Caribbean Plaza: The Sound of the Sun

(It's BGM catch-up month here at Passport to Dreams, with two shorter posts this month to get a record of the remaining fully identified original loops online!)

Caribbean Plaza had its signature attraction, Pirates of the Caribbean, ready in December 1973 but didn't really mostly come online until April 1974, when all of its shops and snack bar were operational. At some point in that few-month period, a new piece of BGM arrived.

And so from December 1973 until July 3, 2006, Caribbean Plaza echoed with steel drums. Although highly atmospheric, much of the steel drum music begins to sound the same after enough time, and for years it was thought that the same steel drum music had been playing in the Plaza since it opened.

Thankfully a few years ago Mike Lee came forward with a 1991 live recording of Caribbean Plaza, which he identified as the music he had heard playing in the Plaza when he was a child. Since many of the original 70s BGM pieces survived until the early 90s, this was entirely credible as the original Caribbean Plaza loop.

Interestingly, it turned out to be merely the first 9 of 12 tracks of a single vintage album, played entirely in album order. Given our educated guess back in 2013 that the original Main Street BGM was simply one album played entirely in album order, this definitely fit an established pattern.

Caribbean Plaza Area Music (1973 - 1993)Running time: approx. 30:00 

01. Sixty-Nine
02. Patsy
03. Coc-che-ohco
04. Erica
05. Landlord
06. Mamma, this is Ma's
07. Mambo Lake
08. Love in the Mist
09. Linstead Market 

All tracks are sourced from the 1967 album Trinidad: The Sound of the Sun by the Westland Steel Band. Thanks to Michael Sweeney for identifying the tracks.

The Westland Steel Band LP has cycled through various owners over the years, and currently can be legally streamed through YouTube. I've created a playlist of the full Caribbean Plaza loop:


20 years later, Disney was modernizing Magic Kingdom's sound system and many old Jack Wagner loops, stored and delivered on magnetic tape, were being phased out and replaced with new ones as the new, CD-based delivery systems came online. Down the street, Adventureland Veranda's languid tropical strings were replaced with upbeat drumming from an endless loop of a single CD released by Balafon Marimba Ensemble. When Caribbean Plaza got its CD player, WDI imported a track from the then-new Disneyland Paris.

Caribbean Plaza Area Music (1993 - 2006)Running time: approx. 60:00 

01. Fire Down Below [3]
02. Grass Skirt [3]
03. Trinidad Girl [4]
04. Mary Ann [3]
05. Spear Dance [3]
06. Grenadine Jump-Up [1]
07. Zulu Chant [3]
08. Badjan Mambo [1]
09. La Paloma [3]
10. Soca Batiste [Edited: 00:00 - ~05:39] [2]
11. Jungle [3]
12. Calypso Non-Stop [Edited: 00:00 - ~07:00] [2]
13. Native Mambo [3]
14. Beef Island Merengue [1]
15. Spur Dance [Edited] [3]

[1] Bomba!: Monitor Presents Music of the Caribbean by Various Artists (Monitor Records, MFS 355)
[2] Steel Band: Antigua & Trinidad by Various Artists (PlayaSound)
[3] Steel Band Music of the Caribbean by Various Artists (Legacy International)
[4] Steel Bands Carnival by Various Artists (PlayaSound)
Notes: Playlist based on 2009 live recording of El Pirata y el Perico by Horizons and compiled by wedroy1923 with assistance from eyore, Filmographik, and needmagic.

One of the goals of the area music conversion in the 90s was to get more music playing in more places of the park, and to get more consistency across the musical signatures of the various areas. As a result the new loop played in areas which previously did not have music, such as the snack stand complex across from Pirates of the Caribbean. This allowed the 1993 loop to survive the area's switch to Pirates of the Caribbean movie music in July 2006 and be recorded and documented in 2009.

Speaking of the Pirates franchise movie score BGM, the history of that version is an interesting story in of itself. While it overtook the steel drumming in 2006, it's gone through multiple versions and locations over the years.

While the hour-long length of the thing strongly suggests it was created for Magic Kingdom from the start, the movie score music was actually used at Disneyland in the attraction's foyer area, displacing the iconic Pirate's Overture for at least a few weeks before being removed. The movie score music actually stuck at Magic Kingdom, where it very soon began to feel at home amongst the sun-washed plaster walls. The original version of the loop was retired in 2007 when the score for the third film, At World's End, was made available, replacing several redundant cues and greatly improving the variety of the loop.

El Pirata Y El Perico was given a mild facelift in 2011 and re-christened "Tortuga Tavern", at which time the 1993 steel drum loop was removed and replaced with a new loop of nautical and ocean-going music. Interestingly, as of Summer 2018 this Tortuga Tavern music now appears to play in the main corridor of Caribbean Plaza, with the movie score being relegated to the extended queue outside of the attraction.

I'm sure kids born in the early 2000s will one day be nostalgic for the Jack Sparrow music, which did indeed lend a sleepy area of Magic Kingdom a certain gravitas. My nostalgic preference is for the sound of the steel drumming music, but there's honestly nothing inherently wrong with any of these choices; what should the 16th-century Caribbean "sound" like anyway?

Miss the original Pirates of the Caribbean? Take a listen to my restored soundtrack of the 70s version here.
Want more theme park music? Check out the Passport to Dreams Park Music Hub!

DEAR READERS: Starting in 2019, Passport to Dreams will be going off its monthly update routine, to focus on providing more of the long-form writing this site excels at as well as clear time for larger projects that need to get finished. If you'd like to get updated on when new posts arrive, please follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks for your support!

All the Lights of Main Street, U.S.A.

Disneyland Paris is full of things that make you wonder why every park doesn't have them: the hotel at the entrance, the tunnels under the castle, the peek into Pirates from the train, a watery Fantasyland. But it's also full of things that make you wonder why Disney has continued to try to emulate a concept already done to terrific effect; the case in point here is Main Street, which simply buries every other Main Street USA.

To walk through Main Street at Disneyland Paris is to see the pinnacle of the concept of Main Street; if you enjoy things like fussy little details and elaborate interior finishes, it's the Space Mountain of that. It's one of those cases where, even if you know it's going to be good, you can't possibly be prepared for just how good it is.

I loved Disneyland Paris, but Main Street rapidly became an obsession. Time when I could have been queuing up for a ride again, I simply stood in the shops and stared. There's places and times where detail on top of detail on top of detail gives you a junk shop; I call it the "frosting on top of frosting effect". But the level of detail on Main Street is organic, it's logical, and in most cases it's deployed exactly proportionally for the overall effect.

When it came time to document my ardor for this park entrance of park entrances, it seemed most logical to hone in on its remarkable light fixtures. Main Street at the other parks is already a master class for awesome light fixtures, but Paris manages to top all others simply through pure, staggering variety.

Magic Kingdom and Disneyland kept it fairly simple outside their parks, with straightforward city park-style globe fixtures and plain green fencing. Paris takes the reminiscent approach, but of course the effect of the whole area is anything but understated thanks to the Disneyland Hotel dominating the area. Magic Kingdom uses simple frosted globes to create a uniform look across its entrance area, whereas Paris is already introducing complexity to the same spot, with upward-facing and downward-facing lights here.

Of course it's fair to say that Main Street has already "begun" by the time you're approaching Disneyland Paris from the Village, whereas Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo all withhold that richer theming until you get inside their Main Street areas. Disneyland Paris rolls out the red carpet from the start with a staggering gauntlet of architecture and gardens, and the effect is unlike any other park entrance in the world.

Covered breezeways with turn of the 20th century wrought iron frills bring to mind Paris train stations and protect from the weather; the plain frosted globe lights continue here and indeed through the first leg of Main Street, as seen in an example from Town Square below. Until Magic Kingdom's Hub area was rebuilt and claimed by Fantasyland, all three of the original castle parks defined the areas in front of the entrance tunnels and the areas between Main Street and the castle as decompression spaces, where there could exist any theme or no theme. This is especially apparent at Disneyland, where each land encroaches on the Hub as if to reach out and offer a preview of what can be found inside. Paris keeps each land separate, requiring visitors to walk through green, empty spaces to reach the next area, almost like each is a self-contained theme park. But here we can see how, through the elaborate hotel entrance and amplified complexity of even minor features, Paris is fixing to top every other park.

Frosted globes on Main Street

Perhaps the biggest departure from the classic Main Street model in Paris are the covered Arcades that bypass the bulk of the land; whereas Disneyland and Magic Kingdom have somewhat themed bypasses, the Arcades are central to the appeal of the Paris Main Street. The effect of entering and seeing all of the dozens of lanterns with their singing gas flames all the way down the length of the arcade is one of the most impressive things in the whole park.

Real fire!

About halfway down the Discoveryland-side Arcade, the unified steel and glass look stops and we pass through a rustic barn-style area, originally intended to open up to a Farm Market behind Main Street. This area has its own unique light fixtures:

The Frontierland-side Liberty Arcade also sometimes takes time to rest and offer a visual break, as in these simple chandeliers outside the Restrooms. Notice that the green and bronze look brings to mind the Statue of Liberty without ever having to be overt about it:

It's hard to understate the effect these traffic and weather crowd relief valves have on the whole feeling of Main Street. If there ever was a spot in any Disney theme parks where it feels like great light fixtures are the whole show, it's in these Arcades.

Huge clusters of lights add a busy feeling to the Emporium. I wasn't super impressed by the DLP Emporium, but it does have a bright, "modern' feel that contrasts nicely with the burnished browns and golds elsewhere on Main Street.

One exception is this amazing stained glass dome above the Emporium cash wrap. Besides housing an impressively exuberant chandelier, the stained glass images represent American industry and ingenuity and this is one of the coolest details in any Disney park anywhere.

Across the street, the Boardwalk Candy Palace has light fixtures which drip with brightly colored pendants.

Besides bringing to mind hard candies, this design touch adds to the carnival atmosphere in this store.

Even the outside light fixtures are studded with hard candies. This is a great example of how choosing to isolate one specific design choice to one specific area can really have an impact. Remember the darkened interior of Magic Kingdom's House of Magic and what a cool contrast it was with the rest of Main Street?

Casey's Corner has their traditional Tiffany-esque lamps which bring to mind advertising of the turn of the 20th century.

The interior of the Market House Deli is cluttered, warm, and red, and these simple hanging lamps add to the cosy atmosphere.

Additional globe lights in the rear hallway to the Arcade.

Disney Clothiers is interesting, and has a refined, feminine elegance to it's various rooms.

The lights in the boy's clothing rooms have a subtle hint of blue in their frosted globes, hard to capture in this photograph:

The lights in the girl's rooms, of course, and tinted pink. Here's a very fine gas lamp-style fixture in the far back room:

Much of Paris' Main Street shies away from the sentimental sides of Victoriana, instead preferring to push towards the brass, barnstorming aspect, but Disney Clothiers has layers of detail that really bring the era to life.

Harrington's, up the street, is a monied and masculine counterpoint, bringing to mind a bank:

Harrington's has another over the top glass dome, although the effect of this one is less surprising and more stately. Everything about the layout and design of the store is based around this impressive centerpiece.

Nearby, Cable Car Bake Shop uses gas-style lights and stained glass to evoke a homey atmosphere:

It also features these incredible, strange tables topped with lights and then fans for good measure:

If we head over to the Liberty Arcade, the rotunda just off Center Street which includes the Statue of Liberty Diorama has a unique array of light fixtures which reinforce the Lady Liberty theme:

Stars and Federal eagles immediately create an American atmosphere without finger-pointing.

Liberty Torch sconces here are a bit more overt.

Statue of Liberty face details hidden in the overhead light fixture.

If we stop next door in the lobby of Walt's, we encounter unexpected Gothic Revival influences:

Dragons ands gryphons are design motifs tied in with the Victorian fixation on a sentimental conception of medieval times, a design language we can also see being used in the Haunted Mansion. In this case, the fantastic creatures bring to mind fairy tales, appropriate for a restaurant bearing the name Walt's.

Victorians didn't just cover their stuff with detail to be obtuse, all of this design work was meaningful to them. One of the strengths of the Paris Main Street is that it actually uses these submerged meanings to help create new ones in each interior space.

On the Hub, I think the most impressive interior on Main Street is Victoria's Restaurant, which serves things like pot roast and absolutely nails the feeling of sitting in a Victorian parlor. The level of detail in these rooms is staggering.

Main Street at Disneyland Paris is a definitive Main Street, the Main Street that makes subsequent attempts to do other Main Streets look like fool's errands. It's tough to top the level of care that went into this one.

But that's most of Disneyland Paris, isn't it? Throughout the park, even in places where it didn't really work, there's a real attempt to present the best version of everything. And when you start really drilling down to the level of, say, a lighting fixture, a door handle, or a wallpaper, that's where the extra effort begins to come out. The park really is the culmination of everything that was learned between 1955 and 1990, before Imagineering went hip and ironic in the 90s.

Feature Animation gets a lot of credit for pushing the boundaries in the 90s but Americans hate when ambition meets mixed success, and while Lion King is an international blockbuster, Disneyland Paris got off to a rocky start. In a fairer world, it would be remembered as a monumental achievement  instead of an expensive and problematic folly. The executive's backs were turned, and these design teams were reaching for heaven.

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.

Marc Davis and Pirate Gold

If you're looking for the ultimate journey through Pirates of the Caribbean - the history, the attractions, the films, all of it - check out my new book Scoundrels, Villains & Knaves. You'll never think of the classic ride the same way again.

I've spent a lot of time on this blog praising Marc Davis. I've lauded his character design and taste in designing an attraction which few enjoy, Country Bear Jamboree. I've tried to bring attention to the sensitivity of tone in his 1971 Jungle Cruise. I've praised the original conception of the Haunted Mansion Attic scene - the one that didn't work - as brilliant. So let's step back for a moment and take a look at one time Marc designed something that didn't really work.

Besides discussing the Haunted Mansion and rambling about music, maybe one of the key elements of this blog has been Pirates of the Caribbean. I've made the case for the excellence of this experience at Disneyland, and mounted an elaborate defense of the maligned Florida version of the attraction. I've even tried to make the case that Marc Davis truncated the Florida Pirates with some care - care not evident because Western River Expedition was never built.

In some ways this post is an outgrowth of "The Case For The Florida Pirates", an essay now over a half decade old. Rather than force everyone back to read some old writing overstuffed with adjectives, I'm going to cover some of that old ground here and begin by looking at the unique narrative of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in Florida.

The Florida Pirates: Narrative Structure

If you've read any of the official books on Pirates of the Caribbean, any official WDI-sourced literature, any of the blogs descending from these official sources, or even actually been trained at the attraction at Walt Disney World, you will have been told that Pirates of the Caribbean is a time travel story. Guests load boats in the present day, discover some dead pirates, drop down a waterfall, and travel back in time to see them sacking a town.

That is the official story. It's also, unfortunately, almost 100% bullshit.

Mind you, this actually is correct - at Disneyland, and also Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris. Paris probably gets the prize for being the most coherent of the lot - guests pass through a fort destroyed in a Pirate raid, blackened with gunpowder and stewn with skeletons. Once on the ride proper, the boats travel back in time and we see the raid which destroyed the fort - pirates scale the walls, fight soldiers, and blast open an aqueduct. Shortly, we discover that the chaos extends to the town nestled at the base of the fort, until the reverie ends as the boats float into a gunpowder store room that explodes. Winding through the caves at the foundations of the fort, we discover the skeletons of the doomed survivors, who spent the rest of their lives guarding their treasure. At one point we can see where the destroyed fortress queue and the caverns below connect.

It's a very impressive experience, but by straightening out the chronology some of the power of the ride is dampened. Disneyland's original masterpiece makes almost no sense taken on a scene by scene level, but has an amazing associative power that goes beyond logic. As the boats wend their way through the twisted swamp into the darkness, then through the caverns filled with bones, we sense rather than are told that the layers of reality are being stripped away. By the time the full scale Pirate raid appears, despite having been foreshadowed from literally the moment the facade of the attraction is seen, we are throughly in its thrall.

But the thing about the nearly perfect structure of the Disneyland version is that it was accidental. One could also say that it's a mess. If you've ever had a personal project that came out amazingly well but not in any way that you intended it to, then you know what the design team of Pirates of the Caribbean was dealing with here. The natural inclination is to assume that it turned out well because your ideas preserved despite the rest of the project being a total disaster. If you were given the opportunity to do it over again, you would double down on your ideas and try to eliminate the things that gave you trouble, wouldn't you?

Early version that still ends with a fire!

That's what Marc Davis was doing in Florida. Here he was, given the opportunity to go back to the well and remove all of the extra stuff that was added to Pirates of the Caribbean because the scope of the project kept changing. No longer would the ride begin in New Orleans and wind its way to a Caribbean colony: we begin in the Caribbean town the pirates are going to attack. In one stroke that obliterates the location jumping and the time travel.

So why do we get into the boats and where do we go? By moving up the start of the pirate raid so it begins while patrons are waiting in line, we motivate the boats as escape vessels and add a sense of menace and urgency to the start of the ride. In Disneyland I guess we assume that we're loading onto boats to go on a tour of the Louisiana bayous or something, and make a few wrong turns before being sent back in time. The new plan means that the facade and queue can be devoted to setting up the idea that "the pirates are coming" rather than springing it on audiences halfway through the ride.

Why are the pirates coming? Well, we've already got all of the X Atencio dialogue establishing that they're after the treasure, because what else do Pirates do? At Disneyland they never find that treasure - a casualty of the fact that Marc Davis was pretty much just drawing random stuff under Walt's direction and then X Atencio would show up and try to make sense of it. So we add a new scene at the end where the Pirates have found the treasure. There. The entire thing is streamlined. We are in a caribbean village, the pirates attack, they spread chaos while looking for the treasure, they find the treasure and the ride ends.

Okay, so what about those skeletons at the start of the ride?

....

If you go back and read "The Case For the Florida Pirates", I pretty much just throw my hands up the air at this point. "It's a problem!" I shout. I've got something new to say about that, and we'll get back to it in a minute.

The Destroyed Fort

All of this narrative information, to have any effect whatever, needs to be set up properly in the queue. The facade and queue for Pirates in Florida really is a masterpiece, albeit one that's almost impossible to perceive now. WDI has done so much futzing with the start of the ride to bring it into line with the time travel story set up at Disneyland that they've destroyed what made it great to begin with, which has a negative effect on our comprehension of the attraction further down the line

It began with tiny things, but tiny things were always placed there by WED for good reason. Originally, the cannons along the roof of the facade would fire. You could hear this through a lot of Adventureland, and it was like a beaconing hand: "Come on in here! Don't you want to find out what's here?". But more importantly, it was a setup so we understood that this was a fort under attack.

Once inside the fort, a short entrance tunnel played a menacing version of the "Yo Ho" theme, but then the music went silent. It needed to, because then we heard the soldiers preparing for the pirate attack. A captain of the guard could be heard ordering the preparations for firing on the pirate ship, and occasionally blasts of cannon fire could be heard. This, combined with the occasional refrain of "Yo-Ho" echoing through the halls, was absolutely essential narrative information that also created the eerie impression that the pirates could be around any corner.

From there, the queues diverged through different areas of the fort, coming back together at Pirate's Cove, a secret rear escape route. Through openings in the cave walls, a distant pirate ship can be seen in the harbor. After a trip through the unexplored caves in the hills behind the fort, boats splash down in the bay, and the pirate ship has begun its attack.

Starting in the late 90s the cannons on the facade were heard less and less often as they went long stretches without being repaired. They were fixed in 2005 shortly before the attraction closed for its big movie overlay refurbishment, but when the show returned in July 2006 the rooftop cannons were silent. They had been muted at the request of Entertainment because they were considered invasive for the "Pirate Tutorial" show happening outside; as of 2016 they are only activated for an effect in one of the Adventureland interactive games.

Also in 2006, the entire queue was refurbished. The dialogue establishing that the pirates are attacking was not removed, but it was drowned out by new music played through the entire queue rather than just the entry area. Worse, instead of the menacing atmospheric music installed by WED in 1973, the music was now the mellow, atmospheric "Overture" played in Disneyland's entrance area. Given the eerie, darkened surroundings, the peaceful flute and rhythmic drums are, and remain, entirely incorrect.

In 2012, as part of the disastrous MyMagic+ program at Walt Disney World, the Pirates queue was again refurbished. This time Fastpass was added to the attraction, requiring a new merge point be created. Worse, the Fastpass side of the queue was cut through a wall near the entrance, removing one of the queue's finest features: the walk up the entrance ramp, then the slow slope down towards the dungeons. Thanks to an original design which did not take into account the very real modern need for wheelchair accessibility, the side of the queue intended by WED to be seen by most guests - the right-side dungeon side with the "chess" and "cave" show scenes - can now only be enjoyed by those with Fastpass.

This is just gone now.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that absolutely everybody understood the setup of the pirate attack in the same easy, clear way that everybody understands the trapped safari at Jungle Cruise: it's a more complex idea. but by removing, bit by bit, the indications that we are entering a Spanish fortress under attack, WDI has, either intentionally or not, made it possible to read the FL ride as a time travel story. And after all why would it not be a time travel story, with every other version being the same way? After all, two other versions of the ride begin with a trip past pirate skeletons and ghosts, setting up the time travel to come. What's the deal with the skeletons at the start?

But given that all of the circa 1973 evidence points us towards an unbroken series of logical events with no timeslip, really WDI should have considered what the significance of the eerie ship out to sea in the distance. Or the pirates heard digging in the cave by the loading area. Or maybe not, since these are two of Marc's finest touches in this ride, and losing them to force the ride to conform to their interpretation of it would be tragic.

Those Darn Skeletons

So really you've got two competing intereptations of the Florida Pirates, both of which appear to fail to explain specific and unavoidable design features of the ride: there's the WDI "timeslip" version, and there's my version, which I believe reflects what WED intended back in 1973.

WDI's version fails to account for the narrative setup in the queue and for the pirate ship seen in the "moonlight bay" tableau. My version has no good explanation for the pirate skeletons seen at the start.

Well, hold on.

Let's go back for a moment here and look again at the final ride. Ultimately, none of the "did you knows" and "fun facts" in the world matter beyond what can be gleaned by simply and purely just looking at the ride. And my mind returns again and again to that cave seen in the queue. Marc Davis put that cave there for a reason - it's the first concrete, unambiguous sign that pirates are indeed afoot - there they are, just out of sight in that cave! We hear the scraping of shovels and their drunken singing and laughing. We know from cultural association that they're digging for treasure.

Then we drop down into town and - at least before Captain Jack Sparrow became the main thing on everyone's mind - we hear, time and again, the pirates are out looking for treasure:

"Speak up ye bilge rat! Where be the treasure?"
"Do not tell him, Carlos! Don't be chicken!"

And then at the end of the ride, we see the fortress' treasure hold and that the pirates have discovered it. We're expected to take this as a clear indication of a narrative resolution. The idea of "looking for treasure" occurs before we get on the ride, during the ride, and as a resolution to the ride, uniquely in this version. It's the primary structuring feature of the Florida attraction.

So what is Dead Man's Cove about? We see the skeletons of pirates and hear the repeated warning "dead men tell no tales". In Disneyland, "dead men tell no tales" doubles as a warning: "the answers you're looking for aren't here". In Florida, it simply and only refers to the actual Dead Man's Cove scene, because the other scenes from the haunted caverns - the inn, the bedroom, the treasure horde - don't appear. In Florida, it's as much of an explanation as it is a warning: these pirates were killed to protect the location of the treasure buried here.

The scene is open to enough interpretation that other, competing speculation has advanced ideas that, say, this is a later band of pirates who killed each other over the gold buried here. I'm confident in my interpretation that the pirates were killed to silence them not only because the idea can be found in Treasure Island, the key source for the ride, but because X Atencio actually wrote narration intended for the caverns sequence that made this clear:

"Hear ye a dead man's tale, what dastardly deed! Brave sea men, these. Helped bury the gold, they did - then silenced forever. Cursed be that black hearted villain! But, stay - I told their tale a'fore, now I be telling it again!"

So this is definitely the burying place for treasure - a lost burying place, because the captain of the ship killed the men who buried it. And if we take the next scene - the skeleton steering a shipwreck - as an indication that the captain then went down with his ship, then the location of the treasure is well and truly lost, and we can now slot this tableau into the story the Florida attraction is telling. Remember, we hear pirates digging in a cave for gold, then board our boats and discover a burial location of gold -- in a cave.

This lost gold is why the pirates attack the island. Presumably, the lost gold was buried there generations before, back when it was mostly uninhabited. In years since, the Spanish crown has turned the area where the gold was buried into a sea-port, and ironically built fortifications right on top of the lost pirate gold.

This is why the pirates fire on the fort, dig in the caverns around it, and raid the town - they assume it was uncovered during the construction. Little do they know that the Spanish didn't find the gold, either - it's still guarded by ghosts and skeletons deep below the fortifications.

Marc was a keen observer of what worked and what didn't in theme parks. The notion of taxidermy animals "waking up" to start a show - an idea repeated for Club 33 and presumably coming direct from Walt Disney - was used again for the start of Country Bear Jamboree. After seeing how effective those unplanned subterranean caverns were at Pirates, Marc would have filed that away in his mind for later use. Marc repeated caverns in his designs for Western River Expedition, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer Island, and Enchanted Snow Palace, and said this to The E-Ticket in 1999:

"You know, you don't really know what's up ahead when you go down into the mysterious area beneath New Orleans Square where all the skeletons are. That mystery area works very well, with the the wind and the dampness, and then the voices."

Marc once said Claude Coats' work was "very commendable", so this recollection by him of the grotto counts as lavish praise. So it makes sense that he would have wanted to retain that element for the Florida show despite having intentionally removed the time travel concept. Going back to the core idea for Dead Man's Cove and building the motivation for the attraction around that tableau was a clever idea.

....which isn't the same as saying that the idea actually worked. There's plenty of Marc designed gags that didn't come off as well as, say, the stretch room portraits. For every few brilliant, snappy, instantly comprehensible visual ideas like the Ballroom duelists in the Haunted Mansion, there's something like the Mummy in the graveyard. I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding what the deal with the Mummy talking the old guy is than when I was eight. Marc was uncommonly brilliant, but he wasn't perfect.

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But it's not as if the experiment with the Florida Pirates was a total wash. Marc took the time to expand and alter Claude Coats' layout of the town sequence so that it's better paced and longer. At Disneyland, the boats approach the well scene from a slightly odd side angle, then turn and end up right in the Auction. In Magic Kingdom, the boats approach and ride alongside the well scene, then ride past some new Marc-designed architecture between the Well and the Auction that adds a bit more build and release to the experience.

At Disneyland, the haunted grotto sequences are brilliant, but they aren't really scary - mysterious, strange, but not scary. For Florida, Marc pushed the ceiling of the cavern down on riders and darkened everything, reserving Claude's beautiful waterfalls for a short scenic stretch at the start. The result - with the narrower caverns, darkness, and loud voices - was truly unnerving. When given the opportunity to rework Pirates a third time for Tokyo Disneyland, Marc brought back the bayou and the extended caves, but kept the low ceiling, the darkness, and the menacing tone. He also replicated the Magic Kingdom town sequences and the unload area - no trip back up the waterfall. Comparing Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Tokyo Disneyland's Pirate attractions reveals much of Marc's thinking about some of his most iconic creations.

Tokyo's Pirates: a darn good compromise

Perhaps in the future some team of Imagineers will attempt to embrace Marc's ideas in the 1973 Pirates instead of work against them. Concieving of the attraction as being a compromised gloss of what was done at Disneyland is not just a disservice to Marc Davis, but it leads to poorly executed additions that do little to harmonize with what the attraction does well. There's no time travel. It's a linear adventure with an en media res opening, a strong motivating image, and an elaborate second act. It may not be as good as Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.... but almost nothing is, and certainly not anything built in the past twenty years by any theme park operator.

Florida Pirates is a good ride, but it needs special consideration - and it hasn't really gotten any since 1973, when it was built. It's time to fix it.

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Go Away Green: Three Years Later

About three and a half years ago I published a little essay called Go Away Green, discussing the illusionistic aspects of disguising show buildings inside theme parks.

What are show buildings? They are those big ugly unthemed warehouses which house the sets that the actual attractions take place in.

This doesn't count as spoilers any more, does it?

Quite unexpectedly, Go Away Green turned out to be one of the most consistently popular essays I've ever put out. I think it speaks to the ongoing interest not only in the "backstage" aspect of theme parks, but in the nuts and bolts that go into making a place work. It takes a lot of dedication to care too much about those big featureless walls, so perhaps a followup is in order. Moreover, a lot has changed at Magic Kingdom since 2012. A Fantasyland expansion has come online, previously empty restaurants have been reinvented, and the entire center of the park was demolished and rebuilt. That's a lot of places which previously had very obvious exposed show buildings. What is to be done about them?

The question is not a new one, but the rules about it do change depending on the age of the park we're talking about here. Disneyland has never made much of an effort to wall off its various areas from each other, because everything is so near together it would be almost impossible to do so. Because it's consistent in this approach, it isn't that big of a deal that you can see a Swiss mountain from Frontierland...

...or that the red rocks of Utah are visible from the front lawn of a New Orleans cafe. It's just the way things work there.

Magic Kingdom's designers made a more consistent effort to visually integrate the various areas of Magic Kingdom, but there wasn't much more of an effort to screen the areas off from each other. You can still see parts of Fantasyland from Liberty Square, parts of Adventureland from Frontierland, and so on. There is a move towards subtle visual integration - notice how the shape and size of buildings in Liberty Square subtly echo the shape of Cinderella Castle - but WED Enterprises was still content to allow everything to smush together organically. It's part of the fantasy nature of the park.

Flash forward to 1992, and Disneyland Paris - by far the most integrated effort at a theme park yet - didn't just have a berm around the entire park, but berms separating each themed land from every other one, too. With the traditionally allowable exception of the castle, once inside any of Disneyland Paris' lands, everything is screened off. It's even almost impossible to see Big Thunder from the top of the Swiss Family Treehouse due to very careful positioning. Each "land" in Disneyland Paris is treated as if it is effectively a separate theme park.

WDI carried this quite far. Due to the practicalities of running a theme park, Main Street and Frontierland sit right next to each other. Not to be outdone, the rear of the Frontierland buildings facing Main Street have Victorian false fronts, and the rear of Main Street facing Frontierland is disguised as barns.

Frontierland from Main Street (thanks David G)

Main Street from Frontierland 

It's all very intricate and impressive. My question is: does any of this at the end of the day really matter, or is this just the sort of thing super-fans (and theme park designers) care about? Does anybody except readers (and writers) of blogs like this really care that It's A Small World has nothing to do with the rest of Fantasyland?

In my original post I pointed out that around 50,000 people a day walk under the gigantic unthemed wall in Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland and never give it a second thought. They simply don't see it. I compared this to misdirection in a conjuring trick - real-life stage magic.

In short, I'm still not at all convinced that in the end this matters all this much. Don't get me wrong - disguised infrastructure like the examples above at Disneyland Paris fill me, as a park fan, with delight. They're one of the reasons I got into this in such a heavy way. I stopped my touring of Disneyland Paris to admire them.

So it's in those specific terms of praise that I think the following discussion should be couched. As a fan and admirer of park design, I think it's great that WDI finally addressed some of the lapses in theme which I will single out below. Yet, in the larger sense, I also think it's worth being skeptical about the objective value of such things. In the end, after all, isn't this all to some degree just a game?

Enough preface, let's look at some show building.... camouflage.

In 2015, after a year and a half of on-again, off-again work, Magic Kingdom finally finished up a long-delayed bypass around Main Street. Disneyland built one too, and while Disneyland's is a lot of walls and only used on emergency occasions, Magic Kingdom ended up with a wide open air boulevard that they end up using basically every night. They compensated by filling the whole thing with trees.

It's not much to look at, which is okay in the sense that it's rarely seen in daylight anyway, but what's interesting is how the curtain of trees affects Main Street day-long, Areas which once offered very stark views of the rear of Tomorrowland...

2012

...have been somewhat filled in and give a sense of some remove between areas.

2015

Until the late 90s, large trees were planted behind this wall to block views like this, and even if it's due to a firework crowd flow outlet, it's nice to be able to stand on Main Street and enjoy the illusion of a park just beyond this wall again.

Other rough corners were not exactly removed so much as covered up to the point where only the truly sharp eyed would notice them.

2012

2016

On the Hub side of Main Street, the most visible gap of theming in Magic Kingdom - the entirely visible rear of Main Street - is no more. The rear of the buildings, once painted in Go Away Green, now have painted on brick details, interestingly acknowledging that this is the actual rear of Main Street for any who would bother to look.

The remaining protrusion onto the Hub, the side of the Plaza Restaurant, received a rather simple dimensional facade wrap and a few new trees. This doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but as I pointed out in my original article, very few will choose to look at this as opposed to the gigantic castle off to the right.

2012

2015

With some extra trees and from a bit of a distance it becomes very hard to distinguish from the more fully realized architecture, which was the point all along:

Over in Fantasyland, so much of the area has been redeveloped that a great deal of modification of sightlines had to take place. New walls have done up to block rooftop AC units (one wonders what modern WDI would make of the endless miles of plain white roofs once visible from the Skyway), and extra paint has been brought in to disguise plain walls.

Previously this was bare walls & exposed infrastructure

One small area of rockwork was rebuilt at least three times, increasing in size each time, to prevent the new show building for the Belle story time attraction from being seen from the Village Haus restrooms. The bizarre result:

To me that looks like a rock floating weirdly in midair, but I guess at least it isn't the view of the back of a corrugated metal shed.

Elsewhere in New Fantasyland, sightlines have been scrupulously maintained. One of the most impressive is this artificial rocky cliff which blocks views of the Little Mermaid show building from every possible vantage point, including the nearby Storybook Circus:

Only in aerial photos can you appreciate how extensive this detail is. It works from all perspectives, including the top of new the roller coaster:

Scott Keating

Yet in other ways the fully-articulated modern theming extravaganzas in New Fantasyland sit weirdly cheek to jowl with the more illusionistic or just plain simple 1971 architecture. My absolute favorite, the west side of the Hall of Presidents show building, is still proudly sitting out in the open:

Depending on the season, Haunted Mansion's show building is no big secret:

Other areas of Magic Kingdom weirdly combine areas you feel you probably shouldn't be seeing with  evocative detail. There's this detailed fence atop the Adventureland Veranda which helps distract from the plain wall behind it:

The side of the Peter Pan's Flight show building can be glimpsed between two Fantasyland structures, simultaneously offering visible pipes and a themed turret:

These wooden logs on the Frontierland side appear to "hold up" an Adventureland facade:

The exact spot where Adventureland (left) becomes Frontierland (right)

It's worth remembering that Disneyland mostly just lets her architectural style smash together like two trains. The concept of transitory architecture was pioneered for Magic Kingdom.

But on the other hand from the train it's very easy to see the stark naked rear of Pirates of the Caribbean, Fantasyland, and the unthemed overpass which I remarked on in Ten Big Design Blunders. Now that the backside of Main Street has been painted over, filled with trees, and basically banished, this is probably the single largest intrusion of the "outside world" into Walt Disney World left.

If we broaden our horizons a bit we could talk about the colossal show building for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which sits out in the open like a shelled peanut:

Or this illusionistic slight of hand on the Disneyland Railroad which passes by so quickly it's easy to forget it's disguising a giant warehouse as... a giant warehouse.

Again, we must ask: does it truly in the end matter?

I think in order to answer that we have to question the extent to which a non-committed audience is likely to respond to the little holes where the illusion slips out. Many guests don't even see obvious details, never mind these weird little gaps where something unintended slips through. You can technically see the Contemporary from Liberty Square, but almost nobody bothers to look to see it.

To what extent does something that's basically subliminal affect the overall perception of the whole?

Tokyo DisneySEA goes to unprecedentedly elaborate means to screen out its back-of-house areas from guest view. If even subliminally, touches like that add to the luster of the park, and make it seem like a more impressive, a complete package. Disneyland Paris and Tokyo DisneySEA enjoy sterling reputations in part because the detail they are built with is staggering. It's possible that even if the majority of audiences don't stop to look at every little thing, the mere fact that it's there impresses on them in some subliminal way.

This is why I think that sweating the small stuff adds up. The measurable difference is played out every day in the park - in reputation, word of mouth, and demand. Mind-boggling spectacles like The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, Tower of Terror, The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, and Kilimanjaro Safaris still do command long waits because word of mouth has made them into the tentpoles of their respective parks, and audiences respond to them for the crazily elaborate experiences that they are. They may not see everything, but the richness of the experience alone is arresting.

But it's worth remembering that Disneyland and Magic Kingdom are unique. Compared to something like Disneyland Paris, the design of both of the stateside parks is far less intricate. These parks are stepping stones towards the modern extravaganza parks represented by an Islands of Adventure or a Tokyo DisneySEA, and to some extent I think they should stay that way.

Magic Kingdom is the last Disney park to have that sense of naive architecture that you get at Disneyland. Yes, it's bigger, and yes, over the years Disneyland has made the texture of their park much more intricate. But intricacy is different than sophistication, and I wouldn't want to live in a place where weirdo design touches like those logs holding up those Magic Kingdom facades or that too-small-for-people bridge in Disneyland's Adventureland were "sophisticated" out of existence. These places are, after all, historical objects as well.

Al Huffman

Floating around the perimeters of theme parks, show buildings are the white phantoms of the art form - ever present, rarely seen. In a place so full of richly satisfying distractions, isn't it interesting how much we can learn about them by choosing to look at things we aren't supposed to see?

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Do you enjoy long, carefully written essays on the ideas behind theme parks, like this one? Hop on over to the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Theory Hub Page for even more!