The Walt Disney Family Museum hasn’t had a virtual event in a while, which is why it was exciting to get back on Zoom for a dose of Disney. Held on December 13th, “Poster Art of the Disney Parks with Authors Vanessa Hunt and Daniel Handke” was a look behind the scenes at the hit coffee table book from Disney Press, first published in 2012 with an updated second edition released last year.
(Disney)
Danny and Vanessa first met at Walt Disney Imagineering, with Vanessa preserving masterpieces in the Walt Disney Imagineering Art Collection and Danny lending his talents to attractions and experiences. One thing they both had in common was retail experience, with Vanessa having worked at the Studio Store in Burbank and Danny getting his foot in the door at Mickey’s of Glendale, a store exclusive to Imagineers and their guests (and occasionally, D23 Members and Adventures by Disney adventurers). In fact, as a fun anecdote, Danny got to design a poster for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride while he was working at the store for a line of poster pins. The Disneyland opening day dark ride didn’t have a poster until then, and Tony Baxter liked it so much he wanted it brought to the park (and, of course, it’s in both editions of the book, too).
It’s fitting that both authors had retail experience, as it was in Mickey’s of Glendale that the idea for Poster Art of the Disney Parks was born. Danny and Vanessa were browsing some of the published books and noticed that they only ever saw the same handful of attraction posters in print, but they knew there was an expansive collection of them right where Vanessa worked. And so they got to work, spending four years around their day jobs compiling assets for what would become the book’s first edition, published in 2012.
One of the highlights of assembling the book was getting to review artwork that hadn’t been seen in decades. Vanessa described a day when they opened a box of original Disneyland posters from the 1950s from attractions or experiences that were long gone. Some of the greatest finds were concept outlines of famous posters and ones that went unused. Another fun find was each layer of the screen printing process for the Walt Disney World Monorail poster, which is depicted in both versions of the book.
(Disney)
The First Edition included nearly every attraction poster created up until then. In the decade since, Danny and Vanessa would message each other anytime a new poster was released, which quickly became expansive. Not only was there a new Disney Resort (Shanghai Disney), but some theme parks that never followed Disneyland’s tradition suddenly jumped on the bandwagon. One of the biggest was the creation of 40 posters to celebrate the past, present, and future of EPCOT in 2019, which coincided with the D23 unveiling of plans to reimagine the Walt Disney World theme park. As a special treat, Vanessa had pre-recorded an interview with the artists behind the posters, Stacey Aoyama and Eric Tan, who both worked for Disney Consumer Products at the time. They took a midcentury-modern approach to many of the designs to bridge the gap between the past and future of the park. The posters were designed to be cohesive, so in addition to being displayed in a large format in the Second Edition, the EPCOT section ends with a layout of all 40 posters together to showcase their harmonious flow.
Even though Danny and Vanessa had been tracking all of the new posters that debuted since their book was first published, it was actually Disney Editions that brought up the idea of giving the book an update. The Second Edition boasts 85 new posters, but Vanessa also showcased how all of the previous images were redone with modern technology. Although she no longer works in the Walt Disney Imagineering Art Collection, she maintained her contacts there. Many of the original posters were re-photographed for the Second Edition using the latest technology, which wasn’t easy as some of them were on metallic backings that reflect light back (the Monorail poster) or have metallic accents (The Golden Horseshoe).
In case you were wondering, Danny and Vanessa are still reaching out anytime a new Disney Parks poster launches. It’s been a little over a year since the last edition went to print, but there are already quite a few that could be added if the decade-interval is followed, including Disneyland’s reimagined Adventureland Treehouse and Hong Kong Disneyland’s three new posters for World of Frozen. So while you definitely shouldn’t wait to add either version to your collection, if Disney Editions decides that a Third Edition should be produced, the authors are ready.
Visit WaltDisney.org to learn more about The Walt Disney Family Museum and how you can participate in future in-person and virtual events.
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