Ah, Main Street. An icon of Disney Parks the world over, the origin of this picturesque land is as timeless as the story of Disneyland itself: a dream-like, hazy recreation of Walt’s childhood hometown – Marceline, Missouri – right at the turn of the century. Of course, this sleepy downtown is passed through the idealized lens of a child’s vision, creating a romanticized, hazy version of the truth; a sort of “ease” into the fantasy and surrealism of the park’s literary lands.
And at once, Imagineering fans will begin to share details of the cinematic details that bring the land to life, like the use of forced perspective to make the streetscape appear taller than it is; the almost-imperceptible incline of the street at Magic Kingdom making the castle appear further away and taller that it truly is; the inevitable nods to Walt hidden throughout the land…
Image: Disney
Yet of all the cinematic details that make Main Street such a favorite for trivia buffs, there’s one detail to outdo them all: the windows along Main Street, U.S.A. Keeping with the unprecedented cinematic style of this new “theme park” venture, the imaginary shops set along the land’s second level are the park’s opening credits, listing the dreamers, thinkers, engineers, financiers, and figures who made (and continue to make) Disneyland a reality.
Exceeding even Disney Legend status, receiving a dedicated window along Main Street is the company’s highest honor, akin to being permanently written into the credits of those who have shaped Disney Parks. While this look at those fabled windows is hardly comprehensive, hopefully it provides a new way of looking at one of Disney Parks’ most fascinating lands.
1. Herb Ryman
Image: Disney
Business: Plaza School of Art
Location: Disneyland (above Main Street Photo Supply Company),
Any list of the shapers of Disney Parks has to begin with Herb Ryman, who – after Walt himself – is perhaps most directly responsible for the Disneyland we know today. As the story goes, when Walt found out that his brother Roy was headed to New York to pitch the concept of Disneyland to potential backers, he called Herb into his office. Walt explained to Herb that bankers have no imagination, and that he was going to send along a piece of artwork to convey just what this “Disneyland” was really going to be.
Herb apparently said it was wonderful idea and asked to see the artwork, to which Walt replied, “You’re going to draw it.”
Click and expand for a larger and more detailed view. Image: Disney
The pair worked for two days straight in what’s called “the lost weekend,” as Herb used a small carbon pencil to design the park as Walt meticulously described each square foot, angle, courtyard, and pathway. The resulting image (which sold at auction in 2017 for $700,000) literally became the basis of the Disneyland we know today, originating the Main Street concept as part of the “hub and spokes” layout and cementing the park’s opening lands of frontier, adventure, fantasy, and tomorrow.
Naturally, Herb’s window on Main Street lists him among the Instructors of the Plaza School of Art (alongside the incomparable John Hench and Peter Ellenshaw, each a beloved Disney Legend in his own right, worthy of in-depth exploration in a continuation of this feature).
2. Bob Gurr
Image: Disney
Business: Meteor Cycle Co.
Location: Disneyland (above the Disney Clothiers shop)
“If it moves on wheels at Disneyland, I probably designed it.” Bob Gurr – self-titled “Director of Special Vehicle Development” was indeed responsible for the style of many of Disneyland’s vehicles, including the Autopia cars, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, the iconic shape of the Monorail, the “horseless carriages” along Main Street, the unforgettable “Doom Buggies” in the Haunted Mansion, and even the celebrated parking lot trams (which Disney literally sells toy versions of).
Image: Disney
Bob was behind the ride vehicle assembly for Magic Kingdom’s 20,000 Leagues submarines (based on Harper Goff’s version from the 1954 film), the Flying Saucers in Tomorrowland, the Ford Magic Skyway that debuted at the 1964 – 65 New York World’s Fair (which was relocated to Disneyland as a Lost Legend: The Peoplemover), and the Fair’s Audio Animatronic Abraham Lincoln (which stands proudly among our Countdown: 25 Best Animatronics on Earth).
Gurr retired from Disney in 1981 and created his own engineering firm, Sequoia Creative, Inc., and thus has a remarkable place in the industry outside of Disney, as well, including creating the Audio Animatronic beast that ravages the Studio Tour in Universal Studios’ Lost Legend: King Kong Encounter and the starring T-Rex in the film Jurassic Park.
It’s no surprise that – befitting his vehicular history – Gurr is listed as the proprietor of the Meteor Cycle Co. – “Our vehicles past the test of time… Fast, Faultless, and Fadless.”
3. Claude Coats
Business: Coats & Co. (Disneyland), Big Top Theatrical (Magic Kingdom)
Location: Disneyland (above the Emporium Annex), Magic Kingdom (above the Main Street Athletic Club)
Claude Coats was one of the biggest figures at Disney during Walt’s time… literally. Standing 6’6”, Walt jokingly denied Coats access to the Stagecoach ride being tested at the studio, claiming he “spoiled the scale!”
The truth is, Coats had been part of Disney since its early years, creating the signature watercolor backgrounds of Disney’s earliest animated films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Melody Time, Song of the South, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp.
Image: Disney
In the 1950s, Coats became one of the leading figures in the design of Disneyland’s attractions, from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and Snow White’s Scary Adventures to Submarine Voyage. Coats is perhaps best known for his role in developing the moody, atmospheric, lingering halves of Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion (with an Imagineer later on this list shaping the more playful, sing-along halves of each), but he also shaped those World’s Fair attractions from 1964.
Coats was also a driving force behind the storied, epic, massively-scaled dark rides that debuted at EPCOT Center – Lost Legends: Universe of Energy, World of Motion, and Horizons.
Disney Legend Marty Sklar later recalled, “Claude paved the way in turning sketches and paintings into three-dimensional adventures. His energy, curiosity, and drive to create new experiences for our Disney park guests made him a leader and a teacher for all of us. He was a genuine one-of-a-kind.”
4. Mary Blair
Image: Disney
Business: Center Street Academy of Fine Art – Painting and Sculpture
Location: Magic Kingdom (Center Street)
Mary Blair joined Disney in 1940, just in time to lend her artistic skills to Dumbo. After traveling through South America with Walt and Lillian (and other Disney artists) in 1941 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, Walt took notice of Mary’s watercolors and assigned her as an art supervisor for Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Color styling credits on Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan followed, with each film representative of her unique art and influence.
Image: Disney
Walt Disney personally requested that she use her innate sense of color styling to shepherd the new attraction being developed for Pepsi-Cola’s UNICEF pavilion at the World’s Fair: “it’s a small world.”
The rest, they say, is history, as Mary’s colors, shapes, forms, and figures literally defined “the happiest cruise to ever set sail.” That influence continued throughout her career, as she created the central murals presiding over Walt’s New Tomorrowland in 1967, and the iconic 90-foot tall Grand Canyon mural at the center of the new Walt Disney World’s Contemporary Resort.
5. Alice Davis and Marc Davis
Image: Disney
Business: Far East Imports (Marc) and Small World Costume Co. (Alice)
Location: Disneyland (above Disneyana)
As Disney animators got to work on the film Sleeping Beauty, they hired a local model to record live reference footage for the character of Aurora. Because they wanted to see how Aurora’s dress would flow and bunch as she moved, a fashion designer named Alice Estes was hired to create a dress for the model to wear and the animator to study.
That animator, Marc Davis, was one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men” – the original generation of animators. Aside from Aurora and Maleficent, Davis developed iconic and instantly recognizable characters like Snow White, Br’er Rabbit, Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Tinker Bell, and Cruella de Vil. Naturally, Alice Estes and Marc Davis fell in love and were married in 1956, and given their expertise in character design, it’s no surprise that the Davises are often credited in conjunction with Disney’s character-focused attractions (not necessarily “Disney” characters).
Image: Disney
That’s why you’ll likely see their fingerprints across any scene in early Disney history where a comical, playful, musical, funny, or cleverly staged vignette takes center stage. Think, for example, of the comical set-ups on The Jungle Cruise, the whimsy of The Enchanted Tiki Room, the perfectly staged Modern Marvel: Carousel of Progress, the classic Country Bear Jamboree, the mini-vignettes of “it’s a small world,” and so many more, with Alice creating the costuming for each.
Image: Disney
Marc Davis is often recalled as the counterbalance to the atmospheric, dramatic, scenic work of Claude Coats, providing the lighter, more character-focused, singalong second halves of Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. In the former alone, Alice created 47 different costumes!
Though they shaped no less than a dozen of Disney’s most renowned attractions, Marc and Alice’s story isn’t complete without exploring “the one that got away” – the never-built E-Ticket he planned to become the signature, epic dark ride of the brand new Magic Kingdom. We sailed through the complete story of his unforgettable masterpiece in its own feature, Possibilityland: Western River Expedition – a must-read for Walt Disney World history buffs.
6. Frank Wells
Image: Disney
Business: Seven Summits Expeditions
Location: Disneyland (above the Main Street Bank), Magic Kingdom (above Crystal Arts), and Disneyland Paris (above the Emporium, as “Main Street Marking Band”)
No history of the Disney Parks is complete without Frank Wells.
Think of it this way – Walt was the dreamer, Roy was the doer. That dichotomy (expressed by both of the Disney brothers) is what was able to make Disneyland a reality. After their respective deaths, Walt Disney Productions entered into a kind of stasis – a period of relative inactivity and loss wherein the company was almost sold off in pieces to various corporations.
It’s well known that the arrival of Michael Eisner saved Disney, reinvigorating the studio. Eisner was a visionary who created the modern Walt Disney Company we know today – a multi-media giant – while using his cinematic ties to turn Disney Parks into action-packed, modern places featuring the characters, brands, and stories people cared about in modern times. But like Walt, his vision would’ve been nothing without Frank Wells as the guiding figure to make it possible.
Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. Image: Disney
Wells was Disney’s President and COO (alongside Eisner and Chairman and CEO), reporting directly to the Board and keeping Eisner’s dreamy, Blue Sky ambitions reasonably grounded.
An avid alpinist, Wells set out to conquer the “Seven Summits” climbing the highest mountain on each continent (Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, Elbrus, Everest, Kosciusko, and Vinson). Ultimately he reached them all except Everest, with poor weather sidelining the summit only 3,000 feet from the mountain’s peak.
When Wells died in an unexpected helicopter crash in 1994, the loss seemed to destabilize Eisner, who counted Wells as his best friend and right hand man. Wells’ tragic death is said to be the motivating factor behind Eisner’s sharp decline in esteem, leading to the troubled last decade of his leadership.
Wells is not only immortalized as the proprietor of Seven Summits Expeditions at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World – allusions to his final peak are embedded into Animal Kingdom’s Modern Marvel: Expedition Everest (where his photo hangs among other Everest mountaineers in the Yeti Museum) and the Wells’ Expedition’s cargo is visible on a scene inside Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds.
7. Ub Iwerks and Don Iwerks
Image: Disney
Business: Iwerks-Iwerks Stereoscopic Cameras
Location: Magic Kingdom (above the Main Street Bakery)
Ub Iwerks met Walt Disney in 1919, and they became fast friends. Fast-forward to 1922, when Iwerks joined as a lead animator at Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram cartoon studios. When Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt in 1923, Iwerks followed Disney to Los Angeles and created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When Disney lost the rights to Oswald to Universal in 1928 and famously sketched the idea of using a mouse instead, it was Iwerks who cleaned up the draft and created the refined Mickey Mouse we know today. Steamboat Willie was almost entirely animated by Ub Iwerks.
Image: Disney
In later decades, Iwerks worked with Disney developing visual effects, including the process that combined live action and animation in Song of the South, and the xerographic process behind cel animation.
Image: Disney
His son, Don Iwerks, was a masterful camera technician, working behind the camera on Disney’s 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. For the rest of his career, Don Iwerks and his father led ambitious, technological innovations behind filmmaking for the Walt Disney Company, including the futuristic 360-degree filming process behind Circle-Vision 360, as we explored in-depth in our Lost Legends: The Timekeeper feature.
8. Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman
Image: edenpictures, Flickr (license)
Business: Two Brothers Tunemakers
Location: Disneyland (at the 20th Century Music Company)
“There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day; there’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow just a dream away!”
“It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears; it’s a world of hopes and a world of fears; there’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware it’s a small world, after all…”
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious…”
Image: Disney
“In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room, in the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Room, all the birds sing words and the flowers croon in the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room…”
“One little spark of inspiration is at the heart of all creation… Right at the start of everything that’s new, one little spark lights up for you.”
If, in your head, you sang those lines rather than reading them, you’ve got the Sherman Brothers to thank. Richard and Robert Sherman were Disney’s go-to songwriters for not only feature films (they scored The Parent Trap, The Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins, the Jungle Book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Aristocats, and dozens more) but for theme parks and attractions.
Their infectious songs have arisen to the top of the Disney Parks songbook, becoming iconic instrumentals that reverberate through the parks today. In addition to the can’t-miss-classics above, they’ve also developed music for Magic Journeys, Tomorrowland’s Lost Legend: Adventure Thru Inner Space, EPCOT Center, and Disneyland’s non-functional Disaster File: Rocket Rods.
It’s only fitting that the pair is forever credited at the Two Brothers Tunemakers, as they live on through the songs they produced that will never be forgotten.
9. Tony Baxter
Image: Theme Park Insider
Business: Main Street Marvels (Disneyland), The Camelot Core (Magic Kingdom), Main Street Gazette (Disneyland Paris)
Tony Baxter is perhaps the most prominent of the “Second Generation” of Imagineers – a band of designers who joined Disney around the opening of Magic Kingdom. As the first of a new generation, Baxter and his peers had an unusual new perspective: having visited Disneyland as children gave them a vantage point that the designers of Walt’s era simply couldn’t have had!
Baxter’s story is an Imagineering dream for most Disney fans. Imagineers caught a glimpse of a project he’d developed for college (a Mary Poppins dark ride for Fantasyland) and, before long, had plucked him from operating Disneyland’s Submarine Voyage to working under Claude Coats to design Magic Kingdom’s fantasy-infused version – the Lost Legend: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Image: Disney
Since then, Baxter went on to become the face of a new age of Imagineering. With mentor Marc Davis’s Western River Expedition on the back-burner, Baxter pulled out pieces of the project to create Big Thunder Mountain (and its could-be compliment, Disneyland’s never-built Possibilityland: Discovery Bay); he designed EPCOT Center’s most-missed fan favorite and Lost Legend: Journey into Imagination, led the charge on Splash Mountain, took creative control of Disneyland’s European-village-inspired New Fantasyland, worked with Michael Eisner and his new, thrill-focused, cinematic vision to create another Lost Legend: STAR TOURS, and led the development of Disneyland’s epic Indiana Jones Adventure.
Brilliantly, Baxter was given complete creative control on the design of Disneyland Paris, and under his guidance, Imagineers there created some of the most spectacular re-imaginings of Disney classics ever, including the park’s headlining Lost Legend: Space Mountain – De la Terre à la Lune and the mysterious Modern Marvel: Phantom Manor.
Tony Baxter is a true living legend. As a pioneer of a new age, he’s unique among this list for having never even met or worked alongside Walt Disney. And yet, he’s a Legend and an icon all the same for the way he’s led the next stage of Disney Parks development and opened the story of Imagineering to a new generation – a symbol of possibility for a the armchair Imagineers of today.
Opening Credits
The notion of Disney Parks’ “opening credits” scrolling past you as you step down Main Street, U.S.A. is perhaps one of the more thoughtful, cinematic, clever, and brilliant pieces of Disney’s Imagineering. And this list is in no way exhaustive. Between the four “Main Streets” at Disney Parks (and a few smartly-placed windows in Disneyland’s Frontierland, Adventureland, and Toontown), hundreds of figures are preserved in a living Hall of Fame, forever written into the recipe of minds who created and shaped the Disney Parks we know today.
Image: Disney
Harper Goff, Card Walker, Harriet Burns, Richard Irvine, Meg Crofton, Yale Gracey, Marty Sklar, Dorothea Redmond, John Hench, X Atencio, Ron Miller, Jack Lindquist, Roy O. Disney, Michael Eisner… the list goes on and on, with each figure big and small having a prominent position and supporting story in the ongoing creation of Disneyland and its sisters.
Hopefully, this brief look at a few of the key windows around the world provides a start to the exciting stories out there around who made Disney Parks and how they did it.
