Considering Disney’s immense success today, it may be hard to recall a time when Walt Disney actually had to pitch the idea of Disneyland to potential investors—website Boing Boing recently presented a “first-ever look at the original Disneyland prospectus”, which details the creative vision that Disney’s founder had for the now-famous amusement park.
Courtesy of an anonymous source, these fascinating documents consist of the legendary first Disneyland map and eight pages of description and sales copy that were used for pitches to investors—in them, we are able to get a clearer idea of how Walt Disney envisioned “the new kind of amusement park”.
While many of ideas documented in the prospectus never really came to be, it still provides a valuable glimpse into the inner workings of Disney’s imaginative mind—for instance, he wanted to set up a mail order catalogue that would offer everything seen at Disneyland, including “a real pony or miniature donkey thirty inches high”.
There was also a distinct sci-fi element to the original plan for the park—it was hoped that the Tomorrowland section of the park would house various scientific exhibitions, and that children would be able to bring home “scientific toys, chemical sets and model kits”.
Read the prospectus in full here—do you wish that Walt Disney had been able to materialize all the things that were set out in it?
[via Boing Boing, Archive.org]