Country Bear Jamboree: The Deleted Songs

Country Bear Jamboree seems to have come into this world in very much the shape it was conceived in. As is well known, the basic idea for a singing bear band dates back to the mid-60s, when Davis was developing ideas for all sorts of musical bears - marching band bears, tuba bears, rock band bears, and more. Many of these idea ended up informing America Sings, three years later.  One of Imagineering's favorite myths is the "last laugh" story, probably most famously related in the original large format hardcover "Walt Disney Imagineering" book, and this story has sometimes been used to conflate Country Bear Jamboree as some sort of extension of something Walt Disney wanted.

In actuality, the decision to move in the country music direction didn't come until 1969 or 1970, making Country Bear Jamboree one of WED Enterprises' first "solo voyages". Deep in the early planning files for the Florida Project is a curious Colin Campbell drawing of the Bear Band show in an open air arena-like setting, with the audience facing a huge rock wall covered with cascading waterfalls. As each act would appear, the waterfall would part, revealing a new bear. The opening waterfall gag ended up being used at the Tiki Room and the richly appointed Victorian theater we know so well was devised by Dorthea Redmond.

You probably remember this photo from Part One:


Back in 2009, the always formidable Stuff From the Park posted a larger, alternate take of the same publicity photo:


Do you see what's behind them? It's Al Bertino's original storyboard. The size of the scanned image allows us to study it in at least a little detail after some futzing in Photoshop:


As can be seen, the entire show doesn't fill a single board. Right below the "Big Albert" poster Davis and Bertino are examining, the return of Big Al to interrupt the show can be clearly seen. There just plain isn't a lot of supporting material to suggest that Bear Band was ever a radically different show.

So it was a pretty direct process to get to the show we actually know, and the various false starts along the way, for the Mineral King Resort for instance, are so deeply buried in the Archive that digging them out is not a realistic goal for this blog. But I can shed light on exactly two songs that were intended for the show and deleted.

The first of these is known simply because of a cue sheet I have listing the various numbers. This same cue sheet was used by WED in 1988 to alter to Japanese version of Country Bear Jamboree for reasons unknown, and the very fact that they had to use an outdated sheet in 1988 does tend to suggest just how little supporting documents the Bear Band show left behind.

Besides presenting an extremely different musical number order than what was used in the final show, it's full of little clues and things that were written out by 1971, for example:



Yeah, sure, for all we know "Bear Bash" is just the working title for Bear Band Serenade, but then we start coming across stuff that absolutely isn't in the show, like:


What is "The Funny Farm"? It seems to be a deleted Henry/Wendell song, as this sheet predates the casting of Bill Cole as the voice of Wendell (and Sammy, by the way).

The only song I knew of that went by "The Funny Farm" was the famous novelty song "They've Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" by Napoleon XIV. This would be an extremely bizarre choice for Country Bear Jamboree, although, to be fair, it wasn't any more bizarre than many of the other choices in the show itself.

"They're Coming to Take Me Away" was also a staple of a novelty record radio show based in Los Angeles hosted by Dr. Demento, which is where many people were also exposed to Homer and Jethro, so that was a possible link. As much as it tickled me to imagine Al Bertino or Marc Davis listening to Dr. Demento on their way to work, he started broadcasting in 1970, making the timing of all of this a little unlikely.

The actual solution did not present itself until I actually got ahold of the Homer and Jethro Fractured Folk Songs record ..... and there it was, right at the end of Side Two:

The Funny Farm - Homer and Jethro - Fractured Folk Songs - RCA Victor LPM-2954 1964

The fact that The Funny Farm shares the same platter with Mama Don't Whup Little Buford and Fractured Folk Song is a dead giveaway. It makes sense that the deleted Henry and Wendell song, a duo modeled on Homer and Jethro, would be itself yet another Homer and Jethro song. And this is Marc Davis territory for sure - the song is about drinking!


It isn't hard to see why this one was cut. It's hard to top Little Buford for comedy, at which point it made sense to just keep Wendell off stage until the finale of the show. A minor deletion, to be sure, but in the unstable terrain of WED Enterprises history, one worth recording.

The second number I've actually known a bit about for a long time, but never had enough information to give a full picture of what happened. It's a song from 1968 called You Make A Left and Then A Right.


You Make a Left and Then a Right - Johnny and Jonie Mosby - Make a Left and Then a Right - Capitol ST-2903 1968

Look at that hair....

Johnny and Jonie Mosby, "The Sweethearts of Country Music", perhaps typify the mainline Nashville sound better than any of the other performers this series of articles has covered. "You Make A Left and Then A Right" is a slow waltz detailing a rekindled affair.

Looking back from 2013 and knowing what we know about the way Country Bear Jamboree turned out, this song seems almost impossible to imagine in the show sung by the Sunbonnet Trio instead of "All the Guys Who Turn Me On Turn Me Down", which is who it was intended for.

I think Davis and Bertino knew they had a problem here. The song seems grossly inappropriate to be sung by three young girls. There's always been a hint of ambiguity about the ages of Bunny, Bubbles and Beulah: the songs they've always been chosen to sing aren't about fantastic kinds of romantic love, they show an awareness of attraction as a physical response. That's part of the joke, I gather: the ones in a ludicrous baby clothing know all of the reasons they want a boyfriend. A lot of the first laughs these characters get in the show is because of the disconnect between their appearance and their song.

But "Make A Left and then A Right" is a song about a fling with a married woman, which doesn't quite seem right coming out of the mouths of babes. The key line that's funny in the Sunbonnet Trio song is "turn me on", which was, as of 1971, a relatively new slang phrase. The phrase has carried on in our culture, outliving even its 60's counterculture meaning, and has an electric effect on audiences to this day. Had Make A Left been used instead, the segment would likely have seemed to be casting about for a joke. The song itself is the difference between an unrealized joke and the show stopper here.

Let's listen to the original Mosby song:


What's interesting is that despite this song seeming to be a poor fit, it seems to have quite far along in production before it was replaced. The Stonemans are listed on my song list (excerpted above) as possible voices, presumably before WED and Bruns decided to bring in three dedicated vocalists for their performance.

We also know this because Marc Davis actually painted the slides for the Illustrated Song to accompany Make A Left and Then A Right. I don't have them in very good quality - sixth generation photocopies from the back of an old information packet - but here they are, with some digital tints to make them easier to enjoy:


Okay, a few things to note about these slides.

 - The song itself is sung by the Sunbonnets, but it doesn't seem to actually be about them, not in any way like "All the Guys" is. The awkward, heartbreaking teenage bear in the shows' final illustrated song slides typify how many young girls feel about themselves - confused, disappointed, and surrounded by hostility. "Make a Left" doesn't even readily invite a female perspective; notice how the bear in "All the Guys" unsuccessfully dresses up to attract a mate and ends up looking like the bear in "Make a Left". To compensate, Davis has invented a guileless bachelor to star in the illustrated song, but he isn't very sympathetic.

 - Davis and Bertino have had to change the basic song itself to make it into a joke, the only time they did this in the entire show. The Mosbys' verse ends with "...And if it's on, come on it / But if it's off, he's home again", which they have modified to "..I ain't in", which seems to imply that somebody beat the bachelor bear to the punch. The on / off light in the window makes good use of the illustrated song slide format, but the joke simply isn't very funny, and has to be telegraphed inelegantly with a huge "CLICK" cartoon bubble.

 - Davis' brushstrokes are extremely rough and irregular, which could indicate rough draft status. Still, he bothered to superimpose the song lyrics over the artwork, which does suggest that these were in some degree of finality. I think the rough brush strokes suggest an attempt to revive the sometimes-crude hand-painted look of vintage magic lantern slides. The final "All the Guys" slides simplify, simplify, simplify.

Everything above, plus the fact that the song, well, isn't in the show points towards the only real evidence we have of development trouble with the 1971 show. I doubt the issue is rights clearances - WED licensed other tracks from Capitol Records for use in Bear Band, including Blood on the Saddle. I think this was intentionally scrapped fairly far along in the process and the dynamics of the segment rethought.

If it seems strange to even consider a song of this type for the Sunbonnets, remember that songs like  "Make a Left" were standard issue for 60's country - "Tears Will Be the Chaser For Your Wine" and "Heart, We Did All That We Could" aren't too different. "All The Guys That Turn Me On, Turn Me Down" is the only song in Country Bear Jamboree to post-date 1968. I think "Make a Left" may have been considered because it suggests possibilities for movement of the bear figures that aren't used in the final sequence - trading off lines between the three, for example, as in the Mosbys' original recording. In the final show all three Sunbonnets move more or less like mirrors of each other, encouraging audiences to focus on the Illustrated Song. The possibilities of treating each individual girl as a unique character, or even simply as lead vocalist and back up vocalists, was not explored until the Christmas and Vacation Jamboree shows.

I'd give a lot to know when the plug was pulled. Did the Stonemans also record a version of "Make a Left"? Was the idea long dead by the time they were actually in the studio? Did the difficulties in "cracking" the Sunbonnets number lead Davis and Bertino to look elsewhere, eventually finding the Stonemans and their song?

Marc and Al took that story with them when they passed on. If it exists on paper somewhere, that memo is probably long buried or long gone. What's left is just a scrap - but a very tantalizing scrap. It's an odd but very fully realized adjunct to one of the best creations of WED's golden era, tied directly to maybe the most influential single artist who ever worked in the themed design field. And looking and marveling and wondering is part of the charm, too.

Well folks, this concludes our story. So thanks for bearing with me 'till the bare end, and barrel around to see us again. Ya'll come back now, y'hear?


The Music of Country Bear Jamboree, Part One
The Music of Country Bear Jamboree, Part Two
The Music of Country Bear Jamboree, Part Three

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 music heard and played in the Disney Theme Parks.

It was last updated on June 26, 2013.

A Brief Introduction to Early Walt Disney World Music

Magic Kingdom Area Music
Main Street USA 1976-1991 (Morning)
Main Street USA 1976-1991 (Evening)
The Original Main Street USA Music

Specific Case Studies
The Music of Country Bear Jamboree: Part One - definition of the show's genre, who recorded the music, and the first part of the show. May 2013.

The Music of Country Bear Jamboree: Part Two - the second half of the show, and a personal reflection on its appeal. May 2013.

The Music of Country Bear Jamboree: Part Three - two deleted songs. June 2013.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Photo Credit: Joe Shelby's Mom

Main Street USA 1976-1991:Morning Music | Evening Music

Last time, as we took the time machine right down the middle of Main Street USA, we stopped by some well-remembered but hard to authenticate music for the morning, and a much more obscure and even more difficult to authenticate evening loop, each one telling half the story of the other.

It's generally "known" that these music loops started playing in 1976, and there are fingerprints all over the tracks, in a way, indicating how they were assembled, that they were probably assembled together. Which is good background to have as we launch off into informed speculation on what played at Magic Kingdom (and Disneyland!) for her first five years.

It gets dicey here way back in the super early days because the existence of affordable home video cameras starting in the mid-80s has provided an invaluable source for authenticating music as it actually played in the park; basically, even if you have the music, there's no telling if it's actually honestly what played in situ without home videos or live recordings. As a result, we're probably never going to know for sure about this particular music loop unless a Wagner tape reel or list appears.

Despite all of that, I'm willing to make an educated guess, a guess that grows out of my experiences identifying the other two loops.

Since I wasn't there for Magic Kingdom's early years, as a Disney history specialist I have a bad habit of mercilessly pressing everybody who is in any condition to remember anything I'm interested in for information, and I spent about a year seriously on the trail of the Main Street music loops. As a result I came across about a half dozen people who have strong memories of visiting Magic Kingdom in the early 70s and hearing the Main Street music.

These memories generally came in two varieties: memories of either Sweet Rosie O' Grady or Strolling Through the Park / Mary Is A Grand Old Name. Some musically oriented people even directed me to the source album, which they sought out without my prompting: The Gaslight Orchestra's Gay Nineties Waltzes.

The trouble, of course, is that Gay Nineties Waltzes and the tracks Rosie O' Grady and Strolling Through the Park / Mary also appeared in the 1976 Morning loop, so there really was no way to be absolutely certain that these people were remembering what they heard in 1972 instead of 1978. I never quite solved the problem, and left it alone during production of A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.

As it turned out, that was the project that attracted my biggest hint yet, in the form of a comment. I ordinarily don't put a lot of faith into personal anecdotes when searching out something as specific as music tracks, however this one by user dichuy carries an unusual amount of authority:

"For those of you who are looking for a more expanded selection of music:

My dad use to take the family tape recorder all over the Magic Kingdom in the 70s and tape all the background music, as well as the rides. One of our favorite tapes was from Main Street USA when it first opened. This soundtrack played for quite a long time before it was changed.

One day my dad came home with a gleam in his eye and a package in his hand. He took out an LP and put it on the record player. The entire family burst into smiles. It was the record Disney used for Main Street. Dad said it was the order of the songs that made a light bulb go off and he ran home with his purchase to make sure his hunch was right."

A few things to note. First, this is an anecdote involving not somebody remembering a specific song, but exposure to a specific set of songs both in the theme park and at home, repeatedly, which lends huge credibility to the accuracy of the memory.

Second, notice the way the record was identified: not by track titles, which of course are commonly recorded standards, but through track order. This can only come about through repeated exposure to the recorded music, and then the version played in park must be identical to the order on the record.

Third, notice that this anecdote fits in with our previously established date of 1971-1976. In 1976, the "Gay Nineties" tracks were split between two longer music loops and ammended with additional tracks from Albert White and elsewhere. Since the 1976 loops do not play the GayNineties Waltzes songs in album order, dichuy's father could not have identified the correct album using track order alone after the installation of the 1976 loops.

This anecdote, plus the memories of others, leads me to embrace the theory that for the first five years of the Magic Kingdom, Main Street USA played the Gaslight Orchestra record, in album order, either in or nearly in its entirety.


Two problems that immediately arise from this theory are easily addressed:

1) The Gay Nineties Waltzes album is too short to provide area music alone.

It is a short album, but many of the earliest Wagner loops were quite short. The Liberty Square music seems to have been about twenty minutes long, the Tiki Room hosted a mere fifteen minutes of music, and many other loops hardly broke the one hour mark. The average seems to have been about thirty minutes, and that's about how long the Waltzes LP is.

2) Wagner never used a whole album in album order for BGM.

Actually, he did, for Caribbean Plaza in 1973, and that was in album order too, even if he didn't use the last few songs on the LP to make the loop an even 30 minutes.

And, actually, who says that Wagner made this early Main Street loop at all? There is literally no date on the original Somerset LP, although it's commonly considered to be from the early 60s. Knowing this, it could very well have been playing on Main Street at Disneyland in Walt's era.

Jack Wagner, for his part, always said that when he got the contract with Disney in 1970, he had to change a lot of music. For an example, this is excerpted from his interview in Disney Magazine in 1998, shortly before his death:

Besides providing vocal talent, Wagner does the master tape recording of music and effects for the Parks' shows and parades. His first job as Production Consultant was supplying background music for 40 different themed areas at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. 

"In Disneyland, you'd go down Main Street and they'd be playing '70s musical hits like 'Mrs. Robinson,'" he recalls. "So I changed that to turn-of-the-century ragtime music."

He told this story several times, and for all I know, it's true. But does late 60's pop music on Main Street sound like a Walt Disney Production to you? So much of Disneyland was so carefully put together that I can't see Walt Disney signing off on pop music in his personal time machine. And while we could say that maybe Disney management put it in after his death, these men were hand-picked by Walt and guarded his Kingdom jealously. So I just can't see Roy Disney, Jack Lindquist, Don Tatum and Dick Nunis signing off on it, either.

And so I've always felt that story had a whiff of apocalyphical to it. But it's worth keeping in mind.

Let's Crunch Some Numbers

Let's take a quick look at the overall structure of the 1976 loops. As noted in the relevant articles, each loop seems to be constructed out of five basic records, with individually-chosen tracks interspersed in. These five records laid the foundation for the 1976 Morning and Evening tracks for Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, and eventually World Bazaar in Tokyo Disneyland.

What's interesting is that when you start to look at breakdowns of how much of each album was used across the two loops, and also how much of each album was used in either the morning of the evening loops, you start to see something like design intent. Of the five core albums represented below, the album which got the least amount of use across the two loops was "Your Father's Moustache Volume 1", using 4 out of 18 songs, or about 22%. They break down, in order, like so:

 - Your Father's Moustache, Vol 1 / 4 of 18 songs or 22%

 - Your Father's Moustache in Hi-Fi / 4 of 14 songs or 28%

 - Your Father's Moustache, Vol 2 / 6 of 16 songs or 37%

 - 30 Barbary Coast Favorites / 11 of 27 songs or 41%

 - Gay Nineties Waltzes / 9 of 12 songs or 75%

This shouldn't be too surprising, as Gay Nineties dominates the daytime loop and Barbary Coast dominates the night time loop, but it is surprising that Gay Nineties leads by so much. In fact, of the three songs left out of the loop - In The Good Old Summertime, After the Ball and Man On The Flying Trapeze - we can even theorize that Flying Trapeze and Good Old Summertime could have been replaced with the versions from Barbary Coast Favorites in 1976.

Let's not forget how Wagner assembled these loops: by working with record companies and compiling themed reels for reference. Once he had worked out a "sound", he rarely deviated from it. And he always reused. Always always reused as much as possible. Does the fact that he used nearly the entirety of Gay Nineties Waltzes in the 1976 Main Street loops seem to corroborate the working theory that the original Main Street music was that entire record,as the music had already been paid for?

I'll let you come to your own conclusions there. The original LP isn't too hard to come by, and if you have a turntable, is definitely the best sounding of the three options. Gay Nineties Waltzes seems to have been one of those records that slipped into the grey market, jumping from label to label over the years. Two companies have remastered the record for digital download: Studio 102 and Lost Gold. Both versions sound equally good:

Gaslight Orchestra: Studio 102 Essentials on Amazon.com
Gay "1890s" Waltzes on iTunes

And if you were around Magic Kingdom in the early 70s or have any sort of memories or even documentation proving or disproving this theory - by all means, speak up! We need you!

History is funny. Sometimes the things you think are worth preserving turn out not to be and the things you are convinced couldn't possibly be of value to future generations turn out to be coveted. Turns out we have more than enough information about the Gulf Coast Room to fill several blog posts, but I couldn't tell you, based on all of my vast amounts of reference material, where the various cafes on the Grand Canyon Concourse were situated from year to year.

Of course scarcity creates demand; we live in an on-demand world where nearly any piece of obscure information is obtainable, and so the gaps in that record loom ever larger. Perspective plays a role in all of this too: as a Disney historian, I saw little worth saving in the Main Street Bakery, which closed six months ago to howls of protest and reopened this month as the first of four Starbucks Coffee locations in Walt Disney World. Since the interior had already been gutted and reworked in the 90s following the end of the Sara Lee era, I saw little reason to document what was there. It turns out that maybe I should've, even if the Internet in general stepped up and did an admirable job anyway. The fact remains that the average minor event at Walt Disney World is better documented than the whole of the first twenty years put together.

I did, however, feel the need to make sure that FountainView Bakery, at Epcot but not really part of 2013, had a good send-off, and spent a few hours there in March recording what I could.

FountainView began life in 1982 as the evocatively named Sunrise Terrace restaurant, so named because its windows faced east, presumably in the off chance that diners would indeed catch sight of the sun peeking over the low beige roof of Communicore at some point in the future. Birnbaum's 1982 Walt Disney World guidebook describes it thusly:

"Fried fish and shrimp, cornbread muffins, and chef's salads are the order of the day at this good-sized fast-food eatery."

Sunrise Terrace seems to have stuck to this menu fairly consistently throughout the 80s, until it closed in 1993 as part of the Innoventions refurbishment to reopen as the a cutting-edge espresso shop, back in the days before espresso was available on every street corner in America. This is the form I remember it best as, until its Nestle sponsorship lapsed in the mid-2000s and FountainView went through several phases of on-again, off-again operation. By the late 2000s it was back open again as an Edy's ice cream parlor, before closing in 2013 for Starbucks conversion.

FountainView was never a very interesting space: a circular room with an al fresco patio overlooking the Fountain of Nations, it was nevertheless one of the few spaces at Epcot still open to the public but left unmolested by the prevailing winds of cultural change; from its suspicious stepped rows of silk potted plants to its stone grey tile, Sunrise Terrace/FountainView seemed better suited as a stage for an early-1990s RadioShack Christmas commercial or perhaps a Nintendo Entertainment System demonstration than it had any business serving suspect coffee and pastries; and since nothing lasts forever at Walt Disney World, a mostly-untouched original interior and unchanged 1989 Jack Wagner loop featuring the immortal "Behind the Waterfall" seemed absolutely essential to document.

After waiting several months, when it came time to edit my footage I was convinced I had been too clever in choosing my angles - the space was, on the main, narrow enough to feasibly spit across, forcing lots of detail work - and couldn't hope to capture the feeling of the place in any cumulative sense. After some careful attention to visual structure, composition and editing, I'm happy to report that this piece turned out vastly better than expected, and captures much of the flavor of FountainView as it exists in my memory. 

On the main Starbucks is a ready made fit for the old Sunrise Terrace - their brand identity mix of earth tones, new technology and old-fashioned idealism is just a stone's throw away from EPCOT Center, anyway. But of course Starbucks is expected to host vastly higher numbers of guests than FountainView could ever hope to pull in, and so the fate of that original interior remains uncertain. After all, much of the interior's charm can be chalked up to its intimate scale. Will the silk potted plants remain? The inexplicable corner areas filled with tiny patches of grass? Who will care for the ugly neon?

Suspect taste, reboot, or not, FountainView will live on online - a neat little donut of a room hopelessly behind the times where Yanni and David Lanz play on. Join me now for one last ice cream in the best little fried food counter/coffee shop/ice cream parlor on the West side of Future World.

"'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

 - Noah Cross, Chinatown

Every so often I'm asked to write an analysis piece on New Tomorrowland, the Tomorrowland reboot from 1994 in Magic Kingdom. I'm even somewhat interested in trying, but the fact remains that I am not the person to write that article, because New Tomorrowland was never my Tomorrowland. It never meant anything to me besides garish decorations and disappointment; it never got inside me in any meaningful way. And so I knew I couldn't discuss what was good about it without sounding condescending.

I also knew if I waited long enough, the "Tomorrowland gap" would close itself, once somebody just a few years younger than I was when Tomorrowland was still "New" - young enough to see its strengths over its weaknesses in ways I couldn't - came along.

The newish blog "Progressland" has stepped up to bat and filled that void, in admirable fashion - I suggest that any and everybody read "The Future That Never Was" whether they be convinced of the greatness of the area or not. New Tomorrowland was nothing if not ambitious, in ways that Disney seems genuinely incapable of being today, and no moping and complaining from any number of Unnamed Bloggers on this very site can take that away from it. And so this article is not going to be about New Tomorrowland, but it is going to proceed directly from the notion that the area was, in the final analysis, a failure.

Maybe not an artistic failure, but it was a failure to realize its stated goal, which was to create a version of "Tomorrowland" which would not require wholesale removal within twenty years. Twenty years are coming up now, and New Tomorrowland starting to look pretty shopworn and dire.

I call this The Tomorrowland Problem: how do you keep up with the future, when Tomorrow keeps becoming Today?

It's an issue which Imagineering thought they had licked back in the early 90s. Surely the fatal flaw, that bungled line of code in Tomorrowland's essential DNA, is that it's trying to predict a realizable future. Instead, they thought, we shall predict an unrealizable future, one rooted in the ideas of the past. Surely this will add the charm back in, add the thing that the rest of the Magic Kingdom has and Tomorrowland lacks.

Conceptually, the idea is sound - in execution is where it went all pear shaped. But we shall come to that later. It's time to unpack the Tomorrowland Problem.

Ugly Buildings

We ought to start, I suppose, by coming to terms with what Tomorrowland is on the basic level of visual identity. And by "Tomorrowland", of course, I mean the "white" Tomorrowland that still mostly dominates Disneyland and dominates over half of Magic Kingdom. So long as WDI isn't going to slap a new skin on the outside of the iconic white Space Mountain and significantly change its visual identity, it seems that as various "tomorrow" fads come and go - browns and earth tones, bolts and sheet metal, green lights - the area keeps backsliding to its pure "white" incarnation, even if the actual shades of white are an ever-evolving project. Space Mountain seems to always control the look of the area.

But when you go looking for descriptions of Tomorrowland, nobody really seems to even agree on what they're kind of buildings they're looking at - search online and you'll find everything from Googie, Industrial, Institutional, Streamline, Futurist, Brutalist, and every genre of "Modern" from Neo-Modern to Mid-Century Modern and Post Modern. Let's take a close look at some close contenders:

Googie - Googie architecture was a regional phenomenon of Southern California following World War II which today we would probably call "entertainment architecture": structures which sought to tap into the cultural zeitgeist by using modern shapes and construction materials made possible by the war to evoke spaceships and aerodynamic shapes. Googie appeared on coffee shops, bowling alleys, diners and all sorts of structures generally considered Suburban Blight throughout the 50s and 60s, and following the maturation of Generation X was generally considered, along with Tiki, to be desirable for its evocation of a bygone age.

"White" Tomorrowland was not Googie, although some aspects of the two styles are complimentary - both invoke space flight, moon rockets, and optimism. What's interesting is that when Disneyland opened in 1955, Tomorrowland very much was built in the Googie vernacular - and all of this was torn down and rebuilt in 1966, before Googie had even really become unfashionable.

Today Googie enjoys a very strong reputation, so it's an easy shorthand in written analysis to describe the 1967 and 1971 Tomorrowlands as Googie as a way of legitimizing them, but it is not an appropriate fit.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

NOCA, San Antonio, Texas - Vintage San Antonio

Streamline / Streamline Moderne - Streamline Moderne is famous as a style fashionable from the decades predating Disneyland, so what is it doing here? Well, conceptually, Tomorrowland owes a lot to Streamline architecture, even if our received visions of Edward Hopper diners and the glam era of rail travel don't quite seem to connect.

Streamline Moderne is often mistaken for Deco or Art Deco, which is ironic because Moderne was supposed to be an architectural revolution rejecting the concepts of Deco. The idea was that Art Deco was only a mildly updated version of the Victorian and Art Noveau fads from a generation before: a style which used the iconography of the machine era but not its ideas: true Art Deco architecture still is, even after all these years, an eyeful. Streamline Moderne was supposed to strip away all that shellacked-atop layers of decorative detail, a symbol of bourgeois conservatism, and create truly modern structures. Streamline buildings are quite severe, almost plain, save for their distinctive horizontal lines and ridges, almost like aerodynamic grooves.

What's interesting is that as Victorian styles turned into Art Noveau, which turned into Deco, which turned into Streamline Moderne, which itself turned into Googie, traces of each step remained along the way, and Tomorrowland combines them all like a cocktail - keep this in mind, which we will return to eventually.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Club Moderne, Montana - Wikipedia

Futurist - if you want to provoke a fight amongst architecture enthusiasts, ask a group of them whether a famous, sleek building - say, the Chrysler Building in New York City - is futurist, deco, or modern, then sit back and watch the carnage.

Futurist architecture, in its strictest sense, is an Italian genre with - troublingly for Americans who wish to follow Walt Disney's lead and identify Disneyland with Democratic institutions - a strong hint of fascism floating through it. Futurist manifestos will forever be written and re-written because the Future is an ever-evolving horizon-line, but the imposing, institutional quality Tomorrowland inherited in 1967 can be traced to Italy of the 1930's.

What's interesting is that the more you try to define the "Tomorrowland look" you realize that it doesn't look like anything -- except itself, and that this itself accounts for its longevity even while it dates the area immediately. There's just no nailing it down with any definable terminology we have available to us, but all you have to do is describe any building as "looking like Tomorrowland" and a host of relevant associations spring to mind. In looking for probable contemporary sources for Tomorrowland's look, besides the World's Fair of 1964, there is this:


The "Theme Building" of Los Angeles International Airport from 1961.

Why the Theme Building strikes me, besides its local nature and date of origin, is that it goes so much farther than Googie or Futurism ever went: it goes really far out there to create an organic suggestion of line and motion flowing free. So, following the example of the Theme Building, I have decided to call Tomorrowland's look Theme Architecture.

Not so much because it is strongly themed, at least not in the way that the Enchanted Tiki Room or Plaza Inn are themed to a specific place and time, but because the architecture itself suggests themes - futurism, dynamism, the conquest of frontiers. This is Theme Architecture, not themed architecture.

What's interesting is that as Theme Architecture combines aspects of many other styles, many examples of those disparate styles are today treasured as classic contributions to world art. Buildings that were once considered ugly and torn down en mass are today restored and preserved. It took around twenty to thirty years - about two generations - which is right about the time when Disney began to tear out their Tomorrowlands.

Is it possible that Disney tore out their Tomorrowlands just on the threshold of when those ugly buildings were about to become respectable?

The Dangers of Specificity

What, then, is the essential component that causes visions of the future to date badly? Popular culture has been generating new ones every few years, and each new edition is more or less an extrapolation of current trends and varying degrees of pessimism. "The World of Tomorrow" has always been a rich ground for social critique, given the theoretical - if always remote - possibility of that future coming true. However, one of the defining traits of visions of the future is that they inevitably get it wrong. After all, if somebody actually accurately predicted the future, say, 70 years out, it probably wouldn't be a widely digested text, because we'd see it as more of a documentary than anything we define as "Sci-Fi".

Indeed, one of the most important appeals of "futures" past is that they got it wrong. We like to look back from our privileged vantage point and see what they got wrong, what they got right, and how the fantastic predictions and obsessions of a past generation are still relevant to us today. The fact that Tomorrowland is always becoming Yesterdayland is, in fact, absolutely essential to its appeal.

And once we say that, once we float the notion that most valuable future visions have been remembered despite presenting a dated version of the future, the scope of the "Tomorrowland Problem" starts to narrow exponentially. The question becomes now how to present a future that never dates, but how to present a vision of the future which dates gracefully.


Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland of 1971/75 was never meant to last forever - in fact, it was dated the second it opened. Rocket/Flight to the Moon, a cornerstone Disneyland E Ticket, became science fact while the Florida version was still a hole in the ground, and it happened only a few miles from where Disney was building, necessitating a quick swap-out in 1975, adding some whimsy and changing the destination to Mars. And while in the 50s the Rocket to the Moon was a fairly serious depiction of what space flight could be like, by the 70s Mission to Mars hostesses were already asking viewers to bring "their imaginations", offering hopeful apology for something already so obviously old fashioned. One wonders when Walt Disney would've pulled the plug on it had he lived even, say, four more years.

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It's that darn albatross again!

No age will ever be the past generation's future age, and an accurate prediction of any future is difficult to pull off, but one of the reasons Disney's "white" Tomorrowland ran dry so quickly is because it was presenting a nearby, realizable future, one promoting ideas and services from contemporary companies.

Furthermore, Disney's "Tomorrow" was weirdly narrow and specific - Carousel of Progress was a rotating furniture gallery tracing the increased automation of a dozen home furnishings like, say, ovens. Adventure Thru Inner Space, besides being a crazy head trip ride, ended up being as much about Monsanto chemicals, fabrics, and home wares. Circle-Vision only made sense when it was new, as an answer to things like Vista-Vision and Cinerama. If You Had Wings was an airline advertisement. Nobody knew just what America Sings was doing there. One of the reasons the EPCOT Center attractions dated much more slowly is because they were big picture dialogs - not about what new high-strain fiber Monsanto was brewing up, but about the history of the whole of man's technological progress. Probably the only attraction ever put into Tomorrowland that never needs anything but aesthetic updating is Space Mountain, because the scale of its concept is so abstract - Space is Weird, and Fast.

Specificity has its advantages and disadvantages, although the disadvantages outweigh the advantages the longer the product is supposed to last. In the era when films, for example, were supposed to enter and leave theaters in a year or two, then specificity could be a virtue - "torn from the headlines" tales of war feats, criminals, and social concerns were important selling points of many movies. Theme park installations, a sort of mutation of cinema, were sort of an early version of home video... the product would be preserved so long as people paid to see it. Whereas films were expected back then to retain their value for a relatively short span of time, theme park attractions can and have been running for going on three generations, assuming that their themes and ideas are universal enough to seem ever-new.

For a comparable example, look at Destination Moon, a film from 1950. Today, Destination Moon is almost completely obscure, although Tomorrowland fans should proceed directly to it - lavishly produced and one of the most expensive independent films of its era, Destination Moon was, for 1950 audiences, an epochal film which opened the flood gates for screen Sci-Fi. Producer George Pal would go on to make such pivotal genre pieces as When Worlds Collide, The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.

Although rights disputes kept Destination Moon off TV and video for generations, the popular appeal of it today is somewhat questionable anyway - Destination Moon is "hard" SF, without any space cruisers, wookies, or death rays. In fact, it's nearly a documentary, although one from an alternate dimension where the first space shot was made in 1950 and funded by industrialists - the government has to buy their technology to stay ahead of the Reds.

Besides the social context, however, Destination Moon is eerily similar to how it was actually done in 1969, and makes for gripping viewing. It seems to be the true inspiration for John Hench's 1955 Rocket to the Moon, for one, including the idea of making the actual count-down and lift off the dramatic center of the action. Disney's roughly similar Man in Space shows which provided the "official" televised foundation for Tomorrowland look like fairly obvious Destination Moon retreads in retrospect. And in fact, just like Destination Moon, the Man in Space shows were not available for generations - not due to rights issues this time, but because Disney probably correctly sensed that the commercial possibilities for them were limited. Both are extremely detailed, technically oriented discussions of theoretical space launches that we now know were only very close to what actually happened; that's not going to be an easy sell for audiences. Audiences kinda do need those spaceship battles and death rays to keep them interested sometimes.

Moreso than maybe any other film, Destination Moon ought to be the poster child for the Tomorrowland Problem: your product can be detailed, exciting, technically brilliant, and influential, but when you only just fall sort of predicting a realizable future, obscurity eventually follows. Audiences seem to want their Sci-Fi wrapped in weird places and technology, and being totally wrong in your "predictions" may just be the key to longevity instead of being mostly right.

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Daveland

Two Defining Examples

To further explore the dilemma, I'd like to pick on two widely seen, evergreen examples of Sci-Fi film making which influenced not only Tomorrowland and New Tomorrowland, but legions of films which came after.

There are, in my opinion, only about a half dozen key Sci-Fi films which permanently informed our vision of "The Future". Some of them forged new ground, others summed up the genre and set it on a new course. Two of the most influential - Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - are outside the realm of our discussion of the "Tomorrowland Problem" for obvious reasons - and Star Wars is self-consciously set in a fairy tale world anyway. The fact that there is now a Star Wars ride actually in Tomorrowland itself points more ironies than I care to elucidate.

Two other seminal films, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982) did have a measure of influence on both Old and New Tomorrowland, although that influence was largely visual. A discussion of their relative complexities and messages, especially 2001's totally abstract modern myth or the ethical limits of corporations and technology found in Blade Runner and echoed in Alien Encounter seems to demand more elaboration than the scope of this article permits. Both use a measure of real-world prediction to carry ideas of identity (personal or cosmic) in a film of primarily visual pleasure.

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Top: 2001: A Space Odyssey; Bottom: Express Monorail on Flickr

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Top: Space Mountain Bottom: 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Top: Blade Runner, Bottom: Tomorrowland 1994 (photo by Tom Bricker)

Instead I'd like to look at the two granddaddies of the Sci-Fi cinema, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and H.G. Wells' Things to Come (1936). Both films are visually spectacular and dramatically ludicrous cinematic monsters which were insanely costly in their day and huge box office train wrecks. Both films rose out of relatively poor reputations to become some of the most influential films ever made. But while one is one of the most recognizable and widely seen films of its time, the other has largely been forgotten by posterity, beloved by only a small legion of admirers. I believe that by looking at these two films in detail and as representatives of the problems inherent in depicting the future, we can nail down the basic challenges facing Tomorrowland.

Interestingly, you can't even make sense of Things to Come without Metropolis, since H.G. Wells explicitly intended Things to Come to be a refutation of Metropolis. Things to Come is exactly what it says on the box: it is Wells' predictions, as a historian and futurist, of what the world can expect in its next 100 years. Specifically, it's a very accurate depiction - almost a documentary - of an impending real-world disaster, which slowly veers off into speculation as Wells shows how the troubles of mankind can be eradicated by a coming new world order. Things to Come is basically Wells' blueprint of how to save the world, and the film is his how-to guide of how to rebuild following the global disaster.

I'm going to summarize Things to Come in its entirely here because most people have not seen it and an understanding of its overall message is important to have on hand. This isn't really a movie you can "spoiler" - the events are less happenings and more excuses for characters to pontificate - but even so, if you insist, the next three paragraphs can constitute "spoilers":

Things to Come opens in 1940 in Everytown (London). Everytown is on the brink of war with an overseas nation, a war which many predict will never come (sound familiar?). War beaks out on Christmas Eve and Everytown is shelled nearly to rubble. The war becomes a drawn out battle of attrition which lasts twenty years and reduces most of the Western World to desolation. Near the end of the war, the unidentified enemy unleashes a toxic gas which causes a plague - The Wandering Sickness - which decimates half the world's population. By 1966, mankind is back at a point analogous to the Dark Ages.

Following the end of the plague in 1966, feudal warlords take control of territories, determined to rebuild and continue hostilities. Unknown to them, in Basra (!) the surviving scientists and engineers from the old world are building airplanes to form Wings Over the World - a benevolent technocracy which removes these dictators with the harmless "Gas of Peace" and unites the world under a single flag. From there, Wings Over the World rebuilds civilization harnessing all of the earth's natural resources as a series of futuristic underground cities where war and want is eradicated.

By 2036, mankind is engaged in a fierce debate about the ethics of a moon launch, while a disgruntled artist rallies a mob to stop the manned space flight and demand a return to the old ways, where life was passionate and short. The launch is thwarted and the first living humans are shot out of a giant rifle (!) into space. The film ends with an impassioned discourse on the destiny of mankind to inherit the stars.

Okay, if you could read those paragraphs without laughing at several points you are a stronger willed person than I. Yet despite the absurdity of the film, both in summary and while watching it, the film is completely serious about the grave nature of these predictions. How the film ultimately loses modern audiences is that, by positioning itself as a straightforward prediction of events which we know very well did not happen, the film proves to be consistently, sometimes bizarrely wrong.

For example, in the terrifying and gripping opening sequences - the parts of the film which do seem spookily prescient, almost a documentary of the near future - a great deal of debate occurs about the role of war on technological progress, a concern that Wells, the great pacifist that he is, places no stock in - he introduces a buffoon who continually reassures us that there will be no war, and whose rejection by the main character is a salient dramatic point. This blustering comic character does bring up the idea that wars can be a start to great technological advancement, which the noble main character immediately rejects - this same character will soon go on to become part of Wings Over the World and rebuild society. Only the characters who take Wells' position are depicted as being remotely sensible.

From our perspective, we know that World War II, in fact, was a spur to technological progress, and that these military projects eventually gave rise to the Information Age, which most futurists never saw coming. We know that the war did not last twenty years and that the immediate fallout was the Cold War and the space race, which put man on the moon some seventy years ahead of Wells' predictions. Space Race technology fueled innovations in home furnishings, food, drink, clothes, communications technology, the computer processor and that very same technology that put men on the moon was used by Walt Disney to make tiki birds sing and flowers croon.

Much of the unintentionally comic aspect of Things to Come rises out of the gap between the film's urgent messages of warning and our own knowledge of what did actually occur. A portentous title card looms out of the rubble of Everytown: 1966, and as the film fades to the last vestiges of humanity scrambling through the wasteland, we smile and imagine teenagers listening to Revolver in their bedrooms.

Despite this, H. G. Wells' faith in humanitarianism shines through every frame of the film, making Things to Come simultaneously absurd and exhilarating, reassuring us even as it depicts the total destruction of our way of life. This makes it prime Tomorrowland material, even if Wells was a genuine futurist while Walt Disney was more of a industrial optimist: Wells wants to tear down all national and personal distinctions while Disney believes in the power of capitalism to achieve a future utopia. Interestingly, they seem to arrive at the same place, with Wells' Everytown of 1936 bearing more than a few passing resemblances to Walt Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. There are even moving sidewalks which remind us inevitably of Peoplemovers. And while Disney's estimation of the need to start fresh is less extreme than Wells' wiping clean of the slate, the idea of staking out virgin land in the swamps of Florida is not too different, in the end, that Wells' escape via international disaster.

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Things to Come, 1936

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Walt Disney's EPCOT, 1966

In fact, if Things to Come is unwarrantably but understandably obscure today, it may have more to do with the fact that the film's constant emphasis on its seriousness and specificity makes it seem like a fantasy to modern audiences even while its rhetoric and warning insists that it is not and thus creates an unbridgeable gap: What is the point, we ask? Audiences generally follow the film through its Christmas Eve, wartime and plaque scenes - The Wandering Sickness sequence looks like a primitive precursor to our modern zombie movies - but start to tune out once Wings Over the World, who strike us today as nothing but fancy Nazis, assume control of man's fate.

If it plays best as a total Buck Rogers fantasy, then the immediacy of Wells' message is lost. Once we lose Wells' message and think of Things to Come as being set "once upon a time" instead of "happening at your house tomorrow", the effect is diluted. Despite a fantastic new edition of the film by the Criterion Collection, Things to Come is likely to remain a remote and faintly ridiculous cult item, a warning from the past of a future that did not come anywhere close to reality.

In contrast, let's look at Fritz Lang's Metropolis, perhaps the most famous and accessible of all films made in the silent era. Metropolis tells a story set in a gigantic city of skyscrapers where the rich idle aimlessly in arenas and gardens of light while the poor labor below in an underground city where they slave on dangerous machinery. The son of the god-like master of Metropolis falls in love with a Virgin Mary-like Maria who pleads the workers to peacefully wait for a "mediator" to bring the city together. Discovering this, the master of Metropolis goes to a mad scientist who has created a humanoid robot. They agree to kidnap the saintly Maria and disguise the robot as her. The false Maria incites the workers to riot, and they attack and destroy the machinery of Metropolis, inciting a biblical apocalypse. In the end, order is restored and the son of the master of Metropolis steps forward to be the mediator between management and labor.

First, you probably noticed how much simpler that story is, despite Metropolis being a full hour longer than the longest available print of Things to Come. What you may not have noticed is that Metropolis is not set in the future. Ironically, despite being one of the most influential works of science fiction of the 20th century, Metropolis isn't so much about the future as it is about modernity in general, and Germany of the 1920s in particular. The film is an allegory for contemporary society, and indeed Germany in the 1920s actually was spiraling into a real life apocalypse. This is why Lang and his team of designers don't include many key elements of the visual lexicon of science fiction, like crazy vehicles - the cars and planes of Metropolis look like cars of the era. The clothes look like 1920s fashions instead of jumpsuits or Things to Come's weird toga-robes. Yet weirdly this "fashions of 1927" effect also enshrines Metropolis in its own timeless look: the fashions look just universal enough to belong to anytime in a way that "futuristic clothes" in many SF films only yank us out of the period.

But really, do we need to look any further than the very first page of the novelization of Metropolis, written by screenwriter (and Mrs. Lang) Thea Von Harbou?


So far as I know, the first author to propose seeing Metropolis as an allegory rather than as a Science Fiction film was Tom Gunning in his book "Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity", and when we take this tactic, a number of questions which otherwise seem unanswerable begin to fall into place. For example, the lack of traditional SF trappings beyond the robot: Metropolis' robot may have inspired C-3PO, but it has only a few minutes onscreen before it is turned into the "false Maria". Similarly, the film's overall structure counterpoints very sleek, modern visions with very ancient ones - catacombs, the Tower of Babel, the Moloch god of sacrifice (Von Harbou seems to have lifted this from Paradise Lost), a Grimm's fairy tale cottage, a church, the Biblical apocalypse itself. Metropolis combines and codifies all of the impulses of its day into one meta-text of modernity, everything from abstract sculpture to Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower.

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The Einstein Tower, Potsdam

Despite its numerous chases, explosions, and special effects, its message seems to be no more complex than this poster, which could be seen everywhere around Berlin in the 1920s:

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"Berlin, stop and think! You are dancing with death!"

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Metropolis, 1927: The dance of death

The poster's imagery of a young woman and a bare skeleton is even closely repeated in the film's famous catacombs sequence.

This, then, is the basic root of the bulk of the complaints the film has raised over the years, including by H.G. Wells, who took offense to its ludicrous action-adventure pulp. Wells was convinced that audiences would leave the theater insulted that such a wildly improbably version of the future was being presented -- but then of course depicting any future was never Lang's goal.

And here's the kicker, the big joke: we are a lot closer to Lang's future than Wells'. While Things to Come may evoke unintentional laughter, Metropolis brings shivers of recognition. We do live in a world sharply defined between haves and have-nots, of riots and organized protest. Our lives are governed by technology and we are being replaced by our creation. Our cities don't look like the organized, air conditioned, plastic Everytown of 2036, but like Lang's modernistic hellscape of concrete, glass, traffic jams and elevated highways. And despite what we may like to pretend, those old impulses and that old religion keeps bubbling up through the cracks of civility like the destruction of the workers' barracks. We all live in Metropolis today, and this is why this film, nearly ninety years old, still obsesses and enthralls audiences to this day. Wells was blinded by his belief in his infallibility and missed the mark almost totally; Lang just wanted to make a movie about robots and invented a crazy fantasy to justify it, but he correctly read the course. This is why Metropolis is, paradoxically, both much more dated and much more relevant than the somewhat comparable Things to Come.

It's also why 2001: A Space Odyssey seems ever relevant. Kubrick and Clarke didn't correctly predict everything - their 2001 depends on the everlasting continuation of the Cold War - but in the end, their monolith is a vision that never ages, because it's nothing but a black board, a visual placeholder for something unfathomable. Similarly, Lang's Metropolis looks like nothing else so it doesn't date. Both films deal with abstract ideas more than they do with the practical possibilities of, say, inventing new textiles or determine what a 2036 airplane would look like.


Because here's the key lesson: all the great movies set in the future aren't about the future at all. This is the Big Point that Tomorrowland keeps missing. Ideas, fashions, cool shapes, colors, all of those variables change, and even ugly buildings and politicians can, one day, become respectable. But all great Sci-Fi and any great Tomorrowland must be built on thematic concerns, not visual concerns. We can keep painting the buildings different shades to match the fashion of the moment, but if the basic buildings underneath that paint don't express something universal, the problem will just keep on renewing itself, like a mobius strip.

Humans don't really change all that much, and this is what the best SF material understands. We are not the world we create. This is why the most dated SF material isn't dated because it fails to invent a crazy enough world, but because it is based on an outdated view of society. A truly timeless Tomorrowland needs to address everlasting human concerns.

What Tomorrowland should really be about is people, and the problems we face as people. This is why so many of EPCOT Center attractions (the ones WDI closed in so much haste) still seem so far ahead of us while Tomorrowland always seems so far behind us. More than any other area of the "castle" style theme parks, Tomorrowland, at its core, doesn't need to be about predicting "the future" so much as the timeless and tireless human struggle. The whole "future" thing is just a shopworn literary conceit - it allows us to imagine ourselves out of the narrow space of our bodies, this theme park, our lives, and allows us to imagine ourselves as beings of the infinite. We can take a God's-Eye-View on our progress as a race.

That's why the "Theme Architecture" works so well. In a theme park which depicts diverse locations and styles, the "Tomorrowland look" is a loophole that allows us to pass easily into abstraction. It's not a British colonial boathouse, an American wild west saloon, or a medieval European village; Theme Architecture is line in motion, architecture as vision. It should challenge us to think outside of the boxes in which we place ourselves. And Tomorrowland, and Space Mountain, like any church, is white, and covered in spires, all of them pointing up.


To heaven? Or beyond the infinite? What is our destiny?

 Article updatedSeptember 12, 2013 with additional information about Jack Olsen.

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"Savor fresh seafood treasures and frozen Strawberry Margaritas in this nautical oyster bar surrounded by Buena Vista Lagoon. Open at 11 am."

Things come and go at Walt Disney World - always have, always will. And as we speak Walt Disney World is moving forward with its rebuilding of their "Downtown Disney" area into something called Disney Springs, a significant thing has happened, and it is the sort of thing which runs the risk of passing us by quietly. In Disney circles, the unloved are forgotten quickly. While future generations have mountains of material to remember Horizons by, just try to find material on the Fantasyland show where guests danced the "macarena".

Although the intent has never been to present Passport to Dreams as a sort of obituary column for early Walt Disney World, just as the removal of Snow White's Scary Adventure last year prompted a passing notice, here we must pause to give due consideration to an early feature of Another Magic Corner of the World, and the significance of its removal is very much likely to be overlooked. Cap'n Jack's Restaurant, not much loved in the world, has closed. But it wasn't always that way.

The Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village is but a fading memory by now, having been thoroughly disassembled by waves of refurbishments in the 1990s and 2000s - curtailed, re-arranged, cut up, truncated, and scattered. Through it all, the unassuming Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar has remained remarkably intact, even while formidable and lauded giants of the Village fell all around it: the Village Restaurant, Gourmet Pantry, Christmas Chalet, and Character Shop are all now gone. Even the once formidable Chef Mickey's failed to make waves on this little dockside dinette when it departed for the Contemporary in 1996, opening up its former space for rubber elephants and silk plants. Cap'n Jack's endured as decade after decade passed, and it nearly made it across the forty-year mark as the last remaining Disney-owned restaurant in the Village. That is, naturally, what doomed it. Disney, in their new "Disney Springs" model, wishes to act more as a benevolent landlord and less as a participant, and Cap'n Jack's is being razed to make way for a new walkway spanning the Village Lagoon. That, as they say, is progress.

Yet who could've imagined, in 1975, that Cap'n Jack's of all things would one day be the last vestige of a bygone era? Anyone betting on such a proposition surely would've chosen The Village Lounge, Gourmet Pantry, Village Spirits, almost anything that opened in those heady early years. It was an era when Disney wanted to do things themselves - and they often did. A movie studio has no business building submarines, operating hotels, or selling antiques, but Disney did all of that - in house, and with the flair of their showbusiness roots. And so they decided to operate an oyster bar, and they were so good at it that they opened another - Cococino Cove, at the Contemporary, followed in 1977. But we are getting ahead of our story.


In 1975, the Shopping Village was intended to be Disney's stepstone into a larger world not confined inside a railroad. Lake Buena Vista was intended to grow into a community of townhouses, condominums, and timeshare communities complete with a downtown that would appeal to locals and tourists alike and a mass transit hub linking Walt Disney World into planned train routes from Tampa up to Daytona Beach. The Village was intended to draw as much local as tourism money.

To this end Disney built the highest of high end shopping plazas smack in the middle of a city which ten years ago could hardly qualify as a cow town. Early shops such as Carolyn's Couture and Miss Merrily's Madness were serious, top line clothing boutiques selling custom clothes of the kind then only seen in New York and Los Angeles. Gourmet Pantry was selling dry-aged beef decades before anyone in Orlando had ever heard of Wagyu.  Village Spirits offered wines and wine tastings which constituted an entire in-house education for those ready for it. In a very real way, Disney brought the Orlando food culture forward twenty years in five, and the keystone of that effort was the smart, stylish, and adult Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village. Whatever high-end food can now be found in and around Orlando has a distant antecedent at Disney.

Cap'n Jack's was one of two Village establishments open until the wee hours, and both it and the Village Chummery were within spitting distance of each other (and the parking lot and boat dock) to make containing late-night crowds more manageable. Cap'n Jack's was in size and layout essentially a tavern and the stylish Chummery, adjoining the Village Restaurant, a lounge masquerading as a living room full of overstuffed chairs. To ensure drawing power to the new Shopping Village, Disney relocated their popular Saltwater Express group from the Polynesian to the Chummery, and these two establishments, along with the Giraffe Discotheque across the street in the nearby Royal Plaza Hotel, represented practically all of Orlando's nascent nightlight scene.

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Giraffe Discothèque at the Royal Plaza - early Orlando nightlife

In advance of the opening of the Village, John Rutherford wrote for Orlando-land Magazine about Cap'n Jack's and its adjoining beach wear shop in November of 1974:

"Stop by Windjammer Mercantile for every concievable style, color, and size bathing suit. [Carolyn Harris, women's wear buyer] said that the swimsuit industry will each week have a different manufactuer at the Windjammer modeling its products. The models, gentlemen, will parade along the dock that leads to Captain Jack's Oyster Bar. [..] Captain Jack's, with its steamed clams and oysters-on-the-halfshell offerings should prove to be a big hit since its being built right out on the water."

What finally opened in 1975 was a three-part structure extending out into the newly created Village Lagoon. The front two sections - a wide glass-walled showroom and a narrower hallway behind it lined with a nautical porch (for modeling!) on either side - was what opened as the Windjammer Dock Shop, with a sort of informal spill-over area for lounging between the shop and Oyster Bar. The hexagonal Cap'n Jack's sat out on the end, with a six-sided bar and seats along the windows.

Patrons to the south side enjoyed a view of the Village Marina, heavy on aged woods and amber craftwork lanterns, and those to the north had a view of the Lake Buena Vista townhouses and the comings and goings of electric Flote Boats headed to and from the Lake Buena Vista Club at the Cruise Dock. In those early years, Cap'n Jack's directly faced nothing but a sea of natural Florida cypress and scrub across the water of the lagoon.


Appropriately for its location, the name of the establishment paid tribute to Jack Olsen, who ran Disneyland's Merchandise department from 1964 to 1970. An avid sailor, Olsen is the one who established the pattern which Disney theme park merchandise maintained until the 1990s - unique products, store as show, and  limited Mickey merchandise. It is likely Olsen who contributed to such unique shopping locations as Olde World Antiques in Liberty Square and it is his demands on his department which made the Shopping Village as unique as it was. Olsen retired from Walt Disney World in 1977.

In just a few months, Lake Buena Vista Village News, a sort a combination newsletter and map, proudly announced what would come to be Cap'n Jack's most famous specialty:

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"Strawberry Margaritas Make Their Eastern Debut

An exciting new house drink has been introduced at Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar and the Village Chummery. It's called a strawberry margarita and it's made from the only Valido Fresa (Strawberry Tequila) this side of the Rockies.

Original tequila is the distillate from the sap of a Century Plant - a sort of cactus resembling a "pregnant" pineapple. It's found all over the Mexican desert surrounding the town of Tequila. Strawberry Tequila, however, is found only in two locations - California, and the Village Spirits.

Enjoy a unique Strawberry Margarita at Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar, then try your hand at preparing one yourself. Just secure a bottle of Valido Fresa from the Village Spirits and follow this recipe: mix the Strawberry Tequila, Triple Sec, regular tequila, and sweetened lemon and lime in a frosted 12 ounce wine glass. Coat the rim lightly with salt and garnish with lemon wedges. Ole! In no time at all, you'll have become the most popular bartender around!"

The unbeatable combo of Saltwater Express and strawberry margaritas, however, may have been too potent: within a few weeks, the popular folk combo was back at the Polynesian Village. After several months of Disney-provided entertainment, The Chummery was rechristened the Village Lounge and began its long-running series of rotating jazz performances by December 1975. These jazz sets by famous artists became a major draw, to the extent that music and jazz enthusiasts from college campuses as far flung as University of Florida began filling up the Lounge on weekends, leading Disney to institute a cover charge.

 Cap'n Jack's potent mixed drinks and late hours and Jazz at the Village Lounge supported each other happily for many years, making the east side of Lake Buena Vista the only happening night spot inside Disney's domain beyond the walls of the Top of the World. By the late 70s, Church Street Station in Orlando was absorbing most of the younger clientele just looking for a good time, and things were settling down in Lake Buena Vista. The Empress Lilly Riverboat restaurant went up in 1977, forever altering the view from inside Jack's, and the Shopping Village was re-named the Walt Disney World Village at this time. Steve Birnbaum writes about Cap'n Jack's in his original 1982 Walt Disney World guide:

"The menu at this water-side spot is so full of good things - seafood marinara, stuffed clams, ceviche (marinated raw fish), crab claws, clams and oysters and the half shell, and delicious smoked kingfish with guacamole - that it's as terrific for a light lunch or dinner as it is for a snack, even though the place is nominally a bar. Cap'n Jack's is a terrific place to be, especially in the later afternoon, as the sun streams through the narrow-slated blinds and glints on the polished tables and the copper above the bar. And the house's special frozen strawberry margaritas - made with fresh fruit, strawberry tequila, and a couple other potent ingredients - are as tasty as they are beautiful. They're served in big balloon-shaped goblets, with a slice of lime astraddle the rim: tart, slightly fruity, and altogether delightful."

The first shock to the system which should've killed off Cap'n Jack's (but didn't) was the removal of the Village Restaurant in 1989. Without a lifeline of jazz enthusiasts to keep this part of the World humming, the late nights at Jack's fell by the wayside. The energy had shifted east to the new Pleasure Island nightspot, and since management had decreed that Pleasure Island was the new "adult" hotspot, the Village changed its image to better accomodate children and families.

Heidelberger's Deli became The All American Sandwich Shop, The Verandah Restaurant became Minnie Mia's Pizzeria (can't make this stuff up...), and the Village Lounge was now the waiting area for Chef Mickey's, showing cartoons where jazz trombonists once filled houses.

At this time, Cap'n Jack's was expanded and the transition space between the Dock Shop and the Oyster Bar became more seating space. A proper kitchen was added at this time as well, allowing Jack to serve full meals instead of just mixed drinks and some simple seafood dishes. This was accomplished by expanding out onto what was once the dock-themed porches to the north and south, enclosing this space with glass windows, unfortunately giving the building a lumpy appearance not present in the original, sleek and symmetrical design. The former modeling promenade was divided between seating and the new kitchen.

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1993 menu

Still, Cap'n Jack rolled on for another seven years, until the second shock that should've killed it off came around.

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The former Dock Shop / waiting room

In 1995 and 1996 as part of the same project which eventually gave us the West Side, Disney leveled the original Pottery/Christmas Chalet complex to the east side of the Village Lagoon and built World of Disney on that spot. At the same time they leased out both the Village Restaurant and Empress Lilly to outside tenants, moving Chef Mickey's to the Contemporary Resort and turning it into a buffet. Now Cap'n Jack's nearest neighbor was a smoking volcano, and the beautiful Empress Lilly restaurant was painted stark grey and became the rambling Fulton's Crab House. At this time Cap'n Jack's was given a blue/white paint scheme to further an ostensible "New England" theme. By early 1996, the Windjammer Dock Shop was gone for good and its former location had become the waiting area for Jack's. Once World of Disney was open all of the Village's original wood and earth tones had been painted over with bright colors, the Captain's Tower reflection pond was filled in with a train ride for toddlers, and Lego characters popped out of the Lagoon where once willows gently waved above the water. Lake Buena Vista was a memory, and Cap'n Jack's was an anachronism.

But it continued along for nearly another twenty years without anybody paying much attention to it. The constant expansion from what was once just a bar into a full family restaurant certainly impliessome degree of success, but Cap'n Jack's remained for years one of the easiest eateries at Walt Disney World to get seated at. At some point in the last fifteen years it was renamed Cap'n Jack's Restaurant, and Jack himself was redrawn to look a bit trimmer and friendlier, but the years moved very slowly by. The Village Marketplace was a busy place, and Cap'n Jack's was not.

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Reception area, looking into the former modeling promenade space.

Still, it endured. It endured the rocky mid-2000s, when everyone seemed sure it was due to receive a Pirates of the Caribbean overlay to cash in on a coincidentally named certain other Jack. It did not. Since Disney seems ever willing to invest in quick cash-grab tie ins, the fact that this did not happen is perhaps a red flag instead of something to be celebrated.

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The enclosed porch / expanded seating area.

I had exactly one experience inside Cap'n Jack's - in 2005. My mother and I were fatigued from an entire day of Downtown Disney, and we wandered into Jack's in desperate need of nothing but a seat and something to eat, and Jack's was the only option available. It was one of those particuarly nasty overcast kind of Florida days, where the heat just seems to stick to your entire body. The meal was entirely unmemorable. I remember it started to rain while we were inside, and that we were seated along the back wall, and even with most of the restaurant empty the place seemed far too poorly laid out. Not being a seafood person, I probably ordered a steak, although I can hardly remember anything about it except finding the entire experience unpleasant. It wasn't until a few years later that I began to research the Walt Disney World Village / Marketplace and found out that Jack's had any history at all.

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The original Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar, almost entirely untouched.

Through most of the 2000s, Jack was in the doldrums. The restaurant's reputation was extremely poor, and the few people who wandered in hardly seem to have been able to describe anything memorable about it at all. The announcement that it was set to be demolished to make way for a new walkway, official as of only a few months ago, then hardly ranks as a surprise.


But in another way it's a shame, and not just because the food is reported to have improved in the last few years, per evidence presented in this 2013 review and photos on Disney Food Blog. It's because there's nothing especially broken about the location, idea or size of Cap'n Jack's - Disney just tried to make it into something it was not, which was a sort of in-house Red Lobster. There still is a market for good, fresh seafood in an intimate setting, but Jack's was situated out on a pier trying to sell meals to families with kids who would rather eat at Rainforest Cafe. Cap'n Jack's could have gone in the opposite direction in the 2000s, away from the mass market it was jammed into in the late 80s, and towards one of exclusivity and uniqueness. In short, what it was doing back in the 70s to begin with.

In another sense, it's always sad to lose something of the past which somehow remained unblemished by modern trends for so very long. Practically everything about the place, from its profoundly unfashionable woods and brass lanterns - even Red Lobster has given those up - to the stained glass panels, unique name and art, and even those dusty silk plants in the corners speaks to the very last little pocket of Lake Buena Vista which survives in the loud and ugly Downtown Disney. Even if the space had to be emptied out and converted to some kind of store, there surely is more to be gained by retaining the basic structure in some capacity than simply tearing down the last little bit of history the place has left.

The preceding paragraph, of course, is little but spilled bandwidth. History has passed Cap'n Jack's by. But that's the reason why it's worth writing this article, here, and now, not so much to protest against Jack going quietly into the night, but to point out that, on the cusp of Disney Springs bursting onto the scene, that the last little bit of WED Enterprises's little Village where the water once lapped calmly along little European chalets is finally being dismantled. To revel in the weirdness that it lasted this long at all, and to show that even something as friendless as Cap'n Jack's Oyster Bar is a signifier of an era when things were done differently.

It is, in short, a potent symbolic moment. Downtown Disney can't go home again.

Part One: Back from the West

It's become something of a tradition on this blog to wrap up the year around the holidays with what I call the Year End Report, an annual accounting and grading of the resort overall which gives me an opportunity to assess recent additions and do some old-fashioned proactive journalism. Longtime readers of my blog may have noticed that I missed my 2012 round up, and I'm probably going to miss the 2013 one too, which this entry will seek to account for. It may seem strange that, right on the doorstep of the opening of the first phase of Magic Kingdom's snazzy Fantasyland area, this blog should go silent. It wasn't really planned that way, you see, I haven't been in Florida.

I've now returned from a year in California and, yes, Disneyland. Over the years I've worn a number of hats as a Disney specialist: I began as a Walt Disney World tourist, became a Vacation Club member, followed by a Cast Member, and then an Annual Passholder. I've also been at Disneyland as a tourist, a day tripper, and now for the past year an Annual Passholder too. As a result I think I'm in a unique position to speak about Disneyland, as a transplanted East Coast kid and then transplanted back. This article will seek to discuss some of my experiences and thoughts about Disneyland from the other side of the coin. Theme parks change when you get to know them well. Magic Kingdom changed for me as a Cast Member and local, and Disneyland has changed too. No longer the exotic other, I've spent enough time in that park for the last year to think of it as a pleasant hangout and good friend and less as a destination or ideal.

So what is that "Disneyland Difference" you hear people (locals) extolling?  I'd like to take a few minutes to cover the things that stood out most vividly to me, and also some things I'd love to see Walt Disney World start emulating.

Perhaps the thing that struck me most impressively as a local was that I finally understood the one component of Disneyland's appeal to Southern California residents that cannot be appreciated as a tourist: the sense of difference. Los Angeles has been a big city for a long time. You can pull up photos of almost any neighborhood from 1940 on and see a lot of the things you see in LA today: tall buildings, wide streets, pollution. Inside Disneyland, you see almost entirely things you don't see elsewhere in the area: cute, tiny buildings. Structures made of wood, even logs. Spreading trees. Rivers with boats on them. Castles. This is the secret extra ingredient that Disneyland has that Walt Disney World does not. By the time you get into any theme park in Florida, you've already been brought so far down the rabbit hole of the fantasy world that it's not really a huge shock to step onto Main Street. But when you have to drive down I-5 in bottleneck traffic, park in a concrete bunker, then schlep across a mall from 1998, stepping onto that tiny, cute, intimate Main Street is like a shot in the arm. I'm at Disneyland. It makes it that much harder to leave at the end of the night, knowing that you'll be driving back through an urban hell scape to get to wherever home is. It makes the return that much more satisfying.

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Los Angeles in Walt's own time

Southern California contributes other things to Disneyland, too. One key item is the weather. Most of the time, when the sun sets in Florida the humidity will linger into the night. Although Magic Kingdom is very beautiful at night, there is less of a sense of the extreme difference that you get at Disneyland, and that difference is just plain due to the location.

Southern California tends to start her days cool, heat up quite a lot during the day, then cool off again at night. The effect of this on your day at Disneyland is seismic. Magic Kingdom's crowds tend to peak in the afternoon, then taper off to be fewer and fewer as the night wears on. At Disneyland, after a period of a few hours in the late afternoon, the heat subsides, the sun sets, the lights come on, and the entire park seems to regenerate into a new form. By 7 pm most of Magic Kingdom is seeing her last busy crowds for the day, but Disneyland is just getting started. Disneyland's Main Street, with its real gas lanterns, tiny size and intimate scale, or Fantasyland, with her cute architecture and close quarters, become at night maybe my favorite places on earth.

It seems like it shouldn't be a huge deal, and I bet many tourists never notice as they charge from attraction to attraction on their itinerary, but I really appreciated it on my casual visits.  It makes it possible to spend many, many hours inside the park - far beyond the two or three I'll spend inside a Walt Disney World park before needing to get out of the frying pan.

And once you've spent an entire day at Disneyland repeatedly, one thing that really makes a difference becomes the food. Although Epcot provides a rough equivalent in terms of quality, selection and availability, Disneyland simply kicks the rest of Walt Disney World around the block in this regard. As a Central Florida local, I've become accustomed to eating in a chain cafe like Panera before venturing into any of the WDW theme parks or, if I must eat at Walt Disney World, absconding to a resort. While the Florida property offers a great array of expensive sit-down meals, Disneyland is so full of good food that it's easier to list the places not to eat than the places to eat.

This is a source of some controversy, but I think there is just no reason for Walt Disney World to operate their food service the way they do except for laziness and cheapness. Even Columbia Harbor House has fallen into the doldrums and the rather decent Pecos Bill specialty burger from 2009 is hardly worth the price anymore, having shrunk to 60% of its size. WDW has effectively instituted a two-tier dining system, where the options inside a theme park involve generic American fare being readily available for a fairly predictable price, or, for a higher price point, going right up to table service. There is no middle ground. Disneyland has burger joints - The Hungry Bear, the Village Haus, and the Tomorrowland Terrace - but practically everywhere else offers above average food for good prices. Defenders have long claimed that WDW patrons won't buy anything else, but the ludicrous lines outside the new restaurant in Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland where not a burger may be found put the lie to all of that.

I find it impossible to believe that a place like, say, the Plaza Pavilion / Noodle Station boondoggle between Tomorrowland and Main Street couldn't attract a good crowd each day with a tasteful refurbishment, a new order station, and a menu of good sandwiches, salads, and soups. Or that the lovely Tortuga Tavern in Caribbean Plaza is incapable of drawing a crowd which is why it's closed. That's reductionist thinking, where the effect becomes the cause. Making better food at Walt Disney World takes being willing to open a place, think outside the box, and keep it open until it catches on.


Disneyland also uses real plates and silverware in many counter service locations. No, you're not eating off Spode - they're decent high-impact colorful plates and the silverware is that awkwardly heavy kind you're used to experiencing at a place like Golden Corral. Still, once you've gotten used to getting a nice fresh salad on a good solid plate with a real fork, paying the same price for Walt Disney World's version in a disposable bowl just feels like a cheap-out. Most Walt Disney World restaurants still have washing machines to service those plates and cups they no longer use, and again, this is the way it is supposed to be. One wonders how much waste Disney is creating by skimping on the reusable plates at take-out locations. Disneyland also still buses their tables - when you finish your meal, you just walk away, and Disney's attentive staff cleans them for you. It sounds small on paper, but isn't Disney supposed to be about the details?

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Lens Art by Tom Bricker: Food Stylist

Here's a story for you. In 2005 at Magic Kingdom, the long misbegotten Plaza Pavilion was reworked as the Tomorrowland Terrace Noodle Station. The Noodle Station provided fresh wok meals made to order. The most popular item was the Beef and Broccoli. Because the Beef and Broccoli was so popular, waits for the dish became very long. And because Magic Kingdom didn't budget to rework the Plaza Pavilion's antiquated service window corral arrangement, the wait was very congested and guests, naturally, complained.

What did Walt Disney World do? They removed the Beef and Broccoli from the menu. That was their solution. And so people stopped going to the Noodle Station and eventually it closed. That's the sort of thinking that leads to the poor food situation we have now. It's a true story.

The other thing that Disneyland has that Magic Kingdom is much, much poorer without is live music.

Yes, Magic Kingdom has a big stage show and some strolling entertainment groups - acts like the Banjo Brothers in Frontierland or the Dapper Dans are great - but Disneyland really uses live music like a battery to energize entire portions of their theme park. The jazz bands in New Orleans Square and the rock music in Tomorrowland really affect the entire area they're in and keep these areas of the theme park feeling lively late into the night. The secret here is - big surprise - live music attracts people, and people do things like go on rides and buy food. I bet Magic Kingdom might be surprised what, say, a Dixeland Bandstand in Frontierland or a drumming group in Adventureland may do to keep those areas of the park that seem to empty out after nightfall feeling active.

Some wags, especially those based at the Disney HQ in Burbank, regularly opine through online "sources" (mouthpieces) that the problem here is that good entertainment simply isn't available in poor out of the way Central Florida, but this is pure west coast elitism. Yes, it is true, Disneyland benefits from being located just south of the entertainment mecca of the country, but Florida isn't so bad off. Back in 1971, Disney imported talent en mass because there really was nothing in Central Florida, but how many generations ago was that? Tampa offers a lively rock and Latin music community, Orlando has some great clubs, and a full range of specialty groups. How much willful ignorance does it take to believe that the talent simply isn't out there?

This is really Disneyland's ace in the hole: great food that isn't hard to get and live music. These were priorities of the Walt Disney Company until the late 90s, when Eisner began to hack as much Entertainment Equity out of Magic Kingdom as the park could stand in the fallout of the disastrous opening of Animal Kingdom, which failed to grow attendance in any meaningful way. During the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of tourists who had been long time visitors stopped going, the new visitors didn't know what they were missing, and people forgot that it was ever like that at all. Disneyland never cut their entertainment, and the balance of the park still very much works. Again, this is the way it is supposed to be.

The rest of the Disneyland experience is really the icing. Yes, there are lots of locals, and yes, they are often annoying. Disneyland has a cult-like devotion of people who began going when they were still in the cradle, and these groups descend at night to engage in Rocky Horror-like rituals. Tomorrowland, for example, has a rotating stock of bands who alternate on weekends, and each band has its own non-overlapping fan base who will arrive to see their group perform. Then there are those who arrive just to see Fantasmic!, or World of Color. Recently, roving bands of "Social Clubs" - whose members dress like Orange County bikers with Disney patches - have been causing a stir  amongst Disneyland employees and visitors alike.

This is not new behavior. Sometime watch Disneyland After Dark and pay attention to the teenagers in the Carnation Gardens bandstand near the end - observe how they're all very much clearly engaging in a practiced ritual. The band leader even asks how many have been to the dance before, and it's most of the crowd. That was in 1962. As a East Coast native to whom a place like a Disney theme park never lost its hint of the exotic, I find this all very bizarre, but then I have my own rituals in each park, as do many repeat guests, including tourists. If they want to watch the band play and I want to take ride 762 on the Haunted Mansion, then the nice thing is that Disneyland has room for both of us.

The final thing that bears some repeating, although it's been very well covered online elsewhere, is the park across the street - Disney('s?) California Adventure. I am not one of those who ever felt that DCA was a bad park, although it was and remains very insubstantial compared to Disneyland - but then, of course, most things do. But Imagineering really did a number on the park, and the importance of the proximity of the Disney castle park and a really, really good second gate park is hard to overstate.

I'm not happy with everything in California Adventure, but the stuff that's good is really good. The Buena Vista Street entrance is the first time in a generation that Disney has totally nailed a park's "introductory statement" and it frankly makes the charming Hollywood and Sunset section of the Hollywood Studios in Florida look like amateur night. The Cathay Circle Restaurant at the end of the street is the best meal I've ever had inside a theme park, for what the opinion of someone who takes photos of theme park street lamps is worth. And DCA's marvelous "Golden State" section - the nice wooded part to the right - has really benefited from a conversion to a "vintage" theme.

Even with an inadequately themed boardwalk section, a Hollywood area that needs a lot of work and the much-touted new Cars area which, impressive as it is, does nothing for me, California Adventure is simply the best "Disney second gate" currently operating in the United States. Animal Kingdom is still unique and beautiful, but Epcot is starting to become a lost cause and the sum total of DCA tramples the Hollywood Studios theme park into dust. Ride for ride, meal for meal, and park for park, Disneyland's two parks offer as much to as Walt Disney World's four, and in many cases Disneyland simply does it better. And it's been a treat to be near that, if nothing else.

--

Part Two: Investigations in the Field ~ Anecdotes and Observations

That Darn Song
Now, I'm one of the very few who prefers to Florida Small World to the California original. Some of that may be simply nostalgia, but I do think the Florida show is tighter, more thoughtfully arranged, and reaches its main point very gracefully, whereas Disneyland's is just all over the place. However, it wasn't until I had been on Disneyland's version dozens of times that I realized how crucial one single, easy to overlook element of the Florida version is, and it has to do with that song.

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Clik here to view.I've never understood the cult of Small World hate generated by that song. Small World is one of my very favorite attractions of all, in either version, and I highly suspect anyone objecting to an attraction advocating for World Peace on the basis of being slightly sentimental. Still, I think I finally understand that the disgust seems to stem from the California version and has spread East via the internet and other media from there.

The California version of the ride is closely related to the 1964 World's Fair version, which was designed, constructed and installed in under a year - a remarkable feat in any era. The main difference between the two is the addition of Mary Blair's simply stupendous facade, clock tower, and topiary garden. The ride enters and exits under the clock tower, so two tunnels have been added to the start and end of the ride. These additions bring a thirteen minute boat ride nearer to the seventeen minute mark - about as long as Pirates of the Caribbean, and longer if there is a backup at the exit, which there nearly always is.

The 1964 model of the ride was also constructed shortly before the time MAPO began to standardize the construction of animated parts and figures. As a result many of the scenery details and animals in the ride are clearly made of papier-mache and glitter, which makes the later 1990s additions to the ride easier to spot as they obviously don't fit in. Of course, this points towards the accelerated timetable of the construction of the Disneyland version, but this also is indicative of a somewhat seat-of-your-pants approach which spills over into all areas - including the music.

My appreciation of the fact that the 1971 version of Small World only uses the English version of the song in its final room was sharpened by months of riding the Disneyland version, where it is used literally everywhere. You hear it in the entrance tunnel - a shortened version, which uses only the refrain. You hear it again in the somewhat extended England section. It's heard yet again in the African section, a full version is heard in the long tunnel between the South America and Pacific Islands room, then a mermaid gets a solo version immediately afterwards. Since 2009 there has then been an America room after that and that's all before the very extended finale room, then an exit tunnel where the shortened, refrain-only version is again used. By the time you're sitting in a backup in the exit tunnel you've been listening to the English version of the minute-long song for over half of your very long ride.

In many ways the 1971 ride is almost instrumental - there's no vocals at all in the Africa or Pacific Islands sections and the vocals are spotty in the rooms where they do appear. I think this makes the ride much easier to enjoy, along with a snappy pace - a mere eight minutes. It sacrifices the weird and wild texture and crazy invention of the 1966 ride, but I think somebody was paying attention in the interval between 1966 and 1971 - the Florida version's Africa room not only sounds the same way the World's Fair room sounded, but just as in the World's Fair ride, the last thing you see before exiting the final room of the ride is a Cowboy and Indian. In Florida it's a powerful moment - by the time you reach them you've forgotten all about the US and the fact that it doesn't have a representative room while China and Russia do. The significance of this makes more sense if we think of Small World as Disney's response to the Cold War, and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was still fresh in the mind of the world in 1964 and indeed in 1971.

In the 1966 Disneyland version, the Cowboy and Indian were restaged to appear midway through the Finale room, potentially weakening the ride's original message as a prayer of goodwill, which was possibly further weakened by the insertion of the America room in 2009. But the original point is still there in Florida, for those who want to see it, and now that we know that this staging was present in 1964 but altered in 1966, the 1971 version of this cowboy and Indian figure looks more like a restoration. I think it's significant that so much was changed between 1965 and 1971, and no matter which you prefer, it's worth looking at both as something that real thought was put into.

Oh yeah, and that song. Somebody clearly thought it was a little overdone long before the rise of the internet.



The Eye of Mara
Indiana Jones Adventure is one of those rides I could ride three times a day at Disneyland and not get sick of - the other two were Matterhorn and Pirates of the Caribbean, by the way. It's undoubtedly a bit oversold, especially to East Coast kids travelling West, but it's still terrific fun and, I think, very funny. I think of Indy as Tony Baxter's secret remake of Snow White's Scary Adventures - complete with an unstoppable adversary, a bunch of skeletons, a big rock that almost crushes you at the end, and a structure that's more frenzied and impressionistic than strictly literal.

A couple weeks ago there was a flap amongst the vocal AP culture about Indiana Jones Adventure. It related to changes introduced in the first scenes of the ride, where some snazzy new projection mapping was applied to the "Mara" idol at the start. This was greeted well; what caused the flap is that in their tinkering, WDI changed the "voice of Mara" sound effect.

Let me explain. The gag of the ride is that you, the rider, aren't supposed to look into the eyes of this big idol placed at the end of a hall, for reasons known only to designers of thrill rides and confusing South Asian deities. Originally, the fact that you had indeed broken this rule was signaled by a strobe light effect inside the eyes, followed by a stream of smoke emerging from them. This was never a terrific effect, but at least it was a visual indication of a key story point. As the years went on the effect became less and less reliable, and as a result the whole reason to send you bouncing around a dark ride became very difficult to comprehend.

In the 2013 version, the idol actually opens its eyes, changes its expression, then does some crazy projection stuff. In order to allow you to see this, the timing of the vehicles and the voice needed to be redone completely, to slow down and allow you to see the crazy projection stuff. As a result, the voice needed to be re-recorded anyway, which WDI did, while simultaneously trying to make better sense of the scene. The original Mara voice was the same low tone throughout, but the new version sounded welcoming at first, then angry when offended.

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"Please place a delicious cake in my hands"

While the new effect was praised, the voice was splattered with tomatoes. Forum posts filled with angry comments, online petitions were formed - all of the usual things which occur when the internet is offended. Surprisingly, within ten days Disneyland responded and removed the new Mara lines - not restoring the original lines, but with new versions which sound very similar, and the brief uproar ended.

Was all of this a tempest in a teapot? Absolutely. Did I agree with all of the complaints? Obviously not. Do I think Disneyland did the right thing? Absolutely. While the changes did not impact my enjoyment of the ride, for many they did, and they made their opinions known, at Disneyland actually responded.

This is the sort of thing Walt Disney World can learn from - the dissatisfied customer of today is not the customer of tomorrow, no matter how small the slight, and maybe it's time for the Florida management team to start sweating some small stuff, too. Now let's be clear here - small stuff is not a two billion dollar tech roll out, an abbreviated show, or a new special effect, but it can be an audio track, a sign, a prop, or a meaningful detail. Perhaps the removal of an inappropriate piece of music from Liberty Square or the restoration of some audio to the Tiki Room. Perhaps more. I know that as much as I lament the loss of Horizons from EPCOT, it's really the accumulation of small stuff that bothers me most of all in the end, inside the theme park - a courtyard that was walled off, a bad music choice in a certain area, or the poor replacement of a classic sign. This is the sort of easy, cheap stuff that Walt Disney World should be more attentive to - and especially those guardians of traditions, the Imagineers. More than anything, Walt Disney World can take some time to let us longtime fans know that they watch our opinions as closely as they do our wallets, and the "Mara voice" flap is one example of Disneyland's ability to excel in this arena.

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"Hello? A little assistance here??"

Send in the Gripes
Which is not to imply that Disneyland unilaterally does everything better than the kids back in Orlando. For example, not every attraction is in fantastic shape.

The Haunted Mansion is the poster child for this, looking increasingly grubby and worn out with each passing year. This is probably due to the popular Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay, which foists suspect decor on the venerable attraction for a quarter of a year. With two refurbishments a year scheduled, the Holiday overlay probably eats up a substantial portion of this facility's yearly budget, leaving the classic attraction with badly aligned projections, broken effects, and graveyard ghosts who are impossible to see through the gloom.

The Jungle Cruise was also subject to "improvements" in 2005 which were more in-name-only. The Disneyland version has always been a patched-together thing, and the 2005 effects were meant to bring a more obvious climax to the show in the form of a piranha attack. I've never been a big fan of the piranhas, but even worse was some meddling which changed the layout and staging of several scenes, especially the Sunken City, which came in the name of "naturalism". Marc Davis designed these scenes to make more visual sense than actual sense, but the new versions lack any sense of guiding the spectator's eyes and the river simply looks empty and poorly staged. Many of the animals along the Jungle river have painted and peeling paint, and a crocodile figure intended to be swatted at by a gorilla has now been placed to pop out of the water directly at the boats - leaving the gorilla to swat at a floating box with some plastic bananas on it. At least they have a nice queue?

And, yes, then there's the parking. If you are a tourist, Disneyland is supremely friendly to your needs - everything is right there within walking distance. If you are a local, you're going to be parking in either a big parking garage or lot and being bussed in. If you don't want to ride a bus or a tram, then it's a very long walk to or from the park - longer than one any tourist staying in any of the nearby hotels will ever make.

This is extended fallout from the late 90s, when Disneyland had a gang problem - no, a for real, actual gangs would protect their "territory" on either side of Tomorrowland or make out with their girlfriends behind Big Thunder Mountain problem. In those days the park sat just on the other side of a parking lot alongside Katella and an annual pass cost under $90. One of the big reasons why Disney arranged the "Disneyland Resort" expansion in the way that they did was to enclose Disneyland, California Adventure, and their three hotels in as much of a "box" as they could. If you arrive at Disneyland via I-5 north - ie from Los Angeles, Santa Monica, the San Fernando Valley, LAX or Bob Hope Airport - you're routed directly into a parking garage without ever seeing Anaheim. It's not quite Walt Disney World but it is pretty hermetic.

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Proof that somebody had to design it!

The other reason why parking is a problem is because Disney expected to be servicing mostly tourists arriving in a full car instead of Passholders arriving one at a time in individual cars back when all of this was being planned in the mid-90s. Compounding the problem, plans to demolish the Disneyland Hotel and what became the Paradise Pier Hotel and situate parking in a logical location were "value engineered" out of existence, placing the main parking structure in a location that never would have been chosen. Instead of fixing the long-term problematic layout that grew out of Disneyland's initial construction, the "Resort Area" highlighted these problems. No wonder long-time Annual Passholders were fond of remarking for over a decade that they preferred the parking lot to California Adventure.

And, yes, in the past few years Disneyland has begun to suffer from the very same malady that sucked so much of the character out of Walt Disney World in the late 90s. Main Street USA's west block was reconfigured, and the resulting shops are more "Cheesecake Factory" than "Disneyland". The historic Carnation Plaza Gardens were converted to sell Princess merchandise, albeit very beautifully. As part of California Adventure's simply superb Buena Vista Street area, WDI put together very evocative prop windows filled with vintage and historically significant items, which lasted mere weeks until somebody in management realized that this space can be used to sell yet more Disney stuff. Currently filled with circa-2010 potholders and glowering children mannequins, most of the Buena Vista Street windows are now indistinguishable from those found alongside World of Disney a few hundred feet away.

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Andy Castro

Most disheartening to me is what is happening in New Orleans Square, the true themed design heart of the park. Designed to house cute shops dotted along quiet sun splashed courtyards, most of the shops are now indistinguishable from those anywhere else in the park. Worse, they're all being squished together - the Royal Courtyard, my personal favorite, has been closed off to make it only accessible from inside the two adjoining shops, as if guests must be corralled directly towards registers instead of being trusted to browse through shops at their leisure. The area has been given over to Pirate merchandise sales and a tarp has been strung overhead, ruining the view of the upper reaches of this area - ie, making the whole reason to have a courtyard pointless. The Disney Gallery, previously one of the best spots in any theme park, has become the exclusive Dream Suite and is now off limits. The Gallery was exiled to Main Street, where it was simply not the same, and sales suffered. It's now been killed off by the displacement of the Disneyana shop, and relegated to a few square feet of wall space in the corner of the Mr. Lincoln lobby. Even the charming Gephetto Toy Shop in Fantasyland is now history.

Of course the internet is now roiling with debate over the impending loss of the Court des Anges at the heart of New Orleans Square, to be made over into an off-limits lobby for an expanded Club 33, the $7,000-a-year "Gentleman's Club" above the streets of New Orleans Square. This is especially bad news because the Court des Anges is literally the defining example of Disney's attention to detail, so well known and beloved that it has been the site of proposals, family photos, and rituals for decades. Disney themselves promoted it as an example of what sets them apart in the 1981 annual report (left). While I understand that Disneyland stands to make a great deal of money by expanding the Club, turning the entire upper section of New Orleans Square - the most defining feature of the defining section of the defining theme park of the world - into a warren of rooms for Millionaires-Only just reeks of bad faith.



Actually a Museum
Despite being located out there for over a year, I actually did very little writing about Disneyland in my year - just this one photo essay from last November. I took some videos and photos, but mostly I spent a long time getting on Disneyland's wavelength, absorbing it as totally as possible. Similar to my "Shrines of the Magic Kingdom" piece, I got very much in tune with certain areas that simply pop with everything great about theme parks.

There's the New Orleans Square Railroad Station and French Market, where one is directly between two of the greatest attractions ever built, and good food and live music is readily available. Simply sitting and watching the Mark Twain take her last trips of the night while the sun slips down behind the Haunted Mansion is my idea of paradise.

In California Adventure there's the Redwood Creek area, wedged between a raft ride and a hotel but which is replete with bubbling brooks, rushing waterfalls, lush pine and even a nature trail up through the mountain, where rafts crash into mine shafts where bats-eyes pierce the darkness and hot springs gently mist the water's surface. It's the one area of DCA that was perfect when the park was new, and although the park has a lot more great places today, it's still the one nearest to my heart.

Then there's the spot in Fantasyland where tea cups spin underneath Chinese lanterns, the Monorail glides by overhead, Matterhorn bobsleds splash into Alpine lakes and boats depart into Monstro's mouth all in the same little spot. John Hench spoke a lot about making theme parks look welcoming, active. Although elbow room is tight, sitting in this area for a minute or an hour is rewarding.

After years of not "getting it" the past year has made me a devoted Disneyland Hotel fan, and as sad as it was to lose Jack Wrather's remarkable Horseshoe Falls, the fact is that it's the only place in the world right now to find Trader Sam's, the best little thing Disney's done in forever. A potent combination of mixed drinks and themed design nirvana, especially for a former Jungle Cruise skipper like me, Sam's is an escape inside the escape - after an hour in its perpetual twilight where the sounds of vintage Jack Wagner music selections play, it's shocking to stumble outside and find oneself in 2013.

Then there's Snow White Grotto, especially at night, which is one of those places that's so perfect that I'm disappointed that Disney cloned it for Tokyo. And given my list above and article above that, I probably don't have to state my love of the Court des Anges, the Blue Bayou right along the water, or the top room inside the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough.


Even if a year was not long enough to extinguish my love of those places, I don't regret having returned because I do feel like I now know that little extra indescribable thing that Disneyland has and Walt Disney World lost: Disneyland is a museum.

Moreso than nearly any other theme park, Disneyland is replete with weird little details that simply are not repeatable. There's the petrified tree in Frontierland, which not even Walt knew what to make of. There's Lafitte's Anchor in New Orleans Square, which was there by the Golden Horseshoe in 1955 and still warns us not to believe everything we read. There's the replica of the Capitol building made by some guy in the 30s and the displays about vintage fire fighting below the apartment where Walt Disney slept. There's Snow White Grotto, an accident of history, and a bronzed Midget Autopia car below the first Disney monorail track. Everywhere you look there's eccentric touches, weird displays, educational plaques and reminders of the past. Everywhere you look, the attitudes of previous generations have left marks for us to gaze and ponder. Although Disney goes to great length to deny it, this is what museums are.

It's that chill of recognition that I've gotten standing at the foot of the Washington Monument or inside the Smithsonian, that electric spark between you and relevant history. It's very much alive at Disneyland. This is where Steve Martin watched Wally Boag and learned comic timing, right there is where Walt Disney cracked wise with the mayor of New Orleans, over there is where Marc Davis rode a mine train and changed theme design history by not liking it. Magic Kingdom is a darn good theme park, but Disneyland is a national treasure, and every student of themed design, or history, or urban planing, or entertainment art needs to see it, and absorb it, and experience it fully.

--

It was December 1971 and Orlando didn't know what hit them. After seven years of speculation, drama, finagling, doubting, and panic, Walt Disney World opened on October 1 as expected and nothing in Orlando was ever the same. The sleepy cow town atmosphere was invigorated by a land rush of colossal proportions.

Suddenly the hamlet of retirees, farmers and good old boys was invaded by strange creatures: tanned Westerners, young people, hotel men, land speculators and developers descended like wasps. Barefoot, long-haired hippies were spotted lounging in Eola Park. Residents decreed that the area around Walt Disney World would become a Sodom and Gomorrah, full of prostitutes and teen pregnancies. Orlando would have to build another jail just outside World Drive. The freeways would be clogged with cars.

What a surprise, then, when Walt Disney world opened with a wimper in October. In November and December there was a shakedown, with cars lined up on I-4, but within a few months Orlando had adjusted itself to the economic growth brought about by Disney. Offices and malls opened. Cheap hotels and gas stations sprung up like crab grass. But in reality, the "disaster zone" was contained because Walt Disney World was contained inside its land parcel.

Then, in 1975, almost ten years to the day after Walt Disney's famous press conference, Disney announced plans to move forward with something called E.P.C.O.T - and the cycle repeated itself. Only this time, Orlando was ready.

The October 28, 1982 Orlando Sentinel devoted four sections of its newspaper to EPCOT Center, the "EPCOT Keepsake Edition" sections. These included overviews of the park, articles about the ideas behind the park, and even some opinion sections - voicing the same opinions that are more or less voiced today.

It's all very nice, but what personally knocked me for a loop were the advertisements that filled this section - advertisements for local businesses, all full of ebullient praise for EPCOT Center. Florida businessmen weren't blind to the danger of Walt Disney World, but they gambled that it would be a victory for Orlando instead, and their predictions turned out to be true. And yet EPCOT Center's opening turned out to be the moment when Orlando ceased to be a Florida town with a theme park and Sea World and began to move towards being the tourist mecca it is today - drawing in crosstown rivals Universal Studios and all that came with them.

As a result it's interesting to see Orlando hailing EPCOT Center at a pivotal moment in the area's history - not quite yet the hospitality metropolis it is today, just shaking out of the Mom and Pop atmosphere of the 60s and 70s. A great deal of the well wishes from small businesses found within those pages were simple in nature, clearly using the new park as a tool to get the word out:


Originally WORZ, WDIZ changed to their current call sign in 1971 for the opening of Walt Disney World, playing an Easy Listening/Beautiful Music rotation, switching to Adult Rock by the late 70s. WDIZ can still be found on Orlando radio dials at FM 100.3 today.

Other advertisements were very classy:


Burdines was a Florida department store chain based in Miami. A subsidiary of Federated Department Stores since 1952, also the owners of Macy's and Bloomingdale's chain stores, every Burdines location was converted to a Macy's in 2005. Many Macy's are still identifiable as former Burdines locations due to the distinctive Burdines Florida motifs such as palm trees, gulls and sea shells.


This poignant ad is from Robinson's - yet another defunct Florida department store chain, this one was absorbed into Dillard's.


Tire World didn't put too much effort into theirs, and neither did Tokyo House. Tire World, Tokyo House, and Albertson's have all vanished from Orlando.


This full-page spectacular by SunBank almost counts as an operating participant ad. SunBank had operated a bank lobby on Main Street to the left of City Hall since 1977, had leased space in the first and only building in the Lake Buena Vista Office Complex, and still maintains a bank in what is now known as the SunTrust building across from Downtown Disney. This is the very same building where Walt Disney World officials like Dick Nunis maintained their offices. The building is remarkably intact even today - stop in and step back in time to do some banking sometime.


Mr. Dunderbak's was a chain of German Cafes of which a handful still remain dotted through the southeast. The Tampa and Daytona Beach versions still thrive as independent restaurants, and there may still be others in North Carolina and Alabama. The Tampa and Daytona versions are true time warps, and offer great food to boot, so please take any opportunity to support them.


A slightly bizarre pair of ads from Geary Distributing, and the second ad seems to have arrived seven years too early. And just who is Geary Distributing and Scan-Am Import-Export to salute EPCOT on behalf of entire nations, anyway??



Here's a fascinating one.

In 1982, Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola equally shared corporate soft drink ownership of Magic Kingdom - Coke sponsored the Tomorrowland Terrace and Pepsi sponsored the Country Bear Jamboree and Mile Long Bar in Frontierland. Most restaurants in Walt Disney World offered both soft drinks at this time.

Coca-Cola agreed to come onboard and sponsor the incredibly expensive American Adventure show with American Express, and as a result were granted sole soft drink dominion over EPCOT Center. Pepsi-Cola pulled out of Magic Kingdom later in the 80s, leaving Country Bear Jamboree sponsorless (the oval woodcut of Zeke, Big Al and Tennessee on the attraction marquee to this day was actually designed to cover up Pepsi-Cola's oval-shaped 80's corporate logo) and Coca-Cola reigning supreme over Walt Disney World, an arrangement which continues to this day.

Also in that issue of the Sentinel, many Orlando-area contractors who helped build EPCOT boasted of their accomplishments:


And finally, most enjoyably for EPCOT Center fans, many of the major corporate sponsors took out large newspaper space to promote their new shows and attractions:


Walt Disney World themselves quietly put out a single ad, much smaller than most of the others:


Disney's first International Fellowship program had not been as large of a success as they had hoped, and Disney had plundered every division hoping to get warm bodies to operate the World Showcase pavilions, whether they be ethnically appropriate, or not.

Ginger H., a longtime Walt Disney World Cast Member whom I spoke to, was pulled from It's A Small World in 1982 to operate El Rio del Tiempo - what she called the Mexico Boat Ride - when it was fast-tracked to be ready for opening day. She hated working the ride, and told me that she was in the habit of going into the Plaza de los Amigos gift shops, borrowing a sombrero and serape, and sitting at the Mexico Boat Ride control panel with her head down, apparently asleep. As each boat would roll past her out into the River of Time, she would unexpectedly raise her head and bark: "Don't drink the water!"

Happily for her, Ginger was transferred back to Magic Kingdom within the year. And Happy 31st Birthday, EPCOT Center.

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Fair Warning: Offer Probably Void

It's that eternal bit of Disneyland/Walt Disney World trivia that we can no longer escape. Everyone knows it by now. Even Steve Birnbaum put it in his earliest Official Guides, and it's given the unimaginative Walt Disney World tour guide slightly interesting material for lo these forty-two years: did you know that the stretching rooms in the Haunted Mansion go up at Walt Disney World and go down at Disneyland?

Yes. We know. Everybody knows. I'm sure children have this fact implanted in their brains at birth by now.

Where this factoid gains some life is when we inquire as to why the Stretch Room at the Haunted Mansion goes up instead of down at all, and most will readily respond: "oh, it's because of Florida's high water table!"

But I don't buy it.

Why? Well I'd first like to point out that Orlando, at the very center of the Florida peninsula, is in fact not at sea level. In fact, although Florida is indeed much nearer the water than many other parts of the country, Orlando sits a comfortable 90 feet above sea level.

Yeah, that isn't much, is it. Still don't share my skepticism? Well, let me then point out that the Magic Kingdom isn't built at ground level. There's those famous Utilidors underneath it, remember? The Utilidors are built at ground level, and walking around Magic Kingdom is very much like walking on the roof of a building. So that adds another fifteen feet, and even if the Haunted Mansion's lowest foundation is about level with the Utilidor, its facade and entrance is nowhere near ground level.

Not only that, but Magic Kingdom is actually built on multiple levels above ground level. As you walk up Main Street, there is actually an almost subliminal uphill slope before arriving at the Hub area. This makes Main Street seem longer from one end and shorter from the other, but the slope is so subtle I needed a level to show it:



Similarly, Liberty Square is entirely situated on a north-south incline, with the Haunted Mansion at the highest point and the Diamond Horseshoe at the lowest point. That's why you can get such an impressive picture of the Mansion from Frontierland:

Fantasyland is located on a plateau high above the rest of the park to get that welcoming forward sweep of the walkway to the castle that John Hench wanted. As the highest point in the park, this view allows us to directly contrast it with the lowest point in the park, which is the moat and Jungle Cruise. The height of this stonework wall is the vertical distance the park covers on pedestrian paths.



It's a Small World, Haunted Mansion's nearest neighbor, is actually buried a good ten feet underground, and below the water level is yet more concrete and earth nowhere near the original ground level. The gauge for the pedestrian level here is the bottom of the windows to the right:


To put it simply: the further south any one ride is at Magic Kingdom, the lower its elevation. The further north it is, the higher its elevation. In 1968, WED Enterprises placed three attractions on the very northern edge of the park: The Haunted Mansion, It's a Small World, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I do not believe that those choices were accidental.

So, you ask, so what? So that old "water table" thing is just a myth, so what?

Well, then why do the stretch rooms go up instead of down? Doesn't that still warrant an explanation? Think of it this way: the Haunted Mansion was, in 1971, still a relatively new attraction for Disney. They had just come off a ten year development cycle on it, and it had opened to a wild success at Disneyland. For Florida the plan was to make it bigger and better, but why would they bother to re-engineer the first major show scene? Wouldn't it make sense to simply replicate the original design, lift and all, especially since it was so successful and popular?

And don't get me wrong: it's an entirely different design. The Disneyland elevator room is a complex design like a telescope, where the rider car (the floor) pulls the walls down in three distinct stages. At Magic Kingdom, the whole thing is basically run on ropes and pulleys. Although it looks impressive on stage, the operation is actually fairly quaint. It's more like pottery making apparatus than a special effect.

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Disneyland Showtime: a model door for the WDW Mansion

And all of this was being done post-haste. The entirety of WED was deep into planning and building the Magic Kingdom by 1968, and the Haunted Mansion was "cloned" nearly immediately. Consider this: when you're watching Disneyland Showtime, the famous Disneyland episode where Kurt Russell takes us behind the scenes of the ride, what we see being constructed is the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion at WED in December of 1969 - the special aired in February 1970. In most photographs of the Magic Kingdom under construction, Haunted Mansion is the furthest along, and in fact reached the finish line first. She was ready to go.

Wouldn't the abbreviated schedule be an additional incentive to replicate the elevator? Was that ever the original plan?

Let me introduce you to the Haunted Mansion that was almost built.

The Importance of Style

Have you ever noticed that Disney likes to localize the Haunted Mansion in upstate New York, specifically in the Hudson River Valley and typifying whatever "Dutch Gothic" is? This is probably because this open, wooded region has deep Americana associations with Sleepy Hollow and the headless horseman, but the house itself really doesn't seem to visually reflect anything specifically New England or upstate New York. It's more Old World than Old Cider Barrel. I think the Hudson River Dutch Gothic name-drop began very early in the pre-planning for WDW and was simply never really weeded out.

Let's unpack this for a moment. For one thing, a Dutch colonial mansion would've necessitated an estate built in the early seventeenth century, a full two-hundred years ahead of the Gothic revival house we got. And since practically nothing of the original New Amsterdam settlement remains, I think we can disqualify anything specifically "Dutch" about Disney's intentions - it's just an evocative phrase, meant to summon up an old house in the oldest part of the country, the Hudson, which flows out to sea at the port now known as New York.

Because so little of the Dutch colonial effort of the 1600's remains today, you're not going to get very far if you go looking for specific Mansion connections. However, you can see real-world Dutch influences that have survived the years. Here's an early photo of the Fairbanks House in Massachussetts, which is from 1637 and is basically the oldest house in America. The Dutch influence can be seen on the right-hand wing:


Of course, Dutch Colonials are still built today. The most famous haunted house in America is one; I'm sure you'll recognize it:


Trying to chase down the Dutch connection is a fool's errand. We're simply in the wrong style and wrong period. And while I'll bite into Gothic Revival more fully a bit later, it's worth keeping that question mark about Disney's old phrase lurking in midair just long enough to suggest that, in our minds, I think we're meant to think of the Mansion as built, with its widow's walks, tower, and proximity to the Columbia Harbor House to be more of a grand seaside horror mansion in the Cat and the Canary tradition. Imagine it atop a rocky buff with the crashing waves of a midnight storm lashing the coast below.

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"Upstate New York, eh? Come inside for Buffalo Wings!"

Of course, Hudson River Valley could still work. Disney amusingly built a near-perfect replica of Sunnyside, the estate of Washington Irving, at the front of Liberty Square and called it Sleepy Hollow Refreshments, so somebody was doing their Hudson River Valley research in WED.

Roughly contemporary with the style, date, and location of the Haunted Mansion is this real-world derelict New York Mansion, Wyndcliffe, built in 1853:

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Urban Ghosts

I think it's fair to say that the Haunted Mansion as we have it isn't traceable to any one specific visual source - in the way that the Hall of Presidents is modeled on Indepedence Hall, for example - and is more of a fantasy creation.

Whereas this really is a Hudson River Valley mansion:


As far as I know this piece was not widely known as being a painting of the Haunted Mansion until 2003, when it was published in The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies by Jason Surrell. In that book Surrell seems to brush it off as an unrealized concept, but this concept actually came very very close to reality. And notice: there are guests gathering outside on the porch and being let in through a door in the facade, exactly like at Disneyland. This requires a house on a hill and an elevator.

Disney had foundations for the Mansion laid in 1969 - among the earliest work done on the Florida property, since it could be done at the same time as the start of the Utilidor entrance. In most construction photos of the Magic Kingdom, which is to say most photos published where there's something to look at, you can see the Haunted Mansion show building sitting there all set - except for the facade. In Florida they did the opposite of what was done in California - they built the ride first and the house last.

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Early 1969 - Haunted Mansion (nearest foundation) goes vertical with the Utilidor

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Mansion (upper left) getting nearly complete while the rest of the park is hollow boxes

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Facade finally goes up as the park rises.

Assuming that the interior show was ready to go out of WED in Glendale in the first few months of 1970, the interior "show finish" - animated props, set surfaces, ride track and all of that - would've been ready by mid 1970, a date which is supported by Tony Baxter's recollection that the Haunted Mansion was basically ready a full year ahead of schedule. Given this time frame, isn't it suspicious that they waited so long to build the facade?

Here's a late 60s colored elevation of the original Mansion facade, probably by Claude Coats, courtesy of Widen Your World. Although the theme park faithful will automatically know this, please keep in mind that this is a colored-in blueprint, not a piece of concept art:


Please expand that and note that there is a separate notation for the elevation of the unload area at the bottom right. As built, the WDW Mansion enters, loads, unloads and exits on the same elevation.

Okay, let's figure out what we are looking at here. We have a facade with two wings. On either side of the facade are porches that are probably waiting areas. Past the waiting areas we have shade structures that terminate in boxy square entryways, much like the one seen in the piece of concept art above. The curved shade structures and entryways would've housed ticket collection boxes and turnstiles, very much like the one that actually was built in 1971:

I'm somewhat hazy on how a double-sided operation would've worked here, because there's only one entry door - it's the green door on the left side. Still, the 1971 turnstile shelter and curved holding area are well designed, even if they're no longer used as intended: the holding area accommodates exactly 90 people, which is the idea load size for both the Foyer and Stretch Room. All the ticket takers had to do in 1971 was to fill the holding area, stop the line, allow the group to clear the holding pen, then fill it again.

There's a few other nice details about this 1968 facade. Notice the two cupolas on the roof - one for each Stretch Room. We can see the entrance columns for the "Haunted Mansion" plaques down in front and, one assumes, gate and fence, as well as a sloping front lawn leading up to the doors. In short, this would've been very much like the Disneyland Haunted Mansion's entry and queue, which was at the time these plans were drawn up being reworked to add additional queueing capacity. The overall visual tone, however, is very close to what was built - Dutch cornerstones, red brick, lots of stone, slate roof. There's just a few too many trellises on the roof for comfort, and those sharp spires on the entry ways look violent. Even more tellingly, every window is shuttered... this place is creepy. It's only slightly creepier than the Disneyland facade - about 10% on the sliding creepy scale - but enough to look seriously intimidating.

In case the concept art and the elevation weren't enough, here's a good view of it on a Magic Kingdom site schematic from March 1969, while the Show Building was already into vertical construction:


And two courtesy Widen Your World, from late 1969 and early 1970:



And then that's it. In early 1970, the trail simply stops. The earliest blueprint depicting the facade as it was built that I can find dates from March 1970. Some of the other Magic Kingdom blueprints continue to use this outdated layout into mid or late 1970. But that's it. By early 1970, Claude Coats had colored a new elevation for the Florida Haunted Mansion:


Examining the Layout

Okay, let's get detailed here. Looking at the 1968 elevation, we can identify the various pieces of operational infrastructure:


And, as we know, this is the layout for the Haunted Mansion facade area as built:


What's interesting is that when you get right down to it, the layout has not been altered at all. Try lining up both elevations to compare; how different is this, in reality?


I think what happened is that once Claude Coats knew he would have to re-design the facade to sit at the same level as the load area, he simply transposed the layout down. The second ticket and holding area would now be useless as well as in the way of the exit door, which would now sit at the same level as the entrance door, so he got rid of it.

The Florida Haunted Mansion facade is really a pretty ingenious case of form following function; in this case; the form was already determined by an aborted elevator configuration. The Florida facade is actually very tiny; only large enough to accommodate the stretch rooms. The Foyer area is disguised as a stone pedestal that the house sits on, and it's buried in dirt on two sides, further disguising its function. This construction photo, paired with the layout above, pretty clearly shows how the Mansion itself is really just a tiny wrap that conceals the empty space that the dual stretch rooms are hauled up into:


In fact, the biggest change is that the entrance door now faces west instead of south - it's in the exact same spot.

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DisneyFans.Com

What's interesting is that the placement of this door in a darkened antechamber next to the main foyer area shows just how little the layout was altered. Disneyland has always allowed a little bit of daylight into their foyer, although as far as I can tell the shade structure enclosing the porch around the door has always been there to mitigate it somewhat. This is not a problem because there are no special effects in Disneyland's foyer.

Florida seems to have always had the Aging Man effect intended for a fireplace between the two Stretch Rooms, and daylight would very much compromise the effect if the foyer were arranged similarly to Disneyland's. This goes double for a facade built up on a man made hill in the harsh Florida sun, facing south, where rays could easily enter in the afternoon. Walt Disney World's door ended up being buried between hills, facing west behind a stand of trees, making that short hallway somewhat unnecessary, but it remains to this day - a small echo of what was once intended.

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Awaiting guests on a rainy day - Martin/Warren video

  
Towards the Gothic

All of the preceding establishes that time was very much compressed in all of this. And although we thankfully do have a fairly complete idea of what Coats' creative process was in arriving at the final design for the Mansion, I feel that a key piece of evidence has been somewhat under-represented in Mansionalia circles, so it's time to take a good, long look at Decorative Art of Victoria's Era, by Frances Lichten, published in 1950 by Bonanza Books.


This book is not exactly a secret amongst Mansion fans - I've known about it for years. It was once part of the Imagineering research library. According to a post at JustinSpace.com, back in the 1980s David Mumford was the first researcher to notice the key role this book plays in the Haunted Mansion's development. You see, on page 105, we come across this exciting photo:

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Busted!

We now know the house to be the Shipley-Lydecker Mansion, now demolished, in Baltimore. Never reported are the additional wrought-iron details on the facing page, 104, which seem to have guided WED's choice of wrought iron back in 1963:


However I was slow in obtaining a copy of the book myself for many years. Figuring that the best of it would already be known, I was finally motivated to get my own copy - partially out of motivation to improve on the low quality scans of the book - in preparation for this article, only to find, as usual, that having the book in front of you changes things quite a bit.


Now, to be clear, there aren't many "smoking guns" to be found in this book, and nothing on the scale of that Shipley-Lydecker house photo, a completely unambiguous "gotcha!" moment. Still, after spending time with the book, I am firmly convinced it was a major reference guide for the design of the ride. Lichten gives clear explanations of the reasons why the Victorians lived the way they did, and follows up with copious illustrations, giving instructions on everything from furniture to chandeliers, wallpaper, and window hangings. There is an entire chapter on graveyards. Another section of the book carefully details the Victorian cross-stitch "motto", and Lichten's precise instructions on the floral border and type of frame are carefully followed for the famous "Tomb Sweet Tomb" sampler - since I don't know of any art for this particular detail, I'm inclined to believe it was inspired by Lichten's book.

And oh yes, on page 59, there is this:


This illustration appears as part of a chapter detailing the Victorian fascination with the medieval as derived from the poems and writing of Sir Walter Scott, especially Ivanhoe. Finding a parallel in the (then) modern fascination with Antebellum style and decor sparked by the success of the film Gone With the Wind (1939), Lichten traces the Victorian development of what we now call Gothic Revival and what it meant in its own day.

Now, call me picky if you like, but prior to obtaining this book, I considered the above only a prettylikely inspiration. With better detail now visible, it's easier to make a case for certain details of the Mansion... that chimney is darn close, as are the peaked roofs, gables, and even the Gothic cross on the central tower of the Mansion can be derived from this engraving.

But what a scanned image can't convey is what sold me on this being the clear, unambiguous source for the Florida Haunted Mansion, and that is the text surrounding it. As I studied the book I felt like I was there with Claude Coats back in 1970, becoming increasing convinced that this was the correct route to take.

This is the text that is directly above the illustration:

Despite the scarcity of good architects, the taste for the new fashion developed quickly in the United States, and by the 1830's there were many examples of the style. The Gothic was thought to be particularly well suited to the American countryside - a region characterized by the "wilder, romantic and more picturesque country where the hand of man has been only partially laid on the forest. This type of terrain," says A. J. Downing, the greatest American arbiter of architectural taste in the first half of the eighteenth century, "supplies the appropriate background for a style which sprang up among the rocks and fastness of Northern Europe." Mr. Downing's affection for the Gothic was responsible for innumerable example of the Old English cottage, and of residences of the Castellated style, as the domestic specimens imitative of castles were then called. Like mushrooms, the popped up on every hill in the more cultivated regions of the country, for country estates were then a fashionable indulgence, and the Gothic, the only style then considered appropriate for rural living.

In 1836, a traveler, describing his initial train ride on New Jersey's first railroad, indicates the early flowering of the taste: "Our ride to Philadelphia over the Camden and Amboy Railroad and up the beautiful Delaware was truly delightful, especially the latter. New and beautiful scenes continually opened to view - with fine country seats, built in imitation of Gothic castles, with towers and battlements standing amid a fine growth of trees of every kind..."

A few paragraphs later, Lichten may have inspired the Haunted Mansion's early landscape design, which included a stately rose garden, as well as the wrought iron terraces which cover the house and grounds:

As the nineteenth century moved into its sixth decade, the craze for the Victorian Gothic house must have reached its utmost in absurdity, for we find it dealt with by the writers of the day. James Russell Lowell accepted the challenge offered his pen by the sight of a ridiculous wooden castle, set on an unshaded, mathematically squared lawn patterned with flower-beds of equal geometric perfection.

[...]

Designers for [wrought iron] brought out patterns calculated to attract the eye of the romantically inclined. No longer need the owner of a new Gothic mansion enclose his velvety lawn with anything so commonplace as a white picket fence. Now he could purchase fanciful wrought iron traceries, as Gothic in detail, if not material,  as that of the most ornamental of ancient stone or wood carvings. As additional medieval garnish, the foundry men stood ready to supply porches and verandas patterned in formal Gothic trefoils or qua-trefoils, as well as garden pavilions - the latter affairs being frivolous counterfeits of the flamboyant traceries of a cathedral window. Over these lacy structures, the Victorian maidens coaxed vines to grow, to simulate the antique arbors of their sentimental reveries. And if the solemn English ivy, accustomed to a support of honest stone, refused to clamber over a deceitful edifice of iron, the light-minded native vines were found to be more accommodating and made quite as satisfactory if less poetically evocative green draperies.

In short, here was a great find - an architectural style not too far outside Liberty Square's era which blended old world and new (to better mix Liberty Square and Fantasyland) and which would harmonize with the high Victorian interior already designed. In short, practically everything about the exterior was inspired by pages 59-61 of Lichten's book. But if all of the above isn't enough, consider how Lichten ends her chapter on the Gothic:

"Many examples of the Victorian Gothic residence are extant, both in city and country districts: the substantial stone and stucco mansion as well as the wooden farmhouse and cottage, their eaves still supporting the remnants of the once-so-fashionable edging of wooden lace. Where the battlemented stucco castle stands deserted, once trim trees and shrubs crowd the jungle-thick, and push exploring fingers through broken windows of many-colored glass. In the dark of the moon, fog drifts about the ruined toy-like turrets. Morayama's or Arzelia's bower is given over entirely to bats and rubble, and the thrust of strong vines has pushed apart iron traceries.

In truth the decaying structure conveys to the present-day observer the same sense of horror and mystery that the medieval ruin conveyed to the popular mind. Lacking the patina which the mellowing touch of time and nature give to the ruins of the middle ages, the abandoned Victorian Gothic domicile, its shoddy fabric disintegrating before one's eyes, has today become the artistic and literary symbol of "the haunted house".

There's really only one alternate that exists between the abandonment of the 1968 Federalist facade with its elevators and the arrival at the 1970 Gothic facade. It's very close to the final product, perhaps indicating that the path here was set right away, with a buried foyer, conservatory and level exit hall:

I think this is likely a half-measure, although I do like the steps up to the facade from ground level. By early 1970 the Gothic Haunted Mansion with the raising stretch rooms was being assembled on-site in Florida and the Federalist facade would be forgotten for over three decades.



Up or Down?

The only thing that's missing from this narrative is the reason why, during construction of the ride, in early 1970, the original plan was abandoned, and the simple answer is that I don't know and I'm not sure if we will ever know.

If you're a long time reader of this blog then you'll know that I love to return to that eternal question of why the Haunted Mansion is in Liberty Square, and I've spent tens of thousands of words justifying it conceptually and artistically. But here's the likely, final reason: they wanted to put it on the north side of the park where it would be properly elevated so they didn't need to even worry about Florida's high water table. I really think that's it. Say what you will, but the Magic Kingdom was an impeccably planned project.

I still believe that what we are looking at here when we corral all of this evidence and all of these schematics is some sort of remnant of a technical gaffe. When you are building a theme park, you don't want to go doubling back to re-engineer a problem you've already solved, which is what Coats was having to do here. He had lots of other stuff on his plate which also had to be ready for October 1, and his friend Marc Davis probably wasn't even involved in the 1971 iteration of the ride. Simply put their initial plan was the obvious one: repeat the elevator, exactly as it is at Disneyland. What stopped them?

I have exactly one lead on this. In David Koenig's More Mouse Tales, printed in 1999, Koenig cites information he culled from an interview with Cast Member "Haught" on page 111:

"The [Haunted Mansion] finally opened six years later, then briefly closed. To lower guests so they can walk underneath the railroad tracks to the main show building, the Haunted Mansion uses a pair of elevators. But, about six months after the ride opened, the elevators stopped going down. Somehow, water had seeped into the elevator pits and caused the lift mechanism to fail. By putting green dye in the water, repair workers were able to trace its source to the Rivers of America. Maintenance pumped the entire river, then resealed the elevator pits."

 Six months after August 1969 puts us exactly in February 1970, which is slightly before the facade of the Florida ride was redesigned to ditch the elevators. If this is a coincidence, it's one that strains credulity. Sadly, I have no information to back up this story, nothing in Disneyland Line, nothing in Los Angeles area newspapers, and most of the memorandum of that era was long ago destroyed and so is not on file at Disney.

Originally, the Rivers of America at Disneyland were lined with mud. Today, they are lined with concrete, and I don't know when the concrete came in - whether in 1970 or some later date. The Magic Kingdom's River has always been concrete, and I'm going to assume that it was the intent from the start, as Florida's sandy soil would likely sucked up any clay lining Disney would've put down.

Did the water leak spook the designers of the spooky house? Having to close your attraction after only a few months to reseal elevator pits after weeks of misfiring effects and years of development may have just been the thing to do it.

And if that's true, then there's an irony lurking behind all of this: for all my complaining and railing against the water table pat explanation, it may be true -- not Florida's water table, but Magic Kingdom's.

Here's a somewhat dispiriting paradox for you: the Walt Disney World theme parks are at their most beautiful when nobody can see them.

This isn't really by design, mind you. Once the last guests roll out of the park at night and the various facilities power down and turn their work lights on, and bit by bit as third shift rolls in, the "show lights" which make places like Magic Kingdom and EPCOT so beautiful at night turn off. Trucks and cars replace pedestrians. Even the street lights turn off, and the theme parks become dark, even beautifully sinister places. Many third shift employees bring their own stereos, and a patchwork of FM radios and CDs replaces the familiar peppy background music. Electrical generators create pools of light for projects amid the stark darkness, and sidewalks are hosed down. The parks become dark and dripping places.

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Pre-Dawn sky, 2005

Then, gradually, the sky turns midnight blue and this strange place begins to turn back into the place we know, and that's when it happens. The open Florida pre-dawn sky gives way to a beautiful, indirect yelllow sunlight, somewhat like the light Disneyland gets out West in the first part of their day, and pockets of humidity become a gentle ground fog that settles over bodies of water. If the parks ever open at 7 am or 8 am around Christmas, some of the very end of this may be observed. By 10:00 am the air gets hot and humid and the light turns that Florida white-hot and the day truly has begun.

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Pre-Opening Sunlight

As a Cast Member I savored these hours before the madness truly descended. Seeing the parks so clean and so empty and so lovely was a reward that made up for the pathetic monetary compensation, and I could see it whenever I wanted. I wish I could get there so easily still, but the parks are not open to those who don't work there in those morning hours, meaning I mostly have my memories and a handful of photos to guide me.

But, you know, you can go to the resorts whenever you want, and late last month I did just that. The Polynesian Village hasn't changed much since 1980 but appears to be next up on the block for Disney Vacation Club expansion, the same fate which brought us a huge tower sitting beside the Contemporary. Although hopefully the Polynesian iteration will be less destructive to original design elements than others have been - they have, after all, nearly no space to work with - it felt imperative to capture something of the feel of this easterly portion of the resort on the eve of the start of construction. Working steadily for about 45 minutes, I was able to capture a mostly unbroken sunrise over the Old Polynesian.

This is the edited version. Compared to some of my other videos, I've done very little to this footage - no music to accompany it, no reshuffling of shots - I did abridge certain shots with fades, but allowing for the fact that this condenses an hour of material into six minutes, it's as close to a real-time sunrise as you can get without being there.

I like the unedited feel of it - the true look and sound of a remarkable place coming online. My overall goal in these videos is to capture that dimension that motion pictures are capable of but photos aren't always - that sense of place and time and, like the Lumiere shots of Parisian street scenes, I've found that the camera plunked down somewhere and allowed to simply record can capture pools of magic. Listen carefully here, and you can hear the Walt Disney World Railroad being brought on the tracks across the lagoon, deliveries being made at the Polynesian, and more.

It's not quite like going into Magic Kingdom on your off day to watch the sun rise over Cinderella Castle, but it's close.

And check out my YouTube page for more videos, including unedited single-shots and some shorter edited sequences.

Normally, I'm not really one to mark this blog's anniversary beyond the end-of-the-year recap. Some of this is because I don't really think anniversaries of things like websites is much to get excited about, and some of this is because the anniversary awkwardly comes in August, usually right when I'm busy with other things. But of course, those first few months don't really count because 1) the articles are terrible, and 2) I didn't really have a "vision" for this site until November, when I posted the two parts of "Two Shows By Marc Davis". I really got into those, and they set the standard (and style) for my own approach in the following years. When I noticed that we are now coming up on the seven-year anniversary (!) of the publication of those articles, and that this is concurrent with the 200th post on the blog, I figured it was high time to say something.

Passport to Dreams Old & New, whose title is a nod to Delta Dreamflight and which I probably should've changed in its first year, began on a lark. Upon moving to Orlando in 2003 I had allowed my old Haunted Mansion website to sit fallow, and in the intervening three years had found my relationship to the place, and to The Magic Kingdom in particular, to be shifting unpredictably. One of the odd things about a theme park is that when you are, yes, there on vacation, although you're definitely experiencing the place as it exists you're also experiencing some other place that doesn't really exist outside your head; where expectation and memory blur out much of the particulars.

In short after moving "to Disney" full time I had to learn how to truly see the place, and that involved going a lot, and going so much that both excitement and novelty finally wore out. In those first few years I was probably at Disney 3 or 4 days out of the week. Inevitably, that intoxicating freedom of being able to be there whenever I desired  soured to boredom.

And that probably would've been that for most people: I had my cake, ate it all, and would've moved on -- except I didn't. I found that the place was changing again, and now instead of a series of emotionally or ritualistically charged spaces, Walt Disney World was becoming something I could see on a micro or macro scale. Now that the urgent initiative to ride Space Mountain had been exhausted enough for a lifetime, I began to find new games to play with Walt Disney World, and the more games I played, the more my appreciation deepened.

In short I did things that no sane person on vacation would try to do at Disney. I spent a day where I made in my business to inspect every door knob and hinge at Magic Kingdom or EPCOT. I spent a full afternoon doing nothing but wandering World Showcase and staring at the way the ceilings of each shop or restaurant were painted. I rode the Haunted Mansion a lot. I found myself getting passionately involved with things like the Tiki Room and Country Bear Jamboree. I found that instead of an empty bag of tricks, the more I dug the more rewarding the place got. Combined with my increasing interest in Walt Disney World history, which circa 2005 had fairly limited coverage online, I started to see Walt Disney World in a way that few can.


None of this was really on my mind when I decided to experiment with this "blog" thing. There wasn't really much of anything to go on back then that may have dissuaded me. There was The Disney Blog, for news - a sort of outgrowth of those early hub sites like Laughing Place - but my main inspiration came from a duo of wildly influential early "single issue" blogs: Re-Imagineering and Epcot Central. I saw that a well-written article could change opinions, and that these opinions and ideas could (theoretically) start to circulate up through the fan community and, eventually, up through the company. I got to work. My instrument was a site called blogger and my thesis was that theme parks were art.

Around the same time, Jeff Pepper started 2719 Hyperion, which was the earliest example of what I think of as the well-rounded Disney blog, freely mixing up history, nostalgia, observation and review. In 2007, a rash of other blogs sprouted up - Main Street Gazette, Imaginerding, Progress City USA, If You Can Dream It, and more, and the blog as a major organizing influence in the Disney community took off.

It's interesting to consider that as recently as ten years ago, what we now know as a Disney blog didn't really exist. What did exist was articles on host sites that fell into two camps: Walt Disney World vacation planning, and park updates. The vacation planners have always had and will always have the biggest slice of the pie: the vast majority of people who go to WDW, and even those who go once or twice a year, spend no time engaging the fan community. These "cyclical" fans tend to have heat-up and cool-off periods of several months surrounding a trip, then simply drop off the community and don't think about Disney until they start planning their next trip. The truly successful sites - like Disney Food Blog - cater to this huge demographic of "planners" while also providing regular content for locals and regularly involved fans. I'm not in this group - if you've made it all the way to Passport to Dreams, you are either a hardcore fan or an interested party, which is why I can take certain things for granted in my writing. But the writing found here will always be a niche thing.

The fact that most serious Disney writing is inherently niche is the reason why you've seen more and more blogs joining umbrella sites like MiceAge - the park updates and vacation planning drives attendance, and the niche authors drive the content. And although I've considered it, I've never felt that my writing belonged on such a site - for one thing I'm unable to write to a deadline and for another, my stuff has always been a hobby for me, not a vocation. Once I stop having fun, Passport will die.

The good news is that this extended project doesn't yet have an apparent end date; in fact, this past year has been unusually active at Passport. I've finally created those sub-pages with navigation bars to steer readers towards the popular topics on the right, hopefully making seven years of my rambling earlier to sort through. My video posts have been very popular, so they will continue, and you can see additional weird stuff on my YouTube channel, including shots and angles that don't get the full edited treatment but still function as documentation. And still the words flow on.


In many ways I've avoided writing one of these celebratory posts for so long for the same reasons that are probably evident in this piece itself: there's little worth saying that can't already be said in the essays anyway. So instead of extending this least essential of essays, I thought I'd take the time to point out a few personal favorite pieces, some popular and some perhaps overlooked, and offer some notes on each:

Buena Vista Obscura: The World Cruise - 2011 - As far as a straight WDW history primer goes, I think this is my peak moment, and even moreso in that the history of this attraction was already in danger of being totally lost. It took me many years to even find somebody who knew anything about The World Cruise and laying out the sad history of the Seven Seas Lagoon sidewheelers was a long but fruitful process. As much as anything here, I'm proud to have rescued this obscurity for the ages.

Go Away Green - 2012 - Every year I try to do what I call a "micro-attention" piece, where I go take photos of very minor parts of theme parks and use them to build large stories about design. I think this is the best of these, about hiding things in plain sight.

Riding the Haunted Screen - 2013 - This piece from early this year seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, and it's not hard to guess why, as it's a) nearly 10,000 words long, and b) spends forever getting around to anything "Disney", spending nearly half its bulk outlining the development of the American supernatural thriller. I think that's a shame, because I worked hard to lay out my theories with full support, and this one was very much a labor of love. Give it another shot with a big spoonful of patience. Which makes it something of a companion piece to our next highlight from early this year:

Death of a Moonwalker: Captain EO - 2013 - laugh if you must but this one is, as of right now, my favorite essay on this site. It isn't so much because of my affection for Captain EO as it is the challenge of neither praising too much nor damning too little something I love dearly but also think is a ludicrous cultural train wreck. It's hard to write something that makes a case for anything by enumerating the virtues of its faults, but both technically and emotionally I've come nearest to writing the article I imagined here than at any other point in the past seven years. My objective was to provide a new perspective for both those who love and those who hate this controversial show, and I'm immensely proud of Death of a Moonwaker.


Three Jungle Cruise Mysteries - 2012 - I like to think this site is second to none at unpacking obscure WDW minutia, and this continuing saga of that one random Jungle Cruise staircase is some of the most fun I've ever had over-turning stones. I've also kept it updated over the years, adding more material as it's uncovered, so you can tell this is a subject dear to my heart.

Start to Shriek and Harmonize - 2011 - if the Haunted Mansion is the one subject I'll never truly escape then I think this essay is my finest moment on the subject. It's hard to find things that are disliked in this ultimate cult attraction, but those pop-up heads come the nearest to being universally panned as cheap or unimaginative. And that's where the story begins.....

Buena Vista Obscura: Johnny's Corner - 2012 - There is remarkably little online information about Central Florida before the Disney invasion began, although newspapers and magazines of the era paint a vivid picture of a near-panicked population and a mad gold rush on land. This is one of my proudest moments because the story stretches from the era following World War I up to our present day, using a little country store as a window into other times, and making the past seem to be a real, shared experience is what good historical writing should be all about.

The Case For The Florida Pirates - 2010 - I could easily instead have directed you to the overall perhaps much more serious companion piece to this essay, written about the Disneyland version of the ride, but much as with the Captain EO post included above, I'm somehow more partial to this essay, which attempts to draw out the positive qualities of the worst version of my favorite ride. That may seem strange or even counter-intuitive, but despite the reputation it carries, the Florida Pirates strikes me as a fascinating failure. I actually once submitted Fire In The Night as a writing sample to a degree program, so I clearly think it's no slouch, but overall I'm prouder of flying here against the grain and against common sense, and coming out with a darn good piece at the end of the gauntlet. Revisit it and think again about the reasons why we classify attractions, or any art pieces, as failures.

And in the end, in the face of such a torrent of words, what else can truly be said except thank you?

When I think of Passport to Dreams, I think of a truly valuable personal pastime which has put me in position to write some seriously rewarding material and also put me in touch with like-minded fantastic individuals the world over. What more can be expected from a silly little blog? Here's to many more!


This article juxtaposes photographs taken in my first months in Florida in  2003 with those taken last month.  What has ten years done to you?

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:

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

Courtesy of Nomeus

....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.

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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:

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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.

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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":

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.

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:

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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:

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"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.

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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.

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"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?

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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.

The experience of a theme park is pretty similar to that of a well-made film, isn't it?

Well, yes it is. But even if we move beyond the convenient fact that this idea is the main crux of most of my writing, it's an comparison worth making because most of the people who created the Disneyland classics were film people. Marvin Davis, Dorthea Redmond, and Harper Goff were brought in from film design to work on Magic Kingdom and Disneyland. And those who came from the Disney Studio's animation department were already working for an organization revered as the most perfectionist and artistically significant of Hollywood's golden age. Film language is coded deep into the DNA of good themed design.

It may be interesting, then, to get outside Disney and think about the subject from the perspectives of filmmakers not imbued with the Disney culture. In this spirit, allow me to introduce Carl Theodore Dreyer.

Now, for those who aren't cinema buffs, it's worth noting that Dreyer is amongst the very few thoroughly, universally canonized film directors; his name is uttered in the same breath as names like Bresson, Ozu, Renoir, and Eisenstein. Practically every film he made from 1928 to 1962 is considered a top-tier masterpiece (even if there were only five!). But the Dreyer whom supplies our upcoming quote is not the grand old man of cinema; these are the words of an up-and-coming director, making an atmospheric drama in Germany in 1924 called Michael.

Michael is fairly obscure, although its status has grown in recent years due to prominent home video releases. Still, of all the great things Dreyer has said about film making over the years, one little comment has kept rolling around in my head for nearly a decade. This is Dreyer speaking to a Journalist about Michael in 1924:

"Isn't it particularly difficult to make a film where atmosphere is decisive while the narrative takes second place?"

"Yes it is. The pictures must be arranged according to the rules of art. It is necessary that the director have a sense of the pictorial. Things must fit together. Every picture must be a true picture; a unity. But, in addition to that, each individual object found in, for instance, a drawing room, must be genuine. And even objects that are not seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the room character." [Emphasis mine]

Now, when I first heard this, the idea struck me as absurd. After all, cinema artists from Méliès on have understood the power of cinema's limited frame; it implies an endless space and continuous action much like reality but can significantly exclude anything undesirable. This is why we can still make films set in vintage periods like the Gay Nineties or old west: if you don't point your motion picture camera at those telephone lines off to screen left, then they don't exist. The motion picture frame includes by exclusion. Similarly, anything off-frame that's "seen but only sensed" doesn't exist.

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Méliès' set for A Trip to the Moon, 1902

But in another sense, the more I thought about this quote the more sense it made. After all, we all know what it's like to see actors laboring for reality inside a bad or unconvincing set, and so in many ways the cinema set is as much to set the proper atmosphere for creativity as it is to capture on celluloid the apparent image of an imaginary space. In the 1910's, D. W. Griffith broke precedents by insisting on placing real glass panes inside the windows of his sets; they had previously been empty. Why include something the camera or audience won't see?

Yes, the camera won't know that the glass is real, Griffith reasoned, but the actors will, and will adjust their performances accordingly. In 1922's Foolish Wives, Griffith admirer Erich von Stroheim used real glass in windows, real bullets in guns, real water in lakes, and most famously real champagne and caviar in dining scenes - as much as he wanted, for as many takes as it took. Decried by Universal as another frivolous expenditure, we can see here Stroheim leveraging the difference between things seen and things sensed.



But this train of reasoning really began to come together for me last year in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. The ride was stopped and we were all gathered in the portrait corridor waiting for operation to resume. As you probably know, in this scene there are four windows on your left. The first two have the famous "rainy night" effect diorama outside them, but the last two windows have their exterior shutters closed. Lightning still flashes through these, but there's no cool effects to see outside them.

But, but.... if you crouch down next to the second to last window and wait for a lightning flash, you can, in fact, for that split second, see some branches outside the window.... just as you would expect. Why bother with these at all? Hardly any guests would ever notice them, and I bet you'd never bother to look for them if I hadn't just bothered to point them out to you. to the right you can see my most successful attempt to photograph them, and even then they're kinda tough to make out.

I think the main reason those branches are there isn't because they're an "Easter Egg" or some kind a testament to Disney's "attention to detail". I think they're there because they're needed. The first two windows set an expectation for a pattern: trees outside the windows, some spooky fog, lightning. And although the human eye may not be wired to decode on sight what fake lightning flashing outside a fake window may look like, we do know what light passing through branches looks like, and the first two windows set us up to expect some branches outside that window. In other words, almost nobody will see it because it's there, but everybody would sense it if it wasn't. The branches are insurance against a break in the illusion (by the way, yes there are not branches outside the fourth window, but nobody looks at it anyway because the line turns right and there's the busts there to distract you).

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User "dland_lover" on MiceChat

The more I thought of it, the more the "branch outside the window factor" seemed to speak less to every-detail perfectionism or foolish consistency as it did to Dreyer's insistence that things "not seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the room character." After all, there are few cinematic "magic spaces" where atmosphere is more decisive than in the stylized film world of a theme park.

Take the example of Big Thunder Mountain: the rocks are fake, but the attraction is littered with authentic antique mining equipment. The equipment isn't just about being authentic, however, and it isn't just about it being difficult to successfully build fake mining equipment. The equipment not only validates the stuff that WED did build for the ride - just a bit salted through makes everything look more real - but it validates the mining operation as a real thing, and because the mine is real, the mountain becomes real. If you think you're too clever to be mentally tricked by this, just consider that Big Thunder Mountain is, in fact, almost totally hollow. It's hard to visualize that, isn't it? that's what the value of things sensed rather than seen can add.

For whatever reason, Claude Coats was amazing at knowing exactly how much of the illusory world is needed to carry the illusion and where a few corners can be cut. More than Haunted Mansion, consider his terrific Caribbean seaport in Pirates of the Caribbean, which unlike Mansion's collection of flats and walls really is mostly there. The success of this ride is largely due to Coats' atmospheric direction in both the cavern and town sections.


But have you ever noticed how fully integrated Coats' town is with the action of the pillage narrative? His staging solutions are so simple that it takes a moment to stop and realize that somebody had to sit down and figure out how the whole thing should hang together. His sea-port is designed but it feels organic. Take note of how the location of each action is mirrored by the content of the scene. For example, the town's mayors and magistrates have been rounded up to be interrogated at the town well. The well is in an impressive public space with a central gathering point. This spectacle of indecency to public officials is being performed in the most public area seen in the attraction's fictional town, immediately implying that the Pirates represent not just a physical but an ideological threat. They are upending social structures.

Consider how easy it would've been to change this idea a little bit and lessen the impact. There's no reason why the well has to be in front of Carlos' house; it could've been a bit off to the left and his wife could've popped out of a window to the right. But it wouldn't be as funny or memorable. Would you have made this same exactly right decision if you were forced to design Pirates of the Caribbean from scratch?

Which brings us to my favorite instance of Coats' staging in the ride. Following his dictate of design following narrative, we move to the public market where the village maidens are being auctioned. This is happening directly in front of a huge building labeled "MERCADO". That's probably obvious, you've no doubt noticed it before. But have you ever noticed that you can actually see inside the market?

Yes, we can write this off as just more detail, but why is the detail there? Well, it's because this allows Coats to visually juxtapose the chain of brides with the market of produce behind them: these women are being treated like wares to be quickly consumed by the highest bidder.


But more than that this detail is the sort of thing that make Pirates of the Caribbean a true picture; in Dreyer's words, a unity. It's easy to throw a lot of detail into theme parks and end up with overkill because what's more important than having details is meaningful details. Everything we expect must be present, but nothing we don't expect or don't need to see is needed.

This, I feel, is what contributes to the sense of peace and relaxation experienced at Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland, while parks of more recent vintage can feel cluttered, chaotic and unpleasant. There's just enough detail to allow us to suspend our disbelief, but not so much that the parks lose their sense of pastoral simplicity and beauty. Everything looks carefully vetted, designed, and built, compared to the visual chaos of a typical urban "strip".

We associate careful detail with the classic WED period of 1964-1984, but it's been there since the start. How many of you, for however long you've been going to Disneyland, have ever noticed that Sleeping Beauty Castle thoughtfully includes a chapel?


You may have noticed this before; it's one the right side facing Main Street. This is a common enough feature of genuine historical castles to not be noteworthy in and of itself, but due to its placement on the east side of the castle, which is an uncommonly photographed angle, and a half-century of tree growth on the Tomorrowland side, it can be downright tricky to spot it.

But once you do spot it, the real trick is to come back and see the chapel at night. All of the windows on the castle are lit up bright, welcoming yellow... except the chapel, which is lit internally by candlelight.

That's a detail which, to me, moves beyond the traditional "wide, medium, and close shot" methods used by Imagineers, which more lay out guidelines for consistency. To me, the marketplace behind the Auction, the tree branch outside the window, and the candles in the chapel are some kind of as-of-yet unnamed kind of themed design detail, which is the detail inside the detail, the sort of thing that you half don't expect to see but you go looking for anyway and there it is, waiting for you. It creates a satisfaction that goes beyond the normal level of detail presented by, say, a themed door knob. It's the discovery inside the discovery and it makes the false theme park world seem real, and lived in.

It's always been an ongoing project to make theme parks seem more convincingly realistic, especially in the hollow areas of themed facades which all too easily can appear to be the hollow or functional spaces they are. The tradition goes back to the start: this July 18, 1955 photograph from Daveland shows what the earliest WED designers probably thought of as "set dressing":


The "stuff-on-balconies" school reached its apotheosis in New Orleans Square in 1967, of course, but the Magic Kingdom in 1971 included balconies in as many niches as possible, sometimes to great effect. The simple balcony above Aloha Isle in Adventureland, stuffed with wicker chairs and faux foliage, has been firing the imaginations of observers for decades.


Stuff-on-balconies can only go so far, however, and Disneyland's other main method of creating imagined extended space is the "light in the attic" method: lamps in upper windows. There are fewer examples of this in Disneyland than expected, and most of them look pretty much like this:


In 1971, the expanded scale of Magic Kingdom allowed Disneyland's designers to experiment with some of these techniques in a larger scale, and the result is very interesting. Instead of simply placing lanterns behind lace curtains. Magic Kingdom's Main Street has actual rooms in the upper level of its facades.


The rooms, of course, are nothing more than a few feet deep. It's actually a wall which encloses the upper level of the Magic Kingdom's office areas, but some well chosen wallpaper and props and the effect is very beguiling. It's also nearly impossible to photograph; the human eye can very easily distinguish between the various surfaces involved in the depth illusion - a richly patterned wallpaper viewed through an elaborate lace curtain - in ways that the camera eye cannot, but I tried very hard:



In person, this effect is nearly subliminal. I've only noticed it in the last few years, but the illusion that there really are Victorian parlors and drawing-rooms behind those windows is remarkably convincing and only fails from certain angles, which is certainly more than should be expected from details within details within details.

To avoid foolish consistency, however, some of the windows do use the simple Disneyland-style lamp, curtain and cloth, as in this handsome tribute window for Yale Gracey:


Or the beautiful dim pink light overlooking Town Square:



This one doesn't have any light inside it but it does have a full-sized chair and table and very intricate "back wall", which can only be seen by those looking very closely during the day:


The curtains hanging in the windows act as diffusion screens to make the textured rear walls - really only a few feet away from the windows - appear more distant than they are, and the illusion holds so long as the floor and ceiling remain hidden and the wallpaper chosen has small, intricate patterns. It's one of the most successful forced perspective illusions in the park. Elsewhere, in Liberty Square, the space above Liberty Tree Tavern is enlivened very simply but effectively in a window only visible from the courtyard behind the Christmas shop:


A chandelier is hung inside an unfinished attic. From the perspective of the street, the unfinished interior visually translates as the rough beams we expect inside of a colonial tavern, and a whole interior is implied for those who bother to find it:


There are other, less specular uses of lights and props throughout Magic Kingdom, although most do manifest in the traditional "light in the attic" rather than 'implied interior" seen above. However, in 1982 in World Showcase, WED Enterprises took another stab at the illusion and ended up with some interesting effects.

The "lighted windows" are applied with less regularity than throughout Magic Kingdom. Magic Kingdom is about nostalgia and exploration and so a warm feeling is created through elaborate displays of lights (except in the "dangerous" area of Adventureland). World Showcase is more about culture and its treatment of lighted second floor windows varies more widely: while Germany wants to create a feeling of warmth and gemütlichkeit and so uses many lit windows, the small British village of the United Kingdom pavilion feels almost sleepy at night due to its mostly darkened interiors. Until you get around the back towards the London flats, there's just a lonely lantern burning in one darkened upper window, one of EPCOT Center's most haunting details:


Contrast the United Kingdom with France, represented by Paris. EPCOT's facsimile doesn't just evoke the city of light through use of a boldly lit fountain; the France pavilion works overtime to imply a busting cultural metropolis just behind and beyond those windows and doors. Elaborate, half-glimpsed lights hang in the windows above the entrance to the Impressions de France attraction:


Diffusing curtains make these very hard to make out, but this fictional "upstairs" space is validated by the nearby second floor restaurant facing the water and, facing the United Kingdom pavilion, the upstairs art gallery, sadly long since closed.





 But the best touch, for me, is around the corner down the "provincial" side street. Many of you, no doubt, have noticed the glass-enclosed artist's loft in this area...

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photo by Al Huffman

...but how many of you have seen the artist who lives there? If you return at night you can see him painting:


Yes, it's just a little cutout, but to me this is the ultimate example of the "Branch Outside the Window" effect. If you just so happened to see this one detail early in the day, wondered if it was supposed to be an artist loft, then just happened to walk back that way later and had your suspicions confirmed? How many have done that? A few dozen a year?

To me, this is what makes the difference between the sort of detail we've been discussing today and the run of the mill sort of detail which Imagineering can now do with their eyes closed. Very few may notice these sorts of things, but the cumulative effect cannot be undervalued: the impression of an organic world where there is none.

To me this sense of inevitability of these sorts of details is the mark of a great, assured artistic creation. To paraphrase Dreyer, the theme park designer must have a sense of the pictorial. Things must fit together. Every picture must be a true picture; a unity. But, in addition to that, each individual object found in, a theme park, must seem genuine. And even objects that may not be seen, but only sensed, have to be there when they even to just some extent contribute to giving the park character.

That's the difference that a great designer makes. The branch behind the window, rarely seen, but always sensed.