I'm out west in San Francisco for a week long vacation and happened to stumble upon the Walt Disney Museum that is located out here at the Presidio. It was raining all day and my wife and I thought it would be a perfect indoor activity, so we decided to spend some time there this afternoon.
It was an enjoyable experience overall. The museum itself costs $20 per person ($17 with discount tickets we found via a Google search) and can take anywhere from 45 minutes up to 3 hours to get through depending on how much of the experience you want to take in and how much reading you feel like doing.
The museum goes into an extreme amount of detail about Walt, his family and his life. The entire first floor is mostly dedicated to his family history and what he worked on prior to his first Mickey cartoons. Pretty interesting stuff if you're really interested in the man.
The second floor then dives into his early cartoons and goes chronologically through basically everything he released throughout his life. There is at the very least a little blurb about every film he worked on, and often significantly more detail than that, and a display of some kind showing drawings used at some point in the production of each film as well. Throughout the museum you will see a timeline that details major events not only in his life, but also in the world to help reference the time frames.
The last part of the tour details his efforts with DL and WDW, and includes a scale model of Disneyland that he used when planning the park. Seeing this alone was worth the price of admission. It is SO NEAT! The very end of the tour details his death and even includes audio recordings from important people in his life as they reacted upon learning of his death.
If you are a hardcore Walt Disney fan, this tour is a 10/10. The info is amazingly detailed, the displays are very well put together and the museum has a nice flow to it. If you're only a fan of the parks and don't care about the movies that were released up to Walt's death too much, or don't care to learn about the man himself, then it won't be too exciting for you. The museum has absolutely no affiliation with the parks in any way, but the display of Disneyland is very cool nonetheless. If you have children -- especially small children -- they will get bored very quickly unless they are REALLY into learning about the history of Walt himself. There is nothing in this museum pertaining to anything Disney that happened after his death.
For me it was amazing though. There were a couple things in this museum that made my eyes well up -- granted I'm an emotional person, but if you're a huge Disney nerd like me then you might love it just as much as I did.
Back on the first floor there is a pretty neat gift shop that sells things that I've never seen at a Disney park, mostly relating to older Disney films and the original iteration of Disneyland. It's pricey so I didn't buy anything, but what else would you expect
There's also a cafe there as well as a decent view of the Golden Gate Bridge!
I took some pictures on my cell phone that I will attempt to share. The quality might not be great but it'll give you an idea of some of the things included in the museum.
It was an enjoyable experience overall. The museum itself costs $20 per person ($17 with discount tickets we found via a Google search) and can take anywhere from 45 minutes up to 3 hours to get through depending on how much of the experience you want to take in and how much reading you feel like doing.
The museum goes into an extreme amount of detail about Walt, his family and his life. The entire first floor is mostly dedicated to his family history and what he worked on prior to his first Mickey cartoons. Pretty interesting stuff if you're really interested in the man.
The second floor then dives into his early cartoons and goes chronologically through basically everything he released throughout his life. There is at the very least a little blurb about every film he worked on, and often significantly more detail than that, and a display of some kind showing drawings used at some point in the production of each film as well. Throughout the museum you will see a timeline that details major events not only in his life, but also in the world to help reference the time frames.
The last part of the tour details his efforts with DL and WDW, and includes a scale model of Disneyland that he used when planning the park. Seeing this alone was worth the price of admission. It is SO NEAT! The very end of the tour details his death and even includes audio recordings from important people in his life as they reacted upon learning of his death.
If you are a hardcore Walt Disney fan, this tour is a 10/10. The info is amazingly detailed, the displays are very well put together and the museum has a nice flow to it. If you're only a fan of the parks and don't care about the movies that were released up to Walt's death too much, or don't care to learn about the man himself, then it won't be too exciting for you. The museum has absolutely no affiliation with the parks in any way, but the display of Disneyland is very cool nonetheless. If you have children -- especially small children -- they will get bored very quickly unless they are REALLY into learning about the history of Walt himself. There is nothing in this museum pertaining to anything Disney that happened after his death.
For me it was amazing though. There were a couple things in this museum that made my eyes well up -- granted I'm an emotional person, but if you're a huge Disney nerd like me then you might love it just as much as I did.
Back on the first floor there is a pretty neat gift shop that sells things that I've never seen at a Disney park, mostly relating to older Disney films and the original iteration of Disneyland. It's pricey so I didn't buy anything, but what else would you expect
There's also a cafe there as well as a decent view of the Golden Gate Bridge!I took some pictures on my cell phone that I will attempt to share. The quality might not be great but it'll give you an idea of some of the things included in the museum.
