Disney+ The Imagineering Story – Review

Disneyland is a place that is mystical for some, magical for others and beyond comprehension for others and after my first visit, I fit into all three groups at once. Since I first went in 2000, I have been to a Disney Park at least once a year starting in 2007 and love each and every minute of going there, there and while I like to think of myself as someone who knows a lot of what happens behind the scenes, like everything that Walt Disney did, there are many more layers to discover each time you look.

Enter The Imagineering Story, the first time that cameras have been able to not only capture the behind the scenes of the modern story, but also take a look at how the Disney company began building the fantastical. The first episode, which was the only one available to me in my preview time, was all about how they started and their first projects, including Disneyland. The episode is constructed using previously released clips, but also unseen footage, there are shots that show the park under construction that are in colour, something I had never seen before. But this is not a series about building Disneyland, but about the company and the people that built it and it does a great job of showing a lot of the original designers, engineers and more as they tackle the problems that they encountered.

The pacing of the episode is something that I hated at the start, I wanted to see more at a faster rate, but as the hour ticked by, I started to fall for the series in a way that I didn’t think of and that is down to how everything is presented. The start of Disneyland was with Walt sitting on a bench, watching his tow daughters on a carrousel, and the idea was simple, what if there was a place where parents and children could spend time enjoying everything together, most Disney fans know the quote, but there is more to the interview, including Walt’s wife Lillian claiming that places like that are dirty and families wont go. In fact, there is a lot of that, things that Walt had said, that some of the famous designers and more, but rather than a snippet that looks good on a shirt, more detail is provided.

As I said as this is not about the building od Disneyland, they skip over some of the monetary challenges that they faced, and focused on more of the technical, including the simple fact that placing a large berm of dirt around the park, helped sell the fact that you were transported to another place and time. Even as time marched on and they were talking about the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, there were things there that I had no idea happened, the episode just kept delivering the goods. Of course, as a series there is much more to see, and the episode ends with a tease of Walt Disney World and the challenges that they would face there, of course that happens after the death of Walt himself.

But as the episode finished playing, I found myself thinking about the things that I knew, from tours around the parks, as well as conversations with other Disney Park fans, is that the story I know is likely only the first few chapters in a book that has many more to read. I was concerned that the pacing of the series might lead people away from it, rather than draw them in, but with the amount of information packed into the first episode, I don’t think that is an issue, as there are countless parks and cruise ships to be explored, not to mention all the other projects they have worked on at times. The curtain has only just started to be revealed and I can’t wait for the rest of it to follow.