first leased the land for the Mickey Mouse Club “Adventures of Spin & Marty” segments in the 1950s. The company bought the ranch in 1959 for $300,000. Subsequent purchases of adjacent land increased the area of the ranch to. A business district set and residential street set were built on the ranch by 2012. The district set has 42 stores, while the residential set has 23 houses all with separate architectural style. In May 2013, Disney announced plans to redevelop of the property into a new film and television production studio, consisting of six new sound stages and production offices. The site will be called Disney | ABC Studios at The Ranch. The project was approved by Los Angeles County in August 2013. In October 2017, a second extension for the new studio's construction permit was granted extending the permit to January 2019.
Productions
The ranch was used to film the episodes of Spin and Marty, a popular segment of The Mickey Mouse Club and parts of Zorro. The first movie shot at the ranch was Toby Tyler. Most of the exterior scenes in Old Yeller were filmed here. The Bolton Estate scenes and several others from Disney's The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit was shot here. The town featured in ' was also built on the Golden Oak Ranch. Other films that were shot on this location include The Apple Dumpling Gang, The Muppets, ', Pete's Dragon, Behind the Candelabra, Treasure of Matecumbe, The Cat from Outer Space, The Muppet Movie, The Electric Horseman, Little House on the Prairie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Majestic, Desperate Housewives, "Role Models", Holes, Camp Nowhere and Colonel Sanders commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken. A covered bridge spans the man-made stream featured in Follow Me, Boys!, episodes of Bonanza, The Greatest American Hero, various episode of multiple ″Star Trek″ series and was used for parts of the music video of Amaranth by Nightwish. The exterior house featured in the original 1961 film The Parent Trap was also shot on the ranch, as was the Peabody farm from the Universal film Back to the Future. It was also used for the filming of three of the five Herbie films, including two scenes at the lake in The Love Bug and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, along with Alonzo Hawk's dream sequence in Herbie Rides Again. In 1985, Big Top Pee-wee was filmed here and part of Short Circuit was filmed here as well. According to Phil Abraham, parts of "The Hobo Code" were filmed here. The rural farmhouse set on the ranch played the part of Margaret Sterling's hippie commune in the fourth episode of Season 7 of Mad Men. It is also the setting of Dwight Schrute's farm on several episodes of The Office.
