Subsonic Radio

At the Disneyland opening, in July, 1955, a year after the first orange tree was uprooted, Walt said, “Disneyland will never be com-pleted. It will grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” It seemed, at the time, a pleasant sentiment, but few took it literally. Walt did, and that is why Disneyland remains unique; he is forever enlarging it (painting, pages 180-82). Now he is building an old New Orleans Square, complete with a bayou boat ride.

Disneyland, on a fall day, is full of warmth and zest. I paid my respects to the giant portrait of Mickey Mouse, in living flowers, that adorns the slanting earth embankment at the park’s main entrance.

I stepped into the Town Square—and right into Walt Disney’s childhood: The Square with its red-brick Victorian elegances is a distillation of Walt’s early memories of Chicago and Marceline and Kansas City shortly after the turn of the century.

A gaily cockaded band was tootling. A horsecar rolled along, the horse’s rubber shoes making muffled thumps; a double-decked bus stood at the curb; and a balloon seller, hidden behind a great cluster of his wares, looked like a gigantic chrysanthemum. Over a loud-speaker from the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad station came the measured voice of the train announcer:

“… now leaving for Adventureland, Fron-tierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland— all aboarrrd!”

Main Street, U. S. A., sets the tone and pace of Disneyland: It is a place for strolling (page 187). People stop to peer into the windows of the apothecary shop and the old-time general store, and to look over the shoulder of a sidewalk artist as he sketches a portrait. Most of the visitors are grownups. As the park statistics prove, adult guests outnumber children three and a half to one.

Visitors Fooled by Live Swans

At the end of Main Street, faraway jungle noises made me turn to the left and enter Adventureland.

I took the jungle river cruise (pages 192-3) aboard the sturdy river boat Ganges Gal, which chugged past menacing crocodiles, a ruined temple, and a group of bathing elephants. Gorillas and a tremendous African elephant roared from the tropical vegetation which choked the banks of the stream.

There was some discussion among the passengers about the animals. Were they real? (They were, of course, animated.) But in Disneyland, it is sometimes hard to know where fantasy ends and reality begins. A little later, I watched a pair of ladies peer intently at the live swans sailing on the moat of Sleeping Beauty Castle.

“They are not real,” one lady finally said with authority.

I met Bill Evans and Ray Miller, landscape architects for the park, and complimented them on the effects they have created along the jungle stream. They have made Disneyland a must for visiting horticulturists. The park has close to 700 species of plants. It takes at least 30 gardeners to keep them in trim.

We wandered to the base of the Swiss Family Tree House, which opened last fall. I asked what kind of tree it was.

“It was modeled after the ban-van tree, Ficus benghalensis” said Ray Miller, “but we call it Disneyodendron eximius, which means an out-of-the-ordinary Disney tree.”

The 70-foot tree is a copy of the Swiss Family Robinson’s tropic domicile, complete with furniture salvaged from their ship.

I took a short cut through Frontierland (pages 183-5) just in time to be caught in the middle of a running gun fight between a rootin’-tootin’ sheriff and a Western bad man. Happily, they were using blank cartridges, or the slaughter would have been awesome.

The Mark Twain, the stately white river packet, was just leaving her dock for a cruise on the Rivers of America. Across the water, I saw some energetic boys romping on Tom Sawyer Island, while others helped Indians paddle war canoes or rode the high-sided keel boats, the ones used in Disney’s Davy Crockett movie and television series.

In Fantasyland (pages’188-9) I found myself face to face with larger-than-life-size impersonations of famous Disney characters: the Big Bad Wolf, one of the Three Little Pigs, Minnie Mouse (page 202). The Mad Hatter, his rubber jowls quivering, was trapped in a corner. He was having a hard time defending himself against a mob of children.

The Most Marvelous Submarine

In Tomorrowland, I boarded the submarine Skipjack, one of eight submersibles in the Disney fleet. It took me on one of the incredible journeys of the world, though it was made in a mere six million gallons of water rather than an ocean.

The sub “went under” in a swirl of bubbles and sailed serenely (guided by sonar, the skipper said) through treacherous coral reefs ablaze with animated tropical fish. Giant turtles dined on sea grass. Barracudas, sharks, and a dangerous moray eel loomed from the shadows. In a plunge to the abyss, we saw phosphorescent creatures of the deep.

We passed through the hull of a sunken ship and glimpsed chests filled with gleaming treasure. And, as the skipper explained that we could not expect to see mermaids since they were only figments of imagination, we nosed impolitely into a mermaids’ boudoir (opposite).

The sub visited the lost continent of Atlantis, went under the polar ice cap, and finally passed what may be the largest sea serpent in the world. Certainly the largest cross-eyed sea serpent.

When I talked with Joe Fowler, the retired admiral who is vice president for Disneyland operations, he said his former Navy colleagues are delighted with the submarines. One, a sub skipper, said, “That’s the only time I’ve ever been on a sub and could see where I was going.”

“We were apprehensive that some guests might suffer from claustrophobia in the subs,” Fowler told me. “But in my Navy experience, I had learned that few peo-pie suffer from claustrophobia if you have moving air and something to see. That’s why there’s an air jet in front of every porthole.”

How to Build a Mountain

Fowler has one besetting problem: “Almost everything we undertake in the park has never been done before,” he told me.

He cited the Matterhorn as an example (pages 194-5). The 146-foot-high mountain, which is one hundredth the height of the real Matterhorn, contains 500 tons of structural steel, and almost no two pieces are the same length, size, or weight.

The Disney Matterhorn is a close copy of the real mountain. Disney designers studied hundreds of pictures of the rugged peak, pictures taken during the filming of Third Man on the Mountain. Like the original, it also has its mountain climbers, athletes in alpine attire who scale and rappel it eight times daily.

Whereas the real Matterhorn is extremely solid, the Disneyland version is hollow and houses an exciting bobsled ride.

I rode one of the bobsleds and was lifted high inside the mountain. Then my bobsled dipped over a sharp edge and I was on my own—moving around curves, through icy grottos, past waterfalls, and under the Skyway’s ski-lift buckets, which take visitors through the mountain for a view of the ice caves. Finally my bobsled dashed into a tumbling mountain stream, which braked it, and the ride was over.

One of the greatest attractions

is the Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System which loops in and out of the park (page 197). Disney and Alweg engineers collaborated in the design, and the trains were built at the Disney studio. The monorail is the first of its type—a “piggy-back” design in which the cars are locked to the track.

I rode the monorail from the Disneyland Hotel to the park several times. A uniformed girl handed me aboard the long silver train. It started gently, smoothly. We glided over the magic kingdom at 20 miles an hour, silently surveying the wonders below like some satellite from space. Most passengers, myself included, leave the monorail convinced it is the answer for rapid transit of the future.

I wandered backstage at Disneyland to visit Bud Washo, the head of the staff shop. There I got a glimpse of the Disney future, though its subject matter in this case was the dim past.

At WED Enterprises in Glendale, where all the design work for Disneyland is done, I had watched Blaine Gibson modeling a series of small-scale dinosaurs, cave men, and other prehistoric creatures. Now Bud Washo took me into a barnlike room where Gibson’s dinosaurs were being re-created—life-size. An enraged Tyrannosaurus rex with a two-foot mouthful of six-inch teeth is something to stand beside—even if it is just clay.

Once the clay figures are completed, plaster molds are made, and then the carefully detailed skin is cast from 3/s-inch Duraflex, which Washo described as a “hot-melt vinyl reformulated for strength.”

“Hardly anything affects it,” Washo said.

“It can take weather, most oils, or gases. It’s enormously flexible and durable.”

When the casts are finished, the figures are trucked carefully to the studio machine shop, where their animation machinery is installed (page 203).

Dinosaur Will Go to World’s Fair

I pointed to a sail-backed dinosaur which was being fitted into its skin and asked: “What will that one do?”

“It will be able to swish its tail from side to side, open its mouth, flex up and down like a lizard, and the sail will sway,” Washo said matter-of-factly.

“Where will the dinosaurs and cave men be used?” I asked.

“They’re for the Ford Motor exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York,” Bud said.

Plastic Birds Come to Life

One day after lunch, Walt grabbed my arm. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

We walked in the bright sunshine between the stages on the movie studio lot and turned into the machine shop. Four elephants without skins sat in a row, gravely nodding their heads. On a bench lay what looked very much like a human hand, closing and opening silently. Farther down, a prehistoric man waved his arm; someone had incongruously placed a handkerchief in his hand.

On the machinists’ benches stood a variety of plastic birds, opening and closing their beaks, turning their heads, and flipping their tails.

Walt stopped to talk to a machinist. I looked at one of the birds. Without its feathers, the creature was a mass of wiring and air tubes. As I watched, this unearthly bird puffed out its chest and began to sing.

A machinist told me that every bird contains five air lines and four sets of wires, plus a tiny loud-speaker.

“This is the latest thing we’ve done with Audio-Animatronics,” Walt said. “We are using the new types of valves and controls developed for rockets. That way we can get extremely subtle motions.”

“About that word,” I said, “Audio-Animatronics.”

“It’s just animation with sound, run by electronics,” he smiled. “Audio-Animatronics. It’s an extension of animated drawings.

“We take an inanimate object and make it move. Everything is programmed on tape: the birds’ movements, lighting effects, and sounds. We turn on the tape and the birds do their stuff. At the end, the tape automatically rewinds itself and starts all over again. With tape we could present a program of an hour and six minutes without repeating anything.”

“Is anyone else doing this kind of thing?”

“I don’t know anyone crazy enough,” Walt laughed.

Disney Birds Sing Popular Songs

Several weeks later, Walt invited me to the studio for a showing of the completed mock-up for the Enchanted Tiki Room, scheduled to open in the park this summer.

Now all the birds had been bedecked in colorful feathers, and were individually lighted. Four macaws opened the show with a line of chatter and then swung into a lively calypso number, followed by Offenbach’s “Barcarole.” A fountain jetted in time to the music under colored lights.

The fountain sent up a particularly high jet and, as it fell back into the bowl, a Bird-Mobile slowly descended from the ceiling, bearing yellow and white cockatoos. They broke loose with

“Let’s All Sing Like the Birdies Sing,” and brought down the house.

There was much more: songs sung by orchids and bird-of-paradise flowers; a rain storm; chants by tikis —carvings representing various native gods—accompanied by animated drummers. It is a tremendous show—the climax of more than two years’ work at a cost of approximately a million dollars.

Abraham Lincoln Returns to Life

I went out into the street again with Walt and Wathel Rogers, who supervised the Enchanted Tiki Room. We entered another building and I got a shock; I almost bumped smack into Abraham Lincoln!

The illusion was alarming. The tall, lonely man sits in a chair much as in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. But this is no cold stone figure; this Lincoln is man-size—and so realistic it seems made of flesh and blood (pages 206-07).

Wathel Rogers made adjustments at an electronic console, and Lincoln’s eyes ranged the room. His tongue moved as if to moisten his lips and he cleared his throat. Then with a slight frown, he clasped the arms of his chair, stood up, and began to talk in measured tones.

“What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?” he asked.

And then he answered: “Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us….”

To get an idea of the tremendous animation job this is, try it yourself. Sit in an armchair and pull yourself to your feet, observing how many muscles are called into play and the subtle balance required.

The Lincoln skin is the same Du-raflex that has worked so well on the other Audio-Animatronic figures.

“Duraflex has a consistency much like human skin,” Rogers said. “It flexes as well as compresses. Rubber, for example, will flex, but won’t compress correctly for our needs.”

Rogers described the mechanics: 16 air lines to the Lincoln head, 10 air lines to the hands and wrists, 14 hydraulic lines to control the body, and two pairs of wires for every line. Rogers ran the Lincoln face through some of its 15 expressions. Lincoln smiled at me (first on one side of his face, then the other). He raised each eyebrow quizzically, one at a time, then, fixing me with a glance, frowned and chilled my marrow. And just to show he wasn’t really angry, he ended by giving me a genial wink.

“Lincoln is part of a Disneyland project called ‘One Nation Under God;” Wathel Rogers explained. “It will start with a Circa-rama presentation of great moments in constitutional crises.

“Circarama is a special motion-picture technique Walt developed for Disneyland and the Brussels World’s Fair. The Bell Telephone Circarama now at Disneyland tells the story of the great sights of America. It has a 360-degree screen. The audience is surrounded by the continuous action, as if they were moving with the camera and able to see in all directions.

“The Circarama for the ‘One Nation Under God’ showing will have a 200-degree screen. After the Circarama showing, a curtain will close, then open again to reveal the Hall of Presidents. The visitor will see all the Chief Executives modeled life-size. He’ll think it’s a waxworks—until Lincoln stands up and begins to talk.”

Audio-Animatronic figures are now being planned for Disneyland’s French Quarter square in old New Orleans. They will also add chilling realism to the Haunted Mansion now under construction in Frontierland. (Visitors who ask about the mansion are told, “Walt’s out capturing ghosts for it now.”)

Never Do the Same Thing Twice

What next? Walt enjoys the past but he lives for the future.

“The fun is in always building something,”

he told me. “After it’s built, you play with it a little and then you’re through. You see, we never do the same thing twice around here. We’re always opening up new doors.”

I asked him a doleful question, “What happens when there is no more Walt Disney?”

“I think about that,” he said. “Every day I’m throwing more responsibility to other men. Every day I’m trying to organize them more strongly.

“But I’ll probably outlive them all,” he grinned. “I’m 61. I’ve got everything I started out with except my tonsils, and that’s above average. I plan to be around for a while.”