100th Anniversary Pop-Up Objects

On view in August 2024.

To celebrate Walt's South America Goodwill trip taken in 1941, we have Walt and Lillian's passports on display for a limited time in our Awards Lobby. The passports include country stamps and Uruguayan money from their trip.

On view in July 2024.

This invitation to the Disney’s’ “Tempus Fugit Celebration” is addressed to Diane and Ron Miller—their eldest daughter and son-in-law—and features a hand drawn map in colored pencil showing their guests how to navigate the newly-built park.

On view in June 2024.

Illustrator Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney maintained a friendship and correspondence for many years. This 1935 edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which features eight oil painting illustrations by Rockwell, is inscribed: “To Walt Disney, with sincere respect for his great art, Norman Rockwell.”

On view in May 2024.

Walt collected, crafted, and curated a breadth of miniatures, including ceramics, glassware, silver cutlery, paper books and magazines, wooden furniture, musical instruments, dolls, faux fruits, candelabras, checkers and playing cards, and working firearms. This vase—which stands at just one-and-a-quarter inches tall—is finely crafted of porcelain, enamel, and gilding. Some of the hand-painted brushstrokes are the width of a human hair. This is part of a set of miniature porcelain vessels by the same artist, each with a different shape and design.

On view in April 2024.

The centerpiece of Walt’s ambitious plan for Walt Disney World Resort as we know it today was EPCOT—an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—which was to be a master-planned city based on modernist ideas in urban planning. These early concept drawings show Walt’s thinking as he developed ideas for this utopian planned community. This napkin was found—crumpled in the trash—by Walt’s gardener, who stored them in a safe deposit box for many years.

On view in January–February 2024. 

Actor, songwriter, and Disney Legend Jimmie Dodd was the host of the Mickey Mouse Club television show during its first four seasons, appearing with the show’s ensemble cast from 1955 to 1959. Dodd wrote more than 400 songs, including the “Mickey Mouse March,” the show’s popular theme song, and numerous other compositions for the program.

On view in December 2023. 

Actress and dancer Margaret Kerry (b. 1929) wore this pair of ballet slippers while serving as the live-action reference model for the character of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan (1953).

Since the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney Studios artists would used live-action references to help capture lifelike motion. Filming human actors—often with costumes and props—allowed animators to study and reproduce the movement of actors’ bodies and clothing in animated form.

On view in November 2023.

On October 16, 1923—the same day he signed the distribution contract with Winkler Productions—Walt penned this letter to the mother of Virginia Davis, the child actress who portrayed the titular character in Alice's Wonderland.