The Pepsi Pavilion That Never Closed: How 'it's a small world' Outlasted the Fair It Was Built For

FLUSHING MEADOWS: In 1963, Pepsi came to Walt Disney’s studio with a problem and almost no time to solve it. The company was co-sponsoring a pavilion at the upcoming 1964-65 World’s Fair with UNICEF, the theme was supposed to be a tribute to the world’s children, and the fair opened in about a year. Nobody expected the ride Disney built to solve that problem to still be running, largely unchanged, decades after the fairgrounds were torn down.

Worth knowing: the deal happened at all because of Joan Crawford. She’d joined Pepsi’s board after her husband, company chairman Alfred Steele, died in 1959, and by most accounts of the pitch meetings, she was the one who overruled Pepsi executives who weren’t sold on Disney’s early concepts.

A boat ride, because nothing else could move the crowds

Walt didn’t need much convincing on format. He wanted people gliding past on water rather than walking a queue or riding track-mounted cars, partly for mood and partly because a continuous boat flume could push World’s Fair-sized crowds through without the loading stalls of a typical dark ride. Bob Gurr, who’d spent years by then engineering ride vehicles at Disneyland, adapted flat-bottomed boat concepts he’d already been sketching, which shaved real time off a build schedule that had none to spare.

The song almost sank the whole idea

The first plan for the soundtrack was each nation’s children singing their own national anthem as guests floated past. In practice, dozens of anthems in different keys and tempos playing in close proximity produced noise, not harmony, and the concept nearly collapsed before construction finished.

Walt brought in the Sherman Brothers, Richard and Robert, who were composing the score for “Mary Poppins” for the studio at the same time. Their first draft of “it’s a small world (after all)” was a slow ballad. Walt wanted something that could loop for hours without wearing on a rider’s nerves, so the brothers sped up the tempo into the bouncing, percussive version everyone knows now, the one that gets blamed for being unshakeable precisely because it was engineered to be repeatable.

One project, five Disney legends

The pavilion pulled together a concentration of Disney design talent that’s unusual even by Imagineering standards. Mary Blair supplied the flat, saturated color language that still defines every scene. Rolly Crump built much of the toy-like figure and prop work. Alice Davis researched and designed costumes for more than a hundred dolls representing dozens of countries, and her husband Marc Davis worked on the animated figures themselves.

From temporary fairground to permanent Fantasyland

When the fair closed in 1965, Disney shipped the entire attraction to Disneyland, where it reopened on May 28, 1966 as a permanent fixture rather than a one-off exhibit. Walt Disney World’s version wasn’t a hand-me-down. It was built from scratch for Magic Kingdom’s Fantasyland when the park opened on October 1, 1971, the same year the resort’s original site-selection deal went public. Both versions have taken only minor refurbishments since, mostly costume refreshes and lighting updates, and neither has had the kind of ground-up overhaul Disney routinely gives its other legacy dark rides.

Our read

Small world gets filed as a joke about an inescapable earworm more often than it gets credit as engineering. But the reason it’s survived sixty-plus years of changing park trends without a redesign is that it was built as pure, durable craft from the start: a color palette designed to read at boat speed, a song built to loop without fatigue, a boat system designed for volume no other Fantasyland attraction has matched. Disney’s licensing machine of that same era, the one Davy Crockett accidentally forced into existence a decade earlier, was built on instinct and scrambling to keep up with demand. Small world was the opposite: a rush job that somehow got engineered right the first time.