Friday, March 24, 2017

More Beautiful Frontierland, May 1958

Here are a couple of nice photo featuring Frontierland, on a lovely day - my guess is that even though the date stamp reads "May 1958", the photos were taken a month or two before that. 

Look at that sky! Definitely a winter (or early spring) sky in SoCal. And it feels like we are in a real frontier - never mind that cable thing in the distance! I don't have much to say about the image, except that I deem it to be... POSTCARD WORTHY!


It's a shame that this one turned out to be underexposed - not only would have been another beautiful view with that glorious sky, but as you can see, the Columbia was under construction in Fowler's Harbor. Which is pretty interesting! I have another photo of the Columbia as it was being built, and I believe that it is also very dark.


5 comments:

K. Martinez said...

Which real frontier is that? Space: The final frontier of the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise. Alaska: the Last Frontier? Whatever frontier it is, it's definitely a beauty and postcard worthy. The clouds do make the pic. Thanks, Major.

Tom said...

I'm sure Disney had those clouds specially produced for that day, at 5/8 scale. Beautiful!

And how cool is seeing the Columbia under construction? Very much cool! That's a total bonus.

Great pics!

Chuck said...

I'm surprised your photos of the Columbia came out at all. Due to the high level of classification around the project and the real possibility of espionage (C.V. Wood had industrial spies everywhere), Walt had a high-powered underexposure projector installed in the lantern at the end of the slip at Fowler's Harbor. The power requirements to keep that baby humming were enormous and a major reason why the power lines remained in place across the parking lot.

Hmmm...never noticed that cable thing in the background before. I wonder what it could be? It really gets in the way of the sky.

Anonymous said...

@Chuck and Major: Due to the tremendous secrecy of the Columbia project, she was built only at night.

JG

Major Pepperidge said...

K. Martinez, it can be any frontier you want. Frontier Airlines, even. Hopefully it isn’t the final frontier.

Tom, those clouds were sculpted by Harriet Burns! It does make me a bit crazy that the slide with the Columbia under construction is the darkest, murkiest of the bunch.

Chuck, Walt definitely took advantage of technologies developed for the space program. And we definitely didn’t want the Russkies to get hold of our square-rigged sailing ship innovations! The cable thing in the background is called the “Sky Tram” (according to many hand-written labels).

JG, all of the construction workers were blindfolded the entire time, too.