lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Do you just not understand the concept of a placeholder? Walt said it would be a different park that he would leave to WED to largely design on their own.
-
Welcome to the WDWMAGIC.COM Forums!
Please take a look around, and feel free to sign up and join the community.
News Disney is Making a Disney+ Original Movie About the Creation of Disneyland
- Thread starter VJ
- Start date
TP2000
Well-Known Member
I get that. But we've got precious young ones here from back East who think Walt designed Magic Kingdom Park lovingly and completely on his deathbed in '66. He didn't.
Walt died happy to just cut-and-paste Disneyland '65 onto his Florida property. He had moved on from theme parks and wanted to build a new city. But he died.
What are you cranky about this time? I'm confused.
brb1006
Well-Known Member
You're comment just reminded me of the upcoming "Ink & Paint" miniseries exclusive to Disney+ that will highlight the women of Disney Animation. It's based on the non-fiction book by Mary Johnson and was announced a year before Disney+ went live.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
Ah, that's a tiny bit better. But still, there's something undignified and creepy about it.
I get it, they are trying to make Walt approachable. I think they did that perfectly with the Dreamers statue they added to DCA in 2012. But this? It looks weird. And unlike any version of Walt we'd ever seen when he was still with us.
I can only imagine what he's thinking in Epcot Park of the 2020's, when what he had really wanted to build and call EPCOT was this...
https:///wp-content/uploads/2020/06/unnamed-550x439.jpg
TP2000
Well-Known Member
You should probably watch this film Walt made about 8 weeks before he died. It's not the manufactured history you find at WDW gift shops and Twitter feeds today, but it's real history and it is informative to what Walt was thinking upon his 1966 death.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
It was such a lovely and crisp fall evening that I sat out on the patio enjoying the huge moon and having a Manhattan and thinking... I've done a lot of reading and interacting over the last few decades about Disney theme park history. I am not an expert myself, but I have read just about everything every real expert has written about WDW's history. And yet...
There seems to be a big gap in the timeline after Walt's death in late 1966 and the time WED started pumping out maps and sketches and real plans for WDW in mid 1968. Basically 1967 was a lost year, as the company reeled from Walt's sudden death and trying to decide how to move forward.
We left Walt with this late 1966 image of the "theme park area" he had planned for WDW. Clearly a cut-and-paste of Disneyland '65, because Walt wasn't worried about the theme park. He wanted to build a planned city of the future in Florida.
But by mid 1968, WED planners began to churn out plans for the theme park area as the EPCOT plans got shelved and forgotten. This is the earliest post-Walt schematic I can find for WDW's theme park area, and it's dated July, 1968.
It's got an early version of the Contemporary, a weird version of the Poly, plus an Asian hotel and an early and vague area for parking and what we now know as the TTC. But if you zoom in, you can see for the first time some changes to the Disneyland footprint. This is no longer Disneyland '65, it's something else. This isn't what arrived by late '71, but at least they cut out the Flying Saucers and Nature's Wonderland.
This map is even more vague, and it's from 1969. The park has changed again, and now Small World and the Submarines and Haunted Mansion are in their '71 locations. Optimistically, Western River Expedition also appears on the park's western flanks.
The WDW models that WED built in late '68 and 1969 are even less helpful. They really play up the hotels, but at least for the models they began to nail down the basic size and shoreline of Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon. Likely because those facilities needed to get done first before real construction started.
Notably, in the 1968-69 timeframe they were really interested in doing some sort of boat or water attraction in and around Tomorrowland. Not sure what that would have been since the Submarines were already moved to Fantasyland, but Tomorrowland canals and lagoons were included on a lot of maps and models about the time Ladybird was showing Pat where the good White House china was kept.
Of course, even this 1969 model isn't really what got built by 1971. And it certainly doesn't look like anything they went on to build or expand into later in the 1970's and 80's.
But there it is. A crash course in WDW planning in the three or four years after Walt's death.
It would be really interesting for Disney itself to release the information and documentation it has of WDW's planning circa 1968-1971, but they'd have to admit some things they don't want to admit.
There seems to be a big gap in the timeline after Walt's death in late 1966 and the time WED started pumping out maps and sketches and real plans for WDW in mid 1968. Basically 1967 was a lost year, as the company reeled from Walt's sudden death and trying to decide how to move forward.
We left Walt with this late 1966 image of the "theme park area" he had planned for WDW. Clearly a cut-and-paste of Disneyland '65, because Walt wasn't worried about the theme park. He wanted to build a planned city of the future in Florida.
But by mid 1968, WED planners began to churn out plans for the theme park area as the EPCOT plans got shelved and forgotten. This is the earliest post-Walt schematic I can find for WDW's theme park area, and it's dated July, 1968.
It's got an early version of the Contemporary, a weird version of the Poly, plus an Asian hotel and an early and vague area for parking and what we now know as the TTC. But if you zoom in, you can see for the first time some changes to the Disneyland footprint. This is no longer Disneyland '65, it's something else. This isn't what arrived by late '71, but at least they cut out the Flying Saucers and Nature's Wonderland.
This map is even more vague, and it's from 1969. The park has changed again, and now Small World and the Submarines and Haunted Mansion are in their '71 locations. Optimistically, Western River Expedition also appears on the park's western flanks.
The WDW models that WED built in late '68 and 1969 are even less helpful. They really play up the hotels, but at least for the models they began to nail down the basic size and shoreline of Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon. Likely because those facilities needed to get done first before real construction started.
Notably, in the 1968-69 timeframe they were really interested in doing some sort of boat or water attraction in and around Tomorrowland. Not sure what that would have been since the Submarines were already moved to Fantasyland, but Tomorrowland canals and lagoons were included on a lot of maps and models about the time Ladybird was showing Pat where the good White House china was kept.
Of course, even this 1969 model isn't really what got built by 1971. And it certainly doesn't look like anything they went on to build or expand into later in the 1970's and 80's.
But there it is. A crash course in WDW planning in the three or four years after Walt's death.
It would be really interesting for Disney itself to release the information and documentation it has of WDW's planning circa 1968-1971, but they'd have to admit some things they don't want to admit.
Last edited:
truecoat
Well-Known Member
I don't follow the WDW side of the board anymore as it's too much to keep up with...that being said, I've seen rumblings on Twitter about 2 sites along the lake with some activity.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
TP2000
Well-Known Member
Bravo to all of that!
With an extra Gold Star to you for mentioning Cal Arts. I had forgotten about that, but it was central to Walt's work in the mid 1960's. Of course, you can't really get a cubicle farm in Celebration to Tweet about Cal Arts, so it gets pushed into the memory hole.
But it was hugely important to Walt in the mid 60's, and it still exists today.
And Cal Arts is featured at the Walt Disney Family Museum more than the Florida Project is, which tells you something about its importance and legacy to Disney the man.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
EPCOT’s city plan wasn’t all that new. It is very much a Garden City as first described by Ebenezer Howard in 1898. Even the WEDway PeopleMover was an evolution on an idea that Walt’s family would have seen at the World’s Colombian Exposition.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
Yeah, but Walt wasn't at that World's Fair. Walt wouldn't be born until 8 years later.
EPCOT's plans also look familiar to the General Motors Futurama from the 1939 World's Fair, and any other number of exhibitions and forward-looking plans to solve the urban ills of the early 20th century.
Walt wasn't the creator of urban planning, it was already a growing craze by 1966. Walt just wanted to get involved in that industry and bring his trademark spin to it. It's obvious though that after Walt's death the company had to take a step back and rethink the entire Florida Project.
It became a prettier version of Disneyland with wider roads and plenty of parking. Sort of like Irvine or Newport Center circa the late 1960's, with a Disneyland instead of a brand new UC campus.
Kirby86
Well-Known Member
I'm a sucker for stories based on true events and I always find stories about Walt interesting. As for David Gordon Green he's been a busy guy lately. I'm not sure when this movie will be made since he still has finish his Halloween movie for Universal next year and I think he is also makeing a remake/reboot of The Excorcist.
TP2000
Well-Known Member
Oh, really? He's remaking The Excorcist?
I'm becoming more and more concerned about this new Walt movie with each piece of information.
Kirby86
Well-Known Member
Even better it's a trilogy for Peacock that cost Universal (checks notes) 400 million dollars just for the rights. I don't hate this guys work and enjoyed his Halloween movies for what they were dumb fun Slasher movies but he's not my first choice for a movie like this.
truecoat
Well-Known Member
400 million? That can't be right but it is and it's not even a remake. It's a series of sequels with the first one starring Leslie Odom jr as a father of a possessed girl. Ellen Burstyn reprises her role from the original as Leslie's character finds her for advice.
Looking through David Green's imdb page, the Disney project doesn't seem like something he'd be interested in but I wonder if he's a big fan and this is a pet project of his.
Kirby86
Well-Known Member
The 400 million price tag was what Variety wrote so I'm going off that. We live in a world where Netflix paid 450 million dollars for a two sequels to Knives Out. It's a ridiculous price but that's Hollywood.
truecoat
Well-Known Member
I look at it as giving them 225 million a piece in guaranteed box office. I guess the Exorcist is getting 133 mil in box office per movie.
Dear Prudence
Well-Known Member
Whelp, I specifically avoided Knives Out because of the kind of people who I knew enjoyed it. That's a bonkers amount of money in my brain for something I specifically NOPED the heck away from.
truecoat
Well-Known Member
Knives Out made 311 million world wide so 225 million a piece looks like a deal to be honest.