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By invitation only…

Walt Disney

Image: Disney

What happens when you throw a party and uninvited guests arrive? That depends on the scale of your affair, doesn’t it? Say, for example, that you invite six guests into your home for the evening. How many more surprise arrivals could you accommodate? Four? Six? How about 22? What would happen if more than four times as many people show up at your home than you’d anticipated?

Think about the situation from all the important perspectives. Would you have enough food and drinks to entertain the extra 22 visitors? Do you have the available bathroom space and reliable plumbing needed to satisfy their needs? If not, you understand that you’re in a for a messy night with a lot of grumpy guests, right?

Let’s take the same situation out to a larger scale. Walt Disney scheduled a soft opening for his new theme park, and it operated similarly to how the system works today. For example, I was one of the guests lucky enough to enjoy a ride on Seven Dwarfs Mine Train prior to its official opening. I happened to walk past the new Fantasyland attraction at a moment when Disney cast members were testing it. They let a handful of fortunate guests past the roped-off area, and we took our turns on the ride. Once a couple of hundred visitors had followed suit, Disney shut down the ride to research its performance. A handful of the riders also took surveys to discuss their satisfaction about its speed, comfort, and entertainment level.

Ten days after we left, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train officially opened to the public. On that date, it had no limitations on its usage. Everyone who wanted to take a spin on the ride did so. A soft opening is a controlled experiment while an actual debut means that the attraction has become a permanent part of the park. It’ll only shut down if it malfunctions or needs renovations.

That was the plan for the soft opening of Disneyland. Several thousand invited guests would enter the park, thereby becoming the first non-Disney employees in the world to spend time at the Happiest Place on Earth. You can already see the problem with this line of thinking. Who wouldn’t want to say that they visited Disneyland on the day it opened to the public for the first time? It’s the same as the upcoming openings of the Star Wars expansion at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Pandora: The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Some Disney fanatics would do anything to attend either (or both) of these events on opening day.

Davy Crockett and George Russel: the Anna and Elsa of 1954

Davy Crockett

Image: Disney

Even in 1955, a large number of Disney zealots existed. Mickey Mouse was an international icon, and the company was enjoying a renaissance in popularity due to the Davy Crockett television mini-series. The news that a Frontierland featuring exclusive Davy Crockett merchandise was reason enough for some kids to pressure their parents to arrive for opening day.

This phenomenon is one of the parts of the story that oftentimes gets lost in the shuffle. Disney sold half a billion dollars of Davy Crockett merchandise during the mid-1950s. In a three-year span, this intellectual property earned the equivalent of $4.4 billion. It was the Frozen/Star Wars/Cars of its generation. Everybody wanted the toys, and many children wanted to live out the frontier experience. Initially, Disney even offered a Davy Crockett museum in Frontierland, the equivalent of Star Wars Launch Bay today. After only three months, they modified the area to become the Davy Crockett Arcade, which kids loved even more.

The best laid plans…

Sleeping Beauty Castle

Image: Disney

What’s the logical conclusion to a scenario where lots of people want to attend a limited engagement? You’ve seen videos of parents fighting to get their kids the IT toy of the holiday season, right? Normal, otherwise calm folks get stabby when a Tickle Me Elmo is up for grabs. They don’t want to dash the hopes and dreams of their kids, at least until puberty. This drive causes them to stand in line for hours on end, desperately hoping to dash to the delivery truck before the competition can reach this destination.

Disneyland was like that, only to the nth degree. Seriously, I’m writing this in a light-hearted fashion, but the only water in constant supply that day came from the river of tears cried by parents and children alike. Walt Disney, in his infinite wisdom, selected a controlled crowd dispersal process. He authorized the dissemination of 6,000 RSVP tickets to the soft opening of his new Anaheim venture. Each ticket included a visitor window. The lucky recipients of the golden ticket of the 1950s could stay for three hours each. Then, they’d leave and let other folks replace them in the park.

Absolutely no part of the plan worked.

How did the whole stratagem fall asunder? Where should I begin? For starters, none of the ticket-holding guests wanted to leave Disneyland after a mere three hours. Even if they did, the lines at so many attractions were so long that they’d run late anyway. Disney park planners sorely miscalculated the wait time for each of their new rides. The fiasco was hardly their fault, though. Events transpired that were impossible to forecast.

The History Channel indicates that “28,154 passed through Disneyland’s gates thanks to counterfeit tickets.” Remember the party example above? It’s the same calculation, only on a larger scale. Disney planned for 6,000 people, but they braced for twice that many. They understood that all the ticket holders would have friends who begged to come. Still, their plan would hold as long as nobody abused the privilege of day one admission to Disneyland.

Breaking the law, breaking the law

Casey Train

Image: Disney

Suffice to say that tens of thousands of people abused the privilege. Word leaked that counterfeit tickets were available for a modest fee. Admission was only a dollar for adults and 50 cents for children, the equivalent of $9 and $4.50 today. If you could walk into Disneyland for that price right now, everyone reading this would do so. Of course, you had to pay per ride, but it’s still a ridiculous bargain compared to current pricing for a day at Disney theme park. Still, people willingly paid the scammers to purchase fake tickets. In fact, some people did so unknowingly. Many of the counterfeit tickets were so similar in style that Disney quickly modified the ticket printing process to prevent further issues.

Of course, some opening day gate crashers at Disneyland didn’t even need tickets. A clever swindler deduced that he could make a quick buck doing something so obvious it is amazing Disney employees didn’t protect against such an eventuality. He grabbed a ladder and built a makeshift backdoor entrance to the park. Then, he sold “admission” for five dollars. That bit of improvisation made him one of the most impressive ticket scalpers of the 1950s. He sold park entrance for five times the actual admission price, and people had to perform a clearly illegal and potentially dangerous maneuver to cross over into Disneyland. Depending on which story we should believe, he either had dozens or hundreds of customers.

That leads us to the final point about all the illegal admissions. While the counterfeit tickets were good, they lacked a key component. None of them displayed the admission window. And the people hurdling the gates to get in certainly weren’t about to leave after only a few hours. That left only the people actually invited as the ones who would even consider exiting the park at the appropriate time. The failure of Disney’s park admission plan was total. They expected a few thousand guests at carefully planned intervals. Instead, they had a factor of four times as many people all at once. I presume the gate entry process looked something like this.

 
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