Peace through understanding. The phrase sounds like a social media platform, and that speaks volumes about the timelessness of the concept. Over half a century ago, the erudite wanted to share their knowledge with the rest of the world. The horrors of World War II were almost two decades in the past, and there was unbridled optimism in America. It was the age of Camelot, and even the assassination of John F. Kennedy couldn’t undo the excitement over the country’s place at the forefront of emerging technologies.
A seminal event during this timeframe came five years before man landed on the Moon for the first time. Instead, it was a global celebration of the betterment of mankind. It was also the moment when a company run by a legendary entertainer defined itself as one of the world leaders with regards to innovation. We still feel the ramifications of this international exhibition today.
The theme park industry and Disneyland in particular were still in the early days when company founder Walt Disney delivered a directive to his legendary Imagineers. He wanted them to attend an upcoming event, but showing up wasn’t good enough for his team. No, they had to dominate, stealing attention away from other major corporations. Their assignment was to place their stamp on the future.
The event in question was the New York World’s Fair that began on April 22, 1964, and it lasted for six months that year as well as six more months in 1965. Those 12 months in total fundamentally altered the way that people view major attractions, expecting them to feel event-like in scope. Any fan of theme parks in general and Disney parks in particular owes a great deal of gratitude to the showcase.
Let’s travel back to the past to a time when Walt Disney had already conquered the world multiple times already, but an unprecedented series of events provided him one final opportunity to do so yet again. The New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965 stands in time as that critical moment when all the breathtaking new ideas from Walt Disney and his vaunted Imagineers triggered the start of several new types of theme park attractions. You’ve heard about this event and Disney’s importance in it for all your life. Here’s the story of how Imagineers stole the show while the entire world was watching.
Good day for a fair
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
People love to reminisce about their youth. It’s the reason why ‘90s pop culture is so pervasive today, and it’s the explanation for how New York City wound up hosting two different World’s Fair events only a quarter century apart. A few powerful businessmen in the five boroughs shared fond childhood memories of the 1939 World’s Fair, also held in New York City. Two decades later, fate afforded these men the opportunity to bid on the event’s return to their fair city. The residual goodwill from the prior celebration of human endeavor gave New York the edge to host again.
The Bureau of International Expositions wasn’t a fan of all the plans for the 1964 World’s Fair. When they learned that exhibitors must pay fees in order to participate, the BIE admonished the event planner, Robert Moses, owner of one of the coolest nicknames ever, the Master Builder of New York City. Undeterred, Moses took his concerns public, thereby pressuring the BIE to bow to his will. They refused to back down and eventually boycotted the event, wholly removing their presence from their most important global event.
Oddly, the ramifications of this political scrum were largely positive. Liberated from the rules of a governing body, Moses could more easily meet his goals for the World’s Fair. The most important of them was that 70 million people attend the event, something that he deduced would require two different six-month periods of operation to achieve. Major corporations wanting to participate knew that they would have to pay to play. They greedily clasped their hands together in anticipation anyway, because 70 million consumers are otherwise impossible to target, no matter how large an advertising campaign a company musters. The entire world would be watching the 1964/1965 World’s Fair, and a significant portion of the population would also attend.
The planning phase
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
There were 3.26 billion people living in 1964, so 70 million represents two percent of humanity visiting the same event. The stakes were high, and savvy corporate leaders knew that the opportunity could make or break their company. In the case of a 62-year-old cinematic icon, the 1964 event afforded him one last opportunity to leave the world in awe prior to his death in 1966. Even if he didn’t know he was sick yet, Walt Disney still realized that by the average life expectancy of the era for American males, just under 67, he was running out of time. This World’s Fair represented one final golden opportunity to leave his mark on society yet again.
The Disney Brand
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
Given his diverse combination of skills, Walt Disney understood that his name and its accompanying brand would always hold appeal to potential corporate sponsors. When he learned in the late 1950s that a new World’s Fair would return to New York City, he knew that his legendary team of Imagineers would be in demand. He saw tremendous business opportunity in this turn of events.
Think of the upcoming World’s Fair from Walt Disney’s perspective. The 1950s and 1960s were the space age, a seminal historical time period when a future of Moon houses and Martian condos seemed only a generation away.
Rent an Imagineer
Image: x-ray delta one, Flickr (license)
Disney had also learned something during the building of Disneyland. As he would later describe it, his illustrators and other Imagineers enjoyed transferring their ideas from paper and pencil to metallic fabrications. They could bring their visions of tomorrow to life. Thanks to Disneyland, the perception of Imagineers was that they were some of the finest inventers and builders of their era.
What does a corporation need to stand out at the World’s Fair? They need a pavilion that will draw in thousands of onlookers, providing a type of not-quite-free advertising that can translate to more customers and thereby more revenue. To whom would they turn to build such an engaging presentation? It’s the same answer as today. If you had the money to hire Elon Musk and his team to build something, you’d do it in a heartbeat. You’d also enjoy the celebrity of saying that you had the power to hire Musk. The same was true around 1960, when Disney started to send out employees of WED Enterprises for pitches. The WED team had earned respect across the world for their work in designing many of Disneyland’s attractions. Building something amazing from nothing was their special skillset.
Despite the overwhelming success of Disneyland and his continued dominance in the movie industry as well as the fledgling television market, he was still cash-poor, at least compared to what he wanted. Plans already existed for a new theme part on the other side of the Mississippi. Disney frequently lamented that the location of Disneyland meant that it was off-limits to 75 percent of the American population. While Walt Disney World wasn’t official yet, an East Coast version of Disneyland was in the planning stages.
Financing that goal left Disney cash-strapped enough that he was financially frugal. The World’s Fair afforded him an unprecedented opportunity. He could exchange the work of his vaunted team of Imagineers for big money from major corporations. They wanted to be in business with Disney as a brand, and Uncle Walt as an innovator and project manager. He wanted to take full advantage of cash-rich corporations by having them pay for his company’s next batch of theme park inventions. In a perfect world, he could even build attractions on someone else’s dime that he could then transport to Disneyland to use as new selling points for his beloved park. Uncle Walt was always quite the opportunist.
The first three sponsors
Image: France 1978, Flickr (license)
Everyone involved with the 1964 World’s Fair understood that there would be dozens of pavilions. Nobody knew exactly how many ahead of time, but the number proved to be roughly 140 of them stretched out across almost 650 acres of land. Everyone wanted to stand out from their corporate peers, but few of the people sponsoring pavilions had a specific plan to accomplish this.
Walt Disney gleefully predicted the madness of the situation while pitching his plan to his staff in 1960. He knew that people were about to come knocking at his door to build jaw-dropping pavilions. He explained the situation thusly, “They won’t even know why they’re doing it, except that other corporations are doing it, and they have to keep up with the Joneses.” Uncle Walt understood people, and he appreciated the madness of corporate sponsorship. His company would entice other businesses to pay for the work of his Imagineers. And if everything broke the right way, Disney would wind up receiving most of the credit and respect rather than their patrons. If anything, the world continually underrates the business acumen Walt Disney displayed during his lifetime.
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
A full four years prior to the World’s Fair, corporations were already jostling for position to acquire Disney Imagineers for their pavilions. There was a stiff pay-to-play price for their services. Not including parts and labor, these companies signed sponsorship deals with WED for a million dollars in exchange for a deliverable product. That’s the equivalent of $7.6 million today, which admittedly makes it sound less impressive. Million dollar contracts were few and far between in the early 1960s, though. The cost of doing business with Disney was hefty.
Two corporations quickly agreed to pay Disney for the services of WED. They were Ford Motor Company and General Electric. When Disney pitched another idea that would stand as a tribute to his home state of Illinois, Robert Moses, by then the President of the 1964 World’s Fair, loved the idea so much that he refused to “open the Fair without that exhibit!” Unfortunately, there wasn’t an obvious sponsor for Disney’s grand ideas. Eventually, Moses cajoled the Governor of Illinois to pay for this third Disney presentation.
A year away from the start of the exhibit, the company stood to make a splash with a trio of dazzling displays. And if you know enough about the 1964 World’s Fair to realize that a famous corporate sponsor is missing, there’s an explanation to that. A fourth corporation later begged Disney to perform a rush assignment, and their agreement fundamentally changed the course of theme parks.
General Electric and the Disneyland attraction that wasn’t…
Image: x-ray delta one, Flickr (license)
If you ever look at a classic Disneyland map from the late 1950s, you might notice something unexpected. There’s a notation about an upcoming section off the corner of Main Street. It was named Edison Square, and it was intended as an attraction celebrating the evolution of mankind. There’s just one problem. General Electric bought Disney off, and so Edison Square never debuted.
Okay, that’s a bit unfair. What happened was that Disney and General Electric had a working agreement on what would become Walt Disney’s favorite attraction, the Carousel of Progress. Long before it became a staple of Walt Disney World, however, it was known as the key part of Progressland, the General Electric Pavilion. The two corporations had agreed on the concept in 1958 but less than a year later, it was readily apparent that the 1964 World’s Fair was going to be a big deal.
In order to make a splash there, GE lobbied Disney to hold off on creating something at Disneyland until after the exhibition. That meant a five-year delay for a park that was only five years old at that point, so it was a huge request. The Disney team saw the value in the argument, though. If they did something spectacular, General Electric would pay for it, the World’s Fair hype would operate as free marketing, and then they could present it as a Disney theme park exclusive afterward. Also, they didn’t feel like the current technology they had in place was good enough just yet. A delay gave them a few years for the science to catch up with their vision for the attraction.
The nuclear robot family
Image: roger4336, Flickr (license)
The idea was a recounting of the evolution of mankind over the past century from humble beginnings to their new status as people capable of outer space travel. Because General Electric was the driving force behind the project, it would focus on electricity. Specifically, it would demonstrate the steps taken for mankind to achieve the dream of “push-button living.”
The simple goal required a ton of planning. This is obvious since the initial pitch for the attraction occurred in 1958, six full years prior to the World’s Fair. To plus the concept enough to make it worthy of the event, Disney and General Electric recognized that the key ingredient was the credibility of the characters onstage. The Progressland effects had to be the best anybody had ever seen.
Imagineers had a few years to work on the Audio-Animatronics (AAs). Their attempts to perfect the technology would have ramifications for Progressland as well as another exhibition at the World’s Fair. Eventually, they managed to create a believable cast of humans as well as an especially cute dog. That wasn’t the only trick to Progressland, though. To tell the story as both companies envisioned, it would require four acts. Disney eventually settled on splitting them into seasons so that there would be a hook to each scene. The problem was that guests had to move from one story to the other seamlessly and quickly.
A ride for all seasons
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
That was the moment when the innovation of Disney engineers stood out. Their cunning plan was to create six phases to the ride. The first and last sections would involve moving people in an orderly fashion. In order to do this, they developed the technology to rotate the chairs at fixed intervals. Every four minutes, viewers would automatically turn to a new stage, affording Disney the ability to tell multiple stories with different AAs and set pieces in the same general location without any concerns of crowd control. They could seat 250 people in each auditorium this way, providing a massive daily traffic throughput to boot.
To a certain extent, Progressland as designed was little more than a glorified showroom for state-of-the-art GE appliances for the 1960s. There was a more telling mechanic under the hood, though. Disney told the story starting with what passed for home appliances in the 1890s, including a hand-cranked washing machine and gas lamps. By the time the people reached the present, the modern world included conveniences such as a beautiful lighted Christmas tree, a heated patio, and a kitchen chock-full of top-of-the-line GE appliances.
Through this brand of storytelling, Walt Disney tipped his hand about what he’d like to see from future attractions, even ones that didn’t involve him in any way. The most obvious spiritual successor is Spaceship Earth, which displays the evolution of humanity over millennia. It lacks the shameless commercialism of Progressland, though. There’s also an obvious influence from Progressland in Ellen’s Energy Adventure, which celebrates the same type of scientific advancements, only without the strong ties to GE, undoubtedly because its original sponsor was ExxonMobil.
While lacking the clear hook of the other World’s Fair attractions, Progressland proved itself as one of the best mergers of art and commerce. People loved watching the AA demonstration of how far they’d come from the days of their grandparents, and they frequented it more than any of the other transparently corporate-mandated pavilions at the World’s Fair. After the exhibition ended, GE transported all the features of Progressland to Disneyland, where it became a fixture of Tomorrowland until 1973.
A little over a year later, it was introduced at Walt Disney World, where it has been a staple ever since. GE stopped sponsoring it in 1985, which has made the process of updating the attraction to keep it modern quite a bit easier for Disney. If Disney ever tried to cancel the Carousel of Progress, however, they’d face a riot. Most people know it was Walt Disney’s favorite attraction as well as the only one at Walt Disney World that he personally touched.
The favorite son of Illinois gives something back
Image: HarshLight, Flickr (license)
As much as people loved and admired the Audio-Animatronics employed at Progressland, it was a recreation of a beloved American president that left people shaking their heads in awe. Walt Disney, an Illinois native, loved the history of America, especially with regards to its ideology and heroic leaders.
Soon after Disneyland opened to the public, he began internal discussions about an attraction that would highlight those principles. He intended to call it One Nation Under God, and he fittingly planned to locate it right off Main Street. The last portion of the presentation would be known as the Hall of Presidents, and he envisioned a robotic Abraham Lincoln anchoring this section. The problem with many potential Disneyland attractions in the 1950s is that time and money were limited, so some of the best ideas got pushed to the backburner.
Image: France 1978, Flickr (license)
In the case of a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, it fell behind other projects in the building queue. By the time 1962 rolled around, Walt Disney had met with Robert Moses several times. Once, he showed the World’s Fair leader his plans for the attraction. Moses demanded that this become a key part of the World’s Fair and, as mentioned above, he went out of his way to find a sponsor for it. Illinois was one of several states participating at the event, so they were a natural fit.
As a native son of the state where Abraham Lincoln gained fame, Disney felt driven to create an exhibition worthy of the 16th president, one of his personal heroes. He crafted a somewhat terrifying life-sized AA version of Lincoln, and he programmed its mouth to move in motion with audio dialogue of some of the president’s most famous speeches. He wanted people to feel as if Lincoln stood in the room with them, presenting his best known quotes for the first time.
Image: Disney
Out of the four exhibits Disney built, this one presented the greatest struggle to get working. Great Moments with Lincoln passed all the quality assurance tests before it left California. After the transfer to the East Coast, it no longer operated correctly. This led to a humiliating moment for Walt Disney.
The governor of Illinois attended a kickoff event for the Living with Lincoln pavilion. The debut of the Lincoln AA represented the highlight of this celebration. Disney himself came out on stage and said the following: There isn’t going to be any show. It’s true. We’ve worked like beavers to get it ready, but it’s not ready, and I won’t show a thing that might fall apart on us.” People originally thought that Disney, a born showman, was joking before they realized he was serious. With the leader of the state present, the Illinois pavilion couldn’t debut its signature attraction because Disney’s Imagineers couldn’t make it work.
On May 2, 1964, a week and a half after the start of the World’s Fair, Great Moments with Lincoln officially debuted. Finally functioning correctly, it was a hallmark achievement in the field of audio-animatronics. The Lincoln-bot was capable of roughly 250,000 movements and actions, providing a historically unprecedented level of authenticity to his motions.
The possible inspiration for Back to the Future
Image: Guerrilla Features | Jason Tester, Flickr
In Back to the Future, Marty McFly gets the keys to a DeLorean that lets him travel through time. Coincidentally or not, that’s eerily similar to the most straightforward of Disney’s four exhibits. The Ford Motor Company pavilion needed to highlight the majesty of 1960s Ford vehicles, something that history wound up doing for them. Many of the classic vehicle designs of all-time rode off the Detroit assembly line in those days, but the burgeoning wealth of the American middle class meant that they had a massive volume of potential customers to target. Their event had to showcase all the reasons a person should consider buying a Ford.
Disney identified what they wanted to do early in the pitch process. The beauty of a Ford sports car from that time period was that its design represented everything great about the American automobile. The Disney team knew precisely how they’d frame their story. They would stick people in a Ford sports car and take them on a tour of history. And if the General Electric exhibition above didn’t remind you enough of Spaceship Earth, Ford Magic Skyway definitely will.
Again employing state of the art animatronics, Disney designed this journey to show the evolution of mankind from the days of the dinosaurs to the space-based future everyone envisioned in the early 1960s. People would get in their Ford cars and ride them down the tracks millions of years into the past. Ford’s pointed request was for Disney to use new the new models of their vehicles straight off the manufacturing line to showcase their sophistication and sex appeal. Who could turn that down?
Image: Ryan Somma, Flickr (license)
Imagineers had relatively free reign on this project, because Uncle Walt himself wasn’t involved. He was extremely hands-on with the other Disney exhibits, and he didn’t want to spread himself too thin by calling the shots on this one as well. All he requested was that his employees challenge themselves by making the most realistic scenery imaginable. The company’s illustrators spent months working on detailed dioramas that they could translate into dinosaur-sized audio-animatronics.
The surprising difficulty with the Ford Magic Skyway involved the cars. Disney had planned to drive people through the set pieces in a standard way, but the introduction of street-ready vehicles added complexity. In the process, they led to an invention with far-reaching ramifications. In order to honor Ford’s request, Imagineers designed a track chain that could space the cars a set distance apart from one another. Then, they could move the entire chain and thereby push the Fords down the line at a set pace.
If this sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s the underlying mechanic of every Omnimover in existence. It’s also the basis for the Peoplemover, your favorite ride when you need a break at Walt Disney World. While the Ford Magic Skyway itself became the only Disney exhibit at the World’s Fair that wasn’t transferred in totality to a theme park, the specifics of its build directly impacted innumerable Disney rides for decades afterward. It was the forerunner of one of their most important technologies, track-based ride vehicles. It was also the most popular Disney attraction at the World’s Fair and the second most popular overall.
Mommie Dearest and the Pepsi Generation
Image: Castles, Capes & Clones, Flickr (license)
All the babies born during and in the wake of World War II represented an untapped market for clever advertisers. Pepsi-Cola described these war babies as possessing “conviction that what lay ahead was better than what lay behind.” They wanted to sell as many bottled colas as possible to the youth of America, indoctrinating them as lifetime customers of their brand of beverage. They eventually named the group the Pepsi Generation, and the overlords of one of this powerful corporation understood something about the target audience. The Pepsi Generation would expect all the cool companies to provide presentations at the World’s Fair.
Pepsi’s guidelines proved to be a challenge. They were working with UNICEF to foster the perception that Pepsi thought globally decades before that business practice became prevalent. Pepsi requested that their pavilion’s featured attraction offer a “salute to UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) and all the world’s children.” Several companies pitched to them, and each one received a sound rejection in reply. Creating a globally celebratory campaign during the Cold War proved unwieldy.
Pepsi executives were ready to cancel their pavilion and pass on the 1964 World’s Fair entirely when 1963 rolled around. Oddly, Walt Disney’s connections in the movie industry rather than his reputation as the genius behind Disneyland led to an unexpected union. If you’ve ever watched Mommie Dearest, you are familiar with the tabloid-fueled life of Joan Crawford, the Academy Award-winning actress. In 1955, Crawford married the CEO of Pepsi, whose death in 1959 left her a widow.
Pepsi executives weren’t interested in an actress sitting on their Board of Directors, but Crawford’s legendary force of will caused it to happen anyway. Most of her advice about the company was ignored during her 14-year tenure on the board, but there was one important exception. As Pepsi prepared to sit out the upcoming World’s Fair, Crawford firmly suggested that her peers meet with Walt Disney, a man she believed was capable of anything.
It’s a rush job after all
Image: Ken Lund, Flickr (license)
Barely 10 months ahead of the start of the event, Pepsi asked WED Enterprises to pitch them on a campaign that would meet their high standards. Many Disney Imagineers believed that the situation was hopeless. They’d worked on some of the projects for as long as three years already. Why in the world would Pepsi think that they could do anything in less than a year?
Where others saw impossibility, Walt Disney saw opportunity. When Pepsi’s executives met him in California, he accepted the job without discussing it with his advisors. Returning to the office, he notified them of the “good news” about the World’s Fair. Now, they would be doing four pavilions, one of which they hadn’t even started yet! The difference between the Pepsi stage show and the others is that it would have many more constraints due to the timeframe. They would have to focus more on the themes and less on technological innovations like Omnimover tracks and AAs.
Walt Disney was a noted disciple of the philosophy that constraints are a huge benefit to the creative process. He felt that Pepsi’s pitch provided his Imagineers with a rare opportunity. They would have lowered expectations due to the time crunch. Were they to present something amazing, the headlines wouldn’t focus exclusively on the presentation itself. Each one would also note that not only did Disney succeed where others had failed, but they also did so with so little time that Pepsi had been ready to cancel their event. With disappointment expected, a Disney triumph would steal the show. And that’s exactly how history remembers the pavilion’s reception.
A little boat ride
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
The one element of their attraction that Pepsi knew they wanted became the central tenet of Disney’s build. They pitched ideas based on the premise of the “happiest cruise that ever sailed.” If you hadn’t deduced the ride before this moment, you know it now. Yes, it was Pepsi that delivered an idea to WED Enterprises that became the basis for arguably their most world renowned attraction, It’s a Small World.
Uncle Walt quickly started thinking of the upcoming attraction as “a little boat ride.” Even his most devout disciples such as Rolly Crump were ready to mutiny over this turn of events. Crump later recounted his perception of the situation:
“”There’s one more piece of real estate that they’ve offered to us. And I’ve got this idea for a little boat ride that maybe we can do.” And we thought, “A little boat ride???” I mean, God, we were working on Lincoln, the Carousel of Progress, both of which were using the highest technology and animatronic figures. And we were working on Ford, too. All of this and Walt wants to do a little boat ride!”
By 1963, however, Disney’s inner circle had grown used to the eccentricities of their boss. They knew from experience how difficult it would be to push him off an idea once he’d made up his made. Plus, he’d already signed the paperwork with Pepsi, so there was going to be a little boat ride no matter what.
A fast start
Image: StudioMONDO, Flickr (license)
Pepsi and Disney agreed to name the attraction “It’s a Small World – A Salute to UNICEF.” The basics of the attraction weren’t difficult. As a concession to the time constraint, WED Enterprises would create a modest track through which a series of boats would float. Their path would be finite and guided, providing Disney designers the opportunity to control the line of view at all points.
This premise became the core concept of many Disney attractions in the decades that followed, even if it wasn’t new and exclusive to the World’s Fair. After Disney finished their moving attractions there, they followed with The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, which followed the same philosophy of controlled viewing perspective. Yes, there is something visible everywhere you look, but the ride design plans for you to focus your eye on a particular subject right in front of the moving vehicle.
In the case of It’s a Small World, that subject is a doll. Well, lots of them. Disney himself conceptualized the details of the attraction after Pepsi pitched its idea. The moment they discussed a boat ride featuring children of the world, he knew what he intended to do. There was even a bit of serendipity regarding Pepsi’s vision.
Unbeknownst to the beverage manufacturers, Disney builders were already toying with boat ride specs. They’d had conversations with Arrow Manufacturing, a noted construction company in Mountain View, California. The two parties had discussed the topic of a functional boat system on tracks. Bob Gurr, an Imagineer who later became Director of Special Vehicle Development at Disney, had designed some of the specs himself. Without ever planning for It’s a Small World, Disney suddenly had the ride mechanics and the display design fall into their lap. And all these events transpired within the first month of their joining the project.
Excitedly, Disney executives headed to New York City to show their amazing work to Pepsi’s board. A hilarious historical footnote is that most of the board members disliked the concept of It’s a Small World and were still ready to cancel the entire pavilion. Once again, Joan Crawford saved the day. She stood up and loudly proclaimed, “We are going to do this!” At this point, everyone consented. She was already a terrifying person, and that was before the world knew about this part of her life.
Doll parts
Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)
All Disney needed to build It’s a Small World in time was to create believable inhabitants of a global society. Realizing that children would influence the decisions of which attractions their parents should visit, the Imagineering team skewed very young with their visuals. They settled on playful caricatures of the world’s most famous landmarks. They recreated the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower in tiny sizes and with splashy colors to draw the attention of kids while also stimulating their imagination.
Uncle Walt brought onboard two of his most trusted female advisors to oversee the design. Alice Davis, whose husband Marc is one of the Nine Old Men, joined the project. Then, Mary Blair, who had already proven herself as an artist, was added. As one of Disney’s favorite illustrators, he hoped that the two women could make lifelike dolls that wouldn’t be creepy. The jury’s still out on whether she succeeded. Davis handled the doll costumes, and Blair was in charge of graphics. Disney Legend Claude Coats earned the final task of overall attraction layout. You have him to thank for the seemingly eternal length of It’s a Small World.
Once Disney finalized It’s a Small World, its employees felt that they had done the impossible. In his own words, Walt Disney stated: “When we completed “It’s a Small World” for presentation at the New York World’s Fair, we felt that we had accomplished what we’d set out to do. We wanted to foster a better understanding among the nations of the world by showing the dress, the customs, the language, the music, and a little of the culture of our neighbors around the world… And I think it’s safe to say that having fun has universal appeal.”
The big show
Image: France 1978, Flickr (license)
With all their presentations completed, all that remained for Disney employees was to bask in the afterglow of their many triumphs. Out of the 140+ pavilions at the 1964 World’s Fair, Disney Imagineers crafted four of the five most popular ones (the other being the General Motors Futurama exhibit). In the process, Walt Disney cemented his legacy as one of the most impressive innovators in history. Once again, he started a project from nothing and built it into something that made the world’s population marvel in awe.
Of course, his accomplishments during the World’s Fair reached far beyond technological achievement. His performance during the run-up to the event should be studied in Master’s classes in business. By selling the services of his Imagineers and himself for seven-figure sums, he persuaded other people to pay for the construction of rides for which they would have no use at the end of the event. Once the World’s Fair was over, Disney generously offered to mitigate the balance of fees for his company’s services.
All that Pepsi-Cola, General Electric, and the state of Illinois had to do to reduce their outstanding accounts balances was transfer the World’s Fair attractions back to Disneyland. All the expenses they incurred during the shipping process would subtract from their WED Enterprises bill. In other words, Walt Disney convinced several different companies and one state government to finance attractions that wound up becoming linchpins of Disneyland and, later, Walt Disney World. And THEY PAID HIM for the honor.
Theoretically, these organizations all received the glory that came from having one of the five most popular attractions at the 1964 World’s Fair. The problem with that line of thinking is that everybody remembers all those exhibits for their Disney influence more than for that of the sponsor, which is particularly brutal for Pepsi-Cola. They were the ones that generated the underlying concept for It’s a Small World, which wound up as a signature attraction at every Disney theme park across the globe. Yes, if that infernal song has ever gotten stuck in your head for days on end, it’s Pepsi’s fault first and foremost. If that doesn’t make you a Coke drinker for life, I don’t know what will.
The legacy of the 1964 World’s Fair is that it crystallized that magical time during the Space Age. The world was brimming with optimism for a better tomorrow, and Disney’s Imagineers somehow encapsulated the feelings of society through four vastly different but equally amazing attractions.
To this day, the company embraces that perception. Their 2015 movie, Tomorrowland, actually begins at the 1964 World’s Fair. George Clooney’s character takes a ride on It’s a Small World, which teleports him to a future only Uncle Walt himself could have imagined. This respectful tribute reinforces the belief that out of the many achievements of Walt Disney, none was more impressive than this series of events. Somehow, he convinced corporate America to pay him to steal the show right out from under them at the most memorable World’s Fair in history. Then, he made them pay to transfer the attractions back to his theme park where they’ve remained in operation for over 50 years now.
