Read Any Good Theme Park Books, Lately?
Stocking up on books about theme parks.
It looks like we are in for a historic work stoppage in the production of movies and television by both the writer’s and performer’s guilds. Given the distance of the demands of these unions from the agreements the studios seem willing to make, it may be some time before any screen entertainment goes into production again.
Fret not. Let us turn lemons into lemonade! Now might be a perfect time to start accumulating some books to read during the upcoming months of reruns, and what better topic to go on a deep dive into than theme parks?
It seems that every year another huge batch of books about the parks is being published. It would be impossible to read them all, but here are some of my favorites that have stuck with me through the years.
Let’s start with four great books by a single author, Sam Gennawey.
In a time when no one thought there was anything left to say about the history of Disneyland, Gennawey proved everyone wrong with his book The Disneyland Story: The Unofficial Guide to the Evolution of Walt Disney’s Dream (2014). The amount of surprising detail in this book is no dry list of facts. Gennawey treats the park as a developing child watching its evolution from a curious, experimental, often erratic person through its increasing awareness of its own stature and importance and then to a burgeoning sophistication.
I can’t emphasize enough how many things I learned in this book that decades of reading on this subject had never taught me before. The book does start to lose steam in the late-Eisner era, but the richness of the material up to that point more than makes up for it.
Universal versus Disney: The Unofficial Guide to American Theme Parks’ Greatest Rivalry (2015) is Gennawey’s take on the war of escalation between the Disney and Universal Parks. The book seems to assume that the reader is acquainted with Disneyland’s history (hopefully having learned it from Gennawey’s previous offering) and then brings them up to speed on Universal’s.
The meat of this book is the escalating conflict between Michael Eisner’s Disney empire and Jay Stein’s Universal — portraying Stein and the rest of his people as almost shockingly fierce competitors, willing to risk completely burning their own business to the ground as payback for some of Eisner’s more suspect moves against Universal.
It’s a surprising and riveting story that forms the origin of much modern theme park scholarship.
Gennawey tried repeatedly to interview Jay Stein for his Universal versus Disney book and was repeatedly turned down. As the book was going to press, however, he was surprised to receive a phone call from Stein wondering why he hadn’t been consulted. Gennawey wanted his story, but it was too late to incorporate into the previous book; so he wrote another one, JayBangs: How Jay Stein, MCA, & Universal Invented the Modern Theme Park and Beat Disney at Its Own Game (2016).
JayBangs is more of a first-person memoir of one of the theme park industry’s most colorful characters than it is any sort of objective history, and it’s a delight.
I am 78 years old, Sid is 80+, Lew is dead, Jules is dead, Drabinsky is in jail, Katzenberg and Spielberg probably don’t want to be interviewed; Eisner will probably say I’m lying when he learns what I could show you. You be the judge. I’m determined to get history right. Would you like to interview me and examine my evidence as to what happened? Let me know. — Jay Stein to Sam Gennawey
Finally, we take a look at Gennawey’s first book, his most esoteric, Walt and the Promise of Progress City (2011).
Gennawey is an urban planner by profession and, thus, well credentialed to take on the history of Walt’s original plans for EPCOT. Leaving no stone unturned in researching Disney’s concepts for his experimental city — including a deep dive into the urban planners that Walt had shown interest in — Gennawey attempts to put the new city together as a thought exercise, showing the possible successes and potential pitfalls of the plan.
At the end of the book, the author speculates on whether or not Disney could’ve pulled it off, discussing it with people who had been involved in the project directly. The answers are surprising and thought-provoking.
Now that we’re out of Gennawey-land, let’s look at something much lighter, Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland (1994) by David Koenig.
I don’t think the author would mind me describing this book as a work of trivia because the book revels in trivial things. Being almost three decades old it is certainly out of date as well. It is hard to deny, however, that this book is laugh-out-loud funny.
A look at insider stories from cast members, Mouse Tales is a delightful shaking up of the Disneyland image to expose a little of the absurdity of dressing up as a five-foot-tall mouse for a living.
Leslie Iwerks is a wonderful writer and filmmaker with a hell of a pedigree. She is the daughter of Disney Legend, Imagineer Don Iwerks, and the granddaughter of the other person who can lay legitimate claim on the creation of Mickey Mouse: seminal animator Ub Iwerks. Leslie Iwerks is so much more than her connections, however. With sixteen very well-regarded documentary features under her belt, she is a respected filmmaker and, now, with this companion book to her documentary series The Imagineering Story (2019) she has shown herself as a respectable writer as well.
No mere supplement to the documentary series, The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering (2022) is a 750-page re-examination of Iwerks’ research into the seventy-year history of Walt Disney Imagineering. It not only expands on what information was in the documentary but also heads down different pathways, exploring the further complexities of the work of an Imagineer and the triumphs that come with the unique WDI mindset.
The reader may find, as I did, that even with topics in which I thought I was uninterested, I was fascinated.
Here’s a piece I wrote about Imagineering, technical debt, and Ub and Don Iwerks.
Claude Coats: Walt Disney’s Imagineer from Old Mill Press
While I’ve deliberately avoided picture-heavy books on this list, Claude Coats: Walt Disney’s Imagineer — The Making of Disneyland (2021) meets me halfway. Disney historian and a former creative director for Walt Disney Animation, Dave Bossert, has written a thoroughly well-researched book about Walt’s renaissance man who was hand-picked to found the organization that became Walt Disney Imagineering.
Coats could do pretty much everything and this lavishly illustrated book shows it. Hardly a single classic Disney park attraction didn’t have Coats’ involvement in some significant way. This book is an affectionate, and hefty, tribute to his genius.
And finally, I’d like to recommend the greatest books about Disneyland that aren’t, in fact, books.
They are magazines.
In the ’80s and ’90s, when the internet was not at such a roar and doing this kind of research meant that you had to reach out to actual people and talk to them, brothers Leon and Jack Janzen began to do just that. This was a time when a great many people who’d worked on the parks at the beginning and who had had direct interactions with Walt Disney were still around and available to talk to.
The Janzens leaped in and, from 1986–2009, they published The “E” Ticket, a magazine filled with information about the early theme parks that was gleaned directly from primary sources. Filled with interviews and illustrations (often by the brothers themselves), the workings of early Disneyland became clear in a way few had understood before.
No more loving of a tribute to Disneyland exists than these magazines and the Walt Disney Family Museum has kept many of them in print and available.
So that’s my guide to starting a theme park reading collection for the upcoming media dry spell. There are hundreds if not thousands more books. I’d love to hear about ones you’ve loved.
Read any good theme park books lately?
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
