Peter Pan Mural Re-creation

You would think that after all of the exhausting hours he put into faithfully re-creating the original Disneyland Snow White attraction mural, Kurt Raymond would have had enough of that type of thing. Fortunately for you, he has soldiered on and recently tackled the Peter Pan mural. Here’s the story from Kurt himself:

Here is the Peter Pan cast portrait, created especially for the entrance mural of the “Peter Pan Flight” at Disneyland. Over the years, artists re-painted this art to preserve the colors and keep the canvas fresh-looking over the 27 year period these paintings were featured on the outer all of the dark ride façades.

In 1976, Disney artist Bill Justice was commisioned to re-paint all three dark ride cast portraits as a way of updating the “look” of the Disney characters. Though the “pose” is correct, he painted several of the main characters “off-model” and it strayed from the originals quite a bit. In 1977-1978 during a rehab, all three rides’ outer façades were repainted (red color scheme for “Mr, Toad,” blue for “Snow White,” and green for “Peter Pan.” In addition, all three rides’ entire queue murals were re-painted over, with Toad and Snow White retaining some of their original color 1955 scheme (but with the Witch’s face re-painted grey in the cast portrait and green in the other two portrayals, very inconsistent from one scene to the next). Peter Pan’s mural received most of the Bill Justice re-coloring but retained the original 1955 characterizations.

To continue with my restoration of these classic “lost” murals, I present the “Peter Pan Flight” cast portrait. This art is an composite of the 1955-1978 version with a little of the 1976 Bill Justice re-paint thrown in for good measure. I have used several of the photos featured here on Daveland to make sure the characters and poses are correct, and his Peter Pan page includes photos of areas that were previously hard to see. For added accuracy, I also took from a page from Adrian Bailey’s book “Walt Disney’s World of Fantasy,” 1984, as there is a very tiny photo of the Peter Pan mural cast portrait circa 1977, and then two of my own personal photos. There were about three entire mural re-paintings between 1955-1981, and they all seemed fairly consistent with one another, but this is the version I remember best as a kid in the early 1970’s.



For the sake of comparison, here are the murals you see today at the park:





One more time...kudos and huge thanks to Kurt for sharing this with everyone!

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