The Halloween Tree — Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney
The mid-century futurists and their friendship.
On Halloween night in 2007 Ray Bradbury flipped a switch hidden near a large oak tree which stood in front of the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Disneyland’s Adventureland area and lights strung through the oak’s limbs and leaves blazed to orange-hued life illuminating dozens of hand painted Jack-O-Lanterns attached to its branches. Thus was “The Halloween Tree,” named after Bradbury’s famous novella, dedicated.
“I belong here in Disneyland,” said Bradbury at the tree’s dedication ceremony, “ever since I came here 50 years ago. I’m glad I’m going to be a permanent part of the spirit of Halloween at Disneyland.”
The tree has been redecorated to honor the author and his works for every Halloween season that the park has been open since.
Bradbury’s history with the Disney Company goes back to a chance encounter between Bradbury and Walt Disney, who the great author described as his “hero,” outside of a department store in 1963. Walt was familiar with Bradbury’s work — Bradbury had published many of his most iconic works by then: Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1950), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) — but even so, it’s understandable that Bradbury at this point was in awe of the man who’s film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Bradbury had reportedly seen NINE times and who’s Disneyland he once described in a letter to The Nation magazine as “an experience of true delight and wonder.” Walt knew who Ray was, luckily, and the men met for lunch the following day, remaining friends until Walt passed away late in 1966.
Famously, Bradbury, during one of their many lunches which tended to stretch for hours with the two men gabbing as if they’d been friends since childhood (Which is Halloway and which is Nightshade?), once asked Disney why he didn’t run for Mayor of Los Angeles. Ray was serious. He had recently formed PRIME (Promote Rapid Transit, Improve Metropolitan Environment) a group to promote mass transit in Los Angeles; ironically focused on a monorail system much like the one Disney had introduced to Disneyland some years earlier. He couldn’t get anything accomplished with the group and believed that Walt was exactly the kind of futurist who could.
“Ray,” Walt responded, “why would I run for Mayor when I’m already King?”
This famous story illustrates a few interesting things about the men; that they both respected the scope of the empire, particularly Disneyland, that Walt presided over, but also it spoke to the kind of futurists they both were.
Early in his career, Bradbury had found himself pushing back against the idea that he was a science fiction writer who didn’t approve of science. It didn’t help that Bantam Books’ paperback version of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles included an, evidently completely fabricated, quote attributed to Bradbury: “I don’t like what science is doing to the world. I think science is a good thing to escape from.”
Bradbury later demanded the quote be removed and clarified:
“Well, then, it should be fairly clear by now that if I’m not against science I must be for it. And I am. I have always been in favor of a science that can prolong and beautify our lives and give us comfort, provide us with heat when we are cold, refrigeration when we are warm, penicillin when we are sick, and entertainment when we are lonely. I believe in radio, television, motion-pictures, automobiles and atomic power. I believe in newspapers, books, and magazines, produced by a scientific technology that has grown steadily in the past century.” — Ray Bradbury in The Ray Bradbury Review, 1952
For a science fiction writer, Bradbury’s futurism comes across as surprisingly practical. As a fantasist, he loved rockets and alien landscapes, but his taste in real-world scientific progress is specifically humane.
Disney seemed to also be a practical futurist. He was interested in finding out how things worked, ultimately, so that he could realize his new ideas with that technology. If he started down a path that had no modern day solution, he would put a team together to invent one. He wanted to add depth to films and so invented the multi-plane camera. He wanted an infinitely repeatable theme park experience with complex characters and motion and from this came audio-animatronics. He wanted to find a better way for people to live, to invent a new kind of urban center — and this is where Disney and Bradbury’s futurism met most profoundly — so he began experimenting with new modes of transportation and designing something that he called an “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow (EPCOT).”
The two men loved telling stories, clearly, but their real philosophical affinity may have been the way that they both could temper progress with nostalgia — Disney’s Carousel of Progress (1964) attraction starts its narrative at the beginning of the 1900s. Bradbury’s Martians in his aforementioned Chronicles initially appear as humans living as if it’s Earth in 1926. Both saw science and progress as ways to make people’s lives better and to allow their nostalgic humanism to flourish.
“He knew enough to pay attention to the past. He knew enough to pay attention to the present. And then he had the foresight to talk about the future.” — Ray Bradbury on Walt Disney
The two men, so admiring of each other and with such similar outlooks, became fast friends for the few years they knew each other prior to Disney’s death. Walt would upend his schedule to talk to Ray and Ray got to experience prototype attractions — Pirates of the Caribbean, The WEDWay PeopleMover (1967)— before almost anyone else not working on them. They were two peas in a pod in many ways while really only knowing each other for a few short years.
For Bradbury, like so many, the death of Walt Disney came as an unexpected shock. On the day of Walt Disney’s death, he had been due to talk to author Richard Schickel who was working on a biography of Disney. Schickel called Bradbury with the news:
“Ray, did you hear the news?”
“I heard. This is a terrible, terrible day. I’m devastated.”
“Would you like to reschedule?”
“Oh no, it’s all the more reason to get together. I want to talk about him.”
After his friend’s death, Ray Bradbury became more involved with the Walt Disney Company than he ever had before. (Walt himself, when Ray suggested he do some work writing for Disneyland, had said, “It’s no use. You’re a genius and I’m a genius. After two weeks we’d kill each other.”) Understanding the friendship, and desperately reaching for a sense of how Walt would’ve moved forward were he still around, company President Card Walker and, particularly, legendary Imagineer John Hench, realized that Bradbury was well-suited to carrying the message and, more importantly, the tone of the late founder’s message of the promise of tomorrow. If they weren’t going to actually build Walt’s City of Tomorrow, they at least had a good cheerleader for the idea of it. After Bradbury had done successful work writing for the American Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, Hench reached out to him to work on the centerpiece of the theme park to be named after Walt’s Dream, Spaceship Earth (1982) at EPCOT Center.
Bradbury’s 23-page prospectus formed the core of the ride as it was built, and much of the narration. As with any project as collaborative as a theme park attraction, much of Ray’s writing got adjusted and merged with other aspects of the experience, but Bradbury himself seemed thrilled with it and came back to consult with many of the Imagineers still around from Walt’s era for aspects of Euro Disneyland (now Disneyland Paris).
When Euro Disneyland opened in 1992, the dedication by Imagineer Tim Delaney of its new, Jules Verne inspired Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune (1995) was “To my heroes, Jules Verne and Ray Bradbury.”
Ray Bradbury’s involvement with the Walt Disney Studios also continued outside of the theme parks with films (Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1999)) and television (Smart House (1999)) as well as remaining an evangelist for Walt’s work for the remainder of his life. The dedication and yearly reappearance of The Halloween Tree at Disneyland reminds us of something enduring: a hopefulness about the future wrapped in the mysterious amber hues of autumn. It’s the limitless potential of childhood and how that potential can never be isolated from that little bit of macabre that all children — and, if we’re lucky, some of us adults too — carry around with them like an alchemical ingredient knowing that neither element can produce the future without the other.
As a child, so Bradbury claimed, he stayed in a movie theater all day just to watch the early Disney Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance (1929) over and over again. At an event at Disneyland’s Club 33 on the night of the dedication of The Halloween Tree at the park he mentioned that his father had to finally come to the theater and force Ray to leave after having been there most of the day. With the author’s profound influence on how we have viewed Halloween over most of the last century, it is worth examining that single day and that single film and that single child, destined to become one of the finest American authors, as a sort of beginning of something very important… and beautiful.
“Walt Disney’s Disneyland liberates men to be their better selves. The great thing is to walk around at Disneyland and see smiling people. And in the middle of the night you wake up and you feel something tugging at the corners of your mouth, and you put your hand up, and, by god, there’s a smile there.” — Ray Bradbury
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