A propulsive and “entertaining” (The Wall Street Journal) history chronicling the conception and creation of the iconic Disneyland theme park, as told like never before by popular historian Richard Snow. One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California, and imagined building a park where people “could live among Mickey Mouse and Snow White in a world still powered by steam and fire for a day or a week or (if the visitor is slightly mad) forever.” Despite his wealth and fame, exactly no one wanted Disney to build such a park. Not his brother Roy, who ran the company’s finances; not the bankers; and not his wife, Lillian. Amusement parks at that time, such as Coney Island, were a generally despised business, sagging and sordid remnants of bygone days. Disney was told that he would only be heading toward financial ruin. But Walt persevered, initially financing the park against his own life insurance policy and later with sponsorship from ABC and the sale of thousands and thousands of Davy Crockett coonskin caps. Disney assembled a talented team of engineers, architects, artists, animators, landscapers, and even a retired admiral to transform his ideas into a soaring yet soothing wonderland of a park. The catch was that they had only a year and a day in which to build it. On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates…and the first day was a disaster. Disney was nearly suicidal with grief that he had failed on a grand scale. But the curious masses kept coming, and the rest is entertainment history. Eight hundred million visitors have flocked to the park since then. In Disney’s Land, “Snow brings a historian’s eye and a child’s delight, not to mention superb writing, to the telling of this fascinating narrative” (Ken Burns) that “will entertain Disneyphiles and readers of popular American history” (Publishers Weekly).

With the defeat of the Overtakers behind them, the five teenagers known as the Kingdom Keepers should be celebrating. By all accounts they saved Disneyland from certain destruction. Why then did their mentor leave one last puzzle for them to decipher? The Keepers must solve a puzzle of the past, or be crushed under an evil that makes the Overtakers seem like gentle souls.

For use in schools and libraries only. Wanting to celebrate the defeat of the Overtakers, the five Kingdom Keepers are mystified by their mentor's final puzzle, which reveals a threat by an evil force far greater than any they have yet encountered. A continuation of the Kingdom Keepers series.

With the defeat of the Overtakers behind them, the five teenagers known as the Kingdom Keepers should be celebrating. By all accounts they saved Disneyland from certain destruction. Why then did their mentor leave one last puzzle for them to decipher? The Keepers must solve a puzzle of the past, or be crushed under an evil that makes the Overtakers seem like gentle souls.

What If Walt Had... For every project that Disney has produced, there are hundreds more that never happened despite significant investments of time, talent, and money. But what if you could see them anyway... Jim Korkis enters the limbo of Disney Never Lands to report on new theme parks, new lands in existing parks, television shows, and animation that were left unbuilt and unfilmed. Over the decades, he interviewed Imagineers and animators who worked on these projects as well as researching contemporary newspaper accounts and official publicity releases. Korkis details the usual suspects like WestCot, Mineral King, Roger Rabbit feature sequels, and Epcot's Africa pavilion as well as surprises like Jim Henson's television series about Ariel the Little Mermaid and the Disney Channel's series that would have featured Dreamfinder and Figment as well as the animation Disney had Ub Iwerks do for Danny Kaye's first feature film. Korkis shares the surprises that he discovered in the deepest vaults of Disney history. For the first time, these stories are gathered together in one book to inspire Disney fans' imaginations of what might have been and to document in great detail these lost dreams.

The American West conjures up images of pastoral tranquility and wide open spaces, but by 1970 the Far West was the most urbanized section of the country. Exploring four intriguing cityscapes—Disneyland, Stanford Industrial Park, Sun City, and the 1962 Seattle World's Fair—John Findlay shows how each created a sense of cohesion and sustained people's belief in their superior urban environment. This first book-length study of the urban West after 1940 argues that Westerners deliberately tried to build cities that differed radically from their eastern counterparts. In 1954, Walt Disney began building the world's first theme park, using Hollywood's movie-making techniques. The creators of Stanford Industrial Park were more hesitant in their approach to a conceptually organized environment, but by the mid-1960s the Park was the nation's prototypical "research park" and the intellectual downtown for the high-technology region that became Silicon Valley. In 1960, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Del E. Webb built Sun City, the largest, most influential retirement community in the United States. Another innovative cityscape arose from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and provided a futuristic, somewhat fanciful vision of modern life. These four became "magic lands" that provided an antidote to the apparent chaos of their respective urban milieus. Exemplars of a new lifestyle, they are landmarks on the changing cultural landscape of postwar America.

This imaginative Little Golden Book, originally published in 1955, tells the story of the creation of Disneyland and the little man who lives there. Boys and girls ages 2 to 5 will love joining Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck as they meet little Patrick Begorra. Great for Disney fans, theme park enthusiasts, and Little Golden Book collectors of all ages!