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The Music of Country Bear Jamboree, Part Three
Country Bear Jamboree: The Deleted SongsCountry Bear Jamboree seems to have come into this world in very much the shape it was conceived in. As is well known, the basic idea for a singing bear band...
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Theme Park Music Hub Page
Hello!This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of music heard and played in the Disney Theme Parks.It was last...
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The Original Main Street Music
Photo Credit: Joe Shelby's MomMain Street USA 1976-1991:Morning Music | Evening MusicLast time, as we took the time machine right down the middle of Main Street USA, we stopped by some well-remembered...
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One Last FountainView
History is funny. Sometimes the things you think are worth preserving turn out not to be and the things you are convinced couldn't possibly be of value to future generations turn out to be coveted....
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The Tomorrowland Problem
"'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." - Noah Cross, ChinatownEvery so often I'm asked to write an analysis piece on...
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Cap'n Jack Casts Off
Article updatedSeptember 12, 2013 with additional information about Jack Olsen."Savor fresh seafood treasures and frozen Strawberry Margaritas in this nautical oyster bar surrounded by Buena Vista...
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My California Adventure
Part One: Back from the West It's become something of a tradition on this blog to wrap up the year around the holidays with what I call the Year End Report, an annual accounting and grading of the...
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Orlando Welcomes EPCOT Center
It was December 1971 and Orlando didn't know what hit them. After seven years of speculation, drama, finagling, doubting, and panic, Walt Disney World opened on October 1 as expected and nothing in...
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Raising - or Lowering? - the Dead
It's that eternal bit of Disneyland/Walt Disney World trivia that we can no longer escape. Everyone knows it by now. Even Steve Birnbaum put it in his earliest Official Guides, and it's given the...
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Sunrise Over the Polynesian
Here's a somewhat dispiriting paradox for you: the Walt Disney World theme parks are at their most beautiful when nobody can see them.This isn't really by design, mind you. Once the last guests roll...
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Seven Years Good Luck
Normally, I'm not really one to mark this blog's anniversary beyond the end-of-the-year recap. Some of this is because I don't really think anniversaries of things like websites is much to get excited...
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Snapshot: The Plaza Ice Cream Boat Shuffle
What do you do with a mystery that isn't?The Magic Kingdom is full of dozens of mysterious events, especially in her earliest years. I've been attending the park for decades and studying it seriously...
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The Branch Beyond the Window and Other Details
The experience of a theme park is pretty similar to that of a well-made film, isn't it?Well, yes it is. But even if we move beyond the convenient fact that this idea is the main crux of most of my...
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Chasing Captain Cook
Captain Cook's Hideaway, I thought I was done with you.Back in June 2010, I wrote - and ammended - a series of articles about Captain Cook's Hideaway, the earliest place for Cast Members to drink in...
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The Adventureland Veranda & the Jack Wagner Exotica Records
From 1971 to 1994, the Adventureland Veranda sat at the entrance to Magic Kingdom's Adventureland and welcomed travelers with airy open porches, dark burnished wood interiors, lazily turning fans, and...
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Universal's Magnum Opus: Spider-Man
Several weeks ago I spent the better part of a day re-riding what I consider to be the second-best ride in Orlando, right behind the Haunted Mansion: The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Islands of...
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The Jungle Cruise and AWOL Airwaves
Today's post lies a bit outside our usual focus on this blog on the very early Magic Kingdom music loops, but by now our subject is widely considered a classic of its kind and it's been around for...
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The Age of Not Believing: Introduction
Walt was dead, to begin with.That's the basic thing we'll be returning to time and again over the next few weeks. Walt Disney Productions, having lately come into prosperity in the 60s, in December...
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The Music of Country Bear Jamboree, Part Two
Devilish Mary (Traditional Song)Zeke's ballad, about the beautiful woman he was married to for a mere three weeks, is a genuine folk song, the furthest the show stretches into the back catalog for...
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The Age of Not Believing: Week One
Are Disney live-action films a genre? Do they have their own internal laws and rhythms and tacit audience contracts? After so many years away, how quickly familiarity with the old rhythms fall back...
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