The Mouse’s Final Frontier
We all take the things like NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for granted,
but if it weren’t for Disney, there may have never been an entire space program. Though
the space race was attributed to the rivalry between the Soviets and the Americans,
Disney’s role in the exploration of the known universe was pivotal. Without Disney’s
endeavors in the world of space exploration, there may have been a chance that America
may never have reached the moon or even gone into space for that matter. By using his
influence and ideas in television, movies and even in his theme park, Disney created the
atmosphere that was needed in order to successfully launch off the entire space
exploration idea.
Disney’s entire career was based on being on the forefront of technology. He was
one of the first people to implement audio effects in his cartoons, film his movies and
television shows in color and was one of the first movie producers to develop surround
sound. With the end of World War II, America was craving a new idea which it could
spend its new found wealth on. No one was quite to sure what the “next big thing” was
going to be. Some wanted to spend America’s wealth on cars, but most fell for Walt
Disney’s image of a future in the final frontier; space.
Until the 1950s, the idea of space travel was thought of to be impossible. After the
invention of the V2 rocket and the atomic bomb, the feat of space travel seemed to be
closer than ever. Now that the United States had collected the Engineers who had
defected from Germany in order to avoid the Soviet Union, the concept of launching a
rocket into space and back began to become plausible. While the advancements in space
technology were taking place, Walt Disney was hard at work on his Disneyland project.
One of the biggest issues for Walt Disney was to find something to put in his
Tomorrowland. Though he had robots and flying cars, most of the things in
Tomorrowland were not unique from their real world counter parts. What Walt Disney
really wanted to get for Tomorrowland was something that would invigorate the masses
and make people want to come to Disneyland to see interpretations of the “next big
thing”. His answer was presented to him in a meeting between him and a scientist by the
name of Wernher Von Braun.
The new idea turned out to be exactly what Walt Disney was hoping for. Von
Braun presented Walt with his concept which was known as the rocket ship. Though
Disney was skeptical at first, everything that Von Braun said made sense and would
appeal to the masses better than anything before. This idea of space had success all over.
It was new and daring, and exactly what America was looking for to enter into the atomic
age. Disney decided that his theme park would feature this new found rocket ship as the
central idea around Tomorrowland. Von Braun happily agreed to aid Walt Disney in his
concept of making Tomorrowland into a rocket heaven. After all NASA would need all
the publicity that they could get, and there was no one better than Disney to do the trick.
Walt thought the best way to present the new future of space exploration would be to
show it on the television. He devised a series of 3 TV shows called “Man in Space” and
decided to release the first episode three months before the grand opening of Disneyland.
In a way, his new show was a way to validate and open up another avenue to
publicize Disneyland. From an economical and business standpoint, if rockets and
spaceships were not the next big thing, his entire Tomorrowland would become a failure.
With all the time that Walt had spent collaborating with engineers and professors like
Von Braun and Ernst Stuhlinger as well as the money already invested for the land, it was
in Disney’s best interests to make his series to appeal to the American people. If they
didn’t fall for his love of rockets like he did, there would be dire consequences for both
Disney and NASA.
On March 9, 1955, Walt Disney aired the first “Man in Space” episode. The
episode started with Disney telling the audience that he had found “the tools and trades
for… man’s newest adventure” (Wright). Von Braun was the one to present the details of
the rocket, but it was Disney that brought the idea of the spaceship home to Americans.
In an animated short, he presented the concept of Von Braun’s four stage rocket on an
island where “man worked together to just one cause – the conquest of space” (Wright).
The response from the show was amazing. It was estimated that over 42 million
Americans viewed the first show, and Disney garnered the support from the American
people. Contemporary television critics recognized the contributions of Disney and stated
that “the thinking of the best scientific minds made the picture of space travel more fact
than fantasy”. The show even went as far as receiving an Academy award nomination for
best documentary short. The effect on the public from the series was so great that even
President Dwight Eisenhower and a high-level soviet official by the name of L. Sedov
commented that it was a brilliant new concept of space travel.
A new level of zeal for the space program hit the nation. Disney’s first show was
attributed to Dwight Eisenhower’s announcement that America would now launch a
small unmanned earth-circling satellite as part of the U.S. participation in the
International Geophysical Year in 1957. On top of that, many Americans were signing up
to join NASA and other agencies that dealt with the future of space travel.
Shortly after “Man in Space”, Disneyland opened in the out skirts of Anaheim
with an amazing turnout. In a presentation of Tomorrow land, Disney is quoted for saying
that "Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the
Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The
Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in
adventures that are a living blueprint of our future." One of the main attractions of
tomorrow was a TWA rocket to the moon from the “Man in Space” program. It featured
almost everything that the series described would be the rocket of the future. It was also
the largest structure in Disneyland, and boasted the largest amount of people who visited
it than any other show case exhibit in the entire park.
One of the reasons that so many people visited the rocket show can be seen in his
presentation during “Man in Space”. After talking about the rocket that would get people
into space, he tells the audience about the TWA rocket in Tomorrowland. The effect from
such a presentation made Americans feel that they would be left out of the new space
race if they did not go to Disneyland and view the rocket ship. Now that America was
hooked on to the possibilities of the rocket ship and the successful release of
Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, Walt Disney set his sights on the other two episodes of the
Man in Space series to promote not just space travel, but his emerging genre of science
fiction as well.
The next two shows began to become increasingly more “Disneyfied”. The
contemporary science and technologies presented by Von Braun and other scientists
began to become nothing more than props for a life that was more at home in films than
the real world. In the second show of the Disney series, “Man and the moon” Disney
spent much of the time of the show with analyzing the myths and other humorous aspects
of the moon. The last show of the Series “Mars and Beyond” presented the possibility of
life on mars, and what it would look like if there was any there. On top of that, it also
gave a story about the idea of Martian invaders, which had become a popular movie
genre after 1955. As the shows began to become more Disneyfied, the sight of the space
program was lost. Realizing this would start to have a negative effect on Disneyland and
the Space Race, Disney cut the Space programming for over 7 years.
Though this marked the end of Disney’s cooperation with NASA and their space
programs, the effect that they put on the space industry did not. Disney’s impact on the
space program was bigger than anyone who made the “Man in Space” series could have
ever imagined. It not only affected the American nation, but it affected the rest of the
world just as well. After the “Man in Space” episodes, the space programs in both
America and the Soviet Union increased significantly. In fact, Disney’s influence on the
soviet space program may have been so great that the Soviet’s rocket that launched the
Sputnik rocket into space looked surprisingly similar to the rocket made by Disney called
the DRM-1. The impact of Disney does not end there however. The space suit employed
later by the Russians in the Vostok I mission had an uncanny appearance to the one used
in Disney’s “Man and the Moon” episode. Though these are both physical attributes that
the Disney films promoted in the area of space travel, one of the greatest achievements of
Disney was in molding the psychology of the Average American with the idea of space
flight.
Before the “Man in Space” series, most Americans did not consider space travel
as the next big thing that America would venture into. Movies about aliens had existed
for a long period of time before the man in space episodes, but most people did not
consider the fact that maybe humans would be the ones going out and exploring the
universe. Disney brought the imagination and excitement to the dull and boring premises
expressed by scientists such as Von Braun and excited the American population into
believing that space could be the new “western” of the 20th century. An example of this is
in the second episode of the “Man in Space” series called “Man and the Moon”. In the
episode the Disney DRM-1 rocket is in orbit around the earth when it is suddenly hit by a
meteorite. Using elements of suspense, the audience was left hanging on what the future
of the rocket would be. Then out of nowhere, an astronaut sporting a space suit appears
and begins to fix the spaceship, saving it from the disaster that may have occurred if he
was not there.
Though this series helped create excitement for the American space program, 5
years after the release of “Man in Space” America began to become bored with the idea
of putting people into space. Disney finally returned back to its “Man in Space” style
series to comment on the emerging technologies of the Space Race. The episode was
called “Spy in the Sky” and was released in 1962. The episode took an almost comical
view on the space race between the two super powers and what they were planning on
putting up next. Even though nothing new as far as innovation was presented in the
episode, one thing that was key in the show was the way that the presented the entire
show. The imaginers at Disney studios designed the episode to almost imply that the
entire space race was the result of the “Man in Space” programs. It then went on to
present the concept of satellites, and how one day they may even be able to affect the
weather patterns on Earth. Just how the other episodes had been Disneyfied to a growing
extent, this last episode was probably the most Disneyfied of all of them.
In all of the Disney films, it seemed that one of the largest reasons that many
people were attracted to it was that the space program would always bring a sense of new
found power to America. In the “Spy in the Sky” episode, it seems to be implied that one
day, one of the super powers would be able to control the weather of the entire world.
This type of presentation once again created a surge in the space race. Americans were
afraid that Russia would come up with these super weather satellites first and in their
anxiety; the NASA’s nimbus program was formed.
Such antics like the one described along with other animations helped to give the
space program the excitement that it needed. Von Braun for many years had been trying
to promote his idea of space travel. He had teamed up with many others releasing news
articles and even radio broadcasts, but none of these proved to help him. His turn to
Disney was the only thing that brought the space program and the concept of space travel
out to everyone. One of the most amazing things about the entire endeavor was how two
seemingly unrelated people both had their stakes on the success of the rocket ship’s
appeal on the American people. In fact Disney had a bigger stake on the success of the
rocket ship and the satellite than Von Braun did. Tomorrowland is one of the most talked
about sections in Disneyland. Walt Disney needed to make sure that the future that he
envisioned would become the future that the American people envisioned as well. By
using such words as “man’s next adventure” and other key phrases, Disney tried to assert
just how much fun and excitement was available in the realm of space.
Whether Disney wished to or not, the entire Space race between Russia and
America was a bit of his invention. His characteristic style against the backdrop of the
cold war often sent the message out that if America did not look at space with the
intensity that Disney wanted; then Soviet Russia would. It also seemed with “Man in
Space” series that there was always a feeling of a great future for whichever nation was
the first to utilize what Disney had laid out for them. Even though he originally created
the “Man in Space” series along with “Spy in the Sky” to help benefit his Tomorrowland
and all of the attractions in it, few could have guessed back when it was first released the
impact that it has had on the American space program even to this day.
Bibliography
Gabler, Neal Walt Disney: The Triumph of American Imagination; New York: Knopf,
October 2006.
Rice, Mark Oxley “In 2,000 years, will the world remember Disney or Plato?” Christian
Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0115/p16s02-usfp.html.
Wright, Mike “The Disney-Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space
Exploration” Nasa http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/disney_article.html.
No Author “Disney Goes to War” http://www.skylighters.org/disney/.
Moe, Richard., "Downside to Disney's America," The Washington Post, December 21,
1993.