"This groundbreaking, deeply researched book explores how Walt Disney and his designers aestheticized midcentury automation and computer science to create Disneyland and transform its offerings. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of theme parks and how they reshaped postwar America." --Todd James Pierce, author of Three Years in Wonderland: The Disney Brothers, C. V. Wood, and the Making of the Great American Theme Park "Betancourt offers a phenomenal, long-overdue examination of how Disney's early team of designers reverse engineered automated assembly-line technologies in designing the park's earliest attractions, diving deeply into the archeology of Disneyland's control systems and revealing their original functions in the real world. This is a book about Disneyland unlike any other and is not to be missed." --Tom K. Morris, Imagineer and Disney historian "Deeply researched, brilliantly written, and wonderfully illustrated, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation is a tour de force.
Betancourt outlines the key role automation has played in the history of theme parks at large and Disneyland in particular, filling an important gap in US postwar and Disney history. This is a must-read for scholars and fans alike." --Sabrina Mittermeier, author of A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks "Like a Mickey-shaped, chocolate-covered ice cream bar, this book offers a fused history of industrial automation and theme-park entertainment in the twentieth century. Betancourt has elaborately researched both topics, individually and together, and even the most experienced Main Streeter or Assemblyliner will learn much from it." --Ian Bogost, author of Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games "An original look into the crucial connections between automation and entertainment." --David A. Mindell, author of The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution "A brilliant intervention in the history of industrial capitalism, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation brings together histories of culture and technology to powerfully lay bare the operating principles of twentieth-century modernity. This is a groundbreaking work.
" --Alex J. Taylor, author of Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s " Disneyland and the Rise of Automation is a wholly original approach to Walt Disney's reinvention of the amusement park. Roland Betancourt offers an exceptional characterization of the park as an industrial plant, its guests as consumer goods, and its methods for moving people and objects as efficient as a well-oiled machine." --Robert Neuman, author of From Hollywood to Disneyland.