Keep your Eyes and Ears on Walt Disney World with the Progress City Public Library
Hello everyone! For many, many years now I’ve put in a lot of hours scanning in a range of old Disney documents and ephemera for use in my research. I’ve also spent way too much time scouring eBay for such things, and watching as they become more and more scarce and, frustratingly, more and more expensive. I would imagine that it’s harder now than ever for an aspiring researcher to get started, as such documents are hoarded by a select few, and public archives are – sadly – pilfered.
Hoping to not become part of the problem myself, I’ve long tried to figure out a way to best share my hoard of documentation with interested parties. Recently, Foxxy at Passport to Dreams began a project exactly along the lines of what I’d been thinking, and that’s finally spurred me to actually do something. And so I’m happy to announce the Progress City Public Library, featuring the Progress City Disneyana Collection. Thanks to the auspices of the Internet Archive, I’m going to be slowly uploading documents and ephemera that I’ve collected and digitized over the last 20 years or so. I hope some of you enjoy such things, and that some of you can even make use of them in your own research!
All documents in the Library came from public sources, but some were very hard to find!
Today we published our 250th document to the Library, a special item for those interested in the never-built Disney’s America project – it’s Design and Development Guidelines for the theme park which we obtained from a library in Virginia.
Of course this project has entailed a lot of effort and expense, so we’re very grateful to our Patreon supporters who help offset some of the cost of this documentation project. It’s very much appreciated! As a thank you to supporters, we’ve been making the scanned documents available to Patreon backers well in advance of their public posting as a bulk download, to save them the time of having to download things individually.
One thing that you can do to help out is to donate items to the collection! If you worked for Disney or know someone who did, and if you have access to old newsletters, documents, ephemera, magazines, and the like, we’d love to be able to scan them in and share them! Just drop us a line and we’d be happy to work something out to help preserve this knowledge for the future.
We hope you enjoy the collection and that you find something interesting in the stacks of the Progress City Public Library!
Walt and Kirk Douglas frolic on the set of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
We’re back with a new episode of the Progress City Radio Hour! This month we’re talking about voyages extraordinaires – Disney’s run-ins with Jules Verne and the scientific romances of old. Leading off, we talk about the making of the 1954 classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the Disneyland exhibit it inspired. We also look at other Disney attractions featuring Verne, from Horizons to Tokyo DisneySea’s Mysterious Island to Disneyland Paris’s Discoveryland. And to top it off, there’s a story about the making of the Disney Verne-wannabe picture Island at the Top of the World, and the magnificent unbuilt Disneyland area which it inspired, Tony Baxter’s fabled Discovery Bay. Listen here or via all podcast outlets!
Disney landscapers lower the Liberty Oak into place in Liberty Square in 1971. Among the crew are Scott Girard (to the left, in orange shirt), Charlie Sepulveda (the yellow shirt, center), and Bill Evans (the mint green shirt, far right).
Today! The Progress City Radio Hour presents part one of our Town Hall with veteran Disney landscaper and horticulturalist Scott Girard. Scott has had a fascinating career, beginning at Disneyland in 1964 and carrying on through the creation of Walt Disney World to Epcot Center, Tokyo Disneyland, and beyond. Along the way he worked with and encountered a roster of legends including Walt and Roy Disney themselves. In part one we discuss his childhood growing up near the Disneyland construction site and stories from his time working on the Disneyland Railroad and monorails. We also cover his contributions to the landscape design of Walt Disney World, including feats such as the moving of the Liberty Oak (shown above). Listen at Podbean or via your favorite podcast outlets!
Also please take note that our next Patreon livestream will be held this Saturday, the 14th, and that we will be having a special public livestream this month as well on August 28th! We hope to see you there.
The Progress City Radio Hour picks up our fife and drum for another celebration of the Fourth of July! In this patriotic episode we’ll look back at how Disney parks celebrated the Bicentennial, and examine some very early concepts for Epcot’s American Adventure. We’ll also walk you through a lengthy televised spectacle of Americana from 1991.
In addition, this episode marks the one year anniversary of our return to podcasting, and we’d really like to thank everyone who has joined in on the fun – especially those who have helped make it happen by joining our Patreon! We really do appreciate you all, and we have lots more fun planned for the year ahead.
But for now, we hope you enjoy the episode – strike up the band, it’s the Progress City Radio Hour!
Yet again, Jeff has provided a list of some of the music cues played in this episode on Twitter. In addition, he has made a fun Spotify playlist of some of the music drops from our last year of programs. Check it out here!
Also, during the show Jeff mentions some pretty amazing plans for a 1976 Bicentennial Exposition in Boston that never happened – check out more information about that project here.
As we say on the podcast, we’re taking August off in an effort to get ahead of things, but there are still a few treats to be had. We’re planning a public livestream event on YouTube for some time in August, so stay tuned to these channels for more information about that. And as always we’ll be having our Patreon-exclusive livestream at the end of July. We hope to see you there!
If you’re still reading this site, you probably know that I’ve been pretty active over on Twitter for the last decade. I’ve posted a ton of old images and historical tidbits over there, but amid all the other tweets and silliness I’ve worried that the real historical content has gotten lost down the bottomless memory hole. So to rectify this I’ve started a brand new Instagram account for Progress City, where I can keep and curate historical images and they’ll hopefully be more easy to find. It also allows me to post longer historical pieces than I can fit onto Twitter, but which don’t really warrant their own full lengthy post here. Think of it as kind of the mid-sized historical option. Join us, won’t you?
From the Progress City archives comes this collection of 33 tall tales and true from Disney history. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats.
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