A Friday Visit With Jim Korkis: Dave Smith and “Walt Wouldn’t Do That!”

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE SMITH

By Jim Korkis
Dave Smith became a Disney Company employee on June 22, 1970 and was the company’s first archivist and the only person in his department at the time. His first assignment was to document all the items in Walt Disney’s offices.

In 2007, he was made a Disney Legend. He retired in October 2010 over four decades after first being hired but continues to work for the Disney Company as a consultant with the title Chief Archivist Emeritus.

I have interviewed Dave many times. The following is an excerpt from one I did with him on March 16, 2005 at the Walt Disney Story Theater in Main Street Exposition Hall at the Magic Kingdom in Florida. It was done on stage in the afternoon in front of more than three hundred eager cast members.

Dave Smith: “I think that Epcot was an idea of a visionary. Epcot was something that Walt Disney came up with just a couple of months before he died so there really wasn’t the opportunity there for people to think about his ideas too much, to discuss his ideas too much and then he was gone. And, the idea sort of died for a while with him because nobody wanted to continue with this because that was Walt’s idea and I don’t think anybody else really had a lot of confidence in the idea of Epcot.

“Roy O. Disney who took over the company at that time said, “We know how to build a Magic Kingdom. We’ve got all this land out there in Florida. It’s got to start making some money for us so let’s build our Magic Kingdom first. Let some money start coming in and then we’ll think about Walt’s ideas for Epcot.”

“So, I think if there had been a lot of discussion in 1966 about Epcot, you found a lot of naysayers in the company saying, we’re going to be wasting our money. Of course, when we built Epcot you had a lot of people outside the company saying that too because we spent a billion dollars to build this amusement park and nobody had ever done anything like that before!

“A lot of people have complained about Disney bringing outside elements into its theme parks. As the example, Star Tours, Captain Eo, things like this. They think, “Walt built a Disney park! This was a Disney park and he didn’t allow all these outside things in!”

“But look at Disneyland in 1955. What part of that park was Disney? Fantasyland! That was about it. I mean, he’d made some true-life adventures and so, yeah, let’s have an Adventureland. But, the Jungle Cruise wasn’t based on a Disney film; that was based on The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart. I mean, the boats are pretty much the boats from The African Queen.

“Frontierland. How much did Disney do on the subject of Frontierland before the park opened? We’d done three Davy Crockett shows on television but that’s about it. So, and Davy Crockett wasn’t very much of a part of Frontierland when it opened. And a year later we expanded Frontierland and bullt Tom Sawyer’s Island. How many movies did we make about Tom Sawyer at that time? None. So, that didn’t have Disney connotations either.

“Look at Tomorrowland. We’d never done anything about the world of the future until our television show started and this was while he was building Disneyland and Walt thought well, we better do some things about Tomorrowland. And so he did a few space shows.

“And, Main Street! What’s Disney about Main Street? I mean, people say that’s based on Walt’s childhood. Well, maybe partially but it’s probably more based on the childhood of Imagineer Harper Goff, who designed Main Street and based it on his hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado, not Marceline, Missouri. So, there are a lot of myths there and people don’t really think this out before they start complaining about what would Walt have done. Well, Walt did that!”

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Thanks, Jim. And come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including The Vault of Walt, Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South?, and The Book of Mouse, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.

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