(from Institutions / Volume Feeding, October 1972)




Disney: The People Pros

It takes a special kind of man to risk his family's savings on Snow White.

It takes a special kind of man to borrow on his life insurance in order to open a $17-million amusement park in a place no one had ever heard of before-unless they remembered Jack Benny's nasal train announcer calling "Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc-a-monga."

It takes a special kind of man to build an organization that has a unique management style, where channels are kept open. Where everyone-down to the proudest sweeper-calls the company president by his nickname.

That special man-Walt Disney-is still very much alive. When top management speaks, it's as though Walt and his brother Roy (the financial wizard) were still around. As though any decision, large or small, would have to be approved by them. Nothing is done half way. It's either done right or not at all. And hang the expense.

This "Disneyism" (almost a kind of "religion" among employees) comes through loud and clear. No wonder. Walt himself stated that his proudest accomplishment was: "Building an organization of people that enabled me to do the kinds of things I wanted to do all my life."

The kinds of things he liked to do? He liked to have fun. He resented the fact that when he took his two small daughters to an amusement park, he had to sit on a bench and munch peanuts while they whirled on a carousel. Today's result: Disneyland in Anaheim and Walt Disney World in Orlando, where guests number three adults to each child.

The millions of people who pour through those gates have fun. They're entertained. They're given a total experience. Everything is one show, whether it's a heart-in-the-mouth visit to the Haunted Mansion or a mouth-watering meal while dining in an elegant swamp. Anyone-whether a senior citizen, a kid, a Senator or a real live princess-who goes to Disneyland or Disney World and isn't sprinkled with pixie dust should call the nearest psychiatrist.

The pixie dust is on employees, too, whether they're waitresses or show boat captains. They don't wear uniforms; they go to wardrobe and pick up their costumes. They're cast in roles. They're on stage. Even middle management employees who do not have direct contact with guests (all Disney customers are always referred to as guests) must do a stint dressed as a Disney character-Goofy, Mickey Mouse-and gallivant around with guests for a while. That's when they get the real "feel" of "Disneyism." That's when it's clearly understood that seeing joyful faces makes the whole thing work. Show biz. Entertain the guest. That's what Walt had in mind in the first place.

A gigantic wardrobe is kept busy creating thousands of Disney costumes.

There were times when what Walt had in mind was not necessarily what his brother Roy had in the company pocketbook. Example: Watt decided to build a Matterhorn. It would cost $7-milion. Roy put his foot down. No way could they afford $7-million to build a mountain. Roy left for Europe. Walt called an executive meeting. "We're going to build a Matterhorn." he informed them. "And when Roy gets back from Europe, let him figure out how to pay for it."

The brothers were close. Roy once said, "Together, we are a success. Separately, Walt would've been a cartoonist for the Kansas City Star and I would have been a bank teller."

Walt was not only a dreamer and a gambler, he was a perfectionist. He put his show business ideas into foodservice - even at a price no normal Operator would pay. Prime example: The Blue Bayou Restaurant (the elegant swamp, replete with flashing fireflies, frog "gribbits" and even a pleasant "swampy" smell) was opened five months before its accompanying ride, "The Pirates of the Caribbean," was completed. The Blue Bayou was a smashing success and highly profitable. Walt walked in one day and demanded that the restaurant be closed until the Pirates ride was ready to operate. "The restaurant complements the ride and the ride complements the restaurant. We can't have one without the other. It's the total show. Total entertainment." The Blue Bayou was closed.

Card Walker, president of Disney Productions, emphasizes, "We don't have profit centers. We have experience centers.  Profit comes if the experience is right." That's why Disney can afford to build a restaurant with a million-dollar interior and charge a guest $1.00 for a good meal. Jack Lindquist, VP of marketing, explains, "We look at Disneyland or WDW on the bottom line. The total. If a restaurant doesn't make it but a customer needs it, we'll make up for the loss somewhere else."

Disney's expertise is moving people - whether on bridges or trams or speedy monorails. Moving them in the right way - without guests being aware of the flow pattern.

Part of the reason is the nature of the Disney experience. The average kid on the street isn't aware that his hot dog isn't prepared by Mickey Mouse. And if that hot dog is bad, it reflects on the entire Disney operation. Walt loved hot dogs, and had his food management team scour the countryside until they found the way lo keep hot dogs (and buns) hot and tasty. This Quest for serving food "The Disney Way" also prompted management to eventually buy back all the concessions previously awarded to companies like Stouffer and an ABC subsidiary. They weren't Disney People. One operator, in fact, insisted that his supervisory staff be called "Mister." This definitely wasn't Walt's way. It wasn't his management philosophy.

Some of these philosophies (called Disney Democracy): Don't departmentalize. Use first names. Everyone must be involved in everyone else's business. Keep the channels open so you can make a decision in a hurry. John Hench, VP- Production of WED Enterprises, the design division, explains, "Among other things Walt left us was the habit of mixing people up and having them freely discuss and criticize all aspects of our operation. We cross division lines, and get into each others departments." These, and other "Disneyisms", would make the average hotel and foodservice operator shudder. But they sure work for Disney.

Guests enjoy limited menu items in an atmosphere of Medieval charm - after all, they're in a castle! Patrons pay for their meal as they enter the restaurant. Menus and decor in all Disney foodservice operations are meticulously coordinated to created a total atmosphere.

King Stefan's cook serves orders fast & furious.

President Card Walker comments, "The Disney Democracy is corny, but it works. We're friendly. We have a thing going with one another. The channels actually are open. If you departmentalize, you develop empires."

This philosophy, however, has caused problems for traditional hotel people- and some have left the Disney organization as a result. One ex-Disney hotelman complained that hotel maintenance was impossible to handle because it fell under the jurisdiction of the Park's overall maintenance department, rather than the hotel manager's.

The key to the management team is the Park Operating Committee at Disneyland and the Disney World Operating Committee at Disney World. Each week, the heads of each division meet end talk it all out. Everyone knows what the other guy is doing. If a decision is to be made that affects more than one division, they all decide - whether it means raising the price of a hot dog or raising the price of general admission.

Card Walker runs Disney as he plays his favorite game - golf (he shoots in the 60s). Expertly and quickly. "I love to hit the ball, but I'm impatient to get to the next shot," smiled Walker.

Moving people is what it's all about - and Disney uses every conceivable mode of transportation. Even an expensive and colorful showboat. Nostalgia reigns. There aren't any mustache-twirling gamblers or dancing girls - but it sure is a fun way to get around!

This impatience became most apparent when Disney World opened. "I wanted to crawl in a hole," admits Walker. "We didn't have time to get scared - it happened so fast. It was a miracle we made it. We weren't finished. We weren't trained. But we did it. Sure, we've got problems. But we've got enthusiasm!"

This enthusiasm, emanating from the president down to the WDW "lodging host" (bellman), kept Disney World going for those first months of calamity. The atmosphere was rough, but employees were so sincere and enthusiastic that a lot of mistakes were simply shrugged off by guests.

Disney masterplanned an entire city in the swamplands of Florida. They opened 2 hotels (1500 rooms) without ever having been in the hotel business before. "We were naive. Hilton never would have done it," quips Jack Lindquist.

Disney did everything on its own, from generating power to operating its own telephone system and computer and mail system. These are merely a few facets of this ultra-modem, vital community. The problems, even with all the enthusiasm, were monumental. Lindquist, based in LA., admits that the California-based personnel dreaded putting a call through to WDW in Florida because the phone system was so atrocious- "I suggested using carrier pigeons!"

Other problems ranged from lost luggage (imagine the trauma to a four-year-old when his security blanket is lost) to improper billing. But through it all, WDW is still turning away 1,000 hotel reservations a day. And repeat convention business has already been booked for next year.

Twirling in Alice in Wonderland's teacups is lots of fun. Even the Mad Hatter would join in the merriment.

The American Bar Assn. convention typifies both the good and bad. In the rniddle of the convention, a power failure knocked out all lights and air conditioning. Management improvised. "We immediately sent the conventioneers flashlights and champagne," states Dick Nunis, executive vice president. "And when they checked out, they found their room rates were cut in half." The tribute came when the Association said if would be back next year.

"We had a lot of growing pains." states Walker. "At first, we wanted to run the hotels separately, but we were wrong. You can't separate merchandising. It's all the same. We can't run our hotels in the typical, traditional way. We have to approach it with the Disney method of moving people. It's actually a people-handling system. We're in the hotel business, but we've got different parameters. Even though we were entirely pleased with our Architects at WDW we've now decided that in the future, we'll do it on our own. If you can design a Matterhorn. you can design a hotel. Everything is one show, and the hotels are as much a part of the entertainment as the Theme Park."

"Creatively, we have all the options. All we have to do is to plug them in and consider the priorities." Dick Nunis admits that these priorities are sometimes problems - the biggest of which are time and money. Disney isn't immune to these traditional dilemmas. But the enthusiasm is so contagious that everything seems to work itself out.

The critical evaluation of what Disney has done in planning its "city" has been mostly positive. Even a sophisticated writer for New York Magazine suggested- only half in jest- that the citv hire the Disney organization to manage its   services. When asked about this, Disney people shrug it off by saying: "Run New York City? Never. The weather isn't right."

(from Institutions / Volume Feeding, October 1972)

Coca Cola is one of over 30 "participants" at WDW. Companies are permitted to test market new products and, of course, to sell their products or service. At Disneyland, during 1971 alone, enough soft drinks were consumed to fill a 5 acre lake 10 feet deep.

DISNEY: "Food as Fun" Package

Walt Disney Productions got into the foodservice business not because they wanted to, but because they more or less had to. Foodservice at Disneyland was originally contracted out to a subsidiary of American Broadcasting Co. In 1965, Disney bought out ABC for $7.5-miliion so that they could do things their way. Disney reasoned that concessionaires tend to look on profits with individual units in mild and will, therefore, cut corners if need be to maintain their profits.

Today, foodservice at both Disneyland and Disney World is "a part of the show." Food is part of the total experience and should be fun. Good value is part of the Disney philosophy, and this means quality food. Food prices at WDW are surprisingly low considering the quality and presentation of the menu. The food is simply good food that appeals to the various markets that WDW serves. The hamburgers aren't laced with Mickey Mouse ears, nor are scrambled eggs presented in the shape of Donald Duck. Each foodservice unit, whether in the parks or the hotels, is designed with a theme in mind, and the menu is designed to strengthen the Total Show.


But gimmicks are minimized. If, to create this total atmosphere setting, one unit runs in the red, that's all right. Another unit or attraction probably has a high enough profit to balance it out.

Jim Armstrong heads up the Food Division and is responsible for both ends of the country, John Cardone, food production manager, and Dean Penlick, operations manager, keep things moving at WDW. The plans for foodservice facilities for WDW were supervised by people who knew they would be transferred to Florida. As Cardone puts it, "we couldn't afford to make mistakes because we knew we would have to live with them on a day to day basis."

There is a Central Food Facility (never referred to as a "commissary") which receives all shipments and maintains inventory. Meat and produce are purchased by carloads. All foods are processed and portioned at the Central Facility. The kitchens in the Magic Kingdom are strictly for finishing and holding. There is a complete, underground transportation system- eight acres of tunnels and basements for service and supply facilities- so that guests never see food being transported or employees "out of costume."



As with any operation serving 80,000 meals a day- an awkward size that's more meals than a local restaurant but not as many as a national packer- finding the right equipment is a real problem. After many adjustments and modifications, the present hamburger machine can cook 2,000 4-oz. patties per hour, and toast the buns as well. Cardone is big on crepes and likes to incorporate them into as many menus as possible. He now has a machine that can produce 900 crepes per hour. The search for capacity in equipment is constant and right now is concentrated on a steak cooker.

WDW has 21 new food facilities scheduled to open throughout the park within the next 24 months. The Central  Facility, which is amazingly small- 48,000 sq. ft. - for its output- preparing food for 80,000 meals a day a day- will have to be expanded, too. And expansion means people. There are presently 130 Central employees, 1000 back of the house and 2400 front of the house. There are at least 14 middle management openings in foodservice now and that should increase to about 35 openings 10 months from now.

"To hell with expense - experience is the most important thing." At the Crystal Palace, interiors cost a cool $1 million - but families can get a good meal here for about $1. Service is cafeteria style.

In the food division, as in all divisions, many management people come from within the Disney ranks. There are six area managers in foodservice. Six years ago, one was an ice cream scooper and another a bus boy. This kind of advancement gives employees something to look forward to: fringe benefits give them something for the present. Hourly employees are reviewed every three months, ticket books for theme park attractions are received with pay checks four times a year, and help is offered in educational pursuits for permanent employees. These inducements help keep turnover down. Bowling, sailing, boating, theatre workshops, and film festivals are but a few of the organized activities for employees. Meals are heavily subsidized by Disney and employees receive food prepared specifically for them, no leftovers.

Right smack in the middle of all the hub-bub in the main lobby of the Contemporary Hotel is the Grand Concourse Restaurant. Guests sit under colorful plexiglass trees - and everyone stops munching when the monorail whizzes through the lobby. The restaurant is open until midnight - and a limited menu is complimented by a buffet, if desired. Elsewhere on the same concourse floor are shops, a bar, a liquor store - and anything your heart may desire. The main lobby is ten stories high, and a focal point is a huge, tiled mural.

Quality, regardless of price, is constant. One of John's "specialities" is Macadamia Nut Pie, which sells for 75 cents a slice. The nuts alone are running $4.80 a pound right now. Hardly a profitable item!

Since most people coming to WDW are from East of the Mississippi, Duck Nunis felt that a good old New England Clambake with lobster would be fun. When John was asked if the fluctuating, high price of lobster didn't bother him just a wee bit, he replied, "of course it does, but if he wants it, he'll get it, and for the right price."

John has changed the menus for WDW eight times in 11 months. It took him 2 1/2 years to plan 11 basic menus. That means a lot of care and planning. Serving 80,000 meals a day requires a master plan which Disney management follows. Menu items have to fit the plan. A beef & cheese sandwich on marble rye is called the Moonsteer in Tomorrowland and the Jouster's Choice in Fantasyland. Very few items are used exclusively at any one location, unless a particular thing is absolutely necessary to maintain the atmosphere. This is the case at King Stefan's, where individual loaves of onion bread are served. What is the trick to opening 40 restaurants at once? Cardone says, "You've got to be crazy not to want to do it. You'll never get that kind of challenge again."

At the Central Food Facility, the cook isn't fixing up a batch of Witch's Brew. Throughout the facility, the most modern of equipment has been installed.

All food is prepared at the Central Foods Facility - cakes and pastries are prepared from scratch early each morning. Sandwiches are big sellers but the 4 oz. hamburger patties is still the Number One favorite. Volume has exceeded expectation - and the CFF will be expanded next year.

Sanitation is another very important facet of Disney foodservice. Can you imagine 60,000 guests leaving the park, all of them sick? Inspections are made continually as preventive maintenance. Equipment is kept spotless, as are the streets and walkways. Guests are shamed into throwing refuse into litter containers because the surroundings are so clean they would feel guilty if they threw a cup or gum wrapper on the ground. Menus are planned with maintenance in mind, too. Pizza and cotton candy are just two examples of foods not found in any unit. They connote a carnival atmosphere with people walking around eating food with their fingers and then littering with what they don't finish. With the exception of popcorn, which is a very high profit item and also very good, there is little else that people can stroll with and eat at the same time.


Per capita, more food is consumed at WDW than at Disneyland and by far more people want breakfast. They arrive at the Magic Kingdom at 6 A.M. and they are hungry. Several of the Park units have had to add eggs to their menu.

Buffets have been a blessing to the hotels. On a typical evening at the Polynesian, 1800 guests can be served in 40 minutes by means of an outdoor luau. This has been so successful that a protective enclosure is being added in order to serve  the luau even if the weather is not the best. Two areas are reserved daily in the Contemporary Hotel for buffet breakfast, lunch and dinner. Buffets seem to work very well in letting Disney people exercise their expertise as people movers. Things seem to flow more smoothly, making for a more relaxed atmosphere.

Disney even has its own unique approach to purchasing. Cost is not really considered. For example, if a fruit cocktail is to be selected, the purchasing department will get samples of several brands. They will be served, unidentified, to chefs and other management personnel. A vote is taken and whichever of the products wins out, that's the one that is ordered. That is Disney Democracy!

Hamburgers at the CFF.

No one goes to Disney World just to eat and no one goes especially to tour the kitchen. You go there for the total experience you can find nowhere else. The food is good, in some cases great. But if you are looking for the epitome of commercial foodservice you'd probably be better satisfied at Maxim's in Paris. Layout and design of kitchens and equipment is good, functional, and gets the job done, but you wouldn't call it avant garde or revolutionary. It simply gets a big job done. As John Cardone says: "We're in the entertainment business. We work while people play." The amazing thing at Disney is that people seem to enjoy their work so much that even though it is hard work, it seems more like they are playing along with the guests.

Crepes are popular in any form, and at any meal, from entree to dessert. (Navigation: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four)

(from Institutions / Volume Feeding, October 1972)

A striking view of the Contemporary Hotel. The structure is topped off with the very popular "Top of the World" restaurant. The floor just below is exclusively suites - and was the only guest floor built not using the modular construction system.

Disney: Design for Tomorrow

Design for Walt Disney Productions means setting the stage to complement the show. Every new act requires a new set. This philosophy is carried out at Walt Disney World, too although the shows here are more magical than Hollywood.

The two hotels in operation right now, the Contemporary and the Polynesian, were constructed by U.S. Steel with modular components. Both are of outstanding design and give the guest a clear feeling that this will be a different experience. With its 1047 rooms, the Contemporary is the largest hotel and will remain so. Business meetings and conventions, which account for 30% of hotel business, are usually held at the Contemporary since it has more meeting and banquet rooms than the Polynesian. Future hotels probably will not be this large, since most of top management agree that a hotel as large as the Contemporary is just not "right" for Disney. It is too large to give guests the individual attention and service Disney people feel is necessary.


The Contemporary is a 14-story A-frame with a monorail running through its core at the fourth level. This floor houses a large restaurant. Diners, young and old, stop munching their hamburgers or twisting spaghetti to watch the sleek transportation of the future whisk quietly by.

The next stop on the monorail is the Polynesian Village, which offers the visitor an entirely different world. The Polynesian theme and design was selected because most guests at WDW have never been to, or will never get to, Hawaii. In some ways, the hotel is more "Hawaii" than our 50th State could ever be. Vegetation and the sound of water dominate the public areas. As you leave the monorail your immediate impression is of peace and leisure. There is none of the hustle bustle you sometimes feel at the Contemporary. Even the employees sense this. As Assistant Manager Jim Raymond explains, "When I first started, I was at the Contemporary. When I was assigned here, it was different. You absorb the atmosphere as you walk around, it is so much more relaxed. It even shows in the housekeeping staff." Jim is so enthusiastic, he claims that guests stay longer at the Poly.

Polynesian Village Hotel Room, 1972

The 492 guest rooms at the Poly are basically the same as those at the Contemporary. "The biggest difference is that bathrooms in the Contemporary have two sinks, a bath/shower combination and another shower. The Poly rooms have only one sink and a bath/shower, making the sleeping/living area slightly larger. Rooms in both hotels are furnished in similar manners. Colors and careful fabric selection have been chosen to emphasize the theme of each hotel.

Because of heat, high humidity, strong sun and other factors inherent to central Florida, all materials in the park and the hotels have been selected for durability and easy maintenance. What appears to be wood to the casual observer might actually be a very durable plastic that will not warp. The majority of furnishings in the hotels were developed by Monsanto. While they are not the types of furnishings most people would purchase for home, they are extremely durable and practically indestructible-a hotel-manager's dream.

Disney designs for the future even though the setting might be a prehistoric cave. The most immediate plans for expansion include a small (probably no more than 150 room) hotel adjacent to the golf course and clubhouse. Right now, guests are not using the clubhouse facilities to full advantage- some do not know it is there, others do not know how to get to it because it is not a stop on the monorail. By building a hotel there. Disney will make the golf course more of a "center." In time, at least three other hotels will be built in other areas, all based on themes.

Every night at the Polynesian Village, there's a luau which is not only popular, but practical. By utilizing outside facilities, the foodservice facilities within the hotel are relieved, although they're still packed. Presently under construction is a huge canopy where luaus can be held even when it rains. Believe it or not, once in a while it dares to rain on WDW.

The city of Lake Buena Vista is also contained within Disney's 27,000 acres of property. Already four hotels are under construction, at least one renting rooms before the paint is barely dry. Dutch Inns, Howard Johnson's, Royal Inn and TraveLodge have all leased land from Disney and are building high-rise showplaces. WDW refers business they can't handle to these four.

There is a "Townhouse Community" with several residents already. Large companies have been buying the townhouses to entertain customers, to use as business retreats and as sales incentives. All sorts of special services come with the town-house: travel arrangements, car rentals, dinner reservations at WDW. Tour arrangements and tee times at the golf course are but a few of the numerous extras. Meals and cocktail parties can be catered and pantries, refrigerators and bars will be stocked on request. Townhouses can be leased on a one or two year basis, furnished or unfurnished. The Buena Vista Club will be completed soon. Residents will have first crack at membership. The Club will have all the social amenities of any first class country club, but with the Disney flair.

Eventually there will be condominiums and, hopefully, an entire community at Lake Buena Vista. Of course, Disney will maintain ownership of all land. The ultimate goal is for EPCOT (Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), which will be the city of the future. Motorized vehicles will travel underground. Homes and offices will be designed with experimental equipment and furnishings, and the lifestyle will be far ahead of its time.

The Poly Pool is always crowded - and a special treat is a natural waterfall, where swimmers climb the rocks and slide down into the pool.

In the Magic Kingdom, the future holds a wealth of ideas. Some will be implemented and some will probably never get off the drawing board. Everything is planned to please people. "If you think back to when you were a kid, there was always something you dreamed of doing but you never did. Or maybe you did something once but you've always wanted to do it again. It could be riding rapids or swinging down on a rope and splashing in the water or exploring a pirate's den. These are the kinds of things we want to do." says Dick Nunis. One thing is for sure. Disney World and Disneyland will never be finished. A visit to either is not meant to be once in a lifetime. Things are constantly changing so there is always something new to capture interest and enthusiasm, and most importantly, to encourage a desire to return.

Hopefully, if the legal hassles ever end, Mineral King (a year-round nature and recreation facility) will begin to be developed in California. Back in 1965, the U.S. Government asked for proposals on how to create a recreation complex in this area. Based on their proposal, Disney was awarded the job. Since then, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have tied the project up in court and a lot of people seem to look at Disney as the villain in the dispute. Eventually, they will probably go ahead with plans, but as Card Walker said, "in the meantime, we have enough to do."

Two examples of Disney's flexibility: elegant dining or drinking at the Top of the World - or full-scale, elaborate banquet scene.

Disney has been approached by several foreign governments, the most recent being Taiwan and Yugoslavia. It seems a lot of countries want a Disneyland of their own. The possibility has not been ruled out. But Card Walker is adamant about the fact that they will never franchise a park or turn it over to a third party. "We find outsiders can't even run a restaurant for us.  They always need to make money and they don't have our values."

Within 11 short months, over ten million visitors have passed through the gates of WDW. This figure exceeds the projections made before the opening day, but then it is hard to project any Disney endeavor. The hotels are running at close to 100% occupancy and turning down 1000 reservation requests daily. The state of Florida has collected over $200-rrillion in tax revenues that they really hadn't expected. The Orlando area has become one of the hottest growth areas in the country with a building boom that won't stop for a long time to come.

Certainly this is change and progress. To a large degree, it can all be attributed to Disney. Walt Disney World is the first total leisure experience center in the world. It won't be the only one for long, Marriott will provide competition with their complex outside Washington, DC. Dick Nunis has that "Marriot will be a very fine competitor and we enjoy competition. I just wouldn't want their weather."

As long as there's imagineering within the Disney team, there is bound to be a bright future. What direction the future will take is hard to determine, but with the people involved, it's bound to be the right direction.

"If we build all this correctly, if we build it beautifully, if we can set an example for the world, we can change the whole damn country."- Ray Bradbury

There are no photos of me at EPCOT Center.

There are photos of me at Epcot '95 and Epcot 2000 and just plain old lower-case Epcot - that lower case is so appropriate, so pallid for a diluted theme park - but my time as a youth in EPCOT Center has left no physical trace - no maps, no pictures, and it's all receded into my memories. It may not have ever happened at all.

Actually, there is one signifier of the impact EPCOT made on me, and it's this blog. I clearly remember returning home from EPCOT in 1990 with "One Little Spark" on a loop track up in my head. The part I remembered best was:

"Imagination! Imagination!
A dream can be a dream come true
With just one spark in me and you!"

I wrote that out of a sheet of paper in crayon at a cheap plastic "art" desk my parents bought me for Christmas. I had been told at EPCOT that one little idea in my head was the start of everything new in the world. I suddenly realized that I could create. I started to draw things. I drew lots of Haunted Mansion, another formative influence. I drew lots of stuff from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. A few years later, I was turning microwave boxes on their side, elevating one panel up into the interior to make a slope, and hanging little handmade targets inside the box. The targets would be made of cut-up cereal boxes. You'd throw marbles at the targets, which I controlled with string. The sloped interior floor naturally returned the marbles to you, saving me the need to obtain more than the four I was working with. I made ten of these little shooting galleries. Many were themed to movies, like Gremlins or The Goonies. From there, I started building walk-through haunted houses in my basement. I was a backyard Imagineer before I was old enough to know what the internet was.

At the same time, I kept writing, and drawing, a reading, and eventually I cultivated a sensibility which motivated me to move across the country to Orlando, get a job at Disney, thereby enabling me to start writing this blog, which set in motion a chain of events which spiraled into the widening circles which bring us together today.

This blog is one of the children of Journey Into Imagination. The closure of that attraction in 1998 was absolutely devastating to me. Coupled with the shock of losing two other personal favorites, Mr. Toad and Dreamflight that same year, I withdrew from all Disney topics with the exception of Haunted Mansion for almost four years. This coincided with the typical disastrous "too cool for Disney" phase all teenagers eventually contract. Once I returned, the rules on the ground had changed. EPCOT Center was just a memory. A wand loomed over Spaceship Earth. Guys in kilts were the big thing to see in World Showcase. I kept asking myself: what happened to this place?

EPCOT Center turned 30 this month, and it is sad to report that the greatest single act of themed design in the history of the form has been reduced to a pin stand and a well-themed bar district. We can argue semantics about Walt Disney's original vision for E.P.C.O.T., the political and cultural reasons these were transformed into a theme park, so on and so on but the fact remains that the guiding principle behind E.P.C.O.T. and EPCOT Center remained the same; like Captain EO, it was here to change the world.

And EPCOT did change the world, actually. This is no lie. Very soon hand-wringers would surround the project and announce its' impending doom: EPCOT was out of touch, outdated, uncool, not right for kids. And, to be completely honest, Disney had made many mistakes in the creation of EPCOT Center. They had grossly overspent despite obtaining the economic assistance of around twenty companies, including one major corporation in almost every sector of the American market. They had grossly overspent so much, in fact, that the company's value was destabilized and the regime in power was swept out. Some EPCOT attractions were too vague in some ways or too specific in others; half of the statistical information presented in The Land pavilion was outdated in just months. Disney formed alliances with regimes of corporations on their way out, assuring that the support for these highly expensive attractions would be but short-lived. Truthfully, EPCOT was a mad grasp for the brass ring that was already a cultural dinosaur - the very last gasp of old-fashioned optimism before mass culture went permanently ironic.

Look at it this way: Walt Disney gambled that the public would want something they had never before seen in 1955 at Disneyland. They did, and so Walt Disney Productions survived. Had Disneyland failed, Walt Disney's personal wealth and company would have ceased to exist. Walt Disney gambled, and Disneyland became a household name. Walt Disney Productions gambled just as large on EPCOT Center - a theme park unlike any built before or since - and their big gamble meant that EPCOT Center became a household name - but even they were finally swept under.

But every child of the eighties or early nineties who passed through those wide turnstiles and squinted up at the glare of the Florida sun off that big geodesic sphere left the park permanently marked with its message. Those catchy theme songs, so easy to dismiss as irritating simplifications, got into our DNA. They became homilies. How many kids eventually discovered the name Buckminster Fuller and connected his writing to the social concerns espoused by the theme park just because Disney name-checked one of his most famous ideas as the title of the park's iconic attractions? How easily we can come up with phrases like "nature's plan will shine above", or "the future world is born today", or "if we can dream it, then we can do it", or "one little spark of inspiration is at the heart of all creation" - all genuinely good advice, and all from EPCOT? These sound like notations not from a theme park, but from something like "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth".

Oops, I made the connection clear, didn't I?

Just as Magic Kingdom and Disneyland taught us how to be savvy navigators of cultural mythology, EPCOT Center was an indoctrination into world citizenship. How many have been introduced to the writings of Steinbeck, Twain , Wolfe or Franklin, to the ideas of Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Will Rogers and Susan B. Anthony through the American Adventure? How many have thrilled to the conceptual beauty of Ray Bradbury's immortal opening line "Like a grand and miraculous spaceship, our planet has sailed through the universe of time - and for a brief moment, we have been among its many passengers"? Once you open up the doors on things like that - even if it's things in the form of a fun and fast theme park experience - the flood gates have already opened. The thing about learning is that once you have a little of it, you want to have more.

In short, EPCOT Center was training for the forthcoming Information Age - before it really even started to get underway in mainstream society. Millions of children exited EPCOT better equipped than when they entered it, and they had fun. Most of us first handled things like computers, portable phones, and face-to-face video conversations at EPCOT - what is Skype or FaceTime but the newest version of WorldKey? Allow for a generational shift - and one happens about every twenty years - and these same kids have now grown up, had jobs and kids of their own, and they all see that EPCOT Center has not kept pace, but fallen into a sort of coma.


It's easy to retrospectively take the micro view - that the Universe of Energy was beholden to the corporate demands of a crude oil corporation, that the end of World of Motion was problematic, that Journey into Imagination eventually ran out of ideas - and lose track of the macro view, the big picture. And the big picture is that EPCOT Center was mission accomplished. We aren't living underwater or building big glass pyramids everywhere, but EPCOT Center did change the world, and if you're reading this, chances are very good that you are part of the EPCOT Generation, the swath of kids who were deeply personally affected by their experiences there.

The public discourse about EPCOT Center has for the last twenty-plus years been largely dominated by its many hiccups and failures. Many of these reflected the fact that an entertainment company was tackling very big issues in what was (and still is) seen as a disreputable media format: the amusement attraction. The distance between a carousel and the ennobling American Adventure could not be greater, but still, EPCOT was seen as a dumbing down of material, much as films which deviate even slightly from source novels are still scowled upon. Both of these attitudes proceed from the unspoken cultural assumption that one media "text" is intrinsically inferior to others.

Yes, it had problems. Yes, it was a huge success. There's no faster way to become the fodder of critical disdain than to be populist, flawed, and hugely successful. But to continue to debate how successful this attraction was or what caused that to close is to continue to obsess over trivia. What's really missing from EPCOT today isn't just Horizons, it's the whole package of information, of inspiration, the message of hope which cumulatively moved us all.

So it's time to change that discourse after 30 years. We are the EPCOT Generation, and we know that the park was not a failure, because it was absorbed into us on some deeply felt level into us. After thirty years, it's time to collectively stop apologizing for what the park has meant to us and start re-committing to a brighter future for the "21st Century of 1982".

The simple fact is that nobody has walked out of an EPCOT Center attraction in over a decade. The park has experienced massive identity shifts since 1994, pulling it further and further away from the ideals it began with - the ideal to make the world a better place through education, art, and culture. The issues that EPCOT Center tackled in 1982 - communication tools, energy conservation, man's frontiers, transportation technology, human creativity, land use, sea exploration and global culture - all of those are things we see in the newspaper every single day. After thirty years, we're still chasing the same ghosts as we were in 1982. It isn't that EPCOT Center was outdated, it's that it was ahead of its time. In an era when American politics and culture were sinking into hedonism and corporate enslavement, EPCOT Center reminded children that they didn't need to make the same mistakes their parents had.

What's "not right for kids" about that? Isn't that a message we all want to pass on to the next generation? And what better media format to tell it in than a place where you can be inspired and have fun - not a museum, but a theme park? With a singing dragon?

As an EPCOT child, that's what I find most troubling about Epcot The Theme Park - not that X or Y specific component is now missing, but that the message of the theme park isn't getting out there. That enrichment is fun. Learning is lifelong. That we are all "tomorrow's children".


That's why I'm most crushed that Journey Into Imagination closed - because I'm a real life example of the power that attraction wielded. That the next generation of creative children won't have their "little spark" awoken by such a rich, sumptuous experience.

That's the real tragedy of what Epcot has become - once the name signified something, all capital letters, bold and burdened with significance. Now it's been demoted to a noun. It's no longer about the idea behind EPCOT Center, but the place itself, another place to ride thrill rides and drink heavily. Just because it says "Epcot" doesn't mean that it means EPCOT.

It's time to stop committing to Epcot as a system and embrace it as a sign - as an idea. For eighteen of the park's thirty years, the mission has wavered. The park has been cluttered with neon and metal debris. The attractions have been content to gloss ideas and images or present uninformative, pedestrian amusements. And the EPCOT babies have all vanished along with the acronym.

This needs to begin somewhere. If not with a re-commitment to the ideals of the park itself, than perhaps starting just with the name: EPCOT Center. It was never an easy name, not at all like "The Magic Kingdom". EPCOT Center makes you think as you say it, the acronym hints at a larger context, the "Center" implying something both important and grand. Epcot is a person, place, thing, or idea; you smile when you say it. EPCOT Center is a bar to reach, a title worth living up to. Perhaps if the park were once again called EPCOT Center, the various units, attractions and displays would once again strive to be worthy of the name. Bit by bit, the components of the park could once again lock in step and flow and move and spin and circle their message of harmony, peace, and idealism.

Yes, I'm a dreamer and an idealist. EPCOT taught me to be this way.

This blog and this writing and my whole creative core is a product of the EPCOT generation, and the EPCOT generation is all of us who were moved by that park, and now we are the ones in a position to vote with our money and write with our voices and tell Disney what a EPCOT Center is and should be. Because EPCOT, as a creative entity, has moved us all. One of the greatest theme parks ever built was also, in the final assessment, amongst the most successful. It actually achieved its' laudable goals.

We are the EPCOT Generation. And it's up to Disney and it's up to us to make sure that we won't be the last.

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence." - Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

It is the everlasting parlour game of the entire Disney community: Disneyland or Walt Disney World? The whole business of comparing the two parks - or, let's be more specific, Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom - probably began late one October 1, 1971, over drinks at the Polynesian Village. I can hear the cries now, rising over the incessant tom tom of the luau and the reflected lights of the Southern Seas plying the Lagoon: "But Disneyland is the original!"

It's still played today on message boards and at fan meetups. Over the years the rules on the ground have changed as Disneyland the Magic Kingdom have added hotels, attractions, and additional theme parks. Walt Disney World suffers from a surfeit of variety. Disneyland is Walt's park. We've all heard them before. In 1995 in Mouse Tales, David Koenig gave us the immortal zinger about Walt Disney World being nothing more than Disneyland with the expand button jammed, which is exactly the sort of thoughtless simplification that's just catchy enough to be endlessly repeatable: check the comments on this blog, you'll find it there.

Let's stop and unpack that Koenig quote for a moment. The operating metaphor is a copy machine, a later 20th century modern convenience, which hits the point that Disneyland predates the existence of copy machines (Koenig is mum on the subject of mimeographs). It hits the point that Magic Kingdom is larger, yet it implies a process of thoughtless, mechanical reproduction, which of course does a great disservice to Walt Disney's confederates who built Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

But it's stuck with us because in some ways it's at least ten percent true, and it's through phrases like Koenig's that we can find a key to unlock some of the deeper resonances and complexities of both parks. The real problem is that the entire question presupposes that there can ever be a satisfactory resolution, which there cannot, because despite their similarities, Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom operate in entirely dissimilar aesthetic registers. It only makes sense in a reductionist world where there can only be one Disney theme park and only one right way to build it. In reality the parks are more complimentary than competitive, and most people who visit one will never visit the other - that is why there are two of them, of course.

Okay, I've said all of that and covered all of the bases, plucked all of the low lying fruit, so that we can go beyond the catchphrases and into some serious discussion. This is our point of entry today: to take old chestnuts and try to crack them to see what pops out. Our subject is Disneyland. Our topic: charm.

The thing you hear all the time about Disneyland ultimately comes down to two words: magic and charm. Now, "magic" is a reappropriated marketing word, so it's really not helpful, but it points towards our second term, charm. Disneyland is intimate and human sized. Magic Kingdom is spectacular and epic sized. Everyone who's been to Disneyland knows it's got something special about it - but what it is, nobody seems to be able to say. Some say it's because it's the park Walt Disney built, which I think rather discredits all of the excellent work that's been done there since he passed away nearly a half century ago. Some think it's the way it was built - Disneyland uses more real plaster, brick and wood, Walt Disney World is largely made up of fiberglass and sometimes looks it.

I was contemplating all of these things last week while in Disneyland doing nothing in particular, searching for the word that describes that special something. As Benjamin states, what is the ineffable, vaporous stuff that Disneyland has and the Magic Kingdom lacks - the "unique existence at the place where it happens to be"?The word I hit on was naive. I don't mean it in a negative way - I mean it in a way more closely resembling the original term for what we call folk art - naive art. It doesn't mean ignorant, it means something as it existed in it's pure, natural, untutored state.

Is Disneyland naive? As the first of its kind, the first multimedia art experience which lifted the amusement center to a new height that a word had to be invented for it - a theme park - it must be. It may not be Benjamin's "perfect work", but it is certainly qualifies as one of his "major works" - in short, a cultural watershed.

Yet Disneyland grew up as the men and women who made it were still making up the rules as they went, and so it grew in fits, starts, and stops. A fairly holistic theme park with lands that were siloed off from each other expanded, tacked new things onto areas where they were not meant to be, the areas bled together, additional demands for capacity forced development of unlikely spots, and urbanization of the surrounding area blotted out hopes of blowing the park out very far beyond its railroad tracks.

Disneyland built things where it could, and so very often buildings are dropped down perfunctorily, only very rarely placed to achieve any specific pictorial effect. Depending on where you are, there can be three levels of themed design occurring around you on different registers. This makes Disneyland visually dense while retaining a somewhat prosaic thematic effect. This is what people mean when they say Disneyland is charming: it's a massive pile of ideas slammed down, one atop the other, with very little room to spare. This means that it's very common to find areas where one kind of texture or surface treatment just ends because it collides with another. This is what I mean when I say Disneyland is naive.

Let's take a quick look at a pertinent area: the Hub. At the top is version one: the Disneyland hub. At the bottom is version two, the Walt Disney World hub. Both of these photographs are presented at the same scale.


We can see that the actual central ring of pavement is roughly the same size, even if Magic Kingdom uses vastly larger sidewalks. I've cropped the image to right about where the Magic Kingdom hub and moat terminates, so that we can clearly see here how, in the space Magic Kingdom uses to slowly introduce the various lands and include spacious lawns and trees, Disneyland has included The Plaza Inn, Plaza Pavilion, Enchanted Tiki Room, Tahitian Terrace / Aladdin Oasis, the entire queue of the Jungle Cruise, half of Adventureland (all of it in 1955), most of Frontierland, The Shooting Gallery, Casa de Fritos / Rancho de Zocalo, part of Big Thunder Mountain, Carnation Gardens, three sets of bathrooms, Snow White Grotto, the "House of the Future" site, the Astro Orbitor, and a substantial chunk of the Peoplemover track. Just in the 1971 Hub.

I want you to think about what the massive increase in ambition and scale that single area of the Magic Kingdom constituted for WED Enterprises in 1971. Keep in mind that these guys had the ability and expertise - the experience - to replicate any darn part of Disneyland they wanted. What they did with this experience was to create a totally new theme park specifically designed to minimize very specific parts of the Disneyland master plan. Magic Kingdom has no berm - they didn't need to block out a city, so why bother? Magic Kingdom largely slowly draws you into the various sub-areas of the park, gradually transitioning plantings, music, textures, and colors in ways which pass by you essentially subliminally. This is what I mean when I say that Disneyland and Magic Kingdom are aesthetically dissimilar - your basic assumptions about the way the place was put together have to be different. Magic Kingdom generally handles its transitory spaces with slow, subliminal, incremental changes, some sort of real life version of a cinematic fade. The part WED Enterprises chose to exclude, of all the things they could have excluded, are the moments in Disneyland where one set of themed design choices meets another in a very small space.

I'm fascinated by those moments, partially because it was exactly that which was excluded with almost surgical precision from every Disney theme park that came after - every subsequent version builds on the 1971 park, not the 1955 one. Therefore, it must by definition be one of the things that makes Disneyland so charming - that thing they removed, that special condition. And if we are interested in drilling down past the years of built up rhetoric and regional squabbling and get nearer that thing that makes Disneyland special, we must engage this facet of the park. We must carefully observe and expose its workings.

So, fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.

Vortex: The Hub
Does the Central Plaza have a theme?

At Magic Kingdom, it does. It's themed to Main Street. The areas which do not carry the Main Street theme are presented across a body of water - the moat. Adventureland is over there, you must cross this bridge to get there. The Magic Kingdom conditions us to expect this by first presenting itself at the far end of a huge body of water - the Seven Seas Lagoon, a mile across - which we must traverse to get to it. We are conditioned to expect strange and fantastic things which await us across the water. This taps into more cultural traditions that can be counted. "Away, I'm bound away / Across the wide Missouri!"

Disneyland laid the foundations for this, and of course it too has a moat - albeit one which does not wrap all the way around the plaza. The moat here serves a slightly different function, and the central plaza itself includes elements from each of the sub-lands standing easily one next to the other. Disneyland generally achieves its' fantastical distortions by contrasting non-complimentary items - an African trading hut contrasted directly with an American frontier stockade, Bavarian castle, and Swiss mountain. It would only make sense in Disneyland.

Therefore, I look at Disneyland's central plaza not as an extension of Main Street, but as a sort of vortex which has drawn elements of all of the various lands towards the center of the park - the vacuum at the heart of the tornado. This central position is now occupied by a statue of Walt Disney, which is perhaps poetically appropriate. It is a sort of thematic no-man's-land where any theme is appropriate, setting up the sense of fantasy through contrasting, dramatic juxtaposition.


Above, we see the point where the Hub's neutral "city park" railings first intersect an architectural  piece of Fantasyland, near the hub and visually linked to Sleeping Beauty Castle. Interestingly, this piece of Fantasyland then immediately ends, returning to the "city park" railings just a yard or so later. Fantasyland proper doesn't seem to begin until this point, which is celebrated with an elaborate light fixture:


At which point this castle stonework continues into the Alice in Wonderland area. Meanwhile, across the way, the city park metal rails continue past and through the current "Pixie Hollow" area, once the former residence of the Monsanto House of the Future:


Here we can see how neutral "Hub" railings can be contrasted directly with Little Mermaid rock work left over from the 1990s, Tomorrowland visual features, and Victorian Main Street. One final example of the Hub area's extremely vague, noncommittal theming:


This is the point where Main Street hits Tomorrowland head-on, around the side of the Plaza Inn. Now: not a single Disney theme park is without awkwardness at the Main Street - Tomorrowland junction, so I'm not picking here, but what we have here is seriously a blank wall with some trees in front of it. But what kind of jerk looks at blank walls anyway?

The Hub at Disneyland is a unique place to observe the most violent visual clashes of theme and idea. So what are we saying here - that Disneyland's central plaza is themed to no land? Or every land? I think it's both. The Central Plaza is actually the second land we encounter upon entering Disneyland, and as such it has a function unique to this park alone. We can think of it akin to the table of contents in a book: come here and you can expect this sort of thing.

Window: Adventureland
Across the way, Adventureland's beautiful entry arch runs direct into the Hub at this point:


The extra little bit of detail there is quite nice, the irregular bricks peeking out from behind the plasterwork brings Main Street to mind. Here, open space and lots of greenery helps the transition feel pretty natural on the right side. On the left side, over by the Tiki Room, we get a much more perfunctory transition:


The ivy-covered terrace on the right is part of the Plaza Pavilion restaurant. The bamboo on the left is actually inside the waiting area for the Enchanted Tiki Room. In between we have this head.

Now, it wasn't always like this. In fact, it isn't even supposed to work this way.
Back in the 50s, open space and foliage created a stronger sense of an entrance to Adventureland, before the Tiki Room filled the open gap between the entrance gate and the adjoining Plaza / Polynesian restaurant:

Daveland

Daveland

October 1971

"Here you leave today.." // Flickr user Tony Kelly

Here's a fun intellectual game you can play at Disneyland: which land is the Matterhorn in?

One of the most famous things about the Matterhorn is that it was "moved" from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland in 1971. This, more than anything, demonstrates its inherent flexibility. The Matterhorn was initially grouped around the number of attractions of indistinct locality: The Fantasyland Autopia, Submarine Voyage, The Motor Boat Cruise, and we could even argue for It's A Small World, which has never been a wholly appropriate fit for Fantasyland. The monorail, undeniably a Tomorrowland element, wraps around it. The bobsleds themselves more closely resemble rocket ships and in 1978 the attraction received clones of sleds then in use at Walt Disney World's Space Mountain. And the Skyway buckets, which disembarked in both Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, of course passed direct through it.

Yet it's a stone's throw away from both Alice in Wonderland and the Tomorrowland Terrace, and depending on whether one walks around the north or south side of the mountain she will experience very different visual elements. And just why was the attraction added to "Tomorrowland" in 1959 in the first place?

Please choose for me, folks!

During the 1978 refurbishment, a number of elements were added to the Matterhorn which perhaps more strongly than ever claimed it for Fantasyland. Reworked rolling fields and flowerbeds, charming footbridges over gurgling mountain streams, and Alpine lights and lanterns now set the scene as we walk around the base of the mountain, setting a bucolic middle-European tone which was very much a "dress rehearsal" for the New Fantasyland of 1983. And of course, with the addition of shimmering gems and the Abominable Snowman himself, we're very much out of the realm of science-fantasy and into fairy tale territory.

Starting way out in Tomorrowland, right at the base of the Monorail exit ramp, we find this whimsical fence surrounding the Submarine Voyage lagoon, which has always included fantastical elements such as mermaids and sea serpents intruding on the orderly world of science and technology:

We've been submerged too long

The railing blithely continues directly past a number of Tomorrowland Elements, such as the Peoplemover track and Terrace, until it links up with newer theming out near the Motorboat Cruise / Small World Mall area. It seems perfectly natural over by the Matterhorn:


From the opposite side of the lagoon, rock work blends the two 1959 attractions together visually, making a tropical coral reef and a European mountain look like natural companions:


Yet continue along the south side of the Matterhorn and the similarities seem less convincing. Here's a European lamp and pole right up against Tomorrowland's streamlined planters and the very futuristic blank wall and bulkhead door:


And if that wasn't enough, here we can see Tomorrowland architecture looming over Matterhorn's Fantasyland street lights and juxtaposed with Main Street telephones:


This is another moment where Tomorrowland attempts to hide in plain sight with muted colors, blank walls and some trees, and the results can be called more charming than effective. None of these elements have any business being in the same proximity as each other.

Matterhorn is one of those many things at Disneyland that ended up where it was due to space restrictions and because Walt Thought It Was Cool. And the Matterhorn is cool, very much so. It seems to belong to both Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, and it's simply such a massive object that it's like a huge block which screens one land from the other. This is themed design by obstruction; it's like a wedge that separates the two areas. Faced with a nonsensical juxtaposition of elements, we see here attempts to aesthetically blend three visually unrelated objects. The results are... mixed.

So what does the Matterhorn fit in best with, Fantasyland or Tomorrowland? I think it's neither. I like to think of the Matterhorn as being themed to part of the Hub, and in fact it forms a sort of second hub; walking its perimeter is one of the most satisfying scenic tours in Disneyland. What could have been a liability is turned into a seemingly natural part of an imaginative visual landscape.

Hinge: The Riverbelle Terrace
In 1955, each of the various areas of Disneyland was a little self-contained pocket - the various lands would each "dead end". This makes perfect sense from a movie back lot design perspective, but this was one of the earliest lessons learned by WED Enterprises when it comes to designing for people, not film crews. Some of these areas were opened up pretty quickly - such as the east Fantasyland dead end, which spilled out towards the train station and Mickey Mouse Circus within a year. Others, such as connecting Frontierland to Fantasyland directly, didn't come about for decades and decades.

One of the quickest of these changes was to open up the small and crowded Adventureland to the west, connecting it with the most westerly portions of Frontierland. If we pull up Disneyland: People and Places, an early promotional documentary, we can see the path the wraps around the Aunt Jemima Pancake House from Adventureland there to the right and crosses then a bridge towards the train station (the Tom Sawyer Island rafts boarded below this bridge):


Just on the other side of the bridge was Magnolia Park, the original planned site for the Haunted Mansion and New Orleans Square:


Notice how the bandstand was just a few yards from the Jungle Cruise behind an earthen berm... there must have been a lot of Dixieland audible in certain parts of the Jungle in those days!

This simple connection created the original transition space in Disneyland, and it's worth looking at in some detail before we look at how it's used today. Now, New Orleans Square is always thought of as Disneyland's first new "land", but it's more rightly thought of as an expansion of an area that has always been there from day one: the New Orleans Street in Frontierland.

Daveland

Interestingly, the "New Orleans Street" was not intended to be visible from the Frontierland Train Station. The side of the Pancake House facing the train (above), clapboard and adobe architecture gave the building a "Western" look:

Daveland

Here's a photo showing how the molding and texture of this strip of buildings on the "Orleans" side simply terminated around the corner on the "Western" side:

Photobucket user darkfairycthulu

And the largest and most conspicuous "New Orleans" building in the area, the stately "Plantation House" by Swift...

Gorillas Don't Blog

 ...looked, on the opposite side facing the train station, more like a "California Hacienda":


This meant that guests walking in Frontierland in the "Orleans Street" and on the Mark Twain would have perceived the street and Plantation House at the end of it as being in the "New Orleans" style while guests arriving at Frontierland by train would have seen only "Old West" style architecture.

By the early 60s, the Aunt Jemima's had been expanded with a large show kitchen and glass walled seating area, covering up the former "Old West" architecture. At the same time, the Plantation House was pulled down. As early as 1962, this transitional space was being smoothed out in preparation for New Orleans Square. The new facade is now familiar to us as the Riverbelle Terrace:

Daveland

Riverbelle Terrace is the most interesting transitional architectural feature of Disneyland, and as such it deserves some extended consideration here, although to start I'd like to begin by playing games with... fences.

Don't Fence Me In
As you may have noticed by now, rails, fences, planters, and flowerboxes do an unusual amount of heavy lifting of the transition-spots of Disneyland. This may because these crowd control barriers generally are felt more than carefully studied: we interact with them and they set a tone without really being noticed in specific detail. Disneyland has a huge and astonishing variety of simply beautiful railings. Entering Frontierland, on the main "T" street, the rails and surface pavers look something like this:





That's an obviously "Western" visual vocabulary. Plants poke out alongside a crude "path" that seems laid over them. Jumbles of rocks define the edges of the walkway, as if they were simply pushed there by foot and stage traffic. If we proceed around the side of the Golden Horseshoe near the Stage Door Cafe the visuals remain similar but now the rough wooden rails have become more formalized stone walls and planters. Large bushes help disguise the changing architecture. This is feet away from the start of the "New Orleans Street":


This half-wall is topped with this intriguingly stylized wooden rail, perhaps a premonition of the increased visual variety of New Orleans Square:


Just a few feet away, the large, irregular blocks of stone seen near Stage Door become formal, mass produced red bricks, heralding the start of the original 1955 "New Orleans Street". Increasingly complex rails and decorative details are evident:


Here's a flowerbed from the middle of the New Orleans Street, this one with an added touch of gentility due to a trim white metal rail around the perimeter. This in particular very much looks forward to the sort of work WED Enterprises would do with Liberty Square in Magic Kingdom:


Continuing past the Riverbelle Terrace, the progression of increasing gentrification reaches its end as the plantings around the glass-walled Arboretum-like dining hall abruptly transition back to disorder, represented by Adventureland:


Nearby, these rails, part of New Orleans Square but also part of the Riverbelle Terrace visual experience - ie, belonging to both Frontierland and New Orleans Square but being actually inside Adventureland - abruptly terminate at the base of a tree:


Let's take a few steps back now, all the way back to Frontierland, in fact. Here's the spot where the Riverboat Landing's open, wide, brightly painted wood architecture gives way to what I call the Disneyland "waterfront":


Around the Petrified Tree Stump (because, you know, Fronteirland) is this attractive wrought iron design:





These two distinct rails continue alongside each other for a bit:


....until the Frontierland rail fence terminates at a potted plant.


That potted plant can be said to be the very last point of Frontierland along the waterfront. Everything in sight from that point on is New Orleans until we get near the Haunted Mansion. The "Waterfront" area was radically revised by Imagineering in the early 90s, turning what was previously a pleasant, gentle slope down to the river into a hodgepodge of terraces, fences, lighting rig pits and other nonsense to support the installation of "Fantasmic". Here's the spot, near the Tom Sawyer Island raft landing, where the gentility of New Orleans begins to strip back down towards the "Frontierland" aesthetic:


Interestingly, since this occurs well east of the Haunted Mansion - where New Orleans Square terminates - the planters and details of New Orleans run parallel to this cruder "waterfront" look for some time:


...ending at Fowler's Inn, an appropriate accompaniment to the seaside horror mansion. And for about twenty-five years, that's how it was. The area past the Haunted Mansion always felt like a reset. Here's a 1966 photo showing what would one day become the Haunted Mansion exit:

Long-Forgotten

It was designed to feel like you're going off into a remote area, whether that be the Indian Village (which you entered through a cave) or Bear Country, which meant walking through a ravine:

Yesterland

Regardless, the thematic transitions "reset" past Mansion until the construction of Splash Mountain, which forced Bear/Critter Country's backwoods aesthetic flush up against the Haunted Mansion's plantation South:


I've been using the term "awkward transitions" rather tongue in cheek all this time because I think Disneyland does a remarkable job with a difficult situation, but this is one spot where I must admit that the Haunted Mansion / Splash Mountain transition is just plain sloppy. You can find more awkward transition spots in Disney theme parks - especially ones with names that end in "Studios" or "Adventure" - but those parks aren't nearly in the same artistic league.


So the Riverbelle Terrace is the hardest-working transitional spot in Disneyland, bringing us from the untamed wilderness of the American West to the gentility of nineteenth-century New Orleans. It also bridges space and time to transition another untamed wilderness, Adventureland, cleanly and clearly into the exotic colors and textures of the Big Easy. In fact, the transition from Adventureland to New Orleans is clearly reflected in the Terrace's south-side architecture which, along with the Pirates of the Caribbean facade across the way, is to my eye the strongest anticipation of Magic Kingdom's remarkable Adventureland Veranda:



A balcony on the Adventureland side:


And one just a few lateral feet away, but a whole world apart on the New Orleans side:


The Riverbelle Terrace directly straddling the Frontierland/Adventureland/New Orleans junction. Notice the open spaces on the left and the dark colors and heavier planting on the right. Both balconies are visible:


Architectural features above the central dining room look equally at home in New Orleans or an exotic outpost. The windows are nuetral: are they French Plantation or French Colonial? One has curtains, the other a simple shade. Colors compliment a wide variety of applications as they can be seen from inside three different "lands":


The same simple white siding serves a variety of uses. In Frontierland, it's hung horizontally; in Adventureland, vertically. Hanging lamps shared on both sides help visually unify the building:


Once past Adventureland and on the "waterfront", the tropical elements are largely obscured by foliage, and the Pirates of the Caribbean, situated inside New Orleans Square but taking us to an exotic port-o-call, is an appropriate thematic transition. Recall that Pirates itself was placed in Adventureland in Florida and in a New Orleans subsection of Adventureland in Tokyo. All of these visual tropes and conceptual ideas are very malleable and blendable.

From New Orleans Square, the Terrace harmonizes perfectly with Dixieland Jazz and gas lamps. Notice how only the side directly facing the square makes extensive use of wrought iron:


But also then notice how, just past the wrought iron, the facade transitions towards simple timbers and earth-toned colors. The "antebellum" timbers out in front of Aunt Jemima's front door aren't the Grecian columns like the Haunted Mansion has, they're in a more rustic style:


And these earth tones and timbers visually transition us to the citified Golden Horseshoe, which sticks out far enough and is positioned on a wide enough corner to mean that the smaller, more rustic Frontierland is hidden from view. It's a sort of cinematic fade that takes several hundred feet that we experience with our eyes alone.


Consider the dramatic increase in sophistication these 1966 and 1962 structures represent compared to that old Plaza Pavilion/Polynesian Terrace on Main Street:


So am I not saying that Disneyland's design is naive? No. The hand-built, human-scale, smushed-together effect is the "Disneyland Magic". It takes a sensitive eye to pick it out in later iterations of the "Disneyland-type-park" built by WED Enterprises and Imagineering, because they are more sophisticated designs. I've spent a long time here talking about the craft of cinema, of back lot sets and cameras, so I'll put it in cinematic terms. I'm sure many of us have had experiences where we watched a movie from several generations ago and scoffed at some sort of outdated camera technique or obvious special effect. This could be the use of camera irises in silent film or maybe something like the obvious model airplane in Casablanca or rear-projected driving scenes in Vertigo.

We scoff at them because as films have continued to change, the tools available to filmmakers have allowed them to smooth out or paper over technical definicies which were accepted by audiences in their day but look much more prominent to us now.

Disneyland is sort of like that. It was so cutting edge in its day that the subsequent evolution of this thing we now know to be a theme park means that its tricks, the moments where the illusions meet awkwardly, is very obvious to modern eyes. This is what creates the sense of cuteness, of charm. This is what I mean when I say that Disneyland is naieve: what it's up to is right out there in the open for all to see. It's a great place to start to learn about how theme parks work because what Disneyland does thematically tends to be very clear and easy to comprehend.

But I don't think that just that aspect alone makes one thing inherently superior to another. The increased sophistication of something like Magic Kingdom or Animal Kingdom is, just like Disneyland, reflective of the era in which those parks were built. I enjoy the artistic aspects of those parks without finding them to be a threat to Disneyland's similar but also quite different excellence, just as I don't find Peter Jackson's CGI gorilla to be much of a threat to the legacy of the 1933 King Kong.

On one hand, modern audiences tend to laugh at the effects in King Kong or Jason and the Argonauts, things that held me in rapt attention as a child as dazzling, seemingly magical expressions of technical skill. Yet Disneyland has largely not dated in the same way, and I think the secret is because even in 1955 the park was about nostalgia. You don't traipse 1955 adults down a fantastical recreation of what America was like in their childhoods for just no good reason. Disneyland never once asks us to believe that what it presents is reality, it has and will forever be intentionally retrograde, slightly hokey.

I see we've come full circle, back to where we started, that special charm of Disneyland. If such a vastly complex work as Disneyland need be broken down into a simple summation of why it often seems to be the the definitive theme park experience, I don't think landing on "charm" and redefining it as "naive art" is all that bad. I've gone through and pointed out just a half dozen especially pertinent and interesting cases to me, but in reality there are legions of possible places in Disneyland where that essential "Disneyland charm" is still in evidence - some good, some not so good, but all characteristic of the place itself, all characteristic of "that unique existence of the work of art."

"We saw every ballet, every film. If a film was good we would go and see it five times. Walt rented a studio up in North Hollywood and we would see a selection of films - anything from Charlie Chaplin to unusual subjects. Anything that might produce growth, that might be stimulating - the cutting of the scenes, the staging, how a group of scenes was cut together... The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu, were things we saw. (...) We didn't miss a trick, really."

Marc Davis, Crimmer's Harvard Journal of Pictorial Fiction, Winter 1975

Disney and World Cinema
It may come as a surprise to some who have grown up in the digital age, but once upon a time, Walt Disney's films were very serious business. Today it's hard to imagine the reams of praise heaped upon Disney not just in popular and trade publications, but in higher, official forums of "cultural taste". One famous admirer was Robert Benchley, a crony of American wit Alexander Wolcott ("Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening") and dean of the "Algonquin Round Table", a group of New York upper crust luminaries which included Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, and sometimes Harpo Marx. Robert Benchley is the star of the Disney feature "The Reluctant Dragon", a bizarre film made by Walt to publicize his production methods and brand-new Burbank Studio. The fact that Disney could do something like that and not be critically savaged speaks volumes to the respect he was afforded at the time.

Disney took from everything, watched everything, and was loved for it. The early Disney features are some of the most astonishing blends of popular culture and high art in American cinema. It doesn't take much probing about in World Cinema classics before you start turning up influences:

Faust, F.W. Murnau, UFA, 1926

Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940

Faust, F.W. Murnau, UFA, 1926

Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940

Haxan, Benjamin Christensen, Svensk-Film, 1922

World Cinema returned the favor. One conspicuous example is Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who left Europe in 1930 to make a film for Paramount. On his tour of Hollywood he met Walt Disney, who was by then already an unlikely cultural hero in the Soviet Union. Disney himself was later in life a staunch conservative and so the Walt Disney Company has largely swept this fact under the carpet and it has received little attention in English writing on the subject.


Before 1930, Eisenstein's famous Soviet agit-prop action spectacles like Battleship Potemkin and Strike! are filmed with the shaky, nervous, hyper-kinetic camera which recalls both amateur film and the documentary newsreel of the era. After Eisenstein's Hollywood period during which he accumulated techniques and ideas, his films become hyper-surreal, stately paced things which revel in bizarre pictorial symbolism. If early Eisenstein films create meaning famously by juxtaposing shots which represent ideas, by the sound period he's using every element in the film frame - actors, decor, lighting, camera placement - to juxtapose ideas against each other. The editing becomes slower because each inch of the exposed image is now steeped in symbolic concepts.

Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky, 1938

Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible Part One, 1944

This sort of crazy, chock-a-block imagery has only really survived in popular films in the medium of animation. Because animated films are created a frame at a time using an incredibly expensive process, every character on screen, every gesture, and every brush stroke works to create meaning and often employ symbolic staging and expressive images to help create mood and sensation in a way that would look quite strange in "reality". This is what Eisenstein took from Disney.

Around the same time, two filmmakers on the (literal) Other Side of the World were grabbing the ball left in the air by the Disney studio and creating their own eye-popping movies. These men were Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger, and instead of copping from the Burbank lot the hand-crafted, symbolist nature of the studio's output, they went after the visual spectacle, the impression of art, music, form and color all flowing freely and as one.

This still from their 1946 A Matter of Life and Death speaks for itself:


As do these stills from their famous The Red Shoes, which itself seems to be constantly straining against being a live-action film and attempting to move into the realm of animation or moving painting:


And their own effort at topping Fantasia, the 1949 Tales of Hoffmann:


As if to make the link clear, in 1956, after splitting with Pressberger, Michael Powell went on to make his own short film - of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in a similar style! So there.

Look at how much of those stills above are painted representations - moving illustrations, animation with live actors instead of Mickey Mouse. All through the 40's Disney worked again and again at perfecting a process for seamlessly inserting live action actors into animation, but Powell and Pressburger simply bypass the technical trickery of something like Three Caballeros and Song of the South and create their animated landscapes the old fashioned way - using super impositions and stage sets.

In fact, it's really just a short imaginative leap from the sort of crazy, distorted, but still real sets found in Tales of Hoffmann to Disneyland in 1955. Very often the film Hoffman reminds us of the sort of thing Claude Coats would've dreamed up for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

Which brings us around to our point of entree today, which is my old muse, The Haunted Mansion. Haunted Mansion is an exemplary model of the bleed-over points between film and theme park, and this has to do with the fact that the Mansion itself is one of the thickest soups of cultural melanges in the whole Disney back-catalogue. Haunted Mansion draws on dozens of influences, references, and deeply ingrained concepts to produce a heady blend of horror and comedy. It sometimes seems to be the apotheosis of the entire cycle of Gothic horror pop culture.

After 1969, popular horrors would steer less in the direction of the traditional Gothics and more towards things like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. This shift reflected the Vietnam War, the rise of tabloid culture, and increasing cultural disillusionment. In fact, if we want to look for cultural signposts that point us away from the Haunted Mansion and towards the sea of gore we all float in today, there's one of the very same weekend - in fact the very same official day of the attraction's opening - the Sharon Tate murders of August 9, 1969.

Of course, we all know this already. The films which influenced the development cycle of the attraction have been extensively covered on the Internet because the Haunted Mansion is the ultimate Disney ride and the Internet is the ultimate depositary for minutia. But instead of glossing over the typical still images and trotting out the same old titles, I'd like to approach The Haunted Mansion from a different perspective: as just another branch in a very large family tree of popular horrors. To trace that tree we have to start below ground - at the seed. I'd like to map a road to the Haunted Mansion from film history instead of taking the typical approach, which traces from the Haunted Mansion to popular films.

By taking the long route we can see the prehistory and history of the ideas that went into the attraction as it came together - why it throws so many deep, deep switches in the dark places of our minds. And to do that, we have to take a leisurely tour of the entire phenomenon of what we now know as the "horror film". This means I'm going to spend the entire first half of this article digging through film history that will appear to be of little direct consequence to the Disney ride. But when we reach the Mansion and the influences begin to converge, I believe it will be beneficial to have all that background information at your fingertips instead of having to elide or summarize concepts that had been building through decades of genre films.

I put "horror film" in quotes above because, like me when I was younger, you've probably at some point gone back to the "elemental" classics of horror cinema and come away pretty disappointed. Those early films just don't seem to be all that scary.  This is because those films were made before the concept of a horror film existed. And if we trace the influences we can find those points of connection where the web of cultural history - of which the Haunted Mansion is just one interlocked strand - becomes clearer.

So let's begin. It was a dark and stormy night....

Proto-Horror and the Great War
One hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a horror movie.

Would anyone today call this film a "pictorial melodrama"?

The style is actually an even more recent phenomenon than that; a quick search through the archives of the  New York and Los Angeles Times reveals that it's difficult to even get relevant results for periods predating 1936. The earliest mention I found of a "horror film" in the generally accepted sense of the term is in a 1932 article by Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times - "New Horror Film Planned" - announcing the start of production on Murders at the Zoo. To put it another way, the early 30s cycle of Hollywood shockers seems to have established the genre as a viable format, and with that viable format came a recognizable name.

This makes the horror film unique, in that it was a late bloomer in the pantheon of film genres. When you go back far enough in film history it's easy to uncover, say, early dramas, comedies, action movies, heist movies, Western, nature documentaries... all of the essential colors which are blended in modern cinema to form various hues and tints which make up our tradition of popular entertainment. But what you don't find is horror movies.

There was a one-off abnormality, the Edison Company's 1910 film of Frankenstein. Although it's since been rescued and promoted by genre enthusiasts as an early example of the horror film, Frankenstein was a creative dead end. The film did not establish the genre and was in its own day quickly forgotten. Edison themselves advertised that anything unpleasant in the source story had been removed!

Frankenstein may be a dead end, but if you go forward a few years to 1914 and across the Atlantic to France, you'll find more fruitful roots in the form of Louis Feuillade, who initiated his famous cycle of serial crime thrillers with Fantomâs. Fantomâs is a 6 hour set of 5 films which chronicle the unending search for a ruthless criminal terrorist who kills and robs to no apparent end and uses disguises and modern technology to hide his identity. These films, which by film standards were shockingly violent and suspenseful in their day, were a runaway success - in one case inciting a riot. French film authorities unsuccessfully tried to ban the films - you couldn't stop people from seeing these things.

Fantomas - the man without a face!

In some ways I'm cheating by including Fantomâs in here because these films were so successful and popular that they initiated their own cycles of influences and remakes -- except for the fact that these influences and remakes intersect tremblingly often with our own discussion today. Fueillade's films, especially his followup to Fantomâs, Les Vampires (calm down, there's no vampires in the movie, it's the name of a gang) influenced an Austrian kid named Fritz Lang, who would go on to start his own cycle of Fueillade-influenced mystery and crime thrillers both in Germany and America. Lang then influenced Alfred Hitchcock, who would go off and start a cycle of Lang-influenced mystery and crime thrillers in England and America.

Lang made a handful of movies that are commonly discussed as having relevance to the horror genre - M (1931) and Metropolis (1927) are often brought up, but easy to overlook but just as clear is Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922-23) and its sequel The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), which are paranoid conspiracy thrillers involving mind control, ghosts, hallucinations and messages from beyond the grave. Hitchcock himself eventually branched out beyond Lang-style pulp thrillers, directing Psycho (1960), The Birds (1962), and Frenzy (1972), whose influence is such that Hitchcock's name alone is synonymous with stylish film terror. So although it's a sidebar to our discussion, you deserve to know and recognize Fantomâs as the source point for what we would eventually call the horror film.

And then, friends, World War I happened and the horror film really got underway.

 In the wake of the Great War, much of Europe's male population had been killed or disfigured and were now limping back to the ruins of their cities and towns - where innocent citizens had been bombed and gassed - and it was clear that nothing would be the same. During the war, Hollywood film exports had conquered the hearts and minds of the world, and America had won the war for the Allies. Americans suddenly were exerting both economic and cultural dominance over the Old World. And now we need to introduce a new major player on our landscape: Erich Pommer.

Erich Pommer

Pommer started off as a producer of educational and cultural films for German audiences as part of the "Decla" film company. After the war, Decla absorbed one company - Meinert-Film-Gesellschaft - and merged with another - Bioscop AG - to form what we would today called a megacorporation, Decla-Bioscop. Decla-Bioscop was then purchased outright by UFA, a massive film production company owned and controlled by... the German government. To put it another way, in the span of about five short years, Pommer went from being a production executive to a CEO to the head of the biggest film production company outside of Hollywood.

Pommer's problem was this: Hollywood had institutionalized production, distribution, and star making techniques into a cultural powerhouse that was leaving Europe in the dust. How do you compete with that? Pommer's solution was to do the opposite of what Hollywood was doing - if Hollywood films were naturalistic, shot against the rolling hills of California, then German films would be anti-naturalistic, shot in artistically conceived fake studio interiors. And if Hollywood had institutionalized a top-down executive committee whose main focus was on making popular, successful, predictable films, then German films would be artistically uncompromising and controlled by artful film directors. Pommer, in effect, would find major film talents and throw seemingly unlimited amounts of money at them, giving them carte blanche to put their dreams on film.

If, when you think of German silent cinema, you think of lavish, strange, visually dense spectacles of expressionism and doom, you are thinking of Erich Pommer's vision for films. Hollywood's trademark was light and fun, Pommer's was artistry and fatality. He branded German cinema as "Expressionistic" for the posterity of world culture, so much so that the words are now inseperable - German Expressionism.


Pommer's breakout production was the 1919 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Today we know it was cinema's first true horror film, but in 1919 it was somewhat different. The story tells of a bourgeois Herr Docktor who appears in a small town as part of a carnival act where he induces a spooky comatose man to step out of a coffin and voice pronouncements of doom. His predictions always come true, because the Docktor then sends the hypnotised Cesare out to stab townspeople to death under the cover of darkness. Eventually the entire story is revealed to have been told by a lunatic in a asylum.

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a parable of World War I, where the rich send the poor off to kill and maim while they remain at home, guilty but innocent. Not only were the upper class insane to start the war, the film tells us, but the entire exercise was madness. And the entire film, which did not have a popular message given that the war dead were still fresh in their graves, was then shot in a style which was guaranteed to upset people: decadent, indecent, ugly modern art.

Albin Grau art for "Nosferatu" (1922)

Although at the time it was unknowable, Caligari set the groundwork for all proto-horror films to follow: madness, shadows, violence, suspense, even a twist ending. Today it's synonymous with "German Expressionism", but at the time the set design was seen as something of a gimmick and the sociological concerns of the film on the effects of the Great War were commented upon - nobody at the time missed the metaphor. Today, the gimmick is the part most likely to be celebrated and the film's reason for being is all but invisible. Caligari has been absorbed into the horror pantheon.

Here, due to the chronological nature of this account it's incumbent on me to mention the short but potent film career of Albin Grau, a real, honest-to-goodness Occultist who had dealings with, amongst others the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. Grau found a company in 1921 - Prana Film - to produce what he called "truly occult movies". He hired talented director Friedrich Wilheim Murnau, who was then making adaptations of successful novels for Erich Pommer, on his first low-budget venture: Nosferatu. Grau designed the production himself, including supplying the famous "occult paper" that the crazed Knock receives from Count Orlock with instructions to send Thomas Hutter to Transylvania - supposedly written with real Occult symbols. Grau produced a great deal of art to promote the film, often filled with menacing images and shadows, and probably conceived (or prompted Murnau to conceive) the famous shots of the shadow of Nosferatu sliding across walls and people.

Prana-Film was forced out of business, but Grau went on to form another company with the same mandate: Pan Film, which produced his second feature, Warning Shadows (1923). Directed by Arthur Robison, the use of shadow play is even more extreme. The film begins with a curtained stage with a candle sitting nearby. A disembodied hand grasps the candle and retreats, and the curtains open on a blank movie screen on which huge hands create shadows (exactly like a movie projector) from which emerge the various characters who will populate the narrative. One pivotal scene finds shadows vanishing as space within a room transforms. Grau writes that:

"In film, shadow is more important than light. Cinema is the language of shadows. Through shadow, the hidden and dark forces become visible."

Murnau and Robison went on to make excellent films but would never again use shadow in the same way with the same meaning - Grau is clearly the auteur of these remarkable films. And while Caligari caused a great deal of consternation in the United States as just another scandalous example of the decadence of European art, Nosferatu wasn't released until 1929 and Warning Shadows was - and remains - an obscurity. Despite the fame of Nosferatu, it would not become an influential force in the development of horror films abroad until much later. American horror was going to have to be home-grown.

What would an American horror film look like? The United States, victorious after the Great War, had returned home to an economy that was shortly booming, remarkable modern inventions, and the jazz music that scored the whole crazy era. The cinema was owned by stars like Charlie Chaplin's sentimental comedies, Mary Pickford's "fish out of water" romances and Douglas Fairbanks' astonishing action spectacles. American popular culture was relentlessly optimistic, and those weird movies from overseas were just yet more proof that those Europeans were still mostly in the dark ages.

And then there was Lon Chaney.

Lon Chaney was called by film historian Scott MacQueen "...a shapeshifter who gave voice to the jazz age's darkest impulses", which is pretty much true. Beginning as a bit and character actor in dozens of short subjects and quickees, Chaney slowly made a name for himself as a superb actor of roles which other performers could not or would not portray. He played a sympathetic Chinese cook in Shadows (1922) and a quirky Fagin in Oliver Twist (1922), and memorably doubled his legs up behind his back and hobbled around on crutches to play a legless gangster in the still-shocking The Penalty (1920). By the time he changed his whole body to play Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), audiences were convinced Chaney's makeup and performances amounted to magic. They began to go to Chaney pictures to see his next over-the-top, gruesome character, and Hollywood began to deliver on the expectation.

But none of these films are horror films. Hunchback is a straightforward historical spectacle, The Penalty is a morality play, and Shadows is a straight drama. Chaney's next film, the frightening He Who Gets Slapped (1924), is a revenge drama that resists classification. What all of these films have in common is a remarkable performance by Chaney as an unloved outcast. Chaney played characters who failed to conform to American society, and audiences lined up to watch him menace, and suffer, and watch sadly as the girl of his dreams walks away with the "hero". This was the Chaney formula which made him possibly the greatest and most mysterious star of his era. Chaney's elaborate disfigurements don't look forward to Horror Cinema so much as they look back to the horrors of the Front.

So it's important to see how his next film got green lit - Phantom of the Opera was intended to match Chaney with a gruesome makeup in a historical action spectacle where his monster dies of a broken heart. The source novel, a florid potboiler by Gaston LeRou, is an abnormality - mixing fairy tale with a Fantomâs-style masked villain who has assumed the identity of a ghost so his thefts and murders will go unpunished. LeRou was part of the very same cultural moment as Louis Feuillade and Fantomâs, and he wrote breezy serial adventures starring detectives and super criminals, the best remembered of which is the excellent Mystery of the Yellow Room. His novel is structured like a detective story, making the link even clearer, and had Chaney not played the Phantom in 1925 and sparked a cycle of influences and remakes, both the novel and its author would today very likely be totally forgotten.


The film Phantom of the Opera is curiously poorly made, having come down through at least five different versions and a phalanx of directors, including Chaney who likely directed his own scenes. It's flat and unimaginative until Chaney comes onscreen, in one of film's most hauntingly perfect performances. Despite its flaws and because of an imaginative ad campaign that censored all views of Chaney's makeup, the movie defined the concept of "critic proof": you couldn't stop people from seeing it. This scene, which still gets modern audiences into a lather, caused shrieks of fright in 1925; audiences ducked to hide behind their seats - then dared each other to go see it again.


Phantom of the Opera, however, did not establish a new wave of horror, nor did it ride an existing one. Audiences clucked their tongues about the horribleness of the whole production and women requested more romance. Following Phantom, Chaney teamed with ex-carnival geek Tod Browning to make a series of lurid crime and revenge films, including The Unholy Three (1925), The Unknown (1927), and West of Zanzibar (1929), all of which featured Chaney as bizarrely disguised or deformed criminals. These have since been accepted into the horror canon, but they're as uneasy a fit as Browning's later, notorious Freaks (1932) is.

The Browning-Chaney film that has the strongest horror credentials is London After Midnight (1927), no doubt because it is a lost film. The stills that survive tend to make it look like a spooky haunted house romp, but always overlooked is the fact that the film is a farce where Chaney dons a spooky-funny vampire costume as part of a plot to expose a murder. He is a detective working for the city. Spooky scenes aside, the film is a straightforward whodunit that nobody in 1927 seems to have particularly liked: "If it were found again, I think people would be rather disappointed" Ray Bradbury once opined. In this way London After Midnight sticks rather close to the mainline of the American Horror Tradition outlined below.  It may deserve a place in the pantheon, but even this widely longed-for film has a big asterisk next to its name.

Chaney himself refused to stay pigeonholed and alternated these lurid thrillers with straightforward character roles, usually played without elaborate makeups such as his drill sergeant in Tell It To The Marines (1927). Following a sound remake of The Unholy Three in 1930, Chaney died of lung cancer, having not lived to see the horror boom of the 1930s brought on by his friend Tod Browning's 1931 film Dracula. Still, if homegrown American horror starts anywhere, it starts with Chaney's Phantom of the Opera.


The American Horror Tradition
The most identifiable American horror tradition of the 1920s is the "old dark house" thriller, which began with a cycle of mystery thrillers on Broadway led by The Bat. In 1926, Roland West brought his version of The Bat to cinemas, billing it under the cumbersome description "A Comedy-Mystery-Drama!". Today, we'd just say it's a good old fashioned horror comedy, with the titular Bat as an ingenious criminal on the run, pursuing a stash of diamonds hidden in a big, rambling Mansion by his latest victim, as the various comic characters are variously killed or just barely escape with their lives  and finally succeed in unmasking the fiend.

If that description excites you, imagine the impact this fast paced, clever thriller must have had with a fresh audience. The film begins with a delightful title card and never slows down from there:


The Bat was then remade by Roland West in 1930 as the basically identical The Bat Whispers, which is such a scrupulous remake that it uses the same staging, identical sets, and what appear to be many of the same props. Bob Kane always cited The Bat Whispers as an influence on Batman, but he interestingly seems to conflate the two films into one in his memory, which is understandable given how alike the two films are and how close their release was. The 1926 Bat has an intimidating bat head with a flapping jaw and bag full of tools:


The Bat Signal makes an appearance in the 1926 film in a sequence left out of the sound remake (it turns out to be a fly on the headlight of a car):

But The Bat Whispers has the speed of the superhero films it begot, although it's best described as a Super-Villain film. Once he actually appears in the film, The Bat has fantastic pulp dialogue like: "I've got the greatest brain that ever existed!" and "You think you've got me, eh? Let me tell you this: there never was a jail built strong enough to hold The Bat! After I've paid my respects to your cheap lock-up, I shall return! At night! The Bat always flies at night! And always in a straight line!"

And you know what? He looks exactly like Fantomas.


The Bat and The Bat Whispers represent European proto-horror crime thrillers finally coming home to roost on American soil. Although The Bat is a figure of fun and fantasy, he's something hard-headed Americans could identify: instead of an actual revenant ghoul with an army of rats, he's just a crazy guy in a mask. The mysterious and spooky events of the film could be explained away as the machinations of The Bat vs. The Police, with innocent bystanders caught in the middle. And so, as studios rushed all over themselves to come up with their own version of The Bat, they would be compelled to copy its setting, tone, stylization and its very human villain. The "Old Dark House" thriller was born.

These films are one step closer to something identifiable as a horror flick. Mixing Old School thrills with American aggressiveness, the horror cinema began to be born. And it was born in Universal City, Hollywood.

In the 20s, Universal catered to down-market exhibitors with cheap westerns, melodramas, serials, and whatever vice they could slip in. They had produced Chaney's Phantom and Hunchback, making them the sole Hollywood studio strongly associated with shockers. But studio patriarch Carl Laemmle had a streak of class in him too, and had "discovered" and heavily promoted (and then heavily sensationalized) super Auteur-director Erich Von Stroheim. Universal had brought German director Ernst Lubitsch to Hollywood, and now they set their sights on a clever director and production designer named Paul Leni. Leni had made a highly entertaining omnibus film called "Waxworks" starring future emigre director William Dieterle which climaxed with an eerie fantasy as Dieterle is stalked by Jack the Ripper. The striking five-minute sequence almost certainly got Leni his next job: as director of the 1927 Cat and the Canary.

Cat and the Canary single-handed invents the comedy-horror film, as Leni combines dark, unnerving European visuals in the Pommer style with American slapstick in a kooky but deadly serious plot of relatives vying for the inheritance of Cyrus West in his dilapidated and possibly haunted mansion. This film became the cornerstone of the Universal "house style": a heavy atmosphere of dread, visually dense (but cost conscious!) setting, capable comedic and dramatic actors, a visually arresting ghoul, and overseen by an imaginative - and preferably European - director. The film was among the most widely seen of its era, and remains so today.

Cat and the Canary is, like Caligari, one of those movies that seems to be a wellspring for a thousand others. Take the example of Benjamin Christensen, a bright young film director from Denmark and a former opera singer. Christensen's 1914 Feuilladian spy caper The Mysterious X was one of the hits of its movie season, where it played around the world. He followed it up with the superb Night of Vengeance, then spent four years making Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, an uncompromising pseudo-documentary which mixes up history lessons with freaky dramatic "imagined recreations" of the practices of witches and their historical persecution. Haxan served as one basis for Disney's superb "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence as seen above, and some of Christensen's visual ideas may have impressed his contemporary Paul Leni:

Benjamin Christensen - Haxan - 1922

Paul Leni - The Last Warning - 1929

But by 1929, it was Christensen who was tagging along behind Leni, making a cycle of Cat and the Canary-derived comedy thrillers, only one of which survives: the weirdly hallucinatory Seven Footprints to Satan.

Paul Leni

Leni went on to direct A Chinese Parrot, a lost Charlie Chain mystery, and The Man Who Laughs, a sort of Hunchback redux based on a Victor Hugo story centering on a historical romance starring a man whose lips were cut off as a boy, giving his face a permanent smile (this idea inspired Bob Kane's Joker character). Originally intended for Chaney, Lon backed out and incorporated the shark's-face smile makeup effect he had developed for the film into his Vampire disguise in London After Midnight. Leni backtracked towards comedy for his final film, the remarkable (and remarkably difficult to see) The Last Warning in 1929.

Universal wouldn't give up their dream of a Paul Leni / Lon Chaney pairing, and intended to team the two on Dracula for 1931. Leni suddenly died of blood poisoning in 1929, leaving behind a small legacy of four available features, two of which totally and forever rewrote how to do stylish screen horror - Leni codified the basic language of the horror film.

When Chaney died almost a year later, Universal decided if they could not have him, they would have his greatest director. It's difficult to imagine now how differently things would have turned out with the dream team of Leni and Chaney on Dracula. We certainly would have a much more accomplished and entertaining film, but we would also be robbed of the iconic Bela Lugosi and his still-riveting persona. Tod Browning did directing duties and moves the camera about with almost apathetic precision, and the film is quite without the blood and thunder he later brought to his major masterpiece Freaks (1932). But the film was a smash hit and, most shockingly for 1931 audiences, Dracula turned out to be a real vampire!

Today this seems like a minor accomplishment, but audiences at the time were shocked, and even more shocked by Frankenstein from later the same year, played deadly straight. Frankenstein was directed by Englishman James Whale, who had screened a number of Universal's early thrillers in preparation for his assignment of Frankenstein and spent the rest of his life eagerly talking up both Cat and the Canary and The Last Warning. Whale went on to appropriate Leni's seamless blend of laughs and thrills for his triumvirate of comedy thrillers The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

James Whale

But 1931 is the landmark year. Dracula and Frankenstein, with their straightforward mystery thrillers without disguises or final twists, is the point where the proto-horror of the American and German schools finally seamlessly combine into Horror Movies. The despair on the screen matched the mood of America, and now Universal's home-grown genre was pulling ahead and the other major Hollywod studios were playing catch-up.

Universal spent the rest of the 30s horror cycle continuing the Leni formula of heavy atmosphere and light comedy helmed by European emigres like Whale, or Frenchman Robert Florey, German Karl Fruend, or Austrian Edgar G. Ulmer. Warner Brothers had Czech Michael Curtiz directing their own horror comedies like Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum and RKO sent out the nasty little The Most Dangerous Game. Even MGM jumped on the horror bandwagon, setting Tod Browning to work on the silly Mark of the Vampire as Karl Fruend made the disturbing Mad Love with Peter Lorre.

But the party ended soon: Ulmer's Black Cat went so far, with its climatic scene of Boris Karloff being skinned alive while Bela Lugosi laughs manically, that some overseas companies began to ban all horror films outright. As overseas money slowed to a trickle, in July 1934 the Hays Office began to actually enforce its Motion Picture Production Code. Whale's Bride of Frankenstein is basically a coda to the whole crazy cycle of the first wave of American screen horror that began with Phantom of the Opera and saw America begin as an emergent world power and end in the pit of the Great Depression. Whale originally filmed his sequel with something like two-dozen onscreen deaths and a phalanx of sneaky debauchery, homosexuality, and blasphemy. The final film is considerably toned down. When Karloff pulls the self-destruct lever at the end of Bride of Frankenstein, the resulting explosion kills off the style for good until the start of World War II.

If it seems like I've spent a long time muddling about in obscurity and flipped past the entire Golden Age of Hollywood Horror in two paragraphs, it's because not only are these classic era shockers much better known, but they are in no particular danger of disappearing; fans of both horror films and the Haunted Mansion - you know, people probably reading this sentence - probably have ready access to the bulk of films mentioned above and dozens more. But it's also because, for better or worse, the horror film stops evolving after 1931. Once you've charted the progression from World War I to Erich Pommer, and from Pommer to Paul Leni, and from Paul Leni to James Whale, there isn't much further to go.

After the Golden Age
Screen horror enjoyed a brief vogue in the late 30s and early 40s, and this is when Universal began their second cycle of increasingly juvenile monster rallies, starting with Son of Frankenstein (1939) and ending with House of Dracula (1945). At the same time, RKO handed a paltry sum to a paranoid production executive named Val Lewton to go off and make a movie designed to ride the coat-tails of Universal's superlative Wolf Man: Cat People. Get it? They may have a Wolf Man but we have Cat People! It can't miss!

Lewton took a dumb title and made a beautiful psychological horror thriller out of it, then then did it again with more RKO market-tested titles like I Walked With a Zombie and The Seventh Victim. Along the way he started a new tradition of horror, and promoted several of his underlings to full director: Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and Mark Robson. We'll hear from them later.

But these films were not universally respected and were designed to return on investment; the era from 1936 to 1957 was dominated by film noir, epic romances, romantic comedies and historical dramas. The nearest mainstream Hollywood would get to horror in this period were the numerous "women's thrillers" like Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945) or Secret Beyond the Door... (1948), which played with concepts like insanity and ghosts in much more structured, predictable ways.

The biggest horror films of the era proved to be a cycle of Universal light horror-comedies probably best typified by Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which also includes the Bob Hope comedy films The Ghost Breakers (1940) and The Cat and the Canary (1939). Compared to the Leni Cat and the Canary or even the talkie remake The Cat Creeps, this newest version was tame stuff, centered around Hope's one liners and almost totally devoid of suspense. Even Universal's big color remake of Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains is remarkably docile, being two-thirds a musical.

Horror and thrillers did return in the 50s... in the form of scientific horrors, minting a new film genre: science fiction in its modern sense. The first film had appeared in 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still, significantly directed by Robert Wise. Once again Universal led the charge with It Came From Outer Space in 1953 and Creature From the Black Lagoon in 1954, and by the time Ishiro Honda's anti-war parable Godzilla landed on American shores in 1956, the rest of the era would sit under the atomic cloud of giant lizards, bugs, arachnids, women, and anything else that could credibly destroy a city.

The Haunted Mansion and Its Era
What this means is that when WED Enterprises sat down to start working on the idea for the haunted house at Disneyland, the pop culture well was pretty dry. The great era of horror cinema had been over a generation before... there was no particularly strong "local" Gothic tradition to turn to to start with. Well... almost. Because now that we've entered the era of Disneyland and Davy Crockett, it's time to introduce the Monster Kids.

In 1957, Universal sold a huge chunk of their now hopelessly devalued horror back catalogue to television, where a new generation of post-war kids thrilled to the same stars their parents had. In a rush to piggyback on this success, Forest Ackerman and James Warren conceived and quickly published a one-off magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, which along with EC Comics became the paper scourge of the schoolbus set. Famous Monsters grew into a massive genre publication, encouraging serious interest in the subject and creating the next generation of horror and science fiction buffs like John Landis, George Romero and John Carpenter who would set the tone for much of where the genre is today.

Spurred by the renewal of interest on the Universal horrors and the sudden monster cult in America, a cheap little production outfit called Hammer Film Productions in England embarked on their legendary cycle of gothic horrors, amping up and blood and sex appeal as much as the British Board of Film Censors could tolerate. William Castle, a savvy businessman who knew how to extract as much money from his films as possible - using force if necessary - made and promoted Macabre (1958) with a schlock advertising campaign that became the stuff of playground legend. By the time monster movie maker Roger Corman launched his own faux-Hammer Poe cycle in 1959, the little spark that flared horror's rebirth was already a blazing inferno... and it was spreading across Europe, Asia, and South America.

The Haunted Mansion is absolutely part of this cultural cycle, but most fascinatingly, it seems to have been conceived in splendid isolation from it. We know that Yale Gracey and Rolly Crump looked at some of William Castle's shock flicks - echoes of both House on Haunted Hill (a kind of Cat and the Canary update) and 13 Ghosts show up in some early Haunted Mansion concepts, but just as strong is the influence of in-house spook stories like The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949).

It's been well known forever that the Haunted Mansion team looked at Robert Wise's 1963 The Haunting for ideas, although it wasn't until late last year that Disney researcher Melody Dale turned up the "smoking gun" in the form of this 1965 memo:

Cleaned up by HBG2 at Long-Forgotten

But never discussed is the fact that The Haunting was pretty much the only place WED Enterprises  had to go. The Hammer flicks were considered the height of poor taste at the time; Disney artisans would be disinclined to go rooting through Castle thrillers like Homicidal or Horror of Dracula, no matter how influential these films would be. There's The Innocents from 1961, but that was a British film that sank without a trace at the box office and was only subsequently rediscovered. From there you pretty much have to go all the way back to 1944 and The Uninvited for a serious depiction of a supernatural event in a Hollywood picture. The Haunting was more or less the only "fresh" thing the Mansion team had to work on.

And as such the nature of the influence of The Haunting has been both exaggerated and under reported somehow all at once. We do know that the Haunted Mansion team were actually paid to go watch The Haunting, but just as often cited is Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete from 1946. We do know that Rolly Crump saw the film - probably in a revival at a Los Angeles art theater - and went around talking it up, but it's pretty easy to exclude La Belle from the docket of serious contenders for "Haunted Mansion source texts".

Always discussed here is the Cocteau film's "living architecture" as being a possible source for the Mansion's eerie leering skulls, statues, and faces.



There's a definite family resemblance, although it's just as possible that the Haunted Mansion team got the idea from The Haunting. Wise uses just as many pieces of decor, especially statues and faces which pop into the edge of the frame at unnerving moments to announce the presence of the uncanny, to infuse Hill House with an atmosphere of dread:


Wise even fades these "faces" into fades between scenes lacking them, adding a subliminal undercurrent of unease - it's very easy to miss these, and I'm convinced Wise got the idea from Val Lewton, who used the effect in Bedlam (1945) to show off engravings by William Hogarth. Here's one from The Haunting which precedes the famous "something at the door" scene:


Wise didn't invent the idea, although his cinematic treatment of it is very effective. The core concept comes from the novel, The Haunting of Hill House, and Wise uses spooky statues at the edges of his frame to always remind us that the characters are being watched by an inhuman entity.

But the idea isn't original to the novel, either. In fact, you can see it in the Universal Horrors, in the Paul Leni comedy thrillers, in Haxan, and it's obviously much older than that. The basic threat of a haunted house is less the return of the dead and more the invasion of your personal, private space by the uncanny - this is why it's a good shorthand to depict the house itself as an omniscient force, because you can't run home to escape the evil, because it's in your home already. The Haunting is just a very classy update of the technique.

Let us return to Cocteau. The main, undeniable piece of evidence in favor of La Bete are the skeleton arm torches in the crypt at the end of the ride:

photo by Cory Doctorow

That one is just obvious. There's no way that can't be a Cocteau reference. And it is. But I'm still not convinced that it means that Mansion designer Claude Coats went and looked at La Belle et La Bete as research of the Haunted Mansion. I think it just proves that Coats was looking through Rolly Crump's art to pick up some extra ideas.

To explicate this, a long-winded example. The "demon face" wallpaper in the Haunted Mansion has lots of rumors flying around behind what it resembles and who's responsible for it. Almost everyone agrees it seems to be descended from this scene in The Haunting:

....and from there goes on to say that Marc Davis designed it, or Rolly Crump designed it, and so on and so forth - the story changes depending on the agenda of who tells the tale. But the face in The Haunting and the demon faces covering the walls of the Haunted Mansion just aren't that similar at all; for one thing Wise's camera finds an eyes and mouth in the negative space of a textured wall, and the Mansion faces are just plain old part of the wallpaper pattern. The piece of art which inspired it isn't shown much, which is a shame because seeing it makes the connection obvious. It's Crump's idea for a man eating plant.

Now, the Man Eating Plant is sometimes misidentified as the greenish blob at the bottom of this famous photo:


That's actually a Mandrake. You can tell because it looks like a baby, as do the ones in Harry Potter. The reason why Mandrakes sometimes look like babies is a nasty bit of folklore I'll let you discover on your own. This is Crump's Man Eating Plant:


It's a much clearer resemblance, isn't it?

Photo by Cory Doctorow

But more than that, this version of the chain of influence is the only one that makes any sense to me because it's the only version that explains how those faces ended up on that wall. It's because they're scary plants, and plants are what you usually see on wallpaper. Now it snaps into focus as a very creative twist on the idea seen in The Haunting. My guess is that Coats hit on Rolly's drawing and from there designed out the famous wallpaper. As Long-Forgotten has pointed out, all of the other (stock) wallpapers in the attraction seem to be chosen for their resemblance to this pattern.

It's also worth pointing out that this idea, too, is far older than The Haunting, so there's no reason to suspect that Coats felt he had to be faithful to the Wise film in this case. I was once riding with a Mansion novice, and when we got to this part of the ride she exclaimed: "Oh, cool, The Yellow Wallpaper!"

To bring this back to my initial point: I have no doubt that the Cocteau film influenced Rolly Crump, and that some of these ideas quite naturally bled over into the ride, but I do think it's safe to say that whatever direct influence La Belle et la Bete had on the finished Haunted Mansion was oblique and refracted at best.

In fact, The Haunting touches on a number of moments that will be familiar to Mansion fans. In the first scene (a flashback) we get a body hanging in a tall,  vertically-oriented space:


Another moment that seems to have inspired Marc Davis occurs elsewhere in this opening montage. I think it's the inspiration for the famous (and now removed) April-December changing portrait.

Montage of photos by Al Huffman

April-December, at least compared to the other paintings in that scene, was a little ambiguous - much less of a "boo" type of scare compared to, say, a seductive lady turning into a panther. I think Davis got his idea from this uncanny series of optical dissolves in The Haunting, which bridges a 60 year span in the narrative:


Laid out like that, it even looks like a Mansion-style changing portrait. For all we know, it inspired them to put the gag in the show. But even beyond the four considerable specific links outlined above, I think a whole vast stretch of the ride is a citation of The Haunting. Not all of the links made it to opening day, and then when Coats reworked the ride for the Florida house he added some patches over the missing pieces probably to satisfy his own artistic discipline, which tended to cloud the debt a bit further. But, there's no denying that as envisioned and constructed, we ascend a huge staircase to the second floor of the Haunted Mansion flanked by creepy statues...


...see a long hallway lined with doors as a menacing pounding echoes down towards us...


...pass through a cold spot...


...discover an old conservatory filled with plants and a menacing object at its center...


...see a door handle turn on its own....


...observe faces in the wallpaper...


....and see a door bulging out, defying the laws of reality.


To put it another way, the second floor of the Haunted Mansion, where both the artistry of the ride and its fright factor are at their height, seems to be a comprehensive catalogue of frightening images from the Wise film. What sets the Mansion apart is essentially the synthesis of these images and the way they are conveyed: the film can take its sweet time building up these ideas, but the Haunted Mansion is like a Gatling gun; it has to fire off these concepts one after another in quick, vivid flashes. It's like watching a horror film in fast-forward.

Okay, so, I've proven something almost everybody knows by now and I've spent longer than anyone else in the history of the Internet doing it. What else have we got?

Well, there's that final part of the corridor of doors where there's the out of control clock and the creepy shadow hand. What about that?

Well, we can start at one common point: the menacing shadows of Nosferatu. I've already said that Albin Grau was the likely source for the treatment of this shadow play thanks to his occult leanings and production design for the film. This is true, but then again director Friedrich Wilheim Murnau wasn't exactly any slouch with shadows and threatening hands in his films.  For one thing there's this scary dream sequence in the film he made immediately before Nosferatu, the non-supernatural mystery Schloss Vogelod (1921):


Or the massive hand of Mephistopheles in Faust (1926):


And.... well, let's stop there, because outside Murnau there's probably thousands of evil hands and shadow hands - and menacing shadows - in Weimar cinema alone. Thanks to Erich Pommer, bizarre distorted imagery and strong visual ideas were what German audiences came to expect in the 1920s, and German filmmakers were really really good at delivering them. And since all of these films came out of the same culture and were minted at the same cultural moment, of course they're going to cycle through the same stock ideas and images. And although the Marc Davis quote I used at the start of this article does tend to lend legitimacy to the idea that the shadow-hand in the Mansion could be descended from the Nosferatu hand, Davis could've just been name-dropping two of the three most famous German silents. In a section I omitted, he actually did then go on to talk about Metropolis, so that's three for three. I don't think Nosferatu merits really serious consideration any more than any number of famous, creepy old movies.

Let's see if we can find something closer to home but in the same style. Murnau and nearly every other famous German director of his era was mentored under Max Reinhardt, and Paul Leni designed sets for Reinhardt. When Universal imported Leni to make The Cat and the Canary, he brought the entire Weimar bag of tricks with him, including creepy hands, a roving camera and expressive images:


The following scene at the bookcase, which probably seems a little silly today, was the absolute height of horripilation for 1927 audiences, with screams and giggles interspersed:


The scene was so influential, in fact, that every remake of the Cat and the Canary has felt compelled to mimic it. We know Ken Anderson remembered it well:


Ah-ha. Now we're getting somewhere.

But if there were so many Cat and the Canary remakes (1930, 1939, 1946, 1961, and even 1979), how do we know that the original version was the influence? One well-worn Internet rumor claims that Walt Disney was thinking of his Haunted House at Disneyland as being similar the the 1939 Bob Hope version, which matches up well with the dates for the earliest ideas for Disneyland, although it doesn't demonstrate if he directed Ken Anderson to look at it. Nor does it prove that the final Haunted Mansion team had it in mind at all. In fact, a number of things convince me that Coats, Davis, and Anderson were more likely to have been remembering the Leni film.

For one there's the film itself, which is chock-a-block with proto-Mansion imagery. The setting and visual style of the house may have inspired the Florida version:


There's a long hallway with windows down one side and a storm raging outside:

Space Mountain Mike via Wikipedia Commons

The style of the interior of the house is the same; heavy wood paneling, gothic furniture, there's even a chair in the main room that's a dead ringer for the Ballroom chairs WED had custom sculpted. There's a spooky portrait that seems to be alive:


The fiend ("The Cat" of the title) is a ludicrous pop-eyed ghoul that Mansion fans will find immediately recognizable:


Who wear a floppy brimmed hat and has a posture that reminds me of a piece of Marc Davis art...


....yeah, that one's a stretch, but look, Davis even bothered to include the "spooky maid" character (hilariously named "Mammy Pleasant" in the film) in his concept art, and she made it into the final show:

Ruth and Matt on Smugmug

It seems to have been on their minds. In fact, since there is so much in Cat and the Canary that seems to anticipate The Haunted Mansion, I think it makes more sense to regard the particular idea of the "shadow hand" as having been descended not from Nosferatu or German films of its era, but from the Leni film, by way of Ken Anderson.


Since Anderson's "Hairy the Arm" character is an unambiguous lift from Canary, and there is otherwise very little in the known Haunted Mansion production art to suggest definitively where the idea otherwise came from, I think the shadow of the hand is an echo of Ken Anderson's Mansion. It's the ghost of Hairy the Arm. The presentation of the idea is even similar to that in the Leni film: a menacing hand comes out of nowhere, seemingly to grab you. It's very possible that a shadow projection was the only way the Mansion creators could conceive of to actually put you in the middle of this situation without the use of an actor or prop. The hand seems to attack you.


 But noticing these similarities to Cat and the Canary unlocks an even wider context outside of the film. Both Claude Coats and Marc Davis were born in 1913. This would've put both men at about age fourteen when Cat and the Canary was new. That's pretty much right in the zone where you start to experience most of the stuff that's going to leave a big mark on you; at age fourteen I was riding The Haunted Mansion too many times.

Furthermore, Davis especially had shown pre-existing  tendencies to raid the films of his youth to serve as inspiration for Disneyland attractions. He seems to have been a big Lon Chaney fan:

London After Midnight, 1927

The Hatbox Ghost, 1969 (http://thehatboxghost.com)

West of Zanzibar, 1928

Pirates of the Caribbean, 1967 (Dave DeCaro)

It's easy to imagine a young Marc Davis going to one film after another in the late twenties to enjoy Lon's eccentric and graceful performances. Chaney's dancelike, balletic mime in films like Phantom of the Opera and Unholy Three anticipates the swift, on-pointe movements of Davis characters like Tinkerbell. One of the things that makes the Disney animated films of the golden era so great is that the men who animated them spent the formative years of their lives watching silent film and so had an intrinsic understanding of how expressive non-verbal communication could be.

We don't have to limit the discussion to just Davis. Could Yale Gracey have remembered this shot in The Bat where a menacing shadow seems to close a door...


...when he drew this effect sketch for the Haunted Mansion?

The E-Ticket Issue Number 34

Yale would've been sixteen when The Bat was new, and it's one of the most memorable moments in the whole movie.

In fact, I think given the circumstances it's completely logical that Davis and Coats could've thought back to The Cat and the Canary while working on the Haunted Mansion. While the films of their own era could provide guidance on content, there were no contemporary horror comedies outside of William Castle's schlocky kids fare. If you had to try to create something which there are few contemporary models for, wouldn't you have thought back to a movie you'd seen years ago that seemed to do exactly what you wanted to achieve? The Cat and the Canary was one of the blockbusters of its era, the most archetypal example of the early comedic thrillers. It set the standard for the genre. And, most importantly, it was both genuinely scary and genuinely funny - a perfect blueprint for what the Haunted Mansion team was after. Leni's film had laughs, but the laughs never undercut the atmosphere of unease. This may also explain why many of Davis' cartoonier ideas didn't end up in the final ride, because they could find a way to fit them into the sardonic atmosphere of the Leni films.

Persistence of Vision Number 9

That's the thing that's missing from La Belle et La Bete and The Haunting as serious contenders as Haunted Mansion predecessors: a useful model for how to combine comedy and chills so one doesn't negate the other.

The Butler Did It

Looking specifically to Leni's thrillers and the Old Dark House genre in particular may help to explain some other aspects of Mansionana that may otherwise appear to be strange. For example, I've looked through a number of Haunted Mansion Cast Member operating guides from various early eras - Disneyland 1975, Walt Disney World 1980 and 1986 - and nowhere in any of them can I find any reference to the "performance" many Haunted Mansion Cast Members continue to give as they perform their duties. Only in a 1990 guide does a section on what to do and what not to do appear. That's about the time you start seeing it showing up in promotional videos or the Disneyland 35th Anniversary television special, where Charles Fleischer makes a hammy cameo as a creepy butler. It had probably been going on for years by that point, but simply based on the available evidence, the tradition appears to have developed all by itself.

Why? Because of Old Dark House horror comedies, that's why. Even if the college kids working the Manson have never seen or heard of these movies, they almost certainly are familiar with the "creepy servant" stereotype in the Whodunit thriller, and the Haunted Mansion is a space where a number of horror genre concerns are acted out in a controlled way. The Florida house even makes this more explicit by adding into the mix a howling wolf in the distance, secret panels (that the Stretch Rooms are hidden behind), portraits with follow-you eyes, and a featured role for the servant as they open a big heavy door and welcome guests inside.

It's an indelible moment on the East Coast version of the ride because it starts to throw all sorts of dusty old switches in your mind - all those times you saw that in a horror movie - now, it's happening to you.

Today the Haunted Mansion has begot a phalanx of imitations, both flattering and not. It's become a film comedy that largely failed to attract interest, despite the fact that the attraction continues to draw long lines and evoke reactions of startled disbelief, surprise, and suspense. Not many media productions of any kind last as long as it has: four decades and counting - while still attracting widespread demand. How many children today have even seen, say, The Rescuers? Yet The Rescuers is a more contemporary piece of entertainment than The Haunted Mansion.

The fact that more modern entertainments date themselves or run themselves ragged over the years - will anyone be watching Avatar in forty years? - is a testament to something else in the Mansion's construction. That something is that it largely allied itself with images, themes, and ideas which have been around far longer than it has. I think this is partially because of the comparative drought of serious supernatural pop culture at the time of its creation. Had the Mansion opened in, say, 1979 it would've had more to draw on - it also may have dated more rapidly. Looking at the history and development of horror cinema is one way to see this. You can also see it by studying larger patterns of, say, prose fiction, or narrative stagecraft, or magic tricks, or visual art. It's a comprehensive package.

In fact, one of the dangers of having "Mansion on the Brain" is that you start seeing it everywhere, which is one reason I've tried to be super scrupulous and careful while putting this piece together to justify my conclusions. But then, that may be the greatest compliment of all, in the end. Haunted Mansions suddenly seem proliferate in popular culture. The ride is like the keystone of the arch or the center of the web where the entire form of the pattern is held together in a single, neat knot.

--

More Haunted Mansion at Passport to Dreams Old & New:
Start to Shriek and Harmonize - on the pop-up ghouls and fairground traditions
Rubber Spider Revue - those darn fake spiders
History and the Haunted Mansion - why is the Mansion in Liberty Square?

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction.

It was last updated on January 24, 2013.

Riding the Haunted Screen - January 2013 - covers details of the attraction's antecedents in the form of popular horror films from 1915 to 1965. Begins with an expansive outline of the development of the genre, before proposing two key films as inspiration.

On Integrity - February 2012 - includes a section on changes made to the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion in Summer 2007.

Passport to Dreams Year-End Report for 2011 - January 2012 - includes a section on the controversial interactive queue added to the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion in March 2011.

Start to Shriek and Harmonize - October 2011 - on the origin and details of the infamous "pop up ghosts" in the Haunted Mansion's attic and graveyard scenes. Also on the classic dark ride origins of the Haunted Mansion in general.

History and the Haunted Mansion - May 2010 - essay on the visual and historical influences of the Haunted Mansion, placing it inside a larger American phenomenon of Spiritualism.

Thoughts on the Haunted Mansion - December 2008 - on the attraction's balance of tone between funny and scary.

Phantoms of Influence - May 2008 - the Gaston LeRoux novel The Phantom of the Opera and how it was adapted into the Haunted Mansions sister attraction, Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris.

Two by Yale Gracey - February 2008 - two special effects used in the Haunted Mansion and how they are done.

In Doorless Chambers - October 2007 - a series of three posts laying out the first approaches to a favorite attraction, much of this information has now been eclipsed by the new series of much more throughly targeted approaches from May 2010 on. They are archived here for completeness' sake.
Part One: Influences and Dark Ride predecessors
Part Two: Building and Design of the attraction
Part Three: Why it still works

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.

It was last updated on January 25, 2013.

Fire in the Night - August 2011 - why is the original Pirates of the Caribbean so often cited, and seems to be, the greatest attraction ever built? A far-reaching analysis. Should also be read with the following article:

The Case for the Florida Pirates - June 2010 - On the Florida incarnation of the attraction, a case for what it got right and how it has been compromised. The "flip side" of the above article.

An Aesthetic Profile of Caribbean Plaza - January 2010 - Getting into details on Caribbean Plaza, The Magic Kingdom's most deceptively complex area.

Structuring the Experience - February 2009 - How arches, walls, portals and doors help make themed attractions into artistically satisfying experiences.

Two by Yale Gracey - February 2008 - How two key effects for Pirates of the Caribbean were accomplished.

The Long, Lonely March - August 2007 - An essay covering the narrative, tone, structural and artistic successes of Disney's original fully-themed pre-boarding queue experience at the Walt Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean.

Caribbean Plaza: Romance of the Tropics - August 2006 - The first post on this blog discusses early approaches to the area and attraction which inspired it.

Visual Structure in New Orleans Square - Mid 2004 / Early 2005 -  Revised version of my first essay ever about themed design and the area that made me aware that theme parks could also be art.

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of Disney's Jungle Cruise attraction - primarily the Florida version, which I worked at and remains an obsession.

It was last updated on January 25, 2013.

 Three Jungle Cruise Mysteries - July 2012 - update on "The Early Years"with new photos and information.

The Jungle Cruise: the Early Years - July 2011 - comprehensive history of the Florida Jungle Cruise, including a full photo tour of the attraction under refurbishment in 1973.

Rubber Spider Revue - March 2011 - those darn Jungle Cruise rubber spiders, and where they have and can still be found.

Nine Shrines of the Magic Kingdom - November 2010 - including a section on the "Sunken Temple" in Florida.

An Aesthetic Profile of Adventureland - November 2009 - How does the Magic Kingdom's Adventureland area subtly visually prepare for and reinforce the anchoring Jungle Cruise attraction?

The Jungle Cruise Florida: Behind the Scenes - November 2006 - a collection of photos from early Disney publications showing the construction of the ride.

Jokers in the Wild - October 2006 - Early, early attempt to write out the history of the Jungle Cruise attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Warning: juvenilia. Read at your own risk. Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of the Disney-designed town of Lake Buena Vista, Florida, including the Walt Disney World Village.

It was last updated on January 25, 2013.

Lake Buena Vista's Lost Crescent City - July 2012 - Chronicle of a truly inspired Village expansion that was cancelled in the wake of the expense of EPCOT Center.

Other Kingdoms to Conquer - November 2011 - Remember when Disney actually advertised other things to do in Florida? You probably don't remember the bus services to Sea World and Cypress Gardens either, then.

Snapshot: Frap-Off at the Village - August 2011 - Profile of a true Walt Disney World history obscurity, the weekend a "new craze" called Frapping overtook the Village.

Palate Cleanser - April 2011 - Includes some unusual photos of the Village.

The Host Community - July 2010 - a few print advertisements for Lake Buena Vista's "Motor Inn Plaza" hotels in the early 70s.

Snapshot: Great Southern Craft Company - April 2010 - Profile of one of the Village's most distinctive shops, including when it moved and what later became of the space.

See the Village. Tonight. - September 2009 - A "Virtual Tour" of the Village as it existed in the 1970s with many rare photos. Part One and Part Two.

Iconography - March 2009 - Overview of the design complexities of the original core group of Walt Disney World icon logos, including the Walt Disney World Village logo used between 1977 and 1989.

The Walt Disney World Village List - February 2009 - An exhaustive list detailing every shop that existed at the Village and its location from 1975 to 2009.

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up many of this site's published critical writing on the subject of Disney-derived themed design experiences. These essays account for the bulk of the serious writing on this site - its reason for being - and so what follows is a selection of personal highlights.

It was last updated on January 26, 2013.

Riding the Haunted Screen - January 2013 - covers details of the Haunted Mansion's antecedents in the form of popular horror films from 1915 to 1965. Begins with an expansive outline of the development of the genre, before proposing two key films as inspiration

The Awkward Transitions of Disneyland! - November 2012 - Close look at the areas where one theme collides with another at Walt's original theme park and how this contributes to the sensation of "charm".

Lightning in a Bottle? Storybook Circus - September 2012 - Thoughts on the Magic Kingdom's newest "Land", analysis of a surprising and unlikely success story, as well as thoughts on areas "for kids" in general.

Go Away Green - July 2012 - How Disney hides (or doesn't hide) its huge warehouses which contain its attractions, called "Show Buildings", in plain sight.

All the Lights of the Kingdom - April 2012 - an exhaustive study of the light fixtures of the Magic Kingdom, and how they contribute to theme, design, and fantasy concerns. Part One and Part Two.

Start to Shriek and Harmonize - October 2011 - on the origin and details of the infamous "pop up ghosts" in the Haunted Mansion's attic and graveyard scenes. Also on the classic dark ride origins of the Haunted Mansion in general.

Fire in the Night - August 2011 - why is the original Pirates of the Caribbean so often cited, and seems to be, the greatest attraction ever built? A far-reaching analysis.

The Third Queue -  December 2010 - Initial thoughts on the Walt Disney World "Interactive Queues" and on the structure, design, and the role of pre-attraction experience in general.

Nine Shrines of the Magic Kingdom - November 2010 - the top moments of design in WED Enterprises' second theme park.

The Case for the Florida Pirates - June 2010 - On the Florida incarnation of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, a case for what it got right and how it has been compromised. The "flip side" of "Fire in the Night", above.

History and the Haunted Mansion - May 2010 - essay on the visual and historical influences of the Haunted Mansion, placing it inside a larger American phenomenon of Spiritualism.

An Aesthetic Profile of Caribbean Plaza - January 2010 - Getting into details on Caribbean Plaza, The Magic Kingdom's most deceptively complex area.

 An Aesthetic Profile of Adventureland - November 2009 - How does the Magic Kingdom's Adventureland area subtly visually prepare for and reinforce the anchoring Jungle Cruise attraction?

A New Approach - May 2009 - two of Imagineering's least loved children of the 90s - The enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management and Journey Into Imagination with Figment - as a form of corporate protest.

Eight Great Moments of Design at Walt Disney World - April 2009 - finding eight great designs and extracting lessons from their successes.

From Paris to the Provinces - January 2009 - How one small store at EPCOT Center includes dozens of little details which take us on a cross-country tour.

Futures with No Future - October 2008 - the decay of the Tomorrowland myth.

Phantoms of Influence - May 2008 - the Gaston LeRoux novel The Phantom of the Opera and how it was adapted into the Haunted Mansions sister attraction, Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris.

Taking Apart World Showcase - Feburary 2008 - Courtyards, streets, and alleys structure the most fully-formed area of EPCOT Center, and its least changed.

The Long, Lonely March - August 2007 - An essay covering the narrative, tone, structural and artistic successes of Disney's original fully-themed pre-boarding queue experience at the Walt Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Anti Food Court - August 2007 - Approaches to the most brilliantly evocative of the Magic Kingdom's interior spaces, the Columbia Harbour House Restaurant.

Walt Disney's America and Keep the Light On For Me - July 2007 - Disneyland and its synthesis of the "American Myth" into a realized place.

All Hail Toad. - June 2007 - reflecting on ten-plus years of the closure of the Magic Kingdom's fantastic Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

Verticality - May 2007 - the Magic Kingdom and her curious obsession with skylights. Fake ones.

Two Shows by Marc Davis - November 2006 - analysis of Marc Davis' two most fully realized projects, The Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings. Part One and Part Two.

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up many of this site's published writing on the subject of extremely obscure Walt Disney World history. This label was created for use on the now-deleted Disney blog 2719 Hyperion, and shortly branched out to this blog as well. Everything on this page constitutes, for me, the "premium" historical content I've written.

It was last updated on January 26, 2013.

Johnny's Corner - January 2012 - A truly obscure piece of Walt Disney World history, at Johnny's Corner a man 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.

Return to the Golf Resort - January 2012 - Extended version of the "Buena Vista Obscura" post linked below. New photos and expanded information.

Snapshot: Frap-Off at the Village - August 2011 - One of the most puzzling and obscure Walt Disney World events, based on the "national craze" of Frapping.

Snapshot: Marines Capture Coke Corner - July 2011 - Remember when the missles launched on Sea World? An early example of Cast Member humor.

The World Cruise - February 2011 - Extensive history of one of Walt Disney World's most puzzling early "attractions".

Snapshot: Mysteries of the Second Floor - January 2011 - Ghosts of the past haunt an obscure corner of the Contemporary Resort.

Snapshot: Olde World Antiques - August 2010 - Revisit the dim, varnished interior of the Magic Kingdom's real antique shop.

Captain Cook's Hideaway (plus followup) - June 2010 - Revisit the dark den of tropical drinks and folk music which once haunted the Polynesian Village.

The Lake Buena Vista Story - April 2010 - Extensive article covering the plans, development, re-development, and ultimate fate of one of Disney's most ambitious ideas and the true predecessor to EPCOT Center: the town of Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

Snapshot: Great Southern Craft Company - April 2010 - Profile of one of the Village's most distinctive shops, including when it moved and what later became of the space.

The Golf Resort - March 2009 - Do you remember the first and only Disney hotel themed to... golf?

It's time to talk about Captain EO.

I will say it up front: the following is not an attempt at a persuasive article. I don't think you could get somebody to enjoy Captain EO who is not inclined to enjoy it with any amount of persuasion. Furthermore, I've never heard of anybody's opinion being totally changed by an article on the Internet, so I'm not here to convince you why I like Captain EO. I'm not even sure I could convince myself why I like Captain EO. So why bother writing about it? Because I'm nothing if not a sucker for Quixotian quests, and trying to write an article about the value of something so obviously commercial and ill-advised is my idea of a fun writing assignment.
 
Since the return of Captain EO in 2010, I've seen the film dozens of times at both Epcot and Disneyland, and if Disney allows me, I'm going to see it dozens of times more. I am always ready for more space-opera hijinx with Jackson, Hooter, Fuzzball, and whatever the other puppet characters are called. I wrote a super gushy review of it in 2010, and I still stand by that review, untold numbers of screenings later. But now I think I'm ready to put some meat on those bones I wrote three years ago, and perhaps make up for my own apparent lack of critical distance on this subject. How could I possibly enjoy something so obviously lousy, and so much?

There's a term for that reaction, and it's called "Guilty Pleasure". I feel no guilt about my love of Captain EO. Yet conversely, I do not regard the film to be camp. The film is simply too dogged in its pursuit of some kind of emotional response for me to turn it off the doorstep by laughing at it. I don't consider myself to be better than Captain EO, which is the essential attitude required to find "camp" enjoyment in unintentional comedy. There's something in the film that's better than the sum of its parts which dazzles me.

Last year, I had the pleasure of hosting a good friend of mine at Disneyland - he had never set foot in a Disney theme park before. This was a fascinating opportunity to get a fresh reaction to each attraction, and we did all of the classics. I offered no descriptive comment on each ride beforehand, nothing to set any of his expectations - he didn't even know if we were boarding a ride or theater show. At the end of the day he requested to see only two attractions over again: Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain EO.

I'm fascinated by this.

To suggest that the two are remotely comparable is laughable, but the very same person who shrugged off the Tiki Room with a deadpan "I didn't expect that" and Storybookland with a confused "Why is this here?" could not get enough of Captain EO. This, to me, was at least justification that my enjoyment of the show was more than just reheated nostalgia and the second-hand cloud of opium buzz that seems to settle over each theater it plays in. Does a film have to be good to be of value?

"Flock of Seagulls Guy" never fails to get a laugh.

I'm going to attack the question from the basic position of Captain EO as a film instead of an attraction. If I were to approach it as an attraction, I'd have to factor in all sorts of questions like "should it have returned" or "is it a good use of the space" - good questions, but ones that do fall outside the scope of my interest today. The only thing I will say is that I find EO to be a better use of the theater space than Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, and it will remain so until Imagineering either removes the theater entirely or comes up with a more appropriate tenant. Your mileage on that point will likely vary depending on your personal experiences with either attraction, as it should. I'm not here to argue for or against the decision.

To set up my article I'm going to embark on, as is typical for me, a long winded digression. But, hey, it's my blog, right? In this case I'm finding my explanatory analogue in the unlikely source of the 1935  Warner Brothers film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The scene in question comes near the end of this marathon-length filmed version, and represents Act 5 of Shakespeare's play - "The Tedious, Brief Scene of Pyramus and Thisbe". Those who have seen the film or read the play will recall that this scene acts as a self-contained self-parody of the proceeding four acts, as the craftsmen of Athens perform a tragic play for their royals and fail abysmally.

Coming at the end of Shakespeare's play, Pyramus and Thisbe comically inverts Midsummer Night's Dream, so that the nature spirits Oberon and Titania do not interfere with the romantic triangle in the mortal realm and the romances play out to an inevitable tragic conclusion.

But that's Shakespeare's play. The film is another thing entirely. The famous "Mechanicals" are cast by Warner Brothers with comic, working class actors from the most working class Hollywood studio of its era - James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, Hugh Harlan, Dewey Robinson, and so on. They play their scenes not for sly wit, but out and out farce. They fall over, hit each other, overact, and generally do their best to turn Midsummer Night's Dream into The Three Stooges. Critics were horrified. This is high art, not low comedy (or is it?)! Cagney spent the rest of his life wincing from complaints that his Bottom does not resemble the traditional character written for comedian Will Kemp in 1595, as if there were only one way to play Shakespeare, or that every performance must be the definitive one.

Warner Brothers' Act 5 brings down the house - for Americans. It's the only part of the film that actually seems to come to life instead of just sitting there on the screen. Coming at the end of a film which is over two hours of actors stiffly posed before beautiful, expensive backdrops, the film finally breathes and flows. Despite the language, the Warner "Mechanicals" actually know how to eke a joke out of comedy that's hundreds of years old. Whether or not they perform exactly as Shakespeare intended, the result is a revelation.

Yet the sequence, as shown in the film, is gaudy, ill-conceived, awkwardly paced, and just plain weird, with Joe E. Brown stomping around in drag slapping the scenery like a refugee from a John Waters film. Cagney devours the scenery and the movie screen even when all he's doing is kicking his legs. The entire sequence is in atrocious taste, and it works perfectly.

In other words, the scene succeeds by daring to fail. By daring to depart from the tone of Shakespeare's text but not its' letter, the 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream depicts working class heroes attempting to stage high art and failing by allowing working class heroes to attempt high art and fail. It's the perfect summary of not only the folly of the enterprise of attempting a Hollywood Midsummer Night's Dream, but by extension the entire Hollywood Studio System in the 30s, an unintentional effacing self-portrait. The pleasure of the scene resides not only in what it provides, but in the context of what it provides.

To me, this is part of the pleasure of Captain EO: by merely existing it damns its own hubristic creation. And yet, by repeatedly acting, over and over again, on the worst possible creative choices, the team which made Captain EO somehow stuffed it so full of terrible ideas that they eventually accumulate and cancel each other out. A film which should be a total creative disaster is compulsively watchable and even a little affecting.

How were these many terrible decisions made? Let me count the ways:

Lets start with the Granddaddy of all bad choices here, and as is usually the case in these situations, Michael Eisner is at the root of it. Eisner, on that very selfsame legendary trip to Flower Street in which Star Tours and Splash Mountain were approved, asked how long it would take to get the attractions open. Tony Baxter began to give ballpark estimates of three to five years. Eisner, who was accustomed to overseeing movie and TV production, was aghast. His solution was to green light a movie, and immediately.

In order to accommodate this, Magic Journeys at EPCOT Center would be vacated a mere four years after it opened. The seats were still warm from tourist butts when EO took over. As far as I know, this was and still is unprecedented - Magic Journeys was in no way an unpopular or poorly attended show, and Walt Disney World certainly saw fit to capitalize on their 1982 investment by installing Magic Journeys in Fantasyland at Magic Kingdom, where it ran for another seven years. At Disneyland, Magic Journeys was being shown at night in the amphitheater in front of Space Mountain... the theater would now be enclosed, rather perfunctorily, to accommodate Captain EO. When you consider that both of these decisions were made in an era when Disney was still largely building specification buildings to house new attractions and would today come under immediate Internet fire, it becomes apparent how quickly and poorly thought-out the decision to make Captain EO was.

We'll just leave this here. (Al Huffman)

But then, even allowing for the fact that the actual production and installation came about in a miraculously fast two years - Eisner knew that he could produce a film very quickly because then as now Hollywood is mostly about getting product to market - the decision to make a Michael Jackson music video is equally baffling. In an era before Ellen Degeneres, Drew Carey, and Elvis ran rampant through Disney theme parks and those famous people and characters who were seen were carefully selected and designed by Disney, whether they be selling theme park tickets or orange juice, the decision to drop a Michael Jackson music video into a barely-vacated theater in a George Lucas production is nothing short of astonishing.

Granted, in 1984 it made a lot more sense than it does today. Lucas had just finished his initial wave of Star Wars films and generally had made more money than King Midas. In late 1983, Michael Jackson's Thriller, his fourteen-minute musical short film directed by John Landis, was changing the way the entertainment industry thought about how they could package and sell their products. Thriller was merely another hit single on a record selling a million copies a week. The "music video" was a fourteen minute stand-alone entertainment experience directed by a filmmaker coming off a string of box office successes. Rotations of the video plus the hour-long accompanying documentary put MTV and Showtime on the map. A video release of the documentary plus the short film itself finally brought a little format called VHS into homes around the country and helped put the final nails in the coffin of Betamax. Thriller was unprecedented in terms of scale, ambition, and effect, and then as now what works in Hollywood will be repeated ad nauseum.


Then there's the pairing of the supposedly unbeatable trio of George Lucas, Michael Jackson, and Francis Ford Coppola - the true rag-tag band, despite what the opening narration may say. Although Jackson throughout his body of work expressed interest in a vast array of cinema styles, by the mid-80s Lucas had settled into the comfortable role of producer, pulling together talent and overseeing the creative components of a project without actually assuming the directing duties himself. Jackson tended to put a lot of himself into his videos, his music, and his concerts while Lucas was by now accustomed to dropping teddy bears into cinemas to promote forthcoming TV specials and plush. Lucas, Jackson and Eisner are the guiding creative visions behind Captain EO and the film is perched on a razor's edge between Jackson's sincerity and the Lucasfilm whimsy-profit machine.

Lost in the middle of this is Francis Ford Coppola, a talented director but an unlikely choice to helm a space-fantasy musical. Coppola excelled at making lavish narratives out of intimate scenes, but nothing in his filmography up to then really seems to suggest him for the job. His Apocalypse Now staged huge battles but not in a way that allowed audiences to enjoy them as spectacle - he even dropped an expensive helicopter raid intended for the end of the film after shooting and editing it. Coppola's interesting One From the Heart, a sort of musical drama where nobody actually sings, is now well regarded but was a conspicuous failure, and Coppola frankly seems to have taken on the job as a way to retreat to the safety net of a smaller scale project following the failure of his 1984 The Cotton Club.

Coppola is marooned by his material. His only film that is anything close to a special-effects fantasy is Bram Stoker's Dracula, which would not be made for another six years and features not ILM rubber creatures and miniatures but intentionally weird and retrograde effects. Coppola brought his closest allies - cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and editor Walter Murch - along for the ride and collectively these men manage to make the best of material where they labor under the duelling obsessions of Jackson and Lucas while tugging along millions of dollars of sets and effects. It's a thankless job and perhaps most remarkable in that the contributions of Coppola, Murch and Storaro are not buried underneath the torpid bulk of the film.

Let me repeat that -Vittorio Storaro and Walter Murch, probably the most revered cinematographer and editor-sound designer currently living, made Captain EO. Their contributions, along with Coppola, and perfectly judged even while the film itself struggles towards relevance, and it's always fun to see what superior filmmakers can do with inferior material. It's the eternal myth of spinning dross into gold. Others would say it's lipstick on a pig. Either way, while you can't exactly say any of them "save" the film, they do make Captain EO the theme park 3D film with the most impeccable credentials in history - a combination only a Paramount TV executive could love.


But none of this really conveys what it's actually like to watch Captain EO, which is somehow even more bizarre than any description can suggest. Michael Jackson plays a pixieish space commander who combines the powers of The Music Man and Bugs Bunny. He possesses rainbow powers that seem to emanate from his light-up t-shirt which mainly seem to involve jumpsuits, choreographed dancing, and Greco-Roman architecture.

That's the part of the film that's played straight.

Hurry up and fix it, Hooter!

For comedy relief we have EO's crew, which includes a slobish miniature elephant in a wife beater tee, two tin-man style robots who may be callbacks to Jackson's involvement in The Wiz, conjoined twin Muppets, and an orange thing with butterfly wings who seems to have been invented to give Jackson's pet monkey something to do. They land on an alien planet that looks almost exactly like the Death Star trench run and confront a transparent Wicked Witch of the West riff with the power of song and succeed in transforming her into Anjelica Huston.

For a short film which cost as much as a moderate budget feature film at the time (it cost nearly as much as Lucas' Howard the Duck), much of Captain EO is surprisingly sloppy. At least a third of the shots in the film required nothing from Coppola as they were obviously storyboarded, shot, and composited by Industrial Light and Magic well after the fact. Of the remaining material, the film is weirdly littered with gaps and continuity errors - especially in the opening ship battle, EO's puppet friends jump around the cabin from one shot to another almost as if Coppola were improvising from one shot to the next. Fuzzball sits in a hammock in Hooter's bunk a mere single shot after he's shown fluttering to his command post. After the ship crashes, Hooter appears to hang from the ceiling in some shots and stand at attention at others. I'm not trying to nitpick, but this short film had a bigger budget than most features - it cost over a million dollars per minute - and nobody seems to have been paying attention to some minor details that even cheap movies get right. There was almost certainly what was then still called a "Script Girl" to take note of blocking and coverage.


Once out of the ILM space battle, Coppola asserts himself more strongly, showing a greater willingness to work in and around Jackson's choreography and displaying a nice range of coverage of the big dance number which allows Murch to very nicely build the second half to three different climaxes. The two best shots in the film stage the action very simply in a center-stage proscenium arch, greatly enhancing the pleasing effect of the 3D. The film, in wide screen and 70mm, looks a great deal more carefully crafted and professional than the MTV full-frame bootlegs had made it appear.


Problems do persist, however. Jackson's dancing company are not actors, which seems okay on a television screen but they become a real liability when projected on a motion picture screen, hamming badly and sometimes stealing glances at the camera. As the Supreme Leader, Anjelica Huston has fun in a dry run for her role in The Witches, but otherwise seems to mostly be on view for reasons unknown - she's not bad, but there's no reason she particularly had to play the role. This was her big follow up to winning an Academy Award in Prizzi's Honor.

Elsewhere, the 3D effect is used rather unimaginatively, to poke us in the eye with sticks or have Jackson punch and kick the camera. Only one shot in the film seems to demand the process, which is the opening one, with a spinning galaxy and an asteroid that sails out into the audience's lap and explodes. It's a remarkably memorable effect, but EO uses its best reason to be in 3D in it's first minute of screen time. Some of the other good effects, such as sailing up through tree branches, simply repeat imagery from Magic Journeys.

Threeeee-Deeeeee

I know, I know. So far I haven't given a single reason to admire Captain EO. But that's just the thing: I think EO is a very rare kind of film. It does so many things wrong that it somehow starts doing them right, rocketing past the sort of bland tedium of most bad movies and somehow minting a new threshold of lunacy. No truly weird movie can be truly bad, but EO does beg the question of what makes movies "bad" or "good".

Those movies that are usually considered "The Worst" - Plan Nine From Outer Space, Manos: Hands of Fate, Troll 2 - those aren't really the bad movies. They're certainly strange and uncomfortably incompetent, but they're also compulsively watchable because they venture so far outside our realm of comfort. The truly bad movies aren't watched because they're not watchable, flailing around through mediocre cookie-cutter plots and uninspired direction to reach predictable conclusions and submerge without a trace. A truly heinous film wouldn't even be fun in the "laugh-at-the-bad-effects" way popularized by Mystery Science Theater 3000 - it wouldn't even get released. If you did see it, you'd forget it by the time the end credits came up. I've seen lots of "consensus bad" movies and generally they had something in them that encouraged me to keep watching, even if out of mere fascination or frustration.

I say this as a longtime lover of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but most of the movies shown there were at least unique or even possibly good (their final episode, Danger: Diabolik, is a brilliant movie). Anybody who's ever sat through Manos: Hands of Fate carries with them scenes and sensations not found in other films, and thus Manos succeeds - indirectly - where many films fail - it sticks with you. The creepy atmosphere, the weird acting, the music - all highly memorable. Does anybody out there remember anything specific from Superman Returns?

An ever rarer - and thus infinitely more valuable - breed is when Hollywood accidentally makes one of these films. Manos or Plan Nine may traipse along on pure weirdness like whacked-out folk-art, but Hollywood has vast bureaucratic and technical systems in place to ensure that their films are at least watchable. Every so often, however, the right combination of factors locks the gears and they turn out something weird - a Waterworld or a Popeye or a Howard the Duck. Whereas most of what's seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000 qualifies as what we call in cinema studies "Outsider Cinema" - a great deal of it with its own unique merits - mainstream film production offers its own unique, rare sensations when its systems break down. In Hollywood these are called turkeys or fiascoes - films that for various reasons venture far from the mainline of public taste to create strange and new combinations that threaten to repel mass audiences.

This is because film making requires so many people and so much money that there is no sure fire formula to success: it's less like science and more like alchemy. If Hollywood knew how to make every film be a Casablanca, we'd have a lot more of them in the world. Some films fall short, most fall in the middle, and some go shooting off into some weird parallel dimension: flukes of the system, entropy.

What do we call these movies? Cult Movies?

I place Captain EO in this tradition. I've already mentioned Robert Altman's Popeye and I think that's still a fair comparison: Popeye gets so many things wrong in so many ways that it alchemizes it's own unlikely entertainment value. While years of availability of Popeye on cable TV and home video have restored some sort of legitimacy to a project that very nearly ended the careers of everyone involved, EO has largely not undergone the same sort of reappraisal. Where EO certainly doesn't belong is in the company of films like Robot Monster and Beast of Yucca Flats, the "so-bad-it's-good" category. I would place it alongside things like Last Action Hero and Hudson Hawk: movies that may not be great but which offer their own loopy charm.

One film which may be closer to home for Disney fans is Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, which by simply existing seems to be an act of subversion. Who would cast multi-million dollar actors then put them in makeup which makes them unrecognizable?  Who would get Stephen Sondheim to write songs which are barely audible? Who would decide to make a film with only seven identical colors? The answer, of course, is the apparently unstoppable Beatty and the cinematographer of Captain EO. Dick Tracy isn't exactly good, but it's never boring.

Now let's be honest: I've focused a lot on technicians and film makers but what makes Captain EO work when it works has to do almost entirely with Jackson. Jackson was not really an "actor" in any sense of the term but as a skilled performer his presence in the film entirely carries the effects it achieves. In other videos such as Thriller or Bad, Jackson seems a little remote, replicating some of the distancing effects of a Buster Keaton type of performer, who can casually do things nobody else can do. Whether this be the effect of a skilled actor's director such as Coppola or just a fluke, Jackson's space captain, after a few initial rough line deliveries ("We're going in!"), completely carries Captain EO, and the reason why has to do with the scale of Jackson's personal involvement in his craft. Jackson never did anything he didn't believe in - he signs the relatively lightweight Thriller with a disclaimer of endorsement of the supernatural as if it were The Exorcist - and he doesn't really act Captain EO so much as embody him. Compared to so many films and performers who seem to be resigned that they're selling us a bad bill of goods from the start, Jackson played everything with as much conviction as he possibly could, not matter what it was. He doesn't cheat with his audience. In the final sequence where EO dances his way out of the palace, Jackson's performance is so obviously striving for authenticity that he seems genuinely moved.

Who is Captain EO? He's a pixieish man from another planet who dances and wants to save the universe with music played by an almost imperceptibly different pixieish man from another planet who dances and wants to save the universe with his music. EO is the ultimate Jackson role because it seems to compile and synthesize the Jackson cultural myth into a fictional character.

The effect is that Captain EO presents us with a world which is disarmingly honest even while it revels in total outlandishness. In our modern era we have no defense mechanism against this: even while we see through the commercial motives EO is engineered to evoke, we can't reconcile the completely straightforward seriousness with which it treats itself, and we laugh. But it's hard to actually say that EO is kitsch or camp: Jackson seems to so completely believe in his music and his performance that it seems impolite to not take him seriously.


The scale to which one finds success or failure in Captain EO is directly proportionate to the level of investment one is willing to have in something so obviously silly. And EO is silly, outrageously so, but the silliness is disarming and prepares us for some genuinely thrilling moments further down the line. I discussed the larger generational attitudes that feed into this in You Do Have Wings, Orange Bird and they are relevant here too: metamodernism invites us to take Jackson seriously precisely because common sense and cultural conditioning today encourages us not to. If Captain EO works for you, the effect of the film is strangely, sadly moving. Through the sea of Lucas kitsch and Disney nonsense, something genuine and strange peers out at us. EO triumphs over itself.

Some of this has to do with the patina of history that has grown over Captain EO in the intervening quarter-century, and our own sad awareness of ourselves. This quality that nearly all films over a generation old, no matter how dire, eventually accrue is something too relatively new to have an actual critical term yet. The 20th Century was the first in history to be recorded from its first day to its last, including its unconscious anxieties and cultural fantasies. Both the material and the immaterial of an entire hundred years of history has been preserved. We now enjoy apparent banalities of the past with renewed fascination, like the workers at the Lumiere factory leaving the gate who fascinate not because they move but because they record the people and places of 1895. As the "time machine" effect of film continues to make itself known through history, we will develop ways to discuss this "magic window" effect in detail, but even relatively recent vintages such as EO possess charms that were not apparent to audiences when they were new.

Captain EO records 1986 extremely accurately as a cultural moment without ever having to show us the Challenger disintegrating, Ronald Regan and Iran-Contra, without ever mentioning Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee and Ferris Beuller's Day Off, and without ever showing us a leg warmer or a Madonna cassette. Because of this, as our own contemporary life has changed, the meaning of EO has changed with it. We now know that the puppet sidekicks of EO is the creative direction Lucas would pursue, eventually bringing us to the Star Wars prequels and defacing the reputation of his great creation. We know that Coppola's amazing accomplishments in the 70s would continue to haunt his declining influence and we know that ILM and Hollywood would shortly abandon the look and feel of these special effects and miniatures in favor of hollow-looking CGI. Depicting Jackson at the height of his success and power, Captain EO has the ability to rewrite history, allowing him to save the planet and sail off into the universe in a trail of rainbow light instead of succumbing to his personal demons and living the rest of his life as a tabloid mystery locked away in his own private Disneyland. Only through a creation like Captain EO can Jackson receive the "happy ending" such a sad life desperately needed. As a popular culture icon in a pop culture creation, Jackson's exit in EO is the way we can remember him for posterity. Here cracks a noble heart.

That's the queer power the film now has. Generally it's considered poor form to discuss any film in what David Bordwell has called the "Zeitgeist genre of criticism" on the grounds that we elevate the era instead of the art object, but we should remember that this is now a major attraction of classic films - a window into the past to what seems a simpler era. Ben Franklin reminds us that the "golden age never was the present age", but you can't change human nature. As long as time marches on there will be people and art objects to commemorate its dwindling passage. It applies to Casablanca, and also to lesser films like Captain EO.

And even if that doesn't make it a good film or excuse its many failings, it does add to its unique, one-off flavor. Whether you love or hate the film, you have to admit that the mold it popped out of is now broken. They literally do not make them them like this anymore. I believe by by nature of its origin, creation, and execution, Captain EO is both culturally and aesthetically significant, and that once it ends its run inside the theme parks I hope that it becomes available on video for posterity if nothing else. EO seems to reside in that weird limbo area that Hunter Thompson called "one of God's own prototypes - some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production."

It's a disaster of a movie. And every last, blessed frame of it is a vast, bizarre delight. I love it.

What do you do with a mystery that isn't?

The Magic Kingdom is full of dozens of mysterious events, especially in her earliest years. I've been attending the park for decades and studying it seriously for almost ten years now and I'm convinced that we'll never quite know about the dead guy outside the Burning Cabin, or the full story behind the Jungle Cruise queue, or why the rest of Liberty Square wasn't built, or just exactly when Western River Expedition was cancelled.

But those things are different in that those articles detail things that came close to happening, or supposed to have happened, or apparently briefly did happen, then vanished, leaving only circumstantial evidence. Today we have a different kind of puzzle: something that's very well documented, but the reasons behind it happening at all are impossible to guess at. And what's funny is that these events in no way involved a Vacation Kingdom obscurity: they hint towards a secret history of one of the most famous of early Walt Disney World phenomena. It's time to meet the star of our show today:


....a dock.

The date is mid 1971, and the above picture was snapped by a Florida Construction Dad standing on the roof of the still-under-construction Circle-Vision 360 in Tomorrowland. The object of interest is the dock under construction in the foreground; given the date and the general state of readiness evident in all of the other areas of the park, it looks like this spot in particular was rather an afterthought.

What is it? It's the Swan Boat Dock.

This is where, if you know Walt Disney World history, you are free to imagine a loud, zany record scratch. Say What?!? Everyone knows where the real Swan Boat landing is - why, there's whole blogs about what it is! Did you know you can rent it for weddings? Everyone knows that the Swan Boat landing is located just north of the Tomorrowland bridge.

Tom Bricker on Flickr

That's part of the story, yes. And, at the same time, no, it isn't the only Swan Boat Landing. Let's dig into the mystery.

Before we begin, I'd like to cover some basics so we are all on the same page. The Plaza Swan Boats were a slow-moving attraction which plied the waters of the Magic Kingdom's moat from 1973 (maybe) to 1983, at which point Disney retired them permanently. They only ran during the busy summer months, and traveled clockwise around the hub, with a detour into Adventureland to pass the Jungle Cruise and zip around Swiss Family Island. The layout, and loading dock, is pretty clear in this 1974 Magic Kingdom map:


Near the southernmost bank of the loop around the Treehouse, the Swan Boats had a spur line which backed into a shaded structure, shared with the Jungle Cruise, where the boats could be lifted out of the channel and onto dry land to be repaired. Although at this point the Hub moat (ie, Swan Boat ride path) and Jungle Cruise river are only three feet away from each other, the waters never intermingle - they meet at a dam hidden underneath a backstage path to the east of the Jungle Cruise unload point.

Here's a modern satellite photo showing the dual maintenance channels for the Swan Boats (top) and Jungle Cruise (bottom). The brown square sitting out on the Swan Boat channel is actually a break room for the Jungle Cruise, put up in the early 90s.


The Swan Boat Maintenance Bay has always been there. In fact, the Swan Boats appear to have been intended as an opening day attraction. The idea seems to have begun with this 1970 Herb Ryman piece:

via Progress City, USA

Paul Hartley included it in his 1971 "Fun Map" of the Vacation Kingdom, a courtesy he pointedly did not extend to a dozen other things that were planned but didn't make it to opening day, such as all of Tomorrowland. The detail is easy to miss, but it's there:


Again notice the boat's placement and direction of travel. As I've pointed out before, Hartley's illustrations are extremely conservative in terms of visual interpretation, and in most cases he seems to be working directly off elevation blueprints.

In short, the Plaza Swan Boats seemed to be on track to open on October 1971. But they did not.

Let's take a quick look at that dock we saw being built at the top of the post; let's see how it looks today. Here are two aerial views obtained from Bing:


Notice the large, smooth ramp leading from directly off Main Street? If you think it looks like an attraction entrance, you would be right, and in 1971 Disney planted a Swan topiary on either side of that entrance to pave the way for the imminent arrival of the boats:


You can also see the finished yellow and white striped canopy intended to house the queue behind the topiary. Enjoy this view; it's probably the clearest photo of this original arrangement that exists. Also notice that the moat itself is not filled in, which is a giveaway that this is a pre-opening publicity shot.

We can see the dock again in The Magic of Walt Disney World, shot in late 1971:


It's blurry, but notice that Disney seems to have simply thrown a bench right in the middle of the attraction entrance and called it a day. Notice also that the canopy is now surrounded by a wall.

As the camera flies over the hub, we can see what appears to be a Maintenance boat tied up alongside the dock:


Did you notice the area to the left leading away from the Swan Boat dock towards Tomorrowland? This simple curved path and monstrous gap between the Tomorrowland and Main Street buildings would soon be filled in by the Plaza Pavilion restaurant in 1973, but originally it was little but a short wall and some grass. This 1972 photo of the Grand Prix Raceway....


...Affords us a very rare view of this wall as well as the original curved exit path from the Swan Boat Landing leading towards Tomorrowland:


It's hard to tell exactly what's going on at the dock, but the walls appear to be down by now. This short stretch between the two lands, which lasted less than 24 short months, is one of the most difficult areas of the original Magic Kingdom to find photographic evidence of.

So the Boat Dock was put in in 1971 and sat there unused. And this is where our story takes a bizarre and apparently unprovoked detour towards the realm of... ice cream. Because we can't tell this story without telling the story of everything that occurred around it.

Daveland.Com

Above we can see the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor in 1972, looking almost exactly as it does today. And you would be right to think that, except when this photo was taken its interior was almost twice the size it is today. Because strangely enough, we can't tell the story of the Swan Boats without also telling the story of the ice cream parlor across the way.

When it opened in 1971, the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor looked like this on the first year map:



It's sort of hard to tell in this map, but if we go to the Summer 1972 GAF guide, we can see that the Ice Cream Parlor clearly filled the entire block of facades directly to the south of the conspicously absent Swan Boat Dock. It's Number 11 on this map:



A 1976 issue of Walt Disney World Vacationland gives us this rare interior view, although it only hints at what was different about this eatery in those early days:


It's clear, based on the evidence available, that for the first few years of the operation of the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor that the restaurant included a large seating area to its east, on the Tomorrowland side. As I've argued here before, the Magic Kingdom at first experienced a glut of tourists unlike any the company had prepared for - a rapid flow that only the 1974 Energy Crisis could diminish. Confirming this scenario, in February 1972, journalist Edward Prizer wrote in the pages of Orlandoland Magazine:

"Such a deluge of Disneyphiles hasn't been without problems for Disney World itself. Months ago the top men realized they needed more of everything, and fast. But it wasn't like an ordinary amusement park, where you could bring in another ferris wheel or pitch game or two and set them up overnight.

[...]

Even more urgent than the opening of new attractions has been the problem of attending to two of the basic requirements for the park's operation: transportation and feeding. With an average day's crowd, it's been possible to move guests smoothly from the main entrance to the theme park aboard the present monorails, trams, and steamships. But just let a swarm of extra people descend on the place and soon there are long lines waiting to get across to the scene of the action. I've had to wait as long as an hour, myself.

Then, once you're in the park, it has on occasion been a real challenge to get into a restaurant or up to a food counter for some grub to assuage a rampant appetite. All the smiling in the world doesn't pacify a crowd of hungry guests."

True to Prizer's word, we see that by Spring 1973, the Ice Cream Parlor has now added Waitress Service to its lineup:


Presumably the waitress service area took over a spot that was previously an open seating area on the Tomorrowland side. However, the two spaces continued to operate under the same name and share the same space, as seen in this 1972 photograph, where I'm reasonably sure that the small sign over what was previously the seating area still reads "Plaza Ice Cream Parlor":

Thanks to Jeffrey Lipack

As we can see, the Swan Boats were still ostensibly located down by the water near the Parlor. However, the Summer 1973 GAF guide promotes several upcoming attractions:


And just as suddenly, where there had previously been open lawn north of the Tomorrowland Bridge:


The familiar Swan Boat queue and dock suddenly appear on park maps in June 1973:


In Summer 1973, the Plaza Pavilion restaurant opens, requiring the construction of steps to replace the previous gentle "exit ramp" slope, and by December 1973, Vacationland Magazine is depicting the former Swan Boat area as a seating area for the Ice Cream Parlor:


Notice how the yellow and white striped umbrellas, which remain to this day, visually echo the original canopy which stood here.

Today we know the area which was probably once the Ice Cream Parlor seating area as the Plaza Restaurant, and although I've found one mention of the name in a Summer 1976 Vacationland, it doesn't appear in park guides until 1977:


Park maps are still vague about exactly how the two areas interface, showing both "Borden's Ice Cream Parlor" and the "Plaza Restaurant" as a single continuous space, although the overall arrangement is now closer to how we know the park today:


Today, few hints remain of the brief period when the Plaza Restaurant was the seating area for the Ice Cream Shop. The wall that joins the two locations has been filled in:

The door that wasn't

And questions linger on. The current Plaza Restaurant has an Art Nouveau interior worlds away from the plain decoration of the Ice Cream Parlor next door, and quite far removed from the relatively unchanged interior seen in the mid-70s Vacationland interior photo:


Watch that connecting door in the back vanish before your eyes!

The "back" wall of the Plaza Restaurant is raised off an apparent original back wall to allow a place for servers to refill drinks and ring checks. It's more of a simple partition which implies that all of the Art Nouveau niceties were added the same time the partition was. There's also evidence of "In" and "Out" signs above the doors to the back area that have since been wallpapered over. How many interior designs has this space gone through?


But when did this happen? 1973? 1977? Or some later date? When did the "Plaza Restaurant" become the "Plaza Restaurant"? I've combed the pages of countless Eyes and Ears and other official documents without ever turning up a mention of the original change. For that matter, when and why were the two establishments walled off from each other?


For that matter, why on earth would you call the darn thing the Plaza Restaurant when you know it's already sandwiched between two other establishments called the Plaza Ice Cream Parlor (1971) and the Plaza Pavilion (1973)?  The Plaza Pavilion is already such a troublingly generic and forgettable name that most people only know what I'm referring to when you refer to it by it's contemporary name.... The Noodle Station. Which it hasn't been called for five years now.


The Noodle Station is a terrible name, but at least it's memorable. What deficit of creative thought gave us three restaurants with the name "Plaza" as their first word right in a row?

Even more puzzlingly: did the Swan Boats relocate to make room for the additional seating, or did the seating fill in a space vacated for the Swan Boats? Since this is the 1970s, it seems hardly likely that Disney would've relocated an entire attraction just because the construction of the Plaza Pavilion required the substitution of a staircase for a ramp. After all, this was 1973, years before anyone has even thought of the idea of ADA-compliance.

When did the Swan Boats open?

Even a question as basic as "When did the Swan Boats" open - something that seems so basic, so simple - is impossible to answer. The official Disney opening date for the attraction is May 20, 1973, which is great but unfortunately demonstrably wrong. I excluded a paragraph from Edward L. Prizer's Feburary 1972 article above, because I wanted to include it here, where it would have the most impact.

"Such a deluge of Disneyphiles hasn't been without problems for Disney World itself. Months ago the top men realized they needed more of everything, and fast. But it wasn't like an ordinary amusement park, where you could bring in another ferris wheel or pitch game or two and set them up overnight.

Disney attractions are complex packages of planning and engineering talent and meticulous craftsmanship that sometimes take years to perfect. There was just no way to phone back to California and say, "Send us another half a dozen."

In due course, according to previous plans, they did get [Flight to the Moon] and America the Beautiful in operation early this year. They'll be opening Eastern Airlines' "If You Had Wings" around June. Two more shops, Olde World Antiques and Mlle Layafette Parfumerie, have just started doing business. Before too long, swan boats will be launched in the canal that flows around The Hub before Cinderella's Castle."

How long is "before too long"? A month? Two months? A year? Well, it took the Swan Boats a year and a half before they opened.

Maybe.

Now, if you go to the Orlando Public Library, you can look through every Walt Disney World newspaper clipping from the 1970s, including many not in English. And if you do so you will find extensive coverage of the opening of Tom Sawyer Island in June 1973, and absolutely no mention of the Swan Boats except to note that they were expected to be ready "By Summer".

The nearest I can find for an concrete implication of an opening date for the Swan Boats is a single paragraph mention of the boats in a June 1973 issue of Walt Disney World News, which abruptly adds the familiar Swan Boat Dock to the map of the hub, as seen above. The May 1973 issue includes no mention of the boats - despite hyping the imminent opening of Tom Sawyer Island - and no visual representation of the dock.

Everything points to a May or June 1973 opening, which makes it very hard to explain how this photo was appearing in Disney publications as early as 1972:

"Anybody have a map?"

Notice that the boat is moving around the moat counter-clockwise, just as both the Herb Ryman concept art and Paul Hartley map seem to suggest.

The Omnibus passes the original canopy, 1972

Also look all the way to the left of the photo, above the Crystal Palace. That black object that isn't a palm tree? It's a crane, putting up the superstructure for Pirates of the Caribbean. This means this photo was taken sometime between early 1972 and mid 1973, when the Swan Boats finally opened.... traveling the opposite direction around the Hub.

The thing is that this direction of travel makes no sense. The highlight of the Swan Boat journey was undoubtedly the trip into Adventureland - a highlight which occurred in the first third of the attraction as it operated from 1973 to 1983. But if the boats traveled in the direction indicated by the above photograph, concept art and Hartley fun map, however, the Adventureland section would become the last third - after which the boat would immediately dock by the Ice Cream Parlor. Isn't this a more sensible and dramatic way to arrange an attraction?

What's even more puzzling is what happened to the Swan Boats after they opened in 1973 - Disney ran them only during Summer months, and even removed them from the GAF park guides in 1975. After only ten years, the boats closed.

So let's review. We have an attraction which looked ready to open in 1971, was reported to open in 1972, finally opened in 1973 in a different place with no fanfare after its original boarding area became an ice cream patio, then was closed with no fanfare after only ten years after being operated only in fits and starts.

"Off to your right, you'll see the site of our future loading dock!"

The 1972 date given by Prizer and the photographic evidence we have of the dock apparently open and in use and the boats traveling on the water in 1972 only makes sense if we assume that the Swan Boats did run in 1972 following the original ride path and then closed. This would explain why there's little to no press for their apparently vague opening date in 1973 - they were already open. June 1973 is when their new loading dock opened, not when the boats began traveling.

Why did they move?

I've considered all of the possibilities here. Was it because the boats needed to load from the opposite side of the river? Seems unlikely, since they had entrances from both sides. Was it because there was some kind of technical problem with the boats or ride path? At first I thought the waves generated by the Tomorrowland entry slopes and spires (they used to spit water, you know) could've caused issues with the Swan Boats, but the boats in operation had no less than two wave breaks and the Tomorrowland entry wasn't re-engineered to produce more water until 1974, anyway. There's no way that moving the attraction closer to the waves before they were a problem could've affected the decision. In fact, directly above and to the left you can see a 1972 Swan Boat blissfully drifting through the area that would later have wave breaks installed around it.

Was it for crowd control?

This seems like a more likely choice to me. The spot outside the Ice Cream Parlor can become a traffic jam even 40 years later, so relocating the boat dock north may have eased congestion in a spot that was becoming unmanageable - and this was back when Disney was still actually trying to operate the Plaza Pavilion as a restaurant all day instead of just letting it become the fanciest covered walkway in the park. Were the Swan Boats causing traffic jams?

Remember what Edward Prizer said - they needed more of everything. In fact, there is some evidence that the Swan Boats were and continued to be an operational nuisance. On Widen Your World we learn:

"A cast member who worked this attraction during its last season said the ride was closed due to operating costs, which stemmed largely from the maintenance of the boats.  This would make the Swan Boats the first ride to contract the disease that laid 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to rest in 1994.  All manner of other reasons have been given for the Swan Boats' closure, including that the ride was "just too popular."  When I first heard that, I presumed it was entirely untrue.  According to Greg Scott, however, the ride's popularity was actually a problem.  Scott staffed the ride as a Lead during its last few summers and in 2003 recounted that even with six boats running the queue could easily reach 45-60 minutes."

In a park that had two theater shows to offer guests as reward for entering Tomorrowland, no roller coasters, no Pirates of the Caribbean or Tom Sawyer Island, no Peoplemover, and an apparently unreliable submarine ride, it's easy to imagine a queue for the Plaza Swan Boats spilling right out into the Main Street parade route at this crucial juncture. In fact, when you get right now to it, isn't the most striking difference between the two boat landings - besides the more attractive and permanent nature of the 1973 canopy - the fact that the newer version has at least three times as much queue space?

Top: 1971 Bottom: 1973

Ah-ha! And now it becomes possible to fit the story of the Plaza Swan Boats into a narrative we've already covered at Passport to Dreams: the early attractions with out of control lines. We already know that new structures and crowd control devices had to be built for Country Bear Jamboree, Hall of Presidents, Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; now we can add Plaza Swan Boats to that list.

In fact we now know that their unreliability was evident from the start, making their closure in 1983 much more understandable. Premiering two years too late, being prone to always being broken and causing inestimable crowd flow damage is not a way to get on Disney's good side. In fact, the mere fact that Disney only ran them during summers is itself a huge red flag for their era. The Plaza Swan Boats were open less often than the Plaza Pavilion, a restaurant that today is open perhaps six weeks out of the year. You have to be a pretty lousy ride for Disney in the 1970's to give up on you so quickly. In fact, it's now easier to place the swan boats alongside something like the Fort Wilderness Railroad: it was a disaster, and it closed quickly.

So that's the story of the ice cream parlor that wasn't and the attraction that wasn't, and who knows exactly what happened but it's still around to haunt us today. We may never exactly know when the Swan Boats opened for real or why they ran them in the wrong direction for a decade or exactly how they got messed up in the first place. Just as we may never know what those original Magic Kingdom guests had to look at while they ate their fancy crepes and ice cream sundaes in the spot that was not yet the Plaza Restaurant. And we'll never know why they just had to have three restaurants in a row starting with the name "Plaza".

I was going to end with this familiar photo of a Swan Boat in 1972, pulling towards the original load dock - already tracing the "backwards" route, with no 1973 landing visible in the background:


Until I noticed something in this photo I never had before:


Is... is that a tow line?

It can't be. Nobody attaches a line to tow a boat under the water line.

Could this be the mythical early electrical guidance system which caused the attraction to close in 1972 after it failed?

And does this early photo, showing the Swan boat ride path under refurbishment, perhaps betray traces of that original, failed ride system?


If this is true, then the May 20, 1973 date given by Disney probably refers either to the opening of the new landing or the conversion of the Swan Boats to the new guidance system - underwater jets, just like the modern day Friendships at EPCOT. But which is it?

The Magic Kingdom refuses to yield up all of her mysteries.

This page was updated on March 16, 2013, with new photos and information.

Tom Sawyer Island is one of the very best attractions at Magic Kingdom.

Yes, you read that correctly. At Magic Kingdom, the park that contains the highest number of attractions per square acre that represent why people go to that crazy Walt Disney World anyway, in a park featuring such brilliant and hauntingly beautiful creations as the Haunted Mansion and 1971 Jungle Cruise, a low-tech oddity like Tom Sawyer Island can still go up against timeless classics and the newest of the new.

I sometimes hear scoffs about that, but it's always from people who haven't seen Tom Sawyer Island, which is not the same as saying they haven't been - because to see Tom Sawyer Island means it has to seep into you, you have to let it into dark spaces where your mind doesn't often travel. One can raft across to the island, disembark, walk around for twenty minutes and leave without actually seeing a darn thing - without looking past the tip of her nose.

Tom Sawyer Island is essentially a collection of low-tech gags that build to an imaginative space of astonishing richness. Many of the gags could've been thought up and installed by almost any theme park - but they weren't. Like the best Disney special effects, the disarming transparent simplicity of the Island gags encourage our imaginations to fill in the blanks - and that's how it gets to us.

Tom Sawyer Island is one of the very last flowerings of a primal mode of themed design representation which most closely resembles a magic trick - rather, misdirection. A speaker and light in the right place can populate a cave with Pirates, or a staircase rising to a sealed door creates an imaginary room. These simple images engage our conscious imagination and create highly pleasurable illusions. This is, to me, what themed design is all about at its best - the scribble in the margin that so enriched rides like Horizons and If You Had Wings. The Island is rich with texture and detail, from the uneven "earth" pathways to the rock-edged waterfalls and babbling brooks.

Tom Sawyer Island is a fantastic place to observe one of the major structural concepts which underlines every Disneyland-style theme park: the dynamic of control versus chaos. Disney creates real-feeling environments where, unlike our unordered cities or uncivilized countrysides, everything has been placed for specific aesthetic effect - from the tiniest white rock to the color of the water in the fake lakes. This effect is especially pervasive at Walt Disney World, where everything as far as the eye can see both inside and outside the theme parks has been placed there by Disney. But while this is pleasing and reassuring, it's also unnatural, and part of our mind draws back. To contrast this  uncanny effect, Disney creates spaces inside their attractions where their orderly world appears to break down and Things Go Horribly Wrong.

Of course, just as it's a carefully controlled illusion of perfection in the theme park, it's a carefully controlled illusion of peril - Brer Fox is an animated chunk of metal and fiberglass and nobody has yet perished from riding a log down Chikapin Hill. Just as we suspend our disbelief in admiration as we walk down Main Street, we suspend our disbelief in gratitude as we pretend to think we're in danger on Big Thunder Mountain.

There are few attractions where the sense of rules having been suspended is as pervasive or effective as it is on Tom Sawyer Island, especially in those caves, where we almost think that we won't make it out again. The Magnetic Mystery Mine, where physics become disturbingly unhinged, or the Escape Tunnel, which is narrow enough to give many adults momentary panic attacks. We run, saunter, shput, tremble, snooze, or daydream on Tom Sawyer Island - we tromp through the flowerbeds, get wet, step off the pathways, shoot fake guns, and generally get away with things. And there are few places where we feel as genuinely unchaperoned- and alone.

Why does Tom Sawyer Island feel so uninhibited? Part of it, I suspect, is symbolic - we take a raft to get there, and therefore experience a physical transition to another place - we feel as though we're outside the theme park, and no longer governed by its rules. Thus the (highly engineered, it's worth noting) adventures we experience take on an ominous undercurrent - not because they are dangerous, but they could be. Just as Mark Twain wrote a fantasy version of his childhood from the perspective of an adult, Tom Sawyer Island zips us right back to the "once upon a time" of a dimly remembered childhood afternoon when we went exploring - an ingrained cultural memory that maybe very few of us ever actually did. But it's a evergreen myth - from Tom Sawyer to Little Nemo to Stand By Me and The Goonies.

No other attraction makes exclusive use of daylight in quite the same way, which is probably why Tom Sawyer Island closes at dusk - although at Magic Kingdom, in particular, a very large number of lights and lanterns have been positioned on the island to illuminate it at night so that it appears to be real place, or at least enough of a real place to have a continued existence after we leave it. But maybe Tom Sawyer Island is most impressive for being basically unlit - scenes like Harper's Mill ask us to step into dim rooms and strain to make out the details - just as in life. Even the caverns mostly refrain from theatrical lighting - if we see a light, it's from a lantern or a torch. The rest is allowed to fall off into obscurity.There is also a remarkably simplistic sound design - next to no music, and the bulk of the sound effects are motivated by a source that can be seen. If we hear birds, they probably are real birds. This contributes to the feeling of being unrehearsed and overall quite different than the carefully crafted, lit, and scored world of the rest of the theme park in general.

These reasons alone are enough to argue for the continued preservation of this remarkable attraction, but, as always, there are more.

Although it probably seemed a lot less special in 1973, today Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is notable for being a very well preserved example of a homespun American original - an attraction which once proliferated across the country and made good use of simple perspective tricks - the Mystery Hill or Mystery Spot. The most famous one still operating today is in Santa Cruz, California, although Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is more likely inspired by the Haunted Shack at Knott's Berry Farm.

The Mine is a creative interpretation of this traditional roadside attraction, as well. Since the attraction has no host or guide which is required for the various scale and perspective illusions of something like the Knott's Haunted Shack, the Disney version uses visual and sensory grammar to make sense of its illusions. An entry tunnel gradually increases in pitch although its walls appear to remain upright, making the audience feel as if they are being pulled to the left, while an ominous humming, the sound of the mystery magnets, can be heard. Inside the main room, a sluice placed under a trickle of water seems to run uphill into a barrel, and a small indoor waterfall becomes a river running upstream towards a formation of jewels which juts out of the wall, shaped like the profile of a man. The entire room is tilted, making travel unsteady and forcing viewers to lean towards the magnetic jewels. The final room is a variation on a traditional scene in classic dark rides such as those by Bill Tracy - the diminishing mine shaft, where visitors appear to grow larger as they reach the end.

Aunt Polly's in better days, Photo by Al Huffman

Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is, as far as I know, the only "mystery spot" ever built by Disney, and that alone makes it worthy of preservation. Tokyo Disneyland got a version of the Disneyland Island in 1983, after which the attraction stopped being built. Disney literally does not make them like this anymore.

But the entire attraction overall is remarkably unchanged since June 1973, and that itself is a wonder. We can pretty much account for the changes on one hand:

 - The "Explorer's Maps" are no longer handed out at the entrance, although a number of metal versions have been placed around the island to aid navigation.

- After years of spotty service, in 2001 the sign was finally removed from Aunt Polly's Refreshments, meaning the closure of this simple snack stand. In the early days it sold cold sandwiches and soda, and later expanded to include things like potato salad and cold fried chicken.

 - The Cantina in the Fort is no longer the place to go for frozen lemonade. I personally have no memory of this ever being open, so its demise may have been far earlier than Aunt Polly's.

 - The extremely cool "spinning rocks" playground was removed and an off-the-shelf playground designed to look like a "salvage fort" was added a few years earlier. Thankfully, we can still see it being enjoyed by children in pyjamas in the late 80's souvenir video "A Day at the Magic Kingdom".

Left: the merry go round, Right: the teeter-totter / Photos by Al Huffman, 1999

This places Tom Sawyer Island in extremely select company at Magic Kingdom, alongside the Riverboat and Peter Pan's Flight and It's a Small World and the Peoplemover as attractions which substantively have never changed. Who in 1973 would've guessed that Tom Sawyer Island would outlast Country Bear Jamboree or the Tiki Room in their original forms? In June of this year, it will have gone forty blessed years without so much as a Pirate intervention.

Which means it's no time like the present to start documenting it. I recently spent several days on the Island trying to document those things likely to be overlooked when and if the time comes to close it - the winding paths and trails and picnics areas on the hills over Injun Joe's Cave and the two ponds which open into slow moving waterfalls, the Hangman's Steps and Gallows Getaway and Hickory Switch Hill and textures and tones and impressions of a few hours exploring.

It's not intended to be a fast-moving overview, but rather an opportunity to explore and contemplate an attraction rich in fascinations. In other words it's meant to document some of the pleasures I find in this attraction and perhaps preserve something of the atmosphere if the time ever does come to close it.

Why do I think Tom Sawyer Island stands high among WED Enterprises' finest creations? Because it both requires and supplies imagination - a little bit goes a long way. It's the retreat inside the retreat - the ritualistic crossing on the raft, the swaying of rocking chairs, the dapple light through the trees becomes a space which perhaps supplies little if we are not willing to stop, look, and listen, but becomes tremendously real and hauntingly deep. Harper's Mill and Potter's Windmill and Fort Langhorn feel as ancient and real today as anything at Walt Disney World, and the effect can be spooky as well as transcendent - like the rest of the Magic Kingdom was just built around it, and there it remains as it has for perhaps a hundred and fifty years.

That's a convincing illusion. And Tom Sawyer Island, untouched these forty years, still has the power to circulate wild and indomitable energies and rich imaginative constructs, a graceful and lingering prose poem that draws its energy from the lapping of the river which surrounds it - the Magic Kingdom's most successful and beautiful lament for the spirit of a bygone time.

This post is intended to be exactly what the title states: a brief overview. Those who have downloaded and read my expanded notes to A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World will already be well ahead on this topic, but for the rest of my readers some preliminaries are in order.

Starting shortly on this blog I'm going to begin an ongoing series about the music which constituted the very earliest in-park background music, or BGM, at the Magic Kingdom as well as topics relating to it.

It's generally my goal to allow others to disprove me, if necessary, in future research, so consider this the start of a paper trail in which I'm going to reveal some very specific and obscure information. Please remember: myself, and my friends who helped me gather, compile and post this information, are human too, and can and possibly have made mistakes. Some of the conclusions you'll see me coming to could probably not be defended in a court of law and are based on interpretation of certain known factors. As you'll shortly be seeing, even sometimes obvious conclusions can turn out to be very, very wrong in the strange, murky world of early theme park background music.

So what is early background music and how do we know about it? It's time to...

Meet Jack Wagner
If you spent any time going to Walt Disney World or Disneyland in the 70s, 80s, or 90s you know that Jack Wagner's voice was ubiquitous. You heard this man's voice everywhere. Inside monorails, Peoplemovers, at ticket booths, during ride breakdowns, for parade announcements, and more. His voice is the one which, having been run through a synthesizer, provides the opening announcement for the Main Street Electrical Parade. Jack Wagner also voices the two most famous bilingual safety announcements of all time: "Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor manténganse alejado de las puertas" and "Remain seated please; permanecer sentados por favor."

Wagner had been an actor, a radio player, and a disc jockey. Of interest to Disneyland fans is his long-running “Silver Platter Service” pre-recorded radio broadcasts of performances and interviews with Capitol Records performing artists, which are very much like the well-rounded audio experiences he would craft for Disney. Wagner’s experience in radio, voice over, music rights and clearances and compilations made him uniquely suited to what Disney was asking him to do. In fact, his one-man operation was completely unique in the industry.

"But there is more to Wagner's unusual occupation than discoursing for Disney. His voice has proven so distinctive that a growing number of corporations, police departments, airports and schools are paying to use it for their own purposes.

Wagner also is a versatile sound engineer with a knack for shortcuts and money-saving recording techniques that have made him popular among producers in the growing field of taped musical productions and video marketing presentations.

The same voice that tells the Tinkerbell story each night also hawks everything from weapons systems to pharmaceutical equipment.

For example, it was Wagner's voice, recorded against a backdrop of James Bond music, that pitched to Pentagon officials a proposal to purchase dune buggies loaded with rocket launchers and machine guns for desert warfare. The armored vehicles are made by International Ordnance Systems, a Los Angeles defense contractor. Hardly the stuff of bedtime fairy-tales." Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1988

 Walt Disney Productions outfitted Jack’s Anaheim ranch house fully with sophisticated audio and video recording apparatus wired directly to Disneyland. If Disneyland was to close early that day due to rain or fog, Wagner could create a new recording to be played in the park in his on-site recording studio and it could be playing inside Disneyland within minutes. He recorded announcements about ticket prices, special programming, events, and attraction spiels. His voice was the voice of Disneyland, and it would soon become the voice of Walt Disney World, too.

But Jack's influence stretched even further than that. Although Disney hired Wagner in 1970 as a contractor to act as their in-house announcer, his tasks also came to include overseeing practically all musical components of the Disney outdoor entertainment empire.

Working from his house, Jack Wagner essentially invented the idea of theme park background music as we know it today and set many of the stylistic conventions. There almost certainly was music that played at Disneyland in Walt's era, such as the Tiki Room "Lanai music", "When You Wish Upon a Star" inside Sleeping Beauty Castle, and the dozens of unique soundtracks and sound effects for the attractions. Still, there were then and remain areas of Disneyland with no formal continuously running musical underscore, such as Tomorrowland and New Orleans Square, but the Magic Kingdom in Florida was intended from the start to have continual orchestral accompaniment in every area. This was Wagner's task, and very possibly why he was hired in the first place.

Record from the Disneyland Sound Archive shows Wagner's notations for Tokyo Disneyland selections

Wagner's job was to work directly with record companies on behalf of Disney to clear specific pieces of music for broadcast inside a theme park - and he must have gotten them for good terms, because some of those pieces he cleared back in the 70s still play on today. Checking off tracks on the back of record sleeves, Jack obtained the clearances for his desired pieces of music - sometimes entire albums, sometimes just a single song. From there he would compile these pieces of music onto reels of magnetic tape, each following a specific theme... "Marches", "Polynesian", "Ragtime", etc. When Disney asked for a new piece of music to play at a specific shop, venue or even special event, all Jack had to do was work off his reels of cleared music and put together a new piece of BGM, or "music loop".

The masters were delivered directly to the Disneyland Sound Department in the Carousel of Progress building, who then would either send the magnetic tape off to Florida or start transferring the music themselves. Masters would wear out over time, requiring Wagner to compile new masters based on his notes or to come up with new pieces of BGM. As these magnetic tapes were retired or thrown out, they would circulate into the hands of collectors, which is how some of the early BGM tracks reach us today.

The broadcast standard for music had shifted throughout the 50s - as the complexity of radio broadcasts increased, it became impractical to have a half dozen turntables simply to play radio spots and station ads, and by the 60s the broadcast standard had become magnetic tape audio carts, like the Fidelipac one seen at the right. These could be custom cut to any length, would repeat endlessly, and were cue able by means of electronic tones which could either stop the tape, start it back up, or cue a second audio cart to start playing. This media format provided the recorded narration for monorails, ferry boats, show breakdowns, and more.

According to a 1969 press release, RCA contributed all of the speakers and playback devices used in the construction of Walt Disney World. Whether or not this is true (it was RCA themselves making the announcement, after all), and you can be sure that at least some of those devices were built to Disney's exact specifications. Below is a bank of custom machines based on the Fidelipac model below ground at the Magic Kingdom. These machines, each processing a single reel of magnetic tape capable of housing many channels of sound, could be synchronized to control the audio of a single complex attraction like Pirates of the Caribbean. They're something like extremely fancy variants of  familiar 8-track tape decks.

Custom audio cart playback machines in Magic Kingdom's DACs Central, mid 70s

Music that did not need to be kept synchronized was treated differently. Disneyland and Walt Disney World used the more familiar one-inch reel-to-reel tapes for in-park music. BGM has always been (and remains) mono sound, because Disney liked to use each stereo channel of a magnetic tape for different pieces of background music - the Main Street USA and Main Entrance music, for example, emanated from the left and right channels of a single reel of magnetic tape stored beneath the train station at Disneyland. The "banjo music" and "haunted caverns music" in Pirates of the Caribbean played from the same tape, and this remained the case even during the CD conversion of the 90s and the data chips which play theme park music today.

(Thanks to ColanderCombo, in the comments below, for helping clarify this section)


Interpreting Data
It's important to have this information handy because otherwise one could incorrectly interpret the extremely mystifying sets of data offered by some of these early background music loops. For example, because Wagner liked to create hour-long pieces of music for most of this career, one could conclude that some of the early loops are fraudulent or incomplete because they're also not an hour long.

In reality, because the in-park magnetic tapes were custom cut for each piece, they could be and often were any old length. The one-hour convention - still adhered to today - seems to have developed for two reasons. The first is that Wagner liked to use Scotch magnetic tapes to deliver his audio masters to Disneyland, no doubt because of the machine he had at his disposal back home. These tapes could house thirty minutes of music playing forwards and another thirty minutes playing backwards. The more songs he licensed, the more he could charge Disney for his services - so Jack had good incentive to fill the whole tape.

Reel from Jack's archive - WaltsMusic.Com

The one-hour convention isn't necessarily a technological limitation on Disney's part. As technology has changed, the way these BGM loops are constructed has changed. Many hotels at Walt Disney World use CD changers loaded with six CDs set to "random", resulting in six to eight hour background loops of no particular "order". Other hotels seem to have licensed many many hours of music tracks, arranged them alphabetically by title in iTunes, and called it a day.

Wagner was at least extremely scrupulous in his selections and often eclectic in his tastes. Once one has had enough experience retracing Wagner's steps, you start to be able to suss out what his methods were. As a result, I can offer these general principles I try to follow when looking at Wagner's early-era background loops:

- No choice is too obscure. If Wagner liked the sound of a piece of music, he would license it, and sometimes only it. Some of his choices are extremely surprising, such as playing "Theme From Minnie's Boys" from the album Appearing Nightly at the Piano by Merv Griffith on Main Street, USA. Jack seems to have loved that one, dropping it into his Main Street loops for Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo Disneyland. It fits very well. Who knew?

- Reuse, Reuse, Reuse. Once Wagner had completed a loop to his satisfaction, he rarely saw need to change it. Of all the areas in the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland's music changed the most between 1971 and 1993 - three times. In the mid-70s as Wagner increased the length and ambition of several pieces of music, even then he went out of his way to expand out the existing loops to a full hour. Some pieces of music repeated several times across the two parks and hotels. Pieces of music which appeared in the 1971 Sunshine Pavilion BGM track pop up again in the Disneyland Tiki Room Lanai loop for 1976. Pieces of music already recorded and owned by Disney were always used, such as the Main Entrance loop which pulled heavily from titles in the Disneyland Records portfolio. In many ways Wagner was extremely economical in his choices.

- Expand, not contract. Similar to the point above, but still worth noting: Wagner generally reused as much of his early work as possible. it's therefore possible to find traces of earlier loops in more recent ones, such as the bones of the 1973 Frontierland loop in the 1976 one. His 1989/1990 "New Age" Tomorrowland track supplied music still used today at Epcot - and which had its roots in music licensed and compiled for Tokyo Disneyland in 1983.

- No BGM was too obscure. This is a dangerous game to play, but it seems that Wagner created more loops than are strictly necessary, simply because Disney paid him as a contractor per work done. As a result he put together BGM loops for almost every shop and every restaurant at Disneyland and Walt Disney World - unique ones. As the BGM playback system modernized in the late 80s, many of these loops were removed and replaced with the general area music. This may help explain why we sometimes run into hints of things like two Adventureland Veranda loops - he made more than was needed.

It's a ludicrously complex maze, and one I'm still navigating. In the best situations, we have consistent loops from multiple sources and eras and dated live recordings. Tokyo Disneyland, which has changed their music the least of all the Disney parks and still uses many Wagner compilations from 1983, is also a useful source and one which is very well documented. Home videos on YouTube are invaluable clues. In the worst, you'll see me doing some "informed speculation". We may never know all the answers, but I do hope to dispel some longstanding rumors and provide an interesting glimpse at the sound of early Walt Disney World.

Hope to hear you soon!

Where it all happened... Jack Wagner's Anaheim "Studio". Set on Imagur

Main Street USA Morning Version - 1976 to 1991
Run time: approx. 59 minutes

01. Frisco Rag [3]
02. Tammany Picnic [2]
03. Unknown
04. The Old Grey Mare [6]
05. Golden Arrow [6]
06. Sidewalks of New York [2]
07. Pretty Baby [6]
08. Mississippi Cabaret [6]
09. Strolling Through the Park / Mary [2]
10. 'Lasses Trombone [5]
11. Good Old Timers [5]
12. School Days [2]
13. Old Timers Waltz Medley [5]
14. Horse Cars [2]
15. Sweet Rosie O'Grady [2]
16. Silver Heels [Edited] [5]
17. Wisha Wurra [4]
18. Theme from 'Minnie's Boys' [1]
19. I Wouldn't Bet One Penny [4]
20. Medley [3]
  - a. Bird in a Gilded Cage
  - b. Two Girls
  - c. Good Old Summertime
21. Little Annie Rooney [2]
22. On a Sunday Afternoon [3]
23. Bicycle Built for Two [2]

[1] Appearing Nightly at the Piano by Merv Griffin (Metromedia 1023)
[2] Gay Nineties Waltzes by the Gaslight Orchestra (Somerset, P-3400)
[3] 30 Barbary Coast Favorites by San Francisco Harry & the Barbary Coast Bandits (Fantasy 3270)
[4] The Pete King Orchestra Plays the Music of Donnybrook by the Pete King Orchestra (Kapp, KL-1243)
[5] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 1 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33002) 
[6] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 2 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33008)

Main Street USA 1976-1991 AM by twilightflopple

Disentangling the Main Street, USA music proved more difficult than expected, largely because of the large amount of misinformation about this piece circulating in the public sphere.

The music that nearly everyone associates with the vintage Main Street music is represented by the playlist above which I believe began playing at Magic Kingdom in the mid-70s. Some who specialize in Disneyland music believe that the same playlist constitutes the 1971 Disneyland Main Street music. While I cannot prove or disprove that, I have my own theories about what played at Magic Kingdom from 1971-1975, to be discussed in a seperate post.

The backbone of the music loop is an excellent LP called The Gaslight Orchestra: Gay Nineties Waltzes, consisting of dreamily stately interpretations of American classics arranged by Joseph Kuhn. About evenly supplementing these are tracks from Albert White, which are arranged in a similar style. Albert White was an influence on the Paragon Orchestra, who provided the peppy Main Street music for Disneyland Paris which was used on all Main Streets from 1991-2012, meaning that this Wagner track very much set the Main Street "sound" which still reigns today. The current loop by Dean Mora is generally slower than the Paragon tracks, so in a way we have returned to the original Gaslight Orchestra "sound" of Main Street.

Many sites report that the original Main Street loop was comprised entirely of tracks by Albert White, from a list beginning with "Waiting on the Robert E. Lee". Some have even built restorations based on this list by pulling from the vintage LPs. Although there are some authentic selections to be found amongst that list, the list is entirely false. The error sprung up due to the nature of the early collector's circles. Starting in the late 80s, a few "mix tapes" of selections of Albert White tracks, with the authentic Main Street selections on one side of the tape and assorted other cues from the records on the other, began being circulated. As the tapes were copied and re-copied from one fan to the next, it was forgotten that these were mix tapes representing some of the music, not actual tape masters. The "Robert E Lee" playlist seems to have re-compiled from these tapes at some later date.

Because of this, it was extra important for me to make certain that my list above was accurate. Besides consulting home videos, I was able to confirm this as an authentic loop based on a live recording generously provided by Mike Lee. Those who have grown accustomed to the false "Robert E Lee" playlist restorations will find this authentic Main Street music loop be vastly more consistent in character, appropriate to Main Street, and enjoyable to listen to. This version is a transfer that appears to come from a reel-to-reel tape provided by Mike Lee, who got it from Todd Beckett.

This list was compiled by Michael Sweeney. Thanks to him, as well as Mike Lee and Mike Cozart for their invaluable assistance in figuring this one out.

And for those of you trying to track down records for your own restoration effort, or for those simply curious, Donnybrook! was a 1961 musical by Johnny Burke and Robert McEnroe based on, of all things, John Ford's The Quiet Man. I don't know if it's more difficult to explain why there's a musical based on The Quiet Man or what on earth the music was doing playing on Main Street. But as we will soon see, these tracks, plus the Merv Griffin one, will prove to be important clues as we move ahead....

Pro Tip:Start here to help make sense of what follows.

In my previous post, one reason I was so concerned with verifying the authenticity of an (apparently) authentic music loop source was to provide a bedrock, base layer of reliable information. Thanks to years of speculation and misinformation, the waters have been muddied consistently on the subject of Main Street music, resulting in reconstructions based on false information and guessing and rumors. Once we do know what played at a certain place at a certain time, we at least have a concrete set of data to base our speculations on, as we will be doing in this very post.

Today the question revolves around whether or not Main Street USA at Magic Kingdom in Florida had two different background music loops, and what this means.

It's been assumed for years that Main Street had two different music loops, one for morning and one for evening, although it's impossible to guess where this information originally comes from. Slightly corroborating this idea, for many years Disneyland Paris' Main Street had an AM and PM loop, that park's Main Street being very closely based on the Magic Kingdom version. But information about the elusive PM loop remained obscure.

When I began researching Main Street music, there was one primary source for obscure background music information: Utilidors Audio Broadcasting, which is very good at posting files which circulate in the darkest corners of the collector's circuits.

One file they hosted split into several parts was labeled "Magic Kingdom 1972", which turned out to be identified as the Main Street BGM at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom 1976-1991, as established in my previous post and hereto called the "AM Loop". UAB also hosts this same AM loop, split into single songs, under the title "Disneyland Main Street Area Music (Uncertain Vintage)". It will take a Disneyland specialist to determine what exactly played at that park and when, although in my opinion the 1976 Main Street loop would've been installed at both theme parks in the same year.

UAB hosts yet another BGM identified as Main Street music, which they associate with Disneyland and the years 1969 - 1975. It is very similar to the AM Loop, but has many distinct differences, and was identified and compiled by Michael Sweeney based on the UAB copy. This mysterious second loop "Disneyland 1969-1975" is our subject today.


Now that the loop has been recompiled and most of it has been identified, there are two important characteristics of the "1969" loop that need to be clearly explained:

1) It's made up of different tracks from albums used to compile the "AM Loop"

Just as identified in the AM Loop, four albums form the backbone of the loop: the Gaslight Orchestra's Gay Ninties Waltzes, 30 Barbary Coast Favorites, and two Albert White albums, Your Father's Moustache Volumes 1 and 2 (published by the Barbary Coast label).

Confusingly, Albert White also published two other albums on the Fantasy record label, also called "Your Father's Moustache" but made up of different songs and recordings. Both of these albums - one of World War I songs called "Over There" and another billed "Your Father's Moustache in Hi-Fi" - are used in this "1969" loop.

Even further complicating matters, a few tracks used in the "AM Loop" also repeat here - "Good Old Timers" and "Silver Heels".

All of this helps to convince me that Jack Wagner compiled both of these loops at the same time, starting with the "AM Loop" and proceeding to this one. Having finished the AM loop, he seems to have had trouble with the "1969" loop, perhaps looking to find more music like the Gaslight Orchestra and Albert White albums, only to find two more Albert White albums of different material. Those of us who research background music can imagine his frustration.

This implies that the label "1969-1975" is obviously false. 1969 predates Wagner's involvement with Disney in selecting BGM loops, and given that this particular loop, if it is authentic, has Wagner's fingerprints all over it, it has to at least be 1970-1971. Allowing that it seems to be produced at the same time as the "AM Loop", I'm comfortable assigning this loop to the same 1976 time period.

2) The sound and tone of the music is quite different

If you own the Albert White albums proper, you know that listening to them in album order is a pretty frustrating experience. White jumps wildly from jazzy, wildly embellished standards to beautifully stately arrangements. What we can say about this mystery loop is that most of the Albert White pieces on it are of the much jazzier variety, and the loop overall pulls much more heavily from the honky-tonk 30 Barbary Coast Favorites album.

Largely, the "AM Loop" gets the stately, slow, dreamy tracks and this mystery loop gets the crazier jazz-era stuff. This is crucially important because this implies design intent, and design intent is what we are looking for here. If Wagner was looking for more jazz-era material from Albert White, this helps explain why he suddenly introduces tracks from two extra albums, almost as if he got frustrated and went back to the record shop.

Similarly, it's as easy to imagine Wagner needing just a few more tracks to round out the "AM Loop", leading him to think of music from his private record collection that fit the mood. This could explain why the tracks from "Donnybrook!" and the "Theme from Minnie's Boys" - both musical Broadway productions - ended up in the AM Loop. All three of the "Broadway" tracks appear one after another in the AM Loop, further implying that they were decided on all at once after Jack reached an impasse.

But what does the differing character of the two loops mean?

Well, it could be that one was intended for Disneyland and the other for Walt Disney World, but this seems unlikely to me. Although the two areas are aesthetically unique, they're tonally similar enough to make me think that Wagner wouldn't have bothered. We also know that the "AM Loop" played at Magic Kingdom most of the time and at Disneyland around the same time, leading me to conclude that this loop was compiled with something slightly different in mind.

It could be that the slower, more stately music is intended to cause pedestrians to slow down, admire the scenery, and just maybe... shop? Similarly, the jazz music at night, which is frankly very appropriate to the visual of Main Street's twinkling lights, could've been intended to get pedestrians up and stepping quickly, helping clear the park at the end of the day and keeping crowd circulating during the parade and fireworks.

Was the "mystery loop" intended to help crowd flow during the popular Main Street Electrical Parade? It's not as far fetched as it sounds, Wagner produced the music for the parade as well. The Electrical Parade returned in 1976 at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland following the final run of America on Parade, lending possible credence to a 1976 date.

The date, Wagner's fingerprints, and the design intent apparent in the resulting work itself convince me that this "mystery loop" is the legendary "PM Loop" for Magic Kingdom's Main Street, USA.



...But is it authentic?

Ay, there's the rub.

In an absolutely ideal situation, this loop would've been rebuilt from a live recording, but as it is it's been remarkably difficult to find evidence of this loop actually playing in park. Unlike the AM Loop, which everyone remembers, the "PM Loop" seems to have played only occasionally.

As it happens, I've come across some helpful clues on YouTube. Here is a 1982 home video where "Geraldine", a song occurring in the PM Loop but not the AM Loop, can be heard starting at 1:24. Disconcertingly, this video was shot not at night, but in the early morning. Thankfully, more concrete proof can be heard in this video from 1990, starting around 1:40, several continuous minutes of the PM Loop - at night - can be heard, starting with "Man on the Flying Trapeze" and continuing through "At A Georgia Camp Meeting", "Smokey Mokes", "Ida", and "Good Old Timers". This exactly matches the "PM Loop" gathered from UAB and pretty much fixes its probable authenticity.

Best of all, if we backtrack to the first part of the home video, as the family enters the Magic Kingdom, an AM-only track - "Strolling Thru the Park / Mary" - can clearly be heard, establishing that these two distinct loops played alongside each other at least as recently as 1990. By 1990, Jack Wagner had effectively retired from Disney, and since this is almost certainly a Wagner loop created alongside his "AM Loop", the chances of my mid-70s date being accurate are very good.

The question of why the PM loop is so obscure is harder to answer definitively, although it's not hard to guess. This was an era when theme park music was still run on 1" magnetic tapes and played out of speakers that were placed somewhat randomly around the park. EPCOT Center's BGM was far more sophisticated than Magic Kingdom's in that you could hear it almost everywhere and at consistent levels. In 1990, Magic Kingdom was just on the cusp of a wideranging refresh of their area music delivery system, switching to CD playback as well as replacing many vintage Wagner tracks with more modern loops from Tokyo and Paris.

This really just means that Magic Kingdom's system was low tech. Very low tech. By 1990, it was basically antiquiated compared to new systems in place at EPCOT Center, Tokyo Disneyland and Disney-MGM Studios. It's highly, highly doubtful that Disney synchronized two 1" magnetic tape machines to a clock just to play different pieces of music on Main Street at day and night back in 1976. This means that the playback probably had to be manually switched, perhaps by a Maintainence guy or a Parade tech. If we assume that human error was just as likely to forget to switch the BGM as not, and sometimes forget to switch it back in the morning, then the obscurity of the loop and the fact that we have some evidence that it sometimes played at times when it wasn't supposed to becomes less mysterious. As a result of all of the preceeding, I'm comfortable labeling the "Disneyland 1969-1975" Main Street music loop sourced from UAB as being the authentic Magic Kingdom Main Street USA PM Loop.

But now you're part of this thing, too, so listen to the music, look at the evidence, and make up your own mind.

Main Street USA Evening Version 1976 - 1991 
Running time: approx. 59.00


01. And the Band Played On [Edited] [2] 
02. Saxema [6] 
03. Saddle Back [6]
04. Poison Ivy Rag [3] 
05. Goodbye Broadway, Hello France [7]
06. Rose of No Man's Land [7] 
07. Everybody's Rag [3] 
08. The Old Grey Mare [6] 
09. Down at the Barbecue [8] 
10. I've Got Rings on My Fingers [3] 
11. Bedelia [3] 
12. Unknown A 
13. Unknown B 
14. Medley [3] 
      - a. Billy Boy
      - b. Tavern in the Town
     - c. Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight 
15. Grizzly Bear Rag [8] 
16. Honey Rag [3] 
17. Geraldine [8] 
18. Man on the Flying Trapeze [3] 
19. At a Georgia Camp Meeting [8] 
20. Smokey Mokes [8] 
21. Ida [3] 
22. Good Old Timers [5] 
23. Silver Heels [Edited] [5] 
24. Black and Blue Rag [Edited] [3] 
25. Polka by Request [8]

[2] Gay Nineties Waltzes by the Gaslight Orchestra (Somerset, P-3400)
[3] 30 Barbary Coast Favorites by San Francisco Harry & the Barbary Coast Bandits (Fantasy 3270)
[5] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 1 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33002) 
[6] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 2 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Barbary Coast, M-33008) 
[7] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 1: Over There  by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Fantasy 3273)  
[8] Your Father's Moustache, Vol. 2 by Albert White & the Gaslight Orchestra (Fantasy 3292)
 
Compiled by and thanks to Michael Sweeney. 

In the future, we who move in Disney theme park circles may look back on the heady early days of the dominance of "The Blog" as being most important for providing the start of a great resurgence of interest in history. News and opinion may be the internet's stock in trade, but there wasn't really much detailed coverage of the company's history prior to 2006-07. Now, anyone with the faintest memory of the Golf Resort may find photos of it, and younger fans will discover and trace the development of EPCOT Center through a Google search bar.

And all without any help from Disney. The fan community is writing their history without them.

And yet one of the largest blind spots that has developed over the years is the development of one of WED Enterprises finest creations: Country Bear Jamboree. We know that the show was being worked on during Walt's lifetime and we also know that it was destined for the Mineral King ski resort in the late 60's. There's some early concept art pieces and song demos and then, that's it - the show opens in 1971 at Magic Kingdom and is a runaway success, but we don't really know how it came together, it just always has been.

This is where Disney's non-participation becomes more of a liability, because we simply don't have access to the documents to follow the paper trail. Whatever and however Marc Davis and Al Bertino put together what is probably the zenith of the Disney park theatrical experience, we can only guess.

Or can we?

There's always been a few tantalizing scraps. In "Project Florida", we see some storyboards and unused narration and animation for Henry. But the pieces never line up into a coherent picture. The piano sequence we see Al Bertino pitching in storyboard form is nowhere to be seen in the final show. In Project Florida, Henry moves and speaks lines that were jettisoned by opening day - full figure animation, several days worth of work. Both the figure seen in Project Florida and some of Marc's drawings suggest that Henry was intended to be seen only from the waist up, not seated on a barrel as in the final show. Nothing we see from the development period seems to be represented in the show as it has come to us.


Yet there is a way in, a way to circumvent Disney's notorious "closed door" policy, and that's to bypass them. The songs used in Country Bear Jamboree almost all existed before it did, and by going back to the source material that Davis drew on to create his characters we may gain insight into the creative process as it probably happened.

It's also unusual to hear the original recordings as they existed before Disney remade them to fit the animatronic bear show: it's like discovering a familiar but foreign holograph of something you spent your whole life seeing, the original definition of uncanny. But before we jump into the music itself, I'd like to take this opportunity to say a few words about genre.


What's in a Name?

That word. Country.

Country Bear Jamboree has never had a sterling reputation amongst some Disney fans, despite its historical pedigree, structural, and comedic sophistication. It has low humor, of course, but it has unusually smart humor as well, and this seeming contradiction has never set comfortably with some. There are those who maintain that the show is essentially mean spirited, who seem to jump to the conclusion that any depiction of "rural types" must invariably be negative. The assumption has generally been to look for farce, find it in Country Bear Jamboree, then make the leap that that is all that there is. Yet Country Bear Jamboree develops its memorable characters out of farce and, through subtlety and comedy, builds them towards something like an actual personality. It may appear to be doing very little, but the show contains whole universes.

And then there are those who simply cannot move beyond that word on the marquee: country. But "Country" is a multifaceted music genre, and one the show explores in some depth, which is why it begins with those words spoken by Henry at the start:


This is true, but it seemingly hasn't ever been explored in any detail, so to frame that exploration we need to know what "country music", exactly, is. It's always been a messy lump of a genre, and musicians we don't always think of as "Country Music" have wandered through it - not just Johnny Cash, but Elvis, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives. The definition of "Country" has changed dramatically since the attraction opened, and today carries connotations which have doomed it with audiences who aren't willing to meet the show halfway. All of these things are important to understand, because Country Bear Jamboree has much more complexity than any show about singing bears has any right to.

The earliest roots of "country" music was what was then officially known as "Hillbilly" music - ballads, railroad songs, and other stories that passed verbally between singer and listener. One of these, "The Wreck of the Old 97" sung by Vernon Dalhart, sold seven million records in the 1920's, making it one of the biggest hits of its era. Today when we listen to "Hillbilly" music, we're unlikely to immediately connect it to our modern Country music, but the style is a key to unlocking what's going on in Country Bear Jamboree:

It's worth remembering that in this era, there still were travelling musicians and performers to pass these songs around, and while Dalhart was busy recording innumerable disaster-themed songs like The Death of Floyd Collins and The Wreck of the Shenandoah, other traveling musicians like Woody Guthrie, one of the great chroniclers of the American Depression, were rewriting ballads Dalhart sung into new forms.

The 1930's saw the emergence of the second key style represented in Country Bear Jamboree: the Western genre, the reason why the show can be placed in Frontierland. Popularized throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s by "Singing Cowboys" like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, Western music, which is largely dead today, has claim to some of our most beautiful American music:


Both styles grew out of the same traditional folk and mountain music, one drawing inspiration from the native sound of the Southeast, the other the Southwest. By the 1940's, the styles were lumped together by radio stations and record producers, and Country Bear Jamboree, more "Out West" than "Down Home", mixes up the styles frequently even as, through the 1950s, Country began to evolve and Western began to decline. I think it's important to hear and know both Hillbilly and Cowboy music because this is what "Country" would've meant to the men who put the show together, whose impressions and memories of the music would've been formed before the 1940's.

The 1950's saw Country merge with the emerging Rock and Roll sound as well as another native American style, Blues, to form "Rockabilly", the style which made Elvis famous. From there, in the 60's onwards, the big record companies in Nashville began to push for slicker and glossier Country music standards, pushing the genre closer to the emerging Pop music scene. The instrumentation became denser, drums were introduced, backup vocalists, as well as anything else that would've made for a popular music sound of its era.

Country Bear Jamboree, and the music we'll be hearing today, date from pretty much the dead center of the shift towards a pop-rock sound, and many of the songs heard in the show are from the sixties - in 1971, most audiences would've recognized these songs from less than ten years ago. But the show itself has a more classical sound, most akin to bluegrass or the early "Hillbilly" records, which is part of the reason why it's played for so long - it quite literally is Your Grandfather's Country. In 1971, the show took popular music of its day and hauled it back towards its roots, demonstrating how very different sounding styles were in fact, at their root, related.

And Country Music kept changing. While Country Bear Jamboree was less than ten years old, Country had fully realized its merge with Pop with breakthrough records by artists like Dolly Parton and John Denver, who managed to get airplay on all radio stations regardless of audience. The style had mainstreamed its sound. By the late 80s and early 90s, most Country was indistinguishable from Pop except for the two-step or ballad arrangement and a few stringed instruments.

Additionally, culturally Country now meant a very different thing than it had in the 1960s. In the 80s, large numbers of rural AM radio stations which had previously specialized in "easy listening" began to switch to Country/Western full time in hopes of drawing in listeners thanks to the onslaught of FM radio. Urban and coastal audiences - those who didn't flee immediately upon seeing the word "Country" on the marquee at Disneyland and Walt Disney World - went inside and may have encountered something very different than they were expecting - if they thought about what they were hearing at all.

In the 80s, the growing rift of expectation and reality was "corrected" by a new generation of Imagineers with two new shows using the existing infrastructure of the Country Bear Theater: the "Christmas Special" and "Vacation Hoedown" in 1984 and 1986. The Christmas show in general, and the Vacation show in particular, seemed intended to draw California audiences back into the theater by both updating the presentation to reflect slick, modern Country-pop and introducing new styles of music, including Beach Boys and old standards like "Singin' in the Rain". Walt Disney World switched back to the original show almost immediately after a four-year run, but the Vacation Hoedown held on in California before belatedly closing in 2001. In 2012, the original show was cut by nearly a third in Walt Disney World. Both the Vacation and "digest" shows may have been masterminded by well-meaning and respectful creative teams, but neither does a show - that was always sort of a cult item - any favors.

Meet the Stonemans

One of the reasons the Marc Davis/Al Bertino show has dated so little has to do with the specific sound achieved by George Bruns in the recording of the performances and music, and much of that is attributable to the under appreciated performing group who brought the music to life, The Stonemans.

The Stonemans were, as of the late 60's, officially a performing group consisting of five to six members: Patsy Stoneman (autoharp), Van Stoneman (guitar), Roni Stoneman (banjo), Jimmy (upright bass), Donna Stoneman (mandolin), and sometimes Scotty Stoneman (fiddle). I'm being clear because the group included, up to 1968, bluegrass pioneer Ernest "Pop" Stoneman, a genuine Appalachian mountain music man who had a breakout success on the 1920's Hillbilly circuit with his song "The Sinking of the Titanic". Pop and his wife Hattie begot thirteen musical children, and depending on the era and record label any combination of them could be billed as "Pop Stoneman and Family", "Ernest Stoneman Family", "The Stoneman Family", and countless other variations. After Pop's death, the core group of five migrated to RCA records to become "The Stonemans", and it is this group, plus Scotty, who were hired by Disney to record the Bear Band music.

The Stonemans never fit well into the categories and market trends of the Nashville music industry; compared to the well-produced, slick product that dominated Country music in the 60's, the Stonemans seemed archaic. They continued to record their music much as Pop has taught them to play on the front porch of their Appalachian house; as a result, their music never quite evolved out of the Bluegrass/Hillbilly sound of the 1920's and 1930's.

The Stonemans got caught up in the folk/protest song movement of the 60s, and the sleeve of their most famous album, In All Honesty, wore hippie outfits while posing amidst the ruins of a battered barn. At the urging of youngest siblings Van and Joni, with probably no small influence from Bob Dylan, the Stonemans were mixing their traditionalist sound with sixties counterculture. The result has dated remarkably well. It's like folk music played at the clip of rock, Hippie Bluegrass:

The variety of skills, performers, and background of the Stonemans made them not only the best, but practically the only option for Disney back in 1970, and it is their specific, culturally unique sound that is the signature sound of the show, the most important thing that the later shows are missing. If you grew up with Country Bear Jamboree, it's surreal to hear a Stoneman record: it's almost impossible not to imagine Zeke, Zed, Ted, Fred and Tennessee playing the music. That's Roni "twangin' on banjo" for Zeke, Scotty on fiddle for Zed, and almost certainly Jimmy's signature upright bass, which once caused female fans to rush their stage in an attempt to touch the instrument, for Tennessee's one-stringed "Thing". Wendell's signature mandolin suddenly sounds more familiar. Many of the voices heard in the show even are provided by the Stonemans.

"I don't know how many labels anymore that Daddy was on, or how many names he used, but we recorded a lot of labels. You know that. We've done a lot of labels. The only two that's ever really paid us anything was a Disney/Vista record and Folkways. [...] We had to disguise our voices. They'd say, "Do it like you'd think a bear would do it," and that was it In fact, Mr. Roy Disney gave each one of us a Mickey Mouse watch. In fact, my husband wears it all the time. I still have mine. I wouldn't take a pretty penny for this."

Now that we've covered why the show sounds the way it does, it's time to get into the meat of the post: the original recordings that inspired Marc Davis and Al Bertino and what we can learn about the creation of Country Bear Jamboree from them.

Some of these records are not especially difficult to find; in these cases, I've included only a sample of the song - the section that made the final cut on Country Bear Jamboree - and encourage you to seek out the full track through whatever legal means are at your disposal. Others are completely obscure and don't appear to be available through any official channels and so appear here in full.

Also providing additional information is a list of musical numbers that appears to predate the final shape of the show; my copy has been heavily notated at a later date in preparation for the production of the Tokyo Disneyland version.

 Give me a little intro, there, Gomer.....

Pianjo! - Don Robertson - Monument MN45-964 1966

 One of two tracks licensed for Country Bear Jamboree and included in the final show, Pianjo! (which is indeed its name on the record) is a jaunty little ditty recorded by Elvis songwriter Don Robertson. Robertson was well known enough, but if he ever issued Pianjo on a compilation LP, I haven't found it. This version comes from a 45 rpm single intended for use on radio; the flip side is a bizarre track called "I Dreamed I Lost You" which leans heavy on electric organ.

This track is especially strange for longtime fans of the show, not just because the Robertson version is twice as long, but because Disney edited the track in 1970 to sound much more straightforward than Robertson's original, which circles and cycles around its melody in a rather jazzy, free form way.

Most of Marc Davis' character drawings for the show include the lyrics the characters was designed to express up in the corner, but Gomer is a noteworthy exception, and I would be interested in knowing if he was designed to fit Pianjo or if the track was found later on.

Following Pianjo, Bear Band Serenade begins, having been written by George Bruns and X. Atencio to set the mood. Although the LP hints at it, I don't think it's widely known that Pianjo was not written or even recorded specifically for the show - at least, I was surprised. Interestingly, this means that the first bit of original music for Country Bear Jamboree to be heard comes about a minute and a half into the show, which is an eternity for a show that moves as quickly as this does.

"Jethro" (left) and "Henry" (right)

Fractured Folk Song - Homer and Jethro - Fractured Folk Songs - RCA Victor LPM-2954 1964

Henry ("Homer) Haynes and Kenneth ("Jethro") Burns were the "Hillbilly" comedians who formed the basis of the Henry and Wendell dynamic of the first half of Country Bear Jamboree; Homer, on guitar, and Jethro, on mandolin, skewered every target, including themselves, with their hilarious patter all while attempting the Herculean task of picking out a simple tune.

Marc Davis seems to have based even the appearance of Wendell, in particular, on the musical comedians, down to the fact that one partner is significantly taller than the other - some things are just naturally funny, after all. Davis may have decided to switch up the dynamic a bit, or he may have just not been entirely clear on who was Homer and who was Jethro, because he seems to have based the face and character of Wendell on Jethro, the comedian of the two, although in reality, Henry was the short one:


What's most interesting for Country Bear Jamboree fans is that all of the patter at the top of Fractured Folk Song in the show comes direct of the Homer and Jethro record. Since Henry is referred to simply as the "M.C." in almost all of the internal materials for what was then known as Bear Band, it seems likely that his name actually comes from Henry "Homer" Haynes and may in fact be called Henry only so the (very funny) insults from the original record can be retained.

Homer and Jethro's "Fractured Folk Song" is especially funny, and it's worth hearing in its entirety, below.



My Woman Ain't Pretty - Tex Ritter - Tennessee Blues - Hilltop 6059 1968

Tex Ritter, one of the quintessential Singing Cowboys of the 30s and 40s, was branching out to Country, Blues and Gospel records thanks to the implosion of the Western music genre by the end of the 50s, and this record, on the "Hilltop" label, seems to be quite obscure.

Interestingly, although Tex sang two songs that ended up in the show, neither character which represents these songs as bears really resembles Tex in any way. Liver Lips, who's usually taken as a sort of Elvis parody, seems to be not an imaginative extrapolation of the performer as is the case of, say, Wendell being based on Kenneth Burns above, but instead an imagined version of who could be singing such a song. Bertino and Davis seem to have latched onto the song primary thanks to the comedy potential of the lyrics and then designed an outlandish character to match.

I think Liver Lips represents Blues in the show, a genre which has a lot of messy crossover with Country and Western, and which also famously launched Elvis' career, which may be why Davis chose to give Liver Lips his trademark cartoon snout.

Liver Lips is certainly extreme, but he's not an Elvis parody, which is just one of the points where the later shows seem to have seen only the most obvious joke. Elvis was trim, carefully groomed, and full of sexual allure in his era. Liver Lips is no Elvis; he's a ludicrous slob. He's full of bizarre touches such as the outrageous single-strap overalls and slingshot tucked in his back pocket. The laugh - and Liver Lips almost always gets one - has to do with his crazy appearance and funny song than any sort of similarity to any real performer in history. Neither Tex nor Elvis need be offended.



Mama Don't Whup Little Buford - Homer and Jethro - Fractured Folk Songs - RCA Victor LPM-2954 1964

Henry and Wendell return for yet another Homer and Jethro song, the second of what was originally three included in the show (more on the third later).

"Mama, Don't Whup Little Buford" is a one-note joke, and the show treats it as such - the original recording isn't much more complex, although it is longer, with explanations of Buford's criminal prowess, his strength ("Buford has been studying Judo / and he'll break your scrawny ol' neck"), and finally, how the family escapes Buford's reign of terror. It's funny, but Davis and Bertino wisely distilled the joke down to its shortest form.



Tears Will Be the Chaser For Your Wine - Wanda Jackson - Reckless Love Affair - Capitol ST-2704 1967

Wanda Jackson's "Tears Will Be the Chaser For Your Wine" represents the first of what could, at the time, be considered "modern" Country music in the show, although the arrangement by Bruns and the Stonemans mellows the song out enormously. Jackson's version is a much more aggressive two-step arrangement with all of the polish Capitol could muster.

Trixie is another character who only got the obvious joke in the Vacation and Christmas shows, where she was given big, brassy Aretha Franklin-style songs. Although Trixie is sometime treated like an extended fat joke (and Henry's introduction of her as "The Tampa Temptation" sets us up for one), once past the visual joke (one reinforced by having her perched on an absurdly tiny feminine little settee), Trixie is funny because of the dichotomy between her appearance and dainty, sad song and behavior. Elsewhere in Country Bear Jamboree, Davis and George Bruns use the energetic sound of the Stonemans and the bluegrass/country genre like a locomotive, to pull the show faster and faster towards the inevitable derailment (Big Al's appearance). Trixie's sad little song and gentle demeanor is the last time Country Bear Jamboree stops for a breath, and this careful attention to pace and structure is one of the things that sets the original show apart from its zanier but less interesting successors. This is one of the reasons Trixie is so memorable: a leftover from the old Mineral King resort show development, Davis seems to had real affection for sad Trixie, and the whole show settles into a gentle groove for her lament.



Next Time:the rest of the show!

(Continued from Part One)

Devilish Mary (Traditional Song)

Zeke's ballad, about the beautiful woman he was married to for a mere three weeks, is a genuine folk song, the furthest the show stretches into the back catalog for inspiration. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this number is given to the Bear Rugs, who represent the sort of mountain minstrels who would've sung this song from town to town, both in appearance and variety of musical skills (Tennessee, instead of his whimsical homemade "thing", would played upright bass or, in some groups, sung from the prayer book). Zeke, especially with his original voice by Dal McKennon, seems to be the oldest bear in the show, and so would be a very tactile link back to the 20s and 30s heyday of Hillbilly music. In a show full of "uptown" Country tunes, the Five Bear Rugs are traditionalists.

It's not hard to find recordings of Devilish Mary. It's been played as a folk song, a rock tune, a square dance, and more. The lyrics (and the order of the verses) almost all differ from each other, especially in the gibberish section of the refrain which is sometimes sung "ring-a-ding-ding Mary" (which seems to fit well with her description as being sexually alluring) "ring-on-my-ding-on-my-derry", or  "rick-em-lick-em Mary", especially in the Western and Cowboy interpretations. There's no sure way of knowing exactly which version Davis and Bertino found in their research, although it's probably a good bet that its' lyric "every time I looked cross-eyed / she hit me on the head with the shevel" (hilariously commented on, deadpan, by Zed: "How sad") is what got it into the show as the representative of old-time Country. This version is by the Red Fox Chasers, and is easy enough to find online.



How Long Will My Baby Be Gone - Buck Owens - Sweet Rosie Jones - Capitol ST-2962 1968

Buck Owens was considered in the 60's to be a Country traditionalist. Beginning as a Rockabilly performer in the 50s, Owens' stripped down, guitar-driven tunes meet Rock and Roll halfway with their strong forward momentum. Owens also hosted TV's Hee Haw beginning in 1969, which almost certainly how Marc Davis and Al Bertino came to think of his music while assembling their Bear Band show.

Terrence, one of Davis' most inspired (and bizarre) creations for Country Bear Jamboree, is a sad-hearted mountain man, whose enormous height is only exaggerated by his pointed hat and his comically tiny guitar, which he strums furiously enough to outpace even Owens. Terrence is sometimes called "Shaker", especially for the publicity for the Disneyland version in 1972, as his primary mode of dancing is gyrating wildly. For the 1972 and 1983 figures in California and Tokyo, Terrence was re-engineered so that his hips and butt could move independently of his body, and was furthermore re staged in profile (instead of pointed straight out at the audience), which made the gag of his ludicrous dancing a little easier to understand. But for pure lunacy nothing matches Wathel Rogers and Bill Justice's programming of 1970-71, where Terrence shakes up the house by literally bobbing around on his tiny, stubby legs, so violently that the curtain behind him shakes. This action was so difficult to program and maintain that for many years the lower half of his body was simply turned off.

Terrence kicks off the second half of the show; he's out on stage seconds after "Devilish Mary" has finished and gets out his songs and his laughs in less than thirty seconds without any introduction at all: both a palette cleanser of sorts and the lynch pin for the furious later part of the Jamboree. His appearance and behavior is so strange, especially coming after the increasing weirdness of Liver Lips and Trixie, that the second part of the show develops an "anything goes" craziness. The audience settles in to see how outlandish the performers will become.

Owens contributed something else to Terrence besides his quick-fingered guitar: the drum beats in Owens' recording of "How Long Will My Baby Be Gone?" likely inspired the bongo-drum fade out at the end of the number, memorably visually accompanied by the only "eyebrow duet" in the history of American theater.



All The Guys That Turn Me on Turn Me Down - The Stonemans - Dawn of the Stonemans Age - RCA Victor LSP-4264

The Sun Bonnets from the Sunshine State and their number "All the Guys That Turn Me On, Turn Me Down" is Country Bear Jamboree's pièce de résistance, the part that even those who can't stand the show enjoy. What could be a more essential musical number in the show? But it almost wasn't there are all; the little maids in blue were originally supposed to sing a very different song.

The track finally chosen was from the third of the Stonemans' best period in the late 60s, the awkwardly titled Dawn of the Stonemans Age. This is the record in which Roni, Patsy, Jimmy, Van and Donna began to experiment with a more eclectic sound, including this comedy duet for the family's youngest musical daughters. George Bruns' arrangement for the show is an interestingly honky-tonk take on the music. He also straightens out the rhythm a bit, making for a better song.

In the late 60s and early 70s and Stonemans, unable to find much work in Nashville's "uptown country" market, were extremely popular in California. I suspect that Bertino and Davis were having difficulty finding a song that properly matched their three Sun Bonnets before coming across both the song and the proper musicians for the job. Part of the trouble may have been that in this era the options in country music for women's songs was limited to songs about affairs or heartbreak, neither of which would've fit the character designs for Bunny, Bubbles and Beulah. Instead of making the three young girls sing about loss, budding desire thwarted probably seemed a better fit.

Did The Stoneman family get the job recording the music for Country Bear Jamboree as a result of this record? Because most of the Studio correspondence of the era has presumably been destroyed, we may never know. For all we can guess at, Davis and Bertino only looked at the record because the group was primarily female, a novelty for Country at the time. What they found was the sound of their show. Roni and Donna couldn't have guessed that their lighthearted little number would live on for decades, seen and heard by millions of people each year.


Davis' realization of the number as an Illustrated Song is ingenious. The Illustrated Song was a vaudeville invention, although movie theaters sometimes showed them too. The basic idea is that somebody stands up on stage and starts singing while hand-painted glass slides are projected through a magic lantern on the screen behind them. Here's a representative slide from 1907 that was reprinted for purchase as a postcard:


Although they hardly lasted into the 1920s, Illustrated Songs were sufficiently popular to cause at least one artist to make the leap from being a "model" for the glass slides into the motion picture: Fatty Arbuckle, one of the silent screen's funniest clowns, launched his career through the Illustrated Song market:

Starts Thursday! Blog

Besides the crazy characters and quick humor, one of the glories of Country Bear Jamboree is in its preservation of the spirit of Vaudeville, an art form that Davis would've remembered well from his youth which was largely dead by the 1960s (it evolved, in a way, into the television "variety show" - itself long gone). This is part of the show's claim to be a fragment of Americana, part of the tapestry of America that the Magic Kingdom and Disneyland offered to us. It's an all-inclusive portrait, including the snarky audience in the balcony (Melvyn, Buff and Max), the rapid pace of the numbers, and even the Illustrated Song. "All The Guys That Turn Me On, Turn Me Down" is the sole survival of the Illustrated Song in popular culture, and probably the most widely-seen example of all time.

If You Can't Bite, Don't Growl - Tommy Collins - The Dynamic Tommy Collins - Columbia CL-2510 1966

Tommy Collins, born Leonard Sipes, had a significant hit in 1966 with "If You Can't Bite, Don't Growl", a lively (if silly) romp of a song emerging, like Buck Owens, from the local sound of Bakersfield, California - a peculiar music movement that ended up influencing both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, one specializing in stripped-down rhythm.


The name of the song alone makes it a prime candidate for Country Bear Jamboree, but even more interesting is the bear designed for the tune, and here it's necessary for a bit of explanation for modern audiences.

Ernest plays a fiddle bearing his stage name "The Dude". "Dude" is used here in an obsolete meaning; it's not just a male or a cowboy, but a very specific and extremely colorful kind of dandy who began to appear in big cities in the East following the Civil Wars. Dudes wore high hats, big pantaloons, white gloves, spats and crazy-colored jackets and engaged in fashion wars to outdo each other. These urban peacocks were especially visible before the start of the Great War; although "Dude" continued to mean a dandy up until about the 1960s, the actual style was long gone by then. A Dude could also be a clueless city slicker; "Dude Ranches" were tourist lodgings intended for city folk from back East who wanted to see the Frontier.

 Ernest, with his tuft-feathered derby, neatly parted hair, and bow tie, revives the Edwardian Dude the same way the Sun Bonnets number revives the Illustrated Song. The joke is that he's a dandy city slicker (or at least trying to be one) stuck in this ludicrous Vaudeville show. And he has a fast paced, rather citified song to sing, one of the most recent and most popular of the fifteen represented. Yet Country Bear Jamboree is slightly out of time; from Henry's stovepipe hat, string tie and starched shirt bosom to the Victorian finery of the theater and the Vaudeville revival spirit indicate that we aren't in the present but somewhere indefinably in the past. We learn from the outside of the building that Grizzly Hall was erected in 1898 and from the proscenium arch that Founder Ursus H. Bear died in 1928; of course detail dates are just dates but if we take 1928 as the earliest possible fixed date of the show, then we may have our answer: Al Bertino and Marc Davis would've been in their mid-teens at the time. Grizzly Hall exists in some nostalgic recollection of the past, which may be one reason why putting Elvis costumes and camp t-shirts on the figures never worked well; it runs contrary to all of the other evidence presented by the show.


Heart, We Did All That We Could - Jean Shepard - Heart, We Did All That We Could - Capitol T-2690 1967

Teddi Barra is a complex Davis creation, consisting of an act that seems borrowed from famous showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, a name that references silent screen sex goddess Theda Bara, and dialogue that quotes screen firebrand Mae West. Nesbit was a chorus girl who had an affair with a famous architect; one of their encounters involved a swing entwined with vines in a private room. Her husband shot the architect to death in Madison Square Garden, leading to an infamous and scandalous trial. Nesbit died in 1967 and was possibly on Davis' mind while he was drawing up Teddi. Nesbit also was the inspiration for the Gibson Girl, who was folded into the Disney theme park mythology in 1992 with the opening of Disneyland Paris.

Theda Bara, a silent screen sex goddess, was perhaps most famous for appearing onscreen in Cleopatra (1917) with as little on her as the movie industry would allow (hint: it's so little that even today it would raise eyebrows). Heavily promoted as an exotic mystery woman - her stage name "Bara" is "Arab" spelled backwards - Bara was likely remembered by Davis for her last name (one wondered if he and Bertino made lists of as many "bear" puns as they could think up). Most importantly, this is more evidence of Davis reaching into his childhood memory to produce an imaginative amalgam for the Bear Band show.

The third piece of the puzzle is Mae West, who handily replaced Bara as the silver screen's sex goddess once Bara retired in 1926. Mae West played bad women - thrillingly so, for audiences of the time. Her famous line "Why don't you come up and see me some time?" is actually from I'm No Angel (1934), but the movie everyone remembers it from is the previous year's She Done Him Wrong (1933), where she actually says "Why don't you come up some time and see me? I'm home every evening." In both films she plays a singer/dancer in a disreputable part of town, and even appears (in the same role) in a Frontierland-appropriate Western setting in 1940's My Little Chickadee, with W. C. Fields. The movie ends with Fields telling West: "Why don't you come up and see me some time?"


What we really see when everything is unpacked here is that Davis created his show-stopping show girl from a composite of three women spanning four decades, all quite unique but each piece contributing to the larger picture of a classic burlesque gal, unique but immediately understandable as a received image all at once. That's not bad for a fiberglass bear on a swing.

"Heart, We Did All That We Could" is another Nashville-style country standard sung by Jean Shepard, which charted quite high in 1966. Shepard was a pioneer female country vocalist in her era, but this is another case where the song is secondary to the bear performer and the iconic image. As of this writing, Shepard is apparently still in the Grand Ole Opry.


The Teddi Barra animatronic figure, by the way, is amongst MAPO's most ingenious creations: she sits on a static swing that's supported by the raising/lowering mechanism in the roof but is otherwise not animated; Teddi swings because in the hollow space inside her body is a pendulum that starts swinging back and forth to naturally power the figure. The pendulum is connected to a lever which activates her "foot kick" in appropriate rhythm. Like all of MAPO's best creations, it's mechanically elegant.


Blood on the Saddle - Tex Ritter - Blood on the Saddle - Capitol ST-1292 1960

Tex Ritter may not have been the definitive singing cowboy, but he lasted longer than most. Born 1905 in Texas, Woodward "Tex" Ritter was already an established radio and stage performer by the time he took the train out to Hollywood and ended up working for Grand National Films starting in 1936 in "Song of the Gringo".

The B Western, as unique an American invention as Disneyland, was unavoidable throughout the 30s and 40s before making the leap to television in the 50s and transmuting into the sort of series beloved my Marc Davis - Wagon Train and Gunsmoke. The reasons why B westerns were so numerous is complex, but even by the late 19th century when the West was still largely available to see, that time and place was transforming into the American equivalent of the England of Arthurian times - the national origin myth for a country still being born. But Hollywood, more than anything else, is what ensured that the Old West would stay forever young. Hollywood sits right on the edge of a desert, and it doesn't take much driving to find convincing Western locales, even today. Since Western stories are basically structured around encounters between civilization and wilderness, once you have your landscape you have most of the movie - from there it's just a matter of costumes and maybe a town set. And if you're planning on making a lot of Westerns, as studios like Grand National and Republic were, then all you really needed was one set to use again and again, plus costumes and actors. It was a low-cost, high-yield, low risk venture, and Hollywood was really really good at making them. The best B Westerns have an effortless companion-ability, artless they may be, and zip by in under an hour.

Tex Ritter made sixty of these shoestring spectaculars at a clip of about five a year between 1936 and 1945, ensuring his legacy and association with the Western even if he never made  a film most would describe as especially great. Most of Tex's westerns have him ride into town, sing a few songs, and maybe win the girl or defeat the baddies or find the gold - it's hard to differentiate when you're making a new movie every eight weeks. He sang Blood on the Saddle in 1937's Hittin' the Trail, his fifth film, and that film may be examined in detail at Archive.Org, having fallen into the public domain. It's a rare visual record of Tex singing a song that would come to be most closely associated with him.


Following the end of World War II and the impending dissolution of the Movie Studio system's monopoly on theater ownership - the arrangement that ensured that B Westerns had a ready market - Tex struck out on his own as a recording artist and sometimes actor. In 1952 he recorded his most enduring record for the film High Noon: "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling", and eventually was a regular member of the Grand Ole Opry after leaving Hollywood for Nashville.

Marc Davis had his attention drawn to "Blood on the Saddle" by Al Bertino, whose performance of the song sold Davis on the comedy possibilities of the number. If you watch Hittin' the Trail and Tex's performance of the song, you'll see the the nucleus of Big Al's ludicrous pitching and lurching as he sings, which presumably Bertino imitated as Big Al is a tribute to him. However, WED did wisely license the Capitol Records 1960 Tex Ritter recording of the song, which is by far the best.


Big Al's appearance in the show, with his miner's cap and vest and out of tune guitar, clearly six sheets to the wind on corn liquor, is still one of the high water marks of theme park comedy. As a composite character of Tex Ritter's voice and Al Bertino's face and gestures, there is one final component: Thurl Ravenscroft appears to provide Al's guttural laugh at the end of his number.
 
The Ballad of Davy Crockett - Walt Disney Records
Ole Slew Foot - Buck Owens and the Buckaroos - Ruby - Capitol ST-795

The Big Al character is the figure who starts to cycle the show back around towards Cowboy and Western music following its lengthy tour of Hillbilly, Blues and Country circa 1920-1970. Undeniably visually a character from the West, with his Western gear and Cowboy music, Big Al's linked identity with Tex Ritter, a cowboy star, is matched by another famous Western song: Disney's own The Ballad of Davy Crockett.

The Western, as an idea and style, has always flitted in and out of fashion, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the two songs chosen for Country Bear Jamboree represent two of the high points for the Western in the twentieth century: a 1930's Singing Cowboy and Davy Crockett, poster child for the 1950's cowboy craze. The singing of Davy Crockett is also an interestingly self-reflexive moment, stretching back to 1954 and 1955, as the original Disney serial was produced as part of the Disneyland television series which sparked a merchandising bonanza worth millions of dollars. Disneyland, the TV show, raised awareness for Disneyland, the place, but helped fund it, too, and Davy Crockett was on hand to open Frontierland in July 1955. In a very different Frontierland in a very different place, in a show orchestrated by George Bruns, composer of the original tune, Henry's singing of the ballad seems to embrace the history of the past and the future all at once, linking Country Bear Jamboree with Walt Disney even while it moves forward with ideas he initiated. And, as of 1971, it was just old enough to count as nostalgic for most audience members.

As an in-house production, there's little need to provide "the" inspirational version of Davy Crockett here, but this version sung by Fess Parker is, I think, especially good:


It's also an interesting use of a Disney icon almost as recognizable as the Mouseketeer ears: the coon skin cap, which is one of the most interesting jokes in the show. At first blush, it looks to be a rare example of hat-on-hat comedy, another Marc Davis special, because what's funnier than somebody wearing a lot of hats on their head? But then we're fooled: the coon skin cap is a real raccoon (somehow), who then sings a duet, a compound joke that always gets a laugh. Hat comedy is a strange subset of humor, and Country Bear Jamboree has a lot of it: from Terrence's weird peaked cap to the Sun Bonnets' bonnets and Henry's stovepipe,  Davis' jokes constantly play up the incongruity of bears wearing people clothes to great effect.

Henry (and Sammy) don't get far into their song before they're interrupted by the irrational return of Big Al, which leads to the final number, another one certainly chosen almost entirely for being a song about a bear: Ole Slew Foot.

Ole Slew Foot is one of those songs that's been recorded by everybody, but the singer who owned that song was Johnny Horton, in 1962. Horton was a Rockabilly singer and in fact he recorded Ole Slew Foot in two versions - a country version and a rock version - and most subsequent performers actually imitate Horton's memorable vocal performance in their own versions. Horton is most famous for his 1959 "The Battle of New Orleans", which you've almost certainly heard, even if you don't know if you have.

Knowing this, it's unlikely we'll ever find out exactly which version of Ole Slew Foot Davis and Bertino heard, so I've included one which sounds very close to the version Bruns and The Stonemans performed for the show, by Buck Owens in 1971.



Big Al's "defeat" at the end of the show has been confusing audiences for several decades now. In 1991, when the original Bear Band show returned for Walt Disney World's 20th anniversary, many of the original programming profiles were updated to match the modern refurbishment and parts the Bear figures were given. At this point, the Big Al figure had a feature disabled in which he would lean back rather far while singing the word "blood", with the idea being that at the end of the show he simply falls backwards off the box he's sitting on, through the rear curtain, and off the stage (did we mention that he's drunk?). To accentuate this gag, air canons situated above the figure inside the proscenium arch would activate, making the curtain visibly shake as he crashes through.

You can see this in the 1971 "Grand Opening of Walt Disney World" and some early videos of the show. The 2012 refurbishment brought back the air canons but not the lean. To modern audiences, Big Al's ultimate fate remains a mystery.

To match Bear Band Serenade, as audiences leave Henry, Sammy, Melvyn, Buff and Max sing another new Bruns song"Come Again", a trick borrowed from the Enchanted Tiki Room to make the show exit lively. The LP release of Country Bear Jamboree lists the track as "Come Again / Come On In", with "Come On In" being the version of the song heard in Mile Long Bar as guests exit, never publicly released.

Mile Long Bar, as probably needs to be explained at this late stage, was part of a Frontierland complex sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Frito-Lay consisting of Country Bear Jamboree, the Bar, and Pecos Bill Cafe - a sort of Pepsi empire in the West to rival Coca-Cola's domination of the Tomorrowland Terrace in the East. The two beverages continued to be available alongside each other at The Magic Kingdom until 1982, when Coke picked up sponsorship of American Adventure and negotiated the exclusivity rights they still maintain.

Mile Long Bar was very much the partner facility to Bear Band, and upon exiting into the snack stand, guests would find themselves looking at another set of Melvyn, Buff and Max mounted heads, this time singing "Come On In" to the exiting crowds. The Stonemans also contributed perhaps a dozen additional tracks, some of which ended up on the Country Bear Jamboree LP. The full set played inside Mile Long Bar, at the Mile Long Bar that opened in Disneyland in 1972, and continue to play today at the Hungry Bear Restaurant at Disneyland. Some of these tunes also ended up in the Frontierland area music from 1971-1991.

Home Sweet Home; A Personal Reflection

I was something of a late comer to Country Bear Jamboree. It was a show I saw going to Walt Disney World as a kid, but it was never something my parents and I considered to be especially important or something we'd see repeatedly. I probably saw Country Bear Jamboree more often as part of my souvenir VHS video than in person. The things I remember most clearly from those early trips were the Sunbonnets and their lament, and thinking that exiting into the Mile Long Bar and seeing Melvyn, Buff and Max still in there singing was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.

Aside from that, I didn't have much personal connection beyond a few viewings here or there. It wasn't until I moved to Orlando in 2003, and more specifically began to work for Walt Disney World, that I began to become more familiar with the show. Even then, I didn't really "get" it, although I knew I liked it well enough and didn't really know why. My interests in college, however, began to shift, and the more I found out about folk music, about vaudeville, about Tex Ritter, and began to experience the American mythology of its own past, the more deeply the show affected me. It wasn't until 2005, however, that the full brilliance of Country Bear Jamboree became apparent to me. As Shane at Parkeology points out, you need at least a dozen viewings. It just clicked one day, one viewing, and I've never looked back.

I became an addict. I'd see the show several times a day, and listen to the soundtrack incessantly. When I started this blog I had no real ideas about what to put on it besides photographs and some appreciations of the design of the various areas of the Magic Kingdom. It wasn't until my second month of writing that I combined my obsessions with structuralism and Country Bear Jamboree into one, put together "Two Shows by Marc Davis" and really hit on the appropriate combination of analysis, history, and speculation that continues here to this day. I owe much of my subsequent development as a writer to my desire to get inside the complexities of Marc Davis' Bear Band show.

There are worlds of things to unpack in Country Bear Jamboree, whether that be confining ourselves to the worlds of design, or of pace, or music, or even animation - each bear has unique little ticks and mannerisms, and each one of them becomes funnier the more you pay attention to them. I've tried to demonstrate some of its surprising depth in this article.

In this way, the show has almost never been the domain of vacationers, but locals, long time devotees and obsessives. Most of the people in Grizzly Hall at one point or another have been there before, and they comply with the rituals of the show - clapping and stomping, applause, or catcalls during Teddi Barra's number - and the tourists on board are swept up in a community experience. Country Bear Jamboree had the sort of relationship with its audience that the Enchanted Tiki Room enjoys in California - the community celebration of the ritualistic where everybody knows the words.

Something strange happens when you've had a Disney attraction in your life for a long time. Your relationship to it mutates until you can't even remember what it was like through fresh eyes, but it also deepens and takes of strange dimensions and unconscious connections. This is easy enough to find evidence of on the Internet, never mind this very blog here, but it's a very old phenomenon. One of the earliest examples I've found comes from the pen of Edward Prizer, who documented the construction of Walt Disney World for five years in Orlandoland Magazine before he wrote this in November 1971, when the paint was barely still dry on the hallowed planks of Grizzly Hall:

"By this time, I thought, I'd have formed my views on the individual attractions and be able to list them in order of preference. Instead, I find this becoming a virtually impossible task. First time around, I picked It's A Small World. This twisting voyage down a cavern filled with music and singing, dancing dolls and outbursts of color left me strangely exhilarated. The impact was directly to the senses, a hypo straight into the blood stream, turning you on like a neon sign.

On the second visit, however, I realized that the choice could not be made so simply. The Country Bear Jamboree was even funnier than before, and the ingenuity of it even more apparent. The Hall of Presidents, too, affected me more strongly the second time around. I listened more carefully to the narration and found it to be a prose poem of tremendous sweep and grandeur. I caught new meaning in the words of Lincoln. Suddenly I realized that he was uttering a message directed at the condition of our nation today... "If this nation is ever to be destroyed, it will come from within."

The Mickey Mouse Revue builds up to a rousing climax, all of the separate characters, after their individual performances, joining in the grand finale. You have to come back again and again, to experience the full impact of it.

The Haunted Mansion is the craziest thing I've ever seen. I've only seen it through once and can't render a final judgement. But I think of all it must be regarded as a thing of beauty evoking the images of Edgar Allan Poe with a whimsical twist. This is the kind of ambiguity that lifts imagery to the level of art. Most people, I know, won't see it in that perspective."

By January 1973, Prizer was writing of the best descriptions of what was not yet called the "Annual Passholder culture":

"And still we keep going back, after all this time, when anyone would think that the charisma should have been worn down to the bones... all the sights seen, all the surprises exhausted, all the thrills quenched. Perhaps somewhere down inside there's a stubborn streak of childlike wonder that won't let go after the onslaught of 50 years.

So there we were, on a Sunday afternoon, driving again out to Walt Disney World for some more. After all this time, there was still that inexplicable pull that kept insisting: put it all aside and to hell with all the stuff you ought to be doing. Forget it. The Magic Kingdom is just down the road.

Surely, I think, it's like old songs now, that are never too old and faded to listen to again. Or old wine that is even better each time revisited.

We ride down Main Street in the horse-drawn street car, plodding slow, with the gaiety and celebration all around us. At the castle, we have to choose - so little time - and we choose first the submarine. Although the lines are long, the journey 20,000 leagues under the sea is as much an adventure as ever. As soon as we surface, we're ready to head over to the Circle-Vision theater. Magic again. For through the miracle of cinema we soar across the face of America and see and experience the places that would otherwise have taken a lifetime to encompass.

There is a pause for coffee in Fantasyland, and then on across Liberty Square to Frontierland. Guns crackle in the shooting gallery. A trio strums bluegrass music in front of the old saloon. Some might call it corn. To us, it is still adventure. And because Artice has an enduring love affair with the bears, we work our way up to Country Bear Jamboree. By now, these zany animals have become old friends. Even though we know each song and scene almost by heart, we still get carried away and sit there clapping and stomping like any old tobacco-chewing hillbillies.

Back outside again, we find the Magic Kingdom wrapped in twilight. The myriad lights are blazing, and it is yet another world. We stop for a glass of orange juice in Adventureland and listen for a while to the steel drum band playing Calypso in the square.

Closing time is near. The crowds are thinning out. Another day in the Magic Kingdom is nearing an end. We drift with the crowds over the bridge and along the walk in front of the Crystal Palace and down Main Street and out the gate.

Yes, time to go home. But, really, we're not quite ready."

It's rarely been better said than that.


Country Bear Jamboree, along with its sister attraction America Sings and counterpart The Mickey Mouse Revue, can be thought of as among the last great Disney animated shorts. Al Bertino was from the Disney story department, and wrote the scenarios (and presumably many of the gags) for the excellent late 40's Donald Duck cartoons and the famous early 50s run of Humphrey the Bear cartoons. The fast pace and conceptual wit of Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings has Bertino all over it.

Wathel Rogers (left) and Bill Justice (right), program Henry in 1970.

And although he never worked in the theatrical shorts department, Marc Davis' sense of animation and visual language, as evident in his late career as his early one, is legendary, even if it only ever fully blossomed in the media of themed design. Marc Davis was so good at what he did that he kept getting the most difficult animation assignments that scared the other animators. Cinderella and Alice aren't flashy roles and are technically demanding, but those characters hold their respective films together, and had they failed, they would've dragged the whole production down with them. That's how good he was, and most of his assignments for Disney animation were thankless ones.

When Walt Disney raided his animation department for Disneyland, he took many of his most accomplished artists to WED. By the mid-50s, the Disney shorts department was floundering. Mickey Mouse was retired after the totally forgettable The Simple Things, while Donald continued to evolve in increasingly bizarre and visually complex shorts like No Hunting and Donald in Mathmagic Land. Following the opening of Disneyland, Disney theatrical shorts became increasingly rare. 1961 saw the release of just two Donald cartoons, one Goofy cartoon, and the inspired Saga of Windwagon Smith, a historical curio. Walt literally stole all of the talent away. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Disney themed design products set standards for the industry, while Disney animation rolled along through the doldrums.

Country Bear Jamboree, Mickey Mouse Revue and America Sings, in style, content, format and length, show the integrity and wit lacking in Disney animation product of the time. Although they were animated with fiberglass figures instead of drawings and cells, the pace, wit and energy is the same as in the best of what the studio could offer in theatrical shorts at the peak of their accomplishment. It's probably no coincidence that animation legends furnished Magic Kingdom with two great tributes to Disney's glory days of animated past, a past that was rapidly sinking below the horizon line.

All of these things: the shows' importance to Disney, it's reverence towards history, and its preservation of memory, argue strongly for its continued existence, even if the full-strength version, with its full dose of Al Bertino and George Bruns' relentless forward pace and stronger structure, has been taken from us temporarily (one hopes).

Because to many of us, Grizzly Hall is home, too. Just as much as the Haunted Mansion, which I'll never tire of, or the Liberty Belle Riverboat, which I lived on for months at a time, Grizzly Hall was home to me, it preceded me and I hope it will outlast me because the show is one of those things that is The Magic Kingdom's birthright. For generations guests have entered the beguilingly simple lobby, toed the bear claw scruff marks on the floor, and settled in the heavy-draped Victorian finery of the theater to clap with Henry, laugh at "Mama Don't Whup Little Buford", applaud for the Three Sun Bonnets and roar with approval at Big Al. Country Bear Jamboree is one of the art's most enduring creations.

Next time:deleted songs!