So today on the podcast, we continue our series with another lost mini park, and this one is

wildly different from anything we've looked at so far. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,

Walt looked to mini parks as a way to bring Disneyland-style attractions to cities far from Disneyland.

In part, air travel was simply too expensive for many American families to fly across country to visit Waltz Park in California.

By the 1970s, with Disney World in Florida, and with the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, more families found

economical access to one of the Disney resorts in America.

Airlines could set their own fares, which quickly led to low-cost travel options, and with

a Disney resort on both the East and West Coast, many families could even

drive to the resort. In the late 1950s, for example, it would have taken a family about 45 hours

to drive from New York to Disneyland. But in the 1970s, those same families in New York could drive down to Disney World in about 15 hours

with interesting stops along the way, such as Washington, D.C. and Charleston, South Carolina.

But in the 1990s, executives under CEO Michael Eisner explored a problem similar to the one that Walt had faced in the early 1960s.

Though most American families had reasonable travel access to a Disney park in the U.S.,

many living outside of North America did not.

At the start of the 1990s, Disney's only International Park was in Tokyo,

though Disney was then building a European resort just outside of Paris. But even with these three

or soon-to-be-four resorts, Disney executives knew that large sections of the world still didn't have reasonable

access to a Disney park, which included strong or rising economic centers, such as China,

Australia, South Korea, South Africa, New Zealand, and the Middle East. Disney executives were aware that there was deep

interest in international communities in visiting a Disney park, but few affordable ways to do so.

And so this was one of the questions with which Disney struggled during those years.

In short, there was demand for the Disney

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