Mickey Mouse gets super-sized to star in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Designed by Walt Disney and his staff, the inflated Mouse first took flight in 1934, one of the first character balloons in what would become a grand Thanksgiving tradition.
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Imagineer and Disney Legend Yale Gracey poses with the infamous Hatbox Ghost at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland Park. Originally part of the show when the attraction opened in 1969, this spook was almost immediately given the hook when the illusion didn’t work properly. As part of the Disneyland Diamond Celebration, this reclusive resident again …
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Assembling outside WED Enterprises (renamed Walt Disney Imagineering in 1986): L-R: Herb Ryman, Ken O’Brien, Collin Campbell, Marc Davis, Al Bertino, Wathel Rogers, Mary Blair, T. Hee, Blaine Gibson, X. Atencio, Claude Coats, Yale Gracey. These remarkably talented Imagineers—each began their careers in Disney animation—kept alive the creative legacy Walt Disney, who they had lost …
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March 25, 1988: During Disneyland Park’s Blast to the Past tribute to the 1950s, 1,527 swivel-hipped participants (including Snow White and other Disney characters) broke the record for simultaneous hula hoopers, shattering the previous record of 240 people.
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One of the more unusual customs captured by the husband-and-wife cinematographer team and Disney Legends Alfred and Elma Milotte in the Walt Disney’s People and Places documentary film The Alaskan Eskimo (1953), was the traditional blanket toss originally used to allow Eskimo hunters to spot game in the distance. Fascinating glimpses into native life such …
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Imagineer Rolly Crump gives fellow Disney Legend Julie Reihm and Walt Disney (as well as the millions watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on television) a 1964 preview of art developed for the Haunted Mansion, which opened on August 9, 1969 at Disneyland Park.
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Even after Disneyland Park opened in 1955, Walt Disney never stopped dreaming of ways to expand and enhance his Magic Kingdom. Here he contemplates new wonders unseen by everyone but him—so far—at the entrance to Adventureland in 1958.
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On a business trip in 1958, Walt Disney visited the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin three years before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961. Walt would again visit Germany during filming of Emil and the Detectives (1964) in 1963, the same year President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech …
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During a return visit to their childhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri, in 1956, Walt and Roy Disney stopped in at the local schoolhouse where the great impresario discovered some of his earliest handiwork—his initials that he carved into his schoolhouse desk when he lived in the idyllic small town from 1906 through 1911.
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Though director Garry Marshall wasn’t at first sure that Richard Gere was right for a light comedy like Pretty Woman (1990), the actor proved he had a light side by unexpectedly snapping the lid of the jewelry box just as co-star Julia Roberts was reaching for it. Her laughter was so genuine that Marshall left …
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