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.

--

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!

Song of the South: Disney's Loaded Gun

"Don't you know you can't run away from trouble? There ain't no place that far."

In 2012, two books were published within two weeks of each other, each with dueling viewpoints but which come to similar conclusions. The first, Disney's Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South by Jason Sperb, is an excellently written cultural history. Sperb, however, falls into the trap so many other Disney critics have fallen into since the 1940s by working himself into an aesthetic lather over the racism of the film, and the presumed racism of Walt Disney. Contrasting the Sperb book, Jim Korkis' Who's Afraid of Song of the South? is a production history from the perspective of an unabashed fan who comes down on Disney's side.

Every Disney blog, it seems, has a post about Song of the South. This is mine. Now, of all of the eras of Disney animation, the period of fevered creativity and pinched budgets between 1941 and 1949 interests me the most. I own three bootleg copies of Song of the South, because each has slightly different visual qualities. I've been showing it to everyone who will sit for it for over a decade.

I'm not convinced of the film's greatness, but I think it's a really interesting movie.

And I'm not going to come down on the side of either Sperb or Korkis. I'm not convinced that Walt Disney was as malicious - or as naive - as he's often portrayed by film academics. However, I'm also not going to follow in the footsteps of so many other Disney bloggers and act the know-nothing when it comes to having to confront the problematic aspects of the film either.

Song of the South is not an easy movie to level with. Merely watching it requires that one take a position, and ask tough questions that don't yield ready answers. These are generally the criteria for a deep dish cinema masterpiece, not a frivolous nostalgia piece occasionally touched with brilliance. It would hardly seem to be worth the effort for a film whose cultural expiration date is long past. But engaging those questions and coming out the other side is the reason it's still worth discussing.

Let's begin by prodding the sensitive underbelly first. It all began a long, long time ago...

1) The Song of the South Problem

The default position of many Song of the South advocates is to either ignore or hand-wave at the basic problem of racism in this film. After all, it's easy to counter, the film was reissued in 1986 and met with no real opposition, the concerns of racism in the film are just overly sensitive allegations. No problem. Don't see any problem here.

This is bullshit.

The key issue comes down to representation, which is still something worth fighting over, because images carry power. Non-white, non-straight people are still fighting for better representation in films and popular culture. But truthfully, the fact that representations of persons of color onscreen have improved dramatically in the past few generations does not enter the Song of the South equation, either. The key character in question, Uncle Remus, no longer is forced to stand alone amongst a relatively narrow group of peers.

In 1946, Remus represented a complex, unusually central role for a black entertainer in a major Hollywood production. By 1986, an era when black actors were striving to escape from a screen ghetto of limited representation, Remus was an impossible throwback. In 2015, when we expect diverse and complex casts in major motion pictures, Remus looks more like a figure of fantasy, which isn't too far from how he was perceived in 1946.

This isn't to suggest that strides cannot still be made in these areas onscreen, but simply to point out that Remus, taken in isolation, is no longer the gigantic problem he once was. We're more likely today to admire Baskett's dignified, moving performance in the midst of a maelstrom of a film of absurdly old-fashioned attitudes than to perceive this sort of Uncle Tom stereotype to be a normal or common perception of a black man. He's so far from our modern reality he's become fiction again.

No, it isn't Remus, it's his context in the movie which is problematic, and the reason it's problematic is because the film splits its black characters between the "culturally black" animal comedy trio of Br'rer Rabbit, Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear and the "manifestly black" cast of actors who represent the labor force on the plantation. The "Br'er" critters have craft and power - they have an agency in their own plot which is not reflected in the plantation laborers, Remus included.

This lack of agency in the story is exactly why it's possible to mistake Song of the South for a film set in the Antebellum period, before the Civil War. There's plenty of scenes between the white, upper class family and the black laborers, but if the word "slave" never appears, neither does the word "employee". We never even find out what they're growing on the old plantation, nor do we ever see Uncle Remus doing any real work, or are told how he gets by or what he's retained, exactly, to do.

We do see him living in what appears to be slave quarters near the house, although we never discover where the rest of the labor force lives. There isn't even a date to clue us in to when the film takes place. All we see are black laborers doing something, white people running the place, and a living situation that looks like it dropped out of Gone With the Wind, David O' Selznick's 1939 bad taste extravaganza. The title actually cues us to think of Gone with the Wind. They even sound kinda similar. It's a clear cue to the movie buying public: "Did you like that film? Here's something similar."

In other words, the film doesn't do anything to dispel the impression of Remus as an old slave, perhaps one beloved and trusted as a member of the family, but undoubtedly a man treated as a piece of property. His attempt to leave the plantation at the climax of the movie is so underdeveloped that it hardly seems to matter, and arrives long after most of the damage has been done.

Not helping matters is Hattie McDaniel, a wonderful actress familiar from films of the 1930s, essentially reprising her role of Mammy from Gone With the Wind. Like most vintage movie fans, I love Hattie - any appearance by her is a reason to celebrate - but she isn't given much of interest to do here. Her character may be hired help, but all the film ever gives us images of Hattie singing and baking. Simply put, to expect post-Gone With the Wind audiences not to process such an image as "slave" is the equivalent of putting Anthony Hopkins in an orange jumpsuit behind a Plexiglas wall and asking us to remember that he's not a serial killer. It doesn't work that way.

Many commentators also like to bring up the happy singing field workers, although this is a case where I'm not sure if this accusation isn't somewhat off base. Truth is, we don't see them clearly enough or often enough to decide if they're jolly or simply singing. But the fact is that by then in the film, it's given any critic looking for a racism angle more than enough rope to hang it. Audiences and critics turn to Song of the South looking for evidence of the racism of noted white guy Walt Disney, and the film over delivers. I've even seen multiple online articles indicate that the reason the father leaves suddenly at the start of the film is to fight for the Confederacy!

But if we want to point accusing fingers anywhere for this state of affairs, it isn't at lazy audiences or inattentive critics, it's at Walt Disney himself. Disney hired left wing screenwriter Maurice Rapf to temper the unfortunate inclinations of the screenplay by Dalton Reymond, and Rapf told Walt directly: he would have to be very clear about the situation and social context of the film, or risk appearing to endorse slavery. This, incidentally, is the key event for Jason Sperb, who takes Walt's "refusal" to clarify the situation as evidence that he didn't care if the film offended anyone.

And so, in maybe one of the worst story decisions ever made at Walt Disney Productions, Walt gifted us millions of words of commentary on a film that in some ways seems hardly deserving of it. How simply it all could have been, if not avoided, then greatly reduced. All it would take is uttering the word "sharecroppers" or giving us a date. But the film refuses.

The sad fact is that there were likely other factors playing into all of this. In the 1940s, with home video still a generation away, films were basically temporary things. They were expected to go out, make their money, and then probably vanish forever. The possibility that future generations from a very different culture would be sharpening our rhetorical knives over this film was not even a realistic consideration. Walt had to do what was right for the film in 1946. And, the fact is, in 1946 and even well into the 60s there were many places in the South where films had, historically, been given a hard time at the box office due to their perceived progressiveness.

MGM released Cabin in the Sky in 1943 and 20th Century Fox had Stormy Weather in 1944, two all-black musicals which today look like two of the best Hollywood musicals ever. In the Jim Crow South, there's places where these wonderful films were refused distribution outright, which meant they had no chance of returning a profit to the studio in certain sectors. Disney met with 20th Century Fox producers to discuss Stormy Weather, so right there goes Sperb's fantasy that Disney simply didn't care. In this case, he may have simply chosen the path which guaranteed a financial return for his shaky motion picture studio, which, shamefully, was to choose no path at all.

Is Song of the South racist? By our modern standards, yes it is. It's foolish to ignore this, because it's the whole reason the film isn't available, which by extension is the whole reason to discuss it. It's reductionist, naive, and to most modern eyes, about blissfully servile slaves. To try to pretend that that just isn't there in the film isn't fooling anybody.

And yet! And yet.

And yet it's also just as foolish to insist that that is all that Song of the South is. Because for all of the cultural hand-wringing over Uncle Remus, he is undeniably Walt Disney's surrogate in this film. He's the most compellingly drawn character, and the only character in the film to have an emotional arc.

The film allows us nearly no empathy for the white characters: Bobby Discoll's character is an annoying wimp and spends most of the film wearing a "dramatic" expression that suggests constipation. His mother is a hysteric who consistently makes the wrong decisions, and his grandmother does nothing to prevent a bad situation from getting worse. We don't blame Johnny for wanting to spend all of his time with Remus; we do, too. Baskett's Remus and Glenn Leedy's Toby are the most likable characters in the movie.

Remus is our identification point, and he's Disney's too. He's a wise but humble storyteller whose stories not only teach valuable life lessons, but save the boy's life and even appear to reshape reality. We can also enjoy the way in which Remus is a master manipulator of his white employers, always making careful allowances to maintain the fiction that his suggestions were their ideas, all along. That's not exactly progressive, but it's something.

This does not obliterate everything I've said before, but it does complicate it. I'm in no position to judge if the Walt Disney of 1946 was racist or not, never mind the Walt of 1926 or 1966. You aren't, either. People aren't that simple. All we have is the film, an alarmingly troubled work about a heroic stereotype. It's not simple enough to come off as a total fantasy, but it's not complex enough to allay our modern unease and easily put the film in its place. So now we have to deal with that.

2) Song of the South Into the Present Day

Audiences in 1946 didn't see it the same way we do. Coming out the other side of a world war, the American film  industry was at an all-time productive high. The post-war era in American pop culture is a fascinating one, and tough, serious film making like Rebel Without a Cause sat cheek to jowl with blistering satires and totally absurd escapist fantasies. The all-star movie musical roared back to life with a vitality it hadn't had since the pit of the Great Depression. Song of the South is one of these escapist films.

If we pay close attention to fashion and dress, it's possible to realize that Song of the South is set right about the turn of the 20th century, or in other words the world into which Walt Disney was born. The 1950s saw a revival of interest in "The Good Old Days", visible in such films as The Jolson Story, The Music Man, Night and Day, Man of a Thousand Faces, and reaching its most immortal expression in Disneyland's Main Street, USA.

Song of the South represented to 1946 audiences an escape into a pre-modern fantasy world, of a world before automobiles and airplanes and mechanized warfare, a dimly remembered cultural fantasia. Today's audiences are, depending on one's perspective, either more informed or more cynical, which makes the acceptance of these nostalgic fantasies tougher to take. We're more likely to look for and expect to see the downsides of a reconstruction south presented even in a fantasy film in ways that 1946 audiences likely would not. This would not last long, however.

According to my first edition copy of Leonard Maltin's The Disney Films, Song of the South was reissued without incident in 1956. Throughout the 1960s, Disney kept Song of the South more or less out of view. The Br'er Rabbit animation segments were featured in episodes of Disneyland and Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear could be found in New Orleans Square, but it would not be until 1972 that it was reissued.

Many modern commentators have opined that Song of the South was not reissued during the 1960s due to the turbulent political situation at home, but I think that's stretching the point a bit. If there's any secret reason the film didn't re-appear during the 60s, it may be because Walt Disney remade it - as Mary Poppins, in 1964. Now, Poppins is quite a different film, but the basic situation of a central, mythologized figure who brings animation and magic to a young boy and girl and in doing so mends a broken family strikes a familiar cord.

It's possible that Walt saw a way to recycle a mythology he found special meaning in into a less controversial, more technologically sophisticated film, and he was willing to do it with either Mary Poppins.... or Eglantine Price. Poppins in the finished film is actually extremely remote and mysterious, not at all like the jovial, magnetic presence of Remus. At the suggestion of the Sherman brothers, the emotional core of Mary Poppins is the father, who isn't even present for most of Song of the South.

Given the comparative excellence and sophistication of Mary Poppins, it's possible that this film could have totally eclipsed Song of the South. Today Song of the South could be one of the studio's many obscurities from the 1940s, like So Dear To My Heart or The Reluctant Dragon. But, in 1989, Disney did the one thing that will ensure that demand for Song of the South will never dry up and its legend will loom ever larger - they opened Splash Mountain.

From the perspective of 2015 it seems incomprehensible that Disney would green light an attraction based on a film they had no intention of releasing, but things were different back in 1985.

Back in the 80s, Song of the South had become a perennial money maker for Disney. Reissues in 1972 and 1980 had been wildly successful in a way the film just wasn't in the 1940s, and another was slated for 1986. In other words, audiences in 1989 were expected to recognize the Disney Uncle Remus characters alongside such characters as those from Cinderella and The Jungle Book.

In fact, the entire original version of Splash Mountain at Disneyland is designed based on this assumption. The characters are introduced very casually - the dynamic between Br'er Rabbit, Fox, and Bear isn't even set up, visually or verbally, since we're just supposed to know who is who. Pumpkins, red earth, mint juleps, willows and cattails belong unambiguously to the deep Georgia south of the film.

At Disneyland, the journey through Splash Mountain begins in an old barn, pointedly one of the few structures explicitly built for the interaction of humans and animals. From there, the queue moves past a fireplace with a cast iron pot, and is routed so guests must walk across the hearth. This represents the fireplace where Remus tells Johnny the Br'er Rabbit tales in the film, and to make the connection clear, a direct Remus quote from the film is painted on the wall above the fireplace. Although Remus is never referenced or seen in the attraction, to the familiar observer, the signposts and connections to Song of the South are many.

Daveland at Disneyland

I'd give a lot to know when exactly Eisner instituted his ban on Song of the South. If the stories told about that key visit to Imagineering are correct, then the design for Splash Mountain had been solidified by 1985 in time for it to be seen by Michael Eisner and Breck Eisner and green lit. Song of the South was re-issued both in theaters and internationally on home video in the 1980s, and of course the Disneyland ride is a direct continuation of what riders would be expected to recognize from the film.

But when Splash Mountain appeared at Walt Disney World in late summer 1992, there were changes both obvious and subtle that reflect Song of the South's status as banned goods. Relocated to Frontierland from a dedicated "Critter Country", holes and tunnels became mine shafts and saw mills. A musical score which previously was a fairly conservative recreation of Daniele Amfitheatrof's 1946 orchestral arrangements was re-imagined as homespun, bluegrass ditties. The final version of "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" employs a gospel singer.

More pointedly, the Florida version of Splash Mountain works overtime to introduce riders to the core characters as if they had never existed before. Disneyland's Splash Mountain starts in media res; Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear are out to get Br'er Rabbit because that's what they always do. Comparatively, Magic Kingdom's version uses framed portraits and signs to introduce us to the cast of characters and locations before the ride even begins, then makes all of the characters chatterboxes. We splash down into the cartoon world and see Br'er Fox and Bear spying and plotting about Br'er Rabbit; Br'er Rabbit sings about leaving home and then a porcupine sings about his decision to leave home being a bad one. Two rabbits and a roadrunner six feet later repeatedly remind us of what Br'er Rabbit is up to. Absolutely nothing is left to chance.

Perhaps even more pointedly, the Florida Splash Mountain removes nearly all of the Uncle Remus quotes from Disneyland's queue and jettisons the hearth, making the film's central character seem more like a distant echo. Instead it creates a character who functions as a sort of replacement Remus - Br'er Frog, an incidental character from the film, now sets up the story seen in silhouette in a (brilliantly framed) introductory queue tableau.

In other words, the Magic Kingdom Splash Mountain goes to great lengths to cut its ties with Song of the South, giving us a new world for Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear to exist in, one unique to Frontierland. They even changed the color of Br'er Rabbit's fur from brown to grey, almost as though they were afraid anyone riding would make the connection.

Despite appearing in its own Critter Country separate from Westernland, the Tokyo Disneyland Splash Mountain repeated the "bluegrass" aesthetic of Magic Kingdom's version, thus creating a "Splash Mountain Universe" that the Disneyland version doesn't quite belong to.

Generally, I view creative decisions as just that - decisions, existing in a timeline of the creative process, which must be made because decision must be made, but I can only conclude that the 1992 Splash Mountain seems to be a deliberate attempt to remove the ethnographic origin of the Uncle Remus characters from the "Disney Splash Mountain Universe". Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox, in particular, speak in the 1946 film and 1989 attraction with cadences, phrases, stammering and stuttering very obviously directly descended from African-American comedy conventions of a bygone era. And let's not forget that James Baskett himself appeared on Amos 'n Andy.

Jess Harnell's Br'er Rabbit sounds a great deal like Johnny Lee's Br'er Rabbit, but what he doesn't sound like, is black. Br'er Rabbit's attractive sass and swagger is totally gone, as are his memorable film dialogue lines retained for the 1989 Splash Mountain, like "'I'm gonna bust you wiiiide open!". With his grey fur and stock hijinx, the 1992 Br'er Rabbit could just be a Bugs Bunny clone with all of Bugs' gender queerness removed.

Even with a core cast that's been literally whitewashed, Splash Mountain is the single thing that's probably kept Song of the South alive in the public consciousness. As Bob Iger said in 2009, the film actually is "antiquated" and "fairly offensive", yet literally thousands of people can ride through a major thrill attraction based on it every day of the year. And these same people can now go on the Internet and discover that those clever, well realized characters and world come from a film Disney doesn't want you to see. In any other circumstances Song of the South probably would've ridden off into the sunset reserved for all entertainment whose cultural expiration date is long past, but Splash Mountain is like a billboard off a major highway advertising a place you can't go to.

And yet despite all of that, there's one defiant scrap of Song of the South left in the Magic Kingdom attraction, and everyone who exits the ride walks past it. It's a tiny, framed black and white photo of Br'er Rabbit gesturing to the Briar Patch from the film. More people likely see it in a single day than have seen the film in three decades.

1986 reissue poster

3) Give Us Dirty Laundry

Nothing spreads faster in our Internet culture than bad news.

Now, in my decades of talking about this movie to people, I've come to the conclusion that most Disney fans, and indeed most people born during or slightly before the ban was instituted, have never seen the Song of the South. They haven't sought out the bootleg DVDs or watched it on YouTube. Disney fans are, if nothing else, above all loyal. But everyone, and I mean everyone, knows about the movie.

Or at least they know that it's "banned". What I've realized is that fewer seem to know what it's banned for. Unacceptable racial attitudes, yes, but that's where the understanding ends and the hyperbole begins.

Since the early 2000s and the wide spread of Internet culture, one of the default understandings of Walt Disney has become popularized by shows like Family Guy and Robot Chicken. Charges of racism, juvenile exploitation, and antisemitism are seemingly bolstered by the fact that there's a "forbidden" Disney film out there - Song of the South - so racist, so I've been told, that the NAACP picketed the film upon its release.

 In other words, there's a popular mythology growing out there which positions Song of the South as Disney's version of Birth of a Nation - an abominable film of undisguised hatred. And that doesn't describe Song of the South at all. For starters, the bulk of the film it isn't even entertaining enough to be offensive.

Part of this comes from the fact that Walt Disney hasn't been a fashionable guy to admire in a long time. Today, admiration for filmmakers behind the scenes like David O. Selznick or Daryl Zanuck is limited to a subset of movie fans, and today we're more likely to speak about directors like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford than the money and organization men who believed in them. A great deal of Disney history today seeks to highlight the geniuses who worked for Walt. This very blog is as guilty of it as anyone - look at the number of posts I've tagged Marc Davis and the number I've tagged Walt Disney.

Since the 1970s, renegade geniuses who did their own thing and beat the odds have replaced the kind of unusual institutional bodies who made films through the end of the 1960s. Walt Disney couldn't even draw Mickey Mouse and is only credited for directing one film - and it's a lousy one. It takes some knowledge of film history to understand him as the creator of so much of the first half of the 20th's century's most potent popular art.

The Walt Disney Company has largely allowed this to happen in the past fifteen years. The Walt Disney Story was closed before Splash Mountain even opened. One Man's Dream, which opened in 2001 and has been updated only once, gives people an overview of Walt's accomplishments but no real personal sense of the man. Neal Gabler's 2005 biography of Walt Disney, positioned by Disney as a definitive Walt book, is a crashing bore, thicker than the complete works of Shakespeare, and seems to be written from an ambivalent perspective about the man's legacy. Saving Mr. Banks, the 2013 film, is widely derided by fans as a fantasy but at least attempts to give some sense of who Walt Disney was.

This means that in popular culture the character of Walt exists in a vacuum, and it's pretty much filled up with the kind of rumor mongering and character assassination that popular culture has been pumping into that vacuum for some time. If you're a Disney fan you've likely been asked point blank if Walt Disney was an anti-Semite (or a Nazi sympathizer) by somebody in the past fifteen years. Walt Disney, noted white guy, has become Walt Disney, likely racist, and Song of the South is his dirty laundry.

This is why I worry that keeping Song of the South out of circulation does as much damage as it does good. By removing consumer's ability to choose for themselves, then the choice to keep it under wraps becomes an eternally self-renewing cycle. It isn't available because it's racist. It's racistand so it isn't available.

This decision to withhold it is really our loss. We're being denied the pleasure of James Baskett and Hattie McDaniels' performances, and the voices of the Hall Johnson Choir. We aren't allowed to see the perfection of Ub Iwerks' special effects, 40 years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Song of the South is the first Disney animated film stylized after Mary Blair's artwork, and the character animation is among the best and funniest the studio ever gave us. It's also the only color film and one of the last films shot by Gregg Toland, on the short list of the greatest cinematographers of all time. This last point, in particular, is very painful for cineastes because Toland is famous for his dark chiaroscuro effects in Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane, and the dark, fire lit passages of Song of the South turn into a blurry mess in all available copies of the movie.

Surely all of those positives are worth something to history. They can't be worth tossing out entirely. But how do you reconcile a film whose reputation requires handling with kid gloves with the massive, moving target of a modern multinational corporation in the shooting gallery of pubic life?

4) Disarming the Loaded Gun

But to get to the core of the reason why Disney hasn't let Song of the South out yet, we have to compare the problem that Song of the South represents to how they've handled similar problems.

Disney has a spotty record when it comes to self-censorship. Things pop on and off the forbidden list randomly, more or less depending on who's paying attention. In the early 2000s, Roy O. Disney requested that cigarettes be removed from certain cartoons - Saludos Amigos and Melody Time - while permitting the cigar smoking in Three Caballeros and Pinocchio to remain. At the same time, he asked that the opening sequence of Make Mine Music - The Martins and the Coys - be removed due to offending sensibilities, but more likely because of cartoon violence and gun play that no child who's ever seen a Tom & Jerry cartoon would bat an eye at. Melody Time and Make Mine Music are still censored in the United States, while Saludos Amigos was presented without cuts on the "Walt & El Groupo" DVD release a few years later.

On the Walt Disney Treasures DVD releases, much stronger material was presented with little but a comment or two from Leonard Maltin, including a number of suppressed Pluto cartoons where his master is a bossy Aunt Jemima type, and several examples of pretty hardcore wartime propaganda like Education For Death.

In a similar vein, the VHS release (and as far as I can tell,  subsequent home video releases) of The Lion King have zoomed in several shots in the "Be Prepared" sequence to make the goose-stepping hyenas a little less apparent.

Closer to home, at some point Disney did major censorship to Dumbo, removing entirely the jive-talking crows from all but their final appearance in the film to sing "When I See An Elephant Fly". And the famous black centaurettes have been missing permanently from Fantasia since the 1960s. Yet despite this, there's never really been any attempt to remove the humiliating "What Makes The Red Man Red?" sequence in Peter Pan.

The reason Disney can't - and I'm not saying they won't, I'm saying that they cannot - release Song of the South has to do with, surprisingly, the success of their home video department.

If I asked you to, I bet that it'd be easier for you to come up with a list of places where you cannot buy Disney movies and DVDs than places you can. Electronics shops, mega marts, pharmacies, gas stations, automotive repair stores, supermarkets... children's entertainment on home video is a gigantic market segment and, best of all, it's recession proof.

During the DVD boom of the early naughts, films of all stripes were flying out the door, but once the market collapsed, home video has returned to levels of business fairly comparable to what it was like in the 1990s. If you grew up in the VHS era, as I did, think back to what movies your friends and family likely owned on VHS, and you're going to be picturing rows and rows of movies in those distinctive white puffy clam shells - Disney movies. Mixed in there was going to be, say, your friend's dad's copy of Goodfellas, or maybe Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or something. In other words: hit movies, and kid's films. Then as now, that's what moves copies of films on home video.

Why? Because kids are easily bored and any parent knows that a bored kid is a recipe for disaster, so it's good practice to keep a bunch of them on hand. To kids, the word "Disney" means a good way to spend time. For adults, it means nothing more than "probably safe for your kids".

As Disney fans we tend to forget this, but for the vast majority of the consumer population Disney movies are used as electronic babysitters. Disney even has a special feature on their discs to facilitate this, and they market it like it's a huge benefit - Disney's FastPlay, in which an inserted disc will play assorted trailers, ads, the feature film, and even bonus material clear through, exactly like a VHS.

They've been using it for 12 years now, and if you look carefully, most other animation studios have followed suit with their home video releases, so they must be hearing from people that this is what they want.

This is the market that Disney fears. It isn't the people who are going to line up to attack a 70-year old movie, and it isn't pointy headed geeks like we who are worried about the aspect ratio of Melody Time, and it isn't the think piece in Huffington Post they're worried about, it's Joe and Jane Blow.

Disney movies are sold everywhere, which means they've locked their product into a massive distribution network that empties out into places like a Publix in Hollywood, Florida. It just isn't practical for them to do a small release of a film like Song of the South, because for Disney releasing a product - any product - on video is the equivalent of pressing a huge red button that vomits 10 million copies of everything into every store in the United States.

If you were collecting the Walt Disney Treasures DVD releases, you've experienced this. If you wanted one of the discs, you had to get to your retailer of choice money in hand on release day. The Treasures discs came in on the truck with all of the other Disney releases for that day, and when they were gone, they were gone.
 
Given this scenario, it's easy to see Jane Q. Public thoughtlessly throwing a shiny new Blu-Ray copy of Song of the South into her basket at Target because there's a fun looking rabbit on the cover, and turning into a raging consumer volcano upon discovering that the film features less than flattering depicting of - are those slaves? It's not nerds, but Moms, that Disney lives in constant fear of. They have spent generations building up goodwill and brand recognition to potentially degrade it by releasing something that's not really okay to most Americans.

So, if Disney is even going to think about a release of Song of the South, they have to find a way of releasing it in such a way that nerds can find it but casual Disney consumers cannot.

They could, for instance, sell it directly to fans at the D23 Expo, which given the cost to get in is all but guaranteed to screen out anyone who's going to be walking into Song of the South blindfolded. This would certainly bolster D23's tenuous claim to be "by fans, for fans", although it would encourage scalpers and bootleggers - but doesn't the current strategy do that already? If anything, the opportunity to purchase a legitimate copy of Song of the South direct from Disney could be a powerful incentive for some to attend.

Disney could also contemplate a limited distribution strategy through, say, their Disney Movie Club, which they're already using to make available such less-marketable titles as Pollyanna and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. Using this method it's still not impossible that Song of the South could end up in "The Wrong Hands", but the risk is far less than a wide release.

An even safer bet could be a direct digital download with, say, a click-through acknowledgement and an attached video disclaimer with Leonard Maltin.

Or, they could use a DVD boutique label.

Boutique labels are an interesting abnormality in the history of home video. The basic concept dates from the laserdisc era, when laserdiscs were an expensive product with a limited consumer base. The true money was in the inferior VHS format and the video rental business, and so while studios poured money into releasing their movie titles on magnetic tape, they often pawned off the rights to release their cult or classic films of more questionable commercial prospects to companies like Image Entertainment or Voyager on laserdisc. This, in turn, allowed these companies to lavish more time and attention on these cult items, and market them especially to collectors and nerds.

The long term benefits of this splitting of the market segment had undeniable benefits in film culture. Successful laser releases of catalog films meant that more and more older films were going to be restored and preserved. At the same time, the cinephilic bent of the format meant that more and more consumers were demanding not only better, but definitive releases of films.

Laserdiscs introduced the notion of alternate cuts, like the duelling versions of Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon, and the now highly marketable Director's Cuts, like the long version of Lawrence of Arabia. Films which had previously existed in altered and truncated versions began to be put back together. Our modern, improved opinion of directors like Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone stems from reconstruction efforts which began as attempts to sell laserdiscs.

This is the model the industry is returning to, by the way. Video stores no longer exist, but the big multi-million dollar agreements of today are over streaming services, while the shrinking video market is increasingly being split up amongst boutique labels. Three of the best today are Olive Films, Twilight Time and Shout! Factory. And then there's Criterion. If you've come all the way to this blog I likely don't need to tell you what Criterion is, but just in case, here it is.

Criterion was the label for art house movies. Their first release ever was Citizen Kane. They pioneered the concept of added-value content on disc, recording the first ever commentary track - for King Kong. They printed essays about the films on the rear on their laserdisc sleeves. And they cleverly assigned each release a number - subtly encouraging collectors, like Pokemon, to get them all.

The impact of Criterion on our modern cinephile culture cannot be underestimated. For the first time, fans like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson could watch a movie and then listen to its director speak about it on a commentary track. Criterion releases were film school in a box and paved the way for our current home video standards - director involvement, correct aspect ratios, high picture quality, and bonus features. As a result, each Criterion film release has, for some, acquired the character of the canonization of a saint.

The respect and prestige conferred on Criterion means that a Criterion release of a film or director can actually turn the conversation of the film around. In the late 1980s Criterion released a gigantic laserdisc set of Terry Gilliam's costly, controversial Brazil and it's probably on the basis of their release, and then again on DVD and Blu-Ray, that the film has graduated slowly from curious cult item to established classic.

Isn't this what Song of the South needs? A careful release that will turn its image around while keeping it out of the hands of casual consumers? A release will confer instant prestige on a troubled film?

This strategy comes with a certain degree of insurance against wandering hands. To begin with, Criterion goes to great lengths to design unique covers which reflect the films inside, a world away from Disney's standard "a bunch of characters looming" method. The upshot is that the release would look nothing like a normal Disney movie. And, of course, Criterion releases are priced at a premium price point - more than twice the price of other movies. All of these factors tend to keep Criterion discs out of mass market retailers like Target and Wal-Mart, where the majority of Disney product moves.

Well, that's how I'd do it. There is no perfect solution to the problem. As I said at the start, Song of the South is a film which demands an interpretive scheme - it demands that the viewer have a point of view. You cannot watch it passively. Even with a careful release and thoughtful roll out, those who want to view Walt Disney as a racist and The Walt Disney Company as an evil corporation will find plenty of ammunition in it. But what does it matter? They were going to take that position anyway. Meanwhile others who may have judged the film harshly based on reputation will be given a chance to re-evaluate their position and make up their own mind. It won't happen right away, but bit by bit the film can be pulled back into respectable company. Hey - it happened for TRON.

Disney's point of view is that the film doesn't exist. By keeping it out of sight they hope it will eventually just go away. It isn't going to work this way. Escape From Tomorrow was allowed to go out unchallenged because Disney correctly guessed that it wasn't a good enough film to be more than a passing novelty.

But Song of the South is a film they advertise to tens of thousands of people a day inside their parks. And what's more, most people who see it tend to like it. By failing to take a position, Disney is fleeing the problem like Br'er Rabbit hopping away from the briar patch. And, just like Uncle Remus said, any place they go will never be far enough away.

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