Obsessive Collector

Things have been kinda slow here at the blog. I've gotten to the point in my postcard collection where I'm only adding about a new card a month (if that frequently). And, I also haven't added any old books in quite awhile.  My wife and I have an agreement that we won't purchase anything for ourselves after Veterans Day. (That tends to make Christmas shopping just a little bit easier). So, you probably won't see any new books posted for awhile too.

So, what's a Disney collector to do?  You start expanding your collection.  While hunting for both postcards and books on eBay, I've purchased some random lots. Most likely an assortment of items from a family trip. Included in those lots are copies of Vacationland - the Disney published magazine that appeared in surrounding hotels. Each issue was usually 80% Disneyland with the remaining 20% covering other things to do in Southern California.

Stay tuned as I start adding more issues.

Worlds Fair Part III

I picked up a third postcard (Part I, Part II) from the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. This one featuring The Ford Rotunda. The back of the card states "This unique building has a glass rotunda with 64 towering pylons at one end and a large exhibition hall at the other. It contains a variety of exhibits, a number of which were designed by Walt Disney."

The Nickel Tour included this description of the attraction. "What visitors lived through - in twelve minutes - was the whole story of mankind (and dinosaurs-kind, too) from it's very beginning in the steaming jungles of prehistory through the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. Caveman peered out from behind the rocks and giant dinosaurs towered above the trees as guests rode along the Magic Skyway in the modern-day comfort of a real Ford convertible. Just ahead lay the future, through a room filled with multicolored wheels that marked the entrance to "Space City".

What really made this attraction unique was its Magic Skyway feature. Guests didn't board your basic theme park vehicle. They actually rode in the latest Ford cars that were pulled along a track.

Alas, at the end of the World's Fair, Ford ended their sponsorship with Disney and the only part of this attraction that made its way to Disneyland were the dinosaurs that ended up in the Grand Canyon Diorama on the Disneyland Railroad.

Disneyland 40 Years of Adventures

This 1995 edition of the Disneyland Guide Book actually turned out to be very difficult to track down. I've found numerous copies of the 93 edition, but for some reason the 40th anniversary edition alluded me - until now.

In comparing this edition to the previous 1993 edition, the front cover stays the same but drops the words "The Original" and adds the "40 Years of Adventures" logo. Indiana Jones gets a two-page spread. The short-lived Aladdin's Oasis is added. The One-Of-A-Kind shop in New Orleans Square gets bumped (although the text remains). It's A Small World goes pastel along with numerous other photos changes in the Fantasyland section. ToonTown goes from a single photo of concept art to two-pages of photos. Gone are photos of Mission to Mars and the Sky-Way buckets. The Disneyland After Dark loses two pages.

There's also an alternate version of this edition in which the 40th logo is replaced with a generic logo.