The story resumes after Walt's death. Roy is newly 73 and ready to retire, but he puts that aside to keep Disney moving through grief and uncertainty. Mary Blair stays locked on Tomorrowland. Around her, the company's treatment of people close to Walt is starting to change. WED matters. So does Florida. The Florida Project, later known as Disney World, adds pressure to the work Walt had wanted to build.
Mary's assignment is hands-on and exacting. She works through figure sketches, enlarged images, clay squares, transferred designs, applied color, and kiln-fired tiles that craftspeople would install. That process changes Tomorrowland. The old industrial look gives way to something bigger, stranger, and more Mary. Scale does a lot of the talking here. Each mural is roughly 54 feet long and more than 15 feet high, about the size of a movie screen or larger. Even in ceramic, she still thinks like a watercolorist. She says the fired process keeps the richness and glistening effect of wet watercolor while resisting fading.
The prestige question has a sting. Disneyland in 1967 did not have the art-world authority of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But public exposure tells a different story. Disneyland drew over 9 million visitors in the year after installation; MoMA had fewer than 900,000. That does not settle the argument, but it changes the frame. Mary's murals may have been seen by far more people than they would have reached in a museum. The episode leaves that feeling bittersweet: her work gets bigger, tougher, and more visible just as Disney becomes less sure what to do with people tied closely to Walt.
