I Wrote A Walt Disney World History Book In A Year

When I was a little kid, there was no such thing as Walt Disney World history.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but that’s how it felt. Growing up in New England, Florida felt like an impossibly distant location. My family lived in a rural area and were not Disney Channel subscribers, so the amount of Disney World content I was dished out on an annual basis could be measured in moments. Plus, as an only child (and a sickly one to boot) I had a lot of downtime to fill wondering about Disney World.

I stared at the photographs in my 1990 souvenir book obsessively. Every so often I would be taken to the library where I looked through books like Walt Disney: An American Original or the various editions of the Ultimate Disney Trivia Books by Dave Smith. There was plenty of information out there about Walt Disney and Disneyland, but not Walt Disney World. I wondered why.

I also liked to rent old videos, like A Dream Called Walt Disney World or Disneyland Fun, to get my “fill” of the place, but I was totally in the dark about how Walt Disney World came to be, the basics of the major players behind its creation, and how all of that connected to the place as it existed in the early 90s. It just existed in a state of seemingly having always just been there.

Eventually, the veil began to lift. As a teenager I went to Disneyland and bought my first issue of The E Ticket at the Disney Gallery. By then there were early internet sites like Widen Your World and Walt Dated World, and eventually I joined the fray and began to write my own histories. But those early years when I was aching for quality Walt Disney World historical content and there was none to be had has always been a sore point.

Don’t get me wrong, the current state of Disney World history is much improved, and Disney has been much more active about promoting its history. YouTube ride throughs and history channels proliferate, and it feels like almost everybody on earth has watched Defunctland. Theme park history is much more democratized…. if you know to look for it.

But by another metric, it’s as bad as ever. Disney locks their history books behind a steep pay wall. The best official Disney history book in recent years, A Portrait of Walt Disney World by Kevin Kern and Steven Vagnini, initially cost $60 if you could get it at all. That huge Disney 100 book was the same, and the brilliant Marc Davis In His Own Words is an insane $150 two-volume set. All worth every penny, but purchases I innately know I would have been denied as a child.

And then there’s the size of these things. The Taschen Walt Disney Film Archives hardcover is a thing of beauty but it’s so huge it’s shipped in a box with a handle. Ink & Paint: The Women of Disney’s Animation is the size of a 1978 Buick; it’s so massive I had to stand at my kitchen counter to read it because it was cutting off the circulation to my legs. This effectively means that Disney hides their history behind a paywall known as shelf space. Increasingly, I’ve begun to resent all of this. I began to wonder if there could be a way to get Walt Disney World history – real, well-researched primary-source history – out to a mass audience at a low price in a book you could throw into a suitcase.

I also began to wonder if there was a way to get that history out of the “Disney Adult Ghetto.” Don’t get me wrong, I love writing for adult nerds, but I’ve never deluded myself that the idea there’s any history to be found in an amusement park is an extremely niche one. I knew if I wanted to carry the message of the kind of history I wanted to present out of my circle of influence, I had to present it in a context that an outside audience was prepared to accept it.

Like a local history book. I don’t know about you, but every place I travel to I like to look through the local legends books. Sometimes I’ll pick one up for a quick read on the flight home, and enjoy feeling like I’ve gotten even a tiny taste of the local color. Most often these books are published by The History Press, those people who have the Images of America books you see everywhere. They’re glossy paperbacks that are never terribly expensive and reasonably attractive. I began to wonder.

By the start of last year I had gotten my book on Pirates of the Caribbean – Scoundrels, Villains, and Knaves – into a state close enough to call “somewhat done.” I could take my time and comfortably hit my 2024 publication goal. I had done it. After messing around with my first book for a half decade, I had put out a complete manuscript in a tight two and a half years. I had proven to myself I could work faster.

I should have taken it easy. Instead, I found myself drafting an e-mail to History Press. I was soon in touch with Joe, who is the managing editor for History Press’ portfolio of books about Florida. I knew they had an existing line of books called “Hidden History of…” (and I knew this because I owned a few). I thought “Hidden History of Walt Disney World” was a great title. They agreed. I said I thought I could write it in a year. They sent me a contract. I signed it. It was one of the most impulsive things I’ve ever done.

History Press has real advantages for authors – resources, professional editing, and distribution – but they have drawbacks too. Length was the main one. History Press sells product at a specific price point that looks a certain way, and there is an upper limit on your word count. I had about 44,000 words to tell the whole story of Walt Disney World. If you’ve read one of my books you know I am a very long winded writer. For context, I spend 40,000 words in my Pirates book describing just the Disneyland attraction.

I needed parameters. I thought of myself, browsing the History Press spinner in the airport. I imagined I had just been on vacation to Orlando and was curious about Disney World. I knew nothing about it except what I had observed while I was there.

That exercise helped a lot. It narrowed the scope of the book to simply explaining how Walt Disney World got to be the way it is. I had to cut the history somewhere, and I chose 1998. That would get me to Animal Kingdom, the Cruise Line, and the “sealed bubble” strategy Disney still uses. That seemed to be a good spot to stop.

I also decided not to spend too long discussing anything that could no longer be observed in the resort complex as it exists today. I again imagined a “use case” where a parent could pick up my book ahead of their vacation, read it, then keep their eyes peeled for Discovery Island and experience the thrill of connecting what they had read to what they were seeing. This had the benefit of knocking out a lot of other complex subjects, like If You Had Wings and most of Future World. This was starting to look manageable.

I put together a list of the subjects I thought I could tackle, organized them into rough groups, and divided that by my page count. I could spare about 3000 words per subject. Of course some of these could be disposed of more quickly than others. And that was it, I was off to the races. 53 weeks later, I delivered my manuscript.

Some of the things I’m proudest of in this book is that, despite the word limit, nearly everything in this book is new primary source research. I only recycled one article, an older one from my blog. Other subjects, even ones which had already been well covered by previous Disney World history resources like the STOLport, I attempted to attack from a new angle. This led me down avenues of research that ventured outside the confines of Disney, and illuminated very interesting aspects of Disney World history.

For instance, I naturally had to discuss the Florida Orange Bird. In the course of putting together the history I found very little evidence to support the dominant “narrative” of the brouhaha surrounding Anita Bryant in the late 70s leading to the retirement of the Orange Bird. Yes, it could have been a factor, but if it was, absolutely nobody on the ground in the early 80s thought it was important enough to write it down. Instead, I uncovered other factors, and was able to present what I think is the most accurate portrait of the relationship between Disney and the Florida Citrus Growers yet.

Some of these were things that surprised me and some were subjects I’d been wanting to write for years. I’ve been doing Disney World history for two decades now and even I was surprised at what I was turning up. A few other salient bullet points for those who know your Disney history and are still on the fence:

• The story of Dr. Phillips and how his citrus operation literally laid tracks for Disney World
• What Nintendo has to do with the Frontierland Shooting Arcade
• That awful “Master Shake” McDonalds
• How a Stuckey’s Pecan Shoppe inspired the Preview Center
• The clearest, most concise explaination I could muster of the politics behind the ascent of Michael Eisner
• The ghost town that Disney accidentally built Disney World on top of

Overall, I’d say I’m very happy with this book, and not just because I was able to do it as quickly as I did. I think it’s probably the funniest and weirdest Disney history book I could have made. I was delighted at just how sassy and bitchy History Press let me make it.

But more than anything, its the people who will never read this article who I’m most excited for, the interested adults who buy this at a CVS in Minnesota or the families who pick it up in the Orlando airport on their way back home. That’s my dream, and that’s why I wanted to do this book. I wanted to spread the gospel of how weird and cool and frustrating and baffling Walt Disney World history is. I wanted the Orange Bird and Radio Nick to be household names.

Because really what I wanted to do at this point in my career as a Disney author was pass it on.

I’ve had my dreams. I’ve stood as a Cast Member and watched the ghosts go through their motions below the ballroom in the Haunted Mansion. I’ve scampered up and down ladders in Pirates of the Caribbean. I drove the Riverboat and nearly got a third degree burn on the steam engine. I’ve written books on my two favorite attractions. I’ve been on the Disney Lot in Burbank at two in the morning. I’ve befriended Imagineers. I’ve been to the ten Disney theme parks I actually care about.

My world – the Disney Theme Parks as they existed from 1955 to about 1995 – is fading and has been for my entire adult life. There’s less and less of this history that I love every single day. What I wanted to do was inspire the next generation of historians who are going to develop the interpretive framework and write the history of the place that covers the period from 1995 – 2020. Disney is not going to do it for us and the work needs to be done. I hope this book inspires some kid somewhere to start scratching at the surface the way Widen Your World and Yesterland inspired me.

Hidden History of Walt Disney World is now available nationwide. Pick up a copy and maybe send one to your Disney obsessed niece. I promise you both will have a fabulously weird time. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, Bookshop.org, and every other place books are sold.