In Travels with Figment On the Road in Search of Disney Dreams, Marty Sklar recounts stories and memories from his 54 years working for The Walt Disney Company. The first ten of those were alongside Walt Disney himself before he went on to become a leader in Imagineering and eventually a Disney Legend. The stories in this book come from different decades and different locations from around the globe throughout his career. The book itself is a response to the many requests made to Sklar by fans to document the many stories that hadn’t been covered in his first two books.
Marty Sklar started at Disneyland one month before the park opened in 1955. There, he created The Disneyland News. The following year when he graduated from UCLA, Sklar began working at Disneyland full time. In 1961, Sklar was moved to WED Enterprises where he worked closely with Walt Disney, often writing for him. After Walt Disney passed in 1966, Sklar continued to pursue the realizations of Disney’s dreams. He eventually became an executive at Walt Disney Imagineering where he worked for the next three decades before retiring on July 17, 2009. In retirement, Sklar traveled, wrote two books, consulted, mentored, and continued to remain active in the theme park industry. In 2017, Marty Sklar passed away while working on Travels with Figment On the Road in Search of Disney Dreams.
Reading Travels with Figment On the Road in Search of Disney Dreams is very much like sitting around the fire on a lovely evening and listening to your favorite grandparent tell their favorite stories. The stories are fun, have been polished with nostalgia, and bring to life a different era. The stories are told through the lens of someone who knows that the good memories outweigh the bad. They are endearing as the storyteller regales the tales that are part of a bigger story they loved living. The result is a book that is fun to read and also isn’t going to change the world. What it IS going to do is give a picture of a man who lived an incredible life and loved the life he lived.
Travels with Figment On the Road in Search of Disney Dreams is a book that I personally enjoyed reading. It is full of great stories. I found myself remembering listening to my Grandpa share stories from back in the day as I read it. It doesn’t go deep anywhere, but it probably doesn’t need to. What it does do is it fulfills the many wishes for more stories from this Disney Legend about his career with Disney. This is a very good thing as there is always the risk that these stories will just disappear. It really was a nice final gift for Sklar to give to the Disney community.
Marty Sklar’s final book, Travels with Figment On the Road in Search of Disney Dreams, will be available to purchase on November 5, 2019. It gets four out of five hat tips. I really enjoyed reading it and if you are a Disney fan who likes to read stories about what it was like back in the day, you will definitely enjoy this one!
