Fastpass to the Past: The Theme Park History Podcast

Join Austin, a former Disneyland Cast Member, as she takes you through the outrageous and sometimes downright strange origin stories of your favorite theme parks, attractions, and shows. The outlandish history of Disneyland, Disney World, Universal Studios, Knott’s Berry Farms, and much more will be explored along with some outrageous stories from former Employees & Cast Members. What are you waiting for? For your safety, remain seated with your hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the podcast at all times. Since Disneyland’s opening in 1955, every designer who has been tasked with creating a new Main Street for a new Disney park has had to live up to that first nostalgic thoroughfare, the only one Walt actually had a hand in designing, while also setting the scene for the rest of the park. For Disneyland Paris, this task fell to a young brand-new Imagineer and self-proclaimed Disneytologist, Eddie Sotto, who envisioned a very different Main Street USA. Eddie spent over a year working on a Main Street inspired by the stories of the Roaring ’20s, and the jazz, cinema, art deco, and gangsters that populated the decade. His design included a hidden restaurant in a locomotive, a speakeasy jazz club, and police raids. Unfortunately, due to creative and financial reasons, his plans never saw the light of day in Paris. In this new part of the ‘Lost Lands of Disneyland’ series, we go back to the drawing board, deep in the Walt Disney Company archive, to see what this Roaring 20’s entrance sequence would have looked like.