Ah, autumn!

The whole stretch of the year from September through to January in Florida has wonderful dusky light and silhoutette sunsets, perfect weather for excursions to the Magic Kingdom - which rarely ever looks better than in the waning hours of sunlight in the waning year - and which seems now especially suited to visits to the Haunted Mansion. There may not be autumn leaves blowing like they have in New England where we lay our scene, but this is a perfect time to experience this most complex of attractions. So it is perhaps natural that our thoughts turn towards the Mansion as the month rolls onward towards All Hallow's Eve.

Today I would like to direct your attention towards one of the least respected and most frequently dismissed aspects of the attraction: the lowly pop-up ghoul.

There is not much love in the world for these minor inhabitants of the spirit house. For one, they are not a special effect - the Haunted Mansion's true stock in trade, of course. Second, they are relatively close to the spookhouse apparatus which had been as of 1969 haunting local amusement parks and fairground Ghost Trains and Wacky shacks for around 40 years.

Me, I'm obsessed with them.

To begin with I, for one, see no harm in pointing out that Disney appropriated certain established aspects of a very rich American tradition of amusement parks, a rich American tradition which is all too often ignored in studies of Disneyland and her progeny. Just as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and especially Snow White's Adventures took the form of dark rides not unlike any number of non-Disney spook houses, the familiar presentation is part of what helped frame the audience's expectations for these attractions. Both Mr. Toad and Snow White were beautifully mounted experiences in a genre they helped disband.  To cite another example, the 1971 Jungle Cruise kicked off with a leafy variation on the traditional Tunnel of Love, and of course the trip behind the waterfall introduced in 1955 at the Disneyland version had been a stock in trade for Dark Rides for generations - Coney Island's "Spook-A-Rama", predating Disneyland, pulled the same trick.


It is where these Disney attractions connect to a larger native tradition of amusement parks, World's Fair, Amusement Piers, Atlantic Cities and Coney Islands that the difference between what Disney did and the rest of the world did becomes most evident. Anyone who had actually boarded a spook house at a local carnival would immediately see and understand this world of difference. The funny thing is that Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom are places where these established traditions, expanded and elaborated, could have lived on. Coney Island is but a pale shadow of her former glory, and rare is the person today who has actually been on a real Wacky Shack or Phantasmagoria at their local amusement park. The Disney versions have driven the originals to the verge of extinction, and today the points of connection between the Disney tradition and the earlier traditions are often our only point of connection to a larger, and vanishing, world of American Entertainment History.

So, yes, the difference between what WED Enterprises did and what these small companies operating out of the East Coast and Midwest were able to accomplish is staggering, but continuing to exclude the heritage of the American Dark Ride - as American an invention as Coca-Cola - from the history of the Disney version is foolish. To begin with, Disney did not invent the ride through attraction any more than he invented the Ferris Wheel or roller coaster. But most importantly: what you gain by insisting on the independence of the two schools - the home brew paper mache one and the big Hollywood industry version - is insubstantial compared to what you lose. It's over sixty years of precedents just gone in a flash.


So yeah, in the Haunted Mansion, those pop-up ghouls are just masks on sticks. What of it? It isn't the trick itself that matters here, but its presentation in a larger context I'd like to dwell on.

Fact is, the Haunted Mansion is really the best Ghost Train ever built. You don't ride in Pretzel Amusement Company cars and you don't zip past dancing skeletons and women being sawed in half, but there are a number of eerie echoes between the Mansion on the earlier attractions which, perhaps even if subconsciously on the part of the designers, became a part of the texture of the whole experience. For example, here's this gag built by Funni-Frite of Ohio. This page comes from a 1966 catalouge:


It's a terrific gag, nearly impossible to predict, and was well known by the time the Haunted Mansion opened. I've always suspected that it inspired, perhaps indirectly, the Mansion's own Grandfather Clock:


Or how about a connection between monstrous spiders and a large, haunted staircase? This was designed by Outdoor Dimensional Display, whose chief designer Bill Tracy had an imagination uneasily combining equal parts whismy and horror, and whose style is as immediately recognizable as Marc Davis':


This is where our pop up ghosts appear. The first company to create what we essentially know as the dark ride was Pretzel Amusement Ride Company of Pennsylvania, whose signature attraction "Pretzel" was a long, winding, disorienting trip through darkness which did not yet have things jumping out at you, but instead often simple gravity-operated gags creating crashes, bumps, and thumps. When there were visuals, these were things like donkeys kicking their hind legs, befuddled cops, and mice running along a shelf, knocking over bottles. These experiences were more about disorientation and absurdity instead of suspense and horror, which is why their signature and namesake attraction, The Pretzel, became known as Laff in the Dark.

They also created this:



The fellow on the left was the "Jersey Devil" stunt, a simple paper mache head impaled on a rod, and the Pretzel Company's highest seller. When the car would roll near the Jersey Devil's box, the wheels would depress a lever set in the floor which would both send the Devil shooting up on his pole and connect an electrical circuit causing his light to turn on. When the car rolled away, the lever would reset and the light would turn off. You should recognize the fellow on the right, he's related to the Jersey Devil but indeed not far removed from our own frame of reference.

I bet you think I've wandered far afeild from the Haunted Mansion by now, haven't you? Check out this drawing in Yale Gracey's own hand:
 

This gag was realized at Disneyland pretty much exactly as Gracey illustrated. Disneyland lost two of their "Rocket Skulls" in 2006. They leapt out of hatboxes in the Attic, a holdover from the bad old Hatbox Ghost days, and it's very likely that Gracey took his inspiration directly from a Pretzel Amusement Company stunt he saw in his own life or in a catalogue.


It's unique gag, and unique to the Disneyland Mansion - I've never found any real evidence that it was replicated for the Florida version. There's one left out in California in the Graveyard scene in front of the Tea Party.

The simple fact is that you can wander Disneyland for many hours and not stray too far from what enterprising people like Leon Cassidy were cooking up back when Mickey Mouse was still making a name for himself. Disneyland is intimately woven into the fabric of this cultural history.

So what separates the pop-up ghouls in the Haunted Mansion from the Jersey Devil lurking in the dark corners of some Pretzel ride seventy years ago is context. Unlike rides with names like Pirate's Cove and Laff in the Dark, the Haunted Mansion seems to pull all these disparate elements together into a tightly woven tapestry which combines a lot of distinct ideas, styles and methods into a single unified whole, something which has structure and life. Even those pop-up ghosts have meaning and form, you know, and I'd like to demonstrate why these simple gags deserve your respect.

Let's start with the obvious, first: compared to the paper mache creations of the Pretzel company and Outdoor Dimensional Display, Blaine Gibson and the rest of the WED model shop did a bang up job sculpting the array of faces which leap up at us from behind tombstones and out of trunks. It's too bad that these sculptures must be seen only fleetingly, and it's almost like somebody was thinking the same thing, because the heads which are used on these pop-ups were also photographed and used to line the walls of the Disneyland Corridor of Doors scene in 1969. They are a rogue's gallery of ghoulies and ghosts:


These photos were excluded, I think intentionally, from the Florida version of the show, although they did belatedly appear on the East Coast in 2007. You'll notice there are really only four heads. From left to right we have Winky, Hook Nose, Droopy Eyes, and Bug Eyes. They're all sculpted to appear to be screaming. Here's what each looked like in situ in the Disneyland Mansion; I've pulled each of these from Disney promotional films so there's no cheating.


 You'll also notice the somewhat extravagent wig designs these figures were given in 1969, complete with those interesting curly-Q hair strands. I'm sure these were devised to "animate" the heads a bit as they bobbed up and down, and of course Winky on the left up there has a quite extravagant fright wig in 1969. Some of these figures have clear "shoulders" intended to give them a bit of body, and others do not:


Generally, the majority of the Disneyland popups still have "shoulders" and wigs, even if the wigs today are are white close cropped affairs. They still have white shirts for bodies, which are a reasonably good approximation of burial shrouds. The Florida versions only used shoulders and white shirts in the Attic scene prior to it's 1996 "upgrade"; the Graveyard figures all have simple black cones of material to hide their mechanics.

Also, this may be a trivial point, but the Disneyland versions tend to rise and then retreat immediately. Over the last forty years as the pneumatic pressure which runs the mechanisms has been reduced, they tend to rise much more slowly and drop out of sight quickly, giving a "peek-a-boo" effect. The Florida versions still rise quite quickly and tend to stay in their raised position for a second or two before lowering out of sight, much more of a shock effect. Again, I have no idea if this is intentional.


For whatever reason these four faces are weirdly spliced across the two Stateside Mansions, with Droopy Eyes appearing only at Walt Disney World and Bug Eyes exclusive to Disneyland. I have no idea if Droopy Eyes has never appeared in California, if the heads were worn out and eventually replaced, or if there were other factors leading to the current arrangement.

I'm not pointing all this out to be pedantic but to establish that far from being careless "scare-em" afterthoughts to the texture of the Haunted Mansion, these simple gags were carefully thought out and integrated into a fully realized environment. In fact, the pop-up ghouls are a far more important part of the attraction than they currently appear to be.

Mansion Specialist HBG2 has already written extensively on the way these pop-ups were used in the original version of the Disneyland attic to suggest a connection between a mysterious bride figure and her phantom suitor with a vanishing head; what was already an implicit connection due to the figures being linked by a phantom heartbeat was made even more on the nose by having - at two other places in the Attic sequence - skulls emerging from open hatboxes amongst the junk. Decapitated heads stuffed in hatboxes is a pure murder mystery gothic horror tropes, the same tropes the Mansion traffics in to create much of its meaning. And what about those other pop-up ghouls?


They popped out of trunks.

Even in Florida, where there never was a Hatbox Ghost for the bride to menace, the connection was perfectly clear. Dastardly deeds were afoot in this house long before the other ghosts moved in, deeds seemingly confirmed by the presence of the ghostly bride. Bodies stuffed in trunks forgotten in the Attic is as firmly established a gothic tradition as phantom lovers, and indeed in some folk stories these two strands intersect where the phantom bride is trapped in and suffocates inside a trunk.

The Attic always seemed to be the dark heart of the attraction, the room you were never supposed to see where the secrets were hid. It is the only part of the attraction where you are without the Ghost Host, who leaves you while you unwittingly uncover the scariest room in the house. This was confirmed by the sudden appearance of the apparently malicious leaping ghosts and the mournful, mysterious bride. After passing through this room, we flee from the house through a window - as clear a sign of escape as you can ask for - and stumble into the graveyard party to rejoin our host. The room is supposed to be a turning point in the attraction.

All these ideas circulating in the undergrounds of the Attic scene were what gave it its deep resonances, ideas which are to some extent still present but now explicitly spellt out for us with big signs and narration in the new Attic show. Furthermore, the new version of the Attic is just another gag sequence, it isn't dangerous or scary. The pop up ghosts and their piercing screams were our indication that things were getting serious in the old house on the hill, and ever since their removal the spark has seemingly gone out of this central sequence in the ride.

Okay, so I've established the importance of the figures, the excellence of the accomplishment of the effect, and the important role they played in the Attic sequence. But the pop-up ghouls have been silenced at Walt Disney World since 2007, and since 2006 at Disneyland. What about the ones left down in the show's big climax, the Graveyard jamboree?

Their relevance lies in a matter of structure.

In the original versions of the show at Disney and Magic Kingdom, the Attic pop-ups came up all at once, which was certainly nerve wracking and loud, creating a din that could be heard as far back as the start of the Ballroom scene. Both coasts also share a feature of timing in the Graveyard scene: each ghoul rises all at once at the conclusion of each verse of "Grim, Grinning Ghosts". It still is this way, but the reasons why this happens is our clue to unlocking the secret of the importance of these figures to the larger Graveyard scene itself.

First of all, we must establish something not much mentioned, which is that the Haunted Mansion signature song, Grim Grinning Ghosts, has a subtitle, and that is:


Now,  not to put too fine of a point of it, but have you ever noticed that the lyrics to Grim Grinning Ghosts are super literal about describing the attraction? I mean no disrespect to X Atencio, but once we notice that lyrics like:



Let's take a look at a picture:


This isn't just a nice picture of the Graveyard band; it contains an important detail. Notice that gravestone in the lower left side? How there's a speaker built into it? You've probably already put it together by this point, but yes, it's true, in the early years of the attraction - for about the first decade, in fact - each Graveyard popup would loudly scream or shout as they rose. Since Grim Grinning Ghosts is called The Screaming Song, they quite naturally scream between verses as a sort of punctuation.

That speaker and gravestone, actually, belong to this guy and, once again, here's how he looked in 1969:


In addition to "vocalizing", each pop-up once had it's unique lighting; you can see it in the picture of Winky above, faintly causing the white "body" of the ghoul to glow blue.

The Graveyard sequence really does play out as a series of loosely connected gags - each group of ghosts is doing something different and they're all singing the song but each setpiece doesn't really feel like it relates to the others. However, each scene has its own pop-up ghoul... except for the Singing Busts, and even they were supposed to have one too:

From the original WED model.
Known as "Sir Misplaced"; he's popping up right where the steps down
into the projection pit are, making it obvious why he was cut




This repetition allows there to be some formal continuity between each cluster of ghosts in the graveyard. So these ghoul pop-ups aren't just cheap scares throughout the scene, they were actually the thing that structured the Graveyard finale, a unifying thread just as much as the song.

When I worked at the Florida Haunted Mansion, I spent a good deal of time under the Graveyard with flashlights and old maintenance books trying to determine positively that there were once individual lights and sound effects for these ghosts. There was only minor evidence left. I believe that the lights are supposed to be off when the figures are at rest, turn on for the ascent and descent, then turn off again. This would mean that each figure would be "invisisble" in its lowered state.

Sometime after these effects seem to have been retired in the early 1980s, and with the apparent reason for the pop-up heads to be present at all now gone and fading from memory, Imagineers began to tinker with the Attic sequence and the pop-up heads began to suffer a number of indignities.

In 1995, to go along with a reworked Attic, Disneyland ditched their screams and added ghostly echoes of "I Do", as well as a fancy new shadow pianist plunking out the Wedding March. The timing of the leaping ghosts was adjusted: no longer rising all at once, they would jump out in sequence from the back of the scene to the front. The shouts weren't all bad, some of them were pretty creepy, but the menace of the scene was radically undercut. Additionally, the adjusted timing now made it possible to ride through the entire Attic and not see a single pop-up ghost, a feat I accomplished several times. Previously, the screams and imagery of heads in hatboxes and bodies in trunks bespoke an atmosphere of dread that rubbed off on the silent bride. Now the ghosts at the piano and hiding in the junk seemed to be mocking her.

Is the bride a hero or a villian? In the original formulation of the scene, she had decapitated the Hatbox Ghost and probably a few others too. Not only that, but her face was a freaky skull that tended to scare the bejezus out of riders. In later years, the figure became mysterious, then eventually sad and oppressed.

Reconfiguring the attic ghouls to shout "I Do!" radically altered their meaning - which ought to be enough evidence of their importance - although the actual staging of the scene was kept more or less the same as it had been in 1969. Walt Disney World took a different route to revamping their bride in 1996.

The Florida '96 variation kept the original screams and the simulatious rise, but absurdly redressed their pop-up ghouls as grooms, or something:


It sounds okay on paper, but as you can see the cartoonish costumes leave something to be desired. But the worst offense was the removal of the boxes and trunks these figures would leap out of; for all except two of these figures all that was required to spot them before they would rise would be to lean forward a few inches. Winky, on the left up above, could be clearly seen "hiding" near the floor right as the buggies ascended into the Attic. It didn't make the scene any less loud or scary, although it was now a good deal more transparently lame. Why bother at all?

The figures themselves followed their hiding places to the great beyond in 2007.

Today, the only place where something like the original Attic can be seen is at Tokyo Disneyland. Although their ghouls rise sequentially, they still scream, emerge suddenly from boxes, and foreshadow a menacing ghost bride.

I think we should care about these pop-up ghouls because they were, like everything else in the attraction, conceived with a purpose. They drew on spook house traditions to further both the atmosphere and design of both of the scenes they appeared in, creating effects and ideas that were far more advanced than the limited technology they represented.

Plus, they were scary. What was once the dark heart of the attraction's mystery now seems fairly tame compared to even the minor scenes which open the attraction. While the Black Widow Bride Attic represents a significant advancement in technology and especially set dressing than its forebears, it isn't really scary. The sense that the stakes are being raised now that your Ghost Host has left you is gone. While The Haunted Mansion is no slouch in creepy ideas and images that can get to you late at night, the pop-up ghosts represent the only really scary thing in the whole ride, the only thing that could make you jump. That they appeared only in the final leg of the attraction was significant and speaks to a structural progression which was carefully thought out and artfully realized. They may represent a sort of base fairground level shock, but I think they were about the right amount of scare for an attraction which is, after all, called The Haunted Mansion. In that name that there is a promise which - at least partially - is no longer being delivered.

I think it's time to restore this particular long-lost effect to dignity. The Florida pop-ups that remain still have their individual lights but these lights should be made to turn on and off at appropriate times. Their gravestones still have holes cut in them for speakers to facilitate their original shrieks, grunts, and groans. In fact, having been under the graveyard to investigate, I can attest that at least as of several years ago most of the wiring is still intact. And, of course, it would be nice to see these figures treated to a bit more loving care - with appropriate wigs, facial details, and bodies.

Maybe then, once the true intentions of the people who, after all, designed the attraction are made apparent, this minor but important feature of the Haunted Mansion show will finally be given the respect it deserves.

--

I raided nearly every corner of the internet to assemble this article, but the following sites were especially helpful: Daveland, Long Forgotten, Laff in the Dark, Disney Fans, and Trimper's Haunted House

The theme park scene in Orlando sure is competitive, isn't it? Whether it be attraction wars, bragging rights or the thrice-annual price hikes, Universal, Disney and Sea World are all necking for the front of the race trying to squeeze the others out.

But it wasn't always like that. Yes, competition may have always been the name of the game, but rather than the rather open hostility between the various travel destinations, back in the 70s there was at least an aura of shared destiny about all of this. Prior to Eisner arriving on the scene, declaring "war" on Universal Studios and attempting to vacuum up every last tourist dollar in Florida, there was a rather cooperative atmosphere about the whole business. Today it's rather strange to see the footage of the Disney Florida press conference and watching the owners of Busch Gardens Tampa and Cypress Gardens praising Disney's arrival, because history tells us that Disney would alter their history forever.

Walt Disney World even shifted traffic patterns for hundreds of miles around. Prior to the opening of Walt Disney World, US 192 was hardly a cow road and most tourist traffic followed along US 27, a north-south strip passing through a number of major southern cities and connecting Indiana to Miami. The Bok Tower, Citrus Tower, and Cypress Gardens, three hugely important early Central Florida tourist attractions, are located off US 27 , and today it's littered with the skeletal remains of hundreds of fruit stands and motels meant to capitalize on the wagon train of tourists headed north and south along a trail that's been dead for decades now.

So Walt Disney World's early relationship with other tourist destinations was always sort of strange. There were buses to Cypress Gardens and Kennedy Space Center leaving every day from the Transportation and Ticket Center. This alone indicated Disney's position as just one component of a huge ecology of Central Florida tourist, an ecology they could all benefit from and which seems quite strange to us today. This was the era of the family road trip, and indeed it was a very big deal that Walt Disney World was once engineered so the vacationing family could leave their car behind for an entire week or more. But car trips outside the "Kingdom" were indeed expected in those early days when Disney's empire was still limited, and so Walt Disney World Vacationland enters the fray to help tourists decide what to do and when.

Vacationland was a regional magazine descended from its Disneyland cousin, which was distributed everywhere within a one day drive of Disneyland. It describes itself this way on the inside cover:

Vacationland is a service-feature magazine published three times yearly by the Walt Disney World Co. Personally distributed through numerous hotels, motels, chambers of commerce, AAA clubs, and leading tourist attractions and carriers, Vacationland is the only publication specifically directed to the vacationer and travelers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

Of course there were plenty of articles about Walt Disney World, but they featured in each issue a nearby Florida attraction such as Ybor City or the Everglades, where Vacationland editors gave us such gems to savor as this:



For the motor-bound tourist, Vacationlands are chock-a-block with delicious, delirious advertisements, which have already been highlighted on this blog here and here. But these advertising missives from three generations ago today are strange, beautiful and sometimes frightening. So let's take a brief look outside the 'Vacation Kingdom' at the Vacationland, a world that seems very different from our own of multi-day tickets, LEGOlands, Magical Expresses and theme park fortifications. A world found today only in... Disney publications of the past.


This eye-poppingly gorgeous ad from 1972 highlights a famous and historical chain of Florida restaurants. I'm pretty sure the Columbia on Lake Eola is gone, but there is one along the lake in Disney's own Celebration, Florida.


More great mid-century typefaces!


Vacationland could always be counted on to deliver advertisements for Walt Disney World sponsors. GAF was Walt Disney World's photography sponsor until 1977, when Polaroid signed on until the rise of Kodak in 1982.


Kal-Kan sponsored the Walt Disney World Kennel, which if you believe what old Vacationlands tell you, was more like a private club where Goofy and B'rer Fox would regularly cavort. If you believe what you read in old Vacationlands, that is.






Circus World never quite grew past its' "Showcase" - read: preview center - although it did last until right around the opening of EPCOT Center, eking out a rather sad eight year existence. It's now a strip mall.


Now we're cooking! The very first Red Lobster opened in 1968 in Lakeland, Florida - about thirty minutes from Walt Disney World and a true Florida original. If you think the vaguely-unappetizing plate of fried shrimp is a little off putting, here's your month's supply:


This. This is terrifying in so many ways, from his eerie expression to those fried... shrimp, or sausages, or something, to the ghoulish supernatural void from whence this image is emerging. Imagine thatpopping out of a trunk in the attic of the Haunted Manson. We're waiting for you!

Did I mention you can click on these for a higher resolution version? Huh?



This one is fantastic, minimalist, and all about Lake Buena Vista, so you know I couldn't resist.


Probably the most handsome of Sea World's many Vacationland advertisements throughout the first half of the 70s.


Okay, Sambo's. Having grown up in the North and in the middle of nowhere, I had no idea what a Sambo's was until I started collecting these Vacationland magazines. We had a few Burger Kings, a Denny's, and a Bob's Big Boy. But you know what? I'm totally sold. There is one Sambo's left - in California. One day I will eat there and tell the staff that I'm here to eat because I saw them advertising in a Florida magazine from 1974.

I'm sure this will make me the most popular gal in the restaurant.


I love this one. It's absolutely pitch-perfect in my book, from the appealing squiggly people, the happy sun, the copy text - they don't make them like this anymore. All the coffee I can drink for just a dime!! I'm there.


Look at that. A bowl full of strawberries and walnuts. It's simple, sure, but don't tell me that spread doesn't raise your spirits.

These are only a handful of the advertising riches found in these all-too-scarce volumes. From restaurants to bars to antique malls, the pages of Vacationland are like an index of places and things you can't do or see any longer. Yes, there are happy endings amidst all that, but they're few and far between, and not every Florida tourist attraction could afford a full page ad in a Disney-published magazine slick.

For every Sea World or Weeki Wachee there's dozens of Movieland Wax Museums, Mystery Fun Houses, Circus Worlds and Marco Polo Parks. Orlando tourism is a gold rush business, where places spring up and dry out as quickly as money can be lost. I don't know about you, but I think maybe a little more cooperation between the tourist attractions and a little less competition could go a long way in the long run.

Once upon a time, a strange place called Walt Disney World opened, and Walt Disney World had everything: rides, shows, rodents, plants, tikis, duck confit and folk singers. But there was one thing that Walt Disney World did not have, and it took her a surprisingly long time to get it: a damn map to get around.

Now, long time blog readers will of course recognize the gentleman to the right, Genius Guy. Besides his smokin' brylanteened hair, he's holding a map of the Magic Kingdom. It's not a map you or I would use today. It's about four feet wide and three feet tall. It is a wall map, the date is sometime in September of 1971, and Genius Guy is likely a contractee of the Buena Vista Construction Company enjoying the Magic Kingdom on a preview day. He's not using a souvenir wall map as a park guide for our amusement, it's because there was actually no general Magic Kingdom guide available and the very first one would not appear for another eight months or so.... in mid 1972.

I have no idea why this happened. Disneyland had had park guides for years at this point. It couldn't have been pretty from a guest service point of view and is the sort of thing you would think Disney would foresee... as a 1972 "Toy Review" article about Walt Disney World memorably describes:

"Mom said, "Don't you think we need a map?" "Of course," Dad replied, "Now that you mention it I see that everyone is looking at a map, where do you suppose they are giving them out?" As he spoke I saw dozens of people in front of us, each bending over a map in their own funny ways. Grandma asked, "I wonder why they didn't give us one when we bought our tickets?" Ten minutes later Mom came back. "They are giving them out nowhere - they sell the 'official' maps there for 50 cents.""

This article was written from the imagined perspective of a child traveling with family to Walt Disney World, but the author was clearly so peeved at the map situation they made sure to write it into their trip report. 50 cents is the equivalent of $2.50 today, by the way, so while that's not prohibitively expensive it is more than one would like to spend for something she should be given for free.

One publication which did have a map of the Magic Kingdom was Walt Disney World News, which featured a two-page spread at the center of early issues:


And it's a pretty good one. Things are clearly labeled although you'll see that those elements in a state of flux - like where If You Had Wings was being built - were pretty vague. That said it's hardly too artistically admirable - effective, yes, but not too pleasant.

In order to really get into the history of early Walt Disney World maps in all their lurid glory, we have to go back to before the place was even open, such as this glorious 1969/1970 "Fun Map" by Paul Hartley:


Because this represents a look at a park very much in a state of becoming, it's worthwhile to point out a few details of this map worth noting in special detail.


One can see for herself that the Indian Village has no inhabitants at all, which is just as the park opened in 1971, with the "population" added later in 1972 and 1973. Also, Marc Davis' "Tree Snag Reef" scene originally featured dangerous floating limbs as depicted in his concept art and on this map. As of September 1971 these show props were in place in the river, but shortly vanished. Whether this happened during the Rivers of America's first big refurbishment in 1973 is unknown, but for over thirty years now visitors on the Riverboats have had to supply their own dangerous waters between the Indian Burial Grounds and the Pirates Cave show scenes. One can hope these will return someday... but this seems unlikely.


There's alternative names, such as The Diamond Horseshoe with its unique Florida facade but painted yellow and gilded, like her Disneyland sister. Or the Liberty Square Tavern, which is a far less interesting name. What intrigues me is the label "Pinocchio's Village", which can accurately describe the entire Fantasyland West corridor and was applied to this area on the blueprints but never in any guest map as far as I know.

Have you noticed how unbelievably accurate this map actually is? Down to minor architectural details such as whether a window has shutters or not? And yet it lets It's A Small World go totally unlabeled?

Of course the general WED Enterprises indecision as to what to do with Tomorowland is reflected in Hartley's drawing here - it's just a jumbled mass of  space age buildings totally lacking in the type of detail seen elsewhere in his effort. Based on the evidence of this and other maps I would guess that Adventureland was the first area to hit the finish line and Tomorrowland was, as always, the last.


More confirmation that the Jungle Cruise queue was meant to go upstairs at some point. Hartley was probably working directly off the elevation blueprints for most of this stuff, which explains the charmingly flat style.

That cluster of three huts just above the Jungle Cruise boathouse represents the Adventureland Ticket Booth, by the way.


Later to become the Gulf Hospitality House, Disneyana Collectibles, Exposition Hall, and the Town Square Theater. But it's designed to be a hotel front, and it is an exceptionally gorgeous one - it's easy to imagine it nestled amidst rolling hills in upstate New York surrounded by a huge lawn.

Once a Hotel idea was nixed before opening day Disney had no idea what to do with that beautiful Redmond facade, so it was basically just a false front with enough room for a lobby and a restaurant. The Walt Disney Story attraction was built onto the back of the existing facade in 1972.


And two old favorites of this blog, the Liberty Square Market and Nantucket Harbour House, which would debut in May 1972 with a different, and inferior, name.

Paul Hartley's illustration is best known in its beautiful revised version which hung in Walt Disney world hotel rooms for the first decade of the resort:


This map circulates in two versions, and this one appears to be a work in progress - note Hartley's penciled in road which accidentally bisects the Walt Disney World STOLport - but offers I think much more spectacular and beautiful colors. The labels have been removed and a number of the finer details evident in his earlier piece not included, but this is one of the finest pieces of art ever created for any Disney property.

And, of course, there's the simple but wonderfully stylized rendering included in the Preview Edition guidebooks sold at the Walt Disney World Preview Center:


This one is beautiful, even if it shows some hesitation as to what the park will actually be - notice the vague Tomorrowland structures, Disneyland-style castle, and somewhat misplaced Small World - but is very memorable and provided the basic style for the 50 cent "official map" (which was far uglier), as well as a 1970's Walt Disney World lunchbox.

Sadly beautiful art was not what was found in the first GAF "Your Complete Guide to Walt Disney World" booklets when they appeared in 1972, handed out with guest tickets:


The detailed maps within were actually even worse, and hardly functional. To be fair, this was consistent with the style of the Disneyland maps at the time, such as this example from a 1971 INA "Your Souvenir Guide to Disneyland":


That's functional, yes, but sort of rough. A bit of relief from austere featureless blocks of color, "whimsical" fonts and suspect geography could be found on the centerfold page of the Walt Disney World GAF guides:

Follow the GAF photo trail!

This was nothing but a smaller and less garishly colored version of the "official map", by the way, and it repeated many of that product's mistakes, such as including the Disneyland Tom Sawyer Island, Frontierland train station, and Tomorrowland train station, which is in the right spot but would never get built. Oh, and that boomerang on stilts over the top of the Grand Prix Raceway.

Thankfully, the tradition of beautiful Walt Disney World maps lived on... in Vacationland Magazine!


Very much in the style of the "Preview Edition" map, this one elects to focus on the entire property rather than just the Magic Kingdom. Oh, and I have to feature this one detail from this map, because it's still hilarious.

Shut up and pay the duck, will ya???

Things did improve for Walt Disney World maps pretty quickly. By Christmas 1974 a greatly improved and much more useful for navigation map was circulation, not in the GAF guides but in separate fliers handed out for special events. This one was from a holiday season pamphlet:


This one really does have it all - it's pleasant to look at, combines the top-down view of the 1971 and 1972 maps with some pictorial embellishments, and introduces a clever color coding system that cuts down on clutter. Unlike earlier Magic Kingdom maps, you can actually navigate pretty quickly and easily through the park using this map.

But it wouldn't be for another few years that this version would be streamlined into an even better incarnation. This is it: in my opinion, probably the best Disney theme park map ever devised for clarity, ease of navigation, and simple aesthetic charm:


I doubt that will ever be topped. This map brought Walt Disney World out of her first decade, and in 1982 all of the maps were altered. Magic Kingdom maps in particular began to get cartoonish and distorted again, while EPCOT Center inherited the simple austere beauty of this style of map because, you know, EPCOT Center was supposed to be less fun. But for pure variety, beauty and interest, no era of Florida property maps have ever topped those first few, fleeting years.

As a researcher it's all too often (or may just often enough) that you find yourself pouring over some obscure publication, peeking into corners, squinting at grainy old photos, hoping to uncover some amazing heretofor unknown treasure. It's the forever pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Friends, I'm here to tell you I found one earlier tonight. While browsing a pleasant but hardly promising looking little 1972 booklet called "The Walt Disney World Story", I found it. Look, can you see it???


It's the STOL PORT logo!!!!!!

I have never ever seen this before. I've talked in the past about Walt Disney World's amazingly cool old emblem system, and even gone so far as to suggest that the Golf Resort had the most amazing logo, but this one just beats them all. It's beautifully designed, relentlessly obscure, and amazing.

I'm going to assume that you know all about the STOLport, but if you don't, there's an excellent primer available here. We can't be certain of the colors, but I imagine the "D" is that lovely dark forest green on some sort of earthtone brown with a white arrow inside.

And that, my friends, is that.

I seem to recall, a year ago, sitting down to write an article much like this. If I recall, I said something like "every year can't be a banner year". I'm tempted to repeat that, but truthfully things change very quickly at Walt Disney world, so quickly that one can easily lose track from one month to the next even if she isn't limiting her general interest to just one park in the way I do. So while it's hard to describe 2011 as a "banner year" for Magic Kingdom, she truthfully hasn't fared too bad. There's been some mediocre, some good, and some bad tempering it all out.

From an aesthetic perspective, the Magic Kingdom has remained about as good as last year, which is indeed a significant step up from the pit of the late 90s/early 2000s when even banner attractions were going to pot. Thanks to dedicated individuals inside the company at a number of levels, almost every major attraction at the park in the last decade has been refurbished or plussed in some way. Amongst those not yet "upgraded" significantly: the animals on the Jungle Cruise are mostly accounted for and operational, a novelty I haven't enjoyed since at least the mid-90s. Peter Pan's Flight continues to tediously chug along towards obsolescence, long overdue for a total tear-out and rebuild similar to what It's A Small World, across the promenade, received in 2005. And Splash Mountain, a headline favorite of many, continues to prove how poorly built it was back in 1992 by needing constant attention and patches every 6-8 months. One of the reasons the Disneyland version is in much better shape is because those America Sings figures it uses were built by MAPO using the highest possible standards back in 1974. Such is the long-term consequence of corner cutting here and there.

Speaking of Disneyland, I took a trip there in early 2011 and had a generally good time, but not having been there in over five years with a lot of water (including this entire blog) under the bridge does change one's perception of the place. I've been thinking a lot about what I saw there, some of which has already made its way onto this blog, but it's enough to say that I believe the park's high standards have begun to slip while Magic Kingdom has improved, closing the significant gap between the two. Besides the always indifferent Cast Members and rampant local population, I saw plenty of broken figures and effects in major attractions and even the Tiki Room, which was so glorious in 2005, feels dustier and threadbare.

Worst of all is the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, which should be a fantastic show piece, is in deplorable condition. Audio tracks are scratchy, paint is smeared, their Seance Room Leota projection is not only badly out of synch but her floating effects are just plain off, and more. There is no excuse for an attraction which receives a refurbishment twice yearly to install and remove their (tacky) Nightmare Before Christmas overlay to be in such terrible shape. The worst offender of all, and a good indicator of just how far that attraction has fallen, is their Load Area. What used to be a strange, haunted blackness has been filled up with clutter on a J.C. Penny level of show quality. Blue lights leak everywhere, making it perfectly clear where the walls are and spoiling the entrance to their Endless Hall scene. Even in the worst days of the Florida version's negligence, the maintenance crew knew well enough not to shine blue lights all over the flat black interior walls.

Disneyland: step it up. I expect better of you.

Okay. So in the next section I'm going to speak some serious truths about Walt Disney World that some of you, dear readers, may not want to hear. If none of this is to your taste then please skip ahead to the section break. This is no rant, no ruse. It is absolutely true. I'm going to accept no complaining about this next section, so if you don't want to hear it, then don't.

I've noticed a general stirring discontentment online in recent months, spurred by a major announcement nobody really cared much about, an increasingly vague future for Pleasure Island, and Universal showing Disney how it's really done up the road. There have been a number of attempts to lash out at the perceived source of the problem, people like Bob Iger or Tom Staggs who really are mostly out of the loop in regards to Disney's little Florida outpost.

I've been ignoring all of this for years on this blog and tried to focus on things I do like, but it's time that the online discourse really start about Walt Disney World and ensuring she has another 40 years in front of her that involve more things than existing attraction overlays and time share sales. If not me, then who? For years the politics of Disneyland have been vented online, but solving Walt Disney World's problems will need more than a new President and a will and a way.

The Big Picture: What is Wrong with Walt Disney World
Back home in Florida, Team Disney Orlando continues to run the parks with a criminal lack of regard for show. Magic Kingdom and EPCOT are hugely busy parks, there's no doubt. On the busiest days at the end of the year, there may be as many as three times the number of people that can fit into Disneyland between The Magic Kingdom and EPCOT. Despite a steady drift away from Disney towards Universal thanks to Harry Potter, it's not as if Disney is losing money here. But, even with the worst crowds and the best people-moving skills, Walt Disney World Operations is still prioritizing money over quality, and this goes beyond their refusal to hire outside of a minimum-wage starting salary.

Foods, for example, has lately gone on a rampage and removed the door handles from a number of alternative entrances and exits from original Magic Kingdom food courts, forcing all traffic through a single entrance where a phalanx of Cast Members are posted, ready to assault you with menus. This is exactly the sort of cheap aggressive grubbery that used to be associated with Universal.

It makes sense, in some ways, as major food outlets at Magic Kingdom can serve as many people an hour as can some attractions - in a park which can hold 80,000+ people and which is, five or six times a year, as full as that. Attractions are built around a unidirectional crowd flow as well, and I imagine that such methods manage to eek out just enough more customers served and dollars per hour to make it worthwhile to Food Operations, but they do so at the cost of making the meal process as harried as getting on an attraction and doing further thematic damage to the park in that these shops and food service locations no longer feel like real places; they're just one step closer to cavernous mess halls with funnels at the entrance. The days of entering a quiet side door of Columbia Harbour House are long gone; the handle's been replaced by a sign with an arrow. I guess we're lucky the door is still there at all.

But if we really want to get at what's wrong with Walt Disney World, we need look no further than the common stroller parking area for the perfect example.


These areas are badly needed at almost all times, and for over half the year resemble vast seas of plastic in a way that seems quite excessive. Nearly all of them are marked with cheap, wooden, folding A-frame signs:



In fact nearly every facility at Walt Disney World has at least one of these things:


I don't doubt that they are perceived as being needed, although every early Walt Disney World training guide I've ever seen clearly states that nobody will read signs anyway (every Cast Member will tell you this is so) and so the parks generally refrained from overloading them in common areas; Universal was and is especially bad about sign overload. What raises my ire is what these temporary signs look like. They look terrible.

There used to be an ironclad Walt Disney World rule that if any sign was going to be used for more than three weeks, it needed to be transferred off an A-frame and made a permanent fixture manufactured by the Walt Disney World sign shop. These digital printout A-frames do not count, and many of them have been in use for years and years.

I have no doubt that the business divisions which use these signs would love that have nice permanent ones, but the cost of manufacture and design for a really good, Disney-quality sign is quite high, and these divisions just don't have money to spend. They can hardly afford to staff attractions like Country Bear Jamboree, which closes early, or Swiss Family Treehouse, which is not staffed at all.

Now hold on there. Why should Magic Kingdom Frontierland Operations have to pay the Magic Kingdom Sign Shop money to make them a sign? Why can't that just be written off as an expense of operating the park? How many guests through the Main Entrance turnstile at $90/head does it take to pay for a simple stroller parking sign on a stick? And why is money circulating through all these sub-departments from one area to another when guests can't perceive the difference and it all ends up going to the same parent company anyway??

Walt Disney World is a vast and bewildering bureaucratic system where every theme park is set up like a self-sufficient business entity; for example: a strip mall. Magic Kingdom is one. Animal Kingdom is another. Transportation is another.  Each one of these has a "Vice President". They all ostensibly answer to Meg Crofton, but if you notice, she's also a "Vice President". There is no President. The next person on up the line is several levels of bureaucratic strata above them; an Al Weiss or a Tom Staggs.

Each one of these "strip mall" business entities not only are in competition with each other, but within each are individual departments, like shops in the mall, which are responsible for their own budgets, that money being parceled out amongst them using methods so obscure it can only be likened to Alchemy. So Frontierland Foods is in direct conflict with Main Street Operations, and so on and so on. All of them are in conflict with Imagineering, who often have to jump through hoops to placate any of them when it comes to designing anything. You liked the rocking chairs on Main Street? Too bad, Operations didn't. Certain areas, like Entertainment, have excessive amounts of money and regularly spend it on expensive free bees for their Cast Members like lovely jackets and shirts. Meanwhile, Operations hasn't got enough money to replace the microwave in their break rooms and they have to rely on cheap jack folding signs.

There is nobody piloting the ship. Nobody charting the course, nobody keeping things on the ball. Every area is being nickled and dimed to death and the people who ostensibly should be stopping them have no power or time to do so. That huge stage in Tomorrowland was built and paid for by Entertainment, who hardly even bothered to ask WDI if they should. It became a fiasco, just like the Adventureland stage across from Pirates, which causes huge traffic flow problems in front of the attraction and was built so quickly that the proper safety precautions were not taken to ensure that it was safe to perform on. I'll let you Google what the unhappy result of that carelessness was. There are standards in place with nobody to enforce them; an art director or supervisor can ask Operations to buy a better sign, but there's never money to do it. Magic Kingdom has to pressure Transportation to keep the monorails running so people can get to or from their theme park. It is an insane way to run a business and it is killing Walt Disney World.

That is what is wrong with Walt Disney World. Not just the signs, but the whole culture of spending and squabbling and cheapness and unaccountability it is an example of. In light of all this, asking for something like, say, a new parade, no matter how badly it is needed, is like complaining you can;t get a cup of sugar because the entire bakery is burning down. The good news is that there's lots of people in multiple levels of Walt Disney World who do still care, and who fight every day to maintain standards, but these voices are lost in the total storm of narrow minded apathy that governs. There needs to be wide sweeping change in every layer of the hundreds of levels of bureaucracy, and a concept of spending money to make money, and a concept of shared destiny before anything can happen. And it's because The Magic Kingdom isn't just the Haunted Mansion, it's also the merchandise shop at the exit, the restaurant across the way, and the attraction down the street, too. The Walt Disney World show is every gear moving and ticking away in harmony - not stuck in a deadlocked budgetary frame.


2011 at The Magic Kingdom

Who is Buried Here Again?
The most controversial new arrival at the Magic Kingdom this year was the new interactive queue for the Haunted Mansion, which set off frenzied firestorms in some departments and relatively few, often half-hearted counter defenses in others. When established classics are messed with, we as fans often feel totally without defenses and intentionally cut out of the loop. Suffice to say that almost everything than can be said to damn this new addition, has been said, and many times at that. So I am not going to reiterate those arguments.

Let's address the single biggest best thing than can be said about the alterations, and it is a technical thing, so it has managed to escape the attention of a lot of online commentary, and that is that the incredibly inefficient and confusing wheelchair access system for the Haunted Mansion has finally been dealt with. This was in fact the primary goal of the entire effort, believe it or not, and it has been very successful. For the first time in the entire attraction's history in Florida, wheelchair parties may enter normally with the rest of the group before splitting off to the alternate access point, which has been rebuilt with a two-way access corridor in the former "Chicken Exit" / Control Tower area, complete with very nicely done thematics which blend the Mansion's Victorian parlor entrance areas and stone Gothic crypt exit areas as well as can be reasonably expected.

This means that many many people who otherwise have had very minimal needs are finally able to experience the entire attraction the way it is intended, from the opening of the front doors, on to the Foyer, Stretch Room, and so on. This is indeed a very big Win for a particular subset and it is no less important to them and indeed the operation of the entire attraction than everything that came with it.

Now. Everything that came with it. First we tackle the big one: the new queue.

Some people do love it. Others absolutely hate it. There has been an astonishing amount of digital ink spilled on this tiny area this year - some of it quite articulate, so I'm not going to go through and pick it apart bit by bit. I'd like to steer a course between the two poles and contextualize my thoughts. I don't believe that this queue means that the Mansion is ruined, nor do I think it's the end of the world, but I had a severely bad reaction to it at first. I've spent most of the year talking this out with various confederates and I believe I can finally offer a coherent take on it besides simply shouting an incredulous "why?"

There has been a lot of attention devoted to discussing what the queue compromises about the Florida Mansion, but comparatively little has been devoted to discussing what the new queue adds.

For the first twenty years of the operation of the Magic Kingdom, the Haunted Mansion felt truly remote from Liberty Square and situated on an expansive estate (right). In the next twenty years, the Mansion's "Operational Infrastructure" has crept its' "property" out further and further, yet much of this is truly "junk themeing" that only makes the area feel smaller, whether that be weeds that crowd away a once sweeping lawn, two of the worst placed trees at Walt Disney World, a totally superfluous gate, or the ill-advised and frankly hideous Fastpass structure from 2000. By opening up the area to the West of the house, taking down some overgrowth, and adding estate-like courtyards and landscape details, some of this lost territory has been regained. The West side of the Mansion facade can finally be appreciated again, and some sense of the house as a large, dimensional place has returned.

Indeed, the sweeping approach from the river and the winding path through the courtyard, with the forest seeming just barely held back beyond the westernmost wall, is fantastic textural stuff. Ever since the green 1972 canopy was expanded and replaced with the ludicrous red canopy, it's been incredibly difficult to even see the Mansion from underneath it, and the new extension offers wonderful views of the house and the river in ways which make me, for one, very thankful for small things. It's been a photographer's dream, like an entire new part of the house has just now been uncovered.

Furthermore, the landscaped hill and forced-perspective graveyard that seems to spill down its side is a thing of beauty. In our minds the large graveyard we see at the end of the ride has always been "behind" the house in some vague sense, but now it seems to be psychically connected to what we see at the front of the house in a very real way - even if the distinction between the "family plot" outside and the "public cemetery" out back, never fully well developed anyway, seems to now be blurred. Now that the weeds and flowers and bushes have grown in a bit, it's a very cool visual and it gets the Haunted Mansion attraction proper off to a terrific start. It also better hides the always incredibly prominent show building, which many will see as a very good thing.

I think the bulwark of the main queue is similarly aesthetically unobjectionable. Some of the tributes and references go a bit over the top, in my opinion, similar to what one would expect in a fanfic, although I see them as having undue prominence, perhaps, mostly because I am myself a fan and those nods are directed at me. Even if I'm not sure I approve of him being included outside the attraction, I touch the One-Eyed Black Cat every time I walk through the queue. Just a few steps later we come across one of the best tableau: a side gate that leads direct onto the lawn where a number of gravestones poke out of the grass, along with some rusted and vine-entwined shovels. It's a lovely thing, and the sort of moment one could linger by forever, and it feels like a real thing in a real world. Yet the fact that it's placed in direct proximity to an opportunity to touch a bass-relief of a cat and hear it yowl at you gets to the crux of the problem with the entire new expansion.

I'm going to use a single thing from the queue as a way of an example. Here we have the "Sea Captain Tomb", lovingly dubbed by fans/adversaries as "King Squirty":


Now, blot everything you know about what this thing does out of your mind for a moment and just look at it. It's sculpturally wonderful - recalling the gothic mansion interior attraction's use of mythical monsters in decorative details, is at least as sculpturally rich, and it's a pretty funny, morbid joke. Truthfully, I can't believe Disney let this one out the door - it's a very explicit representation of a corpse floating in a bathtub. In fact, the rest of the attraction doesn't get anywhere near that sort of direct death scene gag outside of the Ghost Host's skeleton dangling above the Stretch Room. Imagine finding such a monument in a real cemetery - you'd be shocked. Imagine if upon examining the monument closely, you discovered that water were running down the sides of it, apparently out of the tub.

It's a really morbid idea - delightfully so, and so it's perfect for the Haunted Mansion. There's just one problem. Instead of being creepy, instead of water trickling out of it the way it seems to be designed to do, this tomb is zanily squirting you with water!

 Wait, back that train up. Where did that come from??

And worse, there's a goofy voice coming from inside the tomb, which totally contradicts the visual of this corpse floating in the tub.


And there's bubbles! And sneezing! A ghost gravestone that sneezes on you outside the front door of the house. This is the thematic equivalent of going into the Haunted Mansion and visually defacing things with a Sharpie.

What happened? A visual worthy of a great ride has been compromised by an apparently unrelated agenda of somebody's idea of "interactivity". Two totally unrelated concepts have been joined at the hip. I cannot believe that those responsible for creating the visual appearance of that prop would've wanted it to be squirting water and blowing bubbles. Somewhere between the concept of the visual element of the queue and the physical one, there was a massive meltdown and all that careful work was radically compromised by silly and stupid elements. The baby, the bathwater, and the whole damn tub were thrown out with it.

What the Haunted Mansion Queue represents is a commendable effort which is mired in its own inconsistency. I cannot reconcile that the same group of people who put such work and care and love and detail into that queue also wanted there to be goofy ghost sneezes and a cloying interactive voice straight out of Dora the Explorer. But for what it is, the experience leaves very little impression on you. You walk through and still end up next to a closed set of double doors with just an echoing wolf howl and a graveyard to contemplate. And what a graveyard it is now. At least that still feels the same.

John Hench once said.... a lot of things, especially about consistency. The Haunted Mansion Queue is an inconsistent effort. Had they trusted the original designers and those people on the team who cared deeply enough to craft new visuals in the spirit of the original they would've ended up with a better product. They would've saved money, effort, and face. As it is the entire experience became sort of a very public fiasco.

Disney doesn't have a good track record of handling fiascoes well, whether that be inventing public relations fictions about why rides have closed (Pooh toys and sink holes, I'm looking at you), or simply throwing their collective hands in the air and abstaining all responsibility. But you know what? What's bad about that Haunted Mansion Queue can be fixed. Easily. Disconnecting a speaker, bubble machine, and ghost squirt gun can be done overnight. The "Poetess" lines can be re-recorded in an afternoon. Most of my objections could be corrected with very very minor, but meaningful, tweaks.

Let's be totally clear: these aren't just my objections, they're the objections of a significant portion of the specialist niche - the very people who are targeted by things like references to Captain Gore and the One-Eyed Black Cat. You can't give with one hand and slap with the other. I say let the people who clearly knew what they were doing give it another shot without those voices advocating for squirting tombstones and zany popping books in the room and see if we cannot see a radical change. It will take only a little effort to make this effort worthy of the effort that went into it. GRADE: C+

Following You Home 
Truthfully, a potentially more destructive element was added to the Mansion at the same time. What happens outside the attraction happens outside it, but once those doors open and we move inside there is a very definite "reset" button that gets hit in our subconsciousness. But the Hitch Hiking Ghosts are right in the flow of the attraction, and right at the tail end of it, where an obvious misstep will linger much longer in the memory. Part of the power of the original effect was in its simplicity; one could not be totally sure whether the hitch-hiking ghosts were menacing or comic.

The revamped version of the scene features floaty CGI ghosts pulling unusual tricks of varying degrees of effectiveness. The integration of the CGI projected ghoulies and the mirror illusion is pretty effective, even if the ghosts themselves can be said to be, accurately if flippantly, too Tex Avery and not enough Marc Davis.

Part of the associative power of the original scene was its riff on the American tradition of the phantom hitch-hiker tale; these ghosts were riding with you, exactly like in a car, and it was hard not to think of that ghost sitting in the back seat as you drove home that night. That stayed with you in a deep place. These new version don't quite ride with you; they're too busy being silly. They sort of float above you and remove your head, which is cartoonish and not quite as sinister as it sounds, almost like they're satirizing the equally ludicrous but much better aesthetically integrated "Black Widow Bride" scene that's dominated up in the Attic since 2007.

From a technical perspective, I think this effect is fine, and judging from verbal reactions of other passengers, seems to be successful. But I'm not so sure. At the very least these new ghosts are indeed digital projections, and unlike rod puppets, the projections can be changed easily and at any time. Perhaps some future enterprising Imagineer will restore a Haunted Mansion finale in a more dignified vein. GRADE: C-

Mice in the Hotel
For some time now,  Magic Kingdom has been shifting her character meet and greets about, taking here, moving there, sometimes even banishing a few characters to EPCOT. What on the outside perhaps looks like shuffleboard, is on the inside more akin to a game of chess - a very tight game of chess. In the past several years, many of the Magic Kingdom's "twilight spaces" - poorly utilized spaces, former food courts, shops, and attractions - have been rethought or filled in. With the closure of Mickey's Toontown in Feburary, many of the character meet and greets fled to other quarters - including a bizarre and hilarious period when as many as four Mickeys could be found around the Magic Kingdom at once, in such unexpected places as alongside Splash Mountain and inside the Hall of Presidents. One should not underestimate the mouse's ability to draw a crowd or cause Entertainment managers to sweat bullets.

The largest remaining "twilight space" in the Magic Kingdom was the Walt Disney Story show building, built behind the Main Street Hotel facade in 1972 and housing an attraction which ran for twenty years. For the last twenty years, the space has been poorly used. One attraction theater was converted to run cartoons and sell timeshares, the other boarded up and used for meeting space and Cast theatrical productions. In 2009 the entire Walt Disney Story show building was closed off and an elaborate tear-out procedure began. What opened there earlier this year can hardly be recognized. This by itself is an extraordinary relief. All too often "new" attractions seem to be little more than crumbling old attraction infrastructure with some new stickers and paint.


Now, I'm not opposed to character meet and greets, and I'm resigned to their continued presence in this and other theme parks. But I don't think it's an unreasonable demand to ask that, if said meet and greets must be conducted in their current state - with attendants, queues and timed interactions - that they be conducted in reasonably appropriate environs. This is all too rarely the case. Aladdin greets guests in Adventureland in front of a prop door (it once led to a shop) which junk has been scattered around. In his former digs, Mickey held court in the "Judge's Tent" (which made no sense) at "Mickey's Toontown Fair" (which made even less sense) amidst a roiling pit of puffy fiberglass "cartoon" props and the worst design choices in the entire park. He's now landed on Main Street, which could have been a disaster. It's become one of the best things to happen to the park in a long time.

Let's set aside the touchy issue of what he's doing on Main Street for the moment. If Goofy is permitted in Liberty Square then there's no real reason to object to Mickey on Main Street, and whatever slight aesthetic damage is done to the park with this choice is insignificant compared to the massive aesthetic triumph of tearing out Mickey's Toontown Fair. Since the Judge's Tent was due for demolition, Mickey had to be moved elsewhere, and a large, prominent, empty space at the very front of the park was probably operationally mandated before even a single sketch was drawn up. If we take all of that as givens, the resulting attraction is a triumph. It's probably the most texturally complex experience on Main Street.

Victorian Gingerbread and Mickey Mouse don't really go together, but this attraction makes it all seem to work. It accomplishes this primarily through including just enough visual texture and detail to make the Town Square Theater location seem credible, but enough that's just this side of fantastic enough to make Mickey's presence unobtrusive. He appears in a room too stacked with details to possibly take in all at once, and although many of these details are cute references or throwaway gags, they're done on a level of perceptibility which means they seem to exist for more reasons than their own sake. I often complain that current Imagineers substitute props for ideas. These props are ideas, and they greatly contribute to the excellence of the experience.

The Main Street Hotel facade - probably the most handsome on Main Street - has been totally refurbished and looks superb. Most importantly, the ugly Exposition Hall marquee has been scrapped, which fixed a long, wide horizontal sign across a facade which is designed in entirely vertical architectural expressions, from tall pillars to tall doors. The new sign, although not quite as nice as the original Hospitality House sign, actually harmonizes with the architecture and is quite pleasing and handsome. Vertical banners have been added as well which help clue guests in as to what may be found inside, and although some have decried these they are, to my eye, inoffensive. They harmonize with the rest of the building and add a pleasant kinetic element when there is a breeze.


Moving inside, the attraction's crowd flow has been totally reversed. Rather than entering through the south veranda and exiting through the old Gulf Hospitality House lobby, guests now enter a totally reworked vestibule. Many of the original WED decorative and design elements have been retained, but the shop has been contained on one side of the entrance and the Town Square restaurant on the other, which greatly helps the attraction entrance feel like it has a reason for existing. Some very fine textural work here and in the new entrance area is on the nose without going too far - the attraction becomes increasingly visually richer the deeper one proceeds into it. The yellow, white, and gilt darkens to a suitably Victorian brown and red, then onwards to beige and bricks in the exit shop - an orchestrated use of color here really pays off. As one is shuffled through doors and corridors, the anticipation of meeting Mickey is more strongly felt here than in any other "Meet Mickey" attraction yet made.

Where the attraction fails it does so graciously. Some areas are still a little too bare and free of ornamentation, although this can be fixed. The rear theater space is a black void of nothing - currently used for Princess meetings, although they will be moved to Fantasyland before the year is out and the space can be properly finished (see what I meant about a chess game?). The queue space is ludicrously massive, as if in the planning stages the entire Napoleonic army was expected to descend to meet Magician Mickey. Since the Princess space isn't really designed to be anything, it moves very slowly, but a smart and efficient series of rooms on the Mickey side, plus an additional greeting room for Mickey (up to four), means that waits rarely stretch to the extremes this attraction entertained while in Toontown. It is not only better designed and pleasant to see, but it hosts more people in a better experience.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So do I. In a park as densely visited as the Magic Kingdom is, there should not be a square inch of wasted space. This new attraction fixes many longstanding problems - operationally and aesthetically - all at once and it does so very pleasantly in a way which does not contradict the rich theming around it and finally finds a purpose for a major Magic Kingdom facility which has not been under a lucky sign in over a generation. If there were more things happening like this at Walt Disney World, it would be a much better place. GRADE: B+



Likes To Be Seen and Loves To Be Heard -
The return of the Tiki Room was the big surprise of 2011, proving that Walt Disney World may still have some surprises in her even to bored, jaded commentators such as myself - even if said surprises came about through total freak, act-of-God, insurance bait calamities.  As I've said in my previous article, it's a very very commendable effort, what WDI has done with the show, although I must admit that I think I'm grading this a bit more leniently than I think it deserves. After all, what makes the "new" old show work is really nothing that was done for it in 2011 - it works for the same reason the Disneyland show never stopped working and never stopped playing. And I could be complaining that it took an act of God situation to put the real Tiki Room show back in Florida - truthfully they should've closed the offending Under New Management show immediately and let the Disney faithful run the people responsible out of town, tarred and feathered. I don't care. I'm just happy it came back at all.

And the Florida Tiki Room, it's a thing of beauty, even if the fountain in the middle of the room never did make a re-appearance - consider it a lingering scar to remind us of the price Under New Management came at. It's also nice to see such a fresh looking show regardless - with bright feathers, good lights and a robust sound system to back up the 1963 show, it works its wonders all over again. The recent attention has even brought out some nice surprises buried in the old Wathel Rogers animation from 1971, such as a very refined use of diagetic "sound" from the "Glee Club" during the show's signature number - beaks clack and clap and really seem to be clicking out the rhythm of the song, at least compared to the much vaguer movements seen at Disneyland earlier this year by this author.

But the real happy ending here isn't that I personally got what I wanted back, it's that it was done well and is a success. Instead of playing to a ghost house of bored parents, toddlers and others, the Tiki Room is packed nearly all day. During the Holiday peak season, reported estimated queues of 20 minutes made the rounds through the social networking circles. And when was the last time you saw a line for the Tiki Room? But that show is a birthright of the Magic Kingdom, it's one of the things that makes that park -  and Disneyland - what it is. Walt Disney was right and quality does last. But don't believe me. Ask Iago, last seen being carted out of the attraction as a charred hull on his way to a far too late retirement to the junkyard of metric tons of garbage Imagineering from his era. GRADE: A-

.....And The Other Stuff
Besides those big changes, 2011 saw a few other newsworthy items at the Magic Kingdom. To my eyes the biggest deal was the closure of Mickey's Toontown Fair in February, which finally ends nearly twenty-five years of garishly awful aesthetics  behind the Grand Prix Raceway. The immediate result of this was the rapid and belated movement of Mickey to Main Street, followed by an extended shuffling-about of character greeting locations, which at least for the moment has landed Tinkerbell in the Adventureland Veranda, which is a terrible choice but at least is using the space, and will eventually lead to the closure of Snow White's Scary Adventures which will become an elaborate complex to house all of the princess "girl interest" characters. I think it's unfortunate to lose the Snow White ride, which was always a favorite despite the fact that it simply hasn't been very good since the half-cooked 1994 'upgrade'. Yet getting the Princesses inside a controlled area of four walls and out of the rest of the park, where they loiter around like homeless persons in such unfortunate areas as Liberty Square and Adventureland, will be a large step forward in increasing the thematic unity of the park itself.

The Fantasyland Skyway structure, which in my mind was amongst the very best of WED's efforts at the Magic Kingdom in 1971, was demolished this year. It's site is slated to become a relocated bathrooms with a new, auxiliary path lading towards the Haunted Mansion around the previously-inaccessible area behind the Yankee Trader shop, directly through the plot of land originally reserved for a "Haunted Mansion Arcade". This will allow a northbound outlet for traffic leaving the Haunted Mansion - which is absolutely needed, as this area is a horrendous traffic snare on even medium attendance days - as well as clear the way for a reconfigured queue for Peter Pan's Flight.

As sad as it is to lose the Skyway chalet, this author is resigned to face facts that no guest has seen the interior of it since 1998 and without a chain of brightly-colored buckets chugging in and out of its handsome mouth, there was little reason to keep it around. Efforts to reutilize it as a restaurant or Meet and Greet area came to nought, and in the middle of 2011, all that beautiful wood was torn down to the slate foundation. I'm sure, with the passing of time, that the new path will come to seem normal, even natural, much like those bridges that skirt the northern boundary of Frontierland's riverfront. The path could even provide a pleasant new transition to Liberty Square, and since there appears to be no danger of filling in the original Harbour House breezeway, I will have little reason to complain on any further historical grounds. This is the sort of ambitious crowd flow plan that would've been axed out of pure cheapness ten years ago. Still, it hurts a little to know that all these years later I'll never again get to walk through the half round tunnel, past the trickling stream, and then up the narrow steps to the Skyway chalet while the Florida sun sinks low behind the Frontierland pines to the West. It was a blessed space but, much like the Fantasyland Submarine Lagoon which lived out a final shameful decade as nothing but a glorified retention pond / litter dump, I'd rather see the park use all of the space it's been allotted than let just another empty former attraction crumble away.

El Pirata Y El Perico, the mainstay taco bar across from the entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean (because I typed this aloud, some Disneylander who's never been east of the Rockies just started writhing around in torment), underwent a number of aesthetic changes this year, reopening as Tortuga Tavern, which is themed to, or so I'm told, some of the, um, Junior Adult novels based around the films inspired by the attraction which sits across the street. I have no way to verify this, but it is of no relevance to me anyway, because it turned out pretty cool.

El Pirata was once only the most eastwardly of the establishments along the north side of Caribbean Plaza, which opened in mid 1974 along with two shops, the Golden Galleon and Princessa de Cristal, which shared a secluded courtyard. In 1998, concurrent with the expansion of Pecos Bill Cafe which similarly absorbed original Magic Kingdom themeing by the ton, El Pirata evicted both shops and remodeled both into dining rooms, then joined the complex's north wall to Pecos Bill's south wall by way of a huge ramp and some suspect theming. Of course, El Pirata immediately went to seasonal status, making it one of the best places to get away from the crowds at Magic Kingdom, as it's in operation for probably less than 40 aggregate hours a year. One wonders how much money Disney could be making with those dining rooms and courtyards if they were still shops, but that's just crazy talk.

I'm not one to go out of my way to praise movie tie-in theming, but ever since the Pecos Bill expansion robbed this area of so much character and identity, it's been a rather sad place, like the last person to leave the party. If you're going to do synergistic tie-ins, you should do them like this. Nearly everything that was added is well judged and does not overwhelm the original architecture, unlike many of WDI's ill-advised "enhancements" of the 90s. These are small touches but they mean a lot, and run the gauntlet from nice new tile trim on upper balconies around windows and doors that blends in perfectly with the original WED designs, to well-built, custom-made but unobtrusive "themeing". The former Golden Galleon space features dozens of melted candles in bowls and vases and much improved "tavern" decor. An upper level has an overturned table and empty bottles, perhaps the first reference to drunkenness out of Disney in a very long time. The courtyard has some new lights, bullet holes, and a nice little tableau on an upper balcony. Best of all, the new, pleasant nautical background music is the sort of thing Wagner would have compiled back in the 70s, sedate, calming, and in perfect theme and taste. It may still hardly be used, but there's a little more class and life in the Tavern now.

Adventureland got the lion's share of the change this year, with an all-new bridge which debuted in the Spring. There is one incredibly obvious thing about the bridge and one not so obvious thing about the bridge. The first is that its totally flat, which is pretty weird, if you ask me. But the new bridge is not only flat, it's also quite different, despite recycling almost all of the original props.

When Disneyland opened in 1955, the push for July 17th meant that most of the Adventureland pedestrian area was decorated with off the shelf stuff from Oceanic Arts. This being the era it was, this meant skulls. Lots of skulls. Skulls on sticks, animal skulls, etc. The 1971 Adventureland, due in part to the more subtle touch of Dorthea Redmond, was a more refined place and so a new, very simple, but handsome gate in a pop-tiki style was introduced. In fact, outside of the skulls in the headhunter's camp on the Jungle Cruise, there was no scattered evidence of cannibalism to be found anywhere in the Florida Adventureland.

Forty years later, this new bridge is more in line with the Disneyland original, with a prominent animal skull and even a pile of human skulls to welcome guests. One of the skulls even has a huge puncture hole in the top of it's cranium. So we traded a 100% decrease in bridge curvature for a 100% increase in skulls. You know what? I think it was a fair trade.


And finally, the Swiss Family Treehouse was lovingly rebuilt this year, and shockingly enough opened with absolutely no characters in it, except for confused guests. Railings everywhere have overall been made more idiot-proof, meaning studier and with more nets, and there's lots of wonderful new woods, props and textures all through the island. The lighting scheme has been repaired and indeed added to, so at night the attraction seems to beam bright welcoming light out in all directions, and more than once this party overheard confused guests drawn inside this "new" attraction by bright lanterns and the echoing strains of the Swisskapolka. It warmed my heart.

By the way, a long-gone prop was restored during the refurbishment: an elephant rifle once again hangs at the ready in the boys' room. Between the elephant gun, skulls on the bridge, drunkenness at Tortuga Tavern, and absurd ethnic accent comedy in the Enchanted Tiki Room, Adventureland has suffered a quadruple increase in political incorrectness. Maybe there's hope for the world yet. GRADE: A-


Foxxy's Grade: For all the huge improvements and not so huge improvements, Walt Disney World is falling behind in the long run even while they improve in the sort run. This cannot be ignored. Ludicrous interdepartmental politics, general cheapness, and poor long term planning means the spirit of Paul Pressler is still very much alive at Walt Disney World, and now there's thousands of Pauls, not just one. I'm going to call this category "Vision". It can also be thought of as the "Don't Be An Idiot" grade. Walt Disney World needs to shape up in many areas, from crumbling transportation infrastructure to management malaise. Things have gotten worse a whole lot faster than they've gotten better. I give Walt Disney World an F for Vision.


MAGIC KINGDOM REPORT CARD:
Haunted Mansion Interactive Queue: C+
Haunted Mansion Interactive Ghosts: C-
Meet Mickey on Main Street: B+
Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Bonfire: A-
Upkeep and Maintainence: A-
Not Being Idiots: F

AVERAGE: C+

Comments: We all know which grade is holding Miss Disney World back. It's time this was addressed. She can do everything else fine but she doesn't listen to her friends and ignores the advice of her peers. She has 40 more years ahead of her and they could be great, but the last 20 have been nothing but tiny steps forward and huge leaps backward. It's time she stop climbing this hill. - Foxxy, Jan 2012


2011 at Passport to Dreams Old & New: (mostly old)
Snapshots:
Mysteries of the Second Floor
Marines Capture Coke Corner
Frap-Off at the Village

History and Esoterica:
The World Cruise
Palate Cleanser
Fireworks of the Universe
People I've Met in the Past: Part One
People I've Met in the Past: Part Two
Other Kingdoms to Conquer
The First Decade in Maps
Hanging at the STOLport

Commentary and Theory:
Rubber Spider Revue
Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining
Fire in the Night: The Pre-Eminent Attraction-as-Art
Start to Shriek and Harmonize


In the Spirit of Fairness: Walt Disney World Grades Me: "F-----!!!! ur a jerk!!!!! jeez"

"Kissimmee (pron. Kiss-SIMM-ee) is the cow capital of Florida. To get there one has to pass miles of cattle ranches. Stores in town have that false-front look, familiar in Western movies, and the natives wear aging, outsize Stetsons. The most popular hangout for old-timers is Crown's Cafe on Broadway, a modest dining room, in the back of which, through swinging doors, is a poolroom with eight tables. Women are not welcome. If the hot pork is ready, a waitress bangs on a shelf, calls out a name and passes the plate through a small window.

Oren Brown, a thin, weather-beaten man in his middle fifties, scion of one of Kissimmee's first families, presides here with inconspicuous authority. He and his friends reminisce about the old days, when the streets were all dirt and there was a livery stable on the corner, and when, if someone got married, you knew the names of all the guests in the paper. His eye wanders around the room, and every so often, he slides out of the conversation to collect a fee: 15 cents for a game with two people, 20 cents for a game with three or more, 60 cents an hour. This is the same Oren Brown who recently turned down $4,200,000 (somewhat less when he tells it) for his 6,750 acres abutting Disney. "What's money?" he asks. "It's only paper, most of it." He scans the room. "Excuse me", he says, and he slips off to collect 15 cents at table number four. He picks up where he left off: "I never could keep money. The land, it won't run off. Lots of people like money, but I don't care so much for it. I reckon I'm peculiar that way."

Time was when rangeland in Kissimmee went for $2 an acre. But new people have come to town. Taxes are already out of hand, and the retired elderly, no longer able to afford it, have moved away. Meanwhile, church attendance has skyrocketed."

That is the April 6, 1971 issue of Look Magazine, describing a March 1971 preview trip to Walt Disney World. The article everyone remembers is the one describing the upcoming sights at Walt Disney World, but the valuable one comes right after it, describing what life is like in the communities ringing Walt Disney World as the October opening looms overhead like a doom cloud. The start of Walt Disney World will be the end of "Old Florida", as it's called around here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nobody talks much about central Florida before Walt Disney World, possibly because there wasn't much to it. Reading the above description it's easy to imagine Walt Disney circling in his helicopter in November 1963, passing miles and miles of flat scrub and rangeland, until the gleaming intersection of two brand new, high tech highways - The Florida Turnpike and Interstate 4 - shot out of the low, flat land like a rocket. "Build it there", he said, and when his helicopter landed in New Orleans some time later, Walt found out that President Kennedy had been shot. Walt Disney World always was a project with an atmosphere of predestination in the balance.

They built it there, and the nearest thing to Walt Disney World besides retirees and the interstate itself was a little old Country Store called Johnny's Corner. It was at the intersection of State Road 535, which borders the Disney lot to the north and east. Johnny's Corner was a local landmark, and it was especially important in that it was the nearest place to cash a paycheck and buy beer. Dick Nunis drove here on his fabled efforts to guilt the Union construction crews to build God-knows-how-many things at The Magic Kingdom. He, and thousands of others, probably stopped here to get one for themselves, too.

It was quite a place. That's actually an understatement, as the November 17, 1970 issue of Palm Beach Daily News attests, here for your reading amusement:

"Close To But Not In Disney World -

Johnny's Corner, Everything From Snuff to Eggs

ORLANDO, Fla (UPI) - At Johnny's Corner a man can get pig knuckles with his beer, a fan belt for his car, a can of snuff, a pair of used socks, a Barlow knife, or a Hong Kong suit "made to measure" for $49.

He can cuss loud, peel eggs, play pin ball, argue about the Union, eat sardines out of the can and hand wrestle by the gas pumps.

If the late Walt Disney didn't stop by Johnny's Corner when he was staking out land for his vacation resort, he should have. You get the feeling that the old master of folk lore would have liked this dirty old country store.

It's thriving as a satellite to Walt Disney World, but it appears doomed by the same force that made it boom.

Things haven't changed much at Johnny's Corner since the old man, Johnny Speakman, got fed up with all the extra work and sold out. That was last winter.

But they put a new sign out front. Last month they washed the windows and today, a traffic spotter for an Orlando radio station uses Johnny's Corner as a check point.

"If we tried to fix this place up they'd quit coming." says Bill Waring, one of the new co-owners. "These construction workers come in here dirty and they want the place dirty."

Except for a few orange pickers in season, the customers at Johnny's Corner are brawny men with Mickey Mouse decals on their hard hats. They are the working men who are not allowed in the executive cafeteria at the Disney site about a "country mile" away.

At noon they bring their lunch boxes and sit at two big wooden tables. They buy milk in half-quart cartons, Gatorade in pop top cans, pies, hot sausages, potato chips and bean dip.

But at quitting time it's beer they're after. Lots of beer.

"On a pay day we'll such as much as 50 cases." said Bob Morgan, Waring's partner. "You can safely say it's one of the best beer accounts in Orange County."

That's of little surprise. More than 2,500 workers are already on the job at the "Magic Kingdom", a short distance down state road 535, and the number is growing. It's the largest private construction project underway in the United States.

Waren, 40, and Morgan, 55, sleep during the week at the rear of the store. They get up at 4 a.m. to start the coffee and after closing they boil and pickle eggs - "about 20 dozen a week."

"We spice them up with hot pepper and garlic sauce or anything else that we can find and man, you can't keep them on the counter, Waring says.

Straw hats, radiator hoses, flit guns, pocket combs, motor oil, watch bands, staple groceries and advertisements for mail order clothes clutter the walls.

"I sold a man a pair of my own pants last week." Waring said, "A man came in here not long ago who had forgot his socks. I don't know how he managed to do that but I went and got an old pair I had and sold that to him for a dollar."

Johnny's Corner also serves as a bank and filling station.

"We cash their checks for them." Waring says, "and the other day one guy came in here with his eye all busted up and I patched him up."

But the old Country Store, which has occupied the same spot on Vineland Road for three decades, is likely to vanish when Walt Disney World opens next October. With fancy new motels going up everywhere it's expected that a major oil company will replace it with a slick new service station.

You wonder if Walt Disney would have approved of that."

Probably the only view inside Johnny's that Exists.

Of course Look also profiled Johnny's Corner in their article:

"In the next five years, 150 more service stations will be needed in the neighborhood - 330 by 1985 - and the number of restaurants should increase from 54 to 400. In February, an oil company bought a one-acre lot for a gas station near the entrance to Disney World for $300,000.

Already comfortably prosperous are Bill Waring and Bob Morgan, owners of Johnny's Corner, closest general store to Disney and a stop for construction workers on their way home. The previous owner, who used to take in $10 a day, sold out because business was getting too good - he couldn't keep up. The store carries frozen sandwiches, hats, garden hose, jars of pickled eggs and snuff. But Waring and Morgan have increased their take 40 times, mainly because they sell more beer than anyone else in Orange County."

This is the atmosphere Disney was dropping the Vacation Kingdom of the World into. Later in the same article, author Henry Ehrlich describes Windermere, current home of everyone from Tiger Woods to Dick Nunis, circa 1970 as a high priced retirement club with eight roads, one of them paved. He writes: "'We have a nice sort of antebellum atmosphere," says Win Pendleton, a former newspaperman, a lecturer and the author of 2121 Funny Stories and How To Tell Them."



Walt Disney World was like a bomb going off in the fabric of the sleepy little hamlets south of Orlando, and it tore a lot of them down with it. There's no way Johnny Speakman could have foreseen his tiny country store being remembered seventy years later when he opened it in the first years of the 1940s, but it became a focal point for the earliest years of Walt Disney World, before it was even really a thing that existed - piles of concrete, dirt, cement and steel framing. The prehistory, if you like. But Johnny's Corner is so well remembered that the intersection of 535 and Vineland is still called Johnny's Corner - even if it didn't make it to opening day. The June 1971 issue of "News From Walt Disney World", the company's official newsletter for the families of construction crews, simply stated:

"What happened to Johnny's Corner? Progress took its toll and that historic landmark was demolished to make way for a modern service station."

Bill and Bob didn't make out too bad in the end. If a parcel of land a quarter mile away sold for $300,000, they must have seen the writing on the wall. Turning a business from a $10-a-day operation to a $400 one was just one of the first - and nearest - economic miracles Disney worked in the local economy. And, true to Disney form, a lot of local character got bulldozed in the process.

So, really, who cares? A dirty little corner shop got bulldozed, and the owners made a lot of money. It's hard to be too upset about all of this. But Johnny's Corner is just one of those things that keeps popping up over and over again in old materials, because it wasn't just a little store, it was their corner store back when a castle was rising out of a swamp surrounded by lots of nothing.  It is a minor mile marker on the map of Walt Disney World history, the last reminder before the dream state sinks in. It's also an obscure and strange delight. It's a bit of authentic weirdness in a history of manufactured and pre-measured charm.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same and it may only be a twist of fate that where construction crews once drove to buy beer and eat lunch and drink that today, young employees of Walt Disney World flock to an Orlando Ale House. In nearly exactly the same spot, a forty-plus year tradition. I think Bill and Bob, and Johnny too, would've gotten a smile out of that.


Thanks to Michael Crawford and Jackie Steele for helping me gather material for this article.

Golf is bound into Walt Disney World's bloodstream. No matter what you think of the sport, it's one of the things that importantly made up so much of the consideration of the early years of Walt Disney World that no amount of evasion is going to remove it. Walt Disney World opened with one theme park, two hotels.... and two golf courses. They were good courses, yes, and still are well-renowned. When Walt Disney World opened, not much in the Magic Kingdom was exactly "ready"... Flight to the Moon arrived at a delay of some months, as did Fantasyland's main "unique" attraction, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There was essentially nothing to see in Frontierland past Country Bear Jamboree until 1972. But both golf courses, they were ready to go on opening day. By mid 1973, the number was up to three and the Magic Kingdom hadn't even finished its initial build-out.

There were three big "events" in the first three months of Walt Disney World: the grand opening ceremonies on October 28, the first big Thanksgiving where traffic jammed up all of World Drive and onto I-4, and the first Walt Disney World Open on November 29-December 5. Jack Nicklaus won the gold. And despite all of the company's emphasis and pride in its well-rounded portfolio of recreation possibilities at Walt Disney World, the golf courses always seemed a little removed from all that. They were, basically, there to appeal to the whims of the Disney executives, and seeing the triumvirate of Dick Nunis, Card Walker, and Donn Tatum - the three principal administrative "architects" of Walt Disney World - tromping around the courses was not at all unusual. On October 1, 1971, as soon as the Magic Kingdom was open, Tatum and Walker made their first priority a round of golf on the Magnolia.

Now, in another world of consideration, Disney had opened two hotels with sixteen restaurants on a single day with no prior hotel experience, as sure a suicide gesture as can be imagined. They had bought out U.S. Steel in late 1971 to finish building the Contemporary, which a crane still loomed over on opening day. They were in the hotel business now, and they had a problem. Let's peek inside the 1972 Walt Disney Productions' Annual Report...

Since opening day, the demand for accommodations throughout central Florida has exceeded the supply. On site, our two theme resort-hotels, the Contemporary and the Polynesian Village, operated at near 100% capacity all year long. Our two hotels and Fort Wilderness Campgrounds together hosted 1,750,000 guests during the year.


Cumulative projections of hotel occupancy are compiled for only six months into the future. However, as of December 1, 1972, a total of 151,000 room-nights, or 79.2% of the total occupancy available at the Contemporary Resort-Hotel from December, 1972 through May, 1973, had already been sold. 75,700 room-nights, representing 84.8% of the total rooms available at the Polynesian Village, had been sold for the same period, and the months of April and May are considered to be the off-season. Reservation requests by the general public have been averaging 32,000 to 36,000 monthly by telephone and mail.


[...] Recognizing, however, that the public will always prefer to stay within the "Vacation Kingdom" site, the Company will soon begin architectural work on the third theme resort, the 500-room Asian Hotel. Construction is planned for 1974, with the formal opening date to take place that year.


The capacity of the campgrounds has already been expanded several times. A total of 717 campsites will be available for Walt Disney World guests by March, 1973.


Perhaps the greatest single challenge throughout 1972 was to conform operational planning to the emerging attendance patterns, and to adjust, as rapidly as possible, to the new visitation levels, which ultimately exceeded by more than 700,000 the Company's most optimistic estimates.

To paraphrase: Disney was sitting on a gold mine. The reference to only just starting on "architectural work" for the Asian Resort is telling, in that this indicates that the Asian, so familiar in our imaginations from art and models, was probably much farther behind the Polynesian and the Contemporary in actual design. The unreal scope of the building in comparison to the Contemporary and Polynesian was always staggering, and although the Asian seems to have actually come quite close to realization, it perhaps would have seemed quite different than those early models indicate.

But the Asian would never come to be. For almost fifteen years, the last hotel to be built in Walt Disney World proper would be-- The Golf Resort. From the same annual report, previewing the upcoming hotel:

 The Golf Resort Villas: Overlooking the finishing holes of the championship Palm and Magnolia golf courses, this new 153-room resort-hotel will connect with an expanded golf clubhouse and restaurant. Completion is expected during 1973.

That's perhaps significantly less ambitious than the planned Asian Resort. This, along with a number of other quick-hit fixes instituted over the next few years, is unfortunate. But the 1972 annual report was prepared in early 1973, and in just a few months, the Walt Disney World bubble would burst. Although the cause is well known, a 1981 article in Orlando Magazine tells the story memorably intimately:

"Ironically, the needle that pricked the bubble was not of local origin. It was unleashed halfway around the world, in the Mideast. There, in fall of 1973, war broke out and the Arabs slapped an oil embargo on the west.

Gasoline stocks dwindled. Filling stations stayed open only a few hours a day. Some closed permanently.
 
Cut off gasoline, the lifeblood of Florida tourism, and the Disney impact area would quickly become a disaster zone.
 
Bob Allen told me about the reaction to the energy crisis at Walt Disney World:
 
"When it was apparent that the number of visitors was dropping off," he said, "we realized we had to adjust our business. It's one of the few times we've had to do it. Our operations committee went into emergency sessions.
 
"We asked ourselves, 'can we penetrate the Florida market more? Can we reduce costs?' We made a chart that outlined our operations at various levels of attendance. We told management that's our game plan. We had to lay off employees, but we actually learned to operate our business better."

 The effects were immediate. The Asian never would materialize at Walt Disney World. A number of expansions not already in the midst of on-the-ground construction were delayed or deferred immediately; the only thing that probably saved Space Mountain and the rest of Tomorrowland was that it's foundation was already up. Big Thunder Railway, announced for construction in 1974, would have to wait 'till nearly the end of the decade and its companion, The Western River Expedition, would be left in the dust of the third-gear race to figure out what to do about Walt Disney's promise of a "city of tomorrow" to the Florida people back in 1966.

Many of these decisions are regrettable. As soon as the paint was dry on the Tomorrowland project, the full-on charge towards EPCOT... or maybe World Showcase... or maybe the Future World Theme Center... or maybe Frontier Kingdom... meant that the remaining holes in the fabric of the Vacation Kingdom and Lake Buena Vista were not filled in.

Spotlight Magazine, 1977

So in that way, the Golf Resort can be seen to represent the sort of thinking that eventually became a liability to Disney. A more conservative project could hardly be conceived to help fill the demand for more rooms and, after all, one of the chief mandates to Eisner was to build more hotels. But above all that, the Golf Resort was Card Walker's baby. To say the man was fixated on golf is an understatement. Cast Members were actually informed that he could be easily identified as "the short guy who's dressed like a professional golfer." Every year Card would come trundling out onto the green to hit off the first ball of the Walt Disney World Open with people like Glen Campbell, Jack Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer looking on. The Golf Resort is Card Walker in the same way that the Disney-MGM Studios is Michael Eisner.

Given it's low profile and vague stylistic mandate, the Golf Resort was a pleasant, quiet diversion quite unlike anything else at Walt Disney World. Once Walker and Miller had exited, Eisner didn't quite know what to do with the place - re-christening it The Disney Inn and eventually selling it off to the United States Military. I guess the logic is that military guys like golf? Despite its somewhat remote location and lack of a monorail stop, the Golf Resort was more centrally located than over half of the hotels which currently dot the Walt Disney World landscape. It was beloved by everyone I've managed to find who was fortunate enough to stay there during its twenty year tenure for its relaxed, easy pace and "away from it all" atmosphere. It was a true oddity, something that Disney would never let out of the gate today.

So, despite all of the things potentially wrong with the Golf Resort, it is not without its fascinations.

And yet despite its significance to early Walt Disney World as both a place and a signifier, the Golf Resort is a true obscurity. So let's take a trip back to the 70s and enjoy some of the images... and words... used to promote the Golf Resort, a unique early Walt Disney World phenomenon if there ever was one.

"Indoors are more family-styled activities... the Trophy Room for dining, the Player's Gallery lounge and convenient stores, including the Pro Shop carrying a full line of golf, tennis and swimming apparel and accessories. A golf professional is on hand for lessons or simple tips on improving your game." - 1973 check-in folder

"THE TROPHY ROOM allows you to tee off to superb dining any time of the day. A la carte or club breakfast served 6:30 - 11:30 am; buffet lunch, 11:30 am - 2:30 pm; waitress service dinner featuring tasty Pinch n' Putt and gourmet entrees 5:30 - 10 pm and atmosphere entertainment. Sandwiches and snacks also available 10 am - midnight. $1.25-$15.00" - Walt Disney World News, November 1974

"I'm not kidding, Janice... this time I'm going to get the Pinch n' Putt!!!"

"For a casual quiet night with the family, take the complimentary transportation to the Golf Resort's Magnolia Room or drive your own car. Enjoy a family dinner anytime from 6 to 9:30 pm with cocktails 'til 11. Either Sam Barnes or John Chen entertain nightly with a full repertoire of popular folk music." - Walt Disney World News, July 1972

"I heard that!"

"Then, [the Trophy Room] ...will roll out the fondue trays until midnight. Late-night diners (minimum of two persons per fondue) will be able to choose from three fondue selections: the Cheese Fondue (a blend of Gruyere and Swiss, spices and Sauternes wines); the Combination Fondue Dinner (cheese fondue appetizer, salad, beef and vegetable fondue); and the Fondue Dessert (a special chocolate fondue with fresh fruit and sponge cake)."

"Entertainment begins each evening at 6:30, and is usually provided by a versatile guitar playing and singing duo called Amos and Charles. Their show is a combination of soft rock, blue grass, country and folk music. Often inviting their audience to request a favorite tune, they seldom fail to come up with a rendition of the selected song." Walt Disney World News, April 1976

"The Player's Gallery, adjoining the Trophy Room, with a view over the Palm golf course, serves an assortment of specialty drinks and cocktails - Double Eagles (Kahula on the bottom and a tequila sour floating on top), Banana Bogeys (light rum, fresh bananas, cream, and vanilla), Unplayable Lies (champagne doused with Southern Comfort served over a whole frozen apricot), and Lateral Hazards (light rum and curacao blended with orange and lime nectar)."

Also: Memorable pants

"Guests wishing to strengthen their own golf games may take advantage of the Golf Resort's full-service Pro Shop. One of the services offered through the Pro Shop is the Golf Studio at the Magnolia driving range. This unique instructional program is conducted by pros for golfers of any age and at any playing level. As part of the Golf Studio experience, participants have their swings videotaped for replays and critiques in the Pro Shop." - Walt Disney World: The First Decade

"I've always said that there will never be another Disneyland, and I think it's going to work out that way. [...] This concept here will have to be something that is unique, so there is a distinction between Disneyland in California and whatever Disney does in Florida." - You-Know-Who

Walt Disney World is now forty years old. That's two entire generations - a lot of water under the bridge. Forty years is long enough for Walt Disney World to, in human terms, grow up, go to school, get a doctorate, have several children, and a mid-life crisis. Now... Disneyland is going to turn fifty-seven in July, a even more impressive number to be sure. But you know what? The difference in time between the opening of Disneyland in California and Magic Kingdom in Florida is now, frankly, insignificant. The time that elapsed between these two dates - from July 17, 1955, to October 1, 1971 - is sixteen years, two months, and fourteen days. Babies born on Disneyland's opening day were not yet drinking age when the Magic Kingdom opened. And now we're forty years on from that.

Let me put that it even more context. If we took the length of time between the opening of Disneyland and Walt Disney World and subtracted it from today, we'd land at or about in December of 1995. Toy Story is the movie hit of the holiday season. Earlier that summer, Die Hard With a Vengeance and Goldeneye were the summer blockbusters. I bet most of you reading this have a pretty clear memory of 1995. Better than 1955 or 1971, at least.

Put simply: Walt Disney World is old, and Disneyland is only - slightly - older. I bring this up because it's time that we start thinking in long terms about Walt Disney World instead of short term. Yes, ticket prices will go up again this year, stupid things will be built, and that silly little food hut over by Frontierland will try to cut back their menu again. But these are, in the long term, passing things. Moreover, there's an attitude about the differences between Disneyland and Magic Kingdom that is simply no longer historically tenable.

Disney is a west coast organization. They may have been founded by Midwest boys, but all of their major corporate infrastructure, most of their executives, employees, and people who sweep up around the Corporate HQ - they're California kids. And because Disneyland is in California, because the culture of California is super isolationist, and because Disneyland was the first Disney theme park, the natural tendency is to say that Disneyland is the super special, historically interesting, most unique, Walt Disney-approved park.

But, you know, forty years is a long time. And Walt Disney World did not exist in a vacuum those forty years. She has a lot of interesting history too, even if that history did not always invariably involve Walt Disney.... although he was there too. But Walt Disney World very much exists in the shadow of Disneyland, despite Disneyland being hardly large enough to cast a shadow to consume the whole place. There's a lot of stuff to talk about there, as the last five years of my blogging here have tried to suggest. I've been at this blog for five years and I've hardly talked about EPCOT Center - 1982 - or even so much as broken the 1990's.

Disneyland is California pop culture and Disney is a California company, so Walt Disney World history has largely been obfuscated, ignored, and stymied by her own company. I say this as a Walt Disney World researcher, and an independent one, too - I've spent years scrambling after scraps, half-remembered facts, and dead end rumors. Truthfully, the spread of social media has turned out to be the key to connecting myself with like-minded individuals from far-flung corners of the country, and allowed us to pool our resources and expertise. Disney is doing very little to help our cause. And while Disneyland is being treated to triumphant restorations and returns of classic attractions; built, marketed, and sold as loving tributes to the illustrious past; Walt Disney World is.... well....

What Walt Disney World is doing is it's being drawn towards the center of the storm like it's the eye of a tornado, or maybe, a hurricane. That eye is Disneyland. Disneyland has become the officially sanctioned, corporate approved, regardless-of-all else Norm. And in that process, these California kids are gradually sucking the unique culture out of Walt Disney World.

Take, for example, the Jungle Cruise. When I worked at the Jungle Cruise, from time to time, WDI would send over a new spiel for us to learn. Very often, this spiel was by and large copy-pasted from a pre-existing spiel... one meant for Disneyland, asking us to make jokes about baboons on the veldt who were never installed, show scenes in the Disneyland queue installed in 1994, or other such non-sequiturs. This made it very difficult for us to follow the script, but moreover it showed how out of touch Disney could be with their own history. And especially it showed no regard for the idea that unique coastal joke traditions may have been created at the Jungle Cruise in Florida in the past three decades.

Clearly the same man.

This came to a head several years back when new scripts were distributed to be followed at all costs - no exceptions allowed. This was after my time, but I've spoken to several friends about it. Both Jungle rides have always ended with a bare-chested 'native' peddling shrunken heads, although they could not be more different visually. Accordingly, over the years the Florida skippers began calling the figure "Chief Namee" instead of the scripted "Salesman Sam". Now they, and all new skippers call him "Trader Sam" - the same name used at Disneyland since the scene's inception. And another tiny scrap of Walt Disney World tradition is thrown away.

A more recent example, if you don't mind. In 1971, Magic Kingdom opened "The Enchanted Tiki Birds in a Tropical Serenade", just one of a complex of Adventureland features sponsored by Florida Citrus Growers. Although the actual tiki bird show was the same one - aurally - as "Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room" at Disneyland, visually the theater was an entirely new experience, quite different from the intimate little room which still plays on at Disneyland. It was technologically quite different too, with all new figures performing all new actions for the Florida show, beautifully animated by Wathel Rogers, as technology had come quite far between 1963 and 1971. And it was prefaced with a unique preshow, wrapped inside a unique new building, and followed by a new "post-show": The Sunshine Tree Terrace, where orange cheesecake, orange soft serve, and orange chiffon pie were served. The entire complex had its' own name - The Sunshine Pavilion - and even its own mascot, the Florida Orange Bird. It had its own Dedication on October 20, 1971, alongside the Contemporary and Polynesian Village hotels. This was a new show designed for a new, and important, sponsor.

Almost as much fun as New Years' Eve in the orange groves

The show itself was returned to us last year, but the name was not. Now it was "Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room", the same name of the original Disneyland attraction, as if "Tropical Serenade's" life cycle could be conveniently swept under the rug. Although the unique preshow returned, the original 1971 holding area music compiled by Jack Wagner just for the Sunshine Pavilion did not. Instead, that same piece of music that has been playing for about a decade outside Disneyland's bird show took its place. Disneyland has again replaced Walt Disney World history. All of this is especially ludicrous because the 1971 Sunshine Pavilion loop circulates online amongst collectors and is not especially hard to find. This could have been obtained, for free, after probably less than an hour of searching.

You probably see what I'm getting at here, but I'd like to go on.

Pirates of the Caribbean's 2006 movie tie-in reboot happened at Disneyland and Walt Disney World on parallel time lines. It's no surprise that Disneyland's version got all the love and attention, since it's a brilliant ride, but that doesn't excuse what happened in the Florida version. The Barker Bird outside the attraction was removed - a unique Florida Pirates feature with a unique Florida Pirates history. Absolutely nobody connected with the refurbishment has ever managed to explain to me why this happened, it just did. He was removed and was last seen -- at Disneyland, promoting the fourth film last year. At the same time, the Florida "talking skull" figure was removed, although Disneyland's similar figure was not. Again, nobody seems to know why - it just happened.

But the real thing that proved that a lot of these people were Disneyland kids imposing their Disneyland-centric views on a ride they were not familiar with happened in the queue, and again it was a piece of music. The Disneyland and Walt Disney World queues could not be less similar...




...and so, those 1973 Pirates designers, the same ones who did the beloved Disneyland show, elected to use a unique, spookier piece of music in part of the new queue instead of Bruns' sprightly Pirates Overture, a piece called the Pirates Arcade music, which was far slower with some eerie segments, perfect to set up the attraction to follow.

...but moreover, this music then faded out, giving way to a very carefully thought out textural sound scape, with several unique pieces of audio echoing down those corridors to unique effect. In 2006, the Pirates Overture was thoughtlessly dropped in to the 1973 queue, and worse yet, it plays through the entire queue instead of just in the spots WED intended. In one careless move, a careful and intentional choice was obliterated in favor of a direct lift from Disneyland and, on top of that, the Overture plays now through the entire queue, drowning out the original 1973 sound scape. Disneyland history replaces Walt Disney World history yet again.


One final example. In the 2007 Haunted Mansion refurbishment, which was in many many ways tasteful and carefully done, this same Disneyland infection struck. The main site here in the Corridor of Doors scene.

The Florida Corridor was pretty barren compared to the Disneyland version, which always had those cool framed "family photos" of ghouls. I have no conclusive evidence, but I believe Claude Coats left these out of the Florida version on purpose. It is certainly one of the few exclusions in a version of the Haunted Mansion which included so many expansions and reproductions, so its absence is both unique and remarkable. Furthermore, instead of the amber and blue lights from the Disneyland version of the scene, the Florida Corridor of Doors scene was lit in a pallid and uncomfortable red, created by special red globes placed over the hurricane glass lamp chandeliers.  The entire scene was capped with a new gag not present in the Disneyland version, with a pair of hands prying off the corner of the final door.

Those red globes - a photo from 1999

 Now, I don't know why Coats did all this, but it has all the earmarks of being intentional. Perhaps he disliked the way the ghoul photos distract you eye away from the doors? And the red light made the corridor feel more claustrophobic than it really was - the red walls signaling danger unconsciously to the mind. The doors were painted a strange green-grey to appear brown under the red light, just like all the other doors elsewhere in the attraction. The 2007 refurbishment crew added the long-missing ghoul photos, but they removed all the red light and, for good measure, took the ghoul hands off that last door. Now the scene was just like Disneyland's - the way it was always meant to be.

Right?

Except...

They very probably undid Claude Coats' carefully planned intentions in the process.

Now, I have this to say, and I love Disneyland dearly, but when it comes to Walt Disney World -- to hell with Disneyland.

Disneyland has a colorful and unique history. But so does Walt Disney World, and Walt Disney World's history has been slowly whittled away these past few years by thoughtless and presumptive choices, choices held up only by ignorance of the unique local culture of the Florida park.
 
WDI has the resources available to make these decisions, and do the research, but I suspect the research doesn't get done because the assumption is that there is no research to do. It takes very little effort to make those forty years of history go away in a poof. Historical preservation is a creative act - it takes someone who recognizes the value of the history to want to save it. And the much-maligned and uncreative boilerplate moniker "DisneyParks", implying an interchangeability between all Disney outdoor entertainment, becomes more true each day.

WED East, 1972

To some of you, my above examples probably seem like minor things to you, and they are, but they're minor and meaningful things that hit me very close to home. Because, you know, in broad outlines, Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom are pretty similar - they both have castles, haunted houses, pirate rides, fancy malls at their entrances, and world of fantasy tucked away in back. It's the small things that make the park - like the smell of Country Bear Jamboree, that thick perfume of sawdust and motor oil, or the unique sound of the station brake at Big Thunder Mountain, that distinctive and Florida-unique hiss.

Walt Disney World needs to start thinking long-term now, now that forty years have breezed past. They need to seek out and maintain a roster of talent who know and have Walt Disney World bound into their blood and every fiber of their body the way Disneyland does. So far, the last two decades they've been content with Marriott hotel managers and accountants, people who don't see past the ends of their own nose. And lots of being led around by the wrist by Disneyland. But Walt Disney World, she isn't the second Disneyland. She's the first Walt Disney World. And she needs to start acting like it.

Relevant Addendum: Michael at Progress City, USA weighs in eloquently on this piece.

Left: The Sunshine Pavilion, 1971, with a long-retired "pumpkin" lantern, foreground.

(Edit: Part Two may be found here!)

I'm a Magic Kingdom girl. This should be obvious to anyone who's actually read this blog, but besides the now-indoctrinated "home park" nonsense, one of the things I love about Magic Kingdom, despite her faults, is her extreme subtlety. A lot of what is "happening", thematically, at Magic Kingdom, happens on very subtle registers. At Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland, there are extremely violent visual juxtapositions which create the sense of fantasy - Nuclear submarines and Swiss mountains! Victorian Inns and futuristic spires of metal! Steam railroads and modern highways! And many many more.

The rambling stretch of architecture which blends Adventureland, New Orleans Square, and Frontierland, for example, is a fascinating study in how to blend three totally unrelated environments, but there's still that moment where one area abruptly ends, the horticulture and colors change, and we enter the next area. Magic Kingdom saunters through these moments slowly, almost subliminally. The transitions happen smoothly and without calling attention to themselves - blink and you'll miss them; almost.

Magic Kingdom is one of those very few things that becomes richer the more time you spend studying it. In terms of themed design, it's very easy to situate Magic Kingdom snugly between New Orleans Square and World Showcase and then on to Disneyland's 1983 Fantasyland in a fairly direct evolution and sophistication of the form, the creation of the modern immersive themed environment. Magic Kingdom is less naive and more spectacular but a good deal more mass-produced than Disneyland is,  it's just at the transition point where that sense of being homemade and sort of simple is starting to give way to richer elaboration and texture and the more stifling preparedness that comes with it.

So it's possible to still find things inside it which surprise us when examined in detail. In my opinion, one of my favorite things about the Magic Kingdom is her - wait for it - lighting fixtures. I had initially planned to simply observe and document some of my favorites, but much like my previous two "Aesthetic Profiles", what I expected to be a simple and direct route to the bottom turned out to be a very winding rabbit hole. I learned a great deal about what makes up the Magic Kingdom, even after two decades of study. So follow me now as we examine a "lighted" tour of the park, through her astonishing variety of lights and lamps.

....It's more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

--

I spent all day focusing on the Magic Kingdom, just on lamps, and even I, at my most crazed, could not see everything or capture everything, and I threw out just as many perfectly good lamps in my preparation for this piece. My *general* focus has been on lamps which I know or suspect are original to the park. I rarely bothered to go inside shops, rides, or restaurants, which need to be their own thing. Even with all these restrictions in place, I still will only feature those lamps I have something to say about. This is not a definitive account, only a signpost to help open up your own appreciation of this important but little-noticed part of themed design.

I think Magic Kingdom is an exemplary model of superb light fixture choice in themed design; there is very little overlap and redundancy but very few fixtures call attention to themselves. Still, it would be offensive and out of place to offer modern LED freeway light poles in Liberty Square, so the lamps and light fixtures deserve our respect and appreciation as well: another hallmark of the WED tradition of perfection down to the tiniest detail.

MAIN STREET, U.S.A

At left: this light comes from the loading platform of the Magic Kingdom Train Station.

The front part of the Magic Kingdom, where the turnstiles are located and which is overlooked by the train station, tends to favor round, frosted globe lights of the kind seen here. Most of these sit atop fairly undecorated green posts and do not feature the finer details of this example: the screws holding the globe in place, fancy scroll work, and so on. Although not exactly utilitarian, it's clear that the train station is the visual bridge between the turnstile area's simple city park-like globe lights and the very elaborate vintage fixtures seen on Main Street

At right: Main Street Train Station, Town Square side

This attractive five-globe design can be seen all over the train station, and although it is differentiated from the actual Town Square and Turnstile-area streetlights in both size and color, it features a stronger decorative identity, helping differentiate the station from the rest of Town Square. The globe motif from the Train Station continues to appear inside the park.

These more practical, downward facing light posts may be seen all around Town Square, once again echoing both the train station and the turnstile area, and although these are much simpler, the downward-facing globes add a touch of gentility.

I find it interesting that Town Square features these lamps consistently, transitioning only to more old-fashioned streetlights at the Emporium. The frosted globes visually link Town Square and the train station as being relatively "modern" places compared to Main Street itself, newer additions to the town clustered around, no surprise, the central department store, with all of the markers of civility - a huge hotel, Town Hall, Fire Station, and a bank. Main Street is therefore reasonably realistically planned to exemplify how real cities grow.  These are definitely newer light posts, not from the 1890s but the 1910s or even the 1920s. They are municipal. The streetlights help convey this nearly subliminal concept of a growing boom town.


These massive lights (and they really are huge) adorn the back of the train station, and there are four of them.

Besides the nearly medieval over the top size of these things, this is the park's first use of incandescent "candles" in glass boxes, which will get a through workout elsewhere.
This attractive example definitely recalls a gas lamp and is on the backside of the train station facing town square. The main difference between these and those seen at the front of the station is the attractive glass globe, far more detailed than the ones seen at the front. This may be co-incidence, but I doubt it, because a very similar fixture can be found in...
...City Hall, linking the train station and City Hall together.















On the left is the Magic Kingdom's Main Street streetlights proper, and on the right is one of a set of lights on the front of City Hall which echo them nearly exactly.

You'll notice that the streetlights are electric lights with little nets fitted over them to replicate filaments; they are not the live gas jets at Disneyland and don't appear to ever have been. I've never been able to figure out why the gas jets were not retained for Magic Kingdom, nor for World Bazaar at Tokyo Disneyland. It's especially puzzling in that Magic Kingdom was quite prolific in its use of live fire; not just burning cabins but also life Indian Village campfires, native torches on the Jungle Cruise, and dozens of burning torches all through Adventureland were fixtures of the earliest years.

Maybe they ran out of money. Or maybe they were afraid of gas leaks in the Utilidor below the street?

Gulf Hospitality House / Town Square Theater facade, which was originally meant to house a hotel. the carving of both the column and the lamp is extremely impressive.
Another memorable lamp from the Hospitality House, these pretty lights are the first use of stained glass in the park; they line the sweeping terrace and trace a path towards the entrance doors of the now long gone Walt Disney Story.

The Emporium's super impressive hanging lamps above the main entry way. These globes were once fitted with copper wire "nets"; Tokyo Disneyland duplicates this facade - twice - and they still have theirs. The hanging chains on this make it one of the most memorable fixtures in the park; built to impress.

 An intriguingly neutral little light in a niche off the main thoroughfare.

This fellow is the workhorse of the Magic Kingdom, appearing in every land except Frontierland (and was probably once there, too). Painted green, the edged pattern brings to mind jungle foliage, aged and patinaed, it appears in New Orleans Square at Disneyland.

I must admit, of all the lamps I took pictures of, this one, to me, most represents "The Magic Kingdom".

Another favorite, this one is quite small - forced perspective, actually, and hangs in the little area above the Plaza Restaurant facing the castle. Zooming in close on this one was a particular pleasure; notice it hangs quite low but seems natural when viewed from ground level... there is not much space up there on Main Street's abbreviated second floor.

Two examples from the Crystal Palace, which sits on the Adventureland side of the Hub; notice the tropical palms and fronds already starting to transition us into Adventureland are echoed in the flowery, organic design of the lamps. Like everything else on the Crystal Palace, these are polished brass and quite beautiful.

While WED could have simply re-used the Hospitality House lamps here for the same effect, they didn't. The more open, twisting nature of these lamps brings to mind gardens and vines instead of the stoic, dense details used on Main Street. At the Magic Kingdom, the Hub really is its own land, with its own meanings, quite distinct from Main Street.


One of the best light poles in the entire park, these tall lamps manage to represent Main Street, Adventureland and the Hub all at once. They span the bridge leading from the Crystal Palace to the gateway to Adventureland.

The Hub features much more utilitarian lamps overall, very similar to those seen outside the train station amidst the turnstiles. I think these were selected to create a garden-like atmosphere throughout the Hub, which benefits in Florida greatly from her meandering waterways, sloping lawns, and expansive flowerbeds, recalling the European gardens which inspired Disneyland. Their frosted globes link the entry area, Main Street, and the Hub in a single unified organically flowing movement.

Our tall lamps, above, are unique and occur only at the Crystal Palace bridge. While their tall shape mimics the castle and their frosted globes remind us of Main Street, notice the details of leaves, fronds, and lion heads - hinting at what will be seen nearby in Adventureland.

TOMORROWLAND

Jumping across the Hub for a moment, I'd like to point out a few of Tomorrowland's lights because they are aesthetic outliers in the Magic Kingdom and it is best to discuss them before the rest. The bulk of Tomorrowland used simple white neon lights and recessed lamps to create illumination; much of the original lighting scheme was ripped out in 1994 in the Magic Kingdom's big Tomorrowland renovation, which added more neon and some interesting futuristic municipal lights. These lie outside the scope of our conversation. What is worth pointing out is how WED originally used Tomorrowland's rather austere lighting scheme to visually reinforce the structural shape and harmony of their architecture:

Notice how these clusters of four simple recessed lights are grouped to visually reflect the Plaza Pavilion's geometric skylights.

In Tomorrowland, every decorative element was subjugated to the demands of form.



The bulk of Tomorrowland was lit with simple streetlights like this, metal poles topped with either one of a cluster of three to five glass discs, like flying saucers. In the background is an original Grand Prix "streetlight" in an even more midcentury vernacular, yet still appealingly sleek.




A better look at one of those Grand Prix Raceway streetlamps. Not all together unattractive, no, but still better at home in the parking lot of a McDonald's than a theme park.

I'd like to draw your attention to this. This row of circular lights is the very last vestige of the main streetlighting component of 1975 Tomorrowland: the underside of the WEDway Peoplemover track. These circular lamps subtly bring to mind wheels and motion as well as drawing a literal dotted line along the underside of the path the WEDway takes, visually reinforcing the way that attraction tied together the whole land. This is the last little bit of them left; in 1994 all of these lamps were torn off the track and their light fixtures now run power to red neon lights, just one of the more thoughtless components of the 1994 Tomorrowland reboot.


ADVENTURELAND

Adventureland contains some of the most diverse architecture in the entire park, and so has an impressive array of lamps and lights to support all that rich texture. If you've read my previous aesthetic analysis of Adventureland you will recall that I identified a number of thematic "zones"; it was no surprise to me to see that the choice of light fixtures tended to support these divisions of neighborhoods as well. Up first, transitioning us out of Main Street, the "colonial district":

Since replaced with similar models, these were the lanterns which welcomed us into Adventureland for forty years. Hanging from ropes, the crude "handcrafted" means of illumination was immediately evident, even while the stained glass and geometric beauty still made these a good match with the Crystal Palace right nearby. Deeper into Adventureland, far less genteel lanterns will light our way.

I took this picture in 2004.
These are the sort of lights which typify "civilized" Adventureland, which I classify as the stretch of architecture from the Adventureland Veranda to just past the breezeway. It's important to note that although there is an absolute tropical favor to this area with its pitch tin roofs, palms, and oriental accents, the basic architectural treatment mirrors Main Street in many ways, easing us into the daydream gently.

These lamps, in particular, are really just as appropriate for Main Street as they are for Adventureland, and in this same area the "Workhorse" light seen above is used as well.

These lights ring the Aloha Isle structure. Elsewhere at the Veranda, large hanging frosted globe lights appear in their arboretum-like patio, instantly recalling the Crystal Palace.
These black wrought iron lamp posts appear in the Adventureland area and trace a path through Adventureland and then down the sloping hill into the Jungle Cruise courtyard. I've been unable to confirm if they are original to the park or not, but they're definitely in place by 1973 and 1974.

It's a fairly genteel light, and I think it's interesting to note that it appears in an area which is meant to reflect Main Street but which reminds many of New Orleans Square while drawing on both Caribbean and Asian design schemes. That's a lot of cultural baggage to unload, but Adventureland can do it effortlessly. It's among the best designed "lands" ever built.








This is perched right at the point where Adventureland starts to transition from the colonial-style architecture to a more "native" mud-built effect, which begins the transition point into Frontierland (although there's now a wall and breezeway, this area was once just an open slope), as well as preparing us for the south seas temple/shrine of the Sunshine Pavilion.

It's a pretty little light, and there used to be another one just around the corner, although it went away years ago and has never returned. This may be due to the fact that these lights used to accent a piece of transitional architecture which has been obscured by a covered patio built onto the front of the shop it services, allowing for the overflow sale of items "outside".
These lovely lights inside the Adventureland / Liberty Square breezeway manage to look tropical, French colonial, and American colonial all at once, without contradicting the "tropical" carved ceiling above it or those interesting plaster pillars. There's a lot of these, and although they're absolutely on the Adventureland side of the breezeway, they help pave the way to and from Liberty Square and Frontierland.


Here we transition into the second half of Adventureland, and the contrast is immediately evident. The interesting thing is that these two aesthetic styles directly parallel each other from the first first as we enter from the Hub - the genteel colonial architecture to the right and a crude retraining fence made of sticks and rocks to the left. To the right is gentrified civilized outposts; to the left is nothing but water and a massive cascade of foliage.


Both the Swiss Family Treehouse and the Jungle Cruise belong to "the wilderness", and both are situated on the same side of the pedestrian path directly opposing the colonial outpost. The "Jungle" side features natural wood and earth tones a world away from the plastered walls, wrought iron details, and colorful paint of the "colonial" Main Street transition area. These lamps are aged and rusted, hung from ropes or off crude poles and posts, and generally obviously mismatched. This crude, earthy aesthetic links both The Jungle Cruise and the Swiss Family Treehouse (at left) visually as part of the same expression.

This one hangs off the Jungle Cruise street-level marquee. The Jungle Cruise and Treehouse are really expressions of the same concept, twin attractions which share the same side of the street and the same conception: survival in the wilderness.

They both share, for instance, volcanic rock waterfalls, elaborate plantings, and color palettes and are clearly complimentary. There was once even a spot at the top of the Treehouse that looked out at the Jungle Cruise temple.

These memorable lanterns lining the Jungle Cruise dock are the final expression of this "wilderness" aesthetic. The Jungle Cruise dock also features large globe lights similar to those seen at the Adventureland Veranda and Main Street, one last reminder that this is is an outpost of the sort of civilization embodied by Main Street before the jungle takes over.

If you think I'm reading too much into this, recall that the Jungle Cruise and Main Street take place at about the same cultural "moment".
The third area is the Sunshine Pavilion and its associated architecture.

The Sunshine Pavilion area has its own streetlights, and these light up an attractive citrus orange at night. They are perhaps shockingly modern in appearance, but distinctive none-the-less.

I think it is a remnant of the "Tiki Modern" midcentury moment, which the Enchanted Tiki Rom is absolutely an expression of. After all, the attraction inside mashes up South Seas fantasy with modern pop culture, and by modern I mean "1963 modern". These lamps are not far behind.



Probably my favorite light fixture in the entire park is this hanging lotus lantern, several of these line the pagoda entrance to the Tropical Serenade preshow: a perfect mash up of tropical and modern, really a signifier for the entire attraction as well.






Once past the Tiki Room, these Caribbean Plaza streetlights appear. There's about twelve of these lining the street headed towards Pirates of the Caribbean, and they're a nice transitional feature, preparing us for the Spanish colonial setting even before the whitewashed plaster, iron railings and tile roofs appear.
Caribbean Plaza itself has far too many lights to show here, but I'll offer some of my favorites; a more complete account of the Plaza's light fixtures and the plaza itself may be found here, in my extensive study from two years ago.

This very nice oversize lantern hangs from the Torre del Cielo at the entrance to the Castillo del Morro; it's a fine overture to the veritable orgy of lamps and lights to be found in the rest of Caribbean Plaza. I don't know of any other area in the Magic Kingdom with more hanging lamps than this.

A small chandelier hanging in an outside alcove near the Torre; weirdly, the same lamps, minus the central wrought iron hub, appear outside the Haunted Mansion in Liberty Square.
This amber beauty appears in a small courtyard inside what's now Tortuga Tavern across the street from the Pirates attraction; this quiet courtyard used to separate the Golden Galleon and Princessa del Cristal shops. It's one of the best, quietest respites in the entire park, although the recent arrival of the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom game has made the adjacent former Golden Galleon space quite a center of activity.

We've covered just half the park and seen an astonishing variety of beautiful lights, but we've hardly featured the bulk of them, only the most characteristic styles. There are, for example, dozens of lights on Main Street alone that I skipped. Each and every one of these carries a characteristic style and atmosphere strong enough to zip one right back to the Magic Kingdom. Even these lamps, easily ignored but so very important, are part of a remarkable and subtle modern art.

(Continue to Part Two!)

(Part One)

Last time we looked at how lights and lamps help set the stage for the Magic Kingdom and how both Main Street and the Hub work variations on that, using lamps that help tell the story and create a sense of place. We also saw some suitably exotic examples in Adventureland and how the 1975 Tomorrowland used modern light fixtures to reinforce geometric architecture. Now let's venture on into Fantasyland, Frontierland and Liberty Square!

FANTASYLAND

There is more or less only one consistent rule in the Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland, and that is that Big Lights = Fantasy. This, left, is a light that's buried deep inside the extended queue for Peter Pan's Flight, and is to me the poster child for this "Big = Fantasy!" approach. It's sort of hard to tell, but it's about the size of a small child's upper body. I'm about ten feet away from it when I took this picture.

The rule is upheld elsewhere. But its size aside, most of the Fantasyland lights are quite elaborate compared to those elsewhere in the park. Although the Florida Fantasyland has a much vaguer theme than, say, the 1983 Disneyland version, that later version is still indebted to certain aspects of our Fantasyland here. A general "old Europe" theme pervades, mashing up Renaissance festivals and Old Heidelberg. It is a frothy melange of influences.



More Olde Europe styling, this little lamp has been seen before, in Part One as a light fixture on the Adventureland Bridge. There, dangling from a rope and with stained glass instead of amber pebble glass, it looked faintly exotic. Here, it's been joined by an impressive anchor fixture. I'm pretty sure that this one in particular and a few other Fantasyland fixtures we'll be seeing were thrown together with parts from different lamp kits, adding to the eclectic, slightly naive charm of the lights in this part of the park.












 This does a good job of showing how the "Old Europe" and "Ren Faire" visuals work together, and this is a deliciously Gothic lamp, with its' bird's head supporting a lamp that recalls European cathedrals. I particularly like the three "candles" which are each irregularly elevated inside. The 1971 Fantasyland tents weirdly mash up modern sheet metal, medieval details, and European weapons like spears and lances; here we can see lanterns hung from shield bolted to spears to accent the entrance to Peter Pan's Flight.




This one is part of the Columbia Harbour House on the Fantasyland side; it also does double duty in Caribbean Plaza as a "Spanish" style lamp. Again, its' wall bracket here is beautiful, and although it does double duty to protect the lantern from Florida storms, the dangling chain adds a touch of Old World elegance.











A nearby lantern at Columbia Harbour House with a unique "wreath". Notice how this one also reflects the New England styling of the Harbour House, which straddles - and exits out into - both Fantasyland and Liberty Square. On the Liberty Square side, nearly all fixtures are white incandescent; Fantasyland lamps have a strong preference towards amber lights and dapple glass.







This one at right is representative of the lights seen all around the west side of the Small World show building/facade, although several have gone missing in recent years. They're just beautiful things; the side of the Florida Small World is designed to look like it's the very edge of the courtyard "enclosure" connected to Cinderella Castle that's rambling off out of sight, and I profiled it here as the "Small World Gate". These lamps both manage to recall Cinderella Castle without having to be faithful to its designs, as we will see.










This lamp is part of the castle courtyard between the exit to the castle the Cinderella's Golden Carrousel, which as a stronger medieval French-inflected design to go along with Cindy Castle itself. This one has a nice "flower" motif in the details and curling leaves.












 Now we're starting to work our way towards the castle "campus". These lights manage to look both Gothic and pleasantly deco modern at the same time, yet their crown-like crest and stained glass details absolutely make their relationship to the castle clear. This one is on the backside of the castle; these also grace the walk up to the castle as well as the terraced area behind it overlooking Main Street from Fantasyland.








Absolutely all of Cindy Castle is lit with indirect light; light bulbs hidden in a decorative crest atop the castle's columns cast light up and into the arched ceiling, which reflects down on the main pedestrian passageway. As a result, nearly all of the visible lamps in the castle are purely decorative and cast little to no light at all; just inside the main entryway from Main Street, it can be positively black at night.

 These two lamps to the left and right of the central arch slightly illuminate the way; notice their royal-crown like details on top as well as their handsome geometry.









This is the basic Cindy Castle light, and it's actually another one that seems, to me, impossibly huge; I'm standing three feet off the ground on a planter to take this picture.

I love WED's use of cracked glass and pebble glass in the Magic Kingdom lighting fleet; at night these lanterns cast lovely shadows on the walls. The Magic Kingdom, it must be said, lacks something for texture that you get at Disneyland, due to both a somewhat more geometric design and larger open spaces, the effect can sometimes be flatter. But at night, the light fixtures bring out new shadows, details, textures and patterns. It's a very intricate design.








The large chandelier from the reception area of the castle restaurant. Again we see WED making good use of lights which reinforce Cinderella Castle's arch-heavy design elements. This one really looks medieval, which is only accented by the fact that it hangs off a beamed ceiling, the only one we can see in the entire lobby portion of the castle. It's fun to imagine Robin Hood or King John or some similar middle-European figure having this as a dining hall fixture.


This one is my favorite and I've saved it for last. Although rather shopworn, this happy little light has been overseeing diners at the outdoor patio of Pinocchio Village Haus for four decades. It's another huge one, about a foot and a half across, and it serves absolutely no lighting purpose but seeing it always makes me happy. With it's three lights, amber bulbs, and faux "candle" bases, it reminds me of Christmas lights we put up in our windows back up north. It's simple, a little plain perhaps, but I find it naive and lovable. May she shine on for four more decades.

FRONTIERLAND

Frontierland is primarily lit with lamps intended to recall gas, kerosene or oil lamps; this could make for a potentially dull lighting landscape, but WED does pull out some nice variations on the basic cold-blast kerosene lamp to keep things interesting. Although these fixtures seem quite stock and generic at first glance, each facade has its own unique light or lamp, which helps the area feel a little more like a boom town that grew up in fits and starts.

This is the basic Frontierland street light. Although not seen in this photo, the base of these lamps is interesting. It looks as if the current lamp is lashed to an older post emerging from the pavement, as if these newer lamps took the place of older ones, a small suggestion of this place's history.





The basic Fronteirland wall lamps which appear in the stretch of facades from Grizzly Hall down towards the Mile Long Bar / Pecos Bill Cafe area.








The area surrounding the Frontierland Mercantile has these cold-blast kerosene lamps with reflectors around the entrance to the store; one on each side of the door. It adds a little touch of gentility to the store and helps it stand out alongside the rather rough-hewn buildings seen elsewhere in Frontierland. It's interesting to note that this particular facade facing Country Bear Jamboree is probably the most gentrified front in the whole of Frontierland, with its fancy latticed porch and upstairs rooms to let.




Two lamps from the middle section of the Frontierland Mercantile facade, these square lights are very cute and add a touch of charm to this bright and cheerful little store front.














More kerosene lamps from the Shooting Gallery side of the Mercantile facade, this one resembling a rough slate and wood structure. These are probably most interesting thanks to their special design which casts light down as well as up.

Another super size lantern, this time from a decorative staircase near the original entrance to Pecos Bill Cafe. This lantern was once also used in Adventureland, although I think most examples of this have since been removed. I find the sandy color of this example especially pleasing when paired with the earth tones of the Southwest-styled Pecos facade, almost like aged and tarnished silver.

If you've never found this little side staircase, which has been largely obscured by later development and a now-huge tree, it's worth seeking out. Tile lined and appealing, it's very very close to something you might find at Disneyland, and indeed the entire original Pecos Bill complex was, before expansion, probably the most direct link between Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, being a nearly direct reproduction of the old Casa Del Fritos / Casa Mexicana facade, and indeed sponsored by the same food conglomerate (Pepsi Cola / Frito Lay).


Some appropriately stylish "Southwest" lanterns, also near the original Pecos Bill entrance, brings us to the end of Frontierland. This entire complex was originally a much more rustic and simple series of facades, with thatch-draped patio areas and charmingly low, simple architecture. During the 1998 expansion which swallowed up all the original al fresco dining space and dropped in a series of huge rectangular facades and dining halls into what was once a rambling collection of intimate rooms. This small courtyard is one of the few remnants of WED-era design in the entire western half of Frontierland.


Frontierland is not the most inspiring of Magic Kingdom lands when it comes to lamps, but it also doesn't fare too badly, working some interesting variations on limited material.




LIBERTY SQUARE


There is a small area in Liberty Square dividing Frontierland from the rest of the land which is intended to recall St. Louis - "The Gateway to the Frontier" - immediately surrounding the Diamond Horseshoe Saloon. This elaborate light, near an exit to the saloon and right at the border nicely straddles the line between the Frontierland kerosene lamps and the Liberty Square colonial lights, as well as echoing the Adventureland Veranda Breezeway lights seen in Part One. It's quite an elaborate "hero" light, straddling three times and places effortlessly.

These nearby lamps don't work quite as hard, but they're still part of the Liberty Square-Frontierland "transition". The dangling one on the right, in particular, with its chain and strong wooden post, is very evocative of Frontierland's earthen textures and colors.







An appropriately brassy big city lamp outside the Diamond Horseshoe. Although both facilities are the same size and very similar inside, the Diamond Horseshoe takes up much less facade space than its counterpart at Disneyland, the Golden Horseshoe. This means something, but I'm not sure what. And yes, this building is part of Liberty Square, despite what some places - including sometimes Disney - would have you believe.



Two Liberty Square wall lamps, similar but quite distinct. Frontierland's gas lamps all flicker and pulse, but I've always found Liberty Square's use of bright steady incandescent lights to be an interesting choice for an area which could become overloaded with "candlelight". These two little lamps cast a lot of light thanks to their reflectors.


This cute little light is part of the side of the Liberty Tree Tavern, which is disguised to recall colonial homes. Placed next to an artificial "front door", it's welcoming little lantern.














One of the few amber lamps in Liberty Square, this light hangs off the side of Olde World Antiques / the Christmas Shoppe. The use of steady incandescent light in Liberty Square helps create, I think, a sense of peace and tranquility after Main Street's popcorn exuberance, whereas the lights in Adventureland, Frontierland, and around the Haunted Mansion, which are dimmer, fewer in number, and often flickering like flames, help create the impression that these areas are less civilized.


One of Liberty Square's fabulous "corner bracket" lights, this one also gets a through workout over by the Hall of Presidents. These lights are tall, large, and elaborate, natural partners to red brick and white moulding.


















A hanging "nautical" light from Mike Fink Keelboats. This building should be explored more in a future post, but suffice to say it manages to look nautical and New England from the pedestrian level, to match the Yankee Trader and Columbia Harbour House, while simultaneously appearing rustically Southern from a distance, to match the Mississippi riverboat and southern ambiance of Tom Sawyer Island. Some of the pure ambition of the multifunctional architecture in Magic Kingdom continues to astonish.

These lamps also used to grace the entrance to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was torn down in 2004.

Two lamps, again from the rustic rear side of the Olde World Antiques complex, these have recently been rebuilt and look fresh and new. I've always admired the fun flower/starburst behind the bulb of the circular lamp, one of the few decorative reflectors in the area. The timbered wood posts and stone walls give this stretch of facades a slightly rustic touch, and these lamps play off that without looking out of place in the area's strongly Philadelphia/Greek Revival overall atmosphere.

Stately, eagle-topped lights hanging in the entrance to the Hall of Presidents.

For the Liberty Square area, WED went to quite extreme lengths on this occasion to ensure the proper atmosphere; the bridge and river is flanked with slate from a quarry near Williamsburg, there are rocks from the Potomac in the hub canal nearby, and WED even raided houses of the period for decorative boot scrapers, door handles and knockers seen on the various facades in the area. I've been told that some lights in the area are actual antiques, but I've always doubted it - a lot of what I've profiled above looks like basic yard / "estate" lamps direct from the catalog. I think these three, however, may be actual antiques. They're visibly much older and fragiler than the rest.

Georgian style sconces inside the Hall of Presidents rotunda nicely match the...









....Georgian style chandelier nearby. These are among my favorite light fixtures in the area, both for their beautiful gilt color and the way they sneakily walk the line between old and modern with their candle-flame light bulbs.

The Hall of Presidents rotunda overall combines ancient and modern in interesting ways, throwing Georgian fixtures, hand-carved plaster paneling, and brightly-lit modern domes and recessed lights into a mix that is effective and not visually contradictory. It is miles better than the American Adventure's similar rotunda and galleries, which sometimes reminds us of what Martha Stewart's idea of Colonial America would look like.

These hanging lamps wouldn't look out of place outside the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. They're from the facade of the Liberty Tree Tavern, which at times strongly recalls that attraction's emblematic front. They speak of hospitality, warmth, and cheer, and are amongst the biggest and brightest fixtures in the Square.















Two gorgeous specimens from the side of the Tavern, which to me match the Hall of Presidents lamps and may also be antiques. These have also recently been rebuilt.















 Two beautiful examples from the dim lobby of Liberty Tree Tavern, amongst the most evocative spaces in any theme park. Compare the simple austerity of these pressed tin and simple copper lamps to those very elaborate ones seen in the Hall of Presidents - 50 feet away - to truly appreciate how much effort WED put into making every facade and room in the Magic Kingdom feel unique. These also use frosted taper bulbs instead of clear ones, which give off a much warmer, homier glow.


Sconces and smaller chandeliers inside the Tavern in context.

Now, I've spent a lot of time discussing these lamps and lights, it's time for some larger context. Theme parks are not made in splendid isolation, and unless Emile Kuri was a much busier boy than I think he was, not every light and lamp in the Magic Kingdom was some sort of brilliant executive decision. A good deal of the choices were carried over from Disneyland. A good deal of these lamps were off-the-shelf models, raided from other facilities, or Hollywood's quite elaborate movie warehouses. Indeed, the rich variety of lamps in the Magic Kingdom is as much a tribute to the film industry than any one person or place.

But all of the decisions are careful. Even when the decision is somewhat arbitrary, in the way that a lot of the exterior Liberty Square lamps are basically interchangeable, we see a careful consideration on the part of somebody of the lamp, the architecture it's on, the space it occupies, and how the whole thing will go together. They aren't just simple choices, they're the right choices.

That's the amazing things about these parks, that we can drill down to the level of, say, a doorknob and see how all the doorknobs of the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland suit their area. It's the reason why these two parks in particular cast such a long shadow over popular culture - a shadow that Disney is now, more than ever, racing to stay ahead of.

There's a thing about the Carousel of Progress that's unintentional and so usually goes uncommented on, but it's a thing I think about often and one I'm thinking about now, and that is its circular shape. It's not that it's just a circle or a wheel; it's that it's a cycle which endlessly repeats despite the fact that the show is about "progress", a unilateral move forward, out, and up. Yet the show obsessively returns to the turn of the century. No matter how much progress is made, a secondary meaning of the shape of the Carousel of Progress could be that "everything old is new again".

That's pretty much the story of the Orange Bird's life - everything old is new again. The Orange Bird was lately honored at Magic Kingdom in a morning ceremony outside his old stomping grounds - Sunshine Tree Terrace. He now, in fact, adorns the signs of the Juice bar he called his home, a very visual tribute to the many Magic Kingdom fans who have stuck with the park through wax and wane, a very explicit call-out to the cognoscenti: We Have Heard You, And You Matter.

Top: 1971 Bottom: 2012

 But, really, does it? Why does the Orange Bird matter whether he's on the sign or not? It's a somewhat ironic fate for a character who was only ever designed to sustain a part-time, short-term arrangement as a mascot for Florida citrus products, not unlike any of the other totally forgotten Disney-designed characters as part of sponsorship deals. The Orange Bird transcended the likes of Mohawk Tommy and Clutter the Squirrel, and we ultimately must ask: why? What about the Orange Bird has that special spark?

Well, we could talk about the most obvious thing, which is his cuteness. But it isn't just his cuteness, it's that the Orange Bird is cute in a very specific way that contemporary to where we are now. Generally speaking, in the United States and Europe, when we tend to design cute characters, they usually turn out looking basically like jowly cherubs:


What we've been seeing for the past several generations is an increasing trend away from the traditional Western forms of cuteness, ie, cuteness based on floppy puppies and pudgy babies, and towards the Eastern version of cuteness, especially cuteness imported from.... Japan.

Following the end of World War II there was an attempt to import American-style capitalism into Japan, an attempt which was essentially immediately very successful in a country which was so war ravaged that citizens were being encouraged to eat sawdust and peanut shells. Throughout the 1950s and 1960's, during a time when American characters were becoming more stylized and less lumpy, Japan embraced Western "beauty culture" until a new generation of kids began to shift paradigms away from beauty and fashion and towards simplicity and childishness - towards "cuteness". The new cute characters were minimalist and simple: unlike Mickey Mouse, who had a personality and backstory, Hello Kitty required one to use her imagination. She didn't even have a mouth.


From there, thanks to pop-cultural ambassadors like Nintendo and Sanrio, Eastern-style cuteness began to conquer the world.

The Orange Bird, created in the late 1960's, is localized at the moment of transition away from Western dominance and towards the East. His design is both minimal and modern, making productive use of the orange's circular shape. Although it's impossible to claim that Orange Bird established the wave, he has ridden it well into the 21st century while other mascots from his era now look quaint.

Another component of the Orange Bird's ongoing popularity is the way he represents an era of marketing and capitalism that has passed us by. Disney and Florida Citrus joined forces in the late 60s, in the era of the massive World's Fair spectaculars. There is currently a great deal of interest in World's Fairs, and part of that interest is what seems to our modern eyes to be the absolute improbability of them. Who today would spend money to build a massive, beautiful building that's going to be torn down in two years?


Of all of the original Magic Kingdom sponsors, Florida Citrus Growers was amongst the most prominent, alongside Eastern Airlines and RCA. They not only sponsored an anchor Adventureland attraction, but it was an attraction housed in a huge rambling three-part structure which took up the entire Western boundary of the land. The anchoring show, inside, was basically a fancier version of Disneyland's classic Tiki Room, although oranges had replaced the pineapples on the fountain in the center of the room. The pre and post shows, however, were totally new experiences, with two toucans chattering above a cluster of oranges behind a waterfall and a relaxed eating area at the exit under the synthetic green leaves of an orange tree where the Orange Bird swung happily away in the tropical breeze. This was the Sunshine Tree Terrace, the star of our story today, and in the days of Florida Citrus' sponsorship, it was the site of any number of orange related delicacies, as recounted in this 1972 article rescued for posterity by Michael Crawford:

As could be expected, orange juice and grapefruit juice are featured on the Terrace menu, but other specialties include tangerine soft freeze, a sherbet-like mixture of orange juice, tangerine concentrate, tangerine oil and sweetener; an orange juice bar on a stick and a jellied citrus salad composed of broken orange and grapefruit segments, grapefruit juice, sugar and gel.

Also offered is tangerine cheesecake, comprising cake topped with tangerine and orange glaze sauce; citrus tarts of heavy cream in an open shell, topped with orange sections and glazed orange sauce, and crepes ambrosia, a delightful mixture of oranges, tangerines, marshmallows and coconut dipped in heavy cream and rolled in a French pancake.

Now this complex is hardly as elaborate as some of the better World's Fair pavilions of its era - Disney was likely going to build a Tiki Room with or without Florida Citrus - but it still represents an era of thinking about commercial investment that would not fly in today's "economies of scale". Looking at a list of Disney's sponsorship partners of the era can be a little intimidating - who really remembers that it was Monsanto who sponsored Circle-Vision 360 in Tomorrowland, or that Welch funded Troubadour Tavern in Fantasyland? Yet all of these companies contributed time and a lot of money to have their name associated with Disney World - often with very difficult to distinguish immediate benefits. These sponsorships were absolutely essential not only to operating the park, but to getting it built in the first place.

EPCOT Center was based on the sponsorship deal more than any other theme park in history, and in today's era of investment concerns, has spellt disaster for what was once Disney's most daring and original theme park. There still are dozens of sponsors at Walt Disney World, but their presence is much more limited. There's no longer a special theme song or an attraction devoted to telling your marketing story. Probably the very last attraction to ever be recognizably in the classic Disney sponsorship mold was Delta Dreamflight, and that was back in 1989. Even Test Track, an extremely elaborate sponsored pavilion from 1996/8, could easily be sponsored by any other car manufacturer instead of General Motors, and indeed as of this writing GM is in the process of shifting the pavilion to focus less on their corporate brand identity and more on their Chevrolet imprint.

If you're a company looking to sponsor a pavilion today, what your financial investment is likely going to buy you is going to look like this:

Ta-DAH

 A tiny sign. That can be easily removed. In some way, it's hard to blame companies for not wanting to step forward more often. Based on a hugely significant cash outlay and yearly maintenance stipend, a lot of these companies are  getting only a cursory involvement in the attraction, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, a strong involvement that can completely backfire.

But the funny thing is, most of Walt Disney World's unique things and characters and concepts that are most beloved are those tied to corporate sponsorships. Kodak's Dreamfinder and Figment. Kraft's Kitchen Kabaret. General Electric's Horizons. Florida Citrus Grower's Orange Bird. When the sponsorship agreement died, in every one of these cases, the properties did too. And the Orange Bird, he wasn't just a theme park character, he was a cross-platform marketing tool, appearing on television, in "Miss Florida Citrus" parades, on records, comic books, and in fruit stands across the state as the mascot for Florida citrus.

So the Orange Bird raises an interesting question, if by proxy. Now that widespread corporate sponsorship on a scale seen in, say, the RCA Space Mountain or the Monsanto Adventure Thru Inner space is no longer fashionable, what was the value of these to begin with? How many of us have spared a sunny thought or two for Monsanto because of "Miracles From Molecules" in complete ignorance of their current activities? How many of us instinctively reach for Kikkoman Soy Sauce in the grocery store because of a restaurant they sponsored twenty years ago? Eastern Airlines-Walt Disney World material is amongst the most readily sought-after material on the secondary market. I know I instinctively think of Delta when I think of airlines because of uncountable numbers of trips through Dreamflight.

What is the value of a lifetime of brand awareness and loyalty?

Today, the Orange Bird is no longer a Florida citrus thing - he's a Walt Disney World thing, and an old one at that. At some point he stopped being about selling your oranges and became a fetishistic nostalgia token, traded on memories. There's a final component of the Orange Bird that needs to be discussed, then.

Right now there is a generation of young people starting to finally exert themselves economically, voting with their dollars. and what these young people have voted for, time and time again, is a category of things we have no real good name for yet and so have been dubbed "retro". T-shirts are printed now to look as if they're already 30 years old. It's astonishingly easy to go into youth-oriented stores and see products designed to emulate the look and feel of products from twenty years ago, when these people were young... to recall the look of NES games, vintage cartoons, forgotten breakfast cereal boxes. Today people restore Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Apple II computers with the level of care and attention generally associated with steam railroad enthusiasts. Young kids walk around with things like Atari 2600 controllers on their shirts, a system that died out before they were even born.

The "Peter Pan Generation" has consistently embraced things which are in many ways throwbacks in reaction to the previous regimen of Generation X irony and detachment. Things which once seemed childish, laughable, or not to be taken seriously are being taken seriously. It is not a kitsch movement. The new generation wants to unironically embrace things like Disney musicals, clunky old electronics, and cultural obscurities because they seem purer and less corrupted and worn out than our current Dancing with the Stars era.

Culture Theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker have termed this "Metamodernism", a sort of post-post modernism, an embrace of things seen as purer, less ironic, and less detached than our current culture. In Disney fan group terms we can see this in the current interest in EPCOT Center attractions which in their day were seen as suspect, kitsch, or laughably out of date - often with the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers watching from the sidelines in horror. There is both an interest in a return to cultural naivety and a distance from taking such things too seriously -  informed naivety, pragmatic idealism.


The Orange Bird is uniquely suited to the "New Sincerity". He stands at the cultural crossroads, between Modernism and Post-Modernism, between Cute and "Kawaii", between retro and modern. The young people of today, who grew up in an era when Pikachu and Super Mario were more recognizable characters than Mickey Mouse, see much to embrace in the design, history, and cultural significance of the Orange Bird. Put simply: the Orange Bird was astonishingly serendipitously poised for a comeback.

Earlier today, D23 made good on their promise to be an official conduit between the fans and the company by unveiling a variety of Orange Bird surprises at the Magic Kingdom. The bird now graces the attraction marquee, sippy cups, shirts, and so on. What's better, a dedicated Sunshine Tree Terrace poster is now on display under the train station:

Ruthlessly swiped from Attractions Magazine!

 Guys, seriously. This is serious. The Orange Bird is on a poster under the train station. This is a commitment to history. Because Disney history doesn't belong in a museum, it's a living part of you and me.  Disney history is Disney culture. The Orange Bird song and Orange Tree have been re-recorded under the watchful eye of Dick Sherman, which handily effaces the Orange Bird's linked history with social discrimination. But the biggest surprise was the return and restoration of the original figure in place at the Sunshine Tree Terrace:

Actually a real thing!

But what does this mean to you, a person reading this article on the internet? I mean, if you grew up with the Orange Bird and love him dearly or if you are a person who came to the Orange Bird through the historical record, either way, this is a massively important gesture on the part of D23 and the entire company. This isn't a multi-day event in a hotel ballroom or a convention, it isn't a temporary thing that goes away in a few days - that bird is back, up there, on the facade, above the juice counter. He's back there because of you.

Yes, that's right, you. The Orange Bird's unbelievably unlikely revival came about because of fan interest. It began, perfectly enough, in Japan, with a wave of new Orange Bird merchandise which probably was half due to his right kind of cuteness and half due to Orange Day, a marketing "holiday" where couples are encouraged to exchange citrus and citrus-colored products. If that sounds like something the citrus industry dreamed up, you're absolutely right. What a beautiful resurrection- snatched out of obscurity to sell citrus half a world away.

From there, the drumbeat started to sound stateside, on sites like Widen Your World and this site here, Florida Orange Bird products began to appear on eBay with more frequency, and Disney Design Group picked up the little guy, featuring him on pins, vinyl toy merchandise, and shirts (these are the same folks who are single-handedly bringing back the resort's evocative original logo, by the way). Last February, the Disney Parks Blog gave the character even more exposure, and last May's Destination D event prominently featured an Orange Bird t-shirt. Richard Sherman sang "Little Orange Bird" in front of an audience of hundreds of paying customers, and for probably the first time in forty years.

The last year or so has actually been something like the Adventureland Spring, which began with Iago being fried like a marshmallow in the Tiki Room, continued through citrus-heavy activities at Destination D, became even stronger with the 40th anniversary of the resort and the re-opening of the Enchanted Tiki Room and a beautifully restored Swiss Family Treehouse, and - seemingly - climaxed with the return of the Citrus Swirl and a frenzy of internet activity.

The Orange Bird became a cypher for fan interaction, a symbol for dedication stronger that that signified by, say, Figment, who never fully left and who still has, after all, an attraction at EPCOT. I remember making an Orange Bird shirt at home in 2006, years before Disney's official ones became available. Orange Bird was gone, a true extinction and obscurity, and had become a signifier to a specialist audience. What better symbol for the Florida parks? He symbolized our history and heritage, both Old Florida and Disney Florida in a single stroke of a pen.

Let's lay it out clearly: this is the very first permanent thing in the history of Walt Disney World that is there because of the internet-centered fan base. Not even Journey into YOUR Imagination was killed because of the internet, which was too small and spotty back then to leverage much fear. This is D23, Walt Disney World, and interest groups moving in perfect harmony. This happened because of us. This is something to be proud of.


It's small, yes, but it's huge, too. It's huge because this is the sort of thing we fantasized about D23 being able to pull off at its inception. It's huge because Walt Disney World has never thrown its fans so much as a bone. It's huge because it proves that small things - like pins and shirts and blog posts and forum signatures - can build to bigger things. We need to stand up and support this and keep that little orange snowballing down the hill. It's proof that maybe, in the end, it's all worthwhile.

Because to us, and now to Disney too, the Orange Bird symbolizes us all. He's jumped on the Carousel of Progress now too: everything old is new again.

Enjoy your Citrus Swirl, you've earned it.

--

Orange Bird event photos provided by Travis Munson of DisneyProjects. Follow DisneyProjects on Twitter!

Walt Disney's Forgotten Characters by Kevin Kidney
Little Orange Memories by Michael Crawford
Sunshine Tree Terrace by Mike Lee
Oh, Little Orange Bird by Moi
Florida Orange Bird Returns to WDW by Jennifer Fickley-Baker
An Enchanted Opportunity by Michael Crawford
A Ray of Sunshine by Michael Crawford
Florida Orange Bird by Fritz
Orange Bird Quest by Hoot
Orange Bird Lands on New Merchandise by Steven Miller
Orange Bird Returns to Adventureland by Jennifer Fickley-Baker

For some time since this blog began, I've been pondering ways to make the history of Walt Disney World seem more alive to the casual reader. If you're steeped in the research, the photos, and putting together the puzzle pieces, it's easy to lose sight of how the material reads on the page: to the experienced theme park goer, the myriad sensory pleasures the parks provide doesn't seem to translate to looking at photos of Otto Rabbe. History becomes textbook.

Thrills n' Chills of Olde World Antiques

Perhaps a photo essay would do? Or a virtual tour of Walt Disney World, from landing at McCoy Airbase in your Eastern jet to arriving at the Polynesian Village? Or perhaps some sort of animated slideshow or edited home movies of the era?

Eventually these ideas gelled with a longstanding concept to create an audio tour of the Magic Kingdom of the past. What era would it be? How far back could I realistically expect to wind the clock? Twenty years? Thirty years? At the time I had this idea, it seemed a pipe dream to even conceive of such a thing. But after years of contact and online connection with like minded people, the dream seemed more reasonable year by year. Previously unknown and unsuspected details about the resort's first ten years were coming to light, from photos to old background music.

The starting pistol for this project turned out to be a site called Walt's Music, which for some time had been posting treasures plundered from the Jack Wagner archives. Then, one day, it finally appeared: scratchy but still good quality source music for If You Had Wings. That was in June. I thought it would be a simple project to rebuild the rest of the park. I finished that project last week.

What I ended up creating was a flowing experience of the entire park localized around about 1977. Space Mountain was new, and Big Thunder Mountain was still several years away. Unlike the Disneyland Records style of music releases best typified by the 2005 Musical History of Disneyland, I have avoided the familiar interior attraction soundtracks and instead focused on park ambiance, background music, and relatively obscure pieces of music. I ended up consulting pretty much everyone who has some connection to Walt Disney World history research and referenced hours of live recordings, home videos, and photographs to aid me in my research.


It's ready for you now. I call it....

What's Inside:

• 2.5 Hours of Magic Kingdom music and ambiance
• Thirteen 256K MP3 Audio Files
• Full If You Had Wings ride-through
• Michael Iceberg in Concert
• Jungle Cruise ride-through - no narration

"A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World" booklet example

• "Vintage" 14-page program booklet
• 30 pages of notes, annotations, and history

What I sought to do here above all else was to give a stronger sense of both history and memory than the typical fan audio project. Besides cross-referencing all of the historical material and my supplemental research, I've included dozens of ambient sounds recorded in-park - all the streams, waterfalls, and incidental sounds which make up the textural landscape of the Magic Kingdom of our memories. And using reference recordings, I had to manufacture many more. In the process of refining and editing it - because I had to be happy with this project too - I've listened to these files hundreds of times.

I think the result is as good as I can reasonably get it. There's plenty of stuff in it that gives me cloudy nostalgia eyes while still remaining fun and fast paced. I've also discovered it's very good for visualization exercises - play it over some good speakers and close your eyes and you're there. The effect is sometimes so convincing I forget I'm in my house.

This experience was part entertainment, part exercise, and part the research equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. It's such an irrational thing to even try to do that I'm amazed I did it at all.  Relax and enjoy, this is built to be your personal time machine to an era when the Seven Seas Lagoon was bright and blue and the Magic Kingdom was just appearing on the pop cultural scene. It is the Walt Disney World you remember.... whether that be real or imagined.

Disney historians are treasure hunters. When I was young, I had the idea that being a historian or expert on anything would be ninety-percent tedium; locked out of the official Disney record halls and vaults, most of the major history-interested folk are left to rummage through bins, binders, and stacks of old paper, furtively hoping to find some previously unheralded treasure: a strange photo, new factoid, some new piece of the puzzle. Sometimes we luck out.

What follows is a stack of 35mm slides I recently acquired. As luck would have it, they are stamped "November 1971", which could indicate that they are from October 71, if the photographers waited a bit before sending them off for development, but in any case they are a rare candid view into a Walt Disney World just starting to burst onto the cultural scene.


These folks stayed at the Polynesian Village! This is the original pool area. See all the torches? I've seen it reported online that the torches are a later addition to the Village, but here they are, scarcely a month after opening.  Way to put the lie to that. See that white blob way in the back off to the left? That is one of the original luxury Yachts parked in the Papette Bay Marina at the Polynesian. From an April 1972 Walt Disney World News we learn:

"COCKTAIL CRUISES depart nightly at 7:30 pm from the Polynesian Village marina. For an hour and a half complimentary cocktails are served on one of the Chris Craft yachts or Aqua Homes. The cost is $10 per person including drinks.


DINNER CRUISES leave from either resort-hotel marina at 7:30 pm nightly. Hostesses serve complimentary cocktails and a steak or shish kebab dinner during the 2 1/2 hour cruise. The cost is $30 per person, payable in advance at either hotel marina.


All the boats, yachts, and Aqua Homes are available for private charter. Touch "1" about hosting your own dinner cruise....treasure hunt....cocktail party....or family outing."

The Cocktail Cruise and Dinner Cruise would each respectively cost $51 and $154 today, by the way.
Those yachts were big ticket items.

Hey, Bob-A-Round Boats!


You can learn more about the Bob-a-Round boats here and here. An October 1971 Walt Disney World News, contemporary with the visit depicted here, has an impressive rundown on the watercraft available at Walt Disney World, including: Capri (14'), Sunfish, Sailing Outrigger, Bob-A-Round, Paddle Boat (2 seats), Paddle Wheeler (5 seats), Outrigger Excursion (Polynesian War Canoe), Trapper Canoe Excursion, High Speed Boat, Hobie Catamaran, Ski Boat, Aqua Cat, Super Dingies (!!!), and Sail Boats.


Here's a true obscurity. This view from the monorail shows the Polynesian Village putting green. This was later replaced with a picnic pavilion, and later a large, shield-shaped pool. The Polynesian Village would expand nearly continuously throughout the 70s and 80s, today this is the lush grounds surrounding the Tangaroa Terrace east of the Great Ceremonial House.


Disembarking at the Magic Kingdom; hey, see those cranes at the Contemporary? Construction would not halt at the Contemporary until November 1971, another hint that these photos could've been taken in October.

Dead ahead, by the way, past the Steamboat Dock, is a stretch of grass where the Ferryboat Landing would appear six months later.


Yikes, there's two of them!


If you look way in the back you can see a "America the Beautiful" poster hanging just to the left of the entrance tunnel. The attraction itself would not be ready for another month.


And just inside the tunnel to the right, an original "Tropical Serenade" poster. Also note the lack of a "Here you leave today..." plaque, Magic Kingdom went for over thirty years without one. I guess after making you drive through the entire property to get to the park, WED figured you had already gotten the hint.


Obligatory group photo! It's nice to know that that goofy Popcorn wagon inside the entrance on the left has been exactly the same for four decades now, isn't it?

Notice that the twin on the left is holding one of those huge fold-out "official maps of the Magic Kingdom". As I've previously established, there was no official GAF guide park map until mid 1972.


The Sunshine Pavilion, with Clyde and Claude. Notice the two resident goddesses, Pele and Hina, staged up on the outer wall of the Tiki Room. This is also how they are staged at Tokyo Disneyland and I had always suspected that Florida once arranged their preshow in this way but had been unable to prove it. Due to plant grown Hina moved down into the terraced pond in the 80s and Pele was finally repositioned for the new Tiki Birds show in 1998, the staging which reigns to this day.

Now that the Orange Bird, Citrus Swirl, and orange grove references have returned to the show, it'd be nice to see those plastic oranges return to the central planter below Clyde and Claude there; I'll wade out there myself if Imagineering doesn't want to.


Now this one is a fantastic view, showing the original arrangement of the Liberty Square bridge. It can be seen both how high this particular feature was in 1971, when it actually did look something like the Old North Bridge at Concord on which it was based, and corresponds closely to the Herb Ryman concept art for this area. It was rebuilt sometime in the first decade to accommodate either America on Parade or the Electrical Parade which decreased the hump you see here, and it was flattened totally a few years ago.

The original entrance was through a court of 13 flags which were eventually moved to surround the Liberty Bell replica at the back of thew land, itself installed in 1987. The entire area was rebuilt in the early 90s with brick walls and props, complete with a guardhouse. Silly People will tell you that the guardhouse used to be a ticket booth. This is why you don't believe things Silly People say.


Liberty Square again, from the interior of a Keelboat. If you enlarge this picture you'll see a huge throng of people swarming around the front of the Hall of Presidents. This is the line. From opening until essentially the late 70s this show was packed with people at all times of the day.


Continuing the Keelboat ride we pass the weirdly depopulated Indian Village. Dick Nunis absolutely hated the Florida train ride, which then and still does pass a lot of Florida nothing. By December 1972 figures began popping up in this scene, which actually required a good deal of shuffling about of scenic elements and the removal of live-flame gas campfires. In 1973, further embellishments were added alongside both the River and Railroad, although the cancellation of Western River Expedition put the kibosh on an Eastside version of the Grand Canyon Diorama. The problem never was and still is not fully solved.


The Contemporary Resort as seen from the Walt Disney World Railroad and another view of those cranes. Disney actually ended up buying out US Steel in 1971 to finish the work themselves. Also seen here: an original red parking tram, one of those ones that would famously overheat on their way under the water bridge.

The water retention pond in the foreground (it's a Florida thing...) would be totally reworked in 1974 to allow the construction of Space Mountain.


Okay, this one was a biggest find in the collection. On the right you can see the original location of the Fantasyland Portrait Artists, as well as a wooden shade structure on the front of their space which was shortly demolished. This is the only photo that I've seen of the artists in their original location, and I had to do a good deal of digital fiddling with this slide to make the artists totally clear.

This space was later used as the furthest reaches of the Peter Pan queue, at which point the artists got a dedicated new building on the other side of Fantasyland, across from the Mad Tea Party. That space became the Enchanted Grove juice bar in 1980 when Florida Citrus Growers renewed their sponsorship.


A lovely view of the Small World / Village Haus complex with those famous Skyway buckets overhead. Also in this photo: a great early view of our friend, the rooster-headed lamp, who I profiled not just a few months earlier in this article.


We end our spin around the Magic Kingdom in Fantasyland with a view of the attractive Royal Candy Shoppe facade, the Round Table soft-serve ice cream spot in the very back, and the small covered porch area between them which would shortly be converted into the Lancer Inn pizza window. I think these Tudor-style facades in their original colors and textures are quite charming, although later creative regimes have been less than kind. This sort of Fantasyland architectural treatment would provide the basis for the 1983 reboot at Disneyland.

What's maybe most remarkable in this set of slides is that there is not a single typical view anywhere in them. Generally, we can expect to find the same old photos people have been taking at Disney World for decades now, but this particular photographer saved his film, probably investing instead in the Disney-provided GAF Pana-Vue souvenir slides sold around property. His enormous good sense then has really paid off now: although Magic Kingdom has been, from its opening to now, perhaps a far more conservative institution that Disneyland, of which far less from its opening day is now recognizable, this odd little group of twin ladies and their friends captured some truly unique and invaluable, fleeting things on film on their vacation over forty years ago.

What's cool, small, all over Disney attractions and totally unseen by guests? It's about an inch wide, two inches tall, sticky, yellowed, fading, old, and stuck to nearly every available surface. It tells you who's boss and is a marker of almost every attraction of real value at Walt Disney World - it's the fabulous MAPO sticker.


MAPO manufactured basically everything that ended up in Disneyland or Walt Disney World between 1964 and 1990 - they must have printed these things out by a thousands because they're stuck to props, motors, figures, power junction boxes, chain lifts and practically everything else you can think of in the World's Fair attractions, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain, Horizons, and dozens of others.

Ulysses S. Grant spots the MAPO sticker on the back of Abe's chair

As you can imagine, MAPO stickers are prized possessions amongst cast members, who are apt to peel the nearest one off the first available prop. The backstages of Mansion and Pirates are full of tiny rectangles of less-aged areas where MAPO stickers have absconded the premises. Here's mine. It's direct off the actuator frame for Herbert Hoover, which was being thrown away:


The problem is that as time goes by and the gap between the shuttering of MAPO and our own age widens, these stickers are becoming increasingly uncommon and most of the good ones have already been thrown out - attached to props in, say, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - or gone home with Cast Members with an eye for history. This is problematic in that these stickers represent Disney history - Disney history that's vanishing out the Utilidor exit year by year.

Since MAPO stickers are a dwindling commodity, I've devised a simple solution, and one that, as a bonus, allows those who did not have the foresight to get a job at Disney to join in the fun - make your own at home!!

I've digitally re-created the sticker for you, and in fact I've re-created an entire sheet. That's thirty MAPO stickers in a go. All you need to do is download the file as a .pdf, open it up, and print it out on some sticker paper - make sure it's slightly glossy sticker paper so it looks more authentic!

Original sticker: left   New stickers: right

After some careful cutting, you too can make all of your furniture, and even your pets, a part of Disney history!

Now a word of caution: you can't just go sticking these things anywhere. Real MAPO stickers are put in places that only cast members can see, so you're going to need to think about putting them on the underside of tables, behind the legs of beds, etc.

An example:


The MAPO sticker on the left is on the arm of a bench, a place it is likely to be seen. This is an incorrect placement. The one on the right is on the back of the back leg of the bench, where it is unlikely to be seen. This is a correct placement.

Some more examples:


This is a good MAPO sticker.


This is a bad one.


Good!

Once Upon a Time....

"The film contains scenes of terror which link it not only to the popular cinema in general and to the horror film in particular, but also to European melodrama and stage gothic tradition. Disney is addressing an audience of both adults and children which makes the texture of the film particularly dense. [...] This address is part of the Disney feature films' layered texture; it disappeared when the Disney studio identified itself with a distinctly younger audience in the post-war era.

At this early stage Disney was taking on the role of a complete story teller, absorbing the gothic tradition from Europe via the German expressionist cinema as well as the rise in popularity of the horror film in the early days of sound." - Robin Allan, Walt Disney and Europe.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937 as the first American feature-length cartoon; it went on to run for years around the world, grossed eight million dollars in the pit of the second wing of the Great Depression, and became a beloved cinema classic. It is a ruthlessly terrifying film, probably the most frightening thing outside of the studio's next project, Pinocchio, to be regularly presented to children.  As his first feature cartoon, Disney was unsure how audiences would react to the emotional plights of cartoon characters, and so everything in Snow White is heightened: romance, comedy, grief and horror in brief snatches, one after the other, each emotion more powerful than the last, as the film barrels forward relentlessly free of fat or filler.

Letters of complaint about the film's frightening effects poured in from around the country; Walt Disney ignored them, he knew very well that real threat was an essential element in fairy-tales. The English Board of Film Censors, who had banned all horror films outright in 1934, did let Snow White play unmolested and the British public reacted with an unusual furor. Over in Italy, the Mussolini regime had similarly banned all terror films and an entire generation of young Italians were caught totally unprepared for famous scenes like the flight through the forest and the queen's transformation. In twenty years, these Italians would come of age and start making their own horror films in the post-war era... films invariably influenced, in some way or another, by Snow White.

What is the strange link between the motion picture cinema and the cinema of imagination produced by the ride-through attraction? In both we sit in the dark as helpless witness to a surprising experience that barrels along towards an inevitable conclusion. The horror cinema and the midway dark ride are especially fully linked - the nightmare images, the lurid pace, the sudden shocks. This is a cultural vocabulary which was fully exploited by the first few generations of Imagineers, those who excelled at creating experiences of terror and awe in equal measure.

Disneyland premiered in 1955 as the first American fully-realized theme park; of course Snow White was present. Snow White and Her Adventures was one of the very first dark rides to make extensive use of ultraviolet light, and it absolutely continued the Gothic traditions of Snow White: much like the film, a light opening sequence gave way to vultures, skeletons, and a flight through the forest.

The 1955 Snow White ride began in the diamond vault for a view of the dwarfs at work; Dopey appeared to open the vault door and also appear with a sign reading "BEWARE THE WITCH!". Exiting the vault, riders rode past a mural depicting the approach to the dwarfs' cottage, only to (irrationally) detour towards the Castle of the Wicked Queen. Entering across a drawbridge, a porticullis slammed down in front of the car, blocking it from exiting, forcing a detour through the castle. After a trip through a dungeon where a skeleton warned you to "Go back!", riders confronted the witch at her cauldron, fled through the Frightening Forest, were surprised by the witch at the door of the Dwarfs Cottage, and then narrowly avoided destruction at the hands of the witch, who was struck by lightning as she tried to pry a boulder loose from a ledge above.

Over the years, more and more documentation of the original ride has emerged on the internet thanks to sites like Daveland and KenNetti, making it possible to place the ride in context of its' relationship to all other previous scary dark rides - striking a harmonious balance between the frights of Laff in the Darks around the country while forging ahead with a more leisurely, scenic style of narrative representation. Instead of a disconnected jumble of frights and laughs, Snow White and her ilk presented an accessible ride-through narrative experience.

This is an even more remarkable accomplishment in light of the fact that the building for Snow White was not built to specifications - the ride designers were given a set space and fit their ride layout inside it, on site. Bill Martin laid out the track based on a list of scenes by Ken Anderson, who executed the scenery at Disneyland with Herb Ryman and Claude Coats, who painted right on the plywood walls and flats as needed. Many three-dimensional props and figures were cobbled together onsite. The entire ride was a unique, original work of art put together by famous Disney artists.

Snow White and Her Adventures was therefore a ride created much like a form of automatic writing - done hurriedly and somewhat thoughtlessly but revealing the artistic temperament behind the improvisation. This was theme park ride as performance, and it is symbolically significant that the concept of a feature-length animated cartoon and the concept of a fully-realized themed environment were localized in the exact same moment by this attraction: just as Snow White led Disney into longform storytelling, she also led Disney into three-dimensional popular art.

And so this is where our story begins, although it is not in any way the beginning of the story of the Disney Snow White. The subject of our story today is the 1971 Magic Kingdom original attraction Snow White's Adventures, the second fully realized Disney Snow White ride, which is a genuine forgotten classic. As I will attempt to show, the ride is both important, influential, and artistically significant, although she was perhaps a little too early to the party of Magic Kingdom extinctions to get full recognition. Plus, she was scary, and not in a fun way like the Haunted Mansion, but genuinely blood-curdling and weird.

I will also attempt to show how important the 1971 Snow White has been for each subsequent version, of which there are three pedigrees, all of which share some common links with the 1971 version and the 1955 version. It is a daunting maze, but one worth navigating, because the links are extensive, impressive, and relevant.

So hop into your Snow White car (are they mine carts? Beds? What's the deal with those things anyway?) and let's take a spin in a dark, back in time, to 1971.

The Magic Kingdom Version:

"Travel through the dark forest to meet the Seven Dwarfs and the Wicked Witch." - Walt Disney World Information Guide, Summer 1972

 "Travel through the dark forest to meet the Seven Dwarfs and the fearsome Wicked Witch. (SCARY)" - Your Complete Guide to Walt Disney World, Summer 1978

Harriet Burns with Mickey Mouse Revue dwarf figures, 197

One place to begin discussion of the 1971 Snow White's Adventures, as distinct from the 1955 Snow White and Her Adventures, is to cover the purely technical aspects related to it's advancement. Starting in 1964 with the formation of MAPO from what had previously been the Disneyland Machine Shop, WED Enterprises had an increasingly sophisticated, skilled, and technologically advanced crew to execute their in-house designs; instead of the crude handcrafted figures created for the Ford Magic Skyway in 1963, off-the-shelf standardized parts could be assembled into a reliable mechanical skeleton, fiberglass and plastic could be cast from molds to ensure predictable and replaceable body parts, and even rubber heads, hands, and gloves could be mass-produced to fit demand.

And so while Snow White's Adventures still ran Arrow Dynamics ride vehicles along a bus bar on the floor, it established for the first time a Snow White ride with scalable physical assets: most of the sculpting, scenic design, and props of this 1971 version became the template for all subsequent versions. The WED sculpture staff, including such geniuses as Blaine Gibson and Adolfo Procopio, produced a number of beautiful in-the-round figures for the ride, including the Witch, a raven on a skull, six haunted trees, crocodile "logs", an entire cottage interior, and all seven dwarfs. This was in addition to a Snow White figure and a fleet of seven totally different dwarfs, plus forest animals, destined for the Mickey Mouse Revue across the street. A brief look at the difference between the handcrafted Witch figures in 1955 and the sculpted witches in 1971 reveals a startling difference.

Original Snow White Witches, 1955

New Witch, 1971

 In addition to the purely technical advancement, the attraction had a new head designer: Claude Coats, who headed up development of the entire 1971 Fantasyland. The 1971 Fantasyland in itself was interesting in that most of its attractions were heavily stylized after the personal art styles of key WED staff: It's A Small World for Mary Blair, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride for Rolly Crump, Cinderella Castle for Dorthea Redmond and Herb Ryman. The styles of the 1971 Fantasyland facades were heavily patterned on the famous Eyvind Earle art direction from Sleeping Beauty. Both the Mickey Mouse Revue and Snow White's Adventures were painted in Claude Coats' personal style.

Snow White, Mickey Mouse & friends amidst Claude Coats styled-landscape

 Now, this point is important to me; take a close look at these, because it's worthwhile to be perfectly clear that the entire ride was beautifully scenically realized in the same style Coats used for his personal, fine art canvases. Look closely at the leaves, the textured trees, and distorted perspectives:

Snow White's Adventures Load Mural, 1971

Claude Coats - Martinique

Claude Coats - Medicine Man - 1953

Claude Coats - Across the Way - 1945

If You Had Wings Interior Show Scene - 1972

Coats re-ordered the 1955 ride radically while still retaining a good number of scenes and events; the ride still moved towards the Dwarf cottage only to irrationally turn away and enter the Queen's castle, the ride still visited the mine shaft of the seven dwarfs, still fled through the scary forest. But the emphasis of the ride was totally transformed.

Snow White's Adventures kicked off in high style with a beautiful ride facade depicting the Wicked Queen's castle to the left, the Seven Dwarfs cottage in the center, and the Mine with its shimmering plastic waterfall on the right. The ride vehicles first circled a wishing well from which a rendition of I'm Wishing echoed; perhaps the only real clue in the entire ride that the riders are supposed to be inhabiting the person of Snow White! From there, the vehicles circled towards the little downscale dwarf cottage (exactly as in the 1955 ride a helpful sign nearby proclaimed: "To Dwarfs' Cottage"), turned away from it, and headed directly into the castle of the Wicked Queen, who parted a set of curtains to glare down at each vehicle as they entered.

Inspirational moment from the 1937 film.

This version of Snow White's Adventures belongs in the very exclusive company of the best conceived and executed entrance areas of a ride ever. To begin with, much like the actual film, a very beautiful and light introductory statement hides darker things to follow; and, just as in the film, the Queen glaring down from a window puts us in the role of Snow White, whom she will have her revenge on.

There's also no lie in this mural; the ride begins in the Queen's castle, ends in the Mine, and in the middle we will visit the dwarfs cottage -- if perhaps things aren't exactly as we expected! Perhaps, much as the film makes it quite clear that the ghosts of the forest are more in Snow White's imagination, the ride is our frenzied, terrorized imagined impression of the true nature of the world presented on the load facade: after all, the demon trees and crocodile logs of the 1937 film are clearly a fantasy.

Or perhaps Coats was just messing with us. I elect the latter.

Upon entering the Queen's castle, the cars move towards a large mirror which momentarily reflects both the cars entering and the scene around the corner, immediately creating a sense of confused space. This is a set-up for one of the ride's wickedest tricks; we see the Wicked Queen facing a mirror, her face seen only in reflection, as outside a long slender window to the right dark clouds cut across the moon.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall -- I am the fairest one of all!"


The Queen's reflection vanishes as she turns to face us - already a gruesome hag -- and her statement ends as a shrill shriek and cackle, sending us off into the dungeon.

The night sky outside the castle "window" is an interesting touch, because dark clouds over the moon is a horror movie cliche and hints at the dark deeds to come. It also reminds me of an shot of the moon near the start of Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, which it recalls very closely, an unintentional but not inappropriate link given the nightmarish yet faintly absurd nature of the ride to follow.

The Throne Room scene is a neat trick as it both establishes the Witch's intention - to do us in! - and makes it clear that the ride will play by nothing resembling "rules". Although I have no specific evidence of this, I suspect that this mind-bending gag and several others in the ride are the invention of resident genius Yale Gracey, who with Rolly Crump performed a significant refurbishment on the original Disneyland ride in the mid-60s. Gracey and Crump were the first to install "floating eyes" in the frightening forest thanks to one of Crump's mobile contraptions; an updated version will shortly appear in this 1971 ride.

Inside the dungeon, the cars zipped past two chained up skeletons, the first of which flapped its jaw - just like it's 1955 counterpart - and warned "Go back!!" while another moaned eerily as a bright orange hued spider crawled down it's web towards the cars. From the darkness, dozens of green rat's eyes blinked and an iron gate swung ominously to and fro.

Another clue to Gracey's involvement in the attraction, the rat's eyes were imported directly from the final scene of the Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbean, and later would be used to represent bats in Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. One reason for this scene's perpetual darkness is that this short dungeon is the point where the ride's spur line, leading to vehicle storage, branched off the main track.

At this point it's worth commenting on the sound of Snow White's Adventures, which was to my young impressionable mind amongst the most upsetting things about it: most of the ride took place in comparative silence, with no recognizable music from the film, to speak of. It was spare and relentless, allowing the Witch's cries of "Mirror, mirror, on the wall -- I am the fairest one of all!" to echo through all of the dungeon scenes and part of the forest, creating a paranoid atmosphere where one was never certain if that cackling witch was in front of you, behind you, or right up upon you before you even knew it.


Around the corner, cars narrowly avoid a squawking raven balanced on a skull. The raven is clearly reacting to something nearby, nicely setting up what's around the next corner, perhaps another echo of the logic informing requiring the riders to enter the rider proper facing a mirror! Notice the mysterious eyes glowing from the darkness in the shadow of the skull:


 "Have an apple dearie?" As we turn away from the witch, a shelf of potions above our heads comes crashing down with a terrifically loud glass shattering sound - a classic dark ride gag, and very effective. Notice the shadows painted directly on the wall - a classic dark ride trick which harkens back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.


Escaping the shattering glass, the cars moved outside and alongside the castle's moat, with crickets singing in the darkness. Of course, just moments after taking in the very elaborately painted scene, the Witch came rocketing out of nowhere on her boat, cackling and offering the poisoned apple.


This is a publicity still of the scene, which sadly must be sourced from a degraded 8mm home movie sold in the park as a souvenir, called "Fantasyland at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom". Still, it allows us to appreciate the scenic beauty of this briefly glimpsed set; the castle wall past the opening of the arch is actually painted on the rear wall; the reeds in the lake are standing flats on the floor, and the first of four "log crocodiles", with glowing eyes, may be seen to the right. Sadly not visible is the beautiful painted backdrop of swirling clouds which vanish into darkness off to the right.


Onwards to the frightening forest, which may have been the ride's piece de resistance. Inspired by the famous sequence in the animated film, the flight through the forest is the quintessential "ghost train" sequence of any Disney attraction.

Gustav Tenggren concept art

The sequence of the film which terrified a generation.

Coats' on-ride forest is populated with frighteningly ghoulish trees and "scored" with crickets, moaning banshees (direct from Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House), and atonal music much like that heard in the Florida Jungle Cruise.

(Sidebar: Long-Forgotten co-incidentally posted a piece on this sequence's influence on the Haunted Mansion on the very same day; great minds??)


The first of the demon trees can be seen here peeking out of the beautifully painted flats; some trees turned to follow the cars with gaping "claws" while others, on the left, "fell" towards the riders. Notice how faithfully the colors of the ride follow those in the film; Coats was a background painter on Snow White and may have executed some of those trees from the film pictured above. Below is another overview from that 8mm home movie, and although some of the details are quite blown out, others, especially those on the left, turn out quite well:


Another view of the 1971 ride, showing one of the "falling" trees and some of the floating eyes:


Tokyo Disneyland's Snow White's Adventures, from 1983, has a very similar sequence, and their trees are painted like this:


A flash photo from Tokyo:


As you can see, the Coats ride did not lack for horror; this is pretty strong stuff for a ride with such a benign facade! At the very end of the scene, the cars passed this clever Yale Gracey "flying eye rig":


These are also replicated pretty faithfully from the film, although perhaps making them seem to be bats was a Crump (or Coats?) invention!


At this point the ride vehicles saw perhaps the first comforting sight of the entire ride thus far: directly ahead, the cottage of the seven dwarfs! Warm yellow light spillt from inside the cottage, and the ride seemed to offer for the very first time the possibility that we could finally arrive at the safety of the cottage we had turned away from in the first moments of the ride and the nightmare could end.

Yet the cottage is dark and silent inside. The abandoned dinner table, chairs, ornate carvings and even the water pump seem to stare at you with terrified burning white eyes.

Cold comfort.

Around the corner, a number of forest animals are clustered in an open window, looking off to the right in alarm - another repetition of the ride's structuring motif of an indirect lead-up to an uncanny event. The next scene is uncanny indeed -- it's probably the most bizarre thing to ever appear in a Disney dark ride.

All seven dwarfs appear to the right ascending the cottage stairs. Dopey, holding a candle in his shaking hand, is being prevented from fleeing the scene while Doc, leading the way, is protectively holding the rest of the dwarfs back near the top of the stairs. In the upper landing, an upstairs door is open, from which spills yellow light and the huge rippling shadow of a looming ghost!



Our attention drawn to the top of the stairs, we are ill prepared for the sudden appearance of the Witch, sliding into view in an open doorway. "Sleeping apple?" To escape, the cars barrel directly through the wall.


The "Dark Cottage" is the central, pivotal scene in the ride, as it is the scene where a situation already Very Bad officially boils over into some kind of irrational nightmare. The false promise of the dwarf's house reveals one of the most chilling scenes in any ride as the flying-bat eyes follow us into the cottage and become part of the decor, making the terror of the flight through the forest literally inescapable. In this way Coats is exploiting the already this-side-of-grotesque visual designs of illustrator Albert Hurter, who led the delicate fairy-tale look of the animated film. In the 1971 incarnation the designs become more visually aggressive and geometric to "read" quicker from a speeding vehicle:


The fact that Coats would zero in on these minor scenic details and "expand" them into an entire scene is telling, but who else but the man who made the interior of the Haunted Mansion a disturbing panoply of leering skulls would take the extra initiative to make sure all those Gothic little eyes glow white and look directly at you? In the "staircase" room, the eyes of the little carved owls on the end of the steps and above the door (see above) are all painted to "look" at the shadow of the ghost on the wall.

The scene of the dwarfs on the stairs is of course patterned on one in the film where Dopey is dispatched upstairs to investigate who is sleeping in their beds, and the appearance of a yawning Snow White underneath a sheet does suggest the looming ghost seen on the wall. But the scene in the film is played for laughs, with broad slapstick, since we already know that the "ghost" is a harmless young girl. In the ride, since we are Snow White and the shadow cannot be the Witch, who lurks nearby, a possible (disturbing) conclusion is that the dwarfs are again reliving the situation in the film - and this time it really is a ghost. Have the demons of the forest found their way inside the house?

Regardless, the dwarfs as possible figures of aid prove to be both elusive and helpless. They are not seen again during the ride.

Moving outside, the witch appears again from behind a tree on which sit two vultures:


Notice here how real, dimensional branches have been appended to painted flats to give the scene some life. See the Witch's hands? Those were actually sculpted for the Haunted Mansion - they appear prying up coffin lids, doors, and on the banshees which circle the ceiling in the ballroom and ride bicycles in the graveyard. The Witch figures in this ride are quite economical - they hardly move, usually sliding into view on rails or boats or being revealed by strategically placed scenery. The feeling of a real persuit being underway is remarkable for being achieved primarily through scenic design and track layout.

For those keeping track, this is the fifth Witch figure, and the second time she's popped out at you in a ten-second span.

The cars head into the Seven Dwarfs Mine, which is dead silent except for the ominous creaking of timbers. One passage to the right seems to lead off into the far distance. The cars turn to the left and proceed down a long straightaway, until the Witch suddenly appears on a ledge above and shoves a crossbeam off it's support columns!


"Enjoying the ride?"

This one is especially ghoulish, with its single red eye and painted splash of light on the rear wall. As you zip away, almost too fast to see her properly, columns to the left and right sway omniously as if a cave-in is imminent.

At the end of the tunnel we see the mine tracks continue around a corner, but before we reach them, the witch cackles from out of sight and a mine cart loaded with glittering gems comes racing into view and stops just short of colliding with us!

At this point the Witch has ceased simply appearing and offering an apple - she's made two attempts on our life in the space of a single scene!  That's four serious threats and shock appearances in a 30 second span, and the feeling of real danger and irrational pursuit it truly underway. Notice, too, how vivid and hallucinatory the colors have become.

The vibrant colors and gem cart subtly set up the largest and most beautiful scene in the ride... the Diamond Vault. Across all of the walls pulsating, beautifully colored gems emerge from the rockwork. Directly ahead is a wooden door labeled "VAULT", and delicate, but atonal music plays, like gently plucked harp strings or droplets of water falling into a puddle. This was the scene in the ride nobody forgot, and it was suddenly and shockingly beautiful.


As we roll forward towards the wooden doors, we pass under an elevated outcropping of rock and see, hidden from our view as we entered, the Witch is already atop the door to the vault! She pries a massive gem out of the rockwork above our heads and it falls towards us as we pass underneath.

At this point the Witch shrieked the most memorable two words to end any attraction: "Goodbye, dearie!"


The cars then passed into a small dark room with "starburst" explosions painted on the walls, illuminated by a strobe light, as the Witch's cackle, bizarrely distorted and sped up, echoed like a record with a skip: "Ah-Ha! Ah-Ha! Ah-Ha! Ah-Ha!"

And with that, the cars rolled out of the darkness into the Florida sun, thus ending the freakiest two and a half minutes of your young life. Yes, that's right kids, the ride ends when the Witch drops a giant gem on your noggin and apparently kills you. Happy dreams. Oh, and please step out to your left!

....What just happened?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the ride is that it actually existed at all. There was a time period when I was convinced it was actually a fever dream of my youth. Who says Disney missed out on the psychedelic seventies? Perhaps it was actually an LSD apple?

"You didn't need a lot of animation because you were moving. You were moving so darn fast that what you did was supply the movement for the characters." - Ken Anderson, The E-Ticket #13

One remarkable aspect of Snow White's Adventures is how well it used very simple animation and motion gags to enormous effect: by concentrating on heavy atmosphere in place of constant character vignettes, nothing ever seemed crude or like it moved less than it should have. Many of the Witch's sudden appearances resulted entirely from the perspective of riders moving through the scenes; the figures themselves were often static props. Several, such as the crocodile logs which "chased" the cars in the Forest, could only ever be seen by a small number of riders. Additionally, even more than most "ghost train" style rides, the track layout here created a lot of the character of the ride; as seen above, it's obvious how the bus bar was laid in such a way to force cars to "leap" out of the way of each new threat, especially in the last third of the ride as the pursuit is really on. Few dark rides have ever been paced as tightly.

What is apparent is that at a certain point the ride simply abandoned even the abbreviated version of the narrative logic of its first half: even allowing for a certain degree of artistic license compressing the transformation of the Witch into the throne room scene, the ride was following the film up to a point: the wishing well, the transformation, making the poison apple, embarking on the boat through the woods, the arrival at the dwarfs' cottage. But the moment the cottage is breached the ride simply throws out the rule book more thoroughly than any other Disney attraction, building on riffs on abstract memories of moments from the film until the Witch literally goes on a murdeous rampage and kills you.

What do you do with a ride like that? In Fantasyland? Mere steps away from Cinderella Castle, with a facade that suggests something far cuddlier than what it is, which is even more of a comfortless horror fest than The Haunted Mansion? Snow White's Adventures and Rolly Crump's brilliant, adjacent Mr. Toad's Wild Ride held down the fort for nearly twenty years as strange, subversive pockets of irrationality and nightmare logic in Disney's orderly theme park world.

Afterlife:

Amongst the Fantasyland installation team sent from Glendale to oversee work on the Florida construction effort was a young guy from the model shop named Tony Baxter. Following what he later described as an "apprentice period" with Coats, Baxter went on to work with Coats on a large rebuild effort of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction in 1974, and then rapidly ascended the corporate ladder in WED by overseeing Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, numerous Disneyland expansion proposals, several aspects of EPCOT Center and the 1983 Disneyland Fantasyland reboot. Baxter always positioned himself as a Fantasyland expert, and it is his version of Fantasyland at Disneyland and Disneyland Paris which most commentators believe is the best, most beautiful version. He also consistently and continually paid tribute to the Coats school of scenic design, inserting a full-on reference to Coats' Rainbow Caverns into Big Thunder Mountain (in addition to a swarm of those rat-eyes from Pirates and Snow White) and to Adventures Thru Inner Space in Star Tours.

But the Tony Baxter Fantasyland is based on work Herb Ryman, Dorthea Redmond, and Claude Coats did on the 1971 Fantasyland, and although he's rarely spoken about it, it is apparent that the 1971 Snow White's Adventures captured Baxter's imagination and attention more than almost any other ride. Here he is talking to Didier Ghez in 1995 about which attractions he worked on with Coats:

"The 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride and the Snow White ride in Florida. They just refurbished Snow White, changing it into a more sweet, happy ride. It was very scary. Many people said it was more frightening than the Haunted Mansion because it was witches all the time.  But the original one in Florida was really scary. It was my first project with Claude." (Source)

As we shall see, Baxter expended perhaps more effort than anyone else on recreating that original 1971 ride.

Now, back West, in a weird cycle of influences, just a few short years after opening components of Walt Disney World had already been exported back to Disneyland as part of an effort on WED's part to maximize their investment in the Florida Project. In the mid-70's, Fantasyland at Disneyland got a face lift; all of the original midcentury tents and canopies were reworked to reflect research and designs done for the 1971 Fantasyland:

top: 1960 bottom: 1978

Cinderella Carrousel at Magic Kingdom, 1971

Other elements to make the journey back West are difficult to track in this pre-home video era. Kenneth Sundberg, on his KenNetti tribute page, has turned up an interesting photo showing a Snow White figure in place in the original ride in the 1970's... of course, the figure is struck from the same mold as the Snow White built for the Mickey Mouse Revue.

There is no real evidence for anything like total figure replacement with the newer models for Snow White and Her Adventures, although it's not unreasonable to guess that besides the Snow White figure (who may have only been very briefly in place), minor figures like her forest friends or the vultures and skeletons could have eventually been replaced and made more like the newer models.

The 1983 Snow White reboot overseen by Baxter would manage to realize a full hybridization between the 1955 original attraction and its extremely unusual 1971 version, achieving an effective compromise between fidelity to the film and riffs on atmosphere and content. This 1983 version had two central mandates: introducing Snow White into the ride and dropping a stronger hint about the scary nature of the ride within. Baxter introduced a gothic stone facade and small pre-boarding dungeon scene to add a sinister element from the start, but the most famous and effective warning came direct from the Claude Coats version: positioned direct above the entrance is the same gag from the Florida loading area, with a sinister queen peeking out from behind curtains to glare at visitors below. The original incarnation of the gag may be gone, but its chilling effect lives on across the country.

The 1983 version, now called Snow White's Scary Adventures, makes good use of the 1955 and 1971 traditions, figures, and sets. Some of its best moments recall the 1971 ride perfectly, such as prudent re-use of the "mirror transformation" gag (Baxter's team improves it a bit by having the Queen's "false reflection" spin around too, which is a further layer of deception), a sudden appearance of the Witch rocketing out of nowhere on a boat (the 1983 version replicates the 1971 castle wall set piece in almost every detail), and a mildly hallucinatory trip through the diamond mine, although this version is cheerful, not frightening.


 Other elements have been toned down considerably. The Witch figures look reasonably naturalistic and close to the film instead of the green-hued red-eyed creatures of the Coats version. Snow White belatedly appears and is descended from the Mickey Mouse Revue figure, now holding a candle instead of a bird. The "Dwarfs on the Stairs" figures from Walt Disney World appear in the traditional "rock drop" finale, positioned so it now seems that the Witch is attempting to crush them instead of - as in 1955 and 1971 - the riders. There is a mine cart in the Seven Dwarfs Mine, but it does not attempt to mow us down. The trip through the frightening forest re-uses the Gracey/Crump crocodile logs and levitating eyes, but is considerably less intense than the 1971 ride. And reprising a Disneyland original gag, one which probably inspired the whole tone of the 1971 "Dark Cottage" scene, the Dwarfs Cottage offered only cold comfort as the Witch appears from inside offering a poisoned apple.


This excellent 1983 vintage version has considerable suspense and strum und drang without seeming too much like a mean trick. It replicates the pace of the 1955 version pretty well, with a beautiful first half before things really go south in the Queen's Castle. It became the template for all subsequent versions, and is a classic in its own way. One of its very best effects is unintentional: without sufficient space for a proper denouement, the ride ends with a clap of thunder, a shriek from the Witch, and a sudden ejection into the unloading area with a mural which merely indicates a happy ending for Snow White.

But it doesn't feel like the end, and it isn't: no matter how many times we ride, the Queen still glares down at us from on high above the entrance. The flight through the dark forest lasts forever.

Coming conceptually after the 1983 Disneyland version, but chronologically before it - opening six weeks before Snow White's Scary Adventures - the Tokyo Disneyland Snow White's Adventures is the true "missing link" between 1971 and 1983, a weird alternate reality where the two rides went on to cross-pollinate each other instead of the 1971 version being pushed off the map. There is no particular evidence of who put this version together, but I would not be surprised if Tony Baxter was behind it, using the superior budget and space of the Tokyo project to craft a tribute to the attraction that obsessed him. If the 1971 Florida ride was like a crazy impossible psychedelia rock single, the 1983 Japan version is a loving tribute by a cover band.

Most importantly, the Tokyo version takes pains to replicate the 1971 boarding area, with its gnarled trees, swirling clouds, and geometric landscape. It even replicates the shimmering plastic waterfall. Unlike the Coats mural of 1971, which was full of moody grays, greens, browns and blues, this version has a lot of pink and purple and can't quite match the furthest painted "depths" of the original, with trees that sort of fall off into far simpler Sleeping Beauty-derived geometric shapes and brighter colors and "textures" overall. But there is still a forced perspective dwarf house, a wishing well with a disembodied voice, and the blood-chilling moment where the Queen catches sight of you from on high, and those things are what matter.

What follows once inside is at times very close to the Florida original. We face a huge mirror before turning to witness the Queen's transformation. The Frightening Forest sequence is nearly exactly the same, with the demonic trees, floating eyes, banshee moans and eerie music. There is an eerie mine shaft full of creaking timbers, pulsating blacklit gems and a mine cart which only threatens to run out of control and hit us.

Other segments are direct from the 1983 ride. The extended trip through the dungeons takes the place of Florida's shorter but scarier version, and the Dwarfs and Snow White celebrate with the "Silly Song" inside their cottage, finally a true light on at the end of the forest. The ride ends with the 1983 cliff scene, and bizzarely interpolated just before is a static version of the "Witch inside the Cottage" gag from the 1955 ride - it must have impressed Baxter.


This version is interesting if perhaps frustrating. It includes the best parts of both rides but in the process can't find a consistent tone - it's neither as much of a horrorshow was the 1971 ride or as much of a storybook at the 1983 ride. A ride for Snow White completists and the curious, it's the only place left in the world where some of the power of Claude Coats' 1971 achievement can be experienced firsthand.

Happily Ever After?:

It would be ten years before another Snow White ride would open. Blanche Neige et les Sept Nains, at Disneyland Paris, is extremely close to the 1983 Disneyland ride, with some improvements. The forest has dancing fireflies, there is a proper happy ending, and this time Baxter able to make sure that that mine cart would roll forward and stop just short of crashing into riders exactly as it had in 1971, with the same sound effect.

That inspirational (some would say traumatic) mine cart would last only another two years back in Florida. In the 1990s in Fantasyland, frightening attractions were less likely to be looked kindly upon. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with its terrifying giant squid, fled the coop around the same time as Snow White's Adventures and a new, brighter color palette of pinks and purples began to appear across the area. Snow White's Scary Adventures opened in 1994, an attempt to lighten the attraction considerably and tell something closer to a recognizable version of its original story.

The beautiful load area was demolished except for the area immediately surrounding the wishing well and a new mural would cover up the rear area where the dwarf house once stood; this space was needed for the new opening (right) and ending scenes. The style of the remaining Coats material was altered to be far more painterly and something like the sumptuous pastel watercolors of the original 1937 film; all of the stylistic independence of the 1971 version would be totally removed.

The Mirror Transformation scene was reworked; riders now briefly faced the Magic Mirror, who set up the story with a bit of dialogue. Yet the Wicked Queen still faces away from us, looking in another mirror; which mirror is the Magic Mirror??

This Throne Room scene also has the distinction of being the only one to not begin with the Queen's eerie incantation of "Mirror, mirror, on the wall...". Instead she simply responds to the Magic Mirror: "Never!" and transforms, which simply doesn't fit the pacing of the scene that the track layout was designed to provide.


The dungeon was lopped in half, the Witch's laboratory now wedged into a corner previously occupied by a skeleton. The other skeleton was still there, but his jaw simply flapped sadly; the warning "Go back!" was removed.

The former cauldron scene space was reused and became part of the forest; now the Huntsman appeared in two dimensional flat form to warn Snow White to "run away, and never come back!" and a simple light-up scrim effect was used to make Snow White appear in a flash of lightning running through the forest; the attraction's first good idea. A much more sedate version of the Frightening Forest followed; the Witch glided slowly into view on a boat, and all of the Coats trees were painted over to appear less less menacing; one, which previously "fell" at riders, tilted forward ever so slowly.

It's worth pointing out here that compared to the 1971 ride or even the fairly talky 1983 ride, the Witch here is a veritable chatterbox, explaining the purpose of the poison apple in the dungeon, explaining how she's riding the boat to the seven dwarfs' cottage, and on and on. The only thing the Coats ride needed to set itself up was a trip around a wishing well, a static figure peeking down out of a window, and twelve words of exposition: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall -- I am the fairest one of all!

The dwarfs appeared to do their now-traditional Silly Song routine in the cottage, completing a cycle whereby those figures, sculpted for the 1971 Mickey Mouse Revue and re-used in the 1983 and 1992 rides, finally returned to Florida. Around the corner, the Witch figure had been bolted down in place in view at the window and the "basic" Snow White figure, now holding an apple instead of a candle or a bird, was present to be menaced. The stairs were still there but now unoccupied, but the scene felt weirdly unbalanced because it was designed and laid out in such a way that the movement of the cars naturally drew the eye to the staircase, which was no longer the focal point of the scene.


In this scene, the Witch was talking for practically the entire duration of it:

"That's right dearie, now take a bite, and all of your dreams will come true! Ha, ha! Now I'm the fairest one of all!"

That's almost twenty-five words coming "out" of a figure represented as a static prop in a room which felt very empty without the dwarfs on the stairs or the shadow on the wall, and the dialogue simply drew attention to the ride's weakest aspect: the nearly constantly static figures. This aspect is something the Coats and Baxter rides hid very well with staging and movement, but it was right out in the open from the first scene of this ride to the last.

From this point on, the track layout of the ride becomes all new to fit in a few new scenes; no longer would the cars increasingly "jump" away from each new danger. Possibly not co-incidentally, this last third was the weakest part of the ride.

The Fifth Witch figure was now bolted down in place amidst a new backdrop of cliffs and rocks; a nifty lightning effect added some life to the scene, but not enough to disguise the static nature of this prop. There was then a brief trip through the Dwarf's Mine and the traditional "rock drop" finale, although two of the seven fleet of dwarfs were used in the mine shaft and not replaced for the cliff, making the scene feel weirdly depopulated.

After a quick trip through the black-out room we came across the new happy ending: a static tableau of Prince Charming kissing Snow White on her funeral bier - a genuine new addition to the Snow White ride heritage! - and a final scene of Snow White and her Prince in a painted mural heading off to their castle, acceptably enlivened by a projected effect. Two, not seven, static dwarfs appeared to the right to send them off, and although I don't intend to be mean about it, these two dwarfs always appeared to me to be cast-off store display figures. Dopey waved from a bridge over the exit doors, ending the ride on a high note.




Snow White's Scary Adventures of 1994 was an acceptable effort at making a less-scary ride out of one of the scariest, weirdest WED rides ever built. The fatal problem with the ride is that almost anything that moved in it was left over from the 1971 ride, which was full of motion - simple motion, but nothing like the static figures constantly "talking" which filled this one. I cannot think of any Disney dark ride with fewer moving props, with such a heavy feeling of stasis. The ride made an unfair impression of cheapness because of this. The overall impression was of moving past beautifully painted window dioramas instead of a fully realized ride.


 And the 1994 ride was beautifully painted, and this was truly the best thing about it. Every surface glowed with lush detail, carefully crafted perspective tricks, and wonderful colors - this was the reason to ride, the reason why it worked at all. The scenic shop really outdid themselves, with fascinating little details in the Dwarfs' Cottage, beautiful rays of sunlight in the finale, and blue cold stones and hanging curtains in the Queen's Castle.

Despite running on "hardware" just as limited, the Coats ride succeeded above and beyond it because his version was more about atmosphere and setting than character - dark, twisting trees, grasping branches, swirling clouds, moonlight shining through windows, and eyes in the darkness - these are the "stars" of Coats' ride, where we are lost and alone in the dark, pursued by a Witch we only ever have fleeting glimpses of while the threat of the foe permeates the air all around us. Like the evil Yeti pursuing us downhill through the ice-caverns of the Matterhorn, our imaginations supplied the movement. In the 1994 version, which never fully exploited the wonderful track layout it was given, our imaginations never contributed much more than imagining a ride with a better budget.


Unload Point:


Snow White's Scary Adventures in Florida closed about a month ago, and the wisdom of this closure still has yet to be proven. It certainly was not the 1971 ride, or even as good as the 1983 ride: neither quite appropriate for young children nor well-executed enough for adults, the ride none the less had fans and adherents. There is indeed something deeply sad about losing this tangible link not only with 1955, but also 1971 and 1937: one cannot tell the story of Snow White's Scary Adventures without telling the story of every version, the film that inspired it, and the fortunes of the Walt Disney Company itself.

Despite the flaws of the 1994 version, it still enacted the rituals of the Snow White ride very well. That's what the rides truly are: rituals, ride through invocations. The offer of the poisoned apple, the flight through the forest, the dwarfs in the cottage, the threat of a falling rock - these are concepts which have submerged into the "cultural memory" of a Disney theme park experience, something that we have come to expect.

The new ride, opening in Florida in the coming years as part of an overall expansion effort, will take the form of a roller coaster through a mine shaft and across meadows, lakes, and so on. It will certainly be a ride of greater general interest than a compromised form of an old dark ride. I have no doubt it will be fun and it will certainly be beautiful. But will it satisfy on the level of the scary old dark ride? Will the Witch offer us an apple? Will she try to drop a diamond on our heads? Right now, these are open questions.

Although maligned and mocked by various wags for not being as sophisticated as most Disney offerings, Snow White's (Scary) Adventures is a very complex part of the history of the entire company, a very complex weave in a massive, growing tapestry. The space which it occupied in Florida, where legendary Disney designers at the height of the power of WED Enterprises crafted a bizarre and ruthlessly scary ride which has been the source point for all others which followed it, has now been gutted down to its wall studs and something new will shortly appear within. But that ride is one of those things that every Disneyland-style park has as a birthright.

On the balance of evidence, I now humbly elect the 1971 Snow White's Adventures as one of the forgotten classics of classic-era Disney design. Few who rode it have ever forgotten it, and it casts a long shadow over the subsequent history of the dimensional representations of Snow White. At the heart of the Magic Kingdom, behind its' cheerful facade, was an inventive, strange and ghoulish dark heart of the Kingdom, direct from the fertile imagination of Claude Coats.

Take a bite, and all of your dreams will come true!

Photo Credits:
1955 Skeleton: Dan Olson, Long-Forgotten. 1960, 1970, 1980 Disneyland Fantasyland: Dave DeCaro, Daveland Web. Claude Coats Fine Art: ClaudeCoats.com. Florida photos: Mike Lee, Widen Your World. Tokyo Disneyland: Chris Calabrese, Tokyo Disneyland Fansite (accessed via Archive.Org) 1994 On-Ride: Martin Smith video, footage by Dan Warren, MartinsVids.Net. Open 1994 Ride: Len Testa, Flickr. Closed 1994 Ride: Cory Disbrow, Dateline Walt Disney World. Snow White, Scary Adventures, Mine Train stills, art & promotional shots: Walt Disney Company

Photo Credit: Ryan Rewasiewicz via ImagineeringDisney

 (This post is an addendum to The Jungle Cruise: The Early Years, which has been updated to link to this new information)

Some people spend all their time finding ways to cure ailments or finding new atoms or researching their ancestors. Me, I just came off a multi-year quest devoted to a staircase near the Jungle Cruise boathouse. That's just how I roll.

Remember the mysterious Jungle Cruise steps I spoke about at such great length last summer? I may finally have all of the information in place to answer with some accuracy this longstanding Jungle Cruise mystery. So to refresh your memory, here's a photo of the steps barely visible at the back of this photo, which rose to the Jungle Cruise's second story near the load point:


The question is whether or not this second level of the queue building was either intended for or, moreover, actually used for guest queue. This is our first mystery.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's look closely at that rear staircase. The absolute best view we have of it unfortunately comes to us from a 1974 Walt Disney World souvenir film, which is ironic in that this particular architectural feature didn't even make it into 1974, having been removed during the 1973 queue rebuild concurrent with Pirates of the Caribbean's construction. This footage was likely shot in 1971 and 1972 as part of the rushes for "The Magic of Walt Disney World". Here it is, visible to the left:


Yes, so, I've proved again and again that the stairs existed. But these steps aren't the only lingering Jungle Cruise mystery: check out this home movie from December, 1972. Once again it's 8mm so the quality isn't so hot, but it provides, amongst other things, a very good overview of something I previously hadn't been able to find: a view of the front of the Jungle Cruise entrance complex prior to 1973.


And here is a reverse view of the area where the photographer was standing from a 1972 paperback souvenir guide:


See the shadows on the ground at the bottom left? Those are shadows of the drumming Tiki Gods seen above. The lady in the red plaid blouse in the upper film frames is probably standing about where the person all in red is standing in the bottom promotional image. Those Tikis Gods are our second mystery.

This 1972 home movie demonstrates two things I had previously not suspected: that the entire front section of the Jungle Cruise queue was added in 1973 and that the original sloped entryway to the Jungle Cruise courtyard from the western approach was dramatically wider, with a far gentler slope, than the current "staircase" arrangement:

Hat tip to EpcotExplorer

Here's a map showing what was added in 1973. The original building is in blue, and the additions in red:


So what we're looking at is a 100% increase in queue space over the estimated requirements of 1971. The revelation that the northernmost section is "new" changes the assumptions we can make about why the arrangement of the courtyard changed and, especially, that longstanding question about why and when the "drumming tikis" migrated West; up the hill to their current location. From the photos above it's pretty easy to estimate how the Tikis were initially situated in the direct center of a pretty open courtyard with a wide, long ramp:


The tikis would of course been placed in such a way to cause as minor a traffic disturbance as possible, but you can only push them around in the above simulation so much and still it's obvious to see how the mere construction of the forward-facing queue extension required not only the reconstruction of the hill into more compact steps but pushed the tikis out of the already-crowded courtyard in 1973.

Until additional evidence appears, this is the most logical answer to our second mystery: the Tikis moved because the forward-facing part of the Jungle Cruise queue expansion and the new narrower, steeper steps which replaced the original gradual slope would have required them to be moved anyway and it made more sense to get them out of a congested courtyard.

Today the courtyard is very close to something like this:


Let's take a second look at that 8mm composite:


Besides the very interesting original signs, this shows something even better. Remember that this is December 1972, at the peak of the busy season. Walt Disney World has been open for 14 months and a new round of construction is sweeping the park to bring air conditioned shade structures to such popular attractions as Haunted Mansion and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

That sea of humanity outside the Jungle Cruise? That's the line for Adventureland's only E-Ticket attraction. The line is so huge it's spilled out beyond the official boundaries of the queue and is filling part of the courtyard. Yet there's clearly nobody in the upstairs part of the queue! And my longstanding question bites the dust. If Disney isn't using that space for queue with a line like this, then they never did. That upstairs section was purely decorative and the stairs were removed because they were in the way of perfectly good queuing space.

Just for, you know, fun, here's two other Magic Kingdom E-Ticket press photos with opening year out-of-control lines visible:

And everyone had fun in the sun that day

So that is a lot of questions that 4-second little clip of home movies answered. But wait, it resolved a third question!

In the months leading up to pre-opening, WED promoted the Jungle Cruise heavily in local publications such as Orlando-land and The Orlando Sentinel, and they tended to circulate a press blurb that was pretty standardized and even ended up, in part, in the Tropical Serenade pre-show. You can read the whole thing at Widen Your World, but here's a relevant snippet:

"Amid all the excitement, there are the sounds of the jungle animals, including the noisy but unseen claw and fang combat of two ferocious jungle cats.  Nearby, natives rise from the undergrowth, threatening with spears poised, while back around the last bend painted warriors continue the ritual of their ceremonial dances near burning skulls, swaying to the mysterious throbbing of tribal drums."

That description is pretty accurate except for the burning skulls. Yet Marc Davis' concept art of the Jungle Cruise, art which was otherwise realized very faithfully for this ride, included clusters of skulls impaled on spears and set ablaze. The fact that this single detail is apparently missing draws attention to itself. Were there ever burning skulls in the Jungle Cruise?

It's pretty hard to see exactly clearly, so I'll let the grainy film footage speak for itself:


That looks like a regular torch to me. Pretty hard to tell if there was ever a skull component to it. Wait, I'll bet the promotional Pana-Vue slides will help us out:



Case closed!

"What If" in Disney theme park developments is never really a very fun place to explore. What tends to get the lion's share of attention is lost areas and attractions like Thunder Mesa, or Fire Mountain, WESTcot, or the long-delayed Indiana Jones Adventure in Florida (and yes, it was real).

Walt Disney World has a second history of abandoned hotel concepts. By far the most famous of these is the long-deferred Asian Hotel, which never did materialize on its rectangular plot of land...

Recognizing, however, that the public will always prefer to stay within the "Vacation Kingdom" site, the Company will soon begin architectural work on the third theme resort, the 500-room Asian Hotel. Construction is planned for 1974, with the formal opening date to take place that year. (1972 Annual Report)

 ...and its' sister hotel concepts, the Venetian and the Persian, appear to have never come half as close to actual realization.


Or we can talk about Cypress Point Lodge, which eventually evolved into Wilderness Lodge and was planned for the same plot of land (incidentally the original Campground site). Progress City, USA has already covered Cypress Point very well.

Other planned developments exist in only frustratingly vague details. The northern end of Fort Wilderness has always been called "Settlement" despite having no buildings beyond Pioneer Hall and the Trading Post, but there were plans for a fully-realized Western township of shopping and dining as early as 1972....


 ....And for a lodge-like traditional hotel as early as 1971!


There are currently plans for a Vacation Club property at Fort Wilderness, making a traditional hotel expansion of the Campground possibly the longest-delayed concept in all of Walt Disney World that still has a chance of getting built... going on four decades now.

One thing for which I never had any leads worth tracking down was the second concept for Phase 2 of the successful Walt Disney World Village. In the mid 70's there was a very real and very probable concept for expanding Lake Buena Vista with monorails, Peoplemovers, and an urban mass transit station linking Walt Disney World with planned state transit from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona Beach.


This would be concurrent with an expansion of the Village past the Empress Lilly, then the westward terminus of the complex, along with an office plaza of thirteen buildings (of which only one was actually built, the SunBank building) and a complex of condominiums and spaces for small businesses.


 Had all this gone forward, the result would have been, allowing for changing taste, a more or less successful realization of Walt Disney's EPCOT city. The problem is that Disney had branded the whole thing Lake Buena Vista and it looked nothing like that Herb Ryman painting everyone in the state of Florida had seen back in 1967.


This quote, from Orlando Magazine in 1982 and brilliantly written by Edward L. Prizer, captures Disney's EPCOT dilemma, and their response to it, perfectly:

"I kept thinking about what Dick Nunis had said that afternoon on the promenade at World Showcase:

"We are still haunted by a painting." Mr. Nunis, who is responsible for all of Disney's theme parks and resorts, was talking about the rendering you see on these pages. He was talking about the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow as it was first depicted to the public: a city under a vast dome [ed: we now know this is incorrect] with rings extending outward: shopping areas, offices, apartments, homes.

What did Walt Disney say?


His words were vague and open to many interpretations: "...an experimental prototype community that will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people will actually live a life they can't find anywhere else today. Everything in EPCOT will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who will work, live, and play here..."


On the promenade that day, Dick Nunis told me:


"It was really just a case of Walt saying, "Herbie, draw me something I can talk about..""

Lake Buena Vista's full realization  ended up being delayed in early 1976 as Disney made a commitment to move forward on what was then known as the EPCOT Theme Center and World Showcase projects, which resulted in a massive effort all across the country and around the world, with a new base on Washington DC, as Disney went about getting into bed with multinational corporations and international governments. Disney was, at the time, still very much an intimate family-run business with a single satellite in Florida. This was probably the most complex and ambitious project that the company ever had or would ever embark on.

When the dust settled in 1982, Disney was in a precarious financial situation. The final result of this huge effort was EPCOT Center, a massively expensive World's Fair which was a bigger success with the public than the press. The Studio division had hardly released a successful film in years and corporate raiders were starting to close in. Disney was in a more conservative mood than they had been six years earlier and the Lake Buena Vista project still sat incomplete.

In mid 1982, ideas began to swirl about a new direction for the Village's expansion. How about something reliable, something Disney had already tested, like... New Orleans? New Orleans Square at Disneyland is still the most beautiful area of that park, and even if they had let the opportunity to duplicate that success in Florida slip by in 1971, the presence of a huge Mississippi riverboat on the outskirts of the Village proved too great a temptation to allow it to slip by again.

For years, the only empirical proof I had that this idea was an actual possibility was a snippet of this May 1982 interview with Nunis:

“But what [Walt Disney] really wanted to do [in Florida] was develop an area where all types of corporations, governments, and academia could come together to really try and solve some of the problems that exist in the world today. We started with the recreation area, and then began the community, which is Walt Disney World Village, and now we’re building the center … Epcot Center, and we’re going to connect it all with the monorail system. […] In addition, we have some dreams for the Walt Disney World Village. From the Empress Lilly, we’re going into a New Orleans street, and you’ll walk right into a beautiful New Orleans hotel.”

 This was the sole tantalizing clue at the end of a cold trail. Thankfully, luck was on my side, and years later I have happened upon a number of renderings of the Lake Buena Vista New Orleans Square.

These are extremely poor quality, probably third generation photocopies, and I've done my best to make them viewable with digital manipulation. This is why they are in sepia instead of black and white, as I've found it makes them much easier to appreciate.

So, for the first time, let's take a stroll down Nunis' New Orleans street as it was conceived over thirty years ago.



This is the entrance area, and the Empress Lilly and her original circular drop-off area is still visible there in the back. In the extreme foreground the natural water line and water taxi dock is apparent. This heavily forested area would make use of Florida's natural resources - chiefly, being swampy and very heavily vegetated. Those who know Walt Disney World well will recognize this as the area which was later carved up and paved over for Pleasure Island.

On the extreme right is the northernmost verandas of what appears to have been called the "Garden Restaurant":


Probably aptly named, this restaurant overlooking the Village Lagoon would have been quite the showplace. This would have been the facade on the lagoon side, and here's another view, probably as seen approaching it from the Empress Lilly side:


Continuing along the waterfront, the outskirts of the city come into view. This is labeled "Cafe Orleans" and probably would have been a duplicate of Disneyand's wonderful informal cafe:


Shops along the bottom floor of all the buildings:


In the center of the activity, the Royale Circle:


And yes, that is the facade of the Disneyland Pirates of the Caribbean back there. No points for guessing what's inside:


Up above the streets, here's a view of the proposed accommodations on Level Two:


Yes, that's right, WED was prepared to recycle Dorthea Redmond's Disney family suite designs into actual guest accommodations in Florida.

Probably near the back of the complex, guests could explore the Rue Royale and Crafts Alley:


And the tantalizing prospect of the Preservation Hall Jazz Lounge:


Remember that this was an era when Disney was very successfully booking top-flight jazz acts to appear in the lounge of the Village Restaurant, a gambit which was so successful that they had to institute a cover charge to deter music students from around the state from descending en masse. This New Orleans area was cleverly conceived to take advantage of the Empress Lilly, the popular jazz acts, the natural Florida environment and lake, and introduce some traditional, identifiably "Disney" texture and atmosphere into a complex which was often cited for lacking it - the Village.

Sometimes, things never happen for good reasons. EPCOT's Space Pavilion would have been a hugely costly undertaking even by that park's standards and I don't think I need to elaborate on why EPCOT's Israel pavilion never materialized. Cypress Point Lodge would have been vastly inferior to Wilderness Lodge, and so in that way we can say that the project evolved into something better. The only thing we can say the New Orleans area evolved into is the Dixie Landings / Port Orleans hotels in 1992, which is such an obvious downgrade that we run the risk of undervaluing what is good about those resorts as they were built.

I admit that I've got nothing on this one. The space was partially used for Pleasure Island, an Eisnerian attempt to compete with Orlando-area nightclub district Church Street Station, and the rest of the area eventually became West Side, which, if it can be believed, is even uglier than Pleasure Island.

But Lake Buena Vista's New Orleans area is such an obviously good idea that I'm amazed it never made it off the drawing board, at least in part. Pleasure Island had burned itself out in less than a decade; had this area been built it would be one of the major "crown jewels" of the Florida property.

Pleasure Island, West Side, and what was once the Village are currently being eyed for a large redevelopment project. I don't know about you, but I'd readily give four Pleasure Islands for something with the taste, elegance, and classic appeal of these long-dead expansion plans, from the very tail end of the era when Disney's themed design efforts didn't come with ten-year expiration dates.

A few months ago, on Twitter, where it seems all the interesting stuff happens these days, I shared a vintage Haunted Mansion photo I found especially beautiful. It's from 1972 and I can't remember where I got it, but here it is:


In response, my friend Epcot Explorer commented that as great as the photo is, it's unfortunate that you can see the show building. My response was the same it usually is when people make this comment: Why do you care? This led off on a long discussion about show buildings, their ways and doings. Eventually it led to this post.

Now, to me, show buildings - those large featureless warehouses which house the Disney attractions - are a way of life, and I have accepted them as features of the Magic Kingdom. They're there at Disneyland -- for generations guests have entered Disneyland by walking past them - but in Florida, for better or worse, they're more conspicuous by nature of the park's very wide walkways and less mature foliage. If Disneyland were laid out the way Magic Kingdom is, there'd be show buildings poking out all over the place.

For four decades it's been possible to walk to the top of the Main Street Train Station, look off to your right, and see this:

Tomorrowland Pokin'

Or walk over by the Chapeau and see this:


Even when I was a kid I knew about this one, and yes, it is ugly. I didn't actually realize what it is until I was an adult, however, and that's a point I'll return to shortly. It's very true that compared to Disneyland, Magic Kingdom has more places where the fact that you're walking the perimeter of blocks of huge warehouses, especially on the East side of the park where foliage and textured architecture is less common, is evident. This, of course, makes Magic Kingdom an ideal place to engage the "show building question". Tokyo Disneyland is actually the most ideal place, but I haven't got a plane ticket to Japan in my itinerary anytime soon.

Magic Kingdom also has weird places where the theming just sort of rambles out, like this very odd gate at the end of Main Street's Center Street:


This photo makes it look way worse than it does in person. The eye is naturally drawn towards complex shapes and patterns and away from plain surfaces, so I guarantee you very very few people ever notice just how stark that covered area is. It's tucked way back at the end of the street where you'd have to go looking for it.

Then there's spots you have to do some searching for to see:


You can't even see that one from ground level, you have to go up the train station and look past all that beautiful architecture and two huge trees. But it's there, hidden in plain sight.

The Enchanted Grove, in Fantasyland, offers a unique example. As you approach from either side, foliage and architecture hides the offending blank wall:


This is a good moment to observe how the effect is supposed to work: painted a neutral shade of green or brown, the eye simply doesn't bother to differentiate a plain wall from the sky or some other vague backdrop we tend to overlook. The eye just slides right over it.

From the front of the building, the architecture does a reasonably good job distracting us from what's behind it:

No Wall Back Here!!!

But approach from the right angle and keep looking up, and there's no way you could miss it:


And this is actually an improvement over how it originally looked:


Obviously those thin trees and grassy hill were supposed to grow in and disguise the show building on the right, but that it didn't last long enough to end up happening that way. The Tudor-style building went up in 1973 to house the Fantasyland Portrait Artists.

Fantasyland, in general, hides their show buildings in a consistent, interesting way. Each "tournament tent" facade consists of three stepped layers: the tent itself, then two levels of "castle wall" interspersed with towers and turrets. In areas like Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, and Small World, you never see bare or blank wall. It's supposed to look like this:


Looks pretty good, right? That really does look like part of a castle.

In the central area around the Carousel, there's always been a lot of open space and you end up seeing some of those areas that were only lightly "sketched in":


That's the top of Snow White. To me, that still looks pretty good, but from other angles it can get pretty dicey:

Meeh

Here's the part of Mickey Mouse Revue / Philharmagic you're not supposed to see:


That stonework looks pretty good, but those banners were put in to distract your eye away from the unthemed rear wall, which to me indicates that WED knew they had a problem with the central courtyard. Also please note that until recently, this view was impossible, but as part of the Fantasyland Expansion, Imagineering removed a good number of spreading trees from the area around the Carrousel (why?).

Here's one of my very favorites: trees and architecture do a very good job of hiding the Hall of Presidents show building, looming behind the Sleepy Hollow Refreshments seating area:


Here's where it gets sort of brilliant: directly below that visible gap, inside the seating area, is a window looking out directly on -- a blank wall. How many times have you seen this without really seeing it?


On the Riverboat side, Imagineering added some brick pattern and railings to the top of the Hall of Presidents in an effort to disguise it, and it works sort of well. It looked like this in 1971:


I find this another completely forgivable one. Imagineering calls these colors "Go Away Green" and "Look Away Gray", and they are specially mixed to strike our brains as being, literally, nothing worth looking at.

Of course there's those spots of the park that have perhaps a bit less texture than we'd like:


And there's always the possibility of looking in really odd places and seeing those weird spots where one facility connects to another in a perfunctory way. Both of these visible from a covered breezeway off Main Street:



And speaking of Main Street, the big daddy of them all is visible in plain sight; all you have to do is exit Tomorrowland through the Plaza Pavilion and look left to see the back of Main Street:


But here's the thing, and this is where my point begins: WHY are you looking to the left?? Have you seen what's off there to the right???


Why are you spending time looking at an ugly flat wall? Nobody else is, why should you?

It's time to talk about magic, and no, I don't mean Disney Magic®, I mean stage magic. What is stage magic? I'm sure none of you are under any real life belief that the magic hat really is empty, right? What is magic? It's misdirection. Penn and Teller define misdirection as knocking over the scenery on stage left while the Amazing Vanishing Duck is yanked offstage to stage right. Of course, if you don't look stage left, the illusion is ruined. But if you aren't willing to go along with the illusion, why are you there in the first place?

Disney is magic in the sense that we pay good money to believe that impossible things can happen. Some of the illusions of creaky, but we love them anyway not because they're perfect, but because they're fun.

I very much believe this is the attitude WED Enterprises took to their show buildings: a quite necessary but forgivable offense, and I'm pretty sure they were following Walt Disney's lead. More recent generations of Imagineers have been far less confident. In the early 90s, a number of clever (and not so clever) techniques were employed at Disneyland Paris to hide show buildings, and many of these were then brought back over to Disneyland in the same decade. As a result it's much more difficult to find the seams at Disneyland; they've been papered over with props, gates, trees and other visual obstructions. I wish I still had available to post here a certain great vintage photo of the New Orleans Square train station; you can see right where the theming terminated in a stark blank wall. This was during Walt's time.

It's true that recent Imagineering is much more likely to thoroughly hide show buildings - a great example, also at Walt Disney World, is Dinosaur/Countdown to Extinction at Animal Kingdom. The berm that hides the connection between the facade and show building is sufficiently convincing that you never even think to ask where the rest of the ride is.

What now?

That's a good illusion, and there's ones just like it in modern, more sophisticated theme parks like Islands of Adventure and Tokyo DisneySEA. It's true: modern theme parks and designs teach us to view show buildings as liabilities.

But, you know, it's one thing to build your attraction so that your show building is impossible to see, and it's another to build your attraction with a show building that nobody ever sees. The public isn't stupid; they don't think the animals on the Jungle Cruise are real, but the simple fact is that there are tens of thousands of people roaming around the Magic Kingdom daily who never see any of these massive gray warehouses.

Let's be honest: if you're on this blog and reading this now, you are not the general public, you are a specialist. This is written for an erudite, sophisticated, and moreover, acclimated audience of theme park goers who are inevitably a bit jaded. To us, we notice these things more. We dwell on them. They're imperfections in an otherwise perfect world.

Theme parks, after all, rely on novelty and surprise to maintain their illusions. If you're like me and you've been to the Magic Kingdom hundreds of times and crawled through most of its' innards, we're less likely to look at that castle. We are more likely to be bothered by obvious show buildings.

But I don't want you to see these things as liabilities, I want you to see them as badges of merit. Next time you're at Enchanted Grove, stand there for twenty minutes and watch everyone not seeing the huge blank wall above their heads. Marvel that the illusion still works. That's it, that's your proof right there of the staying power of the theme parks: there can be huge seams showing - vast expanses of unthemed infrastructure - and everyone looks away just as the designers intended. It's real magic.

Disney goes to great lengths to conceal their men behind the curtains. The ghosts in the Haunted Mansion are real. If there's Pirates, you must have gone back in time. The rain in the Tiki Room may just be from a recycled faucet, but it continues to enchant and perplex. But just because we know the man is there behind the curtain, that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the theatrics anyway. Sometimes, the most remarkable trickery sits right out there in plain sight waiting to be discovered.

In the northeast of Magic Kingdom, for some time now a new area has been slowly taking shape. No longer a fully sovereign entity from Fantasyland, Storybook Circus has been expanding to fill the footprint of what once was the park's absolute nadir of themed areas: Mickey's Toontown Fair. Toontown was largely groan-worthy, a middling collection of half-ideas. Storybook Circus is, with some qualifications, pretty excellent, and this despite having a smaller area and a chief purpose no more ambitious than when this space was occupied by Toon houses. Yet the Circus is undoubtably more compelling and has been very well reviewed, and really digging into what makes this area work beyond the usual superlatives of "color!" and "texture!" is an experiment well worth carrying out. Let's get to it.

Storybook Circus is what one could call a "microland" - an area of minor square footage with a unique theme often presented as a sort of side-attraction to a larger area, usually designed exclusively to anchor a major attraction - Caribbean Plaza is one example, and Bear Country, at Disneyland, can be seen as another. Storybook Circus houses a number of attractions aimed at children, none of which are really much better than "C ticket" level attractions - Dumbo, a kiddie coaster, a train station, and a water play area. What distinguishes these "C" tickets is that they are given "E" level treatment in Storybook Circus.

But to really dig into the accomplishment of Storybook Circus, we have to first reacquaint ourselves with the history of Disney's "official" kiddie zones.

It used to be that the totality of the experience of a Disney park was aimed at the entire family, and the whole experience was understood to be, in some ways, juvenile, regressive, a return to youthful wonder. There have always been exceptions - the Great Moments with Mr. Lincolns and Hall of Presidents of the world - but these were in the minority. Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom were designed to be of interest to people of all ages, and this accounts for their staying power.

The rift began, I think, in 1982. EPCOT Center was the very first Disney theme park to address itself to a specifically adult audience, where Bass ale replaced Pepsi and epicurian dining supplanted burgers and hot dogs. In response, Magic Kingdom began to swing in a more juvenile direction, a process fulfilled by the opening of Mickey's Birthdayland in 1988.

Yes, Mickey's Birthdayland. Mickey's Birthdayland was created to ostensibly celebrate the 60th birthday of Mickey Mouse, and was carved out of a small access road between 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Grand Prix, achieved by shortening the car race attraction by several hundred feet. It consisted of a petting zoo, hedge maze, some tents, very crude "Duckburg" facades, and the main attraction - Mickey's House, which was a walkthrough exhibit comparable in concept to the Swiss Family Treehouse with a Mickey stage show at the very back. There was also a separate tent which housed an opportunity to meet Mickey in his dressing room.

Why his dressing room? Because after leaving his house you'd enter a warren of tents which housed a large stage where the "Minnie's Surprise Party" show would be performed, making the separate dressing room attraction a logical extension of the stage - truthfully, the reason for the area to exist. It's worth dwelling on that for just a moment because each new version of the "Meet Mickey" attraction in its various guises has never really strayed from the dressing room concept, one which was only beholden to the stage and the area's temporary nature to exist.

But "Meet Mickey" outgrew its intended purpose. From the late 50's until the late 80's, meeting Mickey was largely a randomized affair, much as meeting other characters was until fairly recently, where one could walk by any old Magic Kingdom facade and unexpectedly find Mickey standing nearby. It was a spontaneous process, one open to chance and improvisation, which is why it captured the imagination of the public. But it was not until Mickey established a permanent headquarters and guests were told that all they had to do was get in line and be guaranteed an "audience" with Mickey that this simple side-activity began to morph into something ominously important. Today there is hardly a single spontaneous character interaction left anywhere in the theme parks, so Mickey's Birthdayland actually is the start of a massive shift in the public's perception of the code of conduct of these costumed mascots.

Birthdayland was otherwise hardly important or revolutionary. I saw it many times as a child and I can hardly remember anything about it except that when you reached a dead end in the hedge maze, you would get squirted by a colorful plastic pole. Although it was a temporary area done on a big scale, it was still a temporary area. Seen today, the most interesting thing about the Birthdayland area is its indebtedness to the Disney comic books. Mickey's Birthdayland was "set" in Duckburg, USA, and the style of the buildings and scenic details was a loving tribute not to Duck Tales, but to the famous Uncle Scrooge comics by Carl Barks. This meant that the area did have a classic "Disney" feel appropriate to the Magic Kingdom, even if the "Disney" feel was decidedly... low rent. That would have been well and good and the area would have eventually faded out, the Mickey attraction relocated, and all could have been well. But even before the area was rechristened "Mickey's Starland" and made an official permanent part of the Magic Kingdom, something happened to alter its destiny. Just four days after Mickey's Birthdayland opened in 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit premiered in theaters.

Roger Rabbit was a huge success, popularizing the word "toon" as an identifier of a "cartoon being" and posited that these characters were outsiders of the Hollywood community living in an urban ghetto on the bad side of town. This is a funny farcical concept that the film plays off well, creating an environment that the Looney Tunes, Disney, and Fleisher characters could all credibly co-inhabit for the purposes of a single film. The important sequence to us comes near the one-hour mark where Eddie Valiant drives into Toontown:


This sequence is a confection for the film where the animation staff has managed to insert a staggering number of references to classic cartoon output. The stylization of the sequence overall more strongly suggests something more akin to early Termite Terrace or Fleisher animation than anything Disney ever did:

"Who Framed Roger Rabbit", 1988

"Red Hot Momma", Max Fleischer Studio, 1934

This is in service of the film, where Toontown has a definate hellish atmosphere despite all the color and motion. It's actually threatening, a parody of film noir, especially in the "alley" sequence modeled on Dick Tracy:


This sequence may be the last vestige of a great American tradition of grotesque animation. Disney did work with menacing atmosphere in cartoons like Donald and the Gorilla, and outright horror sequences in everything from Snow White to The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, but the grotesque shapes, colors, and motion of Toontown is largely absent from classic Disney animation. Here's a relevant background from Donald's Lucky Day, an atmospheric 1939 short, which has similarities to Roger Rabbit:


But most of Disney animation shows animal characters living in modern suburbia, with houses and props only just this side of unreal. They are, in short, plausibly naturalistic. If you watch any old Mickey, Donald, or Goofy cartoon made between 1934 and 1955, you're going to see something like this:

"Mickey and the Seal", 1948

Bambi, for another example, goes to great lengths to depict credible wild animals living in a bucolic but naturalistic forest. By contrast, Warner Brothers cartoons tended to depict Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc as wild animals living in a cartoony but still identifiably natural environment. The Fleischer studio, located in New York and staffed by hard-drinking blue collar men, tended to depict hellish urban landscapes or totally surreal phantasmagorias: left to their own devices, the Fleisher studio created broken lamp posts, boarded up windows, and bars filled with skeletons. These are credible environments, but they're also credibly run down, abandoned, and condemned:

Both from "Bimbo's Initiation", Max Fleischer Studio, 1931

Take a moment to look at the loving detail put into loose floorboards, that crooked picture staked to the wall, the menacing tableau of the knife and cards at the front, or that dusty old kicked-up floor rug at the back. Think of how much easier it would have been to draw a rug that lay nicely and orderly flat on the floor, in the way the Disney studio would have done. This is what Toontown was channeling to derive it's hellish urban atmosphere. Toontown was a fantastic invention for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but treating the concept as canonical across the board and good for all American animation does a great disservice to the Disney, Warners, and Lantz characters who also appeared in the film, all of whom emerged from unique aesthetic styles and studios.

So in fact the best thing about Mickey's Birthdayland is that, by getting out the door just before the Roger Rabbit craze hit, it managed to realize Disney cartoons in a classically Disney way. It really did look like Mickey's house, the way you always imagined it:


When Disney tried again five years later in Disneyland, the area was no longer Duckburg, USA, the traditional Disney township, and was instead Mickey's Toontown. And Michael Eisner - the man who re-christened a Song of the South-themed log flume "Splash Mountain" because his first major success as Disney CEO was the 1984 comedy Splash - Eisner made sure that the style of the area closely matched that seen in another box office hit:


It probably seems like I'm being very down on Roger Rabbit, and I'm not. The film is wonderful, and it's grown into a real classic. But replicating the style of the "Toontown" sequence into an entire area which only the Disney characters inhabit was a real mistake. That style was only ever devised to make a universe where Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny - two characters who starred in very different films from very different studios - live in the same place and seem credible. The style of Who Framed Roger Rabbit is not that of Disney animation. It wasn't even released as a Disney film, but under the "Touchstone" banner invented by Ron Miller in the early 80s.

There is also something to be said about the wisdom of attempting to recreate this particular visual style at all: buildings designed to move and sway and sing are one thing, but building the style necessarily involves freezing it into plaster and lathe and in that process something is lost.

Yet by 1993, the "Toontown" concept had already spread like crab grass. Some of you may remember the "Bonkers" cartoon of the early 90s, with Bonkers being a Toontown cop, an unacknowledged riff of the Roger Rabbit franchise. What Disneyland built in 1993 is what people of that era would have expected to see, and there is of course a Roger Rabbit ride nearby to motivate the style. But doing so means that the "Toontown" concept was replacing over sixty years of visual continuity of films and in cartoons and even theme parks. Despite the name, this was in no way "Mickey's" Toontown.

For Walt Disney World's 25th anniversary in 1996, Mickey's Starland was converted into Mickey's Toontown Fair. Along with the genius idea to turn the castle into a pink birthday cake, it was a year of highly suspect "birthday gifts". Toontown Fair was certainly more elaborate and unique than Starland, introducing a kiddie coaster and a very nice Minnie's House attraction to compliment Mickey's House. It was ambitious, yes. But with ambition came clutter.

The idea itself made very little sense. The "Birthday Tents" sort of made sense as places where birthdays conceivably could be held, and in the span since 1988 had achieved some importance as revenue centers for the Magic Kingdom - the "Meet Mickey" tent in particular. Meet Mickey was moved to the tent nearest the railroad tracks so the "Mickey's House" queue led directly into it, and the house itself was remodeled at this time. This is a shame because this remodel was a significant downgrade. What had previously come off as a pretty credible place where Mickey could live was toonified, filled with "inflated" architecture, and many scenes lost their pictorial elegance, especially the kitchen which became a disaster zone courtesy of Donald Duck.

The other tents became shops and character greeting areas, probably as mandated by a limited budget and a theme park reluctant to give rid of an already profitable complex. We'll hear this again in ten years.  Due to its limited footprint,  Toontown offered a lot to look at but very little in the way of the large depth compositions that the rest of the Magic Kingdom is filled with - and whatever the merits of Starland, it wasn't cluttered. Toontown Fair generally looked far worse than it really was from most angles, with clashing colors, textures, and all form of visual input assaulting the eye. But it did align the area with the Disneyland Toontown and the Tokyo Disneyland incarnation opening that same year, making the "Toontown" concept a visually and conceptually integrated one across three theme parks of the Disney empire.

Other theme parks tried their own "Starland"s. Six Flags has had areas lightly themed to popular children's franchises such as Looney Tunes and The Wiggles since the early 90's. Universal Studios Florida opened Fievel's Playland in 1992, based on An American Adventure 2 but with a probable conceptual antecedent in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Playground which appeared at Disney-MGM Studios, down the road, in 1990. This firmly established the unofficial rule that theme park playgrounds can only be themed to areas where you're really small, because kids like to feel even smaller than they are, or something. Disney is reluctant to let this idea go, recycling it most recently in the lackluster Toy Story Playland.

Meanwhile, Islands of Adventure ran with the idea of areas themed to illustration into no less than half of their 1999 Islands of Adventure park, drawing together areas based on American comics, Sunday Funny Papers, and illustrator Ted Geisel. It's hard to pick out exactly which of these areas is the "Toontown" - Universal Creative did an interesting job splicing aspects of the style across three distinct areas. Suess Landing has the droopy, flowing architecture but is really more comparable to a Fantasyland, with its simple flat rides and kid-oriented activities. Marvel Super Hero Island uses flat cutouts and perspective tricks to create a dynamic atmosphere, but Toon Lagoon comes nearest to the "Toowntown" mold, with balloony architecture and interactive street elements. And, if it be doubted, the "Sweet Haven" microland of Toon Lagoon is proof that balloony architecture and dimensional cartoon style, when done well, need not be as ugly as Mickey's Toontown. The fact that Sweet Haven is themed around Popeye, a character created by Max Fleischer Studios, only deepens the irony. One suspects that Disney just isn't very good at making things look toony and credibly grotesque.

I trace this entire history of "kiddie" areas up because I think it's essential to keep all of this in mind when talking about Storybook Circus. Mickey's Toontown is your baseline, that's what to expect. Twenty years of theme park history across all of the major industry players have conditioned us to associate areas of the park for children with distorted fiberglass architecture, limited texture, balloony scenic elements, and a less than attentive regard for fine detail. It is very much to the credit of Storybook Circus that it whole heartedly rejects all of these things. I think this is very much responsible for the initial surge of very enthusiastic reviews this area has received, although that initial wave was reviewing only a tiny sliver of what the area will eventually become. Still, some of the early positive coverage was in large part due to an immediate instinctual understanding that Storybook Circus was not to be Toontown Fair Mach 2, but a new kind of "kid zone".

I personally think that this time around Imagineering has finally delivered something that fulfills the demands of being an area "for kids" which also offers something for adults. It's an area that won't look absurd or dated in ten years because it turns the clock back to a design sense that existed before the concept of a kid's area did. It is classical, and so it has an inherent longevity.

Storybook Circus is still under construction but at this point enough of it has been built that I feel that a review of it's complexities would not be a disservice. To begin to discuss Circus, we should discuss how it came to be.

An expanded version of Dumbo had been planned for Magic Kingdom for some time, based on a two-sided Dumbo attraction with a water play between the two spokes first designed for Tokyo Disneyland. This Tokyo concept art is what was first shown to the public as the new Florida Dumbo. See Cinderella's Golden Carrousel off to the left there?


In Florida, Dumbo was slated to appear in an area around the Fantasyland Train Station also accommodating the Disney Fairies merchandise line and some new version of the "Barnstormer" kiddie coaster. This was in what we could call the "Jay Rasulo" version of the Fantasyland expansion project. Rasulo had been making his bread and butter on the Princess franchises for some time, and the initial Fantasyland Expansion plans reflected this clearly.


At this point, the Circus area was little more than some blobby smears:


Once Tom Staggs took over as Parks Chairman in 2010, the Expansion was called back for re-writes. In the interim, Walt Disney World had gotten cold feet on the "Fairies" franchise. Despite the enthustic support of John Lasseter, 2009's direct-to-video Tinkerbell sequel sold about half of what the initial one had, and the pixies had yet to find a consistent audience or place in the parks. Instead of gamble on an expensive area, Operations requested that the successful Toontown Fair tents be retained (I told you we'd be hearing that again). And thus Dumbo's circus expanded to fill the whole area.


It still looks pretty hazy at this point, but about a year later, Disney released the first piece of concept art that gave us reason to think that the Circus could end up being pretty nice:


This shows the greatly improved layout, foliage, and colors that have actually begun to be installed on the old Toontown Fair site. Still, questions remained. Why a circus? Do people today connect to the concept of a circus as an exciting, desirable entertainment venue? Wouldn't this look more temporary than the area it was replacing?

Storybook Circus seems very much to be an evolution of the "Dumbo Circusland" developed for Disneyland in 1972, with it's entrance marquee, scattering of tents, and central Dumbo attraction. It's also interesting to consider that as early as 1972, there was sufficient demand for Dumbo to split it off into its own dedicated area.

Although the model isn't very detailed, it also doesn't take much to imagine that this area would end up looking tired pretty quickly. But the concept lingered on until the late 70's, when it was probably killed by the decision to redo Fantasyland entirely.


Storybook Circus is a great deal more ambitious than it needs to be, and that begins with the fact that it is an area with a history. It doesn't have a backstory, contrary to the tedious modern Imagineering tendency to explain every single thing with a convoluted and impossible to comprehend motivating narrative. Storybook Circus invites scrutiny but pleases in the same way the original areas of the Magic Kingdom do: by implying more than it says. One doesn't read Storybook Circus, she reads into it.

The Circus is set up in an area which clearly previously existed before the Circus' arrival. Dumbo is set in Florida, but the Circus is not a Floridian one; it's set up somewhere in the Midwest, what was probably a little cow town called Carolwood Park. Carolwood Park contributes pre existing railroad tracks, billboards, barns, and train roundhouses to Storybook Circus, and gorgeously crafted rambling stone walls - implied farmland. Along with the heavily vegetated areas, this Circus brings to mind an atmosphere vintage and rural, some vaguely defined sense of pre-modernity. It's the imagined rural youth of American myth.


Although the decision to not replicate the Florida setting of Dumbo seems at first blush to be a missed opportunity, calling the area "Carolwood Park" and hauling in an unexpected vintage patina allows the Imagineering team to bring in an unexpected thematic depth to the area. The use of the name "Carolwood" isn't just an empty name drop; although Dumbo is the reason for the area to exist, the star of the show is the Railroad.

The railroad had previously provided important conceptual links on Main Street and Frontierland, but it grows into a central role in this area. When you enter, you're directly facing a train and train roundhouse - that's the introductory statement! Your other options include arriving on a train, or walking in via Tomorrowland and directly facing a train. WDI has covered all of the bases here. The entire area is, in fact, motivated by the train, because the Circus arrived on it. You can actually see the train spur line that branches off the Walt Disney World Railroad leading to a train turntable where the individual acts and circus wagons split off to set up. You can follow the wagon tracks in the "earth" as they roll off the turntable, a trail of peanuts embedded in the ground alongside animal tracks leading to Dumbo, monkey tracks towards the Barnstormer (where Goofy co-stars with a monkey), and so on. None of these subtle details are at all obvious or vie for your attention. This is the great thing about the Circus: it has a motivational integrity but you have to go looking for it.

And of course by being called Carolwood Park, being set in the Midwest, in some far off once upon an Americana, the area brings in the ghost of Walt Disney's childhood. Disney harbored a fascination with the circus, of which Dumbo is only the most obvious example. There are also a scant dozen shorts, Toby Tyler and Fun and Fancy Free, and the fact that Disney bought and restored an entire Circus wagon train and ran it through Disneyland to a Circus he staged inside the park twice daily.

Is Storybook Circus not only the circus of Dumbo, but the circus of Walt Disney's imagination? It certainly seems so. And by telling that story, it also seems to tell the story of the impetus behind the entire Magic Kingdom itself. It's the origin story for the entire theme park. It's a neat trick because the area suggests this all on its' own. You do the work.

On a strictly aesthetic level, besides that interestingly meta groove it hits, the Circus is an unqualified success because it has an astonishing and beautiful array of textures. The stone walls, the weathered bricks, faded woods, and leafy foliage speak to an attentive eye towards the more lasting grace notes of the existing park, and could not be further from Toontown Fair. The Casey Jr play area, which is designed to closely mirror Ward Kimball's charmingly fluid design seen in Dumbo, is still fully fitted with detailed hinges, latches, hooks, wheels, and real metal parts. Instead of a smooth fiberglass sculpture of a train, it looks and feel like a real train. There's even a brass bell that actually rings - not a piped in sound effect!

These textured timbers holding up the roof of Dumbo, the Flying Elephant look like they've had a lifetime of service. Remember that these poles are actually brand new:


Or the undersides of the Dumbo queue's "wings", which could have been smooth drywall or a drop ceiling, are full of timbers, beams, brackets, bolts, and other signifiers that this structure had to be built. Thousands of people walk underneath this every day without realizing how beautiful all of it is because it's all fake. It's so fake that bypasses credibility to become convincing. Notice how each hanging fan has chains dangling to turn them on and off; the detail is so natural that we never stop to think that these fans are controlled by a switch and so the chain is purely decorative and had to be put there by somebody. When was the last time you were honestly fooled by a theme park?

Outside The Barnstormer: real canvas, real leather, real metal, real wood..... the dirt is fake.

Another example of Storybook Circus' superior attention to detail may be seen in their treatment of the old "Goofy-crashes-through-things" sight gag. Toontown Fair had perfectly sharp Goofy-shaped holes:


Storybook Circus' holes are equally absurdly shaped, but they actually look like damage has been caused to real, tangible objects:


That sort of stuff tends to add up to a lot in the mind. One of these looks like somebody put care and thought into the presentation of the gag with room left for fine texture, and the other looks like a bunch of Imagineers getting jiggy with a band saw.


Storybook Circus interprets its landscape in terms of hills and terraces, which is one aspect I've identified as a common satisfaction factor in themed design areas - is there a lot going on visually and can you have more than one view of any given area? This is one of the reasons New Orleans Square is the best part of Disneyland, and the Circus has staircases, walls, hills, and elevations galore. This is something else Toontown failed to capitalize on, positioning all of its elements as it did along one long, even, steady slope. In Circus we walk upstairs towards tents, we walk down to get to the railroad station, our mind and our eye is engaged. The terraces and elevations make Storybook Circus a pleasure to experience.

Other touches impress equally. Circus thematics imply gaudy lighting, but the new area makes good use of popcorn lights in effective displays. Disneyland and Magic Kingdom make use of traditional carnival modes of attractive light displays, from Main Street's popcorn lights to twinkle lights in the trees of the Hub, and Storybook Circus fits in easily, providing a smooth and visually coherent transition. Here's Dumbo seen from the Mad Tea Party:


And the Mad Tea Party, seen from Dumbo:


Touches like that make the Circus feel like an old friend instead of, as in the case of oh so many theme park additions, an unwelcome invasion.

There's also something interesting going on over at the new Dumbo. Dumbo has never really been worthy of extended notice - it's always been pretty much the same ride in a circle over a concrete pit, with some minor Circus emphatics to dress up the spinner base. In 1983, the Disneyland Dumbo had a number of embelishments added, such as gears, workings, and pinwheels, but it was still just a fancy ride over a concrete pit in the middle of Fantasyland. The pit was now filled with water.

What we see in the history of Dumbo is a slow push in the direction of being a "real" ride, a fully thematically integrated ride, and now it seems as through WDI has pushed the ride concept of Dumbo to its limits. I cannot think of a single thing that could have been done to the new attraction, that has not been done, to snazz it up without changing the ride's essential format of being a hub-and-spoke over a concrete pit. There's now two Dumbos, and they spin in opposite directions, creating an immediate sense of visual excitement. The ride has been plucked out of the concrete wasteland and dropped down admist rolling hills and spreading trees, and has a circus tent backdrop connecting the two spinners modeled closely on the one seen in the Dumbo film. Instead of just an empty room full of switchbacks or a false front, there's a whole experience awaiting us inside the tent, full of texture, and hanging lights, and a circus ring, and everything. At night, LED lights turn the water-splashed pit below the Dumbos into a swirling kaledescope of colors, a display so impressive it draws people in who simply sit and stare at the thing - it's a better show than the fireworks.

But for all those emphatics, all that texture, once you get into your Dumbo it's just a 90-second spin in the air above a concrete pit. This is a C-ticket ride with E-ticket trimmings. Is this bad? There's always been different grades of rides in Disney's "castle" parks; that's the reason Dumbo was a C ticket, after all, and don't forget that it cost you about half of what it cost to ride Haunted Mansion; what were you expecting? But by surrounding a simple ride with so many beautiful textures and tones, somehow the whole feel of it has changed and so we must ask: what is it that makes a ride an "E" ticket? Is it a lot of content or perfect form? If you spend enough time enjoying the exterior, the indoor queue, and so on, it's possible that Dumbo, from door to door, offers more to see and enjoy than some of the shorter "official" E-rides like Mission: Space. How strongly does content dictate our responses to rides as "important" ones in our daily experience of the parks?

I think what Dumbo is now is a newkind of spinner ride that we haven't seen yet. It's a simple ride, but instead of presenting itself as just a simple ride, space is reserved for "doodling in the margins". It's the Hope Diamond of spinner rides, so beautiful and so fancy that we visit it and ride it and see it just because it's there and it looks impressive. I couldn't tell you the last time I rode Dumbo when it was over behind the Carrousel, but I've been on the new version dozens of times. At what point does a park experience cross a line out of being a sideline activity and become a "main course"?


What Dueling Dumbos promises to do is finally to make all of the other spinner rides at Walt Disney World look pretty lousy. Why wait thirty minutes for the Astro Orbitor when Dumbo is three minutes away, looks nicer, and never has a line because now there's two ride mechanisms? Or is the average person's experience of the theme park less compartmentalized? As Fantasyland and Storybook Circus ramble on into history, we'll learn something about the attention spans of vacationers, I'll wager.

And speaking of responses, it would be remiss to close out any discussion of Dueling Dumbos without mentioning what the interior queue is. It's a playground, and not an Image Works or Winnie the Pooh Queue-style playground, but an actual circular rumpus room with nets and slides and all the other things. The idea itself is interesting: since the number one complaint of guests is and has been waiting in lines, and since guests are always looking for new places to sit down on, why not let them do both while waiting "in line"?

I am not really in a position to comment on the playground itself. It is certainly more visually interesting than anticipated, with deep purples, popcorn lights, and some nice details at the edges. I do not have a child, and so the playground is of no practical use to me. It is better done than the Pooh playground it "replaces" (the one across from the attraction), and indoor and air conditioned to boot, making this an ideal spot for families. One could make arguments about whether or not Disney should actually be in the playground business, but it's already there and what is there is visually attractive and, one assumes, appropriate to its use.

So we must ask: what made Dumbo, the Flying Elephant a "classic"? Was it the location? The promotional photos? The ride? By moving the ride to a new location, Walt Disney World is betting that it will remain a "classic", and they have the thematics, the queue space, and the capacity to back this up. But whether it be the location - in a construction zone - or the fact that only so many people a day want to ride Dumbo, the crowds have not materialized - the attraction which handily garnered 45 minute waits now struggles to draw queues above 20. This could be because the capacity is now so high - sixteen Dumbos per ride system, two ride systems each, two holding pens per ride, and five-hundred feet of linear queue plus a "queue lounge" sounds more like Space Mountain and not Dumbo, the Flying Elephant.

Since the lines have never materialized, the utility of the "queue lounge" playground is somewhat doubtful. It's already an entirely optional experience most of the time, and guests are unlikely to fully understand why they're being corralled into an empty kiddie playground and "forced" to sit down for fifteen minutes. We are programmed by over a hundred years of attraction development to expect to stand in a single file line and slowly progress to the front of a line to board an attraction. Disney proposes to redefine this, and the question is not only whether or not the public will understand (never mind embrace) this concept, but whether or not the attraction they chose to implement this on will ever again warrant such an elaborate pre-show area.

But the Dumbo queue is really just a side-attraction in the Circus. This tiny area shows more wit and invention and a more attentive eye to texture and detail than has been seen in many a Disney theme park area in many years. But what is the special extra touch that captures our attention, despite all the texture, despite all the care, and despite all the good work that's gone into the Circus? I finally realized what it is while looking at this photo:


That's a good fake electrical pole, with the vintage transformer, and now that its lights and high tension cables are up as of this writing, it looks even better. Disney has done plenty of fake power lines before - those in Tokyo Disney Sea and Animal Kingdom stand out - but this really captures a charmingly vintage feeling. Looking at it, with Casey Jr. nearby, one can't but help be reminded of Dumbo and the singing crows.

Looking at Dumbo again, and I think this is the key, the area seems to, for the first time, be evoking its' specific blend of animated charm and textural detail:


I think the secret of the area's success is that for the first time Imagineering has created a satisfying dimensional representation of the feeling of Walt Disney's animated output in its' golden era. There is a pervasive simplicity, a rural feeling, a naive charm. I think this accounts for the area's already sterling reputation: it's the first thing Disney's built since themed design went permanently sophisticated with EPCOT Center that feels the way Disney things used to feel. It feels simple and unpretentious and naive in the way the rest of the Magic Kingdom does.

That naive sense of fantasy and design is what people pay to get into Disneyland and Magic Kingdom to experience. The return to another place and time is complimented by the return to a less sophisticated design sense. I can't quite pinpoint yet what exactly Circus does to recapture this lightning in a bottle, although if I had to guess I'd say it's a largely unconscious response to Toontown Fair. Toontown, based not on classical Disney designs but on Roger Rabbit, did never and will never be a comfortable fit with the rest of a "castle park". But Storybook Circus fits right in, and could have always been there. I think it's fortunate that it actually is.

 What you are looking at is the October 15, 1972 issue of "Institutions/Volume Feeding" magazine, in which the magazine announced their annual "Changemaker" award for Walt Disney Productions. It is a 20 page magazinge insert, numbered from page 65 to page 100, meaning it was likely part of a larger publication. You and this magazine are going to shortly become very familiar.

I have not been able to find much information about Institutions/Volume Feeding out there, except to say that it existed and serviced the hotel and dining business sectors. What I can say is that the insert is lavishly produced; well written, with beautiful color photographs - some behind the scenes - and fully fleshed out with interviews of the people who were actually running Disney at the time. Being an industry paper,  the article focuses heavily on the food and hotel side of the new Walt Disney World operation, with very interesting details on buying, cooking, and money handling.

I'm making it sound very technical, aren't I? Here's the thing: in all of my years of reading Disney related items, this is one of the most essential pieces of writing on the company I've ever read. You must read this.

More than being about buying and selling hamburgers and dining tables, this magazine is an industry-inside look at the attitudes and philosophies which ran Walt Disney Productions during its golden era. And, given the current cultural climate surrounding the Walt Disney Company of 2012, it frankly reads like a slap in the face.

I'm not above saying that the executive committee profiled here is beyond critism or reproach - this was written in mid-1972, in the crazy, hazy days following the hugely successful debut of Walt Disney World - these men were flying high, full of optimism and ideas. The Arab Oil Embargo was still in the future, as were the shrinking expectations and horizon of Project Florida's tomorrow. These guys had issues. They thought small, ran the movie studio into the ground, failed to build enough hotels, then blew all of the company's wealth and resources in a single theme park venture.

But they also produced the Polynesian Village, The Magic Kingdom, Space Mountain, Lake Buena Vista, The Empress Lilly, and all of EPCOT Center. Warts and all, this was a company that still dreamed big and did things unconventionally. This was a group of men who sat down and for the first time asked themselves that question which echoes down the musty corridors of the studio: "What would Walt have done?"

These men lived in awe - and fear - of Walt Disney. In retrospect, it's remarkable that the 20th century actually produced such a man, and they lived with him. They were used to pleasing his high standards. And Walt was one of the toughest bosses of all time. You can still feel his prescence in their words here.

So there's that. This article also shows how, until the entree of Eisner in 1984, the Walt Disney Company was very much a small, family run company. They had a single small lot in Burbank that they used as a movie set when they could and two satellites in Anaheim and Orlando. This was the company that was getting into bed with multinational corporations and international governments to build EPCOT Center.

The size of the company today is something none of these men could have predicted, and the Hollywood mentality of the current company is something Eisner brought with him from Paramount. So when you read these men describing how they run the place like it's a corner grocery store, we need to realize both that this approach is impossible today, and that it wasn't very smart back then, either. The same slowpoke approach seen in these pages was what steamrolled this executive team out of existence ten years later. Disney was slow to change and it cost them dearly. So when I say it reads like an indictment, I'm not kidding, but it also needs to be seen in the context of the trouble this sort of thinking caused.

What this is, finally, in an invaluable primary resource for understanding why and how Disney did the things they did in this crucial era. Those just entering Disney circles need to understand this era and the thought it entailed on Disney's part to understand the criticisms leveled at it - not unfairly, I think - today. This ought to be required reading for everyone in the company. It demonstrates, simply and eloquently, their exceedingly high standards and why they asked "What would Walt do?" and why we should still be asking it today.

The issue is split into three articles, each of which will be presented as a separate post, with relevant corresponding images from the text. The first one will be posted tomorrow, with parts two and three following in weeks two and three.

I hope you'll find it illuminating and, like me, a little infuriating. This was the era when saying "a dream is a wish your heart makes" about Disney wasn't marketing bulrush - these men were strange mixtures of businessmen and idealists who pulled the whole castle in the sky down with them.

And now, Passport to Dreams Old & New proudly presents: Walt Disney Productions: The "Imagineering" People Pros!

Third Annual Institutions/Volume Feeding Changemaker Award

In the Magic Kingdom of the entire Disney corporation, emphasis is always placed on the individual-whether he be guest or employee. It is this deep-rooted philosophy - originating from Walt himself - firmly believed and carried out by management, that has been the key to success. It is the constant check for quality and the real, unabashed belief that a guest passing through a turnstile does not necessarily represent a dollar sign. To do this successfully and still maintain a profit is where Disney shines.

This-all of this-is "imagineering." It's innovation. It's a fantasy land on the surface, but behind the scenes it is an efficient, profitable, benevolent operation. The people responsible are professionals-not necessarily food or hotel pros, but people pros.

Those who enter the Wonderful World of Disney-whether they be guest or employee_-come out a little bit different. Happier. Jubilant, perhaps. They have an experience firmly embedded in their Memory Factory. They've been a part of the Total Show. Disney has changed them. Disney is a Changemaker.