Source: Daveland Web
March 1956 – mid 1963
LOCATION
Tomorrowland – The Dutch Boy Paint Gallery sat at the front of Tomorrowland, not far from the primary entrance off Main Street. Today, its approximate footprint is part of the Star Tours building.
BACKGROUND
When Disneyland first opened in 1955, Tomorrowland was the least developed of the park’s lands. Walt Disney and his team needed to quickly fill space with exhibits that could highlight visions of progress and technology – especially if they had the opportunity to save some money with sponsorships.
Enter the Dutch Boy Paint Gallery, in partnership with the parent company of Dutch Boy paint. This exhibit may not seem like an obvious choice for a technology and future-focused land. But its focus on how color impacts perception and your environment made a loose connection to the land’s mission of imagining a better, brighter future (in this case, brighter through color!).
EXPERIENCE
Inside the Dutch Boy Paint Gallery, visitors were greeted with spinning color wheels that allowed them to mix and match shades, and music would sound to indicate of your color combinations were harmonious or too much of a clash. Further into the exhibit, guests had the opportunity to experiment with a few hands-on activities, somewhere between fun and color education. And then at the end, you could purchase a Dutch Boy coloring book if you felt compelled to continue your artistic journey.
Source: iCollector
CLOSURE
Like many early Tomorrowland attractions, the Dutch Boy Paint Gallery was never designed to be a lasting park staple. And from what I’ve been able to find in my research, this was consistently one of the lowest-attended attractions in the land throughout its tenure.
By the 1960s, Disneyland had begun an extensive reimagining of Tomorrowland, to remove many of the smaller exhibits and make way for bigger, brighter, and more exciting attractions. The Dutch Boy Paint Gallery officially closed sometime in 1963, right as the final preparations for “New Tomorrowland” construction were taking shape.
TRIVIA
Dutch Boy paint is still available today; the company is currently a subsidiary of Sherman-Williams.
In different research sources, this attraction sometimes referred to as the “Dutch Boy Color Gallery”. I went with “Paint Gallery” in the title, as this is the most common usage I could find.
Source: Daveland Web