Say what you want about Walt Disney, Disneyland, and the Disney Company. Many people do (particularly Banksy). But consider the possibility that modern cooperate culture aside, the house of mouse has more than a little pixie dust set aside for adults to enjoy.
I’ll make no secret of my enjoyment of Disney and all of its offerings. With a name like Ariel, it would have been a hard year of ’89 if I wasn’t a fan. And what I enjoy most about Disney are two aspects that are so intertwined that they may as well be two sides of the same coin:
On the first side, we have Walt’s famous saying:
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
Sometimes this is phrased by Walt Disney Imagineering as:
“Disneyland is not a museum.”
And on the other side of that magic coin is the Walt Disney Archives, an organization established in 1970 which is dedicated to recognizing, recording, collecting, and restoring historical materials as they relate to Walt, his company, and the enduring legacy of Disney.
Among those materials are more than four million photographs which allow us a behind the scenes glimpse of Disney’s past and its progress toward the future. Recently, the Archives have opened many of those photos to the public.
So, of course, we had to share some of them here.
