In July 1956, the five-member Barstow family of Wethersfield, Connecticut, won a free trip to newly-opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in a nationwide contest. This 30-minute amateur documentary film tells the fabulous story of their fun-filled, dream-come-true, family travel adventure, filmed on the scene at Walt Disney's "Magic Kingdom" by Robbins Barstow.
In December 2008, "Disneyland Dream" was named to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress.
http://www.archive.org/details/barstow_disneyland_dream_1956 (http://www.archive.org/details/barstow_disneyland_dream_1956)
[popcorn] [popcorn] [popcorn]
That was pretty cool
frighteningly wholesome...pathologically so
Escalating Cold War...the threat of Atomic/Nuclear War always hanging over us like a cloud...Air Raid Drills in Grade school weekly
yet we were scripted into this Leave-It-To-Beaver normality that few of us actually lived....at least not in the places where I grew up
Our fathers had returned from WW2 with heads full of horror, savagery and in some cases guilt that they could never adequately explain or convey to those who weren't there...so they remained silent unless they got together and/or got drunk....they could not un-see, un-do or un-live what they endured...there was no emancipation from that episode or their childhoods in the Great Depression that preceded the war
There was an underlying darkness to all that so-called innocence and decency that we acted out, that was demanded of us...it was a deliberate and determined effort to make what happened go-away...as if it never existed
Yet we would wake-up in the middle of the night scared...to the sounds of our fathers screaming fire-command orders in their sleep....or standing in our doorways not seeing us but alert with pistol or knife in-hand looking for an enemy that had long since retreated or surrendered everywhere except in our fathers' minds and souls
we would go to the beach and see other parents, other fathers with deep scars and pock-marks on their bodies from knives bayonets shrapnel and bullets
yes it was indeed a cute, innocent and naive era...it was made to look that way...it had to look that way