Ep. 738: Don Hahn and Chris Merritt on Disneyland at 70, authors and historians on Snow White '25 vs. '37
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You're listening to Mousetalgia for the week of April 6, 2025. Hang on to them hats and glasses, cause this here's the wildest podcast in the wilderness. This is Mousetalgia. Carpe Kingdom, seize the magic.

Welcome to Nostalgia, your podcast about Disneyland, Disney history, and living the Disney life. My name is Jeff.

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All right. We have an amazing show for you this week. You know, I am still, even as I put the show together and probably as I hit launch, I'm a little torn about when to release this show. We're going to talk to Imagineer Chris Merritt and legendary Disney producer Don Hahn about their new book about Disneyland's 70th birthday anniversary. However you want to term it. That comes out on,

I think it comes out in May to D23 members who have ordered it as part of their book. I'm not exactly sure. I think the official publication date is July.

But I'm not sure when they're going to hit the ground. So I've been trying to decide when do I put this out? Because May, is it May 17? Mid-May is Disneyland's official launch of their 70th birthday celebration, right? And then July 17 is the actual 70th anniversary of Disneyland. And I plan to be there that day. Maybe I'll see some of you there. Yeah.

So I booked this interview, you know, significantly in advance in advance. And, um, I talked to Chris and Don and it's just really a lot of great information about, you know, how the book came together and really largely about their feelings and opinions about Disneyland and how they have evolved because of this book. Um, and because of this project, they were both a part of, so I, I,

I think I'm going to just go ahead and... Well, obviously, you're listening to it now. But even as I record this, I'm kind of debating. Because I have another couple shows in the can that I can put out here. But I think I'm going to go for it and give this to you now. Because we have plenty of Disneyland things to talk about before the 70th birthday or anniversary event comes up. There's not going to be a lack of Disneyland things that we can use to celebrate that event. So I think I'm going to let you listen. Because...

It just was such a phenomenal conversation. And also, then you can start planning ahead for, you know, do you want to join D23? This is not something we even addressed on the show. But if you become a D23 gold member, I think you can still decide what you want your gold member gift to be this year. And one of the options is a Disneyland plaque, a replica, of course, of the Disneyland entrance plaque alongside a copy of this amazing book. So we'll talk about it in a few minutes.

And I'm also... This is the show of... Am I really going to do that? So, am I really going to do that? And the other am I really going to do that is I think I will wade into the Snow White conversation a little bit here. Maybe as a coda. Like, Snow White is proven not to be very popular. It's going to disappear soon. Like I kind of predicted when I reviewed it the day it came out. So, not really...

surprise there, but I think it's possible to talk about some of the controversy around Snow White in an apolitical way and an interesting way with two different philosophies. And I'm going to do that by just looking at what other people have said. I'm not really going to put a lot of my own, well, I probably will put some of my own thoughts in here, but I really want to

show you some of the things that have been publicly debated online about Snow White and the pros and cons of the particular film that Disney just released and made featuring that princess. So that's what you have to look forward to in today's show. So let's go. Here you leave today to hear a podcast from the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy. Nostalgia. Carpe Diem.

I think I'm going to do things a little bit different this week and we'll see. Maybe this is something that will stick. Maybe this is a way, a good way for me to handle mouse Dodger moving forward. I don't know. You can let me know. You usually, we start the show. We have a little round table discussion. Then we have the feature presentation near the end. Right. And I think, um,

I'm, you know, more modern podcasting style is to get in and get out and let you hear what you want to hear. I have, I will tell you guys as most of you're the nostalgia audience. So you, I guess already know this, but you as an audience are very loyal to this show. Well beyond expectations that people can have for the dynamics of how the show gets listened to. So most podcasts, there's a, there's a lot of listening at the very beginning and then it has a drop off point somewhere and very few people make it to the end credits. Um,

And my nostalgia has that curve too, but it's, it's very much less of a curve than it's to be expected from a podcast like this. So I, you know, I really want to thank you for showing your interest in your support and being a part of the show and hanging in there. And, um,

Yeah, I'm really grateful for that. And I think it's I mean, I'm just making the show I would want to listen to. So I'm not surprised I found a number of you that have similar interests, you know, and so you're listening and I appreciate that. But I do think I'm going to start to try to turn things around and put the big feature up front and then we'll fill the back part with a secondary feature. We may still start with a briefer roundup, a small roundup. I'm not sure I'm not going to do that this week.

But I'm trying to start playing with the format a little bit. And I'm not really ready to announce anything here. But as a little bit of a spoiler alert, I'm going to be looking to expand the

pool of hosts and talent that appear somewhat regularly on mousetalgia so if you have ever if you have a little bit of experience with either podcasting or broadcasting or reporting or researching and you have an interest in being a part of the mousetalgia family um

Give me now. Let me know. Drop me a line at comments at nostalgia.com. And I would love to pursue that with you further. Okay. We are going to begin with a conversation about the newest Disneyland history book. And the book is called The Happiest Place on Earth. The incredible story of Walt Disney's Disneyland. And of course, as I've mentioned a number of times, it's being released in honor of Disneyland's 70th birthday. So the authors are Christopher Merritt. Chris has been on Nostalgia many times. We've heard him talk about Disney.

His various books about Knott's Berry Farm and, of course, the magnum opus about Mark Davis that I hope you all have on your bookshelves, assuming it's a strong enough shelf to actually hold this big, giant, enormous double two book set. That's Chris. And, of course, you all know Disney legend, newly named Disney legend Don Hahn, who's been on Mousetrager many times also. He's producer for Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King and a host of things. I first met Don...

20, 22 years ago, maybe in preparation, maybe 23 years ago in as the Haunted Mansion movie with Eddie Murphy was being filmed. And I was invited by Disney to come walk around the sets and talk to Rob Minkoff and Don and

And just take a look at what was going on and hear them kind of share their story about Disney and the Haunted Mansion. So that goes way back, way back. So anyway, we are going to talk now to Chris and Don again. And we're going to take a trip back to the first 15 years of Disneyland's history, which is what they cover in this amazing book. I'll scout you.

Today, we're going to talk about a brand new book about, wait for it, Disneyland. The book is called The Happiest Place on Earth, The Incredible Story of Walt Disney's Disneyland, and it's being released in honor of Disneyland's 70th birthday this year. So, I'm pleased to welcome the authors of the book to the show, Chris Smerritt and Disney legend Don Hahn. Back to Mousetalgia. Thanks, you guys, for joining us today. Hello. Hello. It's our pleasure. Thank you. So, Chris, you're going to be talking about the happy place on Earth, the incredible story of Walt Disney's Disneyland.

You know, I look back on both of you, I guess when I look back over the past 17 years of "Mostalgia," holy cow, 17 going on 18 years. I think about all the people we know who really love Disney history and are creating, you know, creative people. Your two names are obviously on the top of the list. You can judge that by the number of times you've both been on "Mostalgia." You know, Chris, I guess I'll start with you. And I'd like to hear a little bit about the origin story here. Like how did the book come together?

Yeah, and I think this caused mass confusion with you and Kristen. So the origin of this book, back in 2019, we were wrapping up work on Disney Publishing on the Mark Davis book I did with Pete Docter and Wendy Lefcon, our beautiful, wonderful, fearless publisher at Disney Publishing.

And I was thinking, well, gosh, I'd like to do something else. And so I was thinking about what I wanted to pitch. And, you know, really what a subject that I didn't know a lot about, and I still don't, but I know more today than I did, is early Disneyland. You know, I never really dove too deep into that. And so I thought, well, gosh, what I'd like to do is I'd like to actually propose something

book series that would all like fit in a slipcase. So it would be like, you know, the first five lands of Disneyland and maybe a sixth volume that would be a volume called Lost Lands. And then maybe put out one a year and they'd be like 150 pages. So you could really like really dive in and really spend some time with it. Kind of like the old e-ticket magazines did with their articles. And, you know, and have it be in a slipcase and you could do it slowly over like five or six years was my idea.

And so I thought, okay, well, I need to put some sort of a mock-up together. So I mocked up a Fantasyland one because I'm very interested in Fantasyland history and, you know, doing the Sleeping Beauty Castle walkthrough with Tony. And I'm fascinated, especially with the early dark rides because I have these memories as a little kid in the 70s just...

these very like, you know, Zapruder esque, you know, memories of, of the flashes of these rides, but you know, just the, the, the, the black light and these, these little, just, just fascinating to me. My memories were very, very strange about those. So I wanted to explore those.

So I mocked up a thing about a Fantasyland volume. So I think I told you and Kristen and just said, hey, you know, I'm going to start with this Fantasyland thing. And so I think you guys later were like, hey, he's doing a book on Fantasyland. I was like, but anyway, so that's where I was starting with it.

And I was kind of pitching it to publishing and like, okay, well, let's get the Mark Davis book out. But then, you know, so by the time 2020 rolls around, I'm like, okay, well, I really want to pitch this thing now. And we all know what happened in 2020. So I spent a couple months, you know, and it wasn't really getting anywhere with it. And so I've known Don for a long time. And, yeah.

you know, I was basically called him up and was crying to him like, you know, why is it, you know, why am I not getting the deal? Why is this not happening? And so Don said to me, and Don, please correct me if I'm misremembering, but I think you had said,

You know, I had another book project in the works, but I decided I'm not going to do that. And so have you thought about maybe pairing up? And I thought, God, that'd be great. You know, it'd be just kind of, you know, like Pete and I did on the Mark Davis book. So I said, I thought that would be wonderful. But I think, Don, you had suggested that we just do it all on Disneyland. Yeah.

And I said, okay, I said, well, I'm not really breaking through, you know, and I said, what I really want to concentrate is the time that Walt was with us, right? Like the first 15 years, because that's the era that I know the least about.

or at least for sure the 50s. And so we kind of, I think mutually decided to pitch it that way. And when we pitched it as this is the time that Walt was with us, right? Where he was deeply involved and ingrained in every decision and basically the creative director for the whole park, you know, the buck stopped with Walt. And so everything that was being done

was through him, I think they responded really well to that. And then I'd hoped, you know, I thought, I wasn't sure, but I thought, you know, if the timing works out the way I think it might, we might actually be able to put this out during the 70th anniversary. And if that's the case, then maybe we'll get a bigger book with a bigger page count out of it. So that's, thankfully, that's what happened. Because even though I...

Don, I think you had said, you know, we could have easily done a book twice as big. Yeah, I mean, you said it. It was a Walt kind of hook that got me involved because I just don't think that's been written about. And our good friend Tony Baxter early on said another book about Disneyland, and he was absolutely right. You know, there's been a lot of really great books about Disneyland. Yeah.

But just saying, this is during Walt's lifetime, and what was the origin story? And for me, it was so much about animation, because Walt kind of pilfered all these guys and girls out of the animation ranks away from the films to the clogged coats of the world to help design the park. And that was pretty fascinating to me. I mean, I'm certainly not an Imagineer, and I'm hardly a historian, but I feel like what an amazing story that was of how that all came together. Yeah, Don, you look at the history of Disneyland,

the path that leads Walt Disney to creating this park, the idea of movies, television, filmmaking, it's right around every corner, right? From financing the park to marketing the park and the people that were the first Imagineers that designed the park, all tied in with media and filmmaking. So Don, like, I'm wondering, can you connect a few dots? Like how much of Disneyland is Walt's dream for making this better than ever amusement park, you know, the Griffith Park story and how much of it is a continuation of his fascination with the media?

Well, he was a filmmaker. He came to Hollywood to be a director and worked in live action, actually, and didn't really want to take up animation, but he was kind of forced to when he couldn't make money or get a job at another studio. So he's always been a filmmaker, which basically is saying he's always been a storyteller. I think what separates Disney from Disneyland from anything is its characters and story.

And so what was remarkable to me is everybody says, and especially at the time, they said, you know, Walt Disney, you don't know anything about amusement parks. Why are you doing this? It's going to be a huge money loser, including his own board of directors at Walt Disney Productions. They were like, what are you doing? This is really stupid. But what Walt knew better than anybody was how to tell a story and that that's what would get people to drive out away from the smog in Los Angeles to Anaheim. And what he really built was a movie backlot.

I mean, that's as simply as I can say it. And he built it not with architects, but with set designers. So if you look at who built Disneyland, and Chris, you weigh in here too, but people like Sam McKim and, you know, that he pulled in that were either just from Fox or had, you know, just come from other studios. Yeah. They designed it, and it was time travel. It was like, here's a movie backlot.

And the plan initially was to shoot there. We can actually go there. We can shoot Frontierland movies. We can shoot Jungle Cruise adventure movies, that kind of stuff. They did very little of that in the end, but that initial time travel of...

Come see Victorian Main Street, come see Adventureland, come see Fantasyland was a big movie backlot with lots of stories to tell and lots of really authentic time travel. When you went to Main Street, they only allowed companies on Main Street who had been in business for 50 years because they had to have been there at the turn of the century. They didn't want anything inauthentic on Main Street.

I mean, just that level of detail. He hired Rene Connolly, who was a costume designer in Hollywood, who went on to get the Oscar for designing the costumes on Cleopatra, to design all the costumes. So here, film designers and set designers and people from the industry were working on designing the park, along with

all the animators, you know, guys like Ken Anderson were down there all the time designing and in some cases literally standing on scaffolding and painting things. It was an amazing motion picture accomplishment that people don't really realize. I think, you know, early on too, he had had like, you know, architectural firms like Luckman and Pereira who like, you know, have done a lot of the Googie architecture you see in Southern California and other firms. And I think one of the, I recall one of the memos that Don and I found in the archives was Roy Disney,

telling them to stand down rather quickly, like, you know, because I think Walt realized rather quickly, I'm not going to get what I want from architects. What I need is motion picture set designers, people who understand things like forced perspective and diminishing perspective and whimsy and putting something that has, you know, uh,

shape language that implies you know um some sort of you know uh vernacular that that helps with with the time period that he's trying to sell you on whether it's main street or adventure land or frontier land or tomorrowland which no one knows what it is so i think you know that was really brilliant of him because he's waltz at the end of the day he's selling romance you know he's he's

He's selling factual wrapped in a big bow of romance and nostalgia and whimsy and with a light veneer of education. I would say all these things, right? And so who better to do that than people who design films for a living, who design sets, who design these wonderful, beautiful, magical, idealized places.

That was kind of a genius of Walt to do that. Because I think before that, you know, you didn't really, I don't know, you know, you have amusement parks, which are, you know, for the most part, kind of tacky and not well planned out and designed, certainly. Unless you go back to some of these like really early parks, like Luna Park and Dreamland and things in Coney Island that have some really beautiful architecture. But really, it's really, it's a motion picture thing, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I do want to kind of dig into a couple of – you started talking a little bit about the content here, and I have a couple questions about that. But, Chris, if I can pull you back just a little bit to talk about the book a little bit more. Yeah.

All of a sudden, I had pictures of I think we're all old enough to remember you could buy the encyclopedia a volume at a time in the grocery store for like a dollar fifty. Like if I could, if we could have like an encyclopedia of Disney books for a dollar fifty each at the grocery store. That's what you made me think of. It's such a ridiculous. And everyone had them, too. And they took up like a city block, you know, like just like, yeah, it was that whole shelf. Like, we're going to use these. We're definitely going to use these. Yeah. So you're you're talking about the book and

Like you've mentioned, it's going to be the first 15 years or so of Disneyland's existence. And so, Mastalgia listeners, you know, we have told these stories a million times. Disneyland was built in the year. Opening day was a disaster. You know, all these stories. So, plenty of Disneyland history books. But we know that you wanted to go...

past the press release here. So for the skeptical Disneyland book collector who has seven books about Disneyland, what's well, what's different here? Sure. So again, and this is, you know, I'm sure Don was sick of me saying this throughout the project, but like, you know, my, my, my, if I could humble brag, you know, a hallmark of the books that I work on is I work very hard to dig up things that people have not seen before or have rarely seen before. Um,

That's kind of important to me because I feel like you're retreading the same territory again and why do it. So that was a real important thing for me on this project and I think we've got quite a lot in there that people have not seen before. And I can talk specifics if you'd like, but I mean also aside from uncovering photos and concept art that have either been rarely seen or in a lot of instances never seen before.

Um, Don mentioned Renee Conley, you know, who did all the opening year costumes, you know, we have a big two page spread on her. I mean, she, she, you know, she worked as Don said, you know, on gone with the wind. Um, I, I'm really interested in, uh,

Educating is too formal of a word, but I'm really interested in lifting up a lot more of these secondary and tertiary early Imagineers that a lot of people may not have heard of that really frankly deserve a lot more credit. So people like Renee Conley,

I think people like Gabe Scognamello, who was the art director of Tomorrowland, who's kind of fascinating to me. The biggest one in my mind for sure is Ruth Shellhorn, and maybe some of your listeners have heard of her before. But she comes in four months before the park opens. And while the Evans brothers are consumed with the Jungle Cruise and Adventureland,

and dealing with all the landscaping for that. She basically landscape architect directs the entire rest of the park in four months brilliantly. I mean, there are these incredible photos. She donated her diaries and all her drawings and her slides. Was it UCLA, Don, where those are at? Yeah, and she really wasn't that well-known until recently, until they started to publicize her work. Yeah.

She was a crucial member. And of course, the weird thing is she didn't start until the year the park opened. But she was a landscape architect, whereas the Evans brothers were nurserymen and brilliant at what they did. But she was able to say, oh, you're missing pedestrian flow. You're missing escape routes. You're missing the design of the house.

of refining the hub and that kind of thing. - The biggest thing for me is, well, not the biggest thing, there are many, many big things, but there was a bandstand on Main Street where the flagpole is now, and we've got a photo of it in the book, like they've installed it, and she talks Walt out of it, and they move it to the left of the castle.

And, you know, it was really smart of her to do that because it blocks that wonderful view of the castle that you all get when you enter Main Street for the first time. She was just a really first-class, top-shelf designer, and they were lucky to have her. And, you know, she's driving... I just, I don't know, like, I picture her, you know, she's driving surface streets from Pasadena to Anaheim because there's no freeway yet, right? Like, every day down to this dusty work site, dressed...

to the nines, you know, business attire, tromping around the work site, probably one of the few women on the work site, and then going all the way back to her studio in Pasadena, and I'm doing these beautiful master development drawings of the landscaping. It's just, I don't know, she's incredible, and very few people know about her. So there's others too, right, Don? I mean, I think we...

we, we don't, I mean, for sure. And, and they tend to be lost or overwhelmed by other stories and that's fine. But I think that's one of the things that I really, uh, Chris and I wanted to do is to at least mention those names and bring them out of the shadows a little bit because their contributions were absolutely huge. Um, you know, in, in every way. And there's some brand names we know, uh, and rightly so the Bob Gurz of the world who certainly is worthy, um,

But there's equal contributors along the way that we want to shine a light on. I want to ask you about the time frame that Disneyland was planted in, the mid-century here. Can you maybe remind us, I know most Moustache listeners have read your book and have looked at yesterday's Tomorrow, but...

I'm wondering if you can kind of remind us about how Disneyland's architecture and like the offerings, the attractions were influenced by the culture of the era. And if I can throw in this twist, like, is that mid-century culture primarily American? Were there international elements to this? Because we know, of course, Tivoli Gardens, right? That's

But then the Chicago Railroad Fair is Americana. I vote pretty strongly. So can you tell how Walt distilled all this when he was coming up with these thoughts and ideas? A lot about it is West Coast, California, post-war. It's all about that.

America came out of World War II in a really positive situation. Families were flooding home from the Pacific and from Europe, young families. And so what was happening in Southern California is there was absolute boom of architecture, optimism, bright colors, optimism.

and we can do it kind of mentality. And that showed up in specifically in housing developments, like there's entire cities like Lakewood, California that are designed, you know, kind of like Epcot, um, you know, with a central hub of a shopping center and houses built around it. Um, and then you had all these brand new families coming in and it was a moment of opportunity for people to either build or entertain that group of people. And it was a huge, huge time for that. Um,

And that manifests itself as modern architecture. Architects flooded into Southern California. Some of them were refugees from Europe from the Second World War or the First World War. And architects like Schindler and Neutra and even Frank Lloyd Wright and most particularly his son, Lloyd Wright, came into Southern California and kind of contributed this architecture of horizontal steel and glass homes and buildings because steel and glass weren't available during the war, but now they were.

So modernist mid-century architecture is all huge glass windows and horizontal big overhangs, which was involved and inspired by Japanese architecture. So you had indoor-outdoor living, which was very Japanese. You had barbecues, the family pool, you had all those things. And Walt Disney's in the middle of it. I mean, and we say this in the book with no disrespect to anyone, but more than Chicago, Kansas City, or Marceline, Southern California is the place that Walt really bonded with.

as did his artists and all of his artists were returning from the war. All of his artists, including the Mary Blairs of the world, were having their houses built by these amazing brand name architects. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston had their houses built by these brand name architects. So the idea of a ranch house, indoor outdoor living, bright colors, optimism, young families, the house of tomorrow,

That's Southern California in this era. It's also a place where there's still cheap land. You can still look at the suburbs and Disney looked everywhere. I think there's a lot of mythology that we wanted to correct in the book. It wasn't just about Anaheim. It certainly wasn't about a Mickey Mouse park opposite the studio, although it started as that. But in our research with the archives, Walt never really called it a Mickey Mouse park. That's kind of a late new invention.

He loved the idea of, you know, universal city studios where people could visit the studio and tour, which is something he did in 1923 when he came to Los Angeles. But it was pretty clear right away that the freeway was going to go through that land and it just wasn't going to work. They looked everywhere. They looked in Chatsworth. They looked in three sites in Orange County and finally found a bunch of land cobbled together from, I think, 11 different owners there.

one of which owned a little midget racing track that was on the land and a trailer manufacturing place and a walnut Grove and an orange Grove and said, Oh, this will do. And, uh, and bought it all up under assumed names. So that idea of growth and optimism and new architecture money, Los Angeles remember was the number one oil producing city in the United States at the time, which nobody remembers. Um,

And so there's a lot of money here. Aerospace was based in Los Angeles. Returning troops from the Pacific, the movie business, all that added up to an opportunity. And that's where Walt saw first television as the opportunity and television then turned into Disneyland. Wow.

You know, I'd be remiss to, and I know this is veering a little away from your question, Jeff, but I got to say, like, how gobsmacked and impressed I was with the things that Don dug up about not just the ABC deal, but in particular the Chicago Railroad Fair. I mean, you know, he found...

pictures that I hadn't seen before of the fair. And, you know, it's really like it feels to me, and I think, Don, you do maybe agree that, you know, like Walt is flirting with this idea of this park in the 40s and various dribs and drabs, not really seriously, but but he goes to the Chicago Railroad Fair with with Ward Kimball and

And comes back basically like on fire, right? And writes this big memo describing what is basically Disneyland. And so we've got some excerpts of that in the book. But, you know, Don found, you know, the guest book where Walt signed his name. And, you know, just photos I've never seen before. And it just...

It's fascinating to me to picture, you know, also it's just, it had to have been somewhat awkward for Kimball because it's an employer-employee relationship, but they're also kind of going as buddies, right? How do you like, you know, how do you deal with that? I don't know how I deal with that, but yeah.

And they go to Greenfield Village. And where else do they go, Don? They go to a couple places. Yeah. And I mean, what's amazing, what Chris is saying is a week after he gets back, he writes this multi-page memo. Yeah. And that 1948 memo, if you read it, you go, oh, that's Disneyland. Yeah. No funding, doesn't know how he's going to build it or where.

But I think it's, as Chris was saying, it's something that was brewing in his mind for a long, long time. And the railroad fare really triggered him. And it had everything Disneyland had, a frontier village and Old Faithful Geyser, an Indian village, and, you know, pretty much everything.

that was at the railroad fair turned into inspiration for Disneyland. And he's just like, I'm going to do this. It's not like a question. We are doing this. And then also, I don't think most people realize the shareholders revolted. I mean, it was like a bad deal. I mean, eventually, the WED, which is the early Imagineers, have to go off the lot and move down the road to Glendale.

to Flower Street. But, you know, for the first, you know, several years, you know, they're operating out of the studio and he's doing this thing, you know, he's basically competing with himself.

So it was a strange thing, I think. But I don't think people just think, oh, he just did it and it was wonderful and all that. No, I'm a theme park designer, so I look at the time frame on this. And really, when you look at, we had this wealth of memos from the archives that they saved so many of all the Dick Irvine memos. And for those of your listeners who don't know, Dick Irvine was kind of the Marty Scalar before Marty Scalar.

And, you know, he saved everything, you know, mimeographs. And so you really realize when you're reading these things, yes, they're talking about it, they're planning, they're gearing up, you know, people like Marvin Davis are doing master plans, working towards it, but they don't really, really lock in on like, we're going, we're going into like serious design. I'm going to say until

maybe mid 54, it feels like or early 54. Like, I mean, really, that's bananas for a Greenfield, like theme park, like, that's a 10 year project. It just is, you know, and and to do it basically in a year or a year and a quarter. It's crazy pants is what it is. And so and the fact that they succeeded as well as they did is it's amazing. So

Well, I'll tell you, Chris, you might think that I've seen this book, but the first, I don't know, in the first 50 pages, probably 30 of them are redacted. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of nudity. And, you know, it's just. Yeah. So we the point being, I don't want to actually I don't want to talk too much about what's in there because you're right. It's it's it is a good like this is something that.

that we haven't seen before. But I will say, I do want to like, so let's dive into, indulge me for a moment, the Haunted Mansion section of the book, because... You like that attraction, Jeff? You've heard... I didn't know that. You've...

Yeah, I do actually. And I liked what you did here, you know, in this book, it has finally, we got that picture of the hat box ghost published for the world to see. Right. So that's kind of awesome. I do want to ask you both about this. Like let's narrow in on Disneyland for a minute here. The very end of these 15 years that you're talking about haunted mansion gets really gets opened up. Right.

So you both have a very specific insights in the Haunted Mansion for different reasons, right? I just want to ask you both the biggest, broadest question in the world. So the Haunted Mansion is inspired movies. The main thing it's inspired is a lifestyle line of not just merchandise, but collectibles, art,

usable household goods what is it about the haunted mansion that is different from every other disneyland attraction oh my gosh i i'm gonna um i'm gonna steal from uh dan olson who does the brilliant long forgotten uh blog um and just say that the haunted mansion is lightning in a bottle

I think it's this perfect convergence of these disparate elements that Walt brought together and then, and it might have been very different if he'd lived to do, you know, production and installation on it, which he did not.

bringing in Mark Davis and bringing in Claude Coates and the mix of that, you know, the light and the humor mixed with the spooky. But also, you know, boots on the ground Imagineers who were doing the install, like, you know, people like Bill Martin. And I mean, we'd be remiss to not mention, you know, Roley Crump's Museum of the Weird, which I'm, you know, thankful we got a two-page spread on and Roley kind of recounts his whole story of that.

And even like, I mean, I don't want to digress, but like, you know, we've made sure to put a good amount of Dorothea Redmond watercolors throughout this book. There's some lovely Main Street things too. But I mean, she, you know, she worked on Gone with the Wind. I mean, that's like incredible. So many people, Colin Campbell. I mean, I just...

It's hard for me to put into words because if there is any such thing as a perfect attraction, and I'm certainly biased, to me, that's kind of it. It just balances everything kind of perfectly is what I would say about it. Don, I don't know. What do you think? You should be talking about that someday, Don. I agree. I agree. I mean, first of all, it's a magic show.

More than any other attraction, I remember being a kid, you go through there, you just don't know how stuff is done. We're all grown up and we've been through it a thousand times, and so we can tell you. But boy, when you're a virgin rider, you're going, first of all, I don't understand this ride vehicle. Secondly, how did they do that? And it's really a head-scratcher. Secondly, it investigates in a really entertaining way.

a whole part of life that we don't talk about or see very often. You know, we talk about Frontierland, we talk about Jungle Cruise as well. So it's very earthbound. This is not earthbound. It's about, you know, a kind of storytelling version of the spirit world. And I think that's fascinating to us. So that along with the magic trick and kind of the storytelling of it all, you know, a simple character like a gravedigger with a lantern and a skinny little dog in the middle of it,

There's not a big narrative about him, but boy, that was a cool character. When I was a kid or the raven that looks down on you when the Doomobile tilts back, those things are like life memories, but because you had never seen them before. You had never been in a ride vehicle like that before. So that magic trick of the whole place, I think, is what really attracted me.

Me and I think everybody. That's that's so interesting. You know, one thing that was important to me, too, was, you know, under under the umbrella of let's do new stuff. You know, I remember, Don, I don't know if you remember this, but I remember telling, you know, Wendy Lefcon early on. Well, let's not do pirates and Haunted Mansion because I feel like, you know, the Mark Davis book just covered that so exhaustively thoroughly. And I don't want to repeat myself there.

and she's like well you kind of have to and i'm like you know the the you know the readers are expecting that and i get that so what we came to was at least where the mansion is concerned i said can we at least explore

the Ken Anderson walkthrough version a lot more than has been explored previously. Because it's only, you know, a lot of these things have only been kind of shown in little dribs and drabs and out of context. And so, you know, it was, there's a series of rough little storyboards that kind of, and then a bunch of the Ken Anderson artwork that matches up. There's a plan view, there's a prospectus that hardcore Mansion fans have probably seen. So we have the plan view of that

And you can actually match, if you look at some of the captions, you can match up some of the concept art with the scene. So you get a real sense of what the Ken Anderson walkthrough was going to be. But even things like...

you know, we were really on the hunt and probably drove everyone crazy looking for not-before-seen concept art. So like the idea that, I believe Ken Anderson did this, a lot of this artwork that we found is not signed, so we're taking our most educated guess, but going into the train, you know, past the mansion, there was a whole tombs and catacombs that was going to be seen in there at one point with a sign that said, "Beware of the haunted catacombs," or something. So we've got that in the book.

So I think, you know, all that is interesting stuff to explore. And of course, we do have some, of course, Mark Davis and Claude Coates and things that you would expect in there. But we have some other things that you probably wouldn't expect, too. And so that excites me to look at different things on it.

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't know if both of you know this, but Dan Olson and I, Dan Olson's a theologian. I'm a church pianist. We both live in San Jose. I don't know if there's something in the water, but the 200 matching guys. Oh, I didn't know that was in San Jose. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, people expecting, you know, tattoos and goths are going to be...

sorely disappointed. Let's see. So let's, I'll start bringing this to a close here. I do have, I guess, an inside baseball, a little bit question that you both can answer however you want, but I would like to know a little bit about your book writing process. So Chris, you've talked about your time writing,

I don't know what you want to talk about this, but searching for stuff in the archives. Right. And Don, you mentioned in the acknowledges that any of the acknowledgments of the book that you have insomniac writing habits. So I'm just curious if you both could share just a little picture of your experience kind of creating the book.

I do have insomniac writing habits. I mean, I'm a little ADD, so I think a lot of the world is a confusing mess in my brain during the day. But when the sun goes down, for some reason, I really focus on these things. And, you know, Chris would bring up these topics and issues, and then I would try to go out and grab research that we had done, but also find things out in the world with our great researcher, Amy Rogers, and try to populate the writing with those kinds of things.

And I was really big, and so was Chris, really, on telling a story that wasn't just this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. I wanted to capture these Imagineers and people we had never met before and talk about why. Why did they do this? Why Anaheim?

you know, why Pirates of the Caribbean? Why anything in Disneyland? And then the how would fit in if we understood the why, if we understood the times, if we understood the television was just on the cusp, if we understood that there was a Supreme Court ruling that took away the rights of theaters, of studios to own their own theaters.

if we understood that movie studios hated television and wouldn't allow their actors to perform in television except for Walt Disney. And he said, oh, great, I'll grab television. Yeah, I didn't know that. That was fascinating to me that you dug that up, Don. Like, I was like, oh, really? Like, I didn't know that. Like, that was amazing. So that stuff lights me up. And then Chris, I think, and you can speak for yourself, but I think what lights him up is those, man, you haven't heard this story before or you haven't seen this before. And that got me excited. So I think that we would go back and forth

I'm a very visual person, so there would be a piece of artwork we would find or something interesting visually, and that kind of fit into the storytelling we were doing. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I mean, if you want to sum up my research slash writing process, it's flood the zone, I would say. Yeah.

Which is both good and bad. I mean, the bad of it is, you know, my, I guess if I have to ascribe a theory to it is I just want to see everything. I want to put everything in a big freaking pile because I want to see everything. Because if I don't see everything that I can't find, like the common thread or the storytelling thread, I feel like I'm missing something. So I actually like...

I actually get like, you know, almost like stomach aches over it because I sit there going, what did I miss? Like, what did I miss? So the problem with that is, is like you start drowning in material and especially like, you know, I had this ridiculous notion in my head that I was going to go through and transcribe every single Dick Irvine memo from like 1953 to, you know, 1969 or whatever.

Which is just insane and I did a lot of it right like I mean what did that document end up being like done like 500,000 pages crazy The most amazing Disneyland book that will never be seen by anyone is yeah Chris wrote as a foundation document Yeah, cuz but but but and then but then you know for me like I'm trying to like go okay like okay We're talking about the first 15 years of Disneyland and first of all you think about like the first 15 years of Disneyland You're like, okay

You could do that in a 340-page book, no problem. But no, especially like, gosh, Tomorrowland. Tomorrowland is such a beast of a chapter. And even a lot of the 1967 stuff kind of got really winnowed down. So it's overwhelming, at least for me. And I just have to sit with it and just keep plowing at it. And so try to get that in some sort of way that's organized or coherent, because the problem with that is

Yeah, you've got this big pile of information and there's little nuggets of gold locked within it, but you've got to find a way to access that. I mean, I'm sure it was overwhelming for you, Don, when I'd send you these big, like long Word documents where like they were just like,

It's too much to read. Early on, that's one thing. But then when you're getting to deadlines and you have to start actually writing and turning things in, then it becomes you really need to be a lot more organized. And so that's where I struggle is I really like getting it in an organized fashion. So I guess for us, the best...

the easiest and the only way to approach it in terms of like how the book is laid out. The book is just laid out, you know, once we get past Walt planning and getting the park open, it really is how you would experience walking through Disneyland if you went, you know, down Main Street and counterclockwise.

And then I still wanted that lost lands, all the things they didn't do at the end. And then at a certain point, it was decided, let's take all these ideas that weren't done and put them in their appropriate land chapters, which is what we did. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's a huge, you know, Wizard of Oz section in fantasy. Oh, my gosh.

We haven't even talked about Uranium Hunt. Oh my god. Did you look at that yet, Jeff? Everybody needs a good Uranium Hunt. Oh my gosh, Jeff. They were going to... Claude Coates designed this Uranium Hunt thing. They were going to hand out Geiger counters and

And they had real radioactive uranium embedded in the rock work as you walked through this slot canyon that Coates designed. And then at the end, you were going to give a souvenir piece of radioactive uranium. This makes me feel better about my desire to collect uranium glass, which I think is, you know, even that my wife's a little bit. I don't know. Yeah.

But I do have one last question for you both. So you're obviously both well-versed in both the storied history of Disneyland and the actual history of Disneyland. So did writing this book, here's the classic question, did writing this book in any way change either of your views or thoughts or what you thought you knew or your perspective on Disneyland, either of Disneyland of yesterday or Disneyland of today? In every way.

There was one day we spent together, I mean, like hats off to the archives and the archives at Imagineering who gave us unprecedented access. I don't know why they did it, but that was it. But we went around the studio one day with, with Tom Morris, great Imagineering historian. We walked into rooms like crazy.

But this is where Mr. Lincoln was in this picture. See the picture of Walt with Mr. Lincoln? It was right there and all in the studio lot. Or this is where the Pope's stables were in the back of the Burbank studio before they moved to... So being able to do this kind of hands-on, this is a room where it happened, is life-changing for me. Because I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. I grew up at Disneyland.

like all of us, but being able to actually be in those rooms was wonderful and spooky and, and moving. But you, I mean, it must've been especially meta for you, Don, because you worked at the studio for so many years. So to be like, you probably walked by some of these rooms a million times before, not because I didn't ever work there. I worked at, but you, the one E wing, the first floor of Disney where Imagineering was, I mean, I started in 1970.

70s, God, almost 50 years ago, working for Wally Reitherman and working in animation. I used to walk by there every day on the way to the volleyball courts. And I never knew what was in there because during my era, it was accountants and lawyers and things like that. And the animators were in the A, B, and C wing. But to know that that's where this stuff was designed, not in Glendale, but

But in Burbank, and the mock-ups of the rides were done in Burbank on sound stages, and the stagecoaches and the vehicles were tested in Burbank, driving around the studio. You know, to be there and say, wow, I had no idea that this is the history of this place beyond what I already knew about animation was mind-blowing. Yeah, it was special for me. But I guess for me...

I'm always wanting to learn more about because I'm such a nerd for especially like dark ride and attraction design, right? That's my favorite thing to work on. So anything I can learn about adventure through inner space or submarine voyage or nature's wonderland, I'm like, I'm there with bells on. But the thing that really strikes me about this whole project and even like other books I did like Pacific Ocean Park book, you know, like where I'm like, you know, there are art directors and designers and

and managers and producers, like all you know, like basically like, you know, a mini studio, like trying to get this thing designed and built and open on time on budget. And that's the world that I deal with. And so when you're when you're looking at like, the design process, you know, where they're iterating, and early on, and they're just throwing stuff at the wall, like they're just like, well, what about this? Well, what about that? Or what about this? Or one of the great

There's a great bit. Thank gosh. There was, you know, there's not, there's not a lot of great documentation like there is for feature animation of like meetings with Walt where he's, he's, you know, he's riffing and he's talking where there were stenographers taking notes, but there's a really interesting meeting with Ward Kimball and Walt and, and,

a couple of the scientists for the man in space series. And they start talking about the rocket to the moon ride and what they're going to do and how it's going to go. And so that's fascinating to me because I'm like, oh my gosh, like that's, and you know, Walt's just kind of throwing out ideas and saying, oh, and you know, what about this thing? And kids will like it because of this. And so I'm just, I'm really reminded of like blue sky and like, you know, early concept meetings that I'll have with people where we're, we're ideating on something and coming up with the idea for a new attraction or a land and,

I think that's why I hope the book is different for your audience and for everybody, because Chris and I are both makers. You know, I make movies, Chris makes experiences, and that's how we pulled this book together. And so what attracts us, because we're not historians with all respect to historians, is that we are unbelievably moved and inspired by how things were made by these people who didn't know they couldn't do it.

Walt would say, you're going to go design this attraction. And it wasn't like, yes or no. It's like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. But they were either naive or fearless in terms of

not saying no and just saying, "Yeah, you know, we'll give it a try. We'll give it our best." And they ended up designing this amazing, culture-changing park that we all still live with. I think there's a lineage there, you know. So I think, I don't know, Don, if you ever think about this because you're such a great filmmaker and this wonderful history of the imagination, like there's this lineage that goes back of these people that came before you and some of whom you were able to work with and some of whom you never got to know.

And for me, I was lucky enough to know a few of my heroes, Mark and Alice and Roley and some of those people, and worked with a few people. But a lot of them, I never got to meet Claude Coates. I never got to meet Ken Anderson once. You probably worked with Ken. He was upstairs. So I think that's really true. And they were generous. They were generous to both of us. And I think...

It's an unspoken thing, but I think both of us want to be generous with our audience to pass on a lot. Yeah, I think about these things and I think about like

like i think about me as a little kid in the 70s going to disneyland all the time and knott's berry farm and kind of growing up with it and loving it and at a certain point going boy i wonder if i could do that like how do you do that and like trying to explore and figure out like how do you do that like how do you what do they do when they design something how do they do that and so this book that we've done i'd like to hope that there's some 10 year old kid somewhere right now who's looking at this and she she gets our book and she goes wow

Ruth Shellhorn, like she was a badass landscape architect. Look what she did in four months or look, you know, or look, look what Bruce Bushman did, you know, and oh my gosh, he didn't just do like fantasy land. He did like all this stuff on main street and in tomorrow land like that. I wonder if I could do that. Like, if you think there's some little kid somewhere and it sets their brain on fire, maybe they're going to be the next designer, you know, of the future. And that makes me feel really good. Cause that's, that's passing the torch on. Cause that was us.

Wow. The book is called The Happiest Place on Earth, The Incredible Story of Walt Disney's Disneyland. Don and Chris, thank you so much for joining us on Nostalgia today. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. Who's the team behind the show you're listening to today? M-O-U-S-E-G-A-L-G-I-A. You're listening to Nostalgia. Hashtag Carpe Kingdom. Hashtag Seize the Magic. Yeah, yeah.

So I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Chris and Don. It's such a privilege to talk to them. I mean, Chris and I, we just, and you'll hear some of this in an upcoming show, we just sat down for chicken dinner at Knott's Bride Farm a few weeks ago, and we just talked and talked and talked about more of the history of the show.

history of this book talked a lot about some of the things he's doing right now some of the projects he's working on right now talked about the history of the boysenberry like chris can tell a story um with so much detail that you'll learn you're guaranteed to learn something new when you hear talk to him and then don don you could ask don

can you tell me the story of the wallpaper peeling off of this wall? And he will somehow make that into some kind of an interesting, fascinating story, right? So I am just super honored that I got to talk to them again. Hopefully you'll be able to find this book. Well, you will, it'll be out. I believe they're going to print quite a few copies. So get yourself a copy of this book when you have a chance. It really is something new. Like I, you know, like I mentioned on the interview a little bit, I've had a preview of,

a digital preview, which was a lot of the stuff is still even blocked out on the digital preview because they are really hiding. I mean, Chris told me what a lot of it is, but they are really trying to keep secret some of these things that have never been seen before. And I think that's pretty cool. You know, Chris did tell me like, Hey, you know, some of this stuff is,

You know, there's a difference between what Disney has officially released before and what fans have like, you know, scuttled around before online. So he said some of the things he thinks have been here and there, but he, but generally speaking, there's a lot of stuff in here that you've never seen before. And, um, I can attest to that. Even the things they did let us see some of it is really amazing new stuff.

So you will not be so if you're a Disney history fan or a Disneyland fan or any kind of person that takes interest in the goings on of the Disney company, you're going to love this book. All right. So let's talk about Snow White. So Snow White did not do very well. It's starting to fade in the theaters. I don't we're not going to talk about the numbers. They're not what Disney hoped for.

They are pretty proof positive that the public was not super interested in this film for some reason. And a little bit of what we're going to talk about here is what people think that may be. You know, why could that be?

There's a simple political answer that a lot of people are throwing around that they just disagreed with a lot of the things that Rachel Zegler said from a political point of view. And I will say off the bat, those kind of things get a lot of online play, but I don't know if that's really the answer to why the public at large just has shown disinterest in this film. So it's a more interesting question, I think, than just like, well, she said some offensive things. Although,

The things that Rachel said about the movie itself, the original 1937 Snow White itself, are very much a part of this conversation. So I'm going to kind of revisit some of that. Because you'll remember, if you listen to my review, I didn't really know a lot of what she had said. I had heard some of it a year ago or more, but I wasn't really trying to remember any of that. And I've kind of refreshed my memory a little bit. And it was a little bit more striking than I maybe made it sound in my review, some of the things she said.

So we're going to talk about that a little bit, and then we're going to hear from some industry experts here as to kind of what they think went on here. So we're going to spill the tea here a little bit, right? So this is going to be conversations from a few different people that I feel like have voices worth listening to. So first and foremost, I'm going to frame this around some public posts on Facebook that.

from one of my Facebook friends whose name is Chris Lucas. I don't know Chris. I've never met him and I don't even know if we've had direct conversation. We're, of course, obviously linked by the Disney fandom community and he's a Disney author. Also, he wrote a book called Top Disney, 100 Top 10 Lists of the Best of Disney from the Man to the Mouse and Beyond.

which is a really cool book because it's kind of like David Letterman top 10 lists, just all sorts of lists of Disney history and Disney topics listed into like the top 10 items in that, in that topic. Right. And so it's a really conversation starter type book or really kind of gets you thinking deeper about Disney, that kind of book. He wrote that book and he also has a Facebook page called top Disney. So yeah,

And on those pages, Chris has been taking the pro Snow White 2025 film position. Like he enjoyed the film. He has a lot of things to say in defense of the film. So I'm going to kind of spell that out a little bit. Now, I will say Chris is also a very political guy. I think he leans a little progressive. But I'm not going to really talk. Sometimes his arguments kind of blur those lines. I'm not going to go into politics at all. I'll say...

I tend to like the way Chris describes things a lot. He's very clear and very concise in his descriptions. He chooses his words carefully. And so I don't always agree with his perspective because I don't think I've ever read anything he's written about Disney that wasn't

In favor of it. Like, I don't think I've ever seen him criticize anything from Disney. It doesn't mean he doesn't have critical thoughts about it, but he's never said anything like that publicly. And he comes out and admits on a lot of his posts and things like, Hey, you know,

If you want to work in this industry, you make friends, not enemies. Right. So it's, you know, you can take that for what it's worth. But I thought he had a good way of framing, like how people do look at this movie in support of the creative decisions that Disney made. So this is I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, but this is a post that Chris made.

on his top Disney Facebook page. So he says, I love live action Snow White. He says, I know many Disney purists didn't because they see it as trying to erase or disparage the original. While I respect their opinion, I don't see it that way. The creators and casts of the live action Snow White had respect for and paid homage to their predecessor, which is an undeniable masterpiece of cinema, even if parts of it haven't aged well in 88 years. And you're going to hear me come in and out. I hope it

makes sense. But that little phrase that he says, the parts of it haven't aged well there, that might not sit well with some people, but we'll leave that for now. He says it also gave a little more clarity to the love story, which was incomplete in 1937. So that's also maybe a little debatable from certain points of view. So he says in the original story outlines developed through conferences at Disney and Walt's twist on the classic fairy tale, Snow White, the prince who was invited to the kingdom by the queen who hopes to marry him says,

Meet by accident in a case of mistaken identity where she's mocking royalty by putting a bucket on the head of a scarecrow and calling it a prince. So they start to flirt innocently with each other when he reveals he's actually the prince. Snow White runs away in embarrassment, but he follows her to tell her he'd like to get to know her instead of the queen. And the queen overhears this and furious. So then the queen orders the prince to be thrown into the dungeon and the huntsman stuff. And then the Snow White story becomes a little bit more familiar and

And then when finally the prince wakes Snow White with his magical kiss, he and Huntsman and some guards get together to defeat the queen. And then she is banished to the netherworld.

And that sounds like something that happened in this film. So, okay. Then Chris says, Walt was under pressure to get the film finished on time and under budget. So he cut most of that Prince story out and focused on the villainy of the queen in the comedy of the dwarfs. Instead, Snow White has barely anything to do in her own story, but sit around wishing, dreaming or running away in fright. The dwarfs are the ones who battle the queen, which leads to her demise.

And then Chris says this was a necessary sacrifice at the time. And as a result of the streamlining, the relationship between the Prince and Snow White makes little sense in the finished film. It's still a magnificent film and groundbreaking classic, but it's still missing important narratives. Walt took a storytelling shortcut to solve the gaps between

By using the template of melodrama and operetta, in particular the 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet and the films of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, who were famous for the quote-unquote, I'm pitching woo to you, love at first sight style romances.

Audiences in 1937 bought that type of instant seduction without question because it was in vogue and they were somewhat familiar with the centuries-old Snow White legend. Audiences since then have noticed the storytelling holes in Snow White and many have remarked that The Prince, as written after the cuts, seems incomplete and a little weird.

Which I think he chose that word, I think, because he wants to bolster what Rachel said about Snow White, which is that it's weird. So, to wit, so this is back to Chris's article, to wit, a teenage girl singing to herself in a private garden behind a secure wall about how she'd like to find true love.

An adult male, a stranger, riding by in his horse overhears her, breaks into her private yard by hopping the fence, sneaks up on her and says, essentially, it's me. I'm your true love. The teenager runs away from the stranger in fright and embarrassment, locking herself in her second-story bedroom. The adult male doesn't take the hint and follows the teenage girl, standing under her window, singing to her to convince her to give him a chance, maybe just one kiss even.

She finally sends a bird down to get rid of the stranger. Then he's gone without explanation. We don't see him again until the end of the film when he happens to find the teenage girl dead in the forest without asking why she died. He plants a kiss on her corpse's lips. That's why there've been so many jokes made about this prince through the, through the years. Walt did have a comic strip published with the full story to explain the prince's motivations and expand on their relationship. But most people have no idea what is missing from the 1937 film. Walt regretted that.

He spoke more than once about a prequel, a short, or some other way to give audiences the rest of the story, but never got around to it. Thankfully, the 2025 film restores much of the missing storyline with slight tweaks, just as Walt always wanted. All right, so that's Chris's perspective on this film.

Well, it's actually more or less Chris's perspective on the 1937 film and why it didn't make sense slash involved the prince being more of a stalker than an actual prince. I will say I have a couple of minds about this. First of all, I have made plenty of jokes about how most Disney movies

Most Disney princesses and their suitors have some sort of weird, creepy, like, is this really how you're going to choose this guy without knowing anything about him? Sort of a situation, you know, which is another way of saying love at first sight. Right. And I don't want to say too much about that right now, because it is something that Richard Hollis, who I'm going to talk about in a moment, has something to say. But I will, other than to say love, yeah.

That is not based in rationality is not. And I tell you this as a high school teacher for 10 years is not an uncommon phenomenon among the high school among teenage youth in any way. It's not weird. It's not unusual. It's not uncommon. So, um,

Yes, you know, middle-aged adults might look back and say, why did Snow White have no wisdom? Why would she possibly choose a stalker? But that is not a good, in my opinion, not a good shortcut to say why this story isn't working. Okay, so we're going to go on to talk about

what two disney historians who are probably the two leading disney historians related to the 1937 snow white film have to say about this but before that i did want to go back and say like what did rachel segler actually say what did she actually say so um so i went to e online to try to they have an article here that lists out everything that rachel said about this movie

I don't actually know how much she has said in various different interviews and things like they, they listed out some of the things that were the most quoted and talked about things that she said. So, and I'm also trying to remember how old Rachel Zegler was when this all happened somewhere between 19 and 22. I think, I think she's 23 now, I think so. Not much older than Snow White herself would have probably been, which makes sense. Right.

So, um, here's a couple of things that she has said, um, without much comment, um, and nothing, nothing politically related or any of that. I'm going to try to stick to her comments specifically about Snow White, the animated classic. So she said, um, early on, she told the, she said something on social media about, yes, I'm Snow White, but no, I'm not bleaching my skin for the role. Um, she said only losers are obsessed with maintaining the bloodline purity of a cartoon princess. And then she told variety, um,

In 19, in 2022, she said, um, so she had to be 19 or 20. So I'm not sure, but she, she acknowledged, um, that it was trending. This idea was trending. And she said, um, you know, at the end of the day, I have a job that I'm really excited to do. I get to be a Latina princess. So, you know, I'm,

Not so sure that there's a big problem with any of that stuff. There are some people who, you know, are whipped up that snow snow white was named snow white because of her skin color. And they changed that in the new film to be because she was born under a snowy sky, which is 100 percent fine with me. Like, that's insignificant information.

to the story has nothing to do with anything there, right? They've made a different, a different type of character to play that role, which is a hundred percent fine. So that's, let's call that nothing. Okay. So then she said, okay,

Snow White has a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her, which is weird. So it's weird. So we didn't do that this time. We have a different approach to what I'm sure a lot of people will assume is a love story because just like we cast a guy in the movie, but it's really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful. So that is kind of the crux, I think, of

of a lot of people's problem with her perspective on what she was doing here. Like a lot of people feel like you should bow your knee to the role, I think, before you're able to play it.

I'm of a couple of minds. I don't really think the film Snow White has anything to do with stalkers. You know, I mean, I don't think to shortcut the story of love at first sight equals stalker. Right. So that and that is a powerful word stalker. Right. And she you know, if she's 19 or 20 years old and she decides she wants to

Yeah.

position there. You know, I don't know that that's the biggest deal in the word, but world, but I do feel like it's wrong. So Chris, I just read his perspective. He thinks it's right. Like he supports that. He says like that Prince was stalking her. He has a lot of reasoning for explaining how new audiences can't accept that.

you know, we have a new story that filled in the blanks because that's what Walt wanted to do. And it tells more of the story. And that original 1937 film was cut back because of the money they couldn't spend in the timeline. And so they just turned the prints into a stalker. Chris had said all that. And Chris is starting to make more posts. Like he's making a lot of posts, answering people and trying to be defensive of Snow White, the current 2025 version of Snow White. He's trying to defend the dwarfs because a lot of people feel a little bit

A little bit weird about animated dwarfs. And there's a whole another backstory controversy about that whole thing that went on involving. Are they going to use actual little people? Are they going to animate these characters? Who are these seven thieves? How do they mirror the dwarfs and relate to the dwarfs at some point in history?

when Disney wasn't saying much about the images they were releasing, people thought, Oh, this, these are the new seven dwarfs. It's these seven people that didn't really make a lot of sense. So there's been a lot of weirdness surrounding the drawers too. And so, um,

Chris is of course supportive of the dwarfs that ended up in the film and he says that Disney really gave the seven dwarfs lots of inner life and characterization they didn't have in 1937 which is understandable in a cartoon that rushed to the finish line and then he feels like the new dwarfs honor the originals while making their own mark. All right so I'm trying to keep myself out of this and I haven't done a good job but we're going to hear now from some Snow White historians and see how they what their take is on this. So as I mentioned I

Richard Hollis, who was, he's a Disney historian. He's written many books. One of the books he co-wrote was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Making of the Classic Film, which is everywhere. You can find that book. It's from quite a few years ago. So it's not the most recent Snow White history, but it was the definitive one until J.B. Kaufman came around and the Walt Disney Family Museum had their big exhibition about Snow White. And then J.B. Kaufman wrote another book. So

So Richard Hollis was the Snow White historian. So he finally has to intervene here, and he's responding first to Chris's conversation about the dwarfs. And he says, Sorry, Chris, I have to disagree. It's true. Walt was confined in the original film due to budget restrictions and time pressures, but the characterizations of the seven dwarfs was one of the film's major accomplishments.

Each had a personality that went far beyond any of the original fairy tale interpretations and set a standard that was to influence every alternate version of Snow White ever made, either on stage or on film. As to the new version, perhaps people would have been less critical if Zegler hadn't made a fool of herself rubbishing the 1937 version in interviews.

After all, the Disney company and Miss Zegler's $2 million salary wouldn't exist today if, quote unquote, Walt's Folly had been a box office disaster. Let's stop trashing the original classic, please. So in a side note, Walt's Folly has been used in a couple of ways in history. In the 30s, people did call it.

Snow White, Walt's Folly. They didn't think a full-length animated feature would keep anyone's attention, and it went on to become one of the biggest hits of all time when you adjust the dollars. And also Walt's Folly. I think actually they called it more Disney's Folly in the press for Snow White, and then Walt's Folly is the way the press talked about Disneyland for a while in the 50s. So you think people would learn not to consider Walt Disney...

um, having any kind of folly ish ideas, but here it is. Um, there you go. So then Chris comes back and he says, um, I disagree. I didn't, I respectfully disagree. I didn't say that the 1937 dwarfs have no personality. They certainly did. And it was a masterpiece in animation, but this film went much deeper than the gags related to their names in that movie, which they actually kind of mostly were. I mean, most of the dwarfs gags related to how they reacted to

which happened to coincide with how they were named. So which came first, the action or the name, who knows? Also Chris back to Chris, he says, Rachel didn't trash the 1937 film. She simply pointed out that the melodramatic operetta style love story, young girl dreams of love and adult stranger comes in to immediately say he's your true love, which she submits to without any buildup wouldn't work in 2025 and would look weird in a modern live action film. So they updated the approach and,

Okay. And if I cut myself in here a little bit, I'll say like I've watched teenage adolescents in both genders and sexes. And I disagree with Chris that true love absent of any rationality would seem strange to anyone, especially at least anyone either in immediate relationship with a child of that age or that is of that age or kind of remembers that age.

You know, everyone wants love at first sight if they can find it or, you know, and then people and young teenagers pursue it relentlessly. All right.

So Richard Horlitz is back and he says, sorry, Chris. She called the original film weird, which it wasn't, and the Princess Stalker, which he wasn't. The phrase melodramatic operetta love story never crossed her lips. And she should have kept her opinion to herself. Even Disney was embarrassed. Actually, he says even Disney's were embarrassed, which is really interesting. Like that's a really 1950s, 60s.

Well, actually 1930s and 40s way of talking about the studio. People always used to call it Disney's because Walt Disney was in head. So they was the head. So they'd call the Walt Disney company or the Walt Disney studios. They just call it Disney's. So he's still talking that way. He says, even Disney's were embarrassed at the time of her outburst. And what's wrong with love at first sight? Why should that be frowned upon just because it doesn't suit the mindset of a modern audience? And what's weird about it? It was an unnecessary criticism by an actress who said,

In my opinion, given her body of work to date has yet to prove herself. So Richard's now letting a little bit of his bias show here. She did a pretty good job of, in my opinion, showing herself in West side story. And I think, I think it's hard to debate that red Rachel's Agler is not a force to be reckoned with talent wise. So I don't know that he needs to go there, but yeah,

It's true that her deep thinking probably did not consider the history of the melodramatic operetta love story. And, um, I think this is the, the conversation right here that most, I most resonate with as a teacher. I don't even know that Richard Horlitz is being blatant enough. I think it does suit the mindset of a modern audience. Maybe, maybe there's a

cultural persuasion where you don't want to admit it's true, but like the search for love at first sight is real. All right. So then they...

keep the conversation going for a while. It does start to get a little personal. Not really against each other. Like they maintain respect for each other, but Richard Horlitz gets a little bit less respectful and less respectful of Rachel Zegler's work as the conversation goes on. And Chris Lucas starts to bring in politics pretty soon as the time goes on. So neither of those, I think, are useful parts of this conversation. But

Richard Horlitz does come back at some point when he starts to talk about the original top Disney article that Chris wrote and the flaws in Walt Disney's original film. And so Horlitz says he's still talking about Rachel Zegler and saying like she she did start. So Chris points out she did say nice things about sleep about the 1937 Snow White. Like she did come out and say complimentary things.

And then Richard Horlitz says, well, yeah, she, and then here I'm going to start reading from his quote. He says, she only started praising the original film and saying she's honored to take part because of the black backlash caused by her original comments. It's obvious that the Disney execs put some pressure on her regarding this. The decision to underplay the princess character in the original was also down to the technical problems involved in successfully animating a human male character. His movements, particularly walking was therefore kept to a bare minimum and

Even if Disney had had all the time in the world and the financial backing to match, the animators would still have preferred to restrict his on-screen appearance, unlike Phillips in Sleeping Beauty. Even at the 11th hour, Walt wanted to reshoot the animation of the prince in Snow White because he was dissatisfied with the footage.

So I have to go back. So this is me breaking in. I have to go back and read the books again. I'm trying to remember about the Prince and what both Richard Horliss or even J.B. Kaufman said, but I don't remember if what Walt was saying was...

I want to go back. Like he didn't like the look of the prints in the film because they were, they were rotoscoping of act, like a filmed action that he just thought wasn't well done. I'm not sure if that was the case or if Walt was saying like, he wasn't happy with the way they were animating it. I suspect it was a little bit more of the former, but anyway, back to what Hollis says, he says, perhaps if Zegler had been more diplomatic and pointing out

I also believe that Zegler's version needs to make half a billion dollars to break even, so I wish it luck.

Okay. So he comes back and he says, I don't think general audiences give two hoots about what's missing in a movie because they're talking about, of course, the prince, the art, the scenes that apparently Walt Disney and his animators considered for the prince before they decided not to use any of that.

So Hollis says, I don't think general audiences get too hoots about what's missing in a movie. Perhaps the new Snow White should have a lengthy academic disclaimer informing the audiences what it's added to the story. So Zegler's character doesn't fall victim to the accusation that she is so keen to level at the original film. It's already been suggested that the 2025 version might require trigger warnings when eventually screened on Disney Plus of ominous trees and light kissing. He's being sarcastic.

But then it's a stupid world in which we live. In his book, America's Favorite Movies, author Rudy Bellmer describes how the prince's role kept diminishing in subsequent drafts because of animation difficulties. The realistically rendered prince appeared stiff and cumbersome in tests, whereas the dwarves and animal characters were relatively easy. The prince and Snow White posed the most problems because they were straight juvenile leads.

And then Richard Hollis throws in an aside and he says, the prince is not an adult showing up to tell a child he's never met. He's deeply in love with her, which you have deliberately worded to make it sound sleazy. So then he goes on to say, if only Rachel Zegler had done her research on the 1937 version like Belmer did, instead of screeching hysterically about weirdos and stalkers before shooting her mouth off. So, yeah.

Okay. Like, you know, it's screeching hysterically is, is of course hyperbole. Everyone's using hyperbole here. Right. But I'm trying to get to some like actual history in here to help you make your own good decisions about what you think about this movie. So, you know, I think it's interesting. Hopefully you're following along still.

So, you know, meanwhile, Chris Lucas here, like to his credit, he knows what he thinks about this film and he's just not budging on it. He really feels like there's an issue with the storytelling and with this prince who comes up and tells the princess that, you know,

You know, I'm your true love. Come with, you know, I'm here for you. You don't know who I am and you've never met me. Like he's he's pretty convinced like this is stalker ish and it's not for this. And I think more strongly he's kind of convinced this is just not applicable to a 2025 audience.

And Chris is answering a whole lot of other people. There's other people disagreeing with him and agreeing with him. And, you know, this whole conversation, you know how Facebook is. So Chris is in here answering different people's arguments. And then Richard comes in and he does say another interesting thing. He says there's no academic evidence.

In fact...

Given the strength of the other sections of the film, most people probably forget all about the prince until Snow White drops a more than subtle hint with the song, One Day My Prince Will Come. And the fact that the prince is captivated by Snow White from the moment he meets her is no different to Prince Philip meeting Aurora for the first time in Sleeping Beauty. And even if the film had included the dream sequence and the imprisonment in the castle, the two prince storylines that we're talking about,

It would have made no difference to their initial meeting in the courtyard. Love at first sight is not impossible, even if the modern generation ridicule it. And here I am telling you, no, they pursue it. Like, that's my perspective. The only alarm bells are being raised by the likes of Zegler and her cohorts, who are determined to not only dumb everything down to a level of mediocrity, but to score points by labeling everything as either sleazy, misogynist, or sexist.

So that's Hollis's last word here. And, you know, he's obviously as a historian and, and obviously a deep admirer of the, the position that Snow White has, or yeah, Snow White has in cinematic history and Disney history. He's defensive of what actually happened and the work that actually went into that movie. It's, it's, it's not really, it's,

super fair to say well you know well well would have done it totally differently but he just had to he didn't have time and money to put in the print so they just cut him out and he he maybe would have done it better done it again if he really could have he would have made it a better movie but he he couldn't so he just left it out so that rather cavalier perspective is i think

what some of these historians are reacting to because they know that just isn't actually how things went and i'll cap this whole story with a couple things first jd jb kaufman who wrote the definitive snow white history which is the fairest one of all the making of walt disney snow white and the seven dwarfs um and that was of course in conjunction with the walt disney family museum's massive exhibition all about the history of snow white a few years back

So J.B. Kaufman actually is replying on another Disney Facebook page, which had reposted the Top Disney story that Chris had written.

So JB Kaufman comes in and he says, some of this is true, but you know, you're in trouble when you start off a post by talking about the original script, because, um, the person that had reposted this top Disney article had said, well, well, in his original script, he wanted to have more, the prints in more of this stuff, but they, this and this and this happened, right? So JB Kaufman says, you know, you're in trouble when you start off by talking about the original script, because there was no such thing. Walt and his team started with a rough idea, uh,

and then refined it through months and months of story conferences. The whole point of those conferences was to arrive at the absolute peak of effectiveness in conveying the story on the screen and in their medium. Yes, the Prince Buckethead idea and the Prince in the Dungeon and other ideas were discussed at length and eventually discarded, but not because of pressure, not because of budget, but because the story was being carefully shaped for maximum effect on film.

The result was the irreducible classic that has been one of the milestones of cinema history since 1937. And then he says, I'm sorry. I usually keep my mouth shut about these things, but I have to speak up when I see this masterpiece treated as if it were an inferior make do compromise. And I'm going to throw this in here myself. And it has to be even worse when it's treated as a compromise only to support the 2025 live action version of

Which, like, it was fun, but it's not going to change cinema history. It's not going to end up in the National, what is our Library of Congress store, cinema classics. I don't think the 2025 Snow White will be there, but the 1937 one is, right? So, you know, if I'm putting my thumb on the scale here, you know, I'm a Disney history guy. I have been to enough Snow White talks and discussions and have enough books and seen enough history to know that it's

It wasn't just kind of a, yeah, it would be better if we had the print stuff in there, but...

You know, we don't have time. We don't have time for that. Like it's, you know, I think I agree with JB Kaufman. Like every film has its pressure points, right? Every film does, but it doesn't mean this film wasn't, you know, plotted and planned to be exactly what Walt wanted it to be. The 1937 version, right? So finally, let's put a bookend on this.

Someone else to chime in was, uh, Steve Seagal, who is, I think it's Seagal, Seagal, Steve Seagal, Seagal. He is an animation, animation teacher, but he worked as an animator for Pixar for many years. He worked on bug's life, toy story, tons of Pixar shorts and other projects like that. Um,

professional animator, right? So Steve Seagal chimed in and here will be the last word on the subject. He said, the original is my favorite film and that has not changed, but I was charmed by the 2025 film. He says, I found the story additions enlightened, the casting inspired and the musical numbers were fun. Okay. I think I can agree with that. I, I might,

Yeah, they were fun. So, okay. See, he got a little political here. I'll say I maybe can see that, although...

I feel like it was general enough that, you know, it does he mean three, two or three years ago, like one political party might have felt like they were talking about the other party. And now that power has shifted, it's possible that the opposite party thinks they're talking about the other party. So like that could work in a lot of different ways. So sure. Okay. All right, Steve.

But back to what he says that I agree with. So he says, well, of course, I have some quibbles. The design of the dwarfs was problematic, although it seemed worse in the trailer. In the film, you kind of get used to it, which is not high praise, but you do kind of get used to it. The oversized heads worked great in cartoon characters, but with realistic faces, they are grotesques, which I will agree to that. Dopey looked like Alfred E. Newman.

I like the concept of him communicating by whistling. And I could imagine some moments where he uses a whistle as a call to action or to stop a fight, but I wish they had not given him a voice. So these are just Steve's asides, right? Steve goes on to say many of the parts that didn't work were some of the best parts of the original snow whites, kindness to the baby bird. As the huntsman is attacking the two expressionistic sequences, which are her imagined terrors as she runs through the forest and the queen transforming.

Also, the comedy with the drawers was pretty much non-existent, which is true. Um, wasn't really funny. Um, he says, I liked most of the new story ideas, the backstory about her parents, a thief instead of a Prince snow whites named Genesis and her feistiness getting people to band together to fight the queen. Um,

The townspeople are hungry, but when snow and the huntsmen go to the forest, there seems to be an abundance of apple trees ripe for the taking. For that matter, why would she be tempted by an apple from a stranger when she had lots of apples? And why doesn't the queen kill the huntsman and Jonathan? So he has a lot of like story questions here. For that matter, why would the huntsman not think the queen would look in the box? But these are his minor quibbles. He calls these minor quibbles and says, really, I was entertained. And here's the kicker. And Steve says, I still have the original to watch.

Which is what we should all remember. So there is my bookend to Snow White 2025. Maybe we won't talk about this ever again. Maybe we will. Who knows? But I just thought this was all really interesting stuff. So I wanted to share it with you. And maybe it helps you inform your decision making a little bit.

And with that, I think we will wrap it up. We've gone well over our allotted time slot. So thank you for listening. If you've made it all the way here, I appreciate you. If you want to support the show, go to mousetalgiaplus.com and you can learn about how you can support me with my Patreon account. I'm super grateful to all of you that help with that. It is a big, big benefit to my family. So we appreciate that. And, um,

If you want to get hold of me and, you know, tell me what you think is Snow White or anything. Tell me about a recent trip, anything you have to say Disney related. Just go write me an email at comments at mousetalgia.com. And you can also use your phone to leave a voice recording and send that along. And maybe we'll play that on the air.

All right, so I hope you all have a super week. I'll be back soon with a little bit more reporting about a variety of things. Lots more Disneyland 70 on the way. A little bit of Knott's in the near future. So lots of good stuff coming. So with that, let's go out and Carpe Kingdom and seize the magic. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.

so