The Walt Disney Family Museum - Part IX

With only two galleries left to explore and three weeks before the official opening of The Walt Disney Family Museum, it is a time of great excitement. For those of you lucky enough to be attending the inaugural D23 Expo, be sure to stop by Stage 23 on Saturday at 3:30. From 3:30 until 4:30 Richard Benefield, Founding Executive Director of The Walt Disney Family Museum, will be giving a presentation emphasizing Walt Disney optimistic nature in the face of great success and heartbreaking disappointment.

We here at the Main Street Gazette will be watching this event, as well as The Walt Disney Family Museum previews in two weeks, very closely. If you do attend the presentation on Saturday or the previews and would like to send along your thoughts, we would be happy to have them.

Thanks, once again to The Walt Disney Family Museum and Andrea Wang for keeping us in the know of all the wonderful things that await us in October!

Gallery 9 The 1950s and 1960s: The Big Screen and Beyond

This prolific period of Walt’s life started with the installation of a scale model railroad on the grounds of his new home, an event that spurred him to develop Disneyland. Walt also created pioneering weekly television shows, and the studio continued creating both animated and live-action films, including the Academy Award™-winning Mary Poppins. Walt was also involved in developing new technologies for installations for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. In the 1950s he announced his ideas for EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.In a 15 year period, Walt created the templates for family television entertainment and outdoor family recreation while also infusing the promise of space exploration and urban planning with a sense of wonder and awe. From the Lilly Belle, the scale-model locomotive that Walt helped build and install on a half-mile track around his home, to the visionary plans for EPCOT, the exhibits in this gallery present a vivid look at the landscape of Walt’s imagination and achievements during the last 15 years of his life.