Disneyland - Ephemera - Main Street Electrical Parade - View-Master - 1979 Informational Guide - Pirates Postcard - Family Circus

Let's open the old box of Disneyland stuff and see what's in it.

Hey!  Here's my old Main Street Electrical Parade souvenir album.  Still works!  If only I had a record player.  The artwork is fanciful and fun.  The music plays in my head without any effort on my part at all.  I can see each float as it rolls by on a Main Street summer night.  I'll bet most of you can, too.

I like to look at the listing of the songs on the back of the album.  There are a few offerings from Pete's Dragon, which isn't surprising, as it was released right around the time the parade made its Main Street debut.  Speaking of Pete's Dragon, I saw a local news snippet just yesterday that Mickey Rooney---elderly and ailing---has won a recent court battle to keep his stepson away from him.  Seems the stepson was trying to hone in on Rooney's estate, was mistreating him and making him "a prisoner in his own home."  Poor Mickey.  Hard to imagine elder abuse involving a person who is perenially young in my imagination.  My thoughts and prayers are with him.  Heck, he was the voice of Santa Claus, Judy Garland's pal, the star of a fabulous Twilight Zone episode, a singer, a dancer, a Hollywood sensation---just to scratch the surface.  Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett will forever live on in my memory for their sensationally funny turns in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the 1963 comedy starring Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Sid Ceasar, Ethel Merman, Jonathan Winters, Jim Backus, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Terry Thomas, Edie Adams, and even Eddie "Rochester" Anderson---to name but a few (even the Three Stooges show up in this film in a cameo role). 

Whoa!  Here are some of my old View-Master reels!  I could go to Disneyland in three dimensions any time I wanted.  I would flick through these images at home between those summer trips to the Park when I was a kid.  Looking through these today literally transported me back.  The Park was really something!   Of course, it still is.

Ooh.  An old Pirates postcard!  Does that date on the back say 1966?  Love the artwork.  Talk about an all-time classic attraction---though I have to say, it was better before Captain Jack and "Davy Jones" moved in.  The Davy Jones fog effect is fine, but actually the tunnel was better when it was pitch black and a disembodied voice intoned: "No fear hath ye of evil curses, says you. Arrrr. Properly warned, ye be, says I. Who knows when that evil curse will strike the greedy beholders of this bewitched treasure."

An here's a couple of old clippings from The Family Circus in the late 1970s when they took a trip to Disneyland.
Speaking of the late 1970's, here's a Disneyland fold out brochure from late 1978 or early 1979 that promises Big Thunder Mountain Railroad will be opening in the Fall of 1979.  Looks pretty cool in the drawings.  Wonder if it will be worth it?  Little did I know then that I'd be clomping around the load area in miner's boots, sporting a Disneyland name tag, eight years later.

Well, better close the box and get off to work.
"Heigh Ho!" as they say.
Keep imagination alive in the world, my friends.

---Mike