Historically High - The History of Disneyland

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Disneyland officially opened in Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955 one year and one day after they broke ground. Originally built on 160 acres of former orange groves, it featured 5 distinct lands all inspired by Walt's loves. Main Street U.S.A, opened up to other lands of Adventure, Fantasy, The American Frontier, and Tomorrowland. Disneyland was an audacious idea to say the very least but was it has grown into is nothing short of magic. Join us as we cover Walt's dream and see what it took to make it come true.    Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Come with me and you'll see. Are you singing the Willy Wonka? That's what it feels like. It feels like you're getting ready to give me the real life close to Wonka land. Well, it is a place of pure imagination, actually. The people that designed it are called The Imagineers. We talked about this during Walt's episode and everything. But we, you know, having to cover Walt's entire life,

Disneyland was a good piece in there, but there is so much just to that, like, park itself, that you know what, why not give it its own episode? This is a teaching episode. This was a Professor Adam request of Professor Chris. Obviously, I'm Professor Adam, that is Professor Chris, to take me to a place where I've never been physically but would love an imaginative ride through Disneyland.

See, my goal by the end of this is to, make sure that you are thoroughly and sufficiently incentivized to actually go and experience this because it's not just like you don't even have to have an interest in like Disney to go and just kind of sit in the like spectacle and when you kind of appreciate how this whole thing was created and all the subtleties that go into making it like such an immersive experience I sound like a giant fucking nerd, I don't care. It just makes it even cooler when you kind of understand some of the mechanics of it.

And not just the animatronics, but the mechanics of the park. Yes, yes. Are there animatronics? There's a ton of animatronics. Really? This is, dude, this is the advent of animatronics. Okay.

Like so many things, you know, like how we talk about, like, NASA having developed certain things that are used in, like, everyday life? It's not necessarily that the things that are invented like during the development of Disneyland and all throughout its, you know, upgrades, things like that. But they have like, not that they're consumer available, but they've like changed the industry like across the board for all kinds of stuff. Without Disneyland, the rat, what's the other place? Chuckie Cheese. Chuck.

Chuckie Chuck establishes dominance without Mickey for rodent supremacy. Yeah, for rat supremacy. There is no animatronic Chuckie cheese band without there being at Disneyland. Dude, this thing was such a long shot. This working out was like an insane idea. And like the,

from the time that it's approved, at the time it gets built and launched, and then what it becomes after that is just part of the story. But before we get too far into it, remember, already enrolled. Get over to patreon.com slash historically high. Get signed up. Get your bonus content. It's all fantastic. Pump those ratings. We love,

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Without further ado, let's get into the happiest place on Earth. There's probably your mother joke in there somewhere. Is that age-dependent happiest place on Earth, or do you think that, regardless of age, because I've been to some pretty happy places. I mean, it depends on what your definition of your happy place is. is as someone who has been there several times both as a child and as an adult, I can, see, here's the thing.

I don't know of going there just strictly as an adult without the nostalgia of having been there and what you experienced with it as a kid. I don't know. I don't think it has the same effect. Yeah, I mean, it's the same reason why you grow up with a favorite sports star and you follow them for their entire career and then into the after, because you, remember the feelings that they gave you watching them as a kid. But I think you can have a different appreciation for it in a different way of going there as an

adult, having never experienced it. And you would pretty quickly look around and be like, I get it. I get how this could make someone so happy. But all right. So Walt does his thing. He's got Disney off the ground pioneer filmmaking animation, yada, yada, yada, yada. No, I did, dude, it's the park is hefty. I know.

So we just go listen to the Walt Disney episode before. this we'll talk about a little bit but this is going to be a deep dive into the land itself so Walt kind of comes up with the idea while I think it's a Griffith park he's actually watching his daughters at the time when parks had like an actual merry go around yeah and he's sitting on a park bench he's feeding some squirrels and I would assume that in Walt's head he's just sitting there being like this is boring as shit for me I'm not doing I'm just literally watching them so he says he comes up with an idea where basically kids and parents are can actually enjoy like the park and the attractions and the amusement together.

And a rough idea was documented in a memo like 1948 and it was called Mickey Mouse Park. Of course, it's going to be called Mickey Mouse Park. It's the most popular thing he has. He starts kind of sending out people from the Walt Disney Company animation, whatever they're doing, to start kind of taking inspiration from these different places of what he actually wants this park to become. When you say places, are there other theme parks in operation? Is there like a Knotsbury Farms?

I'm going to get to that. Oh, hell yeah. Knott's Berry Farm actually, surprisingly enough, started as a roadside berry stand. So it's literally Knott. That was the family's last name, Berry Farm. And that had started and evolved kind of with some attractions in the 40s. Now, this was like a miniature town where they might have done like some stuntman. work. It wasn't necessarily attractions in the sense of like rides, maybe a carousel, something like that.

Safety of rides in the 40s would be suspect. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, and rides also weren't active enough to be unsafe. They were pretty, you know, it wasn't a construction equipment or anything like that. This was the quarter horse outside of the shop co or save on or whatever that your kid would go ahead and jump on. He might have been a rocking horse. So he takes inspiration from this place Chicago Railroad Fair, or sorry, yeah, the Chicago Railroad Fair, because he loved little mini trains. He actually built, like, on his property, a, I want to say the train that he puts at Disney is a one-eighth scale. That's the Disney on Railroad. It's a short three-foot gauge. One-eighth seems small. That might have been the one he had at home was like a one-eighth scale.

Basically, the one where you sit on a comically small train and you're able to actually ride it around. The one that Steve Martin conducts in the jerk. I believe so. I haven't seen that in a long time, but sure, let's go with that. Now, Henry Ford's Museum, I don't know how this hasn't come up through all our study, or also known as the Edison Institute, is in Dearborn, Michigan. This thing contains JFK's presidential limo, Abe Lincoln's chair from Ford's Theater,

Thomas Edison's Lab, the Wright Brothers Bike Shop, and Rosa Parks Bus. Do you know who will be... No. Do you know who will be attending, said museum? Oh shit, are you going? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. We're going to go check it out, so we will have some pictures from that.

That's nuts. Yeah. Okay. Crazy Quinsons. I had no idea. I forgot about that. Okay. These also included attractions like main streets that were modeled to look like, you know,

turn of the century type all a mark. Maracana type stuff. One of them had like a riverboat. He also took inspiration from this place called Tivoli Gardens, which is in Denmark. He's sending his guys like international. Hell yeah. Because he's going to design an amusement park,

but the only thing that's been amusement park-esque up to this point, you've either had a park, which is just normal shit, or you have carnivals, which come in for the amusement aspect, but people are like, those are dirty. The people that are fucking scummy. all this kind of stuff, and that's going to come into play when he proposes to the city of L.A.

about wanting to actually build something like this. So he's trying to make it to where it's also going to be like a lot of landscaping and things like that. He looks at Colonial Williamsburg and then also gets a bunch of inspiration from the New York World's Fair in 1939. So he's just kind of picking and choosing

how to make this, again, because it's going to be a permanent thing. a traveling carnival or a circus. He covered everything. It's also pretty wise to know that you're going to have limitations on what amusement rides that you could do

in that time and that age to be able to look at the landscape and say, if I can just make everything grand, it'll all be entertainment. Okay. Up to this point, just keep this in mind. Up to this point, he has been in

making animation. Yeah. And also nature documentaries, Walt Disney's adventures that we, I think we talked about. We'd go do like safari, things like that. He doesn't have a division to make rides or attractions. This is going to be something that is like we hire some people in, but we also use just the genius of these Walt Disney Imagineers. This is ILM before ILM was a thing where it is these people. Like, think of having a job as an animation director or, like, drawing cartoons and stuff in, like, the 1940s.

It'd be even weirder than having those type of skills of making, like, plaster casts and molds like they do for ILM in, like, the 70s. These are people that are going to figure out, like, how to construct attractions and, like, optical illusions and do all this kind of stuff, kind of just, like, from having hobbies and stuff. I wonder what the gap in time was between the last castle that had been built in the world and then the castle at Disney. Oh, you always have some rich assholes that's trying to reconstruct a castle. Just to think about, like, to model a castle, I'm sure they had to have gone over to Europe, right? And drawn inspiration. So the castle's at each of the different parks. And this is just going to be about Disneyland.

But I love that these questions are going to pop up. they're all modeled after different Disney movie castles. The one in Disneyland is Sleeping Beauty's castle. The one in Florida, I believe, is Cinderella's castle. One in Paris is after another Disney princess castle. One in Japan is after it. They're all modeled after different Disney castles. I didn't think about the ones outside the country, too.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so everything's different at all these parks. but they're all still from like the Disney vein. Yes and no. Sometimes the parks can have the same lands or the same rides because the rides are so popular like Pirates of the Caribbean or something.

Use the IP to make money everywhere. Exactly. Like Star Wars it's going to, but it's only a certain parks or it hasn't been added to other parks. Sometimes they're going to be more locally flavored. They're not always going to have an adventure land of frontier land. I'll talk about Pirates of the Caribbean, how they made this incorrect assessment when they were building Disney World. They're like, we're literally in the Caribbean.

People aren't going to give a shit about Pirates of the Caribbean. And the first thing when people got into the park and looked around, they were like, where's Pirates to the Caribbean? And they're like, we completely like, because they're like instead of Pirates of the Caribbean, we thought that they would want to see stuff that was from like the West. So we were going to make this giant like Grand Canyon-esque river rapid like land and everything. They're like, no, fuck that.

We want Pirates of the Caribbean. If we want to go to the Grand Canyon, we'll go to the Grand Canyon. If there's no pirates at the Grand Canyon. Okay, so people had also kind of requested to visit Disney Studios, but Walt was kind of like, there's nothing to do here. It's not exciting watching these guys draw storyboards and create animation. The end product is awesome, but it's not entertaining. So he floats this idea of building these attractions on this 16-acre lot,

basically across Riverside Drive from the studio. and city gets, you know, notification, Walt wants to build an amusement park. They're like, nope, they're dirty. They attract the wrong type of people. You're in prime real estate on Riverside Drive, not going to happen. 16 acres, too. That's huge. Yeah, this stuff has to happen or else we don't get Disneyland.

Because if he's content with 16 acres. Much different story. Yes. So as he has people starting to design things that he knows kind of what lands he might want. knows what kind of attractions he wants. But as the designers start to actually, you know, start designing, they're like, hey, this is going to take up more room than you think if you're going to be wanting all this stuff. So he hires the two guys from the Stanford Research Institute to locate a site based on projected future growth, accessibility, stuff like that. So they're looking

to places the new highways are being built, what the growth pattern is for Los Angeles. And they actually We find 160 acres of like orange groves and walnut trees out in Anaheim roughly like 30 miles from Los Angeles for I think like $890,000, almost $900,000. And I'm assuming Anaheim at this time is nowhere near what it turned Anaheim into. Orange groves and walnut trees, anything that is, they said that when they were picking this site and they were looking at it, people were like, you're in. saying no one's going to drive 30 minutes outside LA. People, the entire time he's doing this is like, you're crazy, you're going to go bankrupt.

It's, you know, they've never seen anything like this, a permanent like amusement park or something. Also kind of not unlike when he was creating a studio. Yeah. People are going to pay for cartoons? Yeah. There's a lot of detractors there as far as when he was making

like the shorts before movies and then he wanted to turn it into a full-blown business. Does he, Does he have a budget in mind, or is it just this land is so cheap and it's so opportunistic to put it here? I want to say the projected budget at the beginning was like $5 million. Oh, God. For everything. Yeah, I just looked up what it was.

It's, it ain't $5 million. What was it initially? No, your initial was right, the grand total. Yes. It ain't $5 million. No, it's not. It's going to creep up. So another reason they chose this location is because,

they were newly constructing this Interstate 5 that would provide like direct travel from L.A. to the park. Land was cheap because it's orange groves and walnut trees. Perfect year-round temperature or weather because this pocket of Orange County had the least rainfall, least humidity, and the least extreme weather. So they went in on studying this. Walt was like, if we're doing this, we're doing it whole hog. So the pitch for funding was so hard to sell because they're like, you're going to, okay, what do you want this amount of money for?

You're going to build a park that has rides on it like permanent carnival. But you're assuming that people are just going to repeatedly want to come in. They're not just going to show up and then just not have to go back because they've done everything. And people are going to travel. Oh, you're banking on people traveling to this place. Well, yeah, they travel to L.A., but why would they travel to L.A.? travel out to this park. So him getting funding required him to actually create a show called Disneyland to broadcast on ABC to basically like take the audience along on the building and the construction

of Disneyland and would be showing them kind of like behind the scenes, things like that. And since ABC would have the rights to that, they agreed to actually help finance that in exchange. Is this where the partnership between them starts? Yeah, kind of. Because you always have like Wide World of Disney growing up and all that stuff where ABC would show the Disney movies I think this is definitely where that

Yeah, or that's right So yeah there were Disney movies on like during the week Or something like that that would come on I don't remember watching a whole lot of them But I sure remember the cut-ins from commercials for it Yeah also I mean Disney comes and buys ABC don't they They did actually like 2014 I think yeah

So construction actually starts July 6th, 1954. Sorry, I was off by 0.5. Originally supposed to cost $4.5 million to design and construct, and ABC had scheduled, along with Walt telling him that they could do this, that they were going to air the opening, televised, scheduled for July 17, 1955. So a year and a day is what they're giving themselves. How?

I don't know. I don't know how that gets sold because they're having to, you know, level the land, which of course that's not going to be a huge issue and everything, but they have to construct basically a city out there. So I think they said between 2000 and 2,500 construction workers were employed daily to build it in that year. and the way the park was actually going to be kind of like parsed out and be designed was going to be with a total of five lands all centered around like a central hub they said the city of Paris the way that it was actually planned out and mapped was kind of the inspiration that you could go from the Art to Triumph

which is in the middle or something and then everything kind of spokes out yeah so how it was it set up to go is you would walk in the main entrance And kind of like I described you before the episode, you would have the train station and the famous like flower Mickey that stretches out. And as you walk in, you would actually walk onto the entryway to like Main Street, like the town square in Main Street. And this is where if you were to look like immediately to your left after walking in, you would see the fire station that had the second floor apartment for Walt where they keep the lantern lit the entire time. To your right, I think, like some C-thers. And you would walk down Main Street, which is designed to live. look like the quintessential American, you know, turn of the century town.

Now, when they're building this, everything here is designed in such a way that there are sight lines that prevent you from seeing into other themed lands from the land that you're in for like total immersion. And there's like curvatures and buildings that stand up to like block sightlines. So when you're in the small town, really the only thing that you can see if you look to your left and right are the facades of the town that are one or one to one scale or full scale on the first floor. The second floor, I believe it is at 80% scale.

If anything has a third floor, it's like at 60% scale. Wow. So it has this verticality that looks like it stretches up because it's getting smaller away from you, but your mind knows that it's all supposed to be proportionate. Yeah. So as you walk down Main Street, the only thing you can see further down is you can see down into the hub, and then you can see the castle. And that's where all your focus is.

So the castle is the Arctic Triov, basically? Yes. Yep. The middle, actually, the castle itself, if you're in the middle of the hub, that's where the partner statue is that has Mickey and Walt holding hands. And they have their backs to the castle, and they're like greeting everybody that's coming into the park. It's also insanity to put that right in the middle,

because that means that you have to complete the castle in 360-degree nature because it's going to be seen by everywhere. Correct. So the castle at this point is actually the entrance to fantasy land. So let's say that me and you are standing in the middle of the hub. We're standing right next to the partner statue. Back at our probably like 7 o'clock, that way on the spoke, that's going to be adventure land. So we're going to discuss the lands kind of as we go in a spoke-like fashion.

So you would have Main Street USA, which is the first land. Second land was going to be Adventureland, and then going up in a clockwise fashion. you're going to have Frontierland, then straight up at 12 o'clock Fantasyland, which you enter by going through the gates of the castle across a moat and everything, and that basically sends you out into... Fantasyland was Walt's favorite,

and it was basically just a land populated by rides themed upon, like, the characters that he created for, like, the Disney movies. Like all the fantastical stuff. What's going to get you jacked up more walking into a land than crossing a moat? Yeah, exactly, yeah. kind of going over to the right a little bit more,

that's where we actually come to Tomorrowland. The land of the future? Yes, essentially it was designed to be, and again, remember that this is 50, 55. It's supposed to showcase the work of 1986. The future of 1986 is kind of what they were thinking. It looked like we were living in Buck Rogers, is what it was. So as they're developing all this,

the rides that they're going to have that are going to need to be constructed the biggest ones will kind of go through them a little bit were going to be the Jungle River Cruise so that one's an OG it's still there the positioning of the Jungle River Cruise is an adventure land so you're going to the spoke

you're coming back 7 o'clock and you're going back there when they were developing this is a little bit ahead but while they were getting it developed once it was almost up to like full working condition they had all the sound going from all the animals that they had recorded and everything, the back of the jungle river cruise butts up to the very, very back of Walt's apartment.

So you heard all the animals? But you would never, I looked at that and they were shown during like one of the documentaries I was watching. I was like, you have no clue because when you're in each of these lands, because you can't see out, you feel completely immersed and you feel like there's just trees and there must be more of this land on the other side of the trees. Hmm.

And it's just another land. Yes. Wow. So just a few things, like a few little tidbits, kind of while they're actually constructing the park and things, the Walt's designing. He wants to make sure this place stays insanely clean. So after doing all of this research,

he comes up with this thing called the Science of 30 Steps. This is my favorite Walt Disney fact. And all of them. Yep. And so he did it himself where he was like, I want to see the average amount where I start, where I finish my food, whatever. I mean my hot dog and the wrapper or whatever.

and where I have to start looking for a trash can. So he did that, and then he would observe people and see, 30 is the average for when they start looking for a trash can. If they can't find one, they drop it on the ground. So regardless of where you are in the park, publicly or places you're allowed to be in the park, you're never more than 30 feet away from a trash can. Yes. The mark of engineering.

Not only that, trash is unsightly. and the old school way of doing that around like an amusement park would have just been like the wire mesh trash cans. He was the one that started doing the push in lid on the trash cans to where you were pushing in because it would contain the smell and keep all the trash out of sight. Didn't it have the system below it too? We're getting there. That's Disney World. Oh, okay. So Disney World has that utilidor where it's the entire city built basically underneath the park where all like the break rooms are, meeting rooms.

that has all of the plumbing and piping because they had to do that because of the water table. But that has all of the places where you're able to just simply dump it and it gets sucked in through the trash cans. Later invention. Yes. No chewing gum is sold in the entire part

to go and also keep it clean. So building some of these rides during or some of these attractions and everything, you have everybody working on separate lands all at the, you know, at different times. So the jungle cruise, you have to basically turn this area

into a believable jungle environment in a peat or in an orange grove and walnut trees in the middle of now this barren field. You had to put a river in. So as they're grading all the ground and everything like that, around the park proper, Walt has them build like a 20 foot tall berm.

And the berm, And the berm is going to be actually where the Disneyland Railroad actually goes all the way around the park. This is also supposed to, once they're able to go and put the railroad on top of it, landscape and plant trees, this will close off the park to the outside world to kind of complete that immersive experience. So when they're actually building the Jungle River Cruise, their budget for like trees and everything was actually pretty scarce. They were salvaging as many of these trees as they could from where they were removing them on the land and everything. You can tuck like orange and citrus trees back behind like more jungle-looking trees and everything like that just to fill out the foliage and everything. They were putting out ads in the papers that if people wanted like palm trees removed from their yards and everything, that they would come and do it for free.

No joke. And they got a ton of stuff like this. They were offering the city to like remove trees that they needed to have done just to be. be able to come and plant them and use them on this ride. I don't know. Did you get into all the plant species? How many of them there are? So yeah, so as you're talking about this, I just keep firing off these questions and figure this stuff out because I don't know.

You're going to go deep, but my mind goes in different directions. The park represents over 3,000 plant species from 40 nations functioning as a massive curated and ever-involving botanical garden. So they went to 40 different countries. I think I would imagine that once they started like once they figured out it was going to be successful and everything, that just allowed them to put more money into this. Because they redo the rides and everything like that pretty, not super often, but if they seen advancement in technology, they can make it that much better and more believable. They'll usually close it down to do that stuff. Well, and you have to think, too, in order to give the jungle crews.

an even more authentic experience, if you're going down there and you're finding trees that are able to survive in your climate that you're bringing it to, how do you make it look more like a jungle than bringing in trees

from a literal jungle to put up there? People haven't recognized. I've been like, we're in L.A. I've seen palm trees and everything, but if you can throw some stuff in there that they've only seen in your nature documentaries, yeah, that's huge.

Hell yeah. So while they're first building this, again, they're scavenging for this kind of stuff. As they're designing it too, it was going to be, you know, the, I forget you haven't been there. So basically the Jungle River Cruise is supposed to be kind of an amalgamation of a riverboat tour of rivers of Asia, Africa, and South America. Oh, wow. So different animals is you enter into different places and everything.

And you're on a motorized on a track that's underwater, but the boat itself is just, you know, going in a specific loop, basically. But it kind of takes a couple different, it meanders around, like a predetermined place. Gotcha. It's not a boat. It's like a slow-moving coaster. Yeah, but it's... A trolley almost, but it's a boat. Correct.

It's floating. You get a little bit of movement, but it's held in place and steered and everything by the track. So they're designing animatronics to actually start doing this and having to have them submerged. And so this is where they're actually starting to design a system where animals are having to be on a timer timed up with the boat when it's coming through to do certain types of things.

and as they're mapping all this out and building all these things, the guy that's in charge of this specific aspect is basically like driving through it in his station wagon to try to get a sense and a feel for like what the view and what the eyelines are going to be and everything as they're just constantly, you know, trying to figure out the real world way that this is actually going to work. I'm sure there's an easier way to do it,

but it's not going to feel the same. No, and no one has ever done this before. So they're just, you know, they're winging it in a lot of ways. They've gone and got all these ideas from all these other places. There have been possibly water-type rides before, but nothing like this that was supposed to show you all these different things. Going to different continents. Yeah, different animals and all that kind of stuff. So one year to actually finish this.

Now, most of the time, they're working out problems as they come along. they're feeling like they're not going to make it the entire time. Walt's freaking out because he gets there and he's like every time I would get to the park, I would look at stuff and I would just say, there's nothing here that nobody has never seen before or that anybody would pay 15 cents to come in here. And it's because as they're building this, you can't believe in one of the documentaries it was counting it down from the year. And they would say like 10 months and it goes,

it's like they barely have foundations poured at this point. and you have Main Street trying to be built for this little town and then you have a castle being built behind it. You have a trench that's being dug for like the jungle river cruise. You have another like river that's being artificial river that's going to be like the rivers of the Americas where you're going to have a steamship that's going to be operating. And these little,

and then you have a section where it looks like this futuristic rocket type stuff is being constructed. But as the time goes on and they're showing these things on like Disneyland the show with ABC. people have got to be watching just being like, oh, he's not getting this thing done. Not only that, but they're working on rocket ships so long before the space program

or anything like that, it all has to be variations from the cartoons, right? It's Buck Rogers style type stuff with like the three fins sticking out the back and everything. Also, did you say 15 cents? Yeah. They're paying 15 cents to get into this place? I want to say that it ends up being a dollar

to get in, but he's saying there's nothing here that somebody wouldn't would pay 15 cents he's just trying to get his point crossed so they end up getting it done now the opening day the night before they had still been pouring asphalt on like main street i'm not shitting you they had helicopters that were hovering around low trying to go ahead and dry the asphalt as they were doing this stuff paint was still drying on things, like as people were getting ready to, like, walk into gates. But they had, for like a week leading up to finishing, they had ABC, a ton of other, like, camera crews out there setting up all around the park because this was going to be a nationally televised event that was happening. 90 million people watched the broadcast.

Damn. Do you know what the population of the United States was at the time? 120 million. So, what? 75% of the country. Yes. And this was his opportunity to show why anybody that lived outside of the area should come here and visit his park. It's not in the Midwest.

It's not accessible enough for both coasts to come. It's people that will be traveling from the East Coast across the country to come. So, grand opening is on July 17, 1955. they call it Black Sunday. They said anyone that was working there, that's how they were referred to it as. It was Black Sunday. I can imagine that feels like war,

war in the happiest place on Earth. Yeah, but well, so many things went wrong. So there was supposed to be an invite only like press event for 15,000 people. This was the grand opening on the 17th. Apparently counterfeit tickets

ended up changing that to 28,000 people. Not only that, but people were also climbing it over the fence They said there was a guy that was charging $5 per person to climb up a ladder over a back fence. Just entrepreneur and the shit out of that. So he was making five times as much as Disneyland was just helping people over the fence. There was a seven-mile traffic jam back up the freeway to try to get here. The asphalt that we were talking about that had just been poured on Main Street,

because of the 100-degree heat, women who were wearing high heels were having their heels getting stuck in the asphalt, not being able to get their shoes out. Now, leading up to the opening, there had also been a plumber strike. And it caused this Sophie's choice thing between having available drinking fountains or available working toilets. And Walt basically was just like,

listen, they can drink Coke or Pepsi, but they can't pee in the streets. Send them over to the jungle ride. Start having a piss in the forest. No. And they thought it was some type of like scheme to have them boost sales of like Coke and Pepsi by not having water available?

He's like, no, we just needed to have shitters. I can't have people just like, I'm not going to have them take my beautiful park and just turn it into an outhouse. But that's got to be crazy to know that you've got to choose between one or the other. That's got to be a pretty easy choice though, right? Yeah, it's smell, clean up,

all that stuff. Plus, I don't think if you're going to the first day of Disneyland, you're probably conscious enough to be like, okay, kids, you're only drinking water. but Pepsi will suffice Yeah, Coke will suffice Mm-hmm

We're going It's only a dollar to get in You can afford a Coke So Any questions before we So I'm just going to kind of break down the park Yeah, I'm just trying to So as far as the construction goes

Everything was being built at the same time, right? Yes So all the lands were being worked on at the same time Was there any like concern that they weren't going to be able to open one of the lands or was everything pretty much like it's going to be tight but we're there like all the lands were open day one everything is open so there were a few rides that i don't believe were completed enough to be open but they weren't scheduled to be okay tomorrow land ended up um being more of like an exhibition of like future

like technology and things like that the main draw for tomorrow land was called autopia I have no idea how this ride is still in existence. It's got to be a nostalgic thing because it takes up a hefty piece of real estate in Disneyland when they don't have a lot to spare. And it's basically just small miniature cars that kids are allowed to drive. Really? Yes. Huh. Is that thought of the exhibition being put in there like, because obviously they're not, they open, they're going seven days a week, right?

Right. Yeah. Well, there's no off time? No, I don't believe so. So if you're just putting an exhibition with these other grand plans for Tomorrowland going in, you're just knowing that inevitably there's going to be time when there's construction while the park is still open. There is, but they haven't started on an, because right now it's just like, we got to figure out if this thing works before we put any money into it and if this is going to be a viable thing.

Time is going to tell, basically. So Tomorrowland did have that. And that's kind of toward the back of. Tomorrowland. So it requires them to walk through so places are still going to get foot traffic and everything. Everything in this place is going to get, you know, people are amazed by it. And total final cost on opening day? It ended up being $17 million.

Yep. So $5.5 million for the budget. Turns out we hit $17 million. But also, if your deadlines, 365 days away, you're going to have to fork over money much more than you thought you expected to be able to get that done. Yes. Yeah. He mortgaged his house. He cashed in his life insurance policy. He went all in on this thing. So starting kind of back at Main Street USA, I'm going to go through what Main Street USA is famous for having what it kind of looks like.

And then kind of the years things were added to it instead of having to jump back to each land. But I can let you know what was in the park like originally when it first opened. So Main Street USA is where U.S.A is where U.S.A. is where U.S. You get the entryway, the Disneyland Railroad, where you go under the actual station. The railroad itself, it's from, you know, the original opening. It's a three-foot narrow gauge steam engine powered train. And the loop that it does around the park at the time was 1.2 miles and rides on that berm that was created to kind of separate the park from the outside world. Walt's Fire Station, like we talked about, great moments with Mr. Lincoln is basically the animatronic Abraham Lincoln that's

stands up and like talks. Now, the animatronic for this was originally designed for the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York. The design for the park and advancements in additions to the park are sometimes going to be based upon worlds fairs because what they're doing at Disneyland with this like advanced type stuff, they're being offered to like construct and build pavilions for like the imaginers of coming up with all this crazy architecture. Yeah. They want Walt to like work at these World's fairs.

do like exhibits because not only does the Disney name carry a ton of like clout for people to come and want to see that, Walt's like, hell yeah, what can we try to come up with to use the World's Fair? We'll figure out if something works or develop some new technology and then we'll see how we can apply it back to the park. It's also phenomenal advertising. Oh, a World's Fair. Absolutely. So they end up designing this thing and people are blown away because up to that point, nothing looked real. And I mean, you look at it now and you're like, that's obviously a fucking like animatronic.

But the simple fact that it was such a pioneering thing to see like his hands move, this thing stand up and look around the room and give an address. And they were able to match the, you know, in the 1960s to match up the audio recording with mouth movements and to have them look somewhat realistic was completely groundbreaking. And so because all of a sudden, And now people are like, did you see this thing at the World's Fair? Well, where is it at now? It's a Disneyland, man.

You got to go to Disneyland to see that. Was this a, did they have it up close or was it further away? Because again, an optics thing further away, it's going to be hard to see the... He was basically giving a speech in kind of like a theater, no pun intended. But a little bit of a little bit of a theater. Yeah, he was up on a stage and everything. And then he was sitting in a chair and then the animatronic would stand up when he like addressed the crowd for part of the time. There wasn't an animatronic John Wilkes booth that kicked the door open behind him.

No, thank God. No. Sik Semper Taranus. Oh my God. Do you imagine that people would probably yell that during great moments with Mr. Lincoln. So the it, again, it ends at the pub, Main Street, ends up. And you find a lot of shops there. Go and get your mouse ears. You can get some food, all that kind of stuff.

They want you getting that stuff right as you go into Disneyland. Do you? own a set of mouse ears? I don't own a set of mouse ears, no. I own maybe like two shirts from Disneyland. One of them is a Han Solo shirt. Katie has a cool tank top from Tower of Terror before it got changed into Guardians of the Galaxy

and that's about it. I keep it up here. I like the memories up here. I don't need to take shit. You don't need to take pictures when you're experiencing the moment. I did find a pretty sick Chewbacca hat that I took a picture with. I didn't buy it, but

okay. So work on our way. We end up getting to the hub, which is where you can see just kind of the entry facades for the different lands. So Adventureland, adventure land, we're going to go and cut back on like 7 o'clock. Remote tropical faraway land is basically inspired by like Walt's Nature documentaries. This is where we have the jungle cruise. The Adventureland Treehouse is added in 16 or 1962. What is that?

What is that? it's a giant fake tree did you ever see the I don't know you probably didn't Disney Tarzan the one where Phil Collins did like the entire

soundtrack did you ever see Swiss Family Robinson you don't remember Swiss family Robinson okay were they're the ones up in the mountains that were Shipwrecked family on an island

they end up building this huge elaborate tree house where they all live in there all of them have like different rooms up in the treehouse. It's insane. Okay. That's what it is.

So it was modeled after the, so you have this giant artificial metal structure tree that you walk up in and it's just got this entire treehouse structure up there that you can walk in and around. Like a Paddington like? Enormous. Okay. Like EWalk Village type deal for Star Wars. Yeah.

Okay. So, you have the adventure, yeah, Adventureland Treehouse. The enchanted. Tiki Room was added in 1963. Now this was kind of one of their first large scale

forays into like animatronics and audio animatronics. It's got this large cast of like singing animatronic birds and flowers. It's not exciting but it's one of those things that if you're going to go to Disneyland you might as well go in and see. It's crazy. And the dolewip stand is literally right outside it. The Tiki juice bar is right there so you get yourself a dolewip.

You sit down, you're kind of in a little shaded area and you to go into the Tiki room. I'll check out where the Dolewap Station is, for sure. So this is the first attraction in theme park history to feature audio and animatronic technology. Again, pioneering stuff. What do you think the reception is to all of these other places that opened before but didn't have the same?

Do you think it up to everybody's game? Be like, shit, now we have to compete with Disneyland. Places had like roller coasters and everything. Yeah. Like there were amusement parks, but it was nothing to where this is like the perfect combination of trying to design it for both kids and parents and not just people who want to go on the roller coasters.

He's trying to build longevity out of this stuff where there's also so much to do. You can come back repeatedly and do different things and feel like you're having a different visit each time. And it also probably plays to the fact that you were talking about with this hub and spoke system. If you can't see all the other lands and you have to go into each one of them and explore them,

if you can't get all that done in a day, your kids are going to be like, we only have to park, we got to come back to this. Oh yeah, 100%. We need multiple days here. This has to be a full, we got to see everything.

That was one of Walt's things too. He's like, as long as there's somebody like their imaginations and stopping, the park is no, the park will not be complete. Like, as long as there are people coming up with fun ideas, this park will never be finished. It's a living organism, yeah.

Yep. And one of the things kind of going back to Jungle Cruise is when people would be writing it at first it was very serious, like one of his nature documentaries, but somebody had heard, he'd overheard a mom talking to their child, and they're like, can we go on that again, Mom? She's like, I've already seen all of it. So he's like, I got to do something to make these things.

You can't see everything on the first time you go around. And so kind of a little bit later down the road, a few years after, he actually approached some of the guy, or one of the animators or the Imagineers, that had worked on movies where there was like humor within the movies. And he's like, can you think of some scenes that would be kind of funny that we could put in the jungle river? He's like, what about like an elephant like sitting down and like a baby elephant spraying water on himself or the elephant spray water at the guests? Let the people that are steering the boats start making little funny comments and stuff.

So they start to make like dad jokes and like puns about stuff. One of the most famous ones is you go underneath a waterfall and it's like, and now what everyone has waited to see. the backside of water. But a lot of them are scripted in this and they give them options for what to do. But this guy also was like, let's add a whole bunch of animals and a bunch of scenes that are funny.

So when it's like a cocktail party, stuff's going on all around you. You're not in on every single conversation. So the next time you're right, maybe you didn't notice these animals over here or like what was going on over to this side. So he's constantly trying to evolve these things as well. it's like you're just feeding into people going back home and having a dinner party and saying,

hey, we went to Disneyland on vacation. Well, what was it like? There were elephants that were spraying us with water. There was a red-ass baboon that was an animatronic that kept bending over and showing us his red rump. Maybe not that. There's funny scenes where like, just gimmicky stuff where there's a bunch of guys grabbing on to like, it's not a, totem pole, but it's a long pole, like a very tall one, like a telephone pole. And it's a, of course, like a white English safari guy with the safari hat up on the very top of it. And then

all of his porters are climbed up on as well. But there's a rhinoceros at the bottom that'll move its head up and down. And the point of its horn is almost trying to poke the guy in the ass, the lowest guy. And they all raise up together when it goes up and they all lower back in. And there's hyenas around it, just like cackling the whole time. If you got kids sitting at that dinner table as you're describing your vacation, those families are going to Disneyland to see all this stuff. Exactly. Yeah. There were those that were like, you know, wiggling their ears underwater and everything. I'm going to skip some of the more current stuff to go back to kind of show you what gets added to the park at what time. So that's kind of where that one sits around like 1963 as has those things.

Frontierland, which is the next one over in the spoke. This one is themed after like the American Old West, basically to capture that pioneer spirit for Walt. this is the one that had like the entryway looks like an old fort with like the logs that are just stacked and everything like an old frontier type four had the mark twain riverboat so this was an o g this was there on the day that the park opened this massive steam powered 105 foot rear like paddle boat that would be like on the mississippi or like other rivers and everything and was constructed completely to scale because this is an actual that people will get on and go around this circuit called the rivers of the Americas. So the thing is constructed in pieces and then brought to the park and actually like put together a hole. That's the length of waterways that they would have to have. Where are they getting the water from? They're just pumping it in. That was a huge problem when they were doing the jungle cruise and trying to figure it out because it's very sandy soil.

So they said they would fill it up when they were trying to like kind of do testing on it. come back and the water would be all drained out. So it was the land. This was before they had like rubber bottoms. They had to try to start looking into that stuff to be able to spray the ground to create kind of like a gel or like a solid surface to be able to do that. So they had to end up doing the same thing on the river of the Americas. So you would have this Mark Twain riverboat.

And then you also had a in 58, so just a few years later, they added the same. sailing ship Columbia, which is a full-scale replica of the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. And it shares the same track. So it would go around, like, on the opposite time that the Mark Twain would go around. So you had two of these ships that were going

around. You had the golden horseshoe, which was, again, day one. 19th century frontier saloon. You could go in there and they do, like, dueling pianos and everything. But you go in and it's a full time hole.

No, it's not really a bar. It's a saloon, but they don't do, like, Disney is very particular about how they do alcohol. They only serve alcohol over at California Adventure. I don't know if there's a place aside from maybe like the sit-down reservation restaurants that you can get like a drink in Disneyland. I'm a big fan of that. It's not a place where I would think alcohol would mix well with the environment, with as many children are around and everything else. No. No, not at all. Plus, there's a lot of rides that are going to shake up that tum-tum,

and if you're three or four beers deep. Not only rides, but you're going to get impatient when you think people are cutting you off and stuff like that. Yeah. Tom Sawyer Island was an addition to a year later in 1956. It was already an island that was in the middle of the rivers of the America or Americas. But Walt basically designed this just to be kind of like a little play area where it was an immersive thing where you could ride like a log raft across the, river and then explore little hidden caves and roach brope bridges like secret pathways like thinking you're

like huck finn and tom sawyer and you're out in nature and everything it was that it's that big this this one's still around today yeah yes it was actually received this really like major pirate themed overhaul in 2007 because its location is very close to what gets designed as new orleans square where pirates the caribbean gets put okay uh um We'll come back to Thunder Mountain Railroad because that ends get in place there. But there's also this thing that gets put there called the, oh, what is it? Oh, it's called Nature's, the Mind Track Through Nature's Wonderland. Is this like miniature train because Walt loved fucking trains that just takes you on a really slow route around this area of showing you different miniature like landmarks through like out the United States?

It was a very slow ride. It was just basically, I think, for people to get off their. feet but just kind of keep moving trying to keep the kids entertained that's all you ask for in a place like this yeah uh next place is going to be fantasy land and the part and the lands do like connect to each other not just through the hub so if you're and that's what makes it even more incredible is the fact that you can break up sight lines until you almost feel like you're in that next world so if you continue to walk through adventure land you would eventually come out into new orleans square which was originally this thing called Magnolia Park, I believe.

And then if you were to turn right there, you would almost turn it in your sight line. All of a sudden, now you're in Frontierland. Whole new place. Whole new place. And then as you would move through Frontierland to another degree, you would turn a corner, kind of get into another sight line, Fantasyland.

So you can either get through kind of the back way or go through the actual castle. Oh, I love that. So Fantasyland, definitely being Walt's favorite. It was a fairy tale setting where classic Disney, films are basically brought to life. You had Sleeping Beauty's Castle, which day one.

Peter Pan's Flight, which is a day one. This is one of those rides when you go there. You ride one time just to say you wrote it. It's not exciting. It's not super impressive, but at the time it had to be just crazy because it's a dark ride inside. Most of these ones within Fantasyland are like inside type like dark rides.

You basically got in a miniature pirate ship. I think two people could ride. in it, it was suspended by a track in the ceiling, and it would just take you around these darkened rooms where there were miniature models on the floor, and it was supposed to make you feel like in Peter Pan, you're flying over London, and then you're flying over Neverland,

or flying over Captain Hook's ship. Huh. But people had never seen that, because it's putting you in these movies that you've already seen and that you already know. Because, like, imagine that, like, you're getting on a ride, and it's just that, but you have no sense of context. It's just like, so we're looking at miniatures right now,

They're like, no, you're Peter Pan. They're like, oh, shit, we're Peter Pan. That's London. Mm-hmm. Huh. So I... How high is this suspension? Like, are they five feet in the air?

Maybe. So not super duper high, but high enough to where your perception is. Yeah. So, like, when you're writing it, it had to be amazing, and I bet it's amazing as a kid. But I got to see it through the eyes of the kid and then going back and doing it, like, as an adult. Uh-huh. And you're writing it, and it loops. you know, you're not super close together with the other carts or cars or where they're made like pirate ships.

But you can see them turn and then head across the room and then pass you on the other side. So it's like if you turned on the light, the room itself might only be 20 by 20 that you're currently inside, but the walls are blackened. So it looks in their stars. So it looks like so much bigger. It's just all that, again, that illusory type deal. You lose your spatial awareness. Yeah. And all of a sudden it does kind of feel like you're in the sky. Mm-hmm. Uh, Snow White's Enchanted Wish was there. Most of the, the rides were at Fantasyland because that's what Walt was, was best known for. So Snow White's Enchanted Wish was there at the beginning, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, which you are correct.

It would be crazy like an acid trip if you were to do that, right? I'm down. Yeah, I know you are. I want you to experience that. I don't want you to experience that. I want you to experience like Roger Rabbit's cartoon spin, where it's almost like a combination of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and the teacups because the car rotates as well. And it's all like crazy neon colors from like Who Frame Roger Abbott

with like the dip and the weasels and like the different clashes between the real world and the cartoon. I haven't been there since I smoked. So started smoking. So like I am so like doing this excites me to want to go just to like take the GoPro and go do a documentary of you, of watching people see you go to Disneyland and just see the pure joy that you experience. Yeah, I'm fine being the subject to that.

I have a realization that I don't necessarily take in things the way that I think normal people do. That's fantastic, though. I just want to walk you around and put a dolewip in your hand and a chero and just have you try shit. It looked like the biggest 10-year-old would just a dole-whip ring around my lips. I'd get you a propeller hat. Yeah. Yes. Okay, so King Arthur's Carousel.

It's the main carousel right in the middle of it. Now, Walt didn't buy this, you know, brand new. He actually, in 1954, purchased this massive, handcrafted antique carousel that was built in 1875. Wow. Now, it had different animals and everything, but because this is King Arthur's, he wants these people feeling like King Arthur's knights, you know, charging into battle. So he replaces all the other animals with these hand-carved antique wooden horses, had to be sourced from carousels. all across North America, some of them from Coney Island.

And he ended up having to refurb this thing, to buy it and refurbish. And this is at the time, $50,000 to $60,000 for this carousel because not all of them went up and down. He's like, nope, everyone's going up and down. So they had to refit and refurb this thing for every horse to actually have like up and down movement.

And this is in Fantasyland? Dead center, right in Fantasyland. So this is the crown jewel. Yes. So you're going to spend a ton of money. Everyone can see because it's outside. So not only does it have to be functional and semi-fun to ride, but it also just has to be visually stunning.

It has to look beautiful. And it's going to be constantly always going. The Mad Tea Party, which is the spinning key cups, the vomit maker, basically. Dumbo the Flying or Dumbo the Flying Elephant, which is, I'm sure you've seen it in movies, but it's the kind of ride where everything comes off like a central pole. that branches out and then the things can raise and lower

and it just spins in a circle. But with Dumbo, it was crazy because each person individually could control their, you're flying inside Dumbo with the ears out, surprise, surprise, could actually change their elevation up or down. So they had control. They had control over it. Wow. Yeah. So that's I mean, at the same, can you imagine like as a kid

it's not just doing like, you get to go up or down like holy shit. And when was this put in? This is original. Oh my God. So this was from the jump. This had to have been revolutionary to be able to control your own pod like that. Yeah. Wow. Your own flying elephant.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's not a pod. I guess you're in a flying elephant. Yep. Allison Wonderland is, I think, put in a couple of years later in 1958. Again, that would probably be crazy like an acid trip. And the Matterhorn bobsleds. Now, this is crazy because the Matterhorn is the world's first steel tubular roller coaster. Steel tubular roller coaster. So think of it in the sense of there were like,

wooden roller coasters. But those were the ones where it literally just sat on a track. So when it turned, it couldn't take turns super sharp because the thing could tip off the there was nothing holding it. Yeah. The tubular steel allowed you to do wheels on the top, wheels on the bottom, wheels on the side to hold it. Okay, so tubular is the track. Correct.

And you could take banking sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So right out of the gate, they waltz like, I want it to be the Matterhorn. I want it to be. I think it's a one-eighth scale Matterhorn and stands 147 feet tall. Oh, sorry, one-100th scale of the real mountain.

I was going to say, how big is a Matterhorn? Yeah, shit. It sits directly on the border of Tomorrowland and Fantasyland. And when they designed it, it's also like super advanced at the time because it contains two separate intertwining tracks that actually like kind of wind their way through the mountain and provide you like a different experience.

So again, this is Walt being like, well, if you ride this one, not every ride is going to be the same because you could always ride the other one. And this is inside or outside? So this actually goes inside and outside the matter horn. So it comes out the side of the mountain a little bit. They had this thing called the People Mover, I want to say.

And it was kind of like a, you know, like at Lagoon, how they have the thing that'll take you across the park? Like it looks like a ski lift almost. They had one of those. And it went through the top of the Matterhorn. Wow. And as people are writing on it, there's a team of professional climbers that are hired during the day

to make it look like they're scaling up in leader hose. I'm not shitting you. No, in leader hose into scale the mountain. No, this is where you get the basketball court in the top of the Matterhorn. Because in order to entertain the professional climbers that he had hired to scale the peak,

he had to put a place for them to kind of stay up there and kill time between their shifts. So there was a flat spot up there in like a storage area that they put a basketball hoop and so they would play basketball up in the top of the Matterhorn on their brakes. Basketball, a hundred feet in the air?

Probably. Wow. All enclosed and everything when they were taking their brakes. You can look it up. There's like signet. That's where like they would go up and do signatures and stuff

for the people that did work the ride like the cast members. That's nuts. Yeah. So like the different sides of the like the different tracks as well so the fantasy side, land side was slightly longer with like sharper curves

and then the Tomorrow Land's, side is faster, but a little bit rougher. I am confident the last time I win, I got the Tomorrowland side because it jerked the shit out of me. Like it's definitely a, and I mean, it's been, you know, upgraded with like, for maintenance

and everything, but this thing is herky, jerky as shit. You're looking at a picture of the basketball court? That's incredible. Yeah. That's the choice that they made too. Like the basketball, I love that it's the choice that that's what they're using to kill time, but, you know, like

ping pong table or anything like that. Like, we'll just go for a basketball court. Yep. It's not a full soft. Can we knocking ping pongs out of the Matterhorn and have guests getting hit with them? You just see like three of the climbers looking over as a ping pong ball hurdles 100, 100 feet to the ground. All right. So we got, it's a small world was in, was put in in 1966 as part of Fantasy Land. Now, this is one of those rides that originated from the 1964 World's Fair.

this was designed Walt was approached to do this be like we're wanting to do this you know design us something that like is about all like the cultures of the world and everything like that so he's like well all the children of the world will design a water like float ride that you'll go through it and each will design all these little creepy fucking doll things and dress them up like all the different like cultural clothings from different places of the world and they'll all be singing their national anthem and as they're going through this, it's just a cacophony of just sound. And he's like, yeah, this doesn't work because they're all singing not only in different languages, but they're all singing something that is nowhere near the same tune, cadence, anything like that. So they ended up creating the song, it's a small world after all, that they could all still sing in their native languages, but because it was the same tune when you switch to areas, you could then pick up and it wouldn't be like just music banging against each other.

It would be the same tune just in a different language. Probably all similar inflections with the singing and everything like that. And I think like in a lot of the same pitches for like the kids singing and everything like that too. I'm sure they didn't have just one group of kids that could speak all these languages. But they even got it to the point where it was at the same like notes and everything. So as you'd be leaving one place and hearing them sing, their sounds would be able to hear the beat and the rhythm and like the the pitch and you'd come into another like a little open door that would open up and you'd be in another land but they'd be seeing the same tone.

What are your opinions on? It's the, it's a blight upon mankind that ride. But you still have to do it once? Yes. Yeah. I would, yes, I would want you to, I would just have the camera just on your face the entire time doing that. And you'd have the song stuck in your head for the entire rest of the day.

I don't think is there any other words besides it's a small world after all? Well, it's a small world. It's a land of laughter, a land of joy. It's a land of laughter. A land of joy. But it just goes... Huh. I'm making it seem creepier than it is. But no, you can be one and done.

Okay. Moving over, Tomorrowland. Again, future of 1986, baby. Autopia. Being that it was the only one in Tomorrowland when they first opened, You know, this is crazy because kids are getting to drive cars. Yeah. Of course, you had to reach a certain height and everything.

But opening days saw people hop in the fences, just even within the park itself and literally like carjacking people on the track. Like running out mid track and like or people had like turned the car sideways into the wall because people were of course, they had like a steel skirt around it a little bit. But people were still, what if you were to turn your back at a go car track and there no supervision. People are going to be running the fuck out of each other, right? Yeah. Yes. They're naturally doing that. So cars are getting turned sideways.

People are just flat out jumping out of the cars and then running off because they can't get the car turned. People are jumping onto the track and getting in empty cars. It's pure chaos. In the area that's not finished yet, too. Well, yeah, that's basically like just a giant expo center. Yeah. In Tomorrowland as well, Monorail is actually put in in 1950. So just literally four years or what would that be four? If it opened 55, yeah, 59. So four years.

Now, it's a high-speed monorail that travels directly through Tomorrowland and operates as like a fully operational transit system that carry guests to and from like downtown Disney. So Disneyland used to be where the monorail would just go like around the park itself. Downtown Disney is the area that's now between California Adventure and Disneyland. California Adventure is what basically used to be the parking lot. There's no place to park.

There's a huge parking garage, but most people get bust in from like satellite parking lots. Wow. So the area that you're walking between them, you keep walking and that's where like they have an ESPN, like I don't know what they call them ESPN In zones or something like that. ESPN zone? Yes.

That's still around? That's, it was the last time I was there. There was a, a rainforest cafe, so who knows. But this is where they also have like the Lego store and Ben and Jerry's and like all this like fine upscale dining and stuff like,

like that, but it's all like Disney theme type stuff. But yeah, the monorail will actually take you and pick you up and like bring you into the park and everything. Separate fees to go into California adventure? Yeah, you can get park hopper tickets that allow you to go in, but you're you're paying more for it. Yeah. Now, this was the very first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere. Damn. It's a good feather in your cap.

Yeah. Just at an amusement park. Well, no kidding. So unfortunately, they didn't have great taste in who they came out to, like, dedicated and show it off to because Vice President Richard Nixon was there. And his family were attending, like, the grand opening, I think, for this of, like, the monorail itself. So after cutting the ribbon, Walt was so excited to test it out that he got it, got on it with Nixon and his family and basically pulled out of the station without any of like the secret service. Guys, they were just stranded on the club.

Pretty much. Which would have been the, can you imagine what the heart aches? he could have saved us if Walt would have just capped Nixon for us on that monorail. When you say high speed, what are we talking? It had to have been enough to pull Nixon's flappy faceback. It didn't go really that fast. It's the first iteration of a barrel man. I guess the first iteration of high speed is...

It looked like a bullet train, though. I mean, it looked very Buck Rogers like futuristic. There was this thing called the Phantom Boat, which was basically like a motor, like we all steer our own boats and everything. Yeah, that was the first permanently. canceled ride because I think they looked at Octopian. I was like, at least these things we can get out and turn these things on the track. Now we have to worry about drowning and not being

able to get to people. So we need to get rid of this lawsuit. Land is fixable. Water, not so much. So submarine voyage is one of those rides. It's been rebranded a bunch of times, but when it was first put in the park in 1959, it was you would get into a submarine. You would load from the top. But the sub never submerged. You just simply went down into the submarine, which was always, the top of it was always above water, but you were looking, who had ever been in something that was underwater, right?

Nobody at that point. And as you're going down there, they would have, like, animatronic, like, fish. They had for the longest time, um, girls that were dressed up as mermaids that would just, their job was just to hang out in the lagoon and swim around so people that were in the windows could see mermaids swimming. That's thinking of everything. Yeah. To give them a show underwater. Yeah. Now it's like a finding Nemo show or something like that. Space Mountain was put in in 1977. We'll get to that here in just a little bit. All right.

Let's see what we got next. This seems like a crazy question. Do you think that they've designed some movies based upon if they could sell a ride? Does that make sense? If they had something, an idea like Nemo, they're like, well, we can make the movie and make a ton of, of money off of it, but we have this ride that we could update and just make that all happen. It's worked both ways. I'm trying to think about how to answer this. So you have the submarine

ride. It needed, like, it's kind of boring. You do it one time and it's kind of done. You need a way to make it entertaining and repeatable. So you do finding Nemo because that's the popular water-based movie that everyone knows. You then have rides that spawn the movies. that in turn get more popular than the rides and more well-known to where people associate the movie and don't even know it's a ride. So when they get to the park, they assume the ride was based on the movie. Like higher to the Caribbean.

That was based on the ride? Yes. Really? Yeah. So chicken before the egg. Yes. Okay, so we'll get to that. So New Orleans Square.

This is the first new land that's added after the original five. So it was added in 1966. So 11 years after. after the thing is open, they had this new land. And this was themed as like 19th century Nalans in the French quarter. So, Pirates of the Caribbean is going, there's going to be two things that they're planning on having as attractions here.

It takes place in this, or it takes up this area that was previously Magnolia Park. If you are walking out of Adventureland, you would walk right into Norland Square. It kind of like sandwiches between the railroad behind and like the rivers of America. So not in the center, but... You know, I love my clock references. Yeah.

You are at 10 o'clock. You're at 9. You're like at 10 o'clock right now from the hub. So you would walk through, you either have to walk through Adventureland or you've got to walk through front to your land to get to the square or take the train from the initial station.

It'll drop you off at a station there. Okay. So two things are planned for this, Pirates of the Caribbean and the haunted mansion. So I believe the haunted man. mansion was actually built first. Now, Walt wanted everything in the park to look clean, so he didn't want it to look like a dilapidated mansion. He wanted it to look really nice from the outside. It was styled as this like antebellum style manner that was finished in 1963.

Now, World's Fair and taking time away to do designs for that and everything kind of put that on hold. And then other arguments about what it was going to become also delayed construction. on it. And then they figured out that Pirates of the Caribbean was going to be getting put in there too. That was the other one designed. And with the advancement of Lincoln and the animatronics, that was going to be something that they were kind of waiting on for pirates. They saw how well the log or the floating boat aspect of it's a small world had worked. And they saw how the animatronics worked. And that's the two things they needed for Pirates of the Caribbean. So they were like, we have these two things. let's knock out pirates first. So 1967, this opens. It's actually the very last ride that Walt Disney personally oversaw the design for. And unfortunately,

he ends up passing away in December of 1966, three months before it opens to the public. Now, they were able to, when they designed these rides, they, I'm trying to think of how to describe this. The process of coming up with this, they said was Walt would go into like where the Imagineers were in like the studio

and would just walk around and being like, what do you think of this? And what do you think? And you started, people started to know it was an idea he was taking seriously when he would ask multiple people. And then he would get input from multiple people. And if enough gave ideas or kind of kickback or like, you know, feedback, he'd be like, let's figure out how to do this. And so designing this thing would go from, okay, you guys start drawing up some stuff. Let's figure out what is this going to be? Is it going to be a walk-through pirate museum? Is it going to be like an exhibition?

Is it going to be, you know, they don't have a set idea of him walking in and just be like log ride or flume ride or whatever it's referred to as boat ride. It's going to have this and this and this. He just went around to people and he's like, draw me some stuff and then come show me what ideas you have what might be a good theme for this.

And they would just over bouncing off ideas and R&D put stuff. put stuff together until they were able to kind of come up with an agreeable, cohesive story that it would take place in a feasible mechanical way to actually do like an attraction like this. And it's not even a, I want this, build me this, show me how you're going to do it. It was a pretty collaborative effort, it sounds like. Yeah, and some of the guys that have designed some of these rides, there's a guy I want to say his name is Troy or Tony Baker.

he designed like five or six of like the most classic rides at like Disneyland and all these other places. And there are different guys that worked as imaginers that were then like head of Imaginering or head of the park. And, you know, in those certain situations where they had started there on day one is like an ice cream scooper. Wow. So there's a lot of vertical trajectory and where you can go along the park. So with pirates, how it works is Pirates is much bigger than they had room for in the park. So it's so weird to talk to somebody who hasn't been on the right before and everything and trying to describe it.

So they would, you know, design it as a mockup. They would have a smaller scale thing. And before Walt's death, because again, these things take years to actually construct, they were able to like bring him in and walk him through or like put him in a cart and like kind of wheel him through. this is what's going to look like and he would see stuff partially done so he could kind of get a vision for what he was you know going to be missing how the ride works and i'm going to short it or like i'm not going to describe it to kind of give you a sense of how crazy it is so you go into like this norland style like um cat or wrought iron like balconied room or building and you go up onto the

second floor and as you get up there and you walk into the building you're you walk into the building you're instantly in it with the returning boats basically coming up a ramp and it's full of passengers that are just getting done with it and then moves into a queue you get on it and as you get on the boat you float out I want to say they're four rows deep with room for about four or five people in each row

model that for a pirate ship just an actual more so like your standard just floating kind of like benches and stuff but in like a boat when you first start out floating through it, you're in a Louisiana bayou. You can hear like bong bong bong someone playing a banjo. You can see like fireflies and everything. It's supposed to be back, you know, in the time of the pirates. And the ride works in reverse. So like time frame wise, it takes you from the bayou back to like the pirate, like all the pirates being dead and then like

when they were in their heyday. So as you're going through this, there's also a restaurant off to your right where you have to get reservations called the Blue Bayou. It's cool to eat there. They have a Moni Cristo that's a pretty fucking bomb. And you can just eat in the ride? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's so cool because it's designed like you're outside of like a Louisiana plantation and you're in the backyard. It looks like there's trees and there's like lights strung over you when you're eating. And you can literally see people going beside you in the back of it. You can actually sit against the rail and watch people do the first part of the ride. So as you're getting out of the by you, you end up seeing this talking Jolly Roger's skull

and you take a 10 foot or 10 or 15 foot like little waterfall plunge and it goes down. What that does is that takes you underneath the berm where the railroad is and then there's another little drop and it takes you into the building where the actual ride takes place outside the park. So that was how they solved the area problem. do this with a whole bunch of rides. Because they have all these parking lots out there. Yeah.

And then these things are painted that color that I was talking about, that go away green, where it just looks like it blends into the background where you don't see anything because it's been that specially engineered color to where your eyes are supposed to miss it. Huh. So you go in, you go through the pirates, you go through a pirate cavern where they're all dead. Crazy facts about this when it was opened. They couldn't get the skeletons to look right using the technology of the day to recreate. fake skeletons. So they got actual cadaver skeletons that they were able to use when they first started.

And then as the technology to actually craft realistic looking fake skeletons, they started replacing them. But there has not been a denial about there being one real skull still in there in the headboard of like the dead pirate captain's bed. You have to. Oh yeah. It's a pirate ride. You can't. An homage to what you were using before. So the right itself has over 120 life-size audio animatronics. Now, as you go in you, buddy, like you go through this and you're in like pirate caves and everything and then you start to go back in time and you enter this room where you can't see the ceiling, of course, because it's completely blacked out. But you're in the middle of a pirate ship firing on one side of you with animatronic pie slain enough going, yeah, and the cannons are firing on like a Spanish fort town. and you go through the fort town and this is where you see like

famous things like the animatronic mayor that's being lowered into the well by the pirates like torturing him and he comes up and he spits out water and like pirates are chasing women around in the town and everything there's like an auction like a pirate auction going on and then as you enter another area the whole town

is on fire but the fire was created by just using simple stuff like lights a certain sheen of sheet that's the right color and then it just moves behind it, it just shakes it so it looks like constantly moving flames. It was real enough looking that when they were doing like a fire safety inspection before it was going to, they showed the fire and he thought it was real fire.

He's like, you guys can't be using real fire. And they're like, no, it's literally just sheets in. Like these guys just think of like illusory stuff to make everything look real. There was when they were first designing the animatronics, you know, you have to cover up just the the faces are the only things that really have the facial like latex or rubber on them you have to have people that are designing like the wardrobes for everything

so there was this woman named Alice and they were having her do all the dressings for like all 120 of these animatronic pirates or whatever it was and she's like I should probably make two of these it's just as easy for me to make two outfits these things are going to get like animatronic fluid they're moving constantly eight hours a day

clothing is going to rub it's going to wear out we should make extra outfits and like just make one set of outfits, get them done. She ends up making two, and it's good because there was an actual fire in the ride that burned a bunch of stuff, and they were like, do you, can you make so much? She's like, I already made the second

outfits. So it only, like, made the ride closed down for like a day. What caused the fire? I'm not sure. Just some sort of mechanical failure. There's so much wiring and stuff, because all of that stuff, sorry, a little parched there.

When they're riding and designing these rides, and I know it seems like something simple now, but matching up the audio and activities for when every single and spacing out these ride vehicles, it's not like someone is coming into the end of a scene, and to get the whole picture, they would have to ride the ride multiple times. When you start going into the scene, stuff resets for these audio animatronics where the sound is syncing up to music and singing and all this stuff, this is where the song Yoho Yoho A Pirate's Life for me is invented So all of them are singing in this village and everything

It's written by the guys that are doing like The Disney musical, like the musical numbers And Disney movies and everything And they're coming up with these songs All for something that hasn't had a movie tied to it yet No no no not yet Wow But what they've done over time with this

Is as the movie is then created Based on Pirates of the Caribbean and it becomes so famous, a lot of the rides that they're building, they go to, when they refurbish them, they add characters in. So, like,

Captain Jack Sparrow is in certain aspects now. Like, at the end of the ride, it used to be, you go through, like, a gunpowder room where pirates are fighting around a bunch of, like, black powder barrels

and everything like that. And at the end of it, like, there's an animatronic jack sparrow that's like, come on back and all that stuff. That didn't used to be there. It used to be a different just, like,

standard pirate character. character. Crazily enough, Johnny Depp will sometimes dress in, or his character. Yeah. He'll take the place of the animatronic and he'll actually sit there for a few hours and do that stuff or show up at different parts in the ride, like hiding behind barrels and stuff, or show up outside the ride and take pictures with guests. I don't know if I like that.

They have, well, of course, because they have Disney characters. They have lookalikes. Yeah. But there have been times when it's been him actually doing it. I'm just saying, if I'm going through this ride and I've convinced myself that all these are animatronics, and then all of a sudden, he pops up as a live human. Yeah, that's a jump scare for sure. Because your mind's so trained on watching me, yeah, that's not real.

Then all of a sudden, Johnny Depp, who did he do plastic surgery to look like the original Jack Sparrow? Or is that just makeup? Just makeup. He's done enough of the movies where if you've seen the latest Pirates movie, it's not that far off from how he looks age-wise. Okay. Plus, there's a lot of makeup. Jack's wearing a lot of makeup. But I mean, pretty much every one of the Disney parks has a Pirates of the Caribbean. Ones that have been designed further along, like more modern day, have leaned into using like video screen technology to where it'll put you in sight line where the camera tracks your eye movement to where it knows exactly where you're looking for the position. So if you were to look at the screen and you were to be 10 feet off to the right, it would look crazy weird.

but since you're right in the middle of it where they designed your sight line to be, you look like you're in the middle of this huge immersive, like, you know, like the sphere surrounds you completely, like that type of stuff where it looks like you're in the middle of like a pirate ship battle on these rides.

I think one of the Disneyland's, I can't remember if it was in Shanghai, but they did an entire Pirates land. A whole land? A whole land. Just, and then the, like, the... Because basically, if you think about it, New Orleans Square is kind of focused

on Pirates of the Caribbean and then haunted mansion. So you would just have like a pier and other like pirity rides. Am I getting some kind of confusion here with Treasure Island in Las Vegas? Do they do live shows from boats? Yes, they do at the front.

Okay. They did like pirate, yeah. Okay. Kind of the same way you sent me that thing. They had like the Viking land where they were doing like a Viking battle. Yeah. And the guys on the ship and everything.

Yeah. All right. Let's take a bathroom break. We'll get back into it. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourself?

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All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right, getting back into it. A haunted mansion. So this one, because it got put on hold for the World's Fair, Walt ends up dying. so they don't really know what direction to go to because there's a lot of these guys who are the Imagineers that were, you know, trusted by Walt to do certain things. And one guy when they were kind of kicking around ideas was like, you know, people like to be scared. And Walt, you know, Walt had said that. And the guy's like, okay, so we're going to go in a scary direction.

And then he would go to another guy that was good at this other stuff. And he's like, you know, there should be maybe some humor and it should be a little bit more lighthearted. So they end up putting these two guys together. like fucking figure it out what you're going to do here. And this is the same type of ride where like parts of the Caribbean, you look at the mansion and you're just kind of like, there's no way that the ride fits inside that thing. It's just the facade. So when you're going into this, it's got kind of like not Vincent Price, but a guy that kind of is like Vincent Price that's doing the narration when you first walk in and they let you walk in, I'm not sure the exact group

number, but you first enter this thing and you're in like in like a foyer and they close the doors behind you and you hear it comes the mute or the voice comes on it. What am I trying to say? It welcomes you to the haunted mansion. He's your ghost host. And all of a sudden you kind of feel the room start to move and you look and you see the room and it looks like it's starting to stretch up above you and there's four pictures on the wall and the pictures themselves starts to stretch and the frames start to stretch and it shows like the pictures were from just of normal people but you could tell there was something a little bit off about it and as they stretched you see that one person is standing on a tightrope over an alligator pit another one has like a lit barrel of t and t that they're standing on but you don't

notice it until the picture stretches and it's explaining how these people died. And then at the very end of it, after you're looking up at this ceiling that now stretches like 15 feet above you, lightning kicks in and you see a like a dead body hanging from the top of it that's supposed to be the host that's talking to you. This is Disneyland. Yeah. Whoa. So what this does is this stretching room is just an elevator and there's two of them in here. And it lowers you down to a tunnel and as it opens, you walk through another kind of walkable portion of this ride where there's like stuff like weird pictures on the wall that'll like light up and show like the skeleton inside or the face will change you're walking under the berm again out into the actual ride

itself which when you get there you get into these things called doom buggies doom doom buggies and it's just these little two you know two or three person little cars and they face one direction everyone's facing the same direction and as you go through the haunted mansion these things rotate to show you all of these like little ghoulish illusions and it looks like you come upon this like parlor where there's a big like spread down on this table and there's just a bunch of ghosts that are like dancing around the room and they appear at different times and they're doing all of this through like you know smoke and mirrors type stuff but it looks crazy cool and you'll go through like a woman who is inside like a seance ball and she's giving like a premonition it was just one of the

that had like really nice cheekbones and her name was like leota something and so they call them madam leota and so there's one of the women there who that's her mother yeah and she's an imaginer as well now and so as they're riding the ride she'll be with like her kids don't be like there's grandma wave of grandma she's like people think i'm fucking crazy because they're like what's this lady talking about there's grandma but like you go out into an outside like graveyard and there's um like spirits coming up out of like an animatronics coming up out of like the grave. This is the place that on Halloween, it completely gets revamped as like the nightmare before Christmas. Huh. And it's cool as shit. So what's the, the haunted mansion isn't based on a film or any IP of?

Nope. And so the film gets made based on the ride. Is it a film? Yeah, I think it was, so they do, they have a Muppet, Haunted Mansion, which is pretty dope if you have a small child. and then they also have the Eddie Murphy version of the haunted mansion it wasn't a great movie

that's why they haven't made a haunted mansion too yeah I'm unaware I've never heard a haunted mansion before but again it's one of those that are so popular that it's at different Disneyland's but it's different themed so there's no northern square in the magic kingdom in Florida there's a liberty square so it's designed to look kind of like like a building or like a mansion that you would see in like 19th century like New York or something like brick and everything.

They have ones that are over in, like, Japan and Paris and all that stuff that are just different style, but, like, very similar in the right itself. It blows me away to think that that's, it's kicking over in my brain that they were able to make movies off of these. Like, it's wild to me. If the haunted mansion one isn't great, but Pirates of the Caribbean is a massive franchise. Yeah. And this was all just based off of them throwing these things together to... Yeah, but I mean, if you...

If you go and write Pirates of the Caribbean now, you'll be like, oh, this is where they got that idea from in the movie or something like that. The ride itself is not the plot of a movie. No, it's not, but it's the inspiration. Exactly, yeah. But now when you write it, you're like, oh, like, because I think they'll have like Captain Barbosa on the pirate ship instead of just like a standard pirate like they had before

and they're like, oh, like I know that character from the movie, but if you never knew about the ride, you'd be like, oh, they made this right after the movie. That's something I'm going to have to explain to my kid. Yeah? It's because he's going to see the movies. First time I'm going to like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Shut your beautiful mouth. You're missing out, kid. Yeah.

Another place that gets constructed as they're adding on these lands. First, it's called Bear Country. Hell yeah. I know it is Critter Country because then it changes its name to Critter Country. And now it's known as Bayou. country. This is basically where like the country bear jamboree is. Yeah. I, I, I, this is one thing I'm very aware of. Love the country bear jambore. Is the country bear jambore? Okay, fantastic. This is also where Splash Mountain is. So Splash Mountain no longer a thing. It's called, uh, Tiana's Bayou

adventure. Now, Splash Mountain can be a little bit problematic. I was young enough as a kid where I didn't notice the problems with Splash Mountain. Now, the newly created like bear country when it was made was basically just empty because it was created for the country bear jamboree. And there was this Tomorrowland stage show called America Sings. And it was closing down. They were phasing it out. And they had like a hundred of these expensive animal audio animatronics with basically nowhere to go. Like we got to figure out somewhere to use these things. So let's figure out a ride that can go into critter country or bear country, whatever they were calling it. They can use a bunch of these like animals. So Splash Mountain is created and this is the log flume ride you're probably familiar with.

Colmanates in a five-story 45-degree plunge down a chickapen hill into the briar patch at like 40 miles an hour. And the whole story is about like Brear or Briar Rabbit. And the problematic part though is that the ride was heavily themed after the animated segments of this 1946. You get in the time frame, Disney song called Song of the South. Oh. Yeah, and because the movie had been heavily criticized for, it's very problematic and stereotypical depictions of the post-Civil War American South. Jim Crow?

Yep. Yeah. It officially ended up closing. It didn't close until 2023. Oh. Yeah. And here's the thing. As a kid, if you had never seen that movie, you're just seeing the song segments of

that movie, which are very, very. fantastical. It looks like, you know, because it's in the south, there's riverboats, there's talking animals. You don't see anything as a kid about that movie, but then you watch the movie and you're just kind of like, as an adult, and you're like, oh, yeah. So they end up re, basically re-skinned it. It's still like the same mechanical ride as this thing called Tiana's Bayou's Adventure. I want to say it's based off like the frog prints or something like that. I never saw that. It was one of those Disney movies that come out when you're not watching Disney movies anymore.

Is this the princess and the frog? Like a reimagining of the princess and the frog, I believe. Critter Country, Bayou Country now also has the Winnie the Pooh ride that was thrown in there in 2003. You got to throw poo in there. Yeah. You have to throw...

I can't do a Winnie the Pooh. You still have to throw poo in there. I just know. Oh, poo. Yor. Mickey's Tune Town is open in 1993 and this was designed to basically

look like Roger Rabbit style a real life animated neighborhood of like all the main Disney characters so you walk in and there are no like straight lines buildings are meant to kind of look like they're leaned a little bit stuff looks like you put an air pump in it and either overinflated it or it's a little bit like

saggy and everything thing. Everything there is kind of like the water fountains are all like oversized and overshaped and shaped and like cartoonish colors and proportions. This is where there's a few rides. I haven't ridden any of these except the Roger Rabbit's cartoon spin. Mini and Mickey's Runaway Railway was added in 2023. So just recently there's a Chippendales like roller coaster and also individual houses for each

of like the main Disney characters. So weirdly enough, Mickey and Minnie each have their own house, but then like... It's the dream. Oh, yes. They've kept that relationship separate enough. Mickey needs this space. I need my spice. I love the idea.

You're going to need to come right now. But Donald's house is like a ship that's like docked. Goofy's house is all crazy looking. I think Daisy Duck has one there. Like there's a city hall. there's a jail that has like the bendable bars where you can take pictures and all that kind of stuff. You said this is called Toontown? Tune Town, yeah.

I'm going to expose myself a little here. I'm going to roll over. I'm going to show you my belly for my ignorance. Aren't Looney Tunes Warner Brothers? They are. But Tunes is just like the thing that they would use like tiny tunes. They were the name for just like miniature cartoons. Okay.

So tune town for Disney It's just cartoons Gotcha Yes for cartoon characters So it's cartoon town basically So this has nothing to do with any of the Looney Tunes Okay because yeah different brand All right

It'd be the craziest thing to see Stone I can imagine Yeah Just thinking of Goofy's house right now In this present state Yeah Just not seeing it Walking over taking a big pull off the pen

Holding it blown it out, opening your eyes and just walk into the Tune Town. Can you walk into these houses? Oh yeah. Really? Full tours. And at the end of it, you're going to meet the characters. Less in on that, but I want to see the layouts. They're crazy. Wow.

And what's nuts is a bunch of places in the park, when you go to like look out in the distance are professional backdrops. So Tune Town looks off in the distance like it's just rolling cartoon hills. And they're just stretched out. You can't see any of L.A. or Anaheimai or, around you. You're in a world of your own. There is everything. We talked about the smell smeltizers or whatever they are that'll pump in certain scents near the bakeries for like fresh bread and everything. If you're an adventure land, they pump in like dust or certain floral

scents. They will do that in like also like audio cues where you hear just like cartoonish sounds and everything to cover all the background noise of any traffic or anything. The immersion is 100%. Huh. So much thought. Yeah. So the most recent addition to it has been the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. So that opened in 2019, 14 acres.

So it's like one of the largest lands. But it was in a kind of a back lot. So it's back kind of behind like Frontier Land and where like, the bayou land and everything. But you walk in and again, full immersion. You're looking in off in the distance, but very close to you. You're seeing like the spires of this, like rock formations. Kind of in the style of, what am I trying to think?

You ever seen pictures of there, there's a mountain range or a section of mountains in China where it looks like there's just a lot of tall, like, jungle-y, like spider types. You have seen that. Yes. It's kind of like that type of look. so you look up and it's all been designed at miniature scale, but in the distance, you know what your eyesight is supposed to see, so it looks like it's far away.

So it's like a galactic spaceport on like the edges of the galaxy on this strange planet, but you're surrounded by all the colors and like all of like the vehicles from Star Wars. So again, and it sounds to where you can't see or hear any of the other lands. So when you hear doors open, it's like, and your hand droid beeps and stuff like that, like in the background and hearing like ships take off and land that are out of like sight and everything, it totally just keeps you there in the moment. So the two rides that are the main ones,

you know, they have like cantinas, they have a place where you can build like your lightsaber and everything. But the two main rides, the one is one of the most advanced rides in the world. It's the Star Wars Rise of the Resistance. And basically considered the most advanced theme park ride ever belt. It's massive. It's got this multi-system experience that lasts about 20 minutes. It's a 20-minute ride. A 20-minute ride? Yeah, it's one that I haven't been on. I've watched it and everything. The ride takes you through basically. You go to ride. You're a member of like the resistance, and you get captured by an imperial ship that makes you feel like you're there on the ground when it happens. Then you go into a motion-type ship that the screen makes you believe that. The screen makes you believe

that they're taking you prisoner and they're taking you up to a star destroyer in orbit and the motion of that ship, that simply just transfers you to another section like one of these warehouses of the run. I think it's 150,000 square foot warehouse. It opens and you walk out into a hanger that is enormous. It looks like the size of a hanger you would see in Star Wars that can hold like fighter ships and stuff like that. And there are a bunch of animatronic like stormtroopers and their guys dressed as like the enemy the first order and they're ushering you. They're like your prisoners now.

You're going in here. And you get onto a ride that's kind of like haunted mansion style in these little like transport carts that they're going to be taking to like the detention block. And as they're taking you through this enemy ship, there's an attack by the resistance fleet that comes to save you. And you're watching through all of these screens that are interacting with all the live segments inside the ride itself

to make it look like there's a space battle going on outside. the ship is moving a little bit as it gets hit. You're seeing animatronic characters try to like stop you and everything like that during the ride. And as you end the ride and get into this ship, you get into another one of those little like motion pods. And it makes it look like you're dropping out of an escape pod back down to the planet. And as it stops and it opens up your back outside where the ride is letting you off in the exit queue. That's an intense 20 minutes. Yeah.

And it's all 4D. I mean, you're feeling wind. Yes, but then you're also then inside an actual practical set inside that hanger and going through different sections, not on screen, but of practical sets of going through that are combined with screens.

That are like out the windows of the spaceship. Wow. There's another one called the Millennium Falcon Smugglers. Run. This one, fuck. I just want to go with you because I want to do this shit with you so badly. It's an interactive flight simulator that puts you in like a six person crew in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, everyone has

different roles. You have pilots, gunners, and then mechanics. And so as you're going through this ride, everyone is working together in this ride to go ahead and like, and is this screen and it's moving and you're flying the Millennium Falcon. You're like, we need more. And like the gunner is having to shoot down like shit. And like the engineer is having to like repair your shields and like re that's awesome. Yeah. It's like all I see is like taking the kid there and being like you're piloting the ship dad'll take care of like Uncle Adam will be your gunner dad's going to take care of the mechanical stuff

Is there is failure a thing So like can you go through this ride and fuck it up and then go through You can lose stuff during the ride like you're like we lost something like The ship's getting damaged like we didn't accomplish a mission of following this ship That we were trying to like to catch up to him or something like that But like as the ship is responding the person steering the ship is actually like kind of like could steer you into something to where to like jostle the ship a little bit. So this probably has the longest line of people just repeating.

These two rides being the newest ones are usually the, yeah, the longest ones. I could see that. Especially if you weren't as successful or if every single trip that you take can be different and there's an affected outcome by any sort of mess up or somebody not getting their shields up or something like that. Wow. But I mean, and like we kind of talked to, when did we talk about the direction? Frito's thing. What episode was that? Oh, that was during one of the... The Patreon snack, the salty or sweet. That's right. So, yeah. So, you know, there is a, like, a taco place at one of the parks at the Magic Kingdom or at Disneyland that it was a something called Something DeFrito. And Frito Le was sponsoring it. And one of the guys that had come down from Frito Lees saw how many like tortillas that they were throwing out after like the end of the day. He's like, you guys should really just like fry those up and like seized them. I'd do.

it sometimes and they started doing it and they were such a hit that frito lay was like we're going to start marketing these things nationwide um i talked about how disney is unique to the like why you get the big long churros instead of like the little ones that were traditionally served in a cup and you just ate them smaller churros it's because walt wanted people to have a hand free he's like i need something portable that people can walk around to where it's not preoccupying their hands so if they're holding a kid's hand or doing something like that or they're having to hold their ticket or do whatever they need to have one free there's definitely been churro related injuries.

Somebody's poked their eye out with the churro or just trying to move among the park. Oh, I would imagine, yes. Disney's not always the happiest place on Earth. We kind of talked about this pre-show, but there have been deaths. Disney deaths are pretty rare. There's roughly 32 fatalities reported at the Disneyland Resort, California, since opening in 1955. Now, that's as of, I want to say, 2024, 90 million people have visited the park. or sorry, 900 million people have visited the park.

So they've got to be pretty close to crossing a billion this year. Oh, my God. Most of the deaths are a result from like natural causes, you know, people having heart attacks and things like that. There have been a few suicides going off like parking garage or the parking structures. There is, let's see, 15-year-old boy died after standing up on the Matterhorn bobsled. and 64, another one in 84. Two teenage boys died while switching cars on the people mover. One in 67, one in 80.

An 18-year-old employee was crushed to death between two rotating walls. Bad luck. Yeah, during the America Sing's, that's why they didn't do the American Sing's thing, and they had to get rid of all those animatronics. A woman died from cerebral aneurysm after the right on Indiana Jones in 2000. Haunted Mansion of Wants. woman was found unresponsive in a doom buggy and later died on the haunted mansion in 2025,

which, yeah, there's been a stabbing, I think, in Tomorrowland that occurred, a murder there, and then one in the parking lot. But other than that, I mean, 900 million people and only 32 on... It's great odds. Yeah. Statistically thinking, or speaking, probably one of the safest places on Earth as well. But, I mean, it's one of those things. that it spawned, you know, they already started working on Disney World pretty quickly after because

Walt had so many additional ideas for like, what do you want to expand upon when we eventually talk about Disney World and talk about like Epcot and his vision for like the future in that utopian, you know, utopia society and then what it kind of got turned into. But to spawn a park in, I think there's Shanghai, maybe Hong Kong, there's one in Japan. Euro Disney is in Paris. I'm trying to think if there's any other ones. There's got to be a German Disney. I don't think there is a German Disney.

The park is notorious for never closing or anything. There have only been very specific times throughout the, from the time it was opened for actual closures. Maybe one of the greatest Iron Man streaks that a theme park, an amusement park, probably anywhere. Okay. this is what it takes to close down Disneyland 1925

or sorry November 25th 1963 it was closed for the funeral of President Kennedy September 11th it was closed following the terrorist attacks because definitely probably would have been a place they would think of for being a target and everything Talk about terror or terror. This is the craziest one

March 14th 2020 through April 29th 2021 closed during the COVID pandemic which marked the longest closure of the park's history easily at over 400 days. And what they said, it was like hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, yeah.

Lost. Well, and I mean, initially between like 55 and 60, the park was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays during the winter months. But that was just during the winter months on the two, you know, two earliest days of the week when they went out of a lot of stuff. And then very rarely, I think twice it's been closed

due to extreme weather or like snowstorms or something that like freak things that had happened in California. But other than that, any ride refurbishment construction, the entire time that they're constructing like Galaxy's Edge, the park is open. And they're so good at hiding stuff like people don't get an idea of what stuff looks like before it's actually even really done. The movement, it's like you said, if you're doing construction, there's 70 other things to try to pay attention to and look at before your mind would even get to the construction being done. And I mean, there's a strategy to it to make sure, like, not enough stuff is closed down to where people feel like. That's the worst feeling. I think one of the times that we went, there was something closed down.

And it was one of the major rides that might have been Indiana Jones. And I was just like, my trip ruined. And then, like, five minutes. And I was just like, we. Oh, I forgot to mention a couple. We didn't talk about the Indiana Jones ride. Oh, my God. All right.

Also, I got some hotel questions. No, of course. I can't believe I forgot that. Okay, yeah, I got to go back to some of the rides that. See, this thing is all over the place. We go back to some of the later rides. So Adventureland, Indiana Jones, Temple of the Forbidden Eye, open in 1995. So this guy, Michael Eisner, comes in.

The Forbidden Brown Eye or just the Forbidden Eye? Just the Forbidden Eye. Okay. So this guy, Michael Eisner ends up coming as the CEO in, like, the 80s. He's the guy that brings in Star Tours, which was the first, like, Star Wars ride. And Star Tours is basically a motion simulator. it's the first ride me and Katie went on

when we first went down there and first thing in the morning motion sickness almost immediately like you get in this and you're also wearing 3D goggles too so it's motion 3D you can't take off the goggles because then everything is all cock-eyed

and double vision so it makes you even more motion sick but it's awesome because it was like the first official Star Wars it had like Star Wars and basically takes you on this like star tour of all these planets from the Star Wars universe and you get caught up in like the empire trying to capture you and all this stuff. It's an amazing ride.

But what Michael Eisner did, he's like, we need more of this. And because Lucasfilm was so tied in with like Spielberg and Indiana Jones, adventure land, it was a natural fit. So originally Indiana Jones was going to be an entire land because they wanted to do so many different ride types. Temple of Doom had the mine cart escape. Of course. I want to also say it had that thing where they rafted down the ski slope.

There was like the tank chase in the Last Crusade. There was the airplane chase in Last Crusade. There was all this kind of stuff. There was the truck chase in Raiders the Lost Ark. But they ended up going to, of course, the budgeting. And they're like, we want to turn a whole land in the engines. Like, one ride. They're like, we can't afford to do this.

They're like, we can't afford not to do it technically. 10 rides, one ride. Six rides. One ride. What was so cool about this is the ride itself. is they designed these trucks, and the trucks themselves, the tires never leave the ground, but the truck itself, the entire frame of the truck is on hydraulics. So it can pivot and shift and go anywhere it needs to go.

All of the tires steer as well, so if you need to make it seem like it's spinning out, you just turn the back tires and it swings the back end out. So the movement of these trucks basically allowed you to create a ride where the truck isn't moving all that fast, but as it goes around corners and everything, it leans you like the momentum is carrying to the outside. When you accelerate, the thing I think only goes 15 miles per hour max, but when the front of it raises up and like launches you backwards a little bit, you feel like you're going very quick.

When you're breaking, it's not breaking, but it's leaning you forward. So this ride, again, just like the other ones, you go into Adventureland, you enter this temple. And Indiana Jones had discovered this temple. It's become like a tourist attraction where, people are flocking from all over the world and tourists have gone missing. So there's, I think they said it's, the queue itself is somewhere between like an eighth to a quarter of a mile because you have to go into the temple.

You go on a very like gradual downward slope because you have to get under the berm again to go into the where the actual like attraction is. But the entire queue is like a ride into itself where you're going to. going through like a temple where you have these bamboo poles that are holding up the ceiling. And if you go to move one, you hear a crack in the ceiling and everything. Or there's like a guy hanging down a well that you can't see for a rope. And if you pull the rope, he's like, please, is anybody there? There's all these little just things to be looking at and doing inside this temple.

And as you get into this vehicle and you basically go through trying to find Indiana Jones and he has to help you escape. and you're sitting in this giant rectangular warehouse and this guy that had designed it. He's like, everything fits in a box in this. It's just the way the ride curves around and goes through these different rooms. We can make you feel like you're going 50 miles an hour because the truck is simply tilting a certain way.

And then if we want to accelerate and go faster, we just tilt you back a little bit so you feel like those natural movements that you're so used to in a car, we just mimic those with the motion of the actual vehicle with the four wheels never leaving the ground or actually ever shifting weight in any way. You don't have to accelerate to throw somebody back.

You can just... Dude, the craziest thing about this ride is, and I tried to look for it the last time I was there because I knew about this, you go into... You've seen Indiana Jones the first one, right? With the big rolling ball that he has to try it out. Okay.

So you are pulling up and you see him and he's hanging from the ceiling. And he's like, all right, everyone move over so I can drop down. And it's an animatronic that's hanging right above you. And all of a sudden you feel this rumbling and you look up and the ball starts rolling directly toward you and it's coming closer.

the car feels like it jerks backwards really fast and then goes forward and plunges down below the wheel the room is designed to move the car never moves the vehicle just simply tilts and the room is on a giant slide and as the walls come past you it makes you feel like you're backing up and then they move back the other direction when you drop by you never even move and you just go forward slightly to go underneath just like the ideas for these guys to come with like the perception

of motions and what it makes you feel like is is nuts i it's you have finite space if what's the you can't bring mohammed to the mountain you bring the mountain to mohammed is that how that saying goes yeah if they don't need to to send you 100 yards down the field if they can send you 25 yards but it feels like a hundred yards they're the masters of creating like a certain way to like look about something, but like by maximizing space, because that's all they'd done is trying to maximize space in this park that they have. It's not optical illusions even. It's physical illusions. Yeah. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad kind of jumping back, 1979. This was the big addition to frontier land. So basically, they thought, I kind of mentioned to you that the reason that they

didn't build pirates of the Caribbean automatically in Florida was because they're like, these people live in the Caribbean. They're not going to be interested in pirates. Everyone showed up to the park and was like, the fuck are the pirates. So they were going to put in a Western land with like cowboys and stuff that was supposed to be modeled off like the Mojave or like the what do they call

that? Is it Sedona National Park? It has like all the rock formations and everything like red rocks and stuff like that in Utah. It was supposed to be modeled off to that after that kind of like topography and everything. But they ended up scrapping that because they were like well actually I guess they do

want pirates here so we're going to need to do that. but they used that same type of like planning and the storyboards and the artist that created that to create this roller coaster that was big Thunder Mountain Railroad. So they took that slow-ass railroad that was at Disneyland before and they basically created like an old like runaway little railway mine cart type adventure and everything. You're inside a mountain while they're blasting for gold and you go into the tunnel and you can see the fuses going up the walls going to like the powder kegs that are getting ready to explode. It's pretty badass. And then Tomorrowland finally started to get some rides. They did Space Mountain, but they did it first in Florida, I want to say. They had more space, so they built it bigger in Florida,

had two tracks, kind of like the Matterhorn that were going at the same time. When they went to go design it in Anaheim at Disneyland, they didn't have the room, so they just designed it as one car that could go, but it had double the sections attached to it, so it could haul the same amount of people. Oh, efficient. but then when they designed it in Paris they were like well their idea of the future

isn't the same idea as we have of the future so they get to design it in different ways he's like we want to go with like a Jules Verne type Leonardo da Vinci style build so they build this thing and like in one of Jules Vern's books like from the earth to the moon how they get to the moon is they fire them through a giant cannon so they design the ride that looks all like

steam punk and like copper and everything and you load up and it moves the vehicle into a cannon like the little train and you get to fire through this like cannon and then drop into the ride and it's completely in the dark space mount is completely in the dark so everything that you're seeing is just like lit up like the stars but they keep it pretty dark so you don't know where the turns are so it makes you seem like you're going so much faster because you don't know how to like lean into something or what to expect it's whipping you around wow so I mean, it's just all the stuff that has been developed through, like, Disneyland,

it's almost weird to think about how initially Disneyland at some point was more famous than just, like, more people to knew about that than, like, probably, like, Disney itself. Or it became more popular than that kind of stuff. And it's a destination at a time when, the post-World War II when you get the urban sprawl and you get people

that have the ability to drive to these places or now they're flying to these places, it probably became a hot spot for, like the airport probably. Well I mean it's kind of the godfather of like modern amusement parks where eventually

and you can other look at like, you know, cedar point six flags and everything and look at that and say well they're much different than Disneyland they're more about thrill rights. Yeah, because you can't out Disney. No. Disney. You don't have the IP.

You don't have the production value. So you do go for the thrills, which I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. Going on thrill rights and roller coasters, this is fucking awesome. But this was kind of like the birth of like the amusement park age where you had a lot of different also copycats coming out and everything that didn't last. But it kind of spawns this whole age of like the amusement park itself. Probably the wrong analogy. but this is like the first time that they put a script in a porno. Instead of just getting down to the slap and you get a little bit of dialogue and a storyline.

You went some production value with it. Yeah. Why are they there? How did this pizza boy get there? How do they not have money to pay for it? What are they going to do to pay for it? You know, you got to ask those questions. Disney just had movies on deck to be able to tell that story.

Not that story, but the story of their rides. Yeah. So as far as the hotel situation, situation goes, is it, like, where did you stay? Where, where is it all set up? Are these like Disney themed hotels that are around the area? Is it, is they're like a Ramada? What? So, I mean, everything sprung up around this. I'm pretty sure Anaheim kind of sprung up around this as well. Because every piece of real estate around the park that's not owned by the park is a hotel. It's just, it's surrounded on all sides by hotels. Um, they have a few and

over the time they bought additional like property like across the road to expand like the parks parking structures anything they could get their hands on they needed around that area so there was i believe a hotel on the property that they bought that they turned into the dsneyland hotel initially it's now like the pixar pier in because it's more closely associated with like california adventure inside california adventure they built the great california lodge or something like that the grand californian hotel and spa yes and this is all designed to look like a redwood, like, log cabin type deal. And then I believe there's another Disneyland hotel that they've built within, like, the same area.

Or another hotel they acquired and then just kind of rebranded as like a Disney hotel. It says their official ones are the Grand Californian, the Disneyland Hotel, and then the Pixar Place Hotel. Correct, yep. And those are all just kind of like right there on the same side of the property. But, yeah, it's expensive as shit. But again, then you have like downtown Disney and all that. but it's just weird to think that like this all came about with this guy just being like, hey, we're just going to build this like bat shit insane idea within the year and then just

kept adding onto it and adding onto it and building new parks and yeah. And it's such a tight window to get off the ground as far as if you're telling ABC, this is our launch day, you're going to be here for all this filming, advertise it. that just sets that date in stone. Well then what's crazy too is like you think of how it started out and like if you focus on Walt himself this is what he was focused on during the last part of his life. He got the animation stuff up and running but then he put that in the hands of people then do what they're doing. And then when he was working on these, you know, this park and then also Disney World,

this was his sole focus basically. It was like the development of these parks, which is why when he ended up dying, Roy, his brother is the one that wanted to keep this going and kind of like like complete it. It is kind of a bummer to think that he didn't get to see the completion of some of these rides. Yeah. Like I wonder what. Well, he, yeah, because he's frozen somewhere. He'll be back, I guess.

Yeah, what the, the frozen body of Disney being able to see just how his vision that was created in a year has changed and evolved and still kept that same charm from day one and all of the little eccentricities of the spots for the trash cans and these smell shooters that are just hearkening you to to all these different places. He would probably like this all makes sense. I don't know what, I mean, him being around any longer probably wouldn't have innovated any further. It just would have gotten better, right? I think he was just, as far as innovation went, he just was, coming up with the ideas and he would go to the people he trusted that could make these

impossible things happen to be like could you do this and somebody would figure it out the imaginers are kind of unsung heroes oh 100% this doesn't happen without them that's you know there's there's a um a documentary on uh disney plus called the imaginary story that talks about the first part of it about Disneyland and then the next part of it kind of about Disney world and then toward the end all the other Disney parks but seeing what these guys come up with and everything It's insane. Like, they look at Walt as the one that was like, what was the idea guy?

We figured out how to get it done. But in the course of being the idea guy around us, gave us our own ideas, and then we get to kind of continue on with that legacy. And it's cool to see some of the guys, too, that, like, started out as employees day one, like, as part of the Barbershop Quartet or, like, Slingin Churros or something like that,

and then found their way into, like, the imaginary department. but then also now are like have kids that have come through there and work the same way or were the mentors for the people that have designed all these other like well like beloved rides for something that big it's weird to think that it's a family business but for a lot of families I'm sure it was just even little things like the dude that designed Thunder Mountain in the story of Thunder Mountain the whole thing is about this guy named like Theodore B. Bullion or something is this evil like gold miner great name the the picture of the

the evil guy is based off the guy that designed the ride. He's like, I don't like that. Didn't like that. But like all like little things of where like the names of the imaginers are hidden throughout the park or like listed off or like their birthdays and their initials put on to like the Indiana Jones vehicles and everything. There's all these just little weird nods. And it's weird because like it's a very small group of people when it first started that like

came up with all this stuff. And their legacy lives on just through those little nods. Yeah. to what they created. I'm in. I'm sold. Let's figure out of me. I'm going to document the shit out of this of just watching you just go hog nuts.

An alien planet. Yep. That's exactly what it's going to be. It's going to be like giving a monkey cocaine and a loaded gun and a churro. If we could make that a port of Disneyland too, I'd like to see that as well. We'll see what we can do. All right, man. Got any questions?

You fulfilled my Disneyland desire to hear about it. All right. I will make sure we fulfill the other desire of actually getting you there to allow you to experience it yourself. Yeah, sweet. All right.

Hopefully, everyone else got to experience. Even if you've been there, hopefully you'll learn something, you learn a little bit about the history of it. And if not, go take a visit. And we'll catch on the next episode. Peace.