Retro TV Friday

Iit may be Opening Day for baseball this weekend, but today I'm thinking of a different opening day - that of the original Disneyland on July 17, 1955, and as Ed Sullivan might have put it, it was a really big shew. Today it might seem strange for the opening of an amusement park to be broadcast live on national television, but then nobody had ever seen anything like Disneyland before.

Besides, ABC had helped finance Walt Disney's dream, in return for Disney doing a weekly television show for the fledgling medium. (This in itself was a big deal, as movie moguls still thought of television either as light entertainment or a major threat to their livelihood.) So it's no wonder that ABC blocked out 90 minutes on that day for the star-studded broadcast, which attracted 90 million viewers.

Here's part one; the entire broadcast is available on YouTube by following the links at the end of each segment. ◙