DisneyLand & disney world: the true meaning
The opening of of DisneyLand.
Throughout his life, Disney remained committed to family entertainment.
Disney embraced television early on, using the medium to build his multimedia
conglomerate. In the early Fifties, Disney began to envision an amusement park
that would provide families with a safe and clean alternative to midway and
country fairs. He purchased 160 acres of land in Anaheim, California, and with a
fresh palette before him, focused as much on urban planning as he did on the individual attractions.
Disneyland illustrates many aspects of Disney’s personality. The park
opens on an idealized “Main Street,” a portrayal of small town America that
evokes images from American cinema as much as it does reality. That Disney was
partial to Main Street cannot be denied – he kept offices in the park
overlooking it – yet only a few steps away from Main Street is “Tomorrowland,”
representing Disney’s enduring fascination with technology. Disney’s commitment
to family and to the future has surely impacted all of our livesWalt Disney
arrived in California in the summer of 1923 with a lot of hopes but little else.
He had made a cartoon in Kansas City about a little girl in a cartoon world,
called Alice’s Wonderland, and he decided that he could use it as his “pilot”
film to sell a series of these “Alice Comedies” to a distributor. Soon after
arriving in California, he was successful. A distributor in New York, M. J.
Winkler, contracted to distribute the “Alice Comedies” on October 16, 1923, and
this date became the start of the Disney company. Originally known as the Disney
Brothers Cartoon Studio, with Walt Disney and his brother, Roy, as equal
partners, the company soon changed its name, at Roy’s suggestion, to the Walt
Disney Studio