Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco

I finally made it to the Walt Disney Family Museum, smack in the center of San Francisco’s Presidio. Why is it in San Francisco when almost everything that Disney did was in Los Angeles or Orlando? Disney’s only child, Diane Disney Miller (mother of 7!), moved to the Bay Area in the 1980s.

I recommend that you have your Uber or Waymo drop you off at the top of Andy Goldsworthy’s Wood Line. You can then walk downhill through the Wood Line to the Yoda Fountain and from there it is an easy walk to the museum (arrive at the Wood Line about 40 minutes before your timed ticket to the museum).

Lucasfilm is headquartered in the Presidio and everyone is welcome to look at the Yoda fountain. Sadly, it is not inscribed “No, Try Not. Do or Do Not, There Is No Try.”

The museum is in the middle of the Parade Ground:

Getting into the museum costs $25 per adult or is free for those wise enough to refrain from work: an SF resident “receiving Medi-Cal and food assistance can redeem free general admission for themselves and up to three additional guests” (source). I got two free tickets via my Ringling Museum membership.

Back in the 11th century, it seems, Hughes d’Isigny and son Robert moved from France to England and that’s where d’Isigny was anglicized into Disney. The family moved to North America in 1834 (bouncing around Canada, Florida (Orange County, near today’s Walt Disney World), Chicago, and Missouri):

Disney was an ambulance driver in World War I and managed to refrain from writing a tedious novel about the experience:

Disney’s first animated movie company, whose techniques were informed by Animated Cartoons (E.G. Lutz) went bankrupt:

His second company, which featured Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, also essentially failed due to some badly drafted contracts with Universal Pictures, which took over the character. Walt Disney had to #persist through two business failures, essentially, before he could begin building the Mickey-based Disney that we know and love today. The museum does a great job of making it clear just how many false starts there were in what might seem like a steady inexorable rise to greatness.

Speaking of failures, both visitors and staff at the museum refused to accept the idea that simple masks had in any way failed to stop the spread of an aerosol respiratory virus (note also the spectacular autofocus failure of the iPhone 16 Pro Max just when I was relying on it to show that the young slender staffer chose to wear a mask while the older staffer did not):

From the museum’s own web site (11/18/2024), the ideal masked vision:

Here’s Derek Zoolander’s Disneyland, which perhaps needs to be at least three times bigger for non-ant visitors:

The museum covers the shift of EPCOT from actual city to mere theme park, but not the fact that the city phase of EPCOT enabled Disney to have its own county and issue tax-free municipal bonds. Note the underground car infrastructure below.

Visitors are given a trigger warning, though it was unclear to me what the triggering content might be. Certainly, Song of the South clips were not played.

The trigger warning was repeated before a few signs that mentioned Squaw Valley Ski Resort, home of the 1960 Winter Olympics in which Disney provided some entertainment (in a victory for Native Americans, the resort was renamed Palisades Tahoe, thus removing all references to the existence of Native Americans other than the word “Tahoe” itself, which is a corruption of a Washo word for “lake”).

Nerds will appreciate the preserved multiplane camera, in which cels could be placed at different distances from the lens for more realistic perspective during camera motion.

What else is nearby? The Officers’ Club is now a free museum with a permanent exhibit devoted to the Native Americans who apparently won’t be getting any of their land back:

A temporary exhibit is up right now relating to the setting aside of the U.S. Constitution because politicians and bureaucrats declared an emergency and decided that it would be expedient to intern Japanese-Americans:

(Similar reasoning, of course, was applied in 2020 when the First Amendment right to assemble was tossed in favor of Science-dictated lockdowns.)

We didn’t leave by Waymo in an exciting rush of spinning LIDAR, but it would have been nice to!

Note Alcatraz in the background. If the U.S. government ever decides that it needs to reduce the amount of deficit spending/money printing that it does on the Cheat Our Way to Prosperity Plan maybe this island can be sold to a mid-level NVIDIA employee for $1 billion for use as a private home.