615. Disneyland: The Modern American Utopia

26:33Well, it's great to have Vauxhall, which is the tube station that serves the Oval on the podcast. Great to get the Oval back on. The rest is history. Right. That's the last time we'll be mentioning the Oval in this podcast. So Vauxhall. Vauxhall began as the new spring gardens on the south bank of the Thames. The date that it opened is unclear, but it was almost certainly around the time of the restoration. In 1662, Samuel Pepys describes a visit to what he calls Vauxhall, where I had not been a great while. And he and his wife collect flowers and he says, we had cakes and salt beef and ale, and so home again by water with much pleasure.

27:13So they've obviously been for an outing. In 1667, five years later, the great biographer and antiquarian John Aubrey records that the restoration era spy and double agent and inventor Samuel Morland built a house in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens made of looking glass and fountains very pleasant to behold. And there are all these sort of little trace descriptions of something going on in Vauxhall on the south bank of the Thames in the late 17th century. That's fun. Basically, that's the point. Yeah, that it's fun. And people are going there for a day out. And it's hard to pin down exactly what they're going for because there aren't really detailed descriptions until the 18th century.

27:59And by the 18th century, we do have a very clear sense of this is one of London's great tourist attractions. So now it has a proper sort of Walt Disney-style entrepreneur in charge of it called Jonathan Tyres. And the reason I compare him with Walt Disney is that like Disney, Tyres is a kind of mid-market populist. So he's interested in throwing it open to as many people as possible, but with caveats. So he charges a shilling to get in. Doesn't sound like much, but I looked it up, the academic website measuring worth. In relative income terms, a shilling is the equivalent of about£150 today. A lot of money, but almost exactly the same as what you would pay for a one-day ticket to Disneyland in Anaheim right now.

28:48So it's keeping riffraff out. It's a proper event. You don't go lightly. You go because it's a long-conceived trip, a very exciting moment. And it will appeal to respectable people because the price of a shilling means you can be pretty confident there will not be the likes of the young Emma Hamilton. Correct. There will not be thieves and footpads and ruffians. Yeah. And people of easy virtue. So what is it that they've got there? They've got musicians. They've got entertainers. There's lots of fireworks. There are Chinese lanterns. The Chinese lanterns are a huge part of this, actually. People would often comment on the excitement of walking down the kind of the darkened paths illuminated at every turn by these lanterns.

29:34This then inspires a theme park in Russia, in St. Petersburg. And there's a railway station next to it called Vauxhall. And so the Russian word for railway station is Vauxhall. Vauxhall. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. So they have more and more attractions. By the early 19th century, there are organs. There are multiple orchestras. There's a theatre. There are hot air balloons. You would go and you would see high wire acts, jugglers. There'd be puppet shows. The price has now gone up to three shillings, so it's pretty expensive. I think it's where the first giraffe is displayed in England. Is that right?

30:09I think so. You love a giraffe. Yeah, I do. Great to get a giraffe back on the show. Dickens went. It features briefly in Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, and so on and so forth. However, the temptation is always to go down market, and that's exactly what happens. So chasing profits in the middle of the 19th century, Vauxhall's new proprietors, they basically lost some of the respectability. They got a reputation for bawdy behavior, for drinking, for late night parties. And it ended up basically being threatened with losing its licenses and it closed in 1859. Well, now, I mean, you mentioned sex dungeons.

30:46There was a club there, I think, called Dungeon or something like that. Right. Well, that's nice to know. So you see it every time you drive across from North London going down to Brixton. It always used to be there. Right. Well, have you ever been? No, I haven't, but I always kind of wondered. Right. Well, that's a lovely possible destination for Arrested History Christmas outing. Maybe for the Atherstans. Yeah, exactly. So there's one thing, obviously, that Vauxhall is missing that actually Bakken didn't have either, as you pointed out, which is rides. Now, the thing is, I'm guessing most, I'm guessing everybody listening to this podcast has been on a ride at some point in their life, if only as a very small child.

31:26I think if my father is listening, he's never been on a ride, but apart from him. Surely he's been on a roundabout or some sort of. I can't imagine it. Well, but I'm also guessing that almost nobody has ever thought, gosh, rides have a history. Where do rides come from? No. Because you just take them for granted and you think of them as frivolous. So let's start with the first ride that most people ever take, the first sort of sophisticated ride. And that's normally, I would say, probably a merry-go-round or a carousel, you know, the horses going up and down. So the word carousel, French word, and it originally meant this sort of test of skill during a tournament.

32:04So the claim is that you read everywhere. This began, this was imported from the Saracens during the Crusades. They would ride on their horses. and they would basically spear with a lance a ring that was hanging from a post or a tree. It's a kind of standard element of tournament activity in a children's history book. And in early modern Europe, this activity evolved into a much more formalized kind of display. So it's a little bit like dressage or something. So we know that, for example, in 1662, in the summer of 1662, So Louis XIV held a big kind of carousel occasion in the courtyard of the Tuileries Palace.

32:47And people were kind of riding up and down, and they were trying to collect these rings with their lances. And to this day, that square is called, which is now by the Louvre, is called the Place du Carcousel. The game spread, well, the exhibition spread in popularity. By the 18th century, people are doing it in fairs all over Europe. and people have developed basically i suspect because it's cheaper a sort of very primitive mechanical dimension so you will sit on a kind of a wooden horse that wooden horses are suspended in a circle from a kind of axis and a central pole rather like on a modern carousel but they are rotated obviously not by electricity or whatever they're rotated by animals or basically by people just pulling on a rope so there's some poor bloke sweating profusely pulling you while you're going round and round.

33:38It suddenly struck me. In John Wesley's house in London, he rode around everywhere preaching and all that stuff. And he had a mechanical horse. It was kind of the equivalent of an exercise bike. So he'd sit on it in the morning. It would go up and down, up and down. Yeah. And it would exercise his thighs and give him the strength to continue riding. So that is also part of the carousel, isn't it? That the horses go up and down. So presumably that's where that is coming from. Yeah. So that idea of, I mean, that's such an 18th century thing, isn't it? The idea of some mechanical contraption that you'll exercise on and some mad inventor has developed.

34:19And you don't think of that being the ancestor of the roller coaster, Alton Towers or something, but that's exactly what it is. No, it hadn't crossed my mind when I saw it, but now you've enlightened me. Oh, that's wonderful. For which many thanks. So the first proper mechanical carousel comes from the Napoleonic Wars. And this was a creation quite literally of Merlin, of a man called Jean-Joseph Merlin, who was an inventor who had moved from Liège to London in the 1760s. And he was a big name at the time. I mean, he's completely forgotten today, but he was a very big name in the late 18th century.

34:50He was nicknamed the ingenious mechanic. And he made clocks. He made automata, kind of robotic machines of various kinds. He made organs and pianos. He invented a self-propelled wheelchair. He invented a pedal-operated revolving tea table. And this is an amazing fact, he invented rollerblades. So he was the first person to invent the line of wheels, the thin line of wheels on a shoe or boot. And he opened a mechanical museum in Hanover Square, which in the 1780s and 1790s was a very fashionable place to go for coffee. and we know from travelers accounts there's one from i think 1804 looking back at a journey he made a german traveler in 1803 and this bloke said i went to this place i couldn't believe it i went in there was a carousel it was completely mechanical you'd go in there with your coffee and you'd sit on this horse it would kind of go round and round while an organ played a concerto so yeah that basically is the experience they're going on a merry-go-round However, it was just a private toy.

35:58It was only for people who went to Merlin's museum. The man who made carousels for the masses was a Lancastrian, like our co-founder of Goalhanger, Tony Pasta, so another great populist. This was a bloke called Thomas Bradshaw, who was an inventor from Bolton, and he built a carousel with a steam engine, which is a big innovation. and he probably unveiled it in Bolton on New Year's Day 1861 and then we have the first full account two years later he took it to Halifax and the local paper described it as and I quote I was going to do the accent maybe I will do the accent hey hey hey it's a roundabout of huge proportions driven by a steam engine which whirled around with such impetuosity that the wonder is that daring riders are not shot off like cannonballs and driven half into the middle of next month.

36:53They're not drinking coffee by this point. No, definitely not. So that's Bradshaw with his steam-powered carousel. Now, he's actually just preparing the way for an even greater man. And this is the Walt Disney of Kingsland. Fred Savage. Are you familiar with Fred Savage's life and career, Tom? I think he clearly invents Disneyland, doesn't he? It should really be called Savage Land. It should. Good. So he was born into a family of weavers in 1828. He never really learned to read and write. His father was transported to Tasmania for poaching, and he began work as a farm laborer when he was 10. But after his father disappeared, he needed more money.

37:35So he was apprenticed to a local machine maker, and he proved to be very good at making machines. He sets up his own business making farm machinery, and then he diversifies into steam-powered fairground machinery. And Fred Savage becomes, by the 1880s, he is, without doubt, the most innovative and influential maker of rides in the world. So if I give you just three examples of his great rides, there was a roundabout called Sea on Land, where you'd sit in like a boat and it would pitch and toss as though you're on the waves. I mean, this is basically like you see in most fairgrounds, right? They have this ride.

38:13There was a steam-driven carousel, which was kind of the definitive carousel it was called the platform gallopers he had the idea of having you go up and down on colored poles you know the sort of bright colors and stuff and the organ playing and this then was copied all over the world the platform gallopers and then the most influential ride so we at disneyland have been on a ride very like this it was called switchbacks and it was in 1888 and this had you sat in a kind of gilded car and a carriage and the carriage the cars raced around an undulating track. So the Cars ride at Disneyland is basically just an updated version of the Switchbacks ride.

38:54Amazing. And he was a huge figure in Kings Lynn. He became the mayor of Kings Lynn. Brilliant. There is a statue of him in Kings Lynn to this day. So that's very exciting. No one would pull that down. No. He sounds great. Do you know who actually who'd love him is my cousin, Simon, who he makes Victorian fairground attractions and paints them. He's an artist and kind of tinkerer. Well, that's exciting. Maybe he already knows about Fred Savage. I like to think he does. Probably does. I'll ask him. But there's one thing that Fred Savage can't take credit for. And in fact, I'm sorry to say that we in Britain can't take any credit for at all.

39:27And that's the roller coaster. So the roller coaster has a mad history, a very unexpected history. Roller coasters originated in 18th century Tsarist Russia. So basically how it worked was in palaces outside St. Petersburg in the age of Catherine the Great, serfs and servants would build these kind of undulating hills of ice so that their masters and mistresses could go tobogganing. Because it's all very flat, isn't it? It is flat, so that's why they'd build these mountains. Yeah. And the mountains were called Katalnaya Gorka, sliding mountains. And they'd sometimes be 80 feet high and they would be sort of buttressed with wooden supports.

40:05and over time the Russian obdities say well I enjoy this so much I'd like to do in the summer when there's no ice so they build summer versions and they do them not with toboggans but with carts with wheels that roll down grooved tracks so the most famous one was a ride called the Riding Mountain it was built at Sarskoye Selo the country retreat of the Tsars under Catherine the Great by Rastrelli the architect who did the Winter Palace what's the health and safety listen If Catherine the Great comes off that ride, you're in massive trouble. You cannot take any risk. I am not going to go on a ride that's been built in 18th century Russia.

40:43No way. What about 19th century Paris? So by the early 19th century, these have been copied in Paris. And the first one is called the Montagne Russe, Russian mountains. And there's also one called Promenade Erienne. And they were both installed in an amusement park in 1817 off the Champs Elysees. and again these have these wheeled cars running in grooves you would tow your car to the top of a slope you'd release it it would whiz around the track louis the um 18th came to see it he came to see it but he refused to ride in it i very much doubt he could have fitted in it well he's a very large man yeah he would have the whole system would have crashed splinted into timber beneath it unlike you at disneyland he thought it was beneath his dignity whereas you did not i piled Exactly.

41:30And what turns these things into a proper roller coaster is the addition of steam. And that, I have to say, is an American innovation. Oh, that's a shame. So this, I mean, the place, you couldn't make this up. I mean, American names is just absolutely insane. So the first railway that does this was called the Mork Chunk Switchback Railway. Sounds like a pet food. and if you think that's bad the town that it was that it was that it was building it was called the town that it was built in was called jim thorpe who who who founded the town of jim thorpe dominic who could possibly say very modest very modest man the town is called jim thorpe Pennsylvania.

42:21And it's the Mork Chunk Switchback Railway. It was a sort of mining railway. But they called it the Gravity Road because it went so steeply downhill. And by 1870, the company that ran the Mork Chunk Railway decided that instead of using it for its proper purpose, they would throw it open to tourists who were visiting Jim Thorpe. Where are you spending your vacation? Yeah. Jim Thorpe. Not again. No, less a person than Ulysses S. Grant. Oh, the corrupt and boring president. Yeah. The corrupt and boring president of the United States. He traveled on it. So people hear the news of this Gravity Railway.

43:00They're like, brilliant, love it. And this bloke, another man who was called LaMarcus Adner Thompson. Where the hell did he come from? God knows. He built his own version called the Gravity Switchback Railway at Coney Island in the 1880s. And it was LaMarcus Adner Thompson who came up with the idea of you would travel against painted backdrops. So basically you pretend you're in the Swiss Alps or something. And from there, you soon get moved towards having loops. So in other words, going upside down. Again, Coney Island leads the way on that. So the amusingly named Flip Flap Railway, which opened in 1895, has a loop so that you go upside down.

43:43and then there are basically versions in amusement parks all over the world in the next 30 to 40 years, which is kind of the golden age of roller coasters. Actually, we think of it as now, but there are probably more roller coasters in the 1920s than there are right now. They all have one thing in common, and they have that in common with Catherine the Great's Riding Mountain, which you distrust. They are all made of wood. So the very first steel roller coaster was not open until 1959. It is called the Matterhorn Bobsleds. I believe Tabby has ridden on it because where does it open, Tom? It opens at Disneyland.

44:19Disneyland. Do you know, I'd completely forgotten about Disneyland. Yeah. Well, finally got back on track, as it were. So let's have a quick break now. And when we come back, we will be in 1950s California. And we'll be finding out what has happened to Walt Disney's theme park.

44:41To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world i don't know if that's how walt disney spoke uh but in my version it is because that was walt disney and he was unveiling his park to the world's press on the 17th of july 1955 and dominic in those words are lots of the themes that we would associate with disneyland today so kind of looking backwards lots of sepia tinge nostalgia but also the excitement of the future and there's idealism and there's this kind of patriotic sense that american history is something to be celebrated exactly yeah so uh we finally got back to um disneyland and before we get to the opening day let's backtrack a little to explain how we got to 1955 so we left the story with Walt sending his emissaries to Europe to get inspiration from Tivoli and indeed from Vauxhall, if only indirectly.

46:09And they have returned full of ideas and they get down to work in the early 1950s. The plan is going to have to change, A, because it's much grander than before, Walt wants something huge, but also because the city authorities in Burbank say, look, we don't want a children's entertainment park via the studios. You're going to have to look somewhere else. So Walt commissions this study to find a new site. And they report to him in the summer of 1953. And they say, look, Greater Los Angeles, because of the huge suburbanization in Eisenhower's America, is expanding at a vast rate. And the highest rate of growth is expected to be in suburban Orange County, which is just south of Los Angeles.

46:55Now, there are a couple of interesting things about Orange County. One, it already has a theme park called Knott's Berry Farm, which lots of our American listeners will have heard of, which is basically a farm shop that's built its own ghost town, fake ghost town as an attraction. What do you mean a ghost town? A town with ghosts like Scooby-Doo or? A sort of abandoned, like Western town. Miner's town. Yeah, saloon and stuff. But I think there was also a more spectral element to it. Yeah. I mean, now there's loads of rides and things. It's very popular. So with sinister janitors who turn out to be faking ghosts, that kind of thing.

47:28Exactly. I mean, I have to say an absolutely preposterous name for a theme park, Knott's Berry Farm. It's not that scary, is it? But very popular in America. The other thing about Orange County is a hugely symbolic place in post-war American politics. It's the birthplace of Richard Nixon, but it is the heartland of kind of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, conservatism. There's a whole book called Suburban Warriors by a historian called Lisa McGurr, all about Orange County as the sort of Petri dish in which modern American conservatism was made. Anyway, it's here that Walt Disney decides he'll have his park.

48:01He buys 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, and he says, right, now we have to pay for it. Now, the budget for Disneyland ends up ballooning to$17 million. That's the equivalent of about$620 million today in terms of a construction project. So he doesn't have anything like this money. And the way he does it, which you described last time, is TV. He signs a deal with ABC. They will pump cash effectively into his park. And in return, he will make programs, 26 programs a year for them. And this is, as you said before, it's the first time a Hollywood studio, rather than seeing television as the enemy, has got into bed with them.

48:43And that show Disneyland, which is the first show, it's a brilliant advert for his new park, and it's a colossal, colossal hit. the only show on TV that is more popular than its repeats is I Love Lucy, the Lucille Ball sitcom. And as you described last time, this is the show that makes Walt himself a public personality. So people get to see kind of Uncle Walt. Now, meanwhile, his team are racing to finish this park. And the timescale is bonkers by modern standards. So they broke ground on the 17th of July, 1954. And Walt basically said to them, I think a year should do it. Wow. You know, you've got 365 days.

49:24Loads of problems. There are problems with the soil. There are problems with the unions. Oh, those pesky unions again. Yeah, he hates the unions. Problems with plumbing, all of this. Walt is always changing his plans. So he's always saying, why don't we put this here? Why don't we build something else here? Well, exactly like Snow White. Yeah. Why don't you spend seven months working on an entertaining thing involving teacups? Nah, I'm not going to have that. Let's cut it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We should actually give a shout out to the person who really runs the project, who's ended up being airbrushed from Disney's history.

49:55And this was the general director who was called C.V. Wood. And he'd run the study. He'd basically been charged with the research institute that did the study that said, do it in Orange County in Anaheim. And he was brilliant at organizing the project, but he fell out with Walt and he was fired and he was basically erased from Disney's history, which is very sad. Oh, so something that Disney would have had in common with Khrushchev. Yeah. erasing people from history. That's true. I hadn't thought of that. It's a nice, yeah, the Commissar vanishing. So we'll get into later on what the design of Disneyland is and what it kind of means.

50:26But some of the themes of its history are there from the very beginning. So first of all, Walt is always really clear that it is not just an amusement park. It's basically a theme park. And the difference is, if you go to an amusement park and you don't go on any rides, you know, you're in for a very boring time because there's nothing else to do. whereas as we know having been you can go to disneyland and actually spend the day without going on a single ride yeah because you can see all the other attractions you can go to the shops you can go to the cafes you can just relax enjoy yourself there's parades there's fireworks so we went to the star wars area didn't we and there was a kind of there was a bar yeah like the one in star wars um and we were entertained by watching theo be arrested by a couple of stormtroopers exactly Which I thought was actually, for me, the single best moment in the whole visit.

51:17In the whole of the history. The rest is history, no? And actually, we will return to that moment in a second. Excellent. So it's a land. It's a place unto itself in a way that Vauxhall and Tivoli never were. And it's immersive. So every detail has to be right. There's an argument at one point whether they're going to use cut glass or stained glass. Stained glass, obviously. Yeah, and Walt says it's got to be stained glass. Every detail has to be perfect. Who cares how much it costs? So that's what partly explains the commercialism that we associate with Disney and Disneyland. So the sponsorship, for example, he's got sponsorship deals with American Motors, with Richfield Oil, with a swift meatpacking company, because he needs to pay for all of this attention to detail.

52:03And who's he going to get to work in this? Well, this is crucial. So I think this is one of the most inspired things, actually, about Disneyland. Yeah. Walt Disney said, you know, this is not just a park. I want people to think of this as a movie set, which we'll get onto later. And so the staff are not employees. They are cast members. And that term is still used entirely unironically by Disney today. Yeah. So we saw Mary Poppins when we were walking around, but also famously there's Mickey Mouse and Theo's friend Goofy and all these kind of characters. Yeah. And the Stormtroopers or whatever.

52:38So they're obviously actors, but all the kind of the people who are there to help, they are cast as actors as well. Exactly. And they are playing a part as well in a way because they have to be perfectly turned out. They're all smiling. They're incredibly polite. There's a very strict dress code. And no facial hair. That's the mad thing because Walt has a moustache and also there's no smoking. And if there's one thing everyone knows about Disney, he loves a cigarette. Yeah. Yeah. And also no fat people. So the very first manager of Adventureland, which is part of the park, he said later, Walt was always really mean to me and basically made it very clear that he didn't really want me in his park because I was so large.

53:14Walt doesn't like fat guys. So the other thing is the slight suspicion that's hung over Disneyland is did they all have to be white? And that's not really true. So Walt Disney had always employed Asian-American artists and illustrators. But that said, as late as 1963, civil rights groups are still petitioning the Disney organization and saying to them, can you please guarantee that there will be more black employees? And the Disney organization said, yeah, we'll think about it. But it's actually not clear whether that really had an impact and actually how much changed and how long it took. Anyway, back to the story.

53:54The big day approaches the 17th of July. Massive excitement. Walt has been promoting it on ABC. ABC themselves have taken up expensive full-page adverts in the newspapers. Right up to the deadline, Walt is tinkering with his park. Of course he is. He's riding the train, he's saying the shops need to be different and all this kind of thing. Four days early, he has his 30th wedding anniversary, and he uses that as a very, very soft opening. He invites his closest friends and some big Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Gary Cooper to a party at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, which is still there, actually.

54:31And then 17th of July, the big day dawns. And the funny thing about it is that in many ways, it's total and utter chaos. So first of all, C.V. Wood has sent out 15 ,000 invitations because it's invitation only. But loads of people print out counterfeit fake invitations and get in. And loads of other people basically lean ladders against the fence, climb over the ladder to get in, much like people used to do at rock festivals and things. There's a heat wave in Southern California, so the temperature hits 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Wasn't there some issue with the water supply? And Walt had to choose between flushing toilets and fountains.

55:09And he opts for the toilets, I think, correctly. Yeah, but then people complain and they say the water fountains aren't really working because there's been a plumbing strike. Oh, it has unions again. Pesky unions. There's a gas leak. The refreshment stands run out of food and drink. Famously, the newly laid asphalt, the tarmac, melts. So people, if you're wearing high heels, they get stuck, which is very funny. The TV broadcast, which is watched by a colossal number of people, Neil Gabler reckons 70 million Americans. The TV broadcast is a bit of a disaster. Ronald Reagan is one of the three presenters.

55:45Yeah. Well, Reagan introduces Disney when he makes that thing with which we opened this section. Yeah. Yeah. And now Walt Disney will step forward to read the dedication of Disneyland. So Ronald Reagan is very Disney in his appeal, isn't he? In his ethos. So Disney. He misses his line. He forgets his lines. It all goes horribly wrong. However, Walt is absolutely delighted with the day. Everybody says at the time, you know, he seems so happy. Well, happiness is the word, isn't it? Because in that opening speech, he says to all who come to this happy place, welcome. Yeah. And that's the essence of it for him.

56:22He wants people to be happy. The happiest place on earth. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And actually the press coverage, although some of the press said there were quite a few missed cues and things that went wrong, most of the press coverage was pretty admiring. And people said, this is an extraordinary place, an extraordinary achievement. And actually, if you look at the stats, the first week, 160 ,000 visitors by mid-August 1955. So it's been open now for probably a month. It's at half a million. By the end of September, one million. By its first anniversary, so it's been open 12 months, July 1956, four million.

56:58By the end of 1957, 10 million. And at that point, by the end of 1957, it's been open for 18 months. It is a bigger attraction than Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. It is already, after just 18 months, taken its place in the kind of the wonders of the United States, a place that everybody dreams of going. And it's fascinating, all those sites that you listed are parks, they're natural wonders. And of course, the essence of Disneyland is its complete artificiality. Exactly. So we'll get on to, just in the final minutes of the episode, its meaning. But just on Walt Disney himself, he never stopped.

57:39He spent day after day at the park. He had this special apartment built over the fire station. It was kind of pastiche of Gilded Age America, kind of lots of velvet, lots of lace. And he would stand there at the window looking out and people would see him and they'd say he often looked kind of visibly moved, even tearful, as he watched these crowds. And there's a lantern kept alight there to this day, isn't there? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're kind of a very Disney detail. He said to interviewers, you know, it's not finished, it will never be finished. Um, it's a project that, you know, it's a live breathing thing.

58:13He's always thinking of new, of gondolas and monorails and new rides. So of the iconic rides that are still there today, the Tom Sawyer Island that opened in 1956, the Matterhorn was 1959 and the Pirates of the Caribbean, which inspired the films. So that was the last ride that Disney designed and it opened in 1967, a year after his death. so he never got to ride on it Tom but we have we did didn't we and before the park had actually opened doesn't get more Walt Disney than that I don't excite people too much but there may be a piece of content arriving on YouTube that actually shows us riding the Paris the Caribbean ride so that would be fun for people to see now I don't want to tantalise people too much but if you look on YouTube tomorrow so Friday you will see a thrilling footage of me and Tom and a special guest riding Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.

59:13And wasn't that fun, Tom? Amazing. One of the great moments in your life, surely. It was all about happiness. It was. So by the end of the 50s, Disney's ambitions have got even greater. He's thinking about something even bigger, a city, not just a theme park, a city. And he gets his executives to buy 27 ,000 acres of land in Florida. And to put that into context, that is an area the size of Manchester, England, an area twice the size of Manhattan. America. Yeah, Manhattan, America. Just to clarify for people who may be geographically confused, for Australian listeners. And that is what becomes Disney World.

59:54So his plan for Disney World is, you know, he says, well, I suppose I'll have to have another amusement park. But really, my heart isn't in the amusement park. Yeah, because he's moved on now. He's done his amusement park, so now he wants to do his urban planning. He wants a utopian city for his workers, and it will be modelled. Once again, I'm happy to say Disney World, like Disneyland, is essentially British because it is modelled on the garden cities of the Edwardian planner, Sir Ebenezer Howard. So if you want to see an example of Disney World, merely go to Letchworth or Welling Garden City, which are the garden cities based on Howard's ideas because that's what Walt Disney was all about.

1:00:35The Epcot of the home counties. The Epcot of the home counties. So unfortunately for him, he died and then his vision was dialed down and we ended up being dialed down to one of the lands of Disney World, which is Epcot. It's such a shame, isn't it? And then Epcot now, basically it lingered because it was a massive kind of educational world's fair and nobody wanted to really go. They wanted to go on the rides. So now it does have rides. It has a Ratatouille ride, a Frozen ride, and a Guardians of the Galaxy ride. So that's much more exciting. Anyway, Disney World is much bigger, but there's always something very special about Disneyland.

1:01:08It has always fascinated postmodern theorists. Especially in Europe, isn't it? Yeah. So part of this, I think, is because of its eclecticism, but also because of the emphasis on fantasy and stuff. We kind of basically invent the idea of postmodernism, different architectural styles mingling together. It does. So Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose, the great Italian postmodernist theorist, he wrote at length about Pirates of the Caribbean ride, which we've been on, and the Haunted Mansion ride, which I think Tabby may have been on. And he said of Disneyland that it was the Sistine Chapel of America, an allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, a place of total passivity.

1:01:53Then you have Jean Baudrillard. Oh, brilliant. A French philosopher on The Rest is History. We love it. Pile in. Let's get Bojo on the show. He said Disneyland is the supreme example of hyper-reality. And the point of Disneyland, he said, basically, with its artifice and its fantasy, it's to trick us into thinking that the rest of America is real. So French. So Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real. When in fact, all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper real and of simulation. And it continues at great length.

1:02:29I'm not entirely persuaded by Baudrillard's argument. I think Los Angeles probably is real. And also I'm not persuaded that Disney visitors are passive, as we shall see. It's expressive of, I guess, something that's been characteristic of Europeans looking at Disney's films and then of his theme parks for ages, which is a kind of absolute fascination intermingled with a kind of snobbery as well. Yeah, a snobbish contempt. A snobbish contempt, which I think I certainly don't share myself. Well, you're a man of the people. Well, having been to Disney World as a punter, and as a parent and a punter, I have to say it was an extremely enjoyable holiday, and I heartily recommend it to people.

1:03:08Something that I denied my own children. Yeah, you did. What does that tell you? Hatred's Wall is so much more fun. What can I say? So just a couple of aspects of Disneyland that struck me on our recent trip. First of all is if you went as we did, having immersed yourself in the story of Walt Disney, in the biographies of him and so on, when you get there, it's very obvious how much this is based on one man's personal story and one man's personal genius. So as Neil Gabler points out in his biography, when you enter the park, you arrive in kind of Main Street, USA. And this is very obviously an idealized vision of Walt Disney's boyhood in small town, Marceline, Missouri.

1:03:51and you walk down the main street and you get to Sleeping Beauty's castle. And that's the kind of architectural embodiment of fantasy, the idealism, the ambition that's always drawn him on. And then at the castle, you have a choice of paths, different lands. So there's fantasy land, adventure land, frontier land, tomorrow land. And those are all in their different ways. Hollywood pop cultural genres of the 1940s and 1950s. the western the adventure story the fantasy the science fiction story and so on so i think that takes us to the next point which is that the park is very obviously as we've already mentioned a hollywood film set a lot of the attractions even the older attractions to a way that we don't really notice now are modeled on films of mid-century america so the western saloon is directly copied from a saloon in the Doris Day film, Calamity Jane.

1:04:47The Jungle Cruise that you can go on is modeled on the Humphrey Bogart film, The African Queen. And the point is, you're meant to feel like you are in a film. So that moment, the greatest moment in the history, the rest is history, when - Bob Iger got his staff to tell the stormtroopers to arrest Theo Young-Smith for loitering. And the stormtroopers told Theo off, and he looked really sheepish and guilty. Well, he was obviously running guns for the, whatever it is, the resistance. And they say something like to him, they say, don't you want to, do you want to get in trouble again? And Theo says very weakly, no.

1:05:28That was the best thing I've ever seen. The freedom fighter. But he lives to fight another day, to be fair. I guess the other thing just to emphasize is, you say it's like being in a film set. You cannot see outside the park. Once you're in the park, you are surrounded by sets. Total immersion. Yeah. The rides themselves are stories. This will surprise people who haven't been to Disneyland. The rides are not like the rides in normal parks, especially when you do the queue. You know, there's a whole series of kind of tableau. So the Rise of the Resistance, the Star Wars ride. Which we didn't do.

1:06:00But the Star Wars ride, for example, that we did, the Rise of the Resistance, you feel like you're in a story, right? I mean, I remember things saying to me afterwards, I've always wanted to be in Star Wars and now I am. That's the whole point of the show. The other interesting thing, just as in a film set, they're doing all kinds of tricks with the proportions. So on the main street, the shops on the bottom floor are nine-tenths of normal size. And then as you go up, they're eight-tenths, seven-tenths, and so on and so forth. Now, this was really deliberate. Walt said to his designers, I want it to feel a little bit like you're in a toy.

1:06:36You know, that you have, I want to heighten the sense of nostalgia because the past always feels smaller and quainter. He says at one point to his designers, he says, big build, I don't want big buildings, big buildings afford dictators. Big buildings make you feel small. I want people to feel empowered. And when I read that, I had a look at other buildings built at the same time. And as luck would have it, five days after Disneyland, one of the absolute emblematic buildings of the communist bloc in the Cold War was opened in Warsaw. This was a building called the Palace of Culture and Science.

1:07:14It kind of towered over Warsaw. People said it was Stalin's gift to the people of Poland. The people of Poland hated it. And it wasn't entirely dissimilar in ethos from Disneyland because it had a swimming pool. It had a cinema. It had theatres. It had a museum. It was meant to be a kind of palace of leisure. But the effect could not have been more different. So this building, this very Orwellian building, completely dominated the landscape and the sort of cityscape, and it completely dwarfed the individual. You felt intimidated and crushed by it. Disneyland never has that effect on you. No, and so confirming Walt's darkest suspicions of Bolsheviks, Dominic.

1:07:51Quite right. Well, you see, Walt, this is the other thing. Disneyland is nothing if not a heartfelt tribute to American patriotism. So there's the animatronic Abraham Lincoln and all that. The animatronic Abraham Lincoln. The ethos of Disneyland, I feel, is very Eisenhower era. It's the nostalgic small town conservatism on one hand and the sort of innocent faith in the possibilities of the future on the other. And it wears that kind of Eisenhower era Americanism so heavily. So if you go to Tivoli, we've both been to Tivoli, you can go to Tivoli and you can kind of forget you're in Denmark. I mean, I know there's Hans Christian Andersen, but in all other respects, you know, it could be in the Netherlands or in Sweden or Vauxhall.

1:08:36In Vauxhall, exactly. There is no way you could go to Disneyland in California and doubt that you're in an American creation. I mean, the American-ness is everywhere, almost every ride, even the ones with British themes, you know, reek of American-ness, American patriotism, and so on. So that's why P.L. Travers hated it when Walt took her there. And so to go back one more time to the Cold War era, I think in the smallness, in the individualism, in the American patriotism, it's very much a product of that time. But there's also the sense of order and harmony and reassurance that I think reflects the values of the day as well.

1:09:15So to compare it once again with Vauxhall, the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in the 18th and 19th centuries, the organizers tried to keep kind of disorder and the lower orders at bay by charging a shilling and later three shillings. But there was always a suspicion that kind of, you know, reality was breaking in. You know, there were darkened corners where people were drinking or they were sneaking off for erotic assignations. There was always the possibility of hedonism and unruliness. And that's true, I think, with a lot of parks, gaggles of teenagers who've been, you know, necking gin or something.

1:09:50Well, it's why, I suppose, when Euro Disney opens, there's no alcohol on sale because that has to be guarded against. Right. The wholesomeness. Yeah. I mean, Coney Island, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, those are places where you go and you have fun and there's always a suspicion that naughtiness may ensue. Naughtiness may ensue. That's never going to happen at Disneyland. So the future American ambassador to Britain, Nixon's ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, who was a publisher, when he went to Disneyland, he said, if there's one word that sums it up, that word is wholesomeness. And he's not wrong.

1:10:27So for example, the cleanliness is a huge part of Disneyland's ethos. Walt Disney used to go around picking up litter himself. And actually, when we were there, Tom, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, bob iger the head of disney stopping reaching into the kind of gutter or something and picking up you know a bit of litter and putting it in the bin you know this sort of almost as an instinctive kind of reflex and i think what that reflects is that there is an ethos of total order nothing unexpected can ever happen at disneyland you know people always say if you're ever going to lose your child lose lose your child at disneyland because there's absolutely no way that anything bad can happen and you know your child will be returned to you and that of course is what More highbrow critics always dislike it because highbrow critics tend to like disorder.

1:11:16You know, they kind of privilege unruliness and hedonism and all those kinds of things. And they find Disneyland too managed and too perfect. But of course, that's what ordinary punters like about it. There's a collection of essays by somebody called Carol Ann Marling, and she talks about the Disney parks. She says it's the architecture of reassurance. You know, there's no writh angles. It's all loops. It's all kind of curves. Like Mickey's ears. Yeah, like Mickey's ears. Exactly. It all feels kind of comforting. It feels like there is a gentle sort of paternalistic order that is governing everything.

1:11:53And some people find that cloying and off-putting. But frankly, if you go there with an eight-year-old or something, you absolutely crave. Maybe you don't because you take them to Adrian's Wall where they look miserable in the rain. But I loved going to Disney World as a parent because I thought it was the one place where I could kind of switch off and know that nothing would ever possibly go wrong. Well, it is again, that idea of total control also requires banishment of things that might threaten that control. So there's the slogan, isn't there? When you enter Disneyland, you will find yourself in the land of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.

1:12:27Nothing of the present exists in Disneyland. And so you're escaping the news, you're escaping the chaos of the headlines and all of that. And I assume that that is why it's been a kind of perennial theme of science fiction since Disneyland opened to imagine what would happen if a theme park goes wrong. So in 1973, the novelist Michael Crichton wrote a script for a film called Westworld, which was set in a Western theme park. And you have animatronic gunslingers, and one of them is played by Yul Brynner and it all goes wrong and the counsellingers start shooting the guests. And then of course in 1990 Michael Crichton published another book on a similar theme called Jurassic Park which was then made into the film by Steven Spielberg.

1:13:17And I have to say we got taken by Bob Iger behind the scenes at Disney World which I thought in a way was the kind of the biggest privilege I felt going there because you get to see what normal visitors don't see. and I have to say that walking behind you know the Star Wars ride or whatever down these gantries and up ladders and things the whole time I was waiting for a velociraptor to leap out of a tree and attack us yeah surely you're waiting for that the whole time though aren't you whether you're at Disneyland or not I think it felt very Jurassic Park behind the scenes yeah but the difference is that you know that's not going to happen at Disneyland because it's basically the ultimate safe space isn't it correct um now some people i think will find that a hellish prospect frankly i think those people have got no souls because i love disneyland and i i i say that you know even before i'd gone with bob and actually i think this is the most enduring thing that disney created even more than the films because i know the films are great snow white is a great film a landmark in hollywood filmmaking but not that many people watch those films today they're period pieces they are but they do establish the the kind of the animated tradition which is you know frozen and all of that i don't disagree with you at all but millions of people visit the parks as living kind of breathing things probably billions of people have children who watch films with disney films on video and they have been enormously influential architecturally so as early as 1963 at a conference at Harvard, a developer called James Rouse, who was actually the father of the modern shopping mall, he addressed his audience who were architects and critics.

1:14:59He said to them, you know, you may be shocked by this, but my view is that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland. In its respect for people, in its functioning for people, Disneyland has more to teach modern planners than any other single piece of physical development in this country. Well, just to reiterate, it has no cars. I mean, I think that's absolutely crucial to it. Yeah. It's what American tourists to Europe like when they go to Lucca or Florence or whatever. Yeah, that's right. And it's also what they like when they go to Disneyland. Yeah. That you do actually have to walk.

1:15:31I'm amazed American urban planners don't kind of factor that in a little bit more. Well, I think it's because it's on a human scale. Yeah. I'll give the last word to a guy called Robert Venturi. So he's a massively influential postmodern architect. And he designed the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. in London. He was a massive fan of Disney's parks. And he argued that Disney's parks were the ultimate expression of the kind of city on a hill, American utopian impulse. And he said, the best thing about Disney's parks was that they have come nearer to what people really want than anything that architects have ever given them.

1:16:08Well, on that laudatory tone, thank you Dominic that was fantastic and coming out tomorrow as you mentioned Dominic an extra special treat for our beloved listeners that may well feature Dominic going on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride I don't know because I haven't actually seen the film yet but it'll be very very good very entertaining I think thank you so much next week we have one additional Disney bonus we will be going back to the great films we'll be placing them in the context of the age that produced them um so that is snow white through to bambi um so i hope you enjoy that and next week we are going back in time to the young elizabeth the girl who grew up to become elizabeth the first uh her adventures her scrapes with danger before she became queen so we will see you then i hope but for now bye-bye bye-bye

1:17:14Hi there, it's David Aldashogar from Journey Through Time, and here's that extract from our gunpowder plot series that I mentioned earlier. The person who's not rejoicing is Guy Fawkes in The Tower. King James himself came to The Tower to question Fawkes. That's quite an astonishing fact, that Fawkes and the King looked into each other's eyes at that moment. And of course, interrogations at this time, I mean, we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned, but interrogations are brutal, violent events. Yeah, and it's going to get much, much more violent. Fawkes stands up to the king in a way that actually even impresses the king.

1:17:54He's open that they plan to blow up parliament. He said that the aim had been to blow King James and the other Scots back to their Scottish mountains. He says that to the king. It takes guts. but it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the person you've just tried to murder and your fate is in his hands. Well I think Fawkes knows what's going to happen. I mean the king was impressed by his obstinacy that he would not reveal the names of his co-conspirators that he was willing to insult the king to his face and you have to say about Guy Fawkes a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years my god he had guts.

1:18:28I mean he is a bad man. He is a religious fanatic. He's not somebody I admire, but my God, he was brave. You can be brave and wrong. You can be brave and involved in things that are evil at the same time. And he was all of those things. But this willingness to stand up to the king, this is before the torture. If you want to hear more about gunpowder, treason, and plot, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.