Behind the Attraction, a Disney documentary series

Behind the Attraction tells the history of 10 Disney attractions. Their history, their creation, the artists and engineers who worked on them, and how they were built. If you’ve been to even one Disneyland location, you can’t help but be fascinated by the creativity and inventiveness that went into making them.

Watching Behind the Attraction puts Disney locations into your brain and heart all over again even if you visited years ago. Each episode explains an attraction. It’s a history of the people and creativity that built the Disney empire. Attractions from the original in Anaheim, California to the most recent in Shanghai are shown.

The 10 episodes cover these attractions:

• Jungle Cruise
• Haunted Mansion
• Star Tours
• The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
• Space Mountain
• The Castles
• Disneyland Hotel
• It’s a Small World
• Transportation
• Hall of Presidents

There are so many people with so much creative imagination behind the various Disney locations and attractions. They had to create so much new technology, invent many new ways of displaying it, set it to music and make it funny or scary or both. It’s mind-boggling what has to happen to bring an attraction together. It’s also mind-boggling how the knowledge and engineering developed by Disney have affected the entire world.

Each episode uses archival footage, interviews with original creators from the 1950s and 1960s as well as modern day Disney creators. It makes the creation of favorites like Space Mountain or It’s a Small World human stories about real people. It talks about the options and decisions that went into making something. And it explains how attractions have been modernized and improved over the decades.

I’ll bet you didn’t know the story about the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair and how Joan Crawford and the Pepsi Cola Company were instrumental in creating one of your all time favorites, It’s a Small World. Or who wrote the ear worm of a song for that attraction.

I admit, these history of Disney documentaries are probably intended to make you want to go to the nearest park for another visit. I chose to ignore the crass commercialism of the series and enjoy the behind the scenes stories. The series made me remember happy times in happy places.

Here’s a trailer.