Chuck Schmidt

Chuck Schmidt, bitten by the Disney bug at an early age, remembers watching The Mickey Mouse Club after school in the mid-1950s. During his 48-year career in the newspaper business, he channeled that love of Disney as the Sunday News and Travel editor for The Staten Island Advance. Chuck has written or co-authored seven books for Theme Park Press, including Disney's Dream Weavers, On the Disney Beat, An American in Disneyland Paris, Disney's Animal Kingdom: An Unofficial History and The Beat Goes On. Chuck has shared his passion for all things Disney in his Still Goofy About Disney blog on AllEars.Net since 2015. He resides in Beachwood, N.J., with his wife Janet. They have three adult children and seven grandchildren.


THE FIRST TIME I VISITED: Disney’s Animal Kingdom

Posted on by Chuck Schmidt
April 21, 1998, dawned warm and sunny in central Florida … perfect weather for the dedication of a new park on Walt Disney World property. I was fortunate to be in attendance as Disney's Animal Kingdom – proudly dubbed “a new species of theme park” – swung open its gates for thousands of invited members of the press [the park officially opened to the general public on April 22, which is Earth Day].
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THE FIRST TIME I VISITED: The Disney/MGM Studios

Posted on by Chuck Schmidt
Underwhelming. That's what I thought after our first visit to the Disney/MGM Studios in August of 1989. Where it took several days to see and do most of the attractions at the Magic Kingdom and Epcot, it took just a few hours to take in the limited number of adventures in the park, which was based on Hollywood, and specifically, movie and television production.
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A Peek At Some Of EPCOT’s Proposed (But Never Built) Attractions

Posted on by Chuck Schmidt
Epcot was in the midst of a massive and long-overdue overhaul earlier this year when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. If nothing else, the delay in the opening of attractions such as Ratatouille and Guardians of the Galaxy and the overall upgrade of the park has afforded us the opportunity to pause and take a look back … to some of the attractions that were on the drawing board, but never made it to the park.
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Dave Bossert’s Latest Book Shows Us Disneyland Like We’ve Never Seen It Before!

Posted on by Chuck Schmidt
Dave Bossert's latest work, "3D Disneyland: Like You’ve Never Seen It Before" [published by The Old Mill Press], is scheduled to be released in November. “I regularly tell people that if you'd have asked me 10 or 15 years ago that I'd be writing books, I would have laughed,” Bossert said during a recent interview. “And here I am with the '3D Disneyland' book. I think it’s my seventh book.”
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