My Favorite Artifact: Mid-Century Modern Disneyland posters

Our guest curator this week is Lynn Zook.  Lynn is our Digital Archivist and is part of the Collections team.  We asked her to pick her favorite artifact from the Collection and write about why she chose it. Here's her pick: 

As a child growing up in the 1960s, I was like most kids, not always appreciative of the world around me.  Having grown up in Las Vegas, however, I did have a big love for neon signs and roadside architecture.  It wasn’t until the first family trip to Disneyland in 1967, that I truly discovered mid-century modern Disneyland and its influence on graphic design.

Mid-Century Modern architecture and design were born out of the post-war era when America was the dominant world power and the country was alive with the feeling that anything was possible.  The space race in the 1950s helped put sputniks on signs all across the country whether they needed them or not.  Out here in the West where the aeronautic companies were building the engines that would take us to the moon, the “Jetsons” age architecture was embraced from “googie” coffee shops to commercial buildings to housing tracts.

In many ways, Disneyland and Tomorrowland, especially in its early incarnations, were graphic testaments to that era.

My friend Alan Hess, author and respected authority on all things mid-century modern, writes “The bold primary colors, clean open compositions, and strong abstracted shapes seen in the faux-travel posters lining the ticket kiosks and entry tunnels to Disneyland could also be seen in the popular media everywhere, from magazine advertisements to animated cartoons (see Chuck Jones' Bugs Bunny, Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Terrytoons' Tom Terrific cartoons.) Disneyland, and especially Tomorrowland, not only reflected this trend, its design was the very embodiment of the American public's optimistic hopes for a progressive Modern future, to be experienced in everything from commercial space travel to picture phones hanging on your kitchen wall.”

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