Jokers in the Wild, Part Three

In 1993 a series of changes that would alter the original Adven-
tureland forever began. Construction of the Indiana Jones Adventure, a gigantic E-Ticket designed to match Pirates of the Caribbean in scope and size, began and shortly its’ influence would spread into the Jungle Cruise just as it required redressing and retheming of the entire land. New boats arrived, now aged and dressed to look less like tour boats and more like the homes of the skippers on board, and Harper Goff’s original candy-striped awnings were a thing of the past. Work began to add more exotic, middle eastern style facades to older structures like the Tahitian Terrace (now an ill-advised and under-utilized Aladdin tie in) and the Sunkist, I Presume juice bar. Waterfalls now graced the entranceway and the original vaguely British Colonial feeling of the smallest and simplest of Disneyland’s original lands began to be filled with Indiana Jones-looking items like weathered jeeps and canvas awnings began to appear. All would cede to the power of cross-promotion.

By late 1993 the Jungle Cruise was closed and the second dispatch structure, a maze of thatched huts, fell to make way for a two-level British Colonial structure of impressive scale and theme. Gone was the feeling of a simple switchback queue and in its’ place rose a congested, tightly themed, highly detailed scene-setting structure with a new gift shop out front. Now the story became that the Jungle Shipping Company, once a disreputable supply firm stocking the curio shop out front, began to turn profit once tourists began to arrive in the outpost region to flock to the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. The company turned from freight to tours, and now runs a lucrative if disreputable guided tour of the wilderness.

To necessitate the flow of guests into and out of the Indiana Jones attraction, an entire original bend in the river was removed, as well as a full sixteen feet of dock space for the jungle launches. Now rather than a few quick turns through the rainforest it’s a straight shot to the first show scene with the new E-Ticket itself prominently displayed along the waters’ edge. And although the cruise itself was always kind of flakey on geography, now sitting next to each other is an Indian temple and a Cambodian shrine, making for a bizarre contrast.

Less effective was a wholesale change to the Adventureland area, now affixing to it an unnecessary specific date and time period so that it could fit into the Indiana Jones film franchise. No longer would wholesale assorted exotica infused with Hollywood sensibilities be Adventureland’s trademark: now everything had to fit into Spielberg and Lucas’ films or hit the highway. The most destructive change to the Jungle itself was the imposition of this date and time on the material. No longer were sarcastic comments about Disneyland, Southern California, freeways, It’s A Small World, and other “modern” elements permitted. Skippers were given an astonishing volume of information about the attraction’s new backstory and current people and events of 1938 that were “safe” to refer to. A brand new rewritten spiel – probably the best ever devised by WDI for the Jungle – integrated traditional humor with more popular, but until then not approved, jokes.

Of course this flies in the face of the jungle’s greatest asset, the ability of the skippers to improvise along the way according to the demands of the situation. If an animal isn’t working or – worse – Schweitzer Falls isn’t running, a quick anachronistic joke can save face and help smooth over the awkward situation. Although technically such out of show jokes are not allowed, they always have been a tradition on the jungle rivers.

Across the country, there were doings over at the other Jungle Cruise in 1994. Possibly realizing that the Orlando Adventureland was even more ornate and fancifully nonspecific than the Anaheim version, the Florida jungle got a significant facelift. Although the candy striped boats would remain, the entire boathouse was signifi-

cantly redressed to give the appearance of being a functioning shipping facility, stacked with boxes, crates, and other items. A jeep outside gave the very nonspecific date of Est. 1931. Apparently written and recorded by competing teams of show designers, Orlando’s new boathouse audio loop one upped Anaheim’s sedate radio program and Indiana Jones related news broadcasts with a raucous selection of 30’s big band tunes interspersed with a seemingly endless onslaught of jokes and puns.

Other significant changes took place. The redressing was extended to the small shed across from the loading area. An original 1971 conceit – a synthetic canopy of vines for the rainforest segment of the attraction – had since been removed as the actual foliage had by then formed a true natural canopy. The African veldt – originally brilliantly designed to look boundless – had to have it’s horizon line filled in to hide the newly constructed Grand Floridian.

The area immediately after Inspiration Falls was significantly redressed. The pygmy canoes were crowded together much more haphazardly on one side of the beach and numerous set dressings such as paddles and skulls on spears were added to increase the sense of menace and of a group having had just left in a hurry.

The African Veldt itself had its lions reconfigured for less awkward staging. Perhaps most significantly, and bizarrely in that it has never been duplicated anywhere, the trapped safari tableau was restaged. Deleting all but one of the original Nubian guides, the new safari was mostly white and now climbing up to their news camera perched at the top of the tree. The animation retimed, Marc Davis’ gag of them rising sequentially after each rhino swipe was retired in favor of a sight gag of the rhino having already snagged the fellow on the bottom in the seat of his pants with his underwear exposed!

Political Correctness? Not unlikely in the mid-90’s, but then why not also redo the entire hostile natives scenario, which is frankly more offensive? Why such a specific restaging? Although the idea of a film crew escaping a rhino is perhaps more accessible to modern audiences, the reason is lost to the sands of time and the mysteries of WDI show “upgrades”.

Return next week for the final installment!

Note: Whenever possible I try to use my own photos or those from Disney-released materials, but today I ended up using two photos from Al's fantastic photo archive Disney Fans. Photos are used with permission and please give him a visit.

Jokers in the Wild, Part One

An opening day attraction at every Disney park but one, the original “E” ticket, one of the most conceptually and thematically advanced of pre-1964 Disney attractions, and the true heart of any Adventureland, The Jungle Cruise has been a Disney standard since 1955.

It also seems to foster – or breed – eccentricity, for between the years of 1955 and 1994 The Jungle Cruise was the boy’s camp of Disneyland and Walt Disney World, and begat it’s own set of bizarre wisecracks, pranks, and traditions bred out of giving young men a boat, a gun, and a lot of really fake animals to talk about – over and over and over again.

The Jungle Cruise has never been subject to much close scrutiny by fans, possibly because of the evident “hokiness” of the ride vis-à-vis modern sensibilities and attractions Disney has been building since 1967. It also fails to suggest an endlessly explorable “mythology” such as in Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion. Of course those two masterpieces had the benefit of at least ten additional years of planning and conceptual design to build a “background” of mystery and suspense: despite undergoing almost constant improvement, The Jungle Cruise had, in effect, less than one year of turnaround. Those boats have been plowing the waters of the Rivers of Adventure and stopping to admire the backside of Schweitzer Falls for over fifty years now.

The Jungle Cruise is Adventureland.

Of course subsequent expansions have made Adventureland, as a unit, more diverse, but all the way up until 1994 all attractions were built in order to aid the Jungle in mind: The Enchanted Tiki Room neatly matches the “faux Polynesia” tone evoked by the Jungle Cruise boathouse; The Tahitian Terrace continued the tradition of live music accompanying your return to civilization; and the Swiss Family Treehouse was perfectly perched to allow a spectacular view of the rivers of Adventure. But even the all-encompassing hold of Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure, a modern E-Ticket unmatched anywhere in the world, is not enough to dilute the river’s power: despite efforts to age the boats, adapt the spiel, theme the dispatch area and generally impose itself on the then-45 year old attraction, The Jungle Cruise still seems to be the most important thing in the area. In terms of hogging pure real estate in the pantheon of Disney attractions it is matched only by The Mine Train Thru Nature’s Wonderland and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, themselves simply variations of the Jungle Cruise model. Indeed, for the first several years of operation, the attraction’s sign read simply “ADVENTURELAND” and all other buildings in the area were built only to create a backdrop for it.

That early attraction was really the brainchild of Harper Goff, the design genius who gave us the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As is commonly reported by seemingly everyone, the original plan called for real animals, but after various biologists convinced Walt Disney that their care and display would be utterly impractical, Goff offered to design Disney a “Hollywood Jungle”, where animals would threaten boats on cue. It worked.

The early version of the attraction was dependant on Bill Evans’ careful landscaping as much as on Goff’s scenic design and Bill Mattey’s mechanical animals, and between the three of these men most of the credit for the first eight years jungle launches can be attributed. Goff’s major set pieces, such as the candy-striped boats themselves, the early Cambodian shrine overrun by mechanical monkeys, and the magnificent Schwietzer Falls, are still important elements of the show. Goff contributed something else, too: creating a sufficiently winding river to both maximize the limited space and create a real sense of unpredictable flowing and possible danger. Although some concept art exists of the area’s “flow” and of course blueprints had to be drawn up, the flow feels improvisational, twisting and turning out of sight, and trucks were driven through the dry riverbeds to give the designers an approximation of how well this effect would come off.

And such was the Jungle Cruise, for a time. By 1956 mechanical quirks had been worked out of the system and the animals were now controlled pneumatically, a practice which continues to this day. In 1957 a human presence was added to the dangerous Congo, and where bushmen were previously seen to merely peer from behind logs at passing boats, they now danced in a circle and rose to attack the boats with spears. The boats first passed through a synthetic “rain forest” in 1957 en route to the Cambodian Shrine, and for the first time, “Trader Sam” offered shrunken heads at the journey’s end in the area originally nearly devoid of anything to see past “the backside of water”.

By the early sixties Walt had tapped famed animator Marc Davis to take a look around Disneyland and make suggestions for improvements. Davis found a disappointing lack of humor or whimsy and much wasted opportunity and set about designing a series of gags for the Mine Train Thru Nature’s Wonderland. This accomplished, he set about working on The Ford Magic Skyway, Enchanted Tiki Room, and eventually what was then known as the Jungle River Cruise.

Marc Davis' Cambodian Ruins, faithfully executed.

Davis created a series of beautiful and mysterious watercolors of Cambodian ruins for a possible new first leg of the attraction and designed a cluster of humorous pachyderms, taking maximum advantage of the limited technology available to him by adding the kinetic element of water to his designs. Davis was a master at understanding what an animated prop could do, and many of his designs employ simple but brilliantly realized kinetic motion devices such as water or cloth to make the figures appear to move more than they actually do.

The other major scene he developed was the Great African Veldt, which in its early years featured lions menacing guests with a bloodied zebra carcass, which was brilliantly offset by his famous and comical “Trapped Safari” scene immediately thereafter. The skippers, originally delivering a semi-educational if sometimes dryly comic narration, began to gradually modify the spiel to take advantage of Davis’ new scenes which emphasized both danger and perfectly integrated comic relief. The jungle began to take shape as the attraction it is today.

Return next week for more photos and Part Two!