“Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.” — Walt Disney
Disneyland turns sixty-two on Monday, July 17. When Walt Disney opened the Park in 1955, he had a special place in his heart for each of the five lands of Disneyland. Main Street USA, and Frontierland were realms of America’s past. Tomorrowland was a time machine into the future. Adventureland took Walt’s guests to the steamy equatorial jungles of the world.
But Walt’s favorite land, the place he called “The Happiest Land of Them All” — was Fantasyland. Walk through Sleeping Beauty Castle, and you find yourself in an alternate reality, a realm of pure imagination. Walt loved fantasy — the art of making the impossible possible.
The first cartoons Walt produced in his Laugh-O-gram studio in 1922 were fantasy tales — Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and more. In his feature films — from the psychedelic pink elephants in Dumbo to the haunting surrealism of Fantasia to the frenetic madness of Alice in Wonderland — Walt created strangeness and fantasy on a level never seen before.
When Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí journeyed to California in 1937, he was determined to meet Walt Disney. He later wrote to poet André Breton and said, “I have come to Hollywood and am in contact with the three great American Surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille, and Walt Disney.”
When Disneyland opened in 1955, Fantasyland was a Surrealist dream sculpted out of stone, wood, and concrete, bounded on the south by Sleeping Beauty Castle and on the north by Captain Hook’s pirate ship. On opening day, Fantasyland offered just six attractions — King Arthur Carrousel, Peter Pan’s Flight, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Snow White’s Adventures, the Mad Tea Party, and the Canal Boats of the World. Rides were priced from 10 to 35 cents — and admission to the park was just one dollar.
The Dumbo Flying Elephants weren’t running on opening day — they couldn’t get off the ground. The flying Dumbos were built at Disney’s Burbank studios, then shipped to Anaheim and attached to the ride mechanism. When engineers tested the ride, the elephants went around and around but were too heavy to fly. The elephants were grounded for a month while new, more powerful motors were installed. The attraction opened on August 16, 1955.
Another troubled Fantasyland attraction was the Casey Jr. Circus Train. Originally planned as a roller coaster, the little locomotive was supposed to speed up and down steep hills and through tight turns, giving riders a circus-themed thrill ride. In test runs, the train couldn’t make it up the hill. It would stall, then roll backwards. Walt’s engineers pulled up the track, made the hills less steep, and settled for the gentle little excursion we know today. Casey Jr. opened two weeks late on July 31, 1955.
The Canal Boats of the World was one of the oddest attractions at Disneyland. Walt had run out of time and money, so there was nothing to see from the Canal Boats but dirt and weeds. Cast members nicknamed it “Mud Banks of the World.” The Canal Boats were shut down in September 1955, and artist Ken Anderson led a team of Imagineers in transforming the Canal Boats ride. They created miniature scenes from Disney fairytale classics — the houses of The Three Little Pigs, the English village of Alice, Pinocchio’s village, and more. Renamed the Storyland Canal Boats, the attraction reopened the following year.
The gateway to Fantasyland is Sleeping Beauty Castle. It’s about seven stories tall, but looks even taller because of forced perspective — using larger design elements at ground level and increasingly smaller design elements at higher levels to create the illusion of greater height. At Walt’s insistence, the spires of Sleeping Beauty Castle are clad in genuine 22-karat gold leaf.
The ABC-TV network showcased the opening of Disneyland in a ninety-minute live TV special called Dateline: Disney. The show was hosted by TV personality Art Linkletter, along with co-hosts Ronald Reagan and Robert Cummings. During the live broadcast, guests opened an unlocked maintenance door and went inside the Castle. They found the dark and forbidden interior of Sleeping Beauty Castle to be full of ladders, scaffolding, and feral cats. A couple of Disneyland executives discovered the intrusion and chased the intruders out.
Though Fantasyland had its problems — elephants that wouldn’t fly, a train that wouldn’t go, and intruders storming the Castle — most of Fantasyland worked brilliantly on opening day. The King Arthur Carrousel, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the whirling teacups of the Mad Tea Party, and Peter Pan’s Flight to Neverland continue to draw crowds today. Walt would be pleased to know that, after sixty-two years, Walt’s Fantasyland is still the happiest land of all.
To learn more about Walt’s original Disneyland, read Walt’s Disneyland: It’s Still There If You Know Where to Look, available at Amazon.com; Paperback $15.99; Ebook $5.99. And for more stories about Disneyland history, visit https://waltsdisneyland.wordpress.com/.
Jim Denney is a Columnist for the Boardwalk Times.
