For most of us, Disneyland has always been there. You can’t say the word Anaheim without conjuring up images from the wonderful world of Disney. The long and winding road to creating the whimsy of Walt Disney’s dream park is the subject of the new book The Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story by Don Hahn and Christopher Merritt. The pair have brought the book to life at a sister exhibition and documentary film that opened recently at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.
Visitors reach the temporary exhibit after an hour immersed in the story of Walt’s journey from cartoonist to studio mogul to “Showman of the World,” as an award presented to Disney shortly before his death in 1966 proclaimed.
The exhibit includes artifacts that shine a light on the vast team of artists and production designers who assembled to create the new park. “We wanted to highlight the people nobody really knew,” says Hahn, himself a Disney legend. “Look, here’s Marc Davis, here’s Sam McKim. Here’s people you haven’t heard of that did a million iterations of Disneyland. These are the really strong talents from the animation studio that designed Disneyland.”
Hahn is especially proud of including original illustrations of cast member uniforms designed by Renié Conley, a film designer who won her Oscar for Cleopatra. “They are so precious and beautiful,” Hahn says. “They’re working drawings meant to do the heavy lifting of what a costume would look like. She even stapled fabric swatches to the drawings.”
The book and exhibit also include ideas that never came to be, like the original version of Pirates of the Caribbean. “There is a great drawing from when it was a wax museum walk through,” Hahn says. “Some of those pieces are still there like the pirate ship. You can see the sweat and coffee stains and pencil marks.”
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