by Beth Keating
Parks History
DisneyBizJournal.com
April 19, 2024
Sixty years ago, Walt Disney helped kick off the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York, and while I wasn’t personally there, my teenaged parents were, and as a New Yorker, I grew up with references to my family having attended the World’s Fair. Later trips to Shea Stadium (yes, I know Shea Stadium is gone and replaced by CitiField) would take us past the giant globe (the “Unisphere”) and the flying saucer towers (the “Tent of Tomorrow”) that marked the location of one of the defunct World’s Fair pavilions. If you’ve seen Men in Black, you, too, have seen those landmarks!
Four Disney exhibits were part of the fair, which debuted April 22, 1964. Walt was quite the businessman, leveraging other companies’ financial investments in the World’s Fair displays into attractions that would make their way to his Disneyland park when the fair was over. Walt saw his opportunity to expand his own park as he was invited to create the exhibits for other sponsors. Someone else was footing the bill for Disney’s Research and Development (R&D)!
Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln awed everyone at the State of Illinois’ pavilion with its previously unseen animatronic abilities. On Disneyland’s website, it notes that Abe was “so life-like that National Geographic magazine called the figure ‘alarming’ in its realism.” Great Moments was a project that was personally important to Walt, and it later landed at the Main Street Opera House in Disneyland, opening there on July 18, 1965. The show still thrills audiences at Disneyland today. Walt Disney explained, “Ever since I was a small boy in Illinois, I’ve had a great personal admiration for Abraham Lincoln. So when we decided to recreate some of the great moments in Mr. Lincoln’s life for the World’s Fair, we directed all our energies to that task. We wanted to bring to the people of today, the inspiring words of the man who held this nation together during its moment of greatest crisis, the Civil War.” (credit to the Walt Disney Archives at D23.com). The attraction is now called “The Disneyland Story Presenting Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,” and has been updated with more modern animatronics, and additional films and displays.
it’s a small world, presented by Pepsi-Cola and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), was a slow boat ride that showcased the beautiful artwork of Mary Blair and the gorgeous costume design of Alice Davis (with more than 300 costumes!). Both ladies later became Disney Legends. The ride has subsequently been duplicated at Disney parks around the world, including Florida (1971), where it was an opening day attraction. After the World’s Fair, the ride was trucked back across the country to set up the “happiest cruise that ever sailed” in Disneyland in 1966.
Ford’s Magic Skyway introduced guests to an early version of a continuously moving attraction – a prototype Omnimover ride, if you will – at Ford Motor’s Wonder Rotunda with dinosaurs that are now residing along the Disneyland Railroad route. Walt Disney himself provided the narration for the ride on the cars’ radios, which took riders into the past to experience the evolution of transportation.
Carousel of Progress was created for sponsor General Electric, and it first moved to Disneyland after its glorious debut at the World’s Fair, before later being relocated to Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in 1975. Despite some (ahem) technical and mechanical difficulties of late, the attraction is one of the most historically important to Disney fans, in part because Walt himself had a hand in its creation. The first three scenes - the 1890s, 1920s, and 1940s – are still pretty much the same scenes that were seen at the World’s Fair, while the final scene has been updated a few times as John, Sarah, and the family moved forward in time.
The “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” follows the American family as they “go through the 20th century, experiencing all new wonders as they came.” Walt’s theatre-in-the-round moved guests around the center stages as the decades pass by, and his revolutionary new audio-animatronics wowed audiences. Oh, and the appliances on stage? They were all state-of-the art GE appliances at the time! If you listen to the opening narration, you’ll also hear credit given to the 1964 World’s Fair.
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Beth Keating is a theme parks, restaurant and entertainment reporter for DisneyBizJournal.
Get The Disney Planner: The TO DO List Solution by Ray Keating. More information at
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