WALT DISNEY

Walt Disney was a dreamer, who found the ways and means to realize his exceptional creative ideas. From animation he moved easily to television, and then to theme parks, with great success. The jewel of the Disney empire, Disney World, is today the world's largest and most-visited recreational resort.

Building on mundane amusements such as the "Tunnel of Love" boat ride, and the "Fun House" with cars running along tracks, he expanded and sophisticated these experiences. He went on then to imagine and create wholly different sorts of amusing experiences, upon which subsequent Imagineers have continued to expand and develop with new technologies.

But as he liked to say, it all began with a mouse.

Defining theatre broadly, I see Disney parks as environmental theatrical experiences. Guests are immersed in carefully designed spaces - indoors and outdoors - which create a heightened sense of reality and an intoxicating environment of unreality. Cast Members - including every Disney employee on the multiple properties - are trained in hospitable guest relations.

Ken Dresser, a Washington friend of mine who was a contract designer for Disney over many years, said that in creating any space in one of the parks, a routine practice was to consider in detail exactly what a guest would see and experience in every direction: north, south, east and west -- no matter where the guest was standing at any given time.

Walt himself conceived of the parks as film sets, carefully constructed, painted, and furnished down to the smallest prop and detail, ready for a close-up shot.

The Disneys: Lillian, Walt, Ruth, Roy Edna

Most people think first of "Disney" as for children. Perhaps it is the child in me, but I revel in the highly detailed and colorful spaces which the parks assemble to make a heightened, carefree, magical world, more attractive, more energetic, cleaner and happier than "everyday" life.

It's not reality, but that is the point: it provides a delicious imaginative escape from the traffic, the cares, and the often colorless routine of "real" life. We have Walt Disney to thank for those reinvigorating holidays.

This link leads to a treasure trove of Disney videos:

Disney Videos

Image - Walt Disney at Desk - Image Not Found 7/2012
Image - Animated Mickey - Image Not Found - 7/2012
Image - Disney Family - Nerd Wars

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