Posted on 11/25/2005 9:46:46 PM PST by Nasty McPhilthy
In honor of Disneylands 50th anniversary, we present 50 cool, obscure and simply odd things you probably didnt know about the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth. Many were culled from Mouse Tales by David Koenig (Bonaventure, $19.95). Some were provided by Disney archivist Dave Smith, and others came from 101 Things You Never Knew About Disneyland by former park employee Kevin Yee and lifelong fan Jason Schultz (Zauberreich, $14.95).
1. Disneylands original Tinker Bell was a 71-year-old Hungarian circus performer named Tiny Kline. The first to fly off the top of the Matterhorn on a zip line, she previously worked as a stunt aerialist, hanging from a flying airplane by her teeth.
2. High inside the hollow Matterhorn is a basketball court. Its part of an employee break room. Los Angeles Lakers center Vlade Divac has been up there to shoot hoops.
3. Many of the faces of the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean are modeled on those of the Imagineers (Disneyspeak for the parks artists and engineers) who created the ride. Theres evidence one face was modeled on Walt Disneys.
4. Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixons press secretary during the Watergate scandal, once worked as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride.
5. The spooky voice that narrates the Haunted Mansion ride is that of the Pillsbury Doughboy. An actor named Paul Frees, who was to Disney what Mel Blanc was to Warner Brothers, supplied the voices for both, as well as many of the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean and most of the characters in Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln (except Abe himself). He was also the voice of John Lennon in the old Beatles cartoons and Boris Badenov in the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.
6. The sailing ship Columbia, which is supposed to be a replica of the first U.S. ship to circumvent the globe, actually was built in large part from the plans for the HMS Bounty, of mutiny fame. Disneys shipbuilders couldnt find plans for the original Columbia, so they relied heavily on those of Capt. William Blighs ship, which had similar dimensions.
7. Childrens Fairyland in Oakland was one of the major inspirations for Disneyland. Walt Disney even hired Fairylands first director, Dorothy Manes, to work at his park.
8. From groundbreaking to opening, Disneyland was built in just 365 days.
9. Perhaps inevitably, opening day - July 17, 1955 - was a disaster. Asphalt poured just hours before guests arrived hadnt fully dried, and womens spike heels sank into Main Street. VIP passes were widely counterfeited, and double the expected number of people showed up. Rides broke down. Because of a plumbers strike, Walt Disney had to choose between drinking fountains and bathrooms. He opted for the latter, telling a reporter, People can buy Pepsi-Cola, but they cant pee in the street.
10. Fittingly, one of the original Tomorrowland attractions was Cranes Bathroom of Tomorrow.
11. Frank Sinatra showed up on opening day and took a spin around Autopia.
12. Disneyland cost $17 million to build in 1955, about $116 million in todays dollars. The Space Mountain ride, which opened in 1977, cost more than half that amount (in constant dollars).
13. ABC was one of the original financial backers and for years owned a share of the park. Now, of course, the Walt Disney Co. owns ABC.
14. On opening day, Walt Disney had his gardeners cover bare patches of dirt by replanting weeds from the parking lot and labeling them with long, horticultural-sounding names.
15. Disneyland is home to feral cats - nobody knows how many - that come out at night, after visitors leave. Years ago, more than 100 were discovered living inside Sleeping Beauty Castle.
16. If the voice of the droid pilot in Star Tours sounds a little like Pee-wee Herman, its because both are voiced by comedian Paul Reubens.
17. At least three babies have been born at Disneyland.
18. Walt Disney kept a 600-square-foot studio apartment above the firehouse on Main Street. Its maintained as a shrine to the parks founder and kept just as he left it, with Victorian antiques, red velvet carpeting and a device for making grilled cheese sandwiches. Outsiders are rarely allowed inside. A light shines from the window at all times as a symbol of Disneys eternal presence.
19. Untold thousands of the old A, B, C, D and E tickets are still in circulation, moldering away in peoples drawers. From time to time, guests still show up at the park with them, and theyre given the face value of the ticket. (At their most expensive, individual E tickets went for 95 cents.) A better bet is to sell them on eBay, where they fetch many times that amount.
20. On Splash Mountain, high-spirited women sometimes lift their blouses for the cameras that snap souvenir pictures. These girls-gone-wild photos are usually destroyed by park employees, but more than a dozen were smuggled out and posted on an Internet site called Flash Mountain.
21. As a teenager, actor and comedian Steve Martin worked in Merlins Magic Shop in Fantasyland.
22. Walt Disney wanted to populate the Jungle Cruise with live animals, but zoologists convinced him theyd be asleep during most park hours. In the early days, though, live alligators were kept in a pen near the turnstiles; they occasionally escaped into the lagoon.
23. In New Orleans Square, near the Pirates of the Caribbean exit, a door marked 33 leads to an ultra-secret, ultra-exclusive private club. Club 33 is the only place in the park that serves alcohol (including a Chardonnay specially bottled for the club by Fess Davy Crockett Parker). Its 480 members pay an initiation fee of from $8,000 to $27,000, and yearly dues of $4,000 to $15,000. The current waiting list for membership is said to be seven years long.
24. An early Tomorrowland attraction was Monsantos House of the Future, made entirely of plastic. It had the requisite picture phone and other Jetsonsonian appliances, but the most-talked-about feature, according to Mouse Tales, was the microwave oven. Nobody believed you could bake a potato in three minutes, said attendant Dick Mahoney. Years later, when Disneyland tried to tear down the plastic house, the wrecking ball just bounced off.
25. On Star Tours, the short, squat robots you pass while waiting in line are the audio-animatronic ducks from the old America Sings attraction, with their feathers and skin yanked off. One still has webbed feet.
26. To create the illusion of size on Main Street, designers made the ground-floor buildings nine-tenths scale, the second floors seven-eighths and the third floors five-eighths.
27. Sleeping Beauty Castle is based largely on Mad King Ludwigs Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, but with one big difference: The top is on backward. Disney didnt want it to look too much like the real thing.
28. Originally, Mr. Toad did not appear in Mr. Toads Wild Ride, nor did Peter Pan or Snow White feature in their own rides. Disneys idea was that riders would view these attractions from the lead characters point of view. Hardly anyone understood this concept, and now each character makes a brief appearance.
29. If you buy a Mickey balloon and it pops or flies away while youre in the park, theyll give you a new one - as long as you have a receipt.
30. Late at night on rides such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Its a Small World, amorous couples regularly try to make the Happiest Place on Earth even a little happier. Theyre apparently unaware that virtually every inch of every ride is observed by security cameras or hidden employees. Sometimes theyre startled by a warning from a loudspeaker; occasionally theyre greeted at the exit by applauding employees.
31. In the early days, Walt Disney had an agreement with the city of Anaheim that no outside buildings could be tall enough to be visible from within the park.
32. At the end of the Star Tours ride, just as your Starspeeder is about to crash into a fuel truck, a man in the control booth ducks down, then stands up and picks up the phone. The man is George Lucas.
33. Ron Dominguez, the top executive from 1971 to 1994, grew up on one of the Anaheim orange groves purchased by Disney for the park. My house was right about where the grist mill on Tom Sawyers Island is now, he said. Mr. Dominguez spent his entire career at the park, starting as a ticket-taker on opening day and working his way up to the top spot.
34. The names painted in gold leaf on second-story windows along Main Street are Disneylands Hall of Fame. They honor important people in the parks history, usually with an inside joke. Mr. Dominguezs window, for example, reads, Orange Grove Property Mgt. - We Care For Your Property As If It Were Our Own.
35. Attractions that never made it off the drawing board: Lilliputian Land, a Monstro the Whale water slide and, according to Mouse Tales, a child-sized medieval torture chamber.
36. There were no A, B, C, etc., coupons when Disneyland opened. Instead, visitors bought carnival-style tickets from booths in front of each attraction. When the lettered coupons were introduced in late 1955, C was the highest level. D tickets didnt come until the following year, and E tickets until 1959.
37. Conspicuously missing on opening day: the Matterhorn. In its place was a two-story-tall pile of dirt from the excavation of the castle moat. It was billed as Lookout Mountain. The Matterhorn didnt open until 1959.
38. Tomorrowland was originally meant to represent the futuristic year of 1986, when Halleys comet was due to make its next appearance.
39. The soundtrack on Space Mountain, Aquarium from Saint-Saens Carnival Des Animaux, is played by 1960s surf guitar legend Dick Dale.
40. Nikita Krushchev was never turned away at the front gate by Walt Disney, as is popularly believed. Disney was eager to show the Soviet premier his submarine fleet, at the time the worlds sixth largest. It was the U.S. State Department that nixed the visit, saying security wasnt adequate.
41. Its a Small World was originally built for the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. It was later boxed up and shipped to Anaheim, where it reopened in 1967. People who rode it in New York, including this writer, have had that song stuck in their heads three years longer than everyone else. (Other New York Worlds Fair attractions that migrated west: Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, the G.E. Carousel of Progress and the robotic dinosaurs you pass on the Disneyland Railroad.)
42. The telegraph in the New Orleans Square railroad station continually taps out part of Walt Disneys opening day speech in a variant of Morse code once used by railroads. For years it had it slightly wrong, until an amateur ham radio operator deciphered it and discovered the mistake. In the parks early days, according to 101 Things, the telegraph tapped out a ribald message. It was quickly changed after Disney casually mentioned that his wife knew Morse code.
43. Main Street is based in large part on the town of Marceline, Mo., where Walt Disney spent part of his childhood. A whistle stop on the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail line between Chicago and Kansas City, the town named a swimming pool and elementary school after its most famous son. The latter is the only place outside Disneyland authorized to fly the official Disneyland flag.
44. When it opened in 1967, Pirates of the Caribbean used real human skeletons as props. In an upcoming book, imagineer Jason Surrell writes, Because the original imagineering team felt that the faux skeletons of the period were just too unconvincing, the grotto sequence originally featured real human remains obtained from the UCLA Medical Center. The skeletons were later returned to their countries of origin and given a proper burial.
45. Its widely believed that the horse-drawn hearse parked outside the Haunted Mansion was the one used to carry Mormon leader Brigham Young to his burial place. But this is one of many urban legends associated with Disneyland. No hearse was used at Youngs funeral.
46. Designers frequently leave their signatures on attractions. On Star Tours, the lettering on the industrial pipes near the entrance are the initials and telephone extensions of the creators; on Its a Small World, one of the dolls wears the signature poncho of designer Mary Blair.
47. The Disneyland-Alweg Monorail was the first daily operating monorail in the Western Hemisphere.
48. The unforgettable - no matter how hard you try - theme song for Its a Small World was written by the same team, Richard and Robert Sherman, who wrote the Annette Funicello novelty hit Pineapple Princess. (They also penned many Oscar-nominated songs for Disney movies.)
49. When you enter the Star Tours ride, a voice over the loudspeaker asks for an Egroeg Sacul to come to the booth. Thats George Lucas spelled backward.
50. Once and for all, Walt Disney is not frozen cryogenically at Disneyland or anywhere else. He did have an interest in the technology, but he is in fact spending eternity at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, Calif.
Uh, I forgot to do a search on this.
Thanks for posting this, what a hoot!
Hmmmm, nothing about the number of unsafe sex acts on Gay Day....
4 Beth ping
51. Mickey Mouse was inspired by a mouse in Walt Disney's apartment...inspiring the world's most renowned amusement park. If it had been Richard Gere's apartment, it would have inspired the world's most renowned emergency proctological outpatient clinic.
Don't tell me that. I have wonderful daydreams of Uncle Walt clawing his way out of cryofreeze to kick the living crap out of all of the people who've ruined his company.
-Dan
I was there twice when I was 9 years old, Flushing Meadows in Queens, I believe we went through IASM sitting in a '64 Ford Fairlane convertable or maybe it was a T-Bird. I saw it again at Disney World in early 1973 when I was a senior in high school. Orlando was still a small sleepy city, the airport was still called McCoy AFB and there was nothing but orange groves, pine trees and gator ditches between Orlando and Disney World.
You are the God of esoterica.
"People can do without Pepsi Cola but they can't pee in the street."
Gotta love WD. He was a visionary with a very practical side."
bump
-Dan
-Dan
Disney. (spit)
FOR THREE LONG YEARS.
Of course, by the time I got the invite, I STILL couldn't afford it..
About a week ago, I just woke up from a coma that was induced in 1954 when the TV fell on my head. If I remember, they were talking about some kind of Interstate highway on Walt Disney. I still haven't gotten out of the hospital room and I wonder if they ever got any of those things built. I just don't see how it would be possible to do that.
When Disneyland opened, they discovered that the soil beneath the waterway surrounding Tom Sawyer Island leaked the water. They had to drain the water and coat the dirt with clay.
We used to sneak pints of liquor into the park inside our coats. We would then buy soft drinks and make our mixed drinks in the bathroom stalls.
We shared this with a friend of ours who worked there, and he said it was the best time he ever had at the park!
Back when they still used lettered tickets, we would stand near the exit around closing time and ask people for their leftover tickets. Folks from out of town had no use for them, and we accumulated huge stacks of tickets. We would then get in for the general admission price of $1.50 and ride all day long.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.