You’d think they saw each other as competitors. You’d be wrong.
, emerging out of nowhere in what was once the lush orange groves of Southern California. For any Southern California theme park aficionado, it’s hard to ignore the glaring omission: Just down the road — less than 7 miles to be exact — Knott’s Berry Farm had been a successful operation decades before the mouse house opened in 1955.
One of the few theme park histories that tie Disney to Knott is Neal Gabler’s book “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.” In it, Gabler describes how Disney would visit Knott’s Berry Farm, with Disney art director Dick Irvine, to study how foot traffic flowed through the park. When he scoured the employee newsletter while gathering materials for the park’s 100th celebration in 2021, Lynxwiler stumbled upon the first official documentation of Walt Disney visiting Knott’s Berry Farm — in 1951. It was in these incredibly detailed materials, preserved at the Orange County Archives, that he discovered that Disney visited the park’s glassblowing shop in Ghost Town to have European-style custom pieces made.
The little engine that could — literally – was the catalyst for Disney and his Imagineers to begin studying Knott’s Berry Farm and ultimately learn from its limitations.“Knott’s Berry Farm grew in a hodgepodge way,” Lynxwiler says. “It was bits and pieces as they had money. As they had an idea, they expanded. There was no master plan at all and that also influenced Walt Disney.
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