Disney TV 0814337635, 9780814337639

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Disney TV

TV Milestones Series Editors Barry Keith Grant Brock University

Jeanette Sloniowski Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Patricia B. Erens Dominican University

Robert J. Burgoyne Wayne State University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Peter Lehman Arizona State University

Anna McCarthy New York University

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

DisneyTV

J . P. Te l o t t e

TV

MILESTONES

Wayne State University Press

SERIES

Detroit

Copyright © 2004 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 08 07 06 05 04

54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Telotte, J. P., 1949– Disney TV / J. P. Telotte. p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series. TV milestones) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8143-3084-3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Walt Disney Company. 2. Wonderful world of Disney (Television program) I. Title: Disney television. II. Title. III. Series. PN1992.92.W35T45 2004 791.45'72—dc22 2004000538

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION: DISNEY TELEVISION ix

1. Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color: A Chronicle 1 2. Stories of a Mythic Past 27 3. Stories of Fact and (Science) Fiction 45 4. Promoting the Films/Promoting the Parks: Hybrid Stories 61 Conclusion: The Disneyland/Wonderful World of Color Legacy 81 NOTES 93 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 99 INDEX 103

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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riting this book has left me with several large debts. My family most of all—Leigh, Gabby, and Justin— humored me, taped and watched a great number of episodes of Disneyland and The Wonderful World of Color, helped with illustrations for the volume, and even discussed episodes with me, probably beyond all reason. Their support was most important in completing the project. My colleagues and students at Georgia Tech also have a share in this book. Bob Kolker, a model of the film scholar, consistently encouraged the work, as he has all of my efforts. Other fellow faculty, among them Shannon Dobransky and Carol Senf, graciously endured longwinded commentaries spurred by their most casual references to Disney. And my students, particularly those in the Film and/as Technology course, typically humored me while also asking their usual smart questions. I am also grateful to Wayne State University Press for giving me the opportunity to lead off their series, and for providing me with a copyeditor, Jennifer Backer, who was both thorough and sensitive to clear and straightforward prose. “It all started with a mouse,” Walt Disney was fond of saying, as he tried to acknowledge his studio’s indebtedness to an

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audience that had developed a surprising fondness for his creation Mickey Mouse. This study, too, began with something small, my own childhood fascination with Disney television, recalled thanks to a passing reference by Barry Grant to a new series he and Jeanette Sloniowski were coediting titled Landmarks in Television. It is to Barry and Jeanette that I am most indebted for getting me started on what has proved to be a most pleasurable bit of research into my own and my cultural past.

INTRODUCTION

Disney Television In the fifties, the critical mass of baby boomers entered the impressionable preschool and elementary-school ages. And where the baby boom went was where the action would be. Landon Jones, Great Expectations

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wo of the key components of what Landon Jones terms “the action” of 1950s culture were television and marketing, a nexus that surrounded baby boomers with products created especially for them, spurred new fads aimed expressly at them, and differentiated them from previous generations of Americans by redefining them as spectator-consumers. Just as important, that combination established a pattern that would increasingly typify contemporary America, a world that, for many, seemed to be increasingly disjointed from values and traditions of the past while also becoming media- and marketdriven, drawing its tastes from a pervasively mediated environment and even responding to advertisements as if they were entertainment itself. Finding a safe and somewhat stable position amid this action was difficult, since rapid cultural change could lend itself to fads—such as the hula hoop, coonskin cap, finned cars, and the Twist—but fads by their nature burn out quickly, becoming historical curiosities in short order, markers that help measure the more stable elements of culture, as well as its needs and desires. One of the key cultural markers at both ends of this spectrum was the Disneyland television series, which generated one

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of the most popular fads of the era and, along with the comforting presence of its host, Walt Disney himself, stood as a symbol of a kind of cultural and indeed psychic stability in this period. Premiering in 1954, Disneyland would undergo various transformations in title—Walt Disney Presents (1958–61), Walt Disney’s The Wonderful World of Color (1961–69), The Wonderful World of Disney (1969–79), Disney’s Wonderful World (1979–81), Walt Disney (1981–83), The Disney Sunday Movie (1986–88), and The Magical World of Disney (1988–90)—shifts in network, and its creator’s death, yet it would also become one of the longest-lived programs in television history. Over the course of twenty-nine years it continuously occupied primetime viewing slots for each of the major networks, offered audiences family-style programming oriented around a few basic popular themes, and won numerous Emmy and Peabody awards. It was, very simply, a fixture of American television and of family viewing habits during the pioneering decade of the 1950s and for many decades after, although it also started at least a few of the cultural fads noted above. Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color (arguably the series’ two most commonly used and best recognized titles) was, consequently, a key site for the sort of nexus described above, as well as a point of stability from which we can see its development. For the first of the baby boomers, the Disneyland series was indeed where the action was and a model for the institutionalization of that junction of entertainment and marketing that has become such a recognizable element of the contemporary media experience.1 Even prior to television’s movement into this arena, Walt Disney had recognized that nexus and had begun to capitalize on it. In the 1930s with his small film studio desperate for cash to support its animation projects as well as his own dreams of expansion, Walt and his brother Roy licensed the likeness of their “star,” Mickey Mouse, to a variety of commercial vendors. Reflecting the fast-growing popularity of Disney’s cinematic creations, sales for those licensed products—tablets, handkerchiefs, sleepwear, toys, even Mickey Mouse–embossed ice

More than simply establishing another source for capital, though, this accentuation on combining entertainment and merchandising also helped spur the worldwide popularity of Disney’s films and affected the company’s entire production process. Certainly, this thrust marked the beginning of a fruitful symbiosis—of product and marketing, of mass entertainment and personal consumer experience—that would increasingly come to identify the company, to mark its singular place in American culture as the primary and most successful example of the entertainment-marketing conglomerate, and later to script the terms for the company’s entry into television and other mass media.2 In fact, by the late 1930s, as Steven Watts notes, merchandising and its planning had already become “an

Disney Television

cream cones—quickly exceeded all expectations. Probably the best-known example of that impact is the Ingersoll-Waterbury Company contract with Disney, which, although executed at the height of the depression, resulted in sales of two and a half million Mickey Mouse watches in just two years. Equally noteworthy is the agreement allowing the Lionel Corporation to produce a Mickey and Minnie Mouse handcar on tracks, the sales of which are credited with helping Lionel not only to overcome bankruptcy but also to gain a leading position in the toy market (Thomas 107–08). Under the guidance of advertising executive Herman (Kay) Kamen, Disney in this period licensed the use of the mouse and other characters to more than seventy-five manufacturers in the United States, forty-five in England, twenty in Canada, six in France, and six in Spain and Portugal, a move that produced annual sales of over $100 million (Watts 148) within a decade, while helping to sustain the parent company’s film activity. The “action,” even at this point in the twentieth century, was already beginning to shift to a nexus of entertainment and advertisement and in the process anticipated the baby boom generation that would find part of its identity in this combination and that would help propel Disney to its place as a contemporary entertainment and cultural phenomenon.

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intrinsic part of the moviemaking process” (149) at Disney, with Snow White (1937), the company’s first feature, also its first product to implement this new strategy from the outset. Thanks to its previous licensing experience, Disney already had a complete merchandising campaign in place when Snow White opened, involving arrangements with over seventy companies for such goods as records, books, cutlery, toys, and a range of clothing items, including hats, dresses, and underwear. For Watts, a key result of this mixing of family-oriented entertainment with an intense emphasis on merchandising was that even at this early stage in his career, the studio’s head, “Disney the modernist, the populist, and the prophet of abundance appeared on the same stage, indistinguishable” (163). Not simply another entertainment mogul like those who at the time ruled the movie industry—Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, Lewis B. Mayer—Walt Disney was emerging as a harbinger and even a symbol of America’s future, as someone who not only sold the culture a cinematic product (in both traditional and nontraditional ways) but was helping to create what Paul Virilio has lately termed a “cinematic reality” that we would all inhabit. I briefly sketch Disney’s industrial background to establish a cultural context out of which one of its most important developments, one that has had a lasting impact on the American entertainment industry and our cultural environment, would not only emerge but become practically inevitable. Disney television, which has taken a great variety of forms— numerous specials, wildly successful series such as Zorro (ABC, 1957–59) and The Mickey Mouse Club (ABC, 1955–59), The Disney Sunday Movie series (ABC, 1989), various Disney products for Saturday morning cartoon time, and especially the Disney Channel—would deliberately capitalize on this model for success, while Disney’s longest-running and most influential series, Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color, would lay its foundation on this model to become a landmark of the early television era. In fact, we might argue that because of its impact on the film industry, on American viewing habits, on the shape

When Disneyland premiered in 1954, the American film industry was in what might be described as a crisis, due particularly to government action against its traditional structure and to the changing entertainment habits of postwar America. The Supreme Court’s Paramount Decision of 1948 had ordered the breakup of the monopolistic structure of the major Hollywood studios—a structure that had helped them dominate both domestic and world film markets for much of the twentieth century—by forcing them to disband their combination of production, distribution, and exhibition operations. It left the major studios—Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, MGM, RKO, and Warner Bros.—largely as elaborate sites of production, linked to international distribution companies. While they still carried a heavy overhead of contract employees, they lacked the guaranteed venues (and, effectively, guaranteed profits) for their products that the corporately owned theaters had provided. Consequently, the 1950s saw a widespread reduction in the number of studio productions, the elimination of many contract personnel, and increased emphasis on deals with independent producers—in essence, the dismantling of the “movie factory” system that had served Hollywood so well. Adding to that crisis was the competition provided by the fledgling medium of television, offering essentially free, athome entertainment to the many new families of the postwar baby boom. In the economic upsurge following the war, those families were acquiring televisions at a much higher rate than had been the case for the earlier competitor medium, radio, and much faster than the film industry had anticipated (Stuart 291). At the same time, those new and expanding families, many of them moving to suburbia and thus away from the traditional urban theater sites, were staying at home and finding the “action” in TV’s home-based entertainment, which was convenient, generally family-friendly in content, and free. In short, this

Disney Television

of the television industry, and on the changing nature of mass culture entertainment, Disneyland is one of the most influential series in the history of American television.

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new entertainment threatened to supplant, if not replace, an already weakened film industry. In fact, one survey concluded that the rapid and widespread penetration of television accounted for 50 percent of the box office decline that Hollywood suffered between 1949 and 1955.3 The major studios responded to these threats in various ways. Some ignored the newcomer television and focused on coping with the government’s efforts to reshape the film industry. However, as Fredric Stuart explains, most studios viewed television as a dangerous competitor, “an enemy that could be overcome” by further industrial development: “internal reorganization, concentration on high-cost feature production, and technological development” (302). This approach led to higher costs and several rounds of innovations—Cinerama, 3-D, and various wide-screen formats—that for the most part enjoyed only temporary popularity. Another strategy was to “buy into” the new medium. However, most early efforts in this direction—plans for using television to beam movies and live events into traditional theaters or for buying up independent television stations to create a new sort of distribution and exhibition network for studio products—fell through. Paramount’s experiments with theater TV, in partnership with the Scophony Corporation, for example, only demonstrated that neither the technology nor the audience was ready to support such a change—one that promised a substantial capital outlay for equipment by both the studios and theaters. And when Warners and other studios tried to buy existing television licenses and build their own TV networks, the government again intervened to halt any effort to avoid the new film industry controls. Drawing on the Communications Act of 1934, the Federal Communications Commission froze TV station licensing while investigating whether, as Christopher Anderson offers, “the major studios legitimately had the right to own television stations” (40). Yet another approach explored by the studios was to partner with television, either by supplying the networks with old

For its part Disney operated without some of these constraints and hence with somewhat more freedom than the larger studios. Since it had never been one of the majors targeted by government action, Disney had not suffered from the divestiture agreement. It had no theater chain to spin off, and it never carried the burden of large numbers of expensive contract personnel. Cartoon “stars” like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were purely assets, useful for bartering in various commercial arenas and unable to press for higher wages or contractual freedom. Moreover, Disney had already made several moves to meet the upheavals the industry faced. In 1953, for example,

Disney Television

films or creating films specifically for television. However, a combination of internal constraints and reluctance by the dominant networks either frustrated or delayed this line of development. Since the approximately 17,000 movie theaters of the early 1950s were still Hollywood’s target market, the industry, as William Boddy explains, “took seriously” a series of threats by the exhibitors (who were no longer bound to or part of the traditional film companies) “to boycott any studio that sold features to television or moved too wholeheartedly into telefilm production” (134). Similarly, the film talent guilds (the actors, directors, etc.) pressured the studios not to release recent films for television play until the unions had negotiated royalties for such exhibitions. At the same time, the television networks feared being inundated by old studio product, the widespread release of which could compete with and undermine their own efforts to build up a system of network-produced programming while possibly creating a bidding war for established hit films or works featuring top talent still under studio contract. The result of these concerns was that throughout much of the late 1940s and early 1950s, even as the film and television industries often recognized their similarities, the production or exhibition benefits that each offered the other, and the potential profits of a working partnership, they remained wary of one another and were intent on shoring up their own places in the rapidly changing American entertainment industry.

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the studio established its own distribution company, Buena Vista, so that it would no longer have to rely on a larger studio like RKO for distribution—or compete with the distributing studio’s own product for exhibition space. While the short cartoon had been a staple of Disney production and had earned many of the studio’s Academy Awards, Disney ceased shorts production because they had become unprofitable in the new Hollywood with its new exhibition practices. Disney began to concentrate instead on nature documentaries, like Seal Island (1948) and Nature’s Half Acre (1951), and live-action films, such as So Dear to My Heart (1949) and Treasure Island (1950), types that could be produced more quickly and cheaply than animated films. These maneuvers, described by Watts as “both psychologically revitalizing and financially profitable” (284), suggest that the studio had a clear sense of direction amid the changing entertainment climate. Disney was, as a result, better positioned than the big studios to act on the opportunities and the challenges television presented. Equally important in establishing a relationship with the new medium was Disney’s record for producing successful family programming of the sort that early television sought. It is a record supported by the fact that Walt Disney and his studio, prior to Disneyland’s production, had received twenty-five Academy Awards for their animated cartoons, documentary work, and various technical achievements. This record was strengthened by the studio’s early, highly praised forays into television with two specials produced for NBC and CBS. As Walt and Roy Disney had learned through these one-shot productions, their studio could create programs that would draw a large audience, and those efforts could help build an audience for their other projects. In 1950, for instance, Disney had created a one-hour Christmas special for NBC titled “One Hour in Wonderland.” Featuring Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy as hosts, the show took the form of a Christmas party at the Disney studio, offering audiences glimpses of the lot and soundstages, promotional excerpts from Disney’s upcoming

The opening of Disneyland, as seen on a 1950s-vintage television.

Disney Television

theatrical release Alice in Wonderland (1951), and live-action scenes involving the voice- and image-model for Alice, Kathryn Beaumont, and Bobby Driscoll, the child star of the justreleased Treasure Island. So successful was the show in attracting an audience that CBS approached Disney to do a similar special the next year. And since the first show had built audience anticipation for Alice, Walt readily agreed to produce “The Walt Disney Christmas Show,” a special with the then record television budget of $250,000. This time Walt himself served as host, presiding over a Christmas party for children of different nationalities, introducing several cartoons and animated sequences from the Disney archives, and again offering previews of his studio’s upcoming releases, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (entering rerelease) and Peter Pan. This show also received favorable critical and commercial reaction, confirming the possibilities for television foreseen by Disney, who had, in 1950, already hired the research firm of C. J. LaRoche to study his studio’s television prospects.

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With these early forays into the new medium and the studio’s eventual agreement to produce regular programming for ABC, Disney set the stage for a new relationship between the film industry and television. Rather than ignoring television or trying to compete with the networks, Disney positioned itself as a reliable source of quality programming, thereby modeling how the larger film industry might also revision itself as a supplier of prime-time shows and even helping to determine a dominant form—the episodic series—for that programming (Anderson 8). With the TV networks as voracious consumers of product and their increasing openness to the possibility of drawing on the reputation of Hollywood, its talent pool, and its skills at creating attractive programming, most of the major studios would soon begin trading on their long-established practices. In short order, Warner Bros. created its own studio-based series for ABC, Warner Bros. Presents (ABC, 1955–56), MGM provided The MGM Parade for the same network, and 20th Century-Fox supplied The 20th Century-Fox Hour to CBS (1955–57). While all three series proved short-lived—only The 20th Century-Fox Hour lasted more than a season—Disney had effectively blazed a trail. By following Disney’s lead into television production, or as Christopher Anderson offers, its “blueprint for the future development of the media industries” (155), Hollywood saw how it might capitalize on one of its chief strengths: the standardized, highly polished, genre-based studio production. Disney’s move into television was just as significant, though, for its impact on another kind of “action” in this era: the developing shape of the television industry and mass culture entertainment. In the late 1940s and early 1950s four television networks—NBC, CBS, Dumont, and ABC—struggled to dominate the airwaves. The first two, thanks largely to their earlier success as radio networks, were well capitalized, had the most network-owned stations and affiliates, drew in the largest advertising revenues, and had a higher percentage of stations broadcasting their signals live (a process known as “live clear-

Competing with CBS and NBC in this period were two other networks with national aspirations. The smaller of these, Dumont, was strongly invested in early television technology but lacked the capitalization that sustained the larger networks. And despite early investment by Paramount Pictures, the production arm of the old Paramount conglomerate, it never mounted a serious threat to the two majors. In fact, largely because of its links to Paramount—and thus to the newly regulated film industry—Dumont was limited by federal regulators to only three network-owned and operated stations. Forced to rely too heavily on locally owned affiliates to ever become profitable, it ceased broadcasting in 1955. And in the early 1950s ABC, begun as an offshoot of a branch of NBC (NBC-Blue), seemed to have little better fate in store. It ran far behind the two majors in its affiliates’ “live clearance,” its own programming drew a much smaller audience, and its advertising revenues and rates were always far less (Boddy 145). Lacking a daytime broadcast schedule and a top-rated series, ABC was at best just a weak third. However, a merger with the Paramount theater chain (United Paramount Theaters) in 1953 gave it much-needed working capital and a new president, former UPT executive Leonard Goldenson, together allowing ABC to compete with CBS and NBC. In the mid-1950s, then, while two

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ance”). These broadcasters relied heavily on established stars of radio, as well as a number lured from the film studios that were releasing contract players, and they initially derived much of their programming directly from sponsors that produced the shows—a practice that minimized network risks and overhead. Moreover, the advantage of those established radio networks allowed them early on, as Erik Barnouw explains, to use “radio profits [to] pay the television development bill” (103). While the film industry over several decades had gradually coalesced into an oligopoly of five major studios that effectively controlled what was made and seen, the television industry had quickly become dominated by NBC and CBS, whose operations strongly resembled the film oligopoly.4

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well-established networks dominated American television and stood as formidable competitors to Hollywood, a third, under Goldenson’s “five-year plan” for network development, sought to establish its own place in the entertainment industry—to refigure it as a three-network oligopoly.5 Disney figured directly in this “plan,” for ABC, under Goldenson’s direction, saw that studio as a source of prestige and quality entertainment that might help it to compete with the other major broadcasters. While Disney was a minor Hollywood studio, it had established a solid position in the industry, thanks to its consistent profitability and its status derived from more than two decades of producing award-winning animated and live-action films, as well as its successful television specials. As Anderson explains, ABC believed that “Disney’s production values would differentiate” its work from the live, often unpredictable television that dominated the other networks, and that “Hollywood genres might appeal to an audience dissatisfied with the radio-style fare of variety shows, situation comedies, and anthology dramas.” Further, they hoped that Disney’s reputation for family-friendly fare “might attract sponsors that had not previously advertised on ABC, or on television in general” (141). The link to Disney, consequently, was a logical and key move for a network trying to gain critical respectability, to establish an audience, and to situate itself competitively in the two-network structure that dominated American television. Yet, even with Disney’s credentials and its limited television track record, that move was hardly unproblematic. It involved risks for both ABC and Disney, centered around financing and the changing face of the entertainment industry. For Disney’s plans for a full-scale movement into television production were from the start geared to Walt’s larger ideas about where the “action” in family entertainment was heading, specifically to his dream of a theme park to be known as Disneyland. While the LaRoche research report encouraged Disney to enter television (Watts 364), and the studio’s Christmas specials had

For ABC, of course, the stakes were just as high. While that network, like the much stronger CBS and NBC, was eager to establish a relationship with Disney and to draw upon its ability to attract a family audience, ABC was still the weakest

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demonstrated it could produce suitable and successful programming, Walt was exploring even more ambitious plans and, as with the specials, hoping to leverage television to promote those plans. In 1948 he had begun studying the possibility for an amusement park to be called Mickey Mouse Park that would be located on a small, eleven-acre studio property. By 1953 he had greatly expanded his conception and had commissioned the Stanford Research Institute to determine its economic feasibility and to find a location—one suitable for what had grown to a forty-seven-acre park plan. That plan resembled that of a world's fair, not any existing amusement park, while functioning, as Steven Watts sums up, as “a unique embodiment of prosperous, middle-class, postwar America . . . as a monument to the American way of life” (287). But neither the Disney studio nor Walt himself had the capital for such an endeavor, even one strongly endorsed by the Stanford study. In fact, while that report recommended an initial investment of $11,000,000 to construct the park, the studio was already heavily indebted to Bank of America for its day-to-day production expenses and the park plans were becoming even more ambitious.6 Almost from the start, then, television entered into the Disneyland plans, as both a source of financing and, as with the studio’s films, as a means of publicizing and marketing the project. As Walt later noted, “I saw that if I was ever to have my park[,] . . . here, at last, was a way to tell millions of people about it—with TV” (Schickel 266). By committing his studio to this combined initiative of the amusement park and the still new television medium, Disney was risking much, although he was also—in what Anderson terms “one of the most influential commercial decisions in postwar American culture” (134)—undertaking a project that could effectively reconfigure the mass entertainment industry in America.

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and most poorly capitalized of the networks. Indeed, Roy Disney initially approached both NBC and CBS with a television series proposal, since they were better able to meet Disney’s special condition—helping to finance Walt’s amusement park. After the two senior networks balked at the package, though, Leonard Goldenson agreed to the deal, and in April 1954 the two companies signed a seven-year contract, calling for ABC to purchase a 35 percent share in the park for $500,000, to arrange a line of credit up to $4.5 million that would guarantee its completion, and to pay $2 million for a first television season of twenty original episodes. The return on this risky investment was almost immediate, with ABC clearly differentiating its product from its network rivals, establishing a relationship with a quality producer for a long period, and signaling its commitment to what Anderson terms “youthful families with children” (140)—the baby boom generation. The critical reaction also suggested the move was a sound one, as the New York Times termed the deal “the most important development to date in relations between the old and the new entertainment form” (Pryor). Of course, the ultimate sign of success was the bottom line, as Disneyland, during its inaugural run, attracted almost half of ABC’s total advertising revenues for the year (Anderson 141). The ABC-Disney agreement helped boost the status not only of the weakest of the major networks but also of television itself, since it afforded quality programming to the network and helped open the door for other partnerships between the traditional film industry and television. While the new series that premiered on October 27, 1954, served both companies’ immediate needs, it also had long-term, even momentous, consequences. Certainly it helped vault ABC to the status of a major network. The show was also a major pillar in Disney’s plans to, as Anderson explains, “transform the Disney studio from an independent producer of feature films and cartoon short subjects into a diversified leisure and entertainment corporation” (137). Even more, it heralded the start of a larger transforma-

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Leveraging television to build a theme park: Following the success of his television series, Walt Disney inspects his soon-to-open park.

tion of the entertainment industry in the United States and perhaps of American culture itself. For television and the film industry would no longer simply ignore each other or be antagonistic competitors; they began to recognize the benefits of working together, following Walt’s principle that “entertain-

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ment was the same in any medium” (Thomas 242). Increasingly, the action would be located in that interaction between the different media and in the new, thoroughly mediated character of American culture Disney would help shape. To better understand Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color’s place in the action of the emerging postwar and postmodern culture, we shall, throughout the following discussion, follow a methodology that foregrounds these various changes. For this study aims to be by turns both historical and postmodern. That is, on the one hand, it offers a reliable chronology of the events leading up to the creation of the Disney anthology series and following its primary years on the ABC and NBC television networks. It gives special emphasis to the first five years on each network, years in which the show, under its two most well-known designations of Disneyland and The Wonderful World of Color, established its identity. And in this respect the work takes its lead from Walt Disney himself who, in his studio’s films, its theme parks, and its television productions, always insisted on a solid historical grounding and a look that reflected accurate historical research. On the other hand, this study will examine what I describe as the key episode types in the series’ landmark years from the vantage provided by the sociologist Paul Virilio and his assessment of how the media have affected our cultural reality. From this awareness of how much our sense of the real is conditioned by a process of mediatization, we can begin to gauge the contributions to contemporary culture of the media event that was Disneyland. Virilio describes how “urban space, . . . once charged with meaning” (Landscape 72), now derives much of its significance from its representation in film and television, that is, from its revisualization in contemporary media and our subsequent reexperiencing, or even virtual experiencing, of that environment—in effect, from its cultural marketing and reconstitution as a site/source of consumption. Consequently, he argues, to understand our world, we must become familiar with the “media nebula” (70) that surrounds, infuses, and essentially

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transforms it. This sense of a media-extended world seems fundamental to the new entertainment experience that Disney was exploring with the studio’s aggressive efforts at integrating film, the amusement park, consumer products, and television. It was an integration that was central to the conception, execution, and popular response to the Disneyland series. Of course, the Disney Company has since followed this trajectory laid out by its founder to become one of the world’s largest and most powerful media and entertainment companies. It is a company that has helped model the complex nexus of effects (product/marketing, passive entertainment/personal participation) that have come to characterize the postmodern cultural experience. This study should help sketch some of the ways in which the Disneyland show contributed to this larger development. For if it does not mark the point at which Disney finally achieved its paradigmatic status, it is certainly one of the major milestones on that corporate path and on the path since followed by both the traditional film industry and the fledgling television industry.

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Chapter 1

Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color

A CHRONICLE Today it is impossible to talk about the development of the audiovisual without also talking about the development of virtual imagery and its influence on human behavior, or without pointing to the new industrialization of vision, to the growth of a veritable market in synthetic perception. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

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o describe the development of contemporary media, as Paul Virilio notes, is a complex undertaking that implicates various other issues and histories, especially questions about the nature of virtual imagery and the development of what he terms a “vision machine,” that is, a dominant cultural practice of generating visual representations. This vantage is important to a historical overview of the development of the Disneyland series because that show is heavily implicated in various other regimes of visual representation, and it forecasts the development of the realm of virtual imagery and with it a kind of pervasive order of visual entertainment that characterizes postmodern culture. Disneyland, as we have noted, represents a significant intersection of the film and television industries; a key element of that intersection is a shift in image technology that it heralds, the movement from early television’s dominantly live or kinescoped image to the filmed image.1 Equally important is the instrumental connection between the television show and Disney’s theme parks, the rides and exhibits of which would help usher in a cultural acceptance of

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the virtual through their “audioanimatronics.” In short, Disneyland’s history is a media milestone in part for the way it is implicated in—and almost synonymous with—the development of that “market in synthetic perception” Virilio describes (The Vision Machine 5). The history outlined here, consequently, should be read as part of a larger account of the development of the cultural vision machine, although because of space limitations it cannot far pursue what Virilio terms “the ethical questions” (59) implicated in this cultural machinery, which have become the focus of a large body of Disney criticism. Some of those questions— such as who controls image production, what motivates that production, and what sort of controls attend it—have already surfaced here or are involved in the following account. Thus, following the previous chapter’s sketch of the media context for Disneyland, particularly the development of a new media oligopoly, this chapter addresses some of those questions by emphasizing the various corporate strategies involved in the series’ origins and development. However, this section also presumes the need for reading alongside it other accounts, particularly those that explore audience development, the imperatives of television technology, and the gender, class, and ethnic issues involved in all television production and consumption.2 Many of these concerns are at the forefront of recent commentaries on what Michael Real has termed the “Disney universe” (46), that is, the interrelationship of the Disney Company, the various films, television shows, and theme parks that project its image and sell its products, and the people and policies that support this selling. In fact, despite Janet Wasko’s assertion that “Disney is most often accepted with unqualified approval” and “its products are seen as innocent and pleasurable” by most people (3), most commentary on the Disney universe—a body of work begun with Richard Schickel’s 1968 book The Disney Version—seems intent on stripping away any element of the “innocent and pleasurable” that the typical family audience associates with Disney. Eleanor Byrne and Martin

Unlike many of those involved in decision-making positions in the established film industry, Walt Disney had some presentiment of the power and potential of the new television medium. Long before striking the Disneyland deal with ABC, he had given thought to the sort of programming his company might create for television. Disney abandoned United Artists as a film distributor in 1937 when he balked at surrendering later television rights to his film productions. And as early as 1944 the studio joined with RCA, one of the leading producers of early television sets and the corporate parent of NBC, to produce a film, tentatively titled The World in Your Living Room, which would “extol the virtues of television” (Cotter 3). While that production never moved beyond research and planning, it spurred further thought at the studio on the new entertainment technology and its potential impact. Consequently, as he would

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McQuillan summarize—and effectively satirize—the rush to deconstruct and condemn everything Disney, as they catalog the common contemporary criticisms: charges of “sexism, racism, conservatism, heterosexism, andro-centrism, imperialism (cultural), imperialism (economic), literary vandalism, jingoism, aberrant sexuality, censorship, propaganda, paranoia, homophobia, exploitation, ecological devastation, anti-union repression, FBI collaboration, corporate raiding, and stereotyping,” and perhaps even complicity in “the assassination of J. F. Kennedy and the production of anti-personnel landmines” (1). Amid this critical industry that has built up around Disney, subjecting what Real terms the Disney “experience of happiness” (51) to every manner of ideological exposure while often vilifying it, though, there is little attention to the place of early television development in the larger Disney universe and the contributions of that pioneering work to the formation of contemporary visual culture.3 In emphasizing the complex decision to create Disneyland, the nature of the show’s format, and its popular reception, the following account should begin to suggest the series’ role in the development of this pervasive cultural “vision machine.”

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later do prior to undertaking his theme park, Walt commissioned a study by the research firm C. J. LaRoche to determine the risks and benefits of television production. One result was Disney’s commitment to do the Christmas specials of 1950 and 1951, and the success of those shows certainly created interest in further production—both from the major networks, who found ready sponsorship for the specials and gained high ratings, and from Disney, which quickly saw the value of using television to publicize its films. As one contemporary reviewer noted after the first special aired, “That telecast should be worth $1,000,000 at the box office to Alice in Wonderland. I think Disney has found the answer to using television both to entertain and to sell his product” (quoted in Cotter 4). Apparently that sense of combined purposes was central to the company’s television planning from the start. Roy Disney, the company’s financial chief and architect of its economic development, described this developing strategy: “Integration is the key word around here: we don’t do anything in one line without giving thought to its likely profitability in our other lines” (Gordon 1). As they began considering how to enter into network television, Walt and Bill Walsh, who had produced the two Christmas specials, worked from that notion of “integration.” They first conceived of a half-hour series to be titled The Walt Disney Show, which would link the studio’s past and its future, showcasing its older animation while promoting its upcoming releases, after the model of the successful Christmas shows. Should the networks not buy that concept, though, they sketched out several other possibilities to pitch: The True Life TV Show, a series that would follow the format of and use footage from the studio’s successful “True-Life Adventure” films; The World of Tomorrow, a show that would combine existing animation with live-action segments “to educate viewers” about their changing world;4 and The Mickey Mouse Club TV Show, a series that would reintroduce the studio’s first “star” to a new generation, include the older Mickey Mouse cartoons, and be broadcast from a planned Mickey Mouse Club

And yet that larger conception was one reason why the leading networks initially balked at these ideas. For while the networks viewed a deal with the studio in terms of the existing program paradigm, with Disney providing product that they would distribute and exhibit by selling advertising, Walt had another view of television’s potential, one in which network distribution and exhibition would promote the studio’s entertainment agenda. Thus, he tied the creation of a television series to the building of his theme park, as he sought to leverage the negotiations for the former to provide funds for building the latter, and from the start conceived of each as advertising and drawing an audience for the other. In fact, as they began negotiating with both CBS and NBC, Walt and Roy “made it clear that the Park was an integral part of the package they were peddling—no support for Disneyland, no show” (Cotter 58). Under those terms, CBS was not interested, and while NBC continued negotiations for several months, it, too, hesitated to make such a dual commitment. On the strength of a personal phone call from Roy to ABC’s head, though, a deal was quickly struck and an official announcement of the partnership— including the linked plans for the television series and theme park—was made on April 2, 1954. Although a format had not yet been determined, Disneyland the show, a key part in constructing a new sort of vision machine that would become central to the American cultural landscape, was officially under way. To understand the significance of this agreement—and of the Disneyland show—for both television programming in the 1950s and for ABC, we need to have a sense of the sort of shows

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International Headquarters, “located in fabulous Disneyland” (studio memo cited in Cotter 181), the park that was starting to dominate Walt’s attention. As the company prepared to move into television, it anticipated that the new medium would form part of a larger media construct that would extend beyond both traditional film exhibition and the current model of broadcast television.

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that then dominated network programming. The decade of the 1950s is often referred to as the “Golden Age” of television drama, in part because many of the most popular and critically acclaimed shows were live dramatic productions that had something of the “feel” of live theater and addressed audiences as if they were patrons at a performance. Shows like Kraft Television Theatre (NBC, 1947–58), Philco Television Playhouse (NBC, 1948–55), Robert Montgomery Presents (NBC, 1950–57), and Studio One (CBS, 1948–58) offered both adaptations of stage plays and original dramatic pieces penned by some of the top talent of the day, including Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, and Rod Serling. At one point as many as ten live drama shows appeared weekly, and between 1950 and 1955, at least three such shows consistently ranked among the top twenty in popularity.5 The other dominant formula in this period was the comedy-variety show—a genre centered around comedians like Milton Berle, Sid Ceasar, Jackie Gleason, and Red Skelton, and emphasizing a kind of vaudeville mix of comic skits and song and dance numbers. During the period leading up to Disneyland’s premiere, at least four such shows consistently placed in the top twenty A. C. Nielsen ratings.6 Other series types of the era that typically achieved high ratings were the situation comedy (I Love Lucy [CBS, 1951–59]), the police or detective show (Dragnet [NBC, 1952–59, 1967–70]), and the quiz or game show (You Bet Your Life [NBC, 1950–61]). Much as in the film industry, then, a few highly successful formulas dominated television programming, especially that of the two largest networks, CBS and NBC. While these types consistently proved popular, ABC did not place either a live dramatic show or a comedy-variety series in the top twenty-five for any of those years. In fact, prior to Disneyland’s appearance, only two ABC series gained high Nielsen ratings. For the 1950–51 season The Lone Ranger (1949–57) was rated seventh, while the musical quiz show Stop the Music (ABC, 1949–52, 1954–56) finished twenty-third. In the following season only The Lone Ranger repeated that suc-

In fact, behind ABC’s deal with Disney were several key marketing decisions designed to help the third-place network compete more effectively by recasting the very terms under which this segment of the vision machine worked. As we have noted, few of ABC’s affiliates aired the network’s programming live, generally a liability for advertising purposes, but one that the network turned to its advantage by becoming the first major broadcaster to stock most of its prime-time schedule with programs shot on film. These filmed shows could be aired, their original visual quality intact, whenever local affiliates desired. The higher quality of the filmed image also helped ABC to practice a familiar Hollywood strategy—product differentiation. However, when Walt offered to further that strategy by shooting all new material for his show in color, the network balked due to the extra cost and since few of its affiliates could then broadcast in color. Although it cost the studio more money, Walt proceeded with his plan,7 and it paid off in the long run by allowing the company to follow the rerelease policy it had used so profitably with its feature films: rerunning early shows after all the major networks turned to color broadcasting and even releasing a number of the episodes—most notably the two Davy Crockett series—for theatrical exhibition as color films. The initial move from live to dominantly filmed programming, though, already represented a subtle shift in how both the audience and the medium were conceived. Viewers

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cess, finishing in the eighteenth spot, and in both the 1952–53 and 1953–54 seasons no ABC series made the top twenty-five. When it failed at imitating the popular formulas or luring bigname players away from CBS or NBC to anchor a popular series, ABC was ready to try a different path, choosing, as Christopher Anderson explains, “to build its audience in direct opposition to those of the established networks” (139). That choice involved turning not to sponsor-produced programming that aped successful formulas but rather to Hollywood—and particularly Disney—for filmed and polished shows with a different emphasis.

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would now be approached not as if they were part of a singular, live event for which they had specially planned but as consumers of a mass-produced and highly polished commodity, while the medium itself began to seem far more like the traditional film industry.8 A further component of the Disney television decision was even more directly related to programming strategy and audience construction. As noted above, the most popular series prior to Disneyland’s premiere were the live dramatic programs and the comedy-variety shows, both of which aimed primarily at an adult audience. Under Leonard Goldenson’s leadership, ABC began to study audience demographics and decided, as Anderson notes, to target young families with small children, “a section of the audience whose members had increased rapidly since World War II” and were coming to dominate the television viewership. Furthermore, the network “chose to align itself with small-ticket advertisers, those selling the types of products that young families might be more likely to need and afford” (140), in effect, targeting the core of America’s baby boom. With such a targeted audience and advertising segment, Disney must have seemed an especially suitable, even safe, choice for new programming, since with its film offerings it had probably more effectively cultivated a family audience than any Hollywood studio of the period. In fact, Walt clearly recognized the value in targeting and attempting to grow what he termed “my audience”: “[T]hrough television,” he said, “I can reach my audience. I can talk to my audience. They are the audience that wants to see my pictures” (Wasko 21). They also would eventually go to his theme park and become solid citizens in the Disney universe. For ABC the price was high but ultimately worthwhile. The network agreed to pay Disney $2,000,000 for one season of programs, renewable for a total of seven years, while adding $500,000 for a 35 percent ownership in the theme park, also to be known as Disneyland, and guaranteeing up to $4,500,000 in loans for the park’s construction. In return the network

A key to this success was Disneyland’s format and the nature of the shows that dominated its early seasons. Even before the April 2 announcement of the Disney-ABC partnership, and well before a format for the show had been chosen, Walt and a creative team that included producers Card Walker and Bill Walsh were trying to determine not so much what to show but how to interrelate their separate projects; as Bill Cotter offers, those involved in early discussions understood “that the main purpose of the show would be to promote the

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received only 20 original one-hour shows for the season, with each of those to be rerun and twelve to be presented as repeat reruns to fill out the season. Yet through this partnership the network gained in credibility and prestige and quickly attracted sponsorship from such corporate giants as American Motors, the American Dairy Association, and Derby Foods, selling Disneyland advertising to them at $70,000 per episode (Anderson 141). With that sponsorship deal, during its initial season Disneyland was responsible for nearly half of ABC’s advertising revenues. Just as significant, it provided the network with its highest-ever rated program—a number six Nielsen ranking—and garnered a series of awards that helped raise network prestige. For the initial 1954–55 season Disneyland received Emmy awards for Best Variety Series, as well as for Best Individual Program of the Year and Best Editing (both for the “Operation Undersea” episode); it gained nominations for both Walt Disney and Fess Parker in the category of Outstanding New Personality; and it won a Peabody Award for Outstanding Youth and Children’s Program.9 Although in 1955 86 percent of the profitable television stations in the country were affiliated with CBS or NBC, it was also the first year in which ABC reached profitability—a result due in no small part to that costly Disney decision (Boddy 117). And for Disney, too, the decision proved a wise one, since the 1955 financial report showed that in the wake of Disneyland’s first season (and the theme park’s opening), the company’s overall gross income had more than doubled (Watts 375).

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park and other Disney ventures” (60). The format and even content of the shows would thus be greatly determined by the scope of the larger Disney media project, by efforts to intertwine park, product, film production, television, and audience construction—by a sense of the series as part of a larger vision machine. Since anthology and variety shows had previously done well in the Nielsen ratings, ABC readily accepted the selection of an anthology format—an approach that allowed the studio maximum flexibility for its synergistic strategy. It could, as Cotter notes, “switch subjects from week to week in order to promote the park or upcoming films” (59), or to reintroduce Disney characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, to a new generation, thereby renewing their entertainment and economic life. To this end, Disneyland’s first episode on October 27, appropriately titled “The Disneyland Story,” offered glimpses of filming for the upcoming Disney release, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), provided background on the park and its construction, explained its links to the show, and then offered “A Tribute to Mickey Mouse,” a series of excerpts from Mickey Mouse cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s. From its opening, then, Disneyland sought to situate its audience within an entertainment universe that was endlessly self-referential and that would build its audience on an understanding of and even eagerness for such self-referentiality. To further that effect, a more specific plan was laid out. The show would, at least initially, take its shape from the theme park’s design. Walt, as host, explained that approach in the opening episode when he informed viewers that “Disneyland the place and Disneyland the TV show are all part of the same.” Since the park would have four separate “lands”—Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland—the series would alternately feature four types of shows or stories, each geared to familiar film genres: animated fantasy, for which the studio was best known, the western, the action-adventure tale, and science fiction. As Michael Real notes, the park was

Disneyland the park as presented (by Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell) on Disneyland the television series.

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“designed as a total environment made of dramatic productions complete with plot, scenery, and characters. The visitor passes through a Disney experience just as a viewer is carried through scenes in a film by a camera” (47). So the genre contexts—of park, film, and television—would have a natural continuity, even a kind of narrative similarity, and would, like today’s Disney theme parks, play off of their links to the film world. Yet despite that plan, Disneyland never offered the sort of balance viewers might have initially expected from this format. During the first season, for example, only the three Davy Crockett episodes: “Davy Crockett—Indian Fighter” (December 15, 1954), “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress” (January 26, 1955), and “Davy Crockett at the Alamo” (February 23, 1955) represented the Frontierland theme. They were wildly successful, inspiring a national craze; they generated large audiences even as repeat shows; and when edited together, the resulting feature film brought in higher revenues than most of Disney’s previous theatrical releases.10 But the Crockett episodes were virtually the only totally new programming produced for the first season, and suggest some uncertainty about what to do for the Frontierland installments. The Tomorrowland theme received even less attention initially, with only one show, “Man in Space” (March 9, 1955), specifically created for that segment. Fantasy and adventure dominated the rest of the first season’s twenty original episodes, with many drawing on the studio’s animation backlist—for example, a condensed version of Alice in Wonderland (November 3, 1954), “The Donald Duck Story” (November 17, 1954), “A Present for Donald” (December 22, 1954), “The Wind in the Willows” (February 2, 1955), “From Aesop to Hans Christian Andersen” (March 2, 1955)—and others replaying the studio’s theatrical “True-Life Adventure” shorts or action-adventure films—for example, the Academy Award–winning Seal Island (November 10, 1954), Beaver Valley (December 29, 1954), Nature’s Half Acre (February 9, 1955), and a two-part presentation of Treasure Island (January 1 and 12, 1955). Two episodes chronicled the

That mix did not remain constant, especially after the show was retitled and left ABC, but at least throughout the early years Disneyland consistently offered some programming in the areas originally staked out and that were promised in its opening narration. In the 1955–56 season, for example, the series again predominantly offered “True-Life Adventure” shows, animation collections, and serializations of recent films, such as The Story of Robin Hood (1952) and The Sword and the Rose (1953). Serving the Frontierland theme were two new installments of the Davy Crockett series, while Tomorrowland again inspired just one show, “Man and the Moon” (December 28, 1955). And those shows were part of a larger mix, for the second season saw Disney producing twenty-six original shows instead of the originally contracted twenty. The following season relied even more heavily on the “True-Life Adventure” films, while offering two Tomorrowland entries—only one of which, Our Friend the Atom (January 23, 1957), was produced expressly for the series—but only nodding in the direction of Frontierland with “Along the Oregon Trail” (November 14, 1956), an episode recounting the filming of the Disney feature Westward Ho the Wagons! The 1957–58 season marked a further shift in balance, as ABC began to find success with various western series—Wyatt Earp (1955–61), Cheyenne (1955–63), and Sugarfoot (1957–60) were all in the Neilsen top twentyfive—and pressured Disney to include more Frontierland segments to meet viewers’ fascination with this genre. Yet as Walt would note, these shows “made so much money for ABC that before long I found myself in a straightjacket. I no longer had the freedom of action I enjoyed in those first three years. They kept insisting I do more and more Westerns” (quoted in Cotter 66). The result was the creation of another miniseries in the Davy Crockett mold, the six-episode “Saga of Andy Burnett,”

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park’s construction and several publicized upcoming releases (Lady and the Tramp, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) to round out the first season and underscore the intertwined and intertextual nature of the series in its early years.

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the programming of another publicity show about the production of the frontier-set Old Yeller, and the promise of more to come in this vein. While this season included two new Tomorrowland segments, “Mars and Beyond” (December 4, 1957) and “Magic Highway U.S.A.” (May 14, 1958), they practically marked the end of efforts in that area, for even though public interest in space and space travel was high, thanks to the launching of the Russian Sputnik on October 4, 1957, the studio seemed unsure about whether its focus for such shows should be the science and technology of tomorrow or simply science fiction, a genre with which the company had no previous experience. Consequently, the fifth season, one that saw a title change to Walt Disney Presents, had no new Tomorrowland entries, while the Frontierland theme dominated with seasonopening repeats of the original three Davy Crockett episodes and six new shows apiece devoted to historical cowboy figures Elfego Baca and Texas John Slaughter. Since all twelve of those would be repeated in the course of the season, more than half of 1958–59’s shows were devoted to the western genre, with even the “True-Life Adventure” films, by now almost a signature of the series, being reduced to one show. And the next year promised more of the same, as a preseason press release announced that of the twenty-six new shows, eighteen would be frontier themed and the remaining eight split between Adventureland and Fantasyland themes. Throughout these formative early seasons, the Disney series maintained a high level of quality from episode to episode, in part because most shows far exceeded the $100,000 budget allotted. Yet, as the Davy Crockett reruns begin to suggest, as a cost-saving measure the series would increasingly repeat shows from previous seasons, an approach that recalls the studio’s practice of reissuing its feature films in a seven-year cycle, as well as its mixing and remixing of old cartoons to produce the various Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and

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15 The Disney archives, with cartoons such as The Skeleton Dance (1928), provided ready content for episodes such as “The Story of the Silly Symphonies.”

Goofy episodes that remained series constants even as popular tastes shifted. Another constant was the presence of Walt Disney, a reluctant host who was pressured into introducing each episode “after the network and advertising executives convinced him his presence was necessary to provide continuity and identification” (Thomas 255). It was an argument that Disney accepted, despite a self-consciousness about his midwestern “twang,” because he well understood the power of the image to construct a certain context for the program. As Walt would later explain, he believed the series would benefit, as the studio had, from offering a singular identity or face: “There’s only one reason why ‘Walt Disney’ has been played up: because it adds personality to the whole thing. It isn’t ‘Ajax Films Presents’—it is a personality. Actually, ‘Walt Disney’ is a lot of people. Let’s put this in an honest way. This is an organization. Each man is willing to work

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with the other and share his ideas. This is an achievement” (Thomas 279). It was Walt, though, who became instantly recognizable as a result of his hosting duties, as evidence his Emmy nomination. In effect, Walt became an icon, just as much a visual emblem of the show as the first season’s opening evocations of its—and the theme park’s—various “lands.” Just as significant as this celebrity status, though, was the direction that Walt’s hosting lent to the program. Often appearing with a book in hand, drawing one from a bookcase, or referring to historical events, he established a context for each show that went beyond the goal of simple entertainment or diversion. As Christopher Anderson argues, Walt carefully sought to frame the programs “within an educational discourse, reassuring viewers that they inhabited a position of privileged knowledge that was available only through television” (144) and, more specifically, only by watching this show. Thus episodes not only went behind the scenes to show how a Disney film was made but also offered explanations of the multiplane camera used in animation, of the various tricks involved in making the “inanimate animate,” as one show put it, and of the workings of color television. If Walt’s introductions at times seemed didactic, they also established an important tone, a sense that entertainment and education might go hand in hand—an approach on which the Disney theme parks would ultimately capitalize and one in keeping with that underlying notion of how vision, in the contemporary media landscape, is typically constructed and channeled. As Walt and Roy increasingly clashed with ABC executives over the nature of programming for the series, as well as over ownership of two other highly successful shows the studio created for the network, The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro, the Disneys began to consider another possible home for their flagship. Earlier in their careers the Disneys had gained some prominence, as well as a reputation for technological innovation, first by adding sound to their cartoons and then by embracing color technology when they signed an exclusive

The first NBC show on September 24, 1961, quickly established this link and the larger context for the series’ second, most long-lived, and ultimately most successful incarnation. For this show there was no opening voice-over and animation to announce a kinship to the theme park or to visualize its thematic organization. Instead, The Wonderful World of Color began with kaleidoscoping images of the world in brilliant color, a beginning that would, over the next twenty years, become the series’ familiar signature, as well as a sign of its link to television’s developing color technology. The following “Adventure in Color,” as this episode’s first half was titled, was both self-promoting and ingratiating to the network and RCA. Against a black-and-white background, Walt—by now firmly identified with the series and again its host—appears in color, holding a painter’s palette, as he recounts his studio’s role in the film industry’s technological development. He recalls what “a very important breakthrough” Steamboat Willie’s use of sound

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agreement with the Technicolor Corporation to use its new three-strip color process. Both moves had paid off handsomely, as sound propelled Mickey Mouse to celebrity status with Steamboat Willie (1928) and as the studio’s initial Technicolor cartoon, Flowers and Trees (1932), received an Academy Award, the first for an animated subject. Since Disney had from the start, despite ABC’s veto, sought to present the anthology series in color, NBC, the leader in color broadcasting, seemed a promising alternative. In an effort at product differentiation, NBC was at this time promoting color, in part because the network had the largest number of affiliates equipped for color broadcasting, but also because its parent company, RCA, was a leader in color television technology. So when RCA agreed to sponsor half of the episodes should Disney move to NBC, a deal was quickly struck with Walt Disney Presents becoming Walt Disney’s The Wonderful World of Color—a title that suggested a kind of “industrialization of vision” at work and one that underscored the new partnership between Disney’s fantasy perspective and RCA’s color technology.11

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represented, and notes how the studio had also “made quite a splash” by being the first to adopt Technicolor. In a variation on earlier episodes that offered studio tours or an insider’s glimpse of animation in progress, the scene then shifts to a room Walt describes as the paint laboratory, the place “where the whole magic of color begins.” Surrounded by people and objects in black and white, though, Walt resorts to the sort of fantastic mystification for which Disney products have often been criticized, trying out various “magic” incantations to give them lifelike color before finally hitting on the appropriate term: “NBC Color TV.” Accompanying the ensuing shift to full color are several reminders of the audience’s need for a color television to appreciate what was being offered, of NBC’s leadership in color broadcasting, and of Disney’s similarly pioneering efforts in this area. While the rest of “Adventure in Color” provides an “educational” overview of the importance of color in nature, a scientific explanation of how the colors of the spectrum work together, and a lesson in how color television technology functions, this scientific background never fully disguises the show’s industrial-business context, particularly when the NBC trademark color peacock, as if another Disney cartoon character, wanders into one scene. The message repeatedly sounded is of color’s importance to the entertainment industry and, indeed, to life itself, and of the significance of this new partnership between Disney and NBC to bring viewers this “natural” yet also “wonderful” vision of the world. Indeed, as plans for The Wonderful World of Color unfolded, Walt told his staff that he wanted a new organization for the show; he wished to “break it down into The Wonderful World of Fiction, The Wonderful World of Fantasy, The Wonderful World of Adventure and The Wonderful World of the Classics” (Cotter 67). Those concepts clearly overlapped and could have caused confusion among both the audience and the shows’ creators, so in the initial episode Walt explained that the newly titled show would offer “stories which will cover a wide field of new and exciting subjects, from fact and fantasy to tales of adventure,

The new Wonderful World of Color did retain some of the old thematic mix. Of the twenty-nine new episodes created for 1961–62, four were cartoon compilations, drawn from the Disney animation archives; one was in the Tomorrowland vein (“Spy in the Sky,” April 1, 1962), explaining how satellites would help us predict and even control the weather; another was an animal adventure (“Chico the Misunderstood Coyote,” October 15, 1961), recalling the many “True-Life Adventure” episodes; the Frontierland influence lingered in the two-part showing of the 1958 theatrical feature Tonka (February 18 and 25, 1962); and there was also a park promotion show (“Disneyland after Dark,” April 15, 1962). But Walt seems to have recognized that the public’s tastes were changing, certainly away from the westerns that had dominated prime-time viewing and his own series in its last two ABC seasons.12 So The Wonderful World of Color seems consciously aimed at opening up to the world, at providing a more international view. Two of the shows (“Carnival Time,” March 4, 1962, and “Von Drake in Spain,” April 8, 1962) used the newly introduced cartoon character Ludwig Von Drake to comically introduce travelogue shows, the first a comparison of how Mardi Gras is celebrated in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, and the second a tour of Spain and a look at its customs. Many other shows were multi-episode adventures or serialized movies set—and shot—in a variety of colorful locales, including England (“The Horsemasters”), the Netherlands (“Hans Brinker”), Mexico (“Sancho, the Homing Steer”), and the American Northwest (“A Fire Called Jeremiah”). While an episode also promoted the forthcoming release Babes in Toyland (“Backstage Party,” December 17, 1961), the dominant concern was the fascinating nature of the

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from music and dancing to people and places.” It was a vague and sweeping forecast of things to come, but a suitable introduction nonetheless, since the real focus for the initial NBC season was a kind of tour of the world, a world revealed through the wonders of color television technology as a “carousel of color,” as the show’s new theme song offered.

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world and its various cultures—elements which, of course, well lent themselves to color photography. It was also a focus in keeping with Walt’s latest preoccupation, his idea to create several exhibits, including the famous UNICEF/Pepsi-Cola show “It’s a Small World,” for the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65. Throughout the next few years of The Wonderful World of Color (up to Walt’s death in 1966), the episode mix of the first year on NBC remained fairly similar. In a combination of newly produced shows and recyclings of older episodes, we typically find several programs devoted to the studio’s animation (although that type decreased in the 1965–66 season, with only three such shows), one episode per year about the park, a growing number of animal stories, serialized older Disney films, and what would increasingly become the specialty of the series— “light adventure” shows, often focusing on children or young adults involved in unforeseen dangerous situations. In fact, one of the most noteworthy developments during the first five years of The Wonderful World of Color was the gradual merging of two different program types—the “True-Life” show and the light adventure. For while the series continued to air both new and older “True-Life” shows, such as “Survival in Nature” (June 2, 1963), “The Jungle Cat” (April 12, 1964), “One Day at Teton Marsh” (November 8, 1964), and “Wonders of the Water World” (May 8, 1966), it increasingly offered animal or humanand-animal adventure tales, such as “Sammy the Way-Out Seal” (October 28, November 4, 1962), a boy-and-seal story; “Bristle Face” (January 26, February 2, 1963), a boy-and-dog adventure; “An Otter in the Family” (February 21, 1965), a boy-and-wildotter tale; and “Run, Light Buck, Run” (March 13, 1966), an old prospector-and-wild-antelope story. While the “True-Life” stories had capitalized on the facts and drama of the natural world while to a degree anthropomorphizing their animal subjects, the new episode type emphasized those human characteristics and apparent emotions found in the animals even more to create a parallel to the humans in the narrative and thus emphasize our closeness to the animal/natural world. Of course, those humans

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were almost always male, a gender bias that would continue to plague the show, at least to the time of Walt’s death. Yet this show type served the series well, since it capitalized on a wellestablished and popular formula (the “True-Life Adventure”), it could be cheaply done, particularly since the “stars” were mainly animals, it offered a degree of narrative flexibility, as each story might fill one show or be stretched over multiple episodes, and it might be released theatrically as a feature or part of a full Disney bill. When The Wonderful World of Color’s ratings began to dip in the late 1960s, Disney once again turned to audience research to gauge the public’s tastes, and, as Bill Cotter notes, found “that the public was particularly interested in animal stories” (69). After increasing their number, the program regained its place among the top ten weekly series.

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These human-animal adventure shows also point toward several other significant characteristics of the Wonderful World of Color series. Disney films were from the start often serialized, providing multiple “original” programs while allowing the studio to concentrate its resources on other episodes or projects. The Davy Crockett miniseries and the other Frontierland cycles—those about Andy Burnett, Texas John Slaughter, and Elfego Baca—underscored this strategy’s value, since it not only made for economies of production (particularly by reusing costly sets) but also primed viewers to return for more of the same. Thus, the “stand-alone” episodes became less common, and more of the shows, including the human-animal adventure tales, extended over two or three dates. For similar reasons new miniseries—a form we might credit Disney with pioneering— continued to appear. The 1964–65 season, for example, introduced the “Killroy” stories about an ex-Marine who comes to live in a small town, and the “Gallegher” adventures of a copyboy in the 1880s who wants to become a reporter. “Killroy” provided four episodes for that season and “Gallegher” three, with the latter miniseries proving so popular that Disney

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produced three more episodes the following season, a fourstory adventure for 1966–67, and two episodes for 1967–68. This sort of programming also recalls another lesson the studio learned early in its television efforts, namely that product created for television could, if it were good enough and had high production values, be recycled for theatrical exhibition. Of course, Disney had initially moved in the other direction, serializing its films as multi-episode shows, as with Treasure Island in Disneyland’s first season. But Davy Crockett’s success when released as a feature suggested that contrary to fears expressed by many in the film industry, people would pay to see a good product that had previously been offered free on network broadcast. So increasingly Disney edited together these multiepisode series to provide a constant slate of new theatrical releases—and, later, home video sales. Typically distributed overseas first and then, if successful, domestically, these “features”—all adapted from programming in the first five years of The Wonderful World of Color—include such titles as The Horsemasters (1961), The Prince and the Pauper (1962), Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963), The Waltz King (1964), and The Mooncussers (1966). What they point to is an ongoing blurring of distinction between the theatrical release and network broadcast, between film and television, indeed to another dimension of what we have termed the “industrialization of vision,” as Disney developed its own sort of “vision machine,” the products of which would have a kind of narrative uniformity, would demonstrate a universal appeal, and would be adaptable to a variety of exhibition circumstances. While Disneyland was an immediate hit for ABC during the 1954–55 season, after its third season the anthology show had fallen out of the top twenty-five; in fact, for the 1957–58 season even Zorro surpassed it in the ratings. With the show’s reincarnation on NBC, The Wonderful World of Color found a new energy, as it began one of the most successful runs in television history. From the 1961–62 season through 1974–75, and even as it lost the personal guidance of Walt who died in 1966

That level of success may be best measured simply by the show’s longevity, as The Wonderful World of Color would continue on, albeit under other titles and with several subsequent shifts in network. It remained an integral part of NBC’s Sunday schedule until the fall of 1981, by which time the ratings had begun to drop, ironically in part because of the Federal Communications Commission’s mandated family viewing hour. With the advent of that slot for family programming, the anthology show moved into an earlier time period, where its competition was the top-rated news and information show, CBS’s 60 Minutes (since 1968). After several years of losing the ratings battle to 60 Minutes, NBC and Disney parted ways, although the latter immediately found another affiliation, as CBS picked up the series and retitled it Walt Disney. That incarnation was ultimately short-lived, running to 1983 when, with Disney’s corporate focus firmly set on the cable industry and on creating its own broadcast site with the Disney Channel, the anthology show finally left the air. Still, with twenty-nine years of continuous production on all three major networks, the anthology

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and was retitled as The Wonderful World of Disney in 1971, the series remained in the top twenty-five, drawing as many as 15.2 million viewers per week in 1972–73. As a further measure of that reenergizing, the show was again nationally recognized for its quality, winning a Peabody for Youth and Children’s Programming in 1962 and, in its second season on NBC, another Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Children’s Programming. In this period, thanks to both its economic success and its new power in the entertainment industry—as well as the flourishing of the amusement parks (Walt Disney World had opened in 1971)—the Disney Company had attained what Douglas Gomery describes as its true “Golden Age,” an era when it transformed itself “from a marginal operation into a core business in American mass culture” (77), indeed, to what we might term the premier mass entertainment business in the world.

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series ranks as one of the most successful television programs of all time. Further evidence of the show’s lingering prestige was its quick resurrection. Shortly after the series left CBS, the new head of Disney, Michael Eisner, began negotiations to bring it back under the title The Disney Sunday Movie. With Eisner hosting, as Walt had done for twelve years, and with an emphasis on longer stories of the light adventure sort, the program premiered on ABC in February 1986 and again proved a success. While Eisner announced the company’s commitment to the series, noting “there is no more important project for us than The Disney Sunday Movie” (Cotter 72), the show only remained on ABC until the fall of 1988, at which point it was lured back to NBC, retitled as The Magical World of Disney, and featured as part of the network’s Sunday night lineup for two more seasons. Eventually Eisner moved the series to the Disney Channel, where he planned to use the show’s open format as the company’s “major league showcase . . . the place where we premiere our best” (Cotter 73). While it thereby gained the unique distinction of appearing on three networks and cable, the series did not offer any new episodes and eventually became simply another product in the Disney archives that would be rerun in various time slots. Yet with Disney’s purchase of ABC, the program again reappeared in a Sunday prime-time slot, and with Eisner hosting, The Wonderful World of Disney has continued into the new century, enabling the company, as Eisner offers, “to carry the torch of Disney from one generation to the next” (Cotter 73). Because Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color—and now The Wonderful World of Disney—has achieved such longevity, many of its accomplishments are easily overlooked. Of course, endurance itself, in the ratings-driven and taste-shifting world of prime-time television, is a noteworthy achievement. The fact that over the course of nearly fifty years a series could continue to appeal to, as Michael Real sums up, “the dominant substratum beneath the worldview, self-image, and life-values of

Indeed, the company’s development of the EPCOT park— the opening of which provided material for a series episode (“EPCOT Center: The Opening Celebration,” October 23, 1982)—demonstrates that commitment to technological development and its links to the world of entertainment. For EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, through its centerpiece Spaceship Earth ride, makes as its key thematic statement the power of communications to bring people together in a shared realm of understanding.13 Appropriately, one of the exhibits that riders pass by in their historical tour of communication

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an amorphous majority in the United States” and elsewhere (85) is tremendously significant. But we might recall that Walt was never satisfied with popularity for its own sake. Profits had always, despite brother Roy’s protests, been invested in expansion, development, and research. Walt always pushed at the technological bounds of whatever medium he and the company worked in, as in the cases of sound, color, and three-dimensional film photography. With the anthology series Walt carried over that same interest and even imparted to his audience some of his enthusiasm for the revolution technology might work in human lives. We might recall that Disney insisted on shooting much of Disneyland in color, even though it was not broadcast that way, and with the shift to NBC, The Wonderful World of Color probably did more to popularize the color television than any other show. While sound was notoriously poor on early television broadcasts, Disneyland in 1959 offered one of the first commercial stereophonic sound broadcasts with “The Peter Tchaikovsky Story.” And Disney repeatedly demonstrated for series audiences, particularly with the segment on Abraham Lincoln in “Disneyland Goes to the World’s Fair” (May 13, 1964), the future of three-dimensional entertainment with the company’s “audioanimatronics.” These and other technical developments underscore how much the series was, almost from its inception, implicated in a sort of “industrialization of vision,” or more specifically, in the entertainment media’s drive to create a kind of virtual world we might imaginatively inhabit.

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developments is a 1950s-vintage television, playing an episode of the anthology series with Walt addressing the audience. In effect, the ride places both us and the anthology show—along with clips from several landmark Disney films—within an evolutionary continuum of communication, suggesting, just as the epigraph that begins this chapter offers, the ever-increasing impact of these technologies on “human behavior” and the wondrous effects of that “growth of a . . . market in synthetic perception.” It is a marker not only of Walt’s spirit as it continues to inform the company but of the power of the technologies of communication that had always fascinated him, that had drawn the company to the challenge of television in the 1940s and 1950s, and that has consistently proven to be one of the core principles at work throughout the Disney universe. The very aim of television, Mark Crispin Miller has argued, is “to be everywhere: not just to clutter our surroundings, but to become them”; this aim was already becoming realized when Disneyland premiered. For television, even in the mid-1950s, “was not only ‘on the air’” but was quickly becoming the “air we breathe” (8). That description also sums up Disney’s television trajectory, starting with its first awakening to the potential profitability of television in the 1930s, continuing with its specials for NBC and CBS, leaping forward with its industry-merging and technology-expanding Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color series from the 1950s through the 1970s, and continuing to the present day with the anthology show’s descendant. In large part because of television, particularly Walt and Roy Disney’s gamble to cross industrial and technological borders, to merge their moderately successful film company into a larger media and entertainment environment, they built the foundation for a media construct that has become pervasive and in that pervasiveness found its real power. Film opened the door to broadcast television, but the anthology show’s success sired other shows, supported a still-expanding system of theme parks, acquired a cable channel, leveraged the takeover of what had become the leading American television network, gave birth to a worldwide media giant, and in the process transformed Disney into the very cultural “air we breathe.”

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Stories of a Mythic Past ”Tall tales and true from the legendary past.”

D

isneyland’s only completely new programming during its first season sprang from a project that had earlier been discussed and put aside, a three-part narrative on the life of frontiersman Davy Crockett. Originally conceived as part of a series on legendary American characters like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and Bigfoot Wallace, the Crockett episodes were, according to producer Bill Walsh, almost “a fortuitous accident” (Cotter 62), a nearly random choice from those folklore subjects. Yet that “accident” would dramatically affect the studio’s fortunes, precipitate a national craze, and heavily influence subsequent programming. The Crockett stories set in motion what has been estimated as a $300 million industry that developed around the figure and his various symbols—coonskin cap, rifle, leather-fringed jacket, theme song—an industry that helped solidify Disney’s finances in the mid-1950s, even as Walt continued to spend every available dollar developing his theme park. And as the craze passed, the Crockett shows left a legacy, as Disney developed other western and frontier series to reprise their popularity, before largely abandoning the Frontierland theme in later seasons. As Disneyland’s first effort at Frontierland programming, the Crockett shows had to bear the weight of the anthology’s

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announced trajectory. They would be the first examples of what the series’ introduction termed a selection of “tall tales and true from the legendary past” of America. As such they would come to embody a kind of paradox—tall and true, legend and history—that would at times confound or irritate critics, leading them to complain about our history’s “Disneyfication” (King 144), its molding into an untroubling form for mass entertainment. Of course, such popularized representations have often resulted in compromises and, as in the case of George Washington, even a kind of cultural deification. But such combinations do seem emblematic of Disney, specifically of its ability and even predilection for mixing the tall and the true, for producing what we might term hybrid narratives. The character that Disneyland would offer to audiences over three episodes in its first season and, after gauging the unprecedented viewer response, for two more in its second year, was, like the real Crockett, both fantastic and factual but also in keeping with the series’ spirit. In fact, what should have immediately struck any viewer, including those who criticized the series’ portrayal of the frontiersman, is the rather liminal nature of the Davy Crockett narrative, that is, the way it repeatedly underscores that amalgam. For it constantly emphasizes how much the figure of Crockett represents a kind of American mix of the real and the mythic, looks toward the Disney world, and even suggests Walt Disney’s own place as an inheritor of the Crockett tradition—both equally adept at educating and entertaining audiences and at combining the tall and the true. The narrative, after all, is framed with the opening and closing of Davy Crockett’s Journal, a book supposedly written “by himself”—and a reminder of the multiple spurious “autobiographies” of Crockett, including one work published after his death, Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas . . . Written by Himself. And the show’s narrative incorporates multiple exaggerated sketches, its original storyboards, which hint of how near this tale is to the animated fantasy world that had made Walt Disney popular and

We earlier noted the growing popularity of the western on national television and particularly ABC’s success with The Lone Ranger, its first top-ten series. Another western series, Hopalong Cassidy, had been one of the first phenomena on national television, when William Boyd, who had played Hopalong in Bwesterns since 1935, packaged his feature films for television play and, after they proved successful, created a new television series that ran on NBC from 1949 to 1951. Like Disney, Boyd had shrewdly negotiated for subsequent rights to his character, letting him merchandise Hopalong Cassidy much in the Disney fashion, licensing a comic strip and books, an array of western wear and toys, and a radio series, all of which established Hopalong Cassidy as a model for other western series.1 In light of Boyd’s reworking and marketing of his film character for television, several other B-western stars of the 1930s and 1940s followed suit, most notably Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, who not only created new series but also fully merchandised their figures, producing comic books, lunchboxes, clothing, and guns while resurrecting their recording careers for a new audience (both were “singing cowboys” in the movies). Disney’s move to create episodes around real or legendary characters from the Old West was thus a move in an established and potentially profitable direction, one the studio was adept at exploiting. Moreover, in selecting Davy Crockett for the inaugural Frontierland saga, Disney was traveling a path that was well developed cinematically. Crockett was an established western icon, if not yet one with a large cult following. He had been a recurring figure in the early cinema with four silent films, all drawing on a romantic melodrama about Crockett’s life by Frank Hitchcock Murdock that had first been staged in 1872 and eventually had a twenty-four-year run. This play and its screen versions depicted Crockett as a noble backwoodsman in the Leatherstocking tradition and even incorporated mythic

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Disneyland a possibility. This show thus well demonstrates the crossbred and intertextual character of the Disney universe and is a fitting marker for its trajectory of success.

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elements from Arthurian literature. However, several more factual depictions also appeared during the silent era, most notably Gaston Melies’s The Immortal Alamo (1911), with Francis Ford playing Davy, Christy Cabanne’s Martyrs of the Alamo (1915), and Robert Bradbury’s Davy Crockett at the Fall of the Alamo (1926). While these films all exploited the climactic event in Crockett’s life, his death at the Alamo, they also established the character as a historical one in a long line of American patriotic figures. The 1937 Heroes of the Alamo, directed by Harry Fraser, struck that same tone while incorporating footage from the 1926 film. Less accurate historical portraits, treating Crockett as a kind of “stock” western hero or evoking his name as a mythic westerner, would appear in films like Man of Conquest (1939), The Son of Davy Crockett (1941), Davy Crockett, Indian Scout (1950), and Man from the Alamo (1953). By the time director Norman Foster began work on Disney’s Crockett series, then, the figure was well known, already a mix of historical and folkloric elements, and one that was prominently featured in another work in production at the same time, Frank Lloyd’s The Last Command (1955).2 Yet even with this established generic context and character background, the Crockett shows were still a gamble in terms of both ratings and finances. The miniseries format—that is, the limited narrative operating within the framework of a larger program—was a new conception, and the actor cast as Davy, Fess Parker, was relatively unknown, having been selected when Walt noticed him in a bit role in the science fiction film Them! (1954). Even the subject might be considered something of a reach, for while the western was popular television fare, audiences in the 1950s primarily saw the genre, and television typically depicted it, in terms of the post–Civil War West—that of gunfighters, Indian warfare, locomotives, and the Great Plains—rather than the early frontier of the 1820s and 1830s. Moreover, in an unusual move for series television, the first three episodes involved extensive location shooting in Tennessee and North Carolina, eventually costing more than

As has often been chronicled, the three Crockett episodes of Disneyland’s first season—December 15, 1954, January 26, 1955, and February 23, 1955—sparked a national craze. The show’s theme song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” was the number-one pop song for five straight weeks, being covered by singers of every sort, including Fess Parker, and selling approximately seven million copies in six months.3 Merchandising to accompany the Crockett shows and subsequent film version exceeded all previous efforts by Disney and included not only the expected products, such as buckskin jackets, moccasins, jeans, toy guns, action figures, and especially coonskin caps, but also bathing suits, bedspreads, bicycles, guitars, lunchboxes, mugs, pajamas, purses, puzzles, soap, underwear, and wallets. As Paul Andrew Hutton puts it, “every conceivable kind of item” was branded with the Crockett label (31), as Disney’s merchandising division worked overtime dealing with offers from hopeful licensees around the world.4 A great number of books on Crockett were released, some by Disney for the child audience but many others by scholars and biographers intent on meeting the sudden curiosity about this character and debating his role in American history. Fess Parker became a national celebrity, being mobbed by thousands at each stop on a promotional tour, meeting with Vice-President Nixon and other politicians in Washington, and becoming a spokesman for various patriotic and traditional causes. In this latter role, Parker proved particularly successful. Steven Watts notes how he came to be seen as a natural extension of the Crockett figure, radiating “the same combination of sincerity, humility, and homespun confidence as

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$700,000, an excessive sum by all current television standards and one that could not be recouped from ABC, which paid only $2 million for the entire season of Disneyland. However, the series paid off in ways that could hardly be estimated and that foreground the larger pattern of Disney operations, as one medium extended its reach into many others, and the many wielded a power that would be felt throughout American culture.

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the character he played.” In interviews and speeches he continually “presented a ‘plain folks’ image that valued hard work, friendship, and sincerity” (320). While initially surprised by the way these stories struck a chord with the public, Disney quickly capitalized on the popularity of both the figure and the actor who portrayed him. Besides expanding the marketing of Crockett paraphernalia— and finding a new supplier of raccoon skins when the coonskin cap demand exploded—the company rushed an edited version of the series, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, into theaters by June 1955 and began to consider how to develop additional material on its new franchise figure, even though Crockett dies at the end of the third episode. As Walt Disney explained, “We had no idea what was going to happen on Crockett. Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo. It became one of the biggest over-night hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero!” (Cotter 63). The studio skirted this problem by returning to its original conception of Crockett as a figure from American folklore and tall tales, and crafted two new episodes for the following season to pick up the story of Crockett and his friend Georgie Russell at an earlier period and match them with another character steeped in American mythology, Mike Fink. These two episodes, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” (November 16, 1955) and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” (December 14, 1955), proved similarly successful, with the second episode earning an Emmy nomination as Best Single Program of the Year. As a result, the studio again quickly cut the two episodes into a single theatrical film, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, which was released in July 1956. While it further blurred the bounds between film and television, this release brought in added revenues and further solidified what would become a

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Newcomer Fess Parker portrays Davy Crockett in the first Crockett episode, “Davy Crockett—Indian Fighter.”

standard Disney practice: filming for television with an eye to subsequent movie—and later videotape and DVD—release. Disney also made the most of Fess Parker’s sudden notoriety, keeping him in the public eye through personal appearances and making him the first adult actor it would sign to a long-term contract. As part of this strategy, once the magnitude

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of popular interest became clear, Parker and Buddy Ebsen, who played Georgie and originally tested for the Crockett role, were sent on a publicity tour of over forty cities. In an interesting variation on such tours, they later traveled the country advertising one of Disneyland’s sponsors, American Motors. It was, in a sense, as if Disney, through its creations, had itself become the sponsor, probably profiting as much from this promotional junket as did the auto company, since Parker and Ebsen served to keep the Crockett narratives, the mass of Crockett merchandise, and the anthology show in the public eye. With the success of the Crockett theme, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” Disney formed a subsidiary to the Walt Disney Music Company for releasing records, and Parker and Ebsen wrote and recorded another Crockett song for it, “Davy Crockett’s Motto—Be Sure You’re Right (Then Go Ahead)” (Wolfe 184). Parker was also given the lead role in several live-action features that placed him in frontier or early American settings that recalled the Crockett shows. These films included The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), Westward Ho the Wagons! (1956), Old Yeller (1957), and The Light in the Forest (1958), several of which inspired new episodes of Disneyland (such as “Behind the Scenes with Fess Parker” on May 30, 1956 and “Along the Oregon Trail” on November 14, 1956) for which Parker served as host. In another example of that linkage between different media that was becoming a Disney signature, both Parker and Ebsen played prominent roles in the opening of the Disneyland theme park, as well as the television special promoting it. To mark the park’s opening on July 17, 1955, the studio produced a ninety-minute live program, “Dateline: Disneyland.” Hosted by television and film celebrities—Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan—and featuring a variety of figures from both media, the show reached an estimated ninety million viewers. As a centerpiece of that special, “Crockett” and “Russell” made personal appearances and occupied almost as much screen time as did Walt himself: riding in the inaugural

The real key to the Crockett craze of the 1950s and the overall popularity of the series was not the park, the actors, or the merchandise offered in its support, but rather the story Disney crafted. It was simply the right sort of story at the right time. Mired in the cold war in what must have seemed, given the recent and bloody Korean conflict, a seemingly life-or-death struggle with communism, contemporary America readily responded to the sense of identity and purpose embodied in the Crockett persona, as Davy battled renegade Indians in the first episode, fought on the political stage for Indian rights in the second, and gave his life in the struggle for Texas’s independence in the third. As Fess Parker would explain, the country was eager for clear-cut heroes: “[H]ero-hunger . . . [is] a children’s ailment. It’s like vitamin deficiency, only it affects the development of character rather than the body,” and Crockett, as part of a “rediscovery of national heroes,” responded directly to this need (Watts 321). When Crockett dies in the third episode—as the theme song offers, “fighting for liberty”—he casts in relief what Steven Watts terms Walt’s “instinctive feel for cultural pressure points,” an ability that allowed the studio to craft “an ideal, reassuring representative of the American way of life as it faced a daunting challenge from without” (317), and to link that representation to all that the studio produced. Like other successful genre narratives, the Crockett series helped, simply and surely, to assuage a cultural need, if not to examine

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parade, dedicating Frontierland and the Davy Crockett Museum that had been hastily included there, and signing autographs for children and adults alike. As a featured segment of the special, the pair tell a tall tale, sing a song, dance, and then lead children to the Frontierland mule ride, in the process thoroughly linking the park event with the television, film, and merchandise experiences Disney would continue to make available to audiences.

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the dimensions of that need in the way a film like Rebel without a Cause did in the same year. However, another measure of its importance—and of Disneyland’s importance—was the series’ initiation of a national debate about our heroes and the broader issues of truth in history and in the media. Davy Crockett was, as historians have noted, something of a rascal, a figure who not only told tall tales but was a product of them and even cultivated them, producing at least one book during his lifetime, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834), that contributed to his popular legend while also boosting his political career. As a result, the “real” Crockett, both during his life and after, remained a mixture of fact and legend or, as Richard Boyd Hauck offers, of “a complicated set of facts, sprawling and rich,” and “labyrinthine legend” (7–8). The Disney-inspired Crockett craze evoked a mass of popular and scholarly debate about the figure and about American history, spurred on by John Fischer’s essay in Harper’s that denounced what he termed “a simonized, Disneyfied version of history” (16). Admittedly, in physical appearance, the historical Crockett little resembled the tall and handsome Parker; he was, historians now suggest, a largely ineffective congressman; and he probably never wore the coonskin cap that was a symbolic key—and marketing success—of the craze.5 Yet in its broad outlines the Disney portrayal was not as off the mark as Fischer claims; as historian William Jamborsky allows, “for the most part Disney played reasonably straight with history” (105), while incorporating elements of the legend and acknowledging the play of tall tales that, even in life, surrounded the historical Crockett. Yet amid this critical debate a key development has often gone unexamined, despite its significance for popular culture and television history. The Crockett shows insinuated television—and particularly a popular series rather than the self-consciously artistic live drama programs of the era—into a national discussion on history, heroes, and even regionalism. Walt’s assertion that he wanted Disneyland to “educate and entertain”

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Crockett (Fess Parker) and Russell (Buddy Ebsen) celebrate at the end of “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race,” the sequel to the first Crockett series.

notwithstanding, historical notions had been started and powerfully communicated; a figure from the past had been brought back, meaningfully, into the national consciousness. The Crockett series manifestly intervened in the popular psyche as no other television show had done, in the process raising consciousness about national history and its formation while insinuating questions about popular culture’s—and especially the media’s—role in constructing that cultural history. In effect, by entering into the public discussion as both a purveyor of his-

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torical information and as an example of how this new medium might function in the cultural arena, Disneyland assured that television, even if only as the voice of popular culture, would have to be taken seriously. While that ability to sense and minister to the nation’s pulse speaks to the larger success of the anthology show, the Crockett series also owes much of its popularity to its narrative shape. It is, after all, largely about narratives and about how the individual participates in shaping a narrative. Just as academic discussions about Crockett have become, as Hauck says, “fascinated by the dynamics of legend building,” treating the frontiersman as a case study of such constructions (18), the Disney version from the start focuses on the hybrid nature of the Crockett figure—on his situation as both a real human and a larger-than-life American icon, part of our history but also a self-conscious shaper of history. In his own time and in ours Crockett, like many other elements of the Disney universe, and indeed like the anthology show itself, defied boundaries, expanded across the mediascape, and embodied a consciousness of how our narratives help shape our world while showing that shaping influence as benign and acceptable to a mass audience—like Disneyland itself. If Crockett was, long before Disney took him up, a fixture in American popular culture and in the cinema, that cultural fascination derives from two key components of his life and legend—his historic situation as a pioneer and his narrative status as a trickster, both emphasized by Disney. Presented as the archetypal American pioneer, Disney’s Crockett is repeatedly shown exploring new territory, “looking for Paradise,” as we hear in “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress,” or “heading out West again,” as “Davy Crockett at the Alamo” offers. Each episode shows that movement with maps, outlining the territory of the American South and Southwest, tracing with animated dashes Crockett’s journeys across the territories and indicating settled land he left in his wake. With the two sequel episodes, the maps, dialogue, and scenes along the “legendary

In recalling Huck Finn, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates” also underscore another dimension of that freedom—the freedom bound up in the trickster figure, or what Margaret King terms the “frontier jokester” (141). While the first three episodes repeatedly hint at the Crockett of folklore, he is clearly the focus of the later two. “Davy Crockett—Indian Fighter,” for example, punctuates its narrative with three scenes that develop his theory about the “irresistible” nature of a Tennessee grin: first as he tries to “grin down a bear” for dinner; later as he explains his actions to General Jackson; and finally as he fights with the Indian chief Red Stick, decides to “grin” the Indian, and is nearly killed in the process. In “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” Mike Fink, another key folklore figure, remarks that given the stories he has heard, Davy is “about a foot shorter than he ought to be.” Each proceeds to try to best each other via a series of tricks: Fink stirs up peaceful Indians to attack Crockett’s boat and slow him down, Crockett ropes Fink’s boat to tow his during the night, Fink removes the bolts from Crockett’s rudder, and Crockett sets Fink’s men to fighting among themselves while his rudder is being repaired. As someone who is both a folklore figure and a conscious creator of that folklore, both a trickster and the object of others’ tricks, Crockett illustrates another sort of liberty and boundary-crossing ability, a freedom from the everyday and from real-life constraints, a constant ability to,

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Ohio” and the Mississippi extend the notion of pioneering to movement up and down our nation’s rivers, as Crockett and Russell try to move hides to market in New Orleans and later help free the rivers from pirates. These latter episodes clearly evoke the freedom from borders and boundaries that Huck Finn and Jim found on the Mississippi and help define Crockett as the ultimate border crosser, the embodiment of what the shows suggest is a fundamentally American desire for freedom.

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like Huck Finn, “light out for the territory” of the new frontier or of the American imagination. That ability to move from the real into the imaginary also parallels another boundary-defying capacity (recalling another Disney strength)—the easy shifting across different media. The historical Crockett was well known for this ability. His frontier persona easily insinuated itself into popular culture and into the political arena through the media of his own day: pamphlets, almanacs, songs, “autobiographies,” plays, speaking tours, etc. In his introduction to A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, Joseph Arpad explains that in adopting a persona for his book, Crockett largely followed “a stereotype imposed upon him in newspaper anecdotes, in a play, and in a spurious biography” (20). Disney develops this dimension of Crockett not only by emphasizing the frontiersman's reputation but also by embedding a variety of media in the shows that point to his developing persona. Crockett is clearly well-known wherever he goes, and the reputation serves him well, winning over voters in “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress,” cowing the gambler Thimblerig in “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” and winning freedom from hostile Indians because they “know of” Crockett and trust in his word in “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.” That reputation is built, as the series emphasizes, not simply on heroic actions or on his honor—as Crockett reminds Red Stick, “Davy Crockett don’t lie”—but also on the way his persona is broadcast. For Crockett is already the stuff of songs, written by his friend Georgie and others, the subject of newspaper articles in “Davy Crockett Goes to Congress,” the hero of pulp stories published by Georgie, the topic of his own stump speeches and personal appearances, and the content of widespread rumors, as Jim Bowie notes in “Davy Crockett at the Alamo.” In an early version of the sort of “integration” that would mark the Disney corporate universe, Crockett moves freely from one media representation to the other, enjoying his reputation, if a bit embar-

Just as significantly, Disney’s Crockett understands how the songs, tall tales, and books are shaping his persona and is ready to assist in that shaping. In fact, Crockett is first introduced when Georgie arrives at his cabin, singing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Already familiar with its exaggerations, Crockett’s wife, Polly—who, like other female characters in the episodes, remains completely peripheral to the action—admonishes Georgie, “If you don’t stop making up those outlandish songs about Davy, there’s no tellin’ what’ll happen to the Crockett name.” Yet they go off again singing a verse of “The Ballad,” or as the lyrics say, “making up yarns and singin’ a song.” When an angry General Jackson demands to know where his head scout has been, Crockett puts him in good humor by telling a tall tale about his ability to “grin” raccoons right out of the tree and into his cooking pot. In campaigning for Congress, Davy tells a crowd that he “ain’t much shucks at speechifying,” but wins them over by explaining how even the animals want him, since the crickets are, he interprets, chirping “crock-ett, crock-ett.” Upon meeting Jim Bowie at the Alamo, he defends his outlandish reputation by noting all the “yarns” surrounding Bowie and then winking and telling him that when they get out of the Alamo—a situation both realize is hopeless—they can go looking for those “lost silver mines” with which Bowie was legendarily linked. And when pressed into matching Mike Fink’s trick shooting prowess, Davy artfully arranges a shot in which he tricks Fink’s crew into believing he can catch a bullet in his teeth. Aware of his “tall” reputation, Crockett not only uses his status but freely controls it, shaping it to the moment, even as he winks at Georgie—and the viewers—as he prepares his trick, letting us all in on it, and indeed on the trick of such a life. Finally, we might note how throughout the series, Disney liberally inserts footage from various “True-Life Adventure” films—shots of real swamps, alligators, squirrels, bears, etc.

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rassed by it at times, consistently trying to live up to its best elements and quite often profiting from it.

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This footage, as well as the location photography, was meant to establish the narrative context for Crockett’s actions, not to attest to the facticity or historicity of the figure. And here is precisely where those who in the mid-1950s reacted against the Crockett craze—and, even if not quite consciously, against the newly revealed power of television—clearly missed the point. John Fischer, with his attack on the Disney program as “a myth as phony as the Russian legend about kind Papa Stalin” (16), seems to have recoiled primarily against the newfound popularity of Crockett and to have paid little attention to the series itself. For as we have seen, the character as presented is admittedly and from the opening of the series a mixture of “tall tales and true.” More precisely, he is a figure who struggles with his own factual/historical status, as he moves through a world—or frontier—where the boundaries are fluid, much like the river in the Mike Fink stories which, we see, can quickly cut a new channel and where the danger buoys are easily shifted. This Crockett understands and repeatedly demonstrates how easily one becomes like that world, as actions take on a nearly legendary status and as tales that are told and retold, passed from one primitive medium to another, get taller and taller. This sort of awareness seems a significant accomplishment and certainly more reason for this Davy’s great popularity. Another way of gauging the impact of the Crockett phenomenon, and one especially pertinent here, is by its later influence on the Disneyland series. After the craze passed, Disney needed another set of stories to help fill out the Frontierland segment at a time when, thanks partly to Crockett’s popularity, westerns were becoming ever more in demand. In fact, during the 1957–58 season westerns captured seven of the top twenty positions in the Nielsen ratings. As a result, the studio turned to a totally fictional character, Andy Burnett, a western figure in a series of novels by Stewart Edward White. Crafted in the same mold as Disney’s Crockett (Crockett screenwriter Tom Blackburn wrote these shows, too), Burnett was a mountain man who dressed much like Crockett, had a comic companion

Apart from the general model for production and marketing, we might note several other ways the Crockett series affected the anthology program. In trying to capitalize on the lingering appeal of those stories, Disney twice used them to boost ratings in later years, running the original three episodes on consecutive weeks to introduce the 1958–59 season of Walt Disney Presents and the 1963–64 season of The Wonderful World of Color. These episodes also climaxed The Wonderful World of Color’s 1968–69 and The Wonderful World of Disney’s 1973–74 seasons, while the

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like Georgie Russell, carried a rifle and was a marksman like Davy, and more often used his wiles than his strength to escape danger. Disney even commissioned the creators of the hit “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” Blackburn and George Bruns, to do a similar Andy Burnett theme song. Six episodes of “The Saga of Andy Burnett” aired during the 1957–58 season, but they were not popular and the miniseries was dropped. Disney then turned to two more historical figures, both gunmen who became peace officers, Texas John Slaughter and Elfego Baca. The first of these, a Texas Ranger and later a sheriff, became the basis for a successful miniseries, The Tales of Texas John Slaughter, running for seventeen episodes over three seasons (1958–61). The second figure, a Mexican-American gunfighter turned lawyer, is the focus of The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca, a miniseries that ran for ten episodes over two seasons (1958–60). And in further testimony to the Crockett influence, the studio edited episodes of both series to create several successful theatrical releases. In a final effort to recapture the spirit of the Crockett shows, the studio later turned to a similar figure—one whose dress, gun, and general surroundings would immediately recall Davy—Daniel Boone. During the 1960–61 season, the last of Walt Disney Presents, the studio offered four episodes of a fictionalized account of Boone’s early migration into Kentucky. However, they did not build an audience and would prove to be the last effort at creating a western miniseries for many years and essentially a farewell to the show’s Frontierland theme.

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two sequel episodes, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates,” would air four more times on Walt Disney Presents and The Wonderful World of Color. Additionally, in an effort to mark the return to NBC for the 1988–89 season and to recapture some of Disneyland’s original character, Michael Eisner decided to resurrect the Crockett character with hopes of spinning off a new series (Cotter 73). Subsequently, five new Crockett episodes were produced, but audience tastes had clearly changed and the shows were dropped as too expensive. In the more than thirty years since the first Crockett shows had appeared, though, Disney had already gotten ample mileage out of this figure, and national interests had shifted away from the frontier of the Old West. Disney had struck on a figure who was already half real and half fictional, who had been popularized by stories, spurious “autobiographies,” almanacs, and melodramas throughout the nineteenth century, and who had been a staple of early action films. And in trying to be faithful to both the factual and folkloric elements of Davy Crockett, the studio had given birth to what Margaret King terms “one of the great popular culture events” of modern America (143), while also fixing for generations both the look and nature of this quicksilver character. In the process Disney had firmly established the anthology series—as a ratings leader, as a marketing power, and as an emblem of television’s impact on the viewing public. With these accomplishments, having fashioned a kind of folklore of its own, the studio could eventually let its Crockett join the older figure of folklore. For Davy Crockett had become indeed a “tall tale and true,” a figure that, like so many other Disney creations, had migrated across media, from television to comics, novelizations, new movies, biographies, even to the world of academic criticism, in the process becoming part of that “world mediatization” of which Virilio speaks (Art 14).

Chapter 3

Stories of Fact and (Science) Fiction Thousands took the “Rocket to the Moon” daily; before long the passengers numbered in the millions. With their interest made tangible by the combined genius of Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney, people were ready for the real thing. Dennis Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun

I

n his biography of Wernher von Braun, the force behind America’s moon program, Dennis Piszkiewicz describes his subject’s contributions to Disneyland the show, Disneyland the park, and the space program as interconnected. He describes von Braun not simply as a great visionary or an extraordinary scientist but as “the man who sold the moon,” or at least the desirability of going to the moon, to the American public (203). He thus sets von Braun in an intriguingly cross-disciplinary context, as a master engineer and a master of the media, which he expertly manipulated to advance his research agenda, while also paralleling him to that other consummate salesman and imagineer with whom he briefly worked, Walt Disney. Both men could make the dry facts of astrophysics and rocket engineering come alive and excite millions, as they moved these concepts from magazine articles to a series of highly praised Disneyland shows, to the theme park and its Rocket to the Moon ride, and ultimately to the forefront of the national consciousness. Together, they prepared American imaginations for “the real thing.” That imaginative groundwork, the creation of a broad media context in which this momentous event became not only doable but expected and linked to America’s sense of

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itself, was central to the space program dedicated to putting a man on the moon in the 1960s. In fact, when viewed from this vantage, the American space program, marked by the waxing and waning of public enthusiasm, seems like another media event for an era that increasingly experienced events through the media, as if the world were becoming a kind of thrill ride, with the anthology show an important stage in that ride. The Rocket to the Moon attraction that was the centerpiece of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland section and was inspired by von Braun originated in three episodes that appeared on the anthology show during its early years. These episodes, “Man in Space” (March 9, 1955), “Man and the Moon” (December 28, 1955), and “Mars and Beyond” (December 4, 1957), collectively known as the Man in Space series, represent the best of early programming for the Tomorrowland segment of the series, gaining international attention and establishing the program’s ability to present serious ideas in an entertaining context. If the Crockett shows had demonstrated how the series might turn to a mythic past, mixing folklore with history, these episodes suggested an equal capacity for looking forward through the lens of scientific fact, for extrapolating from science with the aid of fantasy. Moreover, they illustrate the series’ ability to cross from one medium to another, in terms of their origins, their individual constructions, and their eventual trajectories. Yet this trilogy also owes much of its form and shape to some simple problems of conception, particularly the difficulties created by the show’s thematic organization. In proposing the series, Walt anticipated that his studio could easily create programming for its announced theme segments. It generally had satisfactory models from which to work and much material about fantasy, the frontier, and adventure to provide raw material for the shows. However, Disney had never dealt with the future or, apart from the then current production project of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, even any sort of science fiction, a genre that became highly popular in the 1950s. Moreover, as Bill Cotter notes, no one at the studio “was quite sure exactly

The link between Disney and the top German rocket scientist, von Braun, follows in part from Walt’s directive to link entertainment with “true-life” facts. In 1951 another German rocket expert, Willy Ley, helped organize the Space Travel Symposium at the Hayden Planetarium in New York with a practical aim, as he put it, “to make the public realize that the problem of space travel is to be regarded as a serious branch of science and technology” (Liebermann 135). This conference proved so popular that the following year, Collier’s magazine assembled a similar symposium of writers, scientists, artists, and thinkers to speculate on the problems and possibilities of space travel, with an eye to interesting a mass audience in those speculations. Among this group were Dr. Fred Whipple, chair of Harvard’s Astronomy Department, space illustrators Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman, the writer Cornelius Ryan, and a

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how to portray the future” or what its most appropriate subjects should be (64). The only television models then extant provided little help, since they were mostly “space operas,” cheaply done adventure series set in outer space, such as Captain Video and His Video Rangers (Dumont, 1949–55), Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (CBS, 1950; ABC, 1951–52), and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (syndicated, 1954–55).1 Walt pointedly steered his creative staff away from that formula. In a studio memo he suggested that in trying to develop ideas about the future, they emphasize two elements: “comedy interest and factual interest. Both of them are vital to keep the show from becoming dry. . . . We are trying to show man’s dreams of the future and what he has learned from the past. . . . I think this parallels the ‘TrueLife Adventures’—facts and opening up this world to people” (Watts 310). In following this lead, particularly Walt’s linking of the Tomorrowland segments and the “True-Life Adventures,” his staff faced a difficult task. However, both their response to the challenge and the trilogy’s impact underscore the anthology series’ achievement, especially the extent to which Disneyland anticipated—and participated in—the emerging intertextual and multimedia context of mass entertainment.

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group of German rocket and space experts—among them, Ley, Heinz Haber, and von Braun. One result of this gathering was an eight-article Collier’s series published between 1952 and 1954, which advanced various proposals for launching an Earth-orbiting satellite, traveling to the moon via multistage rockets, and journeying to Mars using nuclear propulsion (Liebermann 137–38), all done in an entertaining, heavily illustrated format aimed at a lay audience. In what was certainly more a show-business than journalistic spirit, Collier’s even organized a large publicity campaign to promote the articles, providing radio and press kits, releasing photographs to the news syndicates, and arranging television interviews for von Braun on several nationally broadcast programs.2 The series’ first issue was so enthusiastically received that Collier’s was swamped with queries about how to become an astronaut or otherwise participate in the new adventure of space, and several contributors, including von Braun, signed contracts to do book-length versions of their articles. Recognizing the entertainment value of this material, Paramount Pictures contacted von Braun about developing a film based on his projections, and a script was apparently created that von Braun described as “sound and suitable as a basis for further discussion” (Piszkiewicz 78). However, copyright problems scuttled the project and left von Braun open to other possibilities for promoting his ideas for space travel and exploration. Ward Kimball, a Disney animator, producer, and “idea man,” had read the articles and followed the media campaign. He suggested to Walt that the material in the articles be used as a basis for the Tomorrowland segments. With Kimball installed as producer for a project titled “Rockets and Space,” the studio quickly developed a story line and hired the key German scientists from the Collier’s series—von Braun, Ley, Haber, and later Ernst Stuhlinger—to serve as technical consultants and, for the first two shows, even as on-air narrators, giving the project an extra air of authenticity and credibility. With the material these experts provided, though, the single episode expanded to oth-

The resulting shows drew much attention, including some from unusual quarters that testify to its impact. The first program received sufficiently high ratings and critical praise that it was screened three times during the initial season and then released as a theatrical short. Following the second showing, President Eisenhower requested a copy to be screened for his rocket experts in the Pentagon (Cotter 64). And shortly after, he announced that as part of the International Geophysical Year in 1957, the United States would, as the show described, launch a satellite into earth orbit—a project that the government put into the hands of many of those experts involved in the Collier’s and Disneyland series. Precisely how much the show actually influenced Eisenhower and American space policy remains open to question. Von Braun was apparently leery of attributing the government’s decisions—which eventually included his appointment to head the Marshall Space Flight Center—to a popular television program, for fear that it would seem to trivialize the work of American scientists and suggest that popular culture was driving national policy.3 As Randy Liebermann notes, many in the engineering and scientific community had “looked upon the Collier’s space articles as speculative hoopla that served only the purposes of those who participated” (144). However, Piszkiewicz details how the

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ers and followed the trajectory of the Collier’s series, although to avoid copyright problems various details surrounding the rocket designs were changed and the Disney writers and animators added another dimension. Following Walt’s stipulation of “comedy interest,” they humorously illustrated mankind’s historical misconceptions about space, the moon, and Mars with cartoons for each episode. The aim of the series, though, remained factual and scientific; in previewing the upcoming shows during Disneyland’s first episode, “The Disneyland Story” (October 27, 1954), Kimball describes how the space episodes would chronicle “the forward march of science” and emphasize “the latest plans our scientists have made for the conquest of space.”

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show piqued even Russian interest, the serious nature of which was evidenced by a request from Leonid Sedov, chair of the Soviet commission for space flight programs, to Frederick D. Durant III, president of the International Astronautical Federation, for a copy of the program (88). Whether acknowledged or not, the Man in Space shows struck a serious chord, marking not only the intense interest in space and rocketry of 1950s culture but also the substantial role that various media were starting to play in building that interest, in turning the stuff of science fiction imaginings and cold war speculations into “the real thing.” The first show, “Man in Space,” quickly established the series’ broad strategy, as well as the format for each episode. With a phrase that President Kennedy would revive a few years later, Walt introduces the program by announcing that humanity is “at the threshold of a new frontier,” that of space exploration and colonization. The master imagineer then presents his thematic expert, Ward Kimball, who produced, directed, and cowrote the episode. After sketching the show’s scope, Kimball introduces the special subject experts, Ley, Haber, and von Braun. Ley reviews the history of rocketry, which gives way to Haber’s specialty, space medicine, as he talks about the physical problems facing mankind in space. Von Braun follows with his plan for building a rocket to put the first humans in space; as he authoritatively announces, “If we were to start today on an organized, well-supported space program, . . . I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within ten years.” The animated illustration of this plan culminates the episode, serving to make von Braun’s ideas concrete and to suggest a kind of inevitability to the “program” he has outlined. The most important element in leading to that conclusion, though, is the sense of authority that the show has established from the start. Its strategy is simply to link the voices of Disney, the artist, and von Braun, the engineer, and to complement them with other,

Equally important was the format this episode developed— a format that would rhetorically underscore the messages of its authorities and that would form a model for subsequent programs in this vein. To establish the principles of rocketry, the show uses an animated bust of Isaac Newton to explain how every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and in illustration we see a cartoon puppy sneeze and move backward. These animated scenes establish the mixed tone of the episode by providing a light and humorous look at the hard facts of science. We then see the Disney cartoonists and story men in conference with the German scientists, as if working on precisely the right blending of these elements. The result is a cartoon character labeled “homo sapiens extraterrestrialis” who illustrates the problems facing man in space, as well as humanity’s misconceptions throughout the ages about space and space travel. As we laugh at the figure—and at the limited knowledge that has been our lot—the stage is set for von Braun to provide the latest knowledge, what we need to advance beyond this cartoonish condition. He illustrates his brief presentation with sketches, cutaway drawings, and detailed scale models, particularly of the four-stage “orbital rocket ship” that would also “return the men to the earth safely.” Following it, though, is another animation segment, done in a realistic and sober style, illustrating the difficult accomplishment of the plan von Braun describes and urging our dedication to “the conquest of space.” The format described here moves from the past to the present and into the future. It thereby implicitly argues for a kind of evolutionary vision of mankind and of our place in the universe. More significant, it lets us laugh at our ancestors and their misconceptions, while helping us take contemporary science—and ourselves—far more seriously. The live-action scenes of the scientists, the cartoonists, and von Braun’s “lecture” not only bring us into the present but also link the work of the animators and the scientists/engineers, establishing an

Stories of Fact and (Science) Fiction

similarly authoritative voices, to take audiences in a seriously speculative direction television had not previously staked out.

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authoritative ground for the show's conclusion. That final animated sequence, with its darker and more sober tone, effectively frames what is, after all, just speculation, helping us to accept this ultimately cartoonish vision of the future. The degree of that acceptance might be seen in the reaction to this episode’s theatrical release in 1957: an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject. The trilogy’s second installment, “Man and the Moon,” closely follows the model of the first but relies more heavily on the contributions of von Braun and his colleagues. Mapping out a scenario for a manned moon flight, the show begins with an animated sequence describing various myths and superstitions people have held about the moon, its possible inhabitants, and ways of reaching it. From the past the program moves to the present as von Braun, armed with statistics, models, and sketches, explains how to reach the moon in a two-step process, first by building an orbiting space station, and then by launching from it a manned moon probe. The show concludes with an account of such a trip with live actors portraying a group of astronauts making the trip and dramatizing the human difficulties it would entail, and animation to suggest its full scope and to illustrate how the crew would conduct repairs in space. The temporal progression and the mixture of animated myths, illustrated lecture, and dramatized event again effectively argue for the possibility of such a journey in the near future. Adding to this episode’s authority, though, is the increased screen time given to von Braun. With slide rule in pocket and surrounded by models resembling the vehicles described in the Collier’s articles, he explains each step in detail, beginning with the space station, which, he notes, “will have the shape of a wheel measuring 250 feet across. This outside rim will contain living and working quarters for a crew of fifty men. Just below the radio and radar antenna is an atomic reactor. Its heat will be used to drive a turbo generator which supplies the station with electricity.” For use in constructing the station and the moon probe and for making repairs, he displays

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Wernher von Braun describes his model of a rocket for moon flight on the “Man and the Moon” episode.

a model of another invention, a “bottle suit” in which astronauts can work safely in space. He talks about the great distances, times, and dangers, such as meteors, involved in flying to the moon. The sense of authority he—along with his models and figures—projects lends credibility to the journey we see staged, even though the show ends with the rocket only traveling around the moon and returning to earth, instead of landing on the moon, probably because too little was then known about the nature of the moon’s surface. Yet that hesitation to speculate too far in advance of current knowledge did not prevent the episode from venturing, like the first show, into the realms of comedy and drama. The early animated scenes again allowed the Disney animators to humorously catalog superstitions and folklore surrounding the moon: how it can bring good luck, what its phases mean for

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sailors, how it affects lovers, etc. This segment sets a light tone, but it also effectively contrasts with the currency von Braun and his colleagues offer, that of facts, figures, and technological capabilities. The later animated scenes of a space station’s construction and the use of a bottle suit to repair meteor damage combine with the live-action astronaut scenes to build a dramatic context for events and make von Braun’s speculations seem not only plausible but possible. Moreover, that combination would establish much of the pattern for the Rocket to the Moon ride that would become such a popular early Disneyland attraction. While employing the same experts who had helped craft the first two Man in Space shows, and while similarly produced, directed, and coscripted by Ward Kimball, the final trilogy episode has a different feel. Animated images of flying saucers fade to Walt Disney offering his typical lead-in, here vaguely observing that “there is much speculation on what we will discover when we explore other worlds.” Having established that speculative context, the episode unfolds following the familiar pattern of historical progression and the use of mixed media. An animated cavalcade of early peoples (cave dwellers, shepherds, ancient Egyptians, Greek philosophers, Renaissance thinkers, nineteenth-century astronomers), all “contemplating the mysteries of the stars” and all treated humorously, dominates the opening, but it is followed by illustrations of early science fiction literature, particularly that of H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, that speculated about life on nearby planets, especially Mars. A third and more elaborate animated sequence then offers a “sample” contemporary story about a “mechanical robot from Mars”—unusual among Disney productions of the era in its use of a female protagonist.4 But when it ends, there is no shift to current and more factual views, just another animated sequence describing life’s evolution on earth and the conditions that might affect life’s development on other planets. The usual lecture follows, delivered by Dr. E. C. Slipher of the Lowell Observatory, who explains the use of the tele-

As this description suggests, “Mars and Beyond” relies far more heavily on animation—and the comic thrust of that animation—than the prior episodes, while it also downplays the authoritative voices of the scientists and engineers. Walt’s contextualizing introduction becomes little more than an invitation to speculate, and von Braun’s on-air participation dwindles to a brief, nonspeaking scene. This shift might well simply mark the interval between the production of this work and the two previous shows, a delay due in part to the studio’s plans to produce a film on Project Vanguard for the International Geophysical Year—a project dropped when the Vanguard rocket ran into problems (Liebermann 146). In the intervening period, as Steven Watts suggests, the cultural attitude had begun to change, and “the political atmosphere had darkened” (311–12) with Soviet space achievement and its threatening implications. By relying primarily on animated sequences, particularly ones that emphasize humor, exaggeration, and speculation, the episode could depoliticize the cultural focus on space and even shift that focus into a recognizably fantastic frame of reference, that of the science fiction tale. Certainly, the flying saucer images that begin and end the show are significant departures

Stories of Fact and (Science) Fiction

scope, spectrograph, and thermocoupler for measuring conditions on other planets, while he also admits that “there are probably certain unavoidable errors in our calculations.” While we subsequently see images of von Braun and Ernst Stuhlinger, both consultants for this episode, working on models of an “atomic-electric space ship” for use in a manned Mars mission, it is a brief segment, followed by a final animated sequence, detailing a thirteen-month trip to and landing on Mars—a trip that would only “open the first small door of the universe” to further human exploration. The concluding animation of “the years that follow” shows flying saucers moving off into space, recalling the opening and suggesting both human progress in space exploration and a level on which we might finally match up with that science fiction world which, from a 1950s perspective, seemed so fantastic.

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from the carefully detailed, modeled, and explained rockets and space stations designed by von Braun and his colleagues, and they iconically anchor the episode in a fantastic realm. But this shift also recalls something seen in the Davy Crockett episodes—the ease with which the Disney shows blur boundaries, here between hard facts and sheer speculation, between the informative lecture and light entertainment, between documentary and science fiction. The first two space episodes emphasize the presentation of facts by authoritative voices to suggest an agenda of space exploration—one linked to a growing cultural fascination with space—and to help fashion an identity for the Disneyland show as offering a unique combination of entertainment and education. “Mars and Beyond,” however, never quite takes itself seriously, as might be gauged when, among the various outrageously shaped Martian creatures depicted in one animated sequence, Donald Duck briefly appears. While it employs far more elaborate and imaginative animation than the “Man in Space” and “Man and the Moon” shows and was highly regarded enough to be released theatrically, the final episode seems content to be something other than “the real thing” promised by the authoritative voices of the first two episodes. It hints of a level on which the anthology was beginning to stake out a somewhat less serious, even less ambitious identity for itself. While a number of later shows would closely recall the trilogy, none would take as speculative or earnest an approach to its futuristic subject matter as the Man in Space episodes. For example, “Magic Highway U.S.A.” (May 14, 1958) also looks to the past, present, and future in describing how what Walt terms “the greatest highway system in the world”—that of the United States—came into being, examines the current problems of congestion and accidents that plague it, and argues that “we must plan and build for the future right now.” In the course of presenting its Tomorrowland vision of “our magic carpet to new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future,” it mixes media elements and genres in much the way the Man in

Crafted a few years later for The Wonderful World of Color, “Spy in the Sky” (April 1, 1962) faces a slightly more difficult task, for it tries to serve multiple functions—offering a discourse on the use of satellites while also publicizing the forthcoming Disney release Moon Pilot—even as it aims for a new sort of identity, one that points away from the earlier Disney fascination with the future. At first the episode recalls the Man in Space shows, as the opening credits cite Ward Kimball as codirector and cowriter, and as Walt introduces the piece in a familiar manner, recalling Disneyland’s “programs in the past” about space and noting how “every achievement in outer space opens the way to more distant goals.” As he speaks, he points to models of von Braun's moon rocket and space station and various drawings that figured in the first three Tomorrowland programs. Yet from that point he shifts to a discussion of Moon Pilot, a featurelength comedy based on the contemporary space race. Comic highlights from the film segue into backstage scenes that supposedly show the actors rehearsing—of course, all carefully rehearsed and staged for the television cameras, with the “real” interaction between the film’s leads, Tom Tryon and Dany Saval, paralleling their comic-romantic relationship in the film. That level of “real” action, though, establishes the ground for another shift, as Walt then introduces a short on rocketry, satellites, and their use in weather forecasting and control, a segment that, while brief, follows the familiar pattern of the Man in Space trilogy.5 Once more animated footage comically describes

Stories of Fact and (Science) Fiction

Space shows do. It looks to the distant past with humorous animation about primitive travel, recalls the early history of the automobile with a brief comic short on the difficulties of driving Model T’s and their like, offers footage of contemporary road building, and concludes with models and animated images of the highway system of the future. However, “Magic Highway U.S.A.” never marshals the sort of specialized expertise provided by von Braun and his colleagues, and its generally similar collection of materials, by now a formula wearing thin, can only weakly argue for its futuristic vision.

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Animated vision of life on other planets from the “Inside Outer Space” episode.

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mankind’s “questionable weather forecasting devices”; a combination of animation and live-action footage shows current efforts at using satellites to explore the atmosphere and help predict weather; and then a mix of animated footage and dramatized live action, recalling the trip to the moon sequence of “Man and the Moon,” shows how satellite and rocket technology will help us not only to predict but even to control the weather and thereby transform the earth itself. This short but familiar mix of comic scenes of the past, factual footage of today, and dramatized images of tomorrow operates within a new context, for this episode, as the opening states, comes “from the wonderful world of adventure.” With the shift to The Wonderful World of Color in 1961, the thematic divisions that had given us Tomorrowland and inspired the Man in Space series disappeared. And the change in format left little room for the hard science and factual emphasis that had propelled the space trilogy; contrived “adventure” was edging out “the real thing.” While the following season did see another entry that recalls the Tomorrowland shows, “Inside Outer Space” (February 10, 1963), it was largely a compilation of the animated scenes produced for the Man in Space series, linked by a comic narration from Ludwig Von Drake. The shift from von Braun’s authoritative voice to Von Drake’s comically befuddled one, and from hard facts presented entertainingly to an extended cartoon on a space theme, seems telling. Space no longer needed to be sold to the audience; the amusement park thrill ride would be enough. Scientific speculation and its educational dimension were segueing into entertainment, the lines blurring as the “space race” itself became a big show, a popular entertainment done before cameras for the masses. Henceforth, the anthology series would turn in other directions when—and if—it wished to both educate and entertain.

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Chapter 4

Promoting the Films/Promoting the Parks HYBRID STORIES This technological development [the cinema] has carried us into a realm of factitious topology in which all the surfaces of the globe are directly present to one another. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema

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n analyzing the development of what he terms “the logistics of perception,” Virilio notes how our various technologies of seeing, especially film, have changed our sense of connection— to places, people, and even the self. We now live in a realm, he suggests, of constant presence, where all things seem linked, even if only virtually, and we struggle to cope with this connectedness. For some it is a disconcerting experience, particularly as it attacks our desire for privacy and independence, but for others it is liberating. For Disney, especially the Disney of the It’s a Small World ride at the New York World’s Fair and later at the theme parks, that “factitious topology” with its implicit closeness of peoples and cultures has been central to both its business methods and its broad vision. For its business strategy has always been to presume and exploit connections, while its productions have repeatedly celebrated relationships, ties within and between cultures. This approach informs the shaping of another key anthology episode type—that which exploits other shows or presentations, drawing on another topology, that of the media, in demonstrating a pointedly intertextual character. Such shows furthered the larger corporate strategy for self-promotion that has been a hallmark of Disney. Yet they also allowed the studio to take a broader view of various subjects and, on a more

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pragmatic level, to help flesh out two other thematic categories, especially during the ABC years. With the narrative flexibility of this approach, the series easily ranged across the Adventureland and Fantasyland themes to better balance its offerings. One primary motivating factor in Disney’s move into television was the ability to use the new medium to promote the studio’s products. We might recall the studio’s 1950 and 1951 television specials, which allowed it to celebrate the release of its newest animated features, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Bill Cotter suggests that Walt and Roy Disney approached these specials as “little more than thinly disguised commercials” (5). Given the positive response to these shows and their perceived impact on the studio’s releases, we should expect that in preparing Disneyland, they would have drawn on this experience and tried to build in such a marketing element. Reacting to what he sees as an unusual amount of Disneyland’s air time dedicated to “direct studio promotion,” William Boddy agrees with Cotter, offering that the studio may have turned to television “as much for exploitation and promotion as for programming” (147). Yet we should note that such self-promotion was, even before television, consistent with company strategy, one that would eventually extend to broadcast television, cable, theme parks, radio, etc., and that followed from a corporate vision of a thoroughly mediated and interconnected world. Janet Wasko has described Disney’s strategy for such selfpromotion as “synergy,” a process of establishing central brands, products, or services and then “promoting their activities across a growing number of outlets.” She suggests that Disney’s development of this strategy “represents the quintessential example of synergy in the media/entertainment industry” (71). Certainly the company acknowledges this strategy, recognizes its great advantages, particularly in the contemporary cross-cultural and multimedia environment, and consciously follows it as a working policy. As one Disney executive offers, “It’s a unique attribute of the Disney company, the abili-

Of course this model, for all of its success, is no recent development. We have noted how successful Disney was at merchandising its animated films and licensing its characters to advertise other companies’ products—in newspapers, magazines, radio, etc.—from the earliest days of Mickey Mouse. By the time the anthology show appeared, the company was one of the most adept in the country at promoting itself and its products, thanks especially to its experience with the television specials, the creation of its film distribution company, Buena Vista, and the development of specialized music and publishing divisions. If the Crockett phenomenon had initially caught Disney off guard in this respect, the speed with which the company matched the public’s enthusiasm, created enormous merchandising opportunities for itself and others, and then leveraged the Crockett boom to publicize the theme park, pique interest in other Fess Parker vehicles, and provide a model for future anthology episodes attests to its capabilities in this area. The anthology show worked its own spin on this strategy, especially in its formative years, and in the process further refined this strategy and underscored its larger implications. Apart from the Crockett series and the “Man in Space” episode, the first year of Disneyland saw little original programming, apart from shows that promoted the park or the upcoming feature 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The second season closely followed this pattern, with two new Davy Crockett episodes being joined by a second space exploration show, another episode on the park, and one promoting the forthcoming release The Great Locomotive Chase. The rest of the season drew on prior theatrical presentations—cartoons, documentaries, live-action features—material that promoted the studio and its productions, kept its characters alive for a new generation, and

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ty to create synergy between divisions, whether it’s interactive games, Buena Vista television, or the Disney Channel. We all work together and we do it on a year-round basis and we do it aggressively. The success of these ongoing roles makes everything in the company work better” (Wasko 71–72).

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reaffirmed the series’ links to the theme park. It was, as a result, as if all of these shows existed in a larger context of other media experiences and cultural lives, and gained resonance—a cultural significance and market appeal—from their many stablemates. That drive for synergy or integration would take a variety of forms in the anthology series. One followed from the process by which Disneyland was made financially feasible, that is, the quick and inexpensive production of new episodes by reediting older films, especially the studio's trademark cartoons. The series typically employed three variations on this strategy: one was to condense into single episodes feature productions, as Disneyland did in its initial season with a short version of Alice in Wonderland (November 2, 1954) or the following season with Dumbo (September 14, 1955); a second was to serialize a feature over several episodes, as in the case of Treasure Island (January 5 and 12, 1955) or, in year two, The Story of Robin Hood (November 2 and 9, 1955); the third was to construct episodes by linking together shorter works, usually cartoons, around a theme or concept, as in the first season’s “The Donald Duck Story” (November 17, 1954) or the second’s “The Adventures of Mickey Mouse” (October 12, 1955). Of these strategies, the third was easily the most common, resulting in four full episodes and part of another in the first season and ten during the second. Even after the shift to The Wonderful World of Color, the show relied heavily on these compilations, offering as many as eight episodes during each of its first two seasons on NBC. While relatively cheap to produce—thanks to the recycled material—these episodes effectively showcased the quality of Disney animation, for despite the use of older work, as Leonard Maltin notes, “there were no shortcuts taken” (77). Some of the top Disney animators, particularly Jack Hannah, Jack Kinney, and Charles Nichols, supervised the creation of new footage to seamlessly link old cartoons or to combine with live action, such as Walt’s introductory segments or scenes from the theme park. These shows also constantly reintroduced

As examples of such intertextual shows, we might consider two similar episodes, “Cavalcade of Songs” (February 16, 1955) and “Where Do Stories Come From?” (April 4, 1956). Both entries showcase a variety of older Disney animation, the first offering sequences from The Three Little Pigs (1933), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), and Song of the South (1946), and the second portions of such Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons as Donald Gets Drafted (1942), Out of Scale (1951), and R’Coon Dawg (1951). Due to changing exhibition practices and the lack of a demand for short cartoons, the studio had closed its shorts unit in 1955. So these two episodes—and many similar ones—used material that might have had no other market, while keeping some traditional Disney “stars”—Mickey Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck, Chip ‘n’ Dale—in the public eye and available for future use. These shows thus pointed to a whole history of Disney animation, attesting to its quality and continuing appeal, even as the short cartoon, as a distinct form and typical portion of the theatrical bill, receded into media history. Another intertextual element, and ultimately a more significant one, also surfaces in these shows. Both episodes begin with Walt posing a similar question. At the start of “Cavalcade of Songs” he notes that “People often ask us where we get the songs for our pictures, how we decide what songs we want to use, and how we go about working them into our stories.” “Where Do Stories Come From?” opens with the more succinct,

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archival material and trademarked characters to new audiences, thereby making it possible to create completely new shows with those characters or migrate them to other media venues. Thus a number of the Goofy cartoons were joined to produce “The Goofy Sports Story” for the second season (March 21, 1956); a further reediting and compilation resulted in “Goofy’s Cavalcade of Sports” (October 17, 1956) during the next season; and together these shows later helped make up “Superstar Goofy” (July 25, 1976), an episode released theatrically overseas.

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“We have often been asked, where do we get the ideas for our stories.” What each opening presages is a look “backstage” at the complex processes involved in creating animated films of the sort Disney was famous for, especially writing songs, devising plots, and developing characters. Steven Watts sees in this approach a similarity between Walt and another master American showman who struck a reflexive chord, P. T. Barnum. Watts notes how Barnum engaged “the curiosity of audiences by inviting them to examine the very entertainment structures and operations that beguiled them” (366). Seen in light of Walt’s concern with linking education and entertainment, this behind-the-scenes approach to the cartoon shows is hardly surprising. And as we shall see, it is an approach to which the studio would turn in promoting its features, increasingly offering shows on the making of the studio’s live-action films. As many filmmakers have come to realize in recent times—as is evidenced by the vogue for “The Making of . . .” documentaries—this approach not only helps pique curiosity but also provides audiences another kind of pleasure, that of a privileged knowledge. That Disney well understood this effect is illustrated in the titles of many other episodes in this vein, such as “The Story of the Silly Symphony” (October 19, 1955), “The Story of the Animated Drawing” (November 30, 1955), “The Plausible Impossible” (October 31, 1956), “Tricks of Our Trade” (February 13, 1957), “All about Magic” (January 30, 1957), “An Adventure in Art” (April 30, 1958), “The Truth about Mother Goose” (November 17, 1963), “A Rag, a Bone, a Box of Junk” (October 11, 1964), and “Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life” (April 26, 1981). All are shows that provide a kind of metacommentary on Disney films, as they focus on the practices of creating animated films and on the studio’s constant pursuit of the answer to one question, posed by Walt at the start of the “Tricks of the Trade” episode: “How could animation be improved?” Such shows constantly refer to what seems a kind of master pattern, worked out over many years and in many films,

In like fashion, “Where Do Stories Come From?” talks about the difficulty of generating effective plots for animated films and in the process establishes a realistic paradigm for Disney animation. Disney “story men,” Walt notes at the start, are “trained to closely observe everyday happenings,” to build from the “common occurrence.” The studio’s “True-Life Adventure” films thus provide one source by allowing the animators to study “the antics of these little critters” captured by the documentary camera—antics that, as the cartoon R’Coon Dawg illustrates, are often “just downright human.” History, too, provides a fertile source for stories, as was demonstrated by World War II and the many cartoons produced to support the war effort, in this episode represented by several sequences with Donald Duck as a soldier. And finally Walt notes that “hobbies are another fertile field” for plots, although the hobby in the cartoon shown is an unusual one—building scale-model railroads. Home movies of Walt’s own working railroad, of

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guiding the creation of effective and entertaining animation such as Disney’s. In the two episodes noted here, this paradigm surfaces as a concern not simply with realistic representation but with matching the filmic world to a recognizably real world. Thus in “Cavalcade of Songs” Walt describes how the studio’s first hit song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from The Three Little Pigs, succeeded because it was both “timely and . . . timeless,” particularly as it expressed how many responded to the depression. Moreover, such songs were typically chosen because they served, rather than interfered in, the creation of a plausible world; as Walt notes about Snow White, “[O]ur first concern was to make sure that each song helped us tell our story.” By the time this episode reaches the contemporary era and shows how songs were developed to fit the plot and realistically enhance the characters of the studio’s latest creation, Lady and the Tramp, viewers are primed to see this film as part of a continuous topology of classical animation, as a work that will take its place alongside the other films excerpted here—all Academy Award winners and surefire audience pleasers.

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director Ward Kimball’s full-size train, and of the Disneyland railroad, though, attest to the real-life correspondence and lead in to Out of Scale, a Donald Duck cartoon in which the duck’s model railroading runs afoul of Chip ‘n’ Dale, the two chipmunks who upset his scale-model world. Throughout this episode we see a constant emphasis on the “illusion of life” aesthetic that supposedly drives Disney animation, but it is tied to one additional intertextual element, with the final sequence referring not to a new film but to Walt and his own toys—the scaled train and Disneyland itself. It is a reminder that the Disney studio works within a much larger topology, not only of a history of realistic animation but also of fantasy as it takes various shapes and gains expression in a variety of media, even that which Disney was then pioneering, the theme park. A second version of that synergy surfaces in the efforts to use Disneyland to promote the studio’s latest theatrical releases. To illustrate this type, we might consider a noteworthy episode, “Operation Undersea” (December 8, 1954). While publicizing Disney’s production of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, this show also established the series’ loftier credentials by winning two Emmy awards, one for Best Program of the Year and the other for Best Editing. Moreover, the episode had another intertextual dimension, as it drew heavily on an established film type for much of its shape and strategy, a documentary film form for which the Disney studio had already established a substantial reputation, the “True-Life Adventure.” Situating itself intertextually between a factual formula that had proven highly successful and a fictional show with which the studio obviously hoped to find similar success (that is, the feature being promoted), this episode demonstrates the broad media perspective that would increasingly characterize Disney television. The “True-Life Adventure” series had begun in 1948 with a two-reel short titled Seal Island. While RKO, Disney’s distributor in that era, saw small potential in such films and did little to promote it, the picture was a best-seller and won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. That success spawned a long

“Monsters of the Deep” episode describes the shooting of the Disney feature 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.

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series of similar shorts (including a companion series, “People and Places”), while also opening up the possibility for feature offerings in the same vein. Consequently, in 1953 the studio released the full-length film The Living Desert, which at that time was the biggest profit maker in Disney history, bringing in $4 million for a production cost of only $300,000.1 It also won an Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, and awards at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, even as another movie in the series, Bear Country, won another Academy Award that year for Best Short Subject. In all, Disney produced thirteen such films between 1948 and 1960, some shorts and others features, which brought the studio consistently high profits. Moreover, the nature films, as Janet Wasko notes, helped build Walt’s “reputation as a documentarian and educator,” bringing him awards from the National Geographic Society and the Audubon Society, the latter of which cited the “service to conservation” (Wasko 147) made by his studio’s nature films. While some have criticized the anthropomorphizing of the animal world in these films—clearly an offshoot of the studio’s animation—Walt noted that these works were never intended to provide a “formal education in natural science” but rather aimed “to bring interesting and delightful entertainment to the theater” (Wasko 148). It was an aim that ultimately served the anthology series well, for the “True-Life Adventure” films established a solid base on which to build episodes, ones which would, in turn, help publicize the theatrical releases and ultimately point the way for developing hybrid feature versions of these nature documentaries. Especially during the time of The Wonderful World of Color, the studio would produce many episodes combining key elements of the factual films with simple narrative lines about children, farmers, forest rangers, etc., later releasing them theatrically, both at home and overseas.2 One hybrid version that would prove especially useful to the anthology series drew on the “True-Life Adventure” film’s tradition of beautiful location photography, reverence for nature, and fascination with real details to attest to the value of

“Operation Undersea” provides a particularly telling example of this type not only because it was the first such episode on the series but also because it was highly praised and seen not simply as a promotional vehicle. In addition to its awards, the episode received high viewer ratings; in fact, it proved so popular that it ran three times during the first season, each time to improved audience numbers (Cotter 62). It was broadcast again during the 1962–63 and 1970–71 seasons, and portions of it were later incorporated into another episode (“Pacifically Peeking,” October 6, 1968). It also pointedly identified itself not

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the studio’s feature releases. As an example, we might consider “Behind the Scenes with Fess Parker” (May 30, 1956), a show that capitalized on the lingering effects of the Crockett craze, taking viewers to north Georgia where Parker’s latest film, The Great Locomotive Chase, was being filmed. The show provides a look at the landscape and animals of the area where the Civil War event chronicled in the film occurred and offers a brief background on the history of railroads and their importance in that war. “Along the Oregon Trail” (November 14, 1956) again uses Parker to narrate a look at the hardships of the nineteenthcentury westward migration, depicted in the next Disney film in which he starred—and from which we see several scenes— Westward Ho the Wagons! And similarly, “I Captured the King of the Leprechauns” (May 29, 1959), hosted by actor Pat O’Brien, offers a travelogue view of Ireland and a discussion of its folkways, all as a frame for describing the location filming of the feature Darby O’Gill and the Little People and providing scenes from that release. In each of these episodes, we find a subtle effort to “sell” the latest narrative film by demonstrating how much it recalls the studio’s non-narrative works. It is an interesting strategy, an effort not so much to blur the subject (the border between fact and fiction), as some critics would contend, but rather to shift attitudes toward that subject. These shows allow viewers to approach their subjects with some of that same fascination for the real world in which the Disney documentaries were so successfully rooted.3

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simply with the film it was promoting but with those “True-Life Adventure” films that had proven such critical and popular successes. For while Walt offered his usual lead-in for the episode, describing one sort of faithfulness the studio had labored over, an effort to be as true to Jules Verne’s original novel as possible, he quickly handed the show over to Winston Hibler, a producer, director, writer, and even lyricist who was linked to the studio’s documentary projects, having served as narrator for most of the “True-Life Adventure” and “People and Places” films. His reference to a globe and to maps, as well as his comments about how the studio “dug into research” in preparation for filming 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, especially in selecting its locations, further evokes the context of the fact films, as do the close-ups and everyday activity scenes of seldom-seen undersea creatures at the movie’s Bahamas shooting site. But then the connection, as Hibler matter-of-factly indicates, is neither accidental nor subtle, as he labels the episode “a true-life adventure at the bottom of the sea.” Yet the thrust of this show is never simply “the bottom of the sea” but rather what we might think of as the interface between bottom and surface, between novel and film, between fact and fantasy, with the show functioning, much like the submarine Nautilus that is at the center of Verne’s tale, helping us traverse—and ultimately link—these different realms. In emphasizing its “true-life” context, the episode does spend much time beneath the ocean, focusing on a variety of what Hibler terms “factual” stories: “the story behind those underwater cameras” used in filming; the “garden under the sea” that the filmmakers discovered during the shoot; the story, which “might well be called ‘Operation Impossible,’” of “a full-scale movie company shooting a full-length feature picture under thirty feet of water”; and even that of the “20,000 problems” encountered at the studio in completing the film. During these various stories we see unfamiliar yet pointedly real images of underwater life, we learn about the special underwater Mitchell camera and the self-propelled Aquaflex camera used to shoot

However, for all of these realistic details, including citations of time, weight, and distance measurements at every turn, fantasy is never far from the surface of the sea or narrative. After describing the painstaking research that went into the project, for example, Hibler introduces an animated narrative, a cartoon about a character named “Man” and his attempts through the ages to probe the mysteries of the deep—attempts metaphorized in the male’s insistent and humorous efforts to pursue a mermaid beneath the waves. Once the “true-life” type footage begins, the underwater scenes of marine life periodically resort to the sort of exciting imagery that Wasko criticizes as “a tabloid version of nature” (148) and the anthropomorphism for which the “True-Life Adventure” films have been criticized. Thus after we see a variety of marine predators attacking and consuming their prey, all supposedly from the point of view of a stolid and harmless grouper, Hibler notes, “It’s a grim circus the grouper sees, but it has its lighter side,” and he introduces a parade of what he terms ocean “clowns”: a sideways-walking lobster, a hermit crab, a spitting fish, and a kissing fish. The surface scenes that conclude the episode, of friendly Jamaicans singing a song about the moviemakers, or of the casting “competition” back in Hollywood between three trained seals trying out for the part of Captain Nemo’s pet Esmeralda, follow in this light tone. All clearly staged for the cameras—like the film the

Promoting the Films/Promoting the Parks

both the feature and this episode, we hear about the strict safety precautions observed by actors and crew while filming underwater, and we witness one of the accidents of the shoot—a scene in which a shark “interferes” with the action and the “situation begins to get out of hand,” but “in true Hollywood tradition the cameras keep rolling,” producing naturally dramatic footage that, we learn, appears in the finished film.4 All of these scenes, along with the presence of a U.S. Navy underwater cameraman, documenting the techniques of underwater construction and photography for potential military instruction, attest to the facticity of what we see here and, more important, of what we would see when the feature film reached theaters.

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episode promotes—they help balance off the stark, factual, and even grim elements of the piece; they remind us of Disney’s goal of “entertainment,” which is, after all, the film’s aim as well.

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Of course, “Operation Undersea” is ultimately a promotional film,5 one that would establish a model for many subsequent episodes in this vein. As such it is at some pains to bridge the gap, even blur the boundary between the Verne novel that Walt terms “a fantasy fiction” and the film experience, between “all the wonders of Jules Verne’s imagination,” as Hibler offers, and the studio’s efforts at filming “the greatest adventure tale we’ve ever told.” Its strategy for accomplishing this promotional feat is to play at the borders, offering us a “true-life” reality while having some fun with that reality, working Nautilus-like to take us back and forth between these realms, thereby presenting the film almost as if it were—in anticipation of the park and its own planned submarine attraction—a kind of amusement park ride. At one point the action shifts from the divers/actors on the sea floor, who have just been menaced by that unplanned shark visitor, to the film, as Hibler directs our attention: “Now let’s follow these actors into the submarine Nautilus and into the story itself.” This simple cut on action, leading into a brief scene from the film, neatly models the strategy of the episode. From a mediated world that we have been instructed to read as reality itself, the episode invites us into the fictional world of the film, finding in it a most appealing hybrid, a cinematic character right there, available alongside nature itself, thanks to the skills of the Disney studio. As a third example of the synergistic practice that marked the anthology series, we might consider another hybrid type, the theme park visit show. It was, of course, the subject of the first episode, “The Disneyland Story,” and appropriately so, given the way Walt and Roy Disney had negotiated the television deal with ABC and Walt’s reminder to the viewers that “Disneyland the place and Disneyland the TV show are all part of the same.” In fact, Walt announced that starting in its second season, the anthology show would originate from the park and

Christopher Anderson suggests that Disney sought from the outset to identify the anthology show and the park as part of an economic strategy. By fostering that identification, he argues, the company could “create an inhabitable text, one that would never be complete for a television-viewing family until they had taken full advantage of the postwar boom in automobile travel and tourism and made a pilgrimage to the park itself,” thereby having an opportunity “to perform in the Disneyland narrative” (152–53). By providing a narrative framework around the Disneyland experience, a framework found in the anthology series and its numerous episodes on the planning, construction, and further development of the park, Disney not only created a kind of inevitable trajectory for the television audience but also laid the foundation for a maximizing of synergy, as the park experience would also draw on the various Disney films (for example, as ride inspirations), which in turn would provide raw material for additional episodes, which would further attract viewers/consumers to the park and to later theatrical releases. This sort of economic account has dominated much of the commentary on Disney, as we see in Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan’s description of the company and its products as the ultimate embodiments of “Western consumerism” (78) or Wasko’s use of the park to metonymize contemporary “corporate and consumer culture” (225). While such critiques are useful and in some ways congruent with the development of the “factitious topology” that Virilio describes, they never

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draw closely from it for inspiration. Although that plan did not materialize, the park-focused show became a series staple, allowing Disney initially to update viewers on the state of Disneyland, later to introduce new rides and attractions or herald the openings of companion parks, such as Walt Disney World, EPCOT Center, and the Disney-MGM Studios, while always advertising the sort of entertainment climate that Disneyland offered—a climate pointedly shared with the larger world of the media.

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quite account for the narrative attraction of these shows—an attraction that would make them popular throughout the series’ long run. While the program did, as Wasko offers, become “a terrific promotional vehicle for the park” (21), just what was being promoted is usually glossed over. Walt’s suggestion in that initial show, that both park and television program represent “a place of hopes and dreams, facts and fancy, all in one,” that the entertainment experience both would offer was a kind of hybrid one, wherein traditional boundaries became fluid or even disappeared, wherein one sort of text borrows from or depends on another, seems a useful starting point. The most curious element of “The Disneyland Story” episode is precisely this insistence on blurring boundaries. When Walt announces that “we hope that it will be unlike anything else on this earth,” we might assume he is referring to his planned park, still ten months away from opening, but his prior identification of the park and the television series he is simultaneously introducing makes that “it” multiply allusive. Moreover, the episode begins with a helicopter shot of the Walt Disney Studio, which leads into a visual tour of its workaday environment. Throughout this initial sequence the emphasis is pointedly on film production, as we see actors Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre, and James Mason being made up or working on the 20,000 Leagues under the Sea stages, Disney animators sketching a live model for the upcoming feature Sleeping Beauty, and sound experts creating humorous effects for another production. It is, very simply, a typically busy film studio. However, its boss, Walt, then introduces what he terms “something unusual,” his plans—complete with a dominant drawing on his office wall—for the Disneyland theme park. What we learn of the park, though, necessarily remains impressionistic: a small model, a series of sketches, and Walt’s stated “hopes.” Since the park’s proposed “four different worlds” are supposedly the realms “from which our television show will originate,” the rest of the episode illustrates that linkage, as park plans and sketches introduce scenes from upcoming episodes and images of the

If we shift attention to a similar episode from The Wonderful World of Color period, specifically the “Disneyland 10th Anniversary” show (January 3, 1965), we find a similar emphasis. The show begins with Walt introducing Julie Reihm, the official ambassador for Disneyland’s tencennial, as he terms it. While Walt explains future plans for Disneyland from the studio’s “Imagineering Department,” Julie marvels at what is being accomplished: the building of a massive facade and clocktower as an entrance to the It’s a Small World ride; the creation of illusions for the planned Haunted Mansion attraction; and the design of a new area, New Orleans Square, featuring the elaborate Pirates of the Caribbean ride. As we view the different models and displays, a variety of media come into play—theatrical trompe l’oeil effects, scale models, paintings, sculptures, cartoon storyboarding, the virtual worlds and people of Disney’s audioanimatronics. And as a cap for this elaborate display of

Promoting the Films/Promoting the Parks

film crews shooting those episodes. Frontierland drawings precede director Norman Foster talking about preparations for the Davy Crockett shows, and Fess Parker, in Crockett costume, singing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Following several sketches of Adventureland, producer Ben Sharpsteen describes the work of thirty camera crews filming “true-life” stories around the globe, and we see documentary-style scenes from the Galapagos Islands, Lapland, and Morocco. Images of Tomorrowland introduce Ward Kimball’s summary of ideas for visualizing “the latest plans our scientists have made for the conquest of space.” And Fantasyland sketches lead into an animated scene from Disney’s Song of the South. Of course, since construction had only recently begun, little of the park, apart from these models and conceptual sketches, could have been shown at this point. Yet it must have seemed to audiences that Disney’s project was a curious amalgam of different media, something that would draw on a variety of appeals—films, television, the amusement park, even traditional cartooning—and different genres, something whose attraction owed much to being “unlike anything else on this earth.”

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what the park has in store (some of it never realized), Walt reminds us that, after all, “anything is possible at Disneyland.” The remainder of the show confirms that injunction by taking us to the park itself, where we witness the ongoing “tencennial” celebrations, reprise a history of Disneyland, and experience some of its attractions, as if the television viewers were park visitors. As Walt offers to “show” Julie “what’s happened” to the park over its first ten years, the show becomes self-referential, drawing on scenes from previous park episodes (including “The Pre-Opening Report from Disneyland,” July 13, 1955, “A Trip through Adventureland,” February 29, 1956, and “Disneyland, the Park,” April 3, 1957) to establish both the difficulties of the original undertaking and the many changes the park has undergone. To establish the level of acceptance, significance, and fame the park has attained during its initial decade, we also see footage of visiting dignitaries—the Richard Nixon family, the Shah of Iran and his wife, Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, President Eisenhower, his wife, and their grandchildren, the actor John Mills and his family, Prime Minister Nehru of India. More than simply demonstrating new attractions that have debuted over this period, these scenes underscore another way in which “anything is possible” here, attesting to how the park has become not only financially successful but has gained its own worldwide celebrity. Functioning like a compendium of various entertainment forms—as we see in closing scenes of the audioanimatronic Enchanted Tiki Room attraction, the live music of the “Dixieland in Disneyland” celebration, teenagers dancing at the Holidayland pavilion, and a closing fireworks display—Disneyland has achieved such a remarkable place in world culture because of the way it synthesizes and packages various attractions. It breaks down boundaries between forms and between different types of experience, in the process sending a message of surprising freedom and possibilities. The larger Disney strategy of integration, of course, well served the company’s efforts in these television episodes, since

Promoting the Films/Promoting the Parks

it enabled it to link the series with Disney’s various entertainment efforts while turning those other efforts—cartoons, feature films, documentaries, the parks—into appealing material for television shows. And in turn, the television episodes, in what must have been a pleasant surprise to the studio, often became theatrical releases (and later, home videos), bringing in additional revenue. Some examples of intertextual shows that did such double duty include “Disneyland after Dark” (April 15, 1962), “The Goofy Sports Story” (March 21, 1956), and “The Mickey Mouse Anniversary Show” (December 22, 1968). As these and other shows shifted from one medium to another, the dialogue they offered on the full Disney universe gained further resonance. Christopher Anderson wraps this effect in a further economic explanation, arguing that Disneyland’s episodes “drew the attention of viewers to the TV text only to disperse it outward, toward Disney products” (155). However, as the discussion in this chapter suggests, we would do well to expand that notion of dispersal, to account for a much larger effect to which the sort of shows described here contributed. Through their intertextual nature and ability to cross media boundaries, as well as their repeated blurring of publicity, entertainment, and education, they helped build the sort of “factitious topology” Virilio sees as part of the contemporary landscape. For they projected a sensibility in which not only all of the globe seems connected, but all of Disney’s creations, all part of an emerging media environment clearly—and indeed pleasurably—inhabited by Disneyland’s audience.

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Conclusion

W ONDERFUL W ORLD

M

T HE D ISNEYLAND / C OLOR L EGACY

OF

ark Dery begins his study of entertainment in American culture by focusing on a landmark attraction, Coney Island, the early twentieth-century amusement park that he terms “the electric apparition of a coming age” (10). This description seems equally appropriate to Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color, for with its direct, even synergistic link to Coney Island’s ancestor, Disneyland, and its place in a larger spectrum of Disney media developments, the anthology show occupies an important, even singular position in modern culture. Marking an important transition and transformation in the television and film industries, heralding the birth of an international amusement park culture, and initiating an ambitious program of network, cable, and radio development by Disney, it stakes out what Dery terms “the media landscape we inhabit” (36), a realm not only of mass entertainment but of an electronic fabric that binds us together, shapes our values, and responds to our desires. I would like to sketch a few of the later elements of this trajectory begun by the anthology show in order to reaffirm how the series anticipated and contributed to this contemporary mediascape. For while it clearly grew out of earlier media

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initiatives and audience research, and while it followed marketing and integration principles that have always marked the company’s activities, the show also opened the door to other and more ambitious efforts in broadcast television, cable, and other media venues. Specifically, we should note a few of the other series that, following Disneyland’s initial success, Disney created for ABC, programs such as The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro, which in various ways played off of practices established in the anthology series while providing the parent series with more potential material for its episodes. We also should consider how such early series helped pave the way for an even bolder, more ambitious development—the company’s move into cable television, first with the Disney Channel and later with TOON Disney, ESPN, and other channels. Finally, we need to place these developments in the context of an industrial transformation, seeing them as part of the company’s growth into a modern media conglomerate that continues to extend its reach into various media and entertainment outlets and now stands as a model and international measure of such companies. Even before striking the anthology show deal with ABC, Disney had explored other possible television projects. In fall of 1953 the studio began preparing outlines for several prospective network series, including The Walt Disney Show, The Mickey Mouse Club TV Show, The True-Life TV Show, and The World of Tomorrow. But with the commitment to do Disneyland, the studio put these and similar projects on hold as it strained to meet its multiple commitments: to ongoing animation and liveaction feature films, to the “True-Life Adventure” shorts, to the park’s development, and to the twenty episodes promised to ABC. Yet as the studio expanded to meet these tasks and Disneyland proved a hit, talks resumed on other programs Disney could contribute to ABC’s schedule—shows that would maintain a close link to the parent series and attest to its influence on the larger Disney entertainment enterprise. Shortly after Disneyland’s premiere, Disney and ABC began negotiations to produce two new series earlier discussed

The result was another media phenomenon recalling the Davy Crockett shows, as approximately three-quarters of the televisions in use during the 5:00–6:00 p.m. weekday viewing slot were tuned to the program during its first season. As a Nielsen survey reported, The Mickey Mouse Club was “completely dominating regular daytime television.”2 In its second season the show continued this success, following the same formula as in the first year even though high production costs had kept it from profitability. As a result, when ABC renewed the show for a third season, Disney reduced it to a half hour, eliminated the more costly of the themes—Anything Can Happen Day and

The Legacy

at the studio, The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro. The first of these was initially conceived of as a live fifteen-to-thirty-minute children’s show to be aired on weekdays from a special section in Disneyland, Mickey Mouse Club International Headquarters (Cotter 181). When it eventually premiered on October 3, 1955, the show had grown to an hour in length and, like the parent series, developed its own variety/anthology format based on five daily themes: Fun with Music, Guest Star, Anything Can Happen, Circus, and Talent Round-up.1 These themes were primarily addressed in musical-comedy skits with the show’s central figures—the various child performers or Mouseketeers and their adult leaders or Mooseketeers, actor and songwriter Jimmie Dodd and Disney animator Roy Williams. Along with the Mouseketeers’ themed performances, the show offered newsreels of other cultures, serials such as The Adventures of Spin and Marty, Corky and White Shadow, and The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure, vintage Disney cartoons, and a lesson or moral for the day provided by Dodd (known around the studio as “Doddisms”). With this mix Disney provided quality children’s programming in a time slot typically dominated by cheaply produced local shows, while introducing another generation to its cartoons, creating further merchandising opportunities (such as Mickey Mouse ears), and developing new personalities, like Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk, to star in the studio’s live-action films.

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Circus Day—and dropped the number of Mouseketeers under contract. While continued audience appeal justified the show’s return for a fourth year, Disney and ABC agreed on even more radical changes. The Mouseketeers were disbanded, material from the previous seasons was edited to make the new shows, and the serial episodes played an increasingly prominent role. With this shift in emphasis to reedited material, though, the show’s ratings dropped, and as a result ABC did not exercise its option on another season. However, The Mickey Mouse Club retained a level of popularity and title recognition, allowing it to go into syndication in the early 1960s and eventually spawning several sequels, The New Mickey Mouse Club, which aired in 1977–78, and a later version in the 1980s broadcast on the Disney Channel. As was the usual Disney practice, both The Mickey Mouse Club and The New Mickey Mouse Club provided further opportunities for integration with the parent anthology series. In several instances Disneyland episodes centered around the Mouseketeers, as in the case of “The Fourth Anniversary Show” (September 11, 1957), and The Wonderful World of Color followed this practice with “The Mouseketeers at Walt Disney World” (November 20, 1977) and “The Mouseketeer Reunion” (November 23, 1980). Eventually the Disney Channel would mine this same vein, airing specials such as “The Mickey Mouse Club First Anniversary Special” and “The Mickey Mouse Club Story.” Zorro, also done for ABC, proved another major hit. Its saga of a Robin Hood–type figure in old Spanish California was based on a series of stories by Johnston McCulley that had previously been successfully exploited in feature films by Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro (1940), and by serials such as Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939) and Zorro’s Black Whip (1944). In 1952 Disney purchased the story rights with an eye to producing the company’s first television series or making it part of a television package to attract funding for the theme park. Although fourteen Zorro scripts were prepared, Disney

A further key to Zorro’s popularity was the show’s lead, Guy Williams. Like Fess Parker prior to the Crockett shows, Williams was a little-known actor whose career was limited to minor roles in such films as Bonzo Goes to College (1952) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). However, Williams quickly established a following as Zorro, which prompted the studio to sign him to a long-term contract, like Parker’s, that would keep him active with Disney even after the series was canceled. He would later star in the studio’s feature The Prince and the Pauper (1962), as well as land a continuing role on the hit western series Bonanza (1964) before going on to the lead in the science fiction series Lost in Space (1965–68). From its premiere on October 10, 1957, Zorro proved highly popular, drawing the same kind of audience response as Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club. Averaging 35.7 percent of the viewing audience in its prime-time slot, it outdrew every show programmed opposite it. And in its second season (1958–59) the show did even better, drawing 38.9 percent of the viewers, although it also became a pawn in a dispute between Disney and ABC over control of the various Disneycreated series. So after only seventy-eight original half-hour episodes and at the height of its popularity, Zorro was withdrawn as an independent series. However, the studio continued

The Legacy

initially found little enthusiasm from the established networks and set this project aside to concentrate on the anthology show and the park. But with the success of Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club, ABC became interested in the studio’s other projects, so Disney began preparing what would be one of the most expensive series of the early television era. The preproduction costs alone were over $200,000, and Disney agreed to do thirty-nine original episodes per season (an unusually high number), with an eventual average cost of $82,000 per episode. But as Bill Cotter notes, “[T]he quality was obvious on the screen” and contributed greatly to the success of the series (202), as it eventually outdrew the anthology show in both of its two full seasons on the air.

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Zorro: Guy Williams fights for justice on one of the elaborate sets created for this series.

planning subsequent episodes and eventually produced four one-hour shows, which aired on Walt Disney Presents on October 30 and November 6, 1960, and January 1 and April 2, 1961. In addition, the studio followed another practice begun with the anthology program, combining several episodes to create a theatrical release, The Sign of Zorro (1960), which also proved a box office success at home and abroad. A final mark of

Eventually Zorro was revived when the Disney Channel began to recycle its episodes, introducing the character—much like Disney’s animated figures—to a new generation. In fact, after rerunning the original black-and-white episodes for several years, the studio subjected them to what Virilio would term a “technologizing of vision” by colorizing the original shows. In that format Zorro has not only continued to play in various time slots on the Disney Channel but has also provided the raw material for further filmic compilations, in this case for release directly to the home video market under such titles as Zorro and the Mountain Man and Zorro the Avenger. Perhaps the most important offshoot of Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color is the Disney Channel, the cable and satellite-delivered enterprise that has itself become something of a vast “anthology show,” really a great variety of shows linked by the Disney family entertainment strategy. With hundreds of cartoons, feature films, and television episodes in its archives, as well as experience with producing television entertainment for a family audience and a name that would attract viewers, Disney found itself in the early 1980s in an advantageous position to join the rapidly expanding cable industry. On April 18, 1983, the Disney Channel began broadcasting a mix of regular series, Disney-produced or family-themed movies, older Disney series, and specials, and operating with a strategy like that used at the start of Disneyland. That is, much of the product for this endeavor already existed in the Disney archives and simply had to be repackaged for a new generation. In the

The Legacy

the series’ popularity was the ease with which it moved into syndication, running in both the 1965–66 and 1966–67 seasons and, as a result of the ratings for these reruns, prompting the studio to consider reviving production or doing a sequel. High production costs eliminated the prospect of reviving the show, but the studio did pursue a sequel titled Zorro and Son. Despite disinterest from Guy Williams, that series was produced for the 1983 season with Henry Darrow as the senior Zorro, but it lasted only one year.3

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process, Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck could be revitalized, new theatrical releases, as well as the studio’s regular rereleases, could be publicized, and the parks— which by now were beginning to proliferate internationally— could be advertised and, as with Disneyland, even provide subjects and settings for new programming. If critics often—and at times without adequate justification—complained that the original anthology series existed primarily to publicize Disney’s other productions, that criticism seems more appropriate when applied to the cable channel. A regular part of its programming has been specials on the making of every major Disney release, including “The Making of The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “The Making of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “The Making of The Lion King,”and “The Making of Pocahontas,” as well as short “Behind the Scenes” pieces on each new release. In the Disneyland tradition, the Disney Channel has also regularly aired specials on the theme parks, publicizing the new ones, as with “The Making of the DisneyMGM Studios Theme Park”; offering glimpses of new attractions, as on “Walt Disney World: Past, Present, and Future”; and showcasing different acts or events at the parks, as in “Lake Wobegone Comes to Disney” or “Happy Holidays from Walt Disney World.” And while the channel has aired many movies made specifically for cable broadcast, Disney has, with the company’s usual synergistic practice, also recycled several for a reborn version of the anthology show, including the aviation story The Blue Yonder, the western Down the Long Hills, and the sequel to Disney’s earlier hit, Parent Trap II. Eventually Disney moved far beyond the cable network and the audience limitations of cablecasting through two major initiatives. The first of these recalls the company’s efforts in the 1950s to establish its credentials as a major film studio by creating its own distribution network. In the mid-1980s Disney created a special division, Touchstone Television, to develop and supply programming to all the major networks and to create series for possible syndication. Among the most successful

That merger with ABC points to the second major step in the expansion of the Disney media universe—the acquisition of the very network that had first given Disney its series television opportunity. In 1995 Disney tendered an offer for Capital Cities/ABC, the corporation controlling not only the ABC broadcast network but also additional cable channels, newspapers, and various television and radio stations. In early 1996 the $19 billion acquisition was approved in what was at that time the second largest corporate takeover in U.S. history. The result was the creation of what is arguably the world’s largest media company,4 with its dominating presence in the rapidly converging fields of entertainment, information, and multimedia. That acquisition has resulted in more Disney-produced programming for the ABC lineup, including a new version of the anthology show, The Wonderful World of Disney, and a block of children’s programming for Saturday mornings, Disney’s One Saturday

The Legacy

products of this new division were: Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee (syndication, then ABC), The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985–92), Dinosaurs (ABC, 1991–94), Home Improvement (ABC, 1991–99), and Disney Presents Bill Nye the Science Guy (PBS, 1993–2002). These series allowed Disney to expand its show types and market itself to all of the established networks, while also reaching out to new audiences (seniors with The Golden Girls and The Golden Palace, African-American viewers with The Sinbad Show and The Keenan Ivory Wayans Show) and, in a familiar pattern, developing marketable personalities, such as Tim Allen of Home Improvement, who has gone on to star in numerous Disney-produced films. Both shows and actors have also become the basis for new attractions at the Disney theme parks, as in the case of the Disney-MGM Studios’ Drew Carey’s Sounds Dangerous and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Although in 1999 it merged into a larger Disney-owned media division, ABC Entertainment Television Group, Touchstone Television proved to be another successful example of the integration strategy that has guided the company throughout its development as a media and communications giant.

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Morning. It has permitted the company to move into news production and to purchase a number of television stations affiliated with ABC. It has provided further scope on cable through the sports-oriented ESPN channel. And it has opened the door to a radio empire as well, bringing the studio more than forty company-owned stations and links to over 4,000 affiliated ones, while also enabling Disney to create its own radio network, Radio Disney, with special children’s programming.5 In sum, the ABC takeover has helped the company achieve a destiny that seems to have been built into its original move into television, one in keeping with the nature of the contemporary mediascape. Disney has effectively extended its reach to the rest of the world by “cinematizing,” or reconstructing as one of its lands, worlds, etc., the media world itself.

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As Walt Disney was fond of saying, and as he articulated on Disneyland’s first episode, we should not forget “that it was all started by a mouse.” From such small beginnings, very large and powerful results can manifestly emerge. From the simple ambition of cartooning, of providing animated shorts to support the features of the large Hollywood studios, Disney has become one of the major international communications and entertainment corporations, helping shape and control the contemporary mediascape. In fact, in recent years the Walt Disney Internet Group, which oversees a large portfolio of news and entertainment Web sites while controlling Disney’s online business operations, has even become one of the top twenty-five Internet companies.6 In her analysis of this Disney phenomenon, Janet Wasko emphasizes the extent to which Disney, because of its size, power, and ubiquity—as a brand name and as a collection of cultural artifacts that have found international appeal—has for many people come to be seen as “universal.” Yet she reminds us that “this ‘universality’ is neither automatic nor natural, but has been, and continues to be, deliberately manufactured and carefully controlled” (222). In fact, it is the many media outlets, the multiple voices and image producers that Disney can call on—ABC, the Disney Channel, TOON

The Legacy

Disney, and ESPN on cable, films, radio, newspapers, theaters, even the Internet—that solidify this presence, attest to Disney’s appeal, and ensure that audiences view Disney as a necessary and even natural element of their world. That very small mouse seems to have become ubiquitous and a cultural fixture, even as he constantly reproduces, updates, and reaffirms his place here. In that ongoing process of production, distribution, and sale, Disney television, in all its manifestations, has played a key role, in many ways outstripping the company’s film component. As this book suggests, Disney’s initial foray in this area, Disneyland, proved instrumental in solidifying, promoting, and profiting from a different sort of vision than that driving the traditional film studios. More than simply a promise of family entertainment, as the company itself might offer, or of a set of conservative myths, as many critics have contended, the Disney vision that gradually emerged is one of media development, media power, media influence. Looking ahead to the possibilities of television and beyond that to the expanding and entwined nature of the entertainment and communications industries, Walt and Roy Disney saw how they might use television to leverage the company into other more potent and profitable areas. And under the subsequent management of Michael Eisner and what has been termed “Team Disney,” the company has expanded its reach and stature to assume a prominent, even dominant position in the entertainment/communications realm.7 Disneyland thus stands not only as a landmark in American television history but as a crucial step in creating a powerful “vision machine,” as Paul Virilio puts it, that has come to play a central role in our increasingly mediated lives.

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NOTES

Introduction

1. Landon Jones describes a key marketing strategy developed in this era: targeting and isolation. Madison Avenue, working primarily through the new medium of television, learned to target baby boomers as a new audience, then “isolated their needs and wants from those of their parents” (Great Expectations, 45), and finally addressed those distinct “needs and wants.” 2. Even as television was first appearing on the entertainment horizon, Disney was already looking ahead to its possible impact on the company’s distribution and exhibition policies. As Christopher Anderson observes, Walt did not renew a distribution contract with United Artists after 1936 largely because of a dispute over future television rights: “Disney had the foresight to request that he retain all television rights to his motion pictures. When United Artists refused to concede those rights during a series of harsh negotiations, Disney . . . signed with RKO” (Hollywood TV, 33). 3. This study by Sindlinger and Company is discussed in Simon Whitney’s examination of how government antitrust policies affected the film industry, “Antitrust Policies and the Motion Picture Industry,” 187. 4. See especially Boddy, Fifties Television, for background on ABC, CBS, and NBC prior to the network overtures to the film industry of the mid-1950s (132–49).

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5. Janet Wasko traces this industry development through the 1990s. While noting similarities between the film industry’s early formation and that of television, she also sees new combinations of entertainment companies that recall the early situation in Hollywood, with “eight extremely large corporations forming an unprecedented media and entertainment oligopoly” (Understanding Disney, 68). 6. For further information on Disney’s connection to the Stanford Research Institute and the company’s reliance on such market surveys, see Thomas, Walt Disney, 249–52. Chapter 1

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1. A kinescope involved photographing the television screen image with a movie camera. Prior to videotape, this was the primary way of saving a live presentation for later broadcast or syndication. However, the resulting image was very grainy, and television programs available only as kinescopes tended to have a lower “resale” value than those shot on film. 2. For a survey of the key gender, race, and class issues implicated by different elements of the Disney universe, see Byrne and McQuillan’s excellent study, Deconstructing Disney. 3. The noteworthy exception is Anderson’s account of the initial negotiations between the film and television industries (Hollywood TV). 4. Cotter, Wonderful World, 57. Background on Disney’s early television plans comes primarily from pp. 3–5 and 57–61. In writing this authorized history, Cotter had access to the complete Disney television archives, including still extant scripts for the various early show proposals. 5. For commentary on the “Golden Age” of television drama, including an interview with one of the era’s top writers, Paddy Chayefsky, see Rosenberg, “Fifties TV.” 6. The Nielsen ratings for the period leading up to Disneyland’s premiere list six dramatic series among the top twenty for the 1950–51 season, four for the 1951–52 season, five in 1952–53, and three each in 1953–54 and 1954–55. During the same era Nielsen places four comedy-variety shows in the 1950–51 top twenty, five each in the 1951–52 and 1952–53 seasons, eight in 1953–54, and six in 1954–55. 7. As Disney’s biographer Bob Thomas offers, despite the opinion of

Notes

others in the industry that color was “an unwise extravagance[,] . . . Walt was certain that color would add future value to the shows” (Walt Disney, 287). To better understand this decision, we should note that RCA, the primary manufacturer of color television equipment, did not begin profiting on the sale of its color sets until 1960. 8. As evidence of this recasting of the medium, we might look at the congressional hearings of the mid-1950s, which charged the networks with operating like the film industry and called for restrictions on the time blocks they controlled. In their defense, industry leaders NBC and CBS “invoked the aesthetic privileging of live television,” even as they were abandoning that practice. As Boddy notes, “this would be . . . the last time the networks so passionately allied themselves with the critical champions of television’s Golden Age” (Fifties Television, 126, 127). 9. A full listing of Nielsen rankings and major television awards can be found in McNeil, Total Television. I have relied on these listings for my discussion of both ABC and Disneyland’s position in 1950s and 1960s television. 10. The film version of the television series, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, was released in more than 1,300 theaters and earned $2.5 million. As Cotter notes, this was “an unprecedented feat, particularly considering that the television episodes had already been seen by 90 million television viewers” (Wonderful World, 64). The earnings on this release were but a fragment of the total revenues generated by the Crockett phenomenon. 11. For background on Disney’s move to NBC, I have drawn primarily on Cotter, Wonderful World, 66–67, and Thomas, Walt Disney, 287. 12. One of Walt Disney’s major talents was gauging audience tastes, an ability demonstrated by the series’ shift from the Frontierland emphasis (a shift also found in the amusement parks). Westerns dominated prime-time ratings for the four years preceding the anthology show’s jump to NBC, placing eight series among the top twenty in 1957–58, eleven in 1958–59, nine in 1959–60, and five in 1960–61. During The Wonderful World of Color’s first year only four westerns ranked in the Neilsen top twenty and in the following year just two. 13. Reading this attraction from a Marxist vantage, Alexander Wilson finds that “it is hard to tell what this is supposed to be about,” and sees it as another Disney effort to obscure the real social conditions of Western capitalist existence (“Betrayal,” 120). Yet Spaceship

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Earth is the central attraction at EPCOT, situated so that practically every visitor passes through it, not because it is a vague mishmash of ideas but precisely because it dramatically conveys the central Disney ethos of communication, an ethos that ties together the rest of EPCOT, and especially the many nations represented by the pavilions in the park’s World Showcase. Chapter 2

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1. Anderson, Hollywood TV, 56–57, offers a brief background on Hopalong Cassidy, as well as on the larger issues involved in the shift from B-films to television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. 2. Information for this discussion comes partly from William Jamborsky’s survey of Crockett films, “Davy Crockett and the Tradition of the Westerner in American Cinema.” 3. For discussion of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” and its place in folk song tradition, see Wolfe, “Davy Crockett Songs.” 4. The list of licensed merchandise is only partial. For commentary on the merchandising of the Crockett phenomenon, see Thomas, Walt Disney, 256–58, and Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 314–21. 5. Richard Boyd Hauck compares the real Crockett to his various legendary versions in “The Man in the Buckskin Hunting Shirt.” Chapter 3

1. For background on 1950s science fiction, particularly film and television, see my Science Fiction Film, 94–102. We should also note that a number of science fiction films of this era did offer a model for the Man in Space shows. Movies like Destination Moon (1950), Rocketship X-M (1950), and Riders to the Stars (1954) offered neardocumentary treatments of space flight, used expert consultants like Willy Ley, and included animated segments. 2. For discussion of the Collier’s articles and especially the media campaign accompanying them, see Liebermann, “The Collier’s and Disney Series.” 3. Piszkiewicz cites a letter from von Braun to Ward Kimball in which he urges the studio not to publicize the idea that the show influenced Eisenhower’s interest in the American rocket program. “For God’s sake,” von Braun cautioned, “don’t put it that this show triggered the presidential announcement” about launching a satellite (Wernher von Braun, 88).

Notes

4. This sequence is still used to humorously suggest the attitudes of 1950s culture as part of the screened entertainment in the DisneyMGM Studios’ restaurant, Sci-Fi Drive-In Café. 5. This section of the show was adapted from an earlier theatrical short, Eyes in Outer Space, released in 1959. Chapter 4

1. For background on the origins of the “True-Life Adventures” series, I am indebted to Thomas, Walt Disney, 208, 238–39. 2. Examples of the hybrid shows that combined the “True-Life Adventure” characteristics with a simple adventure plot and that received both television play and theatrical release include such episodes as “Rusty and the Falcon” (October 24, 1958), “Sammy, the Way-Out Seal” (October 28 and November 4, 1962), and “Wild Geese Calling” (September 14, 1969). 3. This sort of promotional show follows an established film industry pattern. Audiences of the 1930s–1950s were accustomed to seeing short subjects, often documentaries, newsreels, or travelogues, as part of the movie bill. Drawing on audience expectations, the larger studios customarily created preview shorts that would draw the audience in by masquerading as travelogues or documentaries. As an example, I might cite the 1939 MGM publicity film From the Ends of the Earth. It begins like a documentary on the history of shipping and trade, shifts to an account of the various products the United States imports, and then explains how key those imports are to motion picture production, particularly for a large studio like MGM. It then offers previews for a range of the studio’s upcoming 1939 releases, including The Women, Ninotchka, Thunder Afloat, and Northwest Passage. 4. Of course, similar “accidents” or careful constructions of nature are not foreign to the “true-life” documentaries. For discussion of the shaping of nature in these films, see King, “The Audience in the Wilderness.” 5. This episode was planned as a short film and the location footage shot prior to Disney’s deal with ABC for the anthology show. For background on the show's creation, see Cotter, Wonderful World, 62. Conclusion

97

Notes

98

1. During its four-year run, The Mickey Mouse Club format underwent various changes. In the third season, for example, the two most expensive thematic shows, Anything Can Happen Day and Circus Day, were dropped, and in the fourth season, when the episodes were mainly composed of material from previous years, Tuesdays and Thursdays were renamed Adventure Time. For more information on the show’s changes, see Cotter, Wonderful World, 184–86. 2. The Nielsen report is cited in Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 335. For further background on the response to The Mickey Mouse Club, see Thomas, Walt Disney, 275–76, and Watts, The Magic Kingdom, 335–37. 3. Background on the Zorro series comes from Cotter, Wonderful World, 201–04. 4. For the title of largest media and entertainment company, Disney today competes with Time-Warner. It is a fitting competition, since one of the parent companies, Warner Bros., followed a trajectory similar to Disney’s, beginning its climb back into prominence in the late 1950s with the decision to shift much of its production effort to television and, again like Disney, mainly for ABC. 5. For much of this background on Disney’s media empire I have drawn on Wasko, Understanding Disney, 59–62. 6. “Hoover’s Online,” a business Web site, describes the workings of the Walt Disney Internet Group. See www.hoovers.com. 7. For background on “Team Disney” and its role in transforming the company into a media giant, see Taylor, Storming the Magic Kingdom.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Robert C. “Talking about Television.” Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. 1–16. Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. Arpad, Joseph J. Introduction. A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett. New Haven: College and University Press, 1972. 7–37. Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Boddy, William. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990. Bower, Robert T. The Changing Television Audience in America. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Byrne, Eleanor, and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Cotter, Bill. The Wonderful World of Disney Television: A Complete History. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Dery, Mark. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. New York: Grove Press, 1999. Fischer, John. “The Embarrassing Truth about Davy Crockett.” Harper’s 211 (July 1955): 16–18. Gomery, Douglas. “Disney’s Business History: A Reinterpretation.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Ed. Eric Smoodin. London: Routledge, 1994. 71–86.

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Selected Bibliography

100

Gordon, Mitchell. “Walt’s Profit Formula: Dream, Diversify, and Never Miss an Angle.” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1958, pp. 1, 12. Hauck, Richard Boyd. “The Man in the Buckskin Hunting Shirt: Fact and Fiction in the Crockett Story.” Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985. 3–20. Hutton, Paul Andrew. “Davy Crockett: An Exposition on Hero Worship.” Crockett at Two Hundred: New Perspectives on the Man and the Myth. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro and Joe Cummings. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. 20–41. Jamborsky, William Eric. “Davy Crockett and the Tradition of the Westerner in American Cinema.” Crockett at Two Hundred: New Perspectives on the Man and the Myth. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro and Joe Cummings. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. 97–113. Jones, Landon Y. Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. New York: Coward, McCann, 1980. King, Margaret J. “The Audience in the Wilderness: The Disney Nature Films.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24.2 (1996): 60–69. ———. “The Recycled Hero: Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett.” Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985. 137–58. Lewis, Jon. “Disney after Disney: Family Business and the Business of Family.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Ed. Eric Smoodin. London: Routledge, 1994. 87–105. Liebermann, Randy. “The Collier’s and Disney Series.” Blueprint for Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact. Ed. Frederick I. Ordway III and Randy Liebermann. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. 135–46. Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: New American Library, 1980. McNeil, Alex. Total Television: The Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present. 4th ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Miller, Mark Crispin. Boxed In: The Culture of TV. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. Piszkiewicz, Dennis. Wernher von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon. Westport: Praeger, 1998. Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Random House.

Selected Bibliography

Pryor, Thomas M. “Disney to Enter TV Field in Fall.” New York Times, March 30, 1954, p. 12. Real, Michael R. Mass-Mediated Culture. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1977. Rosenberg, Howard. “Fifties TV: Gold or Dross?” American Film 7.3 (1981): 58–61, 72. Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. New York: Avon, 1968. Smoodin, Eric, ed. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. London: Routledge, 1994. Stuart, Fredric. “The Effects of Television on the Motion Picture Industry: 1948–1960.” The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures. Ed. Gorham Kindem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982. 257–307. Taylor, John. Storming the Magic Kingdom: Wall Street, the Raiders, and the Battle for Disney. New York: Knopf, 1987. Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Thomas, Bob. Walt Disney: An American Original. New York: Hyperion, 1994. Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. ———. A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. ———. The Vision Machine. Trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997. Whitney, Simon N. “Antitrust Policies and the Motion Picture Industry.” The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures. Ed. Gorham Kindem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1982. 161–204. Wilson, Alexander. “The Betrayal of the Future: Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Ed. Eric Smoodin. London: Routledge, 1994. 118–30. Wolfe, Charles K. “Davy Crockett Songs: Minstrels to Disney.” Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy, 1786–1986. Ed. Michael A. Lofaro. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985. 159–90.

101

Selected Bibliography

102

Wright, Mike. “The Disney-Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space Exploration.” Selected Papers from the 1993 Southern Humanities Conference. http://history.msfc.nasa.gov.

INDEX

ABC, xviii–xix, xxiv 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 19, 29, 31, 62, 90, 93n4, 98n4; acquisition by Disney, 89–91; and the Disney agreement, xviii, xxi–xxii, 8–9, 82, 97n5; and MGM, xviii; and The Mickey Mouse Club, 82–85; purchase by Disney, 24; and ratings 7, 22, 83–84, 95n9; and sponsorship, xx, 2; and Warner Bros., xviii; and Zorro, 84–86 ABC Entertainment Television Group, 89 Academy Awards, xvi, 17, 52, 67, 68 Alice in Wonderland, xvii, 4, 12, 62, 64 Anderson, Christopher, xiv, xviii, xx, xxi, xxii, 7, 8, 9, 16, 75, 79, 93n2, 94n3, 96n1 Antitrust regulations, 93n3 Arpad, Joseph, 40 Audioanimatronics, 2, 25, 77 Audubon Society, 70 Autry, Gene, 29 Babes in Toyland (1961), 19–20 Baby boomers, xi, xxii, 93n1

Barnouw, Erik, xix Barnum, P. T., 66 Beaumont, Kathryn, xvii Beaver Valley (1950), 12 Bergen, Edgar, xvi Berle, Milton, 6 Blackburn, Tom, 42, 43 Boddy, William, xv, xix, 9, 62, 93n4, 95n8 Bonanza (television series), 85 Bonestell, Chesley, 47 Bonzo Goes to College (1952), 85 Boone, Daniel, 43 Bowie, Jim, 40, 41 Braun, Wernher von, 45–48, 49, 50, 51, 52–57, 59, 96n3 Bruns, George, 43 Buena Vista, xvi, 63, 89 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 54 Byrne, Eleanor, 2–3, 75, 94n2 Cable television, 23, 62, 81, 82, 87–88, 91 Captain Video (television series), 47 Carey, Drew, 89 CBS, xviii, xix, xxi–xxii, 9, 23, 24,

103

Index

93n4, 95n8; Christmas special, xvi–xvii, xx, 4, 62; negotiations with Disney, 5; and 20th CenturyFox, xviii, 2; and ratings, 7 Ceasar, Sid, 6 Chayefsky, Paddy, 6, 94n5 Cheyenne (television series), 13 Chip ‘n’ Dale, 65, 68 Cinerama, xiv Cohn, Harry, xii Cold War, 35, 50 Collier’s Magazine, 47–49, 52, 96n2 Color broadcasting, 17–19, 25 Comedy-Variety shows, 6, 8, 94n6 Coney Island, 81 Cotter, Bill, 3, 5, 9, 10, 13, 21, 24, 46, 62, 71, 85, 94n4, 95n10, 97n5, 98n1 Cummings, Bob, 34

104 Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), 71 Darrow, Henry, 87 Davy Crockett, 1, 7, 12, 13, 14, 21, 22, 46, 56, 77, 85; and American history, 28, 36–37, 40–42; “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” 31, 34, 40–41, 42, 77, 96n3; Crockett books, 28, 31, 38, 40; effects on Disneyland, 43–44; as feature film, 32, 95n10; and female characters, 41; films about, 30, 96n2; and Huck Finn, 39; imitations of, 42–43; and Leatherstocking, 29; and legend, 27, 29, 36, 38–39, 40, 44, 96n5; location shooting of, 30–31; merchandising of, 31, 32, 34–35, 96n4; national craze, 2, 31, 32, 35, 36–37, 42, 63, 71, 83, 95n10; sequel episodes, 32, 40, 44; and Walt Disney, 28, 32 Dery, Mark, 81 Destination Moon (1950), 96n1 Disney Channel, The, 1, 2, 63, 82, 84, 91; development of, 87–88; as

home for the anthology show, 2, 23, 24, 87 Disney, Roy, xvi, xxii, 16, 26, 62, 91; financial integration, 4; negotiations with television, 5, 74–75; profits, 25 Disney-MGM Studios (theme park), 75, 88, 89; attractions at, 89, 97n4 Disney Presents Bill Nye the Science Guy (television series), 89 Disney Sunday Movie, The, x, xii, 24 Disney, Walter, xvi, xxiii–xxiv, 3, 13, 16, 19, 26, 34, 36, 62, 66, 90, 95nn7, 12, and color broadcasting, 7, 17–19, 95n8; death of, 20, 21; as educator, 66, 70; and expansion, 25, 27, 91; historical emphasis, xxiv; as host, x, xvii, 9, 15–16, 26, 54, 55, 56, 64, 65–67, 72, 78; as national icon, 16, 28; negotiation with television, 74–75; park plans, xxi, 4, 8, 75–77; show plans, 46, 47, 75; as studio head, xii; on television’s potential, 5–6, 8, 93n2 Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color (TV series), ix, xiii, xxiv, 1–3, 6, 13, 27, 29, 31, 36, 59, 63, 81, 89, 90, 91; awards, x, 9, 16, 23, 32, 68; on cable television, 87–88; educational impulse, 16, 18, 36, 56, 66; format, 9–10, 12–13, 18–21, 64; hybrid narratives, 28, 38, 70, 97n2; and image technology, 1; intertextual shows, 61, 64–68, 78, 84, 97n3; longevity, x, xii, 23, 24; miniseries format, 21, 30, 43; park promotion, 20, 62, 64, 74–79, 88; and postwar culture, xxiv, premiere, xiv, 26, 49, 83, 94n6; ratings, 21, 22–23, 24, 42, 49, 95n9; revenues, xxii, 9; sponsorship, 9, 34; stereophonic broadcast of, 25; success of, 38; and synergy, 10, 40, 63, 64, 68, 75, 79, 81; television promotion, 19, 62; the-

Ebsen, Buddy, 34, 37 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 49, 78, 96n3 Eisner, Michael, 24, 44, 91 EPCOT, 2, 25, 75; and Spaceship Earth, 25–26, 95–96n13 ESPN, 82, 90, 91 Eyes in Outer Space (1959), 97n5 Fads, ix, x, 35, 36–37, 41, 42, 44, 83 Fairbanks, Douglas, 84 Federal Communications Commission, xiv, 23 Fink, Mike, 32, 39, 41, 42 Fischer, John, 36, 41 Flowers and Trees (1932), 17 Folklore, 27, 32, 36, 38–39, 40–41, 44, 46, 53

Foote, Horton, 6 Foster, Norman, 30, 77 Freeman, Fred, 47 From the Ends of the Earth (1939), 97n3 Funicello, Annette, 83 Gleason, Jackie, 6 “Golden Age” drama, 6, 8, 36, 94n5, 95n8 Golden Girls, The (television series), 89 Golden Palace, The (television series), 89 Goldenson, Leonard, xix–xx, xxii, 8 Gomery, Douglas, 23 Goofy, 15, 65, 79 Great Locomotive Chase, The (1956), 34, 63, 71 Haber, Heinz, 48, 50 Hannah, Jack, 64 Hauck, Richard Boyd, 36, 96n5 Hibler, Winston, 72, 73, 74 Hollywood studios, xiii–xv, 93n2; box office decline, xiii–xiv; changing exhibition practices, xiii, 65; as oligopoly, xiii, 94n5; reaction to television, xviii–xix, 94n5; technological innovations, xiv, 18; and unions, xv Home Improvement (television series), 89 Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), 88 Hopalong Cassidy (television series), 29, 96n1 Horsemasters, The (1961), 22 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1996), 88 Hutton, Paul Andrew, 31 I Love Lucy (television series), 6 Imagineering department, 77 International Geophysical Year, 49, 55

Index

atrical releases, 22, 97n3; title changes, x, 4–5, 14, 17, 23, 24; and Wernher von Braun, 45, 96n3; and Zorro, 86–87 Disneyland (theme park), xxi–xxiii, xxv, 1, 2, 10, 16, 27, 68, 76, 81, 88; and Bank of America, xxi; construction of, 13; history of, 77–78; opening ceremony, 34; and postmodernism, xxiv–xxv; railroad, 68; research for, 4; rides, 45, 46, 54, 59, 61, 77, 78; shape of, 10, 12, 95n12 Disney’s One Saturday Morning (television series), 90 Dodd, Jimmy, 83 Donald Duck, xv, 10, 12, 14, 56, 64, 65, 67, 68, 88 Donald Gets Drafted (1942), 65 Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), 84 Douglas, Kirk, 76 Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963), 22 Dragnet (television series), 6 Driscoll, Bobby, xvii Dumbo (1941), 64 Dumont Network, xviii–xix

105

Index

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), 85 Jamborsky, William, 36, 96n2 Jones, Landon, ix, 93n1 Keenan Ivory Wayans Show, The (television series), 89 Kennedy, John F., 50 Kimball, Ward, 48, 50, 54, 68, 77, 96n3 Kinescope, 1, 94n1 King, Margaret, 39, 44, 97n4 Kinney, Jack, 64 Kirk, Tommy, 83 Kraft Television Theatre (television series), 6

106

Lady and the Tramp (1955), 13, 67 LaRoche, C. J., xvii, xx, 4 Ley, Willy, 47, 48, 50, 96n1 Licensing, x–xi; and Henry Kamen, xi Liebermann, Randy, 49, 96n2 Light in the Forest, The (1958), 34 Linkletter, Art, 34 Lion King, The (1994), 88 Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee (television series), 89 Lloyd, Frank, 30 Lone Ranger, The (television series), 6, 29 Lorre, Peter, 76 Lost in Space (television series), 85 Maltin, Leonard, 64 Man in Space series, 46, 56–57, 96n1; Academy Award, 52; animation in, 49, 51, 53, 54, 58; female characters in, 54; format for, 50, 51, 57, 59; Russian interest in, 50; and space operas, 47; similar shows, 56–57, 59; tone of, 51 Mark of Zorro, The (1920, 1940), 84 Marketing, x, xi, 63, 83, 93n1

Marshall Space Flight Center, 49 Mason, James, 76 Mayer, Louis B., xii McCulley, Johnston, 84 McNeil, Alex, 95n9 McQuillen, Martin, 2–3, 75, 94n2 MGM, xiii, 97n; and The MGM Parade, xviii Mickey Mouse, x–xi, xv, 4, 14, 17, 63, 64, 65, 79, 88, 90 Mickey Mouse Club, The (television series), xii, 4–5, 16, 82–85, 98n1; merchandising of, 83; and mouseketeers, 83–84; ratings for, 83–84, 98n2; serials on, 83; syndication of, 84 Miller, Mark Crispin, 26 Mills, John, 78 Moon Pilot (1962), 57 Mooncussers, The (1966), 22 Multiplane Camera, 16 Murdock, Frank Hitchcock, 29 National Geographic Society, 70 Nature’s Half Acre (1951), xvi, 12 NBC, xviii, xix, xxi–xxii, xxiv, 9, 64, 89, 93n4, 95nn8, 11; Christmas special, xvi–xvii, xx, 4, 62; and color broadcasting, 17–19; and Hopalong Cassidy, 29; negotiations with Disney, 5, 17; and ratings, 7, 22 New York Times, xxii New York World’s Fair of 1964–65, the, 20, 25, 61 Nichols, Charles, 64 Nielson ratings, 6, 10, 13, 42, 83, 85, 94n6, 95nn9, 12, 98n2 Ninotchka (1939), 97n3 Nixon, Richard M., 31, 78 Northwest Passage (1939), 97n3 O’Brien, Pat, 71 Old Yeller (1957), 14, 34 Our Friend the Atom (1958), 13

Paramount Decision, xiii Paramount Pictures, xiii, xiv, xix; and Wernher von Braun, 48 Parker, Fess, 9, 37, 63, 71, 85; casting of, 30; contract with Disney, 33–34; as national celebrity, 31; as singer, 31, 35, 77 PBS, 89 People and Places series, 70, 72 Peter Pan (1951), xvii, 62 Philco Television Playhouse (television series), 6 Piszkiewicz, Dennis, 45, 49–50, 96n3 Pocahontas (1995), 88 Power, Tyrone, 84 Prince and the Pauper, The (1962), 22, 85 Radio Disney, 90 R’Coon Dawg (1951), 65 Reagan, Ronald, 34 Real, Michael, 2–3, 10, 12, 24 Rebel without a Cause (1955), 36 RCA, 3, 17; and color broadcasting, 17, 95n7 Reihm, Julie, 77, 78 Riders to the Stars (1954), 96n1 RKO, xiii, xvi, 68, 93n2 Robert Montgomery Presents (television series), 6 Rocketship X-M (1950), 96n1 Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (television series), 47 Rogers, Roy, 29 Rosenberg, Howard, 94n5 Ryan, Cornelius, 47 Saval, Dany, 57 Schickel, Richard, xxi, 2 Science fiction, 46, 50, 54, 55, 56, 96n1; and space operas, 47 Scophony Corporation, xiv

Seal Island (1948), xvi, 12, 68 Serling, Rod, 6 Sharpsteen, Ben, 77 Sign of Zorro, The (1960), 86–87 Silly Symphonies, 15 Sinbad Show, The (television series), 89 60 Minutes (television series), 23 Skelton, Red, 6 Sleeping Beauty (1959), 76 Slipher, E. C., 54 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 65, 67; merchandising of, xii; rerelease of, xvii So Dear to My Heart (1949), xvi Song of the South (1946), 65, 77 Space program, 45–46, 49–50, 55 Sputnik, 14 Stanford Research Institute, xxi, 94n6 Steamboat Willie (1928), 17, 18 Stop the Music (television series), 2 Story of Robin Hood, The (1952), 13, 64 Stuart, Fredric, xiii, xiv Studio One (television series), 6 Stuhlinger, Ernst, 48, 55 Sugarfoot (television series), 13 Sword and the Rose, The (1953), 13 Taylor, John, 98n7 Technicolor, 16–17, 18 Television industry, xiii–xiv, xviii–xx; impact on film industry, xiv; impact on public, 36–37, 44; “live clearance,” xix; partnership with film industry, xv, xviii, xxii; programming, xvi, xviii, xx, 5–8, 10; similarity to film industry, xv, xx, 8; sponsorship, 9, 17; stars of, xx; and stereophonic broadcasting, 25 Them! (1954), 30 Thomas, Bob, 94n7, 96n4, 97n1, 98n2 The Three Little Pigs (1933), 65, 67 Thunder Afloat (1939), 97n3

Index

Out of Scale (1951), 65

107

Index

108

Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (television series), 47 Tonka (1958), 19 TOON Disney, 82, 91 Touchstone Television, 88 3–D, xiv Treasure Island (1948), xvi, xvii, 12, 22, 64 True-Life Adventures series, xvi, 4, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20–21, 41, 47, 67, 82; history of, 68, 70, 97n2; and “Operation Undersea,” 71–73 Tryon, Tom, 57 20th Century-Fox, xiii; and The 20th Century-Fox Hour, xviii 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), 10, 13, 46, 63, 68, 69, 72, 76 Underwater photography, 72–74 United Artists, 3, 93n2 United Paramount Theaters, xix Verne, Jules, 72, 74 Virilio, Paul, xii, xxiv, 1–2, 44, 61, 75, 79, 91 Virtual imagery, 2 Walsh, Bill, 4, 9, 27 Walker, Card, 9 Walt Disney Internet Group, the, 90, 98n6 Walt Disney Music Company, the, 34 Walt Disney World, 23, 75, 84, 88 Waltz King, The (1964), 22

Warner Bros., xiii, xiv; and TimeWarner, 98n4; and Warner Bros. Presents, xviii Wasko, Janet, 2, 8, 62, 63, 70, 75, 76, 90, 94n5, 98n5 Watts, Steven, xi–xii, xvi, xxi, 9, 31, 35, 55, 66, 96n4, 98n2 Wells, H. G., 54 Westerns, 2, 13–14, 19, 27, 42–43, 95n12; B-westerns, 29–30, 96n1 Westward Ho the Wagons! (1956), 13, 34, 71 Whipple, Fred, 47 White, Stewart Edward, 42 Whitney, Simon, 93n3 Williams, Guy, 85, 86, 87 Williams, Roy, 83 Wilson, Alexander, 95n13 Wolfe, Charles, K., 96n3 Women, The (1939), 97n3 World War II, 67 Wyatt Earp (television series), 13 You Bet Your Life (television series), 6 Zorro (television series), xii, 16, 82, 83, 84–87, 98n3; costs of, 85; ratings for, 22, 85–86; in syndication, 87 Zorro and Son (television series), 87 Zorro’s Black Whip (1944), 85 Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939), 85 Zukor, Adolph, xii