Disneyland might have changed the travel industry by showing how amusement parks could become more immersive theme parks. But the Walt Disney World Resort changed entertainment by showing how a theme park could help make a company into a lifestyle brand.
The Walt Disney World Resort opened 50 years ago, on Oct. 1, 1971. Disney is celebrating the anniversary with an 18-month-long “The World’s Most Magical Celebration.” Visitors will find a few new shows and a clone of the Ratatouille ride that Disney first installed at its Paris resort in 2014. But Disney has given up on the big prize giveaways that the late Disneyland President Jack Lindquist pioneered for previous Disney theme park anniversaries.
Disney does not need to give away toys, tickets or even cars to win people’s attention anymore. Over the past five decades, Disney has cultivated intense loyalty among its growing fan base, including many who have made Disney a defining part of their lives. That effort started with Walt’s plans for his “Florida project.”
Before his death in 1966, Walt Disney envisioned his Florida property as an “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” or Epcot for short. In 1982, Disney managers revived that acronym as the name for Disney World’s second theme park, after 1971’s Magic Kingdom. But the original Epcot was to be an actual city where people would work and live.
That city never happened, of course. After Walt’s death, his successors scaled back the plans for what they named Walt Disney World in their founder’s honor. When the resort opened in 1971, it included just the Magic Kingdom theme park, two hotels and a monorail connecting them. Today, Disney World includes four theme parks, two water parks, more than 30 hotels and timeshare resorts and the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment district.
Walt Disney’s modernist vision for Epcot feels a bit more like 1950s suburbia on steroids than the walkable, mixed-use communities that urban planners are trying to design today. But the original Epcot did include abundant entertainment, including that Magic Kingdom theme park. It literally was to be a place where people would live and play with Disney, 24/7. And in that respect, even if Walt’s Florida project did not provide an accurate forecast for urban living in the 21st century, it did provide a model for The Walt Disney Company today.
People spend their entire vacations at the Walt Disney World Resort. Fans dress in Disney apparel and fill their homes with Disney décor. They raise their children on Disney movies and TV shows, reading Disney books and listening to Disney music. Disney has cruise ships and Broadway shows. With its Golden Oak development for wealthy homebuyers, Walt Disney World now is a place where some people actually make their home, too.
Disney has grown into a lifestyle brand that touches some of its fans’ lives almost every hour of every day. Fifty years after the Florida project’s opening, many of us now are living in Walt Disney’s world.
