When You Wish Upon a Unisphere...

We take Part One of a two-part trip through time to the 1964 New York World's Fair, this time with Walt Disney as our tour guide.

Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, "Disneyland Goes to the World's Fair"
OB: May 17, 1964, 7:30 p.m. EST, NBC
I was four months old when this show first aired.

My regrets in life usually fall into one of two categories: things I wished I'd done, but didn't, and things someone else talked me into or out of, against my better judgment. Yes, I failed on my own plenty of times and had plenty of my own bad ideas, but my regrets for those aren't quite as deep and don't sting quite so much.

One of those regrets for my life, that actually fits both categories, was that I didn't attend the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. (For the sake of perspective, obviously I have some bigger regrets but I'm not going to discuss them here.)

I have no idea what kept me from doing it. Maybe it's because it debuted in May 1982, the very month I graduated high school, and my mind was preoccupied with making sure I was ready for finals, college admission and the ceremony, and to say goodbye to some good friends who were going our separate ways. Maybe it's because everyone said the crowds were horrible and perhaps I waited (too long) for them to die down. Maybe I listened too closely to people who said nothing but negative things about it (too expensive, too many lines, too far away) despite having not even gone themselves. And I found out later on it was not too far away, Knoxville was even close enough to my hometown of Glencoe, Alabama to make it a weekend trip, perhaps even a day trip if I planned it right. Plus I had enough graduation money that I probably still wouldn't have spent entirely at the fair. I even had the type of friends--Marcus, William and Roger--who would have complained at length and made fun of all the kitsch...and that would've made it even more fun.

I do have a World's Fair brochure taped into my high school senior scrapbook, and I still remember all those commercials with the "You've Got to Be There" jingle playing on our local TV stations. I've at least driven by the Sunsphere a few times since then. And now I know it was actually one of the most successful world's fairs ever, which wouldn't have happened it if were the damnable hellhole so many of those non-going naysayers tried to convince me it was. Why my friends and I didn't pile into my 1973 Chevrolet Caprice Classic and motor up the interstate to Tennessee for what I know would've been a memorable weekend, is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
All of this comes to mind as we pass the anniversary of another such event with its own joys, awes, and living nightmares: the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Granted, it technically wasn't a World's Fair; the London-based Bureau of International Expositions refused to sanction it as such for a number of reasons. (The main one: they only sanctioned one every ten years and the 1962 Seattle Expo was the one that got their blessing.) But it attracted some 51 million people and became an East Coast (and especially northeast U.S.) touchstone of the baby boomer years, a futuristic look at eye-popping technology and peacefully co-existing cultures, that produced smiles, optimism and a lot of tired legs, and not a peep of the actual near future that lie ahead: Vietnam, more assassinations and assassination attempts, Watergate and the 1970s energy crisis.
If anything, several major oil companies led us to believe the future, and their role in it, was limitless. But they also looked backward as well. A number of them joined the big three U.S. automakers as they sponsored pavilions in the travel section of the fair, with exhibits like the ones Sinclair and Ford devoted to pre-historic times. (If you were in the Ford exhibit, you actually rode through that period in a Ford or Mercury convertible fixed to a conveyor belt.) As a collector of oil company road maps, I try to get as many World's Fair maps as possible (as do many other collectors), and it always cracks me up to see the sponsorship agreements that forced, say, the Shell Oil maps to acknowledge the exhibits sponsored by their petroleum archrivals Sinclair and Texaco.
Why another World's Fair on the heels of the one in Seattle was deemed necessary, is often debated. Perhaps it was an East Coast jealousy of that '62 Expo. Perhaps it was the idea organizers could outdo Seattle with such a dense, northeast population base. Perhaps it was the nostalgia of so many backers who fondly remembered visiting the 1939-40 World's Fair held on the same spot, in Flushing Meadows, New York, and a desire to trade on that nostalgia to bring tourist money into the area. In fact, it was presented as something of a 25th anniversary follow-up to the earlier one that provided some happy relief at the end of the Depression and one last big party before what would turn out to be the sacrifices of World War II.

The opening of the World's Fair was enough for several TV shows of the period to address it. The day before the fair opened, The Garry Moore Show opened with a sketch about the construction of the fair pavilions, ending with regulars Dorothy Loudon and Durward Kirby saying the large structure they were supposedly building in the sketch was "just the ticket booth," and the rest wouldn't be ready for months. (When you see the actual, large ticket booth at the subway stop, and the unfinished Belgian exhibit, that Moore sketch appears surprisingly on the mark.)
But prime time TV When I Was Born took at least two especially close looks at the World's Fair, both with contrasting in-depth looks that together, constitute the unearthing of a video time capsule that brings the fair suddenly back to life. Between the two, you can see and hear a lot of the fair, then close your eyes and almost smell, touch and taste it and even feel bone tired from all the walking around you didn't do, and broke from all the money you didn't spend. And both shows are not only opposites but ironic contrasts in polar opposites. The Disney show is clearly meant to present the fair in a positive light, to promote it, yet does the better job of the two in giving us a behind the scenes glimpse of the fair. But the NBC News special takes a more realistic, critical approach to it, despite showing us almost nothing the general public couldn't see for themselves if they were there. The video quality of each is interesting: the copies I found of the Disney episode were beautifully remastered and sometimes even pristine, while the NBC News special had most of its color badly faded out, coincidentally reflecting Disney's glossy PR efforts and the grittier approach from NBC News. (We'll look at "A World's Fair Diary" in our next post.)
Known under a number of titles over its very long run on network and cable television, the Disney anthology series was known by simply one name in the Hayes household. "Walt Disney's coming on! Walt Disney's coming on!" one of us would shout, as the NBC peacock gave way to the fireworks show breaking out over the Magic Castle. Tinkerbell would then take us on whatever adventure Walt had lined up for us. Sunday was always a big TV night for us--over the years, Lassie, Bonanza, The F.B.I. and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom would be mainstays in our living room but Disney was always the Sunday night TV anchor at the Hayes house.
It was known as Disneyland then later Walt Disney Presents during its 1954-61 run on ABC. And even though ABC always showed it in black and white--really, they weren't ready for color yet--nearly all of the shows were filmed in color, and would be rerun that way years later. The show did switch to NBC and full color in 1961, being called Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color during this era (when the Hayes children would first find it), and even having two sponsors split the bill, whose own fortunes were tied to color images: RCA and Kodak.

The very first NBC show was hosted by the Mouse Factory's first-ever made-for-TV cartoon character, Donald Duck's uncle Ludwig Von Drake, who told us about all color that night. The show became The Wonderful World of Disney in 1969, continuing after the December 1966 death of its namesake studio mogul host and still generating ratings magic in the process.
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color was wrapping up its tenth season, its third on NBC, when Walt himself presented "Disneyland Goes to the World's Fair." In fact, it was actually the show's season finale, presented just before school let out for the summer in much of the U.S. and a prime opportunity to sell the fair as a vacation destination. The Disney Studios and the show's two sponsors all had significant commercial interests at the fair, and all would be plugged heavily during the hour.
As the show opens, Walt introduces us to Huey, Dewey and Louie, three baby brontosauruses that are animatronic (and he'll explain what that means as the show progresses). "Hold your head up there, show 'em what you do...that's a good boy," he says to "Huey," never failing to make his non-living creations seem real. He says they're "tame as a kitten" and "won't bite the hand that feeds them." Disney tells us they're "what scientists call brontosauruses." (Not anymore, the animal is now called Apatosaurus, and is believed to have had the wrong name and even the wrong head all these years.)

Disney says the dinosaurs are among the hundreds of 3D animated characters that his studios made for the World's Fair, calling it "The greatest show on Earth, next to Disneyland." (Say what you will about the old goat, the man knew how to talk to children and adults and promote himself, all at the same time.)

Before we get the tour of the big, great Disney factory, Disney introduces a cartoon montage that tells the story of how world's fairs developed since the dawn of man. A cave-child, for instance, is seen laying a just-invented wheel on a rock and spinning it around while riding it, thus inventing the carousel; we're also led to believe exploding cigars dated back to Bliblical times. We're told about fairs in ancient Greece and Rome. As soon as that long, musical history reaches 1851 and the time of the London Exposition (and a suggestion Prince Albert wanted to use it to impress his wife, Queen Victoria), we start getting a realistic story on how world's fairs developed.
In a nod to that week's sponsor, Kodak, Disney also describes how we're able to see many of those images--with the development of the still camera and the movie camera, and he shows their modern-day Kodak counterparts.
He also shows us some nice color footage of the iconic, long-gone trilon and perisphere from the  1939 World's Fair. It's a reminder, for those of use who look at black and white as something that pushes us back in time, that 1939 and 1964 weren't that far apart on the timeline, and the 1964 World's Fair was shaped largely by the earlier one. On the other hand, although Walt doesn't mention it, one of the "futuristic" exhibits on display at the 1939 fair was television itself. (Note: many versions of this episode are missing this animated and history segment.)
Walt then takes us to the Disney "imagineering department," where they dream up new projects for Disneyland and the World's Fair (and likely Disney World as well, which they were already planning but hadn't told the world about yet). It's the imagineering team that invented the first "animatronic" (robotic, but looking like a living being) creature, the giant squid from the movie "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." ("You can't hire an actor like that out of central casting," Walt tells us.) Then we're given a look at how that technology was used on Disneyland rides, since real elephants and crocodiles would have to be fed, can't always perform on cue that often during the day, and real bears might have an unfortunate tendency to eat some of the park visitors waiting in line to ride the Matterhorn.
Then Walt says something rather haunting: the "imagineering" department will always have a workload, "for Disneyland will never be completed." It seems like Disney knew even then, tastes would change over time and technology would make more things possible in his magic kingdoms, while some attractions may very well become obsolete. I think he may have also known, many of his dreams and ideas would outlive him, even be realized only after his death.
We then meet the dinosaurs for the Magic Skyway from the Ford Pavilion. I notice Disney never mentions brand names if they're not one of his sponsors, so we never hear the Ford Motor Company mentioned in this segment, or see any of the Ford or Mercury convertibles that took spectators through the ride. But we see plenty of the dinosaurs, as well as how they're assembled.
Disney describes a new type of artist, "one that works with a slide rule and a blow torch and not a pencil or a brush." (Only Walt Disney could get away with making art and science the same thing.) He says the tyrannosaurus rex is the "heavy" in the "Magic Skyway" attraction and will weigh 20,000 pounds. There's also a triceratops and of course, the larger brontosauruses.

Early cavemen, who didn't appear until 100 million years until the last of the dinosaurs were gone, are also part of the show, and get special attention from the studio's makeup artists and stylists. The head of the makeup department, Pat McNalley in a rare on-camera moment, appears to be working on one himself. McNalley did makeup for "Mary Poppins," "That Darn Cat" and a number of other Disney classics, before he died in 1966 at the young age of 49.
Much of the work is carefully planned and intricate. Each of the thousands of nylon hairs in the woolly mammoth, for instance,had to be attached by hand, and Disney workers are seen doing that very thing.
The groups of dinosaurs are depicted in sketches, and eventually arranged the exact way they will be on the ride. And we get a look at some of the exhibits, like the triceratops hatching her young, a T-rex in a fight with a stegosaurus, and cavemen using ingenuity to attack a woolly mammoth.
After a commercial break, Disney introduces us to a little friend, an animatronic bird from Disneyland's beloved "Tiki Room" exhibit. This is where he explains the concept of "audio animatronics" (the bird actually says the term) and how the robotic people (and talking animals) actually talk. We also see Disney employees designing birds--all synthetic, even the feathers.
We also get our first glimpse some of the children from the UNICEF "It's a Small World" show, but we'll hear a lot more about that later.
We are told, however, that the Disney wardrobe department designed all the costumes (and there are a lot) and that every single moving of the "It's a Small World" dolls are put through a stress test. Disney points out other companies developed many of the technologies and licensed their use to the exhibits.
Walt Disney was a big admirer of Abraham Lincoln, so it was a big deal to him to get the nod to do a Lincoln exhibit for the state of Illinois Pavilion. (Disney himself was from Illinois, where Lincoln had spent his formative years.) Disney sculptor Blaine Gibson says he was fortunate enough to get a plaster of a life mask made by sculptor Leonard Volk, from Lincoln's actual face in Chicago in 1860...just before he grew his beard.
That means they have a reasonable likeness of his face as a starting point for the animatronic Lincoln, who will come to life and deliver a lengthy speech composed of some of his shorter ones. This would later become the basis for one of my favorite Disney World attractions, the Hall of Presidents.
In a scene that for some reason tended to be cut out of Disney Channel reruns, we see almost the entire Lincoln exhibit, as he gives a speech to an audience. The film is intercut between Lincoln and spectators, which include three sailors. The scene is a sight to behold, not just for the awe of Lincoln himself (one of my favorite presidents, by the way) but seeing an audience visibly moved by, basically, a robot.

Speaking of which...here's my favorite part. Pardon me while I geek out for a bit.
When I was 13, Mom, stepdad, and we kids took our 1977 Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, expecting the thrills of the newly-opened Space Mountain. (We also got to camp out in a Magic Kingdom camping area where we met our first, but by no means our last, live armadillo.) And sure enough, Space Mountain was one of the first rides we visited. But later in the day I'd find my all time favorite attraction, the Carousel of Progress. I went through three times that day, in fact. What I saw, it turns out, was a variation of what visitors saw at the 1964 World's Fair.
An animatronic family walks us through four different eras of American life: the turn of the 20th century, followed by the 1920s, then the late 1940s, and finally, modern day life. The robots were on a theater in the round; they performed endlessly in one spot as a giant wheel holding the audience, rotated 45 degrees counter-clockwise to the next stage. Each stop, the robots would discuss their world, their then-modern conveniences, and how life was wonderful with such modern marvels as the hand-cranked phonograph and the refrigerator where you only have to empty the water pan every so often. It's quite possibly the most wonderful celebration of appliances, pop culture and kitsch (especially) you'll find anywhere; The Simpsons and Futurama have even made fun of it. It was originally sponsored at the World's Fair by General Electric (just as they continued to sponsor it when I saw it in 1977) to plug their appliances and how they've been a way of life all these years. (GE no longer sponsors the attraction so you'll see names like Samsung if you visit now.)
The model Disney shows to us features a modern day "last stop" that looks much like Don and Betty Draper's house on Mad Men. (When I saw it, it looked like the 1970s era set of Diff'rent Strokes: if you were to see it now--yes, it's still there--you'd see "Junior" playing a videogame with "Grandma" on a flat screen TV, and Dad burning Thanksgiving dinner because he can't master the voice-activated oven.)

My fascination with this attraction can never, ever grow dim; sure enough, Disney doesn't disappoint here. We see him asking a room full of workers to stop work for just a bit for a "run-through" of Act 1. He tells us the other "acts" are being assembled in other parts of the Disney studio. (So we're led to believe it's actually being built as this is being filmed.)
Disney then demonstrates how the technology works: a man with a wiring harness all around him, dictates his movements into a computer, apparently an ancient precursor to the technology of the Nintendo Wii.
The computer runs the show (or did, in those days; that big room full of equipment Disney shows us probably held even less data than the outdated laptop I'm using to write this). Through the four inch quad tapes that hold all the data, it dictates all the many movements of all the family members, even the beloved family dog that sits at the pipe-smoking father's feet. (It just dawned on me, Disney's playing a similar role to the animatronic family in this scene with the computer console, boasting about the then-modern but now-outdated technology.)

We're then treated to a quick chorus of one of the greatest Disney songs ever written by the Sherman brothers, "There's a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow," which you can still hear the family sing if you visit the attraction today.
Disney goes out of his way to remind us how to find the "It's a Small World" pavilion. First, he shows us a model of the Kodak pavilion, again a nod to that week's sponsor. Then he shows us a model, and some footage, of the Tower of the Four Winds.
Disney tells us it's 12 stories high and weighs 200,000 pounds, and that you should be able to see it from anywhere on the fairgrounds. He calls it a tribute to "the boundless energy of youth," and hoped people would use it as a meeting place or a landmark to give directions.
To the strains of "Hi Ho, Hi Ho," we follow costumed "Disney ambassadors"--Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Pinnochio, the Three Little Pigs, Alice and some of the residents of Wonderland, Snow White and several of the Dwarfs and a hippo from "Fantasia" are among the ones we see--as they skip and walk past the Unisphere through the grounds of the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows. They immediately pay tribute to the other sponsor of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color by skipping up to the RCA Pavilion.
Disney points out an innovative feature of that pavilion: a service for lost children. They appear on camera and their images are broadcast on screens throughout the fairgrounds, so parents can pick them up at the RCA Pavilion. At one point, Dopey the Dwarf appears to get lost on purpose to appear on TV--something real life children likely did at the fair, presaging our reality TV era where so many people seem to want to get on TV.
Like the Ford pavilion, Disney never does mention that General Electric sponsors the Carousel of Progress or that "It's a Small World" takes place inside the Pepsi-Cola pavilion. However, we do get a glimpse of the Pepsi name during a balloon release.
And after we're reminded that you can get your picture made at the Kodak pavilion--apparently with Disney characters, if you like--we're taken to the last stop on the tour: the "It's a Small World" ride, in its entirety.
We even see where the boat takes off at the turnstiles.
The ride is meant to promote UNICEF, "working for a better tomorrow by helping the children of today" according to Walt. He tells us we see animatronic children from more than 100 nations, all singing "It's a Small World" in their native tongues.
This early celebration of diversity (at a time the word "diversity" wasn't quite thrown around as much, with that meaning) does have a few quirky notes: the part set in Africa, for instance, appears to use American jazz as its music, as opposed to anything sounding like, say, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. (I know, much different era, but still...) And someone on Youtube pointed out the South Seas island nations and territories got left out...a mistake not corrected until the late 1970s, after the show had been moved to Disneyland and Disney World.
Some interesting things Disney doesn't tell us here: the Disney composer brothers, Robert and Richard Sherman, composed "It's a Small World" in the wake of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. They originally presented it to Disney as a slow ballad; Disney wanted it to sound "cheerful," so the tempo was stepped up. (What's interesting is, when our class once sang the song as part of an elementary school P.T.A. program, we actually sang it as a slow, even somewhat solemn, ballad.) Disney deliberately never copyrighted the song, as "a gift to the children of the world" (and probably why we were able to sing it in our PTA program). The tickets cost 95¢ for adults, 60¢ for children, with all proceeds going toward UNICEF.

The exhibit itself was hastily put together at the last minute after Disney's friend, Joan Crawford, at the time the chairman of the board for Pepsi-Cola, requested something for their pavilion to promote UNICEF. Despite his studios already being up to their eyeballs with Lincoln, the Magic Skyway and the Carousel of Progress, Disney jumped in and got it done. (A Disney-produced movie attraction at the Kodak pavilion, however, missed its deadline.)
Walt Disney, historically, had a reputation for not being the most diversity-friendly studio head in the world, with allegations of behind-the-scenes antisemitism and of being an FBI collaborator in the 1950s to rat out suspected communists. Indeed, some of his films--"Dumbo," "Peter Pan" and most especially, "Song of the South"--harbor some cringeworthy ethnic stereotypes. I suspect Disney was conscious of this, at a time in the 1960s when it would matter, and saw this as an opportunity to strengthen his image in that evolving decade. I'm not saying that's the only reason he agreed to it, but perhaps a factor. But that's just me.
The end of the original "It's a Small World" ride had all the children back one more time, now singing the song in English and all side-by-side with one another. The U.S., for instance, is represented by a child cowboy with a child Indian right next to him. The ride ends with a giant sign appealing to both park visitors and perhaps mankind in general: "Come again."

The show ends the same way a day at the World's Fair would end: with the big fireworks show over the fountains.
Obviously this is only a small slice of life at the World's Fair, and of the innovative genius that was Walt Disney. I remember thinking when we saw the man in the wiring harness suit programming the Carousel of Progress, for instance, how much time Disney spent shooting behind-the-scenes footage of his various productions that often found its way into his TV show. Disney was ever the businessman and a genius at self-promotion, but when he did this he pioneered three things. He innovated the type of infotainment programming that today fills up Entertainment Tonight and an average day of the E! Entertainment network. And Disney, who most likely died with no conception of DVD or Blu-Ray technology or even of the VHS era (but probably did foresee some type of programming-on-demand), pretty much invented the DVD/Blu-Ray special feature.

And as we see here, Disney brought the world the idea of multi-platform promotion. By 1964 he already ran theme parks, a major movie studio and a TV production house that had given the world three series, and he knew how to tie them all together and cross-promote them. And his particular attractions would turn out to be among the top, most-attended highlights of the fair. Not only would they all find homes in his theme parks, they would influence other attractions as well. For instance, the boat ride aspect of "It's a Small World" had the unintended but happy effect of keeping lines short (long lines were a very frequent complaint about the World's Fair); the still-under-construction "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland was quickly re-designed to reflect this. As late as 1982, the Magic Kingdom's EPCOT Center in Florida was specifically meant to resemble an eternal World's Fair. And it wasn't limited to Disney, either; my childhood memories of Atlanta's Six Flags Over Georgia included quite a few attractions (both rides and entertainment) that, in retrospect, seem World's Fair-influenced.

One of the themes of the 1964 World's Fair was life in the future. The pavilions all had goofy-looking architecture to reflect this, in fact. (Thank God we don't really design every building that way in the actual 21st Century.) As we'll see even more obviously in Part 2, and as Disney unintentionally made clear here, one of the overall effects of the fair would be to correctly predict that branding, product placement and corporate life would be part of our every day world.

Availability: There are several copies on Youtube, each with one part or another missing; I had to watch several versions to actually see the whole show. Even the series opening was separate. If you want it on DVD, it was released as part of a set of "Walt Disney Treasures" called "Disneyland: Secrets, Stories and Magic" that's now very hard to find and expensive.

Next time on this channel: "A World's Fair Diary," as presented by Edwin Newman and NBC News.