The concept for Disneyland began when Walt Disney was visiting Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters Diane and Sharon. While watching them ride the merry-go-round, he came up with the idea of a place where adults and their children could go and have fun together, though this idea laid dormant for many years.

Walt Disney created Disneyland primarily out of a desire for a "living" entertainment medium that was cleaner and more family-oriented than the grimy traveling carnivals of the 1940s. Famously, the idea came to him while sitting on a park bench watching his daughters ride a carousel at Griffith Park; he realized there was no place where parents and children could have fun together. Beyond the sentimental reason, Walt was also motivated by a need to diversify his company's revenue and create a permanent "showroom" for his film characters. In 1953, he mortgaged his own life insurance and sold his vacation home to fund the initial research, as his brother Roy and the bankers initially thought a permanent "amusement park" was a financial folly. By 1955, Disneyland was also a way for Walt to control the entire guest experience in a way that film could not—it was a 3D extension of his storytelling where he could constantly "plus" the environment, a philosophy that still drives the Disney Parks division in 2026.