Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Showdown at Castle Court...

From the early 70s Walt Disney World pictorial souvenirs, comes this, one of the strangest, most memorable images ever to grace the interior of one of those little treasure troves of Disney photography...

Fantasyland was never quite the same... after Dixie-Leigh rode into town!

It may be just a photograph of a kid facing down a dwarf, you say, but I say: look closer. The strange distance. The slanting shadows. The Stimmung. What unspoken past history lies between these two? Is the child here to avenge her family? Is it pistols at dawn? So much of early Walt Disney World photography is memorably opaque such as this, photographs just suggestive enough of some unspoken larger context that you'll always remember, say, the cool guy speeding past a blurry Contemporary Resort in his Grand Prix racecar - the wind in his afro - or the girl walking, all alone through Frontierland, tentatively tugging down the edges of her massive gift shop Sombrero. The old guy, leaning out of a Persianesque window in the heart of old Adventureland, to admire a "Magic Carpet". Or the Dad with the thick rimmed glasses - who looks like Gene Hackman - spinning merrily in a yet-to-be-covered Mad Tea Party. They're strange and memorable and sort of dopey, just like real guests at Walt Disney World still are.

So go ahead. Write your own caption for this immortal bit of early Walt Disney World weirdness I affectionately call Child Vs. Dwarf.

You know you want to.