If you’re serious about creating the Happiest Place on Earth, you must first seal the rest of the planet off lest its frustrations, anxieties, ambiguities, and injustices worm their way in. Walt Disney knew this much from the earliest planning stages of the theme park that would bear his name.
In the mid-1950s, construction crews moved mountains of newly excavated earth to the margins of Disneyland’s Anaheim jobsite. To this day, a massive berm rings the park to prevent visitors from glimpsing anything beyond the delightful micromanaged universe Disney envisioned.
“I don’t want the public to see the world they live in while they’re in the park,” Disney once said. “I want them to feel they’re in another world.”
For its youngest visitors, Disneyland manufactures moments of wonder most will never forget. The park also transports legions of adults back to the joys of their own tender years. While every childhood is marked by its share of strife, loneliness, and privation, those have no place in Disneyland. No wonder some people choose to practically live there.
Disneyland’s Opening Day
The park’s creator understood the desire for escape intuitively. Disney’s father was a religious zealot who used to beat his son for perceived violations of the Sabbath. Walt spent his boyhood under the threat of violence, with little time for fun and games. Starting when Walt was 10, his father roused him at 3:30 every morning to deliver the Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Times, and he forced his son back out to distribute the afternoon editions after school.
Arriving in Hollywood at age 21, Disney set about crafting the idyllic childhood he’d never had—not just for himself but for consumers of all ages. He began with cartoon shorts starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and later Mickey Mouse, then moved into animated feature films. The medium allowed him to control every millisecond of what an audience heard, saw, and felt with a precision he’d never achieve with flesh-and-blood actors and real-world locations.
For his amusement park, Disney was just as thorough, calibrating everything from sight lines to pedestrian flow to color variation to incidental music to Herculean waste removal and militarily precise maintenance of the flower beds. Like the home Disney had grown up in, his theme park was a dictatorship, but a benevolent one, devoted to joy, not fear. While his father had operated his regime through violence, the whole point of Disney’s was to tickle fancies and wipe away fear and hurt.
More than anything else, Disneyland is the living embodiment of its founder’s vision and those of his park designers, with a big assist from the more than 35,000 ebullient cast members who bring those visions to life each day.
The first time I visited Disneyland, in my late 20s, I was ready to be unimpressed. Turns out, I adored the place. Every floribunda rose, every turret, every pore of the park just sang to me. It was relatively uncrowded that day, so I rode the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean five times. I left the park realizing I’d hardly scratched the surface of its full artistry.
Above all, it was what Disneyland did to its visitors—not just me but also the thousands around me—that sold me on Walt Disney’s world. Yes, everything was total make-believe, but the communal joy was resoundingly genuine.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Though Disney left us nearly six decades ago, more than 17 million visitors passed through the gates of his namesake park last year, eager to submit to a state of sublime captivity, more than happy to put themselves and their families entirely, deliciously in Uncle Walt’s hands.•
Ed Leibowitz wrote about how performance venues were surviving during the pandemic for Alta Journal 15.
