By Sheila Ryan, clusterflock – December 27, 2010 at 01:03PM
In the summer of 1956, an amateur filmmaker named Robbins Barstow made a record of his family’s trip to the Magic Kingdom, “Disneyland Dream,” that was recently admitted to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
Robbins Barstow died in November at the age of 91. You can view “Disneyland Dream” either on YouTube or the Internet Archive.
Watching “Disneyland Dream” reminded me of a friend’s discovery of a Flickr stream that included photos of the library in the town where he lived until he was four. He said looking at those photos was “like looking into a dream.” “Disneyland Dream” feels a bit like that for me, too, but not because I ever visited Disneyland. The Barstow family lived in Wethersfield, Connecticut, my parents’ hometown and the site of our annual summer pilgrimage. I returned to Wethersfield a couple of times as an adult, but in my mind it remains as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a child.