Free The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Places on Earth by Leslie Le Mon

times of crisis or disappointment.  Terminally ill people of all ages wish for a visit to Disneyland before they die, and organizations like the Make-a-Wish Foundation (www.wish.org) make those hopes reality.
    What inspires us to imbue Disneyland with this nearly mythic importance?
    On some level, with its carrousel and castle and cowboys, its mysterious jungle and its animated characters, Disneyland is a highly idealized elaboration of our childhoods.  It can be seen as a portal through which we revisit (maybe even heal) our youth.
    Walt himself had a challenging childhood.  His strict, entrepreneurial father suffered periodic business and financial setbacks, so Walt and his siblings had to join the workforce at a young age.  Walt took some hard knocks when he was a young entrepreneur, when he was cheated and betrayed by early business associates.
    Even in later life, Walt never outgrew a childlike delight in the world.  Without a doubt he wanted adults to discover in Disneyland a place to throw off their grown-up cares and woes for at least a few hours, to reconnect with the optimism and imagination of youth, with a childlike sense of adventure, play, and exploration.  Disneyland is a place where everyone can be a kid.
    On an even deeper level, Walt and his team of Imagineers (the term is Disney Legend Marty Sklar ’s welding of “Imagination” and “Engineers”) created a psychologically compelling design, those archetypal themed lands connected by a Central Plaza or Hub .  Guests can stand at the Hub and select among many themed lands that strike chords deeply rooted in the American psyche, and to some degree, in a universal, collective unconsciousness.
    Walt said it best himself:  “ Disneyland will be the essence of America as we know it, the nostalgia of the past, with exciting glimpses into the future … a place … to be at home … a place for the people to find happiness and knowledge.”
    From the beginning Walt wanted to immerse park Guests in a three-dimensional experience of certain defining moments and values.  The immersion was to be complete.  It was to be like stepping through “the fourth wall” into a motion picture, and becoming a participant in it.
    As always, Walt was ahead of his time.  In the 21 st century, artists and scientists develop ever more immersive virtual reality worlds via 3D film and television, videogame technology, and wearable technology like Google Glass specs.  In the 1950’s, Walt created a virtual realm by building it in the real, three-dimensional world.  It doesn’t get much more immersive than that.
    Guests not only see replicas of bygone times , or projections of things-to-come, but experience the associated sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, scents, and motions in the moment.  Walt ’s artists and engineers applied film and theater methodologies to the park.  The result was uncannily immersive, not just photo-realistic but hyperrealistic.  The park still has that sense of heightened reality, the super-saturated colors of movies, memories, and dreams.
    That’s powerful, heady stuff, and over the decades Disney spread it to other Disney theme parks around the globe.  There were initial stumbles with Disneyland Paris , the first major Disney theme park established on foreign soil, but when additional Disney parks were built around the globe, Imagineers leveraged the lessons of Disneyland Paris to ensure that all new parks tapped the culture and dreams of the host country.  With DCA Park , too, Imagineers went back to the drawing board to remember the magically immersive qualities that always made the original Disneyland so affecting.
    Could anyone but Walt Disney have created a virtual reality land that would be at once specific and universal, comfortably small-town and mythically sacred?  Apparently not—since he’s the only that did.
    He was one in a million.  Walt was a unique amalgam of the best qualities of Santa Claus and Willie Wonka,