The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering

This long book about Disney’s imagineering covers the famous department from its inception in 1952. It tells the story of starting Disneyland through interviews with the original team members and from other source materials, then goes pretty much year-by-year, project-by-project all the way through to the book’s publishing in 2022.

There is an amazing wealth of information in this book, about all the inventions of the team and it was fascinating to read about their work on immersive story telling, projection mapping (started with the Haunted Mansion in the 60s and then hugely improved in the 90s), and trackless ride systems (Tower of Terror).

I loved reading about these and many more innovations and the people behind them, but found the book’s writing style hard to get through at times. At 800+ pages it’s a long sequence of: introduction of a project, introduction of contributors, few choice quotes from that person, more on the same topic from others, and repeat. The stories and interviews themselves are good, but it gets long in the tooth.

Only when I finished the book did I realize that it’s based on the Disney TV show of the same name, which might explain the format. I can see how this format would work there, as it’s likely supported by visuals of the attractions and projects. Yet I really wish they’d changed it up for the written edition. I’d say this is recommended for Disney fans (such as myself), but others should probably stick to the TV series (which I now finally added to my watchlist).