General Information:

Media Type: Book
Type: Parks - Picture
Release Date: 2012-09-04

Geek's Thoughts: Anyone who has visited Disneyland or a Magic Kingdom type park around the world has more likely than not seen a Disney Attraction poster. These large colorful pieces of art give you a preview of what to expect once you enter the park. Many of us stop to take a look or notice when there is a new one. Some of you probably collect the ones that they have sold over the years in various formats and sizes. Disney Editions released a hard cover book that explores the history of the genre and showcases many of these pieces of art.

I was looking forward to this book coming out from the first time I read about it several months ahead of its release and I am happy to report that for me it met these expectations. The book features an extensive collection of attraction posters that spans all the Disney parks that have posters starting with the original Disneyland posters. Across the country to Walt Disney World then around the world to Tokyo (Disneyland & DisneySea), Paris, Hong Kong, and finally back to California for the newest round of posters at Disney California Adventure that feature Cars Land and Buena Vista Street posters.

 

The book talks briefly about the process used to create the attraction posters and gives you some of the history and the evolution of the designs and printing methods. A majority of the book is arranged by land and each chapter is led off with an introduction that highlights some of what you will see on the subsequent pages and interesting tidbits of information including some stories from the Imagineers. Within the chapters posters are laid out in a variety of formats some a single large poster, others split, others several on a page. I found it interesting the variations for the parks and the evolution over time of the posters. In addition to the finished posters, scattered throughout are some early concepts as well as iterations of designs. For each poster when an artist/date is known it is listed.

I really appreciated the large format of the book and quite a few of the posters are reproduced as a full page so you can see can see the details. The size of the book is approx 14.25H x 11.25W inches. The forward is by Tony Baxter and a closing quote from John Lasseter which I found interesting.

Currently this book is being released in the parks, it has popped up in some outlets at Walt Disney World and should be any day at Disneyland. Amazon has a pre-order option available for a September 4th release date.