This expansive, must-have coffee table book paints a robust portrait of the Walt Disney World Resort, across half a century, through diverse and vibrant voices and mostly unseen Disney theme park concept art and photographs. Walt Disney's vision for the Florida Project begins with Disneyland and the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. After an imaginative and expansive design, a unique land acquisition process, and an innovative construction period, the Walt Disney World Resort celebrated its Grand Opening in October 1971. It featured a theme park dubbed the Magic Kingdom and three recreational resorts: Disney's Contemporary Resort, Disney's Polynesian Village, and Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground. As Walt Disney World consistently grew and further evolved through the five decades that followed, certain themes reverberated: an appreciation for nostalgia, a joy for fantasy, a hunger for discovery, and an unending hope for a better tomorrow. Inspirational and memorable theme parks, water parks, sports arenas, recreational water sports, world-class golf courses, vast shopping villages, and a transportation network unlike any other in the world resulted in fun, festive, and familiar characters, traditions, spectacles, merchandise, and so much more. The resort has come to represent the pulse of American leisure and has served as a backdrop for life's milestones both big and small, public and private. Walt Disney World: A Portrait of the First Half Century serves as a treasure trove for vacationers, students of hospitality, artists, and all Disney collectors. Searching for that perfect gift for the Disney theme park fan in your life? Explore more archival-quality books from Disney Editions: Holiday Magic at the Disney Parks The Disney Monorail: Imagineering a Highway in the Sky Walt Disney's Ultimate Inventor: The Genius of Ub Iwerks One Day at Disney: Meet the People Who Make the Magic Across the Globe Marc Davis in His Own Words: Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks Yesterday's Tomorrow: Disney's Magical Mid-Century Eat Like Walt: The Wonderful World of Disney Food Maps of the Disney Parks: Charting 60 Years from California to Shanghai The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic Poster Art of the Disney Parks

Featuring your favorite Disney characters, these bestselling storybook collections have been completely redesigned with all new covers, gilded pages, newly edited text, and a classic new look with over 250 illustrations-including full-page artwork from the Disney archives. From Frozen to The Lion King, the best-loved stories of all time are now even better and re-create the movie magic of the most beloved Disney films. Enhanced with new pieces of art from the Disney archives, these stories are still the ideal length for reading aloud.

Presents adapted versions of such favorite Disney productions as Bambi, Snow White, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, and Alice in Wonderland.

What If Walt Had... For every project that Disney has produced, there are hundreds more that never happened despite significant investments of time, talent, and money. But what if you could see them anyway... Jim Korkis enters the limbo of Disney Never Lands to report on new theme parks, new lands in existing parks, television shows, and animation that were left unbuilt and unfilmed. Over the decades, he interviewed Imagineers and animators who worked on these projects as well as researching contemporary newspaper accounts and official publicity releases. Korkis details the usual suspects like WestCot, Mineral King, Roger Rabbit feature sequels, and Epcot's Africa pavilion as well as surprises like Jim Henson's television series about Ariel the Little Mermaid and the Disney Channel's series that would have featured Dreamfinder and Figment as well as the animation Disney had Ub Iwerks do for Danny Kaye's first feature film. Korkis shares the surprises that he discovered in the deepest vaults of Disney history. For the first time, these stories are gathered together in one book to inspire Disney fans' imaginations of what might have been and to document in great detail these lost dreams.