Impressions de France

This summer I finally got an opportunity to head out to Disneyland Paris, and it had been a long time in coming. I started to become interested in the France park sometime in the late 1990s. Having more or less missed the boat on all of the initial publicity (or anti-publicity), it wasn't really until it became possible to view images in reasonable quality on the internet that I began to see photos of the place and realized that it was something radically different from the parks I was accustomed to. But this was also the same time that I became aware that there was a lot waiting for me out at Disneyland too, and at the time the possibility of taking the trek across the country seemed impossibly remote, never mind across the Atlantic.

In many ways I'm glad that I waited, but there was a disadvantage to having waited, as well. Having gotten myself acquainted with Walt Disney World and Disneyland to a degree that few ever do, and having written this blog for nine years before setting foot in Paris, I found my opinions on certain components of the park had ossified into assumptions, and Paris' park is the worst park to have assumptions about, because it chucks the rule book of Disneyland and Magic Kingdom out the window entirely. It took some getting used to. I found myself cool on things I expected to like and very warm on things I previously had no real opinion about.

Upon returning home I realized that perhaps my perspective and experiences could help other park fans plan similar trips. I’m going to be coming at this from the perspective of a fan of the stateside Disney theme parks who is more or less familiar with one (or both) of them, looking for specific details about the Disneyland Paris experience. I’m not going to be covering getting there, getting back, what I did, or my specific opinions about everything to be found within. I will cover common complaints about the experience that I’ve heard online to help set expectations about it.

As American Disney Parks goers, we're quite used to the "feel" of Disneyland and Magic Kingdom being a certain way. Buildings are cute and usually not too ornate. Theming is very elaborate in some places and, in others such as Space Mountain, a little utilitarian. These parks are places of historical interest and relevance. And they're old. Pretty old. They have a unique character and we like it that way.

Disneyland Paris is one of those Disneyland-style parks, but it doesn't "feel" like Disneyland or Magic Kingdom at all. It's actually closer to something like Animal Kingdom in many ways. The details, theming, and texture is much more sophisticated. Decor is carried into places where Disneyland or Magic Kingdom would not demand it. Coming at the experience from the perspective of a stateside fan, Paris is like the "extra fancy" version of Magic Kingdom, or sometimes a bit more like Disneyland executed on the scale of Magic Kingdom. European park fans who grew up with Disneyland Paris, conversely, could be forgiven for taking the trip to the states and finding our theme parks to be almost crude.

So here we go. What I should start off with is the key question most of you will have…

Should I Go?
Yes you should. If you have bothered to come all this way through the internet to find these specific words written by an author of no repute, then you already care enough about Disney that you should go. If you care at all about Walt Disney World, or Disneyland, then you should try, if at all possible, to see them all, because you owe it to yourself.

If you have only been to Walt Disney World, then I consider Disneyland in California to be a far more important destination than Disneyland Paris. Disneyland is one of those places that changes the way for think – not just about theme parks, but all public spaces. On the other hand, if you’ve been to Disneyland but not Walt Disney World you may find Disneyland Paris to be a much more equivalent, enjoyable experience than Walt Disney World.

That's sort of an odd thing to say, because in other areas, DLP is nearer to going to WDW than the other resorts are. It's got the dining district, the hotels around the lake, the park with huge open spaces. But since it has never upgraded its infrastructure, visiting DLP is nearer to what visiting WDW was like in the early 90s - paper tickets, weird breakfast buffets, and the characters aren't being forced on you around every bend. To some that makes the experience "less Disney". To me that makes it more enjoyable.


Do I Need to Speak French?
A little! You will find that nearly everybody who works for Disneyland Paris can speak multiple languages and this almost always includes anywhere from a little to a lot of English. In most cases you’ll need nothing more than to be able to say hello, goodbye, excuse me, please and thank you. I noticed that those working at counter service restaurants tended to be less English proficient than those working tickets, attractions, and table service restaurants. At the counter serve restaurants be prepared to speak slowly, do some pointing, and not make any complex requests.

Outside of Disneyland Paris you’ll need to know a bit more. In France there are very definite etiquette forms you should know for your trip there and for venturing out into Paris. You cannot go right up to somebody and start speaking; you must first say “Bonjour, Madame/Monsieur”, followed by a request to speak English. In America we tend to smile a lot to try to seem approachable and to soften social interactions; this is meaningless in Europe and will probably irritate those you speak to. Often, the French don’t like those who raise their voice or make jokes. Wit is more appreciated than jokes, and you likely don’t speak enough French for this to be helpful.

You’ll find if you stick to these guidelines you’re more likely to be warmly received by the French. Despite the fact that we think of the French as being rude, often they are rude because they are offended by the casual attitude of Americans. Be on your guard, especially if you are an extrovert personality, because your usual method of smoothing out social interactions is seen as rude here. I'm an introvert and I prefer the European method of doing things and I had no trouble at all.

Which brings us to:

Dealing With Who’s There
While I was at Disneyland Paris I was visiting with quite a lot of very large families from the Mediterranean countries and Middle East, a handful of those from the UK and very rarely any Americans.

Generally with these visitors you’re going to see them being led by the oldest male in the group. These family units tend to be large and very loosely organized. Any children with them are likely to be running to and fro. These children will climb on things, slam into you, brush against you, etc. Be aware that for most of these people, personal space is about half what it is in the United States; about one foot compared to our roughly two feet.

All bets are off in crowd situations, they will dash in front of you and around you. In these cases you’ll find yourself pushing your way through a crowd that does not observe the standard American etiquette of trying to “make way”. You will find yourself saying “pardon” a lot. If somebody blows past you and says “pardon” brusquely, they’re probably mad at you.

In queue lines expect these visitors to be right up against you at all times, often twisting about and gesturing a lot. They’re not trying to be rude, it’s just the way they behave. Still, this can take some getting accustomed to.

If you’re offended by smoking, understand that smoking will occur everywhere you are, and constantly. It will be happening in the walkways and queues, and often people will walk and smoke at the same time, which is something almost nobody in the States does anymore. I never saw anybody try to take a lit cigarette into an attraction, but Europeans often aren’t too circumspect about disposing of the cigarettes, either, and I didn’t see many ash trays. They often just throw it aside and step on it.

That said although there certainly were often a few in view I did not find the walkways to be strewn with cigarette butts the way you sometimes see in stateside smoking areas. I’m personally not offended by smoking but if you are then this may be a significant consideration for you.

I Heard It Was Dirty
There’s two big things everybody says about Disneyland Paris, and we’re going to deal with them in order now. The first is the extremely common claim that the park is in very poor maintenance condition. I heard this from everybody. I heard it from locals, visitors, annual pass holders, and even cast members who began apologizing for this before I even left. I half expected to have to fend off cast members leaping out of the bushes as I approached the park begging me not to enter.

In short: I saw some issues, but overall this claim is overblown.

All theme parks have maintenance issues. It's the danger of being a place where the public is invited to come. Some issues take a long time to resolve, others wrap up rather quickly. Disneyland Paris has a poorer reputation than most parks in this area, and I see three basic groups of issues that contribute to this perception - all unique to Disneyland Paris.

The first has to do with the fact that the place opened in the middle of a bad European economy, and as soon as it began to stabilize in terms of profit, Disney rushed a cheap, poorly done theme park in – Walt Disney Studios – and it was, frankly, a bomb. They’ve spent the past thirteen years trying to upgrade WDS, and in that time Disneyland Park has clearly not been getting the attention it deserves.

Stateside we went through a similar issue out in Disneyland where DCA opened and simply was not pulling its weight. Disneyland then spent nearly a decade monkeying with DCA trying to turn it into a draw, while Disneyland got very little attention. Paris was in a similar situation, yet through all of it Disneyland remained profitable where Paris really was just threading water. The condition of the park is an all too obvious reflection of this reality.

I did see some buildings that clearly had not been repainted lately, and some rides did have wonky animatronics. From a strict maintenance perspective, I’d say that Disneyland Paris is currently in an equivalent position that Walt Disney World was in in the late 90s and early 2000s. Remember when 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was sitting there empty with cargo nets flung over the rocks? Remember when Crystal Palace was closed for two years because all of the exterior wood was rotting? Nobody talks about these anymore because the turn around has been remarkable, but they happened.

To their credit, Disneyland Paris is currently engaging in a huge rolling refurbishment of the whole park. I saw resurfacing work proceeding every day all day. Repainting was happening constantly, especially at the front of the park. The whole of the Lucky Nugget in Frontierland was being re-clad in new siding, and that was probably the building I saw that needed work the most.

The second grade of issue is due to the climate. I saw a lot of things made out of stucco at Disneyland Paris, and obviously that will shrink and expand as the seasons change. I saw a lot of hairline cracks as well as hairline cracks that were being patched and repainted. They have to use different kinds of paint and different shades of paint due to the weather. At Disneyland and Walt Disney World we don’t have this issue due to the temperate and tropical climate, but it’s clear that the weather does take its toll in France.


Another item of note is the fact that Europe doesn’t use air conditioning to the extent that the stateside parks do. Europeans tend to view air conditioning as wasteful, where we simply expect it in the States (of course it's also hotter in the US than it is in most of Europe). That's just my guess, but I'd wager that's the case given how offended I've seen some Europeans get over the typical "open door, air conditioning on full blast" setup we have at Walt Disney World. Air conditioning helps keep air circulating and collects dust and debris in air filters. The upshot is that there’s a lot of dust and cobwebs that have settled in many parts of the park. It’s A Small World was especially dusty, but many queue areas had dust everywhere overhead as well.

Obviously this needs nothing more complex than a Swiffer on a pole to resolve, and I saw dusting underway, especially in the hotels. For all I know this level of dust is seen as normal and acceptable in Europe, but in the States we get squeamish about it. Take that for what you will. It didn't bother me.

The final issue is entirely on their guests. I’ve been going to Walt Disney World forever and I’ve worked there in the past, so I thought I was pretty well informed about guest behavior, but what I saw in Disneyland Paris was another thing entirely. Practically every surface below knee height was covered with scuffs and hand rails and other objects had been totally stripped of paint. I saw more people sitting up on the handrails, or any other available surface, than I’ve ever seen at a Disney park. Europe’s motto appears to be “place your butt on any attractive surface”.

This meant that handrails in particular were stripped absolutely clean. This sort of maintenance issue is tough to stay on top of because any work that’s done can be undone in hours by guests behaving this way. I also saw some cracked window panes that rather looked as though somebody had tried to put their fist through them. I’ve never seen this in Walt Disney World.

So this is clearly a combination of factors, ranging from the simple to fix (Swiffer on a pole) to complex (glass punching). I’d also be lying if I said that any of these impacted my enjoyment of the vacation. Everything in Disneyland Paris is conceived and executed on a remarkable scale and the park is very visually complex, much moreso than Disneyland or Magic Kingdom. I’m inclined to give the park the benefit of the doubt and be happy I saw it in what I considered to be good shape. Honestly, unless you are an Annual Passholder at Disneyland or Walt Disney World, I doubt you will see even as much as I did. If you’re still concerned, hold off to visit until 2017, when the parkwide refresh should be complete.

I Heard the Food Was Bad

Obviously this one is very open to interpretation and expectations are changeable. I considered the counter service food to be not as good as it is at Disneyland but better than at Magic Kingdom. That said, there are many pitfalls to consider, and I’ll get into them one at a time.

In considering where to eat, I read many reviews of the restaurants online. Horror stories abounded about mediocre quality food, restaurants closing early, and more. After reading Tom Bricker’s reviews, I set myself a rule: no eating at a place that puts a burger on the sign outside. Since the restaurants tend to close early, narrowing to just two open in the last two hours, I decided I would eat early, and often, to avoid being hungry when the park was closing.

The restaurants in the hotels and Disney Village are often open until midnight or 1 am, thanks to the region's preference for a late dinner. These are almost always better options than rushing around attempting to fight crowds in the last two hours trying to get food.

I called a week before I left and got a dinner reservation for each night I would be there, intending to eat lunch at counter service restaurants when the widest variety of them would be open. I received meal vouchers for a continental breakfast at Sequoia Lodge for each morning I was at the hotel, which took care of breakfast. Honestly, given the mild price difference and hassle involved in eating at the DLP counter serve restaurants, I’d be willing to eat table service for every meal on a future trip.

Depending on the day of the week you’re visiting, you’ll find that different restaurants will be open. With relatively little effort you’ll find that this schedule is announced in advance and can be found online. It’s a good idea to decide in advance where you will eat counter service and stick to your plan. I ate counter service every day for lunch and table service every day for dinner and did not have any food I would consider bad. Not everything was great but most of it was quite good.

At the counter service restaurants, service is slow enough that they can in no way be called "quick service". Multiple times I had to wait twenty minutes before I could approach the cash register and place my order when I was the second person in a line of two. Certain tourists who book at Davy Crockett Campground receive meal vouchers that are only good for specific things, and this invariably means a great deal of shouting, managers coming over, wild gesturing, etc. It's all very Gallic. If you see any kind of delay consider getting in another line immediately.

Disneyland Paris’ food places have their food organized according to “Menu”. The “tourist menu” is also something you may encounter out in Paris. It doesn’t actually save you any money, it simply groups items into two or three course meals including drink in a way that’s easy to communicate in limited French. Some of the sit down restaurants have three or four menus at various price points. If you want anything off the a ‘la carte menu, you mustspecifically say “a ‘la carte” or the counter service cast members may get confused.

At counter service, with each item ordered off the menu you will receive a small cellophane packet containing a fork, knife, napkin, and usually a packet of ketchup and a packet of mayonnaise. The only restaurant I saw that also included mustard was Casey’s Corner. If you need more ketchup you’ll need to approach the counter and ask.

A note on the ketchup because, especially for Americans, this is one of thosethings for many people. The ketchup is not Heinz 57 – in fact, I didn’t see Heinz 57 available anywhere I went in Europe, although I’m sure it is. The ketchup is generally not quite as smooth and a bit sweeter, more like Hunt’s. I liked it quite a lot, but it definitely wasn’t our standby American ketchup. The French definitely believe that a condiment is just that – a small accompaniment – and nobody is going to mistake you for a Canadian with your six tubes of ketchup. I suggest trying to get along without it. Despite the above, I’d also be lying if I didn’t point out that I jumped up and down and squealed like a little girl when I found a restaurant with a public pump bottle of ketchup – Toad Hall in Fantasyland, by the way.

You may find getting snacks between restaurants to be more of a challenge than at the American parks. There are fewer overall ice cream and snack bars. My general policy for snacks was to return to Main Street, where Cable Car Bake Shop and the Market Street Deli had good food and drinks with mild crowds.

When it’s open, Toad Hall Restaurant behind Peter Pan’s Flight was by far the best counter service meal I had. The fish and chips were better than many I had in England and the atmosphere was top notch. Behind that I suggest Restaurant Hakuna Matata, which had amazing special French fries, or Fuente D’Oro across from Big Thunder Mountain. I didn’t eat at Fuente, but the food comes out of the same kitchen as Hakuna Matata and I’d sooner take my chances on lousy tex-mex than a lousy hamburger or hot dog.

If counter service came out slightly ahead of Walt Disney World, I found table service to be slightly behind, although the prices were certainly more in line with what you got than they are in Florida. I ate at The Steakhouse in Disney Village, Walt’s, and Blue Lagoon and found only Blue Lagoon to be below expectations. The place, frankly, was a zoo and the wait staff was clearly outmatched by their tables. The difference between quality and price was not so extreme as it is at the Blue Bayou in Disneyland, but it still wasn’t very good.

At the table service restaurants I’ve read about Americans running into trouble when asking for tap water. In France in particular this seems to be viewed as especially insulting cheapness, which is ironic because I found at the tap water in Marne-la-Vallée to be of excellent quality and drank a lot of it in the hotel room. However I prefer mineral water if at all possible and so I always ordered that with the meals. If you are determined to have tap water, be aware that it may cause some friction. Personally, I wish I could buy bottles of Perrier everywhere I go at Walt Disney World and Disneyland as I could in Paris, but there it is.

I had also read that meals are more leisurely on the continent. I was prepared to have long dinners but found the chief difference was that you were given a nice long time after sitting down before the server approached. In the States its customary to get drinks put on the table immediately after sitting down, here expect to wait about 15 minutes before you can even order. They’re not being rude, it’s just the way they do it. And be prepared to order everything at once; they will give you plenty of time to finish your course before the next one arrives.


Caffienating!
A few tips if, like me, you rely on caffeine to push through a long day at the park.

If you rely on sugar, ie soda, then you’ll have a tough time. The number of places which dispense fountain soda are limited, and the sizes are not quite what they are in America. Generally you’re going to see this in counter service restaurants, where lines simply to order one thing have been described in detail above and are best avoided if you can.

Elsewhere, you’ll find that soda comes in glass bottles. The glass bottles are about 66% the size of the familiar plastic bottles we get in the United States, and about twice as expensive. On the up side the soda is sweetened with genuine sugar instead of the corn extract we get in the US, so if you are corn sugar adverse, as I am, then the soda is a much nicer experience.

Coffee drinkers should not be too thrown by the choices in Paris. As can be expected, if you order European-style espresso drinks, you’ll be right at home. Most table service and some counter service places offer espresso machines and the terminology is of course identical.

Counter services places that do sell coffee generally offer one type, dispensed out of a machine. It comes with or without milk, and as you may have guessed, it has more to do with Americano than our stateside coffee. It isn’t bad – it has a nice crema on it – but it isn’t a lot of coffee for the money and I found myself missing the rich smoothness of American-style coffee.

There is a Starbucks in Disney Village, and I found that on most days they only offered American-style coffee in the morning. You have to specifically request “filter coffee” and probably to point at the vat behind the counter because nobody ever orders it. They will sell you an Americano if you want it, but the value isn’t much better than it is in the parks. On the plus side the Starbucks is open until 1 am, making it perfect for after-park pick me ups.

Out And About In The Parks

While 2015 can hardly be said to be a banner year for changes in the parks at least in terms of the sorts of things Disney heavily promotes - new rides, expansion areas, etc - sometimes it's the minor changes that say more than the major ones. I like to describe the theme parks as big clockwork mechanisms filled with tiny pieces that all need to be moving in precise synchronization. Yes, the clock will stop if a major piece gets broken, say when the monorail to Magic Kingdom goes down. But all of those little pieces are just as important too, and if they get all rusty and wonky then even if the clock is still running then you'll know that it isn't keeping good time, that something isn't quite right.

Most of the Walt Disney World parks are more on this side of the equation: there's enough wonky, small pieces that you can tell things aren't quite right, even if it's hard to say exactly what or why. Conversely, 2015 saw a lot of those tiny pieces get improved, and the benefits may not command extensive celebration through the official sources, but once enough small things get improved you can feel the whole park, the whole system, elevated like a boat gently lifted by the tide.

This is a year to applaud small but worthwhile victories.

Remember the Maliboomer at California Adventure? It was the huge, basically unthemed launch tower of the west side of Paradise Pier? As part of the overhaul of the park, it was removed and not replaced. It was a rare case of enhancement by omission; California Adventure was stronger with nothing in its place. Well, 2015 saw one of the biggest things go the way of the Maliboomer of all time.

This was the grossly inappropriate Sorcerer's Hat at the end of Hollywood Boulevard at Disney Hollywood Studios. And while this is a design oriented blog, I'm sure I don't need to launch into a long description of why the hat was a poor choice. It speaks for itself, absurdly perched as it was at the end of the nicest stretch of themed architecture in that park. What I'd like to point out is how unexpectedly refreshed I was to see it gone.

It had been long enough - 15 years - that I had forgotten how that particular piece of forced perspective illusion was supposed to work, and once the hat (and the stage after it) was taken down, I was frankly dazzled by the view, and it's been a long time since anything in that park actually dazzled me. I was totally unprepared for how effective that view was, how correct and symmetrical the Chinese Theater looked at the end of the street. I had forgotten how effective the tiny corridor opening up to a huge central courtyard actually was, and how near the Theater looked from the end of the street, only to seem suddenly twice as far away from you as it really was once you passed the shops. It's a really nifty optical illusion, and by simply being revealed again it elevates the entire experience of walking into that park from mildly impressive to really engaging.

But moreover it was really exciting to stop and listen to guests walking into the park and hear things I hadn't heard in 15 years: "really cool!", or, "what's in there?". The simple fact of removing the hat means that suddenly the entrance to Hollywood Studios is a place of glamour and intrigue instead of an art deco sidewalk leading to a giant blue metal cone. It gives that park back one of its signature subtleties, imparts meaning and intrigue, and is no less important than the castle at the end of Main Street for making guests feel like they paid for something special.


Hollywood Studios is in the midst of an identity crisis. Very soon, basically the entire back half of the place is going to be leveled, and turned into one of those modern day Imagineering extravaganzas modeled on the success of that wizard boy next door. Being a romantic at heart I wish the entire park could be skinned into some sort of Golden Age of Hollywood fantasy, but I know that millennium falcons outsell films noir by a hundred to one. Disney-MGM Studios was once a place of great promise that ended before it ever really got started: Dick Tracey's Crimestoppers, Red Car Cafe, The South Seas Club from The Rocketeer, a Who Framed Roger Rabbit Toontown; all of these things came very close to being. And while at this point any change is better than none, those of us who find the romance of alien world and lightsabers cold comfort compared to the fantasy of the past will have to keep looking.

Speaking of Imagineering extravaganzas, the vaguely anticipated opening of The World of Avatar at Animal Kingdom draws nearer, and from what can be seen by peeking over construction walls, the place looks bananas. Comparable to the astonishing desert landscape created for Cars Land at California Adventure, nothing short of seeing it with your eyes can properly describe just how large this thing is.

But even better than the future home of blue cat individuals has been the change evident at Animal Kingdom over the past year. Disney's clearly cashing in the whole donut for Avatar, and in the meantime Joe Rohde has been using the extra money swimming around to improve almost everything that was already in place in the park. As a result, Animal Kingdom has quietly elevated itself from an ambitious effort to the best themed attraction in the United States.

Some areas required nothing but a doubling down and removal of tacky elements, like the brightly painted safari animals covering the buildings in the center of the park. Others, like the already excellent Harambe, have been tripled in size in a manner consistent with the excellent standards already in place. The new Harambe, with its repurposed British colonial fort, new port, railway line, and expanded neighborhood out back, now can fit comfortably alongside Disneyland's New Orleans Square and Universal's Diagon Alley as one of the best things of its type that can be experienced anywhere. Once you factor in the remarkable accomplishment represented by the Kilimanjaro Safaris back in 1998 as part of the "land", it becomes even more impressive.

Out at the front of the park, the central area in front of the Tree of Life has been smartly rebuilt. Animal Kingdom canceled its' parade, which at first may strike one as a loss, but the gain was that WDI took the initiative to replant the open area in front of the tree into a tree-shaded courtyard with whimsical touches and in the bargain exposed a waterfall off to the right of the tree that had been there since 1998 but had been impossible to see from its intended angle. Again, these are tiny fixes, but they make Animal Kingdom a delight to visit, which isn't something I ever thought I'd say.

Speaking of making places inhabitable, as Downtown Disney became Disney Springs this year, what I previously thought was impossible finally happened and that area actually became a pleasant, even pretty walk. The changes here are too numerous to encapsulate and aren't even complete, but the walk from West Side into the Marketplace (finally after many years renamed the Village Marketplace; hooray for history) is now full of rich textures, unique architecture, and most importantly a sensation of relaxation. While the West Side will likely never be perfect, new tenants and a new look has returned to this property a sense of relaxation and charm that went away in the 90s.

One of the best things to do is free, and it's to walk through the new Boathouse restaurant to the dock bar out back, then walk down to the water where two dozen or so beautifully maintained vintage boats are there just for you to look at. It feels like old Disney, when Magic Kingdom and EPCOT had things out to see just because they were cool and weird.

 The Boathouse Restaurant is owned by the same CEO who made his fortune through Rainforest Cafe and the similar T-Rex next door, but the Boathouse is as personal and charming as Rainforest Cafe is unfortunate and tacky. He built the place and put the boats out on display because he thought it would be cool, and the difference is like night and day. Frankly it reminds me of the fact that 90% of Disneyland, and by extension the Magic Kingdom, is the way it is just by virtue of the fact that one guy with the financial clout to back his ideas wanted to build stuff he thought would be cool. We need more of that these days.



Trader Sam's Grog Grotto

I will never get over the removal of the Polynesian waterfall. Never. And while I'm in agreement that the Polynesian needed a refurbishment and that most of the hotel now has a fresh feeling it hasn't had in years, none of those factors stack up nearly as much as the fact that the lobby is now a charmless, dead place. So while gaining an excellent bar does not exactly "make up" for gutting the most distinctive thing about the Polynesian, it is a darn good bar, and deserves a bit of celebration outside the scope of my indefinitely extended waterfall mopery. Walk clear past the charmless tiki state and indifferent pile of rocks; head directly for some liquor, because Trader Sam's Grog Grotto is pretty darn good.

An excellent addition in 2015, at least for those of us who enjoy strong drinks in dark places, was the opening of the east coast outpost of Trader Sam's, the popular tiki bar which began life at the Disneyland Hotel in 2011. I quite liked the original incarnation in California, and I like the version at the Polynesian as well. On nights when business isn't too strong and the wait staff aren't constantly shouting, it's even near the Tiki Bar ideal of dark, strange, and contemplative.


Most of us who enjoy the trappings of faux-exotica got the itch from the Enchanted Tiki Room, so it's interesting that the imitation has swung back around to be a legitimate source for an imitation of an imitation. Of course, the original tiki kitsch was itself an imitation of the real thing, spiced up with foods that imitated oriental dishes and drinks the imitated caribbean punches, so what previously was a direct line between inspiration and imitation has turned into a mobius strip. That's part of what's awesome about Tiki: it's simultaneously absurdly convoluted and unreasonably dedicated to casualness.

I wish the east coast drinks were poured heavier in the way they are out west, but overall I think the Grog Grotto is an all-around improvement on the original model. I love that the entrance to the place is an inconspicuous door with a small sign that opens up into another world, and I find the bar bites to be far better than the fast food served in Disneyland. But the real win is the outdoor patio. At Disneyland, if you sit outside you're missing all the fun, but that's at Disneyland where you're in the middle of a hotel from the 60s in the middle of Anaheim. At Walt Disney World you're on the shores of the Seven Seas Lagoon with the Magic Kingdom glittering across the water and, later on, a personal elevated view of the Electrical Water Pageant. That mean you're in one of the finest man made environments ever constructed, never surpassed. Best of all, tables are almost always open outside. When it comes to a few fortifying drinks before heading into the human jungle of the Magic Kingdom, Trader Sam's isn't just an improvement, it's a new tradition, and they don't mint those every year.

Sailing the River of Time

It's time to be honest here guys: El Rio del Tiempo wasn't very good. I loved it deeply and I miss it, but it just wasn't very good. There was a condescending attitude throughout El Rio which no amount of interpretive dance retellings of Mayan and Incan civilizations could disguise; its Mexico was a Mexico of charmingly foreign shopkeepers selling worthless trinkets and mariachi serenading white tourists in hot tubs. It all climaxed with a gloriously ghoulish finale where Mexicans became weird marionettes endlessly circling under artificial fireworks.

With the exception of the lovely, mysterious atmosphere created by the opening tunnel tableau with the mysterious Mayan priest materializing out of a tomb, Gran Fiesta Tour takes most of what was good in El Rio (the sets) and improves it with more color, more action, and more variety. It better presents views of modern Mexico and adds a sense of fun and color that the mostly mysterioso, dour El Rio never attempted. The trouble was, it really didn't have an ending. Nearly ten years later, all of that was fixed with the return of the Three Caballeros figures from Mickey Mouse Revue.

In some ways it's actually strange to have something in the center of that room that you really, really want to look at. There never was anything wrong with the Marionettes in El Rio, but they always were upstaged by the fiberoptic fireworks and Mexico City mural. The initial climax of Gran Fiesta Tour was just another screen in the back of a stage, and I always found the animation on that final screen to be less inspired than the rest of the animation in the attraction, and especially weak compared to Ward Kimball's masterpiece song sequence from the 1946 film.

There's now something that neither El Rio nor Gran Fiesta Tour had in that space: a real sense of payoff, that you rode the boat and reached a goal for a darn good reason. I always felt that El Rio climaxed with the appearance of the Mayan priest and basically coasted, evenly but unremarkably, until it ended. Had the team behind Gran Fiesta Tour found a way to retain the sense of shrouded mystery in that opening tunnel and then transitioned into the steady build of the rest of the ride, with this addition I'd be comfortable saying that Fiesta is a better ride than El Rio. As it stands, the new finale puts them on about equal footing in my mind.



Mind you, my heightened esteem for the ride is a reflection of my admiration for the Three Caballeros figures. These fellows aren't just historically relevant, they're awesome. Mickey Mouse Revue was long gone by the time I first stepped foot in Magic Kingdom, so my exposure to Mickey Mouse Revue was limited to pictures and video. It was not only hard to guess the size of the actual figures, but how they would look in motion. These guys have that elusive X factor that seemingly everything that WED and MAPO would turn out at the height of their powers had. They're cute and they look incredibly alive. And they move so well that many people have been led to believe that they  have entirely new interior functions, which isn't true. MAPO was just darn good at building these things and Tokyo Disneyland was darn good at maintaining them.

Kudos are also due to WDI East for the figure finish on the existing animatronics, of course, which have never looked better, and a snappy new animated performance. But really, this is the sort of enhancement that we shouldn't have to wait ten years for at Walt Disney World.

There's hundreds of areas around the resort that could use improvements that aren't demanded, but still needed, still meaningful. It takes all of the thousands of tiny excellences moving in harmony to build the sense of remarkable show and quality product that Disney once excelled at. Small, meaningful passion projects with dedicated teams striving for excellence needs to be the rule, not the exception.

Captain EO Returns To His Home Planet

Let's take a moment here to appreciate that for a little over five years, Disney has been inflicting Captain EO on otherwise unassuming tourists. Bigger, tackier, and yet somehow more heartfelt than anything our modern age would be likely to try to pawn off as a normal piece of entertainment, Captain EO has been consistently pulling good attendance numbers but also has been consistently scored low on polls. That's not surprising, because the very nature of such a film is that it must resonate strongly with a statistically small portion of the audience. Bringing back Captain EO in the first place may have been a strange choice for 2010, but since then it has grown into a cult film, fiercely loved by a small subsection of its audience.

It's funny that Disney has a cult film to begin with, Disney being as wholly dedicated to the most palatable, most widely popular manifestations of popular culture as any entertainment company on earth. it's doubly funny that it's Captain EO, which in 1986 was something of a distillation of the most middle of the road taste possible: a music video produced by the creator of the most successful motion picture series of all time, starring the biggest pop star on the planet. A 2015 equivalent would be a YouTube reaction video directed by Peter Jackson starring Lady Gaga and lots of explosions. Yet the world turned, and this gigantic expensive glazed ham somehow aged into the finest cheese possible. It was ludicrous, bereft of taste or tact, and I loved every deranged minute of it.

So rather than mourn the passage of Captain EO or opine on its replacement, I'd like to celebrate that it was here at all again to begin with. and that it resonated with the few it did. Indeed, it's impossible to claim that it's anything less than supremely irresponsible to be presenting such a strange film to 2015 audiences at all. Sometimes, popular taste moves on and things which once seemed like a normal, logical part of everyday life are revealed later to be batshit insane. That was Captain EO. It was too weird to die. In a world where artisanal kale salads are the norm, Captain EO was a tuna lime gelatin loaf, an antique of a time long since passed. Now that the Second Age of EO has passed, I salute it passing here while recognizing that it was a bizarre aberration to begin with. I was delighted to enjoy it for the five years that I did.

Farewell, Hooter, Commander Mog, the Supreme Leader, Idy and Odie, and Fuzzball. May you repose peacefully beneath a fried egg, a chain of sausage links, and a marshmallow until the end of days.

Magic Kingdom's Minor Changes

It's been a long time since I've really had to fuss too much over the condition of the main park of my interest. Yes, it wasn't that way even ten years ago, but I think it's safe to say that the era when we have to be constantly concerned that WDW is going to shutter our favorite attractions at any moment has passed. The ones that survived the 90s survived and the rest seem sufficiently popular enough to be bulletproof. Meanwhile the Studios and Epcot share less and less of the pie of visitors every year, and Disney seems more and more reluctant to present visitors with anything out of place in their keystone park.

In other words: this park is slammed, and every year it seems to get worse. Don't expect anything to change, at least in the next five to seven years, as Animal Kingdom, Studios, and eventually Epcot's re-expansion efforts go online. As pleasant as New Fantasyland is aesthetically, it's increasingly clear that only the Dwarfs Mine Train is actually pulling its weight in the numbers department. What Magic Kingdom needs is a couple of brand new huge attractions, probably one on each side of the park, to start sopping up demand. The park was designed back in the 70s to accommodate around 35,000 people daily. Fastpass and the declining popularity of former attendance drawers, combined with the fact that twice that number regularly descend on the park, means that Disney's window to be proactive with this park passed about six years ago.

The good news is that it's now easier to count the attractions that have not received some kind of major cosmetic upgrade than it is to count those that have. In the realm of those that opened when the park was young, it's pretty much down to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Tom Sawyer Island, Peter Pan's Flight, and Carousel of Progress. Big Thunder has needed a gigantic facelift for going on ten years now, on the scale of the work done at the attraction in Disneyland recently. It's been on and off the schedule for next year, but the park may be trying to delay it until after Avatar opens at Animal Kingdom in a year and change.

But frankly overall, the place has been looking really sharp for a very long time. While I don't care for the current shortened version of the show, on the technical level Country Bear Jamboree looks terrific, and even the neglected old Carousel of Progress - which I was on a boycott of for about five years due to Disney's refusal to do anything with it - as recently as three weeks ago was looking surprisingly bright and smooth. Even the long-forgotten show scenes along the back stretch of the Rivers of America have gotten upgrades and refurbishments recently, for probably the first time in over twenty years.

In early 2015, the Sunshine Tree Terrace and Aloha Isle swapped locations and menus, meaning that Dole Whips are now dispensed by the exit of the Tiki Room and Citrus Swirls may be purchased near the front of Adventureland. As a historically minded type I'm supposed to be angry about this, but I'm not really - it makes good sense. Sunshine Tree Terrace has always had an unusually huge counter and a short line. The Dole Whip, meanwhile, despite having been scientifically proved to be vastly inferior to the Citrus Swirl, has always had more of a following. It can be chalked up to a bigger social media presence or perhaps just the American sweet tooth at work, but it is what it is. And while  it seems unfortunate to cut off the Sunshine Tree Terrace from the Sunshine Pavilion, there's some compensatory developments.

To begin with, I like the new sign for Sunshine Tree Terrace better than either the Aloha Isle sign or the 2012 version of the Terrace sign. Aloha Isle's new sign also retains the 1960's lettering reintroduced for the Orange Bird roll out in 2012, so I've got no problem with that.

But besides relocating the historic Orange Bird figure to the new Terrace location and giving him an awesome sign, the move did accomplish one thing which has long been on my wish list for Magic Kingdom: put up some decor in the juice bar. It's long been little but a bare room with some bamboo wallpaper, and once the bird was relocated on a new shelf he was joined by shelves of vintage citrus juicers, plastic fruit, and even a new chalkboard showing which fruits have recently arrived in stock. Many of these props seem to have been leftovers from Disney Springs' expanded margarita bar, but I don't mind. Some theming is better than no theming, and that's just one more original Magic Kingdom interior that's been tastefully embellished to be more in line with our modern conception of a "theme park".



In the department of "things only I care about", earlier this year there was general online consternation about the closure of the "Island Supply" shop in Adventureland in favor of a third party vaguely themed Sunglass Hut outfit. It's as lightly themed as the previous shop in its space was, and as lightly themed as the shop before that was, and so the changeover resulted in little more than a disinterested shrug in Passport HQ.

And then they went and changed something which had long been a bone of contention with me, which was that every store in this spot since at least 1972 has used a banner for a shop sign. I've never liked the look of it and like it even less with the covered patio that was added to the front of the store in the 90s:


And just as annoying to me was the missing light fixture on the side of the adjacent facade which has been missing for literally as long as I could remember. I used to call it in back when I worked at Magic Kingdom (in the previous decade!) only to be told that there was no such missing lamp!


So, here's the happy ending: the renovation of the facade included not only a permanent sign not on a tarp (!) but a replacement, appropriate lamp on both sides of the facade! You can call that a hollow victory that appeals to people who do things like take pictures of every light fixture in the park, but it's something that no longer needs to annoy me when I enter the park and walk through Adventureland.


Pirates of the Sunken Boats

Pirates at Magic Kingdom has really lost its way. In 2006, the nonsensical movie overlay imposed a narrative on the ride that makes no sense, and did worse aesthetic damage to the ride by removing various details that made the Florida Pirates the Florida Pirates.  Then, in 2012, even more random stuff was added to tie into the release of the On Stranger Tides movie, including mermaid projections in the water and a mermaid skeleton on Marc Davis' otherwise perfect "Dead Man's Cove" scene. Meanwhile, 2006-era Jack Sparrow figures sat unnaturally cheek to jowl with Pirates constructed in 1973 and still chugging along by the grace of quality, if fifty year old, engineering.


Pirates finally got its shot in the arm this year. Long outdated technology was finally upgraded, from digital sound with new speakers, to LED lights, and fully upgraded animatronics. It's actually startling to remember that at one point this ride's illusions were considered to be wildly impressive and lifelike. As part of the refurbishment, all of the pirates figures were removed and rebuilt and many of the sets refurbished. Everyone came back with new costumes, new hair, new skin, many with new insides, standing in completely refreshed sets. Some of the pirates and townspeople now have dark complexions more appropriate for what one could expect to see in the Caribbean.

All of the faces and hands of the pirates are painted with techniques that were first introduced at the Hall of Presidents in 2009 to give their faces the impression of actual skin instead of painted rubber. The Auctioneer was replaced with a new(ish) figure entirely, and has a new look closer to Marc Davis' concept art and the most impressive animation I've seen in a version of this ride yet. Even minor touches like the lighthouses in Bombardment Bay and the torches in the queue have new, improved fire effects. The result is startling: the ride looks and feels like it was built yesterday. It's all great, great news.

Old-Timey People Warn: YOU WILL GET WET!

Now for the bad news: a few years ago Magic Kingdom decided to buy a new fleet of boats for the attraction, made of a lighter weight plastic instead of the old fiberglass and metal. The reason for this, besides the age of the fleet introduced in the 90s, was to try to combat the increasing weight the boats are required to carry. As you may know, Pirates of the Caribbean's ride system is designed to accommodate boats of five rows a piece. Back in the 90s, the load area was redesigned and new six row boats were introduced to improve capacity at the attraction. Operations still wants to fit as many people in the boats as possible, but with people being much bigger than they were in 1973 when the attraction was designed, it's a delicate task to balance the new boats with the old ride infrastructure and still end up a ride that works as intended.

To be blunt: they did not succeed. The new boats drag too low in the water to begin with, and if balanced just right make a terrific splash when they go down the ramp into the lower floor of the ride. And to make things worse, they take on water.

The result, combined with the inappropriate introduction of Fastpass to the ride as part of the troubled MyMagic+ rollout, means that Pirates almost always has a slow moving line and breaks constantly. I've read elsewhere that Magic Kingdom is currently trying a "back-up" plan to help the boats, and I've been in one of the new boats which was bone dry and went down the drop as smooth as glass. Being a former Pirates ride operator, that impressed the hell out of me. But I've also been in a boat that dragged far too low in the water, barely made it over the drop, got stuck twice in the ride, and was flooded with almost eight inches of water when the boat behind mine, empty and floating at normal draft, pushed a wave of ice cold chemically Pirates water into the row by bumping us from behind.

Furthermore, the damage done in 2006 still has not been undone. The cannons on the fort facade no longer fire, which is integral to setting up the story inside. The "soldiers in the fort" dialogue in the queue still plays too low, and is drowned out by the inappropriate use of the "Pirates Overture" music instead of the music selected by the designers of the ride in 1973. The music which was selected in 1973 is known as "Pirate's Arcade" and is only meant to play in the queue's entrance tunnel. The parrot on the facade has been M.O.A. since 2006 and really needs to be brought back. The talking skull before the down ramp was removed for no good reason, and his wiring and speaker is still in place behind the wall. The skull is a key character in every other version of the ride, and his absence at Magic Kingdom makes an already somewhat weak ride even weaker.

The mermaid projection effect seems to have gone away with the new refurbishment, which is perhaps for the better, but there's still a mermaid skeleton and wrecked boat cluttering up Dead Man's Cove. The mermaid skeleton was re-staged in the refurbishment and looks better, but still weirdly out of place. The middle pirate skeleton in the same scene, with the sword in his back, was replaced in 2005 with a new figure whose head is weirdly raised. This is fallout from a plan to have this pirate skeleton talk, which was abandoned. It looks silly and really ought to be changed.

"I'm not dead yet!"

The same year, Disneyland restaged their Cove scene to more closely resemble Marc's concept art, which is just more evidence how disorganized and rushed the Jack Sparrow project was. Also introduced in 2006 was a new piece of music for the Cove scene, obviously written for Disneyland's grotto sequence in mind, where the atmosphere always has been melancholy and mysterious. The trouble is, Marc redesigned the caves in Florida and intended it to be dark, and scary - that's why there's a low ceiling and used to be very dim lighting. The "Grotto" music from 2006 never quite fit right in Florida, and I think WDI knew this. They replaced it with the sound of singing mermaids in 2012, which is closer to spooky, but still needlessly distracting.

Here's the bottom line: Pirates in Florida is not Pirates in California. There's no time travel in the Florida ride, and never has been. You see a fort being attacked. You enter the fort and hear the soldiers discussing the fact that the pirates are attacking. You load into a boat to evacuate through the secret back entrance to the fort, which happens to be through a cave where we learn pirates buried treasure long ago and are perhaps returning to claim it. As we load into the boats we can see the boat filled with pirates out there on the ocean, coming to attack the fort! We slip through the caves and when we emerge outside there's that ship we saw when we got on the ride, and it's right there attacking the town. There's no way to turn this sequence of events into the Disneyland ride, not even by closing our eyes and stomping our feet. Pirates in Florida needs to be its own thing, and it was, from 1973 to 2006, when it was made into an even paler reflection of what's out in California.

Enough. Let's do right by this ride. Bring all of the weird unique stuff back, and we can even keep Jack Sparrow in the bargain. The ride currently looks better than it ever has, but it makes no sense and I think audiences respond to that fact on some deep, unspoken level.


Lounging on the Veranda

The Twenty-tens may prove to be some sort of renaissance for unanticipated Disney World resuscitations, with the Orange Bird of course at the top of that list. Arguably a physically bigger deal is the return of the Adventureland Veranda, a marvelously atmospheric counter service location at Magic Kingdom which was shuttered in... July 1994. It's back, now called Skipper Canteen, weirdly enough themed to the Jungle Cruise, and I think it looks terrific. The sign outside is a bit excessive, but once you get inside, it's all beautifully textured work, with a great deal of Dorothea Redmond's interior designs still intact.

The only lost opportunity here seems to be losing use of the actual verandas for which the restaurant is named, on the east side of the facility facing the hub. The furthest-flung veranda was actually demolished for the project, and turned into a new set of indoor bathrooms to service the Canteen. They were wrapped in a new facade which appropriately mirrors the 1971 architecture, and so this strikes me as an acceptable loss. But the other two verandas, one directly off the main pedestrian pathway, remain. It strikes me that they could be filled with tables and returned to use as expanded seating for the relocated Sunshine Tree Terrace. If this is indeed the plan then I would be comfortable saying that there truly was nothing lost in the changeover.


The Hub On The Park Goes Round And Round

The Hub is the heart of Magic Kingdom, in the sense that it's the geographic center. It was, once upon a time, incredibly photogenic.

The way the Hub used to work is that there was a curtain of trees screening off the castle from Main Street. This makes good sense because the castle was part of Fantasyland, and such was "elsewhere". The effect was dreamily evocative: a tall castle floating out from behind a curtain of trees, nearby yet emotionally far away, real but somehow inaccessible.


The trees served a real purpose besides looking nice. What I think happened is that the designers of Magic Kingdom noticed that from a distance, the bottom of Cinderella Castle looks flat as a board:


But the minute you shift off to the left or right, the forced perspective of the towers kicks in, and you end up with an incredibly dynamic looking structure:


Basically by planting the trees where they did, WED was forcing you to approach the castle to get the closer view from the best possible angle. When you're climbing the ramps to walk through the castle, the way the towers shift and seem to grow and loom over you almost induces vertigo. It's a really remarkable effect that too few are allowed to see today.

As I've covered extensively on this site before, the trees came down, and while I'm not willing to call the sight lines necessarily better or worse, they are different, and they changed the way the Hub felt. The Hub had previously been open lawn with a forest in the center, and it was now open lawn and a lot of concrete. It was unbearably hot nearly all the time, and almost never pleasant. And worse, it became a gridlock constantly, especially at night during fireworks. Experienced Magic Kingdom goers knew very well to just sit down in Liberty Square or something and wait.

Starting early last year and lasting for what felt like forever, the Hub was rebuilt into a double-Hub arrangement. What was once open lawn and a meandering moat was re-graded into extra wide walkways. Fountains, new railings and street lights, directional signs, and fireworks viewing areas were added. A new, somewhat themed bypass by added on the East side of Main Street, open almost every night and allowing an accelerated escape from the park during gridlock conditions. Extra wide walkways and paths are clearly and carefully divided up into "standing" and "walking" zones, allowing traffic to flow around fireworks or parade spectators.

What can be said about the new hub? To begin with: it works. In my experience traffic has flowed so smoothly through this operational machine that I no longer need to worry about when I'm set to arrive at Magic Kingdom or when it will be possible to leave: you can escape, or even cross the park during the worst of conditions, which I'm sure will be relief this holiday season.


As for the aesthetics, this is another place where I expected the worst and got a good compromise instead. The new Hub is really not like the old Hub in any way, and this is a case where I think that's okay. During the day, the fireworks viewing corral appears to be a carefully manicured Versailles-like garden; at night, the gates swing closed and traffic is kept tightly controlled. Brand new, surprisingly impressive fountains bubble alongside new walkways, giving the whole area a somewhat Tivoli-esque atmosphere.

Imagineering has seemingly combated the fact that the middle of the Hub seems doomed to remain an open concrete circle by placing huge trees everywhere else. It's actually kind of startling: you can look across the hub now and not see any of the buildings in the individual lands now because there are simply so many trees in the way. Many of these are outfitted once again with the traditional twinkle lights, giving the new area just the right level of nostalgia. Lawns have been retained, but now studded with trees and rambling flower beds, giving certain areas a pastoral feel. The illusion of the castle rising from behind a forest has returned - now viewed from the outside of the Hub looking in. Even the original directional signs on the West side of the Hub have been retained, and given new graphics and paint.

Not everything is perfect. There's half a dozen absurd utility poles poking up around the hub outfitted with bright lights to illuminate the sidewalks before parades begin; these were there before but look less appropriate than ever. Areas which once were expansive lawns are now tiny slivers of grass.

But really this is the sort of thing which had to be done, and you can only hope will be done tastefully. I think it looks very good, and unique. And whatever the aesthetic qualities, it's a huge improvement operationally. What was previously a rather pale imitation of Disneyland's Hub now feels like its own animal, with its own sense of grandeur and odd little details. To my eyes, having grown up with the Magic Kingdom, it sometimes slips into absurd overkill. Someone else seeing it for the first time could see it and think it's an incredibly bold, inviting open space. I'm willing to bet that both interpretations are correct in their own way.

In Summary

2014 was a bad year for Disney theme parks folks, and frankly out at Disneyland the bad news continued with the revelation that the back half of their Frontierland was going the way of the Rocket Rod for Star Wars. In Florida, it felt like things that have finally been rolling down the pike for a long time started to happen, and it's all, in my mind, for the sum better. Epcot still needs a reason to exist, but Animal Kingdom has quietly gone from my least favorite of the Florida parks to my second favorite since about 2007. Disney seems committed to keeping the only parts of the Studios worth saving - the atmospheric front - and gutting the rest for new stuff, which really should have happened twenty years ago. And Magic Kingdom has finally started to retain, or even bring back, its unique charm.

I give the bulk of all this year's work a hearty approval. You earned a solid A, everyone. And Santa, if it isn't too much to ask, could we please begin work on next year's wish list?

Passport to Dreams Magic Kingdom Hit List:
 - Remove Magic Carpets of Aladdin and restore Adventureland
 - Demolish Keel Boat Landing & Mansion Fastpass Structure...
      - ...to rebuild that section of riverfront, remove clutter, add trees
 - Gut Main Street Confectionery and restore vintage theme
 - Refurbish and Replace attraction posters at Entrance
 - New Decor and Layout for Pecos Bill Cafe
 - Plant more trees in Town Square
 - Reopen the Diamond Horseshoe with Live Entertainment
 - Restore and create a new show for Carousel of Progress

And finally, three personal requests:

 - Bring back the hands on the final door in the Haunted Mansion Corridor of Doors
 - Return of the 1980 Liberty Square music year-round
 - Please, please, the return of this:

Welcome! This is a Hub Page on the blog Passport to Dreams Old & New compiling our extensive Walt Disney World historical articles, photos, essays, videos and more into an easy to navigate, alphabetical index, organized by subject.

The Magic Kingdom
Country Bear Jamboree: Part One - the style and background of the show
Country Bear Jamboree: Part Two - the songs of the show
Country Bear Jamboree: Part Three - three deleted songs
Echoes From October 1971 - opening month vintage slides
The Hall of Presidents - the art of the show
Haunted Mansion: Start to Shriek - pop up ghouls and vintage dark rides
Haunted Mansion: Raising or Lowering the Dead - designing the ride facade
Jungle Cruise: The Early Years - extensive photos and history
Jungle Cruise: Behind the Scenes - building the ride
Jungle Cruise: Three Mysteries - was the upstairs ever used?
Jungle Cruise: Year of the Frog - some elusive amphibians
Liberty Square Market - traces of an unbuilt snack stand
Magic Kingdom Maps 1971 - 1981 - scans of park maps
Moonlight Cruise - history and photos
Olde World Antiques - history and photos
The Orange Bird - on his 2011 revival
Plaza Swan Boats - history and photos
The Plaza Restaurant - history and photos
Shakedown at the Magic Kingdom - Disney's food panic of the early years
Snow White's Adventures - extensive history and photos of 1971 version
Stitch's Great Escape - the show's controversy and legacy
Tom Sawyer Island: A Long Look - atmospheric video, appreciation and history
Walt Disney World in Late 1978: Part One - Magic Kingdom vintage slides
Western River Expedition: Part One - locating the building, facade & exterior attractions
Western River Expedition: Part Two - Marc Davis' famous interior boat ride
Western River Expedition: Part Three - Marc Davis' artistic intentions & the ride's legacy
The World Cruise - history and photos

The Vacation Kingdom
Contemporary Resort 1971-1981 - maps, photos, and more
Contemporary Resort 1981-1995 - maps, photos
The Golf Resort - history and photos
Institutions/Volume Feeding Part One - 1972 behind the scenes article
Institutions/Volume Feeding Part Two - company philosophy
Institutions/Volume Feeding Part Three - feeding the masses
Institutions/Volume Feeding Part Four - profits and planning
Johnny's Corner - Orlando before Disney
People I've Met in the Past: Part One - goofy vintage photos
People I've Met in the Past: Part Two - more goofy vintage photos
Polynesian Village: Chasing Captain Cook - history of an early bar
Polynesian Village: Sunrise - atmospheric video
Seven Seas Lagoon Sidewheel Steamboats

Lake Buena Vista
Captain Jack's Oyster Bar - history and photos
Frap-Off At the Village - a "craze" comes to the Village
Great Southern Craft Company - photos and history
Lake Buena Vista New Orleans Square - cancelled early 80s expansion
Motor Plaza Hotels - some photos
Other Kingdoms - Sea World, vintage local Orlando advertising
See the Village: Part One - vintage photo tour
See the Village: Part Two - more vintage views
Virgin Megastore - photos and a eulogy
Walt Disney World in Late 1978: Part Two - WDW Village vintage slides
Walt Disney World Village List - where everything was

EPCOT Center
FountainView Bakery - atmospheric video

Growing up out East, I didn't really have a lot of ideas about what the heck that Disneyland was all about.

In a pre-internet world, my only insights into the place - and indeed the mere fact that it was distinctive from Magic Kingdom at all - came from two sources: the 1990 "The Disneyland Game" published by Parker Brothers - where I first learned that the castle out there wasn't like the castle I knew, and that the Haunted Mansion looked even less like the gothic structure which had so impressed me.


It took a few years, but the next bombshell was a VHS tape called Disneyland Fun. That was how I learned the words to Grim, Grinning Ghosts long before it was possible for me to get to Magic Kingdom regularly. Long before I knew what the Matterhorn was, I was trying to pause the tape to figure out what the heck the monster inside it was.

I still watch Disneyland Fun the night before every trip out to Disneyland, because once you get as familiar with the parks as I am, some of the things that really make you feel like a kid again come from unexpected places.

I took this photo on my second trip in 2005

I didn't get out to Disneyland until I was nearly an adult, so a lot of my key formative impressions of the place came through such twice-removed sources as VHS tapes, TV broadcasts, books, and much later on - the internet. I devoured library copies of The Art of Walt Disney and Disneyland: The First Quarter-Century for any hint of the atmosphere of the place. And very high on my list of early impressions about Disneyland was breakfast at Riverbelle Terrace. I did not yet even know its name, but I recognized that wrought iron patio instantly upon seeing it.

Although the tradition of the Mickey-shaped pancake hasn't totally vanished from Walt Disney World, the adorable fruit faces lasted only a few years after I began visiting, and the notion that I could enjoy that again out West stuck strong with me. Seeing the beautiful, open-air patio only impressed me even more.

Perhaps it all goes back to one of the few keenly remembered thing about one of my earliest trips to Walt Disney World, in 1992. My family stayed at Dixie Landings and I was entranced by the Mill Food Court - the endless pancake operation at the griddle, seeing the pancakes set up and get flipped through the glass window, and the hot morning Florida light filtering through the glass enclosed room stays with me to this day. Perhaps on some deep level I connected to Riverbelle Terrace for being the new equivalent of that distant memory.

Something about such a peaceful location in such a bustling intersection stuck strong in my mind, and does to this day. Few things feel more authentically, uniquely Disneyland than sitting out on that patio with a cup of coffee admiring the view towards New Orleans Square.

The view of the Terrace burned into my five-year-old mind

Earlier this year, Disneyland announced their intention to move breakfast to the nearby Rancho del Zocalo. While I'm sure the Mickey pancake will survive and there's certainly nothing special about the food at Riverbelle on a taste level, it is a tradition none the less. The feeling of being out on that patio really is something distinct that I feel won't translate to Rancho.

So one overcast Southern California morning last month, I set out for my last Mickey pancake, camera in tow, in an attempt to capture something of the atmosphere of the morning bustle of Riverbelle Terrace.

It's nice to know that the beautiful dining room will still be in use, and the kitchen will likely be putting out far better food than it ever has. But the thing about Riverbelle Terrace is that it was one of those spots at Disneyland where you could get onto the wavelength of the past. While you were eating there, it didn't seem so long ago that it was called the Aunt Jemima Pancake House and Walt Disney himself was walking Main Street. There was something comforting about knowing that that restaurant had been turning out box mix pancakes since 1955. Sitting out on that patio was good for your soul.

So grab your $9 pancake and let's take in one last breakfast on the Riverbelle Terrace.

About three and a half years ago I published a little essay called Go Away Green, discussing the illusionistic aspects of disguising show buildings inside theme parks.

What are show buildings? They are those big ugly unthemed warehouses which house the sets that the actual attractions take place in.

This doesn't count as spoilers any more, does it?

Quite unexpectedly, Go Away Green turned out to be one of the most consistently popular essays I've ever put out. I think it speaks to the ongoing interest not only in the "backstage" aspect of theme parks, but in the nuts and bolts that go into making a place work. It takes a lot of dedication to care too much about those big featureless walls, so perhaps a followup is in order. Moreover, a lot has changed at Magic Kingdom since 2012. A Fantasyland expansion has come online, previously empty restaurants have been reinvented, and the entire center of the park was demolished and rebuilt. That's a lot of places which previously had very obvious exposed show buildings. What is to be done about them?

The question is not a new one, but the rules about it do change depending on the age of the park we're talking about here. Disneyland has never made much of an effort to wall off its various areas from each other, because everything is so near together it would be almost impossible to do so. Because it's consistent in this approach, it isn't that big of a deal that you can see a Swiss mountain from Frontierland...


...or that the red rocks of Utah are visible from the front lawn of a New Orleans cafe. It's just the way things work there.


Magic Kingdom's designers made a more consistent effort to visually integrate the various areas of Magic Kingdom, but there wasn't much more of an effort to screen the areas off from each other. You can still see parts of Fantasyland from Liberty Square, parts of Adventureland from Frontierland, and so on. There is a move towards subtle visual integration - notice how the shape and size of buildings in Liberty Square subtly echo the shape of Cinderella Castle - but WED Enterprises was still content to allow everything to smush together organically. It's part of the fantasy nature of the park.


Flash forward to 1992, and Disneyland Paris - by far the most integrated effort at a theme park yet - didn't just have a berm around the entire park, but berms separating each themed land from every other one, too. With the traditionally allowable exception of the castle, once inside any of Disneyland Paris' lands, everything is screened off. It's even almost impossible to see Big Thunder from the top of the Swiss Family Treehouse due to very careful positioning. Each "land" in Disneyland Paris is treated as if it is effectively a separate theme park.

WDI carried this quite far. Due to the practicalities of running a theme park, Main Street and Frontierland sit right next to each other. Not to be outdone, the rear of the Frontierland buildings facing Main Street have Victorian false fronts, and the rear of Main Street facing Frontierland is disguised as barns.

Frontierland from Main Street (thanks David G)

Main Street from Frontierland

It's all very intricate and impressive. My question is: does any of this at the end of the day really matter, or is this just the sort of thing super-fans (and theme park designers) care about? Does anybody except readers (and writers) of blogs like this really care that It's A Small World has nothing to do with the rest of Fantasyland?

In my original post I pointed out that around 50,000 people a day walk under the gigantic unthemed wall in Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland and never give it a second thought. They simply don't see it. I compared this to misdirection in a conjuring trick - real-life stage magic.


In short, I'm still not at all convinced that in the end this matters all this much. Don't get me wrong - disguised infrastructure like the examples above at Disneyland Paris fill me, as a park fan, with delight. They're one of the reasons I got into this in such a heavy way. I stopped my touring of Disneyland Paris to admire them.

So it's in those specific terms of praise that I think the following discussion should be couched. As a fan and admirer of park design, I think it's great that WDI finally addressed some of the lapses in theme which I will single out below. Yet, in the larger sense, I also think it's worth being skeptical about the objective value of such things. In the end, after all, isn't this all to some degree just a game?

Enough preface, let's look at some show building.... camouflage.

In 2015, after a year and a half of on-again, off-again work, Magic Kingdom finally finished up a long-delayed bypass around Main Street. Disneyland built one too, and while Disneyland's is a lot of walls and only used on emergency occasions, Magic Kingdom ended up with a wide open air boulevard that they end up using basically every night. They compensated by filling the whole thing with trees.


It's not much to look at, which is okay in the sense that it's rarely seen in daylight anyway, but what's interesting is how the curtain of trees affects Main Street day-long, Areas which once offered very stark views of the rear of Tomorrowland...

2012

...have been somewhat filled in and give a sense of some remove between areas.

2015

Until the late 90s, large trees were planted behind this wall to block views like this, and even if it's due to a firework crowd flow outlet, it's nice to be able to stand on Main Street and enjoy the illusion of a park just beyond this wall again.


Other rough corners were not exactly removed so much as covered up to the point where only the truly sharp eyed would notice them.

2012

2016

On the Hub side of Main Street, the most visible gap of theming in Magic Kingdom - the entirely visible rear of Main Street - is no more. The rear of the buildings, once painted in Go Away Green, now have painted on brick details, interestingly acknowledging that this is the actual rear of Main Street for any who would bother to look.


The remaining protrusion onto the Hub, the side of the Plaza Restaurant, received a rather simple dimensional facade wrap and a few new trees. This doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but as I pointed out in my original article, very few will choose to look at this as opposed to the gigantic castle off to the right.

2012

2015

With some extra trees and from a bit of a distance it becomes very hard to distinguish from the more fully realized architecture, which was the point all along:


Over in Fantasyland, so much of the area has been redeveloped that a great deal of modification of sightlines had to take place. New walls have done up to block rooftop AC units (one wonders what modern WDI would make of the endless miles of plain white roofs once visible from the Skyway), and extra paint has been brought in to disguise plain walls.

Previously this was bare walls & exposed infrastructure

One small area of rockwork was rebuilt at least three times, increasing in size each time, to prevent the new show building for the Belle story time attraction from being seen from the Village Haus restrooms. The bizarre result:


To me that looks like a rock floating weirdly in midair, but I guess at least it isn't the view of the back of a corrugated metal shed.

Elsewhere in New Fantasyland, sightlines have been scrupulously maintained. One of the most impressive is this artificial rocky cliff which blocks views of the Little Mermaid show building from every possible vantage point, including the nearby Storybook Circus:


Only in aerial photos can you appreciate how extensive this detail is. It works from all perspectives, including the top of new the roller coaster:

Scott Keating

Yet in other ways the fully-articulated modern theming extravaganzas in New Fantasyland sit weirdly cheek to jowl with the more illusionistic or just plain simple 1971 architecture. My absolute favorite, the west side of the Hall of Presidents show building, is still proudly sitting out in the open:


Depending on the season, Haunted Mansion's show building is no big secret:


Other areas of Magic Kingdom weirdly combine areas you feel you probably shouldn't be seeing with  evocative detail. There's this detailed fence atop the Adventureland Veranda which helps distract from the plain wall behind it:


The side of the Peter Pan's Flight show building can be glimpsed between two Fantasyland structures, simultaneously offering visible pipes and a themed turret:


These wooden logs on the Frontierland side appear to "hold up" an Adventureland facade:


The exact spot where Adventureland (left) becomes Frontierland (right)


It's worth remembering that Disneyland mostly just lets her architectural style smash together like two trains. The concept of transitory architecture was pioneered for Magic Kingdom.

But on the other hand from the train it's very easy to see the stark naked rear of Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasyland, and the unthemed overpass which I remarked on in Ten Big Design Blunders. Now that the backside of Main Street has been painted over, filled with trees, and basically banished, this is probably the single largest intrusion of the "outside world" into Walt Disney World left.


If we broaden our horizons a bit we could talk about the colossal show building for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which sits out in the open like a shelled peanut:


Or this illusionistic slight of hand on the Disneyland Railroad which passes by so quickly it's easy to forget it's disguising a giant warehouse as... a giant warehouse.


Again, we must ask: does it truly in the end matter?

I think in order to answer that we have to question the extent to which a non-committed audience is likely to respond to the little holes where the illusion slips out. Many guests don't even see obvious details, never mind these weird little gaps where something unintended slips through. You can technically see the Contemporary from Liberty Square, but almost nobody bothers to look to see it.

To what extent does something that's basically subliminal affect the overall perception of the whole?


Tokyo DisneySEA goes to unprecedentedly elaborate means to screen out its back-of-house areas from guest view. If even subliminally, touches like that add to the luster of the park, and make it seem like a more impressive, a complete package. Disneyland Paris and Tokyo DisneySEA enjoy sterling reputations in part because the detail they are built with is staggering. It's possible that even if the majority of audiences don't stop to look at every little thing, the mere fact that it's there impresses on them in some subliminal way.

This is why I think that sweating the small stuff adds up. The measurable difference is played out every day in the park - in reputation, word of mouth, and demand. Mind-boggling spectacles like The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, Tower of Terror, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, and Kilimanjaro Safaris still do command long waits because word of mouth has made them into the tentpoles of their respective parks, and audiences respond to them for the crazily elaborate experiences that they are. They may not see everything, but the richness of the experience alone is arresting.

But it's worth remembering that Disneyland and Magic Kingdom are unique. Compared to something like Disneyland Paris, the design of both of the stateside parks is far less intricate. These parks are stepping stones towards the modern extravaganza parks represented by an Islands of Adventure or a Tokyo DisneySEA, and to some extent I think they should stay that way.

Magic Kingdom is the last Disney park to have that sense of naive architecture that you get at Disneyland. Yes, it's bigger, and yes, over the years Disneyland has made the texture of their park much more intricate. But intricacy is different than sophistication, and I wouldn't want to live in a place where weirdo design touches like those logs holding up those Magic Kingdom facades or that too-small-for-people bridge in Disneyland's Adventureland were "sophisticated" out of existence. These places are, after all, historical objects as well.

Al Huffman

Floating around the perimeters of theme parks, show buildings are the white phantoms of the art form - ever present, rarely seen. In a place so full of richly satisfying distractions, isn't it interesting how much we can learn about them by choosing to look at things we aren't supposed to see?

Late last year the Skipper Canteen opened at Magic Kingdom's Adventureland, a move which this author enthusiastically endorsed. Yet not everyone was as complimentary as I - almost immediately unfavorable comparisons to the Adventurer's Club of Pleasure Island began to emerge. In fact, 2015 was something of a bumper crop year for restaurants being unfavorably compared to the Adventurer's Club, starting with the new Trader Sam's in the Spring, proceeding through Jock Lindsay's Hangar Bar in the Fall, and climaxing with Skipper Canteen in the Winter. This is in spite of the fact that none of these restaurants - to a one - ever announced or attempted any ties to that loudly missed Pleasure Island institution.

Between Summer 1994 and Winter 2015, an entire generation has passed through Adventureland without stepping foot into the Adventureland Veranda. Pieces of the original layout have been truncated, altered, and removed over time - the shaded verandas which gave the food service location its name did not return, and the most extended seating porches out towards the Breezeway had long been swallowed up by Restrooms.

And so it is entirely reasonable to expect new visitors to not be fully in the know about exactly what the Adventureland Veranda and the Skipper Canteen represents and, in looking for answers, perhaps did not look to the right places to begin with.


Adventurer's Club belonged to some time long ago, where there could still theoretically be snooty butlers and French maids. The time period of both the Jungle Cruise and the Club are some ephemeral sense of "pre-World War II"; back then, when theoretically we could expect Indiana Jones,  Rick Blaine, or Groucho's Captain Spaulding persona to rub shoulders at the bar. A time that didn't really exist, but generations of passed on memories from Hollywood thrillers made us want to believe it could have.

And of course, the Jungle Navigation Company - the fictional proprietors of the Jungle Cruise - were explicitly connected to the Adventurer's Club. Many guests seemingly expected the Canteen to reflect either the Club, which was connected to the Jungle Cruise mythologically, or the Jungle Cruise queue area, connected to the Jungle Cruise physically. Instead, they were served up, in Skipper Canteen, a remade version of something else entirely.

And don't get me wrong; I applaud Magic Kingdom's decision to honor the original design of the Adventureland Veranda, one of the most richly evocative spaces ever created for a theme park. The trick is, it's been so long that most people aren't even sure what the Veranda was designed to evoke, so to show how retaining the interior makes both good historical and thematic sense, we need to grapple with what the Veranda is supposed to be at all.

Adventureland: Tracing the Colonial Narrative

As described in a previous post, Adventureland at Magic Kingdom does follow a specific progression and trace a unified concept, it's just one most observers will never attempt to unpack. We will have to, for the purposes of this essay.

There are basically four sections to Adventureland, and each structure can be tied to one or another. The Theme of Adventureland is of the encounter between the Western world and far-off places and peoples. This Theme is Visualized through the device of exotic architecture. The Thematic Heart of the area is the Jungle Cruise, the ride the area was designed to complement, where we (modern Americans) may travel into uncharted regions and confront various dangers.

The First Section is the Jungle. The Jungle represents the untamed wilderness which Adventureland encroaches on. Attractions that belong to the Jungle are the Jungle Cruise and the Swiss Family Treehouse, both representing the concept of "Survival Against the Odds". Both attractions are perched on the edge of the apparently boundless Jungle section. The Thematic Heart of the Jungle Section is the Cambodian Ruins, which represents the notion that all cultures will fail to conquer the wilds of the Jungle and establishes the dominance of this threat.

The Second Section is the Colonial Area. The Colonists represent the intrusion of Western cultures into forgein lands. The Thematic Heart of the Colonial Section is the Adventureland Veranda. Notice how, when entering from the Hub, that the Colonial Section is directly juxtaposed with the Jungle across the way, an early indication of the main conflict of the area - and setting up the nearby Jungle Cruise.

The Third Section is what I call the Native Section. The transition occurs at the Adventureland Breezeway where the bathrooms are located, where the architecture switches to rougher earthen walls and strong Moorish influences. This is the civilization which existed in Adventureland before the Colonists arrived, and it appropriately is positioned further in the area, allowing the Victorian touches of the Colonial section and Main Street U.S.A. to transition smoothly. The Thematic Heart of the Native Section is the Balinese Temple that the Enchanted Tiki Room occurs in.

Let's dwell for a moment on the altered significance of the Tiki Room at Magic Kingdom. At Disneyland, the Tiki Room is designed to reflect a midcentury American tiki restaurant, the likes of which had proliferated across Southern California since the end of the war. That's why it's supposed to be a surprise when the stuffed birds inside come to life. At Magic Kingdom, the Tiki Room is inside a Balinese Temple, an actual house of the Gods. We are told in the pre-show area that the Birds inside can talk as an effect of the "Magical Sunshine Pavilion", i.e. they can speak because they have been blessed by the power of the Gods. Therefore, when the Tiki Gods end the showing of American pop culture by bringing in a storm, it's an actual reflection of their power. In other words, we're lucky they didn't get even angrier. The Colonists don't stand a chance. Or, as Uhoah said, "When you mess with Polynesia, the Tiki Gods will squeeze ya!"

The Fourth Section is Caribbean Plaza, which comprises Pirates of the Caribbean. The Thematic Heart of the Plaza is the Castillo del Morro, the fortress the pirates attack and overrun in the ride. But the Pirates are intruders as much as the Colonizing Spaniards are, don't forget. Although Pirates of the Caribbean does not dramatize Adventureland's key theme - it's a morality play and thus best paired with The Haunted Mansion - the fact that Caribbean Plaza is executed in Spanish Colonial style, and bookends the Native section of Adventureland with yet another village built by conquerors, both means it feels perfectly at home in Adventureland and allows for a smooth transition into a representation of another area overrun by greedy white men: Latin America and the American Southwest.

Here's a map of the main area with everything color coded to dramatize the clash of values in Adventureland.


The Adventureland Veranda: What Is It?

Okay, now that we know how the Veranda fits into the narrative conveyed by Adventureland's architecture, let's dig into what the darn thing actually is, and we can begin by taking a quick tour of what's represented architecturally here.

Facing the Hub, we see immediately tile-lined roofs and elaborately shaped details.


Yes, tile-lined roofs do evoke the Caribbean, and it's an easy leap to make given the elaborately tiled roofs just down the way in Caribbean Plaza, but let's not forget that tile roofs are also traditional in Asia, which helps visually tie the roofline in with this elaborately realized pagoda-esque tower:


The elaborate scrollwork of the Veranda is unmistakably Victorian in design. We know this because only the Victorians did things like nail intricately scrolled wood on their houses, and they did it because it was brand spanking new and novel. The Scroll Saw that made the production of these pieces possible was not created until the Industrial Revolution, which meant you could now cheaply produce things which once would've required a skilled artisan. The Victorians loved that stuff, which is why we can instantly recognize the intricate but mass produced "gingerbread" of Main Street USA as Victorian.

We also see elaborately designed railings...


..intricate woodwork...


...promenading balconies and painted steel or tin roofs. Corrugated steel, again, being a product of the Industrial Revolution, making it possible to date our structure definitively to late in the 19th century.


So now the trick is to narrow down what sort of tropical architecture has all of these features. One easy place to search for inspiration is Hawaii, which had effectively been annexed by the United States for decades before it was made an official part of the union following World War II. It's easy to see the similarities to structures built in Hawaii to house workers and owners on sugar plantations:


But it's easy and tempting to conflate the merely tropical with a direct source. The tin roof, peaked architecture, bright colors and charming porch recall the Veranda closely, but what of the Asian elements? The same historical location in Hawaii, the Plantation Village in Waipahu, has a temple built for Chinese laborers that looks like even more of a smoking gun:


But let's keep looking before we jump to any conclusions. It gets into tricky territory if you want to claim that Hawaii was ever "colonized" - issues that a Disney blog and this unlearned author would be best to avoid. We are in the "Colonial Section", and if the more Asian the designs get the closer we seem to the Veranda, then we need to question which European powers maintain colonies in Asia. And when we ask that, the range narrows considerably: Britain and France.

How about India? The entrance to the Veranda has this highly atmospheric punkah, redolent of tropical climes and the Indian subcontinent.


Punkahs spread with the English out of British East India during their colonial era, spreading west to Europe.


But there isn't much else you can point to in the Veranda that seems especially British or Indian in design. Punkah became especially popular in the American South among the richest landowners, and those who operated punkah is where we still derive our pejorative "coolie". Dixie Landings/Port Orleans Riverside's lobby has two very visible punkah:


Keep in mind this connection, but next we have to look to French Indochina, and once we do that, things start to look familiar indeed.


French Colonial architecture begins to more strongly resemble the almost hallucinatory refinement we see in Adventureland. The rambling balcony on this house would look at home dispensing Dole Whips.

Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, was the center of the French Indochina Empire and in an old section of town we can see native building materials and tile roofs juxtaposed directly with the kind of elaborate railings and open balconies found at Magic Kingdom:


France was so proud of Hanoi that they actually staged a Expo there in 1902. Intended to ride the coat-tails of the era's love of World's Fairs, to Magic Kingdom fans the architecture is startlingly familiar:


If the Adventureland Veranda's corrugated roofs and shutters strike Americans as redolent of Key West or the Caribbean, well, the reason is because the French stopped off there too. Notice the similarities to this 1911 plantation house in St Lucia:


If we stop off at Caribbean islands which still evoke a Gallic influence, we come across architecture which would look right at home in Adventureland. Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, still has some astonishingly beautiful French Colonial vernacular architecture:


In fact, if the whole thing seems redolent of the American South and Jazz, remember just who it was whom we bought the Louisiana Purchase from. I've heard more than one guest describe the Veranda as reminding them of New Orleans, and they're right, because don't forget that we in the States still have French Colonial architecture too:


We call our concentrated area of French Colonial architecture the French Quarter, but in New Orleans you can also hear it called the "Vieux Carre", which was what the French called it - it means "The Old Square". That's exactly what the Vietnamese call their concentrated area of French Colonial architecture - "The Old Square". This is not a coincidence. In fact, once you lock in on French Colonial as the architectural style, the pieces fall into place: tall rooms designed to circulate air:


Sliding or opening shutters:

Airy verandas, just as in the Old South... wait, the clue was actually in the name all along! Turns out the name "Adventureland Veranda" doesn't just describe the actual Verandas which lined the east side of the structure facing the Hub, but were meant to evoke the function of the space as a great house, a location of manners and refinement, a cool escape from the oppressive heat beyond.

The Adventureland Veranda represents a French Colonial Plantation Home of the Victorian era. Now, notice that in its original state, the Veranda was heavily dressed with bamboo, wind chimes, and other South Pacific textures and patterns:


This not only makes the interior more strange and exotic, helping differentiate it from Main Street, but looks forward to the totally rustic look of the "Native Village" deeper in Adventureland, typified by the Tiki stylings of the Sunshine Pavilion and the Jungle Cruise.

It's a testament to the design talents of WED Enterprises that generations of guests detected this without really being able to put their finger exactly on what it was they were seeing. French Colonial architecture is at once familiar and exotic, an appropriate overture to the area to come. It can look European, American, Caribbean, Indian and Asian all at once, and has been quietly confounding description for decades.

The Design of the Adventureland Veranda

Once I had gathered the above sets of influences, I was able to start drilling down my search for material on the design of the Adventureland Veranda, and thanks to a fortuitous series of "finds", I'm able to present a fairly clear picture for the first time. So, it's time to meet Disney Legend Dorothea Redmond.

Mrs. Redmond has been mentioned here before, but it's fair to say that if the design of Magic Kingdom had an "MVP", I'd place Dorothea at the top of the list. This may seem silly, until I start listing the locations based directly on her designs: The Crystal Palace, King Stephan's Banquet Hall, Liberty Tree Tavern, Plaza Restaurant, Tony's Town Square, Columbia Harbour House... need I go on?

Dorothea's first job out of art school was working under legendary designer William Cameron Menzies.... on Gone With The Wind, David O Selznick's colossal production. Much of the feel of Redmond's production art of Tara was transferred to the screen through elaborate special effects shots:


Redmond kept working for Selznick, including later productions like Rebecca and Notorious, with Alfred Hitchcock. Her art must have caught Hitch's eye, because he brought her over to Universal, where she did design interiors and storyboards on Shadow of a Doubt:


Perhaps it was her work on Gone With The Wind that suggested her, but Walt Disney brought her onboard at WED Enterprises, where she contributed to New Orleans Square:


I've been able to gather up a number of Redmond's pieces relating to Magic Kingdom's Adventureland, which if I had to guess, based on what I have, she designed the common areas in totality.


That's something like what the Sunshine Pavilion looked like in 1968 - it compares tolerably well to the layout seen in this 1968 Magic Kingdom site plan, provided by Mike Lee at Widen Your World:


Sharp eyed viewers will notice that the basic shape of the Adventureland Veranda is pretty much in place by then. Which is why I'm comfortable saying that this blueprint matches an elevation recently put up for sale by Van Eaton Galleries:


Don't worry, we'll get closer to pull it apart presently. I was, in fact, going to pass on this unremarked when I noticed that Redmond had left barely legible source citations at the bottom of her art, and this find was too remarkable to pass up on. Although there were undoubtably other sources, I'm pleased to present two books which are direct sources for Magic Kingdom's Adventureland: The West Indies by Life World library, 1967, and Shadows From India by Roderick Cameron, 1958.


Shadows From India is hard to find today - it seems to have been published only in Europe - and strikes me as the more interesting source so we will begin there. Although in the final park their placement was flipped, on the Redmond piece what is identifiably Aloha Isle is present:


The final design was much reduced and had no visible structural decay, but that is definitely the building where Dole Whips were dispensed for three decades. Redmond's notation here directs us to Shadows From India page 135, which turns out is a fairly unenlightening reference for the windows seen here.

However, if we look carefully, we can find more obvious sources, like these long slatted shades between columns on a British Colonial townhouse on page 142:


These seem to have been copied pretty much directly:


Elsewhere in Shadows From India, it's possible to find echoes of Adventureland:




This British Colonial houseboat seems especially close to the mark:


Going back to Redmond's art, we can see that originally, the very first structure inside Adventureland to the right -- was going to be a Shooting Gallery! Notice the crossed pistols on the mural top the left of the shooting gallery counter:


Her citations direct us this time to page 105 in The West Indies, where she has reproduced a building sitting behind The Queen's Park in Trinidad pretty much exactly:

The park is still there, but all evidence suggests that this fascinating Victorian is long gone. The final version came out a bit differently while retaining the overhanging eaves:


One real life building that strikes me as even closer to the final Veranda design is the Boissiere House in Port-au-Prince:


The central section of the Veranda facade here, what Redmond has labeled "6" and "7", would seem to be total fantasy. The glass gazebo, once called the South Seas Terrace (now the entrance to the Skipper Canteen), only has a notation indicating how the corrugated steel roof should be applied:


But if we follow the paper trail to The West Indies, on page 85 we come across a startling discovery:



It turns out this memorable building is actually a pretty direct copy of a house in Port-au-Prince, which at least as of 1967 was still standing. I've searched online and it no longer seems to exist - much of Port-au-Prince's Victorian architecture was either torn down or finally destroyed by the 2010 earthquake. But here's one, rarely bestowed form of immortality!

As for the interior? I have only vestiges - scans from a Food Service planning packet dated 1970 on file at the Orlando Public Library - but enough to show how faithfully realized Redmond's designs were:




A Club By Any Other Name

Let's go back to the Adventurer's Club for a moment here.

Here's the thing, even allowing for the inexact nature of farce, is that Adventurer's Club was always supposed to be a Gentleman's Club, heavily British East Indian in style. Supposedly the idea germinated from a theme party held by Joe Rhode in the late 80s called "The Last Days of the Raj". In other words the Adventurer's Club was a place you came back to to tell your stories and show off your treasures. The Adventureland Veranda is a plantation, meaning it has the feeling not only of being away from everything, but of domesticity.

Now the Jungle Cruise is unavoidably British Colonial in theme, even if it's staffed with wisecracking yanks in the fashion of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Thus it makes sense that the Jungle Cruise and Adventurer's Club would be bedfellows. So how does the Jungle Cruise fit into the Veranda?

I'd argue that there is a backdoor here through the colonialism theme. And since it would be egregious to keep the distinctive exterior of the Veranda structure but gut the interior to resemble something it is not, then either the whole thing must be torn down and rebuilt into an entirely new stretch of architecture or the Jungle Cruise theme must be adapted to the new space.

The key is that the Skipper Canteen must then by definition not be a social space in the style of the private club represented by the Adventurer's Club, but a private space, and that is just what Imagineering has done. They've made the Canteen into a converted home, even turning one of the side rooms into a family dining room with a fireplace and cabinets of fine china.

Instead of making the connection between the Jungle Cruise and the Adventuer's Club and being disappointed that the Canteen does not follow suit, I'd like to propose a more appropriate lens to view the new restaurant through, one that actually works with both the Jungle Cruise and the Veranda:


The Explorer's Club, also known as Colonel Hathi's Pizza Outpost at Disneyland Paris, is another space which is at once exotic and evokes domesticity, with soaring ceilings and shaded verandas.


I'd rather have it that way, too. The approach is simple and matches the tone of what's there in the park already.


One of the distinctive things about Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom, I feel, is that in many areas the theming is actually dead simple. There's nothing inherently fabulously elaborate about the Columbia Harbour House or the French Market, but they're persuasively alive in the ways that some more modern Disney themed establishments feel more cluttered up with stuff than actually carefully themed.

And that's why I applaud what Imagineering did with the Skipper Canteen. It isn't just about reopening a space and keeping it true to its original intentions, it's about knowing when to stop. It's a problem that pops up more and more these days, as Walt Disney World sees more and more visitors and more and more projects put through the sausage factory.


It's reassuring that the designers of the Canteen saw the value in the intended design, and knew that sometimes that was enough. And that a brilliant, historically valid original Magic Kingdom interior was repurposed and reopened to the general public is even more cause to celebrate.

Liberty Square remains the Magic Kingdom's most successful area beyond the upper edge of Main Street; it's as small and effortless as it is accomplished and rich. It's as intimate as Magic Kingdom gets, and anchors three of her best attractions. In terms of landmass, it's small, but in terms of artistry, it's large.

Which is why you really, really need the musical background here to be appropriate. I'd argue that Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland can support a wide variety of music styles because they're themed to attitudes and ideas, not places. 

But when you get to Main Street, Frontierland, and Liberty Square, you have to be very careful. People already have an idea of what those areas could feel and sound like, and the key is to meet these expectations while harmonizing with the architecture and the overall message of the area. It's trickier than you think.

Liberty Square is special to me, so for the next few weeks we'll be taking a close look at the music of Liberty Square.

The 1971 Music: A Fife and Drum Extravaganza

Anyone who collects park music has likely come across a scratchy piece of fife and drum music with odd fades in and out which purports to be the very original Liberty Square music. From most perspectives, this file is chock-a-block with problems. The music quality is poor, there's weird fades, and worst of all, it's only 12 minutes long. And this from a subset of the community which is no stranger to mislabeling, subterfuge, and just plain lying. No way this is authentic, right?

Wrong! The original Liberty Square music comes to us from the collection of Mike Cozart, who beat all of us to the punch by getting friendly with Jack Wagner before he died. Many of the early, difficult to verify music loops which circulate in the collector community, such as the original Adventureland Veranda and King Stefan's Banquet Hall loops, come from Mike, who got them direct from Jack.

Mike sent along a photograph of the original Master Copy reel from his collection:



Michael Sweeney has identified most of the tracks in the digital file version of this music reel as we have it today. Most of them come from a 1957 Eastman Wind Ensemble Record "Spirit of '76". Please note that the version which was used to create our music loop in question was the LP version. The same music is available most commonly today via a 1997 CD which compiles "Spirit of '76" as well as another Eastman Wind Ensemble record, "Ruffles and Flourishes". This CD version breaks up the running order of the tracks a bit and obscures some of the choices Jack made in 1971.

Tracks 11 - 13 in this list come from a as yet unknown source. Given the rest all come from a same LP - and appear basically in album order -  may seem rudimentary, but is characteristic of other very early Wagner-era music loops.

Liberty Square Area Music [ca. 1971 - ca. 1980] 
01. Yankee Doodle [1] 
02. Sergeant O'Leary [1] 
03. The Belle of Mohawk Vale [1] 
04. Garry Owen [Fades In] [1] 
05. Dixie [1] 
06. Sentry Box [1] 
07. The Breakfast Call [1] 
08. Rally 'Round the Flag [1] 
09. Bonnie Blue Flag [1] 
10. The White Cockade [1] 
11. Battle Cry of Freedom [Fades In] 
12. Yankee Doodle  
13. The Girl I Left Behind Me [Fades Out]

[1] The Spirit of '76 & Ruffles and Flourishes by the Eastman Wind Ensemble (Mercury Living Presence)

Okay, okay, I'd better say something before the more ardent BGM fans out there start throwing things at the computer screen: this list, and the photo provided of the reel above, don't match up. The reel clearly indicates a run time of 14:40. And then below the 14:40 on the identification sticker in Jack's handwriting, it says "19:10", which isn't correct either. This loop has three different run times, and none of them make any sense!!

Okay, relax, let's put on our detective cap here and go through this one problem at a time.

The Missing 2:40

The loop as we have it comes out to around an even twelve minutes. Thanks to Jack's notation on the reel above, we know that the full length was intended to be 14:40. So where did the missing 2 minutes and 40 seconds go to?

What is evident when you're looking at the original LP instead of the somewhat misleading CD version, is that Jack drew from a very specific set of tracks to create the loop. Each side of the Eastman Wind LP is divided into two suites. Side A includes "Traditional Marching Tunes for Fife and Drum" and "Camp Duty of the US Amy", and Side B contains "Traditional Music for Fife and Drums" and "Drum Solos". He uses the entirety of Side A's "Traditional Marching Tunes" and one Track from Side B's "Traditional Music for Fife and Drums". He doesn't use anything from "Camp Duty" or "Drum Solos". Why?

Rear of the Eastman Wind Ensemble LP

It could be that these suites are very, very heavy on, well, drumming. One reason why he may have added the fade into "Gary Owen" is to eliminate the long drum solo at the start of the recorded track. Based simply on what we have, he didn't seem interested at all in "Camp Duty" or "Drum Solos". In fact, when he needs more music for the loop, he goes over to Side B skipping "Camp Duty" entirely.

Therefore, if the missing 2:40 is from the Eastman Wind Ensemble LP at all - and I'm not saying it is, because we'll never know, but if it is - then it's probably from Side B of the record in the "Traditional Music for Fife and Drums" suite.

Tracks used are highlighted

And it just so happens that the next three tracks on the LP following "The Breakfast Call", which he used, happen to work out to about two minutes and 33 seconds - "The Dinner Call", "Wrecker's Daughter Quickstep", and "Hell on the Wabash".

This would fit in with his modus operandi elsewhere in the loop of simply working down the LP more or less in disc order. The final song in the "Fife and Drums" suite - Downfall of Paris - is a length which would require combination with either an edited track or more material of an unknown origin to hit the required 2 minute 40 second window, which of course is not outside the realm of possibility.

With Pauses?

An additional wrinkle on the Master Copy is Jack's handwritten note: "19:10 with Pauses". This means there was apparently sections of the BGM loop which had no music recorded in them!

As it happens, this 1971 loop used to circulate on the internet broken up into three files: what I've got listed above as Tracks 01-03 was once file one, Tracks 04-10 was file two, and Tracks 11-13 in a third. Sometimes they're presented in other orders, as on Utilidors' copy, but those three groupings remain consistent.


Notice that the first two groupings come from Eastman Wind Ensemble and the third from the as-of-yet unidentified second source.

It seems unlikely to me that whoever broke them into pieces did not do so for no reason. I think they broke them up into pieces to get rid of long gaps between the songs. In fact, I swear I remember downloading this piece of music online in the early 2000s and being baffled that it was filled with long pauses between the fife and drum music. I deleted it, convinced it was a mistake. Now I'm not so sure and I wish I had kept that copy.

So we know that the track is intended to have 14 minutes 40 seconds of music in a loop which is 19 minutes 10 seconds long, which is a difference of 4 minutes 30 seconds.

And if we combine this with my guesses above that the missing 2:40 comes from the Eastman Wind Ensemble LP, and that the missing Eastman tracks would have been all grouped together possibly in LP playlist order, we have a fourth "suite" of tracks which is missing from our version of the 1971 BGM.

That's four distinct "suites" of fife and drum music, three contributed by the same "Spirit of 76" LP, and one from an unknown source. I doubt Jack would have begun or ended any BGM loop with a long gap of silence, that leaves three spaces between "suites" where the silence would have been. 

These three gaps exactly correspond to how these files were broken up while they were circulating on the early internet. And, as it happens, 4 minutes and 30 seconds breaks up into three 90 second pauses exactly. So, one possible 1971 playlist could have been:

01. Yankee Doodle [1]
02. Sergeant O'Leary [1]
03. The Belle of Mohawk Vale [1]
    (90 seconds of silence)
04. Garry Owen [1]
05. Dixie [1]
06. Sentry Box [1]
07. The Breakfast Call [1]
08. Rally 'Round the Flag [1]
09. Bonnie Blue Flag [1]
10. The White Cockade [1]
    (90 seconds of silence)
11. Battle Cry of Freedom
12. Yankee Doodle
13. The Girl I Left Behind Me 
    (90 seconds of silence)
14. The Dinner Call [1]
15. Wrecker's Daughter Quick Step [1]
16. Hell on the Wabash [1]

[1] The Spirit of '76 & Ruffles and Flourishes by the Eastman Wind Ensemble (Mercury Living Presence)

Please remember, this is nothing but apure guess.  But if I'm right, then the final group of three tracks could have been physically truncated off the reel at some point before Mike Cozart got it transferred to digital - such damage being more likely to occur at the end of the reel than the start or the middle - and then later on somebody else removed the long gaps of no music between the songs.

So why would there be gaps anyway, and what's with the strange fades? Why is this loop so weird?

I think that what Jack had in mind was a bit different from theme park BGM as we know it today. We're accustomed to a constant, gentle musical accompaniment inside theme parks, often in continual hour-long cycles. No such conventions could have informed Jack's choices in 1971 since he was inventing the style as he went. I think what he was going for here was the impression that a fife and drum band could be playing, perhaps just around the next corner. The fades in and out could represent the approach or retreat of another group of minute men.

Let's also not lose sight of the fact that just because Jack was paid to create this loop doesn't mean it was widely heard in the way theme park music is today. As demonstrated elsewhere on this blog, in the 70s the Magic Kingdom sound system was patchy, and wild. You probably couldn't hear most of the music in the park unless you were inside or right under a speaker. Perhaps this only played from a few speakers near the entrance of the land, or only immediately around the Hall of Presidents.

We'll probably never know for sure.  But, yes, we can confidently say that the 1971 Liberty Square music is authentic, even if it only survives today in weirdly incomplete form.

Ready for more? Visit the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Music Hub.

Or, hop a monorail to the past and spend a full "day" at the Walt Disney World of the 1970s by downloading Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.

Welcome back to the music of Liberty Square, where this time, it's personal!

This week, we'll be wrapping up our look at the music history of Liberty Square, and taking a deep dive into my personal favorite background loop of all time: the Liberty Square music that played from 1980-2010, which is close to my heart.

Liberty Square isn't an easy area to create music for. The obvious choice is Fife and Drum music, but the aggressive, militaristic aspects of a march don't match the pastoral quality that WED achieved in this area. Imagineering must have considered all of this carefully, because in the build up to open EPCOT, they recorded a loop for Liberty Square instead of asking Jack Wagner to put one together, as they had in 1971.

Establishing the Date

Establishing the date of very old pieces of music isn't always easy. Due to a kinship with an EPCOT Center track that will be discussed below, for many years the Liberty Square loop was assumed to have been installed in 1982, which is to say concurrent with its EPCOT counterpart. But the Liberty Square music can also be heard in numerous early Disney home videos from 1981, which means it predated EPCOT - but not by a heck of a lot. Enough to still have a firm connection to EPCOT.

But my thinking about the loop changed dramatically when Retro Disney World posted one of their restored home videos in late 2014. It's from 1980, it has sound, and at 12:58 in the video, you can hear it - the classic Liberty Square loop.


This changed things a bit. A year in advance of EPCOT Center I could accept as a matter of convenience, but this new video brought us all the way back at least to October 1980 for the loop in question, and to me changed the way we should think of it.

Establishing the Tracks

This was an extremely difficult loop to establish an actual track listing for. To begin with, by far the bulk of the songs in this loop are marching tunes, but played at the leisurely pace of the eighteenth-century drawing room. This means it can be very tough to distinguish the songs by ear.

Further complicating matters is the fact that in the era most of these tunes most readily fit into, it was common and accepted practice to write "parodies" of other songs, fitting new lyrics to established tunes. This was often used for political purposes, so that the Yankee "The Liberty Song" is sung to the British Royal Navy anthem "Heart of Oak", or "Free America" is sung to the tune of "British Grenadiers". Such political profanity even gave rise to our national anthem: the English club song "The Anacreontic Song" is combined with Francis Scott Key's "Defence of Fort M'Henry" to become "The Star Spangled Banner".

Adding yet more complications, certain Disney tracks are interpolated into the mix. By far the most vexing is the first track, which could be heard behind the opening scenes of the 1971 "Hall of Presidents" film:


Buddy Baker's score for The Hall of Presidents is an elaboration of his brilliant score for Great Moments With Mr Lincoln. The Lincoln score itself is rooted in themes originally written for the Walt Disney Productions television film Johnny Shiloh. I've watched both Johnny Shiloh and the George Bruns-scored Johnny Tremain trying to ferret out connections to this first mystery track, all in vain. The song does somewhat resemble a slowed-down version of Bruns'"Johnny Tremain" theme, but not enough to lead me to believe that it was intended to be the same song.

Similar Baker material was recycled into the soundtrack for "America the Beautiful" in 1967, and Walt Disney World Forever listed the 1994 Hall of Presidents cues as "America the Beautiful", apparently in error. For lack of anything better, I've called the track "Constitutional Convention", it's name on the original LP.

If there are any specialists of the music of the late-eighteenth and early nineteeth century out there and you recognize something I've mislabeled, please speak up - I'm only working with my own ears here. I've included some dates for the authentic music here to show how careful Baker was in selecting songs of the appropriate time period for Liberty Square.

Liberty Square BGM 1980 - 2010
Buddy Baker/WDP, Arranged by Walter Sheets

01) Constitutional Convention - Buddy Baker?, 1971
02) The Liberty Song - John Dickinson, 1768
03) Chester - William Billings, 1770
04) Unknown A
05) Unknown B
06) Yankee Doodle - Traditional; circa 1755
07) Molly Malone - Traditional; circa 1830
08) Free America - Dr. Joseph Warren, 1774
09) Unknown C
10) The Liberty Tree - George Bruns, 1957
11) The Girl I Left Behind Me - Traditional; circa 1812
12) Hail Columbia - Philip Phile, 1798
13) Unknown B
14) Yankee Doodle - Traditional; circa 1755

This version of the loop is compiled from a new induction recording of the American Adventure BGM and secondary sources provided by Chris Lyndon and is presented in the highest quality possible. Most other online presentations of the loop cut tracks 13 and 14, which simply repeat tracks 5 and 6, but this is indeed part of the proper loop and they are retained here.

Download the Liberty Square loop here (MP3 and FLAC).

Background Information

If fife and drum music made Liberty Square seem too militaristic, then the Sousa and Cohan extravaganza represented by this loop is just as incongruous. Absolutely nothing about this loop is appropriate to Liberty Square in tone or in time period. Even more bizarrely, perhaps as a compromise, the 1980 Liberty Square music - the real Liberty Square music - plays in November and December as "Christmas Music". Even a brief glimpse at its track listing above will tell you that the songs have nothing to do with Christmas.

Interestingly, perhaps aware that there is a major disconnect between the Liberty Square music and Liberty Square itself, Imagineering has reduced its footprint over the years. They've begun playing the Columbia Harbour House music around the exterior of that building, and a muted organ version of Grim Grinning Ghosts near the Haunted Mansion, splitting Liberty Square up into three zones, with the Sousa banished to the area immediately around the Hall of Presidents. But time hasn't made this any more appropriate than it was in 2010. Some new BGM tracks, like the Caribbean Plaza Pirates movie soundtrack music or the "contemporary Japan" music played in World Showcase seem weird at first before synthesizing into the whole, but the 2010 Liberty Square track still stands out. It's just a bad choice.

Of course Sousa marches don't fit with Liberty Square - everything about the architecture and sense of space that WED achieved in this, the richest area of Magic Kingdom, is oriented towards a homey, welcoming, peaceful atmosphere. Liberty Square may be a town on the brink of revolution, but it's also a place where the leisurely turning of a paddlewheel sets the tone and every American president agrees to get along - on stage at least.

If I'm right in my guesses above - and I'm willing to bet that I am - then the 1980 Liberty Square loop was entirely designed to reflect the atmosphere of the area as it was actually built. And it worked. It worked perfectly. Few integrations of music and themed design have ever been as snugly, and as tightly woven. As a transition from Main Street into Frontierland. Liberty Square was the pastoral, the slow movement of the symphony between the go-for-broke American optimism of Main Street and the rough and tumble Frontierland.

But the choice for or against a piece of music comes down to more than that, because more than almost any area music I can think of, the 1980 Liberty Square music - overseen and created by two Disney Legends, used in park for two generations without feeling dated - belongs to Liberty Square, just as surely as "Yo Ho" belongs to Pirates of the Caribbean. Six years of marching music in Magic Kingdom's best land is too long. It's time to bring back the 1980 Liberty Square music, for good. Some things just can't be improved on.

Ready for more? Visit the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Music Hub.
Or, hop a monorail to the past and spend a full "day" at the Walt Disney World of the 1970s by downloading Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.

"Disney is nearer to what people really want than anything architects have ever given them." - Robert Venturi, 1972

Historians don't like question marks. Mysteries are reserved for literature, and send the factually minded chasing down clues and pursuing phantoms, chasing scraps of evidence forever hoping to stumble across that moment where uncertainties are erased.

But no matter what, Walt Disney's E.P.C.O.T. city will forever be the un-answerable question sitting at the center of discussions not just of Walt Disney World, but Walt Disney's entire life. Walt Disney was a man who coaxed art out of unpromising material - cartoons, amusement piers, episodic children's books, rotating furniture galleries - by posing open questions to his devoted league of designers and hashing out the final product from their best ideas. EPCOT didn't get very far from the question of "What would a future city look like?" before Walt Disney died.

Walt Disney's inheritors were absolutely right in their conviction that only Walt could have actually produced EPCOT - partially because there were few men left in the world of his means and conviction, and partially because nobody but him knew what the hell it was going to be. The famous "Progress City" pie-shaped suburb and covered urban center is very much a work in progress - ambitious, perhaps, but also not real.

One need only to look at the problems a later Disney regime faced in trying to launch Celebration to immediately realize that Walt never solved the problem of actually having people living in this place. Riding glass enclosed Peoplemovers and going home to steel and glass houses to be gawked at by tourists and constantly hassled by corporations who want to replace your dishwasher is not everyone's American dream. Everyone who lived in EPCOT would've had to have loved it as much as Walt for any of his goals to actually work.



So in their own way Disney was right to fulfill the specifications if not the spirit of their pact with Florida in creating EPCOT Center. And yet in other ways, the apple of urban design has never fallen far from Disney's tree. Through a combination of accident and design, Walt Disney World actually is a city with a population of tens of thousands - a city of fantasy, not science fiction.

On this blog I've always tried hard to raise awareness about the key role of Lake Buena Vista both in the creation of Walt Disney World and the evolution of Disney's urban planning, but I feel that now is the right time to raise the question again.

The problem is that tracing Lake Buena Vista from conception to present day has always been a failure story - an unrealized planned community that gave way to a patchwork quilt of chaos called Downtown Disney. But times have changed, and Disney has spent the last several years entirely, experimentally and painfully rebuilding the shell of Lake Buena Vista into Disney Springs, and that changes the story.

We'll get there. But before we do, for new readers of this blog as well as for maximum clarity, it's necessary to backtrack. So first let's introduce what Lake Buena Vista was and what it was supposed to be for Disney, and how Lake Buena Vista's development is the key to unlocking the secret history of Walt's EPCOT city.

Lake Buena Vista - Where The Peacocks Roam

The usual way of thinking about the EPCOT City is that it qualifies as an abandoned project by Disney; they simply give up and built a theme park, a betrayal of Walt's final project. This is not quite true. In reality an entire phalanx of complexities and setbacks saw the EPCOT city concept gradually pushed deeper and deeper into the grave. It's a long story, one that sees Disney scaling back and scaling back ambitious plans in the face of an uncertain economy and indifferent housing market.

The Magic Kingdom was not yet open when the foundations began to be poured for Lake Buena Vista. The October 1971 issue of Walt Disney World News includes this surprising headline near the back of the magazine:

"Lake Buena Vista - City of Tomorrow 

The city of Lake Buena Vista, located on 3,800 acres of lush Florida lake country adjacent to Walt Disney World, represents a new concept in urban development. 

A testing ground for modern building and living ideas, the city is rapidly emerging as a new kind of recreation-oriented community. Residential homes, condominiums, motor inns, apartment complex, an 18-hole golf course and commercial development are all part of the new community concept."

Anybody reading that in 1971 could come to the conclusion that this was the start of construction for Epcot, which of course is exactly what Disney was betting on. The 1971 Walt Disney Productions Annual Report included an entire section on LBV, and made the claim explicit:

"A prime consideration of Walt Disney in purchasing 27,500 acres of land in central Florida as the future site for Walt Disney World was his desire to give direction to the surrounding development which would emerge as a natural consequence of his new destination vacation resort. 

Walt Disney's ultimate goal for the Florida project was always the development of EPCOT, an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a living environment, 25 years ahead of its time, which would always be introducing, testing and demonstrating new systems and technologies. 

To gain practical experience in this new field of real estate development, and to provide careful and balanced management planning for the entire Florida property in keeping with Walt Disney's initial objectives, the Company created a wholly-owned subsidiary, the Buena Vista Land Company."

In June 1972, Architectural Forum published an extensive overview of the entire Walt Disney World complex, saving special space for the Lake Buena Vista project as it stood at that time, and they had this to say about it:

"The nearest thing in WDW to a real town is the residential community of Lake Buena Vista, a development of high and low-rise structures that will, eventually, cover 4,000 acres and house 16,500 full or part-time residents, and employ 4,000 outsiders. It's not nearly as adventurous as the late Walt Disney's dreams of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT; but, unlike EPCOT, the community of Buena Vista is both practical, in todays terms; and it is, in fact, under construction. 

An initial development, called the Golf Course Community, has started construction with 27 clustered, neatly planned and designed row houses (some of which may be operated, experimentally, on dry cell batteries that are a product of the Space program at Cape Kennedy, 100 miles to the east). 150 additional, clustered row house will be built almost immediately; and, eventually there will be 2,500 housing units. 

Preliminary plans for commercial development include two kinds of retail areas. The first will be on the water and consist of small-scale souvenir, craft and convenience shops. The second center is planned as a regional shopping district and as it grows will probably become the ultimate in multi-level, all-enclosed extravaganzas."

Architectural Forum published this early master plan for LBV, including the Townhouse that were actually built, with an unrecognizable modern complex where the Village would shortly be:



The "Hospital" seen in the top right off SR-535 still exists today as a CentraCare; before the construction of Celebration Hospital, this is where all injured WDW guests were cared for. Disney put up a new sign off 535 announcing the entrance to Lake Buena Vista, directly across from what would one day become the Crossroads Shopping Plaza:


However, even the sunny Architectural Forum article suggested some of the problems Disney was already encountering in terms of actually getting their planned community off the ground:

"Unless policy changes, Buena Vista will be a recreational community, its houses owned cooperatively by individuals or corporations that want to get their executives to relax, occasionally. There may be no schools in the conventional sense, although there will be commercial and office buildings, if the demand materializes."

The trouble with EPCOT had always been that a city required citizens, and citizens would demand a variety of rights, including voting rights. Disney, of course, would not want to extend private citizens voting rights over the property they had fought so hard to have total control over. The situation was never fully resolved. To this day, Disney does have full time citizens who live on their property... carefully selected citizens, who have been encouraged or otherwise persuaded to vote as the Mouse tells them to.


Disney's first effort to solve this problem was to start the population of its City of Tomorrow with corporate sponsors. Shortly after October 1971, the Walt Disney World Preview Center was closed, and made over into the Lake Buena Vista Preview Center. Disney offered sponsors and other businesses the opportunity to buy a two-level shed-style condo on Disney property and offered interior design services to reflect each individual owner's preferences. Disney went to the extraordinary step of bringing over Disney Studio designer Emile Kuri to establish an interior design firm just for this purpose - Buena Vista Interiors. And early promotional brochure from 1972 explained the program this way:

"Lake Buena Vista is a private community of residences designed for leisure-living in the Florida outdoors. Looking out onto a lake, a forest or a waterway, residences vary: Family detached “second homes” and vacation sites, homes for business executives and corporations, cluster homes and townhouses. 

Disney security, landscape, maintenance and other important services are part of the reason this community is “different” from other leisure-time concepts. 

Residential Hostessing is not a new idea. But at Lake Buena Vista’s Townhouses, the concept has proved especially popular with America’s corporate officers and their guests … because Lake Buena Vista has met its promise. 

In the Townhouse community, where Residential Hostessing is offered, conveniences and life’s pleasures are anticipated. Businessmen meet in park-like settings to discuss business affairs, dine on gourmet-catered luncheons, then tee-off at one of three 18-hole golf courses in Walt Disney World. 

The Residential Hostess has arranged it all – tickets to the Magic Kingdom for wives and children, cocktails at six, dinner at eight, catered at your Townhouse or at Walt Disney World’s exciting hotel supper clubs. 

Flowers, champagne, a note of welcome, arrangements made and followed, service … these are the calling cards of the Residential Hostesses in the Townhouse community at Lake Buena Vista."

LBV Circa early 1972. "Buena Vista Land" is the old Preview Center.

Inside the first cluster of LBV Townhouses, 1971

One of the only, and thus the primary, source for insight into these early days of Lake Buena Vista is an early 1972 issue of Orlando-land Magazine. John Tassos, head of sales for the division, met with editor Edward Prizer and Prizer had this to say:

"Another uncommon aspect of Lake Buena Vista is the emphasis on second homes. Some people have interpreted this to mean that Disney is appealing only to buyers with a certain level of affluence. Possibly the fact that the first group of townhouses have all been leased to business firms has added to this impression. 

I asked John Tassos whether their planning would mean that the average one-family home would be excluded. 

"Our prime motive is a second-home community, but we are not limiting it," he said. "Anyone will be welcomed at our marketing center. We will eventually have year-round residents. We'll be careful about what kind of people can help the community but we see no reason to eliminate qualified buyers." 

Disney has indicated that there may be home sold for as low as $28,000. Plans include provision for schools and churches - a necessity if there are to be permanent residents."

It isn't hard to read between those lines to see that Disney still hadn't come up with a plan for offering residence for citizens - and Tassos went on to hint at the true direction Lake Buena Vista was heading.

"John Tassos mentioned the fact that there was an urgent need among companies associated with Walt Disney World to have a place to put people. "With our hotels at 98 percent occupancy, accommodations just haven't been readily available."

The Townhouses failed to make much of an impact. Today, it's easy to see such an offer being wildly successful, but it's important to remember that in the early 70s there was literally nothing anywhere around WDW - it sat in the center of pasture land and orange groves until well into the 90s. Meanwhile, just up the road, Walt Disney World hotels were filled to constant capacity. While Disney moved ahead with construction of the promised golf course and clubhouse - now called The Lake Buena Vista Club - on-site liscencees for hotels were building a TravelPort, Dutch Inn, Royal Inn, and Howard Johnson's as quickly as cement could be poured. With few other options, Disney furnished the remaining Townhouses and began to offer them as deluxe vacation rentals for tourists.

A Village Rises in 1974

The Shopping Village in 1976

Little changed at Lake Buena Vista for several years until Spring 1975, when the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village opened amidst a swirl of champagne and Glenn Miller by starlight. A cluster of a dozen chalet-style structures positioned around a man-made lagoon, Lake Buena Vista was designed to evoke a sophisticated adult milieu of wood tones, overflowing planters, and classic Mediterranean statuary. It appealed as much to locals as to tourists looking for an extra day of fun. The Shopping Village brought fine wines, high end fashions, and gourmet food to the sleepy little hamlet of Orlando - the kind of place where the best meal in town circa 1974 was at a restaurant called "The Beef and Bottle". Disney's extravagances paved the road for Orlando's sophisticated modern dining scene.


All of this was by design, of course. Despite lackluster sales of the Townhouses, Disney began construction on a series of somewhat similar Treehouse Villas, intended to sleep a large family, and like the Townhouses before them complete with kitchen and laundry. Residents at the Townhouses or Treehouses could have food delivered from the Gourmet Pantry at the Village, while Village Spirits provided wine. The Lake Buena Vista Club, a modern low rise restaurant "where you are already a member" offered one of Central Florida's most exclusive meals, only a short boat ride away. Disney established the Village's bona fides by holding an annual art fair in November, what eventually became the Festival of the Masters.

The Shopping Village was designed to be Lake Buena Vista's downtown - a bustling master planned urban center with high end restaurants and eateries. It was then easy to brush off Disney's claims they they are establishing a city - especially since we, looking back from 2016 know what happened afterwards - but a remarkable series of documents from 1975 hint that their ambitions had not scaled back yet.


This 1975 map shows a series of office buildings directly across from the completed Village, terminating in what Disney describes as a "Multi-Modal Station". The Station was intended to service bus, taxis, automobiles, people movers (indicated in pink in the map above), and monorails (blue on the map above). The planning documents state:

"A major element of making this public transportation system best meet Lake Buena Vista’s needs will be the multi-modal terminal on the downtown Peoplemover system. Guests and Employees will be able to arrive at the city via public transportation and then ride the Peoplemover to their destination – a journey completely void of private automobiles. 

Another very important service Lake Buena Vista multi-modal terminal will provide is a gateway to Walt Disney World for people arriving via public transit. Lake Buena Vista and the downtown Peoplemover will be exposed to millions of these Walt Disney World guests. 

The downtown Lake Buena Vista multi-modal transportation terminal includes intra-urban, inter-urban, and inter-state facilities which provide the critical “location” and “link” to the achievement of a viable regional public transportation system. 

According to the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council recent study estimates, by 1990, the public transit system will provide daily trips to 34,610 Orlando area transit passengers, with 24,570 of these trips going to/from Walt Disney World. For these visitors, the multi-modal terminal at downtown Lake Buena Vista will be the “showcasing” stop while on their way to Walt Disney World."

In other words, the station was to be positioned directly off I-4 because it was expected to interface with trains and other forms of public transportation throughout the Central Florida area.


This is very much in line with Disney's ethos of the 1970s. Disneyland, the Vacation Kingdom, Lake Buena Vista and even planned but abandoned projects like Mineral King emphasized the concept of isolated parking - part of the utopian feeling of Disney's theme parks is that their roads are reserved entirely for foot traffic, unlike modern urban cities where roads make walking slow and dangerous. It's easy to see Disney here calculating the benefits of encouraging and hooking themselves into a mass transit solution - pointedly, they did the same thing in 2012 when high-speed rail lines were proposed linking Daytona Beach to Tampa.

Fascinatingly, the Peoplemover system intended for Lake Buena Vista in 1975 was going to be radically different from the ones at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom: it was going to have vehicles shuttling in and off a main line with stops at each hotel and destination along way way. And, perhaps most interestingly, Disney expected to charge a nominal fee for their use.

"It is envisioned that Lake Buena Vista’s Peoplemover will operate as a “horizontal elevator”. Passengers will be moved from one facility to another just as an elevator moves from one floor to another, but, with one important difference: the Peoplemover will take each party directly to their destination without intervening stops. 

Passengers will use the system by first depressing a vehicle call button near the vehicle entry “elevator” door. The door to the waiting vehicle will open, permitting entry. After selecting the desired location on a control panel inside the vehicle, passengers will be dispatched to their destination without intervening stops at other stations. Each station will have sufficient loading positions to meet passenger demands with a minimum of wait time. 

A reserve supply of units will be capable of “feeding” an empty load position unless another vehicle will be arriving momentarily. Conversely, if a station is filled with empty, dormant vehicles, they will be shuttled to the spur track to make room for loaded vehicles arriving from other stations."

Walt Disney World Village: The Dream Contracts

Building communities? Inter-urban transit stations? World Showcase? Epcot Satellites? The mid-70s was a crazy era for Disney's brand of speculative futurism.

And yet 1975 is also the year that marks, in a way, the end of Lake Buena Vista's potential as a real community. In January 1975, Space Mountain opened at Magic Kingdom, and Donn Tatum announced that Phase One of Walt Disney World was complete. The company would now be lavishing all of it attention and resources on EPCOT - and it was expected to be a theme park, not a city.

Treehouse Villa Kitchen

Up till now the Townhouses and Treehouses had been designed as much for gracious entertaining as vacationing, but a shift was underway. Disney broke ground in 1976 on a new development nestled amongst the holes of the Lake Buena Vista Course, and called them the Fairway Villas. These were smaller energy efficient dwellings with long sloping roofs, with limited kitchenettes instead of full kitchens and bedrooms, intended more for vacationers than full time living. Promotional descriptions from the time hint at the shift:

“The Villas, expected to yield energy savings of 50 percent with their unique design, each have a 720-square-foot living, dining, and kitchen area and two bedrooms, one of which can be combined with the adjoining Villa. Designed for family vacations, meetings, seminars, and executive conferences, the Villa units will be arranged so that as many as four bedrooms can be rented by one tenant.”

As perhaps one final, last-ditch attempt, Disney actually built four full-size houses nearby. If they were ever offered for real sale, I've never seen any evidence of it. Rented out for corporate functions and large families, Number 301, 302, 303 and 304 Lake Buena Vista, FL were the only true residence houses constructed on the site. In later years they were rented under the title "Grand Vista Suites", and Steve Birnbaum diplomatically described them as "model homes for a development project that has been abandoned for the moment".

Across the street from the Village, what Disney advertised as the first of their planned office complexes as part of the Lake Buena Vista Commercial District opened. A square, glass-walled structure housing a SunBank on the bottom floor and Disney administrative offices above, it was the sole structure built. It still exists today and is known as the SunTrust Building.


1977 also saw the expansion of the Shopping Village with the addition of the Empress Lilly riverboat restaurant. Actually a network of seven interconnected restaurants and lounges positioned in a full sized New Orleans riverboat, the Lilly was an attempt to introduce a visual element of fantasy to Lake Buena Vista, to add some more "Disney" to the experience. The same year, the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village was rechristened The Walt Disney World Village. Buena Vista Interiors was quietly disbanded, becoming a furniture show room in the Village.


In this iteration, with the Village, Riverboat, and Villas for guest rental, Lake Buena Vista trundled along for over a decade with no real change. Shops came and went every so often. A series of vacation rentals called the Club Lake Villas opened in 1979, attached to the new Lake Buena Vista Conference Center - conventions having quietly become one of the company's core profit centers.



The Rise of Downtown Disney

Lake Buena Vista Conference Center Lobby

EPCOT Center rose while Lake Buena Vista slumbered. Corporations and deals were hatched, earth was moved, Spaceship Earth was assembled. And in the end EPCOT Center opened in a bum economy and a hostile corporate environment. Even with the largest participation of corporate America in any theme park in history, EPCOT Center cost so, so, so much money, it threatened to capsize Disney. And then the movers and shakers behind Disney were out, and Frank Wells and his chosen CEO Michael Eisner were in. And still Lake Buena Vista slept while the old ways of thinking at Disney that gave birth to it were uprooted and discarded.

By 1989, Eisner, Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg had turned around the floundering Disney studio with a succession of inexpensive comedies and dramas, and the animation unit was showing signs of rebounding. The time for expansiveness had come, and Eisner sought to add an additional full day to vacationers' trips with The Disney/MGM Studios, Typhoon Lagoon, and Pleasure Island. Each of these attractions was intended to directly challenge a local competitor for vacationer's money - Universal Studios Florida, Wet and Wild, and Church Street Station, respectively. The entire area behind the Empress Lilly - an area first envisioned for a New Orleans area - became a rediscovered industrial center.

Michael Eisner had some unusual taste in architecture. Growing up in a wealthy family in New York, and having served successful and controversial stints as both a television and motion picture executive, Eisner's taste was perhaps never in line with the largely heartland, middle class audience Disney had courted since the 1950s. Through the 1980s, one of the largest trends in fashionable coastal cities was adaptive reuse - repurposing old industrial buildings into new civic and entertainment centers. Pleasure Island was themed to an old Florida industrial district that had been destroyed by a hurricane and then adapted by Disney into a nightclub district.


Concurrent with the opening of Pleasure Island, Disney totally revamped the Village, renaming it the Disney Village Marketplace. Gone was the conceit of a seaside hamlet. All of the decorative statues and graceful contemporary touches were suppressed. The concept now was for a lively outdoor festival atmosphere with topiaries, splashing fountains, and twinkling lights. Shops which were intended to be darkened and elegant were made over into bright, kid-friendly spaces. The Verandah Restaurant became Minnie Mia's Pizzeria. The Village Restaurant became Chef Mickey's. The emphasis was on bright, family friendly fun.

On the far side of Pleasure Island, a huge AMC megaplex opened, and was joined by a colossal floating planet in 1994 - the then-hot themed restaurant Planet Hollywood. Just one year later, one of the Village's most distinctive shops - the Christmas Chalet - was demolished and the gigantic World of Disney store was built where it once was. Just past World of Disney, Minnie Mia's Pizzeria was done over into a flagship LEGO store (with LEGO dragon poking out of Village Lake), and just past that, Disney's newest corporate partner - McDonald's - opened a bizarre "Ronald McDonald's Playhouse" location. Chef Mickey's was moved - in name only - to the Contemporary Resort, and its space became a Rainforest Cafe. The Empress Lilly was gutted, its paddle and smokestacks removed, painted grey and turned into Fulton's Crab House.

Across the lake, changes were underway at the Lake Buena Vista Villas. These clusters of buildings, once intended as second homes for residents, had largely been eclipsed by brand new moderate hotels throughout Walt Disney World aimed at the same mid-price vacationers who had used these villas through the 80s. Disney hotels like Caribbean Beach and Dixie Landings had rendered them irrelevant, and the lack of distinct theming of the Villas had been a disappointment to some.

The solution was to rebrand the Villas as The Disney Institute, a resort which offered opportunities for classes in activities as diverse as cooking, rock climbing, and animation. Taking advantage of the relaxed, adult atmosphere of the Villas, the golf course, and the waterways, Disney expanded the Lake Buena Vista Club into a full lobby and spa, with a theater, bandstand, and classrooms.

The Disney Institute is, along with Disney's America, perhaps Michael Eisner's largest stumble in terms of brand name in his tenure at Disney. Many guests were not certain if they could book rooms at the Institute without also attending classes, and the term "Institute" repelled those traveling with children even more than the term "Villas" had. Eisner, with his love of massive corporate edifices, factories, and production plants, saw a romance in the name "Institute" which few others did. However, those who did give the Institute a chance, often found a charming, relaxed atmosphere there - one last remnant of the Lake Buena Vista days.


While Marketplace/Village were original concepts, the West Side development which began construction in 1997 was a stark imitation of Universal Hollywood's City Walk, a highly profitable outdoor mall complex which opened in 1993. With oversize signs, post-modernist architecture, and playful shapes, City Walk is only distinct from West Side in that it has dated remarkably well, at least in its original home in Hollywood, while West Side has not. The West Side's opening meant that the entire complex was rebranded as "Downtown Disney", which made the imitation of the "City Walk" brand even more obvious.

In 2000, Disney's tourism market was already declining, and following the terror attacks in 2001, the bottom totally fell out. Hotel facilities at Walt Disney World, built up so much through the 90s, were simply shuttered to save costs of running them. Dixie Landings and Disney Institute were placed under "refurbishment". Dixie Landings would eventually reopen as Port Orleans Riverside, but Disney opted to demolish the old Lake Buena Vista Villas to make way for a new DVC resort: Saratoga Springs. The lobby, pool, and surrounding facilities built for the Institute in 1994 were retained. Today, only the southmost section of the lobby structure - housing the Turf Club Restaurant, Lounge, Golf Pro Shop, lockers, and tennis courts remains of Disney's 1971 adventure into planned communities.

The Fall of Pleasure Island and Everything Else

By 2005, Downtown Disney had become impossible to continue operating in its current form. Pleasure Island was still a gated attraction, which meant that only paying guests could traverse the island. Anybody visiting and wishing to see both the Marketplace/Village and West Side would have to walk alongside busy parking lots and bus stops to reach a bridge which ducked underneath the entrance bridge to Pleasure Island. Walkways were jammed with tourists while meanwhile attendance at the Pleasure Island nightclubs was faltering. Disney had failed to invest in updating the bulk of the clubs, and 2005 audiences were not interested in night clubs from the 80s and 90s. Only the Comedy Warehouse and Adventurer's Club had managed to attract a loyal following, and those fans went directly to those two clubs and bypassed the rest.


The solution to the crowded walkways and abandoned clubs was to open Pleasure Island to foot traffic, and charge individual admission to each club, which is what Disney did in 2006. The concert stages facing the walkways through Pleasure Island were now free to all, and the free entertainment and parking began to attract an undesirable element. Pipe bombs were tossed in dumpsters fairly regularly. Local news agencies began to report robberies and holdups in the congested parking lots. Drug dealers were often seen at West Side. The most popular thing on Pleasure Island was the Irish pub Raglan Road, which was leased space and not owned or operated by Disney.

The experiment, which required millions of dollars of construction to re-route the foot traffic, ended just two years later. Disney shuttered all of the remaining nightclubs in September 2008. Signs were removed, nightclub entrances locked, and decals painted over. Then something funny happened - nothing. Two years later, in 2010 Disney announced the replacement for Pleasure Island - Hyperion Wharf. A press release trumpeted:

"The district will come to life with a nostalgic yet modern take on an early 20th century port city and amusement pier. By day, stylish boutiques and innovative restaurants will draw you in and by night, thousands of lights will transform the area into an electric wonderland. 

Taking its name from Hyperion, the Greek god of light, as well as the street on which Walt Disney built his first major animation studio, the wharf district will also feature a relaxing lakeside park and enhanced pedestrian walkways. And its diverse eateries will expand dining availability at Downtown Disney by more than 25 percent."

And, indeed, things did begin to change. Several buildings on Pleasure Island were leveled, a new boat dock was built, and the area in front of Fulton's Crab House was refurbished.

Yet no tenants were ever announced, and as time went on, it was clearer and clearer that work on Pleasure Island had stopped. 2013, the announced year of competition for Hyperion Wharf, came with no real progress, until the announcement of Disney Springs later that year. Disney Springs opened last month, with more projects to complete the shift from Downtown Disney to Disney Springs expected to extend into 2017.

EPCOT: A Second Look

Here's my question, and it's a question Disney fans don't like to hear. Would Walt's EPCOT city have actually been any good?

The fact is that Walt Disney died at exactly the moment that a man like him would have to have changed. He had already changed a lot through the 50s, personally and politically. The kids who he had running around in coonskin caps and watching Disneyland on TV were now wearing beads and turning on, dropping out.

Consider, for a moment, that Walt Disney ate at the Tam O'Shanter and held meetings about Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln while, somewhere nearby, kids were playing 45s of "Blowin' in the Wind". Walt lay dying planning his sterile metropolis and only six months later the Summer of Love put Haight-Ashbury under a permanent cloud of opiate. After he died, the Vietnam conflict escalated, his good friend Richard Nixon became president, and the United States entered a period of heightened political awareness that lasted, in fits and starts, for another ten years.

How would Walt have responded to kids burning American flags? To drug culture? To Vietnam? To Watergate? These questions swirl around inside the story of EPCOT and cannot be separated. After he was gone, his inheritors looked at his ideas and thought they could use some of them but changed others to better reflect the culture they would be selling to. If the political strife, urban decay, and white flight of the 60s and 70s made the model of constructing a sanitized urban city forever impossible, Disney was also too early to another movement to really ride its wave: New Urbanism.

That's basically what Lake Buena Vista was supposed to be, but it came way before any famous examples were actually built. Seaside, FL is often considered the touchstone of the New Urbanist movement, but that didn't even get started until 1979 - long after Disney had pretty much abandoned Lake Buena Vista.

The thing is, Lake Buena Vista is still, almost 50 years later, basically appealing. We still long for escapes from and solutions to urban congestion. Biking paths, walking trails, boat launches, Peoplemovers and Monorails are still awesome, and a charming, walkable Downtown is a goal which has often been imitated and rarely bettered than the Shopping Village.


Would Walt have changed his plans for EPCOT had he lived? Probably. Would it have been the sort of wild success it needed to be? We will never know. Would it have managed to keep up with the times to avoid falling into neglect and disrepair? Would Walt have managed to steer it through a turbulent, violent and wrenching social transformation that rewrote popular taste entirely? Probably not.

And it's not as if Disney's taste for urban design has gone away, it's just transformed. Just as Lake Buena Vista begat Downtown Disney - which spread to California, Paris, Tokyo and now Shanghai - Disney is still mucking around with moving people - through theme parks, shopping complexes, and hotels. Shanghai Disneyland will be the most fully developed resort complex they will have built since Disneyland Paris, back in 1992. And this frenzy of activity has extended back to its source in Florida, which has been engulfed in construction for almost eight years now. Disney Springs has become Disney's version of the Big Dig: seemingly endless.

Now that we are oriented in the history of our subject, next time we'll take a deep dive into Disney Springs and the not always unambiguous questions it raises about Disney, urban design, and cities overall.

"The truth of the matter is the only new towns of any significance built in America since World War II are Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Both are 'new', both are 'towns', and both are staggeringly successful." - Peter Blake, Animated Architecture, 1982

Authenticity: the Slippery Slope

Last time, we discussed the history of Disney's failed urban planning project, Lake Buena Vista. This week, we'll be looking at the newest effort to keep the area relevant, but first, a brief detour into semantics. I'd like to discuss what, exactly, makes a place or thing "authentic" versus an imitation.

This subject is central to the very concept of theme parks, but has hardly ever been discussed. It's been invoked by every cultural critic who's written on the subject - implying that being built by an elect group of people with a plan and goal as opposed to being built by unrelated people with no real plan makes a place any less real. But does it?

"Authenticity" is a slippery slope once you actually start sliding down it, and nowhere else is this more evident than in the realm of architecture - architecture being, after all, the main thing that theme parks are made up out of. Let's look at one example: the Philip Chapin house, in my hometown of New Hartford, CT:


Today, we fawn over this sort of thing as an authentic example of Victorian architecture. In its day, it would have been seen as the most ghastly form of nouveau-riche tastelessness. A ludicrous modern imitation of an Italian villa, what was seen in its own day as a sham and fake has become authentic with the passage of time.

Another example, closer to home: Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, or King Ludwig's Castle. It's commonly cited as the basis for Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland:


Yes, it's a real castle, but it's also a ludicrous fake, constructed by a wasteful king in the Victorian era to evoke romances of the holy grail and the operas of Richard Wagner. It was built with what then qualified as the most modern of amenities, including heated running water, toilets, an electric bell system, a modern oven, and including such suspect embellishments as reproduction tapestries and an indoor cave.


When we think of it this way, the space between Ludwig II's private theme park and Walt Disney's fiberglass castle becomes very narrow. They're both widely viewed and beloved by visitors who care not a lick for "authenticity" because both are designed to evoke powerful symbolic associations in the minds of their visitors.

So what makes something authentic? Once enough time passes, will Disney's fiberglass castles be suddenly, magically conferred respectability? Or is it a slipperier thing - is it belief? Does something become "Authentic" because its viewers believe it to be so?

Of course the sort of people who are eager to confer upon theme parks and their like - shopping centers, planned communities, restaurants - the label of "Fake" are those who have the most to lose by failing to control such labels: those who need their opinions to carry the weight of authority. Sometimes the label can be extended to "appropriation", i.e. theft of something held to be integral elsewhere. But even trying to establish what's "real" and what's "fake" is often an exercise in futility, as we shall shortly see.

I think that's good. Theme parks may be manufactured according to strict aesthetic guidelines, but to me that's a crucial distinction, because that is what makes them compelling. What one person sees as "fake" can just as easily be labeled "artistic". And in the case of something like Disney Springs, where the distinctions have broken down to an extent that the distinctions become meaningless anyway, there is a fascinating case study.

Inventing Space

Even if the notion of authenticity is a slippery slope, there is already a built in resistance to confer the blessings of cultural approval on Disney. One way this manifests is a resistance - supported by Disney - to deem the parks objects of historical interest. so far there has been no general acceptance of the idea that a theme park is certainly related and in some ways basically analogous to the traditionally approved manufactured settings - fine dining establishments, museums, theaters, or national parks.

I've thought long and hard on this subject and to me the only workable definition of a "themed" enviroment is one which has been subject to the act of curation - in which certain aspects have been enhanced, or removed, to obtain a specific aesthetic, often symbolic effect. Museums build narratives out of the mess of history; theme parks build narratives out of the harmonization of imaginary spaces. National parks, so often sold as representing an "untouched" area in a specific state of historical preservation, are also subject to the act of curation - by removing or demolishing any aspects of the protected area which would break the illusion of being "unspoiled" (for more on this see Terence Young, Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations).

And yet, I would argue that ideologically and historically speaking, Disneyland, EPCOT, and Magic Kingdom are as central to the American identity as Yellowstone or the National Mall. If they weren't, then there would be no implied threat in Disney co-opting American history in things like The American Adventure and Disney's America. Through sheer popularity, citizens have conferred importance and historical relevance on Disney theme parks, bypassing the gatekeepers of culture.

The minute that we open our minds to the possibility that non-sanctified history is still basically historical, the more the complexities of Disney's manufacture of history become compelling. Disney Springs is a key place to see this at work. Here, real and imagined history weave into a tight web. Let's dip back into our historical narrative of Lake Buena Vista from last week and pick up some threads.

Faux History

By the time Downtown Disney had added its West Side addition, it was a patched-together thing, laid out as three distinct units that made sense on their own but made no sense together. Traffic flow between the three areas was already best described as impractical, and the opening of Pleasure Island to foot traffic only made the situation worse.

Something would need to be done, but what? And how could all three distinct areas be tied together cohesively? In the past, the solution to improving themed areas which were lacking in appeal came down to two options: re-skinning, or demolition. Tomorrowland 1994 re-skinned the offending area, isolating the problem in its aesthetics. New Fantasyland and Disney California Adventure demolished, preferring to start over in a more traditionally appealing aesthetic mode.

At Disney Springs, the approach was, uniquely, to lean in to the mess of conflicting styles and agendas. Areas which already were aesthetically appealing, such as the Marketplace, only received minor facelifts and foot traffic improvements. Pleasure Island's industrial aesthetic could stay. The largest offenders at West Side could be covered up with industrial details or slated for later demolition. Tying the whole thing together is a new "Downtown" area and central water feature.

In other words, by refusing to paper over or demolish the inconsistencies of Downtown Disney, Disney Springs embraces them as the whole darn point. By my count there's at least seven aesthetics at work in the area, and they have been used to signify, rather than try to remove, the pains and competing ideologies of the growth of its imagined community:







And here's where the story begins to become almost perverseley convoluted. Lake Buena Vista represents an abandoned attempt at a "Planned Community". The downtown of this planned Community - the Village - was actually constructed. As a result, even before the notion was legitimized by this new expansion, Downtown Disney already represented the problems of real cities - namely, having a well planned downtown with a bunch of suburbs stuck onto it more or less randomly, causing no end of traffic problems and infrastructure strain.

This new expansion seeks to resolve the problem by building a new, sleeker, more attractive downtown away from the original urban center. Wait, hold on -- where have we heard this before? Oh, that's right, we've heard it in real life - it's the story of every mall that has ever been built.


It even basically looks and sounds like these new "Town Center" outdoor malls which have sprouted like mushrooms in major urban centers. Below is one not far from Disney Springs - "The Grove" at Winter Garden Village. The Grove even contains faux-historical landmarks, a hotel sign above empty space, and signs honoring "local" Winter Garden residents. It is a manufactured downtown, but treated and used as a legitimate one by local shoppers. and what did we say about authenticity up top?



"Inside" the story of Disney Springs, are are supposed to understand that the new Town Center represents the "original" downtown area and the original Village is now a later suburb, yet the mind spins. We've now got a mall built next to a downtown that is pretending to be an yet older downtown - inside a huge mall.

Where Downtown Disney more or less tried to keep pace with whatever the current conception of "cool" is, Disney Springs instead aligns itself with the mode of representation traditionally most successful to Disney - the past. Instead of a murky Florida lake, the area is now centered around a "natural spring" - really a pretty, and pretty elaborate, swimming pool. Surrounding the Spring is brand new - but supposed to be old - Florida vernacular architecture. 35 years ago, this area was a swamp outside the Village. 3 years ago, it was a pile of dirt, yet here now stands "The Oldest Building In Disney Springs."

Yet it's just this sort of absurd, working backwards, built up layers of signification that gives Disneyland and Magic Kingdom their great sense of history. And while perhaps there's nothing deeper to the historical approach of Disney Springs than the generational shift towards all things "retro chic", the new style at least will have the benefit of aging gracefully instead of constantly trying to chase whatever is "cool" in this decade.

Yet for the committed Disney historian, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Throughout the new area, there are numerous small call-outs and references to Disney history, in this case usually tied up with both the real history and imagined history of this part of WDW property, such as this brand new building intended to be an early 20th century converted vegetable market, built by "Buena Vista Steel":


One could easily write off these details as the product of an unimaginative design team dipping into Disney's rich heritage to insert yet more meaningless tributes to past glories. But, in Downtown Disney, probably the number one area in WDW where master planning failed, the authentic history of poor legacy designs becomes disguised as the artificial history of the spreading of a town.

"Buena Vista Steel"

In other words, Disney Springs is the only part of Disney property which has grown to become something of a real life example of the kind of urban space it was designed to evoke. Real life cities do have huge traffic problems, real life cities are putting up parking decks to service their downtowns, real life cities are trying to attract popular and prestigious companies to fill their new malls. At what point does Disney Springs cross a line into fiction? At what point do real life cities more and more resemble Disneyland? If people believe that the fiberglass castle is real, does it become real?

In this sense, Disney Springs opens up a feedback loop akin to the ironic mutation of history seen on Buena Vista Street at California Adventure. There, shops and facilities named after old school Disney characters are said to have inspired a young Walt Disney to create... those same old school Disney characters. It's become an absurd IP game of musical chairs where history and fantasy have melded seamlessly into a mobius strip of influence.

I can see an average visitor being genuinely bewildered by this. Disney has replaced real history with slightly different artificial history and left audiences to sort it out. They've messed with similar elisions before - in the original development cycle of the Haunted Mansion, the ride was said to be a real haunted house transplanted to Disneyland. And since 1955, this plaque at Disneyland has been quietly bewildering readers, assigning great historical import to a random bit of metal:


But as far as I know Disney has never quite created an idea that requires this many layers of fiction piled up on each other, and if the result is aesthetically underwhelming, it's conceptually dizzying. It's like taking everything one step further and claiming the Walt Disney actually grew up on Main Street USA and built the rest of Disneyland around it. Both versions of the area are fiction, but there's a crucial distinction left unsaid.

Then again it's only worth fussing over conceptual distinctions like that if people are actually legitimately fooled, and I have little concern about that happening. Still, the resulting product, with its intermeshed history, fantasy, fact and fiction is truly evocative and conceptually bizarre.

The Fake Real Fake City

Going in another direction, let's return to the Town Center. Around the Town Center are a number of buildings designed to resemble converted houses. There's a few Cracker houses, an old ranch house (D-Luxe Burger), a Googie house (Blaze Pizza), and what is said to be some kind of ice house (Sprinkles) (the owners, presumably, having long ago fled to the suburbs). But most of the Town Center is built to recall Spanish Revival architecture - tilework, whitewashed stucco, wrought iron, and red tile roofs.



Any seasoned Orlandoite will recognize immediately what this is an imitation of: Rollins College in Winter Park.



Okay, so let's talk about Winter Park.

Winter Park, a suburb north of Orlando, has become for many the cultural center of Orlando, with brick lined streets, high end dining, winding canals, and the famous and expensive Park Avenue. Despite all of this, it is in some ways a fake city.

Winter Park was begun as a suburban development in 1885 to take advantage of one of Florida's many land rushes and a new rail line. With strict limits on housing style, varieties, roads, and walking paths, it was one of America's earliest planned communities. It was Celebration 110 years ahead of schedule.

So yes, Rollins College may be old - 1885 - but its beautiful architecture is not authentic old Spanish. Strictly speaking, it's artificial. Of course, in architecture circles, they have a word for this - Spanish Revival, which sits neatly alongside Gothic Revival, Italiante, Renaisance Revival, Queen Anne, Second Empire, Romanesque, and other styles of American architecture built to resemble something they are not. But it's just as correct to say that Rollins College was built themed to Spanish Florida, with its conquistadors, fountains of youth, and romantic tilework.

The fact is that maybe the most distinctive single thing about American architecture is that we have always and forever loved building themed to other things. That's why we were the country that created Coney Island and Disneyland. These places weren't some kind of perversion of a pure cultural legacy, but simply the logical outgrowth of what we've always done.

Don't believe me? Let's go back - back to when the United States was brand new, and take a look at Federalist architecture:



Those cool little pavilions around the front doors, the white columns, the emphasis on symmetry, the mullioned gables, and half-rounded fan lights? We didn't invent that - we stole it from the ancient Greeks and Romans, and stuck it onto our little saltbox houses in the nationalist frenzy of the post-Revolutionary War. The borrowing from ancient Greece was no accident - they were a famous Democracy, just like America.

Thomas Jefferson caught onto the fad and took a trip to Greece to check out what was left of their architecture, and when he came back he applied the Grecian "golden ratio" to American houses and created Jeffersonian Architecture:


See those white columns? The weirdly out of place pediment? The five-part structure of the house? The relentless symmetry? Yeah, Jefferson stole that from the Greeks. You can see it at Monticello, of course, but the symbology of ancient world Democracy is the reason why Americans have always enjoyed slapping neoclassical embellishments onto our nationalist architecture:



It's theming by just another name. And once you accept that something in the American national character just compels us to build stuff that looks like other stuff:


...the distinction between Main Street USA and real Victorian architecture begins to look like nothing but a blip. Less time passed between the era depicted on Main Street and the opening of Disneyland than passed between the construction of Rollins and the new Town Center. The Town Center, for those who only know Florida from Walt Disney World, may not scream "old Florida", but it's as legitimate a copy of the original fake as the fake itself was legitimate.

Town Center is a mall that pretends to be the original downtown of an artificial community, built beside the real downtown of an abandoned planned community, built to resemble a successful planned community just a few miles away.

Reused Reuse

Or, we could talk about Pleasure Island. "Inside" the story of Pleasure Island, it was a manufacturing center for the Pleasure family in the first part of the 20th century, which was wiped out by a hurricane (the same one which destroyed Typhoon Lagoon, in a likely coincidence). The island was re-claimed by Disney and renovated into a nightclub district, all of this to flatter Michael Eisner and his love of 80's style "Urban Reuse".

As far as I know, Pleasure Island was the very first time Disney built structures in which their signifying facades were intentionally at odds with their contents. Even the monumental abstraction of something like Future World's The Land was intended to signify what could be found inside; haunted houses contained haunted houses, pirate forts contained pirate rides.

Pleasure Island asked you to separate form and content in a way that nothing else at Walt Disney World does. Mannequins was a purpose-built facility housing a nightclub, disguised as a reclaimed tin shed-style industrial manufacturing building. Today, "Inside" the story of Disney Springs, it's a reclaimed bottling plant which just so happens to contain Morimoto Asia, a high end pan-Asian restaurant.

In this way, the building now housing Morimoto Asia even more strongly resembles its obvious inspiration: The Cannery Restaurant in Newport Beach, CA, which revolutionized restaurant design in the 80s by reclaiming a disused cannery and leaving its industrial equipment in place around the dining rooms as pieces of sculpture.


Yet this invented history paints over the real history of the building - as a nightclub called Mannequins, one of the few Pleasure Island nightclubs to run from opening to closing day. Nearby, Jock Lindsay's claims to be a converted airplane hangar from the 1940s, and it's tough to tell them apart, despite Jock Lindsay being new construction. It's pretty tough to recognize most of Pleasure Island, honestly, unless one is very up on her Pleasure Island history. Nearly everything there was knocked down and rebuilt, leaving only minor traces behind.

For about ten years, seemingly everything Disney built was rooted in some kind of meta history of abandonment and reuse - to Pleasure Island we may add Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon, parts of Animal Kingdom, and much of California Adventure. Inside the parks, at least, much of this didn't jibe well with Disney's audience and so has been stripped out, especially at California Adventure.

Disney Springs is one of the few places left where this sort of thematic games playing is still in evidence, and it has fakes upon fakes upon fakes all reflecting back at one another, like a hall of mirrors. For just one example: a brand new building on "The Landing" aka Pleasure Island, housing a new upscale restaurant STK Orlando, has a distinctive, seemingly arbitrary shape:


Yet for those who know Orlando well, if it seems strangely familiar, it's because it's built as a reference to this 1889 train station in Downtown Orlando:


Imagineers didn't have to look at old photos to get that idea, because that structure still stands today, on Church Street in Orlando. That's right, it's Church Street Station, and through the 70s and 80s it was a nuisance to Disney management as the entrance to a famous pay-one-price, gated nightclub attraction. To compete with Church Street Station, Disney built....... Pleasure Island, the current location of this reproduction. History doesn't simply repeat; it devours itself whole. Good luck not getting lost in all that.

This is why Disney Springs seems to collapse in on itself conceptually, forever pulling to some center point where fantasy and fact collide, like the house at the end of Poltergeist. There are so many layers of real, but obscured, and invented, but promoted history floating through that place that it's impossible to keep track of.


What I do know is that there are things in Disney Springs, Lake Buena Vista, and Downtown Disney that are beautifully present simply for their own sake - in the end, the only reason that matters. There's the way the afternoon Florida light filters in through the artfully arranged clutter in Jock Lindsay's Hangar Bar, who for some reason knew Indiana Jones, but whose bar feels authentically old in that moment in a way you usually have to go to Key West to enjoy. There's the Empress Lilly, impressive for her own sake, who is shortly getting her smokestacks and paddle wheel back, a real bit of history being returned to us. There's even an honesty in D-Luxe Burger, that brand spanking new old ranch house, in that it quietly and casually reminds Disney guests that once upon a time a long time before a certain theme park was built there wasn't much to Central Florida besides cattle pasture.

It may be fake, and not look very much like the real thing, but there's a honesty in the spring inside Disney Springs too. It's the first time in the 50 year history of Walt Disney World that Disney has seemed to say to its visitors: "Hey, you know, there's stuff in Florida, too, and it's good enough for us to build a fake version here for you.". It's the first time that Disney's home state has been warranting of the sort of representation extended to, say, Canada.

And there's the catch, and why the theme seems to maddeningly fold in on itself, bigger on the inside than the outside. It isn't themed to some other place, but to right here. Disney's mess of a planned community in Florida has embraced its identity as... a mess of a planned community, in Florida.

It's Floridian, and maybe part of being Floridian means being an an elaborate fake, like Charlie Kane's Xanadu deep in the tropical jungle of the imagination. Imagined, fantasized, pre-planned, corporate, artificial, deeply weird - that's Florida, and it's true inside Disney's bubble... and true outside it, too.

Oh, EPCOT Center, where are you?!

It's not the first time this opinion has been voiced, and it surely won't be the last. It's been said so much by now that it's become a cliche... the 30-something EPCOT fan, pining away for the lost attractions of yesteryear. The Sci-Fi kid who grew up with NASA pennants and Star Trek episodes on tape may be one of the few types unaccomodated by theme parks, an area so often dominated by nostalgia and fantasy.

That may be part of the mystique,  but more than anything, EPCOT Center was the right product at the right time, the theme park about science and technology that opened during a pivotal era for science and technology. Home computers, video game systems, cable TV and VCRs became creature comforts used the world over, and special effects began their slow encroachment on the rest of movies. EPCOT Center was there, reflecting ourselves back at us, perhaps not flatteringly but basically correctly.

Recently I was reading through Fjellman's Vinyl Leaves and was struck by his coverage of Future World. Fjellman seemed rather enchanted by much of WDW, but in Future World, he came down hard on the corporate sponsors and their (rather naive) messages inside the attractions. And while it's true that a cultural critic, as Fjellman is, is always going to gravitate towards areas of greater thematic gravity simply because those areas actually have something to discuss, it's sort of remarkable from the 21st century to re-read his late 20th century concerns.

For example, in General Motors Transcenter, he sees the Bird and Robot Show as an effort to portray the computerized factory "workers" - then already replacing flesh and blood workers - as positive, helpful, unthreatening servants. Fjellman makes the connection to Michael Moore's then-recent documentary Roger & Me, depicting the economic devastation in and around Flint, Michigan, by GM's abandonment of the area. Well, Flint MI isn't any better off today than it was in 1990, and for basically the same reasons.

But in other cases he seems to be wide of the mark. In EPCOT Computer Central, people play computer games to humanize and put a friendly face on new, threatening technology, and Fjellman sees this as another effort to indoctrinate the public to their new mechanical masters. It's not Fjellman's fault that he didn't see the internet age and dot com bubble coming, but it's interesting in hindsight to see an area of human activity that de-corporatized as it developed, to the point that fighting for digital freedoms is a very real issue in Washington today, an issue that CommuniCore never hinted at.

Yet more than anything, it's truly strange today to read Fjellman going apoplectic over these attractions which today, if not universally beloved, are considered to be classics of the first degree, standard bearers to beat. Most of them were with us for less than the life span of many house pets, yet their legend was grown outsize, torpid. There are fans of Horizons who never saw it in person. And if these classics really weren't so idiotically vapid as they seemed in the 80s, perhaps they weren't all they're cooked up to be today, either. Ideologically, if not technologically, a lot of Future World was very often suspect.

So let's take a leisurely tour of Future World, taking a look at the message of those original shows, their new message (if relevant), original sponsor, and assessing whether these subjects are still relevant, and how the message of Future World could change. After all, a lot can change in thirty years!



Spaceship Earth, 1982
Original Sponsor: Bell Systems
Original Message: The evolution of communication technology will lead mankind into the future.
Current Sponsor: Siemens
Current Message: The evolution of communication technology has led mankind into the future, where you are also a cartoon.

Comments: Of all of the major corporate pavilions at Future World, this one has aged the most gracefully, which is good, because it's inside a structure so complex it can't really be easily removed. Of all of the visions of the future presented at EPCOT Center, Spaceship Earth's came the nearest to actually coming true - even the families of Horizons were doing things like playing dorky transparent organs instead of staring at glowing screens the way everybody actually is today. This also means it's the easiest to update, which means it's gotten the most updates. But that itself is the problem.

The original version of the show, scripted with an assist from Ray Bradbury, had a tone that was dry and vaguely spooky, like many of the original Future World shows. The Walter Cronkite narration and insertion of "Tomorrow's Child" into the finale had the effect of softening the attraction somewhat, and to me the Cronkite version is still the champion for "best overall" version - it had show scenes almost all the way through, with animatronics and compelling visuals from bottom to top to bottom. The 1994 Irons version was simultaneously an improvement and a downgrade - it had an even better script, a stronger message, and an excellent soundtrack. The trouble came shortly before the "180 top" segment, where the sections dealing with an actual communications technology future, still relevant in the 90s, became an extended advertisement for AT&T's new videophone technology, which looked then like the sort of tech gadget that Screech would mock on Saved By The Bell. Worse still, the entire segment was accomplished with static figures in cheap sets which had no resemblance to the rest of the attraction, and were rendered in UV-sensitive paint which didn't always do a good job hiding the fact that most of what you were looking at was just black curtains.

True to tradition, the 2007 reboot both improved things and made them worse. Screens were added to each car and an Innoventions-style quiz game with animated cartoon became the new finale. A new score by Bruce Broughton doesn't have remotely the same impact as the 1994 score, and Judy Dench's narration is the first truly eye-rolling one for this attraction, although the contrast was heightened by coming immediately after Irons' excellent script and delivery. However, the refresh did manage to extend the good segment of the ride - complete with scenery and animatronics - a good 30 feet nearer to the 180 top, resulting in the strongest version of the front half of the ride since before the 1994 edition.

What Needs to Change: The focus of the next refurbishment needs to be extending the quality scenery at least part of the way down the descent portion of the ride. The original version included astronauts floating in space on the 180 top repairing satellites, then as the cars descended they coasted through the center of a space station where a woman directed the operation from a control tower. It was one of the most impressive things in EPCOT. The same effect can be achieved today, even with limited function figures, and Spaceship Earth really deserves that ending, more than it deserves a grid of dots or watching the news on TV. Once through that section, the original Spaceship Earth show converted to the "Tomorrow's Child" segment, right about where the 1994 show was giving you the famous "lightning in space". The final diorama and tunnel has never been attractive, and WDI really needs to commit to putting something cool here.

I suggest bringing back the 1994 score and dialing back on the patronizing quality of the narration for the next version. The in-car screens were prescient for 2007, and debuted mere months after the first iPhones went on sale, but are embarrassingly behind the curve now, and really need to show something worthwhile or be removed.

Status: Still truckin'
New Sponsor Suggestion: As the iconic visual of EPCOT Center, I think it's time for Disney to commit to this one themselves. The trouble with the sponsorship game is that sponsors are always going to want to tell a specific narrative, and inside an already constructed attraction like Spaceship Earth, it isn't an easy thing to do. As the last remaining Future World Classic, this one should be owned and funded entirely by Disney, and it needs to speak for the rest of Future World in a way that the other pavilions no longer do.

Earth Station, 1982
Original Sponsor: --
Original Message: --
Current Sponsor: Siemens, "Project Tomorrow"
Current Message: Thanks for riding!
Comments: I still think this is the most logical spot in Future World for Guest Relations. The original Earth Station included a detail everybody remembers: the computerized reservation central, where you could talk to another person through a video screen! Literally everything about Earth Station, and the WorldKey system, has been replaced by an average smartphone device, and that's fine. But I still think Guest Relations should be moved back to here. It doesn't need to be anything flashy, but this spot was designed for it.

Status: A less technologically advanced Face Time



CommuniCore Futurecom, 1982
Original Sponsor: AT&T
Original Message: A hands-on look at the complexities of relaying information across the country, including the Age of Information diorama, the Information Fountain, Network Control game, Packet Phraser, and Microchip Maze.
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: the true "post show" of Spaceship Earth was one of Communicore's nicest areas, using human-scaled activities and warm, inviting earth tones. On a basic level, kinetic pieces of art like the Information Fountain and Age of Information were fun to look at even if you didn't bother to stick around to figure out what it was all about. Exhibits like this were Future World's equivalent of Magic Kingdom's charming architectural facades, and the lack of them is one reason why Future World currently feels so sterile. If Future World is going to draw people back in to its monumental architecture, it needs socialization hubs like this - with appealing colors, natural light, and actual fun things to look at that don't mean much.

Status: Not quite as relevant, but still cool.

Universe of Energy, 1982
Original Sponsor: Exxon
Original Message: Fossil fuels, despite the extraordinary difficulty of obtaining them, are still the best energy source available, although if something better comes along, Exxon intends to own that, too.
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: We're running out of fossil fuels, but don't worry, we'll think of something.
Comments: The most ideologically weighted of the original Future World shows, let's be honest - Universe of Energy was never especially progressive or prescient. Much of the original show was devoted to explaining, at excruciating length, where fossil fuels come from and how they are harvested. Don't worry, there's also dinosaurs! The 1996 reboot of the show, Ellen's Energy Crisis, put a warm face on the proceedings but pretty much wrote off alternate energy sources as impractical. In some ways, the 1982 show was more honest - we are running out of options with fossil fuels, and the search for fossil fuels has led us, politically, to some pretty ugly places.

What Needs To Change: Universe of Energy is a problem. The basic design of the pavilion is based on a pitch created by production designer John DeCuir and bought by Disney in the 1970s. Technologically, the "moving theater" is probably the most outdated thing at Walt Disney World, running on an absurd jury rigged system that is as crude as it feels. But the pavilion is also an opportunity to create a real classic; after all, those dinosaurs are still pretty awesome.

If the moving theater concept is going to be retained, then at the bare minimum Disney needs to invest in new theater cars and a trackless ride system. With the ability to quickly and precisely move into place instead of waiting for the equivalent of two Commodore 2s to move you into place, it should be possible to present a dramatically reduced version of the original Universe of Energy show - complete with dorky theme songs - in about 15 minutes. The question is, should we really be doing that, even if the film in Theater 2 is entirely new? Because it's still then a show ideologically dominated by a fossil fuels company.

I think running an omnimover through the building is a better choice. This would allow you to retain the dinos and build new scenes around the experience, as well as present a different point of view, perhaps showing how far we've come since 1982 - and how much farther we have to go. Omnimovers are popular and efficient, and a family-friendly, not too long experience could do well today sitting next to two major thrill rides. To do that we need a sponsor with a real vision for a world without fossil fuels.

Status: Still Relevant
New Sponsor Suggestion: Tesla

CommuniCore Energy Exchange, 1982
Original Sponsor: Exxon
Original Message: Fossil Fuels are still the best!
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: This was the place where, freed from the confines of a moving theater, Exxon really hit home their point, offering guests opportunities to turn bicycles and wheels to light up lightbulbs, before offering the news that we would have to keep turning that crank for hours to generate one dollar of electricity! It wasn't terribly exciting and was usually empty, but it was memorable and did a lot better job doing the ideological heavy lifting than Universe of Energy ever has. If you've got to make a point, that's how to do it.

Status: Effective but Questionable



CommuniCore Epcot Computer Central, 1982
Original Sponsor: Sperry Univac
Original Message: Computers are not scary at all, and in fact even you can use them.
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: A wide-ranging overview of the various ways computers can improve and automate our lives, Sperry-Univac's keystone exhibit - The Astuter Computer Revue - closed shortly and reopened as the blandly cute Backstage Magic within just two years, but that was not the only problem. The exhibit overall focused heavily on the institutional and business aspects of computers - after all, this was years before even simple graphical interfaces became common, and nearly a decade and a half before Windows 95. As a result, a lot of Computer Central felt impersonal and utilitarian, where we could see computers doing things like calculating census data. Other computer abilities highlighted by Sperry included things that almost nobody does on a computer these days, like assembling an American flag. The most memorable thing in Computer Central, SMRT-1, was less of a demonstration of computer technology as a traditional theme park interaction exhibit dressed up as a robot.

One component amidst this sea of number crunching and automation did ring true as to where we were going with computers: the Rollercoaster game. Anybody who played this goofy thing in the 80s may not immediately think it as their introduction to CAD, but that is what it was. Computer Central wasn't much interested in the home and entertainment sectors of computing - the sectors which would explode in about a decade - and there wasn't even a single mention of "e-mail" anywhere in it, but I'd wager that between WorldKey, Rollercoaster, and the other games here, more Americans touched a computer inside EPCOT Center than anywhere else in the country during the 80s.

Status: Fossilized

Wonders of Life, 1989
Original Sponsor: MetLife
Original Message: It's a real battle to stay healthy (???)
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: Instead of breaking up each attraction here, I'm going to treat the entire pavilion as a piece, which is frankly really difficult. Of all of the Future World pavilions, Wonders of Life presented the most diffuse message, and had the shortest life span. Most guests simply treated the individual attractions as Magic Kingdom-style experiences, void of ideological ramifications, which was good, because they largely were.

Throughout, the visual theme of an indoor fun fair gave way to militaristic themes in the major attractions. A rather naked imitation of the 1987 film Innerspace, Body Wars was a ride-thru B movie complete with bad acting and sickening special effects. The charming Cranium Command was, in its day, one of the funniest, smartest things at WDW, but it had no more of a message than the Tiki Room - not freaking out seemed to be its main suggestion for dealing with daily life. Elsewhere, Wonders of Life offered a film about human conception and birth, and sold late 80s idea of healthy foods, like frozen yogurt and waffles.

It's probably better to think of Wonders of Life as a reflection of Michael Eisner's ideas about theme parks than any kind of coherent addition to the Future World lexicon. Here garish, Michael Graves-ian colors combine in a circus atmosphere complete with a spinning overhead mobile. Faceless, industrial institutions like the Miniaturized Exploration Technologies and the eponymous Cranium Command invite tourists to do highly unlikely things. Celebrities appear for no apparent reason - hey kids, is that Charles Grodin? What whimsy!

More than anything, Wonders of Life can be paired with The Living Seas as pavilion ideas that Disney created back in the 70s that never really found a great reason to exist. As an outgrowth of some truly strange ideas created for a Life & Health pavilion by Rolly Crump, Wonders of Life was more of its time and less interesting. It was also never quite able to justify how a discourse on healthy eating and exercise wasn't folded into the message of The Land, across the park.

Status: Goofy Gestalt
New Sponsor Suggestion: It's probably better to allow Wonders of Life to exist in its native habitat - the 1990s. This spot should be used as an expansion pad.


CommuniCore American Express TravelPort, 1982
Original Sponsor: American Express
Original Message: --
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: Basically a laserdisc assisted version of a travel agent, minus the ability the actually book a flight, TravelPort is hardly remembered aspect of Communicore, and for mostly good reasons, because it neither predicted nor rode any particular futuristic wave. It did, however, have a big red sphere, and those will always be cool.

Status: Replaced by Airfare Watchdog, Expedia, UrbanSpoon...



Horizons, 1983
Original Sponsor: General Electric
Original Message: If We Can Dream It, We Can Do It
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: This is the big one, and it's the big one for good reason. While the other Future World pavilions were marked by corporate elisions or made ideological hash of their messages, Horizons made the case that the rest of Future World couldn't - that the future was going to be really goddamned awesome, and you were going to float upside down. That message doesn't date, even if all of the other trappings of the show did. And as an index of the rest of Future World, showing us undersea colonies (The Living Seas), cool space stations (Spaceship Earth), and desert cultivation (The Land), Horizons was enormously effective and Future World will never be complete without it.

Here's why Horizons is still relevant today, and it's the reason why every kid who ever rode it, and most adults, have never forgotten it, regardless of how simplified and schematic is was. Kids deserve to be shown a version of the future that isn't a totalitarian society, or an ecological disaster, or a zombie apocalypse, and our society is not and never has been forthcoming with these options. Horizons delivered and made dimensional, tactile, a version of the future which was friendly and reassuring, and people, especially at a young age, deserve to know that positive change is possible too, even if it's wrapped up in a package which is somewhat of a fantasy. Because if you can't be cheerfully optimistic at Disney World, then what the hell is left?

Now, let's be clear: there will never again be an attraction as elaborate as Horizons. Disney was really the only place that ever built things like this, and they're not in that business anymore. Split into four segments - Looking Back at Tomorrow, the two omnisphere theaters, Tomorrow's Windows and Choose Your Own Future - Horizons was a staggering multi sensory epic. But when you get down to it, the key sections were Looking Back at Tomorrow and Tomorrow's Windows, and both of them were built on the fountain of stuff that Disney still does well - dimensional figures and scenery. These segments also have basically solid designs. What wasn't crucial in Horizons was not the specific designs of the clothes, accessories, even music or narration, all of which were pedestrian. What made Horizons work was the astonishing way the omnimovers creeps through and around those pod-like sets, sliding past space stations, and down below undersea cities. This can still be replicated, and given a new look with modern modern conceptions of shapes, colors, clothes, music, and dialogue - basically the same things which keep Spaceship Earth plugging along.

Therefore, even if the full version in all its glory can never be replicated, there is simply no excuse for Disney not to rebuild at least part of Horizons as their prestige family friendly omnimover attraction at Epcot. It's Epcot's Pirates of the Caribbean, and it really needs to be there, if only in part. I suggest putting up a new, condensed version where Wonders of Life is now.

Status: Integral, badly needed.
New Sponsor Suggestion: Horizons was the most Disney thing in Future World, so this is another one that Disney needs to really build and market as their own. Amongst the Disney faithful, a new version of Horizons would be one of the marketing and public relations success stories of the decade, and truly send the message that Disney was committing to Epcot again.

CommuniCore Electronic Forum, 1982
Original Sponsor: --
Original Message: The upcoming computer age will open new doors of communication, maybe
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: Of anything in EPCOT, Electronic Forum probably got nearest to where we would be in three decades. Televisions in the lobby, ostensibly intended to be used to access news casts from around the world, were most often used by EPCOT visitors to dial up college football games. As Richard Beard memorably puts it in his iconic Walt Disney's EPCOT Center, the Future choice Theater "offer(s) a rare opportunity to get a number of things off your chest and into a computer". The resulting demographic breakdowns displayed onscreen, and indeed the entire concept of electronically voicing opinions, was probably not what visitors carried away from this experience. Since the demographic breakdowns of 170 people were self-reported, Future Choice Theater was likely the first experience many people had with that most modern of internet activities, misrepresenting yourself.

In later years, the emphasis on current social issues gave way to the more benign "Person of the Century Poll", of which the winner was usually Michael Jackson. Because the attractions in Electronic Forum required the cheerful compliance of audiences to remain on message, here already was evidence of the true directions technology would take - subverted for amusement, redirected to watch college football on Sundays, turned into popular culture popularity contests. Anybody who thinks human mischief in the age of the internet is anything but an inevitabile could take a long look at Electronic Forum for a more persuasive alternate view.

Status: Replaced by Social Media



World of Motion, 1982
Original Sponsor: General Motors
Original Message: Private automobiles are more efficient, more useful, and less dangerous than any form of transportation yet invented.
Current Sponsor: General Motors, Test Track
Current Message: Thanks to rigorous testing, private automobiles are safer than ever before.
Comments: Designed at a time when the American automobile industry was imploding due to overseas competition and embroiled in expensive and publicity damaging scandals concerning chemical dumping and labor, World of Motion had next to nothing to say about the future, and spent most of its time concentrating on the past. That past, as designed by Marc Davis, was supremely goofy and fantastical, as various hazards and inconveniences - irate mules, sea serpents, flying carpets, airborne pigs, and traffic cops - impede the frivoulsly liberated human population's desire to go for a drive in the country. This wasn't so much a history of the automobile as a history of getting from place to place, ending in a vision of the future where paved multi-lane highways run every which way into the horizon - a future where no invention will ever replace the family sedan. Exxon, over at the Universe of Energy, would likely have approved.

What Needs to Change: The current version of Test Track, although less of my kind of ride than World of Motion was, is one of the few Future World pavilions to really feel like it has a place in Epcot. It has a corporate sponsor, a unified aesthetic, and is pushing an agenda, and doing a pretty good job doing it. Although I really miss all those those Marc Davis animatronics and huge sets - remember how massive the oak tree in the bicycling scene was? - Test Track is still on message. In a world where EPCOT Center is re-concieved from the ground up for 2016 audiences, an entire pavilion touting the personal car would not, I feel, make the cut, but for the popular and effective ride, this one should stay for now.

Status: Unkillable

TransCenter, 1982
Original Sponsor: General Motors
Original Message: Cars and combustion engines are great!
Current Sponsor: General Motors
Current Message: Buy some stuff, even a car!
Comments: Much like Energy Exchange over at CommuniCore, TransCenter does the ideological heavy lifting for General Motors. While Exxon let you turn a crank and see how insignificant your personal body power was compared to the merest blip of electricity, GM took a comic approach. The Water Engine took place in a darkened room where screens appeared behind the lowering cylinders of a combustion engine. While a laconic cowboy - the absolute embodiment of 80s American patriarchy - insists that he'll stick with the combustion engine till something better comes along, various crazy cartoon characters demonstrate their engines until a Mad Scientist-type turns on a "Water Engine" that explodes and wrecks comic havoc. Funny, charmingly animated, Water Engine still played directly into the prejudices of Americans and General Motors.

Steven Fjellman saw much that was ominous in The Bird and Robot Show, and given that his book was written in the immediate aftermath of Roger and Me, it's not too surprising. It's perhaps better, and more accurate, to see Bird and Robot as an outgrowth of traditional Disney theater shows like Country Bear Jamboree and Tiki Room, similar to the way that Kitchen Kabaret sought to add some old school Disney charm to to sleek, corporate EPCOT programme. WED basically treated the robotic assembly arm as the most advanced audio-animatronic possible, and paired it with a model of one of their earliest animated figures - a Tiki Room bird - to show off how fluidly it could move, lift objects, perform tricks, etc. Three decades on, the automation of labor has only increased, and is rapidly cresting the horizon where social change is going to need to happen to keep pace with the displaced population of laborers. Much like over at Expo Robotics, the robots are now the whole show.


The cleverest idea in TransCenter, and the one that really stuck, was the notion to require riders to exit through an automobile show room. Everyone remembers the Aero 2000, a machine designed to reduce wind resistance, but the Aero was a fantasy car and acted as the lure to keep people walking through the exhibit. Further along came more practical, potentially salable items such as the GM Lean Machine and, most importantly, next year's GM models.

What Needs to Change: The 1998 reboot into Test Track retained a few of the post-show elements. There was a simulator type attraction called Time Chasers, and a new gift shop which absorbed the back part of the automobile show room. The cars were instead moved forward into the exhibit area; guests still walk past the areas where Bird and Robot and Water Engine played. Given the fact that Test Track has a height restriction where World of Motion had none, I find it impossible to believe that films and exhibits in this are wouldn't be more popular with waiting families than the original menu of attractions were. In this case it's a matter of relocating or condensing the shop to make room for some informational activities that supplement the on-ride messages of safety and reliability.

Status: More memorable than you'd expect from a car company.


Come back next time for the rest of Future World!

The Living Seas, 1986
Original Sponsor: United Technologies
Original Message: Teaching respect for the ocean's resources, one supposes
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: Tough to say, but there are fish!
Comments: The Living Seas was one of those attractions that had been planned since the start, and as such was designed more around the standards and protocols of a Disney theme park experience than it was the corporate message of any one particular sponsor. This may have as much to do with the fact that its projected theme - deep undersea research laboratories - still have not come to pass, as much as any practical factors. The company they finally got to underwrite the show - United Technologies - is a massive defense contractor, and through the 80s and 90s was perhaps best known for providing things like water heaters to suburban homes. They also happen to own Otis elevators, a company Disney has used since the early 60s, which is probably why the original plan for Neptune to appear and "pushing back" the sea so we can explore it eventually gave way to a elevator ride to the ocean floor.

The Living Seas was, let's be clear here, not great. It did, however, have one of the most potent single things in Future World, which was a the progression of its show. Entering through a space designed to resemble a museum and allowing its audience to settle into a theater very much like the other Future World pavilions, the wall carpeted expanse suddenly gave way to a dreamscape. At the suggestion of the narrator, an animated grid suddenly became a real filmed space, and the theater opened into exactly what was just seen on screen. Although accomplished with the simplest of means, as a theatrical frisson it was extremely impressive.

The rest of the pavilion never quite lived up to the force of that idea, but rather relied on an accumulation of details to make its environment seem convincing. It was very easy to forget that in Central Florida you were nowhere near an ocean, especially not one like the coral reef depicted in Sea Base Alpha. The hydrator trip and "Sea Cab" ride to get into the pavilion set an expectation, and the hydrator trip to be allowed to leave fulfilled it. Some guests even thought the hydrators actually brought them somewhere!

In its day, in an era where popular thought was still dominated by memories of the space program and Star Trek, The Living Seas had an appealingly low-rent sci fi vibe and just enough of a presentational effort to seem reasonably convincing. Yet as time passed and Future World attractions began to change, demanding less thought from an audience that was no longer expected to consist primarily of adults, demand for the attraction and its particular brand of Next Generation-era sci-fi diminished. The Sea Cabs got a new spiel making announcements about Illuminations and all but begging visitors to stay and see the exhibits after disembarking, and then were shuttered in the economic downturn after the Millennium. The addition of Turtle Talk With Crush a few years later sealed the fate of the pavilion, and the whole thing was done over with a Finding Nemo theme in 2005. The pre-show, the hydrators, and everything else from the old theme was stripped out.

What Needs To Change: The basic problem with The Living Seas has always been that the entire pavilion is built around an aquarium from 1986, and it's an aquarium that really has not ever been updated. But even when it was brand new, the sci-fi presentation of the material far outweighed the actual value of the aquarium; the impact had to do more with how it was presented than what it was. As time has passed, the scale and detail of that aquarium isn't quite as amazing as it once was. Many large cities now have much more ambitious aquariums as regional tourist attractions, and those aquariums now have Disney-style rides and 3D shows in them.

All of this makes it hard to know what to do with The Seas. Much of the educational and informational value of the attraction was a little abstract to begin with, being less rooted in any particular vision than it was more generally advocating for undersea research. Today, James Cameron can knock together a more compelling case for the mysteries of undersea life than Disney can.

Status: Questionable
New Sponsor Suggestion: This is a pavilion in need of a reason to exist. Disney is going to have to be involved somehow, and frankly I don't think there's a compelling reason to jettison the Nemo dark ride -- but there still needs to be a larger context for the still impressive features of the pavilion to have real value. There are government agencies that do undersea research, like NOAA and NASA, and perhaps forming an advisory committee of such research centers could pave the way for a re-introduction of the science angle which made the original pavilion credible - and striking.


EPCOT Outreach, 1984
Original Sponsor: --
Original Message: --
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: It's worth remembering that through the 60s, 70s and 80s, one of Disney's most profitable divisions was as a supplier of quality educational films to schools. An outgrowth of the World War II educational film division, in the days when teachers had to haul out projectors and thread up films, the best products came from Disney. EPCOT Outreach was a physical embodiment of this side of the company - in fact, it's possible to argue that the entire of EPCOT Center was built on the back of Disney's two most successful divisions in the late 70s - outdoor recreation and educational films. In its heyday, besides a general purpose question and answer desk, it had a teacher's lounge complete with attraction previews and even lesson plans built around the attractions.

The trouble is, with the opening of the much more exciting Disney-MGM Studios in 1989 - where seemingly every attraction had an explosion - combined with a bad economy, attendance at EPCOT Center plummeted. To take up the slack, WDW heavily marketed EPCOT Center to area schools as an affordable field trip option, and it worked. Practically the whole place became a sea of visiting Florida schools. This led directly to the efforts to court a younger audience with flashier, more exciting attractions which has given us the uneasy mix we have today. EPCOT Outreach ate EPCOT Center alive.

I think this is still a terrific idea for a feature of EPCOT, but for it to mean anything, practically every Future World pavilion has to be updated. Universe of Energy cannot be soft-pedaling info from the 90s. Living With the Land cannot be presenting 80s-era pest control solutions as cutting edge. The Living Seas needs to have an actual point of view.

Incidentally, EPCOT Outreach eventually turned into a sort of catch-all WDW on-site archive, which eventually became the Walt Disney World Research Library. The Library was disbanded in 2014, and
some of the materials shipped out to California - an appropriately sad end to a final scrap of EPCOT.

Status: Disbanded

Listen to the Land, 1982
Original Sponsor: Kraft
Original Message: Industrial food growing methods are the darnedest things
Current Sponsor: Chiquita
Current Message: Industrial food growing methods from 20 years ago are the darnedest things
Comments: Here's where the dissonance between what EPCOT is preaching and reality really starts to set in, and The Land is currently one of the most popular and throughly refreshed of all the Future World pavilions!

Since 1982, concepts such as natural foods, pesticide-free, GMOs, sustainable seafood and farm raised fish have become hot button issues of our time, and Farmer's Markets and produce Co-Ops have become crucial community centers for many - yet nowhere in The Land can one even find an explanation of what Organic food is. Instead, Listen/Living With the Land has been passing on the same outdated information about pest control and farming since 1994. This message made sense for Kraft, whose name has become synonymous with processed foods. But this is one of the few attractions where the entire cultural discussion of its core concept has pivoted away from where it was in the 1980s. The "open a can" school of cooking of the 60s and 70s is a cultural memory. As a reflection of reality, The Land doesn't made sense for the vibrant current American food culture at all.

What Needs To Change: The basic concept of this attraction is surprisingly resilient - you wouldn't think that a boat ride through a greenhouse would be a crowd pleaser, but people still respond to this. And still, scientific trappings aside, the notion of growing crops to be used onsite could be argued to be "Farm-to-Table" before the words even existed as they do today. Urban farms and rooftop gardens around the country are producing organic crops using methods like hydroponics, and the results look very much like what The Land has had since the 80s. This is an attraction that needs not so much wholesale change as a redirected emphasis on where the food discussion will be in 2020.

Status: Relevant
New Sponsor Suggestion: This will result in eye rolling, but what Living With the Land needs is a sponsor with an actual commitment to modern ethical food cultivation.... and it may as well be Whole Foods Market.

Whole Foods has ridden the tide of the local and organic foods movements to corporate heights, and many Whole Foods have become education and community centers. If there's a single company that has the resources and commitment to redirect Epcot's The Land in the modern direction, it's them. Oh, and bring back the "Listen to the Land" name and theme song, please!



Symbiosis, 1982
Original Sponsor: Kraft
Original Message: Man's relationship with nature has always been fraught and complex.
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: See below
Comments: Symbiosis was one of the original EPCOT attractions most noteworthy for its refusal to let its audience off the hook. Designed as something of a corrective to the test-pattern TV eyes corporate angle of Listen to the Land, Symbiosis was beautifully shot and edited - but didn't even seem to arrive at a coherent point. If anything, it seemed to be suggesting that it wanted to arrive at the same point as Godfrey Reggino's "Koyaanisqatsi" without the avant grade trappings.

1994's Circle of Life is chipper and direct where Symbiosis was artful and kind of dull, but again Disney's refusal to update anything at Epcot means it's now as much of an byproduct of a time twenty years past as Ellen's Energy Adventure is. A 90s take on environmental awareness, using Lion King characters and the concept of the "Circle of Life" isn't a bad one, but in execution it doesn't say anything that Fern Gully didn't do about as well (and let's be clear here, Fern Gully didn't do anything well). The 90s in general were a hotbed of "activism" for rainforests and other endangered areas, even if this awareness most often manifested itself in, say, watching Captain Planet and dropping pennies in tin cups, feeling good about doing very little. A somewhat embarrassing reminder of this era, Circle of Life is fine, but there isn't a single point made in the film that isn't done in a much more compelling way at Animal Kingdom.

What Needs to Change: Disney has used the Symbiosis theater off and on to promote "Disney Nature" films, but I think the real question that needs to be addressed is why The Land needs a film at all. As it is, the themes of utopian agriculture, health and fitness, and food preparation were already weirdly spliced across Horizons, Wonders of Life, and The Land. If The Land is going to specifically be about farming - and let's just wave off the relevance of Soarin' here, because it doesn't fit and never will - then the film shown here needs to be on message with the boat ride to really work. If not, Disney should get rid of the theater and use the space for something new.

Status: Questionable

Kitchen Kabaret, 1982
Original Sponsor: Kraft
Original Message: Creating meals with balanced nutrition
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: If you were a fan of the kind of entertainment Disney had produced through the 60s and 70s, then EPCOT Center sometimes seemed amazingly thin on the old school Walt Disney charm. I personally think this opinion was wildly overstated - and there's even less there now than when it opened in 1982 - but Kitchen Kabaret, Journey Into Imagination and El Rio del Tiempo were classic WED rides in a park basically devoted to serious themes.

WED saw this problem coming, and it's nice that they did create Kitchen Kabaret as a call-out to the kind of theater shows that were Disney's bread and butter for a long time. Like the Tiki Room, Country Bears, and America Sings, Kitchen Kabaret was whimsical, lightweight, and kind of insane. Ostensibly devoted to furthering awareness of what was then the USDA's four major food groups, education was a distant second to Kitchen Kabaret's mandate to entertain. Patterned very heavily on the presentation of Country Bear Jamboree, Kabaret was perhaps not as pokey as Mickey Mouse Revue but fairly sedate compared to Davis and Bertino's truly madcap shows. For those of us who were able to visit EPCOT Center before it was torn out, this show as well as Listen to the Land were a sure bet and usually mostly empty. It wasn't until I was an adult that I appreciated the throwback vibe of the Kabaret, but it hardly mattered: the singing food characters were funny and kind of freaky, and the show barely took up ten minutes of your day. It is well remembered for good reason.

The replacement, Food Rocks, was motivated both by the comparatively empty state of most showings of Kitchen Kabaret, and the publication of USDA's convoluted Food Pyramid in 1992. Like most of Disney's 90s output, the "Hip n Edgy" Food Rocks sometimes seemed more like a compendium of "Dad Jokes" than a real show. Besides updating the roster of musical talent from the 40s to the 90s, and the creation of the truly memorably bizarre "Füd Rapper", neither show was really all that comparable nor really all that much about actual food education. Kitchen Kabaret's true advantage was its startling oversized kitchen set and intricately sculpted, very amusing food based stars.

I'm not sure we need the singing food show back at Epcot. Kabaret fulfilled its role of warming up the sometimes inhuman dimensions of Future World, but both shows pointed towards something shaky in conception about Future World. Was The Land about food and nutrition, or the growing and managing of food? Thanks to the Kabaret and Symbiosis, in 1982 it was both - but then why was Wonders of Life necessary?

The original version of The Land as developed in the 70s was entirely about natural environments, a sort of above ground Living Seas, a concept still present in the pavilion today as the "biomes" on the boat ride. With the removal of Wonders of Life, The Land has an opportunity to consolidate its themes under one roof, and even if the concept of how to use and cook food isn't conveyed by singing foodstuffs, the discussion still has a place at the table at The Land.

Status: Questionable



Journey Into Imagination, 1983
Original Sponsor: Kodak
Original Message: Inspiration is at the source of creation
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: The five senses impact our imaginations
Comments: If EPCOT Center had a beating heart, it was this ride and Horizons. Neither ride was perfect - the final third of Journey Into Imagination was far less interesting than its first two thirds, and the climax was more of an anti-climax, built around the concept of film technology, because Kodak was the sponsor.  But unlike the case of Horizons where we have to hem and haw and allow for "well, if this were updated...", Journey Into Imagination requires no excuses.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for its two replacements, but thankfully conveying a sense of the history of this pavilion is beyond the scope of this article. What can be said is that the current salvage version was a fine attempt to brush up an attraction that almost nobody liked. But, by its very nature of being a salvage of an attraction almost nobody liked, the interim version still has a legacy in the current attraction. The conceit of the "Imagination Institute" was never especially obvious to begin with - being as it was a justification for the placement of Honey, I Shrunk the Audience - but nobody designing an attraction about creative activity from scratch would choose to base it around the five senses. The most resonant attractions have a streamlined conception of content and form - Soarin' delivers exactly what it promises on its marquee. The name Journey Into Imagination promises an epic scale that does not logically segue to screens and office doors. This should be one of Walt Disney World's signature attractions. We deserve better.

What Needs To Change: like Horizons, this is one of those attractions where I believe a revival is in order, at least in part. When you speak about Journey Into Imagination with people, what you discover is that people remember and are talking about the first half of the attraction - the Flight to Imagination, Dream Port, Art Room, and Thriller Room. There certainly is no reason to do a full-scale revival of the ending, where the cars go chugging down a hill while blurry photos of the riders are displayed.

If a full-scale version of the Flight to Imagination cannot be recreated, then this section could be relegated to a pre-show room and have the riders board in the Dream Port. Following the Thriller room, what a new version needs to emphasize is that there are today more ways to be creative than the 80s slate of painting, writing, etc. Music can be written and orchestrated at home. Traditional media art has largely given way to digital art. Films can be made on devices that fit in your pocket. I see no reason a modern version of Journey Into Imagination can't be as good, if not better, than the 1983 original.

Status: Badly Needed
New Sponsor Suggestion: Avid? Google? Apple? Microsoft?

Magic Eye Theater, 1982
Original Sponsor: Kodak
Original Message: We Made A 3D Movie
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: Oh, how 3D has fallen - then risen - then fallen again. In the early 80s, back when the cycle of the 3D revival was just starting to wear out its welcome, EPCOT Center opened with Magic Journeys, a 3D film in development for years by Murray Lerner. A world apart from the excesses of something like Jaws 3D, Magic Journeys was something of a hallucinatory art film supposedly devoted to the imagination of a child but frankly more about being strange, sleepy and kind of freaky. Magic Journeys was shortly replaced by the supposedly more exciting Captain EO, a pure slice of 80s cheese, then by the aggressive spectator punishment vehicle Honey, I Shrunk the Audience.

In our own era, 3D has tread an equally strange path. No modern film has managed to rival the success of James Cameron's Avatar, and the domestic market for 3D has continued to shrink. Disney has continued to offer its animated films in 3D for no apparent reason other than that some people apparently prefer it. The much-ballyhooed home 3D blu ray players and televisions have even gone out of production.

It's time for Disney to divest itself of their 3D theaters, not so much because of the home 3D discs or the 3D revival, but because of the state of the theme park industry. Many smaller scale attractions like World of Coke in Atlanta, most major city aquariums, and many moderate size amusement parks offer 3D films. The showing of 3D - and indeed similar novelty film formats like Circle-Vision - is a tradition Disney began in 1955, at the height of the first wave of Hollywood novelty exhibition circuit. It's lasted through two more revivals, three company administrations, and nearly four generations. The Magic Eye Theater has trouble drawing in a crowd, and Disney has trouble coming up with things to fill it with. The theater should be gutted and used as additional space for a new version of the Journey Into Imagination attraction.

Status: Obsolete



The Image Works, 1983
Original Sponsor: Kodak
Original Message: --
Current Sponsor: --
Current Message: --
Comments: This is another big one. Of everything that was stolen, appropriated, recycled, and absorbed into the popular culture at EPCOT Center, Image Works was plundered most fully by outside forces. Within a few years of the opening of EPCOT, Image Works' unique hands on whimsy had been copied by nearly every Children's Museum in the country.

What's ironic is that Image Works, along with Magic Journeys, was one of the few EPCOT installations to come with no built-in Message - nothing but a quiet reminder that even the most average day to day activities come with an oft unspoken imaginative construct. A dark, cool, and fun retreat from the heat and bustle of the park, Image Works was one of those rare attractions where everything about the experience on a physical register was innately satisfying. The approach to the pavilion raised questions about those glass pyramids, questions satisfied by the ascent up the spiral staircase (by unanimous agreement the best kind) and the view of the attraction boarding area below. Once upstairs, the view of the park through those glass pyramids was another kind of reward, followed by the movement into the theatrically darkened Image Works space. Even the contrast between the brightness of the Rainbow Tunnel and the darkened Stepping Tones and optical illusion mazes beyond was innately satisfying.

While the current Image Works offers somewhat similar experiences, there are two crucial distinctions which make it less satisfying than its predecessor. The first is obvious: located in a plain room, the ritualistic aspect of the ascent to Image Works is removed. It's the same reason Tom Sawyer Island wouldn't work as well if you could just get there on a bridge instead of a raft. The second is that the "lab" theming steps on the wonder of the original presentation. While the late-90s music conductor game is undoubtably more technologically complex than its 1983 original, showing guests the computers running the operation simply turns the entire operation into an effects demonstration. The original Image Works positioned its effects as theatrical magic, not digital magic, and the appreciation of its audience was palpable.

What Needs to Change: besides moving back upstairs, Image Works needs to be given over entirely to WDI's Illusioneering department and filled with the kind of prototype special effects they regularly develop but rarely get to actually use. Image Works is also an area which would be ideal for an exhibit about the history of EPCOT, from Walt Disney's city to the present day.

Status: More, Please



Lessons From 1982

In our memories, EPCOT Center often seems to be a greater accomplishment than maybe it was. As I hope I've demonstrated here by going through every aspect of it's message content piece by piece, in terms of actively looking towards the future, the park presented ideas which ranged from fantastical (Horizons) to retrograde (Universe of Energy) to incoherent (Travelport?).

Despite this, in my opinion EPCOT Center was the highest, furthest, most effective summit the entire category of themed design has ever scaled since the opening of Disneyland. Despite its questionable corporates messaging and nonsensical product plugging, EPCOT Center was no less scattershot than it is today, yet something for those first twelve years held the center together in a way it does not now. And here at last we will try to pinpoint it.

I. Embrace Warmth and Human Scale

EPCOT Center was massive and monumental. The size of the walk around World Showcase is still enough to make adults cry. The architectural statements of each Future World pavilion were huge and impressive, but never leaned towards brutalism - instead falling into the Henchman abstraction that I like to call "theme architecture". Yet these gigantic blocks were dropped with symmetrical precision into a landscape which perhaps more than anything suggested a bucolic college campus - with ponds, fountains, rolling lawns and spreading trees.

But inside each pavilion, everything suddenly became warm and intimate. CommuniCore offered its visitors handmade art objects like the Population Counter and Fountain of Information, simply there to be enjoyed. Natural daylight, terraced seating areas, varnished wood and wall carpet offered a pleasing sense of tranquility. Subdued lighting and peaceful music complemented the uncluttered, enticing atmosphere. Everything about EPCOT Center's gathering spaces - The Land interior, Communicore, the Fountain of Nations, the Imagination lobby, the World Showcase courtyards - contrasted textures, tactile pleasures, and colors to create environments which invited you to linger.

Through the 90s, the scale of these interiors, once criss crossed with walls, plants and natural dividers, ballooned until most of EPCOT today resembles a cross between an industrial trade show and a Wal-Mart Super Center. Tarps, canopies, and unrelated nonsense clutter the sightlines of those monumental pavilions. Carts, pop-up stands, and pin carts dot every walkway. Of all of the parks, Epcot's aesthetics respond the least well to these sorts of theme park mainstays, and they really should be elimiated. You need to give people a reason to get inside and sit down, to get away from the crowded tarmac.

EPCOT Center's walkways may have been stark and simple, but once you actually got into each pavilion, you could spend an hour or more in air-conditioned comfort without ever stepping outside. To me this comes down to respecting your audience as well as having respect for the human scale. Disney needs to accept what tens of thousands of locals and fans already know: Epcot is the ultimate hang out park. Each pavilion should be honeycombed with small exhibits, fun diversions, little places to relax and maybe get a drink, in a classy, clean atmosphere. If you give people places they like to be, you'll be surprised what they'll reward you with.

II. Maintain the Ecosystem of Aesthetics

This is a big one, and it's a place where Future World needs to entirely start from scratch. As these articles have pointed out, EPCOT was a hive of competing ideas, companies, and ideologies, yet it seemed to speak with a single voice. That single voice is so strong that today is still reverberates in the public mind, twenty years long gone. How many still know it as EPCOT Center, and how many still associate it with some kind of learning experience?

That's power. That's power than usually only public figures usually attain, never mind a dorky theme park peddling corporate messages and sentimental songs in equal measure. And one reason the voice of EPCOT Center still speaks through time to us is because its message was scrupulously, carefully aesthetically organized and unified.

This is something that got stripped out of EPCOT piece by piece in such a way that it was gone without anybody really noticing it was leaving yet. The demise of Horizons and Journey Into Imagination was only the final piece that fell into place, but just as important to reducing the overall impression of a unified whole was touches like replacing the original wooden railings and carpeted walls in The Land with metal railings and painted walls. Yes, the current look of The Land is, on a micro scale, more modern, but it's less human on a macro scale. The paving of Communicore Central and the removal of all of Hench's softening trees, bushes and ponds is another. Bit by bit, piece by piece, Epcot of today is a far bleaker, harsher place than it was even 15 years ago.

All of this is a result of different design agendas within the company. EPCOT Center was unified in 1985 because it was all built at the same time. The Epcot of today is the result of hundreds of different design teams with different project leaders, budgets, expectations and goals. While an organic environment like Magic Kingdom or Animal Kingdom presents areas where one design tough or another is unambiguously out of place or not, there's no generally agreed upon single system barometer for what EPCOT should look like. It's really easy to, say, replace one railing in one place and bump that single pavilion out of line with the rest. This is how you end up with signs that look like they come from the cover of Dreamcast games or random wavy descending walls, a sure sign of a lost and bored designer.


Disney needs to write this barometer, then. Every sign in Future World must have specific size, color, and font approved choices. Every pavilion must have a dedicated color palette, approved patterns, approved typefaces, and so on. This is why the Future World pavilion icons worked so well as an organizing principle: pictures require no language translation, and sleek icons are even better. There should be no need for flashing LED billboards to help guests find their way to attractions if there's a streamlined, iconographic wayfinding system.

Yesterland.com

Writing such a manual will inevitably limit the creative freedom of the individual designers creating facilities for Future World, but I cannot see how this would in any way be worse than the garish mishmash we ended up with. The way forward on Future World can be as simple as a start with a strict design standards document, and spread through the rest of the park.

III. Don't Let Them Off the Hook

Disney is really good at talking down to their audience, and their audience really loves it. There will always be a contingent of Disney fans who love toothless pablum like Wishes, but in Future World and EPCOT in general are going to ever coalesce into what it is in the minds of the public, Disney really needs to commit to taking Epcot, and the Epcot audience, seriously.

Taking an audience seriously does not per se mean being humorless or dry. The 1982 version of Spaceship Earth was exactly that, which is why it was reworked to more closely resemble Horizons only a few short years after it opened. Horizons was, despite its eye popping visuals and reassuring message, astonishingly hokey, H.G. Wells by way of Father Knows Best. World of Motion was very funny, Kitchen Kabaret was weird. These attractions offered hopeful apology for their sloganeering, a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Symbiosis, The American Adventure, Spaceship Earth '94 and to a lesser extent The Living Seas all put it to their audience to be ready to make the world a better place - they didn't let them off the hook. And despite all of that, EPCOT Center did have a profound effect on a generation of a certain age. Yes, it was kids who dreamed of piloting the Enterprise instead of kids who fantasized about having tea with Belle, but isn't that still an accomplishment?

Even the lightweight Journey Into Imagination packed an ideological punch. For this five year old child, who didn't much care for science and technology trappings, I walked away floored by that attraction's insistence that I could and should use my creativity to "start making new things". Returning to my ranch house in Connecticut, I scrawled out the lyrics to the Sherman Brothers' Imagination song in black crayon on a piece of construction paper and stared at it for days. That attraction instilled in me at age five the awareness that only I was responsible for getting the ideas in my head out into the real world, and on that wave of inspiration I began drawing volumes. The blog you read now is a direct result of that experience. I may be a castle park kind of person, but Journey Into Imagination changed my life for the better.

Thing is, I am in no way alone. You can't swing a cat in the Disney online community without hitting somebody of a certain age who will readily and loudly tell you that EPCOT Center rewired something inside them. This more than anything is the proof in the pudding that Michael Eisner was dead wrong, that EPCOT Center was relevant, and did matter.

These two articles have been intentionally limited in their scope - I haven't attempted to re-concieve what Future World should be for 2020 audiences from scratch, for example, but then again that never was the point. The point was to become clearer and reach conclusions on what Future World was really saying, and how it said them. And the conclusion I've reached is that EPCOT Center came pre-packed with a sort of aesthetic toolkit, and it's a toolkit that nobody has used since the 80s.

But those tools still work. They can still make muddled messages sing and send the next generation home with the sort of elevating experience I had.

Kids need to see a place that doesn't just tell, but show them that science and technology make our lives better - they needed it in the 80s, and they need it today. It's never going to be perfect, but the next generation deserves a demonstration of mankind's better nature. "If you can dream it, you can do it" may not have been said by Walt Disney, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth saying.

When you think about it, visitors to theme parks really never stop moving. We walk from place to place in order to board attractions that whirl us through scenery. Trams, monorails, boats  and buses whisk us where we want to go. Even the theme park parade is whisked past us, efficiently entertaining tens of thousands at once without having to stop. One of the few places this restless forward motion finally ceases is the food court.


Most theme park guests probably spend longer staring at the walls of a food court than they do riding that multi-million dollar roller coaster or zipping through that highly profitable gift shop. And if you have an audience that's going to need to stop and stare for a while at something you built, then you have a choice. You can either present them with something that's totally perfunctory like the Captain America Diner at Islands of Adventure, or you can drop them off in something like Disneyland's Plaza Inn.

Disneyland seems to have created the idea of the fully themed food court. Much of what Disneyland opened with in 1955 could today best be described as a "snack stand", with the noteworthy exception of the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship in Fantasyland. But, starting with the plans for New Orleans Square and New Tomorrowland, Disneyland food courts would become increasingly elaborate, a progression which climaxed with Magic Kingdom's 1971 slate of indoor food courts. As has been shown on this site before, I have a special interest in the Adventureland Veranda, but really it's hard to top the Columbia Harbour House.

Indeed, among a certain subset of the historically oriented, the Harbour House is almost one of the secret handshakes. It's the dark retreat from the Florida sun where sea shanties echo through mahogany chambers. What makes the Harbour House so special?

Based on atmospheric sketches by Dorothea Redmond, The Harbour House didn't open until Summer 1972, alongside most of the rest of the facilities in Liberty Square - Olde World Antiques, the Perfume shop, the Heritage House, etc. On early Magic Kingdom guide maps, it's called the Nantucket Harbour House, but by the time it opened, it's location had switched to "Columbia Harbour". Why?

To be clear, there is no such place as Columbia Harbour. I'm fairly certain that it was named in anticipation of the arrival of a new vessel to ply the Rivers of America - a copy of the Columbia at Disneyland.

Years back, Mike Lee identified a three-masted sailing vessel on a 1969 model of the Magic Kingdom, just above Thunder Mesa. What's most interesting about this is that everything on the north side of Liberty Square is designed to suggest a seaside atmosphere - the sailing ship weathervane, widow's walks, and turning beacon atop the Riverboat Landing, the harbour House itself, the Cape Cod-style shingles around the Yankee Trader, and then the seaside horror mansion of the long-dead captain nearby. The rock wall that bounds the river along Liberty Square is referred to in old park manuals as the "Sea Wall".



The Columbia had been canceled and replaced by a second riverboat in 1973, due to the two major concerns facing park operations in this first years - shade and capacity. A Columbia vessel, with an exposed single deck holding around 300 persons, didn't make sense compared to a three-deck Riverboat holding 450 persons. It's a shame, because the Columbia would have complemented Liberty Square and made sense of a lot of the theming on the north side of the land.

That secret history is just one of the fascinations of the Harbour House. Did you know that all of the rooms inside are named? I've had the diagram posted on this site for about eight years, but it's always worth re-posting:



Did you know there used to be a separate serving area upstairs at the Harbour House? It's true. There's still a kitchen back there, and food items and whisked between floors for service downstairs. By the 90s, the upstairs counter was dispensing entirely deserts and soup, and by the mid-90s, the menu has shrunk to only offering clam chowder in those huge bread bowls you can still get at Disneyland. By the late 90s it was walled up, although you can still see the spot where it was - with the telltale tile floor - at the top of the main stairs.

In the years since moving to Central Florida, Harbour House has become my personal respite, favorite food court, and a place I take time to rest in every time I'm at Magic Kingdom. And so after nearly decades of faithful service and reliable atmosphere, I decided it was time to give the Columbia Harbour House her due as one of those things that makes The Magic Kingdom what it is.

Step through those familiar cream double doors and let's spend A Day at the Columbia Harbour House.



--

I've posted a few of these elaborate edited videos before, and I try to regularly update my YouTube account with new theme park "viewpoints", static views of the park from a fixed perspective. It occurred to me that I've never made clear exactly why I continue this project, or how the "viewpoints" fit into the larger notion of the more elaborate edited sequences.

I got the basic idea from Mike Lee, who spent part of the early 90s plopping down his camcorder in various places around Walt Disney World and just letting it roll. So part of it, yes, is documentation. but there's something else here too.

When you work at Walt Disney World, it re-orients your way of thinking about the place. Visitors rush about constantly; Cast Members stand in one spot, day in and day out. After a while, if you're willing to look to see it, a secret, alternate Walt Disney World opens up to you: one where shifting light, weather, and crowds become as beautiful and memorable as the place they're in. Eventually, you learn to take pleasure more in the way the afternoon summer light bounces off the river onto the riverboat as much as you do the river itself.

This is why Mike Lee's vintage viewpoint videos struck me as worthy of emulation; they seemed to capture what it's really actually like to be there. My "Theme Park Viewpoints" are as much an effort to explain why I like these parks as they are an effort to document. That's why they go on, and on, and on; they're designed to encourage you to start admiring the way light plays off a structure, or the way the crowd ebbs and flows through a space, or the cyclical rhythm inherent to all theme parks.

This video, A Day at the Columbia Harbour House, is so far my fullest attempt to express this aspect of theme parks. I went back, again and again, at all times of day, to record life in the Harbour House for a five month span. I knew if I kept showing up and being willing to stop and look, I could just maybe be there to film that elusive magic the parks sometimes have when the light is just right. Out of about two hours of raw footage, I pulled out this 17 minute meditation of one of Magic Kingdom's holy places.

Stop, look, and listen inside theme parks, as often as possible, for as long as it takes. The secret life of the park is there for you if you're willing to see it.

There aren't really too many really terrific theme park documentaries out there - at least ones written and produced with an eye towards objectivity and education. There's always been making-of television specials and the kind of "documentaries" Disney regularly commissions from the History and Travel Channels, but these are as much promotional tools as anything else. But a well-researched theme park documentary that has a point of view and a variety of subjects across a broad spectrum of the industry?

Well, I know of one. It was a large influence on my way of thinking about theme parks, and we're going to take a look at it today.

In the 1990s growing up out in the country, I did not have access to a lot of information about theme parks. I had grown up with our regional amusement center, Riverside Park - now known as Six Flags New England - every few years may be able to make a trip down to Disney. There was no such thing as streaming video, and a dial-up connection to a 56k modem was still years away for me. Amazon did not yet exist, never mind of the sort of information resource I've worked to make this site into. I wanted to learn more about theme parks, but my options were very limited.

Thankfully I was at the time a VHS hoarder and was able to capture this Discovery Channel documentary in 1997. When I watched it some time later, it really took my head off and changed the way I thought about my occasional trips to the orlando mega parks. Suddenly, the two worlds of amusement parks I had known - the regional parks like Lake Compounce and the Orlando extravaganzas - were contextualized as being two different expressions of a shared heritage. It was a revelation. The show was called "Fun House", and there seemingly is very little information available about it.

One could argue with certain points that the documentary makes. Its' two examples of cutting edge attractions are Indiana Jones Adventure and Terminator 2: 3D, and most theme park fans would not lump T2 in with all of the dark rides. At the end, it takes a dive into the world of IMAX films. Yet it's very easy to imagine an updated version of this documentary then moving on to discuss Universal's Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man or Disney's Soarin' as examples of rides which build on the boom in themed projection technology from the 90s. The current champion for most cutting edge attraction operating is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which frankly isn't all that different than Spider-Man.

And on the other hand, this hour long show preserves a number of things which are now lost. The Old Mill and Le Cachot at Kenywood are gone, and Bushkill Park's historic Haunted Pretzel was destroyed in the Pennsylvania flooding in 2005. The lights-on tour of the Haunted Pretzel is a high point of this documentary, and worth watching to see exactly what the Pretzel Amusement Company was building in the late 1920s.

Oh, and thankfully the me of 1997 had enough foresight to include all of the commercials. Hop on board the Fun House and let's learn something!

You know what everyone loves? Disney books. There's entirewebsites dedicated to them. It's not an uncommon activity on social media to post photos of your growing library. Every year, new and desirable Disney books are released - independently, and also through official channels.

But - you know what a lot of people are getting rid of? Books. Whether you want to blame the e-reader revolution or larger cultural changes, many people are divesting themselves of large collections of things.

On top of that, changes in online commerce have led to the creation of huge, vertically integrated book resellers on sites like Amazon who take in massive collections of used books and make their money back on shipping and volume. Today, you can buy practically any older book you can think of online for less than the price of a good lunch.

So it's a great time for collectors like me, because it means that books are available online from huge companies for basically nothing. No more waiting for something to list on eBay, no more hoping you land the winning bid, no more waiting for the seller to ship it - the way I got most of my Disney library ten years ago.

But I've been buying Disney books online for long enough now that it's easy for me to forget that not everyone knows what these things are. And, judging by social media, it seems as if somebody discovers one of these great old Disney books every few months that they never knew existed. Perhaps this humble blog can fill in a gap, raising awareness of these great books as well as providing some background on what they are and what to expect - and how not to be ripped off!

So I put together a list of what I consider to be (roughly) nine essential, affordable vintage theme park books. These aren't books that were published with informational purposes in mind - they were sold as keepsakes, and their pleasures are largely aesthetic ones. Please keep in mind that I'm limiting my discussion here to widely available books - Disneyland: The Nickel Tour is amazing, and badly in need of a reprint, but also costs $400. The books I feature here won't break the bank.

But, you know, you should get these while they're affordable. They're also books that have been out of print for decades, so there is a finite number of them floating around. I've got a lot of Disney books, and I've looked through many more - these are ten that always bring me pleasure, no matter how often I pop them open.

The Story of Walt Disney World

Also known as the "Big D" book - because the front cover looks like a big black "D" with the center a cut-out window showing the castle. The interior of the book is a class act - a behind the scenes look at the construction of the Vacation Kingdom, presented with the most charming late-60s promotional writing and typefaces possible. Some of the photos in this book are commonly seen, but just as many are still likely to be new to you was they were in 1971.

So here's the thing to know about the D Book. This book was in print through the entirety of the 1970s - it was sold alongside the "Pictorial Souvenirs" as the main keepsake book available in the Vacation Kingdom through at least 1980. As a result, the book is very common. It's far easier to come across than the original Pictorial Souvenir, and far easier to obtain than any of the GAF guides or ticket books. It's the most easily accessible piece of early Walt Disney World to purchase, because it was in print for so long.

The interior of the book hardly changed that whole time - at some point in the mid-70s, a few of the photos inside were changed, and the resort map on page 14 was changed from the Paul Hartley original map (the one that hung in hotel rooms) to an updated, and less interesting, "fun map" showing the Golf Resort and various tourists cavorting around the property. The text of the book is the same, but the photos chosen for the early 70s edition are a bit more idiosyncratic - fewer shots of sailboats on the Seven Seas Lagoon.

One thing that never changed was the banner reading "Commemorative Edition" on the front, which has led hundreds of eBay sellers who think they've got a real find on their hands and to ask absurd prices for this thing. Every single one of these things says "Commemorative Edition". Very few of them are from 1971. Every one of them has a printing run listed on the inside front cover. I've seen dates ranging from 1972 to 1979.

Even if I feel that the print quality and the photo selection make the pre-1976 version slightly more desirable, this is a terrific book, and well worth something in the neighborhood of $15. Beware of scalpers, but well worth the effort.

Walt Disney World: The First Decade

Printed in 1980 ostensibly as a counterpart to Disneyland: The First Quarter Century, if I had to choose a single object to put into somebody's hands which explains what the company was hoping to do in Florida and how sophisticated the place was for its first few decades, it would be this handsome book. Nearly forty years on, I'm still not sure there's been a better Walt Disney World book.

Printed on thick, glossy paper, with durable binding and filled with uniformly beautiful, evocative photographs, Disney intended this book to last, and it has. Much of the spine of the book later became the basis for the hardback souvenir guides in the back half of the 80s, but the text is denser and more serious in The First Decade.

It stops not only to discuss the attractions, but their design and how they fit into the park itself. It devotes four pages to a smart discussion and beautiful photos of the Magic Kingdom's hub. Following the park tour, the book touts the backstage operations, communications and waste disposal systems, and other innovations. It bothers to print photos of the Utilidors, and makes a better case for their importance than most enthusiastic fans can. It's probably the best Walt Disney world book ever printed, and perfectly preserves the spirit of that distant, early decade in amber.

This book is widely available, and hasn't seen the jumps in price that others on this list have in the past ten years. It's so well printed that any copy you buy will probably have held up very well. Although it's not tough to find copies below $20, I can't see anybody who loves theme parks, public spaces, urban planning or just plain beautiful books being unhappy with this book after paying as much as $30. It's an essential volume.

Steve Birnbaum Brings You The Best Of Disneyland

Steve Birnbaum Brings You The Best Of Walt Disney World

Oh, Birnbaum. I grew up as an Unofficial Guide loyalist, partially because by the 90s the Birnbaum guides had become generic and corporate in their text and message. But if you can get your hands on one of the early Birnbaum guides - red for Walt Disney World or blue for Disneyland - you will find one of the best books ever written about these places. These books are so good that Steven Fjellman interrupts himself in Vinyl Leaves to gush about them.

You know you're in for something special when you open up these early guides and the first page reprints a memo from Dick Nunis approving of Steve's efforts. Things get stranger when, in his introduction, Steve describes his wife jumping up and down and screaming at the prospect of "riding all the rides". Throughout, these early guides have real character as Birnbaum guides you through the parks with wit, a little bit of sarcasm, and an obvious love for a stiff drink.

The amount and variety of information Birnbaum has gathered up from all corners of the company and presented in this guide is staggering. While later day Birnbaum guides present some tidbits of information ensconced in some fairly bland discussion of each ride, Birnbaum's admiration for Disney fairly leaps off these pages. He doesn't just give you an overview of each area of the park, he goes into the architecture, landscape, and atmosphere of each in detail. He doesn't just summarize what's available at each restaurant, he tries to create a sense of its design and offers some smart remarks about how stand-out dishes actually taste.

Some caveats. Birnbaum's 1983 guide, which advertises EPCOT Center on its cover (above), was completed in a rush to get the book to print and so the information on EPCOT is brief and incomplete. EPCOT Center fans will want to pick up his 1984 guide for a much better overview of that park. Also, around the time The Disney-MGM Studios was getting ready to open, the text was already starting to become compressed to fit in the new offerings. While the late-80s guides are still enjoyable, it's those red and blue covered guides that are truly remarkable.

You can see why Dick Nunis approved. These things were written to be ephemeral little books, used for one trip and then discarded, but they're so well done they've survived as both souvenirs and historical records. Not bad for a travel book.

It's always been kind of tough to find old editions of these books exactly for the reasons I described, but if you see a red or blue cover Birnbaum, grab it!

Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow

Here it is, probably in the running with The Nickel Tour for the greatest theme park book ever published. This was written by Richard Beard, who worked directly for Disney and to be sure, this is definitely a promotional publication. Disney did their best to disguise this - publishing the book through Harry Abrams in New York - but that is what it is.

But what a book, and what a park.

Even die-hard EPCOT experts will be staggered by what's inside this book. Huge, colorful photographs accompanied by an intelligent text, this book makes the best possible case for what Disney hoped EPCOT Center could be. The print quality is excellent, and there's even fold-out pages for large format art and photos. The book traces the design and construction of the park - there's no real attempt to make excuses for the failure of Walt's future city to materialize. But this is an unusually compelling text, has excellent and abundant photos, and is a quality publication - Disney was making the case for why and how they built EPCOT through this book.

It speaks for a park that no longer exists. For kids to whom EPCOT was love at first sight, looking through this book can be emotional. It's much more like going to EPCOT than going to Epcot is. And there it can sit on your shelf forever.

This is the book that is seemingly re-discovered on social media every few months, and combined with a perhaps bland title, word has clearly not gotten out that this book is essential. Prices were high for a few years around the 25th Anniversary of Epcot, but have seemingly come down. So here's what you need to know when you go shopping:

First, there are three editions of the book, and they are all distinct. The first edition is simply called "Walt Disney's EPCOT", and pre-dates the opening of the park. The second is called "Walt Disney's EPCOT Center", and was published after the park opened. Both of these editions are large-format hardbound books - measuring 9.5 inches wide and 12 inches tall. They're both 240 pages long and have basically the same text and layout. The 1981 version consists entirely of models and artwork, while the 1982 version has replaced some of these with photos of the finished park.

The third edition is designated below its ISBN on the interior front page as "Special Edition", but it's easy to distinguish from the first two on sight. It's a smaller, thinner book, with a simple board hardcover front instead of the full dust jacket the 1981 and 1982 editions have. It's just 8.75 inches across and 11 inches tall, and has about 125 pages. The front cover includes the EPCOT Center "flower" emblem, and uses the actual park logo (right). This is a slimmed down version of the 1982 edition, and was published to be sold inside the park as a souvenir.

Some people, of course, will want to have all three. I suggest picking up the slim "Special Edition" first, which is the most common and a darn great book on its own, no excuses needed. From there, I think the 1982 version of the big book has a slight advantage for its mix of photos and art. It's not too tough to find the larger versions as library cast-offs.

However you find them, these books are wonderful and there's simply no good reason for ownership of them to be as confined to EPCOT super fans as it is. Seek them out, and the rewards will be well worth the effort.

Disneyland: The First Thirty Years

Yeah, I know. So far this list has been very East Coast-centric, but what can be done when you've got heavyweight hitters like Walt Disney World: The First Decade all lined up? The early 80s were just a darn good time for theme park books.

One of these excellent books was Disneyland: The First Quarter Century. That book is something of an outgrowth of a souvenir publication available at Disneyland through the late 60s and early 70s, usually simply called Walt Disney's Disneyland. Written by Marty Sklar and published in a hardbound edition, it was an early attempt to give a historical overview of the park. Disneyland: The First Quarter Century revised that book, re-organized the text, added better photographs and a few bells and whistles, like card stock section dividers. I think The First Quarter Century is a terrific book, but I'm going to direct you to its updated version from five years later as being slightly better.

To begin with, it includes New Fantasyland, which is for this author a crucial component of Disneyland's appeal. The card stock section dividers have become plain decorative pages, which is not a deal breaker. And the rest of the text is absolutely intact and unchanged.

Disneyland: The First Thirty Years is really more of a photo book of memories, especially when compared to its superb counterpart Walt Disney World: The First Decade. It includes historical photos of Disneyland laid out chronologically, with special attention given to celebrity and world leader visits. The last section is devoted simply to beautiful photos of the park from another time. In many ways, these books set the template for the kind of Disneyland book that still gets published today.

Disney did update the book one last time in 1990, now called Disneyland: The First Thirty-Five Years. I find this version to be by far the least compelling of the three, with few changes besides an even more compressed text and a few new photos. Additionally, the 1990 edition is often significantly more expensive than the 1980 or 1985 versions. So much of all 3 of these books are identical that you really only need one, and to me The First Thirty Years is the best compromise.


A Pictorial Souvenir of Walt Disney's Disneyland

I knew I had to include at least one of these books, which were a staple of the theme parks until around 1990. But which one? The late-70s Walt Disney World version, with the globe cover, came close to iconic, but I knew this list would lean too heavily towards Walt Disney World publications. Of the rest, I liked this mid-80s Disneyland book the best, in futuristic silver!

There isn't much that these books need to do besides contain lots of photos and be beautiful, but this particular edition has a dense, elaborate interior which is especially pleasing, with classy calligraphy lettering and some truly unusual photos.

On top of that, this book represents Disneyland at a specific moment in time worth remembering. Back when Bear Country was still Bear Country, before Captain EO and Star Wars invaded Tomorrowland and America Sings was still spinning, and Cascade Peak was still standing. It was a park on the razor edge between eras - with promotional pages in the back trumpeting EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland - before the real changes began.

Disneyland: Inside Story

You know those websites that cover the history of Disneyland? They all originate with this book.

Now, if the Richard Beard EPCOT book is somewhat under-rated, then this book is somewhat over-rated. This is a book which is so influential that practically its entire spine has been disseminated online in the form of trivia posts, "do you know?" articles, tweets and other digital noise. This is not a book you're going to want to because it contains amazing information; there are more compelling books about the creation of Disneyland which have been built on the back of this one. This is a book that's worth owning because it's a beautifully created object.

Just like with EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow, Disney produced Inside Story as a prestige product, intended to glorify their park. Once again published by Abrams in an oversize glossy edition, this is a park book which just plain looks beautiful. It's easy to imagine an entire generation of Disneyland kids pouring over it repeatedly (the way I was doing with my edition of the Imagineering book ten years later) before logging onto Usenet to talk Disneyland history. It's arguable that Disneyland: Inside Story, with its embrace of the parenthetical and adulation of Walt Disney, is the foundation of the online community.

Taking a step back, it's easy to see how Randy Bright combined aspects of Marty Sklar's Walt Disney's Disneyland book with aspects of Disneyland: The First Quarter Century to build a better mousetrap. Many of the stories from Sklar's book crop up again here, the same ones you've heard over and over again about cars parked in Frontierland and color blind tractor drivers. What Bright did was he added interviews with the designers who built the place and an extra layer of journalistic integrity. Most Disneyland books report briefly on the doubt and challenges related to creating the park in the 50s, but Bright takes the time to bring them to life in a way which makes them into genuine concerns instead of the quickly disproven complaints of negative nellies.

But it's also worth remembering that Bright was writing this book at an opportune moment in history. In 1987, Walt Disney had been dead a mere twenty years. Indeed, the sections of his book break down into Design, Construction, Very Early Disneyland, Pre-1966 Disneyland, and Post-Disney Disneyland. He even stops to describe the corporate takeover attempts of the early 80s with surprising candor.

The importance of this book means it's often sold for vastly inflated prices by those who primarily sell to Disney fans, but thankfully thrift stores, second hand book retailers, and used library copies are becoming more common. Unless price is no object, there's no reason to pay $60 for this book. It may take some hunting around, but I can't imagine than any theme park fan wouldn't find the effort worthwhile.

Walt Disney World (Souvenir Hardcover)

Here we go. This is the book that began my fascination with Walt Disney World. It's also still the most handsome souvenir book I've ever seen. These are truly obsession-worthy books.

I'm speaking, of course, of the hardcover souvenir books produced at Walt Disney World between 1987 and 1992. They don't really have a title, but their covers are instantly recognizable: embossed art around a central photograph of Cinderella Castle; pages and pages of remarkably classy photographs of the park; big Walt Disney painting in the front pages.

There's a couple of them. The forest green version was the original, published in 1987. The second edition has a cream cover and has been updated to include the Disney-MGM Studios, Typhoon Lagoon, Pleasure Island and the Grand Floridian. After that came the "20 Magical Years" edition, with a cover in blue and silver embossed art.

Here's the good news: all of these books are practically identical in layout and content. The book was expanded over time without sacrificing content. The deep basis for the book is Walt Disney World: The First Decade, of which this is something of an updated, slimmed down version. It's definitely more of a mass market souvenir than The First Decade, with less text and more pictures. But what pictures!

As an extension of the exemplary First Decade, these books really generate a feeling of what Walt Disney World was like before the booming 90s added too many things that were too poorly thought out. Visitors must have thought so too, because there's a lot if these out there, for relatively little money. As far as pictorial souvenirs go, this is amongst the most evocative to lose yourself in, and well worth the minor investment.

Since the World Began

If three of the previous books help to tell the story of Disneyland in all of its variance, then Jeff Kurtti's Since the World Began tries to do the same for Walt Disney World, and more or less it's still the best attempt at delivering the full package.

Walt Disney World is so contradictory and complex that in reality each of the parks could fill its own massive book, and such a collection of books would likely still gloss on the resort infrastructure, the dozens of hotels, Lake Buena Vista, Bonnet Creek, the golf courses, the water parks, and all of the rest of it. As a one-stop shop, Kurtti's book is limited in terms of what it can include, but in terms of giving a complete overview, it's still.... still the best effort available.

There are parts of the book where simply the same old facts and trivia about the parks are repeated, which is where the links between this book and, say, the souvenir hardcover are most apparent - I'm sure Disney provided the same packets and lists of information I looked through as a Cast Member. Since the World Began is not a research project, it's a very well done souvenir book.

Although published in 1996, the book is basically still pretty up to date. It includes sections on Animal Kingdom, the sports complex, and Coronado Springs, and since then (setting aside the expansion of DVC) the changes have not been as extensive as they were in the first 25 years of the resort. Since the World Began could be easily updated for, say, the resort's 50th and be fairly similar.

Somebody still needs to write the Walt Disney World history book extravaganza. I've done my best to fill in gaps in the early years, and much of the rest is a matter of public record. Since the World Began is not the telephone directory-size history book that Walt Disney World probably demands, but it's a really superb overview.

This book is also unique amongst souvenir books in that it's more text than images, by a huge margin.  Not even Disneyland: Inside Story seems so committedly... verbal. The book could probably benefit from a slightly more expansive layout and larger photos, and a slightly more in depth text, but this is the one and only place to start for anyone who wants to start learning about Walt Disney World, for two decades and counting.

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Love the Disney World of old? Drop by our Walt Disney World History portal to see all of this site's history articles gathered in one easy to access place.

Let's hop on over to the Golf Resort this week for some historical oddities. I had been looking for a reason to put these online, and a recent episode of the Retro Disney World Podcast focusing on the Golf Resort - making heavy use of my research - seemed to create a good opportunity.


On this site I've focused a lot on things like the Golf Resort and Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village - odd experiments from the first few years that are markedly different from the sort of kiddie-oriented

I've never spoken to anybody who stayed at the Golf Resort - or later, the Disney Inn - who didn't consider it one of the best things they ever accidentally "discovered" at Walt Disney World. It was fairly common for the overbooked monorail hotels to move guests across the street to its manicured greens, and many found they preferred the quiet, intimate atmosphere preferable to the hustle and bustle of the main hotels.

And that's one reason I've continued to put effort into keeping its memory alive - I have no interest whatever in golf, but the Golf Resort would be the kind of place that would attract me. Ironically for being considered an overlooked, remote option, it's nearer to the most desirable part of Disney property than most of their hotels are today. Had Eisner not sold it outright to the US Military in one of Disney World's periodic economic downturns, that property would today host a truly elaborate, profitable Disney hotel.

For all these reasons, plus general weirdness, the Golf Resorts holds a place in my heart. And when, as every so often happens, something Golf Resort related pops up online, I try to secure it. Which is how I bring you today two truly obscure little finds from the olden days of Walt Disney World.

The Golf Studio

One of the oddest sidebars to the Golf Resort story is the fact that Disney offered a genuine golf class at a rate of about $30 for two hours - or $35 if students wished for a few rounds of golf after the class. That's between $75 and $90 today, making this one of the most expensive and unique items in a Walt Disney World vacation of the era - and one of the most experimental.

It's hard to convey just how much effort Disney put into their golf courses in the 70s. The "golfing triumvirate" of Card Walker, Dick Nunis and Donn Tatum ensured that their resort would house three lavishly praised championship courses - making Disney World catnip for the sorts of folks who, like them, read golfing magazines. Disney even installed a 6 hole junior course that used synthetic turf - Wee Links, today called Oak Trail.


The Golf Studio was broken into two sections: instruction and video analysis. After an hour with a instructor in a conference room, students were videotaped practicing their swings. The swing would then be analyzed frame by frame back in the Pro Shop.


At the conclusion of the class, students were given a cassette tape to bring home with them - side A featuring general golf tips from Phil Ritson, a South African golf instructor brought in by Disney to design the program. The second side was an audio recording of the video breakdown session. They came in heavy black plastic cases that looked like this:


You want to hear what's on that tape, don't you? I will not disappoint. Direct from the late 1970s, here's a few minutes of Phil Ritson pontificating about golf swings, then a look into what you would have experienced back at the Pro Shop, featuring Paul Rabito and somebody named "Eddie".

I'm not going to tell you it's especially fascinating listening, but it's remarkable that we can hear it at all.




Classic Golf Experiences: The Walt Disney World Magnolia

If golf instruction is your bag, then have I got a treat for you. If golf instruction is not your bag, then I've still got a treat for you. Every so often something pops up online and you just have to roll the dice and take a chance that it'll be interesting. I took a chance on an unpromising little VHS from 1988 entitled "The Player's Guide to the Walt Disney World Resort Magnolia Course". It turned out to be one of the dorkiest Disney things I've ever seen. And I've seen The Boatniks.

Hosted by golf commentator Gary McCord, it's obvious that Dick Nunis - or somebody, but probably Dick Nunis - rolled out the red carpet for this small-time production. And, possibly inspired and a little goofy on the Disney vibes, the crew turned out a truly bizarre little film. It features ghostly dwarfs, invading chipmunks, "outtakes", an interview with Joe Lee, and more.

It's also, generally speaking, a very good record and overview of a part of Walt Disney World everyone knows is there, but not everybody has seen. I enjoy the aesthetics of golf courses but have no interest in the game, and this video allows me to enjoy a well-designed course without sweating in the Florida heat. There's a lot of conceptual overlap between theme parks and golf courses, both being totally artificial environments created for just one purpose. It's easier to appreciate Joe Lee's course design with McCord's goofily amiable commentary and occasional Disney character appearances.

And in case you think none of this is up your alley, there's a typically goofy Disney World montage at the start, and later on, a look at the model for Wonders of Life. Give it a spin, I don't think you'll be disappointed.


Thanks to Michael Crawford for transferring both of these magnetic tape treasures to digital. And if you want even more Golf Resort, check out my historical overview at Return to the Golf Resort, or the entire Passport to Dreams Walt Disney World History portal.

I've spent a lot of time on this blog praising Marc Davis. I've lauded his character design and taste in designing an attraction which few enjoy, Country Bear Jamboree. I've tried to bring attention to the sensitivity of tone in his 1971 Jungle Cruise. I've praised the original conception of the Haunted Mansion Attic scene - the one that didn't work - as brilliant. So let's step back for a moment and take a look at one time Marc designed something that didn't really work.

Besides discussing the Haunted Mansion and rambling about music, maybe one of the key elements of this blog has been Pirates of the Caribbean. I've made the case for the excellence of this experience at Disneyland, and mounted an elaborate defense of the maligned Florida version of the attraction. I've even tried to make the case that Marc Davis truncated the Florida Pirates with some care - care not evident because Western River Expedition was never built.

In some ways this post is an outgrowth of "The Case For The Florida Pirates", an essay now over a half decade old. Rather than force everyone back to read some old writing overstuffed with adjectives, I'm going to cover some of that old ground here and begin by looking at the unique narrative of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in Florida.



The Florida Pirates: Narrative Structure

If you've read any of the official books on Pirates of the Caribbean, any official WDI-sourced literature, any of the blogs descending from these official sources, or even actually been trained at the attraction at Walt Disney World, you will have been told that Pirates of the Caribbean is a time travel story. Guests load boats in the present day, discover some dead pirates, drop down a waterfall, and travel back in time to see them sacking a town.

That is the official story. It's also, unfortunately, almost 100% bullshit.

Mind you, this actually is correct - at Disneyland, and also Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris. Paris probably gets the prize for being the most coherent of the lot - guests pass through a fort destroyed in a Pirate raid, blackened with gunpowder and stewn with skeletons. Once on the ride proper, the boats travel back in time and we see the raid which destroyed the fort - pirates scale the walls, fight soldiers, and blast open an aqueduct. Shortly, we discover that the chaos extends to the town nestled at the base of the fort, until the reverie ends as the boats float into a gunpowder store room that explodes. Winding through the caves at the foundations of the fort, we discover the skeletons of the doomed survivors, who spent the rest of their lives guarding their treasure. At one point we can see where the destroyed fortress queue and the caverns below connect.

It's a very impressive experience, but by straightening out the chronology some of the power of the ride is dampened. Disneyland's original masterpiece makes almost no sense taken on a scene by scene level, but has an amazing associative power that goes beyond logic. As the boats wend their way through the twisted swamp into the darkness, then through the caverns filled with bones, we sense rather than are told that the layers of reality are being stripped away. By the time the full scale Pirate raid appears, despite having been foreshadowed from literally the moment the facade of the attraction is seen, we are throughly in its thrall.

But the thing about the nearly perfect structure of the Disneyland version is that it was accidental. One could also say that it's a mess. If you've ever had a personal project that came out amazingly well but not in any way that you intended it to, then you know what the design team of Pirates of the Caribbean was dealing with here. The natural inclination is to assume that it turned out well because your ideas preserved despite the rest of the project being a total disaster. If you were given the opportunity to do it over again, you would double down on your ideas and try to eliminate the things that gave you trouble, wouldn't you?

Early version that still ends with a fire!

That's what Marc Davis was doing in Florida. Here he was, given the opportunity to go back to the well and remove all of the extra stuff that was added to Pirates of the Caribbean because the scope of the project kept changing. No longer would the ride begin in New Orleans and wind its way to a Caribbean colony: we begin in the Caribbean town the pirates are going to attack. In one stroke that obliterates the location jumping and the time travel.

So why do we get into the boats and where do we go? By moving up the start of the pirate raid so it begins while patrons are waiting in line, we motivate the boats as escape vessels and add a sense of menace and urgency to the start of the ride. In Disneyland I guess we assume that we're loading onto boats to go on a tour of the Louisiana bayous or something, and make a few wrong turns before being sent back in time. The new plan means that the facade and queue can be devoted to setting up the idea that "the pirates are coming" rather than springing it on audiences halfway through the ride.

Why are the pirates coming? Well, we've already got all of the X Atencio dialogue establishing that they're after the treasure, because what else do Pirates do? At Disneyland they never find that treasure - a casualty of the fact that Marc Davis was pretty much just drawing random stuff under Walt's direction and then X Atencio would show up and try to make sense of it. So we add a new scene at the end where the Pirates have found the treasure. There. The entire thing is streamlined. We are in a caribbean village, the pirates attack, they spread chaos while looking for the treasure, they find the treasure and the ride ends.


Okay, so what about those skeletons at the start of the ride?

....

If you go back and read "The Case For the Florida Pirates", I pretty much just throw my hands up the air at this point. "It's a problem!" I shout. I've got something new to say about that, and we'll get back to it in a minute.

The Destroyed Fort
All of this narrative information, to have any effect whatever, needs to be set up properly in the queue. The facade and queue for Pirates in Florida really is a masterpiece, albeit one that's almost impossible to perceive now. WDI has done so much futzing with the start of the ride to bring it into line with the time travel story set up at Disneyland that they've destroyed what made it great to begin with, which has a negative effect on our comprehension of the attraction further down the line

It began with tiny things, but tiny things were always placed there by WED for good reason. Originally, the cannons along the roof of the facade would fire. You could hear this through a lot of Adventureland, and it was like a beaconing hand: "Come on in here! Don't you want to find out what's here?". But more importantly, it was a setup so we understood that this was a fort under attack.

Once inside the fort, a short entrance tunnel played a menacing version of the "Yo Ho" theme, but then the music went silent. It needed to, because then we heard the soldiers preparing for the pirate attack. A captain of the guard could be heard ordering the preparations for firing on the pirate ship, and occasionally blasts of cannon fire could be heard. This, combined with the occasional refrain of "Yo-Ho" echoing through the halls, was absolutely essential narrative information that also created the eerie impression that the pirates could be around any corner.


From there, the queues diverged through different areas of the fort, coming back together at Pirate's Cove, a secret rear escape route. Through openings in the cave walls, a distant pirate ship can be seen in the harbor. After a trip through the unexplored caves in the hills behind the fort, boats splash down in the bay, and the pirate ship has begun its attack.

Starting in the late 90s the cannons on the facade were heard less and less often as they went long stretches without being repaired. They were fixed in 2005 shortly before the attraction closed for its big movie overlay refurbishment, but when the show returned in July 2006 the rooftop cannons were silent. They had been muted at the request of Entertainment because they were considered invasive for the "Pirate Tutorial" show happening outside; as of 2016 they are only activated for an effect in one of the Adventureland interactive games.

Also in 2006, the entire queue was refurbished. The dialogue establishing that the pirates are attacking was not removed, but it was drowned out by new music played through the entire queue rather than just the entry area. Worse, instead of the menacing atmospheric music installed by WED in 1973, the music was now the mellow, atmospheric "Overture" played in Disneyland's entrance area. Given the eerie, darkened surroundings, the peaceful flute and rhythmic drums are, and remain, entirely incorrect.

In 2012, as part of the disastrous MyMagic+ program at Walt Disney World, the Pirates queue was again refurbished. This time Fastpass was added to the attraction, requiring a new merge point be created. Worse, the Fastpass side of the queue was cut through a wall near the entrance, removing one of the queue's finest features: the walk up the entrance ramp, then the slow slope down towards the dungeons. Thanks to an original design which did not take into account the very real modern need for wheelchair accessibility, the side of the queue intended by WED to be seen by most guests - the right-side dungeon side with the "chess" and "cave" show scenes - can now only be enjoyed by those with Fastpass.

This is just gone now.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that absolutely everybody understood the setup of the pirate attack in the same easy, clear way that everybody understands the trapped safari at Jungle Cruise: it's a more complex idea. but by removing, bit by bit, the indications that we are entering a Spanish fortress under attack, WDI has, either intentionally or not, made it possible to read the FL ride as a time travel story. And after all why would it not be a time travel story, with every other version being the same way? After all, two other versions of the ride begin with a trip past pirate skeletons and ghosts, setting up the time travel to come. What's the deal with the skeletons at the start?

But given that all of the circa 1973 evidence points us towards an unbroken series of logical events with no timeslip, really WDI should have considered what the significance of the eerie ship out to sea in the distance. Or the pirates heard digging in the cave by the loading area. Or maybe not, since these are two of Marc's finest touches in this ride, and losing them to force the ride to conform to their interpretation of it would be tragic.



Those Darn Skeletons

So really you've got two competing intereptations of the Florida Pirates, both of which appear to fail to explain specific and unavoidable design features of the ride: there's the WDI "timeslip" version, and there's my version, which I believe reflects what WED intended back in 1973.

WDI's version fails to account for the narrative setup in the queue and for the pirate ship seen in the "moonlight bay" tableau. My version has no good explanation for the pirate skeletons seen at the start.

Well, hold on.



Let's go back for a moment here and look again at the final ride. Ultimately, none of the "did you knows" and "fun facts" in the world matter beyond what can be gleaned by simply and purely just looking at the ride. And my mind returns again and again to that cave seen in the queue. Marc Davis put that cave there for a reason - it's the first concrete, unambiguous sign that pirates are indeed afoot - there they are, just out of sight in that cave! We hear the scraping of shovels and their drunken singing and laughing. We know from cultural association that they're digging for treasure.

Then we drop down into town and - at least before Captain Jack Sparrow became the main thing on everyone's mind - we hear, time and again, the pirates are out looking for treasure:

"Speak up ye bilge rat! Where be the treasure?"
"Do not tell him, Carlos! Don't be chicken!"

And then at the end of the ride, we see the fortress' treasure hold and that the pirates have discovered it. We're expected to take this as a clear indication of a narrative resolution. The idea of "looking for treasure" occurs before we get on the ride, during the ride, and as a resolution to the ride, uniquely in this version. It's the primary structuring feature of the Florida attraction.


So what is Dead Man's Cove about? We see the skeletons of pirates and hear the repeated warning "dead men tell no tales". In Disneyland, "dead men tell no tales" doubles as a warning: "the answers you're looking for aren't here". In Florida, it simply and only refers to the actual Dead Man's Cove scene, because the other scenes from the haunted caverns - the inn, the bedroom, the treasure horde - don't appear. In Florida, it's as much of an explanation as it is a warning: these pirates were killed to protect the location of the treasure buried here.

The scene is open to enough interpretation that other, competing speculation has advanced ideas that, say, this is a later band of pirates who killed each other over the gold buried here. I'm confident in my interpretation that the pirates were killed to silence them not only because the idea can be found in Treasure Island, the key source for the ride, but because X Atencio actually wrote narration intended for the caverns sequence that made this clear:

"Hear ye a dead man's tale, what dastardly deed! Brave sea men, these. Helped bury the gold, they did - then silenced forever. Cursed be that black hearted villain! But, stay - I told their tale a'fore, now I be telling it again!"

So this is definitely the burying place for treasure - a lost burying place, because the captain of the ship killed the men who buried it. And if we take the next scene - the skeleton steering a shipwreck - as an indication that the captain then went down with his ship, then the location of the treasure is well and truly lost, and we can now slot this tableau into the story the Florida attraction is telling. Remember, we hear pirates digging in a cave for gold, then board our boats and discover a burial location of gold -- in a cave.


This lost gold is why the pirates attack the island. Presumably, the lost gold was buried there generations before, back when it was mostly uninhabited. In years since, the Spanish crown has turned the area where the gold was buried into a sea-port, and ironically built fortifications right on top of the lost pirate gold.

This is why the pirates fire on the fort, dig in the caverns around it, and raid the town - they assume it was uncovered during the construction. Little do they know that the Spanish didn't find the gold, either - it's still guarded by ghosts and skeletons deep below the fortifications.

Marc was a keen observer of what worked and what didn't in theme parks. The notion of taxidermy animals "waking up" to start a show - an idea repeated for Club 33 and presumably coming direct from Walt Disney - was used again for the start of Country Bear Jamboree. After seeing how effective those unplanned subterranean caverns were at Pirates, Marc would have filed that away in his mind for later use. Marc repeated caverns in his designs for Western River Expedition, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer Island, and Enchanted Snow Palace, and said this to The E-Ticket in 1999:

"You know, you don't really know what's up ahead when you go down into the mysterious area beneath New Orleans Square where all the skeletons are. That mystery area works very well, with the the wind and the dampness, and then the voices."

Marc once said Claude Coats' work was "very commendable", so this recollection by him of the grotto counts as lavish praise. So it makes sense that he would have wanted to retain that element for the Florida show despite having intentionally removed the time travel concept. Going back to the core idea for Dead Man's Cove and building the motivation for the attraction around that tableau was a clever idea.

....which isn't the same as saying that the idea actually worked. There's plenty of Marc designed gags that didn't come off as well as, say, the stretch room portraits. For every few brilliant, snappy, instantly comprehensible visual ideas like the Ballroom duelists in the Haunted Mansion, there's something like the Mummy in the graveyard. I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding what the deal with the Mummy talking the old guy is than when I was eight. Marc was uncommonly brilliant, but he wasn't perfect.

--

But it's not as if the experiment with the Florida Pirates was a total wash. Marc took the time to expand and alter Claude Coats' layout of the town sequence so that it's better paced and longer. At Disneyland, the boats approach the well scene from a slightly odd side angle, then turn and end up right in the Auction. In Magic Kingdom, the boats approach and ride alongside the well scene, then ride past some new Marc-designed architecture between the Well and the Auction that adds a bit more build and release to the experience.

At Disneyland, the haunted grotto sequences are brilliant, but they aren't really scary - mysterious, strange, but not scary. For Florida, Marc pushed the ceiling of the cavern down on riders and darkened everything, reserving Claude's beautiful waterfalls for a short scenic stretch at the start. The result - with the narrower caverns, darkness, and loud voices - was truly unnerving. When given the opportunity to rework Pirates a third time for Tokyo Disneyland, Marc brought back the bayou and the extended caves, but kept the low ceiling, the darkness, and the menacing tone. He also replicated the Magic Kingdom town sequences and the unload area - no trip back up the waterfall. Comparing Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo Disneyland's Pirate attractions reveals much of Marc's thinking about some of his most iconic creations.

Tokyo's Pirates: a darn good compromise

Perhaps in the future some team of Imagineers will attempt to embrace Marc's ideas in the 1973 Pirates instead of work against them. Concieving of the attraction as being a compromised gloss of what was done at Disneyland is not just a disservice to Marc Davis, but it leads to poorly executed additions that do little to harmonize with what the attraction does well. There's no time travel. It's a linear adventure with an en media res opening, a strong motivating image, and an elaborate second act. It may not be as good as Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.... but almost nothing is, and certainly not anything built in the past twenty years by any theme park operator.

Florida Pirates is a good ride, but it needs special consideration - and it hasn't really gotten any since 1973, when it was built. It's time to fix it.

I grew up with video games. If you asked me at age seven what my favorite place was, after Walt Disney World I would have told you it was the Mushroom Kingdom. Video games are dreamscapes, fantasy worlds that invite us in to escape. Along with cinema and amusement parks, video games are the third pillar of 20th century escapism - unapologetically popular entertainments which were created to amuse and distract the working classes.

If you dig into game design books, you'll see those links made again and again. The best games are said to aspire to be cinematic, and often are themselves pastiches of popular cinema - Die Hard on a spaceship, James Bond in an ancient pyramid. Disneyland is often brought up by game designers as a key inspirational space, a fully manufactured setting which is also clean, clear, and coherent across generations and cultures. Theme parks are just one other way to achieve immersion and escape.

And so, as a longtime Nintendo kid and a fan of the oeneric dreamscapes of theme parks, one would think that I would be preparing the paper streamers and rolling out the red carpet in advance of the announcement of the wonderfully titled Super Nintendo World - a mouthwatering expansion coming soon to Universal parks. And let's be clear here: I am. Having not been a fan of Cars, or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I finally feel like here's something elaborate that's aimed at me. As beautifully done as those areas have been or promise to be, my heart did not soar at my first sight of Hogwarts. But put a gold coin on a stick and have it spin around behind somebody's head, and I'm going to need to sit down.

So yes, I'm an easy mark. Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, Metroid, Mega Man, and Legend of Zelda were my 'galaxy far, far away' growing up, and I'm going to have a strong reaction no matter what ends up getting done. But that doesn't mean I can't have concerns about what's going to happen, and thoughts on the dividing lines between how video games, theme parks, and films create meaning.

So here's our chance to take a quick overview of Nintendo and theme parks. I've stated before on this site that I think Disney has so far failed to do justice to both games and immersive theming at the same time, and perhaps we can dig under that a little. Not a lot. It's a huge topic, and the year is almost up.

Super Mario Disneyland

So what exactly did Universal get themselves into here?

Super Mario is series which as of late has largely confined itself to the Mushroom Kingdom, but in its early years often took bizarre and irrational detours to lands abroad - the middle eastern Sub-Con, the Asian Sarasaland, the expansive Dinosaur Land. The visual style of each game was often totally different than the ones before it - the ghostly, abandoned open planes of Super Mario Brothers that gave way to a landscape strewn with multicolored blocks and checkerboard tile floors in Super Mario Brothers 3. Yoshi's Island, a prequel set in Dinosaur Land, is manifestly lush and tropical in a way no other game is.

Yet the games have a sense of continuity not so much through their settings and gameplay, as their sense of otherworldliness. The Mushroom Kingdom is filled with bizarre and inexplicable threats. In Super Mario Brothers, there is a palpable loneliness and danger to Mario's mission - only compounded if you read the manual and discover that those plants and blocks are supposed to be the transformed citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom! Morbid. No other Mario game feels as lonely and haunted until you get to Super Mario 64, where the echoing, stone clad interior of Princess Peach's castle leads to some truly heart-stopping moments where Mario is suddenly no longer alone.


The Mario series, like all video games of their era, exist in a world of easily comprehensible symbols. Just as nobody needs an explanation of why you're whipping monsters and ghosts in Castlevania, everyone knows to avoid roaming evil-eyed chestnuts, falling rocks, and leaping fire. In the Mushroom Kingdom, anything that can potentially help you has cute eyes, and everything else has a fierce (or at least dumb) expression. You don't need a language to understand these signifiers.

Super Mario, and the Nintendo Entertainment System generally, was a Japanese import which was wildly successful in an era otherwise terrified of Japan's economic ascendancy. Think of the Tokyo-inflected urban decay of Blade Runner, or potboiler crime pictures like Black Rain or Rising Sun. Super Mario crossed a threshold that Godzilla, Speed Racer, Ultraman and Astro-Boy could not. Even today, Godzilla is still made fun of by a certain generation for being a Japanese import. But Super Mario? That guy was an Italian from Brooklyn. He was pure kawaii nonsense delivered in an Americana candy coating.

Mario's world, with its bipedal turtles, swooping clouds, mobile cacti and cheerful hillsides, is a world of symbols not dissimilar to the fevered imagery incubator of Disneyland. Disneyland is also a place of inexplicable dangers, except Walt Disney used ghosts, dinosaurs, pirates and cannibals instead of mushrooms and man eating plants. They come to roughly the same end: we see these things and know that there's danger up ahead.


Magic Kingdom and Disneyland controlled visitor's experiences by intentionally limiting the number of options available at any time; you can either stop in this shop or this attraction, or keep walking. There's usually only one or two options available at any one time. The linearity of the experience is the defining quality of a theme park, compared to the open grid favored by traditional amusement parks like Kennywood or Cedar Point.

This too is basically similar to the structure of many Mario games - levels must be traversed from left to right, and in a specific order, to reach a specific goal. The most logical way to lay out a Super Mario area for a theme park would be on the pattern of Magic Kingdom's Adventureland - a themed corridor leading to a specific destination.


This imagery-heavy abstraction is the key to understanding why both Disneyland and Nintendo worked so well across generations and ages - both the classic theme parks and early video games created a pressure cooker atmosphere of heated symbolic interpretation, and clawed their way into immortality for their efforts.

Disneyland sticks out in America's literal-minded chronology obsessed pop culture, but I don't think it's coincidental that the Japanese recognized this quality in Disneyland and wanted one of their own badly. After years of rejections, Walt Disney Productions finally relented in the mid-70s - and then, only as a way to get a quick cash infusion due to spiraling costs on EPCOT Center. Tokyo Disneyland opened in April 1983 - just three months to the day before the release of the Nintendo Famicom in Japan. There's a family resemblance between the aesthetics of the Famicom and the Tomorrowland section of Tokyo Disneyland, as if one influenced the other.


In the Mario games of my youth, Mario was a cypher, almost mysterious. He wasn't cuddly - his game sprites made him look stoic, serious. It required a certain degree of interpretation if you wanted to know why this Italian guy was murdering large numbers of turtles. What his personality was like was up to your imagination.

On television, as portrayed by wrestler Lou Albano, the New York aspects of Mario were emphasized - his goofy accent, his constant need for pizza. One of the only other American depictions of Mario produced before the current Mario character debuted in Super Mario 64 may be found in the Phillips CDi game Hotel Mario, where Mario is voiced by actor Marc Graue in a style very similar to Albano's Mario.

In this sense it's easy to see how Americans adopted Mario as one of their own, and it's no wonder that many of us were taken aback by the voice and childlike attitude of Mario in Super Mario 64. Until that seminal game, although you played as Mario, there was no insight into what Mario was thinking or how he would sound, if he could speak. This actually isn't all that different than the abstraction of a WED classic like The Jungle Cruise. What does Trader Sam sound like? It's up to you to decide.

And it isn't WED Enterprises that's building Super Nintendo World, nor is it 1983. The Mario of today is as different from the Mario of 1985 as WED Enterprises is different from Walt Disney Imagineering. And therein lies some of my concerns.

The Difficulty of Complexity

Games grew up quick in the 80s. By the time Nintendo had premiered the Famicom Disk System in 1986, a new breed of interactive narrative was being carved out by innovative hybrid games like Castlevania 3 and Metroid. With the move from 8 to 16 bit consoles in 1988 and 1990, hardware and social forces were in place to give rise to the sort of epic adventure stories that Square Soft and Enix were pioneering. Video games began to resemble the sort of lengthy narratives best contained in novels.

But Mario did not change. Super Mario World may justifiably be called one of the most gorgeous video games ever produced, but mechanically it was very much like the 8 bit games which had preceded it. The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past more or less hit reset on the Zelda series, offering up a hugely expanded take on the concepts behind the original game. But if we really want to dig into the strengths and weaknesses of the expanding scope video games, we really don't have to look much further than Sonic the Hedgehog.

A sort of stepping stone between the pared down, symbolic creations seem on the Famicom and the hugely elaborate spectacles offered on the Playstation and Nintendo 64, Sonic oh so briefly stole the crown from Mario. Sonic may have been built for speed, but he wasn't really built to last.

In 1991, Sonic was something new from the world go - his sarcastic expression and waggling finger taunting you from the load screen. But the first game was actually an awkward series of jumps presented in a glossy, promising package. Through 4 subsequent installments, the series improved bit by bit, before coalescing into the exhilarating Sonic 3 / Sonic & Knuckles.

These are games of surface pleasures - the smooth controls, the buzzing rock soundtracks, the cool looks of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Dr. Robotnik. But the release of Sonic & Knuckles in 1995 was also the end: SEGA was never again able to leverage the blue hedgehog to a widely successful game. Part of this is due to the failure of four SEGA hardware launches in a row, but part of it is because Sonic never convincingly adapted to a new kind of game - a game that didn't just zip from left to right.

And it was when Sonic was down for the count that Super Mario 64 landed and went off like a bomb in the industry - reshaping conceptions of what these kinds of video game characters could do. Today, Sonic is a beloved character, but experienced best and most often in games where he races, or jousts, or fights Nintendo characters. More young kids have probably played as Sonic in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games than they have in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

There's no longer any kind of brand expectation from Sonic. And the reason is because maybe Sonic never really was about being in excellent games - maybe it always was that Sonic is always just Sonic; a better design, a better idea, than an actual character. Maybe the most compelling Sonic product in years has been the cartoon Sonic Boom, a ludicrous weekly excursion into weird humor and lame puns. People like the idea of Sonic more than they do the phenomenon of Sonic.

Sonic briefly represented the future, but in the end he was no more than a fresh coat of paint on the same old problem: people liked these characters because they were simple and relatable. Sonic and Knuckles exist barely more as figures in a silent serial: the cool guy who taps his foot, the evil guy who laughs. Mario is barely more than an abstract vessel to carry viewers through his games.


But isn't this very close to how theme park operate, too? If we're being rushed through a set at 3 feet a second, we don't have time for anything but clear, unambiguous images. Where Sonic failed is when he had to be more than that - to carry a compelling narrative about anything more than smashing robots and being cool.

We could also look at Capcom's Mega Man. Originally about little more than an Astroboy knockoff defeating a mad scientist, Mega Man presented a surprisingly bright, upbeat future of whimsical but aggressive robots. Being an early game, it was not properly translated and released with little fanfare - leaving the door open for American kids to discover and speculate on what exactly the deal with Mega Man was. Was he a soldier? A police officer? A human on an alien world? Early video games on the NES, PC and Atari were imaginatively stimulating experiences because of what they left out, offering players an opportunity to fill in the gaps in their own way.

Capcom eventually rebooted Mega Man into an elaborate and dystopian technology parable, heavily inflected by Blade Runner and The Terminator. And while several of those games are terrific, the flagship Mega Man series was sputtering out. By the early 2000s it had been rebooted yet again - into a form that little resembled its bright, cheerful, side scrolling roots. Today Mega Man is relegated to cameos and nostalgia pieces, even less relevant than Sonic is.

But compared to SEGA and Capcom's efforts to grow their signature game series, Nintendo went and doubled down on Mario's essential abstraction.

By the time Nintendo was selling copies of Super Mario 64, Mario was up against competitors like Solid Snake and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII - games that could shock or emotionally involve players in ways they had never imagined while pushing buttons on their NES. Mario was an abnormality - a cheerful but basically inaccessible fellow, eternally bubbly, in a world of bright colors and happy endings. And he stayed that way. Like Mickey Mouse, attempts to update Mario inevitably failed - and unlike Disney, Nintendo actually recognized this. Even while they branched Mario out into elaborate new genres like racing and RPG, Mario always was just Mario - he only required that players accept him as himself, a sort of mascot.


The Paper Mario series is an interesting case study in this. Hugely immersive and unapologetically long, Paper Mario expanded the intricacy and mythology of the Mushroom Kingdom in ways impossible to do in 16 bits - and they did it without even requiring Mario to speak. The cheerful, red-hatted avatar was the eye of the storm while his presence allowed Nintendo to draw on larger and larger canvases around him.

And yet, strictly speaking in terms of market share, the Mario series had been on a downslide since 1996. Mario 64 had sold less than Yoshi's Island before it, and Super Mario Sunshine sold less than Mario 64. Reissues of Mario's 2D adventures continued to do well on new formats like the Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo eventually gave up and launched a new series of 2D Mario games: New Super Mario Brothers, which has become the staple of Nintendo's portfolio. New Nintendo systems now tout 2D, retro-style Mario adventures.

Yes, that's right. The buying public voted with their dollars in favor of 1980s style abstractions, and Nintendo gave them what they wanted. Disney would've buried their heads in the sand.

Simple Mario Super Show
Which brings us back to Universal, Disney's greatest competitor. As I've claimed elsewhere on this site, Universal's most salient characteristic is their insistence on constructing their attractions based on actual linear narratives. Disney has copied the attitude, but almost none of the specifics - troweling  elaborate narrative justifications on top of random events. Universal actually sets up plot points in their queues that they expect you to keep track of and understand they're paying off later, down the line.

The thing is that I'm not at all sure that theme parks are actually any good at telling those kind of stories, and audiences don't seem to care. It's nice if they're there for the kind of people who go to blogs like this, but it isn't necessary - the kind of simple storytelling represented by a falling rock in Super Mario Brothers 3 or a floating candle in The Haunted Mansion works just as well.

Directly compare two recent Universal extravaganzas: their Harry Potter rides Forbidden Journey and Escape From Gringotts. Despite a typically elaborate narrative setup, nothing that happens in Forbidden Journey makes any sense at all - what you're doing, why it's happening, or why Harry is tolerating it. He even shouts at you in one scene thanks to your inexplicable adventure through Spiderville. Compared to this, Gringotts actually makes a lot of sense - it's well paced, it has setups and payoffs, it actually rewards an attentive rider.

But none of that matters all that much because Forbidden Journeydoes things that work in the narrative environment that rides create, whereas Gringotts is telling you the kind of story better told in a movie. The strengths of Forbidden Journey are themed design strengths - crazy action, immediate dangers, weird illusions. People get off Forbidden Journey excited and inspired. The ride where you bop around in a mine car and characters on IMAX screens shout exposition at you cannot compare, and guests leave somewhat underwhelmed.

Nintendo games are about mysteries, things left unexplained, unpredictable explorations of bizarre worlds. They aren't about, and they don't tell, linear, comprehensible narratives in anything but the simplest way. They're about experiences and emotions, not about writing and plot points.

I don't know if the charm of the best Nintendo games will translate to a physical medium. While Nintendo's nostalgic appeals and retro-style product help convince me that the folks at Nintendo at least know where their strengths are, I've got less hope that the American themed design industry, so obsessed with minutae and specific storytelling techniques, will be able to make the jump.

In Super Mario Brothers 3, there's a room in a World 5 fortress that's empty. There's no secrets to discover in it. It's only there for atmosphere - to make you think about where you are and what you're doing, and to feel the dark and lonely atmosphere. To me it signifies all that's compelling about old school video games - the creation of compelling spaces without explanations or finger pointing. These things aren't all jumping and shooting, or at least they don't need to be. That's the magic of Nintendo. That's what Universal needs to aim at.

The eye of the storm.

--

Do you enjoy long, carefully written essays on the ideas behind theme parks, like this one? Hop on over to the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Theory Hub Page for even more!

Alright, let's try something new.

Besides Disney, one of my hobbies is food and drink. Disney World has always been a dining paradise, but their drinks have never been all that good. Even in the halcyon days of the 70s, their repertoire was limited to the kind of colorful, sugary drinks you find their today - vacation drinks, if you like. Even the opening of Trader Sam's and Jock Lindsay's, with their carefully considered beverage lineup, have done little to improve the situation outside those establishments. There is a fairly good standard Manhattan, but I can make one of those at home.

Making a good cocktail is a lot like cooking, and as a cook, the process is a lot of fun for me. Given the history and complexity of the lore around Walt Disney World, there exists an untapped opportunity to inspire drinks - good drinks, strong drinks, the sort of drinks Disney doesn't sell.

There's always going to be the sort of Disney fan who turns their nose up at drinking - it sullies the air of family frivolity for them. And, to be fair, nothing spoils at day at Epcot like walking past a pile of passed out drunks as you leave Epcot. But after all, Walt sucked down Scotch Mists - 2 shots of Johnny Walker Red in a highball glass over ice diluted with club soda, if you must - and drinking plays a prominent role in classic Disney attractions and humor.

There's obviously Pirates of the Caribbean, but the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion are tipplers too. There's Big Al, six sheets to the wind on corn liquor, who falls over drunk at the end of the show, and the Jungle Navigation Company, who have their own depression-era still. Not surprisingly, Marc Davis liked his drinks in all shapes and sizes, and it's hard to pay a visit to Alice Davis without getting a drink shoved into your hand. That's just the way they did it in their generation. So why not take some inspiration from Disney History and try to whip up some drinks? Which is what I've been doing, for some time, to varied success. I'd like to share my best effort here.

Not surprisingly to anybody who's read this blog before, it's based on the Haunted Mansion. I call it the Howling Dog Bend, and even if you have no intention of ever making one, I think any theme park fan will enjoy reading the rationale behind it.


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The Style

The first consideration should be what type of drink are we making here? Disney has built attractions and facilities which can slot into every period of American history - to colonial taverns to ultramodern high-rises. What would a drink from the Haunted Mansion look like?

Well, it would certainly have to be a stirred drink. Cocktails don't predate the Civil War by much, and the first book of drink recipes dates from 1862. In attempting to date the Haunted Mansion, 1840-1860 is a pretty good guess as to when a wealthy family would have wanted to build a fashionable neo-Gothic country estate; the house of Joel Rathbone, designed by A.J. Davis and the unambiguous stylistic source of the Haunted Mansion, was put up in 1840.


If you're not hip to cocktail lingo and you've always wondered why James Bond orders his martini shaken, not stirred, it's because those are the two main ways to build a drink. Stirring, as can be expected, is the original: you dump your ingredients in any old cup with some ice and stir them together until smooth. All of the ancestral cocktails are stirred: the Old-Fashioned, the Manhattan, the Martini, and the Collins.

So what we're aiming at here isn't the sort of historical cocktail that became popular in the 1880s: the fancy, fruited, shaken drinks that reigned until World War I. What we're aiming at here is something elemental, something nearer to an Old-Fashioned: spirits, ice, and a little bit more. This template will guide us in creating the rest of the drink.

The Base

The base spirit determines all of your other choices here. Given that we're working off of the Old-Fashioned template, using the oldest, most prestigious American spirit of all - bourbon - makes sense, right? Well, hold on.

Bourbon may be one of our national treasures, but there's a reason the cocktail was invented in the first place. In the nineteenth century, and especially amongst the landed gentry, bourbon was considered to be a coarse, crude spirit - and perhaps, in those days, it was. Bourbon was so notoriously unreliable and often watered down by distillers that politicians instituted a 1897 act which allowed distillers who produced whiskey in one location, aged at least four years, and bottled 100 proof to place a special government-approved label on their liquor to signify it as the good stuff. You can still see the label "Bottled in Bond" on whiskeys today, even if no modern industrial whiskey producers are selling colored water anymore.

So for various reasons, anybody with enough wealth to construct a fake castle in the country would be unlikely to be stocking bourbon in 1860. The truth is, wealthy families would have had the money and the means to buy the good stuff - and at that time, that meant wine and brandy from Europe.

So our base spirit here is Brandy. You can use Cognac - which is just brandy from a specific region of France - and both Hennessy and Courvoisier work well here. But I've also used cheaper European brandies like St. Remy, or American brandies from California. If you have the nice stuff it lends a smooth depth and complexity to this drink, but it works even with entry-level brandy.

The Other Stuff

Now we add the bits which make our glass of brandy into a cocktail.

We are, after all, building a drink to honor the Haunted Mansion, and since we're not going in the direction of a glowing blue or green drink, there needs to be something to add a bit of Haunted to our house.

I chose Green Chartreuse, which is an herbal liquor made by Carthusian monks in France. Taken on its own, it's redolent of a monastery - funky vegetal herbs, cold stone, ancient parchment. Mixed into Brandy, it adds an air of mystery and age - a sense of decay. This is a drink appropriate to enjoy in a crumbling Gothic house.

Green Chartreuse is part of a family of sweet herbal drinks of which the most identifiable on these shores is Jaegermeister. The monks have been bottling this drink since the mid-1700s, but their claim it's based on a recipe from 1605, so we are definitely talking about something the Graceys could have purchased were they so inclined.

Best of all, Chartreuse is sweet - sweet enough to negate the need to add sugar to the drink, streamlining the process. I prefer the Green Chartreuse, but a milder Yellow version is also available if you're the type who keels over when exposed to bitter flavors. I'll stick with the green - after all, it's the official color of the Haunted Mansion, splashed all over the cast costumes and merchandise. Bottles of Chartreuse are expensive, but a little goes a long way, and smaller size 375 ML bottles can sometimes be found.

All cocktails have bitters - it's the thing that made spirits into cocktails back in the 1840s. Prior to that, Angostura Bitters enjoyed a fad as a miracle cure-all before being publicly renounced and added to spirits. You can imagine the horror of some in the public - dumping quack medicine into cheap liquor to improve the taste of both. It still works - Angostura Bitters are the salt and pepper of the bartending arsenal.

Angostura works fine in this recipe, but it's formulated for something even better if you can find it - Pimento Dram, or Allspice Dram. A mixture of allspice berries and rum, you can dump this sweet, spiced booze into practically anything and turn it into a drink redolent of Christmas. Originally from Jamaica, locals mixed this up themselves as a sort of local aphrodisiac and cure-all in the humid tropical climate. It's hard to find in this country now, never mind in the Victorian era.

And yet, if we read between the lines, from the hurricane glass chandeliers to the widow's walks on the roof, it's pretty clear that the Haunted Mansion was owned by a seafaring family, and Jamaica was one of the primary ports for Caribbean trade in those days. Americans had been getting rums, exotic fruits and spices from the Caribbean since before the Revolutionary War, and it is not outrageous to speculate that the Graceys could have had a supply of Allspice Dram available to them. In modern days, you can make your own, or buy the excellent St. Elizabeth brand.

Pulling It Together

If you prefer your drinks iced, everything can be mixed together right in the glass you're going to be serving it in with a few ice cubes until nice and smooth. But this drink is so dark, musty and complex that I like to drink it chilled and neat. If you follow my plan, you have to combine everything in a mixing glass, stir it with ice, then strain it into a new glass.

Either way, this is a drink you should expect to spend some time with. The sweet herbal notes and spice flavors poke up above the smoothness of the brandy at first, then recede into the background to add a sense of mystery and age. It's the sort of drink to be enjoyed by a fire with a book of ghost stories in one hand. The iced version will dilute and sweeten as the ice melts into the cocktail, and the neat version will warm and gain complexity as time passes.

Oh, and a garnish? It's not necessary, but I like to add a bit of orange peel. It may now be occupied by a coffin, but the Graceys kept a greenhouse, which in those days primarily existed as means to grow valuable oranges and lemons in cold northern climates. Besides, the orange peel acknowledges the real-world location of the Haunted Mansion in Orange County, Florida. All you need to do is cut off a  thin 2-inch piece with a fruit peeler, rub the cut side on the rim of the glass, then dump the peel into the drink, allowing its oils to spread over the surface.

There's nothing better for a dark night in a musty old library. I can hear that organ playing now.

HOWLING DOG BEND

2.5 oz Brandy
2 tsp Green Chartreuse
1 tsp Allspice Dram


If you enjoyed this, let me know in the comments, and perhaps I'll do more in the future. And so, let's have a drink on it!

Recently, I had a reaction to a new restaurant at Walt Disney World that I can not remember having had before. As this blog has (voluminously) shown, I feel no particular need to like everything Disney does. I think most of the changes they make to their properties fall somewhere in the middle of my range of expectations, and only ever so often does something truly bad - or truly good - get put out.

Last year, I wrote a lot about Disney Springs, and I still stand by that piece - I like it plenty. I've been there more often that I ever visited Downtown Disney near the end of its run, and as a local I'm not bothered much by the fact that its buildings aren't slapped head to toe with Donald Duck.

But I was pretty deflated when Fulton's Crab House returned from its huge remake as Paddlefish. Over the summer I had already prepared myself for the worst - crossing the bridge across Village Lagoon, I could see that the interior had been gutted down to a steel skeleton. That had really taken the wind out of me - it was hard to see what I still thought of as the Empress Lilly more or less demolished. Yet as it was slowly rebuilt with a recognizable shape, colors, and even a brand new (immobile) paddle, my hopes rebounded. Yet when it finally opened and I saw the first interior images, I could not escape my gut reaction: "That's not very Disney."

Easy WDW

Like a lot of gut reactions, this struck me as immediately absurd but difficult to escape. A tour of the facility later reassured me that there was still some charm left in it, but my mind kept nagging away at the conversion: given one of the most impressive things at Walt Disney World, they did this to it?

But was the Empress Lilly ever "Disney" not begin with? Why would I argue that the bizarre modernist / Southwest pastiche Contemporary Resort is classically Disney, despite hardly having anything "Disney" in it for much of its history?

What makes something "Disney", anyway?

Let's be clear, the question was raised by Walt Disney to begin with. He's sort of both the rule and the exception, because pretty much anything he did was by default "A Walt Disney Production". But besides things like Orphan's Benefit and The Wise Little Hen, Walt produced an eclectic batch of films. There's the difficult to categorize wartime films like Education for Death and Victory Thru Airpower, and the manifestly adult, sensual pleasures of Three Caballeros. Many of the Silly Symphonies seem fairly infantile, but The Old Mill and the first segment of Fantasia are practically experimental films. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a sci-fi potboiler that ends with a nuclear explosion. Even Disneyland is wildly eclectic - if there weren't a huge Mickey Mouse face at the front gate, how many in 1955 would have doubted there would be anything especially Disney inside that landscaped berm?

By the 1960s, Walt was on a totally different wavelength, fixated on New Orleans and cities of the future. The question of "Disneyness" is one that Walt's artistic staff struggled with themselves:

"WED had designed some imaginative shows for the parks, but we seemed to be getting away from our heritage. Pirates of the Caribbean was a big hit, but what did it have to do with Disney? What we needed was a reminder of what Walt had accomplished." - Bill Justice, on creating The Mickey Mouse Revue 

"My primary concern is that none of this material was 'Disney.'" - Marc Davis on Pirates of the Caribbean

Walt Disney's lieutenants continued their leader's eclecticism, building a golf retreat, a campground, a few dinner theater shows, and finally a shopping complex. From our modern vantage point - looking back from a time when we're drowning in cheap 2017 t-shirts crowded with the same five Disney characters - this seems to be a golden era when Disney built really risky, unique things.

Throughout the development of Lake Buena Vista, Walt Disney Productions was adamant that it be a totally unique entity from Walt Disney World - so much so that they did not even build a road that connected Magic Kingdom to it. You had to drive back down World Drive to I-4, then drive up 4 to 535 and enter Lake Buena Vista that way. Disney billed it as "Host Community to Walt Disney World", which probably didn't mean much more to random visitors than it would today.



What media coverage Lake Buena Vista got in 1975 was overwhelmingly local and fairly positive, especially following the energy crisis and national recession. In the 1975 Annual Report, Disney trumpeted attendance gains at the Magic Kingdom, while more modestly reporting the opening of the Shopping Village has "helped grow attendance". If actions speak louder than words, then here's one that shouts: within a year, a program to refurbish the Village had begun. In 1977, the Empress Lilly debuted, and with it came a name change for the whole complex: the Walt Disney World Village.

It isn't hard to guess at the reasons. The Village was built in a totally contemporary style, but 1977 renovations added fantasy elements - not just the Lilly with her endlessly churning paddle wheel, but Mediterranean statuary and shops with more whimsical names and decor, like "It's A Small World After All". The name itself points to a direction the Village was pushing towards throughout the 80s: more Disney, more fantasy. While the 1977 Annual Report stayed mum on the changes, in 1978 Disney noted: "The record year in Florida was reflected in substantially improved operations for Walt Disney World Village at Lake Buena Vista. The improved picture is also being impacted by our continued efforts to expand the entertainment opportunities available to our Lake Buena Vista guests and visitors."




In other words, it didn't work, and needed improvement. The Walt Disney World name - a brand WDP was so eager to divorce from their shopping village in 1975 - was needed to convince visitors that this new attraction had something to offer. Arguably, it's kept working ever since then - the Village grew into Downtown Disney, a concept which has opened in every Disney resort complex in the world.

But if everything that has happened before will happen again, then all of this is familiar. And while I've written a lot about the aesthetics, convoluted backstory, and infrastructure upgrades of Disney Springs - the aspects this blog finds most compelling - as another prong in Disney's absurd steeplechase of the affluent, Disney Springs is yet another front. And while I've been the subject of angry rebuttals for my doubting the profitability of certain stores, the fact remains that, as a shopper myself, there's precious little there than I find compelling.

I'm not alone. It isn't hard to find similar notes in the less regulated courts of public opinion on the internet - forums, Trip Advisor, Yelp - even in largely positive appraisals. For me personally, it's enough to enjoy the architecture and urban planning, duck my head into a few shops, get a sushi roll and a cocktail, and leave. Those with who have traveled great distances and expect something more, those with small children, or those looking for bargains, seem especially flustered and intimidated by the size and grown up ambience of Disney Springs.



And so Disney Springs, like Lake Buena Vista and Downtown Disney before it, joins the roll call of history's questionably 'Disney' things - a list that includes, to be abundantly clear, some of Disney's best, most interesting moments. Fantasia, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Contemporary Resort, TRON....

But it's a delicate balance - one informed by decades of perception, expectation, and precedent. Before the opening of Disneyland, there was practically no association between Disney and fairy tale castles - There's one seen in the final shot of Snow White, and one that is a major setting of Cinderella. The logo of the entire company is today a fairy tale castle. There's even new product that seems to exist entirely to try and deliver more of the kind of imagery they are renowned for in the public consciousness - various live action remakes of fairy tales, the whole of The Princess and the Frog, multiple kingdoms in Frozen, etc.

This same fairy tale overkill has been injecting the theme parks as of late too - a period in time I hope we will look back on "the castle wars". It began with Magic Kingdom's New Fantasyland, which added an entire addition to Cinderella Castle out back and two extra castles behind it, belonging to the Beast and Prince Eric. Then along came Shanghai Disneyland with their colossally proportioned castle with a boat ride underneath it. Magic Kingdom expanded their castle again in 2014 by adding new turrets on the hub, and now Hong Kong Disneyland is threatening to put a castle-hat on top of their existing castle because the Hong Kong government isn't about to let their Disney castle be so tiny compared to Shanghai's.

"Now with 40% more castle!"

The fact that castle iconography is sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms is not accidental, and will no doubt be welcomed by the types for whom Disney is nothing but animated fairy tales for children. Disney is bending over backwards to "make it Disney" for their paying customers.

But a castle is just a castle - it only became a culturally loaded symbol once Walt Disney made one the icon of his hugely influential amusement park. Today it's impossible to separate the two - when Shrek wanted to make fun of Disney, it did it by introducing a fairy tale castle and a robotic doll show inside. It's nothing but a symbol - a flexible one, and one that can cut both ways.

Disney may own the imagery, but ownership does not always guarantee mastery. Just as Fantasyland has become an overkill of castles, Disney has a bad habit of slapping Mickey Mouse on everything as a first attempt to repair problematic design. Like the phalanx of cutout Mickey heads added to the Transportation and Ticket Center attempting to disguise a building that's just begging for demolition:


To the Grand Canyon Concourse in the Contemporary, an expensive resort Disney has trouble selling rooms in. If people don't like it, it must not be Disney enough, and what's more Disney than a colossal Mickey head?


I can't think of a single situation where the "slap a Mickey on it" approach actually works, and so much of Walt Disney World has been allowed to fall behind the curve of fashion , that there's a lot of it now. But between the extremes of "not Disney enough" and "giant sheet metal ears", there has to be a middle ground, and it's a middle ground that Imagineering has been groping towards for the past 30 years.

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We live in a world of multinational corporations, and I write about one of them that is the economic steward of a number of works I admire. But I write this acknowledging that even defining what "Disney" is, is increasingly impossible. I'm an old school Disney fan, and so I believe that Disney is absolutely not Pixar, nor is it The Muppets. Or Star Wars and Indiana Jones, or Marvel, or Club Penguin, or any of the other hundreds of things that float around inside the Disney IP biosphere. But when I look at Liberty Square, or Frontierland, or even Disney Springs, I do see Disney. Why is that?

Well for one thing, these are public places which are ostentatiously designed and which create insular universes. And while I may get my kicks at Disney, I'm promiscuous - I was a teenage mall rat, and I still enjoy going to a good mall because it scratches that same itch for some sort of engineered, controlled public universe. Neither am I a Disney snob - I also go to and enjoy other theme parks like Universal, and even regional amusement parks. I will go to and enjoy any place that gives me that same sense of harmony, of energy, of place.

I drool over stuff like this about as often as Disney stuff.

So we could say, on a basic level, that to make something "Disney", it needs urban planning, attention to detail, and a sense of harmony. That sense of harmony is crucial, and it's the reason why a normal mini golf course doesn't come off as Disney but a high-end mall does.

It's the reason why, prior to the Disney Springs conversion, thousands of guests daily milled around thru the Downtown Disney Marketplace, trying to avoid the rest of the complex - whether subconsciously or not. It's the toughest thing to get right, and it's the toughest thing to maintain - Universal Studios Hollywood and Florida has practically no harmonized public spaces at all, just a series of facilities in different aesthetic silos. Harmony is that X factor, the thing that the rest of life is missing, the thing that art tries to correct.

It's the reason why Tomorrowland strikes everyone as a hodgepodge of random stuff - the various reboots of the area always come down to some new stuff placed on top of the existing original structures, so that there is a contrast between clean lines and futuristic bric-a-brac. Those clean lines underneath the new theming always speak louder than what's in front of it - there's a disconnect in meaning and form and that sense of harmony is disrupted.

Consider Liberty Square - the diminishing perspective and solid symmetry of the Hall of Presidents creates the impression of stability and stateliness which reflects the theme of the show inside. At the Haunted Mansion, a similarly opulent and stately structure has gone crazily wrong, with weird spikes everywhere, an asymmetrical conservatory, and with both wings jutting towards the viewer menacingly - a totally different thematic statement than the Hall of Presidents. Then consider the Liberty Tree Tavern, with its three doors, wide veranda, white turned columns, and approachable scale - what a sense of hospitality it creates from the road. All of these structures have harmonized their theme and purpose into their designs, and harmonize with each other, to create that pleasant vibe.

All Ears Net

It's also the reason why "throw a Mickey on it"never, ever works. The mere appearance of Mickey does not guarantee charm, despite what Disney seems to think - the cutout Mickey heads all over the Transportation and Ticket Center aren't theming so much as the design equivalent of branding on cattle. They assert ownership in a way which is intended to be reassuring and welcoming, but comes off as a hollow.

It's because the "Disney" accents on the TTC, or in the Grand Canyon Concourse, or even in many areas of Downtown Disney, are - like castles - just symbols. They speak a different design language than the rest of the area. Whereas the area around it may be visually saying "This area is really impressive, and unified, with beautiful colors", the giant Mickey head always shouts: "Property of Disney!".

Making It Disney - also known just as proper theming - has multiple approaches, ranging from the hard sell to the soft touch. The hard sell is what you see on 192 in Orlando - giant oranges, wizards, and mermaids perched on nondescript buildings. They're "themed" in the loosest sense of the term - they've got a big fantastical doodad glued onto the front.

Or there's the soft touch - the warm colors, white pillars, and shaded porch of the Emporium on Main Street invites you in even before you know it's a gigantic shop. The colors, kinetic activity, forced perspective illusion, and kinetic harmony of Hollywood Boulevard invites you down it, drawing you into the heart of the park, The palm trees are like landing beacons, inviting you to keep walking to find out what's at the end of the street.


Or you could put a huge Mickey hat there. But as John Hench liked to say, good taste costs no more.

Wikipedia