April 30 - The 1939 New York World's Fair

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On this day, in 1939, the New York World’s Fair opened for business. Disney’s involvement in the 1964 World’s Fair is Fair-ly well known. The development of Audio-Animatronics, the four attractions the company built (all of them still existing in some form today) and the birth of Imagineers are all much lauded stories from the company’s lore and for good reason. But 1964 wasn’t the first time Walt created content specifically for Fair goers. That happened twenty-five years earlier at the real New York World’s Fair.

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You heard that right. Technically, there has only ever been one World’s Fair in Queens and it took place during 1939/40. The 1964 Fair may have been better attended, represented more countries and been immortalized in the Men in Black franchise, but it was never officially sanctioned. And, yes, there is an international governing body that decides what is, and what is not, allowed to be called a World’s Fair (or Expo as it’s generally known as now). The Bureau International des Expositions, in existence since the 1790s, has all kinds of rules about this sort of thing, the chief one being how often a World’s Fair can be held (it’s been every five years for decades now). Seattle held one in 1962. Montreal would host the next sanctioned on in 1967. New York knew it was too soon to have one in 1964, but did anyways and illegally billed itself as one.  True, it’s not a legality that anyone is going to care about (except Montreal, which had the biggest, most successful official World’s Fair of the 20^th century and was still smaller in almost every way than the second New York one) but technically, 1964 never happened.

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Anyways, by 1964, Walt and his crew were well seasoned Fair exhibitors. The Walt Disney Studio didn’t have as big a presence at the 1939 Fair, participating in only one pavilion, but it also wasn’t as big a company. The studio was contracted by Nabisco to create an exclusive Mickey Mouse short that would be viewed in their pavilion during the festivities. The resulting film, Mickey’s Surprise Party, was the first instance of a Disney produced public commercial. In the original film, Mickey and Minnie refer to Nabisco products during the story, most notably Milk Bone Dog Biscuits (which are now made by the J.M. Smucker Company). At the end of the short, we learn that Mickey’s favorite cookie is apparently a Nabisco Fig Newton (not the round, black and white Nabisco Oreo you might expect, although those are on hand as well). There is a later version of the short that was released on home video in the Eighties where all Nabisco references were overdubbed with new lines by Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, but it’s fairly easy to find the original. Especially since Mickey’s Surprise Party is one of the few Disney cartoons that’s in the public domain, due to the fact that Nabisco owned it, not Disney.

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One of the features of the 1939 New York World’s Fair was that every day the fair was open was given a different theme. The buttons and programs highlighting each theme have become quite collectable over the years. On August 14, 1939, the Nabisco Pavilion sponsored Donald Duck Day. On that day, instead of showing Mickey’s Surprise Party, the pavilion screened the latest Donald short, Donald’s Penguin, released to theaters just a few days earlier. There was also a parade featuring a three foot tall Donald statue and Donald giveaways at the pavilion throughout the day.

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A final Disney related Fair fact concerns the time capsule that the Westinghouse Corporation put together. A seven foot long, 800 pound container was filled with Life magazines, a Gillette razor, thousands of pages of text on microfilm and an Ingersoll Mickey Mouse watch, first sold at the Chicago World’s Fair just six years earlier. Not only was the 1939 World’s Fair the first time the term time capsule was used, it might also impose the longest time period anyone will ever have to wait to open one. It’s still buried 50 feet down in Flushing Meadows, with a stone marker guarding the spot, waiting to be opened on the 5,000^th anniversary of the Fair. That’s right, if you want to get your hands on an original Mickey watch, all you have to do is be there when they open the time capsule in April of 6939.