Podcast: The Ride - Walt Disney World 50th

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

It's the 50th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World. We take a look at the creation of the Florida parks, what's planned for the 50th anniversary, and some of the great moments in Disney World history. The Late Shift episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Forever. Dog. Warning. The following podcast contains 50 years of dream wish magic that will enchant you, workarounds for that pesky U.S. Constitution, and multiple members of the Nixon administration. It's the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World, and we're looking back at its creation here on Podcast The Ride, hosted by three theme park fans who should be enjoying Disney World's 50th birthday, but instead we're in a gigantic fight. I'll tell you why. I'm Scott Gairdner, and I think of it as 50 years of

magical dreams. But Jason insists that it's more like 50 years of enchanted wonder. Don't even fucking look at me. God, well, this is not... Alright, fine. We'll all turn our backs to each other, and that's how this

will be did. Should be joyous and fun, but I guess it won't be. Mike Carlson is out of his mind. He thinks that it's 50 years of wishful enchantings. It is 50 years of wishful enchantings. It's crazy to not even imagine all the enchantings that have happened over the 50 years.

That's the thing that takes precedent. Yeah, but it's, but I mean, so the basis of so many of the rides is a is a dream coming true and if you want to tell me that those dreams are not magical uh that i we're not looking at the same disney world i guess i guess we're not but all the all the different robots that have and i'm trying to think of a way to say enchant singular and it's not working again it doesn't it's impossible i think i'm quick sometimes on this show but now when it comes to enchant oh it is a wedged word

you can't to enchant think about all the yeah how do you think about all the animatronics that enchant you daily i guess that's in the parks enchant yeah the ice Yeah The Contemporary resort It Look at it It will enchant you Why That's all thanks To the good people At U.S. Steel

We can all agree That U.S. Steel Is great And thank them For all the Disney World magic Yeah I think that's where

We can find common ground today It all feels You're right We can settle this But with our Common interest In U.S. Steel We ground today. It all feels, you're right, we can settle this hash, but with our common interest in U.S. Steel. We love U.S. Steel. Whether you're into magical dreams, enchanted wonder, wishful enchantings,

none of it would be possible if it wasn't built on the back of Steel. Sure, they almost didn't get the two hotels open in time like they promised, but they figured it out, you know? There's a lot to do. There's a lot to do, yeah. We have a lot to do. There's a lot to do, yeah. And we have a lot to do here. We're celebrating Walt Disney World's 50th birthday. Magical dreams.

50 years of magical dreams. I'm just going to assert it. Fine. It's magical dreams, and that is it. And that's the only way we can move forward. I win. It's, yeah, and it's today. It felt like we had to do this as this episode's being released.

October 1st. It is 2021. This was 1971 1971 of course and uh and and can you believe it it feels it uh it feels insane mainly i'm like oh that's what something that's 50 years old feels like well then i guess a lot of like music and things i'm interested in are ancient yeah so it made me that to me. But we should look at the positive side of it, which is the 50 wonderful years. Yeah, yeah. You should stop thinking about your own mortality, really, which is what this is about.

Don't think about that. And don't think about when you first went. It was only like, what, 20 years? That's, I think, the weirdest. Because if, like, I don't know if you guys are doing this at all remembering other anniversaries and how long the amount of time seemed for a 20th or a 25th who could even imagine that amount of years when you are have only barely hit uh two digits in your age and now and now 50 yeah i mean where is the time gone where is the time it's like at the blink of an eye, you know? It's like, yeah, 91, it's the 20th anniversary.

Which one is Castle Cake? I've already forgotten. That's for the 25th. 25th, yes. So, 96. Just that. 25 years since the Castle Cake. 25 years of Disney magic. 25 years of Castle Cake.

Grab yourself a slice of memories. Will Sandy Patty, the gospel singer, be back to sing a medley of the original song 25 Years of Disney Magic mashed up with Zippity-Doo-Dah in 2021? I have a feeling, no. I have a feeling, no, as well. I guess they've retired.

I think when we talk anniversaries, I start to humanize the amount of time. Yeah. So when you say 50 years, I think of a 50-year-old person. And I go, well, that's sort of, look, that's on the back nine at least. You know, that's not, even if you live to a lot. Sorry, any listeners over 50, that reminder. Look, we're getting there. I'm just saying, like, best case, you know, now you can live to a... Sorry, any listeners over 50, for that reminder. Look, we're getting there.

I'm just saying, like, best case, you know, now you can live to 90. But still, it's like, I start to think of that and go, it's an older person. That's okay. Nothing wrong with it. But it does, you do feel like, oh, okay, now we're getting serious here. Well, are there, let me just look up celebrities born in October 1971. Because that'll be just a living manifestation. Oh, my God, Snoop Dogg.

Oh, my God. So when you look at Snoop Dogg, Snoop Dogg equals, that's a good example. Disney World should be so lucky to be in Snoop Dogg shape. Yeah, sure. Sasha Baron Cohen, good. Winona Ryder, good. There's a lot of.

Yeah, good. Winona Ryder, good. There's a lot of. Yeah, sure. Yeah, specifically, I think October. All these people are really, that's the age of them? Hmm. Well, that's the fact that I don't know. They're all looking good for their age. They all look great. As are you, Disney World.

Yeah. I'm not worried anymore. Now, Chris Kirkpatrick from NSYNC. That's. 71? Really? Yeah, people in NSYN sync are 50 years old what that doesn't seem right that can't be true chris kirkpatrick as he he doesn't look as good he's

aged prematurely from worrying for decades now that he's gonna get his ass kicked by m&m of course that's right that's right. That's right. Yeah. Wow, 71. You're right. Somebody in NSYNC is going to be 50. That's not right. That doesn't... That doesn't... Now I'm back to being upset.

Yeah, that was weird. I was upset. Now I was good. Now I'm upset again. I will say, I don't think that he's like the physical specimen that some of the other people in the list were. Yeah. But I don't look at him... First i think but i don't look at him i first of all i don't look at him but if i if i end up looking at him accidentally like right

now on this wikipedia it doesn't seem all those pictures from august 2008 i don't know i don't know what to think this chris patrick thing's throwing me for a loop he's at the if we're on the same page he's on the screening of gone country 2 in august 2008 yeah and i'm just distracted because of all my fond memories of Gone Country 2. Of course, yeah, yeah. I know. It's hard to focus on him when you're thinking

about one of your favorite movies. Yeah, Gone Country 2. I'm sorry. Oh, I mean television shows, obviously. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I was kidding. I, of course, know that it's a CMT reality show.

Oh, okay. With, of course, Sebastian Bach and... Dee Snider. decent yeah and jermaine jackson and lorenzo llama country country star i think that's the idea i think it's all people who are going country right that's what i'm piecing together it's and it's named after uh and i do like this song legitimately an alan jackson song gone country, which is making fun of like, like a singer songwriter or something that might've been like doing a folk thing.

And then they decide, you know what, I'm going to make some money and I'm going to go country. Um, so it's probably based, maybe that's this, we got to look into gone. We have to look into this now and do a whole thing with it.

Obviously. Sure. Sure. Alan Jackson, of course does the five o'clock somewhere with jimmy buffett yeah wrote that song and that's different that's not a folk singer going country that's not the the target of alan's scorn no of course not and alan wrote that that's alan's song not jimmy he just invited jimmy on and jimmy's one of jimmy's only chart topping appearances

oh i think yeah maybe his biggest hit, technically, yeah. You're kidding. Why haven't the charts been kinder? To the song Fruitcakes? To Matt Sucks. Didn't submit them on time. Didn't submit the song for consideration on time. They're on island time.

Yeah. I just forgot. Charts sounds like numbers to me. Yeah. You know what I think. Get out of here, numbers. Matt Sucks. Numbers to me. You know what I think. Get out of here, numbers. Math sucks. Okay, so picture Snoop Dogg in your mind.

Picture a lineup that's Snoop Dogg, Chris Kirkpatrick, and Walt Disney World. And that is those are the faces of 50. And I think they should feel good about themselves. 50 years. First of all, before we go into the past because i think we're gonna we're gonna do some talking about uh how it all got started where how things were uh before the 50 years began right before the clock began and how the whole place got started um what do we know about what they're doing to celebrate the 50th what's happening here in in 2021 i can sum it up in a paragraph go ahead a very short paragraph okay okay all the weenies all the big icons at each parks have a little

light show have a little lighting i saw their beacons of magic of course yeah yeah so everything's that you mean the castle, the spaceship, or Tower of Terror and the Tree of Life are all, they light up gold sometimes. Yes. Ratatouille is opening at Epcot. Good. Right from another place, showing up. And then there are 50 golden statues scattered about the parks. And now I'm not the most religious man,

but my knowledge of the Bible is that golden idols usually don't end well. They're all going to get struck by lightning. Yeah. They will anyway. It's Florida. That's true. That's true. Are you sure they're not the storms?

Lightning conductors? Maybe that's what they're there for. Lightning rods? Lightning rods. We're going to keep it away from the guests So guests don't get hit by lightning So Timon gets hit and not a guest Are any of them literal golden calves? Are any cows

Oh, oh, uh I don't think I think they had the foresight to not have a literal golden calf Home on the range characters? I'm sorry I don't think there's a lot of home on the range or brother bear appearances i guess the disney cows are not that popular and they don't tribute that cow with mickey mouse ears on the side right yeah who i don't okay despite us doing the epis mini moo there it is yeah right right took me a second i mean that's what i want the statues to

be is all yeah nods to the most obscure things that we like like mini moo the cow uh like leonardo columbus who of course led the the tapestry of nations parade um i mean we'd love to see a dream finder obviously yeah yeah we'd love to see sandy patty the gospel singer yeah and sandy dunk or no sandy duncan more disneyland celebrity i guess i'm gonna say yeah i don't want sandy duncan i don't want to go i know you're upset about sandy duncan but always uh uh did they make a beacon of magic of mini moo's grave is mini moo have a headstone over by the fort wilderness campground oh wait that's right isn't it there is a there's a plaque at least i think that's correct yeah and a cow grave has to be fairly big so you could there's enough real estate to light it up gold sure

yeah yeah very nice they should do it they should do it need do it so we'll look yeah we're looking at that too um is that where you done with your uh well yeah because tron and guardians were delayed at least a year due to uh pandemic at least i'm being generous yeah who knows it's really mysterious when those things will finally get finished yeah uh scott were you there is something they announced today that i'm very excited about i know i we might be thinking the same thing, and I credit the Facebook group for making me aware. And I feel like, is Jason maybe not aware? Because you might be talking about it already.

I made Jason aware of this already if we're talking about the same thing. Uh-huh. Probably. Which is a food item. I've gotten it a couple times. Yeah. Multiple people have sent this to Jason today. Very good, everyone.

And do you want me to read it yeah go for it yeah uncle orville's great big beautiful tomorrow sunday chocolate and vanilla soft serve brownie hot fudge and whipped cream topped with red white and blue sprinkles served in a bathtub a little bathtub full of ice cream this is the most Jason-y thing. Clock's ticking. I got a trip coming up, and it might have to be my first time. Where is it? There was a big announcement of all these food items. They do say where the things are.

It said, Anti-Gravity's Galactic Goodies. Okay. Is that in Tomorrowland? Yes. I believe it is, yeah. I believe it's the ice cream windows that kind of connect to Merchant of Venus. Mm-hmm's right it was also in tomorrowland yes look they acknowledge us to

stop somewhere i don't know the shop names i'm sorry uh i'll try all the way come up with some awful reason to have to learn them i wild away precious hours of my youth and merchant of venus it used to be the shop for alien encounter jason's wild youth at merchant of venus it used to be the shop for alien encounter jason's wild youth at merchant of venus crazy stuff no wild w-i-l-e oh wild wild but it was wild i'm saying oh it was wild yeah absolutely yeah there used to only be two places the whole property you could buy star wars stuff mgm studios and merchant of venus can you imagine? No, I can't. Well, then a lot of magical dreams have come true. Yeah.

To make that much more... It's everywhere. It's everywhere now. So that's good. There was an entire block of snack announcements, many of which seem bizarre and disgusting to me. Yeah. The one that jumped out, I have the tab open,

is the Mission to Mars. There's all these snacks that tribute things that aren't there anymore, classic things, and Mission to Mars, this extinct attraction. I don't know what I think here. It's up in the upper right. Burger topped with bacon and macaroni and cheese. Sure, on a bun Dusted with crushed cheese

Flavor puffs It just seems like to hold it Is that you're asking for trouble You know here's My thing with that obviously that's one of those Like fun we're enjoying the excess We're gonna pile stuff on I will say that generally with Disney

World fast service I'm not so sure they'll nail that, if that makes sense. The best you're ever going to see it is in this photo. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when they get, I could imagine like a different place maybe going like, you know what?

It's pretty gross, but it's fun to eat that once in a while. But I don't know. A Disney World hamburger with a lot of, I don't know. Yeah. but i don't know a disney world hamburger with a lot of i don't know yeah i don't i well i think part of it is a lot of the food uh items like this are for instagram well yes yes and some of them like scott and myself and griffin all tried the big chicken sandwich when we were down at disneyland for the day and enjoyed it i thought it was or or no, Griffin got the peanut butter and sandwich with bacon. That seemed like bad news. Yeah.

But you and I both like the chicken sandwich. I did. Yeah. You just need a strategy. You have to go in with a strategy. You got a knife and fork, at least I knife and forked it for a while. Right.

Yeah. Winnowing it down until it was a slider. A manageable, yeah, slider sandwich. Did we talk about how then the person came up to take our trays and said, are you finished with your experiments? No, but I forgot about that. I like that.

We were all questioning. Do we like this? Because it's all over the map. We liked our thing, but it was kind of difficult. Griffin was maybe on this. Maybe didn't dig what he was eating. And then that. Are you finished with your experiments?

All right. Sealed the deal. This place is good. Just with that sealed the deal. This place is good. Just with that one line. Yeah. That is good. A Disney-fied language for taking your trash away. That's great.

Love it. You know what? We didn't talk about this either. Finally, we were back in Galaxy's Edge, and someone was still doing the, like, cosplay, like the kayfabe of it in Doc Ondar where i had a country bear shirt on and she was like ah what is that creature on your shirt and i was like oh uh well it's a bear that does a show she's like ah yes he has some sort of instrument or and i was like yes he does and then i was like i asked a question about the lightsaber and they're like ah the Galactic Federation. There's a slowdown in the shipping of the Galactic Freights.

And we don't have the Master Skywalker's lightsaber in stock right now. And I was like, hey, okay. And I was like, I was trying to play along a little bit. I was very tired at the end of the night. But I was like, oh, good. Somebody's still doing it. Because even opening day, it felt like people were over that. Begrudging.

Yeah. Yeah. Quick to go. That's all fun, though all fun though yeah no i liked it a lot i guess there aren't bears in star wars i never thought about it before yeah there's not yeah things that look kind of like bears but not bears but well they're missing it somebody should get some bears eventually there will be bears yeah ship of bears should crash land next season on the Mandalorian. Yeah, that's my pitch. I am hoping when I order that ice cream sundae that I will order it, and in addition to calling out my name that it's ready,

they will scream no privacy at all around here. At the very least, you can do it. I certainly will. And then raised it up so people knew why you were doing it. You could get a big applause, yeah. Could you bring it bring it yeah you should bring it on the actual show ride could you eat the sunday in the theater hmm uh it's kind of a crap shoot with a lot of theme parks with food or drink you know sort of thing so you could smuggle it in your sweatshirt uh i mean yeah that would certainly be progress for me having a great time

I mean yeah then he could See the tub and then hold up the tub To the tub yeah Waiting 12 minutes Ice cream If it's not the show's not ready to go right when you walk up to it The brownie will inevitably only get

Staler I'd like to see you have one of these a day And try different places to eat it one on the people mover one in carousel of progress um yeah i look there's a lot of sweets to cover in a world so you know scott's got a list of more things i assume there are more i just while we're on it i just want to say the thing i'd maybe like to see and you don't even have to unless you want to give a photo for this to be done with but but uh just a picture of you shrunk down bathing in the tub oh wow oh yeah well i'm i'm not the most uh photoshop savvy so i can provide the elements

and if someone could make the new creation yeah you know you probably could do is just put it put the sunday with the bathtub on a table and have somebody who you're with, you try to get like a forced perspective where you're far away in the distance. So it looks like your head is just poking out of the bathtub. You could do probably a very simple version like that. That's more up. Yeah, I like a practical solution.

That's more up my speed. We love practical effects. We always talk about that. And that's what this is. This is not CGI. You know, this is practical. This is the way that special effects should be done. So that's good.

Yeah, yeah. But I'm not going to say if somebody wants to do that, I'm not going to say don't do it. And if Jason wants to do a little pose of like arms up behind the head, like, ah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they should sell like the big uncle sam

red white and blue hat like that feels like they're leaving money on the table not making more exclusive like carousel of progress based more uncle orville well all of them all of them the mysterious disappearing child like a shirt about like where did the third child go you know they are leaving money on the table you can use that phrase even if the money is only like 42 dollars yeah are leaving the 42 dollars of my money yeah it would be yours yeah yeah well we've got money on the table we've talked before about having the john collection the clothing john wears through the through the eras and that you would buy all of them

there's one pretty funny piece of carousel of progress merch and it's a vinylmation but it's the mickey or vinylmation one yeah and it's john like wearing all four outfits like at once like he's splitting the fours and i do respect the attempt but like it's not the prettiest looking like toy no the vinylmations with the mickey shape were already sort of unappealing And I do respect the attempt, but it's not the prettiest looking toy. No, the Vinylmations with the Mickey shape were already sort of unappealing looking. Yeah. To make it a weird...

A bunch of those. That's like if the Johns from all the eras, from the 20s and the 40s and all of them, all collided in some temporal catastrophe. Like the thing. Yeah, yeah. We'll get a good word about the thing. Yeah, yeah. People gotta go to work by the thing.

So they all tried to show up at the same era. They got these things, time machines now. And then they all tried it at the same time and landed in the same spot. Oh!

Kill it! And we all say like, they all say like, kill me now! This is painful. Oh boy, I don't wanna live. You have no idea

the pain it is to exist like this. I rue that electricity now more than ever. Oh, boy. A great segue into the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, let's get into, let's go backwards. This Carousel of Progress can turn back to 1971 you know this was walt's

dream and just like the carousel of progress and it was a crazy dream and had he lived who knows what bizarre tendrils the dream knows what sort of howard hughes living on top of a casino we could have seen walt disney do it's something in reflecting on the 50 years and on walt's relationship to the place which just to reiterate if you don't know the timeline disney world opens in 71 walt disney dies in 1966 he was alive for the some of the planning uh it was it was all his dream he wanted to buy florida land and do something there um and uh it was it was all his dream he wanted to buy florida land and do something there uh um and uh it was it was kind of this ultimate vision this like you know uh disneyland times 100 uh and just that he didn't that he didn't overlap with it he never got to go there and i i've just thought about how this felt like Walt getting one in at the buzzer.

You know, the fact that he's making movies about it and talking about it, essentially on his deathbed. I learned literally on his deathbed. It's one of the last things he was talking about. I mean, how many people like did something this significant right before their death? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know yeah it does feel yeah right right at the last second we've got david bowie album lazarus or whatever it's called yeah yeah i haven't really heard it i like david bowie a lot but i've i

didn't really know what hear it uh but i like that it happened it's sad it looks neat i think i saw a music video it makes me sad it came up on my shuffle a couple days ago one of the songs and i go too sad and i turned it off part of it yes yeah yeah the right down to the wire it's not like it's not like weird and like tin machine bad or anything no no not the worst but yeah he took care of the worst decades yeah yeah but sometimes yeah i'm never in the mood to hear his death album. Yeah, makes sense. Well, then, and how often is that the case for your Johnny Cashes or your Gwen Campbells, who will come up in a little bit, that they're making these sad-

Warren Zevon. Warren Zevon. Walt Disney, though, gave us, right before he went out, gave us the place that's given us all the the joy the most joy it's why we're all here it's why why i know you guys it's why everyone's listening to us thank you wall let's just give walter a big thank you wherever you are thank you we do have to mention but grudgingly gave us the east coast disneyland as it was often called. Okay, yeah. Because his real passion project was the experimental prototype Community of Tomorrow, the original Epcot.

Progress City. Progress City. Thank you, Walt, for inadvertently giving, or like kind of just begrudgingly giving us Disney World because you wanted to be the king of a city. Yes. So I was curious because I know little bits and pieces. I watched the Epcot one-hour presentation a while ago,

but I wanted to look up more stuff about Progress City, so I got this book from the library. It's another Sam Genoway book called Walt and the Promise of Progress City. You got a tabbed up book here. I got it tabbed up. Wow, look on our hands. And also, the book, I believe, also a reference point for, there's a very good Defunctland episode about Progress City.

Oh, yeah. And I read the Progress City city like the main chapter about it in this book and i stopped because it was giving me the willies because uh i mean it like less willie giving is the first quote i came across here really giving how much willie giving can you take i well i mean i gotta brace my it is the season for it it's oh yeah the scariest season of the year well and this is the you know you notice it's october and the next week maybe we start giving you the willies yeah that's true exactly so so watch out if you hate willies because we if you hate willies watch out uh

do you think we should save some of it because we want to do a full walkthrough of the epcot special do you think we should say we'll save some of the progress city stuff so we'll touch we'll touch on it really it's it is interesting it's really in depth but the funniest thing the the if you follow the threads back long enough to the genesis of disney world uh there's there's a quote in this chapter that is kind of like a very early touchstone uh and it says walt disney said i don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities now Now that's a very boring sentence, but clearly kept this man up at night because Walt just hated what cities had become.

Like, it was just overwhelming. He especially hated traffic, despite the fact that he was a man who constantly worked with automobile companies and built his studio in the suburbs of Los Angeles. You know what? I think Jimmy Buffett hates... I hate traffic, too.

Don't you hate it when you can't get a place fast? You know, I hate to pit them against each other, but Jimmy Buffett has... He's about reinventing lifestyle, too, and he has a brand of physical properties, and there's a lot more of those than there are Disney places. Yeah, that's true. We're talking sheer talking sheer numbers yeah he's lived longer too and then might be immortal

we'll see but like everyone was very complimentary to like the urban planning that kind of went into the genesis of disneyland to the point that like ray bradbury, the author, a close friend of Walt's suggested he run for mayor of Los Angeles to like get stuff done. And then Walt said, why would I run for mayor when I am already King? So I know that's kind of a joke, but also you can tell it's kind of not. Yeah.

Half and half half. Yeah. Sure. But when you, if you made it that far and you, and there was something as risky as Disneyland. And it worked. And it worked. And it worked spectacularly. And everybody's telling you how well it's working. It's what I was, we were talking about it earlier or some other episode where it's like,

it's, there's obviously a pattern for like major success when you're like in a company and it's like a major success and you become very very rich and well known you start to like set your sights on something that feels like it's way out of what you started like jeff bezos wanted to just like destroy small bookstores and make a lot of money and figure out a way to like ship people things fast and then all of a sudden he's going to be a sudden, he's going to be a moon man. He's going to be a Mars traveler. And you're like, wait a minute, that's not. And Walt Disney's like, I wanted to put sound with cartoons. Also, I want to fix cities.

Cities need fixing. And you're like, huh? You make robots. You make robots for us to look at. But he aims way bigger. And then the company doesn't know what to do after he dies. And they come up short,

and we just get a new theme park place, and that's great. And maybe better. Yes. I think so. I don't know. What state would Progress City be in today? I think it'd be really weird.

Well, I mean, look at the states of the other municipalities they built. Toontown looks like shit. They haven't painted that thing in years. They're demolishing it in front of the guests. They're demolishing it right in front of our eyes. It's clearly rife with divorce and missing people and stuff.

There's private investigators popping up all over the place, you know? Everyone's rushing to become a private investigator. That's what's happening. No one wants to be a building painter or a bricklayer. A five and dime. They got rid of it. Yeah, right. All over the place.

A lot of gag factory worker. But it is fascinating because, yeah, as a kid, you're just like, and then, of course, Walt wanted to build another park. It's cool, too. Sure. You don't know about any of this. Right. This is very strange.

But, yeah, it is interesting. I'm trying to think where to start on my end or where to throw it i know that like there was the obviously with disneyland's success there's the desire to do another one and people are telling him that you know east of the mississippi is a whole other world that you are not really taking advantage of there's less flight at the time probably most disneyland guests come via driving uh and and there's maybe the desire to well if we put something over on the other side of the country and that's accessed via driving maybe we get a whole other crowd um so he's scouting places in the late 50s and early 60s and i didn't know some of this stuff like where he was looking yeah yeah yeah that niagara falls was a possibility which today is like trashy tourist insanity and it's pretty it makes a lot of sense that yeah just thematically that

you could end up there but i think i think you know weather is a roadblock for a lot of these places i saw a story about St. Louis. Yes, I saw that too. Being on the table. It was called, what was it? Walt Disney's Riverfront Square. Well, that was the indoor one. Oh, yes.

They were going to build a giant multi-block, like, indoor theme park. Right, but that was before Disney World as well. Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. Whoa. Wait, now that, wait, yeah i i caught a little there's some attraction that was maybe repurposed from that does that ring a bell like because a lot of what ended up getting built that was there were disney world originals came from it was gonna maybe hall

of presidents could be i mean that's that's obviously an extension of great moments of mr lincoln but like the country Bears was an opening day attraction. Happy 50 years, Country Bears. We'll get to you soon. But that was for that weird resort, Mineral King. Yeah. So there were all these oddball plans. I also want to say Disney opened up a bowling alley in Denver.

I barely caught this. I don't know much about it, but that didn't really satisfy anybody and they didn't really embrace the name. They didn't say definitively, this is Disney's bowling alley because it wasn't really good enough and didn't do well enough.

I missed that. That was just like one sentence and I looked at a book too. I looked at a book called Reality Land with David Koenig. Yeah, maybe. St. Louis. Do you know more about that place? Because I don't. Well, maybe. St. Louis, do you know more about that place?

Because I don't... Well, I have some notes about, just from one of these articles. The only thing I saw about it is that he was getting down the road a little bit, but if you're going to be in St. Louis, you're going to have to deal with

Bush at some point, like the Bush family, the beer, and the beer and the uh the head of the bush family told walt he was crazy to build a theme park in st louis and not sell beer right and thus he cut off the negotiations i will not have b i guess he i make fun of this whole we gotta trust walt's wishes not have beer in park. But I guess if that's where he was at in the fifties, how dare you Bush give me a revenue stream, a constant giant revenue stream for the park I want to build.

Yeah. It does seem like there was a lot of conflict in the man about the image of uncle Walt and the family friendliness and the like, you know, clean, no smoking, no drinking sort of thing. And then the Walt who has to live his life and go about his life and drinks scotch and smokes Chesterfields, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Which he, it's funny if he was that protective about it because I don't get the sense that he was a drunk, right? Am I wrong? I feel like he just did what anybody of that age protective about it because i don't get the sense that he was like a drunk right am i wrong i feel like he just like did what anybody of that age in that time would have done i don't there's not a lot of i don't i haven't seen a ton of documentation of like and then like walt had to be escorted out of the tam o'shanter or anything like yeah it seemed like it was just a video of that if only there was tmz back then eight millimeter cameras running separate sync sound off a different little pack while like shirtless across the street where the party city is now just like screaming you let me back in there i'm dopey's father i made dopey i'm the

king of party city that's where they got the phrase from it's what the brand is just yelled at one day uh so yeah i don't know i've never seen anything yeah he was he's just as drunk as every other older man of the time probably i guess i think i don't know um um weird though well you got anything else about that st louis well the st louis thing i think there's a couple like legends because like, the beer thing is one thing. But then there also, I think, was a report that it was basically Disney was going to pay for the rides and attractions. But they wanted St. Louis to pay for the building itself. And then St. Louis didn't want to do it.

St. Louis redeveloped the corporation and then declined to pay for the building. So, Disney was like, we're out. They're always looking for, like. Some of that classic, yeah. They wanted people to pay for stuff. They wanted people to pay for everything. Eventually disney was like we're out they're always looking for like classic yeah they want other people to pay for stuff they want to pay for everything eventually that happens in orlando we're like okay we'll do it but we want roads widened yeah and uh we want to be able to govern however we want and change the structure of a city's work we want the laws we want to make the laws here um so yeah so they don't go to any of those places and they end

up in they start ending up in florida i think walt realizes there's a lot of property there and that it's maybe kind of cheap there and it is like considered this vacation place and people are retiring there um he determines he doesn't want to be on the coasts Because he doesn't want to deal with hurricanes And he doesn't want people in the park in bathing suits There's another little morality clause Well, he didn't get that wish You know, I don't look Walt is a problematic figure in some ways

He's a great figure in some ways But I can really get on board with this no bathing suit policy Can really appreciate that I like to keep that keep that clean and had some good ideas yeah yeah um that was uh uh natural you know disasters and weather patterns also like made him not go with like new york or new jersey dc baltimore areas because the park would have to be seasonal and closed part of the year oh yeah which almost everything is we've talked about parks there,

but that's pretty much the deal, I gather, from Great Adventure and those kinds of things. Yeah, I think as the years have gone on, more and more stuff have invested in Halloween and Christmas endeavors, but very limited, usually not seven days a week sort of events. In the middle of February is a bust. Right. Yeah.

They just don't do anything um so they they settle on this plot of land that is pretty much swamp I think he also didn't want to like kill off a bunch of orange groves and I think he just sensed that people would not be willing to get rid of orange groves because that's the pride of Florida so we end up with this land that is not a lot. One fact I learned from this book Reality Land is that there was a helicopter trip where they went and saw the site

and he said, I think that's it. That's the site. The helicopter stopped to refuel and people got out and heard the radio and heard on the radio that JFK had been assassinated.

I have that too that freaked my shit out i was so like it wasn't until they landed in new orleans later that day that supposedly that they they heard the radio that jfk had been killed geez blissful the only people unaware little helicopter bubble of happiness that was his first time seeing the florida property in person wow that day that's a weird confluence of stuff that's that's pretty nuts yeah that is crazy um and which i've seen the at least the book i was reading or articles are sort of like uh it was a sign more than ever that waltz needed to forge ahead with his vision of a new better america like i don't know i think that's yeah random i think uh i don't know that it was like

this is the end of an era and i need to be the person to take us out i need to reverse the brain of this president being blown up only i can do it the narratives uh not just of the 50 years of Disney World, but the creation of it and the shifting narratives of not just what they were going to do and how they set out to do it. And most than the biggest now after 50 years, what Walt intended to do are wild. Like if you try to find a straight line, you are not going to find it. I found another book that there's a book called walt disney world the first decade it's a big coffee table book you can find it very easily very cheap on ebay i have that i think and yeah and it's you can borrow it from the internet archive like an hour at a time from their digital archive and in the introduction to that they are already 10 years

later erasing the narrative about progress city there is this the slightest mention of it and then they're like but of course you know we wanted a vacation place for children of the vacation kingdom of the world like they the narrative is already shifting by the time epcot the park is built yeah of course mostly water skiing that's mainly what it was about yeah leisure leisure place uh yeah the myth that i mean i guess it makes sense because like you're not going to put in the book like and then this madman decided to build a city but we decided no that's silly uh so we gave you figment and then or or whenever figment opens. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, I get, I mean all this,

all this, yeah. The, the cartoon character of Walt is a very, it's still, I'm trying to think like we, we were just talking about Walter not, which is funny that he's being drawn.

He's at Knott's Berry farm. Cause there's a lot of crazy stuff about him, but no one's paying any attention. So, but you can still buy a little Walter, not like a little Walter, not character by it or can you oh i thought that's what you said i thought it was a piece of merch no there's like a bust in the but that's in the weird that that's in the uh independence hall oh okay i thought they were selling it weird thing

uh um the uh there's a funny thing there, which is there's like, there's like some general like political stuff. Like here's, you know, you can buy little postcards of all the presidents up through Clinton when this series stopped being made. Or, you know, just a little patriotic, even just like Sparkly USA or whatever.

But one thing Aaron noticed was like a big plush area with red, white, and blue stuffed animals. And there were plush like a big plush area with red white and blue stuffed animals and there were plush donkeys and plush elephants and actually i think i phrased that wrong because there were a lot of plush donkeys and they spot for plush elephants and there were zero they were so long sold out okay got it if you're a Democrat pursuing the Independence Hall in Buena Park, plenty of donkeys for you. But if you're raising a young Republican who you want to give an elephant to, look elsewhere. It makes sense because if you're going to Buena Park, you really have to be looking out for Independence Hall.

It's not right in the action. Yeah. So. No, you got to like, yeah, it's's this weird if you don't know knots yeah it's like across the you have to go through a tunnel across the street and end up at a perfect recreation of i still independence hall couldn't quite explain how to get there i know vaguely where it is but don't take my word for it like i wouldn't be able to direct you i don't think you're going through secret passageways like turn washington spies themselves

yes exactly living in turn uh um but speaking of of secrecy and kind of doing things on the slide this is some of the stuff i wanted to talk about uh um so i mean yeah there's the progress city plans but there's you know i think there's a lot of stuff that disney wants to do there he's not even sure what he even says yeah let's buy enough space to hold all the dreams that haven't even been dreamed yet. But the main thing is what Disney is still fighting all the time in Anaheim in California, which is space. And the fact that they bought, because it was such a crazy plan, Disneyland. So they bought because it was such a crazy plan disneyland so they bought what they could

and then as soon as disneyland was open and working lots of shady stuff popped up on the outskirts and that's the thing i you know now i feel like yeah it feels shady around there and there's your like but i but i feel like it's mainly like and we're cheap hotels i do wonder it seemed like it was like much shadier maybe in the 50s 60s like way more low rent yeah yeah or just like odd opportunistic weird dirty shitty places charging too much money i don't really know yeah i mean it's hard to say i think there was a lot more motel kind of things but i think there was a lot more motel places everywhere and a lot of the older pictures have like featuring a cocktail lounge with the singer mickey harry like you know there was just an expectation of like roadside motel and like stuff yeah more chain hotel stuff there now i would imagine that that real estate

people would eventually be getting bought out by bigger places. Yeah. Over the years. So. Even in the last 10 years, I feel like there's been a lot more like suite hotels or like. Right. Mid-range hotel, like nicer mid-range hotels kind of popping up. I wonder if anyone has it. That would be fascinating to know what businesses were on that street for the first 10, 20 years. That really would be fascinating.

What was the first cruddy shit that opened up around Disneylandneyland yeah or was there anything cool like who not like maybe well there was i think in some episode i discovered there was a nixon's hamburgers yes yes exactly nixon had a hamburger place his brother what was he i forgot yeah uh um so that sounds good i don't know so you can't hate on nixon burgers but no no um but mainly he just didn't want that probably he wanted like he didn't want it to be that there is your magic kingdom here and then as soon as you walk outside of it there's a bunch of nuisance stuff and stuff that where they have to regulate the height lines and it might intrude on the park visually he doesn't want any of that he wants pure wilderness around him so i like that he

doesn't go let's buy twice the space he buys it's like 125 times it's something so crazy yeah well i'm making that up no i'll tell you what it is it's twice the size of the island of manhattan a line that everyone from the book publication people to the celebrity guests on that opening day special have been told to say. Yeah, that's in there a lot. There's some listeners might be hearing some of this early Disney World stuff for the first time, or you're hearing certain elements of it for the 100th time. And I was watching the 15th anniversary special with Aaron, my wife, who at some point said like, how many more times do I have to see him

in front of this fucking map? I've seen so much footage of Walt in the big map, and he's pointing, and it's the Drew size, and twice Manhattan's, and 24, and look at me, I'm just five miles tall. They use this stuff a lot, and probably

as she intuited, because it's some of the only footage of him associated with Disney World they use this stuff a lot and probably as she intuited because it's some of the only footage of him associated with disney world there's not a lot marrying him to the place because he didn't really get to be involved right there's no he's not walking walking those streets or anything yeah yeah nope no pictures like that uh so he wants to buy up all of this land uh but if he does it it's going to raise red flags and the land value is going to skyrocket uh and he's it's going to be anaheim all over again so he has to invent all of these shady made-up companies to start buying up all of the land on the cheap uh which is this one they don't hide from this is like part of the charming mythology that they themselves put out.

Even though if you break it down, it's pretty iffy, right? I think so, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. But this is part of the, this is one of the iffy things that, yeah, as you're saying, like, they're like, isn't that cute? Yeah. Those people are getting ripped off.

Like Scott said, they're going to feel like they got ripped off if they find out later on that. I'm going to get ripped off like scott's dad they're gonna feel like they got ripped off if they find out later on that i'm gonna get ripped off they didn't you know charge the uh buyer enough uh yeah yeah you are withholding information from the person you're buying the land from you are not you are you are not being honest about what your thing is so i wanted to know a little bit more about this jason you might have found some of this too, but I was like, what were these companies? And there's one that has a little charming spin that they love to say.

The ones that I saw, some of them are just like, did they just pick like these names because it didn't sound like a white guy buying in a white guy's company? I also had the thought that you're having as well, yes. Yeah, because one of them is the Latin American development and management corporation. Yeah, yeah.

No, that sucks. Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. I think they were like, this will throw them off the scent. They'll never know that the whitest man is buying this. Spain Co. What words can we throw in? That also has the ring of king feature syndicate of like very bland, very boring.

You're bored by the time you've heard the full name, so you stop investigating. All right, sure, Latin American. What was it? Tomahawk Properties. Yeah, no. Doesn't seem right. Definitely, yes. But then you're having fun.

Then they throw out M.T. Lott Company. M.T. Lott, yes. M.T. Lott Company. M.T. Lott, yes. M.T. Lott. Now that's like a cute Disney thing. I do like that. I can't be mad about that. Like N.T. Theme Park Company. Not a, or N.T.A. Theme Park Company.

Like that would be funny. Isn't that cute? Like they're kind of telling them what it is, but they're not saying it. Use not, like the last name not. Not yeah that's better yes not a theme park run that together as one word maybe put like a q u e on it and then walt like name walt dresses up as the guy who owns it like shaves his mustache off and he puts on a wig. Hello there. Or he could just like, if he doesn't want to shave, he's got to be on TV the next week.

He does it as a lady and he's got like a handkerchief in front of his nose. Oh, right, right, right. Oh, my, the vapors. Yeah, yeah. See, that's cute. Swamp bear, I can't breathe. The other thing is bad. This would be cute just to like wink at everyone buying the land. I'm disappointed.

We know he did voices. We know he did Mickey Mouse. Of course, yeah. And presumably one other voice, though perhaps not. There's one clip of him in a sound booth that I also like the map. I've seen him doing the like, ah! I forget what he's doing. They only did it one time.

If I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt of the land buying i think a lot of the land they were buying you could describe as hostile land like nature does not want man to be here it's filled with alligators and bugs and swamp yeah you know uh and i think like some of it may be like still not used for that reason. I think they own some land that is not developable, developable, uh, and, and,

but just hold it because it's, you know, blocking other stuff from infringing. A lot of sinkholes, maybe subterranean sinkholes at places. Uh, I believe that's why some of the other hotels that were supposed to be around the seven seas lagoon, at places uh i believe that's why some of the other hotels that were supposed to be around the

seven seas lagoon as much as they try to shoot a depth test or a girder down there the earth keeps eating them really there's a there was a phrase in one of these articles where it was like all right they had to get started and they had to drain the land and i was like jesus yeah that's so intense drain the swamp it makes sense but but for just looking at it, I go, that seems hard. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There's, in terms, I love the stories of the inhospitable nature of it.

I saw a story about, several stories that involve the need to show up with a gun because you may have to shoot a snake to bits. This happened more than once. These kind of boring stiff shirts going down there to deal with like, let's do our redistricting and get 3D Creek open. But they also have to be like Indiana Joneses. This is some wild stuff. I saw one story about people having some

functional meeting in a trailer and then stepping outside of it oh my god the biggest snake i've ever seen bang bang bang shooting the snake to bits this is this is such a brutal i've never really thought about just blowing a snake to kingdom come um and then the guy goes back into the into the bungalow and says you gotta come out you're gonna see i just had to shoot this snake it's nuts he brought him out wow that is huge thing comes back to life it was not dead oh my god kill it kill it michael myers snake oh yeah horror movie. Not actually dead. And then, oh, just the same story about a guy who I, I mean, I've got more stuff about this gentleman, General Joe Potter. But he for sure is just like, like snakes would just like dive down from tree branches. You'd be hit.

You're like out in a fan boat trying to get a lay of the land. And then, oh, my God, snakes. snakes you just gotta be ready to snipe them just get attacked by snakes 24 7 that's insane it's so crazy you look back at old movies and stuff or old like catalog and you're like wow they sold guns at hardware stores and it's like oh uh stories like this it's like oh i see why they sold a small caliber gun at a hardware store next to like the hedge clippers for the snakes, you know. Would they even?

Through the world. Like I can just imagine they're all like short sleeve dress shirt guys. Big, like big cigarette or cigar gun. Don't even like, like cigar doesn't even fall out of their mouth as they just unload or round at a snake. Barely wins wins which is that the best way to do it no it can't be right no it's like a grabber they are yeah what a tough target that is and then like clearly the blowing the snake to bits and then you didn't get it indicates that that person doesn't know the the anatomy of a

snake not that i do but i'm not being called upon to shoot one no yet but yeah he's like he's like i don't know i got the the tail and the head but then like you probably missed like vital organs that keep it alive yeah i'm not an advocate for snake killing it's their land i mean they should have been there they you know it's their land uh stolen from the snakes um but the all the guys should have just had flamethrowers like the thing like in the thing i think her russell the thing they should just all have been equipped with a big tank on their back and a big flamethrower i guess like the end once upon a time in hollywood aliens too aliens yeah lighten up the inside of the belly a lot of movies so they just like

step outside to get like continue smoking and then they go ah shit and they just shoot up uh the swamp with with uh fire i saw that story about uh dick irvine and admiral joe fowler getting swallowed by a gigantic crocodile bigger than them but luckily they brought flamethrowers right right lit it up from the inside until like that's all i got until all the heat forced them back out of the mouth in sort of a monster scenario yeah yeah so start a guardians of the galaxy 2 when drax ends up in the alien's belly and he gets out i guess he cuts himself out he doesn't flamet flame throw his way out. Same thing, except for Joe Potter. Joe Potter or Joe Fowler? Which former military man was it?

Yes, clear about this. Sorry, sorry. Admiral Joe Fowler is not General Joe Potter. Both very important in the genesis of Disney World. Yeah. I remember this weirding me out the first time that I went to Disney World, because I knew Disneyland, and I knew that there was the Mark Twain, and I knew who Mark Twain is, and that's Americana, and it's this nice boat named after Mark Twain.

And you go down there, and the boat is called the Admiral Joe Fowler. It's kind of, what's with the scary military? And then later, this other boat ends ends up both of these military guys who helped build Disney world. Now there's boats named after them. Yeah. Something about seeing the military word. This is no slight on anyone serving.

I think it just like the, just the word that just like a reminder. It was reminded me of war when I'm trying to get on a nice boat. Yeah. Well, it was in the air with Disney World was being built and conceived, so. The helicopters, that's what this episode was about. Vietnam. For context, this was a different time.

Mm-hmm. Watergate was on the way. Then, yeah, Fortunate Son plays. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I have heard this might help the tale and on spotify in a white room with black people love it's gonna be speaking of aging and everything it's gonna be sad when people are too old to make documentaries about the 60s and they can't drop all of these

oh yeah yeah 60s songs into them anymore that's a good point i'm gonna do i don't know people might forget gimme shelter that's a good point although the rolling stone again i said jimmy buffa might be immortal mick jagger might be immortal he's back on tour he's dancing oh he's showing up gotta show him i'm no charlie look at me go that was certainly a slate to their dead drummer I think for sure Not me not this year I'm not going out like Stan Sherrill He was my friend too Many a rowdy night with a Donald

And Stan Sherrill I just got some fresh blood injections Cause it's easy Sleazy He might have made the only song that is actually that is the song of the weird era where we thought the pandemic was over and then not he gave us the anthem of the most specific sliver of time and it makes sense that the anthem was really stupid yes it's all been a very stupid time why you better believe i listened to easy sleazy after

i got my second shot we all were on the drive back windows down yeah i don't know has this come up on the show yet i don't believe so i think i think people already i had to dive for what was even the name of that song i had to when you said easy sleazy i know exactly what you're talking about but i didn't remember the name mick jagger has a solo song yes it's not a rolling stones song because they didn't want any part of it they released a song called living in a ghost town at the start of the pandemic all right which was not related to they didn't write it for the pandemic but it just lined up perfectly and they released that but then mick jagger released a solo song called easy sleazy right well may we had to wear a mask it's all these like screamed lines about yeah i took a cooking class it's like basically like yeah like a jimmy fallon sketch

but mick jagger wrote it as a serious song i'm obviously he's kidding a little bit but yeah if you haven't heard it please listen to this now easy sleazy that's what general joe potter and admiral joe fowler that's what they described as like murking snakes like they're they're dead shots you know they served you know can you tell him easy sleazy easy sleazy That's what they would say. I would like to talk about General Joe Potter. Fowler can get his time feel free. I just, him as the snake killer. I mean, just what a cool sort of like, just apocalypse now. It's a fictional, it all seems fictional. Yeah, yeah.

In all of its, yeah. This guy is credited, I never knew any of this really till today that this guy is credited with the big infrastructural plant like like the big moving of heaven and earth that it took to turn swampland into a vacation destination and he was given this task because of his military experience where he helped plan the invasion of Normandy. He's like figuring out supply count and how are we going to move these massive vehicles from here to there. He laid the infrastructural groundwork for Normandy.

And it was like not that distant of a memory. It hadn't been that long. No, it was not even building this castle. Not 50 years. No. No. Less than 50. Really recently.

Yeah. And then it was like, yeah, he was planning Normandy. Then he was planning out where all these tourists were going to take a shit. Yeah. Equally important. Of course, they did have to make sure that his office was very far away from the, you know, nonfiction movie department because still some bad blood with werner von baron oh sure yeah that's a very good point

i he uh uh he was the governor of the panama canal zone fake that's fake that seems fake i've never heard that phrase or thought about it or what was going on in the Panama Canal in the 50s. Literally, his jobs were he was that and then like, I think I might retire. And then I'll just consult on the New York World's Fair. And that's where he met Disney. But he went from the fair. And then right before that, he was in charge of the Panama Canal where he was responsible. There were 40,000 people living in the Panama

Canal zone. And one of the things that he had to deal with on a daily basis was malaria. And it's why, among the many things that this guy did for Disney World, he helped figure out how to keep mosquitoes away. This is all things, videos about this, why are there no mosquitoes in Disney World?

And a lot of it is due to this guy because he's like, I was there. I was there in penamuk canal i saw people die every day in front of me they'd throw up their insides and then he but he like the the thing that he knew was if there's water you got to keep it moving still water you're getting mosquitoes left and right so not only all these bodies of water we got to keep things pumping. Everything's got to be rivers and streams and on the flow. And even he consulted

on the roofs to make sure that water wouldn't get caught on a roof in fantasy land because then mosquitoes would start showing up. Wow. He figured out

a weird garlic powder that was, that is, I think, still used to keep mosquitoes away. It's a garlic thing. Like a vampire. Like a vampire. Yeah vampire yeah he was also he fought the vampire he was in transylvania war yeah from 1960 to 1963

i have a thing on that on the swamp and the bugs yeah um so uh bay lake which is on the other side of the contemporary connects to the seven seas lagoon okay they had to do what they call everything is that thing that's it's it's surrounding all the hotels and it's in front of the magic kingdom that is that's the seven seas lagoon and then it's connected to bay lake which is a larger body of water and it had to have a lot of work done uh this is from that teasing world first the first decade book to restore the lake to a pristine state meant draining three and a half billion gallons of water and removing an eight foot thick layer of muck covering the lake bottom but underneath all that muck was a pleasant surprise pure Pure white sand, which is spread along the lakeshore to create beaches.

Do not go on the beaches in 2021. Now, with the lake basin refilled, it was stocked with 70,000 fingerling bass. Not only did this add fishing to the list of recreational opportunities in the vacation kingdom, it aided in insect control. So, a few birds with one stone.

Whoa. The fish help That's crazy And still a bunch of just fish in there But we don't know if that's a general Joe invention Maybe It's not credited specifically to him

But it does seem in his purview I think that's absolutely something He was part That is like heady stuff All of this this is like changing the fabric of a land so what do they call the terraforming the thing you'd have to do in space to be able to live anywhere like this is a mild version of terraforming that had to be done before the skyway and the tea party could get built yeah and if wall was alive he would be in the bezos like i'm sure i'm assuming bezos and musk have all talked about like terraforming mars that's gotta be that has to be part of it if you want to live up in one of these places you have to change the makeup of

what is possible on the actual surface yeah because musk is like well you have to terraform it and then people are like oh what does that involve uh you know it's uh what else uh yeah yeah i was talking to roylan the other day he has no further information about sometimes you listen to him talk and you go is this guy know anything but you know what he did sell a flamethrower so that was cool wait what he sold a flamethrower you could buy yeah but it didn't really work and it was kind of like not that different than the one you use to kill weeds. Yeah, but that was, you know, the Boring Company.

They make little tunnels and he sold a flamethrower a couple years ago. That's pretty sick. Honestly, I gotta say where I'm sitting, that's pretty sick. Pretty sick, bro. Just take a flamethrower to Mars, and I'll probably just carve it up.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And build tunnels. Born Company. Done. Born Company's going to do it. We'll live in tunnels on Mars. Yeah.

Problem solved. Kyle Mooney character you're doing there. Yeah. Yeah. But the character's right. Mm-hmm. Let's be honest. That's a correct character.

So, oh, also in terms of like bizarre nature uh like okay other things that were there at the time gators armadillos uh and i heard a quote from marty sklar that one of the first times he went they were on a boat and they passed by what became discovery island the weird abandoned zoo and that the only thing that was there at the time was an illegal hunter shack just like a weird tin facility of people trying to hunt deer deers boars and turkeys something about that island man just people want to trespass on it like it's just the allure of it you know oh yeah yeah then and now um something magical on there i guess uh but yeah this is illegal hunting shacks and snakes you gotta shoot up uh what a bizarre what a bizarre place um and

not only all that not only just like the the taming of nature that had to be done there's also all of this weird infrastructural stuff. Yes. Because, like, and I'm out of my depth to talk about, like, the zoning and the city stuff, but they, like, just they should have been bound to all of these rules that anything in a city would have been bound to. Like, there was all this zoning stuff that they didn't want to have to answer to yes so they invented a city structure to not have to do any of that is that basically correct well and they would use the the epcot movie as like and we might build a city you

know they might they you would use it as like a carrot to dangle. So we need all of the cities owning stuff. We need control. We need control. Like it's unusual for a resort property to have full control of like localized area. This is what I have. It says Disney lawyers employed Chapter 298 in the Florida Code, which allowed for the creation of independent drainage districts aimed at promoting the development of Florida's swampy lands. Thus, in May 1966, the Reedy Creek Improvement District was born. The RCIP would have near total control over the land. A problem, though, is that the United States Constitution guaranteed certain legal and political rights to all citizens,

even those within a drainage district. Disney's solution was to create fake, company-controlled municipalities. Only permanent residents would be permitted to vote and disney would grant permanent residency only to a select group of employees and managers who were also loyal to the company which is insane yes and this gets you into some stuff we were talking about this on the second gate with celebration florida you guys made me aware of this thing that i didn't know that they've had employees live in trailers on the property so that they can vote and they will vote the way that the company wants yes in this fraudulent election to circumvent the u.s constitution i love yeah from that passage by the way there was a problem though the u.s constitution states what a problem the dizzy

lawyers also kept telling walt like this was this problem with the epcot city it's like you can't let people live here permanently or they will want to vote and control the city they live in. So it's like, well, they'll live here temporarily. And it's like, so temporarily, but you can't make these people gerbil.

Like you can't make these people animals in a zoo, like the human zoo. Yeah. He had this other, I also just saw this, he uh he he wanted to basically uh progress city would have had no retirees you can't be retired there yes because you have to have a job you got to be working and contributing to progress city or to disney up the road or something on this land and maybe in the future i will build another city where retirees are allowed but not progress city because if you're retired you're

making no progress yeah and it it's wild and um that's where now we're getting loony no no retiring here it it does and again it's so funny to think about because you're talking about committees made me think of this section for the getaway book uh roy set up a central committee to work on the amusement park walt was not included in the group because mark and there's an anecdote in here for mark davis of like walt was focused on the city he did he the secondary project was the amusement what was the east coast disneyland and he would get annoyed if people tried to take too much of his time to talk about the park i also think that that has i mean i think there's people have written about i

think it has something to do with why the park isn't drastically drastically different than disneyland because he was like yeah yeah just make a very similar park like he was because he was not so invested he was there he didn't care he was he was much more about new stuff so instead of being like a totally new different park he was like yeah you guys do whatever you want so there's some world where there aren't other magic kingdoms like at all or they're just like touches them they're yeah exactly like it's just like yeah because they they were talking about tokyo before like way before it ever got built like there was already some chatter of other parks elsewhere yeah but i doubt well all anything anytime i've ever read about walt he seems like a guy who's like very adamant about one thing until they go hey you know we can make a bunch of money and it should be and he goes all right fine so like yeah

like they're probably he would have like franchisedised Disney out and focused on his city and then terraforming Venus or something. You know, I'm going to a different planet than this Bezos character. Might have figured out some life-elongating schemes so that he is still around. I mean, he was, you know, like, okay, wait. The Frozen, the cryogenic stuff Is not true He's not frozen But was he looking Into cryogenics at least

That's a good question That I don't know The answer to Because our Current billionaires Are doing this And this is a minor Fascination with myself

As well Reading about all This futurism stuff About life Me freezing yourself Yes me freezing myself I just read that Larry King for years

Had said he wanted to freeze himself but his family talked him out of it so larry is not frozen man but yeah tried though i don't actually know have you ever seen if walt expressed the desire to actually have himself frozen or that's just i hate some of his behavior at the end of the life, definitely seems like a man who wants to, you know, leave a lasting impression. Like, it seems like he feels like the specter of death is following him, frankly. Sure.

Like, some of his behavior. So, I have to think at some point he thought, like, how do I outlive this? Sure. Because the Funkland talks land talks about like he was drinking more at the end of his life well sure and he went in for some surgery and that's an unrelated surgery and then they found the cancer right because he had a horrible cough but yeah there's no like document like documentation i don't know i don't know of i don't know exactly

saying like and i'd like to be frozen. Can we get a big freezer and put me in there? It could be in one of those two biographies. According to mentalfloss.com, that somebody, maybe not him,

I think he was on his deathbed and someone from the studios called Cryogenics Place and asked a lot of questions, a lot of very detailed questions. And that apparently uh the okay wait he never specified it in writing and when he died the family didn't go for it two weeks later they froze the first man oh really so this was the first wow it only happened so he was maybe

in contention if he had like gotten it out and verbalized it he could have been the first man frozen now that's pretty crazy not not just toized it he could have been the first man frozen that's pretty crazy not not just to be frozen he could have been the first wow that is crazy that uh that would have i think that would i don't know which company that was i don't know if they're still around i mean there's there was an expose because baseball player ted williams was frozen and there are two ways i i understand to be frozen one is your whole body gets frozen or they separate the head and just freeze the head I think correct maybe I'm wrong about it being Ted Williams but there was the there was an expose on one of these places and they just had like heads hanging around

people mistreating the heads yeah and just like a fucking sleazy creepy weird fake biz I don't know if it's totally fake but like truly not some sort of professional thing where yeah they take these like human bodies that have just passed away uh they treat them well i don't know if it's that story but there's a sim there's some cryonics kind of situation that i i liked because it was up in in chatsworth which is closer to where i'm from where like there's a forest there's a cemetery where they got some space at the cemetery to do some experiment on there were 10 bodies in there and then it was all investigated and looked into after the funding had been cut and people walked in it was just this horrifying room of like melting it just wasn't like oh my god it was not

being refrigerated and treated properly and i drove up there not a lot it was a whole podcast about it i don't remember specifics very well but i was like i gotta drive up there just to like know the vibe like even to feel what it's like to go off of a road and then get into a building where this ice and corpses melting that is the creepiest shit it is i know a family friend was living with someone who was frozen and was there at the end and was like weird x-file shit of like people lingering in the final few weeks like just like this weird shadow company lingering while the the gentleman was like slowly passing away and it is just hearing a little bit about it you go this is just so creepy I don't know

I would be fascinating to know How many of these places are still around I think by and large the community That is actually trying to end aging Which is really what A lot of these people's premise is that like You're trying to deal with diseases And like trying to cure diseases

But really the thing is aging Aging is the thing Our cells get weak And they can't fight Things off anymore So I don't I think that freezing Is going out of fashion

Pretty fast We're not This has been If we're talking If the first man was frozen In 66 Is what we're discovering That's older than Disney World

Yeah Happy 56th birthday freezing Yeah I don't think it's going Too well for you I think the proof would be in the pudding and the pudding is melting yeah yeah i think there was another story a few years ago about like a cryogenic startup where like oh no the power went out

and all everything melted like it's like the best minds are not focused on this you know there's a lot of other things yeah i guess perhaps if somebody is i wonder what the best minds are not focused on this you know it's there's a lot of other things yeah i guess perhaps if somebody is i wonder what the best cryogenics place maybe they do have a corpse that has been preserved and once they figure the aging thing out they can do it but it feels like they're all about it feels it doesn't feel nearly as good as the austin powers technology i don't think that's possible it's not all. Do you think anyone ever looked into freezing themselves because they watched the first 12 minutes of Austin Powers? Didn't continue to watch the fun comedic romp that ensued. They just saw it as like a technological leap forward.

I watched a sci-fi thriller the other day. Something about power. It was about the power, probably of freezing. I think it was called The Power of Freezing. The Power of Freezing, yeah. I think there's got to be one person who got away.

Maybe it was Larry. Maybe Larry King watched it. I'd like to be frozen now, please. One frozen. Since you mentioned it, I believe Disney's remains were cremated and are in one of the Forest Lawn cemeteries in

the San Fernando Valley. Which again, we're not that far from. I enjoyed a nice iced tea earlier today in the shadow of the hospital where he died. Oh, sure. Well, they've got that walk on Starbucks. Yeah, they've got it.

I just rode my bike. It was very pleasant. I didn't go there to think about, well, now I feel bad I didn't go there and think about, well, here while we're doing this episode, I should have like, you know, bent down and said a little something. Said a little something, sure. Poured out some of the ice cream. Can I see the drop tile ceiling where he explained how the city was laid out in his last week? Yeah, yes.

Well, this was another General Joe Potter thing, that he went to see him on his deathbed in the last couple weeks and that he's using the ceiling and saying, well, then that's going to be over there and that'll be the hub, you see. And he's like pointing at an empty ceiling and saying this plan. This is nuts. Yeah, I can't even imagine that. It's truly surreal. pointing at an empty ceiling and saying this plan is nuts. Yeah. Yeah. This, I can't even imagine that.

It's truly surreal. Austin Powers is more real than what you just described to me. Now, like mere, mere feet away from where we are right now. In his defense, terraforming Swampland, building a major international vacation destination.

They got pretty close. They got pretty close. Oh yeah. what he did was nuts stuff that's ever yeah yeah yeah where they landed and i thank them for it it's truly wonderful but the metaphor i kept thinking about is like if you set out to make a thanksgiving dinner and very quickly you abandon the raw turkey and the entree becomes mashed potatoes and that is the main course the mashed potatoes are the main course the secondary the side dish is now the main course and over the course of 50

years the mashed potatoes just get more and more elaborate and also more and more you're like sweating while you're saying this you're getting like really worked up talking about these mashed potatoes because all the stories about it's like yeah the this this this was secondary the the amusement park the theme park was secondary jim hill i think pointed out that essentially it was the icon the weenie was the magic kingdom to drive uh people's eye to drive traffic tourism dollars tourists to the florida property when the city was going to be the main focus it probably makes sense to get people down there with something to do sure yeah amusement park and not just like come to the city with no olds with no old people the logans are on city yeah no retirees i mean the subtext of that is they killed the old people, right?

Yeah, I think so. They were euthanized. You think? Yeah, yeah. Here's the frozen. No, we'll freeze you. Here, we'll show you the freezing machines. No, they're actually, they're turbines.

It's just big fans. Marty Spada writes in his book, Walt entered the office and said, we need a way to get rid of the old people. Not me No The ones not in control The ones who haven't done anything with their lives And Bob Gurr was like, well, I just built a big fan

And I just roll them in, I don't know Let's call it the magical chamber of dreams Yeah Sounds good That's got a nicer ring to it than euthanasia And then we went to the show we went to the sherman brothers they need a song for the fan yeah winter the magical machine yeah there's some animator somewhere who's like well i i animated the two cats and the aristocats

and then i well i helped him come up with death panels he said you've got talent. Help me with some numbers issues. You can do it all. The way you solve health care is to not have old people. We don't have to support them. Oh, man. Speaking of insanity, though, there was all this, like, how, okay. So, Jason, you said it, that they finally, they start getting the project

off the ground, they're gonna build something, and the state is kinda, well, I don't know, you need to follow these rules, and you gotta you know, you should abide by this and that well, let's show you this movie, and this movie has Walt in it, and he's gonna talk about his dream, and then it melted everyone's icy

hearts, and now, like now like, okay, whatever you need, what would you like to do? And suddenly Disney had the power. They had no state or county regulation on buildings, airport construction. They could have built an airport, though they never did. Distribution and sale of alcoholic beverages. Didn't have to apply for the regular stuff

for that. And they even had the right to build a nuclear power plant. Anyone know that? i hadn't heard that i hadn't heard it either yeah they were like and still and this is like a florida law legislature thing and i don't think it's all companies i think it is like on the books in florida that if the walt disney company wants to build a nuclear power plant on that property, they can do it. And it for sure still does exist because every once in a while, a state Senator will come around and say, maybe that should be out of there.

Even though it doesn't seem likely that here in 2021, Disney is going to suddenly build a nuclear power. That's not, doesn't seem like the way the winds are blowing. They did build a nice solar power plant in the shape of Mickey's ears. That's cute and nice and forward-thinking. Nuclear power, they're probably not going to do.

However, even though it was just this minor thing that I think the senator kind of dropped ultimately, Disney still sent in lobbyists. To keep the option open. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They still put in money to say actually we would like to still have that right you gotta have a little wiggle room you know you gotta let industry grow i mean that is the give and take of all these parks but like especially

the stuff about disney world because walt was encouraging his know, I think we said earlier, like the Florida property will give us projects for decades. And he encouraged the Imagineers to like think past your lifetime. And that's a good, I think that is, you should tell artists that, you know, that I think that is good. But then it's funny to see the way the parks are executed, where it's like, you are lucky if you have a handful of attractions that last 20 30 years or so and then the other thing is he wants industry to fund all this stuff to to make all this stuff and they're not thinking past their lifetimes industry is thinking about lining their pockets and the way you line your pockets changes as industries evolve and change.

So it's like, oh, I don't, he was a man of conflicts for sure. Could he have built an atomic bomb also? Might, I mean, I don't know the full. Is that possible when you have a nuclear power plant? Blow a bunch of dust off of a big book in the florida uh state legislature but yeah is it possible on the books is like walt was allowed to build one nuclear bomb every decade and like would he have hit would he have hit universal orlando with the bomb during construction that was legal according to some sort of charter

you know business cost to be one business so they want to keep it open for that reason if they want a torpedo sea world or a sesame place is expanding let's get these fuckers out of there yeah if they wanted to build a big drill machine yeah it can like go in a subterranean fashion under one of their yeah like um like uh krang's ships that he would use in the from the technodrome to the surface area level yeah they'd have that big drill on the front they got disney got real nervous when ninja turtles started using that because they're like that's really close to our copyright they locked them down locked them down in mgm studios in the early years yeah good point let's cut a deal uh you come dance around in our parks and

we won't say anything about this subterranean machine you blew the cover on you know um while they were fighting the state they were also benefiting uh a lot of the developments in the state because the florida highway system was being rapidly like expanded and built like interstate four and the florida turnpike and then where they built where they did was proximity to uh yeah yeah to those roads thinking like you know there wasn't really there wasn't a major airport yet no orlando so yeah those highways are super important to them and why they put it there orlando was still mccoy air force base and then gradually shifted to more and more civilian flights and it's still the the three-letter code for Orlando is MCO.

Oh, that's why it's MCO. I never knew that. It's still a holdover when it was an Air Force base. But with the drawdown as Vietnam was wrapped up, that was no longer needed an Air Force base in Florida. Wow. In a white room with that person. Land and get on the Mickey's Magical Express.

White room plane. I guess not anymore. Well, for a short while longer. Oh, is it still going right now? I thought it was still going to the end of the calendar year. Oh, okay. I apologize for not knowing that. So, where are we now?

I mean, this is all such madness what they had to do this it's also like in addition to yeah the terraforming essentially they're also they they got to do hotels for the first time and they've never they've never done that because the disneyland hotel was this other corporation running it, and they were just licensing the name initially. Now Disney runs a ton of hotels. They did not at the time. They had to learn some stuff about it.

I saw this weird fact that there was a, in the lead up to Disney World opening, in like the year prior, they saw that a guy was opening a little Hilton Inn on I Drive. He was like prepping it. He's an independent owner. And Disney went to the guy and said, hey, can we run your hotel for you as practice? Like this is this odd little where you go to the hotel and you wouldn't even know that Disney was running the joint. And did for like 18 months after the opening of Disney where they got they made got this big deal we won't just leave you out to dry this will be our hotel for a little while we'll just like learn and watch and figure it out and train people in

here and then uh so that they were more able to do contemporary and polynesian wow that's great that is wild like was like were the imagineers like like, dressed up? Were they running it? Like, how, were they incognito? Like, yes, hello, nothing to see here. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah. Doing, like, broad, stodial characters. Like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, I assume. All big English accents and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, comical bread falls. Yeah, pratfalls yeah stupidly large key rings well yeah they had to see how guests would react to pratfalls from the hotel staff they just needed to know all the different angles of it day to day pratfalls are going to happen at some point in the calendar here so if a bell boy is holding too many bags and the bags open how will the guest react? You wouldn't know unless you tried, unless you ran it and tried that. If there was like a monkey running around who like took the little bellhop costume and put it on and then was running wild in a room. Yeah.

Something I assume happened in a Disney live action film around that time. Yeah. Was Dunstan Checks In based on an older movie, which is the movie you just described. I just assume if it was in the late 60s and Kurt Russell was in it, there's probably a monkey around. Oh, yeah. Kurt Russell was in Chimp Hotel from 1962. Yeah, yeah.

Very popular. The Jane Goodall research was just hitting. Suzanne Plachette and Kurt russell in chimp hotel all disney presents chimp hotel which is coming back on disney plus there's gonna be a full yeah three season arc of it um yeah the follow followed up of course by uh the the bananas bellhop yeah right of course yeah well you start with season one you don't have three negotiate contracts so yeah of course so yeah well we're excited about that i didn't know that i didn't know they were like testing hotel stuff running a hotel there's a whole like even like hiring up

was apparently pretty difficult because just like this notion everything that they'd figured out in california and what was by now in motion of like it's the disney look and the disney way of being and its cast members and its friendliness and all the custom like just like hiring people i think they had trouble shifting people to like teaching the disney way which is sort of creepy thing to bring up i guess but just this like manifested itself in that people would show up at disney say i want a job and they wouldn't really know like know what kinds of jobs they were even filling. Speaking of monkeys,

there was a guy who was like, you're hiring? Okay, great. Went to his truck, brought out a little trained monkey, and did a little act, and thought, so I can do this in Disney World? Great. Amusement parks. Yeah. Carnivals. This is an amusement. Are you not

amused? Wow. Is this like an organ are you not amused wow it's like an organ grinder type of a situation or yeah i think so wow wow yeah just thought like you could use this couldn't you he was right they should have it still yeah there hasn't been a live monkey in a part of the animal kingdom i assume for a long time yeah but not in like a city environment that's true. We're in a costume. Right. That's what we want.

It's kind of crazy to think about, you know, not that Central Florida was a total backwater, but it was a bit off the beaten path because they had to build a factory where like Port Orleans is now to construct the modular hotel rooms for the two hotels oh yeah but then they had to build the monorail like the concrete beams in tacoma washington and then get

them across the country wow so it everything is they're kind of learning it as they go along and with hiring i guess that's how they ended up with about 5,000 cast members on opening day when they ended up with 10,000 guests. So that's a cast member for every two guests? Wow. For two guests. Yeah. Jeez.

Yikes. Yeah, I think a lot of it was very difficult. Who's going to build the monorail? Who's around that can do that just like all the functional stuff and they'd only done this once before i was also reading how they everything at disneyland was built sort of in this bob ger way that we talk about where i don't know i did it and i did a little drawing and here's how it worked i worked it out and then it was there. There was no plan and put, there was no like,

here's a book of how you do this ride or that ride. Cause it all just sort of happened and kind of nobody thought it would happen again. So reproducing everything I think was a big hassle. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Cause obviously now like they probably could get,

they probably have like down to the centimeter every single ride in a database. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They have to. Exact dimensions of everything and every character in it and every exact paint color. Yeah, you could 3D print a Disney park. Right, in a couple days. There's no humans involved.

It is like, hey, did you take notes on how we built the other one? No. No. I thought about that. I do, yeah. I guess we should have saved some of the drawings huh that was that one okay well i kind of remember how it is i think osha comes along after the opening of disney world oh right yeah i'm not saying it's because of the opening of disney but it they weren't subject to it for a while. Right, right. So yeah, that is why it's just wild because so much stuff,

I mean, just not even taking it out of theme parks. I just like you go, you drive through a city, you go, how did they figure out how to do a city? How did they figure out how to make one of these tall buildings? I feel like such an idiot.

Yeah. Because I'm like, if you really think about just logistically how our world has been constructed, I go, I'm the dumbest person alive. I have no clue how to do this. And then in the span of human history, it's relatively, it's not long that this stuff was all created. And so it's interesting getting a little like microcosm of it from Disney World going, yeah, this, it is funny how you just take so many just like mundane things for granted

just because they exist and go well they always knew how to run a hotel or build a monorail but they did not they truly were kind of clueless i know i think that all is yes streets yeah what streets huh i'm like the dumbest man alive if i really start to think about stuff and i go i don't know how this works i don't know how i passed by a pothole then i was like why aren't why isn't it all potholes that was our streets built there are potholes everywhere all the time exactly yes um so dumb i'm dumb i'm yeah i'm real dumb jason no not i'm reasonably dumb yeah i i i don't think i could uh yeah build a city or anything like that but i read a little and i cannot apply it in real life no application for the yeah um i well what have we missed on the way to opening day? Because we want to get to opening day a little bit.

Roy? You got to give it up to Roy O'Disney. Because he kind of made it all happen. First off, he had to put up with his brother's crazy schemes. And then, you know, kind of resigned himself to like, we got to do this. And I want to do this in his honor. Well, he postponed his retirement honor and did make his retirement postponed his retirement yeah uh also died a few months after opening day of disney world in december of

71 yes like my work here is done and then like heaven took him away he slept for the first time in 40 plus years or so and it was instant yeah yeah well in the whole the Imagineering story I believe goes into this how he was always the money guy and then this was his chance to get involved with the artists and the Imagineers and the like the people doing the fun stuff and he apparently had a lot of fun he saw the other side of it. He saw the stuff that Walt got to do. He got to do it. And I think he died with a lot of joy. And he, of course, is why it is called Walt Disney World. Right. One of his first moves was to put the full name in it so that people are more likely

to remember the man. I was going to say, really? I guess Roy. His name is Disneyney your name is pretty splashy like uh yeah on camera a lot i think so much footage of him yeah um of all people likely to be forgotten oh walt disney oh i thought it might be a different guy because this is on the east oh okay it's him i see i see jonathan q disney okay got it um so yeah i mean it seems like his drive really caused it all to happen and that's why there's a statue of him at the park correct and the magic was sitting on a bench next to minnie right gotta ask mike yeah a little jealous

pisses me off yeah that old man doesn't deserve to sit next to Minnie. He's true love, though. He was a money man. Like Hepburn and Tracy, you know? Never got divorced, but, well, you know, that was real love. I don't know. I don't care for it. Yeah.

Maybe the golden one they're putting in will be your shot. Yeah, it should be the exact same statue, but without Roy, and you can sit there and take your own photo that's what i would prefer um hello um uh so yeah he roy makes it happen um they set october 1st 1971 as the day, partially because they are remembering the mistakes of Disneyland. Disneyland opened in the middle of the summer. It was extremely hot, which caused all of the famous problems that they ran out of water and the women's heels are melting into the concrete. Just added to the mania that it was so hot and the disaster that was disneyland opening day we did a

episode about it you can go check that out um so they didn't want that so they they picked october when the weather is worse uh when school is back in session yes it's a friday it's kind of i don't know is it a friday i don't know that it's a friday it is a friday this year it was a friday okay good i didn't get that wrong uh so just kind of like middle. It's not a weekend. I think they wanted to downplay it a lot. And this is funny because it's sort of how the opening of Galaxy's Edge played out. Where they're saying, you're just sensing from a lot of places, this is going to be pretty nuts. You maybe don't want to be part of this.

Maybe people stay away. And then they did. And it was like oddly because we were there first day of galaxy's edge it was oddly sparse everywhere but galaxy's edge and that's sort of what happened with disney world too they it worked too well leading to that problem of a cast member for every two people uh and i it was so it was initially like very initially, I think there was, it's not like it got,

it was that dire, but I think it opened with a feeling of, Oh, what if this didn't, what if we didn't successfully do the East coast outreach? What if people aren't interested in this? Yes. Or hopefully this is just like,

uh, a result of people being afraid of crowds, but maybe we messed it up. They, Roy did think that before he passed away, like that was keeping him awake. Yeah. He was keeping him alive.

The stress was coursing through his body, keeping him alive. But yeah, it was kind of a bad first couple of weeks. I believe seemingly. Yeah. I think they, I think it turned around by the time thanksgiving came around i

think the thanksgiving holiday they were like oh wow there's a lot of people there's like 50 000 people in the park yeah yeah i think no it like it exploded pretty quickly thereafter and then with thus leading to like giant lines of cars they'd have to like block parking lots and say nobody could come in so cars would just pull off to the side of the road and wait and then they'd have to like block parking lots and say nobody could come in so cars would just pull off to the side of the road and wait and then they'd see a car leave and they go all right well then i can go in and they'd go to the turnstile and say that well i saw a car leaves that means i get to go well no it's not as simple as that what why not so like furious campouts and like i think i think it was like pretty rough in terms of crowd management for

the first little run yeah there's a funny helicopter story um the website this day in disney history has a couple of good uh did you find this too um uh it has a lot of interesting facts and pictures and stuff there's a story about card walker and don tatum uh two executives going up in a helicopter and seeing lines and lines of cars uh and getting very excited at all the people coming and then the cars started to turn the wrong way and they realized it was all the cast members going to park whoops it is really like from this from these stories to the opening day special contrasted with disneyland it is night and day it is so like calm that opening this opening day special is pre-recorded it starts with just part of it yeah they were like we learned about we will film this over the course of three

days instead of trying to do some big live thing and it was done way later this was done after october first right it was just kind of like yeah it'll just be oh we'll just ramp up slowly over a month no big weird special where people are on drugs and cheating on their wives it is why yes that it's the difference night like the disney world special opened the week i don't want to jump ahead but like it opens with a four minute glenn campbell video. Largely Glenn Campbell. A lot. So much Glenn Campbell. Yeah.

Watch this special if you want to kind of follow along with us. The grand opening of Walt Disney World, 1971. Yeah, it's real sleepy. It's so sleepy. The song is called Today Is Mine. Today Is Mine. And it's the whole song. And it's the first.

And there's shots of Disney World, but not as many as you'd think the first four minutes of the opening day special would have. A lot of fields. It's a lot of fields and swampland. And then he keeps coming back with very boring speeches. Like, I was just sitting here going, shut up, man, play Wichita Lineman.

Come on. I like some Glen Campbell songs. Yeah. That's exciting. But it is interesting. Yeah, it's real meandery and just kind of like spirit and hope

and Americana. That song is what I wrote. It's like, there's a feeling, there's a feeling rumbling beneath this land. And then they don't really show you like...

Yeah, right. And it's not like... Those sky buckets. And there's some Disneyney songs but you're like i'm not sure why this was the choice yeah the the contrasting it with if you haven't heard our disneyland opening day special you can even just watch that special it is crazy it is it is uh it is punk rock the disneyland opening special i'm gonna say it's like cinema verite yeah it's like very yeah and like kind of with it's like harsh black

and white i think that adds to it uh that you can't always make out what's happening yeah it's uh it's like a very distinct visual palette and this is just this like 70s tide commercial it is just so bland in every way they're just like i don't know what it was with the 70 maybe it was the it's it's post vietnam let's say it let's calm everybody down things are hectic everything just got so like sanitized and gentle yeah yeah nothing going on calm well i think in 55 television was still very new like it was still the early days of the medium so they so to do a major broadcast for this giant event and then by the 70s it's like all right we figured out how to like cut variety and cut like you know live events down to something that like it's very clean but then it's like experience doing it and it's not just it's just not by the seat of our pants anymore

but it's too clean that said there, there's a couple versions on YouTube, one of which I think the one has more commercials in it from the time, and that's a lot of fun. Like getting to see... Oh, of course. We talked about that. The Eastern Airlines ad with Orson Welles narrating of like, fly Eastern Airlines to Walt Disney World.

There is a certain airline to Walt Disney World. Yeah. It's something, this special. I would say if I had to choose between this or really any other special, you know, hey look, I love my old Disney World specials.

I watch these all the time i would not put this towards the top of my favorites it is me and reed oh yeah that is for sure boy some sleepy musical numbers i you know hey i think we all like julie andrews plenty i don't i don't need to see any of those numbers again no no no bad job or anything it's just all boy she she entered she's introduced like on the monorail and the the noise of the monorail is just as loud as her voice which is really funny uh and then she does like yeah like a weird like disco zippity-doo-dah like not even disco like kind of i don't know i guess a little dance it's just it has like in it right yes so it's like i don't know what this is and like hip 70s varieties kids dancing with her yeah and i don't

ugly colors i don't believe anyone would wear in reality yeah uh and then fucking bob hope shows up oh man that's really the core of it. As they call him, the spirit of eternal youth. Now, there cannot be an older looking man than Bob Hope in 1971. Man lived to be 100. He lived to the ripe old age of

100 years old. And boy... You know, what wasn't youthful was his brain. No, it was not. Not the greatest ideas, not the most forward-thinking ideas, this man. Tell a lot of bawdy half jokes. Like half set up, half punchline. Like, I don't, it's not all the way there.

If you don't know this footage, it is, I will give it this, it is possibly the craziest set up for a stand-up comedy routine that has ever occurred. Oh, yeah. Which is the monorail landing in the inside station of the Contemporary Hotel. The monorail door is open. Bob Hope walks down half a flight of stairs and does his stand-up. He's flanked by two guides with like riding crop plaid style right guides uh and then he's and and the you know the contemporary hotel if you've been

in there is just very like uh i mean it's a pretty just big open concourse but it's also like kind of angular depending on where you are so you feel like his angle is weird and everything's pointed weird and diagonal and it keeps cutting to balconies where everybody's like leaning in these weird ways and the sight lines aren't. That's the funniest. The people are like they walked out of their hotel room and they're leaning over the balcony

on the 12th floor trying to watch a comedy routine. One of the strangest rooms I think ever that stand-up's been done in. Yeah, it wouldn't shock me also if it was all like shot at different times because of how odd it is i don't think i'm sure some of it was but it's like it's so disorienting that if you told me that like the place was empty except for bob hope and the two girls there yeah you would be oh yeah it makes because the audio is sweetened the laughs are sweetened for sure oh yeah not enough not enough it still makes it still makes it sound like he's eating

shit with these jokes yeah a lot of them truly don't well you want to you want to get into it you just have them on your i don't know yeah you're right i have them tattooed yeah you have we didn't exhaust you with shitty old comedy talk earlier this week with the two-hour, 45-minute late shift, get ready for some Bob Hope now. Older and shittier. Older and shittier. Yeah. He goes, so he looks, there's a couple creepy jokes.

He looks these girls up and down, and they have to be 17 or younger. I don't know, maybe or younger i don't know maybe 18 with that we can't say yeah i guess not they're very young looking that's all i'll say documentation i don't want to i know you want to defend bob hope's honor here i understand he like looks so one of them up and he goes oh boy they don't build mice the way they used to which first of all let's just break this joke down the they're not might the the because they're a mouse get tears what is he talking about here it's unclear like it's really unclear what we're in disney world it's so he could have just said like they're a mouse get tear maybe

if i'm punching the joke up it's like it's just really what is he doing what do you have the follow-up to that like joke that didn't let about, like, meet me? Yeah, he says, like, meet me in an adventure land. Meet me in an adventure land. And the audience is, like, tickled by that. Yeah. But this old man is saying, hey, let's hook up in adventure land. That's the joke. Yeah.

He's saying, I'm going to hook up with these two young women in adventure land later. And he did. They chartered a private Jungle Cruise boat. Mr. Eternal Youth, who could turn it down? Who could turn down the charm of a, probably in his late 50s, but seemingly in his early 80s? He couldn't do it.

He impregnated both of them, and they raised their children together as friends, and the children are friends, and they have Bob to thank for that. That's very nice. Beautiful story. Beautiful story. Beautiful story. I'm cutting around here.

I just like when he really lazily goes, hey, what a building. Hey, I know we think it too. He's right. I mean, it is a great building. We really like the building. Well, it's really two buildings leaning against each other. I want to congratulate the architect, Dean Martin. Is that the strongest joke?

No. In this set, is that the strongest joke? Because he's drunk. Yeah, because he's drunk and like leaning. I guess so. You know the way you lean and the way you don't ever lean when you're sober. It is only

activated by alcohol. It's leaning. And that's the thing we know about Dean Martin is that he leans a lot. That's the first thing that comes to your head when you think of Dean Martin, is he leans a lot. The guy was tall, but from how often he's leaning, you'd think he was 5'2".

That's a pretty good joke. There. That punches up, yeah. I gave him one. Go ahead go Keep going Keep going It's better than I was around to do the

The punch up If I could be in a Hack scenario With Bob Hope If only The young gun Giving him the John Wayne

When John Wayne Paints I don't have that one Well when John Wayne doodles He really doodles Yeah yeah Cause there's like

A weird mural in the contemporary. It's the Mary Blair. He's referring to the massive. For some reason, the Futuristic Hotel has a Western-themed mural, and you have to know this already to get the joke. Right. And he's like saying, John Wayne painted this. That's the joke.

That one doesn't go with that. I don't feel like the audience gets that. The sweetened audience. This is just like reference. that's the joke uh that one doesn't go that i don't feel like the audience gets that the sweetened audience this is just like reference this is their big references at the time it's like if we were if we were nowadays talking about like i don't know like well oh i'm feeling real malignant in this so like i don't know i can't i'm feeling a little malignant i haven't watched it. I just know it's a thing.

What are the other things? Who painted the Shang-Chi? These are the two things people talk about. BTS. I got BTS tickets for their tour. I'm going to see BTS. The ride on the monorail smooth like butter. I got the Saweetie meal at McDonald's.

Boy, what a meal, huh? What a meal. Rough flight out here, I'll tell you. So much turbulence and all the people on board. I'll tell you what I had after getting out of that. A lot of venom. I'm just thinking, let there be carnage. Look up the, Google the name of the...

I was praying to the patron saints of Newark That flight was so rocky Who could go for a licorice pizza? If only cryogenics worked Then we could have a 125 year old Bob Hope Then he truly would be the spirit of eternal youth Oh man We would ride for one Bob Hope variety special truly would be the spirit of eternal youth. Oh man. We could write,

we could, would write for one Bob Hope variety special and be able to buy a house. Yeah, that's true. You know, the economics of comedy back in the day. Well, look,

the economics are not wrong because now it's a bunch of weird shit that, that most 10,000 people watch or listen to. Back then, this special that we're like kind of boring right kind of bad stand-up and not a you know a boring glenn campbell songs this is watched by uh 52 million people yeah yeah those numbers uh um but no the topicality it's it was different you know you it is such that you sometimes have to do research to figure out what the joke was, as in this case, which is he's referencing the different lands. He says, they got to place Fantasyland.

That's like Spiro Agnew winning the National Open. And at first, I'm like, all right, National, what does that mean? Okay, context clues. Golf could be golf. When he was on the Simpsons, he asked who the mayor, what's the mayor's name? Quimby. Got it. And then he made a joke about Mayor Quimby being a bad golfer.

So, okay, that must be what that is. Spiro Agnew was Nixon's vice president. So was Spiro Agnew a bad golfer? I look up Spiro Agnew golf, and it turns out that about seven months prior at Bob Hope's own golf tournament, that there was a foursome, and the foursome was Bob Hope, Willie Mays, baseball player Willie Mays, a pro golfer named Doug Sanders, and the sitting vice president, Spiro Agnew. And that is a foursome at this golf tournament. They all tee up.

This is the first this is hole number one Spiro Agnew takes his first shot immediately hits two people in the stands an older husband and wife they happen to be if you're gonna hit people make sure they're married helps keep the lawsuits tidier

so he goes up to the woman charms her like I'm so so well there's anything I can do Kisses her on the arm Denoted that Wow the vice president hit me with a golf ball And kissed me Then he goes alright and he charms everybody

Applause applause great he goes back to the T's off again immediately Hits somebody else Hits them harder and worse Yeah a woman half that age who had to go to the hospital and get an x-ray for it. It's like Dick Cheney shooting the guy and hunting.

He was a pioneer of vice presidents. Harming others. Wow. And you don't even know the half of it because it turns like the year prior he hit somebody in the face face he shot a golf ball into somebody's face for saging dick cheney's bullet and the person who he hit in the face was doug sanders

the other guy in the foursome who they still wow this guy still voluntarily after being hit in the face by him is like yeah sure sign me up i'll go that's wild three people three uh people in the stands with two balls so that's the best joke in the set it kind of is yeah bob was there he knew it he heard the screams he saw the bruises personal connection autobiographical Yeah Wow That's okay That's a good joke This is an honest set And that's why An honest joke at least And that's why

It was so funny Yeah People wouldn't be upset With him like they're upset With Mulaney now Because he Hope was more honest In his stand up

Oh Jesus I'm just saying You know You felt so betrayed Yeah I know I felt Bob Hope would never Betray us with his comedy

Real quick side note I have I know. Bob Hope would never betray us with his comedy. Real quick side note, I have collected money at Bob Hope's house. I didn't get to go in and in, but I went to collect money from Bing Crosby's second wife, who I was working for at the time. Oh, who you worked for. Yeah, that's right. Well, because the house, if you don't know, is not far from where we all live and do this podcast. And it's like, yeah, it's just unbelievable. This is this crazy, insane property.

Yes, and there's a three-hole golf course in the back. A golf course on it. Yeah, in Toluca Lake over here. Good Christmas displays. My parents would take me to see that. This is Bob and Dolores personally supervises it. And remember all this because you'll probably run out of ideas and do a second gate on your podcast about this.

That's a title you should use, by the way. Second gate. That was when I was nine. Right. And they were right. So that's what that joke was. Are there any other jokes that we want to name check? Did anyone else do any deep dives into what a joke meant?

No, I'm glad you did because I actually ignored that one. And I think that you got the juiciest one, because the other ones... Yeah, also keep in mind that after all that, he's a horrible golfer, injuring people every time he plays. And then two years later, he's the first vice president to resign due to criminal charges. Spiro. Stay tuned. That's coming back around later.

What? Criminal charges will come back up later in this episode oh my god okay how much how far are you anticipating two more hours it's entirely possible um well if we're done with bob hope who by the way comes back in an even more boring segment of this special god yeah they just give him like a little a non-comedic monologue a wistful monologue at the lake i was reading i was reading how a lot of people were very annoyed with bob hope over the years like johnny carson was annoyed because he would he would like bring something up like oh so bob i hear you just came back from a tour and he go yeah on the show not a giving comedic partner yeah it seems like would this be a drag on a talk show great thanks for

coming yeah there is um something in the special directly in my uh line of interest which is the 1 700 so no sorry 1076 piece marching band led by the music man creator composer meredith wilson and they play 76 trombones marching down main street uh there are indeed 76 trombones in this ensemble uh and uh i it is very funny that they are uh playing a song from a musical about a con man who hoodwinks like average american joes into spending a lot of money the opaque of walt disney world uh but as it is it's just a music man is that what you're saying yeah he's a funny selection even though like they do occasionally here on main street uh yeah that's true no they play the more con manny song yeah they know they play their jaunty song that kind of is often played

removed from it but there are stories about um people in the marching band like you know kids in the marching band and stuff and like the one kid you know their bus was really late arriving and roy o disney came out and shook their hands and said hi. And then Meredith Wilson sent like letters saying like, thanks for being a part of this. Like to everyone in the band? Seemingly to people in the band. Wow. Yeah.

And as we know, I marched in a marching band down Main Street when I was in high school and i did not get a letter from the real from the real wilson meredith wilson who was possibly dead although you know what probably dead at this point we played late in the evening by paul simon and i did not get a letter from paul simon well but paul simon also wasn't leading your band down main street i maybe he was no no i don't know maybe he was i don't think he was i don't think you would have led with that as the main part of the story yeah i guess you're right i was the first time ever he led a marching band at a theme park it's possible in the late or early 2000s paul simon was leading a marching band down main street in disney world it's eclectic the music's eclectic yeah um yeah so uh yeah it's a weird special i mean that i'm glad you're charmed by that marching band thing but it also lasts for i want to say 25 minutes most

of the end of the special yeah most of the back half of the special just which marching band on television doesn't really yeah this isn't like drumline or something. Drumline is awesome. Like a real high energy performance. Now, hold on. Before the marching band, there's an orchestra. So pretty dynamic. People sitting perfectly still in chairs playing instruments before the walking instruments.

Oh, man. Yeah, it's quite a special... There's also some sketches where jonathan winter shoots his wife with an arrow oh yeah these jonathan winter sketches brutal interminable i would say jonathan winter's berating a catatonic woman yeah yeah at this it feels like the first like improv on tv in the early 70s i could be wrong this could be scripted but kind of his thing wasn't that true it was yes john the winners would improvise uh a lot but these uh these don't land i would say no and they plays a a final tracker a final swamp man

yeah and there's some characters some characters but Buddy Hackett does drive Herbie the love bug. Yes. Along Tomorrowland Speedway route against actual race car drivers. With Chick Hearn, my beloved basketball announcer of my youth, LA guy. Right, yeah. I was surprised to see him in a Florida thing. Right. So, yeah, that's nice.

So, yeah, you get some Hackett. He's got energy got energy at least you know and he's in the music man he is he does shibupi that's right so you got that connection yeah very exciting one or more music man content you know did he dine on like chopped sirloin in a pair with uh meredith wilson of the contemporary or whatever gross food they were serving at the time uh and i hope you are prepared you got trouble for the future podcast to ride live music show i'm working on it because yeah you will be performing that i did it at karaoke i did it in the one week we did we're all hanging out without this yes you did. That was a beautiful week. Fantastic. Hopefully soon.

So that's the founding of it. That's the special. That takes us up to 1971. And now we're up and running and creating magic and memories for generations to come. 50 years of incredible moments occur after all this. And I think it's safe to say that Disney didn't peak at the beginning with the Glen Campbell monologues and lengthy marching band performances. So many wonderful things happened in the intervening years. And that is what we want to close this episode with, is determining what is the greatest moment in the history of the Walt Disney World Resort or the greatest thing that ever happened there.

I don't know. I don't want to like completely define. I don't know what all of our answers are and I don't want to shut anyone out. But we do want to determine in 50 years, what is the best stuff that ever occurred there and i guess is this a situation where we all present something and then the audience will decide we're us having obviously correctly picked the the three we've narrowed it down to the three um and there there can only be one um is that fair to say i think so yeah that'll be the best obviously it's going to be real hard to do this.

But yeah, I think that'll be the, yeah. It's going to be personal to us, obviously. I just want to add that caveat. I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's impossible to, you know, take ourselves out of the running and our memories and happy moments we've had. And, you know, we'd like to hear your ideas of what the greatest moment in Disney world history is.

You might, we'll be incorrect. One of us will be correct, but we'd still like to hear him anyway. Of course. You try. Um, but so that,

that's what we're doing between, between the three of us. We're going to figure out what's the best thing that ever happened on the property. Does anybody want to, I don't want to start. You don't want to start too much pressure. Uh,

I could, Jason, what do you think? Um, I could go, or do you want to? I don't want to start. You don't want to start. Too much pressure. I could. Jason, what do you think? I could go. Or do you want to go? Give it a shot. Okay. Richard Nixon. There's a lot of Richard Nixon stuff.

Oh, well, the career's the criminal. Yeah. So I didn't want to be, you know, very basic and go with I am not a crook. Richard Nixon, of of course delivers his famous line i am not a crook at the contemporary hotel in uh 1973 in front in front of 400 managing editors of the associated press so that was was an associated press thing yeah in the lion's den now uh there's some interesting stuff on the nixon library website that they could nixon seemed like he wanted to be at the opening of disney world and there was scouting there was

a scouting trip to go wow and there is a page of potential remarks that the president could say yeah this is like possible speech possible things he could have said yeah uh he did not end up going there was a lot going on in 1971 nixon had just accepted the invite to china uh that was historic um the the uh uh group called the plumbers had just broken into the offices of daniel ellsberg who had released the Pentagon Papers in September. Whatever they were attempting to do, failed. A big troop drawdown in Vietnam occurred in December 1971. In a white room. There we go.

So it seemed like it would have been poor taste for the president to show up. That said, the White House did send an American flag. And who was the representative? H.R. Haldeman. The chief of staff who would go on to spend 18 months in prison for conspiracy and obstruction of justice due to his rolling watergate criminal charges, as we mentioned earlier. Wow. H.R. Haldeman brought a flag to the opening. To the opening.

Haldeman is credited on IMDb in the opening special, and I could not find him. I was wondering if he was possibly in the crowd shots of the marching band. Is he doing a character with Jonathan Winters? But yeah, I don't know if he's in the crowd of the Bob Hope thing, but Nixon kind of a big seemingly Disney dork, I would say.

I would guess that Nixon is... You're going with dork. I'm going with a Disney nerd like us. Like us? Like he was at the opening of the Montreal. He drove the Montreal. He is from Orange County originally. Seemed like he wanted to be at the opening of disney world he's buried 15 miles from disneyland well that doesn't mean

he's a disneyland dork i think he was buried with his we might be buried that close he had a lot of former disney people on staff like disney corporate people he had former jungle cruise skippers on staff like toke colvig the the voice of goofy was involved in the break-in he went to jail for several years people lie they drop pins disney pins on his grave every day he's a pin collector in the after as far as after the afterlife i guess uh and while he was not there for the opening ceremonies or anything, Nixon and his family would go a number of times over the years, not just for the,

I am, I am not a crook speech. So I am going to award. The best thing that ever happened is this moment where Richard Nixon and his grandson meet dream finder and figment. Wow. It's a perfectly symmetrical picture. It's wow. That's's crazy i didn't know i have not seen that picture icons yeah wow icons meeting uh there is also i think

a less iconic photo of uh nixon uh standing in front of spaceship earthhip Earth. Yeah, I think I've seen that. And if you zoom in, you will notice that the buttons on his suit are different. So this is a different day. This is either a different day from the same trip or a different trip when Nixon was hitting up Epcot Center. Sorry to cut you off. I'm obsessed with the idea of like Nixon, Disney dork. Like, did you listen to the new Jim Hill and Lentus

when they were talking about the new rides? By by the way it's mcgruff is uh is my nixon have you read mice chat today uh i believe they were trying to get a hold the nixon library i think they mentioned that they like he really liked watching movies and they were really trying to get a hold of like the disney nature movies to show in the white house sure he uh he's obviously a fascinating uh character uh and i can see that being the greatest moment the greatest moment was the accords nixon nixon uh-huh and figment and dream finder oh man this is throwing me for a loop i feel like i'm gonna call an audible here and switch what i'm gonna say do you need a minute well no i can i'll talk through it um dream finder dream finder talked him out of bombing the uh dykes in vietnam cambodia really grant told him

to bomb it and flood the areas oh man nixon disney dork that feels like if we did more characters on this show that's like well all of a of a sudden, like a knock at the door and we're like, who is it? Oh, it's Richard Nixon. Too many characters. I'm glad this harmonious show still seems kind of ethereal and weird and not just character moments. Did you see that

Tokyo Disney's anniversary merchandise contains the return of Final Mission? We're both just like, I am not a crooked. Always, yes, you, yeah. Mike is doing it only with peace signs, which is the way to do it. Always peace signs up. Yeah.

They announce the 50th desserts. These look like some delicious treats. The iridescent croissant donut. It's got blue icing and sprinkles. I don't understand. A better way to celebrate 50 magical years of dreams. Look, clearly it's working for them, but I don't understand why they keep making the ears

out of different colored walls. Ah, Chapek. Chapek. I love that. That's going to be a recurring character, I think. Bringing back capital punishments just for... By President's orders, Chapek, straight to the chair. Okay, so there are many significant moments that happened.

Obviously, the Nixon stuff. John Lennon signing the papers to dissolve the Beatles at the Polynesian. He's with May Pang. One of his long weekends away from Yoko. I guess I'm going to steal away from that. I was also thinking I was going to do maybe, you know, we mentioned earlier, Alan Thicke sings the Christmas song with the Ninja Turtles.

That was also cut from my... Insane. If we both thought it, it's got to be in... Did we play this on our original christmas specials episode the alan thick ninja turtles santa claus is coming to town rap it's crazy i really did almost think about saying that and it's like that should be it too and it's like how do i stack up these important moments with all these cultural figures so it's like maybe make that a fourth in the poll like

that's the honorable mention is the alan thick i mean if maybe just by virtue of both of us thinking of it because it is a hell of a um yeah yeah but you know what i better watch out dude of talking about your moves you better watch out freak out santa claus is coming to town that's a whole maybe christmas second gate is that song i think sure i mean look if you i would love to just do uh all the alan thick musical numbers i think that is like five that i'm so fond of i think maybe that's a catch we call it ninja turtles and alan thick and it's a catch-all yes great there's there's a ninja turtle christmas special that's oh with this with the the what do we get splinter for christmas yes and there's a couple other Christmas special. Oh, with the What Do We Get Splinter for Christmas song.

And there's a couple other things, too, that are in the Ninja Turtle. So the thick and turtle catch-all is coming in the Christmas season, I think. The thick and turtle connection. Big, thick turtle Christmas. A big, thick turtle Christmas is coming. The thickest Christmas ever. So you know what? I got to say, I'm going to go into all that important stuff, all the stuff that happened.

I'm going to declare the most important thing that happened at Disney World is the video of my mother and I singing Gloria Estefan's song. That is on YouTube. If you don't know, if you haven't heard the episode, I talk about it. They used to be able To make a music video And there's a video Of my mother and I In the year like 1990 And I am grabbing

My crotch the whole time Because I am scared And I don't know The words Two cameras on you The pressure Two cameras It's a beautiful

Nineteen like Eighties-ish Like background Singing one Two Three Four Come on baby

Say you love me Five Six Seven Time We'll repost this This is maybe the most I think this background singing one two three four come on baby say you love me five six seven time uh we'll repost this this is maybe the most i think this i wanted i wanted to pick something personal yeah um and this is this is probably this is beating out another great clip that we have not put anywhere yet is that my sister and i dancing on the deck of the pollination with these like light strands and i hit myself in the eye very hard with one of them like i just knock myself out of commission really hard and that's a great moment too but

it's not as iconic as me singing with my mother at age five grabbing my crotch the entire almost almost the entire time this is at disney mgm studios where's the spot of this yes it was at mgm studios you were you could make your own music video And you'd pick the song And then You could go in there I think they Probably too Was the limit of people

I haven't seen a lot of other people With this exact Like video So I'm sure they're out there But I have to pick it personally And that's the most Iconic thing from my life

So Yeah We'll repost that Yeah And ironically As an adult Grab grabbing your crotch makes you nervous but back then you would be nervous and you would find comfort grabbing your crotch wait wait say that again i know i've been trying to think of it and i just didn't stick the

landing on that wait what is it i was saying your crotch business as an adult would make you incredibly nervous and sweaty and as a kid it would be a source of comfort. You're saying now if there was a video of me grabbing my crotch, I would find it indecent. Yeah, it would just be a source of... A video of that would be... Neurotic anxiety. ...a bawdy video of an adult man in his 30s grabbing his genitalia. Yeah.

Well, if it's in the context of a hip-hop performance, then it's fine. But as far as like Me at 37 Because I'm afraid I think I'm at any Crotch business In general Sure

Like generating neuroses Yeah No if I was Put off by crotch business If it's the same video Only I'm In my 30s With my mother

Grabbing my crotch Yeah that's weird You're right I agree with you Yeah Okay So you're locking in your own. My own personal.

It's all great. It's Nixon. It's Mike Carlson. Yeah. His mother. It's icons. And that's sort of what I was. Well, let me here.

Let me frame it this way in my highfalutin way. We were talking about the founding of Walt Disney World and how it all comes from a great man walt disney trying to create a hub of technology and innovation uh but thankfully you know nearly halfway through the run through the 50 years a better man shows up by the name of michael eisner and uh he has a a more achievable dream because the other shit didn't happen. He didn't make the Progress City, but Eisner thinks that it can be something else, that Disney World can be a hub of the arts, and that's what it became under his watch,

a place where architects can do some of their greatest masterworks and a place where performers and musicians even can have a backdrop to play against. And these things dovetail, came together in a beautiful way, in the most beautiful way, in the most important piece of art produced on the property. I am talking about the backdrop of the Yacht and Beach Resort Hotel, the MMC music video for the song king of wishful thinking you know if you i you are you familiar with this one this like pops up enough i feel like it's like a disney world oddity or do either of you know what i'm yeah the one that i'm i'm talking about uh uh so and i think some of our audience might as well. If you don't, look it up.

Look, I'll play a second of it, but it's not really going to be anything because really you need the visuals. You need to be in Disney World. But nonetheless, because I want to hear the song, first of all. The original song itself, by the way, King of Wishful Thinking by Go West is a masterpiece. So it's just nice to hear it and nice to see the beautiful resort. We meet our hero and our musician Blaine. So it's Blaine from the MMC. This is a song by Blaine. And Blaine is waiting in a restaurant that's also at the hotel, presumably,

where people are wearing island casual clothes. And there's lots of like teal and turquoise curtains, even though the maitre d' is like a fancy tuxedo man. Right. And he asks if anybody else is going to be joining you. And he is sad because, no, it's an empty chair. There's a line about cutting me to the bone. And then the guy's reflection is in a knife. I'm not sure where to pick it up. I'll just do it from here and see where we land or maybe like chorus number two

well first of all here i'll pick it up from here there's our there's our yacht and beach club lighthouse uh beautiful instrumentation There were at that That MGM Studios thing Where you're in the ship that's getting stormed on They're using that He's in a rowboat out in that lake I don't know what that lake's called Uh

Blaine is killing it Blaine's dynamic as hell Yeah yeah That's not how it's gonna be I'm really building to one moment Mater D's checking in on him Mainly that That he's like, he's in a boat in this thing. And then the line is, you've made a hole in my heart.

And then the boat has a big sign that says, my heart. That's the name of the boat. And it has a hole in it. Later, the song is about him being a king. And then there's a card that comes up. And he's the king. He is the song is about him being a king and then there's a card that comes up and he's the king. He is the king of wishful thinking. It is a happy ending. The girl of his

dreams shows up at the end. That's great. And you get to see beautiful views of a beautiful resort. It's a hell of a jam and I think it's a formative foundational piece of art That was thanks to Eisner

Being like a benefactor You know As with George Harrison Financing the Monty Python movies Of course Eisner set up A play box for great artists Like Blaine to play in

And that's why my choice is Blaine and the rest of the's why my Choice is Blaine and The rest of the MMC with King of Wishful Thinking look wow great That's great yeah So and you know we'll throw Alan Thicke In there as well I don't want to split the Votes but you know we might as well

So we got Alan Thicke and Ninja Turtles we got Blaine We got Mike and his mom And we got Nixon and I think the it's mainly Spread yeah yeah I think so But got Nixon And I think it's mainly Covered the spread Yeah I think so But it's all icons and it's an important place That brought golden greats to it

Throughout it's first 50 years And here's hoping for a lot more I guess that's it Make your choice on Twitter And with that You survived Podcast the Ride, WDW 50 edition.

Next week, things start getting a little spooky. Hauntcast the Fright is back. Oh, yeah. What spooky offerings will we bring to the table? We'll find out soon. You can also, as always, find us on the socials At Podcast The Ride

Vote in that poll Merch is available In our TeePublic store And for three bonus episodes Every month Check out Podcast The Ride The Second Gate At Patreon.com

Slash Podcast The Ride Speaking of which There is something else Celebrating an anniversary On this exact date And we will be covering that Over on the second gate Because they've

They've done a lot of Anniversaries They try to open things On October 1st as much as they can right and we can only do this episode uh on actual october 1st but there's more to come so just a little uh tease for that um and that's that um any other closing thoughts about this wonderful place. I just want to know what Nixon thinks of Al Lutz and the controversy. And that's what I'm wondering. I don't think he was real. He was a psyop.

Al Lutz was a number of people operating former usernames, CIA. And I also would like my Nixon to get away from McGruff. Yeah, yeah, figure out the way to move it away. And speaking of icons visiting the park, I think the best way to go out, this is something that I discovered on the 15th anniversary special

where people are wishing Disney World at that point a happy 15th birthday, but why not a happy 50th as well? So let's close out here with a very special Disney World birthday message from one of the greats, OJ Simpson. Thanks, Juice. Thank you. Forever Dog. This has you. Forever Dog.

This has been a Forever Dog production. Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com and subscribe to our shows on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keep up with the latest Forever Dog news by following us on Twitter and Instagram at Forever Dog Team and liking our page on Facebook.