It’s commonly accepted that Disneyland was the first “true” theme park. But it wasn’t, in fact, the first such park to have been dreamed up by its founder.
The idea of building an amusement park-style attraction where families could enjoy themselves together had been interesting Walt Disney for decades before Disneyland finally opened its gates in 1955. And prior to opting to build his first park in Anaheim, Walt had been looking very seriously at a smaller, more intimate park to be based at Disney’s Burbank animation studios.
Although it was ultimately never built, Mickey Mouse Park still exerted a huge influence on the design of Disneyland, and on the many theme parks that have since tried to emulate its success.
This is the story of the lost theme park designed by Walt Disney himself…
In the doldrums
1946 was a good year to be in the business of making movies.
It was a golden period for the motion picture industry. The Second World War had brought hardship, suffering and death to millions of people across the globe, but it was now in the past. Seeking a break from the horrors of war, the distressed public on the home front in America and Britain had flocked to theaters in droves, enjoying a heady mix of propaganda and escapism. Now that the war was over, the boom in cinema attendance showed no sign of abating. In 1946, 19 pictures made $4 million or more at the US box office. Prior to that, only 25 pictures in Hollywood history had achieved that milestone.
Unfortunately for Walt Disney, it seemed that he hadn’t been invited to the party.
The pre-war years had seen him at the height of his creative powers. The studio that Walt had founded with his brother Roy had produced the first animated short to boast synchronized sound, as well as the first to benefit from the use of the innovative Technicolor process. In 1937, it released its first feature-length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Despite running massively over-budget, the film raked in a then-enormous $7.8 million worldwide during its initial theatrical run. It also received a rapturous critical reception, and it seemed that Disney could do no wrong.
Then came the war. The luxurious studio complex that Disney had opened in Burbank, California in 1940 was partially occupied by the military. The company’s animators – those that had not left to fight America’s enemies – were put to work on producing training and propaganda films for the US government. Overseas markets, which generated a large portion of Disney’s profits, were suddenly out of reach. The money that the studio received from the government barely covered its costs, and there was no Snow White in the pipeline to act as a financial saviour.
The end of the war brought no respite. The public seemed to have fallen out of love with Disney’s product, and competitors such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros. had successfully moved into the animation field that it had dominated for decades. By the end of 1946, the company owed $4.3 million to the Bank of America. To save it from complete collapse, it secured a $1 million loan from distributor RKO and announced plans to lay off 400 of its 1,000 employees. Later, Roy would recall: “After the war was over, we were like a bear coming out of hibernation. We were skinny and gaunt and we had no fat on our bones. Those were lost years for us.”
The perilous financial situation placed a huge strain on Walt. Even worse than this, though, was the lack of a great creative challenge. For a man who thrived on “one-upping” himself, being forced to churn out one cartoon short after another simply to survive was torturous. Movies such as Song of the South, which combined live action with animation in order to reduce costs, did not provide the same outlet for his imagination as earlier classics such as Bambi and Fantasia.
At the time, few could have predicted the path that Walt would take to revive both his company and his own flagging spirits. In hindsight, it seems an obvious route for him to have taken. Disney’s movies had always been about wish fulfilment – presenting an illusion of a world that was devoid of the problems that plague people in everyday life. The logical next step was to take that concept and translate it into physical reality. At the cinema, children and adults alike could gaze upon the enchanted forest of Snow White or the fantasy circus of Dumbo. Why, then, shouldn’t Walt build a version that they could step into for real?
A new challenge
Pinpointing exactly when Walt Disney decided to build an amusement park is an impossible task. Indeed, there does not seem to have been a single, isolated epiphany that led to his foray into an industry that, at the time, was largely unrelated to Hollywood. Instead, it appears to have been the result of his interest in three separate (but loosely intertwined) hobbies outside of his “day job” as the head of an animation studio. Over a period of more than a decade, these gradually coalesced into one of the most ambitious and risky projects that Walt tackled during a lifetime filled with such undertakings.
The first of these interests was a fascination with trains that stemmed from Walt’s childhood. In 1906, at the age of five, he had moved with his family from the bustling city of Chicago to tiny Marceline in Missouri. Close to the family farm ran the tracks of the Santa Fe railroad, and Walt would put his ear to the rail to listen out for approaching trains. Often, the engineer on these trains would be his uncle, Mike Martin, who would bring a bag of striped candy with him for the Disney children.
With the farm struggling, the family remained in Marceline for only a few years, moving to Kansas City in 1910. Walt’s father, Elias, bought a newspaper distributorship and Walt was kept busy as a delivery boy. His love of trains remained, however, and in 1917 his older brother Roy lent him the $15 bond that he required to take a job as a news butcher for the Santa Fe. He lost Roy’s money, but enjoyed the romance of travelling along sprawling lines to cities in a half-dozen states.
In 1931, the pressures of running the studio led to Walt having a nervous breakdown. He returned to work after a vacation, but was ordered by doctors to take up a hobby and get some exercise. He settled on the dangerous sport of polo, roping in others from the studio to join him. However, he suffered a serious injury to his back following a fall in 1938, forcing him to give up the sport. Walt needed a new hobby to distract him from his day-to-day stresses. Once again, trains would become a focus in his life.
In 1945, Ward Kimball – one of Disney’s most valued animators and directors – invited his boss to a party at his house in San Gabriel, a suburb of Los Angeles. To Walt’s astonishment, he found that Kimball had a narrow-gauge railway running around his backyard, which he had dubbed the Grizzly Flats Railroad. It was equipped with its own steam locomotive, the Emma Nevada, and Kimball persuaded Walt to take a turn at running it. The experience made a huge impression on him.
Two years later, Walt purchased an electric train set for himself and set it up a room adjoining his office. With the help of Roger Broggie from the studio’s machine shop, he soon expanded the layout to one that was big enough to “fill half a two car-garage”, according to Neil Gabler’s outstanding biography. Ever the entertainer, Walt would often insist on demonstrating the train set to visitors to his office.
Walt received treatment for his polo injury from Hazel George, the studio nurse. To help him relax, she suggested in 1948 that Walt should take a trip to the Chicago Railroad Fair. Bringing Ward Kimball with him, Walt attended the event with more than 100,000 other railway fanatics. The pair explored a series of themed villages, each representing a different tourist destination. They were even able to run some of the steam locomotives themselves. On his return home, Walt declared to his wife Lillian, “That was the most fun I ever had in my life.”
Jealous of his friend’s backyard railroad, Walt was determined to build one of his own. Having convinced Lillian to move home in 1949, he acquired a 5-acre plot on Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, a residential neighbourhood close to Beverly Hills. Work soon began on the Carolwood-Pacific Railroad, which ran for a half-mile around the property. Walt named the engine the Lilly Belle to help placate his wife, who was less than enthusiastic about the project.
A world in miniature
Miniature trains were not the only small-scale replicas of real-world objects that captured Walt’s imagination. At the same time he was collecting new elements for his office railroad, he was also purchasing all manner of other miniatures, including furniture, coaches, farm machinery and figurines.
This went beyond a hobby – Walt’s aim was to create an entire turn-of-the-century village, inspired by his former home town of Marceline. This could then be displayed in large cases all over the country, as part of an exhibit known as “Disneylandia”. In the pursuit of this plan, Walt moved layout artist Ken Anderson onto his personal payroll and set him up in a private office. “I want you to draw 24 scenes of life in an old Western town,” he instructed Anderson. “Then I’ll carve the figures and make the scenes in miniature.” Anderson recalls in Gabler’s book that Walt would often bring in a “whole sack full” of items after disappearing for days at a time.
The first scene that Walt constructed was based on a set from So Dear to My Heart, and was dubbed Granny Kincaid’s cabin. It featured recreations of a spinning wheel, a guitar, a washbowl and pitcher and numerous other household items. Walt took a hands-on approach, creating the chairs by bending wood in his family’s pressure cooker. A narration was recorded by Beulah Bondi, who played Granny in the movie.
As Walt’s ambitions for the project grew, he realised that Anderson’s scenes – which included a blacksmith reading a newspaper, a general store and a group of gossiping women – were too complex for him to produce on his own. He recruited a sculptor named Christodoro to help. He also recognised that, without movement, the scenes would be dull to engage an audience.
In 1949, Walt bought a mechanical, caged bird during a visit to New Orleans. The bird was capable of moving its tail and beak, and also tweeted out a song. Impressed, Walt ordered technician Wathel Rogers to “take this apart and find out how it works.” After dismantling the bird, Rogers found that its mechanisms consisted of clockworks and a double bellows.
Having completed the cabin, Walt set to work on a second, more ambitious scene – one that would incorporate the learning from the dissection of the bird. This one would be set in a frontier music hall, complete with an entertainer performing a dance. He hired dancer Buddy Ebsen to perform on camera, capturing his movements on 35mm film to enabling Roger Broggie and his technical team to analyse them in detail. Walt’s challenge to the machine shop crew was to animate a nine-inch figure created by Christodoro with the same movements. They achieved this using a system of cables and cams.
Although Walt initiated work on a second moving model, this time of a miniature barbershop quarter that could sing Sweet Adeline, it became clear that his idea for a traveling exhibit would never turn a profit. The Granny Kincaid scene was unveiled at the Festival of California Living at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles in November 1952, but by this stage Walt had bigger ideas to occupy his time.
“It’s going to be clean!”
Decades later, the influence of Walt’s loves of trains and miniatures on the creation of Disney’s theme park empire is clear for all to see. At the time, however, few may have guessed where they would lead. The third hobby that played a role in the development of his vision should (and indeed did, in some cases) have tipped off those around him as to his intentions. Quite simply, Walt Disney was enthralled by amusement parks.
As a child growing up in Kansas City, Walt had frequently visited Electric Park, which was located just 15 blocks from the family home. He continued these visits in adulthood. On one visit in 1920 with Rudy Ising, an employee of his fledgling Laugh-O-Gram animation studio, he reputedly declared: “One of these days I’m going to build an amusement park.” He then added: “And it’s going to be clean!” At the time, amusement parks were renowned for being dirty, unkempt places staffed by surly employees.
After he became a father, Walt regularly took his daughters, Diane and Sharon, to Griffith Park in Los Angeles on Saturdays. In a 1963 interview, he recalled: “I’d take them to the merry-go-round, sit on a bench, you know, eating peanuts. I felt there should be something built where the parents and the children could have fun together.”
At the grand premiere for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Walt had a dwarfs’ cottage erected outside the Carthay Circle Theater. Animator Wilfried Jackson recalls that, impressed by the reaction to the cottage, Walt broached the idea of building an amusement park.
By this stage, Walt was frequently receiving letters from fans of his productions asking to come and visit the Disney studio. Often, they would ask to “meet” characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck themselves. Other studios, including Universal Pictures, offered tours of their facilities, and Walt considered taking a similar approach. However, Disney’s focus on animation would be a problem – he did not believe that watching “a bunch of guys bending over drawings” would appeal.
Flush with the success of Snow White, Disney concocted plans to build a new studio on a 51-acre plot in Burbank. Even before the studio opened, Walt hit upon the idea of building an amusement park on part of the property to satisfy the urges of those wishing to visit the Disney studios. In 1939 – prior to the opening of the Burbank studios – he summoned brothers Bob and Bill Jones from Disney’s Character Model Department to his office, and asked them to come up with some initial ideas for a park to be located on a small plot on the studio site.
The pair toured amusement parks in the area, and visited Walt to present their initial ideas six weeks later. Their proposed park was designed to meet his desire to offer something for the whole family, in a clean, wholesome environment. It would consist of a Pinocchio-inspired Bavarian village, and would host attractions include a traditional merry-go-round and a train ride around the perimeter of the park. The highlight would be a dark ride through the mine from Snow White, complete with animated characters.
The outbreak of the war in Europe and the resulting pressures on the Disney studio meant that Walt’s amusement park dream was put on hold. However, it continued to gestate in his mind. On a 1940 visit to New York with director Ben Sharpsteen, he discussed plans to install a small park across the street from the studio, between Riverside Drive and the Los Angeles River. Later, animator John Hench would spot Walt pacing around the parking lot in the new studio, seemingly measuring out the boundaries of the park.
Some accounts of Walt Disney’s life portray him as dreamer, only able to achieve to his great feats thanks to the practical, financially-savvy brain of the less creative Roy. While it is true that Roy played a vital role in supporting his younger sibling’s plans, Walt was anything but scatter-brained. He researched and planned his various projects in meticulous detail, and the amusement park was no exception. Walt himself visited dozens of amusement parks, including those in Coney Island in New York and Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. He was not a passive visitor, grilling the operators, staff and even visitors with questions during every visit. As he began to form a team to develop the amusement park, he tasked its members with doing the same, aiming to learn about every aspect of the parks’ operations.
While he was toying with miniatures – a relatively low-cost, low-risk way of testing his concepts for a visitor attraction – Walt was actively plotting the installation of a narrow-gauge railway at the studio. Prior to his departure for the Chicago Railroad Fair in August 1948, he had already tasked fellow enthusiast Casey Jones with finding a locomotive for the railway, which would wind its way around a “village”.
The trip to the Railroad Fair was the catalyst for moving the project forward. The fair itself, with its collection of trains, themed areas and costumed staff, provided inspiration enough. Walt and Kimball explored a replica of New Orleans’ French Quarter, a generic national park (complete with a geyser that erupted every 15 minutes) and an Indian Village. The president of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, Lenox Lohr, even allowed them backstage during the spectacular Wheels a Rolling pageant, offering them the chance to run famous locomotives like the Lafayette, the John Bull and the Tom Thumb.
However, it was a side trip to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan that really set Walt’s mind racing. Adjacent to the museum sat Greenfield Village, which hosted a collection of historical buildings that had been moved and reconstructed on the site. Ford’s collection included Thomas Edison’s laboratory and the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. There were also rides, including a 1913 Dentzel merry-go-round and a stern-wheeler riverboat. To travel around the property, visitors could board a working steam train.
Greenfield Village was exactly the type of attraction that Walt envisioned setting up at the studios. In itself, visiting a car manufacturing plant might be relatively uninteresting. But the museum and village gave guests something unique and entertaining to do. On top of that, it was clean, well-maintained and manned by friendly staff. It validated Walt’s concept for an amusement park to sit alongside his animation studios. Kimball recalled that Walt talked about the proposed park constantly during the trip.
Just days after arriving home, on August 31, Walt dictated a memo to production designer Dick Kelsey in which he outlined his vision for the park, which would be situated on an 11-acre triangle of land on Riverside Drive. At this early stage, it was to be known as Mickey Mouse Park. In addition to the train, Walt set out to acquire other attractions, sending the head of Disney’s foreign operations, Jack Cutting, to scout for merry-go-rounds in Europe.
By October 1948, the plans were on hold. Walt wrote to a Santa Fe executive with whom he had discussed the park at the fair, saying: “To tell the truth, I have been so involved in production matters since I got back that I haven’t given any further thought to my project.”
It wasn’t until summer 1951 that another excursion provided the impetus to get the project back into development. Walt toured Europe with Lillian, and visited the famous Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. He was impressed by the cleanliness of the park, the beauty of the surroundings, the quality of dining on offer and the pleasant disposition of the employees. It was a world away from what he had experienced at Coney Island. “Now this is what an amusement place should be,” he declared to his wife.
Walt asked Harper Goff, an art director at the studio and fellow railway fanatic, to produce sketches of the park. These were expanded upon with drawings by architect John Cowles, and subsequently by further sketches from animator Don DaGradi. It is from these drawings and sketches, which were ultimately presented to the Burbank Parks and Recreation Board, that we can get an impression of the experience that would have been on offer to guests at Mickey Mouse Park.
Mickey Mouse Park
Location: Burbank, California
Planned in: Between late 1930s and early 1950s
Theme: Small-town America in the early 20th century
Size: 8 acres
Lands: Town Square / Main Street, Western Village, Farm, Carnival
Attractions:
- Steam train
- Horse-drawn streetcar
- Stern-wheeler riverboat
- Horse-drawn surreys and buckboards
- Stagecoach
- Donkey pack train
- Carnival rides
- Canal boat ride
- Space ship replica
- Submarine ride
Mickey Mouse Park was designed to be a small, family-friendly park that would differ significantly from typical amusement parks of the era. Instead of concrete and high-speed roller coasters, it would offer grassy areas, picnic tables, water features and gentle rides that could be enjoyed by young and old guests alike.
The central area of the park would be a turn-of-the-century village that was clearly modelled on Marceline. This would be built around a village green, with a railroad station at one end and the Town Hall at the other. The village green would host benches, a bandstand, a drinking fountain, trees and shrubs. Walt described it as “a place for people to sit and rest; mothers and grandmothers can watch over small children at play.” It would be “relaxing, cool and inviting”.
The railroad station would not just be for show: instead, it would be the embarkation point for a journey on a working steam train on a narrow-gauge track that would circle much of the park. The Town Hall would double as an administration building – Walt described it as “the headquarters of the entire project”.
Located between the railroad station and Town Hall and surrounding the village green would be a fire station, a police station and a selection of shops. All of these would be put to practical use, rather than being simply for show. The fire station, for example, would contain “practical fire apparatus, scaled down”. At the police station, guests could report lost articles or lost children. Walt even suggested that it could contain a small jail that guests could look into: “We might even have some characters in it.”
The retail outlets would be representative of a typical American town in the early 20th century. They would include a drug store with a soda fountain, a toy store, a toy repair shop and “doll hospital”, a magic store, a hobby shop, a book store, a store for dollhouse furniture, a music store, a children’s clothing store and a functioning post office. A candy store would feature an attached factory to produce old-fashioned sweet goods, and Disney artists would be able to sell their works in another outlet.
An opera house would host a movie theatre, and could also be used for radio and television broadcasts. The main food outlets would be a colorful hot dog and ice cream stand and a restaurant with private rooms for birthday parties.
The entire village area would be attractively landscaped, with statues of Disney characters adding to the ambiance. A large section of the park would also be given over to a lake, with an island in the middle. Guests could enjoy views of the island from a stern-wheeler riverboat that would circle it.
A horse-drawn streetcar would carry guests from the main village to a second, smaller village – this time themed around a western settlement. This would host a general store selling cowboy items, a pony ring, a stagecoach ride, a donkey pack train and possibly a movie theatre showing westerns. A frontier museum was also considered, as well as a small settlement of Indian teepees.
From the Western Village, guests could board horse-drawn surreys and buckboards. These could carry them through an old-fashioned farm and to a carnival area. Perhaps surprisingly, given Walt’s dislike for traditional amusement parks, this would be populated by “roller coasters, merry-go-rounds…typical Midway stuff”, according to his memo to Dick Kelsey.
By March 1952, when Walt submitted his plans to the Burbank Parks and Recreation Board, the rides had become much more ambitious. They included a canal boat ride through a “Lilliputian Land”, a mock spaceship and a submarine ride. Other elements that appeared in various iterations of sketches of the park included a petting zoo, a haunted house overlooking the main village and a roller coaster-style ride that would race across a broken bridge.
Mickey Mouse Park was clearly influenced by a number of existing places and visitor attractions. The main village was inspired by Marceline, but also borrowed ideas from Greenfield Village (with its combination of old-style buildings, working steam train and riverboat ride). The Western Village, meanwhile, bore a strong resemblance to the replica Ghost Town at Knott’s Berry Farm.
Growing ambition
Two main factors led to the abandonment of the plans for Mickey Mouse Park. The first was opposition from Burbank city officials. The second was the growing ambition of Walt Disney himself.
The plans and sketches for Mickey Mouse Park were presented to the Burbank Parks and Recreation board in March 1952. They described a relatively modest park that would cost just $1.5 million to build, with Walt promising that it would not operate on a “full bore moneymaking scale”. The board approved the plans, but Burbank city council subsequently rejected them, with one councilman proclaiming: “We don’t want the carny atmosphere in Burbank! We don’t want people falling in the river, or merry-go-rounds squawking all day long.”
Walt suspected that studio insiders who were unhappy with the amusement park project may have influenced the councilman. However, by this stage, Burbank’s rejection was a mere sidenote. Walt had already decided that his ideas had outgrown the small site identified for Mickey Mouse Park. As early as May 1952 – four months prior to the council’s decision – he had confided to an RKO official that he had been “looking into the advisability of securing a plot of ground – something up to 200 acres – not that we would use this much for the project, but it would give us control of the surrounding area, which we feel is important.”
Roy Disney continued to be wary of the amusement park, which by now had come to be known by the new name of “Disneyland”. He refused to invest significant amounts of the studio’s money in the project, insisting that Walt should fund it personally. In 1951, he suggested that Walt set up a separate company to license his name for use by the studio, primarily as a means of protecting the long-term interests of the studio and Walt’s family. In December 1952, Walt did exactly that, forming Walt Disney Incorporated, later renamed to WED Enterprises to avoid conflicting with the name of the studio itself. The company would not be a mere vehicle for licensing Walt’s name, however. He intended to use it to design Disneyland, and immediately began recruiting the likes of Harper Goff and art directors Dick Irvine and Marvin Davis to make his dream a reality.
Walt hired architects William Pereira and Charles Luckman to draw up plans for the park, but swiftly decided to break off the engagement. WED would design Disneyland alone. It did seek help, however, from the Stanford Research Institute, which it commissioned to identify a suitable site for the park in September 1953. After an exhaustive search led by Harrison “Buzz” Price, SRI settled on then-rural Anaheim, California, and Walt acquired a 160-acre parcel of land in the area.
Walt had now a site on which to locate his park, but he still needed money to fund its construction. Once again, he turned to Roy to help finance his plans. In September 1953, Roy flew to New York to try and persuade investors to back the project. To aid his brother in this quest, Walt collared artist Herb Ryman, and the pair spent a weekend at the Disney studios putting together a sketch of the park. This would prove to be remarkably close to the final product, featuring an entrance onto a Main Street and series of themed lands arrayed around a central hub.
The prospectus that Roy carried with him to New York billed Disneyland as “something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic.” It worked. Roy struck a deal with Leonard Goldeson of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), with Disney agreeing to produce a one-hour television series for the network in exchange for ABC taking a 35% stake in the park.
The legacy
The plans for Disneyland that Roy used to secure the involvement of ABC were significantly grander than those that had been put forward for Mickey Mouse Park the previous year. After entering onto Town Square, guests would wander up a Main Street lined with nostalgia-inducing stores towards the towering Sleeping Beauty Castle. From the plaza in front of the castle, they would be able to reach several themed lands: True-Life Adventureland (inspired by Disney’s True-Life Adventure documentary films), the World of Tomorrow, Lilliputian Land, Fantasy Land, Recreation Park, Frontier Country, Treasure Island and Holiday Land.
Over time, these would evolve into the Disneyland that actually began construction in July 1954. True-Life Adventureland would become simply Adventureland, and the cruise down the “River of Romance” that was to be its headline attraction morphed into the Jungle Cruise. Fantasyland, with its attractions dedicated to Snow White, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, survived largely intact. The Western-themed Frontier Country, featuring a pack mule ride and a second main street, evolved into Frontierland. Treasure Island, which was to sit in the center of a mock river and host the Mickey Mouse Club television show, became Tom Sawyer Island (inspired by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). The World of Tomorrow, hosting a rocket ride to the moon and a miniature version of a freeway, was renamed as Tomorrowland.
Three of the original lands were dropped altogether. Recreation Park, a relaxing area that could be reserved by schools or clubs, was among them. So too was Lilluputian Land, although elements of it were absorbed into Fantasyland (most notably a canal boat ride past miniature figures, which would eventually become the Storybook Land Canal Boats). Holidayland would eventually open as part an expansion in 1957, but as a site for hosting large events rather than the constantly-changing, seasonal land that it was originally intended to be.
Mickey Mouse Park had been conceived as a combination of elements of Knott’s Berry Farm, heritage parks and traditional carnivals. Disneyland was undoubtedly significantly more ambitious – with its selection of themed lands and coherent transitions between them, it was to be the first true “theme park”. Nevertheless, elements of Mickey Mouse Park lived on in the Disneyland that opened in 1955, and many remain in the park even today.
The most prominent of these are the Town Square and Main Street, USA, which – like the main village of Mickey Mouse Park – are idealized recreations of a turn-of-the-century Midwestern town. Just like the village, Main Street, USA is “relaxing, cool and inviting”, as is the plaza that it leads to.
Many of the shops and other buildings that were to feature in the Burbank park found their way into Disneyland. There was a City Hall, which doubled as a guest services facility. A police station doubled as a “lost and found” location for a short period, and a fire station hosted a horse-drawn hose and chemical wagon and an alarm system. An Opera House was included, although it was initially little more than façade. Shops including a hobby shop, a music store, a magic shop and a candy shop all eventually found their way into the park.
Of the rides that were planned for Mickey Mouse Park, several matured into Disneyland attractions. A steam train circles Disneyland, just as it would have circled the smaller park. Horse-drawn streetcars pull guests up and down Main Street, USA. The Storybook Land Canal Boats are an evolution of the canal boat ride sketched out by Harper Goff, and riverboats circle Tom Sawyer Island just as they would have circled the small island in Goff’s drawings. The submarine ride concept put forward to Burbank officials eventually opened as the Submarine Voyage in 1959. The Western Village idea was imported wholesale for Frontierland, with Disneyland’s pack mule ride being similar to the proposed donkey pack train.
Other elements of Mickey Mouse Park were lost in the transition. The large movie theatre never became a reality. Several stores, such as the doll store, existed only on paper. Most notably, the carnival area – one that never seemed to sit well with Walt’s views on midway attractions – was dropped altogether.
So, Mickey Mouse Park never came to be. But the next time you visit a theme park, think about the influence that this ambitious little project has had on an industry that now entertains hundreds of millions of guests every single year.
