How big were these displays? They look super huge.
The famous Disneyland Dream Model is about 20 foot wide by 20 foot deep. It's viewed from above on a sloping walkway that moves you from the upper Disneyland exhibit down to the lower exhibit on the last few years of Walt's life.
WARNING For WDW Fans: The Walt Disney Family Museum is
not a museum about Disney World, although Disneyland is featured heavily. It is a museum dedicated to Walt Disney's entire life, focusing most on his working career from the 1920's to the 1960's and all the projects he personally worked on. The museum exhibits follow a timeline of his life from 1901 to 1966, and the exhibits end abruptly in 1966, and you exit into the gift shop. WDW is mentioned very briefly in the very last exhibit, as a panel near the New York World's Fair info about his ideas for the "Florida Project". But WDW opened five years after Walt died, and what opened in 1971 didn't have much in common with what Walt had planned in 1966, and thus WDW has no place in the museum based on Walt's actual life.
There is lots of info about
Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom of Disneyland in the 1950's and 60's, including this fabulous model. But if you are interested in learning about
Meg Crofton's Disney World, this isn't for you.
My first visit about five years ago, I wedged the Disney museum in to a big museum day between morning at the Legion Of Honor and afternoon at the California Academy of Sciences, and I gave myself two hours to see the Disney museum. Big mistake, not enough time! The second time I visited a couple years later, I took the whole afternoon and spent four hours there, including a movie presentation in the theater in the basement. There's a very good café there, and a nice gift shop, and you can make it a full afternoon for those who really appreciate Walt Disney as one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century and the gifts he gave to the world.
Plus, the Disney museum is in the Presidio and the scenery around the museum itself is stunning.
Ho-hum, it's the Presidio in San Francisco, just your average little city park.
