On Sunday, January 23, 1957, a large American audience gathered around their television sets to watch the weekly episode of Disneyland, a popular show created and hosted by Walt Disney in return for an investment from ABC that he used to build Disneyland. On that evening, the audience was treated to a compressed course in atomic physics and science history titled “Our Friend, The Atom.”

The show’s narrator, Heinz Haber, was a knowledgable, respected nuclear scientist. With the help of the professional storytellers and animators who worked for Walt Disney, he wove a fascinating, informative tale that compared the discovery of atomic energy to the fable from The Arabian Nights titled The Fisherman and the Genie (some translations use the title “The Fisherman and the Demon”).