May 28 - it's a small world

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On this day, in 1966, it’s a small world began sending guests on a whimsical journey of international goodwill in Disneyland’s Fantasyland in Anaheim, California. Walt was already under contract for three attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair, when he was approached by Pepsi to create a fourth one. The board of directors at Pepsi knew they were going to have a pavilion at the fair (it would be commercial suicide to not have a presence) but had procrastinated over what they wanted in their pavilion. Hollywood legend Joan Crawford was a member of that board by way of her marriage to the late Pepsi CEO Alfred Steele. She got fed up with the rest of the board’s dithering, asked her friend Walt Disney to come up with something and basically browbeat everyone into accepting whatever was presented, in spite of the fact that Walt would have less than eleven months to produce. Because Walt knew how to bring out the best in people (and had the best people to work with), everything worked out just fine.

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It was decided that the proceeds from the ride would benefit the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) so the basic theme was “Children of the World” and that became its working title as well. Because of the recent international tensions over missiles in Cuba, the theme was expanded to include brotherhood and peace (which may seem like it’s implied in an endeavor based on kids, but it really isn’t). The overall design of the attraction fell to the Legendary Mary Blair, who had already lent her considerable talents to shaping the look of films like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Unlike those projects where she merely influenced things, this overall look would be pure Mary. The simple clean shapes used in deceptively complex ways and the cheerful color palate combined to make a classic ride that endures and delights right up to today.

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Not that Mary didn’t have help along the way. The Legendary Marc Davis, as he did on so many Disneyland attractions, designed the scenes guests would travel through and many of the characters in them. His wife, the Legendary Alice Davis, designed the costumes the dolls wear and the Legendary Rolly Crump took care of the rest of the props and figures. The Legendary Blaine Gibson designed and sculpted the dolls with input from Walt himself, who insisted that every doll, no matter what country it represented, had an identically shaped face. It’s no coincidence that so many of the people who worked on this particular ride have gone on to achieve Disney Legend status (except for Walt himself, who has never been given the award; I know that it would be a fairly redundant gesture, it’s just something that makes me smile when I think about it), they are all that good.

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Which brings us to the music (I can hear some of you groaning already because, let’s be honest, the song has probably been playing in your head since you started reading this article). In its original form, Children of the World was going to have snippets of each country’s national anthem playing near the dolls from that country. It  was a plan that only sounded good on paper. In real life, it was a jumbled up, headache inducing wall of noise. So Walt brought his resident songwriters, the Legendary Sherman Brothers, into the project. He gave them just two guidelines: the song they wrote had to able to be done in a round (so it was infinitely repeatable without a beak) and it had to be easily translated into many different languages. They came back with It’s a Small World, a slow ballad about the universal theme of friendship. Walt said bring me something more cheerful. So they sped their song up considerably and replayed it for the boss. Walt liked the second version so much, he renamed the entire attraction after it. Love it or hate it, the Sherman Brothers’ ultimate ear worm has easily been played over 50 million times over the years making it the most played piece of music ever created, beating out the number two song by over 40 million plays. Of course, the fact that it is playing somewhere in the world at literally any moment of the day helps.

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The success of it’s a small world (and, yes, writing it without capital letters is the proper way to refer to the attraction) at the World’s Fair cannot be undersold. The ride’s high capacity (especially compared to other Fair attractions) meant that there was rarely a line, in spite of the overwhelming number of people who experienced it. Over the course of the two and a half years the Fair ran, over 10 million tickets were sold for small world resulting in over $8 million dollars being raised for UNICEF. At the Fair’s end, it was dismantled, transported back to Southern California and installed in its permanent home. When the Magic Kingdom opened five years later, it included a version of the ride, with the queue area moved indoors. Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland each have their own versions as well, so it’s fairly accurate when Disney claims that the sun never sets on cheerful children of it’s a small world.

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In 1997, Disneyland began a new holiday tradition with their version of it’s a small world. At the end of October, they add in almost a million twinkling lights as well as various Christmas decorations and costumes for the dolls. The soundtrack also gets changed to include international versions of Jingle Bells and Deck the Halls. The holiday version has proven so popular that it’s spread to every other park around the world except one. The Magic Kingdom ride stays unaltered (mainly to keep the change as something unique in the United States to its sister park).