TV and Me: Disneyland (Part 1) Fantasyland

Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Seventh in a series.

 It started with the movies.  The first movie I remember going to was Walt Disney’s Snow White at the Arcadia Theatre on Third Street in Youngwood, Pennsylvania, where children were admitted for a dime. It was 1952, I was five or six, and memorably frightened by the wicked witch carrying that bright red poison apple.

  The Arcadia was up the street and down a block from my grandparents’ house on Depot Street.  Either my mother took me to Snow White, or it was one of the times that I walked to the Arcadia in the charge of older children, a trusted brother and sister, neighbors on Depot Street.  I’d like to think it was my mother, because she had seen this movie when it first came out in 1938, when she was 18. She named it in the diary she kept for most of January 1939 as one of her top ten movies of the previous year. When I saw it in 1952, it was only the second time it had been back in theatres since then.

 I saw other Disney movies and cartoons at the Arcadia and the Manos Theatre in Greensburg, but memories of those are tangled up with learning about them on the television show that over the decades would go by several different names, but which began in 1954 as Disneyland.

 Disneyland the TV show was my strongest connection to Disney stories, and those stories were a major feature of my childhood.  Walt Disney’s reputation has been shaken in more recent years, particularly for his involvement in the Blacklist.  And those stories look different now, though not only in features that are questionable today.  Some didn’t appeal to me, but on  balance, Disney and his company’s creations and the discoveries they led to, were constructive elements of my cultural education, and my childhood in general, including its quotient of joy. 

 In the early 1950s, the movie industry was terrified of television.  It seemed that box office numbers were dropping in proportion to the growing number of TV sets in American homes.  But the industry still had hopes of crushing this fledgling competitor. For as late as 1953, the TV listings in the Pittsburgh dailies were still considerably smaller than either the radio listings or the movie theatre ads.

 The big movie studios principal weapon was denying their recent films and their big stars from appearing on the home screen.  Even as television prospered with older movie content, and made new stars of B movie actors and bit players like Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd, the studios stuck to their strategy.  If they could hold out just a little longer…

 The Walt Disney Company meanwhile was a Hollywood  anomaly.  Long before Disney became the behemoth of Hollywood, a conglomerate prospering on creations of companies it bought and absorbed, it was a modest movie studio that released only cartoon shorts and the relative few features it made.  

But Disney prospered by adopting (or inventing) new techniques and technologies, and using them to tell stories.  In 1938 Snow White was not only his first animated feature-- it was the first animated feature movie, period.  It was preceded by more than a decade of Walt Disney’s earlier innovations, among them the first cartoon to use sound synchronized to the action (“Steamboat Willie,” the debut of Disney’s prime star, Mickey Mouse) and the first full color movie cartoon—in Technicolor, no less.

 Snow White became the biggest box office hit of any Hollywood film to that time. But several animated features that followed didn’t do as well. The studio’s fortunes were further stymied by World War II, which cut out lucrative foreign markets except the UK, where Disney movies could be shown but their profits were frozen until after the war, and even then could only be spent within Great Britain.

 After making scores of training films and other patriotic movies during the war, the company clawed its way back by packaging animated shorts.  Then Disney went all in on a new animated feature in 1950—and Cinderella was a huge hit.  

In the early 50s, the company began using those sequestered profits to make some live action movies in the UK.  They did well, and Walt Disney wanted to do more. Then television came calling.

 Disney knew the standard Hollywood argument: that if people could get high quality images-and-sound entertainment at home, they wouldn’t be buying tickets at the box office to see it in theatres.  (This was the era, by the way, when movie theatres were installing—and bragging loudly about—air conditioning, as well as experimenting with 3-D, smell-o-vision and Cinerama.)

 But as usual Disney saw a bigger picture.  As the guy who introduced Mickey Mouse with a cornucopia of merchandising, he intuited that different elements could reinforce each other.  He was going to test that approach with his latest idea: an entertainment theme park he wanted to build called Disneyland.   By Hollywood’s theory, he was subverting the movies by enticing people to get their entertainment in an amusement park.  But he didn’t see it that way.  He didn’t see subtraction.  He saw multiplication.

 So when all three TV networks were wooing him, he imposed an unusual condition: he required that the network contribute a sizeable investment in cash and loan guarantees for Disneyland, the park.

 In the early 1950s, a family-friendly theme park was as unknown as an animated feature film before 1938. Nobody believed the park was going to work. CBS and NBC passed. (Apparently the Dumont network, already on life support, wasn’t considered.)  ABC was almost as small as Dumont but having recently merged with United Paramount movie theatres, it had some cash.   As a major Hollywood movie name, Disney would give ABC instant credibility.  It was worth the risk.  They made the deal in March 1954.

 Disneyland the park was financed and under construction when the weekly series of one-hour television programs, not coincidentally also called Disneyland, premiered on the ABC network at 7:30 on Wednesday evening, October 27, 1954.  It was sponsored by American Motors (Hudson, Nash, Rambler), the ABC network of automakers.

 In 1954, a gallon of gasoline at the pump cost 29 cents (which was paid in cash to the attendant who filled the tank, while wiping the windshield.) A loaf of bread at the corner grocer was about 20 cents, a quart of milk was a quarter.  First class postage was three cents. The average cost of a new house was $1700.  So basically, Back to the Future.

 I was in the third grade.  My classmates and I had just eagerly lined up for our first polio shots, with the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in nearby Pittsburgh, who had ended this grim cause of fear for all children.

 The show opened with Tinkerbell from Peter Pan flying in sparkly orbit to the plaintive voice of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio, singing “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…” 

The announcer’s voice (familiar from many movie theatre preview narrations) told us: “Each week as you enter this timeless land, one of these many worlds will open to you: Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all.  Tomorrowland, promise of things to come.  Adventureland, the wonderworld of nature’s own realm. Frontierland, tall tales and true from the legendary past.

 Walt Disney himself was the onscreen host.  The first episode introduced the series, and then moved to the world most associated with him: the animated stories of Fantasyland. 

 Fantasyland: From Alice to Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

 The second half of that first episode provided a quick history of the studio’s biggest star, Mickey Mouse. When presenting animation, especially in this first year, Disney illustrated and explained how it was done.  Some would argue that this could spoil children’s belief in what they saw, or its magical feeling, like opening the curtain to show the Wizard of Oz working the levers and pulling the strings. But I remember being entirely absorbed by it. Disney didn’t talk down to children watching; he explained everything as he would to adults.  It only made me more eager to see the finished product, when I promptly dropped into that world completely.

 The second show was devoted to Alice in Wonderland, his animated feature originally released just three years before. It was an appropriate choice, for Alice was Disney’s first fantasyland star in the 1920s, even before Mickey.  The young animator produced a series of short Alice comedies which (like the contemporaneous Fleischer “Out of the Inkwell” cartoon series) combined live action and animation.  The live action stars of the first, called “Alice’s Wonderland” were Alice (a very 1920s child) and young Walt himself, setting up the premise as the animator of the wonderland Alice would inhabit.  

Once he began to make feature films, Disney tried to adapt the Lewis Carroll stories several times, as animation, or a live action film (to star Mary Pickford) and even a combination of the two, to star Ginger Rogers.  Storyboards were created, many songs written and scripts attempted (one by Aldous Huxley.)  But it wasn’t until several years after World War II that he found the key to making it work.

  The serendipitous event that made Alice possible was an unpredictable byproduct of one of Walt Disney’s darkest hours.  After years of pleading with management, Disney animators finally organized into a union and went on strike in 1941.  Walt Disney, who worked closely with his creative teams and organized his studio to encourage personal relationships in ways familiar now as a prototype for high tech company campuses, was furious.  He became convinced the union was a Communist conspiracy, and reportedly testified to that view even years later, when he named names to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

 Walt Disney refused to negotiate, so he saw a picket line of angry animators and their families and sympathizers on his studio lot, while work on the upcoming animated feature Dumbo slowed to a crawl.  So he accepted a longstanding request from the State Department for a goodwill tour of South America.  He was gone a month, during which his brother Roy Disney, who ran the studio business, came to an agreement with the union that met his animators’ initial demands. 

Meanwhile Walt Disney toured South America with his wife and a studio entourage that included a young artist named Mary Blair.  Photos suggest she was a striking figure (though apparently not on strike), very fashionably dressed and coiffed.  On this trip she was impressed by the juxtaposition of bold and bright colors she found in South America, particularly among native populations and in the rainforests.

 When Disney revived the Alice in Wonderland project after the war, Mary Blair provided some concept sketches that combined these bright colors with the oblique shapes and three-dimensional design found in the California School of Watercolor style that she knew. Walt Disney immediately saw that not only was this a new and dynamic look, but it suggested a narrative emphasis on the whimsically strange elements of Carroll’s book.  He finally had a generative starting point.  Mary Blair determined the color palette for the resulting animation.

 But when the movie was finally finished, Walt worried that the Alice story didn’t pull all the emotional strings common to successful Disney animation features.  Sensing difficulty in the movie marketplace, he made his first foray into television with an hour show meant to promote Alice’s theatrical release, four years before his first Disneyland episode.

 Disney made a one hour show for the 1950 Christmas season, shortly before the release of his Alice in Wonderland. (He consistently related Alice to the English tradition of Christmas storytelling, and the Lewis Carroll story remains a Christmas holiday staple.)  It was called An Hour in Wonderland.

 Sponsored by Coca Cola, the premise is a holiday party whose guest of honor is Kathyrn Beaumont, the voice and living image of Alice (she also voiced Wendy in Peter Pan.) 

Guests at the party include the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his two most famous dummies, the city swell Charlie McCarthy and the country bumpkin Mortimer Snerd (there’s a priceless moment when Mortimer is in conversation with a stuffed Goofy, who is the Disney version of the tongue-tied country clown.) 

 Other guests included young Bobby Driscoll, winner of a special juvenile actor Oscar who would be the voice of Peter Pan, and Disney’s two teenage daughters.  The entertainment centered on a Magic Mirror, in which a genie (played by Hans Conreid, the voice of Captain Hook) called up a Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoon, and scenes from Disney’s Snow White, Song of the South and, of course, Alice in Wonderland. 

The show didn’t do much for the Alice box office, but it did turn out to be a prototype for Disneyland.  (Even the Hans Conreid Magic Mirror would turn up again on the show.)

 It turned out Disney was right to worry about the movie.  Alice in Wonderland didn’t do well at the movie box office in 1951, especially compared to the gigantic popularity of its immediate predecessor, Cinderella.  So it wasn’t a hard choice to show a TV hour version of it on Disneyland.  The gamble of it succeeding on television when it didn’t in theatres paid off. 

This Alice in Wonderland was made because of Mary Blair‘s spectacular use of color (she also did Cinderella and Peter Pan in the early 50s), but it became ironic as well as iconic as a popular TV episode in black and white.  

Disney was a fearless innovator, but he also never did anything once.  Disneyland episodes, or parts of them, were rerun over and over, and the black and white version of Alice is all anybody saw for the next ten years, when it became the most famous version of the Lewis Carroll story, certainly for my generation.

  Our image of Alice, the White Rabbit (“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”), Ed Wynn’s Mad Hatter (including the monologue which matched Wynn improvising) and the Cheshire Cat, were all Disney images. (Of course those images were seen in color in magazines, storybooks and other merchandise, as well as in Disneyland, the park.)

 Once the Disney show moved to NBC for its color capabilities and became Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, the hour version appeared in color for the first time in 1964.  It would be another decade before the entire movie returned to theatres.  I may have seen one or the other of the color versions, but I didn’t fully appreciate the amazing colors until I saw the DVD.  I could understand why the makers of Yellow Submarine copied so much of it, but even they couldn’t get quite as psychedelic as this. 

 In the lean years during and just after World War II when the Disney studio couldn’t afford to make  animated features, they released a series of compilations or “package films” of feature length, but comprised of several short animated films.  One of these in 1949 combined two stories in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.  Both stories memorably showed up on Disneyland in its first two seasons, with different titles. 

Under the title of the original novel, The Wind in the Willows, the Mr. Toad story appeared as the first season episode 15 in February 1955.  The saga of the overenthusiastic Mr. Toad of Toad Hall begins when his animal friends try to dissuade him from causing expensive mayhem by driving his yellow horsecart with reckless abandon.  But Mr. Toad is distracted from contrition and reform by the sight of a brand new wonder, “a motor car!”  I can remember how he said those words, and the look in his astonished, ravenous eyes as he said them, from that day to this.

 The well-known Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes film series) narrates the tale, and Mr. Toad was voiced by Eric Blore, who in the intervening decades I’ve come to admire as a comic genius in supporting film roles of the 30s and 40s, particularly the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Top Hat.

 The Ichabod Crane story, again under its original title of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a short fiction by Washington Irving, appeared in a second season episode in October 1955.  This is a more sinister, New England Puritan tale, that we knew by the name of the character that most attracted our attention, the Headless Horseman.  Notably it doesn’t have a happy ending.  The ghost story quality is balanced by a comic approach to Ichabod and a breezy narration by Bing Crosby.

 Using the voices of Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone, well-known to adults, didn’t make much difference to children, but Disney always played to family audiences, never so intently than with his television show. His discourses on techniques of animation and other factual presentations were pitched to interest parents as well as their children. They, after all, had probably seen these classic movies in their own childhoods. By starting his hour at 7:30 p.m., Disney bridged the traditional children’s hour with the start of adult prime time.  And by getting parents interested, it helped insure that their children wouldn’t be prevented from watching. 

 Showing a more or less complete animated feature such as Alice in Wonderland would turn out to be a rare event on Disneyland.  More frequent were the excerpts, along with background and behind the scenes stories, that whetted young appetites for the full meal.  

That technique was first on display in the first season’s sixth episode in December 1954, “A Story of Dogs,” which detailed the making of the upcoming animated theatrical feature, Lady and the Tramp. Fully completed key scenes were the hour’s climax.  A later episode in February showed how the music for the film was created, with more scenes.  By the time the movie came to local theatres that summer of 1955, we were eager to see it.

 This approach worked not only for new movies but for previously released films, especially those that were re-released to theatres in the 1950s.  So we got programs that discussed and showed pieces of Snow White and Cinderella—big hits for the studio—but especially  movies that didn’t do so well on their first run, like Fantasia and Pinocchio (both from 1940) as well as an originally lesser hit, like Bambi (1942.)  These programs preceded their theatrical re-releases (Pinocchio in 1954, Fantasia in 1956 and Bambi in 1957.)

 We all loved Pinocchio, even as it touched a nerve in donkey-inclined little boys (who lacked a Jiminy Crickett companion), but though the TV show got us into the theatre for Fantasia, it did not prevent a bad boy rebellion all around me after an hour of the Saturday matinee. I remember being bored by some of it, but mostly fascinated by the visuals as they worked with the music.  We weren’t used to classical music, so even what I now recognize as conductor Leopold Stokowski’s bombastic approach didn’t make us much more comfortable.  Seeing it today is a mixed bag of brilliance and kitsch. 

Watching excerpts of Bambi on TV prepared us for some of the hardest moments when we saw it at the movies. Though it has since become a cynical epithet, Bambi was such a powerful experience that I’ve almost repressed seeing it.  Small wonder that AFI named it the third best animated film of all time—and Time Magazine included it in its top 25 horror movies.

 In its initial release in 1942 however, Bambi had indifferent box office, and did even worse in its first re-release in the late 40s.  But after its exposure on Disneyland, it did very well in its 1957 return to theatres, doubling the box office of its previous revival.

 The Disneyland TV show became so effective in reaching huge potential audiences that the usual practice of re-releasing the animated features every seven years or longer was accelerated in several cases. For instance, Peter Pan, first released in 1953 just before Disneyland started, went back to theatres in 1958.  

Then there’s the case of the film-that-must-not-be-named.  Song of the South (1946) added animation to a live action story about a boy visiting a Georgia plantation after the Civil War, where he meets a sharecropper, Uncle Remus, who tells him animal stories that apply to the problems he’s having on his visit. 

 Disneyland devoted an hour in its second season (January 1956) to the history of Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Remus tales.  Excerpts were shown from the movie, particularly the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” song sequence.  The song won the Academy Award, and James Baskett, who sang it and played Uncle Remus, won a special Oscar.  

Song of the South was re-released to theatres later in 1956, and had several subsequent re-releases for the next 30 years.  But it has since vanished.  It is never shown in theatres, television or any of the Disney streaming channels, and is not available on home video in the US.  To my knowledge only the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” song and the attached animated tale is on DVD, as part of the 1950 Christmas show for Alice in Wonderland (a DVD extra.)  Bobby Driscoll (who played the boy in the film) asks the Magic Mirror to show it. 

 Disney knew it could be a sensitive subject when he made the movie, and tried to ensure it would not be racially offensive. However it later became politically unpalatable because of objections to its portrayal of black characters, particularly (I gather) the dialects employed.  It’s difficult to describe this, since I don’t remember the film—except for the song that we loved and sang all the time.  Whoopi Goldberg is among those suggesting it be shown again and discussed and evaluated now.  But we’ll return to this in a later discussion of the whole topic of ethnic humor and 1950s TV.

 Fantasyland on TV also combined with Fantasyland in the park that opened at the end of the first TV season in 1955, in a circle of reified and reinforced imagery and stories.  Disney merchandise, books (Golden Books, comic books, guides to animation, etc.) and newspaper comic strips were also involved.

 But to kids in the 1950s all this populated a world of discovery, of play, and of stories--all new to us, even if a little familiar from fairy tales, Golden Books and My Book House.  Fantasyland presented what Walt Disney had done from the beginning: animating tales and creating animated characters.  But he’d since gotten involved in other areas of filmmaking and storytelling, which then became a major part of Disneyland television. 

By the time the TV show came along, I was starting to age out of the prime animation audience, so these (mostly) live action shows were just as influential on my childhood—perhaps more so, and for longer… For there were three other lands.  And one of them almost immediately produced an effect that shook Hollywood to its foundations.

                               ---To Be Continued...