It's summer, which means that "indoor kids" like me stay away from the hot sun and do things like play video games! Old video games. Disney video games. This summer at Passport to Dreams, I'm playing the Disney / Capcom classic games and writing about them. All of them.

If there ever were two companies that were made for each other in the 80s, it was Capcom and Disney. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? had been a genuine hit in 1988, and Disney was embarking on aggressive expansion into nearly every untapped market they could see. In order to pave the way for a future generation of kids who could get hooked on Disney and grow up to write blogs like these, they needed a whole lot of Disney content, and they needed it cheap.

One wildly popular but essentially untapped area was Saturday morning cartoons. Disney's initial two entries into the format - The Wuzzles and The Adventures of the Gummi Bears - were much higher quality than the typical fare that alighted the television at the time. These test balloons were intentionally low stakes - Wuzzles and the Gummi Bears were fictional worlds created just for their shows - but the next Disney cartoon would feature recognizable Disney characters. DuckTales was, in television cartoon terms, a blockbuster that would lead to the creation of The Disney Afternoon, a behemoth that would gobble up after school airtime across the country, opening up a timeslot previously reserved for game show reruns. DuckTales was such a success that other companies felt compelled to respond, leading to the creation of Tiny Toon Adventures for Warner Brothers. Inspired by the fluidity and beauty of animation from the 1940s, DuckTales and Tiny Toons jump started an entire era of animated television shows that remain beloved to this day.

And then there was Capcom. In 1988, Capcom was just starting to enter into its golden age. Originally a purveyor of arcade cabinets like 1942, Capcom's original releases on the new Nintendo Entertainment System were clunky conversions like Ghosts n' Goblins. 1988 saw their first true runaway success, Mega Man 2, and the Capcom programming staff were starting to get truly ambitious in their game design. In the years to come, Capcom would become notorious for creating absurd slews of sequels to their successful properties - Mega Man, Street Fighter, Resident Evil... the list goes on and on. But Capcom's signature would remain the whimsical streak, a perfect match for Disney's fantasy worlds. Between Capcom's love of sequels and Disney's world-devouring corporate sprawl, it was a match made in heaven. It only lasted a few years, but the Capcom-Disney games are known as standard bearers of what terrific licensed games can be.

Mickey Mousecapade - Mar. 1987 / Oct. 1988

A lot can change in just a year.

While the NES was released in the United States in 1985, rolling out nationwide by mid 1986, in this pre-internet world it didn't really have much heat behind it until 1987. This makes sense if you look at the release dates of games - in late 1986, besides Super Mario Brothers, just about the best things on the system were still Balloon Fight, Wrecking Crew, and maybe Ghosts n' Goblins. By late 1987 Mega Man, Kid Icarus, Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, and Punch-Out were available, with more top shelf titles coming out all the time.

Japan got a head-start of about two years on all of this, and Nintendo of Japan already had an installed user base when they unleashed Super Mario Brothers in October 1985. The avalanche of Mario-alikes that followed simply couldn't reach the United States in the order that they were programmed in Japan - when they had a chance of being appreciated as the stepping stones that they were. This means that certain games which were probably respectable efforts at their time looked like ludicrous antiques by the time they reached American shores just a year or so later. Mickey Mousecapade came out in the US after games like Contra and Life Force were already pushing what the NES was capable of.

That's the context for appreciating what Mickey Mousecapade was up against in Japan in early 1987 - but it still isn't the same as saying that it's actually worth playing. If you're one of the American kids sucked in by that colorful, fun cover art, then just keep looking at it - because Mickey Mousecapade is pretty darned bad.

The game actually isn't even called Mickey Mousecapade, and it wasn't made by Capcom - this is a 1987 Hudson Soft game which even the title screen simply calls "Mickey Mouse". The game received a spiffy box and a few graphical changes, but otherwise belongs firmly to that weird middle ground after the success of Super Mario Brothers but before developers had figured out exactly why everyone liked the game so much. Awkwardly still adherent to arcade-style gameplay, Mickey Mouse is short, dull, and frustrating.

Will the real Mickey Mousecapade please stand up?

The nearest reasonable comparison is another Hudson Soft game coded just a few months before Mickey Mouse - Milon's Secret Castle. If any longtime game players are reading this, they probably winced at the mention of Milon - then as now, it's the kind of game people make YouTube videos about. Both games are in a tradition of unreasonably frustrating, obtuse Japanese platform games like Tower of Druaga - for some reason these kind of games filled with hidden secrets, no clues, and sluggish controls were very popular with Famicom owners. There's a segment in Mickey Mouse where players must traverse a forest, avoiding very fast enemies and going through doors. The level appears to loop endlessly, until the correct door is found and the season of the background changes from Spring to Summer. This is your only clue that you found the correct path. After two seasons, only doors that send you back to the start are available - you must find the exit by shooting an unmarked tree in the background until a door appears. If this strikes you as unfair and obtuse, then Mickey Mouse is not for you.

The best thing about Milon is that his secret castle is an off-brand Sleeping Beauty Castle.

What begins as a strict but possible platforming challenge shortly becomes almost needlessly cruel. Enemies swarm in erratic patterns moving twice as quick as you do. Mickey must move both himself and Minnie - you can't play as Minnie, but she follows you, mirroring your movements. In most cases this is at worst a minor annoyance, but in the final level, jumping between platforms becomes controller-throwingly difficult. She can also be carried away, and you cannot progress until you fire stars at enough invisible blocks to find a randomly placed key and play a mini game were you have a chance of winning her back. Player 2 can't play as her - she's only there to make your life more difficult.

All of this goes on for five levels, including the Pirate Ship level pictured on the cover, which is a mere 2 screens wide and 2 screens tall, and filled with some of the cheapest enemies I've ever seen in a video game. After just 30 minutes of gameplay, I was relieved when Mickey Mousecapade was over. Don't play this game.

Good luck.

DuckTales - Sept. 1989

It would be nearly a year until Capcom would be allowed to take a real crack at a Disney game, and this one is a dilly. It's one of the all-time greats according to many - amongst those who reverse Nintendo's 8-bit system, I've found nary a dissenting voice as to its excellence.

Why would a liscenced game like this be such a cult favorite on a system overstuffed with them? I suspect it's exactly the right blend of a recognizable title and a not-too-difficult gameplay experience. I doubt I'm the only player for whom a game based on a cartoon was the second game I ever completed, after a Mario game. DuckTales... was not mine, and so I can't speak for this game from any sort of nostalgia point of view, but you know what? This is a pretty good game.

Perhaps the true mettle of a licensed game is whether or not anybody would want to buy it were it released without its IP tie-in. DuckTales is arguably one of the all-time great examples - absolutely nowhere but in this game is there any suggestion that Scrooge McDuck would bounce around on his cane like a pogo stick... but once you spend enough time with this, it's just about the only thing you'll ever think of Scrooge McDuck doing. The mechanic is so infectious that you'll end up pogo-ing around on dangerous platforms where it would really be easier for you to stand. Like Super Mario's B-Dash, it's so much fun that you forget that you don't need to use it.

But the pogo mechanic comes with a set of limitations, and it's here where my problems with DuckTales begin to come out. It is frustratingly difficult to activate the pogo jump, requiring players to jump and press down on the D-pad. But it's also finicky enough to cause problems - land in the wrong spot, like on the edge of a platform, and Scrooge will immediately stop pogoing. This makes the process of bouncing around more stressful than it needs to be. Later entries in the DuckTales series removed the need to press down to pogo, strongly suggesting that developers recognized that this was needlessly difficult for such a central part of the game.

Which brings me to the second gripe. Capcom was really good at making games that were tough, but fair. There's enough in this game and in the beta version available online that leads me to believe that at some point in development, somebody decided that the game was too easy. The beta build includes a Continue option on the main screen, which was removed from the final version. And the enemy placement, especially in the Amazon and Moon levels, can be amazingly cheap. Enemies will immediately respawn if they are off the screen for more than a moment, leading to an endless barrage of spacemen and bees which are the main obstacle in these areas. Once you fight through, the bosses are simple and repetitive, which may be another sign of a rushed release. There's even a mechanic in the game which gives you a "bad ending" if you manage to lose all of your money fighting Dracula Duck - something which is nearly impossible to do in the final game. All of these small touches, as well as the somewhat wonky controls, suggest to me that the game was never fully polished to its developer's liking.

It's harder to get this ending than it is to beat the game!

What really is the strength of the game is the exploration. Anybody can run direct through, avoid enemies, and reach the end in less than a hour. Throughout, the game simply keeps adding up your treasure - never once making a big deal out of it, never once pointing out that this is something you should pay attention to until the very end, where you receive a total. Then, the next time you play, you start to notice all of the hidden jewels and treasure chests. Eventually, you discover a hidden treasure in a level. The fairly modest challenge represented by completing the game gives way to a personal challenge - to collect as much as possible. This really is where DuckTales gets you, why it's so lasting. I'm not a huge fan of the game and as I sit here typing these words I'm thinking about how I should play it again and try to get a higher score.

Another small touch that really helps the game stand out from its peers is an unusually tight script, with characters speaking as they do in the show - this was very unusual in 1989, where even terrific games were full of bizarre and questionable English. This was overseen by a producer working for Disney in Los Angeles - Darlene Lacey - who was more or less hired to protect Disney's interests.

She rewrote all of the original English text to more closely adhere to the animated property - only leaving Huey's famous "This house has an illusion wall" probably because, like untold numbers after her, she found it funny. It's especially fortunate that Disney thought to hire somebody to do this, because Capcom's game text is hilariously inappropriate:


That version of the text stands unchanged in the Japanese release of the game, marvelously titled Naughty Duck Dream Adventure.

Is DuckTales an unassailable masterpiece for the NES? No. Is it a lovable platform game with terrific music and a gloriously unexplained action mechanic? Yes. Not every game needs to be an austere masterpiece like Ninja Gaiden to earn a place in the canon.



DuckTales Remastered - August 2013

Long after the halcyon days of Capcom, Disney chose the best possible developer to helm their high-profile game reboot: Wayforward Technologies, who has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to retain the values of old school games in series like Shantae and Contra. In DuckTales Remastered, Wayforward successfully split the difference between faithfully updating the game and providing a new experience. In many areas, the level layout are identical - in others, expanded sequences not possible on the NES were introduced. Scrooge's pogo cane controls easily and smoothly compared to the original Capcom game, and boss battles have been very effectively expanded into some very exciting, tricky segments.

The most noteworthy addition are cleverly written and voice acted cut scenes which pop up before and during levels. These range from new scene transitions - Scrooge flies a plane between the Amazon and into ancient ruins - to entirely new stories created to add interest to existing levels. These add a lot of class and value to the experience, really making you feel like you're watching an extended episode of DuckTales.

But, you know, there's a doubled edged sword to that, as any nostalgic fan who's tried to watch DuckTales as an adult can find out. It feels exactly like watching an episode of DuckTales - Bubba Duck, Gizmoduck, Webbigail and all. If these characters annoyed you in the show, they will annoy you here, too. At least the game is faithful.


I think new audiences can come directly to DuckTales Remastered and not need to feel like they missed anything - the gorgeous animation and improved controls alone make it easy to recommend. The 2.5-D applied to the game is often gorgeous, but levels sometimes end up feeling less immersive than they did in 8 bits - more a series of boxes floating in front of a background than a real place to explore.

Many players report that they feel the cutscenes interrupted the flow of the game, which is absolutely true - and it's at these times that the value of the limited medium of the NES can really be felt. There's something to be said for letting players fill in the details of the story in their minds - to decide for themselves why Scrooge fights a giant rat inside the moon. This in no way takes away from Wayforward's take on the material, which is often exciting and funny. But those of us who miss when Super Mario was mysterious and silent may walk away from DuckTales Remastered with a new appreciation for how Capcom did so much with so little.


Next Time:Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers and The Little Mermaid

It's summer, which means that "indoor kids" like me stay away from the hot sun and do things like play video games! Old video games. Disney video games. This summer at Passport to Dreams, I'm playing the Disney / Capcom classic games and writing about them. All of them.


Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers - June 1990

In Capcom's take on the Rescue Rangers, Chip and Dale spend all of their time running, lifting boxes, hiding inside boxes, and throwing boxes. Again, anybody's who's sat through an episode of Disney's big animated follow-up to DuckTales could be forgiven for wondering if anybody working on the game had seen even one hot minute of the source material.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!??

By level 3 I was really enjoying TaleSpin but still didn't like the control scheme - I didn't like that Button B fired bullets and Button A flips Baloo's plane. It then occurred to me that really I ought to be playing this with a joystick, like a real shooter - and five minutes later I had plugged in my NES Advantage and found the controls much better, almost natural.

When I was younger and the internet was a smaller place than it is today, one early hobby was browsing newsgroups searching fir Disney theme park audio. Most often scratchy things in a time when internet connections were still slow enough to make RealAudio an attractive possibility, there was nothing like spending the better part of a day trying to get one file, opening it up, and hearing something totally new to you. I heard Phantom Manor's soundtrack almost 20 years before I got to ride it, and I was listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean "Scare Me Music" long before I got to Disneyland in person. The sounds of the park, the musical soundtrack you could take home, were an early obsession - one that's played out on this blog before.

But one early annoyance that's never fully gone away was: where are all of the Walt Disney World sounds? Disneyland music is everywhere - how many remixes of the Haunted Mansion do we really need, after all - but in the few cases where I could find music from Magic Kingdom, it often was either mislabeled Disneyland tracks, or versions from Disneyland often perfunctorily cut down and remixed. Where were the versions that tried to really capture the idiosyncrasies and unique flavors of each theme park?

Well, as it turns out, I waited so long that I decided to do it myself. My initial attempt to preserve some of the unique atmosphere of Walt Disney World was posted in 2012, and its superior followup in 2014. But the project never really ended: much of the work I did on the Musical Souvenir between July 2011 and December 2014 was intended to lay the groundwork for more expanded audio mixes. Only a few of these bucket list items were feasible; I've still very proud of the restoration work I did on the 1984 version of Space Mountain, and the full Jungle Cruise soundtrack included in the second collection. But one item still bothered me, because I was so close to having a finished version: where was the complete Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack for Magic Kingdom?

In theory, this was not an impossible goal. Very little in the Florida attraction was not simply taken from the recording sessions for the original ride. My Caribbean Plaza track from the second release of the music project had the start and the end of the attraction - the unique pieces - but the whole stretch of the attraction in the middle had to be resolved. How do you decide to cut down all of that material?

If you listen to the majority of audio mixes of Pirates of the Caribbean available online, you don't. The standard, agreed upon method is to play each and every track back to back. I've never liked this, because although it does allow you to hear everything, it also means that areas with a lot of overlapping, interlocking music cues, like the Haunted Mansion graveyard or the Burning City, go on for 6, 8, 10 minutes.

What I like to do is to give as nearly as possible an approximation not of what was recorded, but of what you hear and experience when you are there, on the ride. This means letting the cues all bleed together, but also allowing moments where you can artistically stretch or compress other areas. It also means that I do want to hear incidental sounds in so far as they add to the experience - for the same reason that my reconstruction of If You Had Wings from 2011 didn't sound right until I added a lot of clattering 16mm projector sounds buried underneath the music.

In the end, I tackled Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean first.


Download File:Walt Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean35mb MP3

There were two real goals here: first, to see how much I could extend the first third of the ride to really capture the atmosphere of that bayou and those caves, and to see how much I could tighten up the whole center section and keep it moving without losing the texture of the experience. I really admire how the Disneyland ride modulates its tones - going from the raucous burning city to the absolute quiet of the jail scene, for example - and I really wanted it capture that.

I also decided it was worth including Old Bill, despite my goal to go back as near as possible to the original experience. Old Bill was designed by Marc for inclusion in the Florida show, and brought back over to Disneyland at some point after that version opened. Like the "bayou old man", himself a copy of Beacon Joe designed for Magic Kingdom, he's been there for so long that he may as well always been present.

In Marc's own handwriting, no less.

It all worked very well, especially the haunted grotto - aided and abetted by the dozens of live waterfall recordings I made to construct the Musical Souvenir. However, a hard drive crash meant that I lost a number of the sound files and was left with just the rough export version presented here, which is why there's a few render errors.

And that was that - for a few years at least.

The real thing holding me back from making the attempt was the complete unavailability of the Talking Skull safety announcement from the original version of the attraction. I never really liked the Magic Kingdom Talking Skull - his announcement was kind of lame and more often than not you could barely hear him under all of the howling wind and thunder in those much smaller caverns. I liked him even less after I saw the iconic Disneyland version. But he was an important part of the uniqueness of the Florida ride, and without him I saw no advantage in expanding on what I had already done in 2014.

Al Huffman / DisneyFans.Com

Then something unexpected happened. Magic Kingdom went and put a talking skull back in the ride.

A different one, to be sure. But that got me thinking about the original 1973 talking skull - and whether I should try again to find a usable live recording. It's a total crap shoot whether or not you'll luck into one - it's all up to a kind of camera used to capture the footage, how loud people on the ride with the videographer are, how loud the attraction was that month, and more. It's bad enough considering it with today's modern cameras, but if you consider finding just the right one based on what came were available prior to 2006, you see how unlikely this is.

I went looking anyway, searching backwards chronologically, until I hit 2003 - and a likely candidate, uploaded by "JPL1311". It was clean, mostly clear, and the Talking Skull was really loud. Once I stripped away the audio hiss using digital filters, I had something that sounded pretty close to a source audio mix. I figured it was worth a shot.

So I went back into my files and pulled out the Caribbean Plaza track from 2014 and Disneyland Pirates track from 2015 and was able to combine them into something pretty darn convincing. As far as I know it is the first complete attraction soundtrack for the Florida Pirates of the Caribbean ever created.


Download File:Magic Kingdom Pirates of the Caribbean 197336mb MP3

It was pretty interesting deciding where this track needed to vary meaningfully from the Disneyland track to get the desired effect across. What I can say is that the 1973 show has a much more complex soundscape from the Disneyland original - there's nearly no moments of quiet. I had to layer audio tracks much more aggressively in the haunted cavern to get the menacing atmosphere Marc Davis intended. And, of course, the whole thing ended up being a few seconds longer than the Disneyland mix - even if you don't actually get to the ride itself until nearly halfway through!

But more than anything, it's just satisfying to hear, and to have. I try hard to really transport listeners in my tracks, and this one really takes me back to the Pirates of the Caribbean I knew as a kid. This version of the ride was also my preferred attraction to work back at the start of what passed for my career at Disney, so it's a cherished memory for me, and one I fought to preserve while I worked there.

The talking skull may have returned, and the parrot may no longer be out front and the cannons on the roof don't fire, but at least we have this - I think it's almost as good as being there again.

Ye come seeking adventure and salty old pirates, eh? This be the place - check out the Pirates of the Caribbean Hub Page for more goodness about this classic ride. Or hop a monorail over to our Theme Park Music resource for even more vintage Disneyland and Magic Kingdom music!

It's summer, which means that "indoor kids" like me stay away from the hot sun and do things like play video games! Old video games. Disney video games. This summer at Passport to Dreams, I'm playing the Disney / Capcom classic games and writing about them. All of them.




We've been playing and talking about games on the 8-bit NES, but now the story needs to take a detour as we jump over to Nintendo's rival... Sega. In mid-1990, the Sega Genesis had been on the market for a year and had a reputation for impressive graphics and a vast library of shooting games, but really summer of 1990 belonged to Nintendo in a way that few summer ever would again.

It was the summer of Super Mario Brothers 3, which sold more units that season than any game in history ever had. Super Mario Brothers 3 is the apotheosis of the NES, but it was also the end of Nintendo's solitary market domination. Sega finally got wise and had hired an American, Al Nilsen, to helm their North American marketing department. Since Sega had no name recognition in the US market, Nilsen bought the likenesses of those who did: Tommy Lasorda, Pat Riley, and Michael Jackson. Then in 1990, Sega landed somebody every American knew: Mickey Mouse.

The most Sega image I could find.

Released in the United States as Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion in November 1990, the resulting game is a kid-friendly standout on a system that was still looking for its mainstream hit. As everyone knows, that would prove to be Sonic the Hedgehog just a few months later, but I'd argue that Castle of Illusion is a better game. Illusion is a fun, fairly predictable bounce-and-stomp. The levels are fairly uninteresting - it's wave after wave of the same enemies, over and over - but they do start to improve at about the halfway point. More importantly, it's light years ahead of Mickey Mousecapade on the NES.

The Disney / Sega games could be their own series of blog posts, and they're unfairly obscure today. Europe's preference for Donald Duck resulted in two games for Sega's 8-bit console, the Master System, released in that market: The Lucky Dime Caper and Deep Duck Trouble - these games are even better and cuter than Castle of Illusion. Next, North America got its own unique Donald game, QuackShot, and finally Mickey and Donald were brought together in World of Illusion, a graphical powerhouse for the Genesis that few games would match. It's a fairly impressive run for Sega, and the quality drop in Disney games once Disney abandoned Sega and Capcom would be noticeable.

Which brings us to our subject for today, a series of games that will span nearly the whole history of the Super Nintendo. I don't know if Nintendo or Disney requested a Mickey game of their own to compete against the successful Castle of Illusion, or if Capcom came up with this one all on their own, but this week we're taking a huge bite out of 16 bit Super Nintendo trilogy: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse.

The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse - October 1992

Sometimes you reach for perfect by disregarding convention, swinging for the fences, and beating your own path. But sometimes you get to perfect by simply doing the same thing others have done better, sharper, nicer. The Magical Quest isn't some genre bending masterpiece - it's a really good platform game. Awash in a sea of the same, it rises above the rest like an island.

By the early 90s, the entire game industry was deep, deep into platform games. They've never really gone away, to be sure, but the initial rush of Super Mario Brothers imitators gradually began to produce such a vast glut of similar product that the mutations set in early. There were games that went in an even twitchier direction, like Mega Man, and ones that relied on memorization and strategy, like Ghouls N Ghosts. Sonic the Hedgehog provided multiple paths through levels, rewarding players who replayed levels until they could clear them in seconds. Faced with an opportunity to create a Mickey Mouse game for the new Super Nintendo, Capcom did not reinvent the wheel; they just made it spin smoother.

Magical Quest begins on a domestic scene of Mickey, Donald and Goofy playing catch with Pluto. Pluto runs off, and Mickey chases him until he abruptly falls off a cliff. This short setup establishes an air of fantasy that intrudes into the benign afternoon in the park, as Mickey suddenly falls, bounces off a branch, and lands on a cloud - high in the sky. There's a house sitting on the cloud inhabited by an old man, and Mickey is told of an evil Emperor Pete who rules over this kingdom...


Here's a great example of a video game that's aimed squarely at the Japanese audience, and the Americans are simply invited to show up too. The game requires no special knowledge of Mickey Mouse as a character or cultural institution - Mickey just is in this game, and it creates a powerful atmosphere of Disney-ness without actually ever directly referencing anything Disney. Titles like Mickey Mousecapade and Castle of Illusion brought in references to Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, but Magical Quest deals exclusively with Mickey, Goofy, Pete, Pluto and Donald and creates a totally new adventure for them.

As players progress through the game, they pick up various costumes that give Mickey new skills. There's a magic outfit that can fire projectiles, a firefighter's uniform, and a mountain climber's outfit. By starting Mickey out dressed in nothing but his skivvies and allowing him to accumulate abilities along the way, Magical Quest creates a powerful sense of a dream unfolding, logical and linear on its own terms but strangely skewed.

There's a direct sequence of action to the first four levels, as the difficulty gradually increases. Starting on a cloud, Mickey rides rolling tomatoes along a huge vine down to earth. Traveling alongside a lake, he crosses a dark forest, enters an elevator, and rides it into a blazing inferno underground. Exiting the underground cavern, he begins to scale a mountain, working his way towards Emperor Pete's castle....

In the early 90s, Capcom produced some of the handsomest video games around. There's a lot of detail in Magical Quest - pay close attention to just how often the backgrounds change as you travel from one area of each stage to the next, creating a real sense of progression and atmosphere. The forest grows denser and darker as you head towards the area's boss, a giant spider - the background trees transitioning from awash in golden light to grasping claws with evil Pete faces. The soundtrack seems to be scored by a medieval chamber music quartet, instantly creating a mood of high fantasy.


In terms of gameplay, Capcom seems to have reached into their back catalogue of hits. The weapon-switching brings back memories of Mega Man, although Magical Quest demands far less of players than even the easiest Mega Man game. Certain enemies and situations and the entire high fantasy conceit seems to be descended from the Ghouls N' Ghosts series, and the first boss of Magical Quest - a winged bat creature - is essentially a reference to the famous infamous enemy in Ghouls 'N Ghosts, the Red Arremer. The mini level between the forest and fire cavern - a fairly tricky elevator ride down - recalls a similar ride in Ghouls 'N Ghosts. Even the appearance of Emperor Pete in the final room seems to suggest Astoroth, a recurring boss in that series. Elsewhere from the Capcom canon, the Mountain Climber Mickey outfit functions basically identically to the climbing and swinging mechanic in Bionic Commando.

The game puts up a reasonable challenge to new players, but it's not nearly as demanding as, say, DuckTales on the NES. The oeneric atmosphere, high quality presentation, and sharp gameplay makes this one of my most-often played titles in the SNES library. I beat it in about 30 minutes while preparing this review, and died maybe twice. It's so much fun that it doesn't really matter that only on "Hard" mode does it put up much of a fight.

Generally, the levels in this game are amazingly well planned. The first level allows you to get used to controlling Mickey and throwing blocks before throwing up the first real challenge: the race to the ground atop the giant tomato. The game deposits you by a lake, dodging starfish and beavers, establishing that Mickey can neither breathe nor swim well underwater. In Level 2, the Magic Turban places an air bubble around his head when underwater. Any other game would then send you across the great barrier reef or something, but not Magical Quest - you swim through the inside of a tree filled with sap! Touches like this add a lot of character to the game.

Level 3 introduces a firefighter outfit, cleverly released from a "break glass in case of fire" emergency panel. The Five Cavern is very well done, coming up with what feels like every possible use for the water weapon - from pushing blocks to forcing you to extinguish burning platforms before you can cross them. The final boss of the area is pretty tough, demanding total confidence in both water spraying and fast platforming. The same can be said of the Level 4 boss, easily the toughest in the game - the fight against the giant eagle really requires you to be very good with the Mountain Climber hook.

Then it's off to the ice world, and here's where the wheels come off. The level cues you to use your fire hose, and it allows you to spray water that freezes into platforms - but then never uses this in any meaningful way. The boss of this level can be beaten with either magic or water, but he freezes to death no matter how you beat him - a waste of a cool concept. Then it's off to Pete's Castle, where you'd expect to have to use all four abilities to succeed, much like the Wily Fortresses in Mega Man. Again, there is no such requirement, and in fact if you know where to go you don't even have to deal with about half of the level.  The drop in quality after Level 4 is huge, and hard not to notice.

But there is a conceptual completeness to this game that is tough to top. It's one of those games like Castlevania where every little piece seems to have its place and is deployed at exactly the right time. The magic, water, and hook weapons feel right - inevitable - and easy to control. The atmosphere is top-notch. The whole thing feels like an especially interesting Disney featurette, and coming out in 1992, that's not a bad thing. Seemingly only in video games is Mickey allowed anymore to be a hero.

This one is worth seeking out, and don't be surprised if you find yourself playing it again and again. I began playing it in 1992 and I've more or less never stopped. It's a key action title for the Super Nintendo.

The Great Circus Mystery- November 1994

The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse seems to have been successful - it's a well liked and not too uncommon game, and in Japan it was even featured on an episode of GameCenter CX, where host Arino Shinya plays it to commemorate the opening of Wreck-It Ralph. Naturally, a sequel was produced - this being Capcom, after all. But what's baffling is the way this sequel was released in the United States - instead of being embraced and promoted as "The Magical Quest 2", its title in Japan, it was given the baffling name "The Great Circus Mystery".

This is a two player simultaneous game. In it, Mickey and Minnie head to the edge of town on a bus to see the Circus - but when they arrive, the circus is in shambles and the performers have vanished! They meet two of the three Lonesome Ghosts, who invite them to their haunted house on the far side of a nearby jungle - but when they arrive, the house has been overrun by the minions of Baron Pete. In the end, Mickey and Minnie travel through a cavern, an ice world (of course), and Baron Pete's castle to put an end to his evil plans.

Okay, so, just from that summary alone, we can begin to see problems. "Rescuing Pluto" isn't an amazing story for The Magical Quest, but it works fine and adds to the dreamlike atmosphere - which is fine because - spoilers - it turns out that Magical Quest actually is a dream! The story in Great Circus Mystery is weirdly unfocused, which is fine because the game is still fun, but for a game called The Great Circus Mystery, the mystery of what's going on at the circus turns out to be pretty unimportant.

Then there's the abilities selections in this game, which honestly are kind of terrible - Mickey and Minnie get a vacuum cleaner, a jungle explorer outfit, and a cowboy outfit with pop gun and hobby horse. The vacuum cleaner can convert enemies into coins so you can buy upgrades in shops, which is nice if you really need the upgrades to progress. The jungle explorer outfit works exactly like the mountain climber outfit, and the cowboy outfit allows you to fire pellets. Unfortunately, your hobby horse never stops bouncing underneath you while you're in cowboy form, and the bullets don't seem to be able to hit enemies at close range, so the most useful form in this game is also the most annoying to use.



Compared to Magical Quest, Circus Mystery starts off in the drab confines of a tattered circus - it's not spooky enough to actually be cool, but not colorful enough to create any atmosphere of adventure and fantasy. At least the "Haunted Circus", as its called in the game, has two cool boss enemies - a fire juggling weasel and a lion that tries to run you down in his circus wagon and whose mane you vacuum off to reveal that he's actually a disguised wolf. The Jungle level that follows is the single dullest and most uninspired level in the series - you fight an evil turtle and gorilla while trying not to fall asleep.


The game improves considerably at the Lonesome Ghosts' Haunted House. There's a repeat of a gag used in the Haunted Mansion level of Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, where a specter of Pete replaces your reflection as you pass a series of mirrors. Later, you fight Pete in the best boss of the game - Baron Pete leans out of his framed portrait to attack you! A series of rooms where you must hang onto a lantern on the wall as the room spins around you is a direct reference to Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts. There's even more Ghouls 'N Ghosts references in this game than in the original Magical Quest - a dinosaur boss and cloud boss hail directly from that series, and Baron Pete's outfit again strongly recalls Astroroth's double faces. All three games were extensively designed by programmers who were veterans of that series, so all of this is highly intentional.

Unlike Magical Quest, the last 60% of this game is better than the first third, even if the level progression feels stilted and sporadic. Pete is a two-phase boss this time, and transforms himself into a huge Elliot-style dragon. The boss of World 5, a cloud of cold air, is a legitimate challenge, as you must nearly constantly vacuum him up while avoiding being touched and frozen. The challenge of this game definitely matches and exceeds that of Magical Quest. The two-player option is nice, if not really important, and the opportunity to play as Minnie is great for those of us who prefer to play as female characters when possible.

But there's just no getting past the fact that this is an inferior replay of a game that still feels fresh. And the marketing here merits a stoning - it's amazing how off-base they were, calling this game The Great Circus Mystery. I know for sure there are kids who avoided this one based on the name, never knowing it really was the sequel to Magical Quest. To their credit, Disney and Capcom recognized the error and released this under its proper name on the Game Boy Advance.

Even the box art was a total botch. The original Magical Quest art is still terrific - Mickey, in his yellow and red Magic outfit, pops off the deep blue of the haunted forest, and Emperor Pete holding Pluto captive immediately establishes the story and fantastic world of the game. The Great Circus Mystery uses pastel colors, Mickey scowling, and the circus setting that really isn't central to the game. I don't mean to keep harping on this, but it's amazing how much they botched what could have been a sure thing.

The Great Circus Mystery isn't a terrible game, but it's a huge drop coming off Magical Quest. It was released on both the SNES and Genesis - perhaps the dual release is what prevented it from being identified as the sequel to a series that began on a Nintendo system? The SNES version is the one to get here - the Genesis has a unique section of Level 3 to replace the rotating rooms that the Genesis couldn't do, but overall the graphics are compromised. Anybody who missed out on this in the 90s due to its lousy marketing didn't miss much, but fans of the original Magical Quest should seek it out.

The Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald- December 1995

And one reason I harped so much about the lousy marketing of Magical Quest 2 / Great Circus Mystery is that it likely prevented the West from getting this game, the superior Magical Quest 3. This time Huey, Dewey and Louie are pulled into an enchanted book they find in Donald's attic and Mickey and Donald go in to rescue them. The European flair of the original is back, as they travel through "Storyland" en route to King Pete's castle. They're dropped off in a medieval village overrun with ambulatory crows, ears of corn, and a turkey wearing a helmet. After defeating a pig flying around in a giant pepper - a boss who uses the SNES' scaling and rotation effects and is the most 'Super Nintendo' thing I've ever seen - they proceed through a thicket of vines filled with drifting spores and a menacing desert before boarding one of Pete's flying fortress ships.

The costumes here are great, and actually different for Mickey and Donald. After defeating the rampaging turkey, a blacksmith gives Mickey a suit of armor equipped with a boxing glove, which he cause use to bounce off walls. The blacksmith's wife tries to do the same for Donald - but Donald's butt is too huge to fit in the armor, and he ends up wearing a barrel with a pot on his head. This turns out to be an advantage, as the town is crisscrossed with Venetian canals, and Mickey plummets like a rock in the water, whereas Donald can float along easily in his barrel. In the spore forest, they get Woodcutter's outfits and can climb the tall vines using long leather belts, swinging from side to side to destroy enemies. In the desert, the pick up magic show gear from a traveling mystic - Mickey is dressed in a snappy red suit and can shoot cards from his hat, while Donald is dressed as Aladdin and rubs his magic lamp to summon a giant genie hand which flicks enemies away.



Better still, this game is tough, and atmospheric. Pete's battle ship contains two really frustrating bosses, and the series has its one and only water level when the ship crashes into the ocean and our heroes swim to shore. Instead of the typical glacier ice level, here Mickey and Donald climb up a snowy mountain filled with evil, dead trees. If you keep walking, snow collects on your shoes, making it easier to jump up to higher platforms! Pete's castle is terrific, filled with elaborate stonework and convincingly dark, richly decorated rooms.

After all of your trouble, you're rewarded with a really great fight against Pete. He looks better, more smoother and dimensional than any boss in the series, and when you've weakened him, he puts on his own suit of armor, complete with a huge version of the same giant red curtain Mickey and Donald use when they switch forms! After three games of seeing the same gag, it's pretty satisfying to see a boss turn the tables like that.


After he's defeated, it's revealed that Pete wants to be a hero, but has always been forced to play the villain in the story! Mickey and Donald forgive him, and King Pete repents his evil ways and becomes a good king. It's a sweet ending to the series, and a nice personality touch for a character who almost never gets them.

The Super Nintendo version of this game was only ever released in Japan. The game was finally released, alongside Magical Quest 1 and 2, on the Game Boy Advance and has a new English translation - although the zoomed in new of the GBA reduces the game's visual splendor. There's also an English fan translation that predates the official release by a few years. It's a bit rougher than the official translation, but still perfectly enjoyable.

There is considerable debate among retro game fans about the merits of Sega's Disney games vs. Capcom's Disney games. Sega's Castle of Illusion is a solid title - World of Illusion is beautiful but perhaps a bit too obviously almost too much for the poor Genesis to handle (claims of blast processing aside, remember that the Genesis is an older piece of hardware).

The gameplay of Magical Quest is a bit loosey-goosey, but in terms of presentation and imagination, the series is leagues ahead.  Magical Quest epitomizes, for me, why the Super Nintendo may just be the best video game machine ever released - gorgeous visuals and music and a very high level of polish just on the brink of when the video game industry was hit with polygonal 3D gaming and almost everything was reset to zero. This trilogy doesn't have the legendary reputation of Capcom's 8-bit Disney games, but taken as a whole, the Magical Quest series is the capstone of the entire Disney / Capcom venture, and that's saying a lot.

Next Week: two surprising 8-bit sequels shake up expectations

It's summer, which means that "indoor kids" like me stay away from the hot sun and do things like play video games! Old video games. Disney video games. This summer at Passport to Dreams, I'm playing the Disney / Capcom classic games and writing about them. All of them.


Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers 2 - December 1993

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

If you recall last month, I thought highly of Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers - enough to give it the No. 1 spot on the game rankings list. So it was with some interest that I approached its sequel - both Chip 'N Dale 2 and the next game in this article, Duck Tales 2 were released very, very late in the life span of the NES and are super rare. Very few have ever played these games, allowing me to approach them with no apologies. Chip 'N Dale 2 starts off promisingly enough - a neat animated introduction picks out the silhouettes of our heroes against a brick wall, before loading the menu screen. Once off to the first level, everything seems okay - at first. The games look practically identical, and the first level strongly recalls Level D in the original game. There's longer dialogue scenes and more elaborate boss battles. It took me a few stages to start to realize something was up.

Don't let the similarities throw you - while they make look similar, each Rescue Rangers game is as different under the hood as can be. Rescue Rangers 2 is slightly larger, with more detailed sprites for Chip and Dale - not a bad thing, to be sure. The game is also slower - in the original, the chipmunks could really pick up and lob those crates, and zip and jump easily across the screen - really creating a sense that they were tiny. Rescue Rangers 2 is zoomed in, and instead of interacting with things like telephone poles and bar stools, everything they come across is a much more reasonable scale, such as pots and pans. Because they're a little bigger than in the first game, that illusion of expansiveness has been sacrificed.


But what really spoils Chip 'N Dale 2 is the combination of a less expansive world, slower gameplay, and amazingly sparse enemy placement. In the original game, enemies would appear in clusters of 2 or 3 and charge directly at you - you needed to move fast and really learn to pick up and chuck those crates because you were constantly under attack. The original Chip 'N Dale is a highly distinctive mix of twitchy, fast reflex based game play and memorization - so much of the fun of that game was learning each enemy's distinct attack pattern and where they would appear and learning how to approach and defeat them strategically.

In contrast, you can go entire screens in Chip 'N Dale 2 and only see one slowly moving enemy. In the first game, you had to defeat nearly every threat you came across and always has to have a box at the ready to throw, or you were going to die quickly. It's much easier in Chip 'N Dale 2 to just run past every enemy until you reach the boss.

Speaking of the bosses, there's really only two in the game that will give most players any trouble - the first boss, and the last one. The first boss is fought by jumping between plates beneath a cascade of water - its easy to get washed off the bottom of the screen and die. It's tricky, but the rest of the game is full of far less intriguing enemies. Usually you just have to stand far away and wait for one of the boss' projectiles to land on the ground, then you pick it up and chuck it at them. There's at least four of these battles in this short game, although one of them is an enraged ostrich riding a spoke gear, which is kind of cool. The final boss looks impressive, and repeats a memorable gag from Mega Man 2, where you're thrown in a room where the lights blow out and a huge enemy lowers from the ceiling. This guy drops time bombs, and you have to time it so that the bomb hits him at the exact moment it detonates.


Remember all of those environmental hazards in the first game? They're just plain gone. Remember having the juggle the light switches, or turn off the water taps to proceed? Gone entirely. Every level in Rescue Rangers 2 consists of some slightly themed platforms and every level has the same layout - go right, go up a little bit, then go right or left. Gone entirely is the visual and conceptual unity of the first game, where you climb up and end up on top of telephone poles, or keep climbing up a ventilation shaft or tree. Also gone are the unique enemies in each level - who can forget the tough chicken guys who punch boxes in their way, or the aliens who turn into you as you approach?

Between the redundant level designs and tiresome boss battles, I began to have really nasty flashbacks to Darkwing Duck - this game has that same sense of absolute exhaustion. Certain parts of the game seem to have just been abandoned in design - in certain areas the game would not let me scroll to the next screen until I threw the box I was holding, and in another spot I could not proceed until I cleared the entire screen of all of the boxes. For a major release Capcom game, that's totally unacceptable.

Chip 'N Dale 2 threatens to become interesting twice. At one point, Fat Cat traps you inside a refrigerator and you are given three minutes until you freeze to death. Being the good game player that I am, I rushed the level - easily bypassing the handful of ice skating enemies, assuming the level would be long enough that I'd run out of time if I didn't keep the pace up. I ended up finishing it in less than a minute - and it's then that I realized that Chip 'N Dale 2 didn't care at all.

Immediately after that, Fat Cat opens "The Urn of the Pharaoh", which he promises is full of ghosts and will allow him to conquer the world (apparently both Fat Cat and Adolph Hitler have weird ideas about what ghosts will actually do for you). What follows is a totally absurd and out of place haunted house level, as if the one in TaleSpin wasn't enough. It's probably the best thing in the game, and likely based on the Haunted Mansion at Tokyo Disneyland - portraits are revealed to be full of skulls when the lights are extinguished, and some floating dog ghosts dive bomb you throughout the level. After you beat the boss here, a mummy ghost who retreats back into his urn, the entire subplot is dropped entirely.

Perhaps I'm just being way too tough on this one, but this represents and even bigger quality drop than the one between Magical Quest and The Great Circus Mystery. The original Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers remains fun, tough, and delightful to this day, and after completing this dispiriting slog of a sequel, I had to go back to play it to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. Avoid this one and play the superior original instead.

DuckTales 2 - June 1993

Duck Tales 2 was actually released a few months before Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers 2, but after playing through both I decided to flip their order here to illustrate a point. Chip 'N Dale 2 takes almost everything about the original game and reproduces it in vastly inferior form. Duck Tales 2 takes a solid classic original NES game and tweaks and improves almost everything about it. It's a difference between a swan dive into a pile of gold and Launchpad crashing into a mountain.

Back in Part One 1 suggested that DuckTales was never finished quite to its developer's liking, and if more proof were needed, here's DuckTales 2 - which appears to be, for all intents and purposes, the game that DuckTales was intended to be.

What's different? To begin with, there's a pre-game map screen that sets up the backstory - it's the same kind of situation, where Scrooge must pogo around various locations attempting to uncover hidden treasures. The original DuckTales had two secret treasures, which acted as something of a bonus. Here, each level contains multiple rooms which disguise giant treasure boxes which must be found and unlocked - some of them in incredibly obtuse locations. These treasure boxes contain six pieces of a torn up map - buy the seventh one from the game shop and you can play a secret level for "The Lost Treasure of McDuck". If you can do this, you can head out to Flintheart Glomgold's sunken ship and fight him to unlock the best ending of the game.

And yes, you heard that right - this game has a shop, where you can buy lives, continues, and more. The most important item you can buy in the shop is a Safe, which allows you to keep the money you collect as you play each level. That's right, unlike in the original game, when you die here, you lose your money - this adds a lot of strategy to the game, and gives you an incentive to return to conquered levels to farm for money. This explains why the original game allowed you to return to levels as well as leave the levels with Launchpad - a feature which never made any sense in DuckTales.

You no longer have to jump and press down to pogo - this itself already puts the game ahead of its predecessor, simply hold the jump button and bounce away. Scrooge can do more in this game - taken directly from Darkwing Duck are various rings bolted to the walls of levels, and Scrooge can hang off them with his cane - as the game progresses, you must become increasingly confident with this skill, as retains areas can only be passed using the rings. Instead of simply knocking blocks across the floor, in DuckTales 2 you must clamp your cane onto blocks and drag them across the floor - this sounds like a nonevent, but there's a good number of puzzles that use this.

Gyro Gearloose appears in the first few levels, providing Scrooge with cane "adapters" - a term stolen directly from Mega Man 4, because Capcom - which allow players to swing and pogo to break certain kinds of blocks. The game allows you to play levels in any order, but if you go to, say, the Pyramid right off the bat, you won't be able to collect the treasures because your "cane adapter" is too weak. Besides the hanging rings, Capcom found a way to cleverly include a variant of the famous "vanishing blocks" from Mega Man - none quite so tough as the puzzles in those games, thankfully. but super cool.

On top of that, the levels in DuckTales 2 are just plain better. There's plenty of enemies, but none of them are placed cheaply as in Darkwing Duck or DuckTales. There's fewer secret areas, but the ones that are here are hidden more insidiously - at one point you have to pass through an invisible wall, jump across a huge chasm on flying enemies, then drop down a hole that looks exactly like it will kill you - you land on top of the hidden treasure chest. It's scary, and fun, and rewards the most confident and adventuresome.



Besides secret rooms, there's puzzles - you must drop rocks into certain holes to drain water from the lower half of a level, decode an ancient riddle inside a pyramid, and tug a mirror hidden away at the top of a pyramid so the sun bounces off it and destroys the floor. That pyramid level is a doozy - I bounced around in there for almost an hour trying to find all of the treasures. You enter the pyramid by crossing shifting sands taken directly from Mega Man 4's Pharaoh Man, then head down a narrow corridor with a huge treasure chest at the end - before you can get there, you fall through a false floor! It's awesome, and scary, and if you spend enough time snooping around, you can find your way back to that treasure chest.

The bosses here aren't too different from those in DuckTales, but for some reason the ones in DuckTales 2 strike me as significantly more interesting - there's a sorcerer who is basically a superior replay of the Magica de Spell fight in the first game, and a golem made of rocks who you must break apart before attacking his heart with your cane. The Flintheart battle in this one comes off as exceptionally goofy due to a twist I won't spoil - it's stolen, again, direct from the Mega Man playbook, but darn is it fun.

There I go comparing this one to Mega Man again - but it's warranted. From the open exploration style, to the idea of going back into a level you already beat and exploring a new area, to the rain in the Bermuda triangle shipwreck that comes straight out of Toad Man's level - unlike Darkwing Duck, this is a Mega Man game that still makes time to have some ideas of its own. The gameplay is even better than the first one, and the game really makes you think, and strategize. I had to play the game through three times until I figured out how to get the secret level and the best ending!


This game is the Mega Man 2 of Disney/Capcom games, and probably the best of their 8 bit games, period. It does everything the first one did better, smarter, and bigger. Unlike Mega Man 2, it never really had a chance of being recognized, released as it did a year and a half after the Super Nintendo. It was released as part of the new Disney Afternoon Collection on Playstation 4 and XBOX, which mean it's more wide available right now than it ever has been.

DuckTales 2 really does typify the kind of thing I, as a reviewer, hope to stumble across when embarking on a series like this. Play it however you can.

Game Rankings So Far
01) DuckTales 2
02) Chip ' Dale Rescue Rangers
03) The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse
04) DuckTales
05) Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald
06) TaleSpin
07) The Great Circus Mystery
08) Darkwing Duck
09) The Little Mermaid
10) Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2
11) Mickey Mousecapade

It's summer, which means that "indoor kids" like me stay away from the hot sun and do things like play video games! Old video games. Disney video games. This summer at Passport to Dreams, I'm playing the Disney / Capcom classic games and writing about them. All of them.


Adventures in the Magic Kingdom - June 1990

While Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Florida, at the Passport to Dreams World HQ, I was playing NES. As always this 30 year old toy was still taking me away to a better place. It's a profound product, as iconic and - in its own way - as American as the hula hoop. The NES is an affordable passport, and when I was young, it was one of the only methods I had of visiting Disney World from my home in the northeast.

I’m speaking, of course, of Capcom’s legendary, infuriating Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. On a video game system chock a block with hallucinatory plumbers, sentient robots, Geiger-esque alien monsters, and eggplant wizards, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is truly, bizarrely memorable. A grab bag of the obtuse and the frustrating, in a time when just about there best way to revisit a Disney theme park was a hardcover book, a VHS tape, or a board game, Capcom delivered a game with a fairly accurate, reasonably engaging representation of the parks it was based on.

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a baffling creature. To begin with, the game is obviously based on Disneyland, but the cover of the game and the title uses the Walt Disney World terminology. Make no mistake - that Sleeping Beauty Castle back there behind the title screen. This game puts you in the shoes of an unidentified kid dressed as a Jungle Cruise skipper - khaki outfit, goofy hat, and all.

“You” are tasked with retrieving six silver keys which will open the door to the “Magic Castle” so the parade can begin. This takes the form of six mini games of varying levels of completeness and difficulty. Let's tour them in order of most infuriating to least.

Space Mountain - seems to be a reused tech demo from another game. Stars fly towards the viewer, creating a surprisingly effective illusion of depth - very impressive for the NES in 1990. In this game, Mickey announces that he will be your navigator and that you must reach “Star F”. This makes no sense at all until you olay the game a few times. At the bottom of the screen, a cursor will illuminate, and you must press this button on your control pad quickly - fail three times, and you’re kicked back outside. Besides “navigating”, asteroids and Star Destroyers - yes, Star Destroyers direct from Star Wars - will fly at you, requiring you to fire one of two lasers to destroy them.

This sounds simple, but navigating and firing lasers starts off unforgiving and only gets tougher from there. While the star field effect is cool, it’s hard to stick with this game long enough to make it compelling; the visuals never change. It can be beaten in a few minutes, but from a presentation perspective and with an eye on the difficulty, it’s hard to get too excited about Space Mountain.

Big Thunder Mountain - conceptually identical to Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain at least is interesting to look at and fun to play. It’s also over in less than a minute, which counts for something. This time Cowboy Mickey unhelpfully explains that you must arrive at “Station Four” - again, no explanation provided. The game is a cross between a coaster and a pachinko game, with runaway trains crossing railroad switches and avoiding rocks. One of the nice things about this game is that it’s just simple enough that by the time you’re ready to give up on it, you manage to beat it.

Trivia Game - the cheapest of the six games, the trivia game at least doesn’t force you to start over when you mess up. In this one, you have to walk around the park talking to various guests, who will ask you Disney trivia questions. It goes on about twice as long as you feel like it should, and at one point, one of the great controller - throwing moments in NES games occurs, where for no reason the dog who has the key attached to his collar (yes, Pluto) runs away because “You scared him”. The next person asks you three extra hard questions, because of course they do. By far the most memorable aspect of this game is how incredibly strange the questions are - seemingly taken direct from Dave Smith’s Ultimate Disney Trivia with an eye towards being as frustrating as possible. Are you noticing a trend with Adventures in the Magic Kingdom?

Autopia - turns out to be a fairly fully featured version of games like Spy Hunter and Bump n’ Jump. Maybe the most fully enjoyable game in the set, it’s none the less pretty tough - requiring memorization of where to land after jumps, and the ability to brake quickly to cross moving bridges. At least it only requires that you get to the end - no real racing, in other words.

Pirates of the Caribbean - an ambitious, beautifully visualized homage to the attraction, Pirates seems to be inspired by Konami’s The Goonies, a kick-and-punch platform game for the MSX and Famicom that really has nothing to do with the film it’s based on. Avoiding pirates, traveling through skeleton infested tunnels, and jumping along burning buildings here would be more fun if the controls were less sluggish.



Did you know that Adventures in the Magic Kingdom gives you a power-up screen? If you press 'Select', you can "cash in" all those stars you've been collecting to give yourself an extra heart or freeze all of the enemies onscreen. This makes the game significantly more manageable, and would have really saved my butt as a kid, except I didn't know about it, because I always rented this game and never had access to a manual. Since it's the only place in the game with unaltered Japanese grammar - "fight!" would be "gambare", which means something more like "overcome the obstacles" - I kind of suspect that the English localizers didn't know about this either.

Power up screen or no, at least the Pirates level gives you a few hit points before you have to start over - although they do you few favors, really. The longest and maybe toughest event in the game, this masterpiece of frustration is only outdone by the next level..

The Haunted Mansion - the Haunted Mansion level is this game, simply put. The most graphically inventive and varied of the levels in the game, it’s also perverseley, intensely frustrating, like a Mega Man boss level from hell. Game designer “Bamboo” - really Yoshinori Takenaka, who designed DuckTales - really went all out here. From the introductory screen where skulls jump up from behind tombstones, to dodging dancing ghosts, to the moment where that beautiful 8-bit representation of the Disneyland Mansion comes into view, this entire level induces rage and awe in equal measure.

There’s the floating chairs and self-playing organ at the middle of the stage, and the clever riff on the Hitch-hiking ghosts mirrors seen as you enter - reused in The Great Circus Mystery, but far creepier here. Near the end of the first floor, there’s what looks like a potted plant sitting on a window sill, but wait for lightning to flash outside the windows and you’ll see it’s actually a ghoul peering inside! The Haunted Mansion level is full of cool stuff like that, and it’s arguably the best and most iconic of one of Capcom’s favored level design tropes, the haunted house: see DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Chip n’ Dale 2, The Great Circus Mystery, TaleSpin - heck, Resident Evil. Shortly before the creation of Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, Capcom headed up a survival RPG based on the 1989 Japanese horror flick Sweet Home and created the whole overstuffed genre. One of the most famous Japan-only NES games, Sweet Home is often considered to be a precursor to Resident Evil, but it’s more like just another game in Capcom’s parade of horror houses.

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is maybe not a great game, but it’s an impossible to ignore one. It’s fascinating and infuriating in equal measure, and even if that doesn’t per se make it good, it does make it indelible. Players who thrive on an unreasonably lopsided challenge, or just those like me crazy enough to want to play it to visit Disneyland inside their NES, hold it in high regard.

But what of the rest of the game? Why does this game exist? What’s the deal with the weird trivia questions? Why is the main character Australian? These are the kinds of questions that haunted 90s Disney kids, myself included, and even if I can’t pluck the heart out of every mystery, I can, at least, answer some long-standing questions.

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is unique in the Capcom-Disney output, dominated as it was by movie and TV show tie-ins. The one noteworthy exception was the Magical Quest trilogy, itself aimed more at a Japanese audience than an American one. Magical Quest, in fact, may have been developed to allow Capcom to profit from their game development inside their native country - as I’ve noted before, things like Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin and indeed Adventures in the Magic Kingdom itself were never released over there. So what’s the deal with this one game, not based on an animated property, but a theme park in either Anaheim or Orlando?

Darlene Lacey, photo by Nintendo Player

One answer may be found with Darlene Lacey, the localization producer for Disney in the US. I’ve already mentioned her in my piece on DuckTales, but Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is her magnum opus - she’s the one who came up with the trivia game and chose the questions. As Lacey recalled to Nintendo Player, "..It was my idea to add the trivia in order to quickly and easily boost the presence of Disney in the game. It just took a few phone calls to obtain some official Disney trivia from one of the departments. It provided more than what I needed, so I picked a range of topics from various time periods. I wanted the little kids to have to either guess and learn or ask their parents. That’s just the sadist in me."

As for the weird mix of Disneyland and Magic Kingdom seen in the game: "The game was already named by the time I had it assigned to me, so I wasn’t privy to any discussions regarding this. However, it was common for Disney to try to connect themes and create a sense of consistency across the product lines... [...] We didn’t want to make it appear as though this was literally what the California Disneyland looked like, or that this was the extent of what was in the park, or that these sorts of activities might actually occur there. So, we just blended some things together and gave the setting some slight interpretations."

Lacey also comments that the trivia game was concocted to replace a Jungle Cruise level, and that the trivia game was used to make the playing area feel more like a Disney theme park and less like a generic place. I would have liked to see that Jungle Cruise level, personally. Elements were also removed from each level - The Haunted Mansion has a cat, floating silverware, a niche for a bust, and a crystal ball, indicating it was probably intended to be longer.

Each level also had a text screen where you don't get a silver key, but some other kind of item. Text remaining in the code, including "Adventure in Magic Kingdom by Bamboo" and "Saturday's Morning is Morning Salad" indicate that this game was likely programmed by just one guy, and he ran out of time on this one.

But it's when we start asking about the weird Australian kid that things get interesting. There doesn't seem to be any information about him anywhere. Lacey herself thought he was weird too, but much like players, eventually he grew on her:

"He was already in the game when I received my first EPROM, and I thought, “Well, this strange little boy needs to go.” I think he came about because people from other countries always think of Americans as wearing cowboy hats. I discussed this issue with various people in the office and tried to think of a better substitute, but the longer the kid stayed in the game, his weird charm started to grow on me."

So perhaps this kid was just this game's equivalent of "This house has an illusion wall" - a bit of weirdness left in by the Japanese developer. But the more I thought about it, the less likely this seemed. Not counting the repackaged Mickey Mousecapade, this was only Capcom's third effort for Disney, and given how cautious and conservative Disney had been with their video game properties, I can't see the mouse house handing over the reins to Capcom to do just anything.

It's easy to forget just how early this one was: it came out after DuckTales and Chip n' Dale but before Little Mermaid. In fact, this game was early enough that it was on store shelves before the launch of The Disney Afternoon - DuckTales and Rescue Rangers were still being shown on local TV stations as stand alone shows. The fact that the title and character were already decided on before Lacey got to see the game was suggestive.

If left to their own devices, wouldn't Capcom have just made Mickey the star of the game? Isn't that the obvious choice? That's what developer GRC thought when they made a Tokyo Disneyland game for the Super Famicom: the Japan-only Mickey no Tokyo Disneyland Daibouken. Where did this Australian kid come from?

The simplest explanation would be that the concept, title and character came from an unproduced television show, wouldn't it? Disney in those days produced "pilot" movies for their TV shows which would then be split up into episodes for syndication: DuckTales' was called "The Treasure of the Golden Suns".

 Just because Disney paid for a pilot, doesn't mean a show would follow: hard on the success of The Adventures of the Gummi Bears and The Wuzzles, Disney paid Fred Wolf Animation to produce an 45 minute pilot film for their new concept, Disney's Fluppy Dogs. Yet another stand alone concept patterned on Care Bears, The Fluppy Dogs bombed hard on Thanksgiving Day, 1986, which eventually prompted Disney to reconsider their approach and decamp to more traditionally Disney material with DuckTales.

I'm not the first to suggest this, but was Adventures in the Magic Kingdom intended to be a television show, and somehow only the game was actually released? It appears so, although proving it isn't easy. There's a few whispers and suggestions floating around the web, but most of them seem to descend from a website called the "TMS History Page" - written in Italian. It's an impressive piece of research, and it's old enough to be hosted on the Itialian version of Xoom. Remember Xoom?

TMS, or Tokyo Movie Shinsha, was one of the most important Animation-For-Hire companies in Japan. Besides producing anime for their native country like Akira and Golgo 13, starting with Inspector Gadget and Heathcliff, TMS produced some of the finest traditionally animated shows for Western viewers of their era. Disney used them exclusively until the creation of Walt Disney Animation Japan in 1989; the best looking episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures, The Real Ghostbusters, and Batman: The Animated Series came out of TMS. As if to tease at some kind of casual link between TMS and Capcom, they also produced Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumber Land, an animated freakout which was cherished nightmare fuel for my age group. It was also a terrific Capcom game, one of the console's best B-titles.

The TMS history page says, translated from Italian:

"From the Disney / TMS partnership, WUZZLES, GUMMI-BEARS, DUCKTALES and WINNIE THE POOH were born, as well as some unrealized television series such as MAGIC KINGDOM."

Interestingly, the English version of the same page offers a slightly different take on the material:

"The first work of Disney/TMS agreement was THE WUZZLES. A third pilot-film was completed by a Korean staff, but it was rejected. The Japanese were reluctant to teach them all the techniques and the expedients of the animation process."

The Wuzzles only ran for 13 episodes, and neither Gummi Bears nor The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh had a multi-part pilot, per the episode lists on Wikipedia. This means that the third pilot film, after DuckTales'"Treasure of the Golden Suns" and Rescue Rangers'"To The Rescue", would have been TMS'"Magic Kingdom", apparently animated in Korea and rejected by Disney. This has to be why the game is called Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, and where the weird kid comes from, and why he was always in the game from the start.

In a way, it's almost better than it worked out this way. As usual in life, knowing the answers makes the questions less interesting. Capcom's Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a time capsule of frustration and weirdness. And while it may not be as good as the best games we've covered in Summer Game Camp, it takes up a vast amount of imaginative real estate where the venn diagram of Disney kids and console gamers overlap.

So... who wants to hunt down the TMS Magic Kingdom movie?

Let's find it, people

Final Rankings

So, fifteen games later, where do we stand in the rankings? After some deliberation, I decided to slot Adventures in the Magic Kingdom just above Aladdin - in this case, pure weirdness pushed it higher than the center of the pack, but its difficulty and shortness still kept it below the gorgeous Magical Quest 3.

I also decided to move Little Mermaid up to spot number 10, out of the increasingly congested rear of the line-up.  Here's where it now stands:

01) DuckTales 2
02) Chip ' Dale Rescue Rangers
03) The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse
04) DuckTales
05) Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald
06) Adventures in the Magic Kingdom
07) Aladdin
08) TaleSpin
09) Goof Troop
10) The Little Mermaid
11) The Great Circus Mystery
12) Darkwing Duck
13) Bonkers
14) Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2
15) Mickey Mousecapade

One reason I like this order is because these fifteen games just so happen to break cleanly up into three groups of five which roughly correspond with their relative value. Regardless of the actual numerical ranking - which is always a dumb way to do things - I suggest we look at the rankings falling into these groups:

The Hall of Fame - Games which are responsible for the legendary reputation of the Disney/Capcom collaboration
Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers, DuckTales, DuckTales 2, The Magical Quest 1 & 3

The Rental Shelf - Fun, well designed games worth checking out
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, Aladdin (SNES), Goof Troop, The Little Mermaid, TaleSpin

Curiosities - For the truly dedicated only
Bonkers, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Darkwing Duck, The Great Circus Mystery, Mickey Mousecapade

Disney fans and video game players seem to share a smaller slice of a venn diagram than I expected - I was surprised how many people were asking me if I was going to cover Virtual Magic Kingdom, which is a very different kind of experience than the sort of games I covered here. But with emulators and retro revivals becoming the norm, if I inspire somebody to replay DuckTales for the first time in 20 years, or some younger reader to thrill to Magical Quest for the first time, then I will consider it an honor.

The Year of Summer Game Camp

Every so often, especially in times when Disney is moving slowly, as they have been lately, when I don't have another solution at hand for writing something brilliant about the Haunted Mansion, I do something that usually fails: I try to diversify this blog.

Back in 2013 I tried several essays on film history and tied them back into theme parks, and there was fairly little interest. In 2014, I attempted suicide-via-old Disney movies, in the arduous The Age Of Not Believing series. That series did okay, and I think has some of my better stand-alone essays, but I also learned that click-throughs and comments only materialize when people have an already existing interest in what I was writing about. In The Age of Not Believing, people would show up for The Happiest Millionaire, or Robin Hood, but on off weeks when I was laboring through forgotten nonsense like Napoleon & Samantha, interest was hard to come by. In this way I learned that my historian's appetite for wanting to know the whole story was something of a liability.

And so, by Spring of this year, I was ready for something new, and had always harbored an interest in covering the old Capcom games on NES. In an era when 80s nostalgia is cresting, and DuckTales has received a flashy reboot, I was willing to sacrifice some blog numbers to find out how many of you were interested in this.

On one hand, the results aren't too surprising: the weeks packed with lesser known titles were less popular than the heavy-hitters, but throughout, I've seen comments, links and overall engagement with this subject much higher than it was during The Age Of Not Believing. It seems like not everyone wants to talk about Aladdin on the SNES, but those of you who do, really want to.

Personally, I enjoyed writing these little reviews much more than I expected to. It's not always a bad thing to stretch your legs after years of pacing along on the theme park treadmill, and for those of you who stuck around to see what on earth I liked about these old games, I hope you were entertained and informed. And, just in time for the official start of fall, I close the book on Summer Game Camp.


Should I try another Summer Series? Is there a body of Disney-related media you'd like to see covered?

Today, we're going to go on something of a side-quest from our usual BGM music discussions here, to cover some ground we've trod before. But it's such an odd topic, and so little is known about it, that I thought it'd be useful here to combine everything I know into one easy to reference post. I'm speaking of those mysterious "Bridge" music loops used at Magic Kingdom in the very early days.

It seems that at one point, Magic Kingdom used specially created pieces of music to play in very specific areas to "bridge" the themed areas of the park. Very little is known about these, except that they existed, and a handful have come to light in the last few years.

That's the kind of generalities that send histotrically minded folks like me running for our salt shakers, and indeed my first reaction to the idea of bridge loops was a similar "very interesting, but only if I could prove it!". I believe Mike Cozart was the first to point these out to me, although it took a long time for me to understand exactly what they were. Well, here's everything I know.

One of the frustrating aspects of these loops is that they were more of a feature than a rule - it seems as if Tomorrowland had no music playing around its entrance, which perhaps makes sense given that area's huge waterfalls which should have been the focus of everyone's attention. However, here as everywhere, it's worth pointing out that even had music been playing, it's possible that it would have been very hard to hear anyway. I dig into this problem a bit deeper in my Early Music of Tomorrowland post, but it's important to remember that we are not dealing with absolutes here.


One piece of the puzzle that began to change my thinking about these mysterious "bridge music" pieces was the revelation that Disneyland had the same thing, as far back possibly as Walt's era. If you think about it carefully, there's one very famous "bridge loop" attributed to Walt - the recording of "When You Wish Upon A Star" that plays inside Sleeping Beauty Castle. What is this but a piece of music that "bridges" two areas?

And if we accept that Sleeping Beauty Castle played music around its main entrance, then it's not too unreasonable to assume that other areas did, too. Disneyland music historian Chris Lyndon has recreated severalof these minute long snippets at his website, and both his recollection of them and the music used for them definitely passes the 'smell test' in terms of arguing for a vintage date.

If we go deeper down the rabbit hole, we can even find remnants of these loops still in use at Disneyland today. Those who purchased the 2005 "A Musical History of Disneyland" set may remember an inexplicable version of "Battle Cry of Freedom" attributed to Frontierland that even the liner notes seem to be at a loss to explain. As it turns out, this was part of a loop which replaced the original Frontierland bridge loop recreated by Chris Lyndon - composed entirely of music recorded for Ken Burns' The Civil War documentary series!


So, what can we say about Magic Kingdom's bridge loops? Well, if you think about it carefully, there's still three of them in use at the park today. There's the music that plays inside Cinderella Castle, the music that plays outside the Mad Tea Party, and the music that plays under the Columbia Harbour House between Liberty Square and Fantasyland.

It's this last one that's most instructive in terms of setting expectations here. Modern theme park music is pervasive, properly balanced, and enveloping; the very early park music tracks were not. Very often they just played out of a few randomly placed speakers in case anybody happened to notice them. Disney was still inventing this as they went along; the first theme parks with really consistent musical backgrounds were EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland.

Here's the Magic Kingdom bridge loops we know (a little) about.



Adventureland Bridge - This was a Jack Wagner loop comprised of Exotica music with the sounds of exotic bird calls layered in. I was able to confirm this during the creation of Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World thanks to a live recording provided by Dave McCormick and track assistance by John Charles Watson on TikiCentral.Com. As it stands, we have just the single track I was able to identify from Dave's live recordings - we have no idea how long the loop was.

This track was seemingly suggested by Imagineer Randy Bright and would have been installed sometime in 1972. It played at the bridge to Adventureland, and also in the exterior seating areas of the Adventureland Veranda.

Liberty Square Bridge - We do have what I believe is a portion of the authentic Liberty Square music from 1971, thanks to Mike Cozart - for lots of information on this, check out my post here.

What is not known is where this music played. I've heard live recording taken in Liberty Square in the 70s, and I can't hear any background music at all - it's possible there simply was none until the Buddy Baker general BGM was installed in 1980. As a result, it's possible that the 1971 "fife and drum" music played only at the entrance to the area, where it would have been easy enough to hide in a few speakers. I make no claims as to the accuracy of this - it's just a guess.


Columbia Harbour House Bridge - has presumably played the music that plays inside the Harbour House since the loop was installed. The current Harbour House loop is an expansion of the original with a now stupidly expensive CD entitled The Wind in the Rigging: A New England Voyage.

I believe that the original version of the Harbour House loop was simply the music recorded for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Fantasyland, i.e., the current loop minus the "Wind in the Rigging" tracks. The hour-long version of the CHH loop, still used today, was created for the exterior of Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland Paris in 1992.

Fantasyland Side Entrance - This short loop played along those side entrances to Fantasyland from Tomorrowland and Liberty Square that lead up alongside Cinderella Castle. The castle interior played a vocal version of "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes" from the Cinderella soundtrack LP. Up until this year (!) it was not known that this short 5 minute loop even existed.

As it turns out, it was captured by How Bowers in 1994. By the time How got to it, it was playing from only one speaker, over on the Tomorrowland side. Composed entirely of instrumental tracks from Cinderella, the extreme brevity of this loop strongly suggests it was there from the start before slowly being forgotten and fading out in the 90s. No music plays in these areas today.


Unknown / Likely Lost Tracks
Frontierland - may have had its own bridge loop, or may not. Jack Wagner's early Frontierland loop has survived, and a later loop has not, although Michael Sweeney has reconstructed at least some of it.

Crystal Palace - supposedly played its music in the walkway surrounding the restaurant entrance, which also qualifies it as the "bridge" track. Sadly, the Crystal Palace music of the era seems to be entirely lost.

Plaza Pavilion - also known as the Tomorrowland Noodle Station, this restaurant presumably had its own interior music loop which would have acted as a "bridge" between Tomorrowland and Main Street on the south side.

The transition between Caribbean Plaza and Frontierland, and the transition between the Hub and Tomorrowland, seem to have not had their own "bridge" loops for whatever reason.

It's little scraps of evidence, little sub-sub pieces of stories, but then again that's what's always interested me about Magic Kingdom - it's a big, and old, place. Did you know that the Tomorrowland Speedway used to play F1 engine noises from speakers hidden in bushes around the track? Did you know that many of the Main Street shops used to have their own cassette tape of music? What happened to those creaky floorboard sounds that used to play in Haunted Mansion?

It's not all recoverable, but sometimes it's in the little touches that point us towards what designers were after. These weird little transitional loops should be remembered, too.

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.

"Muzak and mood music [...] emit music the way the twentieth century is equipped to receive it. They have so successfully blended genres and redefined music appreciation that they have become the music world's Esperanto." - Joseph Lanza

Some time ago I was at a thrift store, hovering over an especially unpromising stack of vintage records, when I had an uncomfortable realization.

Over the years, first from working at Disney, then writing this blog and researching historical music loops, has warped my musical taste. I'm much more likely to spin a piece of background music to relax - Epcot's Innoventions music loop, for instance, or perhaps George Bruns' Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii. After a tough day at work, I want to settle into a groove with a drink and some mellow music.

As I stood there contemplating one of these dog eared LPs, I had one of those horrible moments of lucidity that makes one doubt her sanity: I was shopping for easy listening music. I was excited to find elevator music. I went home and began to cue up video after video on YouTube of the most treacly, canned music possible - and I loved it. Theme parks had made me love Muzak.

Gradually I began to wonder if that was such a bad thing after all. Background music cassettes from K-Mart went viral just a few years ago; a cursory search online reveals a raft of websites dedicated to preserving the background music of the past. And yet, theme parks are one of the few places left where you can experience true background music; walk into an average Starbucks or Waffle House and they're playing a sleeker, streamlined kind of BGM that's entirely popular recordings. It's sort of startling to realize that humans as recently as 80 years ago lived in a world where music wasn't constantly blaring out of every ceiling; what's so bad about a preference for music that's atmospheric and relaxing instead of popular hits of the past 20 years?

So I thought I'd take a quick look through the history of moodsong in the 20th century. At first blush this seems to be a tangent for this blog, but the links between postwar elevator music, social engineering, and Walt Disney run deeper than you think - once you go about digging them up, of course. It's a story that stretches over the better part of a century, world wars, and wrenching social changes, all events that can be bridged by strings echoing out of a tinny speaker in the ceiling.


Music To Read By

It was the early 1920s, and George O. Squier had an idea. George had spent a lifetime as an inventor and tinkerer for the US Army - he had invented the method for carrying multiple conversations over a single wire, allowing for the rise of a functional national telephone system, and had flown in one of the Wright Brothers' earliest aircrafts. Now, he wanted to apply his way with wires to send music to homes, offices, factories, and ballrooms across the country. George took the final two letters from "Kodak" and applied it to "music" to end up with "Muzak".

Squier was competing for an increasingly congested marketplace. The original American - which is to say, industrialized and populist - source of background music was almost certainly the radio. A boom market in the 1920s, by the 30s the radio was ubiqutious in American homes - it's been said that if you walked down the street on a hot summer evening during the broadcast of Amos 'n Andy or The Fibber McGee and Molly Show, you could hear the entire program from the open windows without missing a word. In the places where average Americans congregated - cafes, diners, and soda fountains, the radio rapidly gave life a distinct rhythm. And while today we think immediately of the radio stars of old, the fact is that the popular evening radio programs were but a tiny slice of an 18 hour broadcast day - a broadcast day made up of lots and lots of music.

Experiments in the teens and twenties discovered that those early crystal radio sets were best at transmitting a very narrow range of sound. The subtle buzz and hum of early radio transmissions could be counteracted by stringed instruments - especially those played overlapping, in a high frequency range. While George Squire was asking apartment owners to pay several dollars a month for subscription to his wired music services, a crystal radio set could play nearly nonstop all morning and night after the purchase of just one attractive unit that complemented the washing machine and icebox.

Unauthorized use of commercial 78 records, or electronic bootlegs of the same, were so rampant amongst small, rural radio stations that record companies began to stamp "Not For Broadcast" on their record labels. But even the mainstream radio stations of the 20s and 30s had off hours to fill with content, and in-house orchestras were kept gently sawing away between 11 pm and 1 am in stations like Chicago and New York in programs called Music To Read By, Time For Dreams, or Nightcap. The sounds of soft classical music became the defining sound of progress and modernity for a generation.

These early crystal radios were AM only; the superior FM format lumbered along inauspiciously, copying the content of the AM stations until World War II, when political pressure from radio manufacturers and increasing demand for television airwaves caused the US Government to move all of the FM stations further up the dial. This rendered obsolete in a stroke nearly every FM radio in the country. FM stations already just about on the rocks needed to adapt quickly or fold; they began offering their services to two symbols of modernity in urban America: the department store and the self-service grocer. Merchants found that the music helped move product and added and aura of prestige. In later years this format would come to be known as BM Music.

BM - Beautiful Music - stuck around for an astonishingly long time and has never really gone away - do a quick search and you'll find a small station probably not far from you who still broadcasts it. BM stations often ended up as a smaller operation inside of a larger radio studio, handled by less experienced operators. Free of commercials or announcements, BM stations churned away silently in the backdrop of modern life in major cities around the country. All across the country, businesses sprouted up like mushrooms with names like The Storecast Corporation of America, Store Radio, and Point-O-Salecast. Muzak's first major success came in arranging, recording, and selling music to BM stations who were becoming an increasingly legitimate and organized business.


Social Engineered Sound Scapes

George O Squier had died in 1934, a decade before Muzak's full ascendancy. In comparison to the wireless music provided by BM stations, all through the 40s Muzak had differentiated themselves by only offering wired music - the fidelity and reliability being said to be much better. Muzak also refused to be content with playing bootlegged light classical music - they recorded their own versions in house, carefully arranged to be as pleasant and unobtrusive as possible.

As early as 1935, Muzak was using red, vinyl discs running at 33 1/3 RPM, making them more or less the inventors of the LP. They also began to target their music to specific periods of the day - marches for breakfast, tangoes at lunch, light jazz at cocktail hour, then classics at dinner and dancing  till midnight. Through the 30s, Muzak had been bolstered by a raft of social studies published by such outlets as the Stevens Institute of Technology who found that "pleasant, functional music" improved worker productivity and happiness. The constant hum of nonintrusive music had become a welcome addition to a world plagued by depressions and worldwide wars.


(Yellow, Green, Red and Blue were Muzak's four programs - Red was intended for small restaurants, Blue and Yellow serviced retail, and Green for home use.)

By the end of World War II, Muzak Corporation had hit upon the concept of "Stimulus Progression". As American culture converged towards an illusion of stability in the late 40s and early 50s, Muzak claimed that workers were happier and more efficient while background music was playing, and that said music was more effective when played in 15 minute chunks, then silenced for another 15.

Muzak installations that offered the Stimulus Progression package came in two varieties: music for factories and music for offices. A 400 hZ signal broadcast over the wires separating the 4 fifteen-minute chunks would tell the office Muzak installations to remain muted during the more upbeat factory installations, or vice-versa. But a company doesn't go from a name brand to a description on novelty alone; you can't go from Xerox to 'xerox' by accident. With Stimulus Progression. Muzak hit exactly the tenor of their time.



By the 50s, except for that annoying Rock and Roll, American taste was flattening out. The generation that had fought a great depression and two World Wars wanted things to be simple, to be pleasant for once, and a growing peacetime economy and a technology boom promised a happy, prosperous America from sea to shining sea. What could be more pleasant, more productive, more futuristic and modern than pleasing, scientifically selected mood music?

What got forgotten in the Baby Boom generation's rush to tear down all of their parent's idols is that many people genuinely liked the sound of this stuff. The seeds planted back in the 1930s with the radio constantly cranking out it light classical tunes eventually flowered in the 50s into an entire genre: Easy Listening. Go to any old record store and there they will be: hundreds upon hundreds of easy listening records, bought back in the 50s and 60s by Mom and Pop while junior held his nose. Muzak went mainstream, and emerged on the other side as muzak - and ended up on the home stereo.

Indeed, a key part of an hostesses' job was selecting exactly the correct record to play on the newly behemoth home record player consoles, which could play five or six LPs stacked up in order - a full evening's worth of mood music. In the era where the home cocktail party or backyard luau was the social glue that held together a generation, the tasteful background of cocktail tunes was an essential skill.

"The musically aware hostess no longer allows the butler, or her husband, to sling records on to the turntable in a haphazard way... she now supplies a ready made background of elegant and suitable music to smooth the evening into one long feast of pleasure and unshattered nerves." - Liner Notes, Velvet by the Frank Chaksfield Orchestra

The boom economy begat imitators. Seeburg, who started off manufacturing orchestrions, had moved into jukeboxes by the 50s and eventually released the Seeburg 1000 BMS1, the Cadillac of background music equipment. It was sized and styled to replace the old crystal radio haunting shelves in diners across the country.

Each Seeburg 1000 played specially-sized records at 16 1/2 RPM; the device would play the underside of a record, drop it down, then play the top. The device would hold over 25 records, each holding 40 minutes of music, for about 16 hours total, and could automatically repeat the process. Every four months, a new shipment of five records would arrive, and five records would have to be removed and sent back to Seeburg for destruction. Like Muzak, Seeburg offered a number of subscription "plans" intended for various settings, which they called Basic, Mood, and Instrumental. The strictly enforced obsolescence of the music discs and the styling of the unit itself makes the Seeburg 1000 highly collectible today, thankfully, interested parties can stream the music online for free at Seeburg1000.com.

By the same time, radio stations had moved away from records and towards the new endlessly repeating, automatically cueing Fidelipac cassette tapes, a kind of precursor to the 8-track. Fidelipac tapes were a single length of magnetic tape which spooled around inside its caddy endlessly; while best for voice announcements, it could also be played slowly enough and theoretically made large enough to allow for background music application.

The most impressive of these tape systems was the Cantata 700, manufactured by 3M of Scotch Tape fame. Consisting or two giant tape reels spinning around in a massive walnut box, 3M sold the device and tape outright to businesses instead of offering the subscription plan that BM Stations, Muzak, and Seeburg relied on and saw the device fail as a result.

That was in 1965, where the market was already overstuffed enough to see new options floundering. But cultural changes were underway - rock and roll came back, and now it was politically charged and experimental. The lightly relaxing music which once connnoted sophistication and modernity was the squarest of the square; just about the most damning thing you can say about any piece of music, then or now, is to called it elevator music - to call it Muzak.



The Decline of Background Music

Muzak and Seeburg continued trudging along, offering their subscription plans through the 70s and 80s while the various tape machines began to degrade, fall apart, and eventually be replaced by... the radio. Popular radio stations fled the AM band, crowding out BM stations. Grocery and department stores, accustomed to their FM receivers, kept playing the new FM program of popular hits. A few BM stations moved back to the AM band, but most just closed. After 8-track, after compact cassette, it was no longer classy or special to walk into a store and hear music playing - it was just something that happened everywhere.

In 1968, a company called Yesco began offering what they called "foreground music" - popular music of the day, intended to appeal to young Boomers. By the 80s, the writing was on the wall, and Muzak struck a deal with Yesco and began distributing their music programs through the existing Muzak channels. A few years later, both companies were purchased and merged. Yesco's corporate officers and headquarters ate up Muzak, which continued to do business only as a name - their entire strategy was oriented around Yesco's "foreground music".

In the 70s, Brian Eno sat in an airport for a few hours waiting for a flight and was annoyed by the canned background music. In 1978 he produced Ambient 1: Music For Airports, a mellow, experimental soundscape intended to relax listeners. Rolling Stone missed the point entirely, squawking that you could only appreciate the music by listening to it. In 1986, during the Muzak-Yesco merger, Ted Nugent, back then most associated with arena rock, made a public stunt of offering to buy Muzak for $10 million in order to destroy it. In the minds of many, Muzak, which effectively no longer existed, was still associated with inane social programming.

And yet, throughout all of this, wasn't there something unacknowledged just below the surface? In the 50s easy listening boom, records by Jackie Gleason, Henry Mancini, Les Baxter and Martin Denny pictured rigorously sexualized, perfectly up-do'd women staring temptingly out from the record sleeves. Compare this to the cover of any Mantovani album and perhaps we begin to wonder if the marketing of the Les Baxters of the world were perhaps overcompensating for something. Since the 50s, those who rail and rally against the constant musical backdrop of mood song have danced around what would otherwise seem to be their core complaint. Don't their protestations ultimately come down to the music being a little wimpy, a little emotional, a little... feminine?

Women were the ones who heard, supported, listened to, curated, purchased and played the genre we now know as easy listening. It was women who were home all through the 30s to get the taste for the light classical constantly blaring out from the crystal set. Women supported and enjoyed the addition of background music to take the drudgery out of factory jobs as they flooded the workforce during the war effort. And the modern cocktail hostess, armed with a fleet of up to date wonder devices like the washing machine and self-cleaning oven, provided the social lubricant of the 50s and 60s with her easy h'orderves and jello molds made with convenient, shelf-stable products. Mantovani, Liberace, Frank Chaksfield, Ray Conniff and Lawrence Welk played music that appealed to women, and there may still be a sublimated hint of sexism in today's detestation of the genre.

Today, aural relaxation techniques include everything from nature sounds to ambient music. Pop hits, perhaps from several decades ago, are more likely to be heard at workplaces than peppy little marches. The few businesses that do play light classical or jazz music do so in a deliberate attempt to differentiate themselves. While in the American lexicon "muzak" is today synonymous with any sort of canned music, you'll have to look pretty hard to find any genuine examples.

That is, except at Disneyland. Just as it won't take much online searching to bring up people who insist that background music contains "subliminal messages", Disneyland has always reflected the surface optimism and social engineering of the 1950s that some have always found so sinister. In 1957, Muzak was even purchased outright by Jack Wrather, television mogul and owner of the Disneyland Hotel. It's probably a safe bet that Disneyland used Muzak's "aural wallpaper" in several areas around the park in the early days.

Walt Disney was one of those twentieth century conservatives who supported large scale effort to improve the lives of the middle class. Born of blue collar cities at the turn of the 20th century, the product of the hangover from 19th century utopian fiction and the fallout of the great depression, Walt believed in massive public and private efforts like the building of the Eisenhower interstate system. I'm sure his EPCOT City would have played wall-to-wall Muzak inside its covered downtown, apartment complexes, monorails, and Peoplemovers.

It seems that, at least inside Disney, the association between a continuously flowing musical accompaniment and an automated, futuristic world never quite went away - EPCOT Center opened in 1982 with an entire, carefully orchestrated and custom recorded aural soundscape intended to set to mood. The styles ranged from bombastic at the entrance to ambient outside Journey into Imagination to unambiguously Easy Listening in World Showcase.

In the late 60s, Disney hired ex-radio DJ Jack Wagner to act as their permanent in house background music specialist. Jack's job was to clear the rights to and compile music into pleasing musical programs to play in the park - essentially, nothing but Disney's version of the "Stimulus Progression" concept. Prior to his assignment, Jack always maintained that "you'd go down Main Street and they'd be playing '60s musical hits like 'Mrs. Robinson'", which sure sounds an awful lot like something Muzak would have provided. But the story of Jack Wagner and his contributions to theme park background music are a story for another article.

While malls, grocery stores, department stores, and workplaces were switching over to the invasive hum of the radio, Disney held true to their convictions and background music eventually became an accepted facet of theme parks. In the 90s, Universal Studios Florida played pop hits from popular movies - none of that lame easy listening stuff! But their second theme park, the beautiful Islands of Adventure, had a much more traditional theme park musical background, setting the stage for their attempt to out-Disney Disney. The Port of Entry BGM remains one of the finest ever created.

Background Music and Moodsong in Context

Today, we are all music curators. The iPod taught everyone how tough it is to create the perfect playlist, and the disastrous effect following up Duke Ellington with Radiohead can have. What's more, theme parks are one of the only places left where you can watch background music still working. You can watch people pick up the pace in tune to the music on Main Street, or take on solemn, attentive postures inside the Hall of Presidents. It may be subliminal messaging or social programming, but it also works and makes people happy, which is what these places are all about.

There's never going to be consensus about background music, because there are as many people as there are options. But, you know, Muzak, or specifically Yesco - now called Mood Media - are still around, and they still sell sounds and even smells to retail chains. The "Muzak Principle" is still a sound one - consider how the teenagers who frequent, say, Abercrombie & Fitch would feel about those clothes if Garth Brooks were playing in the stores. Or how the patrons of Bass Pro Shops would feel if Run-DMC were playing at the entrance.

Meanwhile, certain sectors of the 50s and 60s Easy Listening genre have managed to shed their toxic reputation and bounce back to respectability. Thanks to his hipster image, Frank Sinatra has never really stopped being cool, but it's easier to find people enthusiastic about Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, or Nat King Cole than it was even twenty years ago. The re-emergence of cocktail culture in the United States has lifted a great number of moodsong purveyors of the 40s and 50s, and the subsequent re-emergence of Tiki as a popular drinking subculture means that exotica music is back in a big way. If you enjoy Percy Faith when he's orchestrating faux-Oriental nonsense under the auspices of a midcentury idol, you'll probably enjoy him in other contexts, too.

Ironically, the concept of background music may be making a resurgence. For many, just getting through a week is getting tougher and tougher, and any kind of stress-free outlet is appreciated. Next time you've had a hard day at work, try playing some Henry Mancini or Mantovani when you get home. It may not be chic, but it still works if you let it.

In 2015, Downtown Disney in Florida became Disney Springs, and the radio-style pop music which once haunted the streets of Downtown Disney was replaced with a mellow, nearly ambient selections of light jazz tracks. The new custom loop for the Marketplace is an hour and a half of unbroken ambient riffing which occasionally breaks into recognizable Disney tunes. It's as if the long arm of Stimulus Progression is reaching through time to gently guide us along, after all.

Sources
Elevator Music by Joseph Lanza, St Martin's Press, 1994
The Soundtrack of Your Life by David Owen, New Yorker Magazine, April 2006
A Brief History of Beautiful Music Radio by Richard O Connor, Percy Faith Pages, 2009
History of Muzak, Inc - Funding Universe
Seeburg 1000 BMS1 Background Music System - Techmoan
3M Cantata 700 - Techmoan

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

“Over the years Disney repeated to his animators: “Make it read!” Meaning, make the action distinct and recognizable. No contradictions, no ambiguities.” - Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original

You, the audience, make your way through the Temple of the Crystal Skull. You know Dr. Jones has been here - he's set up his base camp, disarmed booby traps, and his name is on the attraction marquee. But now he's vanished inside the temple, and his faithful assistant Paco, who can't operate a tripod, decides to send you directly into certain death!

....Hold on, back up here. Let's take this from the top.

We're all taught in Western storytelling that nothing can happen without conflict. There just can't be a story of renewal or growth without somebody running into some kind of obstacle, or antagonist. Many people think the antagonists are more interesting than the heroes who fight them. Even a cursory glance at a single scene from most major Hollywood movies and you'll see it's mainly a checklist of characters developing or resolving conflicts. Sometimes, when the conflict building isn't adequately disguised inside the narrative spine - as in the recent Hobbit movies - audiences rebel.

In contrast, theme parks seem to operate in an entirely different register, despite otherwise seeming to be a direct outgrowth of traditional Western art forms like theater and filmmaking. And while we conflate the effects of multiple art forms - think of those who consider an especially visually appealing area to be "painterly" - the fact is, theme parks construct their meanings quite differently than other narrative modes like cinema.

Although they've been the dominant narrative mode for most of the last 110 years, films have limitations. Film scholar Tom Gunning notes that "Whereas literature is never directly iconic, film, as a series of photographic representational signs, is. [...] In film, the excess of [surface detail] over meaning appears automatically with the photographic image." Films can depict dreams, but they can't really convey thoughts; they are full of surface details, but audiences must know which details in-frame are relevant. We begin to realize the unique difficulties of storytelling in the themed space when we realize that  filmic limitations apply to spaces such as Disneyland, but the difficulties are multiplied!

Unlike in a film, a themed space can be experienced in any order, and at any speed desired. Unlike a film, images may be examined from multiple perspectives, and linged over or rushed past as the viewer desires. And unlike film, the gaze cannot entirely be fully directed, although a truly exceptional themed space can "drag" the eye through it in controllable ways. Themed space shares the visual limitations of films, but without the benefits of editing!

This means that if you want to tell a story in a theme park with an identifiable bad guy, there can be no cut "back at the ranch" while the villains hatch their scheme, no leisurely unfolding of information through a first act. Themed spaces tell stories that hardly ever break down in acts; it's all action, as if you had to tell an entire film's narrative in the context of one huge action scene. Given these limitations, it's amazing that any theme park stories work at all!

So what's the solution? Theme parks tell stories that boil down to morsel size "storylets" with lots, and lots, of conflict.

On one end of the spectrum, we can look at an attraction like Alien Encounter, which had so many various conflicts going on at once it was confusing. There was the conflict of the X-S Tech Corporation wanting to demonstrate its very poorly tested teleporter technology, the conflict of Chairman Clench wanting to teleport into the theater but being unable to, the conflict of an alien bug wanting to eat the audience, and an extra layer of conflict of the XS Tech technicians trying to figure out how to get the bug out of the theater. If Western narrative wisdom about conflict were applied here, this would seem like a winner, and perhaps it would have been - in a feature length film! In the practice of an 8 minute theater show, with an excess of telling instead of showing, it all came across as a lot of shouting.

Another attraction where there's simply too much going on to be digestible at the fast pace required of a park attraction is Dinosaur - in this one two characters even get into an argument in the safety film! We think we're entering an ordinary museum, but surprise! We're going to be sent into the past in a time machine they built in their weird basement secret lab. Once on the ride we're required to keep track of multiple story threads simultaneously: we're supposed to be looking for and capturing a highly specific dinosaur, while also being pursued by another highly specific dinosaur, while also somehow getting out alive before a meteor hits - three jobs nobody associates with bounding around in the dark with dinosaurs. While Dinosaur checks the boxes of being a thrill ride, most guests forget one or two of these plot points while actually going through the darn thing, and the payoffs never register as well as they should.

If we want to look at a more successful example, we could look at the Indiana Jones Adventure, where we are asked to keep track of a missing person narrative about Indiana Jones, a not very fully thought out danger situation involving an angry Indian god, and finally our own desire to survive the ride. I think where Indiana Jones Adventure succeeds whereas Dinosaur fails, is because the first two conflict threads or storylets pretty much resolve immediately; they're only really there to keep us engaged while we're waiting in line, and manage to sneak in a safety film sideways without seeming abstruse. Pretty much right away Mara decides to kill us and Indiana Jones is recovered; with those resolved, the only remaining pressing concern is to survive the temple.

Indiana Jones Adventure and especially Dinosaur spend an inordinate amount of time checking the boxes of classical story structure, to really no discernible good end - ask anybody coming off either ride to identify what the main conflict in the ride is, and they won't. Or, more accurately, they'll fall back on descriptions of things that happened to them - we dodged the Carnotaurus, we avoided the rolling boulder, with no consideration whatever for the elaborate conflicts and storylets laid out inside the narrative for them. With such complicated considerations, the harried theme park designer starts to long for the simple life.

--

I consider these three attractions to be just about the most convoluted experiential narratives ever devised in the industry, and really only one of them works to any degree it was intended to, so let's back away from the double (or triple, or quadruple) conflict narratives and look at some middle-ground examples.

Let's consider Big Thunder Mountain Railroad as an example. Yes, there have been various layers of narrative complication added to the attraction over the years, mostly in the form of queue area entertainments, but when you get right down to it, the basic conflict of Big Thunder Mountain - the one you actually experience between getting on and off the ride - is that you decided to ride a runaway mine train, and now you are on a runaway mine train. Various things, little "storylets", happen to you while you're on the train, and each is more exciting than the last, until you arrive safely back at the station.

Or, to take another famous example, there are many opinions and rumors as to what the "story" of the Haunted Mansion is, but in reality the story is simplicity in and of itself - you, played by you, decide to enter a haunted house and you live to tell the tale. That's it. The ride implies universes of characters, connections, and backstories, but in the end it's really just the story of you spending a night in a haunted house. Does it really need to be anything more?

Perhaps the pioneering narrative conflict told in themed spaces is what we may call "Dodge The Witch", in which you avoid various dangers and make it out okay. Under the guise of "man vs. nature", The Jungle Cruise is basically a Dodge the Witch ride. Grizzly River Rapids is an very good Dodge the Witch - it may not have a grizzly bear, but it does have plenty of dangers and surprises. Even Disneyland's Matterhorn is an exceptionally carefully modulated Dodge the Witch, in which there's nearly nothing doing the storytelling except some steel track and an abominable snowman.

Yet aren't Indiana Jones Adventure and Dinosaur also Dodge the Witch rides, to some degree? Is there perhaps something to the fact that most riders blithely ignore all of the carefully modulated narrative information and conflict setup in these attractions and gleefully report that they did indeed Dodge the Witch?

Laff in the Dark, Early 1930s

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Here, then, is one crucial distinction in the way theme parks tell stories and the way everyone else tells stories. A novel, or a film, or a play, must engage in a lengthy setup in which character are introduced, a situation is outlined, a conflict identified, and then pass through an inciting incident which sets the rest of the narrative in motion. Theme parks don't need to do this.

Why? The reason is because the only characters that really matter in theme parks are the spectators. That's the reason people visit, after all - we sail over London, we encounter some dinosaurs along the Disneyland Railroad, we ride the Hogwarts Express. This is what themed spaces can do that nobody else can, and it's the blend of passive and active participation that makes the places resonant. There doesn't need to be an inciting incident because it already happened when we entered the park.

There is conflict (or at least drama) baked into everything that we do at a theme park, because by their very nature theme parks are places of the exotic and strange. The unspoken contract that exists between the themed space and the public is that we will agree to be mildly inconvenienced while entering an attraction in exchange for being excited inside it - this is why it's disappointing, sometimes enough to make news headlines, when the ride breaks down and the excitement is ended prematurely. Themed spaces are orderly areas of pictorial effects which break down in irrational and chaotic images, briefly glimpsed, once we hop into that Mr. Toad car.

This is why the attractions that really matter, that really last, tie up the conflict with the theme of the attraction in a way that's seamless: we decide to enter the jungle, board our jungle steamship, and are guided through the various dangers. That situation doesn't need anything more than to be present to be understandable, it uses very clear, very understandable visual cues to work. Everybody knows that giant snakes and cannibals are bad news, and - uh oh - now it's happening to us!

This is also why a ride like Space Mountain can work across time and cultures in a way that the Delta Dreamflights of the world could not. Just as with Big Thunder Mountain, Space Mountain really offers amazingly little information about what we are doing or why - we're going into space, and space is weird. The drama is right there in the attraction name, and as far as theming goes, all that's really required is that the vehicles look like rockets and we're off. Again, riders bring more drama to the experience than the designers need to supply, because themed spaces work differently.

This also points towards one feature of themed spaces which the rules say would seem impossible in other media: the low, or no, conflict experience. There's the Enchanted Tiki Room, which 50 years on still enraptures audiences by doing nothing more than slowly coming to life. Consider also the Skyway, which requires severe interpretive methods to find any conflict in it. Or It's A Small World, where the entire darn point of it is that it's conflict free. Through the 70s, Disney repeatedly attempted to make a Small World movie, and repeatedly failed because to introduce conflict into that experience defeats the whole reason it exists in the first place.

During the construction of Disneyland, Walt Disney repeatedly instructed his designers just to "build something people will like". In theme park analysis circles we like to say that areas need a mix of A, C, and E tickets to be successful - a shorthand to refer to the "levels" of the attractions that are needed to flesh out any themed space. But it may be just as well to refer to these ticketing levels in terms of levels on conflict - this is why Tomorrowland doesn't feel complete without a Peoplemover, because the Peoplemover fulfills the role of the Mark Twain steamboat in Frontierland - a relaxed scenic experience with no plot or conflict to speak of.  The low conflict attractions round out the day with a variety of low-stakes experiences that are "safer spaces" than the Jungle Cruises or Space Mountains. Every child implicitly understands this unspoken dynamic.

--

This mass of data seems to suggest, more than anything, that there is in fact a diversity of ways to build a successful theme park attraction's story - there may be plenty of bad examples that hog the spotlight, but for every three unsuccessful, obvious examples, there's at least one where the thing works just fine.

What can be said is that conflict in theme parks can be implied in such a way to require almost no special treatment, or indeed even be a component of creating a compelling experience. The aesthetics of theme parks, and the unspoken contract between themed spaces and spectators, is such that there can be narrative inherent in simple visual designs and enveloping environments that can supplant the need for a formalized conflict. In this sense, themed spaces have a power to suggest narratives in a way nearer to the way that fine art like painting or sculpture can: through the deployment of such features as colors or shapes.

Although themed spaces are absolutely the nearest to cinema in terms of logic and effect, the theme park has a secret power that cinema does not: it can be iconic without needing to be abstract. Every so often, somebody comes along and tries to make a film that is played out entirely from one character's point of view, replacing the "I" tense in traditional novelistic storytelling with the filmed camera. This never ever works; it's easier for audiences to invest in screen characters depicted on the screen rather than as the screen.

Theme parks are films that happen to you, and they happen with no signposting or role playing. Think of the Disneyland Railroad: imagine if you made a film out of those events. You'd have an avant-garde film; mass audiences would say that it makes no sense, that it's outside their comfort zone. But millions ride the Disneyland Railroad every year and take its bizarre mix of nostalgia, sightseeing, and time travel totally at face value. That's the secret power of themed spaces, the power to compel without the need for a formalized narrative or even narrative logic.

Ready for more deep dives into the hows and whys of theme parks? Check out our Park Theory Hub Page, host to dozens of long essays just like this one!

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" is an easy reference for this site's occasional "Summer Series" - extended looks at a specific body of work, often chronologically arranged, intended to encourage exploration and discovery of overlooked corners of Disney.

The Age Of Not Believing - Summer 2014
A pseudo-legendary, vaguely suicidal retrospective on the Disney films released in a crucial period - between the death of Walt Disney and the release of Robin Hood, where what it meant to be a Disney film was shifting rapidly. There's a lot of garbage in this body of work, but there's some gems too, and I watched and wrote about all of them.

There's a lot here, but a handful of highlights for those who don't need to read the whole thing are in-depth assessments of The Happiest Millionaire, The Love Bug, Bedknobs & Broomsticks, and an epic piece on Robin Hood, including it's lasting legacy and Disney's role in forming the modern Furry community (really!).

Introduction
Week One - Monkeys Go Home, The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, The Gnome-Mobile
Week Two - The Jungle Book, Charlie the Lonesome Cougar, The Happiest Millionaire
Week Three - Blackbeard's Ghost, The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band, Never A Dull Moment
Week Four - The Horse In The Grey Flannel Suit, The Love Bug, Smith!, Rascal
Week Five - The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, King of the Grizzlies, The Boatniks
Week Six - The Wild Country, The Aristocats, The Barefoot Executive
Week Seven - Scandalous John, The Million Dollar Duck, Bedknobs & Broomsticks
Week Eight - The Biscuit Eater, Now You See Him Now You Don't, Napoleon & Samantha
Week Nine - The Magic of Walt Disney World, Snowball Express, The World's Greatest Athlete, Charley and the Angel
Week Ten - One Little Indian, Robin Hood, the legacy of Robin Hood

Summer Game Camp - Summer 2017
Growing up a video game kid, I worshipped the famous, fruitful collaboration between Disney and Capcom in the early 90s. But were they really all they're cracked up to be? And which ones are still worth playing? I played through all of them, in order of release date, to find out.

Part One - Mickey Mousecapade, DuckTales, DuckTales: Remastered
Part Two - Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers, The Little Mermaid, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck
Part Three - The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, The Great Circus Mystery, Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald
Part Four - Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers 2, DuckTales 2
Part Five - Goof Troop, Disney's Aladdin, Bonkers
Part Six - Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, plus history and forgotten movie??
Final Game Ranking and Retrospective

Will there be more Summer Series? Only time will tell...

Every so often you come up with an idea so obvious, so stupid, that you're convinced somebody must have thought of it by now. And when it turns out nobody has, well, what's a fan to do? Just go out and do it herself, I suppose. Which is what I did.

Despite growing up in the northeast with a proper wood burning fireplace, and despite having access to a gas burning one in Florida, in my opinion nothing quite lands at that juicy intersection of nostalgia and kitsch as a good old video fireplace. The Yule Log tradition, after laying dormant for most of the hip 90s, has roared back to life in the digital age, and a quick search on YouTube will turn up hundreds of these things. Then as now, the attraction is in the extreme simplicity of the production: find a fireplace. Point a camera at it. Share the results.

The original video fireplace, the WPIX Yule Log, was a scant 17 seconds long, looped over and over, accompanied by the easy listening Christmas hits of the day - an amazing synthesis of midcentury plastic living, the modernization of mass culture, big hearted Christmas cheer, and extreme laziness (the hours-long broadcast meant the TV station staff could take the day off).

Growing up, my grandparents had a copy of the non-yule version on VHS, and that fascinated me even more - no stockings, no Christmas carols, just an hour of a fireplace doing its thing. There were other atmosphere VCR productions - aquariums, beaches, rolling hills - but none quite captured the strange magic of the idea of turning one boxy home furnishing into another.

And as a fan of the intersection of midcentury convenience culture, easy listening, and themed design, it's not too hard to see where my brain went - where's the Disney version of this? Not some generic fireplace with Disney crap piled around it, but an actual, at-Disney fireplace. And what is probably the defining Disney fireplace experience?

I packed up my camera and drove out to Wilderness Lodge.


It was the sort of blustery, overcast Florida winter day that really set the tone for being around a fireplace, and most of my time was spent sitting and waiting for the fireplaces to become available. There were so many that it seemed sensible to include as many as possible.

I really enjoyed making this, and even the editing of the subject came together amazingly fast. So on this cold January, put some Wilderness Lodge on your TV, and if you like this, show your friends and let me know!

Happy New Year's from Passport to Dreams!

Hello!

This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of music heard and played in the Disney Theme Parks. The specific focus and specialty of this site is vintage, pre-millenium music of Magic Kingdom.

It was last updated on October 29, 2017.

If you are interested in the old-time music of the Vacation Kingdom, a great place to start is this own site's Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World, which compiles hours of retro park music into an entire "day" trip to the Walt Disney World of old.


A Social History of Background Music
A Brief Introduction to Early Walt Disney World Music

Magic Kingdom Area Music
Main Street USA (1971 - 1976)
Main Street USA (1976 - 1991) (Morning)
Main Street USA (1976 - 1991) (Evening)
Adventureland Bridge (1972 - ????)
The Adventureland Veranda (1971 - 1977)
The Adventureland Veranda (1977 - 1994)
The Jungle Cruise / AWOL Airwaves (1991 - Present) 
Liberty Square (1971 - 1980)
Liberty Square (1980 - Present)
Liberty Square (2010 - 2017)
Cinderella Castle Area (1971 - ????)
Skyway and Pinocchio Street (197? - 1991)
Skyway and Pinocchio Street (1991 - Present)
Tomorrowland Concourse (1972 - 1983)
WEDway Peoplemover (1976 - 1993)
Tomorrowland Concourse (1983 - 1990)
Tomorrowland Concourse (1990 - 1993) (1994 - 2003)

Disneyland Area Music
The Matterhorn Bobsleds (1978 - 2009)
Skyway and Village Haus (1983 - Present)

Specific Case Studies
The Mysterious "Bridge" Loops - quick overview of some very obscure pieces of music which once played between areas at Magic Kingdom. October 2017.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Two Soundtracks - full attraction sound mixes for the original attractions at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. June 2017.

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

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

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


Other Disney Park BGM Resources:
Walt Disney World Resort Music Compendium
Disneyland Resort Music Compendium - Michael Sweeney has helped out with a great deal of the playlists on this site, and he's put online dozens of carefully curated, extremely accurate playlists of music heard inside the parks.

MouseBits - Features a lively discussion community with numerous playlists, and a torrent seeding resource for a great number of of the commonly circulated pieces of Disney music.

Magic Music - Another discussion forum, this one featuring yet more playlists with a focus on current music and many impressive compilations by site owner Jay.

Tokyo Disneyland BGM Lists - Star Orion has migrated their Wikia site to this slickly designed page, which is easy to navigate even if one does not read Japanese.

Disney Chris Audio - Chris Lyndon spends an enormous amount of time polishing and perfecting the tracks in his Disneyland Tour, which is so extensive I can't think of something he doesn't have available for listening on his site by now.

Yeah Disney Audios - Tumblr blog that maintains download links for a lot of theme park material including loops and attraction soundtracks.

A few years ago, I previewed a bit of the work being done in an infuriating little corner of Disney music that I call "The Swiss Loops". This is a group of three or four Jack Wagner loops created at an unknown time consisting entirely of alpine music - yodeling, accordions, lederhosen, etc.

So grab your alpenhorn and feathered cap, and let's finally get this out of the way - we're going to plunge into those infernal Swiss loops. I hope you like polkas!

Pinnochio Street Music

One of the least appreciated areas of Magic Kingdom is the stretch of Fantasyland that runs from Liberty Square, up past what was once the Skyway Station, past Small World, and ends with Pinnochio Village Haus. On early blueprints, this is called the "Pinocchio Street" - an area of steins and Bavarian charm anchored by a Swiss chalet spitting out a steady stream of brightly colored sky buckets. Compared to the more prosaic and less elaborated themed west side of Fantasyland, and especially compared to the Fantasyland of 1955 which was still what Disneyland had, this little area was the seed that eventually would overrun the entire concept of Fantasyland, turning the whole of the area into Little Europe. It may not look like much to anybody who's been to the 1983 Fantasyland at Disneyland or the 1992 version in Paris, but for 1971 the Pinocchio Street was a major accomplishment, and had its own specific project name to prove it.

We don't know if Disney commissioned Jack Wagner to assemble some "Swiss" music from the start, or if it was added at some later point. Even from the early days, the Fantasyland Skyway was one of the most notorious long lines at the park, so it's not outrageous to suggest that the Skyway queue may have always had music playing to help the time pass.

Regardless, what is likely the earliest surviving piece of music associated with this area was thankfully recorded by Mike Lee in 1991. It's only 30 minutes long, which puts it in line with other early music loops of its era, and the two Capitol Records LPs used in the Matterhorn Bobsleds queue BGM also appear in it.

Does this predate the Matterhorn loop? I'm not prepared to guess. But I am confident in labeling this as an early WDW loop, perhaps even the very original piece of music created to play in the Skyway Chalet and Pinocchio Village Haus.

“Pinnochio Village Haus”Compiled by Jack Wagner
Recorded by Mike Lee, 1991 

01) Obervazer-Schottisch - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
02) Gruss Milano (Salute To Milan) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
03) Lusbübe-Ländler (Naughty Boy Ländler) - Ländlerkapelle Oberland [1]
04) Beim Augustfeuer (By The Bonfire) - Ländlerkapelle Bärner Mutze [1]
05) Tessin Melodies - Orchestrina Verbanella [1]
06) Urner-Polka - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
07) Am Hinterrhein (At The Source Of The Rhine) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
08) Unknown A
09) Unknown B
10) Unknown C
11) Der Klarinettenmuckel - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
12) Landlergrusse - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
13) Gruss aus Bayrischzell - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2]
14) Rund I’m Salzburg - Alfons Bauer and the Bavarian Entertainers [2] 

[1] A Visit to Switzerland - Capitol ST-10264 1964
[2] Music of the German Alps - Capitol ST-1-211 196X

For this track to be playing in 1991 seems astonishingly late considering that its replacement, fully considered below, had already been available for eight years by that point.

However, the 1990/1 date does line up with when Magic Kingdom was really starting to standardize their sound system - see my piece on Tomorrowland for another example. Once "Fantasyland West" received its new digital music playback system, of course it would receive the newer, longer version of the Swiss loop.

"Fantasyland West"

For decades, a 60-minute loop has been floating through the Disney music diaspora  called "Fantasyland West". Trying to identify the tracks in this loop has always been an absurd nightmare of yodeling, brass bands, and alphorns - after even just a few minutes, all of the yodeling begins to bleed together and my eyes would begin to roll back into my head.

Which is how things stood for years. This 60 minute loop played in the Skyway station at Magic Kingdom and Disneyland, inside Village Haus restaurants in California, Florida, and Paris, and heck, even at Tokyo Disneyland - here's a quick video where you can hear it. Besides the fact that it had seemingly been playing since anybody could remember, nobody had any idea where it came from or what it was made up of.

Most of the really early Magic Kingdom music loops were really odd lengths. But even if Disney had wanted to replace the Skyway / Village Haus loop as early as, say, 1975 - when both Main Street loops got filled out to a full hour - it's hard to imagine them having a good incentive to pay Jack Wagner to do the same work over again.  In the early 80s, Disney was moving to standardize the length of all of their BGM loops to exactly 60 minutes thanks to emerging digital formats, a standard that holds even today.

What makes more sense to me is that Jack prepared the 60-minute loop as part of his commission to prepare the music for Tokyo Disneyland. Many of his loops for TDL are interesting expansions and variations of his earlier loops at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, and all of them are a rock solid hour in length. It also makes sense that Disneyland would use the same loop as part of their New Fantasyland project, which saw the addition of a German-style Village Haus of their own.

Meanwhile, the discovery of "A Visit to Switzerland" on MouseBits by RocketRods and the tracks it shared with the Matterhorn Bobsleds made it much clearer the relationship between all of the various "Swiss" loops was much closer than it initially seemed. Except for one little problem...

Bi Eus im Schwyzerland: A Mystery Inside An Enigma

In mid-2013, our understanding of the Fantasyland West loop improved considerably when, with no warning whatever, most of the source tracks appeared on iTunes. Suddenly, we had track names and performing artists but with no real insight into where these things came from. The album in question was called "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland, Volume 3", released by the mysterious "Elite Special" and dated 1974. Trouble was, who knows if the metadata provided on the album was at all accurate. Even more worrying, the total run time of the digital release was nearly an hour - a total impossibility on the vinyl records Jack Wagner was working off of in the 70s.

Thanks to the magic of "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland, Volume 3", we can now show you Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser, who you've been listening to over a loudspeaker at Disney for basically your entire life:


So just who the heck was Elite Special? As it turns out, Elite Special was a sub-label of Turicaphon AG - founded in 1930, and which still exists today in the Swiss town of Riedikon (on the Turicaphonstrasse!). Once you have label and performer information, the rest begins to fall into place.

Its seems as though Truicaphon took a special interest in recording and releasing Swiss folk music in the 1950s - although for all we know, they were releasing these recordings on 78 records in the 30s. Alpine music being of limited interest outside of Switzerland, eventually the Elite Special sublabel was formed to recycle their music into budget LPs of the kind that haunted drug stores through the 60s - cheapjack releases with names like "I Remember Switzerland". Just looking at the mysterious track data and recording company history, that much of the story seemed obvious.

But I still was not satisfied with this "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland, Volume 3". I knew the chances that a single record had nearly the entirety of a Jack Wagner loop was too persuasive to ignore, but after weeks of checking databases and virtual auction sites in English and German, I could find no evidence of a physical release of Bi Eus im Schwyzerland - never mind Volume 3, I couldn't find Volume 1 or 2. I knew it couldn't be this obscure.

After literally years of downtime, in which Pixelated put the rest of the puzzle together, finding "Accordion in Gold" by Horst Wende, I was ready to try again - and I finally struck gold in the Worldcat, where "Holiday in Switzerland" had a single entry with nearly every track listed - the only thing missing was the track "Jodel-Polka". I even found a company in the United States selling a CD of the album.

I was so close I refused to believe that this was not the correct album. After another search through German eBay, I was able to find the actual LP - and "Jodel-Polka" was included. As it turns out, Jack had dumped practically the entirety of "Holiday of Switzerland" into his Village Haus loop, and in near exact album order, no less. With the 4-year mystery of "Bi Eus im Schwyzerland" solved, the Village Haus loop finally came into focus.

"Fantasyland West" / "Pinocchio Village Haus"Compiled by Jack Wagner, 1983
Reconstruction by Michael Sweeney, Foxxy, and Pixelated 

01) Obervazer-Schottisch - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
02) Gruss Milano (Salute To Milan) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
03) Uf Em Grätli (Up On The Cliff) - Ländlerkapelle Bärner Mutze With Sepp Sutter [1]
04) Lusbübe-Ländler (Naughty Boy Ländler) - Ländlerkapelle Oberland [1]
05) Beim Augustfeuer (By The Bonfire) - Ländlerkapelle Bärner Mutze [1]
06) Urner-Polka - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
07) S' Kantönlilied - Ländlerkapelle Heidi Wild mit Kinderchor [2]
88) Frohsinn (Schottisch) - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
09) Am sunnige Egge - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
10) Frühlingsfreuden - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
11) Alpenjodel - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
12) Heigh-Ho / Whistle While You Work - Polka Band [3]
13) En Heimelige - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
14) Jodel-Polka - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
15) Liechtensteiner Polka - Horst Wende und seine Accordeon-Band [4]
16) Die Fischerin Vom Bodensee - Horst Wende und seine Accordeon-Band [4]
17) Mi Freud - Jodelduo Josy Eugster, Helene Schwegler [2]
18)  Am Hinterrhein (At The Source Of The Rhine) - Bündner Ländlerquintett [1]
19) Mitenand Gaht's Besser - Ländlerkapelle Bergfriede, Jodelduo Josy Eugster und Helene Schwegler [2]
20) Aelpli (Schottisch) - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
21) Läbeslust - Berhely Studer [2]
22) De Würzegrübler - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2]
23) "Obe abe - une ufe" - Ländlerkapelle Edy Keiser [2] 

[1] A Visit to Switzerland - Capitol ST-10264 1964
[2] Holiday in Switzerland - Elite Special PLPS 30150 1973
[3] A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom - WDP 1972
[4] Accordion In Gold - Polydor 249 306 1970

One of the nice things about having the actual Holiday in Switzerland album to look at is that it clarifies that not all of the tracks included in the loop are traditional songs. Nearly everything on Holiday in Switzerland is an original composition - these traditional folk music groups, which had likely been performing together since before World War II, and who recorded their efforts for a small, local recording industry would eventually go on to be heard by billions of vacationers in search of a cheap pizza in Florida. That's an exceptionally bizarre path to infamy, but it's a good one.

Also interesting is the inclusion of a single track by the Fantasyland Polka Band smack in the middle of the loop. Many versions of the loop begin with the Heigh Ho, but the loop does appear to play out as I've got it arranged here, with the Polka Band around the 30 minute mark.

The Polka Band was an afternoon offshoot of the Walt Disney World Band that hung around Fantasyland for a few years in the 70s, and their phantom appearance in their old haunt is intriguing. It reminds me of Jack's use of Fred Burri in the Matterhorn Bobsleds loop - a recorded testament of atmosphere music which was once recorded live.

Honestly, this is probably how all of Disneyland's music loops began - a tape would be played while the band went off to lunch. A few years ago, a tape was sold on eBay which supposedly played in the Skull Rock seating area of the Chicken of the Sea restaurant in Fantasyland. Without having a transfer of the tape to be sure we'll never know, but it appeared to be a recording of the pirate band which played in that area in the early 60s. Intentionally or not, this notion survives in the Matterhorn and Village Haus loops of today.

And with that romantic notion, I think we've found as good a place as any to finally put this subject to rest. Auf wiedersehen!

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.

It's back! Enough of you enjoyed my first foray into themed mixology enough for me to consider making this a regular series. And, as I'm able to invent or refurbish drinks, I will. So if you enjoy your theme park history sprinkled with some distilled spirits, let's have a drink on it!

This month's drink comes to us from the Polynesian Village, through a column written by Dorothy Chapman for the Orlando Sentinel - Thought You'd Never Ask, a long-running series divulging recipes for area restaurant dishes, including many at Walt Disney World. Published in December 1977, and republished the limited edition spiral bound book collection of the articles in 1980, The Seven Seas Drink immediately lept out at me - for reasons both good and bad.

Read it first:


This immediately got my attention for a few reasons. First, it was never republished elsewhere and has sunken into absolute obscurity. Second, it specifically calls for something a lot of old-time Disney World collectors have - the large, footed, frosted Polynesian Village tiki mugs.


And the third reason it lept out at me is because it's a total disaster as a recipe. Look at that - two kinds of orange liqueur plus orange juice? Squeezing an orange into the glass? Who would do such a thing??

And even worse, if you actually went through the effort to make the darn thing, it was a total downer - a sickly, sweet confection reminiscent of Orange Fanta and with enough sugar to give you a headache. Can it be saved? Is it even worth saving?

1980 Polynesian drink menu courtesy of How Bowers $3.25 is roughly equivalent to about $10.50 today

Decoding and Improving, First Try

So what's going on with this drink? If you've looked at other Walt Disney World recipe guides from before the mid-90s, you may have noticed that Disney was not exactly a temple of great cocktail drinking, a distinction they still hold today. But in the 70s, things were even rougher, because the "specialty" drinks were not even fully mixed by the local bartender. Instead, Disney made use of a huge number of mixes.

And I don't mean huge bottles of Lime Juice Cordial - Disney made their own mixes, daily, in the same gigantic centralized kitchen which produced much of the food served at Magic Kingdom and the hotels. Working from early in the morning, white aproned kitchen staff would be hard at work mixing huge plastic buckets of mixes for Scorpions, Mai Tais, Banana Bogeys and Monorail Pinks. Distributed to the individual bars, barkeeps would merely have to dump out the correct amount of drink mix, add the base spirit, maybe some soda water, shake it all up, and call it a day.

With this in mind, it's easy to make more sense of the Seven Seas Drink - the recipe asks the barkeep to squeeze fresh orange and lemon juice into the glass to add some freshness back into the likely hours-old mix. If you looked at the "sour mix" and thought of Rose's Sweet and Sour, you're wrong - we're probably talking about the even grosser powdered lemon bar mixes, probably sourced from Franco's in nearby Pompano Beach. The Orange Juice was likely direct from the carton.

Anybody sitting down to make the drink today can simply substitute the appropriate amounts of fresh orange juice and fresh lemon juice and dispose of the need to squeeze citrus into the glass, then build the drink and stir. An approximation of the sour mix can be obtained by using half lemon juice and half sugar syrup.

This also explains the baffling choice to call for both Curaçao and Triple Sec, both orange flavored cordials - one sweet, one dry, both working together to keep the already astronomical sweetness in check. Today, we have access to the excellent Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao, making such mixological tricks unnessecary.

Finally, there's the question of the rum. If any modern day Tikiholics are reading this, they likely gasped at the call for Lemon Hart Rum, since the Lemon Hart 151 is currently a beloved if scarce ingredient in tropical drinks. Based on reviews of Lemon Hart's modern portfolio and from Disney's instructions to cut Bacari Silver with dark rum, I'd say that Lemon Hart 1804 is the nearest modern match.

I've been unable to find Lemon Hart 1804, and the reviews online lead me to believe it's fairly mediocre, so in this case feel free to use any blended aged "Gold" rum you personally enjoy. Mount Gay Eclipse is a decent and widely available choice, and El Dorado 5 or 8 is even better. I do NOT suggest blending Bacardi Silver and dark rum as Disney suggests.

Finally, the grenadine contributes neither color nor flavor to the drink in the "dash" amount specified, so that can go right out. Here's what the Seven Seas Drink looks like if we adapt it for modern ingredients and methods:

Seven Seas Drink 2.0 

.5 oz Fresh Orange Juice
.25 oz Fresh Lemon Juice
.25 oz Simple Syrup
1 oz Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao
1.5 oz Gold Rum
Dash Angostura 

Shake very hard with crushed ice and dump, unstrained, into a Polynesian Village frosted mug. Garnish with the spent Orange shell. Drink with optimism.

If you make this and the original recipie specified in Thought You'd Never Ask, you'll notice only very minor improvements. Simply put, this is still far, far too cloying and sweet for its own good.

So let's see if we can start balancing this thing out, and we'll break all three of the major components down into categories.

Rum - The Strong

In a hotel bar in Florida in the 1970s, perhaps 1.5 ounces of the good stuff was enough, but today we can do better. I boosted the rum content to an easy to remember 2 ounces, which allows us to combine an ounce each of multiple rums for deeper flavor.

The suggested combination of light Bacardi and dark Meyer's is not that great to begin with, and in my opinion Bacardi is expensive and fairly insubstantial. Even switching the recipe over to using a gold rum, as I did in the halfway version above, yields a considerable improvement.

Frankly, though, I think in this drink the darker you go with your rum blend, the better. Unless you're absolutely dedicated to using a white rum in this, you can do better by combining a gold aged rum and a dark one. I ended up using an equal mix of Mount Gay Eclipse and El Dorado Dark for testing purposes.

Citrus Juices - The Sour

A half ounce of sour was far too little for this job. Looking to classic exotic cocktails for guidance, you'll see very few that use orange juice by itself, usually mixing it in combination with a stronger juice like passion fruit or pineapple. This is because, even when fresh juiced, orange is simply too wimpy to put up much of a fight against rum. I tried boosting the amount to 3/4 of an ounce of each orange and lemon juice, and got a much clearer citrus flavor.

Curaçao - The Sweet

Even with the excellent Pierre Ferrand and with boosted juice and rum, this drink needed far less orange liqueur. Few tropical cocktails use a full ounce of the stuff, and it's because it's really very bossy and can quickly take over a drink. Cutting back the Curaçao to half an ounce helped, but really, this drink needed some depth. So enter the secret of many an exotic cocktail: the spice cabinet!

Given that this is a blog about weird old Walt Disney World, not drink mixing, I wasn't about to tell you to make your own cinnamon syrup or something like that. As I saw it, there were only two viable bottled options: Allspice Dram or Falernum.

Allspice Dram we saw in my last cocktail, The Howling Dog Bend, and I love its spicy complexity, but in this citrus-heavy drink it simply did not fit in. Falernum is a spiced ginger syrup from Barbados, and it nicely rounded out the Seven Seas Drink with just a hint of complexity. I like John Taylor's, but Trader Sam gets very nice effects with the spicier BG Reynolds. You can also make your own fairly quickly, especially if you begin with a commercial almond milk, which I recommend.

So to your half ounce of Curaçao  add another half ounce of Falernum. Now we were getting much closer to a proper drink.



Finishing Touches

At this point I had to stop and consider carefully whether the drink was likely to continue improving, and moreover, what exactly the Seven Seas Drink was. After all, this was not some extravagant Donn Beach 11-ingridient opus - this was a resort drink, that tasted like oranges, intended to be enjoyed on the shores of the Seven Seas Lagoon. My inclinations to start floating 151 rum on top of it or adding hazelnut bitters were likely to only bring me further and further away from my goal, which was to improve the 1977 original. But I still had a few more tweaks to try.

I tried cutting half of the rum with Dry Gin, a common Trader Vic technique to lighten up a heavy drink, but the benefits here were negligible - we may as well have been using vodka. Instead, I found that the darker I took the rum blend, the more interesting the drink became, and ended up enjoying a blend of 1 oz El Dorado Dark to 1 oz Black Overproof Dark (think Lemon Hart 151, Gosling 151) the most. However, use whatever work for your interest and budget level.

I tried adding pineapple juice to the drink, but in both half ounce and ounce intervals it only seemed to muddle up the balanced citrus flavor. Speaking of the citrus, I found that bottled OJ works just as well as fresh - the fresh orange juice really only adds a nice orange shell that you can dunk in the drink. If you want to do this, you should use a medium-sized Florida-style juicing orange like a honeybell instead of the monster navel oranges that come from California.

Finally, I decided that the bitters weren't adding much to the mix. You can still use them if you like, but even after adding 3 very aggressive shakes to the mixing tin, I found the flavor was simply lost in all of that juice and rum. Besides, I liked that I had 3 measures of six ingredients, making my improved Seven Seas Drink one of the few tropical cocktails that was easy to remember, and the Bitters were throwing off that neat symmetry.

I like to use my Waring Drink Mixer to put this together, otherwise known as a milkshake mixer. If your go-to drink is a Mai Tai or Test Pilot you probably have already gotten one of these beasts, but for the rest of you, the milkshake mixer is entirely optional. I think it adds just the right texture to tropical drinks when blended up with crushed ice, and it somehow aerates and brings out the flavor in your cocktail syrups like falernum.

If you're using a traditional shaker, you're going to want to shake the daylights out of this drink until it's very, very cold, then open up the whole thing and dump the contents - ice and all - into your beautifully frosted tiki mug. Do NOT attempt this with a classic blender with a blade in it, because you'll just end up turning all of your ice to slush and cleaning the darn thing out later.

Seven Seas Drink Reborn
.75 oz Orange Juice
.75 oz Fresh Lemon Juice
.5 oz Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao
.5 oz Velvet Falernum
1 oz Demerra Blended Rum
1 oz Dark Rum 

If using fresh orange juice, place spent orange shell in bottom of 1970s Polynesian Village frosted tiki mug. 

Combine all ingredients and crushed ice and shake until very, very cold. Pour shaker contents, unstrained, into frosted mug. Add ice cubes as needed until mug is full. Garnish with spent lemon shell and drink through a long straw.

For garnish, I like a few pineapple fronds if I have them, but a nice big bunch of mint works just as well. Go ahead and stick an umbrella in that lemon shell - it's a resort drink, after all.

Did you like this for some reason? Check out our previous drink here, The Howling Dog Bend.
Or drop by the Walt Disney World History Hub for more 1970s Polynesian Resort!

Disneyland Paris is full of things that make you wonder why every park doesn't have them: the hotel at the entrance, the tunnels under the castle, the peek into Pirates from the train, a watery Fantasyland. But it's also full of things that make you wonder why Disney has continued to try to emulate a concept already done to terrific effect; the case in point here is Main Street, which simply buries every other Main Street USA.

To walk through Main Street at Disneyland Paris is to see the pinnacle of the concept of Main Street; if you enjoy things like fussy little details and elaborate interior finishes, it's the Space Mountain of that. It's one of those cases where, even if you know it's going to be good, you can't possibly be prepared for just how good it is.

I loved Disneyland Paris, but Main Street rapidly became an obsession. Time when I could have been queuing up for a ride again, I simply stood in the shops and stared. There's places and times where detail on top of detail on top of detail gives you a junk shop; I call it the "frosting on top of frosting effect". But the level of detail on Main Street is organic, it's logical, and in most cases it's deployed exactly proportionally for the overall effect.

When it came time to document my ardor for this park entrance of park entrances, it seemed most logical to hone in on its remarkable light fixtures. Main Street at the other parks is already a master class for awesome light fixtures, but Paris manages to top all others simply through pure, staggering variety.

Magic Kingdom and Disneyland kept it fairly simple outside their parks, with straightforward city park-style globe fixtures and plain green fencing. Paris takes the reminiscent approach, but of course the effect of the whole area is anything but understated thanks to the Disneyland Hotel dominating the area. Magic Kingdom uses simple frosted globes to create a uniform look across its entrance area, whereas Paris is already introducing complexity to the same spot, with upward-facing and downward-facing lights here.

Of course it's fair to say that Main Street has already "begun" by the time you're approaching Disneyland Paris from the Village, whereas Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo all withhold that richer theming until you get inside their Main Street areas. Disneyland Paris rolls out the red carpet from the start with a staggering gauntlet of architecture and gardens, and the effect is unlike any other park entrance in the world.

Covered breezeways with turn of the 20th century wrought iron frills bring to mind Paris train stations and protect from the weather; the plain frosted globe lights continue here and indeed through the first leg of Main Street, as seen in an example from Town Square below. Until Magic Kingdom's Hub area was rebuilt and claimed by Fantasyland, all three of the original castle parks defined the areas in front of the entrance tunnels and the areas between Main Street and the castle as decompression spaces, where there could exist any theme or no theme. This is especially apparent at Disneyland, where each land encroaches on the Hub as if to reach out and offer a preview of what can be found inside. Paris keeps each land separate, requiring visitors to walk through green, empty spaces to reach the next area, almost like each is a self-contained theme park. But here we can see how, through the elaborate hotel entrance and amplified complexity of even minor features, Paris is fixing to top every other park.

Frosted globes on Main Street

Perhaps the biggest departure from the classic Main Street model in Paris are the covered Arcades that bypass the bulk of the land; whereas Disneyland and Magic Kingdom have somewhat themed bypasses, the Arcades are central to the appeal of the Paris Main Street. The effect of entering and seeing all of the dozens of lanterns with their singing gas flames all the way down the length of the arcade is one of the most impressive things in the whole park.

Real fire!

One of the main attractions that Disneyland pioneered was the concept of themed merchandise; that an area which appeared to be the Old West should sell leather goods, coon skin caps, and toy rifles. Although the masterpiece of such theming is probably New Orleans Square, one early and elaborate effort, the one that probably more than any other made the idea stick, was the Adventureland Bazaar across from the Jungle Cruise. Like Tomorrowland's Art Corner or New Orleans Square's One-of-a-Kind shop, the Bazaar was as much an interactive exhibit as it was a shopping experience, a chance to see some unique items and immerse in an environment. Featured areas included Polynesia (hawaiian shirts and dresses), India (etched brass), Asia (exotic imported items), and the Guatemalan Weavers.

Magic Kingdom would both expand and repeat much of the success of these Disneyland shops, and indeed had its own Adventureland Bazaar and more. But the Bazaar still stands at Disneyland - or, at least, the shell of it is still there, although it's now filled with the same Disney stuff everywhere else sells. But the Bazaar, and practically all of the original Adventureland shops at Magic Kingdom are gone, and have been gone for nearly two decades now. That's a long time, long enough for many fans who never set foot inside the House of Treasure to grow to adulthood.

We are dedicated as always to attempting the stem the tide of forgetting on this blog, and having been made aware that many not too much younger than I don't even know what the shape of these original Adventureland pseudo-attractions were like, the time to assemble and preserve this information was upon us. So set your time machines to the early 70s and let's discover those forgotten shops of Adventureland!

The Bazaar Complex

We're going to begin with the most difficult of these areas to mentally reconstruct, which was the central Adventureland Bazaar, in the center of Adventureland near the Sunshine Tree Terrace. This area was destroyed for good back in 2001 when The Magic Carpets of Aladdin was installed, totally changing the relaxed vibe of central Adventureland. The Bazaar complex was made up of five shops surrounding a central open air courtyard.

DisneyPix.Com

Also included was a tall, pink covered area very much like the glass canopy over by the Adventureland Veranda that today acts as the entrance area to the Skipper Canteen. This was the original home of J.P. and the Silver Stars, Adventureland's steel drum band. When the drums were not set up, this was the de facto entrance to the Bazaar courtyard. In later years, as the steel drum band was more frequently seen in Caribbean Plaza, this area became home to exotic bird displays and, inevitably, merchandise.

Here's J.P. and the Silver Stars doing their thing in 1971. This is the Band Stand / Gazebo on the left of the picture above. Check out the awesome chandelier above them.

retrodisneyworld.com

Alternate access to the central courtyard could also be achieved through a narrow covered passage that squeezed between the Band Stand and the Tiki Tropic Shop, seen here in a 1974 view.


Or by walking straight through Traders of Timbuktu.


Inside the central courtyard, moving from West (Tiki Room side) to East (Swiss Family Treehouse side) were three doors leading into the various rear shops. Starting near the breezeway, we have the other entrance door to the Tiki Tropic Shop:

DisneyPix.Com

(That little covered area between the two potted plants has an ornate door below it, which leads to a small backstage hallway that connects the Tiki Tropic Shop and Magic Carpet, as well as an elevator that can take you down to the Utilidor and stock rooms.)

Next to that is the main entrance to The Magic Carpet, with its impressive tower and moorish window:


Here's some guy checking out the weird little animal figures in the window from the 1972 Pictorial Souvenir:


Here's the view he would have had, looking from the Magic Carpet into the courtyard, towards the rear entrance to Traders of Timbuktu. This is the same door we were inside, four pictures up.

DisneyPix.Com

This sunny patio mostly specialized in hats and toy jungle animals, appropriate to the Jungle Cruise entrance, which it pretty much directly faced. Disney had a LOT of hat shops prior to the 90s, and this was Adventureland's. Hats!


Oriental Imports, Ltd.
Opened: October 1971
Closed: 1987
Became: Elephant Tales

The first of the rear complex of shops, Oriental Imports was a showcase of eastern silks and inlaid woods, and pretty much anything that could be manufactured in Japan or China. Steve Birnbaum writes in 1982: "This shop, hung with silk-tasseled oriental lanterns, stocks the sort of goods that merchants in Hong Kong sell in quantity: lovely satin change purses and eyeglass cases [...] and hand-gilded and engraved copper plates."

The shop was accessed by a ramp from the rear of Tropic Toppers down into the central sunken area; note the elevated area behind the half-wall on the right of this photo. Actually, note the half-wall on the right of this photo generally, because we'll be seeing it again.


The Magic Carpet
Opened: October 1971
Closed: 1987
Became: Elephant Tales

Flowing from Oriental Imports and through a door, The Magic Carpet, despite its name, offered very few carpets and more brass and inlaid pearl items, including a huge Taj Mahal music box. Here's some folks enjoying it in 1972 - notice the nearly identical merchandise display fixtures that we saw in Oriental Imports above, as well was the return of our odd painted animals from the Moorish window.


Traders of Timbuktu
Opened: October 1971
Closed: Late 2000
Demolished

The most distinctive of the original shops, Traders of Timbuktu housed African wares under a rich green hexagonal dome.


Consisting of two rooms, a flow-through larger room and a smaller cash wrap room pictured above, the store was stocked with the sort of merchandise you find everywhere at Animal Kingdom these days.


This part of the structure, as well as the Band Stand and breezeway alongside the Tiki Tropic Shop, were totally demolished as part of the construction of Magic Carpets of Aladdin, seriously compromising the intended aesthetics of Adventureland.

Here's a shot by Mike Lee in 1994 showing the later incarnation of Traders of Timbuktu with a good deal more bric-a-brak nailed to the walls.



Tiki Tropic Shop
Opened: October 1971
Closed: Late 2000
Became: Backstage Office

Surprisingly given its microscopic size, one of the longest lived of the Adventureland shops was the Tiki Tropic Shop, which sold Polynesian and Hawaiian shirts and dresses, similar to shops at the Polynesian Village.

I will warn you first that much as everything else at Magic Kingdom, the 90s were not kind to the Adventureland shops. By late in the decade, the once vibrant paint has been faded to dull colors and the merchandise had begun to slide into increasingly suspicious directions. Here's a shot of the Bazaar complex in 1994 and you'll see what I mean:


I bring this downer up here because the only photos I have of the Tiki Tropic Shop are from the same era, and to put it lightly this is not a pretty sight.


If you replace the gaudy 90s shirts with aloha shirts and leilani dresses and subtract the 90s "beach bum" props, you can get an idea of what this used to look like.


The chandeliers are the same beautiful brass lotuses that hang outside the Enchanted Tiki Room.

Tiki Tropic continued peddling garish 90s 'tude until the Bazaar complex was demolished to make way for Magic Carpets of Aladdin. The exterior door facing the Tiki Room was walled up and converted to a planter, the side door became a merchandise shelf. This left only the interior cast member access door seen in the first photo here, which led to the backstage hallway that connected Tiki Tropic, Magic Carpet, and the Utilidor. The room was gutted, repainted blue, and became a computer office for Merchandise managers.

That's all of the original Bazaar shops, but our story doesn't end here, because in the 80s a few of the shops changed theme.

The Zanzibar Shell Company
Opened: 1988
Closed: 2000
Became: Zanzibar Trading Company

A conversion of Tropic Toppers, Zanzibar Shell Company came into being with the retirement of ticket books at Magic Kingdom and the conversion of the Adventureland ticket booth into a shop selling all of the Jungle Cruise-related hats and wares that Tropic Toppers used to specialize in. Instead, shells and shell-based jewelry and wind chimes became this shop's stock in trade.


Here's our only good view of the original interior, probably only lightly changed from its days as Tropic Toppers.


In the late 90s with the rise of Paul Pressler and the then-new insistence that every part of Magic Kingdom individually turn a profit, out of the way shops like Zanzibar Shell Traders were converted into merchandise stock rooms. The existing merchandise was pushed out onto the shaded porch area of Traders, and the rear room became an offstage space. This new incarnation was called Zanzibar Traders and continued in operation until fairly recently, when it was turned entirely into shaded seating.

Elephant Tales
Opened: 1987
Closed: Early 2000
Became: Merchandise Stockroom

In the 80s, Oriental Imports and The Magic Carpet were combined into the more explicitly safari-themed Elephant Tales. This mostly involved hanging props from the ceiling, converting the more modernistic light fixtures to a hodgepodge of "themed" ones, taking down the wall between the two shops, and stocking more of what Traders of Timbuktu was already selling.

By the 90s, Elephant Tales had morphed into a catchall shop, selling Princess dresses and lots and lots of Aladdin and Lion King toys. Here's a shot Mike Lee took in 1994, taken from NEARLY the same location as the shot of Oriental Imports:


You can see that some of Oriental Imports' old merchandise has been repurposed. You can also see the elevated area behind the half-wall I pointed out to you earlier. Off to the right is the ramp down into the shop. If you squint close, at the top of the ramp you can see a painted mural of a tropical scene that's still visible today at Magic Kingdom:


Up in Elephant Tales' raised area, notice all of the leftover Magic Carpet stock.. this was in 1994, so this brass stuff had been hanging around for six or seven years by now!



Elephant Tales hung in, on and off, until it was shuttered and became a stock room for the new Argrabah Market built in 2001 to accommodate The Magic Carpets of Aladdin.

Colonel Hathi's Safari Club / Island Supply
Opened: Late 1972
Became: Island Supply, Ltd

As documented by Mike Lee, the Safari Club was originally intended to be Adventureland's Arcade - and it was, for less than a year, until it was abruptly closed and reopened as a shop in late 1972 or early 1973. Birnbaum describes the shop in 1982 as being "summer stuff", and by the early 90s when I remember it it was selling rainforest-themed items and small garden fountains. By the late 90s it had switched to selling swimwear and "beach" themed items.

The shop did receive the same ludicrous "beach" overlay that Tiki Tropic did, included the well-remembered game of hopscotch printed on the floor called "Island Hop". With the exception of the blue ceiling and beach theme, this interior was basically unchanged since its days as an arcade:


In early 2015, Island Supply was converted into a Sunglass Hut location. As we've seen earlier in this article, selling vaguely themed "beach" stuff is not a new concept in Adventureland. The interior is still basically the same as it always was.

Bwana Bob's
Opened: 1985
Closed: 2000
Relocated Elsewhere

The original Adventureland ticket booth, Bwana Bob's was repurposed in the 80s to sell vaguely Jungle Cruise-related knick-knacks. Here it is as a ticket booth in the early 80s:


And as Bwana Bob's in 1988, thanks to Mike Lee:


Bob's also makes a quick appearance in the 1990 A Day at the Magic Kingdom souvenir VHS:

"Don't worry dad it's only a fake snake!"

The original structure was demolished to make way for The Magic Carpets of Aladdin, and in the process "moved" nearer the Adventureland Bridge in the early 2000s.

The Forgotten Shops of Caribbean Plaza

Caribbean Plaza opened in 1973 with a much reduced version of its central anchoring ride, but in many other ways it was attempting to be as fully realized an area as New Orleans Square at Disneyland, containing five trickling tile fountains, three secluded courtyards, and a number of exotic shops to wander through. A lot of this has been chipped away today and many have forgotten how nice Caribbean Plaza was supposed to be, so let's move on from Adventureland to its neighbor for a quick look at what was there originally.

Plaza Del Sol Caribe
Opened: 1973
Still in Operation

The Plaza Del Sol, today simply known as the "Pirates Shop", may have been the original gift shop that an attraction exited into, but it was once quite different than it is today. Originally as much of an atmospheric area as a gift shop, it sold Sombreros, silk flowers, pirate heads carved into coconuts, pirate swords, hats, as well as wind chimes and other "patio" pieces.

There were very few freestanding merchandise display racks, with the merchandise overflowing from carts, similar to the visual presentation of the Plaza De Los Amigos at EPCOT Center. Indeed, the overall impression was as much an inviting plaza, similar to the one the attraction enters through, as it was a gift shop.


Inevitably, this could not last forever, and by the time the 90s has rolled around, the Plaza shop was becoming increasingly cluttered with both Pirate and faux "caribbean" items, making it more of a true shop and less of an atmospheric walk past a trickling fountain. The writing was on the wall...


The House of Treasure
Opened: 1973
Closed: 2001
Became: The Pirates League

Originally, if you wanted to buy Pirates of the Caribbean stuff, you had to go into the House of Treasure. This high ceilinged, atmospheric shop had three entrances: the high traffic one from the Plaza Del Sol Caribe, one facing north that spit out by the Caribbean Plaza pay phones and a shaded porch, and a rear exit that flowed into the secluded courtyard alongside the Pirates of the Caribbean queue, with the Fuente de Cielo azul.


When it was in operation, this was probably my favorite shop in Magic Kingdom. With walls lined with Spanish royal flags and decorative shelves stocked with pirate treasure, it reminded me of being inside the treasury room that appeared at the end of the attraction.



House of Treasure was shuttered following the 2001 recession, and by 2003 its main entrance has ominously become home to a dressing room, sealing off the rest of the area. It never returned. In 2009, the space become the pirate-themed version of Fantasyland's popular Princess makeover experience, The Bippity Boppity Boutique.


The Pirate's League, although beautifully themed, has never found the widespread success the Bippity Boppity Boutique has. When Disney closed the House of Treasure, they tore out the heart of Caribbean Plaza, and it's never quite been the same. I await the day when somebody in merchandise with real vision will turn this back into a shop that's accessible to everyone. Given that asking Disney to open a shop is something they'll happily do at any time, this evocative space shouldn't be closed off the way it is today.

The Pirates Arcade / Laffite's Portrait Deck
Opened: Late 1974
Closed: Late 90s
Became: Merchandise Stock Room

Many of you know about or remember the House of Treasure, but have you thought of the gift shop on the other side of the Plaza recently? In late 1974, this small space, tucked between the main walkway of Caribbean Plaza and the restrooms, had replaced The Safari Club and become Adventureland's main arcade. Around 1978, the Pirate Arcade changed names, and was now known as Caverna De Los Pirates. By 1980, the arcade games were cleared out.


What replaced it was an uncharge experience where guests could don pirate garb and get their photos taken in front of two backdrops: a tropical beach overflowing with treasure, or the deck of a sailing galleon. Similar to a photo experience on Main Street and frankly probably "inspired" by Knott's Berry Farm, Lafitte's Portrait Deck hung around at least until the early 90s.

Originally featuring sculpted pirates, the location later began printing cartoon characters on top of photos, such a pirate Mickey and the Little Mermaid.


By the mid-90s, Lafitte's Portrait Deck had become an unnamed side-adjunct to the Plaza Del Sol Caribe, selling pirate swords, hats, and other stuff. In the late 90s, it was closed and became a merchandise stock room.

The Crow's Nest
Opened: 1988
Closed: 2010
Became: A Pirate's Adventure Game

A tiny little shop that opened next to the Frontierland Train Station and survived its demolition and relocation, The  Crow's Nest offered film and disposable cameras, as well as being a drop-off spot for the park's in-house express photo developing service (such things did exist!).

Main Street Gazette

It had a tiny interior, with a register on the rear wall in front of a number of backlit photos of Magic Kingdom such as the castle and Splash Mountain. With the decline of film cameras and the exit of Kodak from the park as sponsors, the little hut became a quick stop for autograph books, toys, and toy guns. In 2010 it closed and became the "headquarters" for a Jack Sparrow themed interactive game, A Pirate's Adventure: Treasures of the Seven Seas.

The Golden Galleon & La Princesa de Cristal
Opened: Early 1974
Closed: 1998
Became: El Pirata Y El Perico Seating

The two most obscure Caribbean Plaza shops may be so for good reason. The area across from Pirates of the Caribbean was originally intended to be a shopping complex with a snack bar in front; the snack bar would eventually grow to take over its neighboring shops. In 1982, Steve Birnbaum describes El Pirata Y El Perico as offering "ham and cheese submarine sandwiches, hot dogs, burritos, hot pretzels, brownies, and ice-cream bars" - fairly standard for Disney snack stands of the era, where everything came directly out of a fridge or warming tray.

Just past the main entrance to El Pirata, near the large arch that anchors the rear of Caribbean Plaza, is a large planter with walkways on either side of it as well as an open space that leads directly back towards an isolated courtyard that sits between the original locations of The Golden Galleon and La Princesa de Cristal. Today, this space is jam packed with tables, but imagine for a moment if instead it was an open space, with signs in the planter directing you back to the courtyard where you would discover yet more quaint and interesting shops. This is how it was in 1973, and how it remained until, along with so many other interesting features of Walt Disney World, was tossed out unceremoniously in the late 90s.

The shop on the left was the Golden Galleon, home to gold, brass, and jeweled decorative fixtures. Anchored by an antique diver's helmet, the shop sold brass fittings, door stops, wall plaques, mirrors, ship's wheels, and spyglasses. It also featured a large number of authentic ships in bottles and, at least in the early 70s, was home to a large collection of authentic and reproduction scrimshaw!


Across the way, La Princesa de Cristal was another Arribas Brothers location, very much like the ones that still exist on Main Street, in the Mexico Pavilion, and elsewhere. La Princesa was notable for specializing in crystal reproductions of sailing ships, ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet long. I haven't ever found anybody who took a photo of this location.

Here's a view looking into Golden Galleon:


That door and arch still exists, below the Caribbean Plaza arch. Modern park goers will be confused by a sunlight coming in the rear of the shop, but the 1998 expansion of Pecos Bill in Frontierland swallowed up a sunny courtyard that used to sit between Frontierland and Caribbean Plaza.

That 1998 expansion of Pecos Bill is what finally sealed the fate of Golden Galleon & La Princesa. Foods took over pretty much the entire western end of the west side of Magic Kingdom, filling in all of the space surrounding Pecos Bill which used to be open patio seating, and pushing into The Mile Long Bar at the exit of Country Bear Jamboree in the process. La Princesa was "upgraded" to a green-fringed cart which sat just outside its former digs, while El Pirata expanded to fill what was previously two shops. The crystal shop became home to a topping bar and restrooms, and Golden Galleon was converted to seating and connected directly to Pecos Bill via a ramp.

The timing of the conversion for El Pirata was not fortuitous. Park attendance was already slipping following years of eroding fan goodwill during the 90s, and the opening of Animal Kingdom did not grow attendance as expected but instead cannibalized the other three parks. Following the dip in tourism following the 2001 terror attacks, El Pirata went on seasonal operation and has never really came back.

In late 2005, Magic Kingdom toyed with offering El Pirata as a buffet location. Catered by the Contemporary, the buffet was operated for a few weekends. The topping bar was cleared out of the La Princesa space, hot food was brought in, and steaks were grilled in the courtyard. It never returned.


In February 2011, El Pirata Y El Perico received a name change and new theme: Tortuga Tavern, with a vaguely defined tie-in with a line of Captain Jack Sparrow young adult novels being published at the time. The cosmetic overhaul did nothing to change the location's fortunes. This "restaurant" has rarely been open two months out of the year for nearly 20 years now.



There's no reason that Disney needs to waste all of this valuable real estate - it's hard to imagine that clearing out The Pirate's League and reopening it as a store would make that location any less profitable than it is now. La Princessa de Cristal is never coming back, given that it now houses two restrooms, but the former The Golden Galleon space sometimes isn't even open when Tortuga Tavern is. Merchandise across Walt Disney World has been experiencing something of a renaissance lately, and specialty shops like Memento Mori or the Dress Shop regularly set social media ablaze with new and exclusive merchandise offerings.

It's hard to see that a new line of Pirates of the Caribbean merchandise offered in either of those two spaces wouldn't do well. More importantly, reclaiming House of Treasure and Lafitte's for merchandise sales would both help traffic move through the exit of Pirates of the Caribbean and restore much of the charm of the area that's been lost.

As for the Adventureland Bazaar, it's safe to say that for now removal of the Magic Carpets of Aladdin is unlikely. However, there's still the old Magic Carpet / Elephant Tales space sitting right behind and connected to the operating Adventureland shops. Again, an exclusive line of Jungle Cruise and Tiki Rom merchandise in this location could do well, adding some prestige to this very compromised area and the semi-hidden nature of the location wouldn't matter much in the era of social media marketing.

Given that Disney just spent the better part of a decade rebuilding Downtown Disney into the high-end retail mecca of Disney Springs, it seems strange that so little attention is being paid to underutilized areas of their keystone park that were intended to offer the kind of varied, exclusive, themed shopping experience that Disney can deliver. These spaces are sitting there, just waiting for somebody to come along with the imagination to use them properly.

Special thanks to Mike Lee, Todd McCartney, Whit Elam, and many others who contributed to this article.

Want more vintage Walt Disney World history? We have an entire indexed archive of that, right here on the WDW History Hub!

One of the troubles with being canonized as a Disney Legend is that all of the rest of your life's output tends to become a sidenote to that studio in Burbank. There's a handful of artists like Rolly Crump and Walt Peregoy who were busy enough and rebellious enough to avoid total identification, but it's no coincidence that when we think of Disney Legends from Walt's time, we're thinking mostly of loyal Disney lifers like Frank Thomas and John Hench.

And then there's George Bruns, who probably ranks third in the Disney pantheon behind Charles Wolcott and the Sherman Brothers in establishing what Disney "sounds like". He wrote The Ballad of Davy Crockett, the bass inflected soundtrack to 101 Dalmatians, and the soothing, mysterious music heard in The Jungle Book. He wrote the original score heard in Pirates of the Caribbean, which to these ears may be the finest attraction soundtrack ever. His jazzy inflection of bluegrass means that his layered, toe-tapping orchestrations for Country Bear Jamboree haven't dated a lick in a half century.

But what isn't well known is that George continued to record other material before, during, and after his career at Disney. It may not be well known, but it's out there. So this time at Passport to Dreams we're going to be looking at and listening to the unknown recording career of George Bruns.

Early Life and Dixieland

Born in Oregon in 1914, the earliest places you can hear George Bruns doing his stuff is in Dixieland and Jazz recordings from the 1940s. The group he seems to have been most associated with was The Famous Castle Jazz Band, where he played lead trombone. The Castle Club was a nightclub south of Portland, and seems to have been famous and popular as a location for great jazz. Here's George on trombone in a 1949 recording:



He also seems to have appeared with jazz legend Turk Murphy on a handful of recordings around the same time, sometimes on bass and sometimes on trombone.

It seems fairly clear that before Castle Club, George had organized his own group of musicians as "George Bruns and His Jazz Band", and they had recorded a number of tracks for the famous Commodore jazz label out of New York. I can't find any evidence that these recordings were actually released at the time, and the only reason we know they exist is due to a pricey and out of print 60 LP (!) reissue of Commodore's entire library in 1990. George appears in Volume III of the set, which means he made the recordings sometime between 1938 and 1943. I tried to track down a library copy of this set to heard these recordings, but it seems that somebody with more patience or deeper pockets than I will have to be up to the task.

Which brings us to our first recovered recording, and the sad fact is that I have no idea when or where it was made, however it makes more sense to group it with these early Jazz recordings than the later ones, as we'll soon see. But first I have to explain how the heck we even have it.

In the mid-60s, Reader's Digest got into the business of promoting and selling huge boxes of LPs all under a certain theme. The original examples, such as a box devoted to Swing music or light classical music, were actually produced by other companies and sold by Reader's Digest through a mail-in voucher. They were enough of a success that Reader's Digest was producing several "theme" sets a year, and continued to do so well into the 80s on LP, 8-track, cassette, and eventually CD.

The company Readers Digest eventually settled on contracting to create these sets was RCA. RCA already had a massive back catalog of releases because they operated a program in the 50s and 60s very similar to the Columbia House CD programs of the 90s - where new albums would be sent to you directly, monthly. As a result RCA recorded a lot of albums that never saw general release outside of special "RCA Music Service" shipments, and probably sat on many more without ever releasing them. It was primarily this back catalog of recorded music that filled out the Reader's Digest "theme" LP sets, especially the early ones.

Which is how George Bruns managed to appear in a Reader's Digest compilation album, Gaslight Varieties, released in 1969.


1. The Cakewalk in the Sky 00:00
2. Down South 02:44
3. Any Rags? 05:32
4. Kentucky Babe 08:06
5. I Love My Baby 10:40
6. At A Georgia Camp Meeting 13:30

Gaslight Varieties is pretty interesting to Disney fans - besides the Bruns tracks, there's a lot of Thurl Ravenscroft and Mellomen tracks throughout - but interesting isn't the same as actually being very good. RCA tended to use second best options when compiling these sets to keep costs down, and the result is albums that quickly wear out their novelty and have no real sense of progression.

Because of the way RCA structured these albums, we have only one side of one record of Bruns playing Ragtime music - the other side was never released. It's impossible to tell when this was recorded, and there are no personnel credits besides "George Bruns and his Rag-A-Muffins". We're not even sure what the album was supposed to be called, although RCA named that side of the record "Ragtime, Yessir!"

But at least get have six good tracks of previously unheard George Bruns music out of it! It's good stuff, wonderfully "hot" jazz similar to his work with the Wonderland Jazz Band on the famous "Deep In The Heart of Dixieland" Disneyland LP.

To The Tropics

George eventually provided jazzy music to several UPA cartoons before being scooped up by Disney and embarking on the recording career we know him for today. And despite his busy career writing music for dozens of Disney projects, he found the time to produce and record a tropical easy listening record!

As part of the background music for the Ford Magic Skyway at the 1964 World's Fair, George recorded a piece of music called "Moonlight Time In Old Hawaii", which he later expanded out to a full size album, released by Vault Records in 1969 or 1970.

This record is at least somewhat famous in Disney circles today for its use at the Adventureland Veranda in the 80s. It's also tough to say if it was really ever properly released at all - Vault, as a record label, was floundering in the late 60s, and ever copy of "Moonlight Time" that I've ever seen has its "Promotional Copy" sticker still attached. This scarcity and its mild fame in Disney circles has driven up its prices on the secondary market. Thankfully, Chris Lyndon beautifully restored a transfer of my copy, so now you can enjoy it whenever you like:


Side A
1. South Seas Island Magic (0:00)
2. Hawaiian Paradise (2:52)
3. Moonlight and Shadows (5:40)
4. To You, Sweetheart, Aloha (8:28)
5. Paradise Isle (11:24)
6. Song of Old Hawaii (14:36)

Side B
7. Blue Hawaii (17:04)
8. Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii (20:01)
9. Sweet Lelani (23.:24)
10. Aloha Nui Hawaii (26:38)
11. My Tane (29:30)
12. Ka Pua (The Flower) (33:16)

Now, I may be biased, because I obviously liked this well enough to seek out a copy and have it preserved, and I also have a weakness for atmosphere music, but I think this is a terrific exotica record. There's nothing quite like the soothing strings and languid pace of this music to make you slow down and relax when you need it. It's a shame it never got a real release of any kind, and that its one release has a cheap stock photograph from Pan American for a cover.

The world may have whipped clear past Moonlight Time in Old Hawaii, but I'm pleased to have helped it continue to weave its spell over listeners in the digital age.

Retirement and Beyond

Our final record is a treat, and one I'm very pleased to have been able to "rescue" for posterity. After his retirement from Disney in 1976, George moved back to Oregon and taught at a local college part time. And he recorded one last record, the delightfully titled "Have A Good Time With Big George Bruns".

It's tough to say if George explicitly intended this to be a testament record, but that's what it plays as: a summation of his whole career, mixing hot Dixieland jazz riffs with Disney tracks in equal measure. The albums begins with "Happy Rag", familiar from a million Disney promotional films, and ends with the theme music to The Love Bug. Throughout, he includes such deep selections as "Inky the Crow" and "Ah, See the Moon", a total nonsense song he wrote with Ward Kimball for Ludwig Von Drake!

But the real stand out aspects to Have A Good Time are its inclusion of an electric organ and Lou Norris - a jazz singer who adds a lot to the "throwback" numbers on the record. I can't determine if Miss Norris ever made another recording, so it's more likely that George met her locally at Sandy Hook. But she has a terrific voice, and it's easy to see why Bruns included a prominent credit (and caricature) of her on the cover.

That cover was drawn by famous cartoonist Virgil Partch, by the way, who is miscredited on the album sleeve as "Virgil Parks".


Side A
1. Happy Rag (Bruns) 00:00
2. You’re Gonna Be Sorry (Bruns) 02:57
3. Inky the Crow (Bruns) 05:53
4. Please Come Back Big Daddy (Hilton-Bruns) 09:00
5. Have A Good Time (Bryant-Bryant) 11:59
6. Ah, See The Moon (Bruns-Kimball) 14:57

Side B
7. When You’re Gambling (Fisher-Goodwin-Shay) 18:04
8. Where Has The Melody Gone (Hilton-Bruns) 21:04
9. Wabash Blues (Meinken-Ringle) 23:41
10. Mama’s Gone Goodbye (Bocage-Piron) 26:44
11. Uptown Downtown Man (Hilton-Bruns) 30:02
12. Herbie (Bruns) 33:20

As with everything George Bruns left us, it's a spritely, upbeat listen - craft and entertainment value seamlessly blended. Like all three of the albums we've looked at here, it received a minor and local release, if any at all, and coming across a copy isn't easy.

So give these albums a listen, and I'm sure Mr. Bruns will be smiling somewhere knowing that people are still enjoying his efforts five decades later. Here's to you, Big George.

Do you love theme park and atmosphere music? Then hop on over to our Music Hub, where dozens of obscure tracks - and the stories behind them - are preserved!

You don't often get to break the news on genuine lost classic attractions. Although unbuilt concepts are still a matter of particular interest for certain Disney fans, the deeper you dig, the more often it seems that there was less there than meets the eye, or that the information usually presented about these things online is less than accurate. If this information has been circulating unchecked for many years, more often than not that information is more fiction than fact, which is one reason I spent so much space clearing up misconceptions in my piece on Western River Expedition.

But what if there were a lost attraction that was not only compelling, but conceptually fairly complete and mostly unknown? Wouldn't that be really worth the effort to dig into, the make its secrets public?

About five years ago, I first began to hear about a Marc Davis walk-through attraction intended for Fort Wilderness called Adventure House. I began to gather information and what loose scraps of art I could track, not certain if I would ever be able to share anything about this attraction, until last year I was finally able to obtain at auction what turned out to be an early outline draft of the project. From there, pieces began to fall into place and the forgotten story of Adventure House could now be told.

In the years since, a few pieces of information have become available through the various fan events and Disney history sources, but I don't believe that anybody has yet done justice to this fascinating design concept. So, after much research and patience, I'm proud to present a look at one of the most singular efforts of one of Disney's best and brightest. It's time to welcome Adventure House into the fold.

Fort Wilderness' Frontier Town

The year was 1976, and Fort Wilderness at Walt Disney World was riding high.

The Bicentennial years of 1975 and 1976 had been red letter years for Disney following the tourism downturn spurred by the 1973 oil crisis. The hotels were full, the parks were busy - it was those years that allowed Disney to move forward on Epcot. 1974 at Fort Wilderness had seen the debut of Pioneer Hall and the wildly successful Hoop De Doo Revue. The Fort Wilderness Railroad had been up and running for a few years, and the crown jewel of Fort Wilderness had debuted in 1975 - River Country, an innovative and richly themed water playground for its day.

In other words, as much as the Contemporary and the Polynesian, Fort Wilderness was growing into its own unique destination, with its own set of recreations and attractions for vacationers. While side wheel steamboats brought boat loads of visitors to Treasure Island across the way, plans at WED were stirring to add even more unique offerings to Fort Wilderness to eat 70s guest time and dollars.

In truth, such plans had existed long before. As far back As 1972, Disney was trumpeting plans to expand the northern section of Fort Wilderness, which had always been called "Settlement" but which hosted little besides a beach, petting zoo and boat dock. The 1972 Annual Report goes into the most detail:

"Early in 1973, a narrow-gauge steam railroad with Victorian-style open air cars will begin transporting guests along a three mile loop of track between their campsites and the campground's reception, recreation and entertainment areas. By next summer, the steam train will also connect with the new Fort Wilderness Stockade and Western Town where complete, dining, shopping, and entertainment facilities are being built in phases."

It shows just how much potential Disney saw in the fairly underdeveloped and remote Fort Wilderness that scarcely a single Annual Report passed in the duration of the 70s where they did not mention elaborate plans for the area. In 1974, they speak of the possibility of developing a ticket book for the campground attractions, and in 1975 they report:

"118 additional campsites will be constructed during the coming years which will bring the total available to 832 by June, 1976. That same month, a major extensive themed area for water recreation will open at Fort Wilderness. This will enable the company to establish a new revenue center at Walt Disney World. A variety of new admission ticket is being developed, which should also stimulate additional use of the Fort Wilderness Steam Trains, Treasure Island, and the other recreational facilities at Fort Wilderness. These will be available not only to guests of the campgrounds, but to hotel guests and others from all over Central Florida."

In 1976, Disney's still beating the drum for the Fort:

"Already the company's 'Imagineers' are at work designing new attractions for River Country, possibly to include more water slides, an additional raft ride or a two-man boat ride. Ft Wilderness itself is slated for further expansion in the near future. Plans call for a Frontiertown, a new recreational complex and still more campsites."

It's not tough to read between the lines and conclude that WDP saw the possibility to add an extra day to the vacations of visitors, a major concern through the 70s and 80s and something that the Lake Buena Vista complex was only halfway successful at doing. They were looking for ideas, and at some point, Marc Davis began suggesting them. His idea was to build a fun house.

The Roost

The initial proposal was for a massive red barn, which is easy to see sitting in well with the down-home atmosphere for Fort Wilderness. The caption of the art is "A kind of indoor 'Tom Sawyer Island'", which is as fair a pitch as I've seen. By 1976, the red barn was gone, and the concept for what would soon become known as Adventure House would be much more developed.


Assisting the core team of Marc Davis, Al Bertino and Wathel Rogers was WED newcomer Gary Goddard, who typed the June 1976 memos which outline the status of the project. It is through these memos that we have insight into the initial ideas for Adventure House.

Hotel Name: The Roost 

Suggested Exterior Appearance: a wilderness attempt at a fine hotel. A conglomeration of several architectural styles of the times, with certain sections almost out of place with the others. A lot of "units" that give the silhouette a look of many towers and additions to the main structure. Three stories high, it is covered with whirligigs and weather-vanes that make the entire structure a constant show 

Characters: Our hosts are the original builders of the hotel, Jasper and Maude. Jasper is meek and mild mannered and a "tinkerer" who has created many of his own "inventions" and additions to the hotel, including the whirligigs that abound on the roof of the building. 

Maude is a heavy-set, strong lady who likes her pet chickens very much, and is a hero-worshiper who has named many hotel rooms after her idols. 

Themeing Overall: The entire hotel is filled with Maude's chickens who rooster wherever they feel like it. These chickens cluck, squawk, sing and talk - depending on their mood. All over the hotel, these hens provide gags and comments on the various experiences. 

Theming - Individual Rooms: Each room has its own character in terms of the design and function within the hotel. In addition, a number of rooms are named after Maude's famous guests, Paul Bunyan, Ichabod Crane, Johnny Appleseed, etc. 

The overall feeling of the hotel is that there was a genuine attempt at creating the best hotel ever - but that in the building of it, things were not completed to exacting specifications. If it looked good to Jasper and Maude, they nailed it down and painted it.

We're in Marc Davis territory here for sure. Jasper and Maude are nothing but the latest version of Marc's beloved henpecked husband jokes that were the basis for so much of The Haunted Mansion, except in this case with a twist on the story of Jack Spratt. And yet other details here are suggestive as well - the eccentric architecture, for one. It's easy to imagine a high victorian interior somewhere between Grizzly Hall and The Haunted Mansion, with the eccentricity of a low budget Winchester Mansion. The chickens, too, bring to mind the aborted idea to have a raven narrate the Haunted Mansion.

But just as worth noting here is the preoccupation with American folk stories, which is as significant a signpost for late Marc Davis material as any. After America Sings, Marc went all in on Americana at WED, and the result was some of his most intriguing work. In the early planning for EPCOT, he had created a concept for an attraction at the United States pavilion, based on characters such as John Henry, Ichabod Crane, and Captain Ahab. A later version of this attraction used noteworthy historical Americans, and under a different team would mutate into The American Adventure.

And of course, we need look no further than Western River Expedition and the proposed "Land of Legends" at Disneyland for the connections to Adventure House to run deep. For more on both of those, see my article here.


Guests entering what was then known as The Roost would be greeted by the ghosts of Jasper and Maude on a balcony above the Registration Desk, setting the scene and backstory for the attraction to come. The project memos include a long script for this gag, of which this excerpt will be enough to give an idea of it:

(Maude is seated in a rocking chair with a pet rooster on her lap, which she pets as she speaks. Both Maude and Jasper appear and disappear as Pepper's Ghost illusions) 

Maude: You might be wondering''bout all these here chickens.. well, when we first moved out here, all them wilderness varmints outside wanted to sink their teeth in our hens ... so we just moved 'em inside to be safe and they been here ever since ... I even lost count count of all them cluckers... but anyway, that's why we call this place 'The Hotel Roost'. 

(She pats the Rooster's head) 

Maude: Tiger here is my pet and he's the great, great Grandfather of the whole flock... Say 'Hello' to the people, Tiger! 

(Tiger roars like a lion)
(Jasper reappears) 

Jasper: Did you call, dear?

Once through the pre-show, guests were to be unleashed on a variety of interactive walking attractions, such as Maude's Kitchen (slanting room), Hall of Doors, Earthquake Room, Mirror Maze, Dosi-Doe Balcony (an exterior balcony with a shaking floor), The "Prairie Schooner Hall" which would sway from side to side, Jasper's Attic, a laundry-chute slide, and an upside-down dining room. Several of these are tentatively outlined in the memos, including:

Maude's Kitchen, where hens lay eggs into Jasper's "egg mover" and appear to roll uphill, another gag where water runs uphill, and two chairs that are actually boxes and thus are impossible to get out of. This strongly suggests that Marc was very familiar with the Haunted Shack at Knott's, and is also confirmation that he had a hand in the design of the Mystery Mine on Tom Sawyer Island.

The Barrel Room, with barrel tops spinning on the floor and teetering barrels on the walls. The central area includes a large spinning floor with a stack of barrels topped by a drunken chicken who sings. Various barrels have sound effects from inside them such of gurgling or hiccups.

Paul Bunyan's Bedroom, a tall room where the entire floor is a "quilt" - and a huge bounce mattress. On the wall are three huge paintings of Paul, Babe the Blue Ox, and his axe.

The Hall of Doors was to be the main showcase of Wathel Rogers' projection screen technology, where various doors would open onto gags, such as a door marked "Exit" that would appear to open onto an oncoming train, or Rain and Thunder behind a door marked "Florida Room". Another door marked "Rest Room" would open onto a single chair, and one labeled "No Smoking" would have the figure of a man who sprays water at the viewer - presumably, behind a glass panel. At the end of the hall were to be two elevators that would appear to take viewers up or down but actually go nowhere.

Windwagon Smith's Nautical Quarter, a circular room with windows looking out onto Frontier Town, with various cranks and levers that would spin and rotate the weather vanes on the exterior of the house.


Other rooms were already running into issues or seemed to be conceptual dead ends. A mirror maze was to have two dead-end areas where projections of fluttering bats and the headless horseman throwing his pumpkin were to be triggered, and another, the Dark Maze, to be experienced entirely through touch, is exactly the sort of thing that theme parks can't do. Memos also indicate that in mock-ups they were having trouble with the first illusion room, the Perspective Hallway. There's no real hint as to what it's intended to be, but my guess is it's some kind of spin on the "diminishing mine shaft" on Tom Sawyer Island.

In any case, it seems clear that these and other concerns caused Marc and Al to do a radical re-think of the concept for The Roost, which led to some of Marc's finest and craziest ideas for WED.

Adventure House

The largest distinction between the Adventure House and Roost version of the attractions comes down largely to interactivity. A lot of The Roost was the kind of classic fun house attraction that was already dying out, with shaking stairs, rocker panel floors, and crazy mirrors. Marc's final concepts seem to ditch the hotel theme and double down on the weirdness - gags and illusions in the style of the Haunted Mansion.

This was a long time coming and a return to form for Marc. He had always kept a torch burning for the walk-through version of the Haunted Mansion, having been sufficiently impressed by Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey's ghostly sea captain vignette to find ways to insert the character into the final attraction. Marc even wrote several drafts of a walk-through version of the Haunted Mansion, the version where "The most dangerous ghost in the Mansion" turns out to be the host.

Later, Marc developed a huge number of gags for Tom Sawyer Island at Magic Kingdom, most of which were very interactive in nature - slides, trees to climb, etc. His influence in the final product is most keenly felt in Injun Joe's Cave and the Mystery Mine, although I've never been able to determine if he actually oversaw these.

So Adventure House is a fascinating look into ideas that one of WED's best designers had been ruminating on for years. Let's go inside, shall we?



The waiting area carries over Marc's roosting hens, this time as a sort of time piece - each time a hen lays an egg, it drops into a basket and the bell rings. When one of them plays three eggs, the bell begins ringing rapidly and the portrait of Maude and Jasper comes to life for the pre-show!

Note the benches here that expand or sink - another one of Marc's clever re-utilizations of an existing WED effect, in this case the inflating seats from Flight to the Moon. It's also a premonition of the Adventurer's Club, of course.

After the pre-show, groups are admitted to the Library, where presumably a Cast Member will give a short safety spiel, before releasing them into the attraction through a door at the back of the room. Notice that the "perspective hallway" has been abandoned, and that the "prairie schooner hall" is now the introductory effect of the attraction, viewed from the stationary hallway outside. Unlike at the Haunted Mansion, this hallway is truly endless!



Between each major scene, Marc designed short hallways to link the experiences, some of them fairly simple, others truly strange and baroque. He specified that each hall be treated with sound-proofing material, to give the effect of going from very loud gag rooms to dead silent hallways. It seems likely that as guests wind through Adventure House, the linking hallways would become increasingly abstract, until the walls and floor were painted in Escher-like patterns in eye-popping red and black.

The room sequence here is nothing but a good guess, by the way. If a document exists specifying order and layout for this version of the show, it has not yet surfaced.



The first scene seems to still be the Dining Room, but instead of a tilt room it's now a visual gag where an overhead bucket system carries food above the dining room table while model trains on the table top carry platters of food in and out of the kitchen. This was to followed up by a Kitchen scene where the buckets appear to glide out of an old-fashioned larder cabinet, heading out to the Dining Room full of food and returning empty! Nearby, a water pump pumps water by itself and kettles rattled on the stove - effects recycled from the Carousel of Progress, and which Marc first attempted to re-use in the Haunted Mansion.

Marc specified that the model trains should make the same sound as full-sized locomotives, by the way!


Next, guests would descend into the greenhouse, full of goofy and leering "man-eating plants". The floor here was intended to be a soft material, and covered by a low layer of fog! Again, the links both to the Tiki Rom, Haunted Mansion, and Jungle Cruise are unmistakeable - Marc even designed a belching man-eating plant for the Florida Jungle Cruise that didn't make the final cut.



Upstairs now to Jasper's Den, the new tilt room illusion. The centerpiece of the room is now a billiards table where the balls appear to roll uphill. Note the fish tank with a full-size shark swimming inside - not only a vestige of Wathel Rogers' projection scenes which once were a key part of The Roost, but a good example of Marc's problem solving ability. No doubt through testing and application of the screens in attractions like If You Had Wings, Marc was keen to find a way to make the technology appear more "real". Placing the screen behind an aquarium filled with seaweed and bubbles would diffuse the image just enough to turn it from yet another obvious screen into a real illusion.

The other gags in here are decent, such as the cat terrified of the bear rug. The cat is direct from Pirates of the Caribbean, and another example of cost-saving measures designed into the attraction. The clock pendulum is supposed to animate at an angle that implies the room is tilting the opposite direction of the way it is, which is a nice touch.



More total weirdness, the Photography Studio has cameras set up on each side of room, alternately flashing. Each time they flash, the "shadows" of various ghouls illuminate the walls, slowly fading out. This was likely intended to be a simple effect achieved with slides or cutouts mounted behind scrim walls on the left and right - dead simple, but very interesting.

Here's two of my favorite Marc gags of all time. Not everything the man came up with was a winner, but if anybody ever claims he wasn't as sharp at the end of his career at WED as he was at the start, you have my permission to wave these under their noses. Let's take a peek inside the Guest Room at Adventure House.

Guests entering immediately hear loud snoring and spot a huge shape asleep under the covers - it's a bear! His huge expanding belly and paws can be seen, moving in time with the snoring. The sound is so severe that every time he inhales, the room's ceiling pulls down, and every time he exhales, it shoots up away from the floor!



A nearby chest of drawers opens and closes in time with the snoring, as well as a swivel mirror that is pulled towards and away from the bed. A cross-stitch sampler above the bed reads "MANY BRAVE SOULS ARE ASLEEP IN THE DEEP".


Did you see it? Did you make the connection? It's the Stretch Room.

One thing that impresses me so much about this gag is the the Stretch Room is one of those things that's so iconic, so memorable, that nearly everybody who attempts to do a spin on the illusion just ends up repeating it. You can spot a stretch room knockoff immediately.

But here's a spin on the basic illusion that has nothing to do with changing portraits or vanishing ceilings. Marc is, as far as I know, the only person to ever come up with a viable alternative on the illusion that actually brings something new to the table. Oh, and it's really funny to boot.

From there, guests walk into the Bathroom. On their left is a bath tub with a curtain drawn around it; a dress hangs on the curtain and we can hear high, opera singing coming from the tub. The path bends around the tub to the left and reveals:



Again, the staging here is simply superb. Marc had really been digging into how to direct guests through theme park spaces throughout the 70s, and his use of a Claude Coats-style "reveal space" here is extremely effective. Budding and current theme park designers take note: this is the way you set up and pay off a joke.


Here's an odd concept for a library with tilting walls; as the walls tilt forward, books slide out of the shelves and stop, then slide back in as the wall tilts away. Not nearly as effective as the "Prairie Schooner Hall" and Guest Bedroom gags, but still interesting.

There's also an updated take on the mirror maze, with Maude, Jasper, and Tiger appearing and disappearing through the maze:



The final room appears to be an Attic, with a hooting owl, player piano, and busts that come alive and talk. In this case, the idea is pretty much identical to a scene in the old outline, which reads:

"The effect of the room is to be a feeling of crawling in, around, over and through various articles of furniture, props and assorted units. The room should be designed with primarily younger ages in mind, but structurally it should support the weight of whoever might want to make their way thru it. [...] Basic experience is to enter the "obstacle course" by entering the open front of a trunk and then proceeding through a multilevel series of tunnels, bridges and platforms [...] Last effect is a short, straight slide into a pile of plastic eggs (chickens are above, squawking)."

Yes, it's a kid's playground. You can see the trunk entrance to the left and the adult walkway off to the right. Presumably all of the other various illusions would be present to keep the adults amused. Next time Disney opens a pedestrian play area in one of their parks, remember that Adventure House found a way to make it unique.



The End of Adventure House

It's hard to know exactly why projects never get off the ground at Disney, even less so back in the 70s when all we have left is art. Adventure House seems to at least had the support of some in WED, enough for Marc and Al Bertino to be mocking up sets and mazes and running tests on effects, which is nearer to actual realization than something like, say the Snow Palace came.

It's easy to see what the thinking was. A trip to Discovery Island, River Country, and a lap through Adventure House and dinner at the Hoop-De-Doo is a full day for anyone, and the notion of there being an actual Disney-style full attraction to take in may have just been the thing to start diverting traffic in that direction that turned the combination River Country / Island ticket into an actual full day draw.

Personally, I think something like Adventure House still has a place at Walt Disney World. Any modern version would need to have a wheelchair route that goes around the most significant obstacles, but that seems to have been the plan anyway - early memos mention a "chicken route", marked with statues of pointing chickens, for those who preferred to watch but not interact. In almost every other way the idea makes sense: the illusions are low-maintainence, and there's no ride vehicles to break down. I could see this attraction doing very well at Disney Springs, where some families seem to be at a loss for things to do. If it cost, say, $5 a person to go into Adventure House, it could be a low operational cost, high-profit attraction.

As for Marc, Adventure House was near the end of his career for WED before his retirement in 1978. Towards the end of his career, Marc's ability to get new projects off the ground was dramatically compromised, which must have been a frustration for a gifted designer who once had Walt Disney's ear. Although brought back after retirement to help design Tokyo Disneyland, his last significant new project for Disney was The World of Motion, which was publicly credited only to Ward Kimball  until fairly recently.

And just like that, the man who put more "Disney" into Disney than probably anyone other than Walt Disney was gone. When you consider exactly how much the humor and characters Marc worked on still defines what Disney is - from Thumper to Cinderella to Tinker Bell and Maleficent onto the Jungle Cruise, Tiki Room, Small World, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, his influence is still huge and unavoidable.

Since I first found out about Adventure House I've been working diligently to make this material as public as possible. I would not have been able to succeed without the help of those in "The Chummery", Mike Lee, J.M. Jr., "OrangeBird517", "WDWSkip01", and more. Thank you everyone!

Ready for more WDW History? Check out our hub page, covering all sorts of forgotten Walt Disney World obscurities.

For more Marc Davis check out our individual hub pages on The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Jungle Cruise. Happy adventuring!

One of the troubles with writing a blog like this is that although the posts that I push out onto it stay there to be read in the future, one can't go back even a few years without immediately starting to find ideas and assumptions that I wouldn't make today. Passport to Dreams has been a terrific forum for me to clarify thoughts and reach conclusions about things, but the whole trouble is that the more you know, the more you're positive that you don't know, and I think anything written before around 2010 or 2011 these days is a little suspect.

For example, talking to others and doing my own research into the Walt Disney World of the past has permanently undermined my faith in personal nostalgia. It doesn't take too much digging to find opinions of those fans that preceded you that undermine your own; the vocal supporters of If You Had Wings have all but buried the internet legacy of Delta Dreamflight, an attraction I thought highly enough of to make lyrics from it the very title of this blog. But once you start going back even further, to previous generations of fans, the waters become even murkier; how do you reconcile the fact that there are those who feel that the removal of Nature's Wonderland and installation of Big Thunder Mountain permanently ruined Disneyland? There are, presumably, even older fans than that who felt that Disneyland really started to go downhill when comedy elephants were added to the Jungle Cruise.

"I WILL NOT REST UNTIL THE FOUNTAIN AT THE BASE OF THE SKYWAY PYLON IS RESTORED" - me in 2003

And yet, and yet. At the same time, I'm now seeing what's happening to the fans of the stuff that came after my glory years. There are those nostalgic for the 1994 Tomorrowland Transit Authority narration, gone since 2009 and which I personally hated. There was, believe it or not, an online furor over the removal of the gaudy 90s decorations inside World of Disney. But it's hard not to look upon such things with a generous eye; after all, I hated when my stuff was removed, and the generations before me hated when their stuff was removed.

And so this post is something I maybe might have written in the early days of this blog in a radically different way. I've been putting it off for years for just such a reason, and only recently have I finally felt like I've made peace with the fact that all of the stuff that was so sacred to my childhood wasn't necessarily integral to that of others', never mind those who are children right now - today (Star Wars fans take note).

Which itself is a long winded way of saying that I feel like I'm finally ready to make this list something other than a long list of demands for the return of every last thing removed from Magic Kingdom since 1990. That is almost certainly what it would have been in 2007, and possibly in 2011. I've seen similar lists from younger folks who want, say, every single thing done to Fantasyland to be recalled and see the clocks turned back nearly exactly as possible to 1971. There are, to be sure, a good smattering of pet peeves to be found, but hopefully balanced with a good amount of experience and a healthy skepticism that not all changes are by definition terrible even if they are not per se terrific.

The one stipulation I've placed is to consign myself to the realm of the reasonably practical with the park as it exists right now. If I were given carte blanche and a limitless budget, I certainly would love to bring back every quaint shop and attraction of Main Street, but I'm also not convinced that would be anything but a largely symbolic victory. Fifty years changes a place and a culture, and it is not my job here to rail against that. So instead I've presented a list of nine reasonably possible alterations that I feel would tangibly improve the Magic Kingdom of 2018.

Tomorrowland Theater Problem

So one of the big problems inherent in the design of Magic Kingdom is that they radically underestimated who would actually show up to the darn thing. Despite the success of Disneyland and the test balloon of the World's Fair, in the end Disney erred on the side of elaborate theater attractions, predicting that Magic Kingdom would attract an older crowd that just wanted to get out of the damn sun.

That's not quite what happened. In order to close the gap between what was on offer and who was there, in the years between 1972 and 1975 Disney promoted some pretty odd things as "thrill" attractions, such as Pirates of the Caribbean and the Star Jets. The problem wouldn't be fully resolved until the 1980 opening of Big Thunder Mountain.

One odd result of of this miscalculation in the 60s is that every single Magic Kingdom area except for Adventureland has a massive theater right at its entrance. This isn't so obvious now, but perhaps no other area is as burdened by this as Tomorrowland. Since the 70s, guests have had to keep walking past two variously unappealing theatre shows to get to the good stuff. Disneyland has always had two similar buildings at its entrance, but at least one of them has always been some sort of ride!

The Circle-vision theater is a bit more flexible due to its size, but the Flight to the Moon space to the north has always been more problematic. Redoing the space into Alien Encounter and then Stitch did not solve the problem, and Disneyland opted out of the whole mess by shuttering their twin theaters and then turning them into a pizza parlor.

After 50 years it's time to admit that enough is enough and abandon the theater concept at the front of Tomorrowland. While the Alien/Stitch building isn't large enough to accommodate a dark ride, what it could accommodate is a lengthy queue, dark ride boarding area, and a few scenes. From there, Disney could wall off the front of Tomorrowland and dig a tunnel connecting the two show buildings, allowing vehicles to travel to the much larger Circle-vision theater space for the bulk of the ride. Riders could enter thru the Stitch building and exit thru the Circle-vision building, which would be pretty cool, I think.

And while we're at it, it's probably time to close the 20-year-old Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin around the corner. As the oldest and worst of all of the Buzz shooting rides, it's out of place and there's already a Toy Story shooting ride in another park. I'd close and gut the whole thing, perhaps splitting the difference between the Circle-vision space for the two rides.

There could even be a room where the two rides share a show scene - how cool would that be? Imagine seeing two different dark rides interacting with the Peoplemover running above them.

To be clear, I'm not expecting a great new concept dark ride here, but simply any kind of ride would be a better use of the space that what they have now. Have a cute Stitch ride on one side and a Big Hero Six ride on the other. Or perhaps The Cat From Outer Space. Um.... Unidentified Flying Oddball maybe? ....Disney really kinda sucks at creating sci-fi movies, y'know?

Grizzly Hall Rescue

Disney does not know what to do with Country Bear Jamboree, and this is a problem.

Bear Band has always been one of those "you get it or you don't" things, and the fact that things have gotten this bad is not all that surprising. In the days when Disney heavily marketed Country Bears, inside the park and out, the show could make a respectable showing, but now that it's competing with two of the biggest attractions in the park just down the street, people no longer feel like they have time to discover Country Bear Jamboree. Everybody reading this blog probably knows (or has been in the past) one of those people who walked clear by it, never giving it a second thought. When I tell many people that Country Bear Jamboree is one of my favorite things, the incredulous look I get speaks volumes.

But the fact is that those who do go in to see it tend to enjoy it more often than not, and having sat through probably hundreds of showings of the bears, I'm here to tell you: especially in the original 15 minute version, the show flat out works. It's weird for a few minutes, but when audiences finally surrender to its weirdo charms, it always brings down the house. Al Bertino and Marc Davis really knew their stuff. This, coupled with the recent cultural shift away from irony, places CBJ in a position to continue to be a minor favorite.

Notice those words: minor favorite. Disney, for their part, has decided that the problem with Country Bear Jamboree is Country Bear Jamboree, and various efforts have been initiated in the past 15 years to introduce newer country music, or have the bears sing Disney songs, or turn the thing into "American Idol".

But here's the thing, is that you can't make Country Bear Jamboree into the afternoon parade. It's never going to be a massive crowd pleaser, because by its very nature it's very, very weird. Country Bear Jamboree is a cult favorite, except Disney insists on treating it as a box office disappointment. The problem here isn't Country Bear Jamboree, but Disney.

Specifically it's the Disney who has insisted, more and more, that guests turn themselves into type A psychopaths, planning meals, lodging, and even attraction times down to the smallest detail. Given how stressed they've made everyone, and given that the attraction always was sort of a cult item, fewer and fewer guests are going to be in a position to give it a chance.

Disney already tried to fix the problem, by cutting down the show - from 15 minutes to a measly 10. This ignores the problem totally, because it again assumes there this is some wide, popular appear to be extracted from a cult attraction. There isn't, and those who liked it fine as it was are now less likely to stop by, while doing nothing relevant to draw in those new viewers it needs. Given that Disney is now looking at messing with the show again, more catastrophically, it obviously didn't work. It's time to save Grizzly Hall.

Country Bear Jamboree is never going to be the headliner attraction Disney wants it to be, and any further changes risk messing it up even worse than it is already - they don't make Disney like this anymore, and nobody has ever improved on a Marc Davis anything by changing it. Ever. So what if, instead of trying to turn the show into something it isn't, we found a way to change the conversation around it?

If people aren't willing to take the time to see Country Bear Jamboree, then what needs to be addressed is its role as a "value proposition". It's a 10 minute show, inside in the air conditioning, which is a fraction of the time the average guests spends standing outside having a nervous breakdown in the July heat. If they don't see the value proposition in getting out of the heat for any reason, then perhaps they need added incentive.

So my idea is to turn Grizzly Hall into an ice cream parlor.

No, seriously. Imagine taking out the back wall of the lobby so when you enter, you can see into the theater. There's now an old-fashioned saloon bar dispensing soda and ice-cream, and the seating area is the theater. Rip out all of the benches, and have multiple tiers of big comfortable booths with charging stations facing the stage. Oh, and every 30 minutes or so, the show begins!

This way everyone could have everything. Those not interested in the show can come and go as they wish, but those who would enjoy the show but would never otherwise made the time to see it can discover it as an added value to relaxing indoors with some ice cream. And those of us who love the show can "Rent Space" in the theater by buying some food. And, most importantly, the show would finally be turning an actual profit and pulling its weight in the park.

Who knows, maybe with all of those positives we can even get a longer version of the show back.

Ghostly Grievances

Okay, here's some petty stuff. I said I had some, so let's get detailed!

I think the 2007 Haunted Mansion refurb is one of the best Disney attraction redos ever, and secured a future for this beloved attraction. But that doesn't mean everything's exactly perfect. And here are a few of my pet peeves I'd personally love the address about my home away from home.

The first isn't so much a peeve as it is just something I still don't understand. In 2007, the Graveyard vocals were finally fixed and synchronized after about 15 years of being all over the place, which was great. But for some reason, they replaced most of the vocal tracks with new ones!

I don't think the new vocals are awful or anything, but I still don't understand why this was done. I don't even think it dramatically changes the ride experience, but the sheer weirdness of even thinking of doing something like that still just nags at me.

My second grievance is at the start of the attraction. Until 2007, Haunted Mansion kicked off with a slow crawl past some creepy portraits with follow-you eyes. I loved this introduction to the ride, setting to my mind the perfect tone of the house being alive and watching you. I don't think the replacement scene is bad, but what puzzles me is that the portraits were relocated to the barren Load area but the eyes were covered up!

I think if anything the effect would be even better on foot, and give people something to really enjoy while in line to get on the cars. I'm positive that this one isn't WDI's fault, though - I suspect that Operations requested the effect be axed under the belief that such an interactive effect would cause a bottleneck. I'd like to point out that such an effect has worked fine at Disneyland since August 1969 without causing a bottleneck, but given that Ops themselves insist on running the attraction improperly, stuffing far too many people into each Stretch Room and therefore causing a bottleneck, perhaps their wishes shouldn't carry so much weight.

My final gripe is a bigger one, and it has to do with something that I do think negatively affects the attraction. In 1969, Claude Coats was given a chance to re-think the Mansion for Florida, and made a number of improvements which I think make the MK model the definitive version of the attraction.

One of the biggest changes was in the Corridor of Doors, which dramatically improved the impact of the scene. Now lit in oppressive red, the scene was given a visually improved breathing door effect and a new climax, as a dead looking pair of hands are prying the top of the final door off its hinges. To my young mind this was an iconographic high point of the attraction, a moment where it really felt like the Haunted Mansion was a direct and immediate threat.


It also greatly improves the end of the scene. At Disneyland, few guests notice the last breathing door on the left because their attention has been directed off to the right. When the Doombuggies pivot past the final door and turn to face the clock, most people naturally keep looking straight ahead instead off looking down to see the bulging effect. Moving the main punctuation up to the top of the door simply stages the effect where most are prepared to see it, and also prepares you to be looking up in time to see the clock. The effect was a sudden, startling flash as you realize that the ghosts are getting ever nearer to you.

Well, in 2007 they removed the red lights - and they removed the hands. I was told at the time that an executive inside WDI decreed that no ghosts should be seen before Madame Leota summons them, to which I say fine - but that also means you've gotta take the hands off the coffin a few feet away. Personally I think the hands were a great touch, and as something drawn by Marc Davis and okayed by Claude Coats, I trust the opinions of those guys more than anyone else. I'm resigned to never seeing the blood red lighting again, but let's bring back the hands, please?

Tokyo's version shows how the gag looked in context, video by LMG_Vids

Oh, and you know the changing portrait in the Foyer? It's projected from the rear, and bounced off a mirror, meaning it's flipped twice and is seen from the right way around from the guest side. In 2007, somebody forgot about this, and flipped it to account for the rear projection, but not the mirror. He's been facing the wrong way for 11 years.

Pirates' Slow Slide Into Incoherence

One thing that I feel gets short attention in Disney circles is the role of Walt Disney and his studio in the cycle of American art we retrospectively call the Golden Age of Hollywood. Many elements of this man's career that seem incomprehensible to those of us looking back eight decades later are rather typical if we compare him to the likes of Daryl Zanuck or Louis B Mayer. The thing is, without certain contexts, we run the risk of making too much hay out of something that the larger culture of the era took for granted. And one of those facts of life of making movies once upon a time was the Production Code.

The Production Code was the result of one of those times where society is struggling with the normative changes brought about by a booming but still young Industry. Because Cinema was a media form that could reach such groups as women, children, and immigrants, the result was a morals panic in 1922 and again in 1934, each time bringing new standards for motion picture producers to abide by and increasingly strict controls.

Because Disney produced animated cartoons - not musicals and crime pictures - the influence of the Code is rarely discussed in relationship to his productions. But it was such a pervasive influence on popular culture that it created norms which would have seemed so obvious to not even be worthy of mention. And in the case of criminal behavior, the Production Code is entirely clear: if you break the law, you've got to pay the consequences. Usually this simply meant killing off the villain at the film's end in a way which seemed either accidental or coming about of their own doing. This is why so many classic Disney villains fall to their deaths: the hero really couldn't just outright kill them without needing to, under the Code, be killed off themselves.

Which is really one way of saying that the Morality Play construct of Pirates of the Caribbean, rather than being some grand artistic statement as it's been made out to be by writers such as this one here, may not have even been a consideration in 1966. Pirates were bad guys, so they must come to a bad end. And for audiences and storytellers who grew up during the enforcement of the code, it would have been simply a matter of course to be concerned with depicting this: of course the pirates must die, it's simply the way it is done!

But that's only half of the story. Come now and let's jump forward in time about forty years, when a new Pirates of the Caribbean is being created that caters to the expectations of a new audience.

This audience has grown up accustomed to films where the main characters may be not all that sympathetic and where evil is not always punished. For this audience, it makes sense to present pirates not as criminals, but as fantastical creatures from a storybook come to life. But more than anything there's one concept which the entirety of this new Pirates will be staked on: the notion of the anti-hero - a character type not seen in a single Disney film of the classic era.

And that, more than anything, is the thing which totally disrupts Pirates of the Caribbean, and why Jack Sparrow seems to so totally change the meaning of the attraction. The entire concept of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction is that piracy is bad and immoral and crimes will be punished, whether that be exploding in a burning warehouse, being stabbed over a treasure chest, or slowly dying in a cave full of pilfered treasure. But the mere existence of Captain Jack Sparrow suddenly turns a clean, clear group of villains into a group of villains where... some of them? Aren't bad either?

Add to this the fact that Barbossa, a fairly clear cut bad guy in the first film, himself returned in later films as a Jack Sparrow-esque antihero and is depicted as actually leading the band of Pirates that attack the town on-ride. Instead of getting the feeling that these crimes are being created by a disrupting force, identifying characters audiences have already accepted in other media forms as the driving characters in the story necessarily changes the inflection of the actions.

And then there's the merchandising, which regrettably plays a role in all of this too. Now to be clear, it's not like Disney hasn't always been selling pirate hats and swords and letting children buy them and run around the park pretending to stab each other. I was purchased a tiny metal pirate gun when I was five and I used it to shoot all of the animals on the Jungle Cruise. Kids will be kids. However, for a long time Disney has really been pushing the angle of "join the crew", no more so that at The Pirate's League, where boys and girls can be made up into pirates and pirate-princesses or mermaids. There's also an interactive Adventureland game where you band together with Jack Sparrow to search for treasure. The emphasis, time and time and time again, is on joining the crew, the same crew that we can see on the ride burning down a city!

The moment you back away from the position that the ride was designed under - that pirates are bad news - is the moment when you then open up the possibility for debate of "well if the Pirates are such fascinating fantastical beings, then why are they doing such awful things?" and that's when you start losing the heart of the ride. Are we supposed to admire the pirates? Are they heroes or villains?

It's clear that WDI's position is that instead of a morality play, Pirates of the Caribbean is an action-adventure, an action-adventure to fit with the popular action-adventure films of its era. Jack Sparrow is like a layer of sweet frosting plopped on top of this brooding atmospheric rock. It may make it more fun, but it doesn't mean its a cupcake.

I think the Magic Kingdom version is nearer to that action-adventure than the others, and pretty much always has been. But if they're going to commit to that tone, then more work needs to be done not only to clarify who exactly is supposed to be the good guys and who is supposed to be the bad guys, but how all of this fits together.

I'd do this by bringing back a new version of the Blackbeard captain in Bombardment Bay and losing all of the mentions of Jack Sparrow in the well scene. You can then take Jack Sparrow out of the well scene and move him upstairs, near the start of the ride, where he can establish that he's looking for the gold - a motivation consistent with his character in the films - and perhaps hint that the caverns are haunted. If the queue were then re-worked to make it clear that you are in a fort and the pirates are coming to attack the town, then we could have an unbroken chain of action from the start of the ride to the end. Add some exciting music to the exit and you've got an action ride.

Of course the real question is whether at this point it's worth redoing the ride to better present the film material at all. Prior to the 2006 reform, Jack Sparrow mania was at a fever pitch, but already the films have receded from the public eye. WDI removed the Davy Jones waterfall from Disneyland this past year, and I wouldn't be surprised to see most of the film materials slowly being phased out over the next decade. It may seem like commerce beats art more often than not, but one nice thing about art is that it tends to last and last while profits fade.

At a bare minimum, MK Pirates needs help on its setup. The current attraction gives no real hint that you're supposed to be entering a fort being attacked by pirates, and the loss of the firing roof cannons does nothing to help this. Additionally, the queue was redone in 2006 and the Glendale-based design team slapped the Pirates Overture music all over the entire queue, totally messing up the creepy tone that had been established since opening day and drowning out the dialogue establishing that the pirates are coming to attack further into the queue. Since the roof cannons were refurbished to make them part of the Jack Sparrow game, turning those on a constant loop, returning the "Pirates Arcade" music to just the entrance tunnel, and turning up the volume of the queue dialogue are three 100% free things WDI could do tomorrow to improve the front part of that attraction.

Consider the Background

Given that I'm pretty well known for this these days maybe this isn't so surprising but I really wish somebody would sit down and rethink the area music at Magic Kingdom from the ground up. I don't think parks per se need to constantly be evaluating their musical background, but Magic Kingdom has overall made fairly few changes to the locations and kinds of music they play since the 1990s, and I think this can lead to bad "legacy" changes sticking around longer than necessary.

For instance, all of watercraft that ply Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon are trapped in the early-00s "Radio Disney" mode, and the result is I think fairly embarrassing. Relaxed instrumentals and perhaps ocean-going music really would do a better job setting the atmosphere for these minor vehicles. Similarly, especially given that new ones are supposedly en route, not playing up-tempo music on the monorails is really a lost opportunity. These sort of minor improvements can really help set expectations and pace the experience, so you don't have the absurd juxtaposition of, say, playing 90s pop covers on a ferry boat that moves at a snail's pace.

Similarly, I think Magic Kingdom overall needs a total rethink in the sound department. Some areas, like Liberty Square, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, or the Tangled bathrooms, are perfectly fine, while others I think really could be improved with new music selections. Given that the expanded Hub area seems to belong as much to Fantasyland as Main Street, stately music would go a long way towards improving the feeling of that area. Similarly, Cinderella Castle has been playing the Disneyland Paris castle area loop since at least the mid-90s, and for that castle the choice is entirely wrong. For the first 20 years, Cinderella Castle played a short vocal version of "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes", and all it takes is a trip to Tokyo Disneyland to hear what an impact that track has in situ.

In other cases, I think less music would be just as effective. Frontierland can keep its upbeat Western music around the entrance, but there's an opportunity here to create a more dynamic soundscape, perhaps with plunked banjos or honky tonk pianos coming from upstairs windows. How cool would it be to walk along the Rivers of America at night and hear the crickets and frogs of the Mississippi instead of the hum of Florida cicadas?

Similarly, Adventureland has been playing upbeat drumming and steel drum music since 1993, another track taken over wholesale from Disneyland Paris, and it does nothing to set the tone. Languid exotica music as well as some strategically placed speakers on the landscaped hill across the moat playing jungle bird calls would really bring the area to life, setting the correct mood of mystery that's being missed right now.

To be abundantly clear here, I don't think every track needs to be changed at Magic Kingdom, never mind changed back to what it was in the 70s and 80s. There's plenty of places where what's playing there now is as good or better than what was used there before, such as Tomorrowland. And while I'd jump at a chance to return the WEDway music to its ride, I think the 2003 Tomorrowland music does such a good job setting the correct tone that there's no need to change it again. But there's other areas of the park where the design of the area says one thing and the music says another, and I think bringing those into closer harmony would really improve things for everybody.

To give just one more example, MGM / Hollywood Studios recently had the entire entrance of that park totally redone from a musical perspective with an integrated "vision", and the effort made a huge difference. Music can improve or detract even when the design of a park remains static, but I think Magic Kingdom feels like a very different place than it did even ten years ago, so there's a real opportunity to improve here.

That Dumb Hub Stage

Yes, it's back. Already my number one remaining complaint about this park, I still think the Hub Stage is a terrible, terrible decision, and on top of that, doesn't even make much sense for the theme park built in Florida. Do people really enjoy standing in the absolutely merciless sun to watch the 30 minute long shows that happen here?

A few years back, Disney announced they were going to build a new indoor theater off Main Street, a decision I applauded. The project hasn't moved forward, leading to online rumors of cancellation. I really do think that, given the choice between standing out in the sun and sitting indoors to watch a Mickey Mouse show, most guests will choose the latter. Given all of this, I'm hopeful that the Main Street Theater is simply delayed, or will return in a better form, and that once open it will start reducing Entertainment's absurd reliance on a hub stage. I think the hub stage would be a nice venue for band performances, or seasonal events, but it's time to stop pretending that this dreary slab of fiberglass is remotely an appropriate location for staging increasingly long and elaborate shows.

If nothing else, if the number of shows on the Hub stage were even at a bare minimum halved, this would allow time for Operations to bring out those Main Street Vehicles, which Magic Kingdom's Main Street hurts for badly. If it were up to me to start from scratch I'd lose the Hub stage permanently and build a theater facing the castle where the poorly-utilized Tomorrowland Terrace Noodle Station is, but really any move forward on this totally senseless arrangement is a good one.

Restore the Peddlar's Passage

Did you know that Liberty Square had two of its buildings cut fairly late in the game? They were right across from each other, near the Riverboat Landing, and while one of these has received its very own write-up on this blog nearly ten (ack) years ago, it's the one across the way that I'd like to focus on here.



The north side lost building of Liberty Square (above) was originally intended to feature artisan crafts like woodworking and blacksmithing, and when it was cut, designers replaced it with a short-lived open green space. This stuck around for maybe a full year total, when the constant out of control queue for the Hall of Presidents required that the south half of it be turned into a covered queue for the attraction. It stayed like this for some time until the grass was paved over and replaced with a bunch of circular planters, which is the arrangement that's still there to this day. Over the years it's hosted various popcorn wagons and merchandise options, before settling into its current role as an outdoor food market circa 2002.

So here's an situation where Magic Kingdom has been utilizing a building they have no real need of, a covered queue with an open air network of umbrellas and random tables, for a perfectly good purpose, but due to the very nature of its temporary setup, not doing it as well as it could be done. And here's the thing: there's already a 100% attractive structure that was designed 50 years ago by John Hench and Herbert Ryman that's just sitting in their archives unused.

So what I'd do is pull the blueprints, make the necessary adjustments for modern accessibility, and put it up on the spot of the old queue and circular planters. The same food options can be offered in the interior space, with the added benefit of not needing to operate at reduced capacity when it rains every day.


Oh, but the thing is that the design benefits to Liberty Square would be huge. Designed to resemble a charming series of colonial cottages very much like the ones behind the Liberty Tree, it would restore one of the biggest cuts to the design of Liberty Square when the building got the axe: the narrow, atmospheric alley that was supposed to run between the side of the building and the Hall of Presidents, an area called the Peddlar's Passage. Liberty Square has always been charming, but imagine an opportunity to bring back an intimate alley from the designers of New Orleans Square that was lost for 50 years while also serving to improve an existing problem area in a way that Disney is actually honestly prepared to spend money on these days. The blueprints exist in the Archives in Glendale. This could be real.

The Rivers of America and Railroad

I long ago decided that I really have no interest in working for Imagineering, so for those of you who do and are fighting the good fight: I salute you. But if I could join and do just one thing, one single thing I'm absolutely chomping at the bit to redesign isn't a new Horizons or Mr Toad or Journey Into Imagination, it's the Rivers of America and Walt Disney World Railroad at Magic Kingdom.

The Railroad in particular has always been a real wasted opportunity at Walt Disney World, although I do prefer it to the slightly more elaborate Railroad in Paris, which never quite creates the feeling of removal that makes the WDWRR so interesting. Pretty much all of the railroad rides except for Florida's is landlocked, and as a longtime Magic Kingdom rider I find something evocative about riding the rails at night, where the forest surrounding the back of the park really feels endless. As a result my redesign of the Railroad would probably be vastly simpler than most: just a few simple gags here and there to keep interest high without spoiling the atmosphere. I'd for sure send the train through a new tunnel which would block out that terrible overpass on the edge of Fantasyland, I'd also theme the rear of the Pirates of the Caribbean show building that everybody sees plain as day before the tunnel, but the rest would be simple atmosphere building stuff.

For instance, it would be nice to see a jungle animal or two as we pass through the "outskirts of Adventureland", and I think Disney missed a huge opportunity when they cut up the plane from The Great Movie Ride into pieces and tossed it out instead of moving it to sit alongside the railroad tracks for clever visitors to ride the Jungle Cruise and finds its rear half.

The back stretch of Magic Kingdom has always just been sort of a nothing area, and in the early days this was even presented as "a view of untouched Florida". Today it's seen more as "the outskirts of Fantasyland", which is absurd, but if that's what it is, that's what it should look like. I'd move the rattlesnake and frog-on-a-stump vignettes to be nearer to the Frontierland area, nearer to the Indian village, and do something with the idea that Fantasyland is somehow supposed to be nearby. Perhaps some fantastical boats plying the retention pond, or, to play into the idea that this its way outside the "nice" areas of Fantasyland, some crumbling castle walls would add a sense of romance and mystery.

The tunnel that goes under the overpass could be claimed to be part of the mine of the Seven Dwarfs, and have a jeweled forced perspective tunnel that leads off in the direction of the new coaster. Another approach that would be interesting is to imply that the villains hang out way outside here; Stromboli's wagon parked alongside the river or Prince John's carriage from Robin Hood would be a cool touch. Honestly, the area's so green and underpopulated that it would be super cool to pass by Robin and Little John hanging out around their camp.

Past Tomorrowland, the Railroad provides views of the Seven Seas Lagoon and the Contemporary, making it the only castle park to really try to integrate the railroad, park, and resort area into one scenic view, but I've always thought more of an effort to imply that we're getting closer to Main Street, and that the Main Street Citizens come hang out here, would be cool. It can be something as simple as a Model T Ford parked underneath a tree with a picnic set up.

Nice shot of the boat, but don't forget the "dangerous" floating logs!

I feel that the Rivers of America needs far less work, although an extensive re-landscaping would be great. The real trouble with the Rivers of America is that a "hazard" scene was removed in 1972, although the ride has continued to pretend that this part of the River is somehow dangerous. Originally the scene was a bunch of branches sticking up out of the river (left), a detail lifted from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. The branches went away almost immediately, and since then they're been pretending that underwater shoals are the reason we're supposed to be concerned. The trouble is that underwater shoals look like nothing, whereas branches are at least a good visual indicator of a threat, so the scene doesn't work at all. Something needs to be installed to look at between the Burial Ground and Pirate's Cave, and additionally I've always felt that expanded propping along the shoreline of the Haunted Mansion was a missed and obvious opportunity.

Another thing I'd like to do is install a number a "show" boats in the river alongside Liberty square, to better carry the idea that it and Frontierland and supposed to be bustling port towns. This idea went away when the Keelboats did, but some prop tall-masted ships sitting alongside the docks of Liberty Square would really tie together the north part of the land. Oh, and of course, something needs to be done about that burning cabin. I don't care if it never burns again, but it needs to be fixed up and turned into something attractive to look at if that's the case.

This has been a longwinded and fanciful ramble, perhaps more than any other in this list but I think it's nice to point out that even without a Primeval World diorama and fancy Star War-blocking waterfalls, there's no reason why simple additions couldn't turn both of these attractions into real winners.

And One Last

Okay, one last petty one. I love Magic Kingdom Small World, and I don't care if you don't like it, or think that Disneyland's is better. I love this ride. But in the otherwise excellent 2005 refurbishment, why on earth would they remove this absolute masterpiece of a visual gag from the final scene?



You laughed, admit it. It's still funny. Bring it back.

If you enjoy long winded design essays like these, then you should check out our Theme Park Theory Hub Page, where there's a lot more like this. Thanks for stopping by!