When Disneyland opened in 1955, it proved an instant success. Sixteen years later it spawned a bigger sister the 27,000-acre Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Tokyo Disneyland followed in 1983. Then it was Europe’s turn. After weighing some 200 places across the continent, the company settled on a fantastic site near Paris which the French government was offering. For a bargain price, Disney bought nearly 5,000 acres, 20 miles east of the capital. Final contracts were signed in March 1987, and soon some 10,000 construction workers were digging and building and wiring and painting. When I visited the site last August, it looked more like a battlefield than an amusement park. How, I wondered, would 150 million cubic feet of churned up earth become, within nine months, a resort containing Sleeping Beauty’s castle and 29 other attractions, 360,000 trees and shrubs, 20 bridges, six hotels, five swimming pools, 50 restaurants and snack bars, 100 shops, 1,051 robots and a Mississippi River steamboat "They will need a magic wand to finish it on time," said a cynical French friend. But the Disney people have been in the magic wand business for well over half a century.