New York

Disneyland’s Original Prospectus Revealed!

Roy Disney — the Disney brother who controlled the company’s finances – — didn’t like the idea of Disneyland at first. Walt Disney poached the best talent from the studios to help him flesh out his idea for a new kind of amusement park, eventually winning over Roy, who helped him raise the $17 million it took to build Disneyland.

The first animator Walt took into the project was the legendary Herb Ryman. Over the course of a weekend in 1953, Walt and Herb drew the storied first map of Disneyland, as pictured here. An additional eight typed pages of description and sales copy were added to these pages and the resulting “brochure” was used as an unsuccessful pitch session that Walt and Herb conducted for three different New York bankers.

Read the full post and prospectus at Boing Boing

The new $99 Roku 3

The biggest change with Roku 3 is the new interface. I had a chance to give it a test-drive at a private demo with Roku in New York, and it’s a huge improvement. The first thing you’ll notice is you can see nine channels at once, compared with just five on the old interface. The new layout also reveals three more channels with every click, which lets you zip through all your channels in a fraction of the time.