Off Site: Walt Disney World Vs. Their Own Customers

 This article written for MiceChat in April and June 2023 explores all of the ways Disney has tried (and mostly failed) to control their paying customers, from 1955 and leading to the present day. It also includes a story I've never shared publicly that greatly influenced my decision to leave Disney in the late 00s.

Remote Control: Disney World vs Their Own Customers

Off Site: The Haunted Mansion and Inventing Halloween

In the interest of maintaining a complete index here, I'm cross-linking to the articles I'e done for MiceChat while writing my second book. I did this piece in 2021 - for what was supposed to be Halloween - celebrating that great American tradition and the Haunted Mansion's place in it:

https://www.micechat.com/308943-disneys-haunted-mansion-and-the-invention-of-halloween-as-you-know-it/

Disney Annual Reports 1965 - 1975

As a Disney parks fan, it can be easy to feel like I missed all the good stuff. Adventure Thru Inner Space! Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland! America Sings! Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour!

This, of course, is nonsense. Simply having experienced every one of the original EPCOT Center attractions puts me in fairly elect company, and as always, such things are always a matter of timing, dumb luck, and opportunity.

One of those timing opportunities that actually landed me in the plus category was moving to Florida when I did, which gave me access to opportunities to look at and acquire paper goods, magazines, and primary source documents at a time when being into Walt Disney World history was a pretty niche pursuit.  The prices that certain things I paid a few dollars for can fetch online can be pretty eye-watering, and while the COVID pandemic has seemingly slowed down some of the worst excesses, I feel lucky to have a library of several thousand paper items that are absolutely the bedrock of the research for site. I feel lucky to have them and I'm worried about younger Disney history buffs who probably won't have access to these things in the future. Until such a time that a fan-organized library can be created that's open to the public, too much of Disney history is dependent on being able to buy your way in through pricey editions or secondhand collectibles. I don't like that.

So I'm going to do something about it. I've determined to start dumping some of these less-accessible treasures online in properly scanned versions. I'm not going to be a weenie about it and cover them in watermarks. I want these to be available to everyone. My only request is that if you are a historian or author and you use any of these please credit the "Passport Free Library" and this site in your citations. 

I'm going to start with the WDP Annual Reports, all scanned by me (some from copies at the Orlando Public Library, which is where this project began). These fascinating and colorful little books are where so many of my research efforts have begun, it seems right to launch this project with them.

Even if you don't care about financial statistics, you absolutely should download and enjoy these, as they're absolutely bursting with construction shots, concept art, descriptions of doomed plans, and general vintage Disney weirdness.

Download, share, and enjoy them at your leisure..!

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1965

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1966

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1967

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1968

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1969

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1970

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1971

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1972

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1973

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1974

Walt Disney Productions Annual Report 1975

More content coming as I can get things scanned...!

The Passport Free Library

Welcome!

This hub page on the blog Passport to Dreams Old & New is a collection of free primary source resources for Disney fans and historians looking to do some research into aspects of Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Walt Disney Productions. These are downloadable, searchable, and shareable.

If you are a historian or author and you use any of these please credit the "Passport Free Library" and this site in your citations. 

(Contents Coming Soon!)

Other Resources:

Disney Index Project

History of Disney Theme Parks in Documents

The Heart of Our Cities by Victor Gruen (Archive.Org)

Martin Smith's Videos

Harold's Lost World of Snow

"It will be going the same speed it always has, but it will seem faster." - John Hench, Disneyland Line, December 1977

In 2003, I took my first trip to Disneyland, and Disneyland is one of those places that rewires the way you think. Besides absolutely taking my head off and stuffing it back on in a new way thanks to their incredible Pirates of the Caribbean - still my favorite ride ever - I discovered one of the great loves of my life: the Matterhorn Bobsleds.

I've spent a long time thinking about the Matterhorn, and a long time riding it, and it's one of those rides where I find my ardor for the experience cannot be contained by a logically structured essay. I suspect many folks are the same way about certain things: they can't say why they like it so much, but they do. I probably have never loved a roller coaster more than I love the Matterhorn, which says a lot about my priorities.

For one, comfort isn't one of them. The Matterhorn was rough in 2003, and after installing new bobsleds apparently made out of pottery and saran wrap in 2012, it got rougher. Those 70s Arrow Development sleds didn't seem to sit as low to the track and had better shock absorption, but the 2012 bobsleds are like a gigantic speaker pushing vibrations right up into your posterior. I haven't really cared; I've kept riding the thing, my feet pushed into the nose of the car, my hands gripping the handle bars, body tense and ready to absorb the pain.

I do it not because the Matterhorn is a great rollercoaster, or even because it's a landmark roller coaster. The Matterhorn, along with the 1975 Space Mountain, shakes you like a rag doll, which modern coaster enthusiasts absolutely do not like. They prefer their terror to come from drops and g forces, not being rocked around like a dead cat in a barrel being sent over Niagara Falls. As I said, I don't much care for roller coasters. I love the Matterhorn not at all because it's a coaster, but because it's an amazing experience, and there's only one of them in the world.

It's hard to say how much I would have liked the 1959 Matterhorn, with its hollow interior. What can be said is that the decision to enclose a roller coaster inside of an artificial mountain is one of those Walt Disney ideas which has become so ubiquitous in our culture that it is almost impossible to imagine a world where it does not exist. I'm fairly certain Walt got the idea from the Rutschebanen at Tivoli, a sort of scenic railway that dashes in and out of a scenic alpine mountain (with a fake cow in a field on top!). But as usual at Disneyland, the scale of the effort and the decision to combine it with a world famous peak made all the difference. The Matterhorn turned the idea of a fiberglass mountain into a genre, and Space Mountain would make it into an institution.

There is also just something about the other-worldlyness of the Matterhorn that works in some impossible to articulate way. The way it rises up and hooks with the little shadow just under its peak added by Fred Joerger - the way it hangs there against the hazy California sky, seemingly always further away than it really is. You can walk all the way around it, something you cannot do with any other stateside Disney mountain. That fact, and its central location, transforms the Matterhorn into something that exists for the pleasure of everyone, even those who do not ride. This is landmark design for pleasure, and it's been repeated endlessly since - I'm certain that the size and dreamy unreality of the Matterhorn is the basis for the height and effect of Cinderella Castle in Florida, for instance.

And yet all of that is literally just on the surface, what was put there in 1959. What I really love is the 1978 version, which in my opinion is an absolute stone classic in how to perfectly structure a themed experience, and do it so simply it's almost subliminal.

Storytelling in three dimensions is hard, and even harder because it rarely needs to conform to dramatic beats. Instead it could be said that most successful rides need to introduce a dramatic situation directly involving riders, then build and riff on that situation in a variety of interesting ways. Riding bobsleds down a fake mountain is pretty interesting already, but the wrinkle of introducing a rampaging monster really pushes the Matterhorn over the top. The idea supposedly goes back to Walt Disney, but how easily it could have turned out wrong.

Lets begin on the approach to the Matterhorn from the Hub. As we draw near, there is a surprise: the trees part, and a huge waterfall comes into view. The waterfall instantly suggests that there is going to be more going on in the Matterhorn than we expect, yet the Matterhorn looks picturesque, inviting with its alpine trees and flowers. A mountain stream winds around the base of the mountain, which somehow looks like cold mountain water thanks to the contrasting landscape around it.

Yet thats not quite the whole story. The whole top of the mountain is open, effectively turning its upper echelons into a gigantic loudspeaker which bellows out the unearthly roars of its resident monster. Even less comforting is the whistling wind which can be heard everywhere around it. This is the introduction of the dramatic conflict of the ride; the Matterhorn looks peaceful, welcoming, and charming, but.....

For my money no other theme park deployment of this concept comes even close to the raw elemental energy of this juxtaposition - the Matterhorn looks welcoming and inviting while also warning you to stay away. In the 70s, WED did a lot of this sort of stuff, and perhaps the wolf howl that emenates from the Florida Haunted Mansion and the booming cannons which once heralded the facade of Pirates of the Caribbean are predecessors. But those were really just atmosphere, whereas the approach to the Matterhorn initiates the dramatic conflict which will inform your entire experience: what's gotten into the Matterhorn?

The 1978 Matterhorn operated on the principle of suspense, and so the dramatic thrust of the story (will I escape?) mapped perfectly onto the build and release inherent in all coasters. This was an experience where the physical sensations of being on a coaster really meant something. The slow approach, the cheerful yodeling music, the wait at the bottom of the mountain ready to be released into the pitch black interior all built up anticipation. Of course all rides create anticipation, but the cheerful gemutlicheit of the Alpine landscape had an edge to it thanks to those unearthly roars.

The fact that the ride was going to be scary was announced instantly by the lift hill's perpetual gloom. The long monster roars were interspersed with screaming sounds, supplied by a speaker. The suspense of the lift hill is briefly released once the bobsleds peak and slowly begin to head downhill, then replaced with another kind of suspense. One of the best Disney jump scares of all time - the glowing eyes in the dark - illuminate with a ferocious roar, and now the rest of the ride is a long downhill slide where you are never entirely sure where the Snowman will be next. I've been on the Matterhorn probably a hundred times and I still sometimes forget exactly where the second Harold is.

Harold is one of the best designed theme park monsters of all time. The original design is a perfect distillation of a monster; long white hair offsets his blue face and hands, defining a fierce looking body shape as a silhouette, instantly comprehensible as a threat. Long hair above the eyes de-emphasizes the forehead, making the creature seem less human. Two thirds of the face is an open mouth full of teeth, the white teeth highlighted against the dark scream of a face. The nose is tiny, almost invisible, and the eyes are asymmetrical, making the yeti seem fantastical, an appropriate resident of Fantasyland. Harold was literally reaching hands, a mouth full of teeth, glowing red eyes, and almost nothing else.

But the thing is, nothing else was needed. Under the best circumstances you could get maybe 5 seconds to look at him, and those key elements: mouth, red eyes, reaching hand read perfectly from a speeding bobsled. As Ken Andersen told the E Ticket in 1993:

"You didn't need a lot of animation because you were moving. You were moving so darn fast that what you did was supply the movement for the characters."

That was the brilliance of Harold: he hardly moved, but he looked and felt alive. The long downhill escape, as well as his sudden reappearance, caused riders to fill in with their imaginations far more than was really going on.  More than any mountain-dwelling monster who has suceeded him, Harold really felt like he was chasing you, popping through secret caves and dashing down rock wall faces in an effort to cut you off. The physical structure of the ride itself worked perfectly to put you off the wrong foot; was that roar coming from ahead of or behind me?

The Matterhorn was a long build of suspense, followed by a chase down to the bottom, the splash of the glacial pond the release of the tension. Compared to the Matterhorn, Big Thunder was one damn thing after another and Space Mountain was just weirdness, but the Matterhorn felt like real peril, and it was peril created with some light-up eyes and three figures that moved only just enough to create a sense of motion. It was, in its own way, brilliant.

I didn't really start to understand just how good the Matterhorn was until Expedition Everest opened at Animal Kingdom a few years later. I admit that the Matterhorn created in me false expectations of a suspenseful, "boo" kind of experience, which Everest really isn't. Beautifully mounted, the attraction doesn't introduce its dramatic conflict until over a minute into a three minute ride. It's nearly another minute until we see the shadow of the Yeti, who honestly seems more interested in tearing up railroad tracks than chasing riders, and there's a final confrontation mere seconds before the ride ends. But the real thing that I couldn't believe when I rode Everest in previews, the thing I walked off the ride saying, is that the multi-million dollar yeti was gone by so fast you could barely register that he moved at all. Fusty old Harold inside the Matterhorn gave just about as good of a show at a fraction of the cost, and his mountain had actual caverns inside it!

For my money, Disneyland's new Snowman figure has the same issue. He looks terrifically fierce, and he snarls and lunges at the cars, but the pure, streamlined, communicative power of that goofy 1978 figure has been lost. The new figure has a visible forehead, which makes him look a bit more human, and his mouth opens and closes, a detail often lost because you're by him way too fast. He seems almost realistic, and to me this makes the new Snowman less visually appealing, less like an appropriate resident of Fantasyland.

But really the biggest issue is that those reaching hands are gone. The new Snowman is grabbing the ice wall around him like he's climbing out of a cave, but that image of him reaching for the cars was really important. Look at the silhouettes; there's no comparison.

The new guy seems like less of a threat; when you pass him a second time, he's twisted around to the side as if he isn't even expecting you to come upon him. He's louder, and he looks meaner, but its harder to feel like he's really and truly out to get you.

The trouble is that the window of comprehension for understanding something you coast by in a bobsled can be measured in micro-seconds, and the new Snowman just doesn't cut it. Blaine Gibson had fully absorbed this fact of theme park life and was a master at sculpting figures just the correct side of impossible to read in a flash. Think of all the figures in Pirates of the Caribbean, sculpted in mid-smile or mid-scowl. Think of the Hitch-hiking Ghosts, with their hugely exaggerated extended thumbs.

Think of how much artistic skill it takes to correctly draw attention to something as small as a thumb.

Blaine sculpted Harold's scowling face in a permanent scream for a reason, and he gave him huge reaching hands for a reason, and grossly exaggerated their size so you couldn't miss them. That version of the Matterhorn's monster was fit for the job.

On a similar track, the same team in 2015 removed the ice crystal scene and replaced it with a new hoard of destroyed Matterhorn ride vehicles, like bobsleds and skyway buckets. The previous ice cavern scene was nothing amazing, but you could look over and see the crystals and hear the music and instantly understand that you were looking at some crystals. The new scene just looks like some random stuff, and you're past it before you can figure it out. Worse, nobody going into the Matterhorn fresh in 2020 (2021?) is going to understand what they're looking at, making it a weird in-joke that doesn't really look like anything. That's a shame, because most of the Matterhorn is spent looking at snowy rocks, and anything to make it feel a bit more like a real place was a help. Like the Snowman figure upgrade, it was a great idea on paper, but in practice is a misfire.

From This 2014 Video

But the change that really stings me is moving your initial encounter with the Snowman to the lift hill. This makes some sense, but those glowing eyes were truly a perfect jump scare, and set the tone for the rest of the downhill chase. The slow ascent up the mountain in the pitch darkness listening to the wind howling built up terrific suspense, increased by the fact that Disney pumped in occasional scream sound effects to this scene. Was it another rider on the coaster, or was it....?

Then, the lift hill crested, and the first few moments of the ride were gentle. You relaxed. Then Harold's eyes lit up in the darkness and scared the tar out of you. I screamed on my first ride. And then you spent the rest of the ride on edge, expecting Harold to come bounding out at you again at every turn. That was the moment the ride had been building towards since you first laid eyes on it with its beautiful flowers, glistening waterfall, and baleful whistling wind.

I'm sure new riders enjoy the Matterhorn plenty, and I'm not here to make some absurd claim like Imagineering "ruined the ride". It's still lots of fun. But the previous version changed the way I look at theme park rides because of how much it was able to do with so little. That 1978 refurbishment, when you get right down to it, was a lot of rock work, three figures that only barely moved, some sound effects, and light-up eyes on a stick. But they totally transformed the tone and feeling of the Matterhorn, and gave it unique shape and rhythm. And they did it without changing the track.

And that's what the Matterhorn became for me, a kind of yardstick I use to measure all other rides: did the designers get the absolute maximum out of what they chose to build? I find this useful because it de-emphasizes the tech and the design density that Disney and Universal tend to get caught up in and looks simply at effect. Does what they spent money on really work?

The Matterhorn brought Harold to life with the simplest means, and did so in a way that was straightforward, understandable without words or preshow videos, and easy to maintain. The new version is flashier, but in sacrifing that elemental sinplicity of what was done in 1978, it is in my opinion significantly less powerful.

Because that's something that maybe gets lost in discussing the Matterhorn; it is one of the great scary Disney rides. Harold was designed to startle jaded 70s teenagers - who may otherwise have brought their business to a place like Magic Mountain - and did so in a way that was not so intense you couldn't still bring a six year old on the ride. Harold has moved out now, and try as I may, I've never quite warmed up to the new guy. The Matterhorn I fell in love with at 18 is now another resident of Yesterland, and I miss it dearly. That hollow wind still blows in my heart.

--

While I have your attention!

I thought I'd take some time to answer a few questions I've been getting recently about this site and to explain what the future holds for it.

I should probably begin with some context: this site, and text-based blogs generally, are enjoying a fraction of their old readership.

Time was, I could spend 2 weeks writing and editing a post that would reach an audience of over 20,000 people. Today, my posts are averaging about 2,500 people and capping out at around 7,000 on the high end. And the fact is, I haven't met a single person under the age of 25 who is a self-professed retro theme park fan who learned about them reading sites like this. They've learned everything they know on YouTube. It's fair to say that the time of the informational blog seems to have passed. 

Which is why I wrote a book. That book is one reason I began posting shorter form pieces (like music loops) in 2015. The past few years have been weird for this blog, and this year has been a desert. This is because I've been seriously perusing getting the thing published since last November and the complexities of doing that have taken up all of the spare time I used to devote to writing blogs.

The good news is that the book is coming out this year; my next post will be its announcement! The bad news is that given the time commitment of writing blog posts vs the work that goes into writing a book, it makes more sense to write more books. I've already begun work on my second book, and now that I have a publisher, I hope to get it done in 2-3 years instead of 5 years this time.

This site has seen a spike in readership since the pandemic began, and its been wonderful seeing old readers and new coming back to enjoy my writing. I never wrote a word on this site for money or fame, and I have no intention of stopping writing. I actually have about four unfinished pieces right now that have been either delayed by work on my book or other issues. 

So basically: more content is coming! I thank everyone who has stuck it out with me or has just recently discovered my stuff. It is amazing to me what this little writing exercise has turned into, and I want to keep it going as long as possible.

So till next time: stay cool, my friends.

Haunted Mansion Video Treasures

To this author, perhaps the greatest boon to my life afforded by the modern internet is video streaming - the ability to watch nearly anything at any time for reasonable cost in decent quality. And although I remain an enthusiastic supporter of physical media, the internet has become a digital Aladdin's cave of delights for fans of the weird and obscure. Writing this during the Coronoavirus shutdown, I've recently gone for strolls around Disneyland and Disneyland Paris from the comfort of my home thanks to the modern wonder of streaming high-definition video. And this, in a lifetime where I remember leaving my computer on for an entire week attempting to download Sam Raimi's first horror film through a telephone line.

I picked up the habit of mass video accumulation early. Around 1995 I became obsessed with taping things off television, and I still have a box of around 50 VHS tapes from Disney Channel and other sources that I've never been able to part with. A few years later, I was involved with the Haunted Mansion fan community as it existed through mailing lists and Yahoo groups at the time, and one of our hobbies was trading tapes through the mail of various home video ride-throughs. Please remember that this was a time when RealVideo was just about the best online video streaming option, and you still had to pay for the wonders of QuickTime video. Creating and mailing video cassette tapes was the more convenient option!

Well, I held onto those videos for a long time. A few years back, my good friend Michael Crawford helped me get a few of my stranger video treasures transferred, but I still knew there were goodies yet to be discovered. Late last year, I bought a new old stock VCR. It took several weeks of experimenting, but I'm finally getting results I'm happy with from my capture setup. And so here now are a few of the better tidbits that obsolete technology has granted me an archive of!

First up is a video of extreme importance to me and of nearly no importance to anyone else - just how we like them on Passport to Dreams! Along with Discovery Channel's Fun House documentary, this is probably what kicked my Haunted Mansion fanaticism into overdrive and turned me into the theme park person that I am today. It's a short excerpt from a show called Walt Disney World Inside Out, which Disney Channel ran weekly through 1996 and 1997.

Hosted by J.D. Roth (from GamePro TV!) and Brianne Leary (from CHiPS!), it was essentially part of the promotional mission surrounding the resort's 25th anniversary. Certain highlight sections ran between Disney Channel programming as "Inside Out Spotlite" segments, and this was the most memorable.


For context, you must realize that as a child my ability to see anything from the interior of the Haunted Mansion was limited to a few photos in a souvenir hardcover book and the Day at the Magic Kingdom VHS tape. So seeing a program that not only gave me a good look inside a personal obsession, but went further and explained how certain effects were done, absolutely floored 11-year-old me. I don't think I had even considered at that point that the ride was made up of illusions with secrets behind them, so seeing J.D. Roth put his hand through that bust rewired my brain.

From a historical perspective, this is the only good look I've ever found at the remarkable film bin looping devices invented by Ub Iwerks for WED in 1954. He actually engineered these things as part of his assignment to create Cir-car-rama for Disneyland, allowing the film to circulate endlessly through a giant series of spools without ever getting out of synch with each other. These same looping projectors were also used in the Main Street Cinema, using prints purchased from the Blackhawk Films library. The Haunted Mansion's 16mm 1-minute bins are cool enough, but the 70mm 15 minute bin loops for the Hall of Presidents were things of beauty, 25 feet tall. I wish I had thought to take a few pictures of them before the show switched over to digital in 2008.

This segment is also just quality Disney programming, perfectly judged to increase your appreciation of just how complex these attractions are without revealing too many secrets. Walt Disney World Inside Out was a show wildly variable in quality - there's episodes where they do nothing but poke around The Disney Institute - but when it's good like this clip, it can be very memorable.

Moving swiftly on, let's take in some vintage ridethroughs! These sorts of videos used to be easier to find online before YouTube became the dominant source for streaming video it is, but the migration to that platforms meant that a lot of older material simply never made the leap. Who remembers going to Visions Fantastic and downloading Disneyland videos?

These three vintage ridethroughs are amongst the best that I know of, but they actually aren't mine! These were on one of the tapes I traded for in the early 00s, and recorded by Brian Follansbee. For their vintage they really are excellent, shot with a higher end camera than most consumers ever had access to by a rider who really knew where each little detail was.

First up, the Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion in glorious, low-fi murky regular vision! This is the category of video that is the toughest sell today, when we all have video camera on our phones that handle dark environments much better than this. But there's still value in this, and this is by far the clearest pre-2007 Mansion video I know of. Certain areas, like the first third of the ride, are near total losses but other areas like the Corridor of Doors are nearly exactly how they looked in real life.

It's also the best view I have of what the controversial "windblown" bride looked like in real life. Flash photos always made her look dopey, and as the years went on and more and more of her lighting and wind machines broke and were never replaced, she looked worse and worse. But when she was brand new she at least was impressive, and that is captured well here.


Some stray observations before we move on. First, the line. For the past fifteen years, Walt Disney World has been so busy and so plagued with the scourge known as Fastpass that it seems almost incomprehensible to look back at a time when except on the very busiest days you could walk on Haunted Mansion with a very modest wait. There were no interactive queues and other such nonsense things to get in your way; once you got through the turnstiles at the porte cohere, that little corner of the park with the family cemetery butting up against the front door was as serene as an actual graveyard.

Second, take note of the entrance area. This particular arrangement - with the front gate that had been put in the early 90s, plus the hearse and fountain which had replaced a large planter and tree in 1997 - ended up lasting a mere 2.5 years. In 2001, Disney put up the Fastpass building which clutters up the area today, added a covered-over fountain smack in the middle of the walkway, and took down the central gates with the dead wreaths on them which much better communicated the idea of "old, closed-off estate". The intersection of strollers, Fastpass building, former Keelboat dock, and gate in this area has been a logistical disaster for at least the quarter-century, and I really wish the park would tear the whole area out and rework it.

Let's take a moment to enjoy the "Aging Man" effect in its full original form here, and actually facing the proper direction! The 2007 digital morph, although certainly smoother, has never struck me as being as eerie or oeneric as the original effect here is, with simple fades between each stage in the deterioration. This is almost certainly a device built in 1969 for use in the Disneyland show, back when they were planning on a full 6 stage transformation for each of the portraits. It was crated up and shipped to Florida instead, and I wish I had thought to take a picture of it before it went digital in 2007.

As for the direction of the portrait, it's been wrong since then. The projector is aimed at the ceiling; it bounces off a mirror and onto the scrim, meaning it's reversed twice once you view it from the other side in the Foyer. Whoever composited the video flipped it to account for the scrim but didn't know about the mirror. That's another small touch I hope they fix when they upgrade the projection to HD. (Edit, Feb 2024: they did!)

Before real low-light video cameras became a thing, the most coveted form of ride video was night vision, in which your camcorder spit out a beam of infrared light. In retrospect, it's bizarre that home camcorders even had this option, given that it makes people look like weird glowing demons. However it was amazing for theme park nerds who wanted to take in every detail of their favorite rides, so let's take another spin through, this time, in phosphorescent green!


We begin with a decent look at the Load Area in its mostly original state; I believe the lights along the loading belt went blue in the early 90s and that the red and white wallpaper replaced an earlier pattern sometime around that time. In the 1997 refurb a couple of theatrical lights were dropped in through the ceiling around the corner, pointed down to illuminate the pinch point where the line becomes single file; just a few years later, wall sconces would be added to properly illuminate the floor space. At the same time, weird elevated urns on shelves would be installed to disguise speakers for the safety boarding announcements. Finally, in 2007, the "Sinister Eleven" portraits would migrate to the load area, the wallpaper would be replaced again, a "ledge" would be added to lower the apparent ceiling height, and a solid black wall separating the queue from the doom buggy track would be built.

Practically every old-school Florida Mansion fan was unusually fond of that table, chair and lamp on the other side of the buggies; it was a weird little tableau that suggested that perhaps an unseen ghost was doing a little late-night reading! All of those props are in the Attic now and although I'm not hardline enough to insist that their removal ruins the scene or anything, I do wish that WDI would add some stuff over in that corner because it did help the Mansion feel more like an actual house.

I'd also like to bring up the Corridor of Doors. Nearly the whole soundscape of the Mansion was re-mixed and re-jiggered in 2007, and largely I think they did a terrific job - although many of the changes are subtle, it's one reason I think the Florida Mansion feels very fresh and dynamic. And while many Mansion fans have bemoaned the loss of the original Graveyard vocal tracks, I think the removal of the original Corridor of Doors voices is just as big of a loss. Generally, the 07 sound mix veers heavily towards ominous rumbles and creepy whispers - the sort of thing that we recognize from horror films of this millennium. The 1969 Corridor of Doors tracks are definitely way closer to old fashioned haunted house album tracks if you sit down and listen to them individually, but they never played that way in person because you simply didn't have time to sit there and listen to each one. The new version of the scene is still creepy, but the original was way creepier.

So let's talk about the Attic scene. The pop-up guys up there always were a controversial feature of the ride, and I think at its heart the reason is because you had just come from the Ballroom, the spectacular visual highpoint of the ride, and around the corner was a skeleton dude bobbing up and down on a stick.

But, you know, they didn't have to suck. Were the figures properly hidden, and dropped down out of sight immediately, you wouldn't have to be stuck looking at a static head on a stick slowly being ratcheted out of sight. Making the situation even worse, in 1997 WDI decided to put glowing purple top hats on every one of them, meaning that even the ones properly hidden could be spotted thanks to their dumb glowing top hats.

Then there's the separate case of that first fellow on the right as you entered. I have no idea if he was simply malfunctioning for 8 years, but more often than not he looked the way you see in this video - way too far up, bouncing around in midair, looking stupid. When I was a little kid, this guy came out of an open trunk on the floor and scared the heck out of everyone. It still works that way in Tokyo Disneyland, the last place on earth to enjoy this simple effect. I have a suspicion that someone in Imagineering wanted the popups to be this way, to give "riders a hint" before they appeared.

But the thing is, the only positive thing you can say about a head on a stick that pops out to scare you is that it scared you; with the exception of rubber spiders bouncing around in webs earlier in the ride, it's the crudest thing in the Haunted Mansion. I miss these guys, but I don't miss the way you see them in this video, looking stupid and not properly hidden. If you're going to have a jump scare, you need to commit to having a jump scare, and I think without at least one or two in the attraction, the Haunted Mansion is missing something. The Attic is supposed to be the dark heart of the ride, the room you were never supposed to see, and on that count Connie doesn't cut it.

And, oh, hey, the graveyard of my teenage years! The Singing Busts were out of synch. Somehow, after the switch to "laserdisc technology" as our ghostly friend George put it to J.D. Roth, they were never quite able to synch them up properly. Also, the Old Man was REALLY loud, and the mummy didn't have a vocal track. Was that way until 2007, as best I can tell. Also, if you listen REALLY carefully, you can barely hear the "La-da" singer track by the Hearse, still lurking around in the late 90s. This was a graveyard vocal removed from Disneyland for some reason and some folks are obsessed with it.

Alright, let's hop a plane over to California for one last bit of Mansion-y goodness.


Again, this was a short-lived incarnation of the Mansion. A 1995 refurbishment introduced changes to the Seance Room and Attic, as well as the red wallpaper in the stretch room (which I've always preferred) and an upgraded sound system. Many of these changes were subsequently removed by further changes in 2005, meaning it's increasingly difficult to find good versions of this incarnation of the ride.

The "I Do" version of the Attic has always struck me as a pretty good middle ground between keeping the popups and decreasing the intensity of the scene. Interestingly, in this version of the scene the popups rose one at a time, from the back of the scene to the front. I'm fairly certain that the first guy in the hatbox right by the entrance was supposed to come up every time another one did, but he appears to be broken on this day. Sadly, this pattern did make it possible to go thru the whole scene and not see a single popup. I know because I accomplished this feat more than once in 2003. Videos from the early 90s do show the pops all rising at once, as they did at Magic Kingdom, so perhaps starting in the 90s Imagineering began exploring ways of lowering the intensity of the Attic.

The two other notable changes occur nearer the start of the ride. Imagineering has imported the "Leota tilty table" effect designed for Phantom Manor, which I've never liked all that much. It's fine in Phantom Manor because there isn't much else going on it that room, which I'm fairly sure has a smaller diameter circle around Leota anyhow. I think the "flying Leota" used at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom is a much better upgrade to the scene.

The other change is the reintroduction of some Ghost Host dialogue in the Corridor of Doors. Supposedly the attraction opened with this in 1969 and it was removed a few months later, perhaps as part of the same refurbishment which saw them move the bride and deal with cellar flooding. I've never liked these lines, and was sort of afraid they would introduce them to Magic Kingdom in 2007 as part of that refurbishment. However, I can see how they help keep the Ghost Host more of a participant in the attraction during Disneyland's shorter ride, because without them he gets you on the ride, commands you to listen, then leaves a minute later!

Also, I like and miss that "Dead End!" sign outside the Unload area.

When we talk about Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, especially on sites like these, it can be so fun to dig into the history and details of the places that we forget that they're constantly changing, in ways big and small. Time races by regardless, and now that the mere look of analog video is nostalgic, I hope these small documents of a time long since past are helpful or at least fun. Everyone stay healthy and let's hope for a return trip through the Mansion soon!

--

Looking for more spooky fun? Head on over to our Haunted Mansion Hub Page, or check out this index of articles on Walt Disney World History!

The Secret Recording Career of George Bruns

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

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

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

Early Life and Dixieland

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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

To The Tropics

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Retirement and Beyond

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

That Infernal Swiss Music

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

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

Pinnochio Street Music

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

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

Thanks to a snippet posted by the excellent website WaltsMusic, I'm confident in assigning a date to this one. The WaltsMusic segment, taken from Jack Wagner's collection, is the first seven tracks represented here, and is labeled "Village Haus Disneyland 1974". Since Disneyland didn't have a Village Haus in 1974, this has to be our date.

I'd give a lot to know if music played in the Skyway and Village Haus before 1974, but like a lot of early Disneyland and Magic Kingdom music, we'll just never know.

“Pinnochio Village Haus” 

Compiled by Jack Wagner 1974, Recorded by Mike Lee 1991 

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

[1] A Visit to Switzerland - Capitol ST-10264 1964
[2] Music of the German Alps - Capitol ST-1-211 1959

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

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

"Fantasyland West"

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

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

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

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

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

Bi Eus im Schwyzerland: A Mystery Inside An Enigma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] A Visit to Switzerland - Capitol ST-10264 1959
[2] Holiday in Switzerland - Elite Special PLPS 30150 1973
[3] A Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom - WDP 1972
[4] Accordion In Gold - Polydor 249 306 1970

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

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

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

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

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

Ready for more? Visit the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Music Hub.
Or, hop a monorail to the past and spend a full "day" at the Walt Disney World of the 1970s by downloading Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.

Conflict in Theme Parks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laff in the Dark, Early 1930s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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