The park means a lot to me
in that, it's something that will never be finished.
Something that I can keep developing.
A thing I can keep building as long as I can get some money to build it with.
And I felt that all along and all through my career,
instead of talking to somebody about something,
if I could, I'd go ahead and make something and then show it to them.
The people of this country are about to see and hear
a new adventure in entertainment.
It will come upon the American scene shortly under the title of Disneyland.
Walt Disney is the greatest creative genius
in the entertainment business.
He's brought new concepts to the theaters
and entertained millions and millions of people.
- That was quite a build up there and, uh-- - You deserve it.
Well, that's what worries me, you know?
Walt had decided in his own mind
that if he was going to make this thing work,
he'd have to have financing,
and was willing to do some TV shows in order to help get the financing.
He's now going to try his luck on home television.
And I'm sure the same impact will be made on the home audience
as Walt has made in the theater audience.
Well, I just want to assure you that we're not taking it lightly,
that it's not going to be just a little stepchild of the Disney organization.
It's going to be one of our major enterprises.
Now on a site of, uh, 240 acres, near the city of Anaheim,
we've begun to build Disneyland, the place.
When Walt described this great park,
I knew that this was not a good idea
because who is going to drive 30 or 40 miles?
The opening date for the park has been set for mid-summer of 1955.
We could never meet this deadline
without the complete cooperation of everyone who works here.
Most people in Hollywood thought Disneyland
would be a Hollywood spectacular, a spectacular failure.
So, Roy Disney said, "What do you mean, most people in Hollywood?"
He says, "That's what I thought."
We want you to see and share with us
the experience of building this dream into a reality.
Once the area was picked out, everything started really congealing
because Walt, in his own mind,
set a deadline that was impossible to make.
An opening of July of 1955.
And I still don't see how it was ever done.
One day he called me up and said,
"Remember I was talking about having some kind of a Disney affair
here in Southern California?"
And so, um, I got in a car with him,
and we rode, and we rode, and we rode, and we rode.
I thought, "Where the hell
is he taking us to?"
And we got down to his orange groves.
He said, "This is all top secret stuff." And I said, "Yeah, that's right."
And I didn't bother to tell him I thought he was out of his mind.
This is our progress report from Disneyland.
On our first television program, we showed you a blueprint for a dream.
Well, this is the blueprint. And the dream is Disneyland,
the park that we're constructing near Anaheim, California.
We promised to keep you informed as our dream became a reality.
So, for a firsthand progress report, let's visit Disneyland now.
One of our naturalist photographers is Stuart Jewell,
an expert in time lapse photography.
We don't have these cameras up here just for fun.
They keep a daily record of the growth and development of Disneyland.
Now, an ordinary camera takes 24 pictures a second.
But these take one picture every 15 seconds.
And of course, that makes things look a lot faster on your screen.
Disneyland is divided into four cardinal realms,
the four different worlds from which our television shows will originate.
Adventureland...
Tomorrowland...
Fantasyland...
and Frontierland.
Walt, even at that time,
had in the back of his mind how he wanted to move people.
He was anxious to just get all the ideas possible together.
It was, uh, helping him to gel his concept.
Which I think at the time was loose and fluid and all over the place.
Roy always hated to be in debt.
And Walt seemed to revel in the idea because we were continually in debt.
And it did take that extraordinary blind faith,
you know, to follow Walt,
because he had a rough time with banks, and they couldn't see it either.
And he was always off in left field somewhere.
There was nothing he could say about something,
except that he had a hunch it was going to work.
Believe it or not,
it wasn't too easy to sell people on the success of Disneyland
because there were a lot of doubting Thomases.
And finally the ball began to roll
and it began to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And you think, "Well, now what if this fails?
What if the people don't like it? What if it's too far away?
What if they go once and never come back?"
But that's Walt's problem. If he fails, then it's his failure.
We could go by car, of course.
It's a pleasant 50-minute trip across town.
But let's be different.
Let's take to the air. Let's go by helicopter.
In order for Walt to take his guest by the hand
and take him on a hike through the Missouri wilderness or anything,
what he doesn't need is a high-rise building,
or a transmission tower
or freeway interchange in the background.
So, number one, they build a berm because it takes a berm to shut out sound.
Now, you're in Walt's world.
That's an important function from the landscape standpoint.
Walt, he didn't want just small trees. He wanted big trees.
He says trees have no scale.
So, he wanted a real show in there.
And he used to ride herd on Bill Evans to get bigger and better trees.
Walt didn't want to have to wait five years
to get the landscape to harmonize with the architecture.
Well, we could do that up to a point but we ran out of dollars.
We're striving for instant maturity within the constrictions of a budget.
And our budget was very, very meager.
I did... I did a quick sketch of where we were going to put berms
and where we were going to put boulders, and where we were going to put trees.
But no dimensions or anything.
I planted it all by the seat of my pants.
♪ Crazy man crazy ♪
♪ Oh, man, that music's gone, gone ♪
♪ When I go out and I want a treat ♪
♪ I find me a band with a solid beat ♪
♪ Take my chick and we dance about ♪
♪ When they start rockin' Boy, we start to shout, we shout ♪
♪ Crazy man crazy ♪
♪ Man, that music's gone, gone ♪
♪ Go, go, go everybody ♪
♪ Go, go, go, go, go, go, go ♪
♪ Crazy man crazy ♪
♪ Man, that music's gone, gone ♪
♪ Said crazy man crazy ♪
♪ Crazy man crazy ♪
♪ Man, that music's gone, gone ♪
♪ They play it soft They play it strong ♪
♪ They play it wild And they play it long ♪
♪ They just keep playin' Till the break of day ♪
♪ To keep them rockin' All you gotta say is ♪
♪ Crazy man crazy ♪
♪ Man, that music's gone, gone ♪
♪ Go, go, go everybody ♪
♪ Go, go, go, go, go, go, go ♪
With so much activity and so much heavy equipment,
there's bound to be an upset now and then.
But the operators take these things in stride.
And fortunately, we've had no serious accidents.
Here's the beginning of Main Street,
a composite of all the small towns in America at the turn of the century.
Here, you can take a ride in a horsecar
past the old town hall, the opera house, the firehouse.
And if you stay on to the end of the line, you will reach the Hub of Disneyland,
where this camera tower now stands.
The budget in starting was four and a half million dollars.
In August, it was seven million.
In December, it was 11 million.
In the springtime, it was anybody's guess.
And we ran out of money
and almost had to stop construction at 17 million.
That's what happens
when you try to make a thing as special as Disneyland in a short time.
I haven't invested money in ranches.
I haven't got anything here. I have a home. That's all.
But this thing, I put my own money in.
And I borrowed on the insurance that I've been paying on for 30 years.
Walt and I would be walking around the enormous foundation
for the railroad station and the underpass coming into Disneyland.
And he turned to Dick Irvine and said,
"By the time Joe gets through burying all our money underground,
we won't have anything left for a show."
He was really sincerely worried about the... the situation.
In Wilmington, California,
construction was going forward on two steam locomotives, vintage of 1900.
Probably the last of their type ever to be built in the United States.
Walt just loved miniatures of almost everything, I think.
And the trains were
probably a kind of a personification of childhood to him.
You know, it's what you grew up around.
Walt was eight years younger than Dad.
And so, he kind of was the little kid around the trains.
And they were around the railroads a lot.
And they had an uncle who was an engineer.
Both of them used to talk quite a lot about the thrill
of going down and standing there by that great big locomotive
and, you know, seeing their uncle.
I learned about trains by building one for Walt.
The one that we built that ran around his house.
We had the drawings for what is known as the Lilly Belle.
Having all the drawings for the little train,
we got started and manufactured the, uh, locomotives, the cars.
So all we had to do was expand the gauge
from 1/8th scale to the 36-inch gauge track.
Back at the studio, the working models of our rides
had been perfected and we were well into construction on the real thing.
The, uh, Peter Pan ride, for instance,
they had one whole warehouse building over there
filled up with the overhead rails and the cars.
And we did the dips and the swirls.
This was something that's completely new too.
I don't think there's ever been an overhead suspended ride
in any amusement park, to my knowledge.
In nearby Newport,
we were building and assembling miniature Autopia racing cars.
These will speed along the Tomorrowland freeway.
Our most difficult problem
was to build them to fit the varying sizes of growing youngsters.
And to give it that authentic real-life feeling,
our freeway will be patrolled by miniature police cars.
Every job that you work on with Walt is different,
and you figure out what you're gonna do and how you're gonna do it,
just as you get started on it.
We had no project managers, therefore we didn't need any coordinators.
The Xerox machine hadn't been invented yet, so we didn't, uh, publish anything.
All we did was just do the work.
Walt never gave a thought that he was overloading people.
It was like, well, okay, we're just doing it.
So you do all this stuff sort of at once.
You didn't dilly dally on decisions.
And it's up to Walt to run around and catch you,
that it's not going the way he wants it. That's his problem.
And there was a lot of people that said, "He's done."
If it had gone down, the studio would have gone down with it
because everything was tied up in the park.
They had a lot of problems
getting the place opened by that opening day.
They dug out the Rivers of America, and they filled it up with water one night
and came back the next morning, and it was totally dry.
It was a sandy soil, and the water just plain disappeared.
We started to experiment with the waterway for the, uh, big river,
Rivers of America.
First of all, we used, uh... bentonite or whatever it was.
It was a gooey thing that was supposed to make a waterproof bottom,
and that didn't work too well.
Everything wasn't sweetness and light
and beautiful during the construction.
Walt always came down on Sunday morning,
and he looked all around, all over everything,
and he... he took a couple of big sighs...
and, uh, he turned to me and he says, "Do you know something?"
And he says, "I just got some figures today."
And he said, "We've spent a little over half the money
that we have to spend on this park."
And he says, "There isn't one thing there, or there, or there,
but holes in the ground and piles of dirt.
There isn't one thing that any human being
would spend fifteen cents to come and see."
And he said, "I'm scared."
And he was.
And it was-- You couldn't believe that you spent half this--
It seemed like an enormous amount of money,
and there was nothing there that anybody would give a darn about.
He just sat there. He didn't say anything for long.
And it really impressed upon me on what responsibility was and what worry was,
because I was worried about little things,
about whether this was going to get done or whether this and that...
But this is something that hadn't occurred to me
because I didn't know anything about it.
But this is what worry is, and it was brought home to me that day.
Inside stage three nearby,
we started construction on a 105-foot American riverboat,
the stern-wheeler, Mark Twain.
Since the deck slopes from one end to the other,
each piece of wood had to be individually cut and fitted.
Constructing such a large boat inside a building 50 miles from water
caused a lot of raised eyebrows.
But unlike the fellow who built a boat in his basement and couldn't get it out,
we had a plan.
Well, we fooled nearly everyone,
for it was designed to come apart in sections for shipping.
Walt, right from the beginning,
made up his mind that he would have something different.
He would have the concept of a family amusement park.
And, uh, we were highly criticized
at the beginning by some of the old-time operators of amusement parks,
because of spending too much money,
going into too much, uh, detail.
Before the park opened,
we went to various key amusement parks in the country
and manufacturers to see if they would be interested in manufacturing
things that we had designed.
Almost invariably, the manufacturers would say,
"Well, that would be pretty hard to do. Why don't you buy one of our things?"
So there's the typical amusement park ride for sale.
But, with Walt, we can't do this.
And so these beautiful things were all made and they were not practical,
and he knew they were not practical.
The idea for a Disneyland lay dormant all those years.
It came along when I was taking my kids around to these kiddie parks.
And I'd take them around, we used to go out every Saturday and Sunday.
Their mother wouldn't go with us. We'd be gone.
I took them to zoos. I took them everywhere.
And, uh, they used to love to go with me in those days,
and it was some of the happiest days of my life.
All my life I heard him talk about doing this kind of a park.
And as the years went on, from the time I was five
and until he finally did it when I was 21,
the dream just grew.
From this very humble little thing,
that maybe would be contained on the studio lot,
to something quite grand.
I think everyone thought he was crazy
like they did when he said he wanted to do a feature-length cartoon.
You have to look at this in some respects
as a kind of a... it was a huge experiment.
This was the genesis of that kind of park.
What Walt started out to do, for heaven's sake,
was to do something as radically different from Coney Island as he could dream up.
Walt knew everything that went into that park.
He knew where every pipe was.
The only thing that he didn't realize, and it was hard for him to learn,
the necessity of building concrete.
He thought we could build it like a motion picture set on a temporary basis.
So he never got over and was awfully mad at the Adventureland waterfall,
because of all the concrete that went into it.
Up river, other workmen were just as busy
solving the problem of how to build a rock.
Creating beautiful rock formations is nothing for Mother Nature,
but it wasn't so easy for us.
I was supposed to look at the cost sheets...
...when they came in every day,
but I had never... I failed arithmetic in high school.
And I didn't know whether we were in the black or in the red,
but if nobody had come over
and said you were running over, I didn't say anything.
And Walt would come in, and he'd say, "How much money have you spent so far?"
And I'd say, "Let me see." And he'd say, "I'll tell ya."
And he'd tell me exactly.
When Disneyland was under construction,
there were so many people at the studio
all working on this crazy idea for an amusement park.
In one way, it seemed crazy, in another way, it seemed completely natural.
We really didn't have, what you would say, administrative offices.
We just had people everywhere.
♪ Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dee ♪
♪ I'm as happy as can be... ♪
You kind of hated to go home at the end of the day because, oh, gosh,
you'd have to go home and go to bed and then get up the next morning
and drive all the way back and keep going again.
So it was kind of an inconvenience to stop and have to go home.
♪ Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dot ♪
♪ How you gonna keep that honey you got? ♪
♪ Hunkies, hunkies fishes bite I'm gonna see my honey tonight ♪
♪ Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dot ♪
♪ Tweedlee dum, tweedlee dum ♪
♪ Give it up, give it up Give your love to me... ♪
Well, here we are inside Disneyland.
Yes, we're in the park, all right,
but we haven't left our problems behind at the studio.
We're just concentrating a lot of them in one place here.
When we started out, Walt didn't know how to read a plan
and he would never say so.
But we used to try and fool him about it,
so it wasn't soon until he not only could read a plan,
he could read it better than all of us, and he had a better feeling of proportion
than any of us did,
because he knew exactly what he wanted
in a way of scaled down version of Main Street.
We built Disneyland with probably not 10% of the plans to start with.
The plans were developed as we went along.
I think Walt was convinced
that if his guests were exposed to good taste,
good quality, good design,
they would sort of subconsciously perceive this
not as a consequence of being educated in landscape design
or in architecture or anything else,
but they would, subconsciously, know the difference between good and bad.
They were bringing in
various landscape architects to do different projects,
and then Walt Disney became worried that, because so many people were in it,
it wouldn't hang together, and so that's the way I started.
So, I made a plan of the Main Street and the Hub.
And they called a meeting of all the art directors,
and Walt was there, and they approved it.
Roy Disney said, "Don't ever bother him with a problem.
If you have a problem, come to us." "Let him dream."
So, every Saturday he would come down
and we'd go around with all the art directors
and he would have new ideas of something to be done.
And he did, he wanted to start it Monday morning.
He didn't want plans Monday morning.
So, many weekends, I'd work till midnight
getting out sketches or something and that's the way it went.
The thing that I remember about it is,
while Walt had a temper and he could demand things to be done
because he expected everybody to do what he did.
In, uh, Disneyland, we had very acute problems there.
I was advised by two or three of my major assistants.
Under no circumstances should we try to continue to open in July.
We should postpone until September.
But we said no.
It was so important, in the minds of the public,
we were going to open in July,
and as a matter of fact,
if we had waited until September with all of our problems financially and so forth,
we might never have gotten off the ground.
It was a learning process all the way through,
and the thing I liked the most about those days
was it was a great thing to have somebody say, "Well, let's do it."
By now, all over the studio,
hammers and saws were quickly being replaced by paint and brushes
for the deadline was drawing near.
The hurry-up, paint-up, finish-up campaign began in earnest.
Well, it seems as if there's always pressure.
I suppose it's part of the nature, I guess, of show business.
And, of course, part of it is opportunity
and part of it is sensing the moment has come.
And, Walt being the intuitive man he was,
of course, sensed it was the time for this.
And he did put pressure on us and we did do it.
This was our big bugaboo.
What were you gonna do with this Tomorrowland?
We had to have it.
You couldn't say we didn't want it. And we struggled so hard.
One day, Walt and I drove down together to Disneyland
and he said, "Well..." he said, "Herbie..." he said,
"You know the worst thing that could happen to us, don't you?"
And I said, "Well, what do you mean the worst thing that could happen?"
He said, "Well, the worst thing that could happen would be that I'd go broke."
And I said, "Yeah, I guess that would be pretty bad."
And he said, "Well..." he said,
"I've been broke five times in my life and one more won't hurt."
If your team is sympathetic and you all have the same goals,
why, you arrive at something
that's greater than the sum of the parts, of course.
And, uh, I think it's well known that this kind of thing works that way.
You build a kind of an enthusiasm and you share something.
Sometimes it becomes a little ridiculous and you just end up with fun.
But most of the time, you turn over things by a mutual stimulation
that, uh... that you'd never arrived at by yourself.
Walt was a... was a real master at provoking that type of atmosphere.
Here on the shores,
we come upon the realm of the creatures of the Serengeti plains.
Towering above them all, the giraffe.
To reproduce these animals requires the combined efforts
of the finest designers, sculptors and master mechanics.
I was determined that I was gonna have the first ride
when the first boat got in the ride with water in it.
I was gonna ride first and find out if the person got wet...
because I had conceived the idea of going behind the waterfall.
So I went slow around and looked at everything,
and looked back to see the clearance and everything.
And, uh, as I started under the waterfall, I got right in it.
And then I looked back to see where the stern was...
...and there was Walt sitting there.
My heart stopped beating.
I was clear through the waterfall before I came to.
He stepped on board very carefully, just as I left, and I didn't know it.
Presenting this week, the pre-opening report from Disneyland.
In our first television show last year,
we described to you our hopes and plans for a place called Disneyland.
A few months ago, in a progress report,
we showed you the actual start of construction.
In our mail recently, a lot of you have shown interest in our progress.
And so this week, just a matter of days away
from the formal opening of Disneyland,
we want to bring you up to date on what's been happening,
and let you share with us the joys and anxieties of our race against time.
In this, our final report on building a Disneyland,
I want to pay tribute to the many studio artists, craftsmen and engineers
whose untiring efforts helped bring this dream to a reality.
Without their skills and imagination, Disneyland would not have been possible.
Those last few days were frantic.
I saw gardeners spraying bushes and flowers and things with paint
because they had died.
So, instead of with water, they were painting grass, bushes, trees.
Prior to the opening, there was a plumbing strike.
So, the decision was, should we have drinking fountains or restrooms,
because there literally wasn't enough time to get both done.
And Walt said, "Well, you know, we've gotta have restrooms.
And people can drink Coke and Pepsi, but they can't pee in the street."
We had a gas leak under the castle,
and you could see little blue flames coming all around the perimeter
and the foundation of the castle.
I was unaware of this, of course, at the time, but...
So I was smoking my pipe as usual, and walking up from the Hub.
All of a sudden, the fire chief at the time came running out and grabbed me.
We waltzed all the way back down to the Hub.
He said, "Don't you know there's a fire out there?"
He figured I'd blow up the castle.
Well, the pressures were tremendous on everybody.
We all lived down there, and we worked from early morning to late at night.
We were on a 48-hour week.
Walt used to come over on Saturday, and we'd all go to lunch together
and come back and work some more, and he was right on top of us.
As far as the opening period, it was very hectic.
I know at the time we lived down there, we lived over the... the City Hall.
We did all our last drawings, uh, on the second floor of the City Hall there
and were right on the spot.
It was just like a great big panic all the time.
It was a miracle that it ever went on.
And just as it was a miracle that Disneyland ever got opened on date.
People, uh, looked at me in many ways and said,
"Well, I mean, look, the guy has no regard for money."
That's not true. I have regard for money.
There's some people that sit and worship money
as something you've got to have piled up in a big pile somewhere.
I've only thought of money in one way. And that is to do something.
I don't think there's a thing that I own that I'll ever get the benefit of,
except through doing things with it.
"We were learners," Walt said,
"and I didn't have enough money to do any more than that.
I had to borrow, as you know, from ABC and my insurance, and mortgage the house."
There were delays by suppliers,
and there were breakdowns and threatened strikes.
But Walt was daring. He put everything on the line, and his beliefs.
How many guys would do that?
Tenth of July,
we had a party at Disneyland.
And the first time we were allowed to run the train around the park was that day.
And also, the riverboat ran that day.
Walt was living down there,
and he was out there early, early morning,
seeing how everything was going.
Just before opening, we...
Tomorrowland wasn't finished,
and we had to get in and do a quick and dirty dressing job.
Before Disneyland opened, everything was in utter turmoil.
And in Tomorrowland, we had these big buildings on both sides,
but nothing in them.
We hope you all will be listening and watching
next Sunday, July 17th,
when we present the formal opening of Disneyland,
in an hour-and-a-half show over most of these stations.
These are just some of the sites that ABC undertook
to show a waiting nation on the world's largest live telecast.
It all started when Mr. Kintner said to Mr. Disney,
"How about ABC televising the opening of Disneyland?"
Mr. Disney thought it was a fine idea.
After all the preliminary planning,
the camera crew started rehearsing their moves.
Calls were sent out all over the nation, rounding up equipment.
Getting 85,000 feet of cable, including 16,000 feet of coaxial,
was no easy task in itself.
Thirteen hydraulic forklifts were brought in
and were set about building special camera platforms
and mounting them onto these lifts.
The forklift operators had to be rehearsed.
There was always the danger they wouldn't stop the lifts in time
and pull the cables out of the cameras.
My work at the time was getting Casey Jr. running.
And I was testing it before opening,
and the train started up to the first lift and started going over.
We shut the ride down, of course, to find out why this happened.
We discovered, well, there was no safety rail around the track,
so we couldn't open the ride.
But I was to run the locomotive once around the track for the TV show.
All the time we were trying to rehearse,
the workmen were still building Disneyland.
Another one of our small problems. That's asphalt, not sand.
We did manage to get some work done,
in spite of all the frantic last-minute construction,
and men and material and trucks
kept passing through in a frantic effort to finish on time.
This kept rehearsal virtually at a standstill.
Just before showtime, the last preparations were being made.
And then, ready, Fantasyland, Frontierland,
Adventureland, Main Street, Tomorrowland.
Stand by. Five seconds. And here's the show.
♪ When you wish upon a star ♪
♪ Makes no difference who you are ♪
How do you do, everyone? This is Hank Weaver.
For the past year, this signature has announced
the opening of Disneyland, the show.
Now it announces the opening of Disneyland, the place.
The people and eyes around the world
are focused on these 160 acres here in Anaheim, California.
This afternoon, Disneyland, the world's most fabulous kingdom,
will be unveiled before an invitational world premiere, and you, our guests.
And to start the proceedings, we take you to the entrance of Disneyland
and your host, Art Linkletter.
I'm standing here on the railroad tracks,
and I'm in front of the big Disneyland and Santa Fe railroad station,
and down these tracks in just a couple of seconds will come Walt Disney himself,
barreling in on a railroad train built to 5/8th miniature size.
How did the run go?
Oh, fine. Fine.
The governor had her around till Frontierland
and then Fred Gurley there, he took her round.
I picked her up and brought her in. Highballing in, boys.
- Hello, Governor. - Hello. Glad to see you, Art.
Governor Knight of California, ladies and gentlemen,
and Walt Disney, of course, and Mr. Gurley, the President of the Santa Fe.
And of the Santa Fe and Disneyland, if you please.
That's right.
Thousands are coming in.
They're going through the magic tunnel on foot because no car can enter here.
And, like Alice in Wonderland,
as you go on through that tunnel past the Disneyland Santa Fe,
you find yourself in a bygone time, another world.
The clock has turned back a half a century,
and you're in the main square of a small American town.
The year: 1900.
I was just one of the sweaty people trying to find our way through the...
Oh, it was a rat maze down there.
Everybody had been out celebrating a little the night before,
so there were more than a few hangovers.
It was not the best of all days.
Most people remember the opening day as a total disaster,
because they had almost twice as many people as they had planned for,
they ran out of food... Almost every imaginable thing that could, went wrong.
Women had to wear high heels all the time and hose in hot weather,
like the beginning... opening of Disneyland.
It was, uh, a ferocious day.
But you had to give Walt credit
for a most impressive idea, all the way.
You couldn't knock a man who thought like that.
All activity on Main Street has ceased.
Walt Disney will step forward to read the dedication of Disneyland.
Yay!
To all who come to this happy place, welcome.
Disneyland is your land.
Here, age relives fond memories of the past.
And here, youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.
Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams,
and the hard facts that have created America
with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.
Thank you.
Standing here has been one of the most exciting moments of my life.
I think, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone who's been here today will say,
as the people did many years ago when they were at the opening of the Eiffel Tower,
"I was there."
I'm very proud to say I was at the opening of Disneyland.
It's a fabulous thing to happen, ladies and gentlemen.
We didn't lack faith in the idea that it was going to be something good.
It was other people that were sure that it was not going to be a success.
I don't think it was true with the people in the creative departments.
Walt, he says, "All I want is that when people walk through or ride through
or have access to anything that you design,
I want them, when they leave, to have a smile on their face."
And he says, "You just remember that, and that's all I ask of you as a designer.
Make it pretty, but make it so that the people come out smiling."
The press was not very complimentary to the... of our opening,
but that's part of the cost of this business,
of being in show business in Hollywood.
And that is, they're looking for any kind of little cracks
or any kind of things they can magnify.
Right now, it's my pleasure to introduce the lovely lady
and famous star who Mr. Disney has asked to christen the Mark Twain.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Irene Dunne.
- Hello, Irene. - Hello. How are you?
My, it's listing.
It's listing a little because it'll be shoving off in a moment.
And there the boat is christened, and it starts on its daily trips
up and down the rivers of the world. Of America, that is.
- Thank you, Miss Dunne. - Have a good journey.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, I've got other places to go.
And the commodore, Admiral Joe Fowler, up there in the wheelhouse.
Looks like they're getting ready to shove off, so I better...
Goodbye, Irene. Goodbye, everybody. Have a good ride.
There goes the whistle.
Take her away, Admiral.
Bye.
Before our preview of Tomorrowland,
I'd like to read these few words of dedication.
"A vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man's achievement.
A step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come.
Tomorrow offers new frontiers in science, adventure and ideals.
The atomic age, the challenge of outer space
and the hope for a peaceful and unified world."
Those doves are, ladies and gentlemen, I hope,
the harbingers of peace, for the world of tomorrow.
I think it comes back to the way people feel.
They feel better about themselves.
I think if we give people confidence,
if we make them feel that they can handle anything,
it seems to me it not only reduces their fear,
but it makes them better people.
And there is hope.
Walt, you've made a bum out of Barnum today.
But we've got to go.
I know, but I just want to say a word of thanks to all the artists,
the workers and everybody that helped make this dream come true.
Let's go into Fantasyland and have some fun.
- Let's go. - Goodbye, folks.