
Disneyland’s Disastrous Opening Day (2015) - spking
https://www.history.com/news/disneylands-disastrous-opening-day-60-years-ago
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coldcode
People forget that Disney made up the whole idea of a theme park (as opposed
to something more like a carnival) and built it in basically a year. Anytime
you are the first to do something, it's really hard to know how to do it right
the first time. Having been a programmer in the 1980's, a lot of what we did
was making it up as we went along since there were no precedents (and no easy
communications like the internet today to know if someone else did it before).
In 1955 Disney had no computers or cell phones or CAD or anything we take for
granted. Despite the opening day disasters, today it's a huge business.
DisneyWorld in Orlando by itself as a separate company would be in the middle
of the Fortune 500.

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sandworm101
It wasn't the first theme park. What it was was the first theme part based on
a particular set of core values. Disney did not like what he saw in other
parks and so decided to build a more perfect world. His park would not serve
alcohol. His park would be immaculate. The people at his park would be young
and attractive, the embodiment of what was portrayed in the Disney cannon. He
succeeded.

Disney then stood at the gates of Disneyland and looked at the string of
shoddy hotels that sprung up beside his creation. Disney should be an all-day
experience. A Disney _World_ was necessary.

~~~
cynicalkane
> What it was was the first theme part based on a particular set of core
> values.

That's what makes it a 'theme park'. Previous large-scale amusement parks
didn't have central defining themes, though there were older examples of
small-scale theme parks.

By modern standards, 'old timey carnival' might be a theme, but obviously it
wasn't at the time.

~~~
sandworm101
Ya, 'core values' isn't a theme. I'm talking about family/american/christian
values. Disney had Regan and a Protestant minister open the park. This was a
park backed by the american political and religious establishment. It wasn't a
religious theme park, nor a political one, but an idealized image of how the
two could/should/would get along.

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lukey_q
The article mentions the lack of drinking fountains due to the plumbers'
strike, but not the fact that they only had the capacity to hook up either the
bathrooms or the water fountains and Disney picked the bathrooms [1].

It's also pretty remarkable that they finished the entire thing in a single
year. For a modern comparison the new Star Wars expansion took 3 years to
complete with just one working ride (the second ride will be open in December,
so 3.5 years from construction start). I wonder if that's due to more relaxed
laws surrounding construction back then or another factor.

[1] [https://mentalfloss.com/article/541360/disneyland-
disastrous...](https://mentalfloss.com/article/541360/disneyland-disastrous-
opening-day)

~~~
dspillett
_> I wonder if that's due to more relaxed laws surrounding construction back
then or another factor._

Relaxed regulations back then will be a factor, both externally enforced and
internal rules designed to stop past mistakes repeating.

Another significant consideration is the growing complexity of each individual
installation. Also the higher expectations and attention to detail of the
modern customer: you don't have the luxury of hiding a few flaws behind the
spectacle of novelty, now such theme parks are no longer that novel.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Something I think about a lot is how the base quality and complexity of things
is improving but we still still consider it the same thing in many respects.

I think what you're describing is a great example, checkout one of the classic
rides, It's a Small World:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tbm4Au3dZ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tbm4Au3dZ0)

vs the new Smuggler's Run

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IZDfFDbGnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IZDfFDbGnU)

An astounding leap forward in environmental storytelling, attention to detail,
technology, etc.

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Stratoscope
This article is all too short, but it left me wanting to know more about this
opening day where so many things went wrong.

My favorite bit: "Nearly all of the 36 cars on the Autopia, which Disney
envisioned as a utopian miniature freeway on which children would learn
respectful rules of the road, were wrecked by aggressive drivers who crashed
into other vehicles."

We've never seen this happen anywhere else, have we?

~~~
hodgesrm
> "The stagecoach ride in Frontierland was discontinued after it proved too
> top-heavy and prone to flipping over."

This one caught my fancy. Did they discover the behavior by trial and error?

~~~
Animats
Scaling. Classic stagecoach designs are extremely stable; I've seen someone
drift them at a rodeo. Disney's original stagecoaches were undersized and with
full sized people the center of gravity was too high. There's a mention of
this in "The Hollywood Posse", by Diana Serra Cary, which is about cowboy
stunt riders.

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xfour
Visiting there recently I was in awe of what it must take to run and maintain
that place. Every single day... it’s more or less spotless at any given moment
you have attractions shows security vegetatation water systems etc. it’s
incredible any amount of staff can keep that place running.

~~~
underwater
I've heard this sentiment a lot, but honestly didn't notice it when I was
there. Generally I found the US to be much dirtier than a lot of other
countries I've visited. I wonder if there is a bit of "broken windows theory"
helping out - people won't litter or break things because it's _Disneyland_.

~~~
kstenerud
I noticed that Disneyland was a lot cleaner than the rest of the normal USA.
But the USA in general is a very dirty place. Trash piles up everywhere in
larger cities and towns, roads are poorly kept, and in many places there's
just this overall feeling of "dirty" and constant "mess" that I've only seen
in third world countries and in Paris.

~~~
technothrasher
The most striking place you can notice this is at Niagara Falls in NY. The US
side is dirty and tired. Walk across the footbridge to the Canadian side and
its like walking into a sci-fi utopia of cleanliness.

Although, being a US citizen, I'll say that what I notice most when visiting
Europe is that the graffiti seems 100x worse to my eyes in most European
cities than in US cities. Italy seemed especially bad to me. It's like some
child has drawn on the walls of Europe with crayons.

Another interesting point to me is Sydney, Australia. I had visited it as a
child in the 80's and remembered a very grubby, dirty city. I visited again a
couple years ago and found a beautiful, clean, enjoyable city.

~~~
astura
Niagara Falls, NY is dumpy because is a typical Rust Belt city that
experienced significant industrial and manufacturing decline in the late
70s-80s coupled with failed "urban renewal" projects. The population went from
102,394 in 1960 to ~48,144 in 2018. It's not exactly easy to maintain a tax
base in that situation.

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hcs
"if Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists"
\- Ian Malcolm

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_pmf_
Very entertaining presentation, not about opening day, but about operations at
Disney parks in general: [https://resources.qt.io/videos/qtws18-keynote-
beyond-the-ux-...](https://resources.qt.io/videos/qtws18-keynote-beyond-the-
ux-tipping-point-jared-spool-center-centre-uie)

Spoiler: ... ah, watch it yourself

~~~
Stratoscope
I will only spoil a little bit, because I only got 10 minutes into the
presentation and will have to watch the rest later.

But apparently in the late 1990s, Disney's website was so bad that they
routinely had customers show up at one of their hotels at Disneyland
(California) or Disney World (Florida) with paid reservations for the wrong
hotel. And not just a different hotel at the same resort, but a hotel 3000
miles away!

Fixing the website would be much too expensive. Instead they kept a set of
rooms free at each hotel for guests who were on the wrong side of the country,
so they wouldn't ruin their vacation.

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doitLP
Here’s the ABC broadcast of opening day. Pretty interesting and definitely
different than it is today:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JuzrZET-3Ew](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JuzrZET-3Ew)

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ackbar03
I guess we should have given fyre festival a chance?

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pvaldes
We can expect having posts with funny trivia about Amazon and Disneland around
1 jul, 15 jul, 1 aug, 15 aug, 1 sept...

The always predictable marketing stunts to introduce the brand name in our
brains in strategic days with any minor excuse (outrage in twitter, historical
trivia...)

~~~
seisvelas
Everyone's downvoting you but your hypothesis, but I think it seems easily
falsifiable and would be fun to investigate. It might be worthwhile to do a
simple data analysis of submissions mentioning such companies around those
dates to see if the correlation exists, then do a bit more to see if how
attributable it is to marketing ploys from the companies themselves.

