Blood All Around

The most valuable contribution of Country Bear Jamboree to the representations of American culture in the Magic Kingdom is its' resuscitation of Vaudeville and Vaudeville records - from the ambiance, the interaction of acts, and the forced interaction of rowdy audience and performers via the theater's talking mounted heads - this is perhaps the only modern survival of one of America's most potent and important cultural institutions. Make no mistake, many of the artists who shaped American popular culture in those heady days when entertainment was first starting to be recorded in "real time" documents began as vaudevillians: Billy Murray (The Denver Nightingale), Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and innumerable others. What's even more remarkable is that Marc Davis and Al Bertino snuck this history lesson in right under the noses of Disney guests and it has remained essentially unremarked on for 35 years. In presentation, especially in the use of a "host" bear, the mode of the show is not unlike that predecessor of Vaudeville, the Minstrel show.

The show also documents a wide variety of styles of what eventually became what we think of as "country" music, but which originally was folk songs like Big Rock Candy Mountain and Red River Valley, became "cowboy" music like Blood on the Saddle or, more familiarly to Disney fans, Blue Shadows on the Trail. It eventually became some of the songs represented in the show like Tears Will Be The Chaser For Your Wine. But many of the songs represented in the Bear Band show date from the 1920's. Pretty Lil' Devilish Mary, Fractured Folk Song and Mama Don't Whup Lil' Buford all date from this era. So does Blood on the Saddle.

Even more importantly, the show uses many of the performers who were actually there for the roots of that kind of music, including Ernest Van Stoneman, Dallas McKennon and Tex Ritter. And although the songs in the second half of the show are mostly from the decade surrounding the opening of the attraction, their vocalization and arrangement is clearly meant to insist on their status not as "Country Music", which even back then tended to be garish and overprocessed, but as a continuation of the longer legacy of truly American music, folk music and cowboy music. When Bertino wrote in the introduction to the show that it would be "...songs from Americana", he wasn't kidding. To those who recognize that's going on in the show in terms of instruction through entertainment, it is a remarkable panorama of American music.

I recently ran across a very fun account of Tex Ritter's relationship to Disney regarding their use of "Blood on the Saddle" and, knowing that many Disney fans were unlikely to find this themselves since it's hiding in the unlikely location of a 3 LP Tex Ritter career retrospective set from 1973, did my best to record the relevant vocal portion (Ritter vocally introduces all of the songs on the set) and attach it to a transfer of the music portion done by somebody who actually owns a USB turntable. It doesn't sound perfect but it is listenable, and affords an opportunity for Disney fans to familiarize themselves with a proper version of a song likely generally encountered only through Country Bear Jamboree:

Tex Ritter - Blood on the Saddle w/ vocal introduction (4.6 MB MP3, 5 min 4 secs)

As a bonus, I've done the same for Ritter's two other most famous records for those unfamiliar with Ritter's booming voice:

Tex Ritter - High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me) w/ vocal introduction (3.6 MB MP3, 4 mins)
Tex Ritter - Jingle Jangle Jingle w/ vocal introduction (3.4 MB MP3, 3 min 43 secs)

I post this partially in an effort to clarify a misconception about the role of the Big Al character in Disney circles. Although the performance certainly is dreadful, "Blood on the Saddle" is intended to be a comedy song with its' out of tune guitar and outrageously stressed syllables. The joke is that the song is awful rather than, say, Ritter or the bear character, which is minor point but one lost if the audience does not know that the joke is the song itself. If one were to locate the 1937 Ritter film "Hittin' the Trail" where he actually sings "Blood on the Saddle", she can observe Tex puff up his mouth to spit out each syllable for comic effect. If then one watches the Big Al figure's original 1971 animation she will notice how faithfully Davis replicated this motion as best he could (with comic exaggeration).

YouTube Links: Hitting the Trail / Big Al original animation

Teddi approved.

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These songs were originally released by Capitol on record, although their rights currently seem to be in dispute, so please remember that these are presented here for edification / reference purposes only and no money has been earned by posting this material.

Welcome Return

So I've been meaning to post about this since at least Feburary when I discovered this item for sale at Downtown Disney, but a combination of my epic coffee posts over at Minute-by-Minute and getting sidetracked by other stuff means I've kept forgetting. Furthermore, I meant to include it in my my "Various Updates" from a bit ago to get all the current news items out of the way at once, but I decided this topic deserved its' own post and I'm giving it its' due here especially in light of my old complaining about it.

Recently released at Walt Disney World was an unassuming little set of thin paperback books available seperatley or together in a slipcover with a bonus fifth book: Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Epcot and Disney's Hollywood Studios. The bonus book covers all the resorts and such and is called Everything Else in the World. The books have generic front covers with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Pluto and Goofy in a clipart pose in front of a box with a relevant photo per each volume. Don't let their thin lightweight paper printing and generic covers dissuade you: these books are great. They're about the size of the books Disney has been making available for the entire resort for the past few years, so the expansion into a five-volume set is an immediate and tangible quality increase. But open up the book and start reading. I was amazed, too.

They're actually very well written with the mix of atmospheric description and quality, no-nonsense information I was bemoaning a year and a half ago in Promotional Prose. They're also beautifully laid out with very carefully chosen pictures. I don't see any staged, lame-o fake families anywhere, and when a good recent picture was not in the cards the creators of the book went back to very old pictures indeed - I see some 1982 photos of Epcot in its' book!

I think where these books really shine is in their inclusivitiy and careful attention: just like the Souvenir Guides of old, you are presented with very few big "here's all of Main Street!" photos and many moments of small and careful attention, things you would actually remember. The text is similarly careful, and a number of grids and charts of relevant statistics are scattered throughout the books. Make no mistake, this is a full-scale return to the form of those early Souvenir Guides, and author Jody Revenson, designer Steven Rosen and editor Wendy Lefkon deserve great credit for their efforts.

It must be said that the text would be much more suitably contained in a hardbound book and the disconnect of exterior and interior in these volumes to me belies the work of another hand dictating their outwardly appearance and strange publication method. But the five-volume, matte paper approach has a trickle down effect on consumers: you can buy the individual volumes for a scant $7 a piece, and the whole slipcovered box with fifth book will run you something insanely cheap like $20. That means not only the fifth book is free, but the price of each individual book has dropped to $5. Regardless, in the future, I'd immediately purchase a hardbound version of these books.

Here's some of the more beautiful spreads in the books:


OK, I've complained about it and my complaint has apparently been answered. I've done my duty and shelled out for the books. If you also care about quality pictorial souvenirs, consider doing the same. If you can locate the five book set, it is well worth your money, not only to get the nicest thing Walt Disney World's published since its' 1998 -2000 "A Magical Year By Year Journey", but to support the work and show Disney that quality sells.

For Further Study, #2

It is my genuine, firm belief that if all you ever do to expose yourself to culture is that culture approved of by Disney, then your world view will be far narrower than any shared by any of the artists who created the Disney product we all know and love. Disney isn't high culture, but it isn't low culture either (something I've been trying to establish here for some time now) and as such I genuinely hope to point the receptive spectator in the direction of related but challenging, exciting art which will significantly broaden the richness of the experience Disney offers. I'll be exploring books, media, music, or whatever it is that doesn't directly relate to Disney but is useful/essential to understanding Disney product.

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Hollywood was a strange place. In 1935, in the middle of the Depression, Warner Brothers Pictures was best known for outrageous musicals like Wonder Bar and Dames, James Cagney extravaganzas like (the still breakneck) Lady Killer and Picture Snatcher, and what were then congenially called "shooting gallery dramas" like the superb Public Enemy or, less glamorously, Bullets or Ballots. This was 1935, years before superb dramas like The Maltese Falcon, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Dark Victory or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. To Warners' credit: Dick Powell, James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, Busby Berkley, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, Micheal Curtiz, and a surprisingly intact economy through six years of the depression by cutting salaries viciously, paring costs to the bone, and producing fast, furious mass entertainment with as much sex and scandal as could be ferried past the film censors. And in 1935, this film machine was turned loose on - William Shakespeare?

Although there is literally no 21st century fair comparison, this would be akin to Burger King suddenly adding Escargo, a Waldorf-Astoria salad and the Del Monico steak to it's menu. Warner Brothers was pure working class entertainment, fast, cheap, and rude. A snappy 69 minute Warner epic in the height of the form shows your grandparents had more going on than anyone ever expected; the best Berkley musical number has more sex and psychedelia in it than any "liberated" modern picture ever could. And here, this studio, was going to film the famous Max Reinhardt production of A Midsummer Night's Dream - all singing, all dancing, all couplet reading.

The resultant picture is one of Hollywood's wackiest mixes of success and failure. Especially compared to the breakneck pace of the typical Warner product of 1935, Midsummer Night's Dream is a long, slow slog which is mired in self-importance - 150 minutes versus a more typical Warner 60, nearly a double feature by itself! Throughout the piece ballets of some description arrive to appear to be somebody's idea of High Art. Elsewhere, Dick Powell and Ross Hunter seem to be totally lost in the Bard's couplets while Olivia de Havilland perpetually looks confused.

Yet it has it's wonderful things too: Cagney and Joe E. Brown and the rest of the clowns perfectly interpret the humor of Shakespeare's working-class dolts who try to stage their own tragedy. Joe E. Brown, who famously voiced the closing line of Billy Wilder's drag comedy Some Like It Hot spends much of the final leg of the film in drag himself, rending snappy and hilarious American-style one liners from Shakespeare's gentle puns through pure force of personality. Cagney's Bottom the Weaver is unstoppable, except through the awkward mule's head he wears for a portion of the film, and Mickey Rooney as Puck is perfect. Rooney, in particular, may grate against modern sensibilities, but his Puck is an unhinged little devil with a cackling, annoying laugh and far too much energy, but Rooney, Cagney and Brown deliver Shakespeare to us rather than asking us to go to him as many other actors in the film do. Sometimes interpreting the Bard and making him relevant for modern audiences, especially in the case of his gentle comedies, requires less the gentle touch and more the sledgehammer. Warner's A Midsummer Night's Dream is the most gloriously alive Shakespeare film until Orson Welles unleashed his furious version of Othello.

And, of course, the beauty of the film. Directed by William Dieterle, with special effects by Byron Haskin and Germanic sets by Anton Grot,the film looks and feels unlike anything Hollywood has ever achieved, creating an atmosphere more convincing and less austere, but related to, the thick forests of something like Lang's Die Nibelungen. And when the forest nymphs cavort across a starry moonlit sky to the strains of Mendelssohn, conducted by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the effect is poetry, not product.

Which brings me around to why we're talking about this accidentally great film on a Disney blog: this film is absolutely the source for Fantasia. The haunting imagery achieved by Warner - as the nymphs rise out of the mist or the retreat of the moth-fairy, carried by a bat creature into a starfield, as her arms flutter and sway in a spotlight and finally vanish - is a crazy mashup of high and low art which was essentially repeated in Fantasia, especially notably in its' "Dance of the Hours". Furthermore, this film is what British director Micheal Powell would later call a "composed film" - referring to the minute orchestration of image and music that he would perfect in his 1949 continuation of the Fantasia aesthetic, The Tales of Hoffman from Offenbach's opera. So there can be seen a line that runs through the 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream, the 1941 Fantasia and the 1949 Tales of Hoffman as a sort of "unofficial triptych".

And of course let us not overlook the financial trick achieved in Midsummer and repeated with Fantasia: hijack a cultural institution (Reinhardt and Mendelssohn by Warner, Leopold Stokowski by Disney) to validate your culturally ambitious high-art-to-the-masses project. Both films required their creators to eat their shirt in the small towns but validated the makers' intentions. The difference is that in 1935 Warner still had Captain Blood, G-Men, Gold Diggers of 1935 and Black Fury to please the "Hix in the Stix". And in 1936 they would still have The Petrified Forest, The Singing Kid and 50 other pictures. In 1940, Disney had the esoteric Pinocchio to fall back on and the company was nearly sunk.

I'll let these three films' relationship to one another speak best in pictures. Please click to best appreciate.

Pixies in Pastorale: Midsummer Night's / Fantasia / Hoffmann

Oberon, Chernabog and Dr. Miracle: devils in the works

Fantasia / Tales of Hoffmann

Climax of Tales of Hoffmann / Salvador Dali art for Selznick International's "Spellbound" (1945)

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And here's the list so far:

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Warner Brothers Pictures 1935, Dir: William Dieterle
The Tales of Hoffman, London Pictures 1949, Dir: Michael Powell
Last Time: Tiki Modern, by Sven Kirsten, 2007 - Taschen

Phantoms of Influence

It's sort of an open secret in the realm of Disney parks that the European version of the Haunted Mansion is sort of a riff on the famous musical The Phantom of the Opera, annotating its' iconography, lush score, main character, and even its' name: Phantom Manor. Although logic follows that the name was chosen due to its' bilingual comprehensibility, it is also telling that the designers of Disneyland Paris and Frontierland saw their attraction as enough of a departure from the Coates-Davis stateside Haunted Mansion that a wholesale name change was in order. And between the twin poles of the Coates-Davis Disneyland attraction and the Lloyd Webber-Hart-Prince musical does the Phantom Manor hover unsteadily.

Although a full account of the successes and failures of the Phantom Manor show in relation to its' modifications of the Haunted Mansion would be instructive, this is not the purpose of this essay. The spectator is encouraged to take the Phantom Manor as its' own creation, and it's not hard to, given its' wild oscillations between sources until it finally becomes a whole different attraction entirely. But taken as blending of two forms of popular culture - a Disney attraction and a successful musical - the show offers fascinating possibilities. And so from this let us observe an attraction which is not a satisfactory adaptation of any of its' sources, but a fascinating manifestation of a litany of sources direct and indirect. And even if we dismiss the Haunted Mansion from the equation to consider only the Lloyd-Webber 1986 musical, we still find a number of sources which have "trickled down" through the musical inadvertently:

- The original Gaston Leroux novel of 1910
- Universal Studio's 1925 Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney
- Ken Hill's 1976 Phantom of the Opera musical

(I am not qualified to discuss the Hill piece in relation to the Lloyd-Webber version or any other, having never seen it, but I can faithfully discuss the Phantom Manor's relationship with other Phantoms with some authority.)

The first important question to consider in relation to Phantom Manor is the question of story. Just as in the Haunted Mansion, much ink has been spilled over the validity of various plots which have been concocted, confirmed and denied over the years in regard to the attraction. Phantom Manor builds on the Haunted Mansion's accidental use of recurring images and ideas which suggest a story to create an attraction which actually has recurring characters. There is a lonely bride who seems both alive and dead, a shadowy Fantomas-like figure who may or may not be a ghost, and various contributions from the atmosphere of a ruined wedding. Jeff Burke, show producer for Phantom Manor, has emphatically stated that there is no plot in Phantom Manor but a symbolic fight between good (the bride) and evil (the ghost or phantom).

Burke should know but his statements don't jive with the reality of the attraction: unlike in the Haunted Mansion, there does actually seem to be something going on in Phantom Manor. One must remember that Burke worked with Marc Davis on Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings and as such may have absorbed Davis' philosophy on the place of story in theme park attractions, but he was also a key personnel under Micheal Eisner's regime where "story" was king. Could Burke have been attempting to maintain what he saw as the guiding principles of the original masters of theme design under the restricting principles of Eisner's mandates? Whatever the status of story in the ride, Phantom Manor seems to have an organizing logic if not an actual plot.

The Phantom of the attraction's name is actually personified in the attraction, displacing the Ghost Host as the de facto "host" of the attraction, and unlike the Ghost Host - but like Leroux's Erik the Phantom - is a shadowy threat throughout the attraction. The image this Phantom is based on dates back to early 20th century French pulp novels, where figures like the Phantom and, most famously, Alain & Souvestre's Fantomas the master criminal, are a reoccurring theme. The French mystery criminal is a concept likely derived from Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' famous rival, although this is of course innately supposition. The image of the Phantom in the attraction, however, is strongly derived from the famous Lon Chaney Phantom of the opera of 1925, where for much of that film's first act Erik the Phantom is seen as a literal shadow cast on the wall.

It is traditional for the Phantom of the Opera to be confused with being a ghost for, much like the traditional Devil, his best defense is his apparent unreality. The tightrope line between life and death is articulated reasonably well in the Lloyd-Webber Phantom, although Webber, being a stage performer himself, ultimately stays close in spirit to Leroux's backstory for Erik being a sadistic magician under a Persian king (although he ultimately revealed as a sideshow freak). Webber, however, muddies the waters by pulling in influences from other Phantoms as well. In the Chaney film's final version the Phantom is explained as being an insane escapee from Devil's Island, which references back to Erik's status as being confined in a cage at the carnival, and there is some suggestion of post-birth disfigurement in the face makeup for the stage version of the Phantom of the Opera, where peeling skin reveals a skull and even a bit of brain! This would swell the list to include the 1943 Phantom re-make where Claude Rains is famously splashed with acid, although Charles Harts' lyrics seem to be at pains to argue against this:

This face which earned a mother's fear and loathing
A mask my first unfeeling scrap of clothing
Pity comes too late! Turn around and face your fate!
An eternity of this before your eyes!

Leroux's Phantom is balanced of a razor wire between life and death in an even more profound way, as in the novel the Phantom's face is essentially a bare skull, and the traumatic maternal rejection comes from the implied image of a baby's body surmounted with a literal death's head. In response young Erik becomes a phantom - a word meaning both a ghost and an item of mystery - and goes into hiding. His concrete identity is further plagued by his apparent old age in the Leroux, for although he claims to be late in life (he was to die of a stroke in the Chaney version), he moves faster than any man of his age seems possible. As such between life and death, youth and decrepitude can Leroux's Phantom subvert any easy label, being both specific and anonymous at once.

The attraction can imply no such subtleties, being what it is, but there is an interesting confusion about the mortality status of both the bride and phantom in Phantom Manor. At the start of the attraction the Phantom speaks to us in the fashion of the Ghost Host in the Haunted Mansion, and as such is operating in the traditional mode established by the Haunted Mansion of those who are inarguably "dead". Yet he appears to us at the top of the expanding gallery as a cackling silhouette and later as an apparently flesh and blood figure.... surmounted with a death's head. Although his vanishing act in the final scene of the attraction confirms him as a ghost, it must be noted that he also appears to age as the bride does, and his final appearance is as a very decayed looking corpse rather than the clean skull we saw earlier. The significance of his three different appearances is elusive, but we must still consider the possibility of his being alive at one point in the attraction. If this is true, then, Phantom Manor has time travels similar to those found in Pirates of the Caribbean, rather than the continuous "one night in a haunted house" timeline which is accepted as the coomon reading of the Haunted Mansion.

It can be further noted that his musical signature in the attraction is an organ, the instrument the Phantom of the Opera is associated with in all productions save one (Claude Rains' Phantom plays the violin). The image of the Phantom atop the Stretching Gallery, pulling on a rope, can further be seen as a corruption of the Phantom dropping the chandelier on the Paris Opera audience, the second most famous incident in the original text.

Leroux's Phantom is also, perversely, a father figure to the parentless Christine, first a mentor and then a potential lover. In both the Leroux book and Lloyd-Webber musical the Phantom confounds Christine by making his voice appear to emanate from her father's grave, and in the original novel proceeds to roll skulls at her! The musical substitutes fireballs for flames, but contributes haunting voice to the obscene seduction:

Wandering child, so lost, so helpless,
Yearning for my guidance..
Too long you've wandered in winter
Far from my fatherly gaze
You resist
But your soul obeys!

Erik's slim figure and grotesque head also invites a not uncommon reading as being a ruined penis, a masculine symbol which has lost its' ability to entice (these readings immediately appeared in the wake of the Chaney Phantom in fact, still the scariest Erik of all). As such the frustrated erotic impulse in the Phantom is carried over and greatly expanded in the Lloyd-Webber musical, where the Phantom must use a number of stage props such as masks and wigs to appear to be a dashing young lover. This is a great embellishment of the Leroux text, although not perhaps as great as one of the best subtleties in the book, which is the Phantom's appearance at the Paris Grand Masque Ball as the Red Death. Harold Prince and Lloyd Webber, keeping with the famous scene from the Universal production, give their Phantom a large skull faced head covering. Yet these two productions utterly mistake the best symbol in the original book, which is that when the Phantom arrives at the Masque Ball, he is the only person in attendance not wearing a mask.

Does the Disney Phantom wear a mask? This is a tempting reading as it explains the phantom's two different appearances and pidgeonholes the figure into being a specter from start to finish of the attraction as only the bride ages. Yet a mask is never spelled out to us and the creators of the attraction knew enough that things which weren't explicit were likely lost in theme park rides. So perhaps the Phantom of the manor has some secrets which will never be fully resolved. But it is telling that in many versions of the backstory to Phantom Manor, the Phantom is identified as Henry Ravenswood - owner of the house and father to the doomed bride.

The bride in the attraction is the Christine Daae figure, in effect. Although the relationship of the Phantom to the bride - sometimes called Emily or Melanie in fan discourse - is never fully made clear (is he keeping her in the house or is she a mourning recluse, for example, is never actually explained), and whatever the relationship is, the Phantom doesn't seem to be vying for her affection. The identity of the character as a bride seems to be the key concept derived from the traditional Haunted Mansions, itself a concept borrowed from Gothic horror and folklore (humans being a superstitious lot, wedding days seem to produce an abnormal number of ghosts - in literature anyway).

Extrapolating the Daae character into a jilted bride is in many ways a logical proposition because of her uneasy romantic relationships throughout the various texts of various Phantoms over the years. The 1925 film's intertitle labeling an ornate bed she is deposited in by the Phantom following a fainting spell as a "wedding bed" dates back to the Leroux Phantom's careful crafting of a "suitably feminine environment" for Christine deep under the Paris Opera, just as he has himself crafted a typically middle class flat for himself as a way to belong to the world of "normal people". In both versions there is a carefully planned wedding bed - which one assumes the Phantom plans on using.

The Lloyd-Webber musical has no explicit rape scenario in it, although the bride imagery is strongest in this version, for at one point the Phantom pulls a cloth off a mirror and Christine Daae sees her reflection as a wedding day bride. Of course it's a stage illusion performed by this theatrical Phantom and when the string supporting the mannequin-Christine snaps, the figure surges towards the real Daae and she faints (in the silent film scene which models this event she passes out when she realizes that the masked, mysterious figure which has kidnapped her is - surprise! - the Phantom of the Opera). It's one of the show's most potent moments and it returns in at least two incarnations in the Phantom Manor - in the entrance room where we look in a mirror and see the bride within, and much later on, where the bride looks in a mirror and sees death. The Phantom of the Opera has always used mirrors for trickery, like his mirrored torture chamber, and the Disney Phantom may take a cue in the final scene, where he appears looming behind the carriages in reflection. Or perhaps not, since that scene is primarily a reinvention of the Davis Hitch-hikers gag.

Some, none, or all of these connections may be intentional, since not only does Phantom Manor have to contend not only with influences coming through 83 years of Phantom of the Opera versions and corruptions, but coming from an attraction which is at once embraced and reinvented, and from WED enterprises itself (the Phantom Canyon finale is a ghostly regurgitation of a portion of Marc Davis' unbuilt Western River Expedition). But The Phantom of the Opera, French pulp fiction from 1910, has proven itself to be unexpectedly evergreen, successful yielding to reinvention without sacrificing many essential elements of the appeal of the legend. Long since, horrors from a similar vintage... Frankenstein, Dracula and others.. have had to forcibly disassemble, re-assemble, infantilize, trivialize, and finally lurch off into the mire of postmodernism that much of our current culture has become, Leroux's pulpy amalgamation has survived remarkably intact. Phantom Manor may not be the best example of "trickle down culture", but in this isolated instance it can yield many fascinating examples of how our enduring myths can echo through the most unexpected of places.

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Serious kudos go to Jerrod E. Hogle, whose long-winded in title but illuminating in content "The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and its Progeny" greatly influenced the formation of this essay. And, spookily enough, the publication of this essay means I have now exactly thirteen posts filed under the "Haunted Mansion" label!

Vanishing Walt Disney World, #7

The focus of World Showcase and one of EPCOT Center's most key attractions, in 1982 as well as now, was to be its' diverse group of eateries gathered around that big lagoon and presented under the auspices of being representative of some kind of cultural gathering. The names were big: three famous chefs of France, Japan's largest department store, and that famous (to Americans) Italian eatery, L’ Originale Alfredo di Roma.

Alfredo di Roma had always been a contested eatery along the lagoon, some patrons finding it excellent and others thinking they'd rather go to an Olive Garden. The food was Italian rather than Italian-American, and perhaps presented to please a palette more Mediterranean than most people patronizing the eatery. For example, the famous dish of the place, the Fettucine Alfredo, is usually presented in America as pasta tossed in a heavy creamy cheese sauce. Most Americans' experience with authentic Fettucine Alfredo was probably at this establishment, which is simply butter and cheese tossed with hot pasta. The palette may have been more subtle, but tourists are not known for their love of subtlety. Alfredo di Roma closed September 1 of last year, and one more element of the original EPCOT was gone. Here's some photos taken on August 30, 2007:

A busy waiting room // One of the smaller dining rooms

The overfilled main hall

The legend of the golden fork and spoon, wall hanging in waiting room

Badly placed tables ruin the illusion.

Waiting for the last day....

I dined at Alfredo's once, in 20o5, and found the experience a mixed bag. Although the food was memorably positive and prepared with excellent presentation, the dining hall was loud and cramped to excessive capacity with tables. Tables were placed against walls in ways which did not flatter the beautiful wall murals, and the presence of a roaming band did not help the congestion. In much the same way Disney has crammed the sedate San Angel Inn full of tables, Alfredo di Roma was a nice eatery which left a less favorable impression of being stuck in a crowded subway car.

A more recent departure has been the Nine Dragons restaurant at the China pavilion, which closed on May 30 to renovate the eatery to present a more modern view of China and Chinese food. Unlike Alfredo di Roma, which was at least contested, nobody seems to have liked Nine Dragons much, most describing the food as mediocre and overpriced (a quick glance at the menu shows an abundance of food like General Tso Chicken at triple price you'd expect for what is, realistically, fast food type dishes. Of course this isn't uncommon, let's not forget Chefs de France's $22 lunchtime hamburger). But the interior of the eatery was cozy if a bit plain, with lots of dark carved wood divider screens and big windows which were one of the prime viewing locations for Iluminations for 26 years. One of the memories I have of my first EPCOT visit is of those big dark carved wood panels, and although in the interest of full disclosure I have not eaten there in the past few years, I have made several of their dishes and found them to be reasonably good. One of the tricky balances to maintain is the identity of World Showcase pavilions' simultaneous nod towards the traditional and the modern, which is why we now have a big modern Tokyo-style sushi bar inside a 16th century palace. If the tip towards a more brightly lit, "streamlined" 2008 appearance in EPCOT restaurants is deemed grating, we should also remember to look for the earmarks of 1982 elegance on all these original establishments, from the dark woods, lush interior plantings and gestures towards a quiet atmosphere. In short, these places were more opulent than authentic even when new. Here's what Nine Dragons looked like in February 2008.

Detailed ceiling in the entrance area.

The cozy interior one late afternoon day.

Time marches on....