Weird WDW: Eulogy For A Dancing Hippo

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It doesn't feel like it anymore, but there's still a lot of weirdness left at Walt Disney World. The past ten years have seen a shocking amount of expansions, reboots, reconstructions and rejiggering, not all of which have sat well with fans. But travel outside of the well worn haunts to the distant corners of property and you will find remnants of the 90s and even 80s still hanging on, passive observers of a Disney nearly unrecognizable.

One of these corners is Fantasia Gardens, a miniature golf course Disney built only after a long legal battle with the hotel entities that own the Swan and Dolphin. The Swan and Dolphin themselves were once emblematic of weird WDW, but they were redone in the 00s and again recently and their teal and salmon decor and rococo, trellesed madness has long since been subdued. But keep walking.

Out on the edge of nothing, backed into a corner by an onramp, is one of WDW's great forgotten corners - the Swan and Dolphin's picnic pavilions. While it seems that the nearby tennis courts were originally constructed in 1990 with the opening of the hotel complex, part of Disney's agreement with  the operating partners for those hotels was that the space across the street was earmarked for any "entertainment complex". Five years and much gnashing of teeth later, Fantasia Gardens opened in 1995.

The Swan and Dolphin have always been more heavily favored by a certain class of business traveler than families, and so perhaps the idea of adding picnic pavilions to complement the full array of meeting facilities seemed a good one at the time. But I can think of no other area at Walt Disney World that has lived out such an abandoned, twilight existence as the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "Dancing Hippo" pavilions. At least River Country, Discovery Island, Wonders of Life and the ImageWorks were in use at one point in time; I don't think I've ever seen the picnic pavilions in actual frequent use.


Visited today, it's clear that cast members treat these pavilions as a backstage area, the event space strewn with chairs, burnt out light bulbs and intermittently in use fans. Between the two pavilions, in an antechamber that hasn't seen a simple dusting in many years, are two bathrooms, cleaned and stocked daily, for the patronage of nobody. There are areas of the Disney convention centers, especially the less popular ones like the Grand Floridian, where the bizarre disjunction between the effort to keep them maintained and the actual patronage feels as acute, but rarely as at Fantasia Gardens.

In college, when I was a rebellious Cast Member, I'd sometimes park at Fantasia Gardens and walk into Epcot the back way. I'd pull into the unmanned parking lot and wonder at those bulky warehouses on the other side of the pond, silent and empty. I'd visit the lobby of the Dolphin, stroll the Boardwalk, then enter Epcot and make the World Showcase loop. It was a pleasant afternoon, and each visit began and ended with the pavilions on the edge of forever, as dark and empty as they always were.

Disney is about to tear these down, and the Tennis Courts too. An expansion has been deemed necessary, and a small tower is being built on the former parking lot and tennis courts. The pavilions will become the new parking lot for Fantasia Gardens. By the time you read this, they may already have been dismantled.

In our current amped-up, plugged-in world of Disney fandom, consider that the closure of the garish Hanes T-shirt shop at the Village was deemed worthy of a minor round of complaining, and yet there are people who practically live at Walt Disney World but who have never even seen the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Dancing Hippo pavilions. They've been around for 23 years, meaning they lasted longer than many of the original EPCOT Center attractions, but they've entered life and are now leaving it as desolate and forgotten as ever.

Weird Walt Disney World is still out there for you, if you're willing to go find it.

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The Wilderness Lodge Video Fireplace

Every so often you come up with an idea so obvious, so stupid, that you're convinced somebody must have thought of it by now. And when it turns out nobody has, well, what's a fan to do? Just go out and do it herself, I suppose. Which is what I did.

Despite growing up in the northeast with a proper wood burning fireplace, and despite having access to a gas burning one in Florida, in my opinion nothing quite lands at that juicy intersection of nostalgia and kitsch as a good old video fireplace. The Yule Log tradition, after laying dormant for most of the hip 90s, has roared back to life in the digital age, and a quick search on YouTube will turn up hundreds of these things. Then as now, the attraction is in the extreme simplicity of the production: find a fireplace. Point a camera at it. Share the results.

The original video fireplace, the WPIX Yule Log, was a scant 17 seconds long, looped over and over, accompanied by the easy listening Christmas hits of the day - an amazing synthesis of midcentury plastic living, the modernization of mass culture, big hearted Christmas cheer, and extreme laziness (the hours-long broadcast meant the TV station staff could take the day off).

Growing up, my grandparents had a copy of the non-yule version on VHS, and that fascinated me even more - no stockings, no Christmas carols, just an hour of a fireplace doing its thing. There were other atmosphere VCR productions - aquariums, beaches, rolling hills - but none quite captured the strange magic of the idea of turning one boxy home furnishing into another.

And as a fan of the intersection of midcentury convenience culture, easy listening, and themed design, it's not too hard to see where my brain went - where's the Disney version of this? Not some generic fireplace with Disney crap piled around it, but an actual, at-Disney fireplace. And what is probably the defining Disney fireplace experience?

I packed up my camera and drove out to Wilderness Lodge.


It was the sort of blustery, overcast Florida winter day that really set the tone for being around a fireplace, and most of my time was spent sitting and waiting for the fireplaces to become available. There were so many that it seemed sensible to include as many as possible.

I really enjoyed making this, and even the editing of the subject came together amazingly fast. So on this cold January, put some Wilderness Lodge on your TV, and if you like this, show your friends and let me know!

Happy New Year's from Passport to Dreams!

Nintendo's Universal Worlds

I grew up with video games. If you asked me at age seven what my favorite place was, after Walt Disney World I would have told you it was the Mushroom Kingdom. Video games are dreamscapes, fantasy worlds that invite us in to escape. Along with cinema and amusement parks, video games are the third pillar of 20th century escapism - unapologetically popular entertainments which were created to amuse and distract the working classes.

If you dig into game design books, you'll see those links made again and again. The best games are said to aspire to be cinematic, and often are themselves pastiches of popular cinema - Die Hard on a spaceship, James Bond in an ancient pyramid. Disneyland is often brought up by game designers as a key inspirational space, a fully manufactured setting which is also clean, clear, and coherent across generations and cultures. Theme parks are just one other way to achieve immersion and escape.

And so, as a longtime Nintendo kid and a fan of the oeneric dreamscapes of theme parks, one would think that I would be preparing the paper streamers and rolling out the red carpet in advance of the announcement of the wonderfully titled Super Nintendo World - a mouthwatering expansion coming soon to Universal parks. And let's be clear here: I am. Having not been a fan of Cars, or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I finally feel like here's something elaborate that's aimed at me. As beautifully done as those areas have been or promise to be, my heart did not soar at my first sight of Hogwarts. But put a gold coin on a stick and have it spin around behind somebody's head, and I'm going to need to sit down.

So yes, I'm an easy mark. Super Mario Brothers 3, Super Mario World, Metroid, Mega Man, and Legend of Zelda were my 'galaxy far, far away' growing up, and I'm going to have a strong reaction no matter what ends up getting done. But that doesn't mean I can't have concerns about what's going to happen, and thoughts on the dividing lines between how video games, theme parks, and films create meaning.

So here's our chance to take a quick overview of Nintendo and theme parks. I've stated before on this site that I think Disney has so far failed to do justice to both games and immersive theming at the same time, and perhaps we can dig under that a little. Not a lot. It's a huge topic, and the year is almost up.

Super Mario Disneyland

So what exactly did Universal get themselves into here?

Super Mario is series which as of late has largely confined itself to the Mushroom Kingdom, but in its early years often took bizarre and irrational detours to lands abroad - the middle eastern Sub-Con, the Asian Sarasaland, the expansive Dinosaur Land. The visual style of each game was often totally different than the ones before it - the ghostly, abandoned open planes of Super Mario Brothers that gave way to a landscape strewn with multicolored blocks and checkerboard tile floors in Super Mario Brothers 3. Yoshi's Island, a prequel set in Dinosaur Land, is manifestly lush and tropical in a way no other game is.

Yet the games have a sense of continuity not so much through their settings and gameplay, as their sense of otherworldliness. The Mushroom Kingdom is filled with bizarre and inexplicable threats. In Super Mario Brothers, there is a palpable loneliness and danger to Mario's mission - only compounded if you read the manual and discover that those plants and blocks are supposed to be the transformed citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom! Morbid. No other Mario game feels as lonely and haunted until you get to Super Mario 64, where the echoing, stone clad interior of Princess Peach's castle leads to some truly heart-stopping moments where Mario is suddenly no longer alone.

The Mario series, like all video games of their era, exist in a world of easily comprehensible symbols. Just as nobody needs an explanation of why you're whipping monsters and ghosts in Castlevania, everyone knows to avoid roaming evil-eyed chestnuts, falling rocks, and leaping fire. In the Mushroom Kingdom, anything that can potentially help you has cute eyes, and everything else has a fierce (or at least dumb) expression. You don't need a language to understand these signifiers.

Super Mario, and the Nintendo Entertainment System generally, was a Japanese import which was wildly successful in an era otherwise terrified of Japan's economic ascendancy. Think of the Tokyo-inflected urban decay of Blade Runner, or potboiler crime pictures like Black Rain or Rising Sun. Super Mario crossed a threshold that Godzilla, Speed Racer, Ultraman and Astro-Boy could not. Even today, Godzilla is still made fun of by a certain generation for being a Japanese import. But Super Mario? That guy was an Italian from Brooklyn. He was pure kawaii nonsense delivered in an Americana candy coating.

Mario's world, with its bipedal turtles, swooping clouds, mobile cacti and cheerful hillsides, is a world of symbols not dissimilar to the fevered imagery incubator of Disneyland. Disneyland is also a place of inexplicable dangers, except Walt Disney used ghosts, dinosaurs, pirates and cannibals instead of mushrooms and man eating plants. They come to roughly the same end: we see these things and know that there's danger up ahead.

Magic Kingdom and Disneyland controlled visitor's experiences by intentionally limiting the number of options available at any time; you can either stop in this shop or this attraction, or keep walking. There's usually only one or two options available at any one time. The linearity of the experience is the defining quality of a theme park, compared to the open grid favored by traditional amusement parks like Kennywood or Cedar Point.

This too is basically similar to the structure of many Mario games - levels must be traversed from left to right, and in a specific order, to reach a specific goal. The most logical way to lay out a Super Mario area for a theme park would be on the pattern of Magic Kingdom's Adventureland - a themed corridor leading to a specific destination.

This imagery-heavy abstraction is the key to understanding why both Disneyland and Nintendo worked so well across generations and ages - both the classic theme parks and early video games created a pressure cooker atmosphere of heated symbolic interpretation, and clawed their way into immortality for their efforts.

Disneyland sticks out in America's literal-minded chronology obsessed pop culture, but I don't think it's coincidental that the Japanese recognized this quality in Disneyland and wanted one of their own badly. After years of rejections, Walt Disney Productions finally relented in the mid-70s - and then, only as a way to get a quick cash infusion due to spiraling costs on EPCOT Center. Tokyo Disneyland opened in April 1983 - just three months to the day before the release of the Nintendo Famicom in Japan. There's a family resemblance between the aesthetics of the Famicom and the Tomorrowland section of Tokyo Disneyland, as if one influenced the other.

In the Mario games of my youth, Mario was a cypher, almost mysterious. He wasn't cuddly - his game sprites made him look stoic, serious. It required a certain degree of interpretation if you wanted to know why this Italian guy was murdering large numbers of turtles. What his personality was like was up to your imagination.

On television, as portrayed by wrestler Lou Albano, the New York aspects of Mario were emphasized - his goofy accent, his constant need for pizza. One of the only other American depictions of Mario produced before the current Mario character debuted in Super Mario 64 may be found in the Phillips CDi game Hotel Mario, where Mario is voiced by actor Marc Graue in a style very similar to Albano's Mario.

In this sense it's easy to see how Americans adopted Mario as one of their own, and it's no wonder that many of us were taken aback by the voice and childlike attitude of Mario in Super Mario 64. Until that seminal game, although you played as Mario, there was no insight into what Mario was thinking or how he would sound, if he could speak. This actually isn't all that different than the abstraction of a WED classic like The Jungle Cruise. What does Trader Sam sound like? It's up to you to decide.

And it isn't WED Enterprises that's building Super Nintendo World, nor is it 1983. The Mario of today is as different from the Mario of 1985 as WED Enterprises is different from Walt Disney Imagineering. And therein lies some of my concerns.

The Difficulty of Complexity

Games grew up quick in the 80s. By the time Nintendo had premiered the Famicom Disk System in 1986, a new breed of interactive narrative was being carved out by innovative hybrid games like Castlevania 3 and Metroid. With the move from 8 to 16 bit consoles in 1988 and 1990, hardware and social forces were in place to give rise to the sort of epic adventure stories that Square Soft and Enix were pioneering. Video games began to resemble the sort of lengthy narratives best contained in novels.

But Mario did not change. Super Mario World may justifiably be called one of the most gorgeous video games ever produced, but mechanically it was very much like the 8 bit games which had preceded it. The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past more or less hit reset on the Zelda series, offering up a hugely expanded take on the concepts behind the original game. But if we really want to dig into the strengths and weaknesses of the expanding scope video games, we really don't have to look much further than Sonic the Hedgehog.

A sort of stepping stone between the pared down, symbolic creations seem on the Famicom and the hugely elaborate spectacles offered on the Playstation and Nintendo 64, Sonic oh so briefly stole the crown from Mario. Sonic may have been built for speed, but he wasn't really built to last.

In 1991, Sonic was something new from the world go - his sarcastic expression and waggling finger taunting you from the load screen. But the first game was actually an awkward series of jumps presented in a glossy, promising package. Through 4 subsequent installments, the series improved bit by bit, before coalescing into the exhilarating Sonic 3  / Sonic & Knuckles.

These are games of surface pleasures - the smooth controls, the buzzing rock soundtracks, the cool looks of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Dr. Robotnik. But the release of Sonic & Knuckles in 1995 was also the end: SEGA was never again able to leverage the blue hedgehog to a widely successful game. Part of this is due to the failure of four SEGA hardware launches in a row, but part of it is because Sonic never convincingly adapted to a new kind of game - a game that didn't just zip from left to right.

And it was when Sonic was down for the count that Super Mario 64 landed and went off like a bomb in the industry - reshaping conceptions of what these kinds of video game characters could do. Today, Sonic is a beloved character, but experienced best and most often in games where he races, or jousts, or fights Nintendo characters. More young kids have probably played as Sonic in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games than they have in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

There's no longer any kind of brand expectation from Sonic. And the reason is because maybe Sonic never really was about being in excellent games - maybe it always was that Sonic is always just Sonic; a better design, a better idea, than an actual character. Maybe the most compelling Sonic product in years has been the cartoon Sonic Boom, a ludicrous weekly excursion into weird humor and lame puns. People like the idea of Sonic more than they do the phenomenon of Sonic.

Sonic briefly represented the future, but in the end he was no more than a fresh coat of paint on the same old problem: people liked these characters because they were simple and relatable. Sonic and Knuckles exist barely more as figures in a silent serial: the cool guy who taps his foot, the evil guy who laughs. Mario is barely more than an abstract vessel to carry viewers through his games.

But isn't this very close to how theme park operate, too? If we're being rushed through a set at 3 feet a second, we don't have time for anything but clear, unambiguous images. Where Sonic failed is when he had to be more than that - to carry a compelling narrative about anything more than smashing robots and being cool.

We could also look at Capcom's Mega Man. Originally about little more than an Astroboy knockoff defeating a mad scientist, Mega Man presented a surprisingly bright, upbeat future of whimsical but aggressive robots. Being an early game, it was not properly translated and released with little fanfare - leaving the door open for American kids to discover and speculate on what exactly the deal with Mega Man was. Was he a soldier? A police officer? A human on an alien world? Early video games on the NES, PC and Atari were imaginatively stimulating experiences because of what they left out, offering players an opportunity to fill in the gaps in their own way.

Capcom eventually rebooted Mega Man into an elaborate and dystopian technology parable, heavily inflected by Blade Runner and The Terminator. And while several of those games are terrific, the flagship Mega Man series was sputtering out. By the early 2000s it had been rebooted yet again - into a form that little resembled its bright, cheerful, side scrolling roots. Today Mega Man is relegated to cameos and nostalgia pieces, even less relevant than Sonic is.

But compared to SEGA and Capcom's efforts to grow their signature game series, Nintendo went and doubled down on Mario's essential abstraction.

By the time Nintendo was selling copies of Super Mario 64, Mario was up against competitors like Solid Snake and Cloud from Final Fantasy VII - games that could shock or emotionally involve players in ways they had never imagined while pushing buttons on their NES. Mario was an abnormality - a cheerful but basically inaccessible fellow, eternally bubbly, in a world of bright colors and happy endings. And he stayed that way. Like Mickey Mouse, attempts to update Mario inevitably failed - and unlike Disney, Nintendo actually recognized this. Even while they branched Mario out into elaborate new genres like racing and RPG, Mario always was just Mario - he only required that players accept him as himself, a sort of mascot.

The Paper Mario series is an interesting case study in this. Hugely immersive and unapologetically long, Paper Mario expanded the intricacy and mythology of the Mushroom Kingdom in ways impossible to do in 16 bits - and they did it without even requiring Mario to speak. The cheerful, red-hatted avatar was the eye of the storm while his presence allowed Nintendo to draw on larger and larger canvases around him.

And yet, strictly speaking in terms of market share, the Mario series had been on a downslide since 1996. Mario 64 had sold less than Yoshi's Island before it, and Super Mario Sunshine sold less than Mario 64. Reissues of Mario's 2D adventures continued to do well on new formats like the Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo eventually gave up and launched a new series of 2D Mario games: New Super Mario Brothers, which has become the staple of Nintendo's portfolio. New Nintendo systems now tout 2D, retro-style Mario adventures.

Yes, that's right. The buying public voted with their dollars in favor of 1980s style abstractions, and Nintendo gave them what they wanted. Disney would've buried their heads in the sand.

Simple Mario Super Show

Which brings us back to Universal, Disney's greatest competitor. As I've claimed elsewhere on this site, Universal's most salient characteristic is their insistence on constructing their attractions based on actual linear narratives. Disney has copied the attitude, but almost none of the specifics - troweling  elaborate narrative justifications on top of random events. Universal actually sets up plot points in their queues that they expect you to keep track of and understand they're paying off later, down the line.

The thing is that I'm not at all sure that theme parks are actually any good at telling those kind of stories, and audiences don't seem to care. It's nice if they're there for the kind of people who go to blogs like this, but it isn't necessary - the kind of simple storytelling represented by a falling rock in Super Mario Brothers 3 or a floating candle in The Haunted Mansion works just as well.

Directly compare two recent Universal extravaganzas: their Harry Potter rides Forbidden Journey and Escape From Gringotts. Despite a typically elaborate narrative setup, nothing that happens in Forbidden Journey makes any sense at all - what you're doing, why it's happening, or why Harry is tolerating it. He even shouts at you in one scene thanks to your inexplicable adventure through Spiderville. Compared to this, Gringotts actually makes a lot of sense - it's well paced, it has setups and payoffs, it actually rewards an attentive rider.

But none of that matters all that much because Forbidden Journey does things that work in the narrative environment that rides create, whereas Gringotts is telling you the kind of story better told in a movie. The strengths of Forbidden Journey are themed design strengths - crazy action, immediate dangers, weird illusions. People get off Forbidden Journey excited and inspired. The ride where you bop around in a mine car and characters on IMAX screens shout exposition at you cannot compare, and guests leave somewhat underwhelmed.

Nintendo games are about mysteries, things left unexplained, unpredictable explorations of bizarre worlds. They aren't about, and they don't tell, linear, comprehensible narratives in anything but the simplest way. They're about experiences and emotions, not about writing and plot points.

I don't know if the charm of the best Nintendo games will translate to a physical medium. While Nintendo's nostalgic appeals and retro-style product help convince me that the folks at Nintendo at least know where their strengths are, I've got less hope that the American themed design industry, so obsessed with minutae and specific storytelling techniques, will be able to make the jump.

In Super Mario Brothers 3, there's a room in a World 5 fortress that's empty. There's no secrets to discover in it. It's only there for atmosphere - to make you think about where you are and what you're doing, and to feel the dark and lonely atmosphere. To me it signifies all that's compelling about old school video games - the creation of compelling spaces without explanations or finger pointing. These things aren't all jumping and shooting, or at least they don't need to be. That's the magic of Nintendo. That's what Universal needs to aim at.

The eye of the storm.

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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!

Lost and Found From the Golf Resort

Let's hop on over to the Golf Resort this week for some historical oddities. I had been looking for a reason to put these online, and a recent episode of the Retro Disney World Podcast focusing on the Golf Resort - making heavy use of my research - seemed to create a good opportunity.

On this site I've focused a lot on things like the Golf Resort and Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village - odd experiments from the first few years that are markedly different from the sort of kiddie-oriented

fare that would begin to dominate the Eisner years. The Golf Resort is one of the strongest hints at the sort of laid back, for-adults vacation Disney was trying to create.

I've never spoken to anybody who stayed at the Golf Resort - or later, the Disney Inn - who didn't consider it one of the best things they ever accidentally "discovered" at Walt Disney World. It was fairly common for the overbooked monorail hotels to move guests across the street to its manicured greens, and many found they preferred the quiet, intimate atmosphere preferable to the hustle and bustle of the main hotels.

And that's one reason I've continued to put effort into keeping its memory alive - I have no interest whatever in golf, but the Golf Resort would be the kind of place that would attract me. Ironically for being considered an overlooked, remote option, it's nearer to the most desirable part of Disney property than most of their hotels are today. Had Eisner not sold it outright to the US Military in one of Disney World's periodic economic downturns, that property would today host a truly elaborate, profitable Disney hotel.

For all these reasons, plus general weirdness, the Golf Resorts holds a place in my heart. And when, as every so often happens, something Golf Resort related pops up online, I try to secure it. Which is how I bring you today two truly obscure little finds from the olden days of Walt Disney World.

The Golf Studio

One of the oddest sidebars to the Golf Resort story is the fact that Disney offered a genuine golf class at a rate of about $30 for two hours - or $35 if students wished for a few rounds of golf after the class. That's between $75 and $90 today, making this one of the most expensive and unique items in a Walt Disney World vacation of the era - and one of the most experimental.

It's hard to convey just how much effort Disney put into their golf courses in the 70s. The "golfing triumvirate" of Card Walker, Dick Nunis and Donn Tatum ensured that their resort would house three lavishly praised championship courses - making Disney World catnip for the sorts of folks who, like them, read golfing magazines. Disney even installed a 6 hole junior course that used synthetic turf - Wee Links, today called Oak Trail.

The Golf Studio was broken into two sections: instruction and video analysis. After an hour with a instructor in a conference room, students were videotaped practicing their swings. The swing would then be analyzed frame by frame back in the Pro Shop.

At the conclusion of the class, students were given a cassette tape to bring home with them - side A featuring general golf tips from Phil Ritson, a South African golf instructor brought in by Disney to design the program. The second side was an audio recording of the video breakdown session. They came in heavy black plastic cases that looked like this:

You want to hear what's on that tape, don't you? I will not disappoint. Direct from the late 1970s, here's a few minutes of Phil Ritson pontificating about golf swings, then a look into what you would have experienced back at the Pro Shop, featuring Paul Rabito and somebody named "Eddie".

I'm not going to tell you it's especially fascinating listening, but it's remarkable that we can hear it at all.




Classic Golf Experiences: The Walt Disney World Magnolia

If golf instruction is your bag, then have I got a treat for you. If golf instruction is not your bag, then I've still got a treat for you. Every so often something pops up online and you just have to roll the dice and take a chance that it'll be interesting. I took a chance on an unpromising little VHS from 1988 entitled "The Player's Guide to the Walt Disney World Resort Magnolia Course". It turned out to be one of the dorkiest Disney things I've ever seen. And I've seen The Boatniks.

Hosted by golf commentator Gary McCord, it's obvious that Dick Nunis - or somebody, but probably Dick Nunis - rolled out the red carpet for this small-time production. And, possibly inspired and a little goofy on the Disney vibes, the crew turned out a truly bizarre little film. It features ghostly dwarfs, invading chipmunks, "outtakes", an interview with Joe Lee, and more.

It's also, generally speaking, a very good record and overview of a part of Walt Disney World everyone knows is there, but not everybody has seen. I enjoy the aesthetics of golf courses but have no interest in the game, and this video allows me to enjoy a well-designed course without sweating in the Florida heat. There's a lot of conceptual overlap between theme parks and golf courses, both being totally artificial environments created for just one purpose. It's easier to appreciate Joe Lee's course design with McCord's goofily amiable commentary and occasional Disney character appearances.

And in case you think none of this is up your alley, there's a typically goofy Disney World montage at the start, and later on, a look at the model for Wonders of Life. Give it a spin, I don't think you'll be disappointed.


Thanks to Michael Crawford for transferring both of these magnetic tape treasures to digital. And if you want even more Golf Resort, check out my historical overview at Return to the Golf Resort, or the entire Passport to Dreams Walt Disney World History portal.

Fun House: A Dark Ride Documentary

There aren't really too many really terrific theme park documentaries out there - at least ones written and produced with an eye towards objectivity and education. There's always been making-of television specials and the kind of "documentaries" Disney regularly commissions from the History and Travel Channels, but these are as much promotional tools as anything else. But a well-researched theme park documentary that has a point of view and a variety of subjects across a broad spectrum of the industry?

Well, I know of one. It was a large influence on my way of thinking about theme parks, and we're going to take a look at it today.

In the 1990s growing up out in the country, I did not have access to a lot of information about theme parks. I had grown up with our regional amusement center, Riverside Park - now known as Six Flags New England - every few years may be able to make a trip down to Disney. There was no such thing as streaming video, and a dial-up connection to a 56k modem was still years away for me. Amazon did not yet exist, never mind of the sort of information resource I've worked to make this site into. I wanted to learn more about theme parks, but my options were very limited.

Thankfully I was at the time a VHS hoarder and was able to capture this Discovery Channel documentary in 1997. When I watched it some time later, it really took my head off and changed the way I thought about my occasional trips to the orlando mega parks. Suddenly, the two worlds of amusement parks I had known - the regional parks like Lake Compounce and the Orlando extravaganzas - were contextualized as being two different expressions of a shared heritage. It was a revelation. The show was called "Fun House", and there seemingly is very little information available about it.

One could argue with certain points that the documentary makes. Its' two examples of cutting edge attractions are Indiana Jones Adventure and Terminator 2: 3D, and most theme park fans would not lump T2 in with all of the dark rides. At the end, it takes a dive into the world of IMAX films. Yet it's very easy to imagine an updated version of this documentary then moving on to discuss Universal's Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man or Disney's Soarin' as examples of rides which build on the boom in themed projection technology from the 90s. The current champion for most cutting edge attraction operating is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which frankly isn't all that different than Spider-Man.

And on the other hand, this hour long show preserves a number of things which are now lost. The Old Mill and Le Cachot at Kenywood are gone, and Bushkill Park's historic Haunted Pretzel was destroyed in the Pennsylvania flooding in 2005. The lights-on tour of the Haunted Pretzel is a high point of this documentary, and worth watching to see exactly what the Pretzel Amusement Company was building in the late 1920s.

Oh, and thankfully the me of 1997 had enough foresight to include all of the commercials. Hop on board the Fun House and let's learn something!

A Day at the Columbia Harbour House

When you think about it, visitors to theme parks really never stop moving. We walk from place to place in order to board attractions that whirl us through scenery. Trams, monorails, boats  and buses whisk us where we want to go. Even the theme park parade is whisked past us, efficiently entertaining tens of thousands at once without having to stop. One of the few places this restless forward motion finally ceases is the food court.

Most theme park guests probably spend longer staring at the walls of a food court than they do riding that multi-million dollar roller coaster or zipping through that highly profitable gift shop. And if you have an audience that's going to need to stop and stare for a while at something you built, then you have a choice. You can either present them with something that's totally perfunctory like the Captain America Diner at Islands of Adventure, or you can drop them off in something like Disneyland's Plaza Inn.

Disneyland seems to have created the idea of the fully themed food court. Much of what Disneyland opened with in 1955 could today best be described as a "snack stand", with the noteworthy exception of the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship in Fantasyland. But, starting with the plans for New Orleans Square and New Tomorrowland, Disneyland food courts would become increasingly elaborate, a progression which climaxed with Magic Kingdom's 1971 slate of indoor food courts. As has been shown on this site before, I have a special interest in the Adventureland Veranda, but really it's hard to top the Columbia Harbour House.

Indeed, among a certain subset of the historically oriented, the Harbour House is almost one of the secret handshakes. It's the dark retreat from the Florida sun where sea shanties echo through mahogany chambers. What makes the Harbour House so special?

Based on atmospheric sketches by Dorothea Redmond, The Harbour House didn't open until Summer 1972, alongside most of the rest of the facilities in Liberty Square - Olde World Antiques, the Perfume shop, the Heritage House, etc. On early Magic Kingdom guide maps, it's called the Nantucket Harbour House, but by the time it opened, it's location had switched to "Columbia Harbour". Why?

To be clear, there is no such place as Columbia Harbour. I'm fairly certain that it was named in anticipation of the arrival of a new vessel to ply the Rivers of America - a copy of the Columbia at Disneyland.

Years back, Mike Lee identified a three-masted sailing vessel on a 1969 model of the Magic Kingdom, just above Thunder Mesa. What's most interesting about this is that everything on the north side of Liberty Square is designed to suggest a seaside atmosphere - the sailing ship weathervane, widow's walks, and turning beacon atop the Riverboat Landing, the harbour House itself, the Cape Cod-style shingles around the Yankee Trader, and then the seaside horror mansion of the long-dead captain nearby. The rock wall that bounds the river along Liberty Square is referred to in old park manuals as the "Sea Wall".

The Columbia had been canceled and replaced by a second riverboat in 1973, due to the two major concerns facing park operations in this first years - shade and capacity. A Columbia vessel, with an exposed single deck holding around 300 persons, didn't make sense compared to a three-deck Riverboat holding 450 persons. It's a shame, because the Columbia would have complemented Liberty Square and made sense of a lot of the theming on the north side of the land.

That secret history is just one of the fascinations of the Harbour House. Did you know that all of the rooms inside are named? I've had the diagram posted on this site for about eight years, but it's always worth re-posting:

Did you know there used to be a separate serving area upstairs at the Harbour House? It's true. There's still a kitchen back there, and food items and whisked between floors for service downstairs. By the 90s, the upstairs counter was dispensing entirely deserts and soup, and by the mid-90s, the menu has shrunk to only offering clam chowder in those huge bread bowls you can still get at Disneyland. By the late 90s it was walled up, although you can still see the spot where it was - with the telltale tile floor - at the top of the main stairs.

In the years since moving to Central Florida, Harbour House has become my personal respite, favorite food court, and a place I take time to rest in every time I'm at Magic Kingdom. And so after nearly decades of faithful service and reliable atmosphere, I decided it was time to give the Columbia Harbour House her due as one of those things that makes The Magic Kingdom what it is.

Step through those familiar cream double doors and let's spend A Day at the Columbia Harbour House.



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I've posted a few of these elaborate edited videos before, and I try to regularly update my YouTube account with new theme park "viewpoints", static views of the park from a fixed perspective. It occurred to me that I've never made clear exactly why I continue this project, or how the "viewpoints" fit into the larger notion of the more elaborate edited sequences.

I got the basic idea from Mike Lee, who spent part of the early 90s plopping down his camcorder in various places around Walt Disney World and just letting it roll. So part of it, yes, is documentation. but there's something else here too.

When you work at Walt Disney World, it re-orients your way of thinking about the place. Visitors rush about constantly; Cast Members stand in one spot, day in and day out. After a while, if you're willing to look to see it, a secret, alternate Walt Disney World opens up to you: one where shifting light, weather, and crowds become as beautiful and memorable as the place they're in. Eventually, you learn to take pleasure more in the way the afternoon summer light bounces off the river onto the riverboat as much as you do the river itself.

This is why Mike Lee's vintage viewpoint videos struck me as worthy of emulation; they seemed to capture what it's really actually like to be there. My "Theme Park Viewpoints" are as much an effort to explain why I like these parks as they are an effort to document. That's why they go on, and on, and on; they're designed to encourage you to start admiring the way light plays off a structure, or the way the crowd ebbs and flows through a space, or the cyclical rhythm inherent to all theme parks.

This video, A Day at the Columbia Harbour House, is so far my fullest attempt to express this aspect of theme parks. I went back, again and again, at all times of day, to record life in the Harbour House for a five month span. I knew if I kept showing up and being willing to stop and look, I could just maybe be there to film that elusive magic the parks sometimes have when the light is just right. Out of about two hours of raw footage, I pulled out this 17 minute meditation of one of Magic Kingdom's holy places.

Stop, look, and listen inside theme parks, as often as possible, for as long as it takes. The secret life of the park is there for you if you're willing to see it.

Breakfast at the Riverbelle Terrace

Growing up out East, I didn't really have a lot of ideas about what the heck that Disneyland was all about.

In a pre-internet world, my only insights into the place - and indeed the mere fact that it was distinctive from Magic Kingdom at all - came from two sources: the 1990 "The Disneyland Game" published by Parker Brothers - where I first learned that the castle out there wasn't like the castle I knew, and that the Haunted Mansion looked even less like the gothic structure which had so impressed me.

It took a few years, but the next bombshell was a VHS tape called Disneyland Fun. That was how I learned the words to Grim, Grinning Ghosts long before it was possible for me to get to Magic Kingdom regularly. Long before I knew what the Matterhorn was, I was trying to pause the tape to figure out what the heck the monster inside it was.

I still watch Disneyland Fun the night before every trip out to Disneyland, because once you get as familiar with the parks as I am, some of the things that really make you feel like a kid again come from unexpected places.

I took this photo on my second trip in 2005

I didn't get out to Disneyland until I was nearly an adult, so a lot of my key formative impressions of the place came through such twice-removed sources as VHS tapes, TV broadcasts, books, and much later on - the internet. I devoured library copies of The Art of Walt Disney and Disneyland: The First Quarter-Century for any hint of the atmosphere of the place. And very high on my list of early impressions about Disneyland was breakfast at Riverbelle Terrace. I did not yet even know its name, but I recognized that wrought iron patio instantly upon seeing it.

Although the tradition of the Mickey-shaped pancake hasn't totally vanished from Walt Disney World, the adorable fruit faces lasted only a few years after I began visiting, and the notion that I could enjoy that again out West stuck strong with me. Seeing the beautiful, open-air patio only impressed me even more.

Perhaps it all goes back to one of the few keenly remembered thing about one of my earliest trips to Walt Disney World, in 1992. My family stayed at Dixie Landings and I was entranced by the Mill Food Court - the endless pancake operation at the griddle, seeing the pancakes set up and get flipped through the glass window, and the hot morning Florida light filtering through the glass enclosed room stays with me to this day. Perhaps on some deep level I connected to Riverbelle Terrace for being the new equivalent of that distant memory.

Something about such a peaceful location in such a bustling intersection stuck strong in my mind, and does to this day. Few things feel more authentically, uniquely Disneyland than sitting out on that patio with a cup of coffee admiring the view towards New Orleans Square.

The view of the Terrace burned into my five-year-old mind

Earlier this year, Disneyland announced their intention to move breakfast to the nearby Rancho del Zocalo. While I'm sure the Mickey pancake will survive and there's certainly nothing special about the food at Riverbelle on a taste level, it is a tradition none the less. The feeling of being out on that patio really is something distinct that I feel won't translate to Rancho.

So one overcast Southern California morning last month, I set out for my last Mickey pancake, camera in tow, in an attempt to capture something of the atmosphere of the morning bustle of Riverbelle Terrace.

It's nice to know that the beautiful dining room will still be in use, and the kitchen will likely be putting out far better food than it ever has. But the thing about Riverbelle Terrace is that it was one of those spots at Disneyland where you could get onto the wavelength of the past. While you were eating there, it didn't seem so long ago that it was called the Aunt Jemima Pancake House and Walt Disney himself was walking Main Street. There was something comforting about knowing that that restaurant had been turning out box mix pancakes since 1955. Sitting out on that patio was good for your soul.

So grab your $9 pancake and let's take in one last breakfast on the Riverbelle Terrace.

Sunrise Over the Polynesian

Here's a somewhat dispiriting paradox for you: the Walt Disney World theme parks are at their most beautiful when nobody can see them.

This isn't really by design, mind you. Once the last guests roll out of the park at night and the various facilities power down and turn their work lights on, and bit by bit as third shift rolls in, the "show lights" which make places like Magic Kingdom and EPCOT so beautiful at night turn off. Trucks and cars replace pedestrians. Even the street lights turn off, and the theme parks become dark, even beautifully sinister places. Many third shift employees bring their own stereos, and a patchwork of FM radios and CDs replaces the familiar peppy background music. Electrical generators create pools of light for projects amid the stark darkness, and sidewalks are hosed down. The parks become dark and dripping places.

Pre-Dawn sky, 2005

Then, gradually, the sky turns midnight blue and this strange place begins to turn back into the place we know, and that's when it happens. The open Florida pre-dawn sky gives way to a beautiful, indirect yelllow sunlight, somewhat like the light Disneyland gets out West in the first part of their day, and pockets of humidity become a gentle ground fog that settles over bodies of water. If the parks ever open at 7 am or 8 am around Christmas, some of the very end of this may be observed. By 10:00 am the air gets hot and humid and the light turns that Florida white-hot and the day truly has begun.

Pre-Opening Sunlight

As a Cast Member I savored these hours before the madness truly descended. Seeing the parks so clean and so empty and so lovely was a reward that made up for the pathetic monetary compensation, and I could see it whenever I wanted. I wish I could get there so easily still, but the parks are not open to those who don't work there in those morning hours, meaning I mostly have my memories and a handful of photos to guide me.

But, you know, you can go to the resorts whenever you want, and late last month I did just that. The Polynesian Village hasn't changed much since 1980 but appears to be next up on the block for Disney Vacation Club expansion, the same fate which brought us a huge tower sitting beside the Contemporary. Although hopefully the Polynesian iteration will be less destructive to original design elements than others have been - they have, after all, nearly no space to work with - it felt imperative to capture something of the feel of this easterly portion of the resort on the eve of the start of construction. Working steadily for about 45 minutes, I was able to capture a mostly unbroken sunrise over the Old Polynesian.

This is the edited version. Compared to some of my other videos, I've done very little to this footage - no music to accompany it, no reshuffling of shots - I did abridge certain shots with fades, but allowing for the fact that this condenses an hour of material into six minutes, it's as close to a real-time sunrise as you can get without being there.

I like the unedited feel of it - the true look and sound of a remarkable place coming online. My overall goal in these videos is to capture that dimension that motion pictures are capable of but photos aren't always - that sense of place and time and, like the Lumiere shots of Parisian street scenes, I've found that the camera plunked down somewhere and allowed to simply record can capture pools of magic. Listen carefully here, and you can hear the Walt Disney World Railroad being brought on the tracks across the lagoon, deliveries being made at the Polynesian, and more.

It's not quite like going into Magic Kingdom on your off day to watch the sun rise over Cinderella Castle, but it's close.

And check out my YouTube page for more videos, including unedited single-shots and some shorter edited sequences.

One Last FountainView

History is funny. Sometimes the things you think are worth preserving turn out not to be and the things you are convinced couldn't possibly be of value to future generations turn out to be coveted. Turns out we have more than enough information about the Gulf Coast Room to fill several blog posts, but I couldn't tell you, based on all of my vast amounts of reference material, where the various cafes on the Grand Canyon Concourse were situated from year to year.

Of course scarcity creates demand; we live in an on-demand world where nearly any piece of obscure information is obtainable, and so the gaps in that record loom ever larger. Perspective plays a role in all of this too: as a Disney historian, I saw little worth saving in the Main Street Bakery, which closed six months ago to howls of protest and reopened this month as the first of four Starbucks Coffee locations in Walt Disney World. Since the interior had already been gutted and reworked in the 90s following the end of the Sara Lee era, I saw little reason to document what was there. It turns out that maybe I should've, even if the Internet in general stepped up and did an admirable job anyway. The fact remains that the average minor event at Walt Disney World is better documented than the whole of the first twenty years put together.

I did, however, feel the need to make sure that FountainView Bakery, at Epcot but not really part of 2013, had a good send-off, and spent a few hours there in March recording what I could.

FountainView began life in 1982 as the evocatively named Sunrise Terrace restaurant, so named because its windows faced east, presumably in the off chance that diners would indeed catch sight of the sun peeking over the low beige roof of Communicore at some point in the future. Birnbaum's 1982 Walt Disney World guidebook describes it thusly:

"Fried fish and shrimp, cornbread muffins, and chef's salads are the order of the day at this good-sized fast-food eatery."

Sunrise Terrace seems to have stuck to this menu fairly consistently throughout the 80s, until it closed in 1993 as part of the Innoventions refurbishment to reopen as the a cutting-edge espresso shop, back in the days before espresso was available on every street corner in America. This is the form I remember it best as, until its Nestle sponsorship lapsed in the mid-2000s and FountainView went through several phases of on-again, off-again operation. By the late 2000s it was back open again as an Edy's ice cream parlor, before closing in 2013 for Starbucks conversion.

FountainView was never a very interesting space: a circular room with an al fresco patio overlooking the Fountain of Nations, it was nevertheless one of the few spaces at Epcot still open to the public but left unmolested by the prevailing winds of cultural change; from its suspicious stepped rows of silk potted plants to its stone grey tile, Sunrise Terrace/FountainView seemed better suited as a stage for an early-1990s RadioShack Christmas commercial or perhaps a Nintendo Entertainment System demonstration than it had any business serving suspect coffee and pastries; and since nothing lasts forever at Walt Disney World, a mostly-untouched original interior and unchanged 1989 Jack Wagner loop featuring the immortal "Behind the Waterfall" seemed absolutely essential to document.

After waiting several months, when it came time to edit my footage I was convinced I had been too clever in choosing my angles - the space was, on the main, narrow enough to feasibly spit across, forcing lots of detail work - and couldn't hope to capture the feeling of the place in any cumulative sense. After some careful attention to visual structure, composition and editing, I'm happy to report that this piece turned out vastly better than expected, and captures much of the flavor of FountainView as it exists in my memory. 

On the main Starbucks is a ready made fit for the old Sunrise Terrace - their brand identity mix of earth tones, new technology and old-fashioned idealism is just a stone's throw away from EPCOT Center, anyway. But of course Starbucks is expected to host vastly higher numbers of guests than FountainView could ever hope to pull in, and so the fate of that original interior remains uncertain. After all, much of the interior's charm can be chalked up to its intimate scale. Will the silk potted plants remain? The inexplicable corner areas filled with tiny patches of grass? Who will care for the ugly neon?

Suspect taste, reboot, or not, FountainView will live on online - a neat little donut of a room hopelessly behind the times where Yanni and David Lanz play on. Join me now for one last ice cream in the best little fried food counter/coffee shop/ice cream parlor on the West side of Future World.

A Long Look at Tom Sawyer Island

Tom Sawyer Island is one of the very best attractions at Magic Kingdom.

Yes, you read that correctly. At Magic Kingdom, the park that contains the highest number of attractions per square acre that represent why people go to that crazy Walt Disney World anyway, in a park featuring such brilliant and hauntingly beautiful creations as the Haunted Mansion and 1971 Jungle Cruise, a low-tech oddity like Tom Sawyer Island can still go up against timeless classics and the newest of the new.

I sometimes hear scoffs about that, but it's always from people who haven't seen Tom Sawyer Island, which is not the same as saying they haven't been - because to see Tom Sawyer Island means it has to seep into you, you have to let it into dark spaces where your mind doesn't often travel. One can raft across to the island, disembark, walk around for twenty minutes and leave without actually seeing a darn thing - without looking past the tip of her nose.

Tom Sawyer Island is essentially a collection of low-tech gags that build to an imaginative space of astonishing richness. Many of the gags could've been thought up and installed by almost any theme park - but they weren't. Like the best Disney special effects, the disarming transparent simplicity of the Island gags encourage our imaginations to fill in the blanks - and that's how it gets to us.

Tom Sawyer Island is one of the very last flowerings of a primal mode of themed design representation which most closely resembles a magic trick - rather, misdirection. A speaker and light in the right place can populate a cave with Pirates, or a staircase rising to a sealed door creates an imaginary room. These simple images engage our conscious imagination and create highly pleasurable illusions. This is, to me, what themed design is all about at its best - the scribble in the margin that so enriched rides like Horizons and If You Had Wings. The Island is rich with texture and detail, from the uneven "earth" pathways to the rock-edged waterfalls and babbling brooks.

Tom Sawyer Island is a fantastic place to observe one of the major structural concepts which underlines every Disneyland-style theme park: the dynamic of control versus chaos. Disney creates real-feeling environments where, unlike our unordered cities or uncivilized countrysides, everything has been placed for specific aesthetic effect - from the tiniest white rock to the color of the water in the fake lakes. This effect is especially pervasive at Walt Disney World, where everything as far as the eye can see both inside and outside the theme parks has been placed there by Disney. But while this is pleasing and reassuring, it's also unnatural, and part of our mind draws back. To contrast this  uncanny effect, Disney creates spaces inside their attractions where their orderly world appears to break down and Things Go Horribly Wrong.

Of course, just as it's a carefully controlled illusion of perfection in the theme park, it's a carefully controlled illusion of peril - Brer Fox is an animated chunk of metal and fiberglass and nobody has yet perished from riding a log down Chikapin Hill. Just as we suspend our disbelief in admiration as we walk down Main Street, we suspend our disbelief in gratitude as we pretend to think we're in danger on Big Thunder Mountain.

There are few attractions where the sense of rules having been suspended is as pervasive or effective as it is on Tom Sawyer Island, especially in those caves, where we almost think that we won't make it out again. The Magnetic Mystery Mine, where physics become disturbingly unhinged, or the Escape Tunnel, which is narrow enough to give many adults momentary panic attacks. We run, saunter, shput, tremble, snooze, or daydream on Tom Sawyer Island - we tromp through the flowerbeds, get wet, step off the pathways, shoot fake guns, and generally get away with things. And there are few places where we feel as genuinely unchaperoned- and alone.

Why does Tom Sawyer Island feel so uninhibited? Part of it, I suspect, is symbolic - we take a raft to get there, and therefore experience a physical transition to another place - we feel as though we're outside the theme park, and no longer governed by its rules. Thus the (highly engineered, it's worth noting) adventures we experience take on an ominous undercurrent - not because they are dangerous, but they could be. Just as Mark Twain wrote a fantasy version of his childhood from the perspective of an adult, Tom Sawyer Island zips us right back to the "once upon a time" of a dimly remembered childhood afternoon when we went exploring - an ingrained cultural memory that maybe very few of us ever actually did. But it's a evergreen myth - from Tom Sawyer to Little Nemo to Stand By Me and The Goonies.

No other attraction makes exclusive use of daylight in quite the same way, which is probably why Tom Sawyer Island closes at dusk - although at Magic Kingdom, in particular, a very large number of lights and lanterns have been positioned on the island to illuminate it at night so that it appears to be real place, or at least enough of a real place to have a continued existence after we leave it. But maybe Tom Sawyer Island is most impressive for being basically unlit - scenes like Harper's Mill ask us to step into dim rooms and strain to make out the details - just as in life. Even the caverns mostly refrain from theatrical lighting - if we see a light, it's from a lantern or a torch. The rest is allowed to fall off into obscurity.There is also a remarkably simplistic sound design - next to no music, and the bulk of the sound effects are motivated by a source that can be seen. If we hear birds, they probably are real birds. This contributes to the feeling of being unrehearsed and overall quite different than the carefully crafted, lit, and scored world of the rest of the theme park in general.

These reasons alone are enough to argue for the continued preservation of this remarkable attraction, but, as always, there are more.

Although it probably seemed a lot less special in 1973, today Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is notable for being a very well preserved example of a homespun American original - an attraction which once proliferated across the country and made good use of simple perspective tricks - the Mystery Hill or Mystery Spot. The most famous one still operating today is in Santa Cruz, California, although Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is more likely inspired by the Haunted Shack at Knott's Berry Farm.

The Mine is a creative interpretation of this traditional roadside attraction, as well. Since the attraction has no host or guide which is required for the various scale and perspective illusions of something like the Knott's Haunted Shack, the Disney version uses visual and sensory grammar to make sense of its illusions. An entry tunnel gradually increases in pitch although its walls appear to remain upright, making the audience feel as if they are being pulled to the left, while an ominous humming, the sound of the mystery magnets, can be heard. Inside the main room, a sluice placed under a trickle of water seems to run uphill into a barrel, and a small indoor waterfall becomes a river running upstream towards a formation of jewels which juts out of the wall, shaped like the profile of a man. The entire room is tilted, making travel unsteady and forcing viewers to lean towards the magnetic jewels. The final room is a variation on a traditional scene in classic dark rides such as those by Bill Tracy - the diminishing mine shaft, where visitors appear to grow larger as they reach the end.

Aunt Polly's in better days, Photo by Al Huffman

Old Scratch's Mystery Mine is, as far as I know, the only "mystery spot" ever built by Disney, and that alone makes it worthy of preservation. Tokyo Disneyland got a version of the Disneyland Island in 1983, after which the attraction stopped being built. Disney literally does not make them like this anymore.

But the entire attraction overall is remarkably unchanged since June 1973, and that itself is a wonder. We can pretty much account for the changes on one hand:

 - The "Explorer's Maps" are no longer handed out at the entrance, although a number of metal versions have been placed around the island to aid navigation.

- After years of spotty service, in 2001 the sign was finally removed from Aunt Polly's Refreshments, meaning the closure of this simple snack stand. In the early days it sold cold sandwiches and soda, and later expanded to include things like potato salad and cold fried chicken.

 - The Cantina in the Fort is no longer the place to go for frozen lemonade. I personally have no memory of this ever being open, so its demise may have been far earlier than Aunt Polly's.

 - The extremely cool "spinning rocks" playground was removed and an off-the-shelf playground designed to look like a "salvage fort" was added a few years earlier. Thankfully, we can still see it being enjoyed by children in pyjamas in the late 80's souvenir video "A Day at the Magic Kingdom".

Left: the merry go round, Right: the teeter-totter / Photos by Al Huffman, 1999

This places Tom Sawyer Island in extremely select company at Magic Kingdom, alongside the Riverboat and Peter Pan's Flight and It's a Small World and the Peoplemover as attractions which substantively have never changed. Who in 1973 would've guessed that Tom Sawyer Island would outlast Country Bear Jamboree or the Tiki Room in their original forms? In June of this year, it will have gone forty blessed years without so much as a Pirate intervention.

Which means it's no time like the present to start documenting it. I recently spent several days on the Island trying to document those things likely to be overlooked when and if the time comes to close it - the winding paths and trails and picnics areas on the hills over Injun Joe's Cave and the two ponds which open into slow moving waterfalls, the Hangman's Steps and Gallows Getaway and Hickory Switch Hill and textures and tones and impressions of a few hours exploring.

It's not intended to be a fast-moving overview, but rather an opportunity to explore and contemplate an attraction rich in fascinations. In other words it's meant to document some of the pleasures I find in this attraction and perhaps preserve something of the atmosphere if the time ever does come to close it.

Why do I think Tom Sawyer Island stands high among WED Enterprises' finest creations? Because it both requires and supplies imagination - a little bit goes a long way. It's the retreat inside the retreat - the ritualistic crossing on the raft, the swaying of rocking chairs, the dapple light through the trees becomes a space which perhaps supplies little if we are not willing to stop, look, and listen, but becomes tremendously real and hauntingly deep. Harper's Mill and Potter's Windmill and Fort Langhorn feel as ancient and real today as anything at Walt Disney World, and the effect can be spooky as well as transcendent - like the rest of the Magic Kingdom was just built around it, and there it remains as it has for perhaps a hundred and fifty years.

That's a convincing illusion. And Tom Sawyer Island, untouched these forty years, still has the power to circulate wild and indomitable energies and rich imaginative constructs, a graceful and lingering prose poem that draws its energy from the lapping of the river which surrounds it - the Magic Kingdom's most successful and beautiful lament for the spirit of a bygone time.