Passport to Dreams Old & New

Return to the Golf Resort

2012-01-28T04:12:00.000-05:00

Golf is bound into Walt Disney World's bloodstream. No matter what you think of the sport, it's one of the things that importantly made up so much of the consideration of the early years of Walt Disney World that no amount of evasion is going to remove it. Walt Disney World opened with one theme park, two hotels.... and two golf courses. They were good courses, yes, and still are well-renowned. When Walt Disney World opened, not much in the Magic Kingdom was exactly "ready"... Flight to the Moon arrived at a delay of some months, as did Fantasyland's main "unique" attraction, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There was essentially nothing to see in Frontierland past Country Bear Jamboree until 1972. But both golf courses, they were ready to go on opening day. By mid 1973, the number was up to three and the Magic Kingdom hadn't even finished its initial build-out.

There were three big "events" in the first three months of Walt Disney World: the grand opening ceremonies on October 28, the first big Thanksgiving where traffic jammed up all of World Drive and onto I-4, and the first Walt Disney World Open on November 29-December 5. Jack Nicklaus won the gold. And despite all of the company's emphasis and pride in its well-rounded portfolio of recreation possibilities at Walt Disney World, the golf courses always seemed a little removed from all that. They were, basically, there to appeal to the whims of the Disney executives, and seeing the triumvirate of Dick Nunis, Card Walker, and Donn Tatum - the three principal administrative "architects" of Walt Disney World - tromping around the courses was not at all unusual. On October 1, 1971, as soon as the Magic Kingdom was open, Tatum and Walker made their first priority a round of golf on the Magnolia.

Now, in another world of consideration, Disney had opened two hotels with sixteen restaurants on a single day with no prior hotel experience, as sure a suicide gesture as can be imagined. They had bought out U.S. Steel in late 1971 to finish building the Contemporary, which a crane still loomed over on opening day. They were in the hotel business now, and they had a problem. Let's peek inside the 1972 Walt Disney Productions' Annual Report...

Since opening day, the demand for accommodations throughout central Florida has exceeded the supply. On site, our two theme resort-hotels, the Contemporary and the Polynesian Village, operated at near 100% capacity all year long. Our two hotels and Fort Wilderness Campgrounds together hosted 1,750,000 guests during the year.

Cumulative projections of hotel occupancy are compiled for only six months into the future. However, as of December 1, 1972, a total of 151,000 room-nights, or 79.2% of the total occupancy available at the Contemporary Resort-Hotel from December, 1972 through May, 1973, had already been sold. 75,700 room-nights, representing 84.8% of the total rooms available at the Polynesian Village, had been sold for the same period, and the months of April and May are considered to be the off-season. Reservation requests by the general public have been averaging 32,000 to 36,000 monthly by telephone and mail.

[...] Recognizing, however, that the public will always prefer to stay within the "Vacation Kingdom" site, the Company will soon begin architectural work on the third theme resort, the 500-room Asian Hotel. Construction is planned for 1974, with the formal opening date to take place that year.

The capacity of the campgrounds has already been expanded several times. A total of 717 campsites will be available for Walt Disney World guests by March, 1973.

Perhaps the greatest single challenge throughout 1972 was to conform operational planning to the emerging attendance patterns, and to adjust, as rapidly as possible, to the new visitation levels, which ultimately exceeded by more than 700,000 the Company's most optimistic estimates.

To paraphrase: Disney was sitting on a gold mine. The reference to only just starting on "architectural work" for the Asian Resort is telling, in that this indicates that the Asian, so familiar in our imaginations from art and models, was probably much farther behind the Polynesian and the Contemporary in actual design. The unreal scope of the building in comparison to the Contemporary and Polynesian was always staggering, and although the Asian seems to have actually come quite close to realization, it perhaps would have seemed quite different than those early models indicate.

But the Asian would never come to be. For almost fifteen years, the last hotel to be built in Walt Disney World proper would be-- The Golf Resort. From the same annual report, previewing the upcoming hotel:

The Golf Resort Villas: Overlooking the finishing holes of the championship Palm and Magnolia golf courses, this new 153-room resort-hotel will connect with an expanded golf clubhouse and restaurant. Completion is expected during 1973.

That's perhaps significantly less ambitious than the planned Asian Resort. This, along with a number of other quick-hit fixes instituted over the next few years, is unfortunate. But the 1972 annual report was prepared in early 1973, and in just a few months, the Walt Disney World bubble would burst. Although the cause is well known, a 1981 article in Orlando Magazine tells the story memorably intimately:

"Ironically, the needle that pricked the bubble was not of local origin. It was unleashed halfway around the world, in the Mideast. There, in fall of 1973, war broke out and the Arabs slapped an oil embargo on the west.

Gasoline stocks dwindled. Filling stations stayed open only a few hours a day. Some closed permanently.

Cut off gasoline, the lifeblood of Florida tourism, and the Disney impact area would quickly become a disaster zone.

Bob Allen told me about the reaction to the energy crisis at Walt Disney World:

"When it was apparent that the number of visitors was dropping off," he said, "we realized we had to adjust our business. It's one of the few times we've had to do it. Our operations committee went into emergency sessions.

"We asked ourselves, 'can we penetrate the Florida market more? Can we reduce costs?' We made a chart that outlined our operations at various levels of attendance. We told management that's our game plan. We had to lay off employees, but we actually learned to operate our business better."

The effects were immediate. The Asian never would materialize at Walt Disney World. A number of expansions not already in the midst of on-the-ground construction were delayed or deferred immediately; the only thing that probably saved Space Mountain and the rest of Tomorrowland was that it's foundation was already up. Big Thunder Railway, announced for construction in 1974, would have to wait 'till nearly the end of the decade and its companion, The Western River Expedition, would be left in the dust of the third-gear race to figure out what to do about Walt Disney's promise of a "city of tomorrow" to the Florida people back in 1966.

Many of these decisions are regrettable. As soon as the paint was dry on the Tomorrowland project, the full-on charge towards EPCOT... or maybe World Showcase... or maybe the Future World Theme Center... or maybe Frontier Kingdom... meant that the remaining holes in the fabric of the Vacation Kingdom and Lake Buena Vista were not filled in.

Spotlight Magazine, 1977

So in that way, the Golf Resort can be seen to represent the sort of thinking that eventually became a liability to Disney. A more conservative project could hardly be conceived to help fill the demand for more rooms and, after all, one of the chief mandates to Eisner was to build more hotels. But above all that, the Golf Resort Card Walker's baby. To say the man was fixated on golf is an understatement. Cast Members were actually informed that he could be easily identified as "the short guy who's dressed like a professional golfer." Every year Card would come trundling out onto the green to hit off the first ball of the Walt Disney World Open with people like Glen Campbell, Jack Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer looking on. The Golf Resort is Card Walker in the same way that the Disney-MGM Studios is Michael Eisner.

Given it's low profile and vague stylistic mandate, the Golf Resort was a pleasant, quiet diversion quite unlike anything else at Walt Disney World. Once Walker and Miller had exited, Eisner didn't quite know what to do with the place - re-christening it The Disney Inn and eventually selling it off to the United States Military. I guess the logic is that military guys like golf? Despite its' somewhat remote location and lack of a monorail stop, the Golf Resort was more centrally located than over half of the hotels which currently dot the Walt Disney World landscape. It was beloved by everyone I've managed to find who was fortunate enough to stay there during its twenty year tenure for its relaxed, easy pace and "away from it all" atmosphere. It was a true oddity, something that Disney would never let out of the gate today.

But despite its significance to early Walt Disney World as both a place and a signifier, the Golf Resort is a true obscurity. So let's take a trip back to the 70s and enjoy some of the images... and words... of the Golf Resort, a unique early Walt Disney World phenomenon if there ever was one.

"Welcome Golfers ...to the finest tee-side accommodations ever...at the Golf Resort Hotel!"

The Golf Resort was graced with one of the most inexplicably awesome logos and signs ever, the golf club inscribed inside the distinctive Walt Disney World "D".

This is the original Golf Clubhouse as it appeared in 1971. This is on the West side of the clubhouse looking East, towards the Polynesian Village. The glass windows directly facing the camera behind that sand trap are what was then known as the Palm Lounge, which wrapped around the Magnolia Room (the two golf courses are called the Palm and Magnolia, of course). The Magnolia Room is easily identifiable by its distinctive "topper" at the peak of its chalet-style roof. The Pro Shop was located beneath the Magnolia Room.

The hours of the Pro Shop were, in October 1971, 9 am to 6 pm. The Magnolia Room and Palm Lounge entertained from 11 am to dusk.

Here's the Golf Resort after expansion, from a similar, although elevated, angle. The T-shaped building abutting the Swimming Pool to our right is the 153-room expansion, which connected to the original structure via an elevated breezeway directly to the south of the Magnolia Room. Nearer the view of this elevated photograph, we can see a large kitchen and support facility has been built onto the side of the Magnolia Room. The lobby is directly connected to the breezeway that leads to the hotel rooms. The large port cohere can be seen behind the Magnolia Room, with a white car driving direct into it. The Golf Resort was approached from the long road that ran between the two courses, out of sight but to the left of this photograph.

It's the early 80s and Donald Duck is checking into the Golf Resort with his clubs in the lobby! To the right of this photograph is the breezeway leading to the guest rooms, and directly behind the photographer is the entrance to the Magnolia Room.

Another view of the lobby. This couple is standing more or less where Donald Duck was.

"Indoors are more family-styled activities... the Trophy Room for dining, the Player's Gallery lounge and convenient stores, including the Pro Shop carrying a full line of golf, tennis and swimming apparel and accessories. A golf professional is on hand for lessons or simple tips on improving your game." - 1973 check-in folder

The Pro Shop typifies the Golf Resort's contemporary styling... even more "contemporary" than the actual Contemporary Resort-Hotel! Yes, the drop ceilings and mirrored walls shouted "1971!", but the decorative embellishment around the ceiling was a nice, classy touch.

I call the woman on the left Amazing Pants Girl. Seriously, look at those pants! Mustard yellow? Watch her putt...

Hey! Almost a hole in one!

The decorative border also made an appearance in the Magnolia Room, re-dubbed the "Trophy Room" in 1973 with the opening of the resort concurrent with the Walt Disney World Open. The Trophy Room's memorable signature culinary concoction? French fried ice cream.

"For those guests who appreciate dining well in a quiet atmosphere, the Golf Resort Country Club dining room offers an excellent menu, superb service, and complimentary transportation from both resort hotels in you desire it." - Walt Disney World Vacationland, Summer 1973

"THE TROPHY ROOM allows you to tee off to superb dining any time of the day. A la carte or club breakfast served 6:30 - 11:30 am; buffet lunch, 11:30 am - 2:30 pm; waitress service dinner featuring tasty Pinch n' Putt and gourmet entrees 5:30 - 10 pm and atmosphere entertainment. Sandwiches and snacks also available 10 am - midnight. $1.25-$15.00" - Walt Disney World News, November 1974

"I'm not kidding, Janice... this time I'm going to get the Pinch n' Putt!!!"

"For a casual quiet night with the family, take the complimentary transportation to the Golf Resort's Magnolia Room or drive your own car. Enjoy a family dinner anytime from 6 to 9:30 pm with cocktails 'til 11. Either Sam Barnes or John Chen entertain nightly with a full repertoire of popular folk music." - Walt Disney World News, July 1972

Think that's Sam Barnes or John Chen back there?

"I heard that!"

Goofy folk music or not, the Magnolia Room / Trophy Room was a real culinary showplace for Walt Disney World, with its vaulted ceilings and heavy timbers. In 1976, six Disney chefs went to Tampa for a fine cook-off event and won almost every prize, including the Top Prize for the third year in a row, after which it was retired permanently. Walt Disney World took its upscale dining seriously.

"Then, [the Trophy Room] ...will roll out the fondue trays until midnight. Late-night diners (minimum of two persons per fondue) will be able to choose from three fondue selections: the Cheese Fondue (a blend of Gruyere and Swiss, spices and Sauternes wines); the Combination Fondue Dinner (cheese fondue appetizer, salad, beef and vegetable fondue); and the Fondue Dessert (a special chocolate fondue with fresh fruit and sponge cake)."

"Entertainment begins each evening at 6:30, and is usually provided by a versatile guitar playing and singing duo called Amos and Charles. Their show is a combination of soft rock, blue grass, country and folk music. Often inviting their audience to request a favorite tune, they seldom fail to come up with a rendition of the selected song." Walt Disney World News, April 1976

The Player's Gallery lounge adjoining was a popular spot for Disney executives, due to its quiet atmosphere and unusual mixed drinks. It is no exaggeration to say that all manner of business deals - meaning, in this case, Walt Disney World history - was made in the Player's Lounge.

"THE PLAYERS' GALLERY offers specialty drinks and cocktails with a fairway view. Also sandwiches and beverages "to go". Open daily 11 am to 1 am. $0.60 - $2.50." Walt Disney World News November 1974

The 1982 Steve Birnbaum guidebook has memorably juicy details:

"The Player's Gallery, adjoining the Trophy Room, with a view over the Palm golf course, serves an assortment of specialty drinks and cocktails - Double Eagles (Kahula on the bottom and a tequila sour floating on top), Banana Bogeys (light rum, fresh bananas, cream, and vanilla), Unplayable Lies (champagne doused with Southern Comfort served over a whole frozen apricot), and Lateral Hazards (light rum and curacao blended with orange and lime nectar)."

A whole frozen apricot? How is that even physically possible?? It's worth pointing out that of all the lounges profiled in his book, Steve reported only the Trophy Room drink menu in total, which means it probably impressed him. Either that, or it's because Dick Nunis approved the book.

Let's move outside to the Golf Resort's memorable pool:

Also: Memorable pants

Compared to the austere Olympic pools at the Contemporary and Lake Buena Vista Villas, Golf Resort swimmers were treated to these water-spouting things:

...which I think are a pretty cool grace note for a very restrained hotel. I mean, I want to swim there right now. It's not the Polynesian Village's legendary grotto slide, but iIt was also the first heated pool at Walt Disney World.

The Player's Gallery overlooking the new pool. At the bottom of the staircase, in the back, on the left, there is an entrance to the Pro Shop.

An almost identical view from before the expansion project.

"Guests wishing to strengthen their own golf games may take advantage of the Golf Resort's full-service Pro Shop. One of the services offered through the Pro Shop is the Golf Studio at the Magnolia driving range. This unique instructional program is conducted by pros for golfers of any age and at any playing level. As part of the Golf Studio experience, participants have their swings videotaped for replays and critiques in the Pro Shop." - Walt Disney World: The First Decade

"Golfers and fans who attended the PGA-sponsored Walt Disney World Classic late last year left cheering two winners: Jack Nicklaus and the newly-opened Walt Disney World Golf Resort Hotel.

Rising serenely above the sparkling lakes and rolling greens of the championship Palm and Magnolia courses, Walt Disney World's newest hotel is a wood-and-volcanic-stone study in earth tones, designed to blend into the lush, tropical atmosphere of the resort.

The accommodations are excellent. Golfers and their families can choose from 151 spacious rooms, all with balconies overlooking the courses and a fountain-splashed swimming pool. Autumnal hues of burnt-orange, gold, and brown carry out the "natural" feeling of the decor.

For early-bird golfers who rise with the sun, the Trophy Room offers a full breakfast menu as well as fast and efficient service. Along with ham and eggs served in a piping hot skillet, hosts and hostesses, when asked, can usually serve up tips on how a course is "playing" and how to avoid the traps.

The Trophy Room also serves a superb buffet luncheon and, in the evening, offers diners soft lights, live musical entertainment, and a menu which includes Cornish game hen and red snapper almondine. The Hotel also has a gifts & sundries shop where everything from gruyere cheese to toothpaste can be found, and a "full fashion" Pro Shop which carries men and women's top-designer sports apparel, golfing equipment, novelty items, and even a full line of Mickey Mouse watches and Mickey Mouse golf balls. Created to provide the golfer with an ideal vacation situation, the new hotel also caters to the non-golfing member of the family. Lighted tennis courts and a heated swimming pool are only a step away from the rooms, and mini-buses depart the hotel every few minutes, providing hotel guests with free transportation to the Magic Kingdom theme part, Fort Wilderness Campground Resort, the Polynesian Village, and the Contemporary Resort.

The setting is beautiful, the atmosphere is serene, and whether you practice on the putting greens, challenge the courses, or just lie by the pool in the sun, your stay at the Golf Resort will be a "winning" one." - Walt Disney World Vacationland, Summer 1974.

Buena Vista Obscura: Johnny's Corner

2012-01-17T04:34:00.000-05:00

"Kissimmee (pron. Kiss-SIMM-ee) is the cow capital of Florida. To get there one has to pass miles of cattle ranches. Stores in town have that false-front look, familiar in Western movies, and the natives wear aging, outsize Stetsons. The most popular hangout for old-timers is Crown's Cafe on Broadway, a modest dining room, in the back of which, through swinging doors, is a poolroom with eight tables. Women are not welcome. If the hot pork is ready, a waitress bangs on a shelf, calls out a name and passes the plate through a small window.

Oren Brown, a thin, weather-beaten man in his middle fifties, scion of one of Kissimmee's first families, presides here with inconspicuous authority. He and his friends reminisce about the old days, when the streets were all dirt and there was a livery stable on the corner, and when, if someone got married, you knew the names of all the guests in the paper. His eye wanders around the room, and every so often, he slides out of the conversation to collect a fee: 15 cents for a game with two people, 20 cents for a game with three or more, 60 cents an hour. This is the same Oren Brown who recently turned down $4,200,000 (somewhat less when he tells it) for his 6,750 acres abutting Disney. "What's money?" he asks. "It's only paper, most of it." He scans the room. "Excuse me", he says, and he slips off to collect 15 cents at table number four. He picks up where he left off: "I never could keep money. The land, it won't run off. Lots of people like money, but I don't care so much for it. I reckon I'm peculiar that way."

Time was when rangeland in Kissimmee went for $2 an acre. But new people have come to town. Taxes are already out of hand, and the retired elderly, no longer able to afford it, have moved away. Meanwhile, church attendance has skyrocketed."

That is the April 6, 1971 issue of Look Magazine, describing a March 1971 preview trip to Walt Disney World. The article everyone remembers is the one describing the upcoming sights at Walt Disney World, but the valuable one comes right after it, describing what life is like in the communities ringing Walt Disney World as the October opening looms overhead like a doom cloud. The start of Walt Disney World will be the end of "Old Florida", as it's called around here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Nobody talks much about central Florida before Walt Disney World, possibly because there wasn't much to it. Reading the above description it's easy to imagine Walt Disney circling in his helicopter in November 1963, passing miles and miles of flat scrub and rangeland, until the gleaming intersection of two brand new, high tech highways - The Florida Turnpike and Interstate 4 - shot out of the low, flat land like a rocket. "Build it there", he said, and when his helicopter landed in New Orleans some time later, Walt found out that President Kennedy had been shot. Walt Disney World always was a project with an atmosphere of predestination in the balance.

They built it there, and the nearest thing to Walt Disney World besides retirees and the interstate itself was a little old Country Store called Johnny's Corner. It was at the intersection of State Road 535, which borders the Disney lot to the north and east. Johnny's Corner was a local landmark, and it was especially important in that it was the nearest place to cash a paycheck and buy beer. Dick Nunis drove here on his fabled efforts to guilt the Union construction crews to build God-knows-how-many things at The Magic Kingdom. He, and thousands of others, probably stopped here to get one for themselves, too.

It was quite a place. That's actually an understatement, as the November 17, 1970 issue of Palm Beach Daily News attests, here for your reading amusement:

"Close To But Not In Disney World -
Johnny's Corner, Everything From Snuff to Eggs

ORLANDO, Fla (UPI) - At Johnny's Corner a man can get pig knuckles with his beer, a fan belt for his car, a can of snuff, a pair of used socks, a Barlow knife, or a Hong Kong suit "made to measure" for $49.

He can cuss loud, peel eggs, play pin ball, argue about the Union, eat sardines out of the can and hand wrestle by the gas pumps.

If the late Walt Disney didn't stop by Johnny's Corner when he was staking out land for his vacation resort, he should have. You get the feeling that the old master of folk lore would have liked this dirty old country store.

It's thriving as a satellite to Walt Disney World, but it appears doomed by the same force that made it boom.

Things haven't changed much at Johnny's Corner since the old man, Johnny Speakman, got fed up with all the extra work and sold out. That was last winter.

But they put a new sign out front. Last month they washed the windows and today, a traffic spotter for an Orlando radio station uses Johnny's Corner as a check point.

"If we tried to fix this place up they'd quit coming." says Bill Waring, one of the new co-owners. "These construction workers come in here dirty and they want the place dirty."

Except for a few orange pickers in season, the customers at Johnny's Corner are brawny men with Mickey Mouse decals on their hard hats. They are the working men who are not allowed in the executive cafeteria at the Disney site about a "country mile" away.

At noon they bring their lunch boxes and sit at two big wooden tables. They buy milk in half-quart cartons, Gatorade in pop top cans, pies, hot sausages, potato chips and bean dip.

But at quitting time it's beer they're after. Lots of beer.

"On a pay day we'll such as much as 50 cases." said Bob Morgan, Waring's partner. "You can safely say it's one of the best beer accounts in Orange County."

That's of little surprise. More than 2,500 workers are already on the job at the "Magic Kingdom", a short distance down state road 535, and the number is growing. It's the largest private construction project underway in the United States.

Waren, 40, and Morgan, 55, sleep during the week at the rear of the store. They get up at 4 a.m. to start the coffee and after closing they boil and pickle eggs - "about 20 dozen a week."

"We spice them up with hot pepper and garlic sauce or anything else that we can find and man, you can't keep them on the counter, Waring says.

Straw hats, radiator hoses, flit guns, pocket combs, motor oil, watch bands, staple groceries and advertisements for mail order clothes clutter the walls.

"I sold a man a pair of my own pants last week." Waring said, "A man came in here not long ago who had forgot his socks. I don't know how he managed to do that but I went and got an old pair I had and sold that to him for a dollar."

Johnny's Corner also serves as a bank and filling station.

"We cash their checks for them." Waring says, "and the other day one guy came in here with his eye all busted up and I patched him up."

But the old Country Store, which has occupied the same spot on Vineland Road for three decades, is likely to vanish when Walt Disney World opens next October. With fancy new motels going up everywhere it's expected that a major oil company will replace it with a slick new service station.

You wonder if Walt Disney would have approved of that."


Probably the only view inside Johnny's that Exists.

Of course Look also profiled Johnny's Corner in their article:

"In the next five years, 150 more service stations will be needed in the neighborhood - 330 by 1985 - and the number of restaurants should increase from 54 to 400. In February, an oil company bought a one-acre lot for a gas station near the entrance to Disney World for $300,000.

Already comfortably prosperous are Bill Waring and Bob Morgan, owners of Johnny's Corner, closest general store to Disney and a stop for construction workers on their way home. The previous owner, who used to take in $10 a day, sold out because business was getting too good - he couldn't keep up. The store carries frozen sandwiches, hats, garden hose, jars of pickled eggs and snuff. But Waring and Morgan have increased their take 40 times, mainly because they sell more beer than anyone else in Orange County."

This is the atmosphere Disney was dropping the Vacation Kingdom of the World into. Later in the same article, author Henry Ehrlich describes Windermere, current home of everyone from Tiger Woods to Dick Nunis, circa 1970 as a high priced retirement club with eight roads, one of them paved. He writes: "'We have a nice sort of antebellum atmosphere," says Win Pendleton, a former newspaperman, a lecturer and the author of 2121 Funny Stories and How To Tell Them."

Walt Disney World was like a bomb going off in the fabric of the sleepy little hamlets south of Orlando, and it tore a lot of them down with it. There's no way Johnny Speakman could have foreseen his tiny country store being remembered seventy years later when he opened it in the first years of the 1940s, but it became a focal point for the earliest years of Walt Disney World, before it was even really a thing that existed - piles of concrete, dirt, cement and steel framing. The prehistory, if you like. But Johnny's Corner is so well remembered that the intersection of 535 and Vineland is still called Johnny's Corner - even if it didn't make it to opening day. The June 1971 issue of "News From Walt Disney World", the company's official newsletter for the families of construction crews, simply stated:

"What happened to Johnny's Corner? Progress took its toll and that historic landmark was demolished to make way for a modern service station."

Bill and Bob didn't make out too bad in the end. If a parcel of land a quarter mile away sold for $300,000, they must have seen the writing on the wall. Turning a business from a $10-a-day operation to a $400 one was just one of the first - and nearest - economic miracles Disney worked in the local economy. And, true to Disney form, a lot of local character got bulldozed in the process.

So, really, who cares? A dirty little corner shop got bulldozed, and the owners made a lot of money. It's hard to be too upset about all of this. But Johnny's Corner is just one of those things that keeps popping up over and over again in old materials, because it wasn't just a little store, it was their corner store back when a castle was rising out of a swamp surrounded by lots of nothing. It is a minor mile marker on the map of Walt Disney World history, the last reminder before the dream state sinks in. It's also an obscure and strange delight. It's a bit of authentic weirdness in a history of manufactured and pre-measured charm.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same and it may only be a twist of fate that where construction crews once drove to buy beer and eat lunch and drink that today, young employees of Walt Disney World flock to an Orlando Ale House. In nearly exactly the same spot, a forty-plus year tradition. I think Bill and Bob, and Johnny too, would've gotten a smile out of that.

Thanks to Michael Crawford and Jackie Steele for helping me gather material for this article.

Passport to Dreams Year End Report, 2011

2012-01-08T03:00:00.000-05:00

I seem to recall, a year ago, sitting down to write an article much like this. If I recall, I said something like "every year can't be a banner year". I'm tempted to repeat that, but truthfully things change very quickly at Walt Disney world, so quickly that one can easily lose track from one month to the next even if she isn't limiting her general interest to just one park in the way I do. So while it's hard to describe 2011 as a "banner year" for Magic Kingdom, she truthfully hasn't fared too bad. There's been some mediocre, some good, and some bad tempering it all out.

From an aesthetic perspective, the Magic Kingdom has remained about as good as last year, which is indeed a significant step up from the pit of the late 90s/early 2000s when even banner attractions were going to pot. Thanks to dedicated individuals inside the company at a number of levels, almost every major attraction at the park in the last decade has been refurbished or plussed in some way. Amongst those not yet "upgraded" significantly: the animals on the Jungle Cruise are mostly accounted for and operational, a novelty I haven't enjoyed since at least the mid-90s. Peter Pan's Flight continues to tediously chug along towards obsolescence, long overdue for a total tear-out and rebuild similar to what It's A Small World, across the promenade, received in 2005. And Splash Mountain, a headline favorite of many, continues to prove how poorly built it was back in 1992 by needing constant attention and patches every 6-8 months. One of the reasons the Disneyland version is in much better shape is because those America Sings figures it uses were built by MAPO using the highest possible standards back in 1974. Such is the long-term consequence of corner cutting here and there.

Speaking of Disneyland, I took a trip there in early 2011 and had a generally good time, but not having been there in over five years with a lot of water (including this entire blog) under the bridge does change one's perception of the place. I've been thinking a lot about what I saw there, some of which has already made its way onto this blog, but it's enough to say that I believe the park's high standards have begun to slip while Magic Kingdom has improved, closing the significant gap between the two. Besides the always indifferent Cast Members and rampant local population, I saw plenty of broken figures and effects in major attractions and even the Tiki Room, which was so glorious in 2005, feels dustier and threadbare.

Worst of all is the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, which should be a fantastic show piece, is in deplorable condition. Audio tracks are scratchy, paint is smeared, their Seance Room Leota projection is not only badly out of synch but her floating effects are just plain off, and more. There is no excuse for an attraction which receives a refurbishment twice yearly to install and remove their (tacky) Nightmare Before Christmas overlay to be in such terrible shape. The worst offender of all, and a good indicator of just how far that attraction has fallen, is their Load Area. What used to be a strange, haunted blackness has been filled up with clutter on a J.C. Penny level of show quality. Blue lights leak everywhere, making it perfectly clear where the walls are and spoiling the entrance to their Endless Hall scene. Even in the worst days of the Florida version's negligence, the maintenance crew knew well enough not to shine blue lights all over the flat black interior walls.

Disneyland: step it up. I expect better of you.

Okay. So in the next section I'm going to speak some serious truths about Walt Disney World that some of you, dear readers, may not want to hear. If none of this is to your taste then please skip ahead to the section break. This is no rant, no ruse. It is absolutely true. I'm going to accept no complaining about this next section, so if you don't want to hear it, then don't.

I've noticed a general stirring discontentment online in recent months, spurred by a major announcement nobody really cared much about, an increasingly vague future for Pleasure Island, and Universal showing Disney how it's really done up the road. There have been a number of attempts to lash out at the perceived source of the problem, people like Bob Iger or Tom Staggs who really are mostly out of the loop in regards to Disney's little Florida outpost.

I've been ignoring all of this for years on this blog and tried to focus on things I do like, but it's time that the online discourse really start about Walt Disney World and ensuring she has another 40 years in front of her that involve more things than existing attraction overlays and time share sales. If not me, then who? For years the politics of Disneyland have been vented online, but solving Walt Disney World's problems will need more than a new President and a will and a way.

The Big Picture: What is Wrong with Walt Disney World
Back home in Florida, Team Disney Orlando continues to run the parks with a criminal lack of regard for show. Magic Kingdom and EPCOT are hugely busy parks, there's no doubt. On the busiest days at the end of the year, there may be as many as three times the number of people that can fit into Disneyland between The Magic Kingdom and EPCOT. Despite a steady drift away from Disney towards Universal thanks to Harry Potter, it's not as if Disney is losing money here. But, even with the worst crowds and the best people-moving skills, Walt Disney World Operations is still prioritizing money over quality, and this goes beyond their refusal to hire outside of a minimum-wage starting salary.

Foods, for example, has lately gone on a rampage and removed the door handles from a number of alternative entrances and exits from original Magic Kingdom food courts, forcing all traffic through a single entrance where a phalanx of Cast Members are posted, ready to assault you with menus. This is exactly the sort of cheap aggressive grubbery that used to be associated with Universal.

It makes sense, in some ways, as major food outlets at Magic Kingdom can serve as many people an hour as can some attractions - in a park which can hold 80,000+ people and which is, five or six times a year, as full as that. Attractions are built around a unidirectional crowd flow as well, and I imagine that such methods manage to eek out just enough more customers served and dollars per hour to make it worthwhile to Food Operations, but they do so at the cost of making the meal process as harried as getting on an attraction and doing further thematic damage to the park in that these shops and food service locations no longer feel like real places; they're just one step closer to cavernous mess halls with funnels at the entrance. The days of entering a quiet side door of Columbia Harbour House are long gone; the handle's been replaced by a sign with an arrow. I guess we're lucky the door is still there at all.

But if we really want to get at what's wrong with Walt Disney World, we need look no further than the common stroller parking area for the perfect example.

These areas are badly needed at almost all times, and for over half the year resemble vast seas of plastic in a way that seems quite excessive. Nearly all of them are marked with cheap, wooden, folding A-frame signs:

In fact nearly every facility at Walt Disney World has at least one of these things:

I don't doubt that they are perceived as being needed, although every early Walt Disney World training guide I've ever seen clearly states that nobody will read signs anyway (every Cast Member will tell you this is so) and so the parks generally refrained from overloading them in common areas; Universal was and is especially bad about sign overload. What raises my ire is what these temporary signs look like. They look terrible.

There used to be an ironclad Walt Disney World rule that if any sign was going to be used for more than three weeks, it needed to be transferred off an A-frame and made a permanent fixture manufactured by the Walt Disney World sign shop. These digital printout A-frames do not count, and many of them have been in use for years and years.

I have no doubt that the business divisions which use these signs would love that have nice permanent ones, but the cost of manufacture and design for a really good, Disney-quality sign is quite high, and these divisions just don't have money to spend. They can hardly afford to staff attractions like Country Bear Jamboree, which closes early, or Swiss Family Treehouse, which is not staffed at all.

Now hold on there. Why should Magic Kingdom Frontierland Operations have to pay the Magic Kingdom Sign Shop money to make them a sign? Why can't that just be written off as an expense of operating the park? How many guests through the Main Entrance turnstile at $90/head does it take to pay for a simple stroller parking sign on a stick? And why is money circulating through all these sub-departments from one area to another when guests can't perceive the difference and it all ends up going to the same parent company anyway??

Walt Disney World is a vast and bewildering bureaucratic system where every theme park is set up like a self-sufficient business entity; for example: a strip mall. Magic Kingdom is one. Animal Kingdom is another. Transportation is another. Each one of these has a "Vice President". They all ostensibly answer to Meg Crofton, but if you notice, she's also a "Vice President". There is no President. The next person on up the line is several levels of bureaucratic strata above them; an Al Weiss or a Tom Staggs.

Each one of these "strip mall" business entities not only are in competition with each other, but within each are individual departments, like shops in the mall, which are responsible for their own budgets, that money being parceled out amongst them using methods so obscure it can only be likened to Alchemy. So Frontierland Foods is in direct conflict with Main Street Operations, and so on and so on. All of them are in conflict with Imagineering, who often have to jump through hoops to placate any of them when it comes to designing anything. You liked the rocking chairs on Main Street? Too bad, Operations didn't. Certain areas, like Entertainment, have excessive amounts of money and regularly spend it on expensive free bees for their Cast Members like lovely jackets and shirts. Meanwhile, Operations hasn't got enough money to replace the microwave in their break rooms and they have to rely on cheap jack folding signs.

There is nobody piloting the ship. Nobody charting the course, nobody keeping things on the ball. Every area is being nickled and dimed to death and the people who ostensibly should be stopping them have no power or time to do so. That huge stage in Tomorrowland was built and paid for by Entertainment, who hardly even bothered to ask WDI if they should. It became a fiasco, just like the Adventureland stage across from Pirates, which causes huge traffic flow problems in front of the attraction and was built so quickly that the proper safety precautions were not taken to ensure that it was safe to perform on. I'll let you Google what the unhappy result of that carelessness was. There are standards in place with nobody to enforce them; an art director or supervisor can ask Operations to buy a better sign, but there's never money to do it. Magic Kingdom has to pressure Transportation to keep the monorails running so people can get to or from their theme park. It is an insane way to run a business and it is killing Walt Disney World.

That is what is wrong with Walt Disney World. Not just the signs, but the whole culture of spending and squabbling and cheapness and unaccountability it is an example of. In light of all this, asking for something like, say, a new parade, no matter how badly it is needed, is like complaining you can;t get a cup of sugar because the entire bakery is burning down. The good news is that there's lots of people in multiple levels of Walt Disney World who do still care, and who fight every day to maintain standards, but these voices are lost in the total storm of narrow minded apathy that governs. There needs to be wide sweeping change in every layer of the hundreds of levels of bureaucracy, and a concept of spending money to make money, and a concept of shared destiny before anything can happen. And it's because The Magic Kingdom isn't just the Haunted Mansion, it's also the merchandise shop at the exit, the restaurant across the way, and the attraction down the street, too. The Walt Disney World show is every gear moving and ticking away in harmony - not stuck in a deadlocked budgetary frame.

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2011 at The Magic Kingdom

Who is Buried Here Again?
The most controversial new arrival at the Magic Kingdom this year was the new interactive queue for the Haunted Mansion, which set off frenzied firestorms in some departments and relatively few, often half-hearted counter defenses in others. When established classics are messed with, we as fans often feel totally without defenses and intentionally cut out of the loop. Suffice to say that almost everything than can be said to damn this new addition, has been said, and many times at that. So I am not going to reiterate those arguments.

Let's address the single biggest best thing than can be said about the alterations, and it is a technical thing, so it has managed to escape the attention of a lot of online commentary, and that is that the incredibly inefficient and confusing wheelchair access system for the Haunted Mansion has finally been dealt with. This was in fact the primary goal of the entire effort, believe it or not, and it has been very successful. For the first time in the entire attraction's history in Florida, wheelchair parties may enter normally with the rest of the group before splitting off to the alternate access point, which has been rebuilt with a two-way access corridor in the former "Chicken Exit" / Control Tower area, complete with very nicely done thematics which blend the Mansion's Victorian parlor entrance areas and stone Gothic crypt exit areas as well as can be reasonably expected.

This means that many many people who otherwise have had very minimal needs are finally able to experience the entire attraction the way it is intended, from the opening of the front doors, on to the Foyer, Stretch Room, and so on. This is indeed a very big Win for a particular subset and it is no less important to them and indeed the operation of the entire attraction than everything that came with it.

Now. Everything that came with it. First we tackle the big one: the new queue.

Some people do love it. Others absolutely hate it. There has been an astonishing amount of digital ink spilled on this tiny area this year - some of it quite articulate, so I'm not going to go through and pick it apart bit by bit. I'd like to steer a course between the two poles and contextualize my thoughts. I don't believe that this queue means that the Mansion is ruined, nor do I think it's the end of the world, but I had a severely bad reaction to it at first. I've spent most of the year talking this out with various confederates and I believe I can finally offer a coherent take on it besides simply shouting an incredulous "why?"

There has been a lot of attention devoted to discussing what the queue compromises about the Florida Mansion, but comparatively little has been devoted to discussing what the new queue adds.

For the first twenty years of the operation of the Magic Kingdom, the Haunted Mansion felt truly remote from Liberty Square and situated on an expansive estate (right). In the next twenty years, the Mansion's "Operational Infrastructure" has crept its' "property" out further and further, yet much of this is truly "junk themeing" that only makes the area feel smaller, whether that be weeds that crowd away a once sweeping lawn, two of the worst placed trees at Walt Disney World, a totally superfluous gate, or the ill-advised and frankly hideous Fastpass structure from 2000. By opening up the area to the West of the house, taking down some overgrowth, and adding estate-like courtyards and landscape details, some of this lost territory has been regained. The West side of the Mansion facade can finally be appreciated again, and some sense of the house as a large, dimensional place has returned.

Indeed, the sweeping approach from the river and the winding path through the courtyard, with the forest seeming just barely held back beyond the westernmost wall, is fantastic textural stuff. Ever since the green 1972 canopy was expanded and replaced with the ludicrous red canopy, it's been incredibly difficult to even see the Mansion from underneath it, and the new extension offers wonderful views of the house and the river in ways which make me, for one, very thankful for small things. It's been a photographer's dream, like an entire new part of the house has just now been uncovered.

Furthermore, the landscaped hill and forced-perspective graveyard that seems to spill down its side is a thing of beauty. In our minds the large graveyard we see at the end of the ride has always been "behind" the house in some vague sense, but now it seems to be psychically connected to what we see at the front of the house in a very real way - even if the distinction between the "family plot" outside and the "public cemetery" out back, never fully well developed anyway, seems to now be blurred. Now that the weeds and flowers and bushes have grown in a bit, it's a very cool visual and it gets the Haunted Mansion attraction proper off to a terrific start. It also better hides the always incredibly prominent show building, which many will see as a very good thing.

I think the bulwark of the main queue is similarly aesthetically unobjectionable. Some of the tributes and references go a bit over the top, in my opinion, similar to what one would expect in a fanfic, although I see them as having undue prominence, perhaps, mostly because I am myself a fan and those nods are directed at me. Even if I'm not sure I approve of him being included outside the attraction, I touch the One-Eyed Black Cat every time I walk through the queue. Just a few steps later we come across one of the best tableau: a side gate that leads direct onto the lawn where a number of gravestones poke out of the grass, along with some rusted and vine-entwined shovels. It's a lovely thing, and the sort of moment one could linger by forever, and it feels like a real thing in a real world. Yet the fact that it's placed in direct proximity to an opportunity to touch a bass-relief of a cat and hear it yowl at you gets to the crux of the problem with the entire new expansion.

I'm going to use a single thing from the queue as a way of an example. Here we have the "Sea Captain Tomb", lovingly dubbed by fans/adversaries as "King Squirty":

Now, blot everything you know about what this thing does out of your mind for a moment and just look at it. It's sculpturally wonderful - recalling the gothic mansion interior attraction's use of mythical monsters in decorative details, is at least as sculpturally rich, and it's a pretty funny, morbid joke. Truthfully, I can't believe Disney let this one out the door - it's a very explicit representation of a corpse floating in a bathtub. In fact, the rest of the attraction doesn't get anywhere near that sort of direct death scene gag outside of the Ghost Host's skeleton dangling above the Stretch Room. Imagine finding such a monument in a real cemetery - you'd be shocked. Imagine if upon examining the monument closely, you discovered that water were running down the sides of it, apparently out of the tub.

It's a really morbid idea - delightfully so, and so it's perfect for the Haunted Mansion. There's just one problem. Instead of being creepy, instead of water trickling out of it the way it seems to be designed to do, this tomb is zanily squirting you with water!

Wait, back that train up. Where did that come from??

And worse, there's a goofy voice coming from inside the tomb, which totally contradicts the visual of this corpse floating in the tub.

And there's bubbles! And sneezing! A ghost gravestone that sneezes on you outside the front door of the house. This is the thematic equivalent of going into the Haunted Mansion and visually defacing things with a Sharpie.

What happened? A visual worthy of a great ride has been compromised by an apparently unrelated agenda of somebody's idea of "interactivity". Two totally unrelated concepts have been joined at the hip. I cannot believe that those responsible for creating the visual appearance of that prop would've wanted it to be squirting water and blowing bubbles. Somewhere between the concept of the visual element of the queue and the physical one, there was a massive meltdown and all that careful work was radically compromised by silly and stupid elements. The baby, the bathwater, and the whole damn tub were thrown out with it.

What the Haunted Mansion Queue represents is a commendable effort which is mired in its own inconsistency. I cannot reconcile that the same group of people who put such work and care and love and detail into that queue also wanted there to be goofy ghost sneezes and a cloying interactive voice straight out of Dora the Explorer. But for what it is, the experience leaves very little impression on you. You walk through and still end up next to a closed set of double doors with just an echoing wolf howl and a graveyard to contemplate. And what a graveyard it is now. At least that still feels the same.

John Hench once said.... a lot of things, especially about consistency. The Haunted Mansion Queue is an inconsistent effort. Had they trusted the original designers and those people on the team who cared deeply enough to craft new visuals in the spirit of the original they would've ended up with a better product. They would've saved money, effort, and face. As it is the entire experience became sort of a very public fiasco.

Disney doesn't have a good track record of handling fiascoes well, whether that be inventing public relations fictions about why rides have closed (Pooh toys and sink holes, I'm looking at you), or simply throwing their collective hands in the air and abstaining all responsibility. But you know what? What's bad about that Haunted Mansion Queue can be fixed. Easily. Disconnecting a speaker, bubble machine, and ghost squirt gun can be done overnight. The "Poetess" lines can be re-recorded in an afternoon. Most of my objections could be corrected with very very minor, but meaningful, tweaks.

Let's be totally clear: these aren't just my objections, they're the objections of a significant portion of the specialist niche - the very people who are targeted by things like references to Captain Gore and the One-Eyed Black Cat. You can't give with one hand and slap with the other. I say let the people who clearly knew what they were doing give it another shot without those voices advocating for squirting tombstones and zany popping books in the room and see if we cannot see a radical change. It will take only a little effort to make this effort worthy of the effort that went into it. GRADE: C+

Following You Home
Truthfully, a potentially more destructive element was added to the Mansion at the same time. What happens outside the attraction happens outside it, but once those doors open and we move inside there is a very definite "reset" button that gets hit in our subconsciousness. But the Hitch Hiking Ghosts are right in the flow of the attraction, and right at the tail end of it, where an obvious misstep will linger much longer in the memory. Part of the power of the original effect was in its simplicity; one could not be totally sure whether the hitch-hiking ghosts were menacing or comic.

The revamped version of the scene features floaty CGI ghosts pulling unusual tricks of varying degrees of effectiveness. The integration of the CGI projected ghoulies and the mirror illusion is pretty effective, even if the ghosts themselves can be said to be, accurately if flippantly, too Tex Avery and not enough Marc Davis.

Part of the associative power of the original scene was its riff on the American tradition of the phantom hitch-hiker tale; these ghosts were riding with you, exactly like in a car, and it was hard not to think of that ghost sitting in the back seat as you drove home that night. That stayed with you in a deep place. These new version don't quite ride with you; they're too busy being silly. They sort of float above you and remove your head, which is cartoonish and not quite as sinister as it sounds, almost like they're satirizing the equally ludicrous but much better aesthetically integrated "Black Widow Bride" scene that's dominated up in the Attic since 2007.

From a technical perspective, I think this effect is fine, and judging from verbal reactions of other passengers, seems to be successful. But I'm not so sure. At the very least these new ghosts are indeed digital projections, and unlike rod puppets, the projections can be changed easily and at any time. Perhaps some future enterprising Imagineer will restore a Haunted Mansion finale in a more dignified vein. GRADE: C-

Mice in the Hotel
For some time now, Magic Kingdom has been shifting her character meet and greets about, taking here, moving there, sometimes even banishing a few characters to EPCOT. What on the outside perhaps looks like shuffleboard, is on the inside more akin to a game of chess - a very tight game of chess. In the past several years, many of the Magic Kingdom's "twilight spaces" - poorly utilized spaces, former food courts, shops, and attractions - have been rethought or filled in. With the closure of Mickey's Toontown in Feburary, many of the character meet and greets fled to other quarters - including a bizarre and hilarious period when as many as four Mickeys could be found around the Magic Kingdom at once, in such unexpected places as alongside Splash Mountain and inside the Hall of Presidents. One should not underestimate the mouse's ability to draw a crowd or cause Entertainment managers to sweat bullets.

The largest remaining "twilight space" in the Magic Kingdom was the Walt Disney Story show building, built behind the Main Street Hotel facade in 1972 and housing an attraction which ran for twenty years. For the last twenty years, the space has been poorly used. One attraction theater was converted to run cartoons and sell timeshares, the other boarded up and used for meeting space and Cast theatrical productions. In 2009 the entire Walt Disney Story show building was closed off and an elaborate tear-out procedure began. What opened there earlier this year can hardly be recognized. This by itself is an extraordinary relief. All too often "new" attractions seem to be little more than crumbling old attraction infrastructure with some new stickers and paint.

This Mural....

...once knew better days.

Now, I'm not opposed to character meet and greets, and I'm resigned to their continued presence in this and other theme parks. But I don't think it's an unreasonable demand to ask that, if said meet and greets must be conducted in their current state - with attendants, queues and timed interactions - that they be conducted in reasonably appropriate environs. This is all too rarely the case. Aladdin greets guests in Adventureland in front of a prop door (it once led to a shop) which junk has been scattered around. In his former digs, Mickey held court in the "Judge's Tent" (which made no sense) at "Mickey's Toontown Fair" (which made even less sense) amidst a roiling pit of puffy fiberglass "cartoon" props and the worst design choices in the entire park. He's now landed on Main Street, which could have been a disaster. It's become one of the best things to happen to the park in a long time.

Let's set aside the touchy issue of what he's doing on Main Street for the moment. If Goofy is permitted in Liberty Square then there's no real reason to object to Mickey on Main Street, and whatever slight aesthetic damage is done to the park with this choice is insignificant compared to the massive aesthetic triumph of tearing out Mickey's Toontown Fair. Since the Judge's Tent was due for demolition, Mickey had to be moved elsewhere, and a large, prominent, empty space at the very front of the park was probably operationally mandated before even a single sketch was drawn up. If we take all of that as givens, the resulting attraction is a triumph. It's probably the most texturally complex experience on Main Street.

Victorian Gingerbread and Mickey Mouse don't really go together, but this attraction makes it all seem to work. It accomplishes this primarily through including just enough visual texture and detail to make the Town Square Theater location seem credible, but enough that's just this side of fantastic enough to make Mickey's presence unobtrusive. He appears in a room too stacked with details to possibly take in all at once, and although many of these details are cute references or throwaway gags, they're done on a level of perceptibility which means they seem to exist for more reasons than their own sake. I often complain that current Imagineers substitute props for ideas. These props are ideas, and they greatly contribute to the excellence of the experience.

The Main Street Hotel facade - probably the most handsome on Main Street - has been totally refurbished and looks superb. Most importantly, the ugly Exposition Hall marquee has been scrapped, which fixed a long, wide horizontal sign across a facade which is designed in entirely vertical architectural expressions, from tall pillars to tall doors. The new sign, although not quite as nice as the original Hospitality House sign, actually harmonizes with the architecture and is quite pleasing and handsome. Vertical banners have been added as well which help clue guests in as to what may be found inside, and although some have decried these they are, to my eye, inoffensive. They harmonize with the rest of the building and add a pleasant kinetic element when there is a breeze.

Seriously, who thought this sign was a good idea?

Moving inside, the attraction's crowd flow has been totally reversed. Rather than entering through the south veranda and exiting through the old Gulf Hospitality House lobby, guests now enter a totally reworked vestibule. Many of the original WED decorative and design elements have been retained, but the shop has been contained on one side of the entrance and the Town Square restaurant on the other, which greatly helps the attraction entrance feel like it has a reason for existing. Some very fine textural work here and in the new entrance area is on the nose without going too far - the attraction becomes increasingly visually richer the deeper one proceeds into it. The yellow, white, and gilt darkens to a suitably Victorian brown and red, then onwards to beige and bricks in the exit shop - an orchestrated use of color here really pays off. As one is shuffled through doors and corridors, the anticipation of meeting Mickey is more strongly felt here than in any other "Meet Mickey" attraction yet made.

Where the attraction fails it does so graciously. Some areas are still a little too bare and free of ornamentation, although this can be fixed. The rear theater space is a black void of nothing - currently used for Princess meetings, although they will be moved to Fantasyland before the year is out and the space can be properly finished (see what I meant about a chess game?). The queue space is ludicrously massive, as if in the planning stages the entire Napoleonic army was expected to descend to meet Magician Mickey. Since the Princess space isn't really designed to be anything, it moves very slowly, but a smart and efficient series of rooms on the Mickey side, plus an additional greeting room for Mickey (up to four), means that waits rarely stretch to the extremes this attraction entertained while in Toontown. It is not only better designed and pleasant to see, but it hosts more people in a better experience.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So do I. In a park as densely visited as the Magic Kingdom is, there should not be a square inch of wasted space. This new attraction fixes many longstanding problems - operationally and aesthetically - all at once and it does so very pleasantly in a way which does not contradict the rich theming around it and finally finds a purpose for a major Magic Kingdom facility which has not been under a lucky sign in over a generation. If there were more things happening like this at Walt Disney World, it would be a much better place. GRADE: B+

"The Walt Disney Story" Theater B awaits demolition

after twenty years of neglect.

Likes To Be Seen and Loves To Be Heard -
The return of the Tiki Room was the big surprise of 2011, proving that Walt Disney World may still have some surprises in her even to bored, jaded commentators such as myself - even if said surprises came about through total freak, act-of-God, insurance bait calamities. As I've said in my previous article, it's a very very commendable effort, what WDI has done with the show, although I must admit that I think I'm grading this a bit more leniently than I think it deserves. After all, what makes the "new" old show work is really nothing that was done for it in 2011 - it works for the same reason the Disneyland show never stopped working and never stopped playing. And I could be complaining that it took an act of God situation to put the real Tiki Room show back in Florida - truthfully they should've closed the offending Under New Management show immediately and let the Disney faithful run the people responsible out of town, tarred and feathered. I don't care. I'm just happy it came back at all.

And the Florida Tiki Room, it's a thing of beauty, even if the fountain in the middle of the room never did make a re-appearance - consider it a lingering scar to remind us of the price Under New Management came at. It's also nice to see such a fresh looking show regardless - with bright feathers, good lights and a robust sound system to back up the 1963 show, it works its wonders all over again. The recent attention has even brought out some nice surprises buried in the old Wathel Rogers animation from 1971, such as a very refined use of diagetic "sound" from the "Glee Club" during the show's signature number - beaks clack and clap and really seem to be clicking out the rhythm of the song, at least compared to the much vaguer movements seen at Disneyland earlier this year by this author.

But the real happy ending here isn't that I personally got what I wanted back, it's that it was done well and is a success. Instead of playing to a ghost house of bored parents, toddlers and others, the Tiki Room is packed nearly all day. During the Holiday peak season, reported estimated queues of 20 minutes made the rounds through the social networking circles. And when was the last time you saw a line for the Tiki Room? But that show is a birthright of the Magic Kingdom, it's one of the things that makes that park - and Disneyland - what it is. Walt Disney was right and quality does last. But don't believe me. Ask Iago, last seen being carted out of the attraction as a charred hull on his way to a far too late retirement to the junkyard of metric tons of garbage Imagineering from his era. GRADE: A-

.....And The Other Stuff
Besides those big changes, 2011 saw a few other newsworthy items at the Magic Kingdom. To my eyes the biggest deal was the closure of Mickey's Toontown Fair in February, which finally ends nearly twenty-five years of garishly awful aesthetics behind the Grand Prix Raceway. The immediate result of this was the rapid and belated movement of Mickey to Main Street, followed by an extended shuffling-about of character greeting locations, which at least for the moment has landed Tinkerbell in the Adventureland Veranda, which is a terrible choice but at least is using the space, and will eventually lead to the closure of Snow White's Scary Adventures which will become an elaborate complex to house all of the princess "girl interest" characters. I think it's unfortunate to lose the Snow White ride, which was always a favorite despite the fact that it simply hasn't been very good since the half-cooked 1994 'upgrade'. Yet getting the Princesses inside a controlled area of four walls and out of the rest of the park, where they loiter around like homeless persons in such unfortunate areas as Liberty Square and Adventureland, will be a large step forward in increasing the thematic unity of the park itself.

The Fantasyland Skyway structure, which in my mind was amongst the very best of WED's efforts at the Magic Kingdom in 1971, was demolished this year. It's site is slated to become a relocated bathrooms with a new, auxiliary path lading towards the Haunted Mansion around the previously-inaccessible area behind the Yankee Trader shop, directly through the plot of land originally reserved for a "Haunted Mansion Arcade". This will allow a northbound outlet for traffic leaving the Haunted Mansion - which is absolutely needed, as this area is a horrendous traffic snare on even medium attendance days - as well as clear the way for a reconfigured queue for Peter Pan's Flight.

As sad as it is to lose the Skyway chalet, this author is resigned to face facts that no guest has seen the interior of it since 1998 and without a chain of brightly-colored buckets chugging in and out of its handsome mouth, there was little reason to keep it around. Efforts to reutilize it as a restaurant or Meet and Greet area came to nought, and in the middle of 2011, all that beautiful wood was torn down to the slate foundation. I'm sure, with the passing of time, that the new path will come to seem normal, even natural, much like those bridges that skirt the northern boundary of Frontierland's riverfront. The path could even provide a pleasant new transition to Liberty Square, and since there appears to be no danger of filling in the original Harbour House breezeway, I will have little reason to complain on any further historical grounds. This is the sort of ambitious crowd flow plan that would've been axed out of pure cheapness ten years ago. Still, it hurts a little to know that all these years later I'll never again get to walk through the half round tunnel, past the trickling stream, and then up the narrow steps to the Skyway chalet while the Florida sun sinks low behind the Frontierland pines to the West. It was a blessed space but, much like the Fantasyland Submarine Lagoon which lived out a final shameful decade as nothing but a glorified retention pond / litter dump, I'd rather see the park use all of the space it's been allotted than let just another empty former attraction crumble away.

El Pirata Y El Perico, the mainstay taco bar across from the entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean (because I typed this aloud, some Disneylander who's never been east of the Rockies just started writhing around in torment), underwent a number of aesthetic changes this year, reopening as Tortuga Tavern, which is themed to, or so I'm told, some of the, um, Junior Adult novels based around the films inspired by the attraction which sits across the street. I have no way to verify this, but it is of no relevance to me anyway, because it turned out pretty cool.

El Pirata was once only the most eastwardly of the establishments along the north side of Caribbean Plaza, which opened in mid 1974 along with two shops, the Golden Galleon and Princessa de Cristal, which shared a secluded courtyard. In 1998, concurrent with the expansion of Pecos Bill Cafe which similarly absorbed original Magic Kingdom themeing by the ton, El Pirata evicted both shops and remodeled both into dining rooms, then joined the complex's north wall to Pecos Bill's south wall by way of a huge ramp and some suspect theming. Of course, El Pirata immediately went to seasonal status, making it one of the best places to get away from the crowds at Magic Kingdom, as it's in operation for probably less than 40 aggregate hours a year. One wonders how much money Disney could be making with those dining rooms and courtyards if they were still shops, but that's just crazy talk.

I'm not one to go out of my way to praise movie tie-in theming, but ever since the Pecos Bill expansion robbed this area of so much character and identity, it's been a rather sad place, like the last person to leave the party. If you're going to do synergistic tie-ins, you should do them like this. Nearly everything that was added is well judged and does not overwhelm the original architecture, unlike many of WDI's ill-advised "enhancements" of the 90s. These are small touches but they mean a lot, and run the gauntlet from nice new tile trim on upper balconies around windows and doors that blends in perfectly with the original WED designs, to well-built, custom-made but unobtrusive "themeing". The former Golden Galleon space features dozens of melted candles in bowls and vases and much improved "tavern" decor. An upper level has an overturned table and empty bottles, perhaps the first reference to drunkenness out of Disney in a very long time. The courtyard has some new lights, bullet holes, and a nice little tableau on an upper balcony. Best of all, the new, pleasant nautical background music is the sort of thing Wagner would have compiled back in the 70s, sedate, calming, and in perfect theme and taste. It may still hardly be used, but there's a little more class and life in the Tavern now.

Adventureland got the lion's share of the change this year, with an all-new bridge which debuted in the Spring. There is one incredibly obvious thing about the bridge and one not so obvious thing about the bridge. The first is that its totally flat, which is pretty weird, if you ask me. But the new bridge is not only flat, it's also quite different, despite recycling almost all of the original props.

When Disneyland opened in 1955, the push for July 17th meant that most of the Adventureland pedestrian area was decorated with off the shelf stuff from Oceanic Arts. This being the era it was, this meant skulls. Lots of skulls. Skulls on sticks, animal skulls, etc. The 1971 Adventureland, due in part to the more subtle touch of Dorthea Redmond, was a more refined place and so a new, very simple, but handsome gate in a pop-tiki style was introduced. In fact, outside of the skulls in the headhunter's camp on the Jungle Cruise, there was no scattered evidence of cannibalism to be found anywhere in the Florida Adventureland.

Forty years later, this new bridge is more in line with the Disneyland original, with a prominent animal skull and even a pile of human skulls to welcome guests. One of the skulls even has a huge puncture hole in the top of it's cranium. So we traded a 100% decrease in bridge curvature for a 100% increase in skulls. You know what? I think it was a fair trade.

...but skulls!!!!

And finally, the Swiss Family Treehouse was lovingly rebuilt this year, and shockingly enough opened with absolutely no characters in it, except for confused guests. Railings everywhere have overall been made more idiot-proof, meaning studier and with more nets, and there's lots of wonderful new woods, props and textures all through the island. The lighting scheme has been repaired and indeed added to, so at night the attraction seems to beam bright welcoming light out in all directions, and more than once this party overheard confused guests drawn inside this "new" attraction by bright lanterns and the echoing strains of the Swisskapolka. It warmed my heart.

By the way, a long-gone prop was restored during the refurbishment: an elephant rifle once again hangs at the ready in the boys' room. Between the elephant gun, skulls on the bridge, drunkenness at Tortuga Tavern, and absurd ethnic accent comedy in the Enchanted Tiki Room, Adventureland has suffered a quadruple increase in political incorrectness. Maybe there's hope for the world yet. GRADE: A-

Foxxy's Grade: For all the huge improvements and not so huge improvements, Walt Disney World is falling behind in the long run even while they improve in the sort run. This cannot be ignored. Ludicrous interdepartmental politics, general cheapness, and poor long term planning means the spirit of Paul Pressler is still very much alive at Walt Disney World, and now there's thousands of Pauls, not just one. I'm going to call this category "Vision". It can also be thought of as the "Don't Be An Idiot" grade. Walt Disney World needs to shape up in many areas, from crumbling transportation infrastructure to management malaise. Things have gotten worse a whole lot faster than they've gotten better. I give Walt Disney World an F for Vision.

MAGIC KINGDOM REPORT CARD:
Haunted Mansion Interactive Queue: C+
Haunted Mansion Interactive Ghosts: C-
Meet Mickey on Main Street: B+
Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Bonfire: A-
Upkeep and Maintainence: A-
Not Being Idiots: F

AVERAGE: C+

Comments: We all know which grade is holding Miss Disney World back. It's time this was addressed. She can do everything else fine but she doesn't listen to her friends and ignores the advice of her peers. She has 40 more years ahead of her and they could be great, but the last 20 have been nothing but tiny steps forward and huge leaps backward. It's time she stop climbing this hill. - Foxxy, Jan 2012

---

2011 at Passport to Dreams Old & New: (mostly old)
Snapshots:
Mysteries of the Second Floor
Marines Capture Coke Corner
Frap-Off at the Village

History and Esoterica:
The World Cruise
Palate Cleanser
Fireworks of the Universe
People I've Met in the Past: Part One
People I've Met in the Past: Part Two
Other Kingdoms to Conquer
The First Decade in Maps
Hanging at the STOLport

Commentary and Theory:
Rubber Spider Revue
Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining
Fire in the Night: The Pre-Eminent Attraction-as-Art
Start to Shriek and Harmonize

In the Spirit of Fairness: Walt Disney World Grades Me: "F-----!!!! ur a jerk!!!!! jeez"

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Passport to Dreams Year End Reports: 2011 2010 2009

Hanging at the STOL Port

2011-12-08T03:36:00.001-05:00

As a researcher it's all too often (or may just often enough) that you find yourself pouring over some obscure publication, peeking into corners, squinting at grainy old photos, hoping to uncover some amazing heretofor unknown treasure. It's the forever pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Friends, I'm here to tell you I found one earlier tonight. While browsing a pleasant but hardly promising looking little 1972 booklet called "The Walt Disney World Story", I found it. Look, can you see it???

It's the STOL PORT logo!!!!!!

I have never ever seen this before. I've talked in the past about Walt Disney World's amazingly cool old emblem system, and even gone so far as to suggest that the Golf Resort had the most amazing logo, but this one just beats them all. It's beautifully designed, relentlessly obscure, and amazing.

I'm going to assume that you know all about the STOLport, but if you don't, there's an excellent primer available here. We can't be certain of the colors, but I imagine the "D" is that lovely dark forest green on some sort of earthtone brown with a white arrow inside.

And that, my friends, is that.

The First Decade in Maps

2011-11-27T03:00:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, a strange place called Walt Disney World opened, and Walt Disney World had everything: rides, shows, rodents, plants, tikis, duck confit and folk singers. But there was one thing that Walt Disney World did not have, and it took her a surprisingly long time to get it: a damn map to get around.

Now, long time blog readers will of course recognize the gentleman to the right, Genius Guy. Besides his smokin' brylanteened hair, he's holding a map of the Magic Kingdom. It's not a map you or I would use today. It's about four feet wide and three feet tall. It is a wall map, the date is sometime in September of 1971, and Genius Guy is likely a contractee of the Buena Vista Construction Company enjoying the Magic Kingdom on a preview day. He's not using a souvenir wall map as a park guide for our amusement, it's because there was actually no general Magic Kingdom guide available and the very first one would not appear for another eight months or so.... in mid 1972.

I have no idea why this happened. Disneyland had had park guides for years at this point. It couldn't have been pretty from a guest service point of view and is the sort of thing you would think Disney would foresee... as a 1972 "Toy Review" article about Walt Disney World memorably describes:

"Mom said, "Don't you think we need a map?" "Of course," Dad replied, "Now that you mention it I see that everyone is looking at a map, where do you suppose they are giving them out?" As he spoke I saw dozens of people in front of us, each bending over a map in their own funny ways. Grandma asked, "I wonder why they didn't give us one when we bought our tickets?" Ten minutes later Mom came back. "They are giving them out nowhere - they sell the 'official' maps there for 50 cents.""

This article was written from the imagined perspective of a child traveling with family to Walt Disney World, but the author was clearly so peeved at the map situation they made sure to write it into their trip report. 50 cents is the equivalent of $2.50 today, by the way, so while that's not prohibitively expensive it is more than one would like to spend for something she should be given for free.

One publication which did have a map of the Magic Kingdom was Walt Disney World News, which featured a two-page spread at the center of early issues:

And it's a pretty good one. Things are clearly labeled although you'll see that those elements in a state of flux - like where If You Had Wings was being built - were pretty vague. That said it's hardly too artistically admirable - effective, yes, but not too pleasant.

In order to really get into the history of early Walt Disney World maps in all their lurid glory, we have to go back to before the place was even open, such as this glorious 1969/1970 "Fun Map" by Paul Hartley:

Download a Larger Version Here

Because this represents a look at a park very much in a state of becoming, it's worthwhile to point out a few details of this map worth noting in special detail.

One can see for herself that the Indian Village has no inhabitants at all, which is just as the park opened in 1971, with the "population" added later in 1972 and 1973. Also, Marc Davis' "Tree Snag Reef" scene originally featured dangerous floating limbs as depicted in his concept art and on this map. As of September 1971 these show props were in place in the river, but shortly vanished. Whether this happened during the Rivers of America's first big refurbishment in 1973 is unknown, but for over thirty years now visitors on the Riverboats have had to supply their own dangerous waters between the Indian Burial Grounds and the Pirates Cave show scenes. One can hope these will return someday... but this seems unlikely.

There's alternative names, such as The Diamond Horseshoe with its unique Florida facade but painted yellow and gilded, like her Disneyland sister. Or the Liberty Square Tavern, which is a far less interesting name. What intrigues me is the label "Pinocchio's Village", which can accurately describe the entire Fantasyland West corridor and was applied to this area on the blueprints but never in any guest map as far as I know.

Have you noticed how unbelievably accurate this map actually is? Down to minor architectural details such as whether a window has shutters or not? And yet it lets It's A Small World go totally unlabeled?

Of course the general WED Enterprises indecision as to what to do with Tomorowland is reflected in Hartley's drawing here - it's just a jumbled mass of space age buildings totally lacking in the type of detail seen elsewhere in his effort. Based on the evidence of this and other maps I would guess that Adventureland was the first area to hit the finish line and Tomorrowland was, as always, the last.

More confirmation that the Jungle Cruise queue was meant to go upstairs at some point. Hartley was probably working directly off the elevation blueprints for most of this stuff, which explains the charmingly flat style.

That cluster of three huts just above the Jungle Cruise boathouse represents the Adventureland Ticket Booth, by the way.

Later to become the Gulf Hospitality House, Disneyana Collectibles, Exposition Hall, and the Town Square Theater. But it's designed to be a hotel front, and it is an exceptionally gorgeous one - it's easy to imagine it nestled amidst rolling hills in upstate New York surrounded by a huge lawn.

Once a Hotel idea was nixed before opening day Disney had no idea what to do with that beautiful Redmond facade, so it was basically just a false front with enough room for a lobby and a restaurant. The Walt Disney Story attraction was built onto the back of the existing facade in 1972.

And two old favorites of this blog, the Liberty Square Market and Nantucket Harbour House, which would debut in May 1972 with a different, and inferior, name.

Paul Hartley's illustration is best known in its beautiful revised version which hung in Walt Disney world hotel rooms for the first decade of the resort:

Download a Larger Version Here

This map circulates in two versions, and this one appears to be a work in progress - note Hartley's penciled in road which accidentally bisects the Walt Disney World STOLport - but offers I think much more spectacular and beautiful colors. The labels have been removed and a number of the finer details evident in his earlier piece not included, but this is one of the finest pieces of art ever created for any Disney property.

And, of course, there's the simple but wonderfully stylized rendering included in the Preview Edition guidebooks sold at the Walt Disney World Preview Center:

Download a Larger Version Here

This one is beautiful, even if it shows some hesitation as to what the park will actually be - notice the vague Tomorrowland structures, Disneyland-style castle, and somewhat misplaced Small World - but is very memorable and provided the basic style for the 50 cent "official map" (which was far uglier), as well as a 1970's Walt Disney World lunchbox.

Sadly beautiful art was not what was found in the first GAF "Your Complete Guide to Walt Disney World" booklets when they appeared in 1972, handed out with guest tickets:

The detailed maps within were actually even worse, and hardly functional. To be fair, this was consistent with the style of the Disneyland maps at the time, such as this example from a 1971 INA "Your Souvenir Guide to Disneyland":

That's functional, yes, but sort of rough. A bit of relief from austere featureless blocks of color, "whimsical" fonts and suspect geography could be found on the centerfold page of the Walt Disney World GAF guides:

Follow the GAF photo trail!

This was nothing but a smaller and less garishly colored version of the "official map", by the way, and it repeated many of that product's mistakes, such as including the Disneyland Tom Sawyer Island, Frontierland train station, and Tomorrowland train station, which is in the right spot but would never get built. Oh, and that boomerang on stilts over the top of the Grand Prix Raceway.

Thankfully, the tradition of beautiful Walt Disney World maps lived on... in Vacationland Magazine!

Download a Larger Version Here

Very much in the style of the "Preview Edition" map, this one elects to focus on the entire property rather than just the Magic Kingdom. Oh, and I have to feature this one detail from this map, because it's still hilarious.

Shut up and pay the duck, will ya???

Things did improve for Walt Disney World maps pretty quickly. By Christmas 1974 a greatly improved and much more useful for navigation map was circulation, not in the GAF guides but in separate fliers handed out for special events. This one was from a holiday season pamphlet:

Download a Larger Version Here

This one really does have it all - it's pleasant to look at, combines the top-down view of the 1971 and 1972 maps with some pictorial embellishments, and introduces a clever color coding system that cuts down on clutter. Unlike earlier Magic Kingdom maps, you can actually navigate pretty quickly and easily through the park using this map.

But it wouldn't be for another few years that this version would be streamlined into an even better incarnation. This is it: in my opinion, probably the best Disney theme park map ever devised for clarity, ease of navigation, and simple aesthetic charm:

Download a Larger Version Here

I doubt that will ever be topped. This map brought Walt Disney World out of her first decade, and in 1982 all of the maps were altered. Magic Kingdom maps in particular began to get cartoonish and distorted again, while EPCOT Center inherited the simple austere beauty of this style of map because, you know, EPCOT Center was supposed to be less fun. But for pure variety, beauty and interest, no era of Florida property maps have ever topped those first few, fleeting years.

Other Kingdoms to Conquer

2011-11-03T04:56:00.004-04:00

The theme park scene in Orlando sure is competitive, isn't it? Whether it be attraction wars, bragging rights or the thrice-annual price hikes, Universal, Disney and Sea World are all necking for the front of the race trying to squeeze the others out.

But it wasn't always like that. Yes, competition may have always been the name of the game, but rather than the rather open hostility between the various travel destinations, back in the 70s there was at least an aura of shared destiny about all of this. Prior to Eisner arriving on the scene, declaring "war" on Universal Studios and attempting to vacuum up every last tourist dollar in Florida, there was a rather cooperative atmosphere about the whole business. Today it's rather strange to see the footage of the Disney Florida press conference and watching the owners of Busch Gardens Tampa and Cypress Gardens praising Disney's arrival, because history tells us that Disney would alter their history forever.

Walt Disney World even shifted traffic patterns for hundreds of miles around. Prior to the opening of Walt Disney World, US 192 was hardly a cow road and most tourist traffic followed along US 27, a north-south strip passing through a number of major southern cities and connecting Indiana to Miami. The Bok Tower, Citrus Tower, and Cypress Gardens, three hugely important early Central Florida tourist attractions, are located off US 27 , and today it's littered with the skeletal remains of hundreds of fruit stands and motels meant to capitalize on the wagon train of tourists headed north and south along a trail that's been dead for decades now.

So Walt Disney World's early relationship with other tourist destinations was always sort of strange. There were buses to Cypress Gardens and Kennedy Space Center leaving every day from the Transportation and Ticket Center. This alone indicated Disney's position as just one component of a huge ecology of Central Florida tourist, an ecology they could all benefit from and which seems quite strange to us today. This was the era of the family road trip, and indeed it was a very big deal that Walt Disney World was once engineered so the vacationing family could leave their car behind for an entire week or more. But car trips outside the "Kingdom" were indeed expected in those early days when Disney's empire was still limited, and so Walt Disney World Vacationland enters the fray to help tourists decide what to do and when.

Vacationland was a regional magazine descended from its Disneyland cousin, which was distributed everywhere within a one day drive of Disneyland. It describes itself this way on the inside cover:

Vacationland is a service-feature magazine published three times yearly by the Walt Disney World Co. Personally distributed through numerous hotels, motels, chambers of commerce, AAA clubs, and leading tourist attractions and carriers, Vacationland is the only publication specifically directed to the vacationer and travelers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

Of course there were plenty of articles about Walt Disney World, but they featured in each issue a nearby Florida attraction such as Ybor City or the Everglades, where Vacationland editors gave us such gems to savor as this:

For the motor-bound tourist, Vacationlands are chock-a-block with delicious, delirious advertisements, which have already been highlighted on this blog here and here. But these advertising missives from three generations ago today are strange, beautiful and sometimes frightening. So let's take a brief look outside the 'Vacation Kingdom' at the Vacationland, a world that seems very different from our own of multi-day tickets, LEGOlands, Magical Expresses and theme park fortifications. A world found today only in... Disney publications of the past.

This eye-poppingly gorgeous ad from 1972 highlights a famous and historical chain of Florida restaurants. I'm pretty sure the Columbia on Lake Eola is gone, but there is one along the lake in Disney's own Celebration, Florida.

More great mid-century typefaces!

Vacationland could always be counted on to deliver advertisements for Walt Disney World sponsors. GAF was Walt Disney World's photography sponsor until 1977, when Polaroid signed on until the rise of Kodak in 1982.

Kal-Kan sponsored the Walt Disney World Kennel, which if you believe what old Vacationlands tell you, was more like a private club where Goofy and B'rer Fox would regularly cavort. If you believe what you read in old Vacationlands, that is.

Circus World never quite grew past its' "Showcase" - read: preview center - although it did last until right around the opening of EPCOT Center, eking out a rather sad eight year existence. It's now a strip mall.

Now we're cooking! The very first Red Lobster opened in 1968 in Lakeland, Florida - about thirty minutes from Walt Disney World and a true Florida original. If you think the vaguely-unappetizing plate of fried shrimp is a little off putting, here's your month's supply:

This. This is terrifying in so many ways, from his eerie expression to those fried... shrimp, or sausages, or something, to the ghoulish supernatural void from whence this image is emerging. Imagine that popping out of a trunk in the attic of the Haunted Manson. We're waiting for you!

Did I mention you can click on these for a higher resolution version? Huh?

This one is fantastic, minimalist, and all about Lake Buena Vista, so you know I couldn't resist.

Probably the most handsome of Sea World's many Vacationland advertisements throughout the first half of the 70s.

Okay, Sambo's. Having grown up in the North and in the middle of nowhere, I had no idea what a Sambo's was until I started collecting these Vacationland magazines. We had a few Burger Kings, a Denny's, and a Bob's Big Boy. But you know what? I'm totally sold. There is one Sambo's left - in California. One day I will eat there and tell the staff that I'm here to eat because I saw them advertising in a Florida magazine from 1974.

I'm sure this will make me the most popular gal in the restaurant.

I love this one. It's absolutely pitch-perfect in my book, from the appealing squiggly people, the happy sun, the copy text - they don't make them like this anymore. All the coffee I can drink for just a dime!! I'm there.

Look at that. A bowl full of strawberries and walnuts. It's simple, sure, but don't tell me that spread doesn't raise your spirits.

These are only a handful of the advertising riches found in these all-too-scarce volumes. From restaurants to bars to antique malls, the pages of Vacationland are like an index of places and things you can't do or see any longer. Yes, there are happy endings amidst all that, but they're few and far between, and not every Florida tourist attraction could afford a full page ad in a Disney-published magazine slick.

For every Sea World or Weeki Wachee there's dozens of Movieland Wax Museums, Mystery Fun Houses, Circus Worlds and Marco Polo Parks. Orlando tourism is a gold rush business, where places spring up and dry out as quickly as money can be lost. I don't know about you, but I think maybe a little more cooperation between the tourist attractions and a little less competition could go a long way in the long run.

Start to Shriek and Harmonize

2011-10-24T04:41:00.003-04:00

Ah, autumn!

The whole stretch of the year from September through to January in Florida has wonderful dusky light and silhoutette sunsets, perfect weather for excursions to the Magic Kingdom - which rarely ever looks better than in the waning hours of sunlight in the waning year - and which seems now especially suited to visits to the Haunted Mansion. There may not be autumn leaves blowing like they have in New England where we lay our scene, but this is a perfect time to experience this most complex of attractions. So it is perhaps natural that our thoughts turn towards the Mansion as the month rolls onward towards All Hallow's Eve.

Today I would like to direct your attention towards one of the least respected and most frequently dismissed aspects of the attraction: the lowly pop-up ghoul.

There is not much love in the world for these minor inhabitants of the spirit house. For one, they are not a special effect - the Haunted Mansion's true stock in trade, of course. Second, they are relatively close to the spookhouse apparatus which had been as of 1969 haunting local amusement parks and fairground Ghost Trains and Wacky shacks for around 40 years.

Me, I'm obsessed with them.

To begin with I, for one, see no harm in pointing out that Disney appropriated certain established aspects of a very rich American tradition of amusement parks, a rich American tradition which is all too often ignored in studies of Disneyland and her progeny. Just as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and especially Snow White's Adventures took the form of dark rides not unlike any number of non-Disney spook houses, the familiar presentation is part of what helped frame the audience's expectations for these attractions. Both Mr. Toad and Snow White were beautifully mounted experiences in a genre they helped disband. To cite another example, the 1971 Jungle Cruise kicked off with a leafy variation on the traditional Tunnel of Love, and of course the trip behind the waterfall introduced in 1955 at the Disneyland version had been a stock in trade for Dark Rides for generations - Coney Island's "Spook-A-Rama", predating Disneyland, pulled the same trick.

Before Disneyland, Coney Island was America's Playground

It is where these Disney attractions connect to a larger native tradition of amusement parks, World's Fair, Amusement Piers, Atlantic Cities and Coney Islands that the difference between what Disney did and the rest of the world did becomes most evident. Anyone who had actually boarded a spook house at a local carnival would immediately see and understand this world of difference. The funny thing is that Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom are places where these established traditions, expanded and elaborated, could have lived on. Coney Island is but a pale shadow of her former glory, and rare is the person today who has actually been on a real Wacky Shack or Phantasmagoria at their local amusement park. The Disney versions have driven the originals to the verge of extinction, and today the points of connection between the Disney tradition and the earlier traditions are often our only point of connection to a larger, and vanishing, world of American Entertainment History.

So, yes, the difference between what WED Enterprises did and what these small companies operating out of the East Coast and Midwest were able to accomplish is staggering, but continuing to exclude the heritage of the American Dark Ride - as American an invention as Coca-Cola - from the history of the Disney version is foolish. To begin with, Disney did not invent the ride through attraction any more than he invented the Ferris Wheel or roller coaster. But most importantly: what you gain by insisting on the independence of the two schools - the home brew paper mache one and the big Hollywood industry version - is insubstantial compared to what you lose. It's over sixty years of precedents just gone in a flash.

So yeah, in the Haunted Mansion, those pop-up ghouls are just masks on sticks. What of it? It isn't the trick itself that matters here, but its presentation in a larger context I'd like to dwell on.

Fact is, the Haunted Mansion is really the best Ghost Train ever built. You don't ride in Pretzel Amusement Company cars and you don't zip past dancing skeletons and women being sawed in half, but there are a number of eerie echoes between the Mansion on the earlier attractions which, perhaps even if subconsciously on the part of the designers, became a part of the texture of the whole experience. For example, here's this gag built by Funni-Frite of Ohio. This page comes from a 1966 catalouge:

It's a terrific gag, nearly impossible to predict, and was well known by the time the Haunted Mansion opened. I've always suspected that it inspired, perhaps indirectly, the Mansion's own Grandfather Clock:

Or how about a connection between monstrous spiders and a large, haunted staircase? This was designed by Outdoor Dimensional Display, whose chief designer Bill Tracy had an imagination uneasily combining equal parts whismy and horror, and whose style is as immediately recognizable as Marc Davis':

This is where our pop up ghosts appear. The first company to create what we essentially know as the dark ride was Pretzel Amusement Ride Company of Pennsylvania, whose signature attraction "Pretzel" was a long, winding, disorienting trip through darkness which did not yet have things jumping out at you, but instead often simple gravity-operated gags creating crashes, bumps, and thumps. When there were visuals, these were things like donkeys kicking their hind legs, befuddled cops, and mice running along a shelf, knocking over bottles. These experiences were more about disorientation and absurdity instead of suspense and horror, which is why their signature and namesake attraction, The Pretzel, became known as Laff in the Dark.

They also created this:

The fellow on the left was the "Jersey Devil" stunt, a simple paper mache head impaled on a rod, and the Pretzel Company's highest seller. When the car would roll near the Jersey Devil's box, the wheels would depress a lever set in the floor which would both send the Devil shooting up on his pole and connect an electrical circuit causing his light to turn on. When the car rolled away, the lever would reset and the light would turn off. You should recognize the fellow on the right, he's related to the Jersey Devil but indeed not far removed from our own frame of reference.

I bet you think I've wandered far afeild from the Haunted Mansion by now, haven't you? Check out this drawing in Yale Gracey's own hand:

This gag was realized at Disneyland pretty much exactly as Gracey illustrated. Disneyland lost two of their "Rocket Skulls" in 2006. They leapt out of hatboxes in the Attic, a holdover from the bad old Hatbox Ghost days, and it's very likely that Gracey took his inspiration directly from a Pretzel Amusement Company stunt he saw in his own life or in a catalogue.

It's unique gag, and unique to the Disneyland Mansion - I've never found any real evidence that it was replicated for the Florida version. There's one left out in California in the Graveyard scene in front of the Tea Party.

The simple fact is that you can wander Disneyland for many hours and not stray too far from what enterprising people like Leon Cassidy were cooking up back when Mickey Mouse was still making a name for himself. Disneyland is intimately woven into the fabric of this cultural history.

So what separates the pop-up ghouls in the Haunted Mansion from the Jersey Devil lurking in the dark corners of some Pretzel ride seventy years ago is context. Unlike rides with names like Pirate's Cove and Laff in the Dark, the Haunted Mansion seems to pull all these disparate elements together into a tightly woven tapestry which combines a lot of distinct ideas, styles and methods into a single unified whole, something which has structure and life. Even those pop-up ghosts have meaning and form, you know, and I'd like to demonstrate why these simple gags deserve your respect.

Let's start with the obvious, first: compared to the paper mache creations of the Pretzel company and Outdoor Dimensional Display, Blaine Gibson and the rest of the WED model shop did a bang up job sculpting the array of faces which leap up at us from behind tombstones and out of trunks. It's too bad that these sculptures must be seen only fleetingly, and it's almost like somebody was thinking the same thing, because the heads which are used on these pop-ups were also photographed and used to line the walls of the Disneyland Corridor of Doors scene in 1969. They are a rogue's gallery of ghoulies and ghosts:

These photos were excluded, I think intentionally, from the Florida version of the show, although they did belatedly appear on the East Coast in 2007. You'll notice there are really only four heads. From left to right we have Winky, Hook Nose, Droopy Eyes, and Bug Eyes. They're all sculpted to appear to be screaming. Here's what each looked like in situ in the Disneyland Mansion; I've pulled each of these from Disney promotional films so there's no cheating.

You'll also notice the somewhat extravagent wig designs these figures were given in 1969, complete with those interesting curly-Q hair strands. I'm sure these were devised to "animate" the heads a bit as they bobbed up and down, and of course Winky on the left up there has a quite extravagant fright wig in 1969. Some of these figures have clear "shoulders" intended to give them a bit of body, and others do not:

Generally, the majority of the Disneyland popups still have "shoulders" and wigs, even if the wigs today are are white close cropped affairs. They still have white shirts for bodies, which are a reasonably good approximation of burial shrouds. The Florida versions only used shoulders and white shirts in the Attic scene prior to it's 1996 "upgrade"; the Graveyard figures all have simple black cones of material to hide their mechanics.

Also, this may be a trivial point, but the Disneyland versions tend to rise and then retreat immediately. Over the last forty years as the pneumatic pressure which runs the mechanisms has been reduced, they tend to rise much more slowly and drop out of sight quickly, giving a "peek-a-boo" effect. The Florida versions still rise quite quickly and tend to stay in their raised position for a second or two before lowering out of sight, much more of a shock effect. Again, I have no idea if this is intentional.

For whatever reason these four faces are weirdly spliced across the two Stateside Mansions, with Droopy Eyes appearing only at Walt Disney World and Bug Eyes exclusive to Disneyland. I have no idea if Droopy Eyes has never appeared in California, if the heads were worn out and eventually replaced, or if there were other factors leading to the current arrangement.

I'm not pointing all this out to be pedantic but to establish that far from being careless "scare-em" afterthoughts to the texture of the Haunted Mansion, these simple gags were carefully thought out and integrated into a fully realized environment. In fact, the pop-up ghouls are a far more important part of the attraction than they currently appear to be.

Mansion Specialist HBG2 has already written extensively on the way these pop-ups were used in the original version of the Disneyland attic to suggest a connection between a mysterious bride figure and her phantom suitor with a vanishing head; what was already an implicit connection due to the figures being linked by a phantom heartbeat was made even more on the nose by having - at two other places in the Attic sequence - skulls emerging from open hatboxes amongst the junk. Decapitated heads stuffed in hatboxes is a pure murder mystery gothic horror tropes, the same tropes the Mansion traffics in to create much of its meaning. And what about those other pop-up ghouls?

They popped out of trunks.

Even in Florida, where there never was a Hatbox Ghost for the bride to menace, the connection was perfectly clear. Dastardly deeds were afoot in this house long before the other ghosts moved in, deeds seemingly confirmed by the presence of the ghostly bride. Bodies stuffed in trunks forgotten in the Attic is as firmly established a gothic tradition as phantom lovers, and indeed in some folk stories these two strands intersect where the phantom bride is trapped in and suffocates inside a trunk.

The Attic always seemed to be the dark heart of the attraction, the room you were never supposed to see where the secrets were hid. It is the only part of the attraction where you are without the Ghost Host, who leaves you while you unwittingly uncover the scariest room in the house. This was confirmed by the sudden appearance of the apparently malicious leaping ghosts and the mournful, mysterious bride. After passing through this room, we flee from the house through a window - as clear a sign of escape as you can ask for - and stumble into the graveyard party to rejoin our host. The room is supposed to be a turning point in the attraction.

All these ideas circulating in the undergrounds of the Attic scene were what gave it its deep resonances, ideas which are to some extent still present but now explicitly spellt out for us with big signs and narration in the new Attic show. Furthermore, the new version of the Attic is just another gag sequence, it isn't dangerous or scary. The pop up ghosts and their piercing screams were our indication that things were getting serious in the old house on the hill, and ever since their removal the spark has seemingly gone out of this central sequence in the ride.

Okay, so I've established the importance of the figures, the excellence of the accomplishment of the effect, and the important role they played in the Attic sequence. But the pop-up ghouls have been silenced at Walt Disney World since 2007, and since 2006 at Disneyland. What about the ones left down in the show's big climax, the Graveyard jamboree?

Their relevance lies in a matter of structure.

In the original versions of the show at Disney and Magic Kingdom, the Attic pop-ups came up all at once, which was certainly nerve wracking and loud, creating a din that could be heard as far back as the start of the Ballroom scene. Both coasts also share a feature of timing in the Graveyard scene: each ghoul rises all at once at the conclusion of each verse of "Grim, Grinning Ghosts". It still is this way, but the reasons why this happens is our clue to unlocking the secret of the importance of these figures to the larger Graveyard scene itself.

First of all, we must establish something not much mentioned, which is that the Haunted Mansion signature song, Grim Grinning Ghosts, has a subtitle, and that is:

Now, not to put too fine of a point of it, but have you ever noticed that the lyrics to Grim Grinning Ghosts are super literal about describing the attraction? I mean no disrespect to X Atencio, but once we notice that lyrics like:

When the crypt doors creak and the tombstones quake

Spooks come out for a swinging wake

Or:

Now don't close your eyes and don't try to hide

Or a silly spook may sit by your side

And:

Restless bones etherialize

Rise as spooks of every size!

Seem to be describing things have have happened or will happen on the attraction? Observant riders will see plenty of creaking crypt doors and quaking tombstones and rising spirits in the Graveyard scene and of course the reference to spooks sitting by your side needs no explanation. Ironically X's own lyrics help discredit his famous assertion that the Hitch-Hiking Ghosts were a last-minute addition!

Once we've noticed that Grim Grinning Ghosts is quite directly referencing things happening in the attraction, statements in the lyrics like:

Creepy creeps with eerie eyes

Start to shriek and harmonize

Start to look suspicious. There's plenty of harmonizing happening in this "Screaming Song", but shrieking?

Let's take a look at a picture:

This isn't just a nice picture of the Graveyard band; it contains an important detail. Notice that gravestone in the lower left side? How there's a speaker built into it? You've probably already put it together by this point, but yes, it's true, in the early years of the attraction - for about the first decade, in fact - each Graveyard popup would loudly scream or shout as they rose. Since Grim Grinning Ghosts is called The Screaming Song, they quite naturally scream between verses as a sort of punctuation.

That speaker and gravestone, actually, belong to this guy and, once again, here's how he looked in 1969:

In addition to "vocalizing", each pop-up once had it's unique lighting; you can see it in the picture of Winky above, faintly causing the white "body" of the ghoul to glow blue.

The Graveyard sequence really does play out as a series of loosely connected gags - each group of ghosts is doing something different and they're all singing the song but each setpiece doesn't really feel like it relates to the others. However, each scene has its own pop-up ghoul... except for the Singing Busts, and even they were supposed to have one too:

From the original WED model.
Known as "Sir Misplaced"; he's popping up right where the steps down
into the projection pit are, making it obvious why he was cut

This repetition allows there to be some formal continuity between each cluster of ghosts in the graveyard. So these ghoul pop-ups aren't just cheap scares throughout the scene, they were actually the thing that structured the Graveyard finale, a unifying thread just as much as the song.

When I worked at the Florida Haunted Mansion, I spent a good deal of time under the Graveyard with flashlights and old maintenance books trying to determine positively that there were once individual lights and sound effects for these ghosts. There was only minor evidence left. I believe that the lights are supposed to be off when the figures are at rest, turn on for the ascent and descent, then turn off again. This would mean that each figure would be "invisisble" in its lowered state.

Sometime after these effects seem to have been retired in the early 1980s, and with the apparent reason for the pop-up heads to be present at all now gone and fading from memory, Imagineers began to tinker with the Attic sequence and the pop-up heads began to suffer a number of indignities.

In 1995, to go along with a reworked Attic, Disneyland ditched their screams and added ghostly echoes of "I Do", as well as a fancy new shadow pianist plunking out the Wedding March. The timing of the leaping ghosts was adjusted: no longer rising all at once, they would jump out in sequence from the back of the scene to the front. The shouts weren't all bad, some of them were pretty creepy, but the menace of the scene was radically undercut. Additionally, the adjusted timing now made it possible to ride through the entire Attic and not see a single pop-up ghost, a feat I accomplished several times. Previously, the screams and imagery of heads in hatboxes and bodies in trunks bespoke an atmosphere of dread that rubbed off on the silent bride. Now the ghosts at the piano and hiding in the junk seemed to be mocking her.

Is the bride a hero or a villian? In the original formulation of the scene, she had decapitated the Hatbox Ghost and probably a few others too. Not only that, but her face was a freaky skull that tended to scare the bejezus out of riders. In later years, the figure became mysterious, then eventually sad and oppressed.

Reconfiguring the attic ghouls to shout "I Do!" radically altered their meaning - which ought to be enough evidence of their importance - although the actual staging of the scene was kept more or less the same as it had been in 1969. Walt Disney World took a different route to revamping their bride in 1996.

The Florida '96 variation kept the original screams and the simulatious rise, but absurdly redressed their pop-up ghouls as grooms, or something:

It sounds okay on paper, but as you can see the cartoonish costumes leave something to be desired. But the worst offense was the removal of the boxes and trunks these figures would leap out of; for all except two of these figures all that was required to spot them before they would rise would be to lean forward a few inches. Winky, on the left up above, could be clearly seen "hiding" near the floor right as the buggies ascended into the Attic. It didn't make the scene any less loud or scary, although it was now a good deal more transparently lame. Why bother at all?

The figures themselves followed their hiding places to the great beyond in 2007.

Today, the only place where something like the original Attic can be seen is at Tokyo Disneyland. Although their ghouls rise sequentially, they still scream, emerge suddenly from boxes, and foreshadow a menacing ghost bride.

I think we should care about these pop-up ghouls because they were, like everything else in the attraction, conceived with a purpose. They drew on spook house traditions to further both the atmosphere and design of both of the scenes they appeared in, creating effects and ideas that were far more advanced than the limited technology they represented.

Plus, they were scary. What was once the dark heart of the attraction's mystery now seems fairly tame compared to even the minor scenes which open the attraction. While the Black Widow Bride Attic represents a significant advancement in technology and especially set dressing than its forebears, it isn't really scary. The sense that the stakes are being raised now that your Ghost Host has left you is gone. While The Haunted Mansion is no slouch in creepy ideas and images that can get to you late at night, the pop-up ghosts represent the only really scary thing in the whole ride, the only thing that could make you jump. That they appeared only in the final leg of the attraction was significant and speaks to a structural progression which was carefully thought out and artfully realized. They may represent a sort of base fairground level shock, but I think they were about the right amount of scare for an attraction which is, after all, called The Haunted Mansion. In that name that there is a promise which - at least partially - is no longer being delivered.

I think it's time to restore this particular long-lost effect to dignity. The Florida pop-ups that remain still have their individual lights but these lights should be made to turn on and off at appropriate times. Their gravestones still have holes cut in them for speakers to facilitate their original shrieks, grunts, and groans. In fact, having been under the graveyard to investigate, I can attest that at least as of several years ago most of the wiring is still intact. And, of course, it would be nice to see these figures treated to a bit more loving care - with appropriate wigs, facial details, and bodies.

Maybe then, once the true intentions of the people who, after all, designed the attraction are made apparent, this minor but important feature of the Haunted Mansion show will finally be given the respect it deserves.

--

I raided nearly every corner of the internet to assemble this article, but the following sites were especially helpful: Daveland, Long Forgotten, Laff in the Dark, Disney Fans, and Trimper's Haunted House

People I've Met in the Past: Part Two

2011-09-18T15:00:00.002-04:00

In Part One we explored what I think of as the "Cast of Characters" of early Walt Disney World souvenir guides, the people and pictures and places which are almost signposts on any pictorial trip back into the past. Walt Disney World has a memorable cast, as I'm sure does Disneyland, although my limited collection has really only ever indicated one memorable recurring character in their guides: Phone Girl. There is, however, another type of character we meet in the past, although these people don't generally come to us in one sitting with any one piece of paper, book or booklet.

We become familiar with these characters through collecting. One day you notice a slight difference between two photos you thought were identical in two different publications. You go looking for more of these discrepancies. Gradually more and more are revealed. Even at some remove and allowing for different cropping and printing of the various photos, it becomes possible to reconstruct a photo shoot.

Take this dapper quartet, for example.

They're sitting in the plush environs of the Magnolia Room at the Walt Disney World Golf Clubhouse. Actually, to be specific, they're in the Palm Lounge that adjoins the Magnolia Room on two of its four sides, as the lounge offered those large windows we see overlooking what I believe in the last hole of the Magnolia golf course. The distinctions between the two venues was hazy at best.

First, let's point out the obvious: the screaming colors. Not just that guy on the right's astonishingly orange blazer: even the table setting and glassware reflect that era's curious love of vibrant earthen tones and brazen textile patterns. The artificial splendor of potted trees and bushes is a hallmark of country clubs the world over but here reminds me of the "indoor forest" of the later Village Restaurant at Lake Buena Vista.

I've always been intrigued by Orange Jacket Guy's apparent annoyance at his glass of sweet tea. It's probably just an inopportune moment to have a picture taken, but he really seems sort of annoyed by it.

Hey, see that dinner roll sitting in the middle of the table at the front?

A mildly different angle of the same scene taken possibly immediately before or after the photo above. The lens has been changed and the photographer has moved slightly to the right. This is by far the more commonly printed version of this photo, despite being an arguably inferior one. It's possible it's been badly cropped, but I've yet to turn up a larger version. It's easy to see why it was more often chosen because Orange Jacket Guy doesn't look so annoyed. Notice the golf game progressing in the background?

That dinner roll is still sitting there.

Dinner roll is still sitting there. Apparently these people were not permitted to eat anything. Maybe the food was plastic?

Now the cocktails and soft drinks are gone and a bottle of wine has appeared. Also, Orange Jacket Guy is completely gone, and the stage belongs solely to his friend, who in fact looks remarkably like young Malcolm McDowell.

There's probably even more photos of the adventures of Orange Jacket Guy and Malcolm McDowell-lookalike, but it's sort of remarkable that any variants of the initial set of photos got printed in official publications at all. Disney tended to scrupulously avoid printing obvious variants of similarly staged scenes, so we have no record at all of, say, alternate takes of that couple dining in King Stephan's Banquet Hall.

That's one kind of game that can be played with early WDW publicity. This next example is even more diffuse in that these photos were printed over a very wide variety of brochures and leaflets and feature the same models in very different situations.

I call it the "Beard Guy" series : wherein he and his lady friend could be seen lounging at the Barefoot Bar at the Polynesian Village:

Or lurking at the beach:

Her super-prominent wedding ring here has always intrigued me. Was Disney concerned that their good intentions not be misunderstood or was that just something the model brought with her? Anyway it colors your perception of an otherwise unremarkable picture.

Following hi-jinx at the Polynesian, Beard Guy and Lady Friend leap time and space to the Village, where they may be seen investigating wares in the Candle Chalet:

This is the first example of Beard Guy performing his patented "dramatic reaching for something".

This photo irritates me to no end because it's a really good look at the interior of the Candle Chalet, possibly the only one in existence, and was invariably printed over the seam of two pages of various editions of World Magazine. To even stitch it together the way I've done here I had to undo those thirty year old staples and gently disassemble the book, then put it back together after scanning.

This one is a borderline case. It could be Beard Guy and Lady Friend (the telltale beard isn't visible to help), or it could be a similar couple who were photographed in and around the Lake Buena Vista Club and Treehouses. Whichever it is, it's a very rare look inside the original Flower Garden shop at the Village, so the era is correct, and nobody would likely have noticed the discrepancy had I not just pointed it out to you.

So there.

They've moved on to the Village Restaurant now, and I'd really like to know what Lady Friend is drinking, because if that's beer it's being served in a really unusual glass. It could be a mimosa or something. Notice also the hilariously over sized pepper mill. Massive pepper mills were a real trend there for a while, almost de rigueur to indicate a general shift away from the mid century tendency to use pre-ground pepper, as if the size of a mill made the difference more important. I wonder if she was allowed to eat any of that salad, or whether it was plastic too.

I call that one "Beard Guy Looms".

One thing I like about Beard Guy is that he has two modes: "Dramatically Reaching for Something":

...or: ZANY!

Look at that. Has anybody ever been happier to examine copper cookware than Beard Guy? They're in the middle of the Pottery Chalet, by the way, which besides offering pottery was an all-around housewares store. But seriously, Beard Guy, when he turned on whimsy, the fun never stopped:

"Wicker makes me act all zany!"

Here they are clowning around in Cane, Rattan, Wicker and Suns, a shop that was technically part of Port of Entry. I believe that's the shop's signature item, the wicker rickshaw. Back then, every shop at the Village was sure to stock items intended more for novel shopping than buying, and this was one of them. Not like Walt Disney World vacationers were likely to buy things like giant bamboo birdcages, anyway.

It's easy to make fun of photos like these and in the previous post, but you know what? They're still fun to look at, and not just from a historical perspective, either. We tend to look back with ambivalence at things like marketing from other eras because styles and fashions change; there's no way any of this could be used today to effectively "sell" Walt Disney World even if any of the things shown here still existed (hint: most of them don't).

But who really looks twice at the 2010-era marketing these days? The photos of gleaming pudgy-faced moppets cavorting with costumed characters or in princess dresses show a high degree of technical polish and sophistication, but as marketing has become more sophisticated, charm has been left behind. These photos shown unrehearsed, unretouched people behaving simply in places which were not treated like photo studios. These are real places and we respond to the simple "go out and take pictures" ethic of early Disney World promotion. It shows something far closer to what the actual experience of the place was rather than the MBA statistics-driven school of marketing now in vogue.

Me? I'll take Beard Guy or Sombrero Girl any day. I suspect you would, too.

--
ADDENDUM: September 22, 2011
Thanks to Mssrs. Jason and Alex, we now know the identity of "Beard Guy". And he is, surprisingly.... noted artist R. Tom Gilleon! No, seriously, look at his site. Tom, a Florida native, worked for WED for a time on EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland before moving out West to paint his familiar vivid canvases. I've also been sent along this recent photo:

Beard Guy, thankfully, still has a beard. This casts entirely new light on these nostalgic promotional photographs: how many of these "unrehearsed" models were actually culled from the talent pool Disney had cultivated in Florida? Tom was probably chosen for his unique expressions and beard, looking as he does not like a Cast Member, but many of the people we see in these photos are fairly well-dressed and trim, which certainly explains some of the unique qualities of many of these early souvenir guides and photographs.

Over at Walt Disney World: a History in Postcards, Brian Martsolf has already identified a number of photographs which likely show the Magic Kingdom during construction, which means that the bulk of the people in those photos were currently employed by Walt Disney World and many of those earliest photographs show the Magic Kingdom very much still in a state of becoming. Take a look again at the "Gene Hackman in a Teacup" photo:

First, obviously, this photograph is from the first eight months of the resort as the roof has not yet been added to the Mad Tea Party. But look in the background, over by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. See that irregularly shaped object? Doesn't it look like something with a tarp thrown quickly over it?

And maybe there aren't as many people walking around the park as you might expect? And look again at "Gene Hackman". Doesn't it look sort of like he's... wearing a name tag?

I'm willing to bet that everyone in this photo is a Cast Member or Contractor for Walt Disney World, that this was taken during a preview day in August or September 1971, and that the object in the background is covering the fact that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still under construction. The ride wouldn't open until December. Sort of puts a new - if you'll pardon the pun - spin on things, doesn't it?

Me? I'm very excited by this news. Now that we know Beard Guy is Tom Gilleon, who knows who Sombrero Girl is or who that kid facing off with one of the seven dwarfs grew up to be.

Maybe it could even be you, reading this blog, right now.

People I've Met in the Past: Part One

2011-09-12T03:30:00.000-04:00

Ah, the mighty Walt Disney World Pictorial Souvenir. How many times I've leafed through those pages, researching, scanning, staring - how many of those images have been burned indelibly into my brain. It's true, the real Walt Disney World can disappoint - there's no longer a slow-moving journey through the history of transportation in that big shiny cylinder at EPCOT, but with just a few leaves of paper, twenty or forty years old, and all that history between then and now seems to collapse - the past is always today. This is, of course, the great pleasure of paper collecting. Ephemera becomes a way to relive history, make it seem like the present. It's fun to hold that C ticket in your hand and plot to spend it on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride next time you're at Magic Kingdom. Hey, a girl can dream, can't she?

In a way, this sense of lost things being possible to reclaim is especially potent with those pictorial souvenirs of the 70s and 80s. I still have my original one, hardcover, and that book is probably why I became obsessed with Walt Disney World. It still has the texture of my youth bound into its pages. You can see the indentations in the page where I tried to trace the Haunted Mansion when I was eight. So, in a very real way, these books and booklets, which only ever served a short-term marketing purpose of reminding people of their trips and perhaps inspiring new ones, have become windows to the past. It's a trip we've all taken often.

A lot of those photos have become like old friends. And unlike the photographs of today's marketing blitz, they show people in the park how they often really are - unrehearsed, somewhat unglamorous and sort of dopey looking. So let's take a trip into the past and revisit some of the better dopey Walt Disney World denizens of her first ten years. Maybe you'll run into your favorite along the way.

I've often wondered if she's implacable or just embarrassed with her 50 gallon sombrero on. The hesitant tugging at the edges suggests she's seen the camera and is hiding her face. Or maybe there's just a wind and it's threatening to blow away.

Go ahead kid. Touch the mouse. I dare you.

No words can possibly do justice to the sort-of nerdy archer.

Yellow bell bottoms. Yellow and turquoise tile floors. You know you want to be there right now.

It's sort of hard to tell what the dynamic of this hug is. Whatever it is, the kid in the blue sailor outfit could care less about us and our darn pictorial souvenir. No matter how many times I see this, it's still good for my soul to know that Frontierland looks exactly like that today. Not even the signs have changed, nor should they.

Screaming. Whenever you meet Baloo. Screaming.

"Fiiiiiire!!!"

These people look genuinely terrified by that flambe. Is this some sort of statement about the regular quality of service at the Pueblo Room? And, oh yes. The white suited guy looks on, impassive to their plight.

The Duke shops at Kingdom Jewelers. Is that a Marquis cut or a Lozenge cut you've got there, pilgrim? Oh, come on, you always thought of it while looking at the book, admit it. By the way: I've color corrected this one and I'm shocked at how green that shop was. I always assumed it was a weird printing artifact but, no, it really is an all jade green jewelry store.

Okay, this guy cracks me up. First, he looks too cool, with his pomaded hair, jacket and shades both for that family and to be that lost. Secondly, he's using a wall map as a park map. Seriously, look at that, it's the 1972 original Magic Kingdom wall map folded in thirds, the one with the bugged-out colors. I call him "Genius Guy".

You didn't seriously think I'd let this one go, did you? Child Vs. Dwarf is still brilliant. Think of it: this face-off has been ongoing for forty years now. In another forty years it'll still be happening.

Gene Hackman in a teacup. Actually, this one is sort of disappointing, because this guy looks markedly less like Gene Hackman when scanned in huge and color-corrected, instead of while squinting at forty-year-old paper. You want to see Gene Hackman at Walt Disney World?? Here you go:

There it is. Gene Hackman versus the Salt Water Express. I think the drugs are hidden in the guitar.

It's Gondolier Day at the Haunted Mansion! If you don't believe me, look at the guy further on up the line from the guy in the red stripes; he's wearing blue stripes and a straw hat. See? Totally a Gondolier. By the way, this photograph is impossible to take today; it'd look like an explosion in a red canvas factory. It's pretty cool to see the way this looked before even the familiar green canopy was up. Can't have been fun to wait in the sun, though.

Another classic. Who doesn't remember Old Guy In The Window?

OLD GUY IN THE WINDOW POV!!! A rarely seen "backside of Traders of Timbuktu" shot. Check out that awesome bag the lady in the middle has. And of course, that freaky cow-horse creature in the front. They were all over the store:

See them up top? This store was called, depending on the era, either The Magic Carpet or the Brass Bazaar, and seemed to attract unusually high numbers of Blurry Old Folks. It was renovated into Elephant Tales in the late 80s and finally closed to make way for.... nothing. The Old Guy window still exists; it's behind a register in the "Agrabah" shop across from that awful Aladdin spinner. There are no window carpets, freaky horses, or blurry old guys there anymore. You really shouldn't go looking for it; you'll just get depressed.

I warned you!

I believe this is Papeete Bay Verandah. Wherever it is, it's very red. I seriously doubt anything this red would be allowed to be printed now.

Seating Area for the Sunshine Tree Terrace and, again, a picture you currently can't take because of the Aladdin spinner. It's hard to tell, but I think that's the Sunshine Tree / Floria Citrus Growers logo ringing the table. I really like how the yellow and green umbrellas put one in a citrus mindset without ever having to so much as show you an orange.

These come from a GAF Guide, specifically the "How To Take Pictures" section that came in all those early Magic Kingdom guidemaps. So these are obviously staged "family photos", but what's the deal with the children wearing ponchos??? Not only that, it's the same kids in each picture, but the ponchos are different! It can't have been fun to wear those in any sort of Florida heat, so it was probably a colder winter day (we get them in Florida, you know!) and the kids demanded them to stay warm. So some poor assistant had to high-tail it to Frontierland or wherever it was they got these things to borrow some ponchos. But why different ones? Did the kids fall in the sub lagoon after the second picture was taken??

The world will, likely, never know.

Hey! Guys! It's DST! I think! It stands for..... Something... something... Track! And they're at the Tomorrowland Terrace! And there's lots of backs of people's heads and stuff!

I'm 90% certain that this is The Space Port, Tomorrowland's original shop, which later became "Merchant of Venus" to funnel those happy happy kids leaving the new Alien Encounter attraction into a merchandise shop. My 1972 GAF Guide describes it as:

The Space Port - Contemporary Decorative Gifts

And I guess that describes what we see here pretty well. I love that polka dot dress! And what is that kid in the stroller reaching for, anyway? No shoplifting, kid!

Again, the inner Traders of Timbuktu courtyard. It kills me that this has been demolished. Old Guy Window is to the immediate right.

Possibly a nun? With a camera? Whatever, she's got an awesome bag and the first letter of "Frontierland" superimposed near her, so she's cooler than I am. She's in the middle of Liberty Square and the area right behind her near that tree is the current home of a speaker cleverly disguised as a birdhouse. Behind her is the future home of Thunder Mesa, I mean Splash Mountain. Before Big Thunder started construction in 1978, this area was known as "The Meadow" because...

....Yeah. All man made, however, which is pretty amazing. Show this to someone and dare them to identify it as Walt Disney World; it's fun.

Hey, watch out! You're gonna get squirted! Just kidding. This is thirty years before these guys would be made to squirt water, back when they were down in front of the Jungle Cruise and devoted to awesome drumming.

Hey! Yeah! Finally... some action!

Vrooooooooooom!

Yow! Hot stuff! These demonstrate a beloved 'Pictorial Souvenir' motif...

...in which things that don't really go fast... do.

And who could forget this handsome specimen:

"Listen, I'm awake, what else do you want from me?"

One could look at the kid grasping his face in the foreground there. Or the fact that there's a mob of people at The Lunching Pad there in the background. Or the fact that we can see the end of the Peoplemover track at the very top of the image; it wouldn't be finished until 1975 and just ended there in space. But you know what I love most? The rare on-the-ground view of the Great Construction Wall of Tomorrowland in the very back. Groovy.

I'll leave it up to you to decide what they're looking at. This is a blog about a family park, after all.

I'll end with one of my favorites. This captures everything wonderful and awkward about early Walt Disney World photographs. The staging, composition, Meadow in the background...

"Look happy! Look at it! Look at the bird!
Hey! Don't make it so obvious that you're holding him!
Look happy!"

...Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Snapshot: Frap-Off at the Village

2011-08-31T05:00:00.002-04:00

Perhaps it is just endemic in the nature of this blog to dwell on obscurities. I did name it after a single line of a song in a minor attraction which has been closed for a generation, so maybe even my best intentions early on already showed the direction I was fated to go in. But in the universe of Walt Disney World research, your options are somewhat limited. Everything from around about 1985 onward is pretty well covered on the Internet - EPCOT Center researchers only have to dip into "speculative history" for the very first few years of that great park. Similarly, Magic Kingdom's general historical outline is pretty firmly in place, even if she will not so readily give up all her secrets.

I often joke that I became an expert on Lake Buena Vista and the Village by accident. As of the early 2000's, there was little useful information about the southeastern portion of the Florida property circulating and so interested parties, such as me, had to reconstruct it from scratch. And because the Walt Disney Archives have been closed to outside researchers for some time now, this was less about gathering information as discovering it. Think of it like archeology. For years I followed cold trails, occasionally unearthing a small piece of the story here or there. Only slowly could I knit the whole thing together by drawing reasonable conclusions from available evidence.

I don't open my discussion of today's subject this way to impress you, but because it's central to why and how this article exists. It is a dead lead come back to life.

Toys Fantastique opened with the rest of the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village in April 1975. At that time, Lake Buena Vista Village News, a sort of newsletter which also doubled at the Village's guest guide map, described the shop as "A see-to-believe collection of European toys for a child of any age - including yours." It was a small affair located right next to Heidelberger's Deli, but it must have been popular. As was the fashion of the time at the Village, traveling special artists and experts filled the store with miniature Victorian mansions, collectible bears, and usual hand-made trinkets. I have exactly one picture of the inside of the original Toys Fantastique, but it isn't much to look at.

I mean, really, that could be shot in any depressing cubicle in the universe. Not very useful. Regardless, the popularity of Toys Fantastique is evident enough in the fact that in 1976, when the first round of changes and cuts were made in the Village, the toy shop not only remained, but greatly expanded, moving across the street and evicting Posh Pets. From the October 8, 1976 issue of Eyes and Ears of Walt Disney World:

"In the first year and a half that the Village has been operating, it has become quite obvious that certain popular shops needed to be expanded to offer our guests an even better shopping experience.

This month you will see the beginning of the replanning of the Village which will include a considerable amount of interior redesigning. And that means construction... an inconvenience and employees in the Village alike, but it will all be worthwhile when complete.

Shop by shop, the "new" Village will look something like this... Toys Fantastique will move to a larger building formerly occupied by Posh Pets. Posh Pets has already closed. The Flower Garden will be merged into the Pottery Chalet patio area, thus consolidating all of our plants and garden accessories. The existing Cash Control/Post Office complex will become the Vintage Cellar annex to Village Spirits, selling wines and cheeses. Cash Control will be moving to a new location in the Pottery Chalet/Wardrobe stockroom. The Post Office will relocate to the LBV Preview Center. Michael's will be closing to become Footlights, a shoe store annexed to Miss Merrily's Madness. The old Flower Garden shop will become Miss Merrily's Fashions. The old Toys Fantastique store will become Sassy's, a fashion shop catering to pre-teens. This will be annexed to the new Miss Merrily's Fashions, thus allowing guests to enter Sassy's and walk through the entire fashion complex, exiting through Footlights."

I hope you got all that, because there will be a quiz.

This new, expanded Toys Fantastique really was something to behold. With an elevated loft, carved dimensional dioramas of scenes from Pinocchio, and a vaulted ceiling, it was one of the major attractions in the Village. Toys Fantastique even hosted special events.

And what events...!

Now, put yourself there with me while this happened. We are dutifully pouring over old issues of Eyes and Ears, looking for some nugget of information about the Village, the Villas, anything. And this is what is found in an August 12, 1976 issue:

LAKE BUENA VISTA

This October, the Village will host its third Boat Show. Owing to the success of previous Boat Shows there, this one has been extended to 10 days! The show will open Thursday, October 6, and run thru Sunday, October 17. Sixteen dealers will be participating with some of the boats being on display in the Lagoon itself. A total of 130 boats are currently set for display.

Hey, do ya wanna Frap?"

...what?!

"...Coming September 4 & 5 is the first Village Frap Tournament, and it's also the first in the Central Florida area! Frapees and Frapers will gather on the area around the Garden Courtyard for a frap-off to decide our champs. Lake Buena Vista will provide the frapping equipment and even a Frumpire!"

....what?!

"A tie-in promotion with a local radio station will advise the general public of this major Frap event. But wait a minute...do you know what Frapping is? No...then watch upcoming issues of EYES & EARS for more details."

That's it. The article ends there. An Internet search yields no relevant results for our "Frapping", though of course plenty of other interesting things come up. And of course, there is no telling which issues of Eyes and Ears the information will appear in. Although they aren't terribly rare on the secondary market, the likelihood of stumbling across the exact issue I needed was slim. The fact that Eyes and Ears was not exactly reliable in their dating or numbering schemes (which could go weeks without being updated, jump over numbers or even go backwards) made the possibility even more remote. Yet the question loomed large, unresolved, almost monstrous: what was frapping?

...And why does it sound so unclean??

The answer was, thankfully for my sanity, forthcoming. It was delivered through an unanticipated means. Thankfully Lake Buena Vista did not exist in a vacuum and was covered by a variety of media sources. One of these was linked to a charge card. The Lake Buena Vista Village Charge Card was a curious little phenomenon from the resorts earliest days, apparently offered to Florida locals. I haven't yet found one of the cards itself, but here's the little cardback it arrived in:

Those who had a Charge Card were also directly mailed a newsletter in the form of an "Exclusive Credit Card Edition" of Lake Buena Vista Village News, condensed from 4-6 pages down to just two and printed on remarkably hideous yellow paper.

This is sort of interesting in and of itself, but hold on - this charge card is the reason information about frapping comes to you today. The answer was found on one of these "Credit Card Editions", apparently saved by its local recipient. So you, gentle reader, will not have to endure my many months of anticipation and mystery. I can tell you right now what frapping was. This is the relevant part of the article, from September 1976. Read it slowly or you'll choke.

"Something special every weekend
A FRAP 'N' FORUM FALL!

How long can you keep the fuzzies flying? Keep 'em going long enough and you could be the frampion of Lake Buena Vista's First Fantastique Frappin' Frappening. It's the start of a (Toys) Fantastique September highlighted by three big weekends of fun, each sponsored by the Village's popular toy shop.

What's Frap? It's the newest frad - oops! - fad. And it can be played indoors or outdoors by practically anyone. Here's how it works: a frapper and a frapee, both armed with wooden frapaddles, volley with frapballs or frapfuzzies for as long as they can. (You might want to go over that slowly. If you're still frantically confused, Toys Fantastique will be happy to give you a demonstration.)

Anyway, The Village invites all frapees and frappers, even if you've never frapped before, to the the First Fantastique Frappin' Frappening, Saturday and Sunday, September 4-5. There is no entry fee and nothing to buy. All you have to do is come to Toys Fantastique and register for the Frap Fixins (qualifying round). If you and your partner cam keep your frapfuzzie flying for forty-five seconds, you'll qualify for Sunday's semi-finals and, possibly, for the Frap Finals. Winners will receive Village gift certificates."

Look, I didn't make this up, here's a picture of the newsletter to prove it:

Look! There's even a picture! Visual proof!

Look at them! They're FRAPPING!

This is the part of the blog post where I, your historian, offer some perspective on the meaning of all this, why it was relevant, why you should care. But I honestly just am at a loss for words. I wonder if the entire thing was concocted to be as bizarre as possible and use a shocking surplus of letter F's littering the Village landscape. This is true obscurities, folks. This is two days thirty-five years ago when people with light-colored flare-legged pants bounced fuzzy balls back and forth at each other trying to win gift certificates. It could have happened anywhere. But it happened at Walt Disney World and it wasn't just silliness, it was.... FRAPPING. That memorable period in our lives when everything stopped for some good old-fashioned down home Frapping.

I mean, seriously. Could there have even been a second Frappin' Frappening? Was this even a real fad? I haven't yet been able to produce a single human being who even remembers that there was such a thing as a Frapping. Maybe some of you, dear readers, were hard core Frumpires in your youth. Maybe you toured the Frampionships with your trusty Frapaddle in one hand and your elite class Frapfuzzy in the other. Maybe it's all just a hazy memory now, an earth-toned Frapever dream of a Fraparade long gone by.

I think I need to go lie down now.

---

Buena Vista Obscura:
The World Cruise
Captain Cook's Hideaway (plus followup)
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part One
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Two
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Three
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Four
The Golf Resort

History and Esoterica:
Snapshot: Frap-Off at the Village
Snapshot: Marines Capture Coke Corner
Snapshot: Mysteries of the Second Floor
Snapshot: Olde World Antiques
Snapshot: The Great Southern Craft Company

This post is part of the Disney Blog Carnival. Head over there to see more great Disney-related posts and articles.

Fire in the Night: The Pre-Eminent Attraction-as-Art

2011-08-21T01:00:00.001-04:00

"[This is] the beginning of an entirely new form of art and entertainment which will eventually take its place beside the theater, opera and motion pictures." - Walt Disney at the 1964 World's Fair

"It's better than the movies. Pirates of the Caribbean, the 40-year-old Disneyland ride, is better than the hit movies it spawned. Also, it's better than more than half the rides in the Park, better than half the movies you've ever seen, better than half the moments in your life, and perhaps better than at least half the sex you've ever had. Everybody has their off days. POTC is such an impeccably awesome attraction that there's really no point to my writing about how awesome it is." - Geoff Carter, Your Souvenir Guide

A Personal Admission

It's been put off for long enough.

As a critic and commentator, there are certain "holy mountains" one is expected to scale at least once. In writing about film, for example, a confrontation with "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) is both ritualistically expected and necessary, not only because it is a landmark film but because it is one of those moments where everything about the cinema crystallizes into one coherent moment in time. Because it's impossible to ignore Griffith's film, one must grapple with it and, inevitably, find oneself both desiring and fearing the process.

Pirates of the Caribbean is the "Birth of a Nation" of themed design, the moment where the concept of a ride through attraction that began so humbly and so long ago - as metal cars scooting along on tracks in darkened rooms - finally crossed over into the rarefied world of art. It is the moment where everything about themed design and what is possible in it crystallized into a single master stroke of an attraction, still the one to beat all these years later. In 1967 it plumbed new depths of the possibilities of a theme park attraction. It created the public perception of a Disney attraction as a lavish, larger than life spectacle. It was Walt Disney's final project. Riding it is like going to church, that's how strong the tidal pull of fascination it exerts is. It may as well be a national monument. Other attractions may have more superlatives to their names: Haunted Mansion may be more rich in fascinations; Horizons may be more ambitious and complex. But there is nothing like the original version of Pirates of the Caribbean, at Disneyland or anywhere else. It is unquestionably the greatest attraction ever made.

(Image at right from Daveland)

And with that comes a problem, which is that in the high regard we give it, it often seems unapproachable. Certainly, even on this site beyond a few call-outs to it as a touchstone experience, I have resisted going too deep down the flume into the subterranean areas below. Despite this I will admit that Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland was the galvanizing experience that compelled me to begin to think critically about a themed design experience; in that way it both changed my life and means that much of the writing on this site rests uncomfortably in its long shadow.

On another level it also means that I'm not sure even a full size book on the subject could fully expunge all of the brilliance contained in the attraction. It's like King Lear; it is one of those monumental works you could spend your entire life studying. So this essay is also, in a way, doomed to inadequacy. There is simply no way to fully account for Pirates of the Caribbean in one article. I shall combat this not by trying to tie together everything brilliant about the attraction in some sort of master thesis the way I did with the more prosaic Orlando version, but by presenting a collection of different approaches to individual components of the ride. In doing so, however, it means this essay must come with a caveat:

If you have not experienced the Disneyland, 1967, full strength version of Pirates of the Caribbean, please do not read this essay, because I will ruin the ride for you. Such a dynamic work needs to be experienced with a fresh mind instead of through the lens of an academic "reading", which is what I am about to attempt. Please preserve this wonderful experience for yourself.

Okay, then: I have a final admonition in this preposterously extended prologue.

For those of you playing along at home, it may be worth noting here that this essay is intended to sit alongside my piece about the Florida Pirates of the Caribbean, but in reading both one may note that my message is somewhat conflicted, in that elements I highlight as strengths of the California show in the text below are the things I praise the Florida show for eliminating. I'm not being hypocritical; I'm recognizing that both attractions are unique entities that play by different rules. While I don't think this is a bad thing it does contribute greatly to the misunderstanding and scorn the Florida Pirates receives. Because a California native imposes a "West Coast Reading" on the East Coast ride doesn't mean that the designers had any such inclinations in mind. The rides do, after all, have unique strengths and weaknesses.

For example, to call out an example from another attraction, Disneyland natives almost universally praise the trim exterior and stately entrance room of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion because it means that the attraction only becomes strange and "haunted" when the elevator begins to descend in the stretching room scene. That's undoubtedly a powerful moment but the Florida version simply doesn't have it; there's a bat weather vane on the house outside, a howling ghost dog, and an aging portrait in the entrance area. These aren't weaknesses of the Florida show, it just means that it is doing something different.

What all of this means to say is that Pirates of the Caribbean, more than almost any major canon Disney ride, indicates that there is no single "right way" to do themed design; there is no single platonic solution that solves everything, even when one version of the sum total effort achieves near perfection. Some strict design elements in this, the greatest attraction ever made, were later straightened out and improved, and they happened for the 1973 "inferior" model. This itself proves the fallacy of comparison, the uselessness of playing that age old game.

I say we let each work stand or fall on its own strengths or weaknesses, because the integrity of the individual art piece is, in the long run, far more important than its place in a canonical progression of the history of the form.

Influences

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons,
And buccaneers, and buried gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today: so be it.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

Pirates of the Caribbean is its own national myth.

It was born relatively recently - 1967 - but it has become as eternal as George Washington and his apple tree and the stories of Johnny Appleseed. In other words, it has become a popular legend, perhaps moreso than any other Disney product. Walt Disney Studios has spent much of its life enshrining American myth and legend, in doing so replacing the original with the popular art incarnation of it in the public imagination, but in one of Walt Disney's final acts he created his own national myth, stitched together from castoff bits of cultural debris, and in the last forty-five years it has gained an astonishing amount of cultural currency.

Yet this final, penultimate success was not won on the shoulders of any one recognizable established cultural figure, not in the way that, say, the Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln show piggybacks on the American obsession with the sixteenth president. Instead, Pirates of the Caribbean draws from a more ethereal set of influences and thus seems to be the zenith of the entire cultural concept of high seas piracy. This accounts for its cultural longevity, perhaps, even as works like Treasure Island and Captain Blood seem to echo down through those caverns. It reminds us of them but also seems to sum them up, to synthesize everything about those pieces into a whole which draws upon our collective unconscious even while breaking expectations and forming new ones. Because it is original yet draws on every trope and tradition of pirate lore possible, Pirates of the Caribbean supplants them all as the definitive popular culture text on piracy currently in circulation.

"When Walt was talking about this, the first thing I did was to get a few books on pirates. You know the artist who really invented pirates as we now see them was an illustrator by the name of H.C. Pyle. I have some of the old books with his illustrations. He was the guy who really decided how pirates should look..." Marc Davis, The E Ticket, 1999

"We do try to use the material that's in [pre-existing films] because people know it and recognize it. It helps a great deal to have something that they already know." John Hench, Disney Family Album, 1984

"I knew a lot about pirates, having lived down on the Gulf Coast. I lived in Galveston, Texas, where there was a lot of interest in pirates, and locating pirate gold. Somebody was always trying to find Captain Kidd's treasure around there, you know." Marc Davis

The search for pirate gold is one of those myths that refuses to die. Its roots surely predate Mark Twain when he wrote of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn marauding downriver and lifting the plundered gold from Injun Joe's Cave, although that may have been the text, along with Treasure Island, which most strongly fixed the image in the minds of the generation of artists who built the attraction, Walt Disney amongst them. Truthfully, the buccaneer gold business been going on for centuries now.

Besides Captain Kidd, who buried treasure up and down the east and gulf coasts of the popular imagination, there was Thomas Veal, who entered a cave known as "Dungeon Rock" in Massachusetts to retrieve a hidden hoard and never came out. He was likely buried alive with his gold in the New England 1658 earthquake, making Veal a deep source for Davis' famous Treasure Scene in the mystery caverns. One man, Hiram Marble, spent sixteen years and his entire life's savings digging into Dungeon Rock looking for Veal's motherlode. And of course Blackbeard has kept the citizens of North Carolina busy for generations looking for his ship and/or riches.

"I got a call from Walt and he wanted me to do a script for the pirate ride. I'd never done any scripting before. I'd worked in the Story Department, mostly as a sketch artist. But I said, 'Oh, all right, I'll give it a try.' So I put on my pirate hat, dug out a bunch of pirate books, and watched Treasure Island." X Atencio, Disney News, 1992

These are very strong inherited images, and the American tradition of searching for pirate gold (these are pirates of the Caribbean, not the Atlantic), informed by the evocative images supplied by Louis Stevenson, of Ben Gunn's caves and the skeleton of Allardyce, the human compass, combined to create the "mystery caverns" which begin the attraction proper. Indeed, we would be surprised to not find pirate gold down in those caves, and the attraction (at least in California) does not disappoint. This sequence exploits our pre-existing cultural knowledge of piracy to achieve its effect.

"..At the beginning... I was taking the pirates that were real from history, like Morgan, Captain Kidd, and Blackbeard. These guys would shanghai somebody and force them to become a member of the crew. They would have to sign the articles with their own blood. [...] Most pirates died of venereal disease that they got in bawdy houses in various coastal towns. I was sorry to read that because it took a lot of the glamor out of these characters. So at first I wanted to explore the possibility of using real pirates in the show, but later I decided that that wasn't the way to go." Marc Davis

"[Walt Disney] didn't like the idea of telling stories in this medium. It's not a story telling medium. But it does give you experiences. You experience the idea of pirates. You don't see a story that starts at the beginning and ends with, 'By golly, they got the dirty dog.' It wasn't that way." Marc Davis

In the way that the final attraction draws less on specific influences than it allows you to "experience the idea of pirates", in Davis' succinct phrase, it simultaneously shrouds itself in myth to the point where it seems like it may have always existed. The first thing presented in the attraction's entry area is a beach strewn with a map, treasure chest and jolly roger as if to hint that treasure may be buried below - a visual abstraction of our conception of lost pirate gold. Behind it, a cascade of leaves forms a curtain which seems to shroud the rest of the attraction from view. Along the walls are painted Davis' abandoned concepts for historical pirates. This simple, mostly bare room - which features little more than a boat channel, a bit of queue and the aforementioned simple scenic elements - seems to summarize everything one may expect to see in a pirates ride right off the bat: "Here's all the icons in one place, now watch us do something else."

"The Idea of Piracy"

And they do, of course. With the obligatory imagery out of the way, Pirates of the Caribbean succeeds as a riff on the entire cultural concept of pirates and seems wholly original yet still familiar as if we knew of it all along. Indeed, as proof, there are few people today who don't seem to secretly believe that X Atencio's famous "Yo Ho" song isn't an authentic sea shanty.

And yet in another way the simplicity of the entry room has another effect, one probably unintentional: it is like a bare stage on which the essential props of the drama are placed before the audience, or the opening statement of the magic trick that frames the rest of the illusion. You enter a building; you are inside... but not. In just a few meters, inside space becomes outside space and day is twisted into night. It is one of the essential magic tricks in the themed design lexicon yet that simple opening chamber frames the whole trick and grounds it in reality. Even as it provides the basic elements of a high seas adventure it's the setup for the illusion to follow.

Unraveling the Mystery

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

There are drawbacks to this cultural familiarity, however, which have obfuscated certain parts of the attraction and diluted their impact. One of these facets which we risk losing sight of is an attraction which poses its action as a parable which is told as a mystery. The pirates will all perish in the burning city or else each others hands after the treasure has been lifted; these men are doomed. We only come to their story by little, tiny remnants which may be pieced together in retrospect.

Consider how the Disneyland attraction withholds its pirates for an astonishing length of time; we enter the attraction with the promise of pirates and signs of their presence are all about; following the very first drop we now hear the pirates singing and expect them to be around the next bend. We do find them after another waterfall, but they're dead. It should be a sobering moment in an attraction which promises pirate frivolity.

As the first major scene in the attraction proper, as the first sign of pirate life we've yet seen, Dead Man's Cove offer only death and decay and establishes the grim morality play to come. Because we know the brigands can never outrun this fate as ghosts and ossified bones, it casts a long shadow over the attraction. This is the necessary editorial perspective, why it is possible to frame the debauchery that follows as actions that will have consequences. It is a judgement, and it should be a bucket of ice water in the face to any rider paying close attention.

One of the great strengths of the Disneyland ride is the looping rising action which seems to be constantly cheating towards the primary action from odd angles, always teasingly oblique. For an attraction with such a strong, exciting name as "Pirates of the Caribbean" that it can now be used to market action movies, the show spends forever moseying about the periphery of the concept. We begin in a nighttime bayou under a sign that only vaugley hints at what's to come - Laffite's Landing - before we're off into the bayou and the mystery begins. Why are we here and where are the pirates? Over the years, thanks to the internet, it's been very easy to find speculation that the "old man on the porch" scene in the Blue Bayou represents Jean Laffite himself. Of course this is nonsense, but it's nonsense we can learn from.

Where are the pirates and what is the bayou? The name itself is our clue here, for the name "Blue Bayou" was not accidental and does have an precedent in the world of Disney.

Familiar Disneyland images... but not from Disneyland!

What is the Blue Bayou? It was the name of an animated short intended to be part of Fantasia, originally meant to accompany "Claire de Lune". Because Fantasia was so long, it had to be excluded, but Disney finished the thing anyway in 1942 and sat on it for four years, finally releasing it with new music by the Ken Darby Chorus as part of "Make Mine Music". Yep. But when you watch Make Mine Music, what's the very first thing that shows up onscreen during the "Blue Bayou" segment? A title card reading: "A Tone Poem".

That's the key: the Disneyland Blue Bayou is a tone poem, a throwaway loveliness that opens the heart more than it develops the action. It is a necessary prelude to the attraction that follows because it sets up the central mystery by deferring our expectations. Where are the pirates? The first person we see on the ride is the old man in the bayou; could he be a pirate? The ambiguity lingers in our minds. The Bayou serves the same purpose as the opening title crawl at the front of a film: it is the buffer between our reality and the nocturne to follow at the same time that it raises a central mystery and a growing sense of unease. It allows us to calm down, get settled in, and look and listen; to truly absorb.

This is a neat trick because following the Blue Bayou, we come across maybe the best hundred feet of track ever put into any themed design show ever, and what's most amazing is how this is accomplished with essentially nothing. Just as the entry room acted as the attraction's overture, expressing central themes, and the Blue Bayou is the prelude to the strum und drang to follow, a mood of quiet contemplation and anticipation rather quickly gives way to dread as we pass through the brick arches into the darkness. Now, suddenly, there is almost nothing to look at or hear as the bayou sounds fade away and are forgotten. Now, it is one thing for an attraction to promise Pirates and not immediately deliver; it is another to not even offer scenery to admire as we press on into the darkness. The questions loom larger.

Here Pirates of the Caribbean accomplishes something no other attraction ever has, to my knowledge: it utilizes a whisper in the darkness. As both eyesight and hearing fail us in the dark tunnel, we slowly hear and then, by dint of its solitary nature, strain to resolve a human voice seeming to speak barely above a mumble. Our senses effectively reduced to just one, we latch onto that voice and narrow our focus onto it like a laser. Who is speaking? Will it be a hero or a villain? The design of the tunnel adds the unsettling dimension of making it impossible to guess from whence the voice issues: is it in front of us, or behind us, or to the side? Surely, now, we will encounter the Pirates of the Caribbean.

This is pure gothic horror stuff. A whisper in the darkness is just the sort of thing you never want to hear late at night when your defenses are at their lowest ebb. There are abstract visuals to confuse us as we move through the darkness: an unexpected lantern, a door and a window that seems to promise some logic to this deepening dream. Just before, as a sort of setup we saw the old man rocking outside of his apparently inhabited cabin, the only human characters we've yet encountered, but the pattern betrays us. The voice does not speak from beyond the door; there is nobody home, and as we turn the corner we discover that the voice issues from something that can hardly even said to be human. It's some sort of ghoulish apparition, a disembodied head issuing confusing commands at the apex of the very last brick arch. The mysteries deepen and now have tipped over into what is unambiguously a ghost story and, like Alice, we are pulled down the rabbit hole deep into our unconscious.

The drop leads to a cavern where we expect to find the pirates once again, but once again we are deceived; the buccaneers have rotted away; all that's left are their voices. Even those betray us, as the rousing song becomes an echoed warning that "dead men tell no tales", that the dead will not give up their secrets so easily. The cavern itself is interesting in how quickly it establishes an understanding that we are now under the city; roots push through the ceiling and as jaunty as the song is, the setting is even less reassuring than before. The memory of that fades with the second drop. The attraction has at this point thoroughly demolished our expectations: day has turned into night, inside has turned into outside, pirates have turned into ghosts, and we are now not even sure of where we are.

So as we pass the bleached bones of the brigands, the mystery and ghost motif kicks into high gear; most all ghost stories are mysteries, after all. Discover the reason the ghost is here and the dead can be sent back to their rest and the natural order restored. This works for everyone from Pliny the Younger, through to Shakespeare, and on to Stephen King. We the audience become investigators, looking to clues amongst the detritus of the pirates underground stronghold as the mood shifts from mysterious to foreboding to darkly comic. The skeletons are faintly funny, their human-like positions and activities only pointing out their status as corpses ever more clearly. They drink rum, they count money, and a piano plays itself, obviously typical ghost business: the same gag was used in the Florida Haunted Mansion just a few years later and the instruments even look similar.

The caverns themselves speak as eloquently and essentially subliminally. The mere act of plunging underground into a cavern carries with it a wallop of associations which play on us just as strongly today as they did on their creators in the 60s. We not only bury our dead in the ground but we know from a host of literature from Plato to Dante to Milton that the underworld is down there, too. Like Orpheus, we will confront the dead. And just as Dante's inferno was more about Dante's soul than the blazes around him, we perhaps can expect to uncover hidden truths in this pirate underworld. The descent underground and twisting path through the caverns is as surely into our own subconscious dream state as it is to any place literal. The caves ultimately cannot be localized under the city of New Orleans or any other place because they are our one step beyond: underground, apparently open to the ocean, full of water, storms, falls, beaches, bones and dust. Lulled into accepting this impossibility, we are prepared for the next.

And then we reach the attraction's first climax, the treasure horde, which is positioned last in the sequence not only to send the "mystery" sequence out on the strongest visual but to give us the impression that we've found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Immediately after this visual, the attraction shifts tones for the fourth time as we apparently travel back into history through yet another dark tunnel with echoing voices to finally find the answer to the question of how the pirates met their doom.

I make much of the fact that X Atencio wrote narration for each of the scenes in the "Lower Grotto" sequence, but these narration pieces were never used. The scenes are rich in fascinations, from the ghostly sounds of revelry which still echo through the underground bar to the weird Victorian decor of the Captain's Chamber, and of course the images are self explanatory without really explaining much. We've arrived too late: dead men tell no tales. The ghostly voices which send us back in time are the very first pieces of expository narration we've yet heard and the attraction is by now nearly half over.

All of this leads up to the Bombardment Bay scene, a suitably epic first movement for the show's second act, and it is impressive no matter which version of the show we see. But no other version spends a full six minutes preparing us for it by making us complicit in the act of getting there, six minutes full of intrigue, ghosts, and a mute chorus of rotted bodies. No other version denies us the pirates again and again, luring us deeper and deeper into the dream state until we find them in their ship, cannons blazing, as iconic an image of piracy as was ever presented. One of the things which makes Pirates of the Caribbean great is how it refuses, again and again, to manifest the very reason it exists, how slowly the petals open to reveal the flower, how gradually the icy grip of death yields its secrets. It is as perfectly orchestrated an opening to an attraction as has ever been devised. In six perfect minutes a high seas adventure becomes a ghost story that becomes a mystery and back again. By framing the main action as an investigation into history of a group of doomed men, the mantra "dead men tell no tales" never fades from our minds.

Circularity

It can be argued that the Bombardment Bay scene is like a hinge that the rest of the show pivots around. It is more or less the midpoint of the ride and, like most hinges, its action is symmetrical. We have been brought from a state anticipating piracy and adventure to a state where we are like crime scene investigators, trying to piece together the story from some time in the future. It is an enormous act of drama to bring us back in time to the "scene of the crime", then. We've spent the first half of the show watching the pirates materialize out of nothing, becoming skeletons and then flesh and blood, and from the Bay scene onwards we now watch them fade away back to skeletons. We anticipate and foreshadow the act of destruction then watch itself play itself out, bringing us back to where we started.

Act Two of the show climaxes at the burning city; this is the pirates' biggest moment of triumph and revelry and, following the rules of classic drama, it is also inevitably the moment where their fortunes turn. If the Blue Bayou is the Overture and Prelude and the Act One is the mystery Caverns, Act Two can be seen as the "major action", the sequences the ride is built around. This act ends when we pass out of the burning city and into another dark tunnel for a short Act Three: Inferno. Fire symbolically destroys as it purifies, and we don't need any indication other than those swaying timbers and thundering silence that the crew has begun to perish in the flames. A circle is starting to close.

This circular nature is one of the greatest pleasures of the attraction, one of the things that makes it as great as it is. In the mid 90s there were a number of additions which made the circular plot even more apparent, adding skeletons to the final scenes and a reprise of "Dead Men Tell No Tales", but in a way these were redundant. We understand on some unspoken level that the spell is reversing itself when we take that long, chugging ride back up the lift hill back to the bayou, it's an understanding beyond phrase or comment. We move up after having moved down and return to our point of embarkation, the musical Overture returns, the Bayou once again reasserts itself.

In this way Pirates of the Caribbean may be the only attraction to ever utilize its structural resources as an attraction effectively. The Blue Bayou and Laffite's Landing are not just locations of the load and unload zones, they are signifier of our journey. Literally everyone who gets on the ride sits down and looks up at that sign:

Ever wonder about that sign? Maybe, why it's there? It is there because it makes the Load zone into a location, it fixes it in your mind. It's even a neat little alliteration, all the better to help you remember it. You're not just getting on a boat, you're getting on a boat at Laffite's Landing, dammit. When you return to that sign, a very satisfying sense of closure comes with it, a closure which helps point to the attraction's circular nature. Laffite's Landing may be the most important attraction load area ever because of that sign and the circular structure it points to.

Make no mistake: all attractions, no matter how sophisticated, inscribe a circle, for specific, technological reasons. But no other attraction tells a narrative that is a circle while inscribing that circle, allowing us to connect meaning (narrative) to form (a boat moving in a channel). Pirates of the Caribbean is that Wagnerian aesthetic of the total synthesis of all the works of art into a single statement, the Gesamtkunstwerk. Other attractions may have separate load and unload areas and encourage us to see ourselves starting at one location and proceeding to another, different one: the Disneyland Haunted Mansion does this very effectively. But these attractions seek to obscure their circular nature, in Pirates of the Caribbean, that nature is given meaning and form.

The events of the attraction happen in the past and are surrounded by signifiers that foretell their conclusion: the Pirates of the Caribbean will always perish at each others' swords. This is an event we can replay over and over again and access through a magic window, a portal to another time, a brick arch in the corner of the bayou that brings us somewhere new and nowhere at once. Attractions seek to create the illusion that what we see happens spontaneously, unpredictably, but not Pirates of the Caribbean, it is an impassive procession of a doomed history. Every time we ride the Haunted Mansion, or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, or Snow White's Scary Adventures, there is an implicit "reset button" that gets pressed so the story can unfold its narrative from A to B again. Pirates of the Caribbean starts at A, goes to C, then back to B, then on to A. There doesn't need to be an excuse that the same thing happens every time you ride it because the events of the past are as fixed in time as that skeleton pinned to the wall of the cave.

Visual Patterns

The visual treatment of the attraction can be our clue to appreciate this. If we accept the understanding I've posited that the attraction depicts an event of the past in a fixed cycle of destruction and it does this by bringing us back in time to replay some deep, unresolved trauma which still haunts the caves, then there must be some visual indication of this, no matter how subtle they may be. Some of the best art is created more or less unconsciously, and as similar efforts have gone forward to reveal the hidden concepts structuring the Haunted Mansion, we can find the same sort of thing within Pirates of the Caribbean if we peel it apart.

We have already established the myriad purposes of the entry room, with its plain windows and plastered walls. It challenges us out of the "reality" of New Orleans Square to introduce signifiers of "the idea of piracy" and thus provides the visual overture to the attraction. There is another purpose, too, and since this simple room is the very first architecture we see that wholly "belongs" to the attraction, it's worth examining closely.

It is, primarily, an empty room with a boat channel running through it; the boats are returning to Laffite's Landing from the attraction. On both sides of the channel are arches, and the channel hugs the small island on which are placed the lanterns, chest, map etc discussed above. Behind these items is the "leaf curtain" that shrouds the Bayou. In this way we can see the return loop of the boat channel as a line dividing New Orleans Square from the Bayou and, thus, the "reality" of the square from the supernatural mystery it conceals.

Photo by Al Huffman

The arches indicate this. On the "square" side, nearest the entry doors, they are tall, thin poles with wrought iron brackets and details from which are hung lanterns in the Old French Quarter style. They "belong" to the Square. On the "Bayou" side are strong, sturdy brick arches through which the Bayou may be glimpsed.

Both styles of arch, beach scene, and "leaf curtain" all visible in one image.

Photo by Al Huffman

Arches of this style are visible elsewhere in New Orleans Square...

Arches within arches

..but only in Pirates of the Caribbean do they attain their unique symbolic power. Those arches are the magic portals that allow us to access the mysterious night of the Bayou. It is only when we walk through one of them alongside the boats...

Photo by Al Huffman

...are we transported into the fantasy forever-night of the bayou itself. Notice how the texture detail of the walls is different on each side of the arch in the photo above? These arches are a simulated sunset; as we move through them away from the brightly lit, windowed "Overture" room, we make our supernatural crossing into the bayou and, only then, can the story begin.

Here's a diagram I worked up based on a fanmade blueprint downloaded from Flickr user Enfilm (which is an amazing resource, I may add). It's not really accurate but it does show how the two kinds of arches in this entry room divide "daylight" (tan area) from the "nighttime" of the bayou (dark blue area).

Notice how WED could have elected to make those windows looking into the Foyer false windows or black them out, but they let daylight in anyway: this is all part of the showmanship of the Bayou illusion. It's a better trick if during the day that first room is flooded with Southern California sunlight. The green dots represent the wrought iron poles, the "New Orleans Square" arches, and that thick red line is the brick arches which divide day from night. The light blue boat channel moves between these. That brick arch we pass through is right at the solid black line dividing New Orleans Square from the dream state of the ride.

The arches return, past the old man once we are deep into the dark heart of the bayou, and here they seem totally abstract until we remember their supernatural power to transform space before. Yet they've almost become totally abstract now:

Photo by Al Huffman

All of this arch imagery comes to a head here:

This is literally the moment that the entire attraction has been building to, the reveal of the skull and crossbones, and as a frisson it is second to none. The skull is tellingly placed at the apex of the arch. This is where the keystone is placed; the wedge shaped rock which holds the arch together. Similarly this moment is the keystone moment of the attraction which holds it together: all those arches have been building away in the background, quiet signifiers of your progress towards the attraction's transformation into a ghost story. You've seen dozens of arches so far; but this last one, which leads to a drop and the inky darkness beyond, is the one that will do you in.

Arches recur elsewhere in the ride, of course, and are used extensively in the Second Act to divide the various scenes. But one in particular, right, is very close to the brick arches used to divide space in the Bayou; indeed it is one of our "Magic Portals". It's the arch that divides Act Two from Act Three, and it's another dark stone portal capped with a prominent keystone and darkness beyond. From this point in the attraction on, the arches begin to return, even as the town burns around them: the arch shaped cells in the Jail scene, for example. The arsenal is full of them, usually with fire licking just beyond, and as we escape up the waterfall and back to the Bayou and Overture, we pass through just a few more, marking our return to the present through a very prominent red brick arch. The circle closes.

Attractions as Art

All of these things contribute to the greatness of the ride, but the above has by no means come anywhere near close to exhausting the interpretive possibilities of this great, great dynamic work of art. For example I have steered clear of discussing many of the town scene in Act Two, these are the scenes that the attraction is built around and so have received the bulwark of critical attention. But in a way, the strongest moments of the attraction are those between scenes, in the quiet moments, as we slowly drift into the darkness of the bayou and the whispering voice can get to us.

Or the leisurely rounding of a corner in the caverns as waterfalls splash around us to the left and right, or skeletal forms slowly materialize out of the darkness of a wind-torn ship. The uncomfortable quiet as we move under the creaking timbers of the burning city and are allowed to process the magnitude of the destruction. Or the almost full minute of darkness as we pass out of Act One and into Act Two, with no visual input whatsoever and the booming, taunting voices of the pirate ghosts echoing all around us. Pirates of the Caribbean may be the only theme park attraction to give us both time to regard it and then give us time to reflect on its brilliance in the spaces between scenes where things get very quiet and still. This surging push and pull between thrilling action and spectacle and quiet moments of reflection is what makes this ride such an indelible experience.

Yet that Prelude and First Act, they're so central to the attraction that they nearly eclipse the rest of it. When lifelong Disneylanders visit the Florida version of the ride, it's those scenes they object to missing, and it's not just because that's what's been removed, it's because they're the lifeblood of the attraction, in a way. As my friend Michael Crawford said after experiencing the full version for the first time: Pirates isn't better in California because it's longer, it's better because it's better. Every component is improved.

In a way, trying to do Pirates without the Bayou and Cavern sequence is like try to make Hamlet come off without the Ghost scenes. Yeah, the most famous scenes and quotes aren't in those scenes, but the Ghost of Hamlet is what makes the thing work, it's the little engine that the rest of the piece can trail behind. Temper with stuff like that at your own risk. Marc Davis had an astute eye for what worked and what didn't in themed design, and in a way, he was the very original student of the art which is what made him its finest practitioner. Davis shuffled a good deal of the ride around in Florida and Tokyo and he was the one who argued for a better Pirates in Florida, an argument he lost. For Tokyo Disneyland, though, he kept most of the start of the ride exactly the same as it had been in 1967. You can't improve on the perfect attraction.

Pirates of the Caribbean has given us many images, many famous moments. As such, I would like nominate my favorite thing in the attraction. It isn't what you would expect. Look off to the right.

These little forced perspective lighthouses appear in Bombardment Bay at the center of the attraction. I never get sick of looking at them because there's something about them that somehow encapsulates everything wonderful about the ride. They're there, off to the side, fun little details but you aren't really fooled by them. You know it's just an optical illusion but it never stops being fun to let yourself be tricked by them. And in another way, they're a perfect central image for the attraction and it is indeed serendipitous that they appear at the center of the show. Pirates of the Caribbean is the benchmark of all attractions, the one to measure up to, and so it's sort of like those lighthouses themselves. It's always there for you to come back to, always ready to be experienced again, it helps you navigate through life and art and by dint of its perfect construction is always richly rewarding. Pirates of the Caribbean is those little fires off in the night, somehow distant and close all at once. Always ready to help guide us home.

--

Emotional Map of Pirates of the Caribbean:
Entry Foyer = Overture
The Blue Bayou = Prelude / Pastoral
Haunted Grotto = Movement One
Transition Tunnel = Intermezzo
Sacking of the Town = Movement Two
Inferno = Movement Three
Up the Waterfall = Overture

--

Related Reading:
The Case for the Florida Pirates
History and the Haunted Mansion

5/11/11 - 8/17/11

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

2011-08-15T02:00:00.001-04:00

"But, Monsieur, we've had the same show!"

"Ja, since 1963!"
"My, how time flies! Get a life, you guys!
You're ancient history!"

I told myself I'd stop blogging about current Magic Kingdom stuff. And here I am, backsliding.

It's been a pretty up and down year for longtime Walt Disney World denizens. The early half of the year saw very controversial changes to the Haunted Mansion, changes made all the worse by the fact that the attraction was allowed to continue running while its finalie was being torn apart, resulting in some very poor temporary effects. When essential attractions like the Mansion are messed with, we as fans are completely without defenses. It appeared to get bad enough at one point that I was willing to give up on this blog altogether. If Disney was going to trample all over my attempts to argue for the artistry of the attraction-as-art-form by adding squirty gravestones and Chuck Jones ghosts, then maybe I should just pack it in.

Well, that was a bit melodramatic, but you can see how these were all very grim times. But I'm not hear to complain about what was done to the Haunted Mansion, and besides, I sort of like a lot of the results. No, I was on about Magic Kingdom.

On the other hand, major and important things did happen at Magic Kingdom. The monstrous Mickey's Toon Birthday Town Starland Fair closed, ending a nearly quarter century "temporary" reign of terror in the northeast part of the Magic Kingdom. If you think that's over the top you should probably stop reading this blog now. In other news, Mickey Mouse relocated to the long poorly-used space built for the Walt Disney Story in 1973, a space which had not been adequately justified since Aladdin was brand new in theaters. The east side of Town Square no longer feels evacuated, and this is a very important if subtle improvement to the entrance of the park. After all, you can only make a good first impression once.

And, oh yeah, there was this fire in the Tiki Room you may have heard about.

Now... there are a number of ways I could cover this event. I could talk about the history of the Florida incarnation of the attraction, how it lost its sponsor and identity in the late 1980's and continued to play to dwindling crowds until it was closed in 1997. Or I could talk about Under New Management, it's replacement, and its toxic reputation. I could point out how it opened the very same year that was ground zero for a seismic split in the fan community, the same year that saw the Toad-Ins and the closure of more than one classic attraction, the moment where fans first felt required to choose sides, to become dissidents ("haters") or toe the company line ("dusters") . Under New Management was very near the center of this maelstrom, and it still inflects all fan discourse today.

Or I could get even nastier and talk about the fire, how it mysteriously occured in such a way and place to destroy only the most objectionable elements of the show but leave the original 1971 components undamaged with the accuracy of a tactical strike. I could talk about how this happened for as yet unexplained reasons while the hated show was chugging into it's thirteenth year of scorn, on it's 666th week of operation, and on the very same day that Marc Davis died eleven years earlier. Call it the "divine intervention" theory.

"And now let's head towards the Sunshine Pavilion, host to your firey doom."
(try getting that view of Adventureland today...)

But, you know what? If you're on this blog you probably know all that stuff. I'm not writing to people who want to know the place to get the best corn dog nuggets or how best to use their Disney Dining Plan to get extra strawberries on their funnel cake. I am speaking to a niche market. You're as happy as I am that Under New Management was destroyed with fire. But I would like to take a small moment here to pity the underdog. Under New Management: you did everything poorly. There has probably never been another Disney attraction to evoke such a level of vitriol. Had Walt Disney been alive you would have been closed in five days and everyone involved in your creation fired. You became synonymous with the entire Eisner-Pressler regime and you ironically outlived them. Yours was a hounded, doomed existence.

Yes, there was much in Under New Management that was awful, but there was much that was instructive as well. I watched the show back to back many times to prepare my essay on Post-Themed Design, and came to believe that besides its obvious problems and apparent last minute butchery (by perhaps as much as half), that the attraction was most astonishing for its' utter failure to communicate to its' audience, it's vague feeling of non-resolution, of having not made its intentions clear. There was perhaps no other Disney show which had quite the epic breakdown between creative staff and audience as that one had. So yes, I feel sort of bad for Under New Management. It was kicked around so much that its true nature was never really commented on. It may not have been great but it was a fascinating "reading text".

I returned from the Magic Kingdom tonight with the extreme satisfaction of having seen a true Tropical Serenade in WED's beautiful Sunshine Pavilion, a structure and interior which in many ways bests the 1963 original. But the Disneyland original had an important advantage: it was where you could see the proper show. Let's be honest: as long as Under New Management was playing, Magic Kingdom was always going to be held back. We may have an awesome Haunted Mansion, but we still had that awful Tiki show. I'm happy to say that the tiki gods would be pleased.

I mean, yeah, it's not exactly what closed here in 1997. There's no fountain or anything to replace it, to begin with. I'm not sure anything is forthcoming, either, and we should probably resign ourselves to that. And not only does this new Tiki show cut the Offenbach number that Disneyland removed in the 90's, it goes it one better and removes the entire second half of "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing", the sing along segment. While the historian in me is somewhat leery of losing both the fountain and the sing-along, my practical side is very pleased.

It's wonderful to go to Disneyland and see their Tiki Room because audiences have an established tradition of the show much like the one we enjoy in Florida for Country Bear Jamboree: they whistle and sing along with it. In Florida, where the Tiki Room has never been as big of a deal, some pruning was called for. I believe that this is the right Tiki Room for Florida.

And the atmosphere, thank goodness, is still there. The show feels about the right length, Yale Gracey's wonderful atmospheric effects still drift dreamily by those perfect window dioramas, and Clyde and Claude once again hold court outside in the waterfall in their wonderfully strange preshow. If the mood of tropical reverie has been reduced slightly due to these cuts, then the show is never boring. It's snappy with a fighting weight and it's appropriate for a show that can lag deadly for modern audiences. I saw it four times today and not once with a variety of audiences did someone walk out. What I did see was looks of wonder and awe, hear appreciative laughter at Wally Boag's one-liners, and observe children and adults watching the room come to life around them in wonder. It occurred to me then there there's a whole generation of east coast kids who never had this experience; that this essentially simple show, a half century old, still something in it that still fascinates all these years later. This is a primal experience.

My concerns that bringing the show back would not be the right thing to do dissolved in that instant. Yes, it is of its time but also outside it. It is something worth preserving.

So there it is, we've got the show back, and it's something I'm sure we all thought we would never see; let's do our best to deserve it. I know my Magic Kingdom visits have been dramatically altered; instead of just stalking past the Tiki Room I can go inside and enjoy a very nicely done show. The idea of having something else to do in Magic Kingdom is astonishing to me because my cycle of activities has only shrunk with time; long gone are the days of running back and forth between Dreamflight and the Peoplemover for hours on end. Now I try to avoid that side of the park totally. In fact, my reaction is almost one more of astonishment than jubilation. The idea that thirteen years of a dysfunctional relationship with a major Magic Kingdom attraction can simply end overnight is almost incomprehensible.

But as much as this is about the past, it needs to be seen in the context of the future, too. Moving forward now that the most obviously objectionable thing in the park is gone, where do we go? Let's be honest: we're never going to get anything like Horizons, World of Motion, or Journey into Imagination back. Imagineering appears to do their best work on medium sized budgets these days and the financial structure and in-house production capabilities that made their "super productions" possible are just gone. On the other hand their big Fantasyland reboot looks very exciting, but it will be a very glossy safe type of thing. We will likely never again get a mid-range esoteric classic like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride or El Rio del Tiempo. Imagineering now has an excellent five year track record of brushing up the classics, and now that Tiki Room has been squared away, it's time to reboot another important Magic Kingdom component.

I vote for the Carousel of Progress. Despite featuring, like the new Tiki Room, Walt Disney's name, there is not much of the spirit of his quality of showmanship left in it. And while the Rex Allen 1964 version wouldn't work today either, there should be some way to bring that version's strong, very admirably written central concept of progress into the show while embracing it's basic form. That form is a spinning furniture showroom. There's no nice way to work around that; you can't change that about the Carousel of Progress without making it into something else. The 1993 reboot grafts that concept onto a sort of lousy sitcom. But with some careful rewriting and a few aesthetic changes, this attraction could be enough to lure me back into Tomorrowland. And that's whether the song be Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow or Now Is the Time.

So go, and rejoice. It's a very important thing that happened in the Sunshine Pavilion this year, in both symbolic and practical terms. My love for that theater almost cannot be understated and now I will not have to suffer the slings and arrows of Gilbert Gottfried for the very special privilege of watching a Yale Gracey cloud drift silently across a blue tropical sky, sunlight glinting off the water, framed with silk plants. May this show be successful and endure another forty years.

The Jungle Cruise: The Early Years

2011-07-18T20:00:00.001-04:00

In the world of themed design scholarship, we tend to spend a lot of time fussing over oeneiric, platonic versions of attractions. Especially in Haunted Mansionology, there's a lot of discussion of intention - who did what, why did they do it, and what does it mean - which is usually an attempt to extrapolate out a reading of an unfinished area already in the ride or a new idea being introduced and whether it truly meshes with the creative intent of the original design team. And of course that great castle in the sky of themed design: what would it have been like if it turned out exactly as planned?

In such cases, the idea is often floated that the earliest possible incarnation of the attraction, minus of course any momentary technical imperfections, is supposed to be the "perfect" version, the version against which all others are judged. This happens a lot in film scholarship too, especially with reference to filmmakers who misbehaved or were removed from films. There is an entire restoration of a Welles film, Mr. Arkadin, based on this idea - that the earliest extant cut of any given scene is preferable over others because it's more likely that Welles edited it himself before being locked out of the cutting room. It's just one example, sure, but it's a real life example of the phenomena - the "earliest possible version" theory.

Of course this is absurd because the rides change constantly, from wear and tear or just the environment. Lights burn out and are maybe replaced with lights of not quite the exact same brightness and color. And who says there's anything to whether or not that lamp is supposed to be 60 watt or 75 watt bulb? The original construction crew probably didn't give it much thought either.

Still, I bet most of us would like to know, for example, exactly what Pirates of the Caribbean was like in 1967 when it finally opened. Did those timbers in the burning city sway just the way they do now? Should they? In other words, has the original vision of the designers been diluted over time? That's the point of it all, that the earliest versions - ones most likely to have been tinkered with by the original WED staff - can be a guide to all subsequent alterations to preserve the intended effect. And in case you think that's being extreme about things, you should know that Disney plays this game too - the type, brightness, and color of every light and lamp in every attraction is recorded on opening day and compiled into massive documents. There are binders full of reams and reams of codes explaining exactly how one figure or another was programmed. The original staff of WED was fully prepared for their creations to outlast them, and many of them have.

Perhaps today's post will be of interest, then. It is primarily composed of a set of photographs of the Walt Disney World Jungle Cruise under refurbishment in 1973. Now the Jungle Cruise really has not changed much in the past forty years, and good thing, too. Things have broken, been forgotten, been rediscovered, tinkered with, repainted, second guessed. But the biggest changes have really boiled down to the amount of foliage growth, the guests' attention span and how sarcastic the guides are.

It isn't commented on much, but the Florida Jungle Cruise was designed, from a visual perspective, nearly entirely by Marc Davis and his designs were absolutely slavishly deployed by the WED model shop. Davis had already tinkered with the Disneyland version, but that remained a show designed by committee, a group effort by different teams of designers working in 1955, 59, 62, and so on. The Florida Jungle Cruise was designed by Marc from beginning to end and so faithful to his art were the scenic artists that the attraction is one of the few places in the entire world where one can see Marc Davis rocks and waterfalls. Squint below for a rare peek at his art for Inspiration Falls sitting on the table near its model counterpart.

Or to put it another way, what is good and unique about the Florida Jungle Cruise is good because Marc Davis designed it to be that way. So the Florida jungle is an unannounced treasure - a completely intact Davis design, not substantially altered in realization, still operating after 40 years. This photo set represents some of the earliest and most extensive photo documentation I've ever seen of the ride at a time when it had not been touched basically at all since opening day - a true look at the unadulterated vision of the original design team. It's also a fascinating look "under the water" at the Jungle Cruise, something few people ever get to see.

But first, some preliminaries. Let's begin way back at... the beginning - in fact, even before then.

This piece of concept art can't exactly be said to be "rare"; it's available on a DVD you can buy at the park itself (!), but it may reasonably be said to be "uncirculated" or "under appreciated". This unidentified artist also created beautiful pieces for the Sunshine Pavilion, but unlike many early Magic Kingdom art pieces, this one is perhaps most remarkable for how closely the final product resembles it, strongly suggesting that the Jungle Cruise was amongst the earliest attractions to be designed for the park, perhaps as early as 1969 - it along with the Haunted Mansion were more or less complete very early on. Davis could have moved off Haunted Mansion directly onto the Florida Jungle Cruise in fall 1969.

The building closely resembles the original Disneyland boat house in general shape and more or less always has, but this piece is maybe is best for showing the original arrangement of drumming tikis outside the building in the sunken courtyard. Although later moved to be nearer the Tiki Room at an unknown time in the first few years, these are exactly the same "wooden" tiki figures which today squirt water. Here they are on an early list of speakers and sound effects for the ride:

Now you know: next time you're at Magic Kingdom, you can point at one of those six tikis and shout "TALKING LOGS"! For the record, we have no real proof they ever talked - only drummed.

Keep those tikis in mind; we'll come back to them later.

Another interesting thing about this piece of concept art is that although it's hard to tell, the second floor of the boathouse does seem to be intended to be appropriately sized and detailed to be used for guest queue. I've been trying to confirm for years if this was ever the case. There is this construction photo clearly showing a staircase rising to the second floor near the current loading area for the ride:

That isn't proof it ever held extended queue. It could have been storage or even a lead office. The rails on the second floor of the Jungle boathouse are realized in forced perspective scale making it a somewhat unlikely spot for guest use; it's also a tiny area which is today made even smaller by being mostly occupied by air conditioning vents and machines. But the air conditioning came later, in 1972-1973, and I'm not sure what other purpose this now long removed staircase could serve; if there were photos establishing a second staircase (one going up and another going down), it may be possible to conclusively prove that an upstairs queue was at least an idea at one point.

For what it's worth, Junior Pouchet (the J.P. of J.P. and the Silver Stars) once told me that on October 1 1971, the "Adventureland Steel Drum Band" performed on the second level of the Jungle Cruise before being relocated to the familiar Adventureland Gazebo location on October 2.

Jumping forward a few months it becomes surprisingly easy to find shots of the Jungle Cruise that look like this:

This image was once common on postcards and Pana-Vue slides, and I'm willing to bet that this image and ones like it (showing the Giant Python figure or the Trapped Safari) was amongst the earliest promotional images shot for the park. These were probably even sold at the Preview Center. You can tell because this is a shot which has been cleverly framed to hide the fact that the ride is still under construction. There is extremely sparse vegetation and, most importantly, there's no hint of water. It would be several months before the river was filled, in all likelihood.

Here's another from the same set, showing "Salesman Sam" aka "Chief Namee" aka "Trader Sam".

Another image likely taken standing on a box in the middle of the dry river, this one is even better at showing the pre-opening state of the vegetation. The Jungle Cruise was the very first part of the entire Magic Kingdom to be landscaped so that opening day guests would not see a jungle that looks like this, and the plants on the very right have always looked to me to be either brought in just for the shot or perhaps were sitting in the riverbed awaiting installation.

By point of comparison here's a 1971 shot showing a jungle steamer headed off into the Amazon in a filled and completed river.

I have no idea why that guy is riding the boat out into the ride, by the way. Watch your head!

A few things to point out about this photo. First, it's taken from the southwest corner of the second floor of the boat house, note the little architectural detail evident at the top right. Second, it's a fantastic view, and thus possible evidence that even if it were never used as such it may have been designed with guest perspective in mind; off-stage areas in Disney theme parks are not known for their great views. Third, those familiar queue lanterns looked fantastic when they were new and their brass finish hadn't yet been rusted over. Finally, as any jungle skipper would be able to identify immediately, half of the queue is missing.

I'd like to be super super clear on this point. Below is a overhead view of the queue building as it looks today.

Above, the different phases are highlighted. The blue and yellow areas are the original construction in 1971; the red area is the queue annex built in 1972-1973. Jungle Cruise was one of a number of opening day attractions which regularly had large queues that spilled outside into the heat and sun; convention wisdom has it that WED Enterprises had not taken into account Florida's brutal weather and shade structures had to be devised. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Haunted Mansion received canopies; Jungle Cruise and Hall of Presidents had full annexes built. Mike Lee sent me this photo showing how the Jungle Cruise queue was expanded concurrently with the construction of Caribbean Plaza in 1972-1973:

In fact, from the pedestrian level the queue annex looks to be part of Caribbean Plaza. Obviously the attraction is still operating at the time this photo was taken, but at some point after this tourist snapshot was taken it closed for a full refurbishment.

That's where this photo series picks up. These photos are undated but I'll be willing to guess that they're from 1973 during an early refurbishment, probably taken by WED for reference. This is some of the very earliest photo documentation of any Walt Disney World ride I've ever seen in such an extensive way; this is very close to how the ride was intended to look in 1971.

This refurbishment seems to have accomplished several things:
- general refreshment of the show scenes
- completion of the queue annex
- removal of several figures from the Amazon
- site prep for "Year Two" additions

Here's an overhead view of the load area.

This is one of the photos that helps convince me that this was taken in 1973, by the way. In addition to showing a generally similar level of foliage growth compared to that 1971 Pana-Vue slide of the same area (above), this photo is taken from a raised perspective and an angle that would be impossible unless the queue annex were being built; the photographer is standing on it! Sadly there are no photos in this set of the queue itself; the mysteries of the time frame of the removal of those staircases and the "talking logs" continue to haunt us.

A great photo showing the original decoration of Marc's fascinating little shed across from the load area; a perfect overture to the mysterious fantasy to follow. This version follows his concept art closely and I find the draped mosquito netting especially to be very pictorially elegant. Later refurbishments covered this classic little house with all manner of vulgarizing props and bric-a-brac and generally did his designs few favors.

A view of one of Walt Disney World's loveliest waterfalls, currently dry for the refurbishment. I'm pretty sure the cinder block is there to anchor the outrigger canoe that usually accompanies the little house, inlet, and waterfall. These four elements comprise one of the Magic Kingdom's most pictorially elegant compositions; it still has the mysterious allure of tropical fantasy today.

The first scene, the Rain Forest, originally featured this beautiful jungle canopy constructed of welded pipes to which various artificial and real plants were attached. This cooled the river and allowed the mysterious fog effect to settle naturally over the water. The rusted superstructure was removed in 2000 and the fog effect has not worked properly since.

Now we're rounding the bend near Inspiration Falls, one of the loveliest kinetic sculptures at Walt Disney World. Hey, what are those guys doing?

This is entirely conjecture but I'm willing to bet that what we are seeing here is the removal of Davis' giant frog figures. There's always been frog sound effects in this part of the jungle but it was not until recently proven that there were once figures to go along with the sounds. The full story is at Widen Your World, but based on the evidence presented there I will say that these WED employees are standing right where a cluster of four frogs was supposed to be located.

The original Pygmy Canoes scene, this original version closely modeling Davis' concept art once again. This scene was originally the visual accent to a traveling sound effect of beating native drums from just out of sight; a scene of mystery with just a little danger. In the early 90s a more textured beach surface was added along with some skulls on spears and a silly little soup pot with a spoon. I don't know about you, but those decorations seem to hem much closer to the stereotypes of "unseen other" cultures in the third world than this original; the in your face joke of the newer version is that cannibals may be lurking nearby instead of a beautiful but eerie tableau of human culture having just fled the scene at the approach of your boat. I'll take Davis' version any day.

On to the ride's second scene, "Gorilla Area".

This distinct little rock formation may still be seen today to the left of the camp overrun with gorillas; more importantly, what can be seen in this photo is the very first of the ride's animation pits. It's still there and it is still unused. What's supposed to be there is a crocodile being pummeled repeatedly by an angry gorilla. No, seriously! The size of the pit and distance of the scene to the boats to me suggests that had the scene been budgeted and approved for Walt Disney World in 1971, that gorilla would have been smashing that crocodile's head into the water in the way depicted in the concept art, with the croc's tail flailing in the air.

A number of early documents list this scene as "In At Year #2", which would have meant that the scene was meant to be installed during the refurbishment which is being photographed here, and the existence of photographs of this pit from WED in 1972/73 does suggest that somebody was looking at this area seriously. It's possible that the rapid construction of Pirates of the Caribbean, Tom Sawyer Island, and numerous shade structures and extended queues around The Magic Kingdom absorbed the Jungle Cruise's "phase two" figure budget. Any current Imagineers looking to enhance but not detract from the Jungle Cruise would do well to look at Marc's art for the attraction as there are a number of unused and forgotten ideas that came very close to realization.

Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland did get this scene, but the gorilla mereley threatens to bean the crocodile, which is much less funny because that's the whole joke of the scene. In 2005, the crocodile figure was relocated to elsewhere in the ride and the gorilla now reaches for some bananas on a floating box, which is just stupid, if you ask me.

This angle on the Nile River scene approaching the veldt reveals interesting facets of the design of the ride; I especially like the way the giraffe's heads originally appeared to poke up above the rocks on the approach. Those rocks, by the way, are hollow and at some point were meant to feature a family of baboons:

See how the rocks are similarly shaped? These primates did make the cut during the Disneyland Jungle's 1976 refurbishment which added a number of scenes from the new Florida show, as well as at Tokyo Disneyland. Again, why these figures never materialized in Florida is a mystery. They never appeared on any figure diagrams.

This lovely view of the Veldt shows the original horizon-line effect; it is not for nothing that the Jungle Cruise is situated at the lowest elevation of any attraction in the Magic Kingdom. The lower elevation allows the attraction to sit in a sort of cater; the hills around it blocking out unwanted visual intrusions from both inside and outside the park as Magic Kingdom was built without a Disneyland-style "berm". The lowered vantage point of the boats and the raised hill of the veldt allowed a variety of vehicles, including parade floats, to pass behind this scene unobserved.

In 1988 the "back wall" was filled with plants; the construction of the Grand Floridian meant that the outside world was finally visible on the veldt.

The Trapped Safari, before the entire party got whitewashed and the scene was filled with campground clutter.

I don't think anybody here will be surprised to learn that the hippos have no bellies. This is the deepest part of the river, by the way.

On to the Native Village. Note the pleasant use of grassy banks here and in the Hippo Pool. Still present but not prominent today are those tikis poking up out of the foliage, but wait - aren't they familiar? Yes, that's right, these are the diminutive counterparts to our "TALKING LOGS", and it seems we've finally come across the native culture that produced those carvings outside the queue!

I've already talked about how Adventureland alternates between structures intended to be understood as "colonial" and those meant to be "native"; we are meant to understand those six totems outside the boathouse as having predated the construction of the outpost itself, a leftover sign of local culture. In this way the contrast between these two items would make the defining dynamic of the Jungle Cruise immediately evident on the approach - European culture's encounter and friction with natives - an encounter the colonists are doomed to lose, by the way, which we know from both history and the ride itself. Gorillas overrun the camp, the colonists are chased up a tree, attacked by villagers, and ultimately there are the Cambodian Ruins, the ultimate reminder of the transience of all conquerors of the jungle. Nature is the only winner; all others fall back.

Davis' original art and some early promotional literature tell us that the Native Village not only originally was supposed to have skulls on sticks, but that they were on fire. Weird.

Bet you can't guess what we'll find in the "Floating Croc Area".

Of course these figures are just a minor visual accent to one of WED's most gorgeous and haunting tableaus ever: the magnificent crumbling ruin of the Khmer empire. The small dome shaped devices surrounding the crocs create bubbles in the water and are used extensively in the Hippo Pool as well; you're supposed to imagine dozens more crocodiles underwater.

Look at how beautifully painted this is; the WED model shop really was amazing.

Since we're looking at an animation mechanism here it's worth pointing out that the Jungle Cruise figures aren't really "animatronics" so much as what is called "animation". They're run pneumatically and the illusion of life is more or less achieved entirely through actions which translate to a solenoid valve being open or closed. For example, on the veldt the value opens and closes quickly to cause ears and tails to flick. This crocodile is either rising or falling based on whether or not his mechanism is receiving compressed air.

This is the first Squirting Elephant; the caged intake valve next to him draws in water to feed Elephant Falls, Inspiration Falls and the Load Area waterfall.

This is the other elephant, but don't look at him; look past him, to the left. See that raised concrete platform at the water line along the shore? That's the location of the final never-installed scene along the river, and our final puzzle to ponder.

Now this one is even more mysterious. In some ways its' easy to figure out why the Gorilla-Bashes-a-Crocodile or the baboons never showed up: money and time became scarce, projects rolled along and the scenes work fine without them. This scene is something else, though, there's some elusive other reason why it isn't there in the ride today.

This is it. It's a parrot on a stump being leered at by crocodiles.

Again, on most early diagrams this scene is labeled "In At Year #2". It never appeared in Florida, but it did appear in Disneyland in 1976, now significantly revised by Davis. Now the crocodiles poked their heads out of the water, the parrot has become a hornbill, and the stump has become a branch over the water. Here it is along with a Pana-Vue slide of the same scene.

But why did Davis revise the scene at all? His concepts for the Gorilla vs. Croc scene and Baboon Family were faithfully created to match the concept art. It can also be pointed out that he added water buffalo to the Florida Giant python scene when it was exported to Disneyland in 1976:

Of course there's no evidence that buffalo weren't planned for Florida at one point as well; or maybe Davis was simply trying to find a new use for some old animals as water buffalo had appeared alongside the jungle river back in the late 50s. Or maybe it was to mirror his new scene at the start of the ride; in 1976 the Jungle Cruise began with predators surrounding a docile bird on a branch and ended with a predator on a branch surrounded by docile buffalo.

Actually, Davis redesigned the bird-on-a-stump gag because it had already been used. This is where things get really weird: the scene was built, but not at the Jungle Cruise. It was and still is alongside the Walt Disney World Railroad. Here's a picture I found on flickr of that scene from the 70s:

As you can see the setting has been transposed from a jungle to a swamp and been mildly restaged; still, I think this reads faster and is much funnier than the bird-on-branch incarnation from Disneyland. But what's the deal with that creature on the stump? Why, it's a frog. A frog that had recently been removed from the Jungle Cruise. Remember that picture of the WED staff lurking around the site of some former frogs above?

Davis was the show designer for the Florida Rivers of America, too, and while the river was down in 1973 to allow the installation of Tom Sawyer Island, a number of Davis gags and scenes were incorporated there and along the backside of the railroad track. To be clear: this work was happening at the exact same time as the Jungle Cruise refurbishment we've been looking at.

But seriously, why? It seems like a madly strange thing to do. Those crocodiles were made just for the scene and a few eventually made their way into Disneyland's jungle, too. Why relocate it at all and then, once you've done that, why use a figure you've just removed from the ride you relocated it from? Time and money is only the easy answer, there may yet be something else to it. I hope one day to be able to report that I know why.

The Jungle Cruise has always been about mysteries and enchantment, and I believe the Florida version of the show is a genuine classic, the best thing of its' type for emotional flow, for beauty, and artistic excellence. But the jungle does not yield her secrets easily and is all too often overlooked for her more obvious elements: silly jokes and limited believability. We need not have everything be "realistic" for it to be good; Animal Kingdom, the nearest obvious successor of the Jungle Cruise, could learn a thing or two from Davis' beautiful but patently fake primeval wilderness. I feel like I learn more every time I ride it.

And now, two smiling native boys will help you from your boat, and please watch your step.

Snapshot: Marines Capture Coke Corner

2011-07-09T15:34:00.012-04:00

Only a few days late after a nice long rest here at Passport to Dreams World HQ and we've got a story to share with you about the fourth of July! .... About the fireworks, to be precise.

Now, fireworks have always been a part of Disney theme parks, for better or for worse. Of course way back at the beginning they had very little resemblance to the cloying three-hankie schoolroom malarkey that passes for nighttime entertainment today. These displays were about fireworks, not soundtracks, and Disney did them better than anyone else.

In 1975 and 1976, Disney was hitting the "Patriotism" angle especially strongly. It's true that today few things seem as inherently "American" as Walt Disney World but the early 70s featured such promotions as "I Am An American Week" celebrating the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln back before they were complied into a single holiday (don't blame Disney for the ludicrous name; Florida governor Ruben Askew made it an official Florida event in 1973). But 1975 - 1976 were especially star spangled at Walt Disney World; the Bicentennial promotion was underway. The freaky / awesome America on Parade rolled through the park twice daily. You could see the Hall of Presidents for free - a 90 cent value (that's almost four dollars today, by the way)! There was even a special floral display on the Hub.

And yes, in case you've been wondering for your entire life why the Electrical Water Pageant ends with "Grand Old Flag", it's because of the Bicentennial.

So it makes sense that Disney would come up with a heck of the fireworks show for July 4, 1975 and July 4, 1976. The summer 1975 issue of Walt Disney World Vacationland provides details in an article entitled "Red, White and Blue Spectacular":

"In August 1973, the Entertainment Division began preparing for the 1975 season of shows. In keeping with the Bicentennial celebrations which will begin this summer, the fireworks will feature red, white and blue exclusively."

"Realizing that the tremendous demand for red, white and blue fireworks during 1975-76 will far outreach the supply in the United States, Disney experts set out to find other sources from around the world. A partnership of fireworks manufacturers from eight countries was established, under Disney direction, to help meet the coming need. Included are pyrotechnics experts from Japan, Free China, France, Brazil, Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Mainland China."

"In the past, the visual effects of fireworks have generally been a potpurri of color. But as Disney's imaginative teams envisioned the pariotic shows, they had some very specific designs and effects in mind . Armed with artist's rendering which illustrated these various designs, they traveled around the world searching out experts in such countries as Japan and Mainland China. These drawings introduced a new approach to an ancient art and soon became a kind of universal language where no other could be understood."

Or, to put it another way, Disney spared no expense to make these fireworks as elaborate as possible. But that, of course, is the public side of the story, written by Walt Disney World's publicity department. Enter... Spotlight Magazine.

Established in 1975, Spotlight Magazine was the sarcastic equivalent of Eyes and Ears, written by front line cast members instead of the PR department. In a December 1976 blurb in Eyes and Ears, they described themselves as such:

"What are we looking for? Humorous stories, short jokes, cartoons, serious short stories, humorous photographs, quality photographs (black and white only) you wish published, poems, jokes, limericks, jokes, satirical views of company related items, jokes and more jokes! In fact, we can use almost anything you can think up."

Whereas Eyes and Ears is the safe and publicly acceptable version of events, Spotlight Magazine throbs with the wild and bitter imagination that any front line cast member, past or present, will recognize as their own. Several include articles by Randy Bright.

Captioned still from "The Apple Dumpling Gang", Spotlight 1975

But there's something else to it, too. What began life as inside comedy has become, over time, obscure comedy. Spotlight Magazine has become the ultimate inside joke, a blend of comedy and history of the Vacation Kingdom that is something like Disney Nerd Nirvana.

And so, now that the requisite background information is out of the way, I present for your delight, an article from the Winter 1976 issue of Spotlight Magazine written by Rich Whitt.

BIGGEST "SKY SPECTACULAR" EVER PLANNED SOON

Plans were announced last week for the fireworks show on July 4, 1976. Being the Bicentennial birthday, our Entertainment Division promised the biggest and best show ever attempted. Dell Shilling, spokesman for Entertainment Division and part-time choral director, told SPOTLIGHT that... "We are putting together a show right now that is so big, even Howard Cosell's mouth couldn't hold it." In our exclusive interview, we learned the proposed schedule of events:

9:55 pm - Following the conclusion of "America on Parade", hard hats which have already been distributed to guests should be put on and protective eyeglasses and clothing adjusted.

9:59 pm - All employees should be under cover and all air traffic cleared from the area.

10:00 pm - Fireworks begin from four different locations around the Magic Kingdom.

10:02 pm - Overture begins, played by the New York Symphony Orchestra and sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, live from a barge anchored in the Seven Seas Lagoon.

10:05 pm - Fifty hot air balloons representing our fifty states arise from locations around Theme Park and start to twinkle red, white and blue.

10:09 pm - Two giant American flags burst into flame from sites atop the Contemporary Resort and Space Mountain.

10:11 pm - 25,000 singers and dancers parade down Main Street singing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" while the Mormon Choir takes up singing it.

10:12 pm - Grand Finale Begins

10:12.30 pm - On musical cue, the 59th Air Force Squadron will begin aerial bombardment of Sea World.

10:13 pm - Battleship "USS New Jersey" anchored off Treasure Island will open fire on the Chinese Junk and the Ports-O-Call.

10:14 pm - Tribe of authentic Seminole Indians will attack Fort Wilderness and burn Pioneer Hall

10:15 pm - False ending.

10:15.30 pm - As music builds, the following will happen simultaneously:
a. Fireworks sites launch ground-to-air missiles.
b. Torpedoes and launched from Friendship I at "USS New Jersey"
c. Wave machine begins to operate.
d. Battalion of Marines land on Magic Kingdom dock, fight their way up Main Street meeting heavy opposition in Town Square

10:24 pm - On musical cue:
a. Sea World launches counter-attacked aided by forces from the Miami Beach and Daytona resort areas.
b. The 59th Air Force falls in flames.
c. The "USS New Jersey" explodes.
d. Marines capture Coke Corner
e. Wave machine destroys Polynesian Resort
f. First stage of Castle Rocket ignites, putting it in orbit

10:30 pm - All systems shut down, The End.

Happy Fourth of July!!!

Buena Vista Obscura:
Marines Capture Coke Corner
The World Cruise
Captain Cook's Hideaway (plus followup)
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part One
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Two
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Three
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Four
The Golf Resort

History and Esoterica:
Snapshot: Mysteries of the Second Floor
Snapshot: Olde World Antiques
Snapshot: The Great Southern Craft Company

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This post is part of the Disney Blog Carnival. Head over there to see more great Disney-related posts and articles.

Special Thanks to Matt Feige for the Spotlight Magazine blurb from Eyes and Ears.

Fireworks of the Universe

2011-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00

You know, I love vintage Walt Disney World ad publicity. It's nearly always well written, terse, and evocative. The Lake Buena Vista Club isn't just a golf clubhouse, it "features 14-ft. vaulted ceilings with exposed beams, rough-sawn cedar planks, plush carpeting and wide-view windows overlooking the fairway." Really, who wouldn't want to go there after a description like that? And the Polynesian luau isn't just dancing, it features "the delightful Samoan slap-dance, [and the] romantic Hawaiian Wedding Song."

The delightful Samoan slap-dance. Try saying that to somebody out of the blue. Spectacularly strange language.

But sometimes they just hit it clear out of the park and into a low-hanging orbit, such as the cover story for this January 1975 edition of Walt Disney World News:

Take that, Arthur C. Clarke! We got there 26 years early!

Amongst a front page featuring such curiosities as "World Swings into P.G.A. Winter Activities" and "Hall of Presidents Adds No. 37" is a pretty picture of Space Mountain (with topiaries!) and the subject of our article today. We all can agree that Space Mountain is a pretty big deal, right? I mean, Magic Kingdom would not be Magic Kingdom without it. It's been rebuilt in every Disney "castle park" around the globe. But you just don't get it, man. Space Mountain isn't just a big deal - it's going to CHANGE THE WORLD. The article is so full of astonishing hyperbole and bizarre turns of phrase that I have no idea what to say about it besides..... it may be the apex of all Walt Disney World promotional material.

"THE FUTURE BEGINS TODAY IN ALL-NEW TOMORROWLAND

As the rest of the world steps nimbly into 1975 with the hopes of better times in a better year - Walt Disney World steps boldly beyond the limits of time and space into the 21st century!

At 2:00 pm, Wednesday, January 15, the Grand Opening Ceremonies of Space Mountain, the monolithic white "mountain" towering over Tomorrowland, will mark the beginning of a new era in space adventure! Visiting dignitaries (including U.S. astronauts), the musical pageantry of over a thousand band members, plus a spectacular display of daytime fireworks will celebrate the end of the "armchair astronaut."

For in Space Mountain, presented by RCA, you, without any previous aeronautical acquaintance, can experience the incredible adventure of outer space!

You'll board the eight passenger space capsule, buckle your seat belt and be whisked away into the most enthralling, free-falling flight through brilliant stars, whirling spheres and unearthly forces ever imagineered!

Disney imagineered, of course (see related story, p. 8).

After a spinning re-entry into earth's atmosphere, you'll disembark and tour the technological wonders of life in the twenty-first century in the RCA "Home of Future Living."

Then, be off to visit the second exciting addition to Tomorrowland - the G. E. Carousel of Progress. A unique unveiling of the American Family's advancement from the wood-burning stove of the 1890's to the micro-wave wonders of the 1970's, each of four eras is portrayed by audio-animatronic actors as the audience rotates around them, carousel-style.

This unique theater is similar to the original "Carousel of Progress" which entertained more than 45 million guests at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair and later joined Disneyland in 1967.

And, for another high-speed adventure, board the air-bound gantry elevators to the launching pad of Tomorrowland's centerpiece, Star Jets. Here, you'll pilot your own space ship up, down, and around the atmosphere of your very own mother ship.

Adding still another futuristic look to Tomorrowland will be the People-Mover, scheduled for operation later this year. An elevated transportation system, which winds its way around the entire complex, the People-Mover will be comprised of 30 "trains" with five cars each. Operating under a covered guide way 14 feet above the Tomorrowland mall area, the People-Mover will transport over 3,500 guests an hour.

The most highly appreciated aspect of the People-Mover, however, is that it operates via a magnetic field of force without moving parts and, consequently, free of any pollution whatsoever.

Space Mountain, Carousel of Progress, Star-Jets, People-Mover. All part of an all-new Tomorrowland which will allow you, our guests, to touch tomorrow today - at Walt Disney World."

Wow. Where to begin. That's a heck of a way to begin an article, isn't it? All this time you knew that your method of entering the new year was inadequate compared to Walt Disney World's ability to bend time and space. And let's not forget that we take for granted that back in 1975 humankind forever vanquished the age of the "armchair astronaut." Somebody behind the typewriter had a previously unforeseen gift for the Amazing Ongoing Alliteration. And of course it's always amusing to see a description of the plastic red re-entry tunnel as "spinning", which popped up both in Disneyland and Walt Disney World promotional materials and which seems as inappropriate as ever. Really, spinning? Did that red plastic ever spin?

It's amusing and fun to see the term "imagineered" half explained and not capitalized as it would be today. It was not yet a marketing term!

And I personally am very enthusiastic about calling the cavernous Tomorrowland pedestrian space the "Tomorrowland Mall Area." Thank you, anonymous Walt Disney World ad-pub writer of two generations ago!

Let's not overlook the brilliant use of boldface!

The hilarity continues in the article mentioned on page eight, "The Mountain That Imagineering Built", although with less concentrated interest and lunacy. I'll not transcribe it here, but I'll have you know that it features the phrase "Fireworks of the Universe", which is either Byronian opium-induced poetic verse, of just another example of early Walt Disney World's astonishing fever dreams of promotional prose.

I only wish we had nonsense like this today.

Palate Cleanser

2011-04-15T05:00:00.001-04:00

My goodness, it's been a long time, hasn't it? It has... in the meantime I've gone to Disneyland and come back with a head full of ideas and not much desire to write them. A lot of stuff has happened to Disney and to the rest of the world too, and not all of it has been great.

What we need is a palate cleanser, hopefully to kick my butt back into gear and to give us all a little relief from drudgery. And since this is Passport to Dreams Old & New, that likely means... seventies stuff. Bright, beautiful, early Walt Disney World goodness to keep us mindful of our priorities.

Shall we?

This early Walt Disney World couple, taken for a 1976 merchandise catalog, may be showing off their spiffy "Collegiate" tees but they're also standing in a spot where taking this photo is today impossible. In the background where the white rail and benches are was the original proposed location for the Tomorrowland Railroad Station; it's also the original exit to the Space Mountain attraction. Today, a massive half round salmon colored arcade blocks this fantastic view.

Wow, look at the line for the Peoplemover!! All those people are going to be happy to have spent their E ticket (yes, it was an E ticket in 1975) on what is arguably still one of the greatest experiences at Walt Disney World. Who remembers the little dioramas in the tiny hexagonal boxes on your way up and down the speedramps (visible in the background here)? Tomorrowland was so awesome.

Look how clean the track is. Tomorrowland hasn't looked this good in years.

Hopping across the Seven Seas Lagoon, we come across this group, also modeling Walt Disney World "Ready To Wear" tees at the Polynesian Village:

Besides Bob-A-Round boats and the Asian Resort expansion pad, let's take time to apprechiate the rich wood grained sides of the Polynesian longhouses long before they were painted cartoonish yellow and the lovely effect of the decorative wood tucked into the peak of that roof before it was alternating shades of yellow, orange and white. The roofs of each longhouse were intentionally rusted to an orange patina instead of being painted that way.

Here's a Rarity I've been looking for for some time: this is the sign for the short lived Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village tobacconist, which as you can see did not lack for seventies "groove". All of the original Shopping Village signs were brilliantly executed craftwork pieces; the sign for "Von Otto's Antiques" was emblazoned on an antique coffee grinder and anybody who stared in fascination at the sign for "Lite Bite" will likely never forget it. This one can't quite compare but it lasted less than two years, so what it lacks in interest it makes up in obscurity!

The following pictures were taken to celebrate the second anniversary of the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village in Eyes and Ears of Walt Disney World, and although they focus on goofy-looking Cast Members, the photos, like most, reveal interesting details at the margins that the photographer did not intend.

It's fun to see the proper scale of this sign which featured an actual spout! It's also fun to see the rather uninspired costumes worn by cast outside of the "Vacation Kingdom"... that blazer with the Lake Buena Vista emblem looks pretty dorky today. The caption for this one is too cheerfully lame not to reprint:

"Modern as well as 'vintage' spirits are the specialty of the Vintage Cellar. Jo Tisdale and Jerry Robinson compare their job with the Haunted Mansion... both deal with the spirit world!"

Well... not everyone got to wear the Mansion green and white, so we'll go easy on them.

This rather assertive mugshot is chiefly interesting for capturing, even if in passing, the interior of Shoe Time. The ladies pictured therein are Jeannie Clarke and Kaye Frampton.

...and we'll go out with this page from the merchandise catalog we've been skirting this whole time. I don' know if these kids are actually in a room at the Contemporary or on a set somewhere, but I suspect that this will bring a smile to even the most hardened heart:

Rubber Spider Revue

2011-03-05T18:00:00.002-05:00

You know it wasn't all that long ago that you could walk into the Haunted Mansion, hop in a doombuggy, ride up through the library and past the self-playing piano and see this:

Boo.

HBG2 at the excellent Long-Forgotten blog has recently written on the Haunted Mansion's debt to popular culture Halloween traditions, or the lack thereof, and locates these spiders in a tradition of iconic Halloween images - like sheet ghosts, orange and black treat bags, etc.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that, at the time when the Haunted Mansion fangroup was still being organized on the internet, a time I was absolutely a part of, everybody hated this scene. It was dark, spare, unimaginative, and cheap, and - worse of all - put square into the middle of a ride known for lavish sets and effects. I took that picture in 2002 and it was for my old GrimGhosts.Com Haunted Mansion website, by the way, so I speak from experience here!

Well... I'm not so sure about all that. I've posited in the past that the Grand Staircase scene was a bold if failed attempt to create something basically impossible to represent, that it was Claude Coats at his most representative and basic, that the concept was interesting if the execution was not, etc. By and large these opinions have not infiltrated the fan community to any extent and most people will agree that the endless staircase / spooky eyes scene that exists in that spot in the Haunted Mansion now is a far better use of that space than what was basically a flat black wall, some string and a few rubber spiders on wires.

Or, to put put it simple: rubber spiders, nobody loved you.

But here's the thing, those guys may have just been stupid rubber spiders painted day-glo colors and jerked around in webs, but those rubber spiders deserve your respect, darn it. And I'm going to prove it. You may not agree with me in the end, but at least you'll be fully equipped to understand where that scene came from and make up your own mind about something that was, after all, despite its obvious faults, part of our Magic Kingdom heritage.

Now, I've searched high and low to find the origins of those rubber spiders. Ken Sundberg offers in his super comprehensive look at Snow White's Scary Adventures that the 1955 version of that attraction may have included one or more rubber arachnids in the original Ken Andersen dungeon sequence, but photographic evidence is not forthcoming and I have a better idea anyway. Although Mansionologists like myself tend to associate these rubber spiders with Claude Coats and his ideas about negative space in themed design, Marc Davis is actually the one to blame.

This is a segment from a beautiful Davis piece from 1963, drawn for his top-to-bottom re-imagining of the Jungle Cruise's "sunken city":

And the actual scene from a mid-60s Pana-Vue Slide:

You'll notice that although Davis' concept features Ganesha, the Hindu Remover of Obstacles, the final scene actually depicts Hanuman, the ape-headed disciple of Rama. Ganesha got moved to appear just before Davis' new Indian Elephant Bathing Pool scene and the alligators which previously appeared where those elephants now play were moved to this new scene. This whole little stretch of the river has been subject to dozens of iterations which may be tracked on Daveland's Jungle Cruise page more or less chronologically, but the point is that once Hanuman shows up in his rebuilt shrine, the giant spider makes his debut in Disney history. Marc Davis spearheaded all these changes.

Let's take a close look at that Jungle Cruise spider because it's the best look you'll ever get at her.

I say that this spider must date from 1963 for a variety of reasons. The first is that it's a custom mold and an excellent one at that; we're used to seeing the default "orange spider" around these days but painted differently it can look like a pretty creepy beastie. Even had there been rubber spiders in the 1955 Snow White ride, they likely would have been off the shelf spiders. By the mid 60s WED had a very robust model shop and had the time and money to make a serious and unique rubber spider, which is what they did. It's impossible to prove but to my eye it looks like the work of Adolfo Procopio, who was WED's resident wildlife expert for almost 40 years.

Now HBG2, resident Mansionologist at Long-Forgotten Haunted Mansion, tells me that this spider and its twin which lurked in the loading area of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion for almost 35 years, were basically props, ie, not animated in any way. But from the Disneyland Haunted Mansion to the Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion it's only a leap of about two years, so follow me now and together we'll go on a...

THE HAUNTED MANSION!

We'll begin our Safari at the point we began this article, in the Haunted Mansion. It's fairly common knowledge these days that the Florida Haunted Mansion expanded on the Disneyland load area concept to make the "Grand Staircase" it's own scene (or maybe not: as we used to joke, the "Grand Staircase" was neither grand nor the staircase [it is and has always been a ramp]). For a few weeks in the test and adjust phase, the scene consisted of three webs: two with the familiar rubber spiders, and one with a skeleton caught in it. The skeleton was shortly removed but the vacant web stayed for almost 35 years.

Both of these spiders got upgraded to what Disney calls "animated figures" for the 1971 show, via a wire attached to a solenoid valve which would click open and closed, causing the spider to wiggle slightly. The resulting clicking sound was familiar enough to anybody ever got stuck in this part of the ride.

Here's the spiders. This first image I stole from Imagineering Disney because it's a different angle than the first and shows the spider clearly. The second I got off Disney Fans and was taken by Al Huffman in the mid 90's, showing the second of the two spiders and webs.

(I feel like I'm making a GrimGhosts.Com page again...)

Two things about these spiders. First, they looked okay under black-light, but their webs were pretty terrible. Just look at that first spider, whose web was very impressively sized, but just filled with broken strings, spit, and debris. Goodness knows how old that iteration of his web was - twenty years? Thirty years? Scroll up and look at that 60s Pana-Vue slide and you can't tell me that these webs weren't in awful shape. I think this accounts for the poor reputation of the scene: it just looked cheap.

The second issue is that the webs weren't painted so much as sprayed with the Mansion webbing effect, giving the scene a dusty, ethereal quality. Because the web was right near a wall and very large, it was lit up a bit too much, casting light on the wall and ruining the "boundless void" effect. Had the scene been suitably black, had the webs been well maintained and commonly replaced, and painted properly, this particular part of the Haunted Mansion may have needed nothing more than some new set dressing to update it.

Well. Okay, maybe not.

THE JUNGLE CRUISE!

Let's hop across the park and visit an attraction Marc Davis was heavily involved in c. 1969-1970: the expanded Walt Disney World Jungle Cruise. For this incarnation, Davis took his 1963 "sunken city" concept to new heights with an entire indoor sunken temple. The pivot point of the scene is a shrine to Hanuman, covered with gems and treasure and guarded by swaying cobras. This is pure gold Marc Davis intrigue, but he repeated the spiders too, to the left and right of the scene:

Also noteworthy: unlike the Disneyland original, these spiders also moved, in the same manner as the Haunted Mansion arachnids discussed above.

Both of these spiders actually look fantastic under show lighting conditions, with careful painting, properly built webs, and excellent staging. That first spider, which is to the right of the shrine, is rarely seen due to appearing extra-dim on daytime cruises but if you ride the Jungle Cruise at night and the skipper turns off all the lights on her boat as you head through the temple, you'll see and appreciate the proper appearance of this simple gag.

I've never much liked the second spider because she looks a little too flopsy and rubbery, but expand the image and you'll be able to clearly see the wire tied 'round her midsection leading behind the pillar to the solenoid that makes her wiggle. Classic Imagineering, people!

I think it's important to note that Davis still felt this simple tableau - I mean, is there anything simplier than sticking a rubber spider in a fake web? - merited inclusion in a ride which dramatically and sometimes totally reworked the basic stuff of the Disneyland original, and despite his gag having been already recycled twice in other attractions.

Twice? Actually... make that three times.

SNOW WHITE'S ADVENTURES!

Moving further eastward, we come across the 1971 Snow White's Adventures, probably the nearest WED ever got to designing a true, traditional spookhouse dark ride. A variety of people worked on these rides, including the "1955" crew for Fantasyland, amongst them Ken Andersen and Claude Coats, plus some later-generation Imagineers who had a hand in refurbishing the 1955 originals in the 1960s: Yale Gracey and Rolly Crump.

Hey, Yale, what'cha doing there?

See? The Rubber Spider conspiracy grows by the moment.

I'll stop here and quote Ken Sundberg's Snow White Adventures page now. He's talking about the 1955 original version of the attraction at Disneyland, referencing scene where the shadow of the Witch crosses your path through an arch. In that arch was a spider web, and a picture of the scene may be found in issue #13 of The E Ticket.

"Following immediately after the Dungeons scene, the vehicle faced a huge spider web in a dark archway. The silhouetted Shadow of the Wicked Witch emerged behind the web and moved across the wall. [...] In the late 1970's the foreground of the Shadow of the Wicked Witch scene was changed glowing in fire-orange, with a spider possibly flicking across the web as the vehicle passed the archway. The movement of the Witch's shadow was also changed; it didn't move across the wall anymore, but rocked up and down to the right, as if the Witch was dipping the apple in a cauldron."

Whoever it was who decided to add this little vingette to the Walt Disney World version of the ride, however, was undoubtedly doing so in the spirit of both the original and the generally increased interest in rubber spiders at WED in the late 60s:

Mike Lee took this picture of part of the original dungeon scene in the early 90s, shortly before the ride was removed. The skeleton would flap its jaw at you and warn you to "Go Back!" You'll notice that this spider's web is painted right on the wall behind it... because this spider was the only one to actually move. That's right, it would slowly lower towards the skeleton on a track. I remembered this vividly from my early visits to Walt Disney World and after the removal of this scene - this corner is where the witch can now be seen poisoning the apple - I couldn't remember which ride it was from and swore that the Haunted Mansion spiders used to move towards you on a track.

We lost this spider, probably the most impressive of them all, in 1994.

In 2007, both of the Haunted Mansion's spiders went away, leaving the two in the Jungle Cruise the only spiders left holding down the fort. The Magic Kingdom's 1971 rubber spider population has been decimated by 60%.

Over at Disneyland, the spider in their Haunted Mansion load area bowed out in 2003 and has not been seen since. In 2005, as part of a larger refurbishment effort, the 60s WED spider was removed from the Jungle Cruise. Some new spiders, in more realistic but less fun webs, appeared deeper in the Sunken City sequence. But these spiders look off-the-shelf and don't match the subject of our article here, the 60s version.

Overseas, Tokyo Disneyland's Haunted Mansion carries on the tradition of the giant rubber spiders, and I'm sure their spiders and webs looks very good, not just because they're Tokyo Disneyland but because they each have to be removed and replaced once a year for their Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare overlay. And in an ironic twist of fate, the same year that the original WED spider was removed from the Disneyland Jungle Cruise, in Hong Kong Disneyland the "Jungle River Cruise" ride opened, the saddest and most anemic of all the Jungle Cruises. But it features an astonishing number of these fake spiders... I counted at least six in one ride video and there's probably more. So overseas at least, rubber spiders continue to haunt the darkest corners of Disney rides.

It's sort of hard to feel bad for the fate of these singularly unconvincing rubber arachnids. I've made the best possible case for them here but let's not forget: It's a rubber spider. In a fake web. Some of you have probably made more impressive rubber spider displays in your Halloween decorations than all of WED could muster in the early 70s.

But the real fascination isn't what it is, it's how easy it was to find it. All of Imagineering and WED-era design especially has maddening consistencies, consistences which made the experience of going to The Magic Kingdom or Disneyland truly singular. Beyond the obvious scope and scale of the ambition, it had to do with the excellence of the staging, the care of the painting and sculpting, and yes, sometimes, the constant recycling of materials. Submarine Voyage's tropical fish obtained a new coat of paint and became salmon jumping in and out of the water on the Mine Train Trough Nature's Wonderland. The "Old Man in the Bayou" scene of Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean begets The Magic Kingdom's Beacon Joe, who makes return appearances at Tokyo and Disneyland Paris. Beacon Joe's face is a Blaine Gibson sculpture who appears elsewhere in Pirates of the Caribbean, along with several appearances in the Haunted Mansion and so on.. and on and on. These are the sort of fun games the true hardcore students of WED design can play.

So now I've clued you into a secret. Have fun playing the game and remember: it all started with a rubber spider.

Written by Us!

2011-02-13T20:43:00.004-05:00

Last year, I was approached by Chad Emerson, whose book "Project Future" had recently been published, to write for an compendium of Walt Disney World essays to celebrate the resort's 40th anniversary. Naturally I accepted and am pleased to announce that the book is actually available, for reals, in print, to hold and to cherish!

For those of you looking to complete your (tentative) FoxxFur library, this is my first published material.

The lineup of authors contributing the twenty-eight essays is pretty impressive. On one hand you have fanpress authors like me, George Taylor, Michael Crawford, Sam Gennaway and Jeff Pepper, but there's also contributions by much larger Disney personalities like Lou Mongello and Kevin Yee. It's also safe to assume that this is your only option for reading essays by myself and Mike Lee printed together with an introduction by Jim Hill. The world moves in mysterious ways.

As for my own essays, I've included a revised (and hopefully improved) version of my urban legend mystery story Goodnight George, first published over at 2719 Hyperion. I've also written a totally new account of the Walt Disney World Village with improved coverage of the Empress Lilly and an all-around effort to be more concise and accessible. That the Village article is still somewhat incomplete means either I need to find a new obsession or maybe I just ran out of space.

Anyway the whole thing is now available online at Amazon.Com and you can also get it for your virtual reader Kindle thingie instantly. Or, you can visit the website of Ayefour Publishing for more details!

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I have not received monetary compensation for my contributions to this book and am publishing this article strictly as a voluntary announcement for readers of my blog.)

Buena Vista Obscura: The World Cruise

2011-02-05T04:00:00.002-05:00

"What is the World Cruise?"

I asked that about two years ago. It would prove to be a fateful question, because answers were not exactly available. I can tell you now what it was with absolute certainty, but at the time the World Cruise was a total mystery and as always... the actual core of the mystery isn't as interesting - or as instructive - as all the other factors working into and through it.

So, for now, with your permission, we are going to defer that question a bit in the service of working towards it from a historical context, because simply telling what the World Cruise was is only half the battle - knowing why it was is the real story, and what took me so long to piece together. And as it always seems with these things, we can't help but to go all the way back to the start - the late 60s, when Disney's publicity and planning machines were moving in lock-step to bring Walt Disney World into being.

I would be very surprised if the experienced Walt Disney World researcher has never come across this image, as it's one of a clutch of late sixties publicity images - the monorail zipping through the Contemporary, Liberty Square, the castle itself - that more or less put over the resort concept to the Florida government and the general public. This particular incarnation is a post card, much like ones sold at the Preview Center and even into the resort's first few years. So in this way we can see that the roots of the World Cruise go back even deeper than may be suspected, all the way back to before there was a preview center or a Walt Disney World, to speak of.

From "A Complete Edition About Walt Disney World", 1969, page 10:

"The principal means of travel from the parking center and main entrance to and from the theme park and hotels will be aboard the Walt Disney World-Alweg Monorail trains. Current plans call for the building of six five-car trains, some to stop at every hotel on the way around the circuit, while others carry passengers non-stop directly to the 'Magic Kingdom.'

Double-deck busses and other land conveyances will back the monorail at peak hours, in the job of moving large number of visitors to the theme park.

On the water, there will be a pair of double-deck side-wheelers to cross the lagoon from the entrance area. They'll be driven by steam and patterned after river boats of a hundred years ago. A steam-driven, open-deck excursion boat is also in the planning for Phase One, and steam will be the motive power for half a dozen launches or water taxis for use in the various activities on the lake and lagoon."

And then later:

"The resort hotels will be showcases in themselves, presenting entertainment consistent with the individual theme of each.

In addition to its theme-slanted activities, plans are for each hotel to present nightly entertainment spectaculars to appeal to every taste, and both family and adult audiences. Top name popular, folk and rock groups will perform. A Dixieland cruise originating from one of the hotels will feature a southern fried chicken dinner and a show."

What ended up happening, more or less, is that all of these different concepts presented in the 1969 text ended up being integrated into the routines of two boats, which were built in drydock on property - the Ports-O-Call and the Southern Seas. These hundred foot long "Osceola-class" (Disney just invented that term, don't worry) steamboats were driven by a central "Gallows A-Frame Walking Beam" engine and roughly modeled on similar famous riverboats like the Mary Powell and Francis Skiddy. They were driven exclusively by side-wheel paddlewheels and authentic in every regard, including temperamental steam engines.

Quoting a "Captain Jeff" speaking on the boats at Walt Disney World: A History in Postcards:

"The Osceola class steamships "Ports O'Call" and "Southern Seas" were steam driven by a replica of an 1858 Gallows A-Frame steam engine. They were oil fired boilers running at 350 lbs of pressure. The steam engine only ran on 15-20 pounds of steam pressure, most of the pressure was used by a steam turbine to generate electricity. It took 3 people to run the steamships; a pilot that steered, an engineer that operated the steam engine and controlled the forward and reverse speeds and a deck hand whose duties were to cast off and secure the vessel at each dock. Each steamship was 100 feet, 5/8 inch long and 30 feet wide, drawing 3.5 feet of water, weighing in at 100 tons and could take on board 250 guests."

Assembling one of the live steam engines in drydock, 1969

One of the most intriguing aspects of the earliest years of Walt Disney World is the sheer abundance of varieties of modes of transit, including some varieties in an intentionally outmoded style. Live steam engines riding rails or rivers or lakes fought for attention with absurd 1970's Bob-a-Round boats (with stereo music!!!) and a converted Chinese junk docked at the Polynesian. Seven Seas Lagoon may have been ringed with futuristic monorails and modern conviences, but in those earliest days old fashioned steam power ran paddlewheelers back and forth from the Magic Kingdom. There was originally but one single dock at the front of the park, extending outwards with symmetrical precision into Bay Lake in a T configuration. Here's a blurry close-up image taken from Time magazine, showing the park just weeks away from an October opening:

And another, depicting an opening year post card, again from the superlative Walt Disney World: A History in Postcards:

An October 1971 issue of Walt Disney World News includes these opening year operating notes, including a hint that the Ports-O-Call was not ready for the October opening:

"OSCEOLA - Southern Seas: 9:30 am to 7:00 pm. (The Southern Seas will stop at the Magic Kingdom one half-hour prior to opening. Last stop will be made one hour after the Park closes.)"

During the resort's first few months of Operation, the Ports-O-Call and the Southern Seas served a dual purpose, because in those early years the Magic Kingdom was rarely open past 6:00 in the evening. Once those final Magic Kingdom guests had made their way back to the Main Entrance Complex or their Walt Disney World Resort, the two paddlewheelers would begin the Moonlight Cruise. What was the Moonlight Cruise? From an April 1972 Walt Disney World News:

"CRUISE ON A LUXURY YACHT OR STEAMER... Moonlight Cruises on steampowered paddlewheelers leave from both resort-hotel marinas Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday evening. Departures: Polynesian 9 pm (Saturday 9:45 pm) and Contemporary 9:30 pm (Saturday 10:15 pm). One and a half hours of leisurely cruising, live entertainment, cocktails... Adults - $3, Children under 12 - $1."

And from a 1973 Walt Disney World Vacationland:

"Guests who wish to cruise the waters of Walt Disney World after dark will have a lark on authentic, paddlewheel steamboats which depart twice nightly from both resort hotel marinas and from the Fort Wilderness dock. The "Showboat" cruises last approximately 90 minutes and, while costumed hostesses serve refreshments, a Dixieland Band entertains passengers with Ragtime favorites."

Generally two to three costumed hostesses, attending from the Contemporary Hotel, would be on hand to mix and serve drinks. Besides live entertainment, both the Ports-O-Call and the Southern Seas were provided with background music. Former Watercraft Operator Greg Chin recalled to me via e-mail:

"One of the great memories I have of the Watercraft charters that we did on the "Kingdom Queen" ferryboat (now the "General Joe Potter"), and the "Ports-O-Call" steamship is having the ragtime soundtrack tape.

Some of the ragtime songs on the soundtrack tape were Scott Joplin's "Peacherine Rag", "Pineapple Rag", and of course, "The Easy Winners", which was made famous earlier, by the movie "The Sting" (1973). There's also the famous ragtime song called "Dusty", which is also part of the Magic Kingdom - Main Street USA background music. There were other songs, too.

(Photobucket user Icegator-fan)

I remember how sometimes we would play the ragtime soundtrack tape for our own listening pleasure, while we were washing, cleaning and prepping the "Ports-O-Call" and the "Kingdom Queen". Ragtime music seemed to fit the "Ports-O-Call" and the "Southern Seas" steamships real good.

The tape cartridges were specially made to fit the tapedeck cabinets, in order to play them, over the ships' P.A. system. The looping 8-track tapes played at 1-1/2 times the speed of a normal 8-track tape that you would have at home. But these were show-quality 8-track tapedecks, and that was their playing standard. "

It was these demands and dual schedules of the Seven Seas Lagoon steamships that would soon bring The World Cruise into existence in 1972.

The problem is that 1971 and early 1972 saw some unexpected infrastructure stresses on the fledgling resort, and Disney's noble plans to have "...land conveyances [back] the monorail at peak hours, in the job of moving large number of visitors to the theme park" eventually proved somewhat unrealistic. In David Koenig's Realityland, Bob Gurr recounts having to engineer trams that could easily ascend the hills under the famous Water Bridge without overheating, and six more monorails were quickly ordered. The entire transit system was overtaxed. It's hard to imagine the sense of growing panic over concerns about the number of guests visiting the new resort, but these transportation concerns apparently even led to Mike Fink Keelboats being pressed into service on the Seven Seas Lagoon during Preview days:

(Taken from one boat looking at another. From Flickr user UFG8R)

In 1972, two new Ferryboats arrived at the Seven Seas Lagoon to alleviate the traffic concerns, the creatively named Magic Kingdom 1 and Magic Kingdom 2. Modeled on New York's Staten Island ferries, these two flat-bottomed, 120 foot long boats ran on diesel engines, not finicky and difficult to maintain steam engines, and had propellers on each end, allowing the boats to travel north and south laterally - without having to turn around - instead of side-docking at the Magic Kingdom's T dock like the Osceola steam boats.

A steamboat and ferryboat pass.

A second dock was built to accommodate the new ferries, and with a 600 passenger capacity per boat departing every five minutes, the leisurely steam boats were free of their peoplemoving obligations.

A 1975 view showing the steamboat dock and ferryboat dock.

And so this is where our story really begins. In the summer of 1972, Walt Disney World premiered two new attractions:

From a GAF guide to the Magic Kingdom, helpfully directing new riders:

A July 1972 Walt Disney World News fills in the details:

"World Cruise - Our Latest Attraction... See all that Walt Disney World is...and will be...an entirely NEW way, with a paddlewheel steamboat World Cruise around the Vacation Kingdom!

Osceola-class sidewheelers make 50-minute cruises daily around both the Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake, giving guests an unprecendented opportunity to view all of Walt Disney World from the water.

Along the way, guides explain future expansion programs planned for the Vacation Kingdom, including construction of new Walt Disney World hotels and other attractions along the lakefront. Guests can also learn how Walt Disney World was created and how thousands of tons of earth were moved to form the completely man-made 200-acre Seven Seas Lagoon!

Cruises depart at noon, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5pm, from the Magic Kingdom dock, directly in front of the Main Street railroad station. 90 cents or "E" coupon at boarding gate."

Both the Ports-O-Call and the Southern Seas had been planned as charter cruiseships and so were equipped with snack bars and facilities. Available were cold sandwiches, Frito-Lay chips, and a basic soda fountain. Additionally, taped spiels describing the sights around Walt Disney World probably replaced the steamboat's arriving and departing narration at this time, even if some World Cruise pilots have told me they were not exactly always reliable about turning it on! Also, the issue of how often the spiels were updated is questionable - for how long after the projects had been abandoned, for example, did World Cruise guests hear about the Asian and Venetian Resorts? Or did the taped narration stick to only certain "official" events around the lagoon? Greg Chin relates:

"All of the large Disney Watercraft vessels had tapedeck cabinets in the "Trunk Rooms" where the electronic equipment was, aboard the ships. The tape cartridges resembled an 8-track tape cartridge... these Disney "Show Soundtracks", or "Spiel-Tracks" tape cartridges were usually gray on one side of the casing, and the other side was transparent polycarbonate plastic, so we could see the tape looping around inside.

All the Ferryboats, Cruise ships, Monorails, and even the Frontierland Riverboats have these Tapedeck cabinets aboard. At the beginning of the trip, or cruise, the Pilot will press a button on the P.A. box, in the Pilothouse. The spiel will start. The tape itself is equipped with a series of high-pitch signals on the tape, as it reaches certain positions in the "spiel". The tape and spiel will stop at those points. As the Pilot feels it's the right time, they will press the button again, and the spiel advances, and so on.

The ferryboat Pilots would press the spiel button on the black P.A. box on the port side of the Pilothouse, and the spiel would start. "Welcome aboard the Walt Disney World ferryboat, we're heading for the Magic Kingdom, across the Seven Seas Lagoon" and so on.

I don't remember all of the "World Cruise" spiel, but it was the same sort of thing. For instance, as we passed the Polynesian Village Resort, I would press the spiel button, and the spiel would say something about what the guests aboard would see. Back then we didn't have the Grand Floridian beach resort, and we were pre-occupied by guests in small rental boats (Aqua Larks) streaking by us, (hell-bent on suicidal runs), in front of my ship."

This is the pattern that the World Cruise followed for the first two years, but in April 1974 with the opening of the brand new Treasure Island attraction, Disney saw a new way to use their World Cruise attraction. From a 1974 promotional flier:

"EXPLORE TREASURE ISLAND! Sail the Seven Seas to Treasure Island... a remote tropical paradise inhabited by colorful tropical flowers, plants and birds of the South Seas. Treasure Island... where Ben Gunn's buried treasure lies amidst the memories of Long John Silver, Cap'n Flint and the Black Dog! Now... there are two exciting ways to visit the Island!

STEAMBOAT VOYAGES... a visit to Treasure Island and the Walt Disney World Cruise, the story of the Vacation Kingdom past, present and future departs from the World Cruise dock at the entrance to the Magic Kingdom daily. Adults $2.50 Children (3-11) $1.25. Last cruise departs at 4:00.

TREASURE ISLAND EXCURSIONS... direct sailings to and from Treasure Island only. Departs Magic Kingdom entrance daily. Adults $1.50 Children (3-11) $.75. Last launch departs at 4:30 pm.

Tickets are on sale at the World Cruise dock at the Magic Kingdom entrance. Island closes at 5:30 pm"

Climbing aboard the Ports-O-Call or the Southern Seas, we surrender our tickets and receive our "World Cruise Passport to Treasure Island":

Inside, information about the boat and the voyage, including some atmospheric nonsense about safe passage, mysterious waterways, and landfalls. Note the "entry stamps" on the first page, all dated 1973 despite the fact that Treasure Island would not open until the following year. Also, a beautiful fold-out map of the entire complex:

Each World Cruise left the Magic Kingdom on the hour, Treasure Island on the half hour, and lasted an aggregate total of one hour, meaning thirty minutes out and thirty minutes back. For $2.50, about the equivalent monetary value of two trips on the Haunted Mansion and one spin through Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, the World Cruise to Treasure Island was a good value, providing a full half day of relaxation and entertainment at one's own pace.

For the duration of the rest of the seventies, the World Cruise and Moonlight Cruise provided hours of restful relaxation to Walt Disney World guests. These two attractions, besides providing some recreation and night-life to a still limited Vacation Kingdom, can best be understood as manifestations of Walt Disney World's early emphasis on relaxing activities to do outside of the Magic Kingdom, things such as River Country and the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village. These are the sorts of activities Disney had in mind when they termed the Seven Seas Lagoon/Bay Lake complex the "Vacation Kingdom of the World", a vacation that would include a theme park but also water recreation, horseback riding, continental dining and tennis.

Some great vintage Walt Disney World ad-pub from 1976:

"MOONIGHT CRUISE CAN BE ROMANTIC ON A PADDLEWHEELER

Paddle-wheel steamboats were as essential to early Florida settlers as the Prairie Schooners were to western pioneers. Throughout the mid 1800's, the Sunshine State's lakes, rivers, canals and bays echoed the rhythms of chugging steam engines.

Now, that most romantic means of travel has been given new life at Walt Disney World with two authentic side-wheeler replicas, the Southern Seas and the Ports O' Call. Mood music, cocktails, and twinkling nighttime scenery beckons guests aboard the steamboats for Moonlight Cruises around the Waters of the World, Bay Lake, and the Seven Seas Lagoon."

Ironically, by the time that article was being published in Walt Disney World News the information in it could hardly have said to be accurate. In 1975, the Southern Seas had suffered serious water damage to her hull and had been out of service for about a year, placed in the Walt Disney World drydock behind the Magic Kingdom's Frontierland. In 1977, the original 1969 Southern Seas was destroyed and a new ship was built - the Southern Seas II, although it's numerical status was never indicated anywhere on the boat herself - this one one hundred twenty feet instead of just one hundred. Designed by a naval architect by the name of Ben Ostlund, this new boat included many elements of the original Southern Seas, including the Gallows Walking Beam engine, but unlike on the original boat, the engine was just decorative - this new boat ran on diesel, just like the ferryboats. Each of the two propulsion sidepaddles could operate independently and in different directions, which allowed for greater maneuverability in the water and also made it the only other boat on Disney property which could spin in circles like the Plaza Swan Boats. Due to the increased capacity and longer hull, the Southern Seas II was termed a "Seminole" class steamship.

And of course, in 1977 all efforts to theme Treasure Island to the classic Robert Louis Stevenson book were scrapped, including elaborate recreations of Spyglass Hill and Ben Gunn's cave. The Island closed and re-opened as Discovery Island, with an emphasis firmly placed on tropical bird and wildlife displays. As such the daytime attraction became the "World Cruise to Discovery Island".

Despite this significant investment in time and money, by the time EPCOT Center opened in 1982, it becomes difficult to find references to the World Cruise in Walt Disney World promotional materials. Greg Chin explains:

"As soon as EPCOT opened in 1982, suddenly the resort guest-population that was centralized at the WDW Magic Kingdom area resorts, was decentralized and suddenly shifted down towards EPCOT area... all of a sudden, the long-running "World Cruise to Discovery Island" and "Moonlight Cruise" was rendered unnecessary. Attendance dropped off sharply to 50% for both cruises, right after EPCOT opened in October of 1982....

[Editor's note: given the popularity and adult appeal of the World Showcase area of EPCOT, the first area of any Disney theme park to sell alcohol, this makes sense.]

...plus increased competition from Church Street Station in Orlando. Being in Watercraft during the late 1970's and mid-1980's, I would see plenty of daily skywriting over WDW, advertising for "ROSIE", which was a pain in the butt for Disney Co. Pleasure Island was the Michael Eisner/Disney nighttime entertainment plan in 1987, to get the guest-business back, that Church Street Station - Rosie O'Grady's Good Time Emporium, Phineas Fogg's Balloon Works, and Apple Annie's Courtyard (all in Downtown Orlando) was siphoning off Disney property."

And so the World Cruise and Moonlight Cruise simply faded away. Discovery Island became part of a ticket package with River Country, and this is the way most people my age or slightly older remember it. The Southern Seas II, then a recent investment, became a boat exclusively for charter cruises in 1984. These corporate programs were a huge source of income for Disney, who could charge $250 an hour to rent the boat out to meetings and conventions - not including food, drink, and staffing, of course. In this way, it could be said that the Moonlight Cruises continued to exist for some time.

So the World Cruise goes off to a quiet and unglamorous end. But what about the boats, you say?

The 1969 Ports-O-Call had by then fallen to the same water leakage in the hull of the boat which led to the destruction of the original Southern Seas. In 1984 the boat was hauled out of the water. Problems with the steam engine system compounded the problems, making reparations costly and unlikely to return any significant investment. Despite Watercraft Cast Members' efforts to have the boat purchased by the Smithsonian Institution as a display on steam power, Disney destroyed the boat with a bulldozer.

A proposed "Orlando-class" steamboat, again designed by Ben Ostlund with a length of 140 feet and featuring a dance floor on the first deck and observation level on the roof, was never built, although blueprints of it may be seen on the back wall of the Boatwright's restaurant at the Port Orleans Riverside resort. The days of live steam on the Seven Seas Lagoon were over, the blue canopied Motor Launches which still service the resorts today having long ago been converted to diesel engines.

The Ports-O-Call being dismantled in drydock. Photo by Greg Chin, 1984.

In 1996, the Southern Seas II, now overdue for a refurbishment, was put in drydock. With Watercraft Operations no longer using the boats on a daily basis and Convention Booking unwilling to finance the task, the steamboat was without a home. It was eventually destroyed in 1997.

Stories like this rarely have a happy ending in Walt Disney World history. Times have changed. In 1996 when the last of these boats was decommissioned, the entire property was in the midst of her 25th anniversary promotion, Cinderella Castle was painted bright pink, a new era in Disney fine dining was coming of age high above the Contemporary Resort in the California Grill, New Tomorrowland was still new, and the Pirates of the Caribbean had not yet been made politically correct nor into action-movie advertisements. EPCOT Center was in the midst of a massive identity crisis, The Disney-MGM Studios was the new park, and Animal Kingdom was still on the horizon.

It was, in short, the last moment of the last gasp of breath of old Walt Disney World before everything began to radically change, and the destruction of these boats, once such an emblematic image for Walt Disney World - not just as a marketing image on a postcard, but of an entire way of thinking about a vacation - is a moment where we can see the final connections to the reality of the first ten years, of the Vacation Kingdom of the World, snuffing out.

The Southern Seas II in port at Discovery Island, 1980.
From Walt Disney World: The First Ten Years

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Further Reading:
The Walt Disney World Watercraft Home Page
WDW: A History in Postcards: Sailing the Seven Seas (Lagoon)
Widen Your World: Treasure Island/Discovery Island
Imaginerding: Discovery Island, the Early Years
Progress City, USA: The Great Discovery Island Logo Contest

Special Thanks:
Michael Crawford, Mike Lee, Scott Otis, and Watercraft Captains Greg, Jeff and Robert.

Buena Vista Obscura:
The World Cruise
Captain Cook's Hideaway (plus followup)
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part One
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Two
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Three
The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part Four
The Golf Resort

History and Esoterica:
Snapshot: Mysteries of the Second Floor
Snapshot: Olde World Antiques
Snapshot: The Great Southern Craft Company