Friday, March 04, 2016

1950s Autopia in BW



Still more from the prolific 1957/58 photographer who has populated this week's posts. Today we get a view of the Autopia. Not too many exciting details in the closeup, other than a better view of the young boys who seem annoyed with the cast member holding up his arm.



Living in Southern California, it seems odd that an attraction is based around driving a car on the freeway. Traffic and congestion have taken away most of the joy of traveling on the roadways. Yet, this opening day attraction is still a hit.

It will be interesting to see if the new sponsor, Honda, brings anything new to the attraction when it reopens.

Drive on over to my main website for more vintage and current Autopia fun.

6 comments:

  1. Who doesn't love driving along the scenic roadways of Tomorrowland, under and over bridges, past pleasant wooded scenery along with a chance sighting of the Monorail? And it's the only opening day attraction still operating in Tomorrowland. I think it's still popular because kids and kids at heart love it. I still enjoy it and don't equate it to real-life driving where it's imperative that you pay attention. With the new sponsor Honda coming onboard, I sure hope Disney changes the ugly color scheme on the queue building.

    The prolific 1957/58 photographer's work you've been featuring this week has been wonderful. Vintage B/W Disneyland is heaven to me.

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  3. An iconic attraction that hailed back to the Eisenhower era and the Freeway Act of '56, where the future was a bright wonderful place of superhighways that would take us anywhere, quickly. Contrast that to last Wednesday when it took me 4 hours from San Diego to Culver City then 5 hours coming home. I don't think Ike saw that one coming.

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  4. Sure remember this the first summer the park was open. Seems I recall by the next year that midget (or maybe it was the junior) autotopia was open and it was a big deal for kids to be tall enough to go on the 'real' autotopia and not have to get out of line and go over to the other 2.

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  5. I feel guilty now often when I see your photo collection of old park photos. I had no idea what to do with the thousands of slides my folks had when I cleaned out their home after dad was gone in the 80s. I ended up just throwing them all away - we had scores of photos from Disneyland. It was rare we didn't go every month or two in those first few years it was open.

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  6. Our first trip to the park was in '56, I was 6 yrs. old.
    I have a few precious photos.....so sorry to hear about the
    slides. Wow.

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