Special Quarterly Exhibit Walt and the 1964 New York World's Fair Welcome to this special multi-part Special exhibit about Walt and the 1964 World's Fair, with essays by Paul Anderson and all-new video, photos and sketches. Please choose an exhibit: 1. Introduction 2. The GE Carousel of Progress 3. The Ford Magic Skyway 4. Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln 5. It's A Small World Introduction By Paul F. Anderson "$500-Million Fair Planned To Mark 300th Anniversary of New York City" was the headline splashed across the front page of the New York Times on August 10, 1959. The headline news was welcome to many, of course. World's Fairs and Expositions had been very popular since their inception in the mid-19th Century. But the headline was especially exciting to one individual in particular: Walt Disney! Walt saw great potential in this New York World's Fair as a way to build, and pay for, new attractions at Disneyland. Walt was also thinking about expanding and building more Disneylands, and so he wanted to know if his Disneyland-style of entertainment would play for the "more sophisticated" audiences of the East Coast. Walt gathered his Imagineers and artists and instructed them: "There's going to be a big Fair in New York. All of the big corporations in the country are going to be spending a helluva lot of money building exhibits there. They won't know what they want to do. They won't even know why they're doing it, except that the other corporations are doing it and they have to keep up with the Joneses. Now they're all going to want something that will stand out from the others, and that's the kind of service we can offer them. We've proved we can do it with Disneyland. This is a great opportunity for us to grow. We can use their financing to develop a lot of technology that will help us in the future. And we'll be getting new attractions for Disneyland too. That'll appeal to them: we can say that they'll be getting shows that won't be seen for just two six-month periods at the fair; those shows can go on for five or ten years at Disneyland." With this goal, Walt assembled a group of his best people to find just the right companies to partner with. When the dust had settled, three companies and a state government chose Walt and his organization for the 1964 New York World's Fair: Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Pepsi-Cola, and the state of Illinois.