ABC Network's Operation Disneyland (1955)

ABC Network's Operation Disneyland (1955)

John Fell narrates this short featurette served as a pre-show to the broadcast for the opening of Disneyland in 1955.

ABC supplied this featurette to local affiliates to air before the show.

There had never been a live broadcast on this scale before and ABC wanted to show the general public all that went into achieving this.

Like the very construction of Disneyland itself, the opening day broadcast was an engineering marvel.

Today we're used to polished live broadcasts in our digital age but back in 1955 everything was analog and far more complicated to produce.

Essentially five live broadcasts were being produced simultaneously that could be intercut as needed.

Miles of cable were required to pull this off and this rare behind the scenes footage shows the lengths went to in order make that happen.

When this aired, behind the scenes footage was even an innovative concept.

Very few featurettes or TV shows were done to showcase what it took to make anything happen.

This is a rare document of both Walt Disney and broadcasting history,