Disney Meets Westinghouse–Part 2

Here are the remaining pages from the Electrical Living booklet. What great rooms! I need me a time machine…

Mary Blair Ad

I found this in my online travels today and simply had to share! What is better to see while flipping through the ads in a magazine than a two page spread of Mary Blair artistic gorgeousness?! I can’t think of anything!

This ad features one of the two The Spirit of Creative Energies Among Children murals Mary Blair designed for the 1967 New Tomorrowland. This mural was on the north side of Tomorrowland, covering the uppermost portion of the CircleVision-360 building.  I have left this ad LARGE so you can look at it all in all its glory. See below.

It reads:

“Welcome to the bright, new world of telephone communications!

This is the theme… and the promise… of the 88-foot-long mural that greets visitors to the new Bell System Exhibit in the new Tomorrowland at Disneyland, California.

The artist is Mary Blair, well-known illustrator of children’s books and a designer of the ‘it’s a small world’ exhibit at the New York World’s Fair and Disneyland. Miss Blair interpreted the promise of world-wide communications in a colorful tile mosaic of a children’s orchestra sending music to friends in other nations.

But the mural isn’t the only thing that’s new about the Bell System Exhibit. There’s a larger, expanded display area that shows you telephone communications of the future.

Feature of the Exhibit is a Walt Disney film, ‘America the Beautiful’, in CircleVision 360, the motion picture that surrounds you and puts you in the center of the most beautiful scenery in the world. This is the new year to discover America in person. If you and your family get to Disneyland, you’ll be warmly welcomed at our new building in Tomorrowland.”

From Life magazine dated July 7, 1967.

New Paintings!

For those of you who have been following my Disneyland paintings, I have updated my website with two more you have not seen. If you would like to, hop on over by clicking HERE. They include paintings of the Skull Rock area of Fantasyland as well as the third installment to my Storybook Land series, Pinocchio’s Village. I hope you like what you see!

Disney Meets Westinghouse Pt.1

On May 28 of 1945, Disney delivered a 16-minute long animated short entitled The Dawn of Better Living to Westinghouse Electric. The short illustrated the improvements of electrical innovations from the log cabin era up through modern times. 

To accompany the short, Disney produced a booklet, Electrical Living,  featuring, what I can only assume (because I haven’t seen the short), images from the animation, or something close to it anyway. It’s a really nice booklet and I’m sure the Westinghouse - or Westinghouse if you saw The Lucy-Desi Westinghouse Special ("Now, look Lucy. It just so happens that I studied English grammar in Cuba.  Lemme 'splain something. When the G is followed by an H-O, like in G-H-O-S-T. Ghost. G-H-O you say, ‘Go’ there is no H.") – people were proud to hand it out to their potential customers. For me, a huge enthusiast of all things 1930s-50s, I can’t choose which kitchen I like best, so Westinghouse would have had a fantastic customer in me!

The illustrations in the book are just fantastic, a couple having a certain feeling of the Ave Maria sequence in Fantasia and concept paintings of Bambi, in my opinion. The other illustrations are informative and at times whimsical. But why tell you when you can just look for yourself, right? Have a gander and enjoy!

Remember to check back for part 2! Have a great day, everyone!