent workers in the inventory group who noticed a term on a can that was getting ready to move out of southern california for deep storage in pennsylvania in the salt mines and it said disneyland on it and because the natural curiosity of this individual his name is tim barber he opened it up and we took a look at it together and we saw that it was this construction footage and we're sure that it had not been seen before so we brought it to the attention of our management scott kelly and he gave us the green light to take all this footage all on 16 millimeter koda chrome and transfer it transfer it to a video format that we could use and you know as great as this is ed it's a tease because i've seen over 200 reels of footage that stretches almost from prior to opening up to the 70s and it's just amazing amazing footage someday we're going to have a 400 disc set that would be for our grandkids to enjoy actually if you stretch this footage around the world i think it wraps three times now under that tarp in the middle is what would eventually become the portrait of mickey mouse and flowers it's amazing all the work going on and that takes forever to get that portion of the scene complete they probably put a lot of effort into making sure that mickey looked right from the forced perspective there it begins now because you view it down at eye level which means it had to be stretched vertically almost like an anamorphic mickey walt disney was certainly a master at realizing even the documentation of the building of one of his venues would be important someday as an historical record this is shot from a tower that was used obviously for the time lapse but there are several towers all over the park that were used for the time lapses we're going to get into what you're about to see is the testing of the train here with guests prior to the initial opening day on july 17th in the background check out the smoke stacks from the mark twain going by in time lapse that would be behind the facade and tony what would be on the other side of that facade of main street in the rear would be the back of adventureland it would be the storage area for our little boats that take you out on the excursion and down here in the front right side is the corner of the lincoln building which at this point in time was going gangbusters as the mill it was the first building completed on the site and all the mill work that you see on the facades over there was created in that and put together in that building and then moved out and incorporated into the detail and what with the uh the pilot dirt that we see right behind the train station which becomes our city square what is where do you think that's from i think they were going to use that to pile up against the concrete holding up the train station to create the planters that you walk up the stairway through and so while they're forming all the cement work that you see now in the foreground once that hardened then they could take that dirt and pile it back into the the different planters that kind of create the beauty of it as you walk up into the building now the work going on with the interior there is the second floor which is the pbx office is now for disneyland where when you call a disneyland operator she'll be sitting over here on the right side on the second floor looking down over town square and it still operates that way to this day you're mentioning the the many hours that we have of this footage that has yet to be shown uh we figure that we have recorded around 200 hours but after a while we decided to not transfer everything and there must be literally three to four hundred hours of this footage there's that gazebo yeah the the moving gazebo the gazebo was originally intended by walt to be in the town square and when you got down into town square it blocked the view of the castle so near the opening date of disneyland they moved it out and it appeared then up at the plaza gardens area and then ultimately was moved out to where new orleans square is today now the town hall here uh city hall is uh rumored to be based on a building in colorado and again the trees that back up that area are all eucalyptus and brought in many years before the opening of disneyland to work as a windbreak to protect the orange trees now tony city hall is more to scale than the other buildings on main street correct it is because the upper floor was used as the operational offices leading up to disneyland's opening and then for many years that was where all the publicity and handling of the press and everything was done from that upper floor so those are functional offices and then of course the little fire station we all know is walt disney's apartment and he would literally arrive down here on a friday afternoon and spend the whole weekend there surveying i think we'll see some shots of walt riding around in the park later on according to our timeline we're about three months out in a few days from the opening here comes our gazebo here it is working its way down and oh my gosh you can't see the castle so away it goes after they get it all set up i love the ability to mold and shape things and you hear walt say that in many of his pieces about disneyland that he loves that it's alive and can be changed in like a movie that once it's in the can it's finished and something as dramatic as that changing the whole centerpiece of town square to become the flagpole that we know today is pretty amazing we're looking now to tomorrowland through that gap between the main street buildings was that was going to be where international street was yeah and there was on opening day it said coming soon international street and the fence that was that barricade to keep the guests from seeing it is still there to this day so we're still waiting for international street you'll have to go to epcot to see world showcase yeah i was gonna say that that shot that you just saw there was from a crane moving behind the facade now there's the beginning of that red concrete lately we've been replacing it with uh cobblestone pavers which gives it a more authentic look but everything at disneyland to get it all in for the price of 17 million dollars on opening day was pretty amazing and they had to be very resourceful you notice there's no handrails around those planters they didn't know what the guests were going to when you get 25 000 people in the park they start walking on the grass the shortcuts you take yeah i think we're starting in tomorrowland and that highway in the background right in front of the orange grove is harbor boulevard and you're going to watch the moon ride flight to the moon up here very quickly and all of this was near the end they didn't really know what they were going to do on tomorrowland until ward kimball did the man in space television series and that really kicked it into high gear as to you know getting uh out there but it was way late we're already into may two months from the opening when you're watching this footage and it literally made it just to the finish line i'm not sure if the ride was actually open on opening day it may have been delayed a couple of days but for the press they were able to go in and see a good part of the show but i don't think it was actually open to the public for a few days now tony i've heard you tell a story about the crane being featured in some of the artwork yeah we're gonna see when the lunar rocket arrives in a minute which was only days like 10 days before opening and they set it up and they got the publicity people out there and they took a really great shot which was made into a silk screen a beautiful silkscreen piece that we sold in the disney gallery many times and i always wondered what is that crane and it turns out it was actually the construction crane and whoever shot the picture and painted the painting just thought it was part of there's the crane and if you see any of that original artwork you'll see that crane actually in the picture as though it's a part of the gantry or something and you know what did i know as a seven-year-old kid it looked great to me so they had to hold it in the air while they actually attached the landing gear here and we are about 10 days from the opening of this attraction and i can't believe that doing what i do uh with walt disney imagineering if we were 10 days away and and the facility looked like this i can tell you everyone that i work for would be having a heart attack okay we're now only four days before the opening of this attraction and uh it looked really good watch the umbrellas and things arrive here in the next few moments out in the front and they just squeaked by believe me the tomorrowland was probably the the least complete land it was yeah there are the umbrellas they're all in and we're now three days away and this is how it looked just probably a day or so before it was the least complete the autopia was the big attraction and it's still one of our favorites today it's the first time kids get a chance to drive wait a minute where are the guide rails for the cars there aren't any you could literally pass you know you could take and go around the car if they were going slow this is another shot now the lake there is the phantom boat lagoon and it is kind of representative of the fact they're not out there they never were out there i think it was the least ridden attraction in all of disneyland it's just is this some what's this interesting shot here well there's walt disney and uh i don't think to my knowledge there's ever been a shot of walt riding a bicycle but that must have been a great way to get around disneyland when there weren't any rides open now we're in fantasyland and straight in the center of this shot is the castle where that guy is digging he's starting to dig out the castle and you're gonna watch that come up now that is a snow white building and what is now uh you know pinocchio and over here is peter pan and beyond that mr toad alice was not part of the opening day so now we're watching the foundation between those two buildings going up you're gonna watch the castle come out of the ground and we'll go all the way through to the testing of the drawbridge and uh it's quite a remarkable bit of footage fiberglass was a material that came into being in the mid 50s so it was still a miracle so you don't see as much of it at this point in time it was something that they used for the white crenellations the corbels there on those turrets the white portions are fiberglass the rest is uh traditional lath plaster and carved stonework those actually look like church windows behind the turrets yes there's a chapel there and the other interesting thing is it was so derivative of the movie sleeping beauty that the castle is sort of heralding yet four years away you know so it was sleeping beauty's castle they knew they were going to do this movie but it was four years away but you know i think the strength of the disney brand and their conviction that they were going to get it right they were willing to go out on a limb and build something that was going to honor a movie that was yet four four years away the whole gothic look of that chapel is so much a part of what ivan durrell put into the motion picture and in fact ivan was hired by walt to come down and do the show that was inside this castle which is more or less a preview of the movie it was open i think in 1957 two years after the park opened and for two years it operated giving guests a really neat preview of what the movie was going to be like now is that a different experience than we have now where you walk up the stairs and you go through each view it was very very different it had that you know just stunning ivan girl stylization now there goes the driver you see the drawbridge there now when was the last time that drawbridge came down well when we rebuilt fantasyland in 83 we decided let's see if it still works and doggone it it did so that's pretty long span between the two openings now this is interesting this is going to be a captain hook's pirate ship which we all know is the chicken of the sea tuna boat and it was built in the mill where lincoln is now and as you can see moved across the park to its location and again like the flight to the moon this was one of the attractions that was right at the end so we're looking at this gosh it's only a couple of weeks from opening and if you do get a chance to look at the footage that's in the kinescope opening day of disneyland you can see that the boat was painted red it's black and white but you can tell they put paint on it and there were no details none of the beautiful gold filigree work was on it was just a piece of wood that had been painted red and that's about as far as they could get on that opening day now where uh other than the fact that it was damaged and thus destroyed where were you planning on putting this in the fantasyland rehab in the early 80s well we carved out a space right at the end of the ride where currently you come out into uh eric's castle area as you leave the ride and it was just north of that towards small world and so someday but much of this boat is salvaged and in the current peter pan ride all the pieces that we could lift off of it and restore into the peter pan ride itself painted in black light and the entire boat was duplicated for disneyland paris and you can visit it with skull rock cove and everything in disneyland paris in orientation due to today where is this in disneyland it is exactly on the footprint of the dumbo ride that's what i know and behind it you can see what is now storybook land and the casey junior railroad at the time there was nothing but dirt and they didn't know what they were going to do with it so they called it canal boats of the world and the rumor is that bill evans who is the great legendary landscape architect for disneyland labeled the weeds so that the ride operators talked about overlay vulgaris and various things along the way so yeah those uh wooden trestles are now all beautiful rock work and so forth this is the start of the carousel now the carousel was moved back to where in this early disneyland the teacup ride is and that gave us much more space in front of snow white and peter pan and those facades were built further out to give us a longer ride so both snow white and peter pan today are longer rides than they were in the versions that were created back here in 1955. now this is an interesting view of the castle this almost looks like the front yes although from town see those three arches that is a lift from the neuschwanstein uh castle in southern germany and that was the original front of the disneyland castle and they were taking the model apart to vacuum it one day and walt came by and they quickly put that top back on and they put it on backwards and that is the view that everyone sees today because when wallace said i kind of like it that way better than the way it was originally so the neuschweinstein vista of our castle is actually the back now rather than the front well we're moving now to frontierland and you get a good sense of the density of the orange groves there this is fowler harbor it's still pretty much intact as it was on opening day in fact we are often restoring the mark twain in the same direction that is the mark twain in the upper left yes that's the base of the mark twain the base of the mark twain with the boiler has been installed on it now the actual detailing of that boat was done at the studio and then these pieces of woodwork and fretwork were all shipped down to disneyland now we got a lot going on here they tried filling the rivers of america and it drained out because the ground in anaheim is so sandy it just went right through it so they had to line it with clay to get the water to stay in place and down in the foreground is a very interesting predecessor of new orleans square this is sort of near where the french market is today a little closer to the river and it's an odd building because the side where you can see the gables towards the water was themed as new orleans and it was called the chicken plantation but the backside that we're looking at was themed to kind of a hacienda and gave it kind of a very early california western look so there are a lot of buildings in disneyland that had two faces that way and definitely something that would come only to someone who was familiar with backlots in hollywood where they could get double usage out of the same structure this is an odd view it's looking into frontierland proper and off to the far right is just the edge of the jungle cruise and off the edge of the screen on the left side is the rivers of america and in the center we're watching the golden horseshoe come up down in the foreground is a bridge that in the early days connected the water of adventureland over to the rivers of america and in the middle now you'll see the golden horseshoe footprint just starting to take place in the dead center of this up at the top is the castle in work in the background now that's the first start of the golden horseshoe those steel beams are uh in the main auditorium portion of the of the building speaking of that bridge between the two bodies of water you can see that in disneyland usa the restoration in the disc set uh it's a great aerial view showing the connection walt was a genius with making things appealing for kids and to get to tom sawyer island you had to go underneath that bridge in the kind of place that a kid would go down in and build a raft to sail away where he was hidden in secret there's in the back you can see the front face of the chicken plantation familiar disney icon here davy crockett and his sidekick russell and they were often brought down to kind of help promote disneyland for the television shows but this footage i don't believe has ever been seen on any of the things that were released to uh well we're actually getting so close opening day i think they brought them down for an extra pair of hands yeah yeah we're gonna see a little log work actually go on here with the guys pitching in yeah i don't know how much of this he's actually done for a living but and we don't want you to try this at home no he's got to be hot because this was in july i had to be close to the end this is probably early july kind of a jump cut there too where we were testing the boats they brought in different you know groups from the studio and what not to try things out walt's anniversary was held on the mark twain and in the golden horseshoe a few weeks before opening this is a model of adventureland i've never seen it in color other than it was installed at disneyland in a preview center area and resided there many years but i've never seen it photographed in color so this is kind of again a very unique element some of this was used in early television shows but of course it almost looks like they put davy crockett at the front yeah or it's indiana jones and this is about where today you'll find the piranhas just after uh schweitzer falls now there again is that stand of eucalyptus which is there to this day and provides a great blockage so you don't get the very radically different quality of main street from the jungle it's beautifully obscured by that row of trees i'm going to point out a couple of trees in here the two large palms stood at the front of ron dominguez's house which was on the property and was sold to wall and they were beautiful full-size specimens of pumps and we to this day call that the dominguez palm and when you're getting your next fast pass for the indiana jones ride take a look at what's right to your um right and and you'll see that that palm that's in the picture right now and ron dominguez was the owner of the property he was the son and he went on to become a ride operator at disneyland and actually became the head of running disneyland for many many years the two trees that are upside down there became banyan roots those were walnut trees and bill evans got the idea of cutting the roots off turning them upside down and making them look like amazing jungle gnarly old stumps and i thought it was beautiful because again they were trying to get the most value out of everything they could and those were left over from the orange girls we're looking out towards the hub this facility here was the adventureland veranda which eventually became the tiki room now harper goff who was the art director on the jungle cruise and also did 20 000 leagues under the sea and the vikings and willy wonka and the chocolate factory told me a wonderful story that is very different from how we would design the layout for this jungle ride he took a stick and with the bulldoze operator he drew what would be the left side of the water and then went about 10 feet over and drew what was the right side of the water and then he said all right take all the dirt in between these two lines and pile it up and make the banks on either side of this and that was how they carved out this ride so they didn't have to haul the dirt away they didn't have to do any drawings or anything they just you know did it right there with two guys working in the field it's amazing amazing how beautiful the track layout is i think it's one of the most convoluted trails you can imagine and then so doing makes it seem like you've gone all over and this is harper harper with his model of the rock work for schweitzer falls and i think having the backlot art direction they knew how to do this applying the metal lath on a paper base and then shooting it with what's called gunite like you'd do a swimming pool and then another layer of cement after that stride is put on and that is actually carved to get the beautiful textures and we still do this pretty much basically the same today and the finish is so permanent that the matterhorn and many of the structures like schweitzer falls are still there 50 some years later now this is from our piranha pool looking back at schweitzer falls and back into the native encampment there's again one of those upside down trees and this is the beginning of the temple in the jungle and i think you're going to see some guys doing the incredible work of aging this all down again a studio technology that you wouldn't have found in the labor market today a lot of people are doing this for people's backyards but at the time you know you couldn't find anything like that were most of these technicians laborers were they from the studio no but i think they were uh the foreman and so forth were brought down from the studio to train the crews and then in the case of the painting i believe that was all studio labor and artisans now this machine is actually bending the track you can see the guys sliding it as it makes that curve and there would be a limit to the tightness of the radius that that boat could do so they had to be completely accurate on it so that the tail end of the boat didn't slam into the the banks of this amazingly carved out river that was two sticks drawing lines in the dirt now the tower didn't last very long again those are the two palm trees from dominguez estate this was a beautiful loading dock and i don't know why it was taken out other than i heard that the jungle grew up so much that the idea of watching the boats from that top deck became a moot point we're at the studio here and these creatures are being done again by the studio technicians who would have brought to life the giant squid the year before in the movie twenty thousand leagues under the sea so this is again leveraging the talents that were working in the industry at that time one of the things that's fun and and it's in a lot of other you know already shown television works is always bringing these creatures down the santa ana freeway and yeah i always like to see them on the back of the trucks and pirates and animals and dinosaurs and this is kind of tricky again did one get away from us i don't know you notice that's what we call free animation when the bouncing of that rhinoceros causes the ears to wiggle we'll often call that free animation because you don't have to pay to have an actuator in there to do it now all the figures that appeared at disneyland whether they were native americans or natives in the jungle here were modeled after a famous actor of that era woody strode who was you've probably all seen him in the movie the ten commandments he was the king of ethiopia and harper goff convinced him to come down and he was a very well-built man and they were able to get that casting here are the two baby rhinos with their free animation there it looks like they're on springs but it was a really incredibly done and yet simple technology now the jungle cruise was hollowed out and made deeper wherever there was animation in the water these didn't look very like these these are so scary pretty scary yeah they i think they may have been gone before the first year they found out how bad the elements are on actual real fur and the studio had to develop ways around that now those are all the different control wires that you know make one item come to life this may or may not be the first time water was going in but since it's in dirt i think it's probably a test to see how it's going to work before they go night at the actual canal which would have been later so they just wanted to make sure it was all level since they used such scientific methods as drawing a track with a stick they probably had to find out where water sought a level and then marked that and adjusted so that the boats weren't going downhill or uphill and everything worked out i don't know if i'd want to go down underneath that boat or not i certainly would not want to do it today oh this is a great shot because today even if you went to google you wouldn't be able to get a look down into the water because it's such an overgrown amazing real jungle today but at this time you could really look at how fantastic that layout is of making absolute use of every bit of the square footage this is again the terrace which is the adventureland veranda it later became the tahitian terrace and was added to with the tiki room in the front side which is is the plaza pavilion now olive trees were used because they grow really nicely in southern california and i'm kind of pleased to say i have three of those original olive trees in my yard when they were going to be taken out three years ago i was able to procure them and they have all the twinkle lights and still going beautifully here we are in the jungle cruise and this is an interesting group of folks in here i think gail storm who is my little margie is driving the boat in that scene and walt is right behind her and then next up is harper goff who designed the adventureland attraction now we're thinking this is probably a good few months before opening yeah it's again the jungle was well well along it was very important to walt to get that jungle growing and make it green by opening day so they had to get the big plants in and then start the ground cover covering you can still see a lot of dirt there and just in case something happened with the boat you have the diver with you that's right because no one knew how it was going to make all those guys yeah that back side of water is dangerous yeah if it was a little too sharp the back end could lift out of the the track groove and uh here we come to the most dangerous part of the journey as we all know the return to civilization in those california freeways as the boat comes in i think walt takes the wheel away from gail storm and pilots us into the home stretch here which is kind of neat a great shot there are those upside down walnut trunks and they put sphagnum moss with bromeliads in the top to make them look exotic but they are from the original orchard again looking at this footage i'm amazed especially with the walt footage of the attention to detail that he would bring his creativity his innovation down into the ride construction and the supervision itself to me when you realize that nothing like this has been done before it's absolutely something that could have only come out of the industry of hollywood and taking that to another step and this has just been such a great opportunity to go back to the pages of time and look at something that was truly a transformation in america

Channel: Stef

Views: 1,080,531

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Id: rItAd9FuIDo

Length: 37min 40sec (2260 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Blu_Crew]

Ive seen this before but watched it again. Thanks! Do you know if theres more footage like this? They said there was much more but dont know if they have it edited nicely like this one. Thanks

[u/rolfraikou]

The title suggests it's just the footage of the timelapse. Instead we get an entire special about the construction? XD

Thank you. XD

[u/aesthet1c]

Absolutely incredible. My wife and I just watched it and were left both inspired and in awe.