Disneyland

“That SRI is the research firm that Walt hires to go identify what ultimately becomes Anaheim.”

“So it quickly becomes the second most popular show on television after I Love Lucy, and it's the first ABC program to crack the top 25 shows Ever. Like, it was all NBC and CBS until Disneyland.”

“He sold his vacation house in Palm Springs. He borrowed a 100,000 dollars against his life insurance, and he took on a personal loan to fund that obligation.”

“ABC negotiated to have the right to all the profits from Disneyland's food and beverage for the first decade.”

“In the second year of the park's operation, it does over four million visitors, which makes it more popular than both the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park.”

“There were 65 corporate sponsors in Disneyland within the first few years of it opening.”

“This gives you a sense of Walt's leadership style. He would take a talented creative person and he'd be perfectly willing to assign them to things that they've never done before and say, yeah, you'll figure it out.”

“The headline is, the Walt Disney Company would not actually own the park and everything within its borders for a full 27 years after opening in 1982.”

“If you actually look at physical construction, it was less than that. 11 months. Wow. So they end up building Disneyland in one third the time that it took to make Snow White.”

“It was the world's largest live telecast ever. Eighty-three million people tuned in to watch from home. Which means that nearly half of America watched this broadcast.”

“He is the Walt Disney who Has come up with a crazy new idea based on his obsessive hobby with model trains that the board of Disney Studios has basically rejected. And so he has gone full crackpot like Colonel Kurtz style and started his own separate company o…”

“Three of the four. The Ford one does not. The part of the deal is that Walt says, you have to pay a million dollars to use my name as a part of your attraction, of course, in addition to footing the bill for building it, but I'll forgive that million dollars i…”

“Costs ballooned from the original five million to a total of seventeen million, but that's actually pretty cheap. I did the inflation math. That's two hundred and ten million dollars today. You absolutely could not build anything remotely close to Disneyland t…”

“ABC, though, Ben, as you were saying, they're the newest of the networks, and they're struggling to catch on. They need something like Disney and Disneyland to break out. So they say, yes, Walt's line on this was that ABC needed the show so badly that they bou…”

“So in order to go get the bulk of the financing for the park, Walt comes back fully into the fold at the Disney studio and does something that no other movie executive is willing to do. At this point in time, he embraces television. He goes to the TV networks …”

“Ticket prices at the Disney parks have basically been flat since Walt died.”