A rare collection of Disneyland concept art heading to auction of rides that didn’t make the cut on opening day in 1955 and were thought lost to history includes sketches of the Anything Can Happen themed land that ultimately never happened.
The Art of Disneyland auction will be held Friday, April 5 through Monday, April 8 at Heritage Auctions in Beverly Hills.
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The auction includes hand-drawn sketches from the Bradley/Bushman Early Disneyland Archives featuring rides and themed lands conceived but never realized at the Anaheim theme park. Opening bids for the Bradley/Bushman sketches ranged from $1 to $420 at press time.
Walt Disney hired Beverly Park owner David Bradley in the early 1950s to help develop rides for Disneyland. Bradley worked with Disney artist Bruce Bushman to design the attractions and overall layout for the park.
“I can’t draw,” said Bradley, according to Heritage Auctions. “But I could talk to Bruce Bushman.”
The two worked together on early concepts for Disneyland — with Bushman quickly sketching Bradley’s ride ideas and Walt offering periodic feedback.
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The Bradley/Bushman Early Disneyland Archives up for auction includes never-before-seen theme park plans and concepts for Disneyland that never got built or morphed into other attractions.
Walt’s early vision for the center of the park featured an 80-foot-tall Goofy dressed as a clown. Visitors would have walked through Goofy’s legs where Sleeping Beauty Castle now stands. Bradley ultimately convinced Walt to take a more subtle approach than the Goofy gateway.
Bradley and Bushman explored and ultimately scrapped a number of ideas for Disneyland.
Anything Can Happen land would have been based on Anything Can Happen Day that was the theme every Wednesday on the “Mickey Mouse Club” variety television show.
The land catering to young kids would have had attractions themed to cartoon shorts featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. Among the brownline sketches are unrealized concept art for Steamboat Willie’s Paddle Boat, Pluto’s Dog House, the Lost Boys Tree and a Casey Jones Jr. roller coaster.
One section of the Anything Can Happen land would have been dedicated to a Jungle Compound where kids could sit on figures of lions, tigers and zebras and swing from jungle vines like Tarzan.
Bradley and Bushman developed plans for a pair of underwater aquariums where visitors would have walked into the gaping mouths of Tick-Tock the crocodile or Monstro the whale to view marine life.
Another concept imagined a shoot-the-chutes thrill ride exiting the mouth of Monstro the whale with riders splashing down into a bay below.
The unrealized Duck Bumps bumper boat ride would have been paired with an attraction based on Disney’s 1937 “Old Mill” animated film with riders spinning aboard seats attached to the windmill blades.
An early version of the Alice in Wonderland dark ride that was ultimately built in 1958 was originally conceived as a walk-through fun house attraction during the planning stages of Disneyland.
Scenes would have been dedicated to the White Rabbit, Mad Hatter Tea Party, Caterpillar, Queens Court, Card Soldiers, Rose-painting Knaves, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. The plan was scrapped when research proved a walk-through attraction would be plagued by bottleneck congestion.
Bradley and Bushman were tinkering with a centerpiece concept for the Mad Tea Party spinning teacups ride five months before Disneyland opened.
One sketch featured the Mad Hatter and March Hare atop a giant teapot at the center of the ride with another depicting the pair atop the tea party table. Large figures of the Cheshire Cat and Caterpillar were envisioned for the periphery of the attraction.
Motor Mania started out as a simple bumper car ride and evolved into a dark ride maze of twists, turns and thrills.
A detailed dimensional layout of Motor Mania showed riders navigating thunder and lightning, rock slides, falling trees, broken bridges and trash cans. After smashing through a haystack, bumping into a cow and crashing through a brick wall, riders would have heard heavenly music and passed through the pearly gates.
Motor Mania ultimately morphed into Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Early plans for Fantasyland envisioned a “Birth of a Mouse” show starring Mickey Mouse, a towering Ferris Wheel, a Babes in Toyland attraction and a circus-themed concession stand with a pair of giraffes poking their heads through the roof.
A birds-eye view of the Skyway gondola lift attraction included a hidden-in-plain-sight Easter Egg: The unrealized Airboats ride on the ground down below.
The Submarine Voyage ride that ultimately opened in 1959 was on the drawing board in 1954 during the development of Disneyland. Brownline concept art shows underwater explorers with a Nautilus submarine in the background from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
Exploratory conceptual art of Tomorrowland shows a pair of rockets poised for interstellar flight flanking the entrance to the futuristic themed land.
Another view of Tomorrowland imagined a rocket ride swooping through the land on an overhead rail like a high-speed PeopleMover attraction.
