Original subtitles

[gentle music]

- Before Walt Disney is even a teenager,

he's earning money to support the family.

- He's expected to work through a paper route.

We're talking, like, 600, 700 homes,

but he doesn't get to keep the money.

So Walt would take some of the extra papers

and then sell them locally in the trolleys

so he could have some pocket money.

- He's got a great work ethic,

but there's not a lot of fun

in the life of young Walt Disney.

Then this one bright spot emerges.

[bell clanging]

- [Conductor] Electric Park. This stop, Electric Park.

- Here you go, sir.

- At the end of the trolley line is an amusement park.

This glowing, glittering escape.

- Electric Park in Kansas City,

it was an amusement park filled

with about a hundred thousand electric light bulbs.

- For a kid who's working, trying to make ends meet,

suddenly at the end of the trolley line,

there is this glorious place

meant for fun and entertainment.

- You're coming, kid?

- Do you know what time the park opens?

- Not 'til noon.

- I'm gonna wait.

[dramatic music]

[bell clanging]

- That boy, with the little bit of cash

he's earned on his paper route,

sitting there with the exuberance and anticipation

of entering this glowing world of escape,

would eventually create the happiest place on Earth

where we all could escape.

- Disneyland is something new, something crazy,

something no one had ever done before.

- [Narrator] Walt Disney will transform an American pastime.

- He was breaking every convention

on how to build an amusement park

because he wasn't trying to build an amusement park.

- [Narrator] Creating an entirely new,

multi-billion dollar industry: theme parks.

[fireworks booming]

- How much is this park going to cost?

- [Adam] 12 times the cost of "Snow White".

- That's how insane this idea is.

- [Narrator] Against impossible odds.

- The whole thing needs to feel like you're flying.

- It's never gonna work.

- It was a huge problem,

and it was a problem they had to solve fast.

- [Narrator] Disney will lay 15,000 cubic feet of concrete.

- I don't care how much it costs, just do it.

- [Narrator] And pour 20 million gallons of water.

- I was just at the bank.

What is going on?

- [Narrator] To make his dream a reality.

- It's become an entire industry that didn't exist

before Walt created it.

[dramatic music]

- I'm building that park,

with or without the studio.

[dramatic music]

- By 1920, amusement parks were a huge part

of the American landscape.

They were kind of pegged to mass transit

like trolley systems.

- Ingeniously, trolley companies

set up amusement parks at the end of the line,

because typically ridership dropped off during the weekend,

and so now you had all these workers

getting on the trolleys

to go get their affordable form of entertainment.

[people screaming] [dramatic music]

- Around 1930, there are some

2,000 amusement parks across the country.

Every town of any size has at least one.

- But after World War II

is the great era of suburbanization

of highways spreading out from cities.

- You start to see the breakdown of public transit

because you have the growth of the automobile industry.

- Cities are ripping up their street cars,

and along with the trolleys going away,

the amusement parks go away.

- By the late 1940s,

you have fewer than 300 amusement parks

still in existence.

- The ones that are left, they're kind of down market.

- You'd have peep shows and pachinko machines,

and they were a little seedy.

- [Narrator] By the time Walt Disney is a father,

amusement parks have lost their luster.

- Walt Disney can't take his kids

to an amusement park like he had when he was a child,

because you got the kind of questionable characters

hanging around these places.

[clown laughing]

- [Narrator] So Walt decides to make his own backyard

a little more fun.

- Somewhere in the late '40s,

Walt Disney became really interested in model trains.

Not just little trains,

but trains that you could ride around on.

- He laid out the tracks in the backyard.

It went under trestles and through tunnels.

It was a whole, elaborate setup.

- And this is his newest, latest, greatest obsession.

- [Narrator] It's an obsession

that seeps into his time at the studio.

- The studio builds his locomotive,

but the incredible thing about Walt Disney

is he's so hands on.

This is the executive who comes down to work in the shop.

- Here you are.

They need you in animation.

The new storyboards are ready.

- Story's in good shape.

I don't need to approve every little detail.

- Walt Disney was the idea man

and his brother, Roy, who is eight years older than him,

was the money guy.

- [Narrator] Roy knows that Walt's hands-on leadership

has always been the secret to their success.

- In the 1930s, Walt oversaw absolutely everything

from the very beginning to the very end.

- [Narrator] From "Mickey Mouse"

and the first synchronized sound cartoon,

"Steamboat Willie",

to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves",

the first feature-length animated film,

and subsequent hits like "Pinocchio",

"Dumbo", and "Bambi",

Walt Disney's fingerprints were on every frame.

- And now for Walt,

it's just a 'been there, done that'

kind of a feeling.

- At this point, "Alice in Wonderland",

"Peter Pan", "Cinderella"

are all in different phases of production.

And I think it's understood by everybody

that Walt's an essential part of this equation.

But he is playing with his trains.

- Walt?

- Okay, Roy, let's go have a look.

- Disney, throughout his life,

he never wanted to be bored.

He is someone that is restless.

He is someone that is constantly looking

for something new to excite him.

[pensive music]

- [Narrator] Walt isn't the only one

looking for something more from Disney.

- Hello.

You like Mickey?

- Is this where he lives?

- It sure is.

- Can we meet him? - Oh, boy.

I wish we could,

but it's hard to find a little mouse

in a big place like this.

- Walt has people showing up at his animation studio

and they wanna see where the magic happens,

but it's just artists sitting in rooms at desks.

There really isn't any Disney to offer up.

- It's not like when you go to Elizabeth Taylor films

and you might see her walking out of her trailer.

You're not gonna see Mickey Mouse walking around

because he exists on paper.

- Tell you what,

get them some ice cream from the commissary.

On me.

Enjoy!

- We're in this, kind of like, void moment for fan culture.

Walt is seeing all of these people

traveling to Hollywood

to see where their favorite movies are made,

but there's, like, nothing for them to see.

- One of the things that sets Walt Disney apart

is his ability to see around corners.

Some people will see a void as a deficit,

while Disney will see it as an opportunity.

[dramatic music]

- I wanna create a Mickey Mouse park

where parents and children can spend time together

and see Mickey and Minnie and the whole gang.

You could have a train and a carousel,

or a few rides.

- It's a lovely idea, but we're a studio.

What do we know about amusement parks?

- What did we know about sound cartoons?

What did we know about animated features?

- The idea of an entertainment entity

going into amusement is crazy,

and amusement parks were all going out of business.

- His brother, Roy, didn't get it.

Why would you stop being in the movie business

to go build a carnival?

- Don't you see?

This is the next thing for us.

- [Narrator] Walt already has the perfect spot in mind

to build his park.

A 16 acre lot directly across from the studio.

- Maybe so.

It's not just me you have to convince anymore.

- So in the pre-war era,

Roy and Walt were always stressed out about money,

but they had a lot of creative freedom.

When producing "Snow White",

Roy and Walt didn't have to answer to anyone

except the bank,

but during World War II,

they decided to take the company public.

- Now you get an influx of money,

but now you also get a board of directors.

He now has people to answer to.

- [Narrator] Walt knows building a park

is a radical departure

from anything the studio has done in the past.

So he'll need to convince them it's their future.

- Walt Disney Studios

is about blazing new trails, gentlemen.

And now, we're gonna do something really different.

- [Narrator] Walt wants nearly $5 million to build his park.

- A family amusement park

that will cost about three times

what "Snow White" costs.

- That's how insane this idea is.

It's huge, this is big money.

And who knows how it's gonna work?

- We tend to think of studio entertainment

and outdoor amusements

as being part of the same enterprise.

There was no connecting tissue like this in Walt's lifetime.

This idea couldn't be further

from the center of Walt Disney Productions.

- I don't want this company to stand still.

We have prospered before when we have taken chances

and tried new things.

This is our golden opportunity

to move into an entirely new field.

- Walt,

we're a film studio, not a carnival.

The answer is no.

- Most people would have walked away,

but Walt was always different.

The real pixie dust was an imagination

of a person who's really curious.

- The moment when Walt Disney has done the very thing

that other people and logic have told him not to do,

have been his greatest triumphs.

Breaking new ground,

pushing boundaries,

things that had been considered crazy, dangerous, and risky,

that's Walt Disney's comfort zone.

[tense music]

- What are you doing, Roy?

- What are you doing, Walt?

I was just at the bank.

They said you borrowed against your life insurance policy

and took out a loan?

Is this about the park again?

- [Narrator] The studio may have turned him down,

but it's not enough to stop Walt Disney.

He's continued to work on his park concept.

- Walt, if he believes in one thing,

it's his own dreams.

So he's gonna just fund it himself.

- He will hawk his life insurance.

He will sell his vacation home in Palm Springs.

He will do whatever necessary to make that dream a reality.

- What is going on?

- I'm building that park,

with or without the studio.

- Walt's burning through money and Roy's worried.

He knows this is not sustainable.

- At this point, he's borrowed roughly $100,000,

which is over a million dollars in today's money.

So if this fails, it's not just a shattered idea.

He will leave both himself and his family penniless.

- When Walt starts designing the park,

he doesn't have any idea how to go about it.

- The smokestack's wrong.

The old Western engines were wood burning.

It's gotta have a big balloon stack.

- It really was just an expression

of all the stuff he loved.

- When he's sketching out ideas for his park,

he's like, "You know what would go great there? A train.

And then if you're gonna have a train,

maybe you should have, like, a steamboat."

- And his ideas outgrew

that little plot of land near the studio.

He was thinking bigger and bigger.

- [Narrator] Walt's new vision

expands far beyond Mickey Mouse.

- Walt starts calling his park Disneyland.

Well, I think Disneyland is a really appropriate name for it

'cause it is essentially the world according to Walt Disney.

- That's better.

- I keep thinking,

you've gotta have a better funding stream.

I can't let you bankrupt yourself.

What becomes of Lillian and the girls

if something happens to you?

- You wouldn't have a Walt Disney

if you didn't have a Roy Disney.

As brothers, there was a bond there

unlike any other partnership.

- And Roy comes to grips with how much this means to Walt

and he's not gonna simply be able

to let him go off by himself.

- Nothing's gonna happen to me, I'm Walt Disney.

- That's exactly it.

You are Walt Disney,

but you're not the only Walt Disney.

- Roy Disney is a bit of an unsung hero,

especially in this case.

- The studio's been using your name for 30 years for free.

I think it's high time you get paid for it.

- Roy Disney's brilliant, outside-the-box idea

is to license his brother's name

back to his own studio

and create this ancillary revenue stream.

- That's 160,000 a year

to spend on whatever project we want.

And the shareholders won't be able to say a word about it.

- We?

You said whatever projects we want.

- Without the ingenuity of Roy Disney,

there's no Disneyland, period.

We owe so much of that to Roy Disney.

- Well, I guess we're gonna have to find some land.

[intense music]

- [Narrator] But finding the right place to build Disneyland

will be no small task.

- In the early 20th century,

you would build around the end of trolley lines,

but now we're really in the automobile era.

He's forging into new territory here.

- [Narrator] So Walt seeks out professional help.

- If you were to build today, your best bet would be here.

Right downtown, three miles east of the train yards.

- The Stanford Research Institute

tracked land sales, population centers,

utility rates, and land rates.

Walt knows that this is exactly the information that he needs

to find a place to build his park.

- But we don't wanna know

where the ideal place for a park is today.

We wanna know where that place is going to be in five years,

10 years, 20 years.

- How can you possibly know where the ideal place will be

20 years from now?

- I don't.

But the California Highway Commission does.

- In the 1950s, Southern California

is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States.

- During the war years, there's lots of new jobs.

LA, in that whole era,

was the center of the aerospace industry.

- After World War II,

people are moving there in huge numbers.

- With the G.I. Bill,

the returning American soldiers are able to buy new homes,

and of course, now they're gonna need a car

to be able to get around.

- The highway system is the key.

It gives birth to the suburbs,

and they were spreading out in every direction.

The growth you have in LA, it's phenomenal.

It is the golden age of California.

- And so SRI look at areas around Los Angeles

that haven't yet been built out substantially.

- [Narrator] The strategy is genius in its simplicity.

Figure out where the highways are going

and buy before they get there.

[tense music]

- The Stanford Research Institute identifies Anaheim

as an ideal location for Disneyland.

One, because it has a temperate climate,

two, because the population

is slowly moving in that direction,

and three, because it's relatively cheap.

- Located about 30 miles south of Los Angeles,

Anaheim is mainly farmland and citrus groves,

but it promises one key element Walt needs.

- The Santa Ana freeway is gonna come right along there

in less than a year.

- Walt is hoping that the car

that actually killed the first generation of amusement parks

will bring people to his.

- Walt.

It's almost 900,000.

There'll be nothing left to build a park.

Hell, we don't even know what we're gonna build yet.

- [Narrator] It's a massive gamble

for a bit of remote farmland with an unknown future.

- Maybe let's slow down.

Put a plan together for the park first.

[tense music]

- We'll take it.

[dramatic music]

- He's building an amusement park

in an era where amusement parks are closing,

and he's plopping all of his money down

in a bunch of orange groves in the city nobody goes to.

Cool, cool, good idea, cool.

- [Narrator] Walt Disney has purchased

160 acres of land in Anaheim, California

for his dream of Disneyland.

- Disneyland was a radical concept for anybody,

but I think especially for Walt Disney.

- It seems totally crazy.

One, amusement parks are in decline,

so it's not exactly like entering a growth industry.

Second, he is a studio head.

Since when do studio heads open amusement parks?

- This isn't the final report,

but it gives you an idea of what works and what doesn't.

- [Narrator] Walt turns to the Stanford Research Institute

once again for some hard data.

- He hires SRI to research existing parks

to find out what are the best standards and practices

for him to make this a profitable venture.

- One critical point,

you need a Ferris wheel or a roller coaster.

Put light bulbs on it

and it basically becomes a big billboard for your park.

It's free advertising.

[people screaming]

- Amusement parks at the time

were very focused on getting crowds in.

They would have multiple entrances,

so it was just, get in the door and start buying things.

- Rides are closely placed together.

No connection between them.

There's really not much cohesion.

- It's really just about profit.

The customers are kind of marks and suckers,

and every single aspect of the experience

is just meant to separate the fools from their money.

- The average visitor stay time

is two and a half hours.

- Only two and a half hours?

- They say you have to pump them for all the money you can

before they get frustrated and leave.

- Thank you.

That was very helpful.

- Everything about what Walt was thinking about

was the opposite of those things.

- There would be no roller coaster,

there would be no Ferris wheel.

- An amusement park that is not featuring a roller coaster,

that's like saying you're gonna build a baseball stadium

but no one's gonna play the game.

It would just be insane to do that.

- Everybody thinks he's crazy, but for him,

he's really going back to the very beginning.

- [Narrator] Before Snow White,

before Mickey,

even before Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,

there was Alice,

Walt's very first attempt at an animated film.

- In the Alice comedies,

he took a real girl and put her into the animation.

- Walt was looking for a new way to push his audiences

into an immersive world.

- Part of that comes from

what Walt had always been looking for in his life:

escape, fantasy, and control.

And that's what he wanted to do with Disneyland.

- He understood Disneyland

was a way for him to tell his stories

so that you can live your own hero's journey.

- This was your chance to actually jump through the screen

and be in it.

- In a movie, we control the camera.

But there's no camera here.

- The visitor is the camera.

- Right.

So how do we get them to go where we want?

- So much of what Walt did with Disneyland

was born of the movies,

and you were going into Walt's world of storytelling.

Scene one, scene two, scene three.

- In a film, you're able to manage

how the people experience the story based on the camera.

Walt needs a similar type of control

in terms of how they experience moving into his park.

- Exactly, one entrance.

- [Narrator] By creating one single entrance,

he can control the starting point of your story.

- Now, put a train station above here.

- You pass under the railroad track, through a tunnel,

leaving the outside world.

- It's like going through the rabbit hole

in "Alice in Wonderland".

- City hall here,

gazebo here,

fire station, movie theater.

Yes, that's coming along nicely.

- As you enter the park, you go up Main Street,

and that scene one, inspired by Walt's home town.

[inspiring music]

- Marceline, Missouri,

it's a small town with small town values.

- He only lived there for about four years,

but Walt was kind of in love with his childhood at Marceline.

- It was the main street of turn-of-the-century America,

a place of trains, and petticoats,

and barbershop quartets, and soda fountains.

A return to innocence that America didn't have anymore.

- Main Street is just the first stop.

How do we get people to keep moving forward

towards the heart of the park?

If we put something in the distance that they can see.

[dramatic music]

A castle.

We put a castle in the middle of the park

with different lands coming off of it.

- The castle at the center of the park serves as a hub.

And then from that hub,

you can move out into different lands of your choosing.

- These lands that are based around

the films he's producing.

Fantasyland is a fairytale.

Adventureland is documentaries.

Frontierland, you have the westerns.

And then Tomorrowland is interest in the future.

- What's nice about the design is,

you're never gonna find a dead end.

There was kind of a big circular element to it.

Every direction brings you back to where you started.

It's a genius design for a park.

- He was breaking every convention

on how to build an amusement park

'cause he wasn't trying to build an amusement park.

- He's creating a theme park, a story-based park.

Something that doesn't currently exist

anywhere in the world.

- That's a thing of beauty.

- You think it's enough to sell them on it?

- I guess we'll see.

- So there's one big problem in making Disneyland a reality.

This is gonna be an extraordinarily

expensive project.

- He kept going to banks.

They didn't understand what he was talking about.

But there was one place

where there was a good possibility of finding funding.

- If this works,

we're not only gonna be building a park,

we'll be in the television business too.

- [Announcer] The entire world began to pour

into American homes everywhere.

- The 1950s are basically the decade of television.

- Everybody's buying a television

in the same way that everybody

was buying a personal computer in the 1980s.

- By 1955,

well over 50% of American households

owned a television set.

- [Narrator] Television networks scramble

to add programming.

- They were asking

all of the different movie studios for content,

and the studios were all fighting it.

- They want nothing to do with television.

Television is this giant threat.

It's going to destroy the movie industry.

- Because why would you go to a theater

when you can go sit at home and turn the TV set on?

[family laughing]

- So theater chains threaten to boycott

movie studios that move into TV,

and Walt Disney Productions

is a company that is almost entirely focused

on making films for the big screen.

- But now with Disneyland on his mind,

Walt saw an opportunity.

- Roy and Walt cook up this audacious plan to finance it.

- Everyone's going right, Walt's going left.

- [Narrator] The rest of the film industry

has declared war on television,

but Walt Disney is willing to take a gamble.

- Film studios are trying to kill television

before it kills them.

And now, into this battlefield walks Roy and Walt Disney

going against their own industry.

- We think this could be a unique opportunity for ABC,

and for Disney.

You might call it a partnership.

- [Narrator] Desperate to fund Disneyland,

Walt sends his brother to pitch a weekly TV series

with one unique element.

- In order for Walt to get into television,

he wants the networks to buy into his theme park.

- Basically, to help bankroll the creation of the park

in exchange for creating a television show for them.

- How much is this park going to cost?

- Walt figures about 2 million to 5 million to get started.

[tense music]

I'd say closer to 10.

- We weren't your first stop, were we, Roy?

- NBC and CBS both turned us down.

- NBC and CBS, they want Disney.

They don't want Disneyland.

And so ultimately, Roy went to the third place,

fledgling ABC network.

- ABC didn't have a single show in the top 25.

It was such a small fish that one of the names for it

was the "Almost Broadcasting Company".

- And this television program would be what, exactly?

- A mixture of live action animation.

Some original, some from our library.

With a weekly update in the park's progress.

- Walt sees television as an opportunity

to communicate directly to the American family.

- How long to build a park?

- Aiming to open in less than two years.

Summer, 1955.

- ABC knows they need to somehow

catch up to the other networks

if they're going to be viable moving forward.

[executive exhales]

- All right, Roy, you have a deal.

But we are going to hold you to this 1955 deadline.

[dramatic music]

- Deal.

[glasses clink]

- Disneyland.

- So ABC signs off on the deal

and they're gonna pay for the building of Disneyland

as long as they get the television series.

Who really wins in this deal?

Walt Disney.

[magical music]

- [Announcer] Walt Disney's Disneyland.

- Now we want you to share with us

our latest and greatest dream.

Disneyland: A place of hopes and dreams,

facts and fancy, all in one.

- Walt Disney is able to pull off a major coup

by using the television series

as free advertisement for the theme park itself.

- We want you to see and share with us

the experience of building this dream into a reality.

- And pretty quickly, ABC has captured

40% of American viewers,

which is a quarter of all American households.

- [Narrator] With millions of Americans tuning in each week

to watch Disneyland's progress,

the pressure is on for Walt to get it built.

But construction crews are having issues,

throwing them behind schedule.

- They keep telling me that the scale is all wrong.

It changes from one building to the next.

Sometimes one floor to the next.

- Who cares about scale?

Hollywood set designers do this all the time.

It's about what looks right.

- Disneyland was not designed by engineers.

- They had traditional animators,

they had scenic painters.

They used techniques that are common

to the filmmaking process

but just don't translate to the typical construction world.

One of those being forced perspective.

- We're shortening the upper stories

to make the building seem taller.

I have to trick your eye into seeing what I want you to see.

- They use force perspective all throughout the park.

That's why the castle has larger bricks at the bottom,

then they get smaller as it goes up.

So if you look up,

it seems like it's much taller than it really is.

- Construction crews really struggled

to understand this concept.

- They're behind schedule.

Opening day is less than a year away.

This is a massive obstacle for Disney.

- I get it, Walt.

It just isn't done like this.

- I don't care.

This is how we're doing it.

- [Narrator] As Disneyland's construction

ramps up in Anaheim,

Walt and Roy turn their attention

to a key addition to Walt's vision: attractions.

- Walt's original idea was essentially

a walk around themed experience

where you can go from world to world to world.

But then he realized the attractions

actually could tell a story.

- Yes, we've gone through your entire catalog.

We're looking for something altogether different.

- It's a "Peter Pan" ride.

Passengers will sit in a ship

and fly over London onto Neverland.

The whole thing needs to feel like you're flying.

- You're talking about a one-off.

It's never gonna work.

Why don't you take a Tilt-a-Whirl

and paint a pirate ship on the back?

- In the movie, "Peter Pan,"

one of the great sequence of all times

is that flight to Neverland.

And Walt now wanted to take this

to a new level in his theme park

and literally have his audience fly to Neverland.

- Why don't you come over here?

I'll show you some other options.

- Conventional rides couldn't give

Walt Disney what he wanted.

He needed to really think outside the box,

or maybe right above the box.

- Who makes that track up there?

- [Narrator] Aerial track systems

have long helped factories and warehouses

move heavy goods overhead.

- Walt Disney realizes that this thing that's just used

as a means of conveyance in an industrial setting

can be the way to fly to Neverland.

- [Narrator] Walt boldly decides

that his attractions will be revolutionary,

one of a kind experiences

designed and built from the ground up

[dramatic music]

- Walt created this combination,

this art and science of storytelling.

And that's where the real magic begins.

- You are boarding the pirate ship

and soaring along the skylines of London

with the darling children.

- When you ride Peter Pan, you get to be Peter Pan.

- What Disney's doing is inventing

an entire new way to experience an attraction.

- Walt wants to connect us to the emotion of these stories.

So in Fantasyland,

Snow White's adventure is all about fear and danger.

Peter Pan's flight, awe and wonder.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, humor and comedy.

- He literally is placing you into the fantasy.

To be able to step into a giant teacup and spin,

that's mind blowing.

That's surreal.

- [Narrator] But the experience doesn't end

when the attraction is over.

Walt insists that every experience at Disneyland

must bring to life one of the park's themes.

- He wanted the experience to be seamless.

He wanted the immersion to be complete.

- So in Adventureland at the Jungle Cruise,

they wanted you to live and experience

the true life adventure films.

- Walt Disney originally wanted live animals.

He wanted to actually see the hippopotamus and so forth,

but that was not gonna work.

- The problem is that they often don't stay

in where you put them.

So Imagineering decided to figure out a way

to simulate the animal encounter experience.

And they're willing to sort of try things

that no one else has done before.

And this leads to brand new technologies

like the audio-animatronics.

- In Tomorrowland,

the whole theory behind Autopia was

that freeways are our new thing

and this is gonna teach children how to drive on the freeways.

- So I made a point that the little car that I designed

for the first Autopia was a believable, realistic,

future type of sports car.

- And in Frontierland,

which is sort of this homage to the American West,

Walt loved the association with Mark Twain and his stories,

and he loved the idea of setting off

on an adventure down the river.

- [Narrator] Walt's Rivers of America

will be plied by the Mark Twain Riverboat,

a majestic Mississippi paddle wheeler.

The first of its kind to be built in some 50 years.

And by May of 1955,

the Mark Twain is nearly ready for launch.

But in Frontierland, there's a problem.

[tense music]

- We filled it three times.

The water keeps seeping out,

- Well, line it with plastic.

- We tried that.

- This is supposed to be a river.

I have a quarter million dollar steamboat

that needs to be floating right here

in a matter of weeks.

[tense music]

- They scooped out the river,

and they fill it up only to discover

that all of the water

quickly goes down into the porous, sandy soil.

They need millions of gallons to create that water system.

- How do you build a massive paddle boat

and not have water to put it in?

It was a huge problem,

and it was a problem they had to solve fast.

- [Narrator] With opening day less than two months away,

the Rivers of America affect a lot more

than just the Mark Twain.

- All the water systems in Disneyland are all connected.

The same water in Rivers of America

is the same river for the Jungle Cruise

and the moat around the castle,

which means one problem in one place

means a big problem all over the place.

[tense music]

- This is what the old timer farmers are using

to line their irrigation ditches.

Plain, old clay.

- One of the big problems

that they have in constructing Disneyland

is the Rivers of America.

This thirsty, California, arid land soil

just sucks up the water.

But the farmers in the area use natural clay

that actually creates an impermeable surface

and the water doesn't seep in.

- Well, does it work?

- Yeah.

They're lining the riverbed with it now.

- Well, clay it is.

- So it's pretty low tech.

And that's the thing about Walt Disney.

He doesn't care if it's high tech, low tech.

If it gets the job done, he likes it.

- [Narrator] It's also cheap, which Walt desperately needs.

With opening day rapidly approaching,

he's running out of time and money.

[clock ticking] [tense music]

- Disneyland, in its last months of construction,

owes everyone money

and is in a tremendously tight spot.

If it does not open that summer,

Disneyland is going to go bankrupt.

- And so the closer it went towards opening day,

the more worried Walt got

that more and more things weren't happening.

- They have to decide whether

they're gonna have bathrooms finished,

or water fountains finished.

They're able to get one, but not both.

- I don't care how much it costs, just do it.

- The decision is ultimately made.

Finish the bathrooms.

- There was trouble getting concrete,

so they had to haul it up from San Diego,

which is like a 90-mile, one-way trip.

- The park absolutely needs to open on July 17th.

- And here's the kicker.

We were gonna have a live television show that day.

So not only do we have construction equipment

for finishing the park, we have to accommodate

all this new live television equipment coming in.

- [Narrator] ABC will run five control rooms,

29 cameras, and 85,000 feet of cable

for this one event.

[tense music]

But on the eve of opening,

Disneyland is not quite complete.

- The day before opening,

they were still putting asphalt down on Main Street, USA.

Tomorrowland was not finished at all.

- Looks like you can use a hand.

- Walt stays up most of the night

trying to finish areas.

- Walt was just visible everywhere.

Not so much giving orders,

but out there kind of urging everybody,

as, "What else do you need?

What can I help you with?"

- Almost there.

- But you know, it was so exciting.

We're opening tomorrow.

[tense music]

- How do you do, everyone? This is Hank Weaver.

For the past year, this signature has announced

the opening of Disneyland, the show.

Now, it announces the opening of Disneyland, the place.

Thousands are coming in.

They're going through the magic tunnel.

And like Alice in Wonderland,

as you go on through that tunnel,

you find yourself in another world.

- [Narrator] An estimated 90 million Americans

tune in for the live broadcast,

more than half of the nation's population,

beating the previous record for a televised event

four times over.

- And that built up so much excitement for the theme park

that you couldn't sell tickets fast enough.

- To all who come to this happy place, welcome.

Disneyland is your land.

- True to exactly what Walt Disney thought,

Disneyland was a phenomenal success.

They had over a million visitors within months.

- Eventually, the board of directors

who turned Disney down

want to be part of Disneyland,

and they buy up ABC's stake

so that they could be part of the park.

- [Narrator] A year earlier,

hardly anyone had heard of Anaheim, California.

By 1956, it's one of the top tourist destinations

in the Western hemisphere.

- Walt Disney is always on the razor's edge of innovation,

moving forward into new directions

that ultimately become cultural mainstays

at a very real level.

- Giving us a theme park,

Walt completely turns the amusement park industry

upside down and on its ear.

- Walt didn't just invent a whole new kind of park.

He invented an entire category of entertainment.

- After Disney's success in Anaheim,

the theme park became a highly duplicated entity.

Look no further than Legoland and Universal Studios.

- But nothing has achieved

anywhere near the cultural awareness

that Disney parks around the world have achieved.

- [Narrator] Today, theme parks

are a $50 billion a year global industry,

with Disney leading the pack.

- I mean, if you're going to India and you're saying,

"I'm going to the Taj Mahal.

I'm going to France, I'm gonna go see the Louvre."

It became our Taj Mahal and Louvre.

Disneyland blew people's minds.

- Walt said that Disneyland will never be completed

as long as there's imagination left in the world.

- Despite the fact that everyone told him he was crazy

and he was spending money on the wrong things

and putting his attention in the wrong places,

he bucked convention and he was a success.

Not only was he a success,

but he created the new standard,

the happiest place on Earth.

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