You all know the famous Peter Ellenshaw Disneyland Artwork that he did at the request of Walt. And he did it in two versions, one on "day light" which magically transformed in a "night" version when seen under dark light.
As we talk about Disneyland maps i suggest we have a look at some others vintage ones and we'll start of course by the famous Herb Ryman artwork that Herb drew in one week-end with Walt over his shoulder. The legendary masterpiece includes small details such as a cowboy on a wild horse, squids in lagoons, and a church that was proposed to be for all religious denominations and is shown here in its rarely seen color version.
Artist and imagineer Sam McKim was the master of Disney's theme parks "fun maps" and here is the one he did for Disneyland back in 1958.
This last map below was done 42 years later by Nina Rae Vaughn, in 2000. As you can see on these two pictures and the one of the Peter Ellensaw map, the prints were signed by two artists each time. It's because these were limited editions by the Disney Gallery and were available at the Gallery above Pirates of the Caribbean in New Orleans Square on the 45th anniversary of the opening of Disneyland—July 17, 2000. On that day six six key Disney Imagineers were present and signed the prints, Peter Ellenshaw, John Hench, Sam McKim, Blaine Gibson, Nina Rae Vaughn, and Tony W. Baxter.
Pictures: copyright Disney
4 comments:
The unexpected picture of Walt is "rare" for yet another reason: for observative fellows, you can notice he is holding a cigarette in his right hand, something that can never seen in typical publicity photos of him!
These maps were awesome....park management doesn't realize what a sure fire seller they had with these things. Recently we had some maintenance done on our treadmill and the repairman spent about 30 minutes looking at the collection of Magic Kingdom, Disneyland, and original EuroDisneyland maps that I have on the walls of our exercise room. I wish they'd bring the maps back.
There was at least one more map done for DL, released at the 50th Anniversary. It was mostly the same map as the 45th, but there were a few costmetic changes. Aside from the logo update in the bottom right corner, they returned Space Mountain to it's white color, and I believe the rest of Tomorrowland was blue/white/etc.. (I have this somewhere but am doing this from memory). I can't remember but there might have even been one more map- whichever one is the last, either this 50th anniversary version or one beyond, very little effort was put into updating it. They relabeled one of the original 4 trains as the Ward Kimball, the name of the 5th train, but didn't change the art to reflect the name change. I believe there were several attractions that had received name changes in real life that were not reflected on the map also- Mr. Lincoln/Opera House/Disneyland story come to mind. I'll have to dig that map up and figure out if there was something else.
One of my jobs was removing cigarettes from Walt's hands as the first commentator mentioned, at least in any photographs like in the Walt Disney Story where I did a full size blowup of Walt. Loved Disney Legend Sam McKim's and Herb Ryman's Tom Sawyer Island maps and they inspired me in grade School. I would later share this with them at WED. When we flipped Tom Sawyer Island at Tokyo Disneyland, we also flipped Sam McKims mp for it with a few changes.
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