WALT, MEET HENRY: The Henry Ford premieres Disneyland art and artifacts
BY ERIN CHAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
September 29, 2005
Like Tinkerbell's fairy dust, the magic of Disneyland cannot be contained.
It started sparkling in Anaheim, Calif., 50 years ago with the birth of Walt Disney's original theme park. It has since spread to in Orlando, Paris, Tokyo and now Hong Kong.
Now the magic has reached Dearborn.
More specifically, it has cascaded into a 7,500-square-foot exhibit space at the Henry Ford and is beckoning those who love the "happiest place on Earth" (or just plain like seeing how magic happens) to enter.
Working with Walt Disney Imagineering, the folks at the Henry Ford have scored the world premiere of the largest public exhibition of art and artifacts focused on Disneyland.
Walt Disney Imagineering consists of engineers, designers and specialists in hundreds of disciplines who create rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and It's a Small World and attractions that form the infrastructure for Disney's 11 theme parks.
"This is pretty unusual for us to open up our archives and travel these pieces around the country," says Marty Sklar, Imagineering vice chairman and principal creative executive. "It will give a whole story: first, all about the first 50 years of Disney parks and also about how we create an attraction."
"Behind the Magic -- 50 Years of Disneyland" includes Walt Disney's first concept of Disneyland, drawn on vellum by artist Herb Ryman and taken by Disney's brother, Roy, to pitch the park and secure funding from ABC, which also agreed to air the weekly series "Disneyland."
The exhibit's premiere in Dearborn, a city known more for tires and trucks than Mickey Mouse, is not random.
As Scott Mallwitz, director of experience design at the Henry Ford, notes, the museum celebrates American ideas and innovators. He says Disney innovated by "channeling imagination and myth into the creation of a new entertainment medium: theme park."
Then there's the history.
Walt Disney himself made two visits to Greenfield Village in the 1940s, intrigued by the idea of an old-fashioned Main Street and by the Henry Ford Museum's transportation collection, in particular the railroad pieces. On the train ride back to California in 1948, he took notes on what he saw and later composed an internal memo with thoughts for what he then called Mickey Mouse Park.
Sklar, who started working for Walt Disney in 1955 (one month before Disneyland opened), says the yearning for a theme park started when Disney grew frustrated while sitting on a bench at an amusement park one day, waiting for his daughters to finish the kiddie rides.
As his daughters rode, "he thought, 'Why isn't there something families can do together?' " Sklar says. "If you have a great time and a great host, you could. That was what it was all about to him."
For Cheryl Clossick, 41, a real estate agent who lives in Pittsfield Township, Disney theme parks have always been about nostalgia, fantasy, escapism and, of course, magic.
"Basically, I'm a Disney freak," says Clossick from her five-bedroom home, where she houses a porcelain Mickey Mouse and Goofy and a Disney Princess tea set in her two china cabinets.
"They probably rank higher up than my good china," she says of her collection.
Clossick has gone to Disneyland just once but has taken her children to Walt Disney World in Orlando just about every year for the past nine years. This fall, she and her husband Phil, 50, plan to sneak away for a long weekend at Disney World -- without the kids.
At the Henry Ford, which she hopes to visit after her romantic getaway, Clossick wants to learn how Walt Disney turned his dreams into reality, or rather, made reality like a dream.
The exhibit pairs that process with wonder and technique.
Visitors will be greeted by a decorative D, roughly 7 feet high, that once welcomed visitors to Disneyland. After walking through a portion about the life of Walt Disney and his visits to Greenfield Village, visitors will venture into a hub featuring the four original Disneyland spaces: Adventureland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland and Fantasyland.
"Walt Disney presented a mirror to Americans," says Andrew Dahl of Dawber & Company of Bloomfield Hills, which helped design the exhibit. "'We fantasize. We still want to cross frontiers ... He just really presented who we are. He was a genius."
The last portion of the exhibit delves into the perspectives and techniques of the hundreds of employees at Walt Disney Imagineering, called Imagineers, who fashion the fun at Disney theme parks.
This area displays Disney's first Audio-Animatronics figure, a talking Abraham Lincoln shown at the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York. It also looks at popular creations such as the Haunted Mansion and Peter Pan's Flight, complete with one of the original boats that ferried people to Neverland.
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