Passport to Dreams 2015 Year-End Review

Out And About In The Parks

While 2015 can hardly be said to be a banner year for changes in the parks at least in terms of the sorts of things Disney heavily promotes - new rides, expansion areas, etc - sometimes it's the minor changes that say more than the major ones. I like to describe the theme parks as big clockwork mechanisms filled with tiny pieces that all need to be moving in precise synchronization. Yes, the clock will stop if a major piece gets broken, say when the monorail to Magic Kingdom goes down. But all of those little pieces are just as important too, and if they get all rusty and wonky then even if the clock is still running then you'll know that it isn't keeping good time, that something isn't quite right.

Most of the Walt Disney World parks are more on this side of the equation: there's enough wonky, small pieces that you can tell things aren't quite right, even if it's hard to say exactly what or why. Conversely, 2015 saw a lot of those tiny pieces get improved, and the benefits may not command extensive celebration through the official sources, but once enough small things get improved you can feel the whole park, the whole system, elevated like a boat gently lifted by the tide.

This is a year to applaud small but worthwhile victories.

Remember the Maliboomer at California Adventure? It was the huge, basically unthemed launch tower of the west side of Paradise Pier? As part of the overhaul of the park, it was removed and not replaced. It was a rare case of enhancement by omission; California Adventure was stronger with nothing in its place. Well, 2015 saw one of the biggest things go the way of the Maliboomer of all time.

This was the grossly inappropriate Sorcerer's Hat at the end of Hollywood Boulevard at Disney Hollywood Studios. And while this is a design oriented blog, I'm sure I don't need to launch into a long description of why the hat was a poor choice. It speaks for itself, absurdly perched as it was at the end of the nicest stretch of themed architecture in that park. What I'd like to point out is how unexpectedly refreshed I was to see it gone.

It had been long enough - 15 years - that I had forgotten how that particular piece of forced perspective illusion was supposed to work, and once the hat (and the stage after it) was taken down, I was frankly dazzled by the view, and it's been a long time since anything in that park actually dazzled me. I was totally unprepared for how effective that view was, how correct and symmetrical the Chinese Theater looked at the end of the street. I had forgotten how effective the tiny corridor opening up to a huge central courtyard actually was, and how near the Theater looked from the end of the street, only to seem suddenly twice as far away from you as it really was once you passed the shops. It's a really nifty optical illusion, and by simply being revealed again it elevates the entire experience of walking into that park from mildly impressive to really engaging.

But moreover it was really exciting to stop and listen to guests walking into the park and hear things I hadn't heard in 15 years: "really cool!", or, "what's in there?". The simple fact of removing the hat means that suddenly the entrance to Hollywood Studios is a place of glamour and intrigue instead of an art deco sidewalk leading to a giant blue metal cone. It gives that park back one of its signature subtleties, imparts meaning and intrigue, and is no less important than the castle at the end of Main Street for making guests feel like they paid for something special.

Hollywood Studios is in the midst of an identity crisis. Very soon, basically the entire back half of the place is going to be leveled, and turned into one of those modern day Imagineering extravaganzas modeled on the success of that wizard boy next door. Being a romantic at heart I wish the entire park could be skinned into some sort of Golden Age of Hollywood fantasy, but I know that millennium falcons outsell films noir by a hundred to one. Disney-MGM Studios was once a place of great promise that ended before it ever really got started: Dick Tracey's Crimestoppers, Red Car Cafe, The South Seas Club from The Rocketeer, a Who Framed Roger Rabbit Toontown; all of these things came very close to being. And while at this point any change is better than none, those of us who find the romance of alien world and lightsabers cold comfort compared to the fantasy of the past will have to keep looking.

Speaking of Imagineering extravaganzas, the vaguely anticipated opening of The World of Avatar at Animal Kingdom draws nearer, and from what can be seen by peeking over construction walls, the place looks bananas. Comparable to the astonishing desert landscape created for Cars Land at California Adventure, nothing short of seeing it with your eyes can properly describe just how large this thing is.

But even better than the future home of blue cat individuals has been the change evident at Animal Kingdom over the past year. Disney's clearly cashing in the whole donut for Avatar, and in the meantime Joe Rohde has been using the extra money swimming around to improve almost everything that was already in place in the park. As a result, Animal Kingdom has quietly elevated itself from an ambitious effort to the best themed attraction in the United States.

Some areas required nothing but a doubling down and removal of tacky elements, like the brightly painted safari animals covering the buildings in the center of the park. Others, like the already excellent Harambe, have been tripled in size in a manner consistent with the excellent standards already in place. The new Harambe, with its repurposed British colonial fort, new port, railway line, and expanded neighborhood out back, now can fit comfortably alongside Disneyland's New Orleans Square and Universal's Diagon Alley as one of the best things of its type that can be experienced anywhere. Once you factor in the remarkable accomplishment represented by the Kilimanjaro Safaris back in 1998 as part of the "land", it becomes even more impressive.

Out at the front of the park, the central area in front of the Tree of Life has been smartly rebuilt. Animal Kingdom canceled its' parade, which at first may strike one as a loss, but the gain was that WDI took the initiative to replant the open area in front of the tree into a tree-shaded courtyard with whimsical touches and in the bargain exposed a waterfall off to the right of the tree that had been there since 1998 but had been impossible to see from its intended angle. Again, these are tiny fixes, but they make Animal Kingdom a delight to visit, which isn't something I ever thought I'd say.

Speaking of making places inhabitable, as Downtown Disney became Disney Springs this year, what I previously thought was impossible finally happened and that area actually became a pleasant, even pretty walk. The changes here are too numerous to encapsulate and aren't even complete, but the walk from West Side into the Marketplace (finally after many years renamed the Village Marketplace; hooray for history) is now full of rich textures, unique architecture, and most importantly a sensation of relaxation. While the West Side will likely never be perfect, new tenants and a new look has returned to this property a sense of relaxation and charm that went away in the 90s.

One of the best things to do is free, and it's to walk through the new Boathouse restaurant to the dock bar out back, then walk down to the water where two dozen or so beautifully maintained vintage boats are there just for you to look at. It feels like old Disney, when Magic Kingdom and EPCOT had things out to see just because they were cool and weird.

 The Boathouse Restaurant is owned by the same CEO who made his fortune through Rainforest Cafe and the similar T-Rex next door, but the Boathouse is as personal and charming as Rainforest Cafe is unfortunate and tacky. He built the place and put the boats out on display because he thought it would be cool, and the difference is like night and day. Frankly it reminds me of the fact that 90% of Disneyland, and by extension the Magic Kingdom, is the way it is just by virtue of the fact that one guy with the financial clout to back his ideas wanted to build stuff he thought would be cool. We need more of that these days.

Trader Sam's Grog Grotto

I will never get over the removal of the Polynesian waterfall. Never. And while I'm in agreement that the Polynesian needed a refurbishment and that most of the hotel now has a fresh feeling it hasn't had in years, none of those factors stack up nearly as much as the fact that the lobby is now a charmless, dead place. So while gaining an excellent bar does not exactly "make up" for gutting the most distinctive thing about the Polynesian, it is a darn good bar, and deserves a bit of celebration outside the scope of my indefinitely extended waterfall mopery. Walk clear past the charmless tiki state and indifferent pile of rocks; head directly for some liquor, because Trader Sam's Grog Grotto is pretty darn good.

An excellent addition in 2015, at least for those of us who enjoy strong drinks in dark places, was the opening of the east coast outpost of Trader Sam's, the popular tiki bar which began life at the Disneyland Hotel in 2011. I quite liked the original incarnation in California, and I like the version at the Polynesian as well. On nights when business isn't too strong and the wait staff aren't constantly shouting, it's even near the Tiki Bar ideal of dark, strange, and contemplative.

Most of us who enjoy the trappings of faux-exotica got the itch from the Enchanted Tiki Room, so it's interesting that the imitation has swung back around to be a legitimate source for an imitation of an imitation. Of course, the original tiki kitsch was itself an imitation of the real thing, spiced up with foods that imitated oriental dishes and drinks the imitated caribbean punches, so what previously was a direct line between inspiration and imitation has turned into a mobius strip. That's part of what's awesome about Tiki: it's simultaneously absurdly convoluted and unreasonably dedicated to casualness.

I wish the east coast drinks were poured heavier in the way they are out west, but overall I think the Grog Grotto is an all-around improvement on the original model. I love that the entrance to the place is an inconspicuous door with a small sign that opens up into another world, and I find the bar bites to be far better than the fast food served in Disneyland. But the real win is the outdoor patio. At Disneyland, if you sit outside you're missing all the fun, but that's at Disneyland where you're in the middle of a hotel from the 60s in the middle of Anaheim. At Walt Disney World you're on the shores of the Seven Seas Lagoon with the Magic Kingdom glittering across the water and, later on, a personal elevated view of the Electrical Water Pageant. That mean you're in one of the finest man made environments ever constructed, never surpassed. Best of all, tables are almost always open outside. When it comes to a few fortifying drinks before heading into the human jungle of the Magic Kingdom, Trader Sam's isn't just an improvement, it's a new tradition, and they don't mint those every year.

Sailing the River of Time

It's time to be honest here guys: El Rio del Tiempo wasn't very good. I loved it deeply and I miss it, but it just wasn't very good. There was a condescending attitude throughout El Rio which no amount of interpretive dance retellings of Mayan and Incan civilizations could disguise; its Mexico was a Mexico of charmingly foreign shopkeepers selling worthless trinkets and mariachi serenading white tourists in hot tubs. It all climaxed with a gloriously ghoulish finale where Mexicans became weird marionettes endlessly circling under artificial fireworks.

With the exception of the lovely, mysterious atmosphere created by the opening tunnel tableau with the mysterious Mayan priest materializing out of a tomb, Gran Fiesta Tour takes most of what was good in El Rio (the sets) and improves it with more color, more action, and more variety. It better presents views of modern Mexico and adds a sense of fun and color that the mostly mysterioso, dour El Rio never attempted. The trouble was, it really didn't have an ending. Nearly ten years later, all of that was fixed with the return of the Three Caballeros figures from Mickey Mouse Revue.

In some ways it's actually strange to have something in the center of that room that you really, really want to look at. There never was anything wrong with the Marionettes in El Rio, but they always were upstaged by the fiberoptic fireworks and Mexico City mural. The initial climax of Gran Fiesta Tour was just another screen in the back of a stage, and I always found the animation on that final screen to be less inspired than the rest of the animation in the attraction, and especially weak compared to Ward Kimball's masterpiece song sequence from the 1946 film.

There's now something that neither El Rio nor Gran Fiesta Tour had in that space: a real sense of payoff, that you rode the boat and reached a goal for a darn good reason. I always felt that El Rio climaxed with the appearance of the Mayan priest and basically coasted, evenly but unremarkably, until it ended. Had the team behind Gran Fiesta Tour found a way to retain the sense of shrouded mystery in that opening tunnel and then transitioned into the steady build of the rest of the ride, with this addition I'd be comfortable saying that Fiesta is a better ride than El Rio. As it stands, the new finale puts them on about equal footing in my mind.

Mind you, my heightened esteem for the ride is a reflection of my admiration for the Three Caballeros figures. These fellows aren't just historically relevant, they're awesome. Mickey Mouse Revue was long gone by the time I first stepped foot in Magic Kingdom, so my exposure to Mickey Mouse Revue was limited to pictures and video. It was not only hard to guess the size of the actual figures, but how they would look in motion. These guys have that elusive X factor that seemingly everything that WED and MAPO would turn out at the height of their powers had. They're cute and they look incredibly alive. And they move so well that many people have been led to believe that they  have entirely new interior functions, which isn't true. MAPO was just darn good at building these things and Tokyo Disneyland was darn good at maintaining them.

Kudos are also due to WDI East for the figure finish on the existing animatronics, of course, which have never looked better, and a snappy new animated performance. But really, this is the sort of enhancement that we shouldn't have to wait ten years for at Walt Disney World.

There's hundreds of areas around the resort that could use improvements that aren't demanded, but still needed, still meaningful. It takes all of the thousands of tiny excellences moving in harmony to build the sense of remarkable show and quality product that Disney once excelled at. Small, meaningful passion projects with dedicated teams striving for excellence needs to be the rule, not the exception.

Captain EO Returns To His Home Planet

Let's take a moment here to appreciate that for a little over five years, Disney has been inflicting Captain EO on otherwise unassuming tourists. Bigger, tackier, and yet somehow more heartfelt than anything our modern age would be likely to try to pawn off as a normal piece of entertainment, Captain EO has been consistently pulling good attendance numbers but also has been consistently scored low on polls. That's not surprising, because the very nature of such a film is that it must resonate strongly with a statistically small portion of the audience. Bringing back Captain EO in the first place may have been a strange choice for 2010, but since then it has grown into a cult film, fiercely loved by a small subsection of its audience.

It's funny that Disney has a cult film to begin with, Disney being as wholly dedicated to the most palatable, most widely popular manifestations of popular culture as any entertainment company on earth. it's doubly funny that it's Captain EO, which in 1986 was something of a distillation of the most middle of the road taste possible: a music video produced by the creator of the most successful motion picture series of all time, starring the biggest pop star on the planet. A 2015 equivalent would be a YouTube reaction video directed by Peter Jackson starring Lady Gaga and lots of explosions. Yet the world turned, and this gigantic expensive glazed ham somehow aged into the finest cheese possible. It was ludicrous, bereft of taste or tact, and I loved every deranged minute of it.

So rather than mourn the passage of Captain EO or opine on its replacement, I'd like to celebrate that it was here at all again to begin with. and that it resonated with the few it did. Indeed, it's impossible to claim that it's anything less than supremely irresponsible to be presenting such a strange film to 2015 audiences at all. Sometimes, popular taste moves on and things which once seemed like a normal, logical part of everyday life are revealed later to be batshit insane. That was Captain EO. It was too weird to die. In a world where artisanal kale salads are the norm, Captain EO was a tuna lime gelatin loaf, an antique of a time long since passed. Now that the Second Age of EO has passed, I salute it passing here while recognizing that it was a bizarre aberration to begin with. I was delighted to enjoy it for the five years that I did.

Farewell, Hooter, Commander Mog, the Supreme Leader, Idy and Odie, and Fuzzball. May you repose peacefully beneath a fried egg, a chain of sausage links, and a marshmallow until the end of days.

Magic Kingdom's Minor Changes

It's been a long time since I've really had to fuss too much over the condition of the main park of my interest. Yes, it wasn't that way even ten years ago, but I think it's safe to say that the era when we have to be constantly concerned that WDW is going to shutter our favorite attractions at any moment has passed. The ones that survived the 90s survived and the rest seem sufficiently popular enough to be bulletproof. Meanwhile the Studios and Epcot share less and less of the pie of visitors every year, and Disney seems more and more reluctant to present visitors with anything out of place in their keystone park.

In other words: this park is slammed, and every year it seems to get worse. Don't expect anything to change, at least in the next five to seven years, as Animal Kingdom, Studios, and eventually Epcot's re-expansion efforts go online. As pleasant as New Fantasyland is aesthetically, it's increasingly clear that only the Dwarfs Mine Train is actually pulling its weight in the numbers department. What Magic Kingdom needs is a couple of brand new huge attractions, probably one on each side of the park, to start sopping up demand. The park was designed back in the 70s to accommodate around 35,000 people daily. Fastpass and the declining popularity of former attendance drawers, combined with the fact that twice that number regularly descend on the park, means that Disney's window to be proactive with this park passed about six years ago.

The good news is that it's now easier to count the attractions that have not received some kind of major cosmetic upgrade than it is to count those that have. In the realm of those that opened when the park was young, it's pretty much down to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Tom Sawyer Island, Peter Pan's Flight, and Carousel of Progress. Big Thunder has needed a gigantic facelift for going on ten years now, on the scale of the work done at the attraction in Disneyland recently. It's been on and off the schedule for next year, but the park may be trying to delay it until after Avatar opens at Animal Kingdom in a year and change.

But frankly overall, the place has been looking really sharp for a very long time. While I don't care for the current shortened version of the show, on the technical level Country Bear Jamboree looks terrific, and even the neglected old Carousel of Progress - which I was on a boycott of for about five years due to Disney's refusal to do anything with it - as recently as three weeks ago was looking surprisingly bright and smooth. Even the long-forgotten show scenes along the back stretch of the Rivers of America have gotten upgrades and refurbishments recently, for probably the first time in over twenty years.

In early 2015, the Sunshine Tree Terrace and Aloha Isle swapped locations and menus, meaning that Dole Whips are now dispensed by the exit of the Tiki Room and Citrus Swirls may be purchased near the front of Adventureland. As a historically minded type I'm supposed to be angry about this, but I'm not really - it makes good sense. Sunshine Tree Terrace has always had an unusually huge counter and a short line. The Dole Whip, meanwhile, despite having been scientifically proved to be vastly inferior to the Citrus Swirl, has always had more of a following. It can be chalked up to a bigger social media presence or perhaps just the American sweet tooth at work, but it is what it is. And while  it seems unfortunate to cut off the Sunshine Tree Terrace from the Sunshine Pavilion, there's some compensatory developments.

To begin with, I like the new sign for Sunshine Tree Terrace better than either the Aloha Isle sign or the 2012 version of the Terrace sign. Aloha Isle's new sign also retains the 1960's lettering reintroduced for the Orange Bird roll out in 2012, so I've got no problem with that.

But besides relocating the historic Orange Bird figure to the new Terrace location and giving him an awesome sign, the move did accomplish one thing which has long been on my wish list for Magic Kingdom: put up some decor in the juice bar. It's long been little but a bare room with some bamboo wallpaper, and once the bird was relocated on a new shelf he was joined by shelves of vintage citrus juicers, plastic fruit, and even a new chalkboard showing which fruits have recently arrived in stock. Many of these props seem to have been leftovers from Disney Springs' expanded margarita bar, but I don't mind. Some theming is better than no theming, and that's just one more original Magic Kingdom interior that's been tastefully embellished to be more in line with our modern conception of a "theme park".

In the department of "things only I care about", earlier this year there was general online consternation about the closure of the "Island Supply" shop in Adventureland in favor of a third party vaguely themed Sunglass Hut outfit. It's as lightly themed as the previous shop in its space was, and as lightly themed as the shop before that was, and so the changeover resulted in little more than a disinterested shrug in Passport HQ.

And then they went and changed something which had long been a bone of contention with me, which was that every store in this spot since at least 1972 has used a banner for a shop sign. I've never liked the look of it and like it even less with the covered patio that was added to the front of the store in the 90s:

And just as annoying to me was the missing light fixture on the side of the adjacent facade which has been missing for literally as long as I could remember. I used to call it in back when I worked at Magic Kingdom (in the previous decade!) only to be told that there was no such missing lamp!

So, here's the happy ending: the renovation of the facade included not only a permanent sign not on a tarp (!) but a replacement, appropriate lamp on both sides of the facade! You can call that a hollow victory that appeals to people who do things like take pictures of every light fixture in the park, but it's something that no longer needs to annoy me when I enter the park and walk through Adventureland.

Pirates of the Sunken Boats

Pirates at Magic Kingdom has really lost its way. In 2006, the nonsensical movie overlay imposed a narrative on the ride that makes no sense, and did worse aesthetic damage to the ride by removing various details that made the Florida Pirates the Florida Pirates.  Then, in 2012, even more random stuff was added to tie into the release of the On Stranger Tides movie, including mermaid projections in the water and a mermaid skeleton on Marc Davis' otherwise perfect "Dead Man's Cove" scene. Meanwhile, 2006-era Jack Sparrow figures sat unnaturally cheek to jowl with Pirates constructed in 1973 and still chugging along by the grace of quality, if fifty year old, engineering.

Pirates finally got its shot in the arm this year. Long outdated technology was finally upgraded, from digital sound with new speakers, to LED lights, and fully upgraded animatronics. It's actually startling to remember that at one point this ride's illusions were considered to be wildly impressive and lifelike. As part of the refurbishment, all of the pirates figures were removed and rebuilt and many of the sets refurbished. Everyone came back with new costumes, new hair, new skin, many with new insides, standing in completely refreshed sets. Some of the pirates and townspeople now have dark complexions more appropriate for what one could expect to see in the Caribbean.

All of the faces and hands of the pirates are painted with techniques that were first introduced at the Hall of Presidents in 2009 to give their faces the impression of actual skin instead of painted rubber. The Auctioneer was replaced with a new(ish) figure entirely, and has a new look closer to Marc Davis' concept art and the most impressive animation I've seen in a version of this ride yet. Even minor touches like the lighthouses in Bombardment Bay and the torches in the queue have new, improved fire effects. The result is startling: the ride looks and feels like it was built yesterday. It's all great, great news.

Old-Timey People Warn: YOU WILL GET WET!

Now for the bad news: a few years ago Magic Kingdom decided to buy a new fleet of boats for the attraction, made of a lighter weight plastic instead of the old fiberglass and metal. The reason for this, besides the age of the fleet introduced in the 90s, was to try to combat the increasing weight the boats are required to carry. As you may know, Pirates of the Caribbean's ride system is designed to accommodate boats of five rows a piece. Back in the 90s, the load area was redesigned and new six row boats were introduced to improve capacity at the attraction. Operations still wants to fit as many people in the boats as possible, but with people being much bigger than they were in 1973 when the attraction was designed, it's a delicate task to balance the new boats with the old ride infrastructure and still end up a ride that works as intended.

To be blunt: they did not succeed. The new boats drag too low in the water to begin with, and if balanced just right make a terrific splash when they go down the ramp into the lower floor of the ride. And to make things worse, they take on water.

The result, combined with the inappropriate introduction of Fastpass to the ride as part of the troubled MyMagic+ rollout, means that Pirates almost always has a slow moving line and breaks constantly. I've read elsewhere that Magic Kingdom is currently trying a "back-up" plan to help the boats, and I've been in one of the new boats which was bone dry and went down the drop as smooth as glass. Being a former Pirates ride operator, that impressed the hell out of me. But I've also been in a boat that dragged far too low in the water, barely made it over the drop, got stuck twice in the ride, and was flooded with almost eight inches of water when the boat behind mine, empty and floating at normal draft, pushed a wave of ice cold chemically Pirates water into the row by bumping us from behind.

Furthermore, the damage done in 2006 still has not been undone. The cannons on the fort facade no longer fire, which is integral to setting up the story inside. The "soldiers in the fort" dialogue in the queue still plays too low, and is drowned out by the inappropriate use of the "Pirates Overture" music instead of the music selected by the designers of the ride in 1973. The music which was selected in 1973 is known as "Pirate's Arcade" and is only meant to play in the queue's entrance tunnel. The parrot on the facade has been M.O.A. since 2006 and really needs to be brought back. The talking skull before the down ramp was removed for no good reason, and his wiring and speaker is still in place behind the wall. The skull is a key character in every other version of the ride, and his absence at Magic Kingdom makes an already somewhat weak ride even weaker.

The mermaid projection effect seems to have gone away with the new refurbishment, which is perhaps for the better, but there's still a mermaid skeleton and wrecked boat cluttering up Dead Man's Cove. The mermaid skeleton was re-staged in the refurbishment and looks better, but still weirdly out of place. The middle pirate skeleton in the same scene, with the sword in his back, was replaced in 2005 with a new figure whose head is weirdly raised. This is fallout from a plan to have this pirate skeleton talk, which was abandoned. It looks silly and really ought to be changed.

"I'm not dead yet!"

The same year, Disneyland restaged their Cove scene to more closely resemble Marc's concept art, which is just more evidence how disorganized and rushed the Jack Sparrow project was. Also introduced in 2006 was a new piece of music for the Cove scene, obviously written for Disneyland's grotto sequence in mind, where the atmosphere always has been melancholy and mysterious. The trouble is, Marc redesigned the caves in Florida and intended it to be dark, and scary - that's why there's a low ceiling and used to be very dim lighting. The "Grotto" music from 2006 never quite fit right in Florida, and I think WDI knew this. They replaced it with the sound of singing mermaids in 2012, which is closer to spooky, but still needlessly distracting.

Here's the bottom line: Pirates in Florida is not Pirates in California. There's no time travel in the Florida ride, and never has been. You see a fort being attacked. You enter the fort and hear the soldiers discussing the fact that the pirates are attacking. You load into a boat to evacuate through the secret back entrance to the fort, which happens to be through a cave where we learn pirates buried treasure long ago and are perhaps returning to claim it. As we load into the boats we can see the boat filled with pirates out there on the ocean, coming to attack the fort! We slip through the caves and when we emerge outside there's that ship we saw when we got on the ride, and it's right there attacking the town. There's no way to turn this sequence of events into the Disneyland ride, not even by closing our eyes and stomping our feet. Pirates in Florida needs to be its own thing, and it was, from 1973 to 2006, when it was made into an even paler reflection of what's out in California.

Enough. Let's do right by this ride. Bring all of the weird unique stuff back, and we can even keep Jack Sparrow in the bargain. The ride currently looks better than it ever has, but it makes no sense and I think audiences respond to that fact on some deep, unspoken level.

Lounging on the Veranda

The Twenty-tens may prove to be some sort of renaissance for unanticipated Disney World resuscitations, with the Orange Bird of course at the top of that list. Arguably a physically bigger deal is the return of the Adventureland Veranda, a marvelously atmospheric counter service location at Magic Kingdom which was shuttered in... July 1994. It's back, now called Skipper Canteen, weirdly enough themed to the Jungle Cruise, and I think it looks terrific. The sign outside is a bit excessive, but once you get inside, it's all beautifully textured work, with a great deal of Dorothea Redmond's interior designs still intact.

The only lost opportunity here seems to be losing use of the actual verandas for which the restaurant is named, on the east side of the facility facing the hub. The furthest-flung veranda was actually demolished for the project, and turned into a new set of indoor bathrooms to service the Canteen. They were wrapped in a new facade which appropriately mirrors the 1971 architecture, and so this strikes me as an acceptable loss. But the other two verandas, one directly off the main pedestrian pathway, remain. It strikes me that they could be filled with tables and returned to use as expanded seating for the relocated Sunshine Tree Terrace. If this is indeed the plan then I would be comfortable saying that there truly was nothing lost in the changeover.

The Hub On The Park Goes Round And Round

The Hub is the heart of Magic Kingdom, in the sense that it's the geographic center. It was, once upon a time, incredibly photogenic.

The way the Hub used to work is that there was a curtain of trees screening off the castle from Main Street. This makes good sense because the castle was part of Fantasyland, and such was "elsewhere". The effect was dreamily evocative: a tall castle floating out from behind a curtain of trees, nearby yet emotionally far away, real but somehow inaccessible.

The trees served a real purpose besides looking nice. What I think happened is that the designers of Magic Kingdom noticed that from a distance, the bottom of Cinderella Castle looks flat as a board:

But the minute you shift off to the left or right, the forced perspective of the towers kicks in, and you end up with an incredibly dynamic looking structure:

Basically by planting the trees where they did, WED was forcing you to approach the castle to get the closer view from the best possible angle. When you're climbing the ramps to walk through the castle, the way the towers shift and seem to grow and loom over you almost induces vertigo. It's a really remarkable effect that too few are allowed to see today.

As I've covered extensively on this site before, the trees came down, and while I'm not willing to call the sight lines necessarily better or worse, they are different, and they changed the way the Hub felt. The Hub had previously been open lawn with a forest in the center, and it was now open lawn and a lot of concrete. It was unbearably hot nearly all the time, and almost never pleasant. And worse, it became a gridlock constantly, especially at night during fireworks. Experienced Magic Kingdom goers knew very well to just sit down in Liberty Square or something and wait.

Starting early last year and lasting for what felt like forever, the Hub was rebuilt into a double-Hub arrangement. What was once open lawn and a meandering moat was re-graded into extra wide walkways. Fountains, new railings and street lights, directional signs, and fireworks viewing areas were added. A new, somewhat themed bypass by added on the East side of Main Street, open almost every night and allowing an accelerated escape from the park during gridlock conditions. Extra wide walkways and paths are clearly and carefully divided up into "standing" and "walking" zones, allowing traffic to flow around fireworks or parade spectators.

What can be said about the new hub? To begin with: it works. In my experience traffic has flowed so smoothly through this operational machine that I no longer need to worry about when I'm set to arrive at Magic Kingdom or when it will be possible to leave: you can escape, or even cross the park during the worst of conditions, which I'm sure will be relief this holiday season.

As for the aesthetics, this is another place where I expected the worst and got a good compromise instead. The new Hub is really not like the old Hub in any way, and this is a case where I think that's okay. During the day, the fireworks viewing corral appears to be a carefully manicured Versailles-like garden; at night, the gates swing closed and traffic is kept tightly controlled. Brand new, surprisingly impressive fountains bubble alongside new walkways, giving the whole area a somewhat Tivoli-esque atmosphere.

Imagineering has seemingly combated the fact that the middle of the Hub seems doomed to remain an open concrete circle by placing huge trees everywhere else. It's actually kind of startling: you can look across the hub now and not see any of the buildings in the individual lands now because there are simply so many trees in the way. Many of these are outfitted once again with the traditional twinkle lights, giving the new area just the right level of nostalgia. Lawns have been retained, but now studded with trees and rambling flower beds, giving certain areas a pastoral feel. The illusion of the castle rising from behind a forest has returned - now viewed from the outside of the Hub looking in. Even the original directional signs on the West side of the Hub have been retained, and given new graphics and paint.

Not everything is perfect. There's half a dozen absurd utility poles poking up around the hub outfitted with bright lights to illuminate the sidewalks before parades begin; these were there before but look less appropriate than ever. Areas which once were expansive lawns are now tiny slivers of grass.

But really this is the sort of thing which had to be done, and you can only hope will be done tastefully. I think it looks very good, and unique. And whatever the aesthetic qualities, it's a huge improvement operationally. What was previously a rather pale imitation of Disneyland's Hub now feels like its own animal, with its own sense of grandeur and odd little details. To my eyes, having grown up with the Magic Kingdom, it sometimes slips into absurd overkill. Someone else seeing it for the first time could see it and think it's an incredibly bold, inviting open space. I'm willing to bet that both interpretations are correct in their own way.

In Summary

2014 was a bad year for Disney theme parks folks, and frankly out at Disneyland the bad news continued with the revelation that the back half of their Frontierland was going the way of the Rocket Rod for Star Wars. In Florida, it felt like things that have finally been rolling down the pike for a long time started to happen, and it's all, in my mind, for the sum better. Epcot still needs a reason to exist, but Animal Kingdom has quietly gone from my least favorite of the Florida parks to my second favorite since about 2007. Disney seems committed to keeping the only parts of the Studios worth saving - the atmospheric front - and gutting the rest for new stuff, which really should have happened twenty years ago. And Magic Kingdom has finally started to retain, or even bring back, its unique charm.

I give the bulk of all this year's work a hearty approval. You earned a solid A, everyone. And Santa, if it isn't too much to ask, could we please begin work on next year's wish list?

Passport to Dreams Magic Kingdom Hit List:
 - Remove Magic Carpets of Aladdin and restore Adventureland
 - Demolish Keel Boat Landing & Mansion Fastpass Structure...
      - ...to rebuild that section of riverfront, remove clutter, add trees
 - Gut Main Street Confectionery and restore vintage theme
 - Refurbish and Replace attraction posters at Entrance
 - New Decor and Layout for Pecos Bill Cafe
 - Plant more trees in Town Square
 - Reopen the Diamond Horseshoe with Live Entertainment
 - Restore and create a new show for Carousel of Progress

And finally, three personal requests:

 - Bring back the hands on the final door in the Haunted Mansion Corridor of Doors
 - Return of the 1980 Liberty Square music year-round
 - Please, please, the return of this:

Passport to Dreams Old & New Year End Essays

Report Cards: 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2015

My California Adventure (2013)

Notes on a Time That Was Not Happy (2014)

Ten Big Design Blunders at the Magic Kingdom

Well, nobody's perfect.

I spend a lot of time talking about Magic Kingdom on this blog because I believe it's a remarkable place. Walt Disney was right; you can only do Disneyland once, and Walt likely took the secret to doing it twice with him to his grave. Magic Kingdom is the park where the foundations for how to do theme parks moving forward would be laid, while expanding and, at least for 1971, improving on a lot of what had come before.

But that doesn't mean it's free of black eyes; really, no theme park is. And having spent as much time pulling the place apart to see how it ticks as I have, I've collected observations of flaws, eccentricities, and just plain bad choices but never had any good place to collect them.

I'm going to try to keep this focused on problems having to do with design, or aesthetics, or operations, with special attention paid to choices which disrupt already existing areas or which cause huge complications down the line. What you won't see a lot of is nagging on things which have markedly better, or different, versions elsewhere: we all know that Pirates at MK isn't as good as any other version, or that Disneyland's Small World facade is a huge deal in all of the other castle parks and which many miss at Magic Kingdom. I've got more interesting things to discuss here.

Let's begin the countdown.

10) Walt Disney World Railroad's Cement Overpass (1971)

It never really occurred me when I was a kid that there's actually nothing to look at along the Railroad at Magic Kingdom. The long trip past trees, some more trees, and some plastic wildlife never really struck me as a problem until I saw Disneyland's Railroad, which has unique scenery, intriguing views into Fantasyland, and ends with the Grand Canyon and dinosaurs. It's hard to top any ride that ends with dinosaurs.

I always thought that the point of the Florida train ride was that it was a simulation of what rail travel could have been like, and especially at night as the train creeps through the bamboo outside Adventureland, it's easy to forget that you're not chugging though a boundless wilderness filled with hostile creatures. The front two-thirds of the ride has never been the problem, as it has always offered a good view into Tomorrowland and Frontierland, a look at Walt Disney World's marvelous Seven Seas Lagoon area, and a fine, if not exactly thrilling, bamboo thicket.

But the back third - what's always been called the back stretch - has never been fine. Since 1971 it's been an unsimultated ride through a swamp, unsimultated because it really is a swamp. In the earliest years the spiel on the Railroad attempted to present this as a view of what this area looked like before Walt Disney World was built, which is just about the best spin you can put on it. This most disappointing stretch of the ride climaxes with the ultimate disappointment: a ride underneath a concrete overpass!

Dick Nunis hated how spare the Magic Kingdom railroad was compared to its Disneyland counterpart. He relocated scenes intended for the Jungle Cruise to the back stretch, and kept pushing for a Matterhorn that the train could ride though and see a blizzard. I've long joked that the addition of a few dummies plus a silk flame in a barrel could improve the overpass with a simulated hobo encampment.

It isn't hard to guess why it's gone nearly fifty years looking the way it does. The concrete overpass is the main way into the Magic Kingdom for employees and service vehicles, so it falls under the umbrella of facilities, not guest show, and as a piece of infrastructure, it's super duper important. The bridge can't be closed to be rebuilt into something better themed without massive complications, complications which understandably are best to avoid. It's one of those problems that falls between poles and thus doesn't get addressed.

Ever notice that the supports are designed to resemble a train trestle?

I think the solution need not be any more complex than a plain tunnel around the train, perhaps a vintage wooden one, with a simple facade on the side the train approaches to block views of the concrete overpass and the buses which regularly traverse it. It could probably even be built without needing to close the ride. It's one of those fairly easy fixes that gets put off forever because there's no immediate tangible benefit to them. But I wish Magic Kingdom would see their way clear to committing to smaller scale issues like this. We're coming up to the big 50 with this park and should be way past the era of exposed concrete overpasses.

09) Open-Air Mad Tea Party (1971)

I think everyone agrees that the Magic Kingdom's Mad Tea Party is sort of in a quandary. The roof has never been very nice and it's always been in an odd spot, at least compared to Disneyland's near-perfect tea cups. But I've always found spinning around under that roof to be attractive, and now that I've seen Disneyland Paris' Mad Tea Party, which has a beautiful roof but a sluggish turntable and unattractive teacup designs, I think it's fair to say that Magic Kingdom's has it where it counts.

But that doesn't wave away the fact that WED Enterprises botched the Mad Tea Party big time in 1971, when it opened without a roof on it. The park was characterized by an overall lack of shade in general for her first few years, but no ride was as severely impacted as the Tea Party.

It is incomprehensible to me that this was done by a company so thorough that they built a multi-million dollar tunnel underneath this same theme park, yet opened a totally exposed teacup ride in a region characterized by brutal heat and apocalyptic rain showers. The cups would bake out in the sun, their fiberglass seats becoming uncomfortable, their central metal rings impossible to touch, then liters of water would fall into the cups every day, requiring the ride to close, and stay closed, while each cup was carefully mopped out after the rain had passed. According to some opening year cast members I've spoken to, the area underneath the tea cups flooded more than once.

As we know, Disney worked fast once the problem was recognized, and by 1973 the tea cups had their roof. One could write this off as part of the normal cycle of working the kinks out of any large, new venture. Given how much went right in 1971, it's remarkable how little went wrong. But this one still makes me laugh as much as it boggles my mind. With the Mad Tea Party, we see a company run by a bunch of California boys finally having to learn what bad weather is.

08) I Love A Parade Route (1971)

Have you ever noticed that the parade route at Magic Kingdom makes no sense?

I didn't at first. When you grow up with something its easy to assume that that's just the way it's supposed to be. Seeing Spectromagic blaring its way through Liberty Square and Frontierland was the sight of many a Walt Disney World trip for me. But after seeing Disneyland, and enjoying the way the parade route there does not affect the atmospheric west side of the park, it occurred to me what the cost of running a parade route through it really is.

For one, the Frontierlands of Disneyland and Disneyland Paris benefit from a variety of planters and landscape features which do a far better job creating the atmosphere of an old west mining town. The parade route running through those western facades and so near the river really precludes many features which at Magic Kingdom could visually soften the area and improve its atmosphere.

Also, and especially at Magic Kingdom where the least successful areas of the park feel less like environments and more like freeways, it robs the west side of the park of a sense of intimacy. It creates wider walkways and more clutter in the part of the park that doesn't benefit from them. And why the heck does the parade go there, to begin with? Doesn't it make just as much sense to limit the parade route to Fantasyland and Main Street?

I puzzled over this for years until I remembered some very old photographs I had seen. As it happens, Magic Kingdom's parade route is ported over directly from Disneyland's parade route in the 1960s. The parades at Disneyland in this era started on Main Street, turned left through Frontierland, and ended over by the Haunted Mansion! The parade route did not seem to change to its current route, from Small World to Main Street, until the 1970s, which is about when Disney began building very tall and wide parade floats.

Here's Disneyland's Christmas Fantasy parade making it way past the Aunt Jemima Pancake House in the 60s:

Davelandweb.com

So Magic Kingdom, interestingly, has retained the "bones" of some Disneyland history long since past. I'd love to see a Magic Kingdom with a relocated parade route to reflect Disneyland's. It's easy to imagine how much more pleasant Liberty Square and Frontierland could be with spreading trees and more benches. Of course, given that the staff entrance to Magic Kingdom is on top of where a relocated parade barn would need to go and New Fantasyland is taking up the rest of the space, this is one change we'll never see at Magic Kingdom, but it's interesting to know where it came from.

07) Stitch's Supersonic Celebration Stage (2009)

Everything old is new again!

That's good news for the Peoplemover and the Carousel of Progress, but it's bad news for remembering mistakes that were made long, long ago.

The background here is that in 1980, Magic Kingdom turned what was originally an open seating area West of the Carousel of Progress into an open-air stage, the Tomorrowland Theater. This stage was, in a word, lousy. The backstage facilities were no more than some permanently-parked trailers, the seating and "walls" were pounded into asphalt with pegs. The seats were standard metal baseball bleachers. If, like me, you ever went up on the stage, you could hear its simple metal framework shifting and creaking under your weight.

Disney-Pal

The Entertainment Department hated using this creaky old thing, and who can blame them. Disneyland's Tomorowland gets a lot of energy from the stage and bandstand in the center of the land, so the idea of moving the Tomorrowland stage to a central location and rebuilding it as a more permanent venue was a good one. But literally everything else about this idea was misbegotten.

Entertainment's plans for the stage were originally extremely plain. What little ornamentation exists on the side and front of the humongous box was added by Imagineering late in the game. The entire structure is out of scale for the area it inhabits, introducing aesthetically irrelevant purple boxes. But the fatal mistake was that the whole thing was built with no seating and no shade structure. Although everything else about the original Tomorrowland Stage was cheap, the stage did at least have shade canopies and seats, meaning that people could be persuaded to sit and see whatever happened to be playing in that theater.

The new stage opened one especially hot Spring in 2009, an open air theater sitting in a sea of concrete in the hottest, most punishing area of Magic Kingdom. The show it opened with, Stitch's Supersonic Celebration, has developed quite the toxic reputation in Disney circles, partly because it closed after only a few weeks and partly because Stitch Mania had already played itself out by 2009. But really, it didn't have much to do with the show. Any show that asks its audience to stand or sit on a concrete expanse in Florida in the sun is not going to do well.

This photo from Attractions Magazine really says it all.

Attractions Magazine - 2009

 In many ways it was a hilarious replay of what happened with the Mad Tea Party in 1971 - except the Tomorrowland stage never got a roof, or seats. It's now back in nightly use as a dance party venue, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this stage go the way of the dodo if any of the Tomorrowland expansion plans ever materialize. It's one of those "enhancements" that cost a lot of money, didn't work out for anybody, and many would rather it be quietly swept under the rug.

06) Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom (2012)

Disney really has been struggling with bringing interactive media into its theme parks. While the panic began way back in the 80s with the ascendancy of Nintendo into daily life, the latest generation of kids who grew up clutching smartphones replete with cheap, addictive games like Angry Birds sent Disney into an all-out panic tailspin in the late 00s, and instead of pushing forward immediately with park improvements that could encourage kids to look up from their smart phones, they responded by launching competing cheap distractions of their own.

Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom is a great idea. The notion of discovering secret, out of the way pockets of Magic Kingdom and battling monsters there is a great one. But instead of carving out new quiet areas and encouraging real exploration, Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom drop its game portals thoughtlessly into any existing area it could find. Portals are often just steps away from major pedestrian paths, usually hidden in such a way that isn't really hidden at all.

But really the biggest problem with Sorcerers is that it's a lousy game. Since the 80s, various companies have tied to compete with traditional controller-driven game play under the notion that the controller is an artificial imposition and that a superior game would somehow dispense with the buttons. Since the 80s, these experiments have always been a failure, and the reason is because a game pad is nothing but the most convenient way to make a game easy enough to play to allow the player to focus on the truly compelling elements of gaming: rhythm, timing, and strategy. You can't focus on perfecting the rhythm of sword blows if you have to swing a big heavy sword.

Simultaneously a similarly misguided idea was born that, since the best video games are often cinematic, one way to improve games would be to make them like interactive movies. This line of thinking led to the infamous Full-Motion Video games or FMV, which combine the thrill of watching a low budget movie with occasional button pressing. This type of game is even less immersive than even the crudest video games. Sorcerers combines both of these bad ideas into a phenomenally dull game.

The actual game play involves holding up (nifty) collectible cards pointed at a screen, except instead of watching something enjoyably trashy like a Troma film (as in the case of many of the better FMV games), you're watching a straight-to-DVD Disney sequel. The main way to improve your game play is to collect better cards, which can be traded or, of course, bought. There's no skill involved in actually playing the game outside of building a deck of powerful cards. This may seem to be superficially similar to playing card games like Magic or Yu-Gui-Oh, except in those cases you're strategizing against a person who has cards you don't know about. Sorcerers is no more complex or satisfying than assembling a burn deck. I had a burn deck when I was a kid and after using it three or four times I realized I wasn't actually playing the game even if I won. I had the same sinking realization the first time I set out to play this game.

But really the most regrettable thing about the game is the damage it does to the environment of the theme park. If you had to walk down obscure side paths that led only to a Sorcerers game portal or through a network of themed rooms that would be one thing, but none of the game play stations are at all hidden. This means that simply by walking around the theme park you're constantly seeing poorly animated Disney villains on televisions poking out of windows, and hearing things like explosion sound effects. In an environment as carefully crafted and thoroughly controlled as Magic Kingdom, that's not just out of place, it's downright disrespectful.

05) The Grand Prix Raceway / Tomorrowland Speedway (1971)

Walt Disney really liked highways, and as a man of his generation, who can blame him? They were cutting edge, brand new, and America was really good at building them in the 1950s. When Disneyland opened with its own micro-highway in Tomorrowland, the notion of being able to drive a tiny car on a modern highway was intoxicating to many Southern California kids. Astonishingly, the ride was so popular that at its height Disneyland ran three Autopia rides - the Tomorrowland Autopia, Fantasyland Autopia, and Midget Autopia.

Given how of its time the romance of a space age road was, on paper it makes sense to re-theme the car ride into something more modern by 1971. The late 60s and early 70s in America saw the start of the true mainstream fascination with motor sports which is with us today, reflected in films like Grand Prix and The Love Bug. Racing culture derived from the gear head car kids of the 1950s, so it can be claimed with a great degree of accuracy that the racing theme of the Grand Prix Raceway is the next evolution of the modern highway of the Autopia.

But, but. The Disneyland Autopia has aged surprisingly well and the Raceway has not. Already by the 1960s, the Autopia was becoming pleasantly lush and today it's a veritable forest - the most dense area of scenic vegetation in Disneyland outside of the Jungle Cruise. This makes a ride on it surprisingly rewarding - perhaps a reminder less of space age super transit than charming drives in the country. While LA's freeways have widened from two to four to sixteen lanes, the Autopia now looks cute and cuddly.

The Magic Kingdom Speedway isn't bad in the scenic department, but it's hard to call it "pleasant", exactly. The track replicates the wide open spaces and long turns of a real grand prix track, and although four decades on it has nicely mature trees and beautiful views of the castle, it's still a stark open expanse of concrete. The Grand Prix theme means that the Magic Kingdom's car ride accommodates four lanes of traffic, instead of the more intimate two at Disneyland, and features such decorative items as a large paved embankment and one whole overpass. Its placement nearer the center of the park means it's impossible to avoid the sights, sounds and smells of the ride, whereas at Disneyland the ride is reasonably well isolated in the far corner of Tomorrowland.

This is one case where the new idea that was sound on paper made an even bigger mess in practice. Raceways, whatever else may be said of them, are not aesthetically beautiful places and Disney proved it not only by building this attraction but by building a real raceway in front of the park in the 1990s. It's a shame that one of the few Magic Kingdom attractions to effectively never change is such a dud visually.

04) How To Misplace A Mountain (1992)

This one's tough to talk about, because Splash Mountain is a Magic Kingdom classic and deserves a place in that park, as do Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and Br'er Bear. It's wildly popular, well designed, and is still - still - a major headliner attraction at the park.

But it just doesn't fit there.

Consider for a moment the disjunction between the homespun aesthetic of Splash Mt and the rustic river town of Frontierland. Frontierland is frontier men and fur trappers; Splash Mountain is a homespun quilt. There's a few attempts to blend it into the environment - many of the tunnels are now mine shafts and the music has a "bluegrass" twang to it - but the more you notice it the more and more apparent it is that the design team on this ride was just destined to get clobbered trying to fix the problem.

Splash Mountain gets in through a side door, I think, thanks to the fact that Country Bear Jamboree already existed in the area, and being descended from Marc Davis designs for America Sings and Song of the South, Splash Mountain fits in just enough to not seem like a gross contradiction. Until you realize that the red Georgia clay of the mountain is down south, not old west, and the romantic South isn't "Frontierland" no matter how you try to define it.

What elevates a poor thematic placement into the top five is that it makes mince of the careful architectural and conceptual progression of Magic Kingdom's river district, the true heart and most accomplished area of the park.

Liberty Square sweeps from upper New England (The Haunted Mansion) down through Philadelphia and Virginia (The Hall of Presidents) before heading west and transitioning to Frontierland at St. Louis (The Diamond Horseshoe). It then proceeds through the frontier territories, perhaps Kansas and Colorado, before arriving at cowboy vernacular architecture (Pecos Bill Cafe), then heading direct for the great Southwest pueblo architecture and monument valley (Big Thunder Mountain). This means that Splash Mountain's "deep south" is inserted directly into the section of the progression which once had a unified southwest and desert rock look. Lots of trees and an orange-red color help ease the intrusion, but an intrusion it indeed is.

The progression, of course, was intended from the start and would have ended with Thunder Mesa instead of Big Thunder Mountain, but of course Big Thunder was designed to replicate the sort of rock work we would have had surrounding Western River Expedition, so the careful progression was retained into the early 90s.

Just as unfortunate, Splash Mountain is out of scale for Frontierland. This part of the park was designed to sit on a lower elevation than Adventureland and by the time the facades ramble out towards Pecos Bill, they were originally quite short. The need to have the pedestrian path cross over the main drop of Splash Mountain means that a large hill was added at the end of the street, spoiling the forced perspective of the Pecos Bill facades until they were rebuilt at double height a few years later. More significantly, the elevated view of Big Thunder Mountain from the top of the Splash Mountain hill steps on the forced perspective of Big Thunder Mountain, which originally rose gracefully at the end of the otherwise flat Frontierland area like a beacon and looked absolutely colossal.

Really the only upside of Splash Mountain's placement is the absolutely terrific views of Liberty Square and Cinderella Castle from the top of the main lift hill and pedestrian bridge. That's the reason why it's there, and it's understandable and obvious. Of course, we can ask if the view of the castle is really all that important - Disneyland's faces some trees and, far away, the Matterhorn, and Tokyo has a general view of Westernland, and nobody thinks that there's something seriously missing when they ride those versions of the ride.

In many ways this is a tough call because the spot it was built is really the only place in Magic Kingdom it could have realistically went without building a self-contained Critter Country, which of course could not be directly on the big river, an important feature. Still, if I could move that mountain to an equally appropriate place in the park, I would.

Steve Burns

The gorgeous stretch of land between Country Bear Jamboree and Thunder Mountain, with spreading trees, flowers, and split-rail fence, was one of the few areas in that Frontierland to feel genuinely rustic. And it seems to be a shame to lose that beautiful original train station, and that sense of a town way out on the edge of nothing, in the bargain.

03) The Emporium Expansion (2001)

This one was brutal.

I probably don't have to explain what this one was, because even to new visitors, it's obvious that the giant facade which fills what was once Center Street shouldn't be there. This isn't to say that it looks out of place, per se, but there's something about its interior being extraordinarily out of scale and the way it unbalances the neat, four-block symmetry of Main Street that just draws attention to itself.

Two other castle parks have lost their West Center streets: Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland. Disneyland's is the least objectionable, having retained all of their old architecture and simply filled the street with an open-air cafe. Even later additions of increasingly disruptive shade structures at least retain the sense of there being a street, even if it is an impassible one. Hong Kong filled their center street with a shop in the style of Magic Kingdom, but did actually find an okay compromise by making the structure a glass-domed Victorian greenhouse which still allows you to look up at the original architecture it displaced. If anything it looks even more out of place on Main Street than the Emporium expansion, but it manages a more pleasant overall effect.

The thing about the Emporium expansion is that it didn't need to be so severe. There was no compelling reason to destroy those opening day facades, slap a roof on the space, and put up a new front. Relocating part of one stock room was all that was required to expand the Emporium west, through the old Barber Shop, and wrap it around the back of the West Center street facades to connect on the other side. This would likely have resulted in much more, and more pleasant, floor space while maximizing an area that everyone enjoyed. Heck, they could even have done what Disneyland Paris did and wrap the Emporium around the existing barber shop and added another entrance. Crazy talk, I know.

And that's the thing: when you look at old photos, family photos and promotional photos of Magic Kingdom, you see the Flower Market and Center Street a lot. I've watched dozens of reels of 8mm home movies and seen probably thousands of amateur photographs and Center Street is one of those things that everyone bothered to photograph, along with the monorail, the castle, and the parade. I've seen enough family photographs in there over the years to know that it was like the Court of Angels at Disneyland - a space of hallowed ritual.

Shops come cheap and easy at Disney World; they may appear in corners, under tents, or in the open air. But people don't buy things if they don't first and foremost like what they see. Atmospheric, accomplished areas like West Center street are the reason for profit, not an opportunity to profit. When theme park operators forget this, they not only shoot themselves in the foot by deracinating the value of their parks, but they rob future generations of the glory of the Disney art of the show.

02) Cinderella Castle Stage (mid-70s)

This is one that seemed harmless at the time, but has grown and grown to the point where it's done real damage to the park it once enhanced.

The castle forecourt has always been used as a stage in one way or another. Originally the area between the forward sweep of the ramps into the castle was a mildly raised platform used for band performances. In the mid-70s, a small stage went up in that space, used for Kids of the Kingdom performances and marching band shows. Sometimes, it was used for a bit more. By the 1990s it would host the occasional special event show for the Christmas parties.

The first real change came in 2001, an elaborate stage show called "Cinderella's Surprise Celebration", which ran five times daily and featured permanently parked bright cartoon gifts on the stage. For a show introduced to celebrate the birth of Walt Disney, Surprise Celebration was a poorly written embarrassment. This was the one where Peter Pan defeats Captain Hook by dropping him through a hidden trap door on the castle parapet - and if that sounds intriguing to you, it was accomplished by having the Hook actor duck out of sight.

The show pointedly departed from its predecessors on the point of being loud. It could be heard from everywhere the the hub area and in most of the entrance areas of the various lands. For better or worse, this is the show which killed off the Main Street vehicles - guests were allowed to congregate on the road in front of the castle, and operations responded by simply deciding to stop using the vehicles instead of going up against the heavy-hitting Entertainment department for use of the tarmac.

The next show, Cinderellabration, raised the stakes by adding a taller, more elaborate stage, daytime fireworks, and annexing the entire Hub as the viewing area. This show was billed as a "gift" from Tokyo Disneyland to Magic Kingdom to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Disneyland (no, Disney couldn't explain this logic either) and Entertainment decreed that those huge trees in the middle of the hub must go because they interfered with sight lines for the stage. And so the beautiful original hub was paved.

Cinderellabration was mostly a crashing bore, frequently putting the tiara-ed kids it was directed at to sleep, and so was retired quickly. Dream Along With Mickey, the show which replaced it, returned to the basic format of Cinderella's Surprise Celebration, featuring an appearance by Captain Hook and Smee and having Maleficent crash the party. Mickey and friends originally wore blue and silver outfits appropriate to the Year of a Million Dreams sweepstakes promotion which coincided with its opening, and since Disney's newest hard ticket event was the Pirate and Princess Parties, the show dutifully broke down into Pirate and Princess sections. And it ran seven times a day, meaning the interior of the castle was inaccessible from 9:30 in the morning until 5:00 in the afternoon. There's people who have been to Walt Disney World multiple times and don't know you're even allowed to walk through the castle.

A show which has the audience shouting marketing slogans to defeat the forces of evil, Dream Along With Mickey is a show that could only be loved by a Marketing executive, but it's become a Magic Kingdom stalwart. It if makes it to Spring 2016, it will have been running for ten years, and of course the Hub being emptied of all features except standing room for the castle stage paved the way for such questionable features as the similarly disruptive Move It, Shake It dance parade.

This means that maybe the most important land in the Magic Kingdom - the first one - has been subjugated to a supporting role as the host for a variety of inappropriate parades and shows. No other Disneyland-style park has thrown the period atmosphere of their Main Street under a bus so thoroughly. Walking onto Main Street at Disneyland and Disneyland Paris is a joy because it looks and feels like what it's supposed to be - horse drawn carriages, the rattle of a vintage car, the calming music all contributes to the sense of this being a real city. Without the grace touches, including Center Street mentioned above, Magic Kingdom's street sometimes feels like a funnel towards a castle where Mickey Mouse is screaming at you through a bullhorn.

Now that the Hub is finally being rebuilt into something which better balances atmosphere and traffic, Magic Kingdom really needs to start assessing the appropriateness of what they're subjecting their paying customers to. Main Street doesn't need a blaring dance party, three parades, and an endless character breakdown, it needs to be allowed to be itself. Character shows can happen in other places, too.

The introduction of the stage to the castle in the mid-70s began a slow degradation and increasing disregard for the thematic authority of one of the few Magic Kingdom areas to have a valid claim to a connection with Walt Disney. If I could go back in time and prevent one thing from happening at Magic Kingdom, it would be this. A beautiful Main Street, twinkle lights in the trees, that view of the turning carousel through the arch of Cinderella Castle, and the ability to walk up to and walk through a fairy tale castle is a right you should have by paying your ticket to walk into this place. It's so important and I don't think most people know what they're missing by trading it for a poorly written character show or a better view of some fireworks.

01) Mickey's Birthdayland (1988)

It really is remarkable that such a quickly built little trifle has had such a remarkably extensive legacy.

If we take a step back and think about what it offered and what it begat for a moment, it becomes apparent that the core of the Mickey's Birthdayland, the Meet Mickey attraction, doesn't make much sense. If you simply go from the bulk of the material that made Mickey famous - the clever and brilliantly executed cartoons - a dressing room doesn't seem to be a logical place to encounter him. Mickey Mouse should be out having adventures, not perfecting his look in front of a mirror. The combination of the suburban house and dressing room, with or without the stage show from the original incarnation of Birthdayland, implied less "dynamic beloved character" and more "retiree".

So there's the immediately problematical fact that Birthdayland codified a Mickey attraction which doesn't do the guy any favors at all. I know people who absolutely loathe Mickey Mouse because for their entire life he's been nothing but a character who toes the line and tells you what to buy, or how to feel. He deserves better. In the past there were several efforts to raise his profile in the parks in a way more consistent with his character. Bill Justice's Mickey Mouse Revue had huge pacing problems, but Mickey conducting that cartoon orchestra was and remains irresistible, and if Mickey didn't have much to do besides conduct, at least you could watch him doing it throughout the show,  putting him on par with a Tiki Bird or Mr. Lincoln.

In the late 70s, Bill Justice and Ward Kimball worked on an attraction called Mickey's Madhouse, which was intended as a tour of a cartoon studio in black and white where riders could see such films as Orphan's Benefit being "filmed". This would have combined a Mr. Toad-style dark ride with a car on a roller coaster track, providing a few thrills along the way. Notice that both of these attractions were headed up by former animators.

By now every Disney park has a "Meet Mickey" attraction, and it's a shame, because the proliferation of this specific idea of what a Mickey attraction is means that a more inventive one is unlikely to ever get built. Pretty much the most appropriate venue for Mickey Mouse available today is Fantasmic, which prioritizes his heroic and resourceful qualities. Mickey's Philhamagic is a telling example of the rest: it's named for him, he's on the marquee, he's the first thing you see upon entering the building - and it's a show starring Donald Duck.

And yet we should also discuss the lasting physical legacy of Mickey's Birthdayland: tents. Many, of course, are quick to point out that Birthdayland used tents because it was meant to be a temporary attraction, but one wonders how long that temporary status lasted: a week? A month? Remember that by the time the Disney-MGM Studios opened the concept to use the park as a real movie studio had already been abandoned, so it's not as though Disney in the late 80s wasn't used to putting a spit shine on a bad decision.

And so Mickey's Birthdayland gifted us with tents. Tents that will never ever go away.

The Mickey's House - Stage Show - Meet Mickey attraction lineup proved to be extremely popular, so much so that Birthdayland was "promoted" to permanent area status in 1990 and called Mickey's Starland. Nothing changed; it still had the same low budget look. The area was rebuilt into Mickey's Toontown Fair in 1996 as a "birthday gift" for the 25th anniversary of Walt Disney World, which made the whole area much more permanent and introduced some clever touches but increased the volume of the noise and clutter.

The three north most Starland tents were retained for Toontown, becoming the queueing area for the "Meet Mickey" attraction (now upgraded from a dressing room to a Judge's Tent). Additional meeting areas were packed in around the Mickey attraction, eventually settling on a lineup of three Princesses - who, like Mickey, just hang around in tents all day - as well as a selection of Tinkerbell pixies.

By 2001 the Toontown tent complex had become the single most profitable structure per square foot at Magic Kingdom. Mickey was the anchor, pulling crowds into Toontown, then dispersing them through a variety of shops and photograph locations. This profitability would ensure that the tents would survive yet another round of renovations- Storybook Circus.

Storybook Circus managed the impossible, which was to turn an area of Magic Kingdom which had no business ever existing into something which feels like it belongs there. It accomplished this by leveling everything and starting over. Of course, before this could be done, the cash cows - Mickey and the Princesses - had to be relocated to Main Street, where Mickey received a much more appropriate attraction and the Princesses didn't. They would have to wait for their own lavish attraction, which would displace the Snow White's Scary Adventures dark ride.

Despite the fact that the reasons for the success of those tents were being scattered to the winds, it was proclaimed by fiat that the tents must remain due to their profitability. What had previously been the Princess Tent was transformed into Pete's Silly Sideshow, a permanent venue for Mickey, Donald, Minnie and Daisy with a nicely done circus theme. The crowds never quite returned to their original levels. What had previously been a bustling store where Princess dresses and Mickey dolls flew off the shelves now seems nearly abandoned after nightfall. The Sideshow meet and greet has started closing early.

The legacy of Birthdayland is not just a legacy of questionable designs but questionable practices. It initiated the concept of having to wait in line to see a character, which has destroyed any sense of spontaneity these encounters used to have. And particularly at Walt Disney World, there's no such thing anymore as just coming across Pluto, Goofy, or Baloo, and the fact that they are kept out of sight in locked rooms means that demand for them is artificially inflated.

The Mickey attraction has given us Mickey's Birthdayland and Mickey's Toontown Fair, and it wasn't until 2012 that Imagineering was able to pry those cartoon aesthetics out of Magic Kingdom - nearly 25 years. And in the bargain it also led to the closure of the Snow White dark ride, which is one of those things that ought to be a birthright of Disneyland-style parks.

Now that the power of the circus tents is on the wane, it really would be a nice gesture to finally lose them and build a permanent ride in that spot. The three Storybook Circus tents take up about as much room as the Mermaid ride next door. The basic problem is that the use of tents, no matter how nicely you build them or how intricately you theme them, still evoke temporary structures and, by extension, cheapness. Cheap ideas and cheap aesthetics are what Birthdayland initiated, yet it must be said that the new Magician Mickey and Fairytale Hall attractions are far above its standard, leaving just those three tents as symbols of Birthdayland's enduring legacy.

We may not ever be able to at this late date scrub Birthdayland loose from the Disney parks, but finally seeing the tents fall would mean that its most objectionable aspect - its aesthetics - will finally be banished to that great theme park in the sky.

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I've been accused not unfairly in the past of being extremely tough on Imagineering when I dip my toes into the world of critique. Long posts like this are never easy to write, and I hope that my evident respect for the parks manifest elsewhere on this blog will help balance the grumpier aspects of this piece. Those are my ten big regrets. If you could change or move anything at Magic Kingdom, what would your choice be?

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!