Herbert Ryman

But we wanted to talk a little bit about the history and where this iconic landmark has come from.

The thing that's really amazing when you think of Disneyland is if you have seen anything about the history of Disneyland and you've heard about the kind of like infamous lost weekend where Walt got together with Herb Ryman to... put together kind of like what is good what is Disneyland going to look like so that they could then take that to go to investors to kind of pitch this idea of this theme park to kind of make them understand what it is that Walt was trying to trying to accomplish when it came to Disneyland and everything like the original sketch of Disneyland included the castle.

Now, was it specifically the castle that sits in the park today? No, but since the beginning, Disneyland always had the castle kind of at its heart and at its core, which I just think is...

Pretty, pretty amazing.

And they talk about that last weekend.

I don't think I realized that.

Herb Ryman was not employed by Walt Disney when he got that call to go in and do this Lost Weekend.

I didn't realize that.

Snow White and Her Adventures was designed and built between 1953 and the summer of 1955.

Ken Anderson, one of the art directors of the original 1937 film, adapted the script for the attraction and led the original design team that included Bill Martin, who was responsible for the track layout, Herb Ryman, who created several interior backgrounds, and Claude Coates, who brought the dark rides to life through his ultraviolet painting skill.

Now, Ken Anderson was the most responsible for creating the original attraction, in part because of his architectural background.

Anderson became one of the art directors for the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and had built scale models of the Seven Dwarfs cottage.

Baxter and Coates worked together on a large rebuild of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction in 1974.

And Baxter was handed larger and larger assignments and then got to lead the team on the rebuild of Disneyland's Fantasyland.

Baxter designed his designs for this realm on the work of Herb Ryman, Dorothea Redman, and Claude Coates.

And so this one is...

Sam McKim, who later became super famous for drawing those gorgeous vintage souvenir maps, did a lot of the original concept sketches for Frontierland way back in 1954.

And then for Tom Sawyer Island specifically, sources point to a different name, Vic Greene, working alongside Herb Ryman and Claude Coats with Bill Evans handling all that gorgeous landscaping.

So there's a little bit of mystery there, whether it was Patrick or Green running point on the art director for the land part.

My guess is the role probably shifted around a bit as the project grew.

If you go to Disney's D23 and look at the history of the Jungle Cruise they will say this.

We're all familiar with the famous sketch that Herb Ryman did of Disneyland in one weekend, as Walt Disney-

Mm

... needed to present it to the bank.

Right.

And that's the sketch we all see.

So the story goes, and Disney tells us, that 20,000 Leagues' squid was going to be part of the Jungle Cruise to the extent that he, Herb Ryman, included a sketch of the squid in that sketch, which you can see.

Okay.

And just to kind of let you know a little bit about things that are going on.

First off, it's the 75th anniversary of Herb Ryman drawing the original Disneyland map.

It was the weekend that Walt took him to a hotel room and got him hyped up on coffee and stayed there all weekend with him to get him to draw the map they used to sell the bankers on the park.

So 75 years ago.

Well, the reason I suggested this topic at all is because, well, this weekend— We're celebrating, well, let me do the math here.

What is it? The 73rd anniversary of, you know, Herbie Ryman sitting at home on a Saturday, and he gets a call from Walt to get the effect of, hey, could you come over to the studio? I got something to show you.

Pack a lunch.

There we go.

The 20 years this space spent as an art gallery are packed with genuinely interesting history.

For example, the inaugural exhibit, The Art of Disneyland, featured a 1964 concept painting of New Orleans Square by legendary Disney artist Herb Ryman.

And Herb Ryman isn't just any Imagineer.

In 1953, you may know, Walt Disney personally asked him to sketch the entire concept of Disneyland over a single weekend so that Roy could take the drawings to New York bankers to secure the original $17 million construction loan.

Without that weekend, there may not have been a Disneyland at all.

The Disneyland Dream Suite is the opposite.

It was Walt's real personal architectural project, designed with the woman who built sets for Gone with the Wind, decorated by his own wife and let unfinished by his actual death rather than scheduling gap between a park that opened without him.

It then spent two decades as a genuine museum of original Disneyland concept art from legends like Herb Ryman, the man who helped save Disneyland from never being built at all.