The Best One Yet - PART 2 🏰 Disneyland: The Fantasy that Almost Flopped

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet here: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/Who wouldn’t want to visit the happiest place on Earth? Well — at the start of the 1950s, it seemed like no one did, at least not when Walt Disney pitched the idea. Sure, Walt had revolutionized animation with Steamboat Willie. And he'd had critical successes with classics like Snow White and Bambi. But his studio was nearly bibbidi-bobbidi-bankrupt,. Even so, Walt just wouldn't Let It Go. Then, after Cinderella (another of Walt’s “crazy” ideas) hit the bigtime at the box office, Walt had the creative capital to strike a groundbreaking TV deal to fund his park’s construction.Thanks to Walt's epic vision, relentless eye for detail, and a build-it-in-no-time sprint, Disneyland rose from orange grove backwater to a live-televised opening day spectacle (90 million viewers) — and straight into one of the most chaotic debuts in history. From plumbing problems to gas leaks, this is the story of how the theme park went from Goofy idea to the lynchpin in the Disney empire — and why Disneyland is the best idea yet.Walt’s brilliant flywheel strategy diagram: https://www.businessinsider.com/1957-drawing-walt-disney-brilliant-strategy-2015-7&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1754403374186600&usg=AOvVaw12ZvO8lMD-GgiyJ1AlbZq9Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet for the untold origin stories of the products you’re obsessed with — and the bold risk takers who made them go viral.Episodes drop every Tuesday, listen here: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yeties, welcome back for part two of our deep dive episode of The Best Idea Yet. It's all about Disneyland. Now, when we left off yesterday, Walt and Roy Disney were dealing with all the haters. Yeah, but then they had that wild idea to turn the construction of their theme park into a TV show. So the setting that we're about to drop you into is Walt and Roy about to pitch their documentary slash show to CBS. Jack, as Walt Disney would say himself, without further ado, on. with the show. Here is part two of our special deep dive vacation episode on the origin story of Disneyland. And the more that Roy thinks about it, the more it makes sense to him. So they take

the pitch to America's biggest network, NBC. But NBC says no. They love Disney's content, but they think the theme park is just too risky. All right, Jack, let's give this another shot. Next stop, CBS, but same story. Great studio, great brand, but a theme park, they think it's too out there. But all these setbacks, they actually get Roy fired up. And now he's about to give a big plus one to Walt's enthusiasm for TV with one of the most important

decisions in the history of Disney. The brothers go and pitch the show to Little ABC, the underdog network. And you know what? They say yes. You see, at the time, NBC is broadcasting on 63 stations. CBS, they got 60 stations, but ABC

they just have 14. They don't have an audience. But they're hungry to grow on. So maybe they'll see a Disneyland show as a way to do exactly that. They'll put Disneyland on a pedestal. Maybe even the primetime slot. And it turns out Roy is right. ABC jumps at the chance. Because if this Disneyland show causes a buzz, then kids and parents across the country are going to be clamoring for their local

stations to become ABC affiliates, which means more advertising dollars, and eventually when cable comes, more affiliate fees. So ABC agrees to produce the show. show. They invest $500,000 and guarantee $4.5 million in loans in exchange for a one-third slice of Disneyland. Disney gets airtime and investment dollars. ABC gets a show and equity in Disneyland. Like we said, Hakuna Matata. When news breaks of the deal, it shocks the movie and TV industries, not because of the plan to build a park, but because of the plan for a Hollywood movie studio to produce a weekly TV show. You see, at this point, New York is the home of TV.

Hollywood is the home of movies. So this deal is as disruptive to 1950s media as Uber was to 21st Century Taxis. And Jack, the first episode airs just weeks later on October 27th. On you grab the remote and turn it on. Now, next year, our television show will be coming from this Disneyland. That voice we just heard, that's Walt. It turns out he's a natural in front of the camera, like a kind uncle who's genuinely excited to show you,

his model train set. But this is much more exciting. In each one-hour episode, Walt gives viewers a front row seat to his dream in progress. It's like Mr. Rogers meets extreme makeover home edition. And the show is an instant hit. It is the first time ABC breaks into the top 10 most watch shows on television. Actually, it's the first time any ABC show had ever even cracked the top 25. It is this show that really gets Disney started in TV. and paves away for Mickey Mouse Club, the Disney Channel, and eventually even the modern-day Disney Plus. The TV show feels relaxed and charming,

but behind the scenes, it's all hands on deck because Walt makes a call bolder than one of Captain Jack Sparrow's plans. To keep the hype from fading, he sets Disneyland's opening date for July 17, 1955. Well, Jack, I'm looking at the calendar, and that gives us just 10 months to transform 160 acres of sleepy orange growth, into the happiest place on Earth.

That's less time than it takes to make a single animated movie. And if Walt and his team fail, it'll extinguish the magic for millions of Mousketeers. The sun is just beginning to rise over Anaheim, but construction noise is already echoing through the rubble-strewn, half-built streets of Disneyland. It's the spring of 1955, and Woody, the engineer, not the toy cowboy,

is walking the site, clipboard in hand. Walt was so impressed by Woody's intelligence and problem-solving capabilities that he hires him full-time. Now, Woody is overseeing the entire construction of Disneyland. In fact, Woody is officially Disneyland's employee number one. You could say Woody is Walt's eyes and ears on the ground, but that's not exactly right, because Walt is everywhere. In fact, right now, Woody sees the big man coming right around the corner in his bathrobe. Walt actually has his own apartment on Main Street Disneyland

right above the fire building just so he can stay close to the project. At any hour, day or night, he might show up next to a crew laying concrete or painting trim. Walt will sometimes even pitch in and help toss his back alarm at Castle. And quite often, he doesn't even take the time to swap his bathrobe for some proper workwear. So Woody is standing here on Main Street overseeing a work crew

or fixing plastic railings to the upper floors at one of the buildings. And when Woody sees Walt making a beeline for him, he does a little inside groan, because Walt is a perfectionist. And Woody, he can guess what's coming. Walt asks Woody why the railing that's going up is plastic. It should be metal. Woody explains that the railing is going to be on the second floor. No one's going to notice what it's made of. Walt pauses.

And then he says, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different is the detail. If we lose the detail, we lose it all. It's actually a concept his team later calls plussing, because Walt goes around asking employees, how can we plus it? Could this grass be greener, this castle stonier? The answer is actually yes once that plusing attention is paid to it. Walt takes notes on everything, and he's not shy about sharing them. For example, he thinks the carousel horses don't look like they're leaping enough. So he has the legs rebuilt on all of the horses. Well, then, Jack, there's the gravel under the railroad tracks. Apparently that was too big, so he orders each rock ground down to the perfect scale. Walt even takes a personal interest in the placement of every trash can. Walt loves eating hot dogs from the food stalls. And after he gets his hand on one hot dog, he paces off the exact number of steps it takes him to finish off that frank, and he discovers it's about 30 steps. And then he orders a trash can installed at that very spot. That's why Disneyland today has over

for a thousand trash cans. It's because of Walt's trash math. And the payoff is really clean parks. Well, Jack, Walt's not just sweating the small stuff. He's also constantly thinking about the big picture. It's important to him that Disneyland isn't just a collection of rides. He wants it to be an immersive, engineered world with a strategic layout. Remember that trip to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark? Walt is putting everything he learned there to use. He wants the park to feel like a story that draws you through its narrative and delights you at each turn. He is applying the storytelling model from his movies to the physical industry of parks. This isn't a random collection of scenes.

The park needs to follow a narrative arc, from entrance to the climactic rides through to the exit. And then, to keep people moving through the park, he comes up with a term for the tall visual magnets that pull guests through the space. He calls them weenies. Why weanies? Well, that's how Walt would get his... poodle, duchess, to move when she wasn't being cooperative.

Yeah, he would lay a trail of hot dog pieces to coax her along. The next time you're wandering your way through Disney World, remember, it's because you're being led like a puppy. And in Disneyland, the biggest visual magnet, or weenie, is Sleeping Beauty's Castle. It's strategically placed in the center of the park so visitors are enticed further inward. And like a lot of the other buildings,

it is designed using forced perspective so that it actually seems taller than it really is. But for all the clever designs in Walt's head, it's chaos on the ground for the teams of workers and engineers, or Imagineers, as Walt likes to call them. They're working around the clock. The original budget of $5 million has now ballooned to $17 million. Oh, Roy's not going to be happy.

No, he's not, Nick. All that overtime means labor costs are through the roof. Well, here we are on Saturday, July 16th, 19th. The day before the opening, and the park, it's still not finished. It's swarming with cement mixers, electricians, landscapers, and TV crews, all trying not to trip over each other. And then, as if things aren't intense enough already, Walt gets some bad news. There's a plumber strike, which means the park will have limited water on opening day. Walt has to make a choice. Does he want running toilets or running water fountains?

So Walt thinks it over and he goes, okay, Right now, Southern California is in the middle of a heatway with temperatures hitting 100 degrees. Another dose of bad luck. But even so, Walt chooses the toilets. He figures, worst case scenario, people can buy a soda to quench their thirst. But they can't hold it in all day long. It's a gamble he hopes doesn't come back to haunt him because everything. The TV deal, his reputation, and the future of the Walt Disney Company is riding on what happens next.

Because ready or not, the gates of Disneyland are about to open. It's supposed to be the happiest place on earth. Instead, for thousands of people, it's one of the most miserable. Temperatures soar above 100 degrees. Cars clog the Santa Ana Freeway. Kids are crying. Parents are fuming, and people are relieving themselves on the roadside. Welcome to Disneyland's grand opening, July 17, 1955.

Inside the gates, things are even worse, man. Only 11,000 guests were invited, including Hollywood stars, politicians, and other VIPs. But counterfeit tickets and gate crashers, they flood the park with more than 28,000 people. One guy even slings a ladder over the fence and charges people $5 entry to use his ladder. The asphalt on Main Street is still wet, and it gets so gooey in the heat, people's shoes keep getting stuck in it. Even Walt gets caught in the chaos. He gets locked inside his apartment above the firehouse until it's. workmen can come and break him out.

Oh, and Jack, the rides? The crowd is so thick that you're lucky if you even get near one, let alone on one. And as the day continues and the heat rises, many of the rides just keep breaking down. The hydraulics that made Dumbo fly, they start leaking foam. And the speed limiters on the Atopia cars,

they fail. People are jumping curbs and one kid even loses some teeth. The crowds are so big that people can't even get to the toilets that Walt diverted the water to. And with the water fountains out of action, some guests accused Walt of turning them off on purpose in order to sell more soda. Meanwhile, trash piles up. It's spilling out of the bins and baking in the sun. This is sounding less like a magical kingdom, more dystopian hellscape. It's like Ursula took over his COO running the operations.

And not even future presidents are safe because movie star Ronald Reagan, one of the TV hosts for the live broadcast, is forced to scramble over a wall just to make it to a next on-camera hit. At one point, a gas leak shuts down a portion of the park, and the Mark Twain Riverboat nearly capsizes from overcrowded. Why stop there, Jack? I got more for you, because it's all starting to feel like a flimsy facade, literally, in some cases, like Sleeping Beauty's Castle, because behind the battlements and spires, it's just an empty shell that's been overtaken by a colony of feral felines. That's right, cats are living up in the castle like the original Aristocats. It's a day so dire that Disney historians will call it Black Sunday. It's got to be the worst product launch we have ever covered on this show.

But here's the wild part. Even though the park is crawling with TV crews broadcasting a live opening day special on ABC, none of the mishaps make it to air. For the record-breaking 90 million people who tune in to watch, day one of Disneyland looks perfect. If you are watching this on TV, then you'd see parades. confetti, gleaming rides, happy kids, and Walt himself, smiling and giving his opening day speech like a man who just pulled off the impossible. On screen, Disneyland looks like a dream come true.

In reality, it's a miracle it didn't collapse on day one. If social media had existed at the time, this would have gone viral for all the wrong reasons. And we probably wouldn't have had a Disneyland Day 2, or Disney World for that matter. But instead, the crew at ABC, co-investors in the venture, shine the park in the best possible light. So they survive day one. But Walt and his crew have no time to rest. Because at 2 a.m., just hours after Disneyland closes the lid on its baptism of fire, families are already lining up outside for day two.

That's right. Despite this real-life disaster, Walt's dream is still alive. After the chaos of opening day, Disneyland finds its rhythm. The bugs are ironed out, the water supply comes back, and the park starts to work the way Walt has always imagined. That's five themed lands with 20 original attractions. And if you go today, you can still ride a few of the OGs, like the Jungle Cruise, Peter Pan's flight, Autopia, and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Now, Jack, let's talk numbers here.

By the end of 1955, Disneyland attracts one million visitors, paying a dollar entry for adults, 50 cents for kids, which today feels like it's a million times more expensive. inflation, it's pretty magical. Well, the year after, the park's first full year of operation, they bring in four million guests. Over the years, Walt keeps on working on the park. He adds new rides and phases out old ones, which brings us to Walt's final project. An eerie, fully immersive journey into a swashbuckling fantasy, Pirates of the Caribbean, which could be a case study on Disney's

true innovation, the flywheel effect. This ride inspired the Pirate. This ride inspired the Pirate of the Caribbean movie franchise 48 years later. And after the film came out, they added Captain Jack Sparrow onto the ride. This is all part of a way bigger strategy that Walt himself devises. In 1957, he sketches out what might be the most profitable diagram of all time.

The drawing maps out how all of Disney's different assets are actually connected. At the center, you have Disney movies. And then radiating out like spokes on a wheel, TV shows, theme parks, merch, comic books, music, publishing, each one of them feeding off the movies, and then each other, in a flywheel effect that just keeps growing and growing and growing. He drew the diagram in 1957, and it's amazingly accurate to Disney's business model still today. Take the Lion King, for example. The movie came out in 1994. Since then, there's been a Broadway show,

a live-action remake, endless merch, video, games, and in 2024, 30 years after the film first came out, Disney announced it's working on a brand new ride for its Paris Disneyland. And even today, Disney's Empire still runs on that same flywheel. We linked in the show notes of this episode to a picture of that 1957 sketch. You're going to want to see it. It was spot on. Now, sadly, Walt Disney didn't get to see just how successful that plan would be. He passes away in December 1965. And Walt's brother, Roy, post-Polm, hones his retirement again to finish another project that Walt had been working on, Disney World in Orlando, Florida, which Roy renames Walt Disney World as a tribute to his baby brother.

Today, there are six Disney Resort destinations worldwide with 12 theme parks, 55 hotels, and a cruise line, but it's the parks that are now Disney's profit puppy. Get this, the theme parks drive over a third of Disney's $91 billion in annual revenue. And it all started with an idea from a depressed animator on a bench in Griffith Park and the stories that he wanted to tell. So, Nick, now that you've heard the story of Disneyland, what's your takeaway? Here's my takeaway, Jack. Walt Disney's magic cloak against the word no. Because how many times did Walt's idea for Disneyland get rejected?

Think about it, his brother, investors, the TV executives? They all thought it was more far-fetched than a talkin' mouse. And we all know the many ups and downs of entrepreneurship, you and I have experienced them, Jack. The self-doubt that can creep in. But after a thousand nose, you still only need one yes for your business ambition to become a reality. The story of Disneyland is a reminder that you'll always get more nose than yeses. And you can still end up becoming the most successful person in media history, despite all those nose. Yeah, Walt Disney, he's got 32 Oscars.

So don't ever forget Walt Disney's magic cloak against the word no. Jack, what about you? What's your takeaway? Travel is the ultimate innovation hack. Walt Disney didn't come up with Disneyland at a boardroom whiteboard. Inspiration struck when he got out of the office and went on a day trip with his kids to Griffith Park. And to keep the ideas flowing, Walt visited tourist attractions across the U.S. and Europe and made detailed notes of everything from what made people happy to the distance between trash cans. He then took those observations, threw in some Disney magic, put it together, and what did we get? Bibbobbidi-boo, the world's greatest theme park.

Sometimes the best ideas don't come from looking inward. They come from getting out there, getting out of your bubble, and seeing how the rest of the world plays, and then putting your own unique spin on it. Okay, Jack, before we go, it is time for our absolute favorite part of the show, the best facts yet. These are the hero stats, facts, and surprises. We discovered in our research but couldn't fit in the story,

Yet. All right, Jack, kick us off. What do we got, man? Disneyland does not sell chewing gum. This was a Walt Rulner. And it spoke to his obsession for the details. Nobody will ever step on chewing gum at Disneyland unless it got smuggled in there as contraband. Good call, Walt.

You can't have Pluto walking around with a stick I melted Wrigley's on his paw. Here's another one for you that Walt himself probably never imagined. Disney created a professional sports team based on a movie. You might not have realized this, but Disney, owned and created the Mighty Ducks, the NHL team that existed from 1993 to 2005. Quack, quack, quack, Mr. Ducksworth. We're talking purple, jade and silver. Their logo was a duck-shaped goalie mask because of the movie.

And that is why Disneyland is the best idea yet. Yeties, you look so fantastic right now. They should have cast you in Fantasia. You'll never look at Epcot the same way again, will you? No, we won't, Jack. No, we won't. Now, if you've got a buddy who's building something and facing the odds right now, send them this episode. If you got a buddy who's building a business with their brother, send them this episode.

And if you just loved our Disney story, then go follow our weekly show, the best idea yet. We got a link in the episode description. Now, Nick and I are still on vacation for the rest of the week and for next week, but we have a bunch of awesome content prepped for you. In fact, tomorrow, we're dropping an entire interview episode with a wild entrepreneur. The guy behind the most viral food product that launched so far this year. Yeah, should we tell them, Jack? You want to tell him? We're interviewing the creator of the David Bar.

Yeah, remember they launched the codfish? Yeah, that David Bar. Wild story. So stay tuned right here on the T-Boy Feed. All week, we got your back. Hope you're enjoying the week, just like we are. See you tomorrow.