Reviews (5)

What a Shame Walt Couldn't Finish...
Although a bit technical in places, this is simply the best book on Walt Disney that I have ever read.The author fearlessly draws upon many disciplines to help explain what the genius of Walt Disney was consumed with at the time of his death.Author Steve Mannheim used documents as well as interviews with Disney family and colleagues to paint a fascinating picture of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT).It is worth the academic book price and I would not be surprised if its collectors' value increases.

Fascinating read, but can't answer the burning questions...
'What if Walt Disney had lived 10 or 20 more years?' and 'What would Walt's EPCOT have been like?' are, to me, two of the most burning "What Ifs" of our time.Steve Mannheim's "Walt Disney and the Quest for Community" is a captivating and fascinating read.Excrutiatingly well-researched, well-written, and incredibly informative, it provides Disney fans and those interested in urban renewal with basic incites into the last great dream of the visionary Disney.But that's as far as it goes.Mannheim treads lightly around the basic questions of what life would have actually been like in the city of EPCOT and, sadly, never provides much more than a teasing glimpse of the "might-have-beens".According to Mannheim, Disney himself was only in the preliminary stages of planning and working out the details of his experimental city when he died and that we will likely never know for sure exactly what it would've been.Perhaps this is true, but seeing as how so much of the early planning/purchasing/contracting/construction/building stages of the proposed Disney World project were already a done deal (or, at least, well under way), it seems quite unlikely that Walt hadn't confided his plans to someone.He was a meticulous planner and not given to flying by the seat of his pants when realizing a vision of this scope.Not to mention the fact that EPCOT was going to be joint venture with several leaders in American Industry who would likely NOT invest in undisclosed ideas that existed only in someone's mind, even Disney's.Also, Mannheim seems to too strongly defend current Disney management in the closing chapter and states that, with the construction and population of Celebration, Florida, that somehow Walt's EPCOT truly lives and that the time has finally come for some slight realizations of his last unfullfilled dreams.Celebration, as any student of Disney's final dream can tell you, is a FAR cry from the EPCOT concept and that current Disney Company philosophies and standards show little resemblance to the high moral standards and belief system he held his company to during his lifetime.The book portrays today's EPCOT Center as a living tribute to the man and his bold vision, but even the most casual recent visitor to that park can see that this simply is not so. Stil, I'd highly recommend this book for anyone who's a Disney fan or, like me, still fascinated after all these years by Walt's ambitious vision, just be warned going in that you'll likely still have the same burning questions after finishing it.

Researching the Story of Walt Disney's Final Dream
It is clear that it will be the responsibility of historians to accurately reflect the influence that Walt Disney had upon the development of cultural and social structures; beginning during the twentieth century and continuing into a new millennium.Though Walt Disney reflected the social values of his contemporaries in the United States, he also tapped into the essential curiosity that drives all human beings toward exploration and discovery.It is that final phase of Walt Disney's bold and creative exploration that provides the backdrop for this important study.

In "Walt Disney and the Quest for Community", author Steve Mannheim brings Walt's original idea for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) back to the table after almost four decades of neglect.While the creation of Epcot Center at Walt Disney World provides for an interesting day of amusement, the origins of EPCOT (the community) had far greater implications.Those living and working at the EPCOT of Walt Disney's mind would participate in an innovative commercial, social, and political experiment that would be unprecedented in human history.Regrettably, the genius of Walt Disney was revealed to be finite with his passing in December 1966.With Disney's death, the dream of EPCOT as originally conceived was shelved as being unattainable without the necessary provision of Walt Disney's personal authority and command.

Reviews (6)

Muckraking journalism... by an academic
Richard Foglesong is one hell of an investigative reporter. I know, I know - he's not a journalist, he's a college professor. But he writes like a journalist and reports like a journalist, and "Married To The Mouse" is a terrifically entertaining and penetrating look at the relationship between Disney and Orlando.

Unfortunately - and this only a minor point, really - Foglesong is also an academic. I say "unfortunately" because the academic portions of this book are far-and-away the least interesting. They are filled with urban planning buzzwords and jargon. They try to tie together in neat academic theories what were really power struggles between a big business and a comparatively small county government.

Foglesong is at his best when he tells us how things happened. How did Orlando build those roads that lured Disney to town? How did Disney get that crazy charter that makes the company an autonomous government? How did they abuse that charter to get perks that no other private business could dream of? How did Orlando and Orange County and Osceola County shirk their responsibilities to their taxpayers in failing to more forcefully confront Disney's abuses? These stories are told through detailed interviews and narrative-style writing that makes the tales engaging reads. It is in the best tradition of muckraking journalism.

Understand one thing: I like Disney World. I've been there many times. It's a fun place. I like Disney movies. I generally root for the Mouse. But I also despise abuses by large corporations. Disney is guilty of more than its share, and "Married To The Mouse" is the best account I've read of how and why that happened.

not an expose
I enjoyed this book and all the intricacies it points out about the Disney Conglomerate.Sometimes a little tangled and overdetailed, it examines the business aspects of the Disney Corporation.Not at all an expose of actual park practices, this book deals with the big business of urban planning, politics, and scuffle over Orlando public funding.Well written for a complicated topic.

Reviews (10)

A Mickey Mouse Book About Walt Disney World
I'm surprised to read that the "scholarly" Fjellman doesn't perpetuate the old chestnut about Walt being cryogenically frozen. As it is, he has his readers believing this ridiculous story about Walt making a series of films to be shown after his death to guide the company after he's gone.

This is a respected author?My God, where are his sources?Hopefully if he comes out with a second edition, he'll correct such glaring errors as these.

Still THE scholarly standard...
I keep hoping that Fjellman will update his seminal book to encompass all that has happened in the last ten years; I'll be the first in line when he does. I wrote my MA thesis at NYU on Disney using Fjellman as a prime source, and have used various chapters from Fjellman's book to teach graduate classes in museum studies, design, and architecture. Students in many fields find a lot to think about, discuss, debate, and apply to their thinking.

Witty, engaging, balanced, factually accurate, yet still with a point of view... a great book all around. Other reviewers who complain about the writing level, or some of the more obscure academic theorizing, are missing the point. For a truly academic piece of literature, it is written in incredibly accessible, engaging, and clear style. Highly recommended.

Great imagineer and business model info
This is not a tell all/behind-the-scenes gossip book. It reads like a business venture case file with some interesting bits of Disney design and innovation thrown in. The author gives equal wonderment to the imagineers' genius as to the company's business decisions.

Reviews (12)

Walt's World
Walt Disney lives.

No, I'm not talking about the urban legend about him being cryogenically sealed and stashed below the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibition. Nor is this some soft New Ageism about spirits inhabiting the celestial plane.

He's alive down on a plot of land outside of Orlando, Florida, a boom city that was a dumpy little crossroad when Walt began buying what became a 30,000-acre spread there is the late 1960s.

Walt's gone, but his vision and energy lives on, and once you start dipping into "Since the World Began," you'll see that the scope of his vision is nothing short of awesome.

There are many faces of Disney, the producer of family-friendly and highly profitable movies, the creator of family-friendly theme parks, but also a visionary who thought that, as one associate put it, "bad information was responsible for all the evil in the world." Who tried to change people's attitudes within the confines of an amusement park, the man whose idealism spawned the Epcot center, and under Michael Eisner, the Disney Institute, where education and learning are on a par with entertainment.

What the book won't tell you -- this is published by Hyperion, Disney's publishing arm, and written by Jeff Kurtti, a longtime Disney employee -- is just what hell Walt went through to realize his vision. You won't hear of Disney's fundamentalist upbringing, his retreat into fantasy to escape a brutal father and life in poverty, his endless hard work to make animated movies, his multiple nervous breakdowns. His brother Roy is idealized as the business brain behind Walt's success, but you won't hear that Roy constantly opposed Disney's ideas as a waste of money. When Kurtti writes that Disney founded the design firm Walt Disney Imagineering in 1952 "because he realized that he wouldn't be able to create Disneyland within the boundaries of the studio system," he doesn't mention that it was also because Roy and the Disney board refused to advance Walt the money to design Disneyland, fearing that it would be a failure.

There was plenty of reason for Roy to be worried, too. Disney's ideas constantly threw the company perilously close to bankruptcy, generally on the order of every 18 months, until Disney's deal with ABC in 1955 made him very wealthy and put the company on a firm financial footing. Walt Disney was an idealist and a visionary, and if it wasn't for his tenacity, the company would not be the worldwide giant it is today.

Even while ignoring those shadings, there is still plenty of story left to make "Since the World Began" an awe-inspiring overview of Walt Disney World. It's probably the single largest and most complex construction project this side of the space shuttle. Its statistics are jaw-dropping: 55 miles of canals and levees were built to control the water levels, nine acres of underground corridors thread through the park, housing sewer lines, pipes and cables, and a pneumatic system for hauling trash, 60,000 plants and 800 varieties of trees acquired, moved and transplanted to build the park, 100,000 pounds of linen had to be washed every day.

As befitting its creator, the theme park was ahead of its time in its use of innovative technology. WDW was also the first area to implement 911 service in Florida, the first commercial venture to use fiber optic cables, the first telephone system using underground cable instead of overhead wires.

But the park was also a reflection of Walt Disney's vision of a global coming together of different peoples and cultures, learning about each other and attempting to find and enjoy peace as a result. It's globalization with a human face, to borrow someone else's phrase, and even if it seems outdated or even impossible in this post-9/11 world, Walt's beliefs is a hopeful and sustaining vision, and as American as the culture from which it sprang.

The Ultimate Book for the Disney Fanatic!
Wow, wow, wow what a great book depicting the history of the number one vacation spot on the planet.I actually bought this book when it came out about 5 years ago.After reading it, I decided I'm going back to Dinsey World to celebrate its 25th birthday.Needless, to say it was a great trip.This is the book for all you wanting to know about Dinsey World History.For Dinseyland I would reccommend Disneyland: Inside Story, but getting on of those under... is a hard task....What are you waiting for, buy this book!Get ready to experience the magic!

Reviews (18)

Fabulous Book on Disney
This book is great! I also want to be a Disney Imagieer. I already designed some cool, new rides. I hope I become an Imagineer! See Ya!

One of our TOP TEN Books on the Walt Disney Studios
While created as a companion text to the 1997 exhibition hosted by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), this remarkable record is as fascinating to Disney fans and collectors as it is valuable to researchers and scholars.One feast at this banquet table will never be enough.Readers will be returning to this masterwork for decades to come.

From the project's genesis in meetings between Nicholas Osberg (Chief Curator, CCA) and Marty Sklar (Creative Director, Walt Disney Imagineering), an agreement was reached whereby every historic file and document at The Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney Attractions, and Walt Disney Imagineering was made available to the exhibition's research team.Together, they met the awesome challenge of providing an in-depth analysis of the cultural phenomenon that began with Walt Disney's original theme park known as Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

As the project's director of research and curator of the exhibition, Karal Ann Marling has assembled a text that not only details the architectural elements of creation and design, but integrates the historic backstory and visual wonderland that led to the creation of the Disney theme parks in Anaheim, Orlando, Tokyo, and Paris.

Designers, Disney-fans, Architects, Dreamers...listen up!
This book is amazing. It immediately captured me. It gives valuable insight on the vison of disneys world and on how this vision becomes tangible.

Not only it talks abou the history of the themeparks but it shows the sketches, maps, plans of different parts and attractions of the disney world. An amazing resource full of phantasy and a joy to watch. The photographs and illustrations are very well chosen and it is a plasure to flip through this pages every once in a while. A very inspiring book, showing that often it is enough to dream it and then it becomes reality.The most peculiar shapes and interior spaces are built to be reality.

Reviews (49)

Beautiful Book
This book was an amazing combination of original Disney art and facts. I love the fact that it covered Disney attractions from around the world and added commentary about how they were created. Well presented and beautifully designed.

Not a Lot of Meat Here
This is just a PR piece for the Disney company, a way to build hype so more people will buy their products and see their shows.I was hoping for some nuts & bolts advice on designing theme parks and theme park rides.Everybody knows how to brainstorm;everybody knows the importance of color and lighting and music;everybody models on computers before they make physical models.What do Imagineers do that's different?Do they have special techniques for brainstorming, or for choosing colors, or stage lighting?The answers are not here.Also, what have Imagineers learned from their mistakes?If you take this book at face value, Imagineers have never made mistakes;everything they've done is perfect, and any criticism leveled at Walt Disney world was later retracted or countered.

Reviews (2)

Complicates Assumptions about Disney
Disney Discourse is a substantial contribution to the field of Disney Studies. Smoodin's collection offers a range of reactions to the different Disneys that exist: television and film, theme parks, retail, and so forth. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary work is structured in three useful ways. First, it offers some representative materials from Disney's "golden age" that tend to praise Disney (both the man and the corporation). Second, many of the essays consider the reception to Disney. Three, the book is divided into four separate categories that provide an overview of possible approaches to the study of Disney.

As with any collection, not all the essays are of equal analytic strength. There are many good essays, however, particularl in the the sections entitled Cultural Production and Reception. Smoodin's own essay, "How to Read Walt Disney" is, in my opinion, worth the price of the book alone. Even essays which seem more grounded in personal reaction than critique have their worth; they demonstrate the investment individuals have in Disney as a site of debate.

Overall, the result of the book's conscientious structure is to complicate any easy binaries--taken as a collection, Disney Discourse refuses to unreflectively praise Disney or, equally problematic, simply critique Disney. Instead, Smoodin's book offers Disney as a site of investigation, of exploration, and of analysis. Indeed, Disney Discourse might be better renamed Disney Discourses in order to reflect the multiple ways people have approached Disney. Though not all the essays are equally strong, the book is a "must-have" for both serious scholars and Disney enthusiasts alike.

Reviews (1)

Reviews (1)

not worth it
Written horribly.....researched sloppily.....out of date (isn't great that Disney bought ABC?) and above all with no real perspective or anything new to say about the company.Almost everything in this book was culled from other articles (Time, the New Yorker, etc....) and sound bites.There is no focus or thesis of any kind--"Disney...powerful....money".....is about as close as it comes.I know Ron Grover writes for Business 2.0 so I expected better from him but....oh well.
It would be wonderful if one of these media writers actually did some real research on the Walt Disney company--not "What have they done over the past twenty years" the same old story which is so boring--but: What does Disney mean as a company? How does it fit into American life?(Radio Disney, the Disney stores, etc...) Or if you are focusing on Eisner, maybe try to portray him as a PERSON rather than a cut-out 2dimensional character with less depth than Mickey Mouse.Eisner may be "imperial" but he's also a human being--how do the things that have been written about him compare with what he perceives himself as, the early, more positive portraits of him as a "huggable CEO" or perhaps the friendly if airbrushed annual reports he writes every year? What does Eisner's 20-year relationship with Jeffrey Katzenberg and its subsuquent self-destruction say about him as a person? (And more importantly: WHAT WAS EISNER'S REAL RELATIONSHIP WITH JEFFREY KATZENBERG LIKE? Were they simply like colleagues, friends, rivals, father/son orbrother/brother?Why did they stay together for so long?How did Frank Wells "keep them working together"? How does Jeffrey Katzenberg's impressions of his experiences at Disney ( reflected in flms like Prince of Egypt, Shrek) compare with "what really happened"? Why did Disney (or why DOES Disney) continue to censor Katzenberg from their records as well as all books and DVDs?Oh, and one more thing:Michael Eisner may have been partially responsible for Katzenberg's expulsion but there was a whole board of directors (including a certain man named Roy Disney) who were against Katzenberg from the start because Katzenberg did not bother to "form ties" with them.Why did Stanley Gold and Roy Disney so vigorously oppose Katzenberg?What Don't their efforts to "save Disney" at this present time reek of HYPOCRICY?