Official Guide – New York World’s Fair

1 9 6 4   /   1 9 6 5   New York World’s Fair

    

Front and Back Covers

The thing I enjoy most about collecting is that you just never know where or when the next big find is going to come from. I’ve been looking for a guide to this World’s Fair for years because it hosted many Pavilions designed and built by Walt Disney’s Imagineering company.

But before we get to the individual Pavilions, how about a couple of maps to get your bearings?

     Approaches to the Fair

Plan of the Fair          Enlarge to find Disney Pavilions

For this second map, I’ve circled in red the numbers indicating each Pavilion’s location and labeled each with the name of the sponsor and/or attraction. So definitely enlarge this one to get an idea of where each Pavilion was in relation to the others.

The four Disney Pavilions were:

• In “Pepsi Presents Walt Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ – a Salute to UNICEF and the World’s Children” at the Pepsi pavilion, animated dolls and animals frolicked in a spirit of international unity accompanying a boat ride around the world. The song was written by the Sherman Brothers.

• General Electric sponsored “Progressland”, where an audience seated in a revolving auditorium (the “Carousel of Progress”) viewed an audio-animatronic presentation of the progress of electricity in the home. The Sherman Brothers song “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” was composed for this attraction.

    

• Ford Motor Company presented “Ford’s Magic Skyway”, a WED Imagineering designed pavilion, which was the second most popular exhibit at the fair. It featured 50 actual (motorless) convertible Ford vehicles, including Ford Mustangs, in an early prototype of what would become the PeopleMover ride system. Audience members entered the vehicles on a main platform as they moved slowly along the track. The ride moved the audience through scenes featuring life-sized audio-animatronic dinosaurs and cavemen.

• At the Illinois pavilion, a lifelike President Abraham Lincoln, voiced by Royal Dano, recited his famous speeches in “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln”.

Unfortunately, this attraction was not pictured in the book, but only explained. Perhaps this was intentional to increase the impact on the audience to the animatronic Lincoln.

I’ll be reading this book over the next little while and will share tidbits that I find about Disney and the wonderful Pavilions that he and his team created.