For Further Study, #3

It is my genuine, firm belief that if all one ever does is to expose herself to culture that is culture approved of by Disney, then her world view will be far narrower than any shared by any of the artists who created the Disney product from the great eras. Disney isn't high culture, but it isn't low culture either, and as such I genuinely hope to point the receptive spectator in the direction of related but challenging, exciting art which will significantly broaden the richness of the experience Disney offers.

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Walt Disney often sought in his life and work to associate himself with other notable figures of American history - other movie moguls, oftentimes immigrants, aligned their product with the great international masters such as homespun Warner Brothers offering England's Bard in our last For Further Study - Disney sought and found success in America by creating works of undeniable local color. His early films have been often described as "Barnstorming" - as much for their irrepressible energy as their rural Midwest atmosphere and unsophisticated humor. His one big effort to recruit "Continental" sophistication - Fantasia - mired an already troubled studio in even more financial doubt. It was not an experiment Disney would repeat. His bread and butter for the next several years would draw heavily on American pop rather than the European Gothic of Snow White and Pinocchio.

Disneyland, Walt Disney's largest manifestation of American mythology, included a "River of America", essentially a fantasy of the Mississippi in miniature, a big sternwheel riverboat called the Mark Twain, a whole attraction called Tom Sawyer Island based much on "recieved knowledge" about Sam Clemens' most popular book, and would eventually expand to include a whole New Orleans section, a miniature great northwest, monument valley, and more.

Walt Disney World's version of American history tied together by that river was overall perhaps a bit more ambitious, and in the intervening sixteen years of additions and reconceptualizations the threads of the fictions of Sam Clemens, Walt Disney, larger American myths and WED enterprises had become tangled so finely that extracting any one element from the others would be almost impossible. Mike Fink's Keel Boats, based on a historical figure appearing in Davy Crockett Disney-produced television episodes and extrapolated by Bob Gurr and others into operable form for Disneyland, circled Tom Sawyer Island, a careful index of many places and incidents sometimes mentioned only in passing by Clemens in his famous book, passing along the way Wilson's Cave Inn, a factual figure and location along America's waterways, integrated into the Disneyland television show, and redesigned by Marc Davis for the Walt Disney World show. The ties become culture soup, unlikely and undesirable to untangle.

In 1996 the Magic Kingdom Florida's remaining steamboat Richard F. Irvine was refurbished and renamed the Liberty Belle, in an effort to tie the boat more concretely to her dock in Liberty Square. Part of this effort included a new spiel, rewritten and revised perhaps more extensively than any other equivalent spiel at Walt Disney World. These spiels were often recorded by a jovial but generic sounding "captain" who would point out various attractions of interest along the ride path in typical "folksy" fashion. The new Liberty Belle spiel, adapted from the existing Keel Boat Standard Operating Guide Narration, split the role amongst two narrators, a "captain" and a "pilot", allowing for some degree of banter to enter the narration. The clever touch is that the pilot is Sam Clemens and the captain is a gentleman named Horace Bixby, putting the time frame of the attraction somewhere about 1857 - 1860. Instead of being the result of Clemens' fanciful adventure tales, Tom Sawyer Island is now the place which inspired them.

There are a handful of objections to the spiel, including certain historical inaccuracies - Horace Bixby was never a riverboat captain to Clemens, for example, a Captain of a riverboat being the owner rather than chief operator of the vessel - and the generally pervasive sense that the existing spiel was peppered with passages from a rather short collection of famous Sam Clemens quotes in fairly desperate fashion. It is, however, the only attraction in Disney to casually mention almost hanging somebody as a throw-away joke, and deserves more credit than the above paragraph perhaps suggests.

At this point we reach the For Further study portion of this history lesson, which is not, as expected, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain but rather, his lesser known and wickedly entertaining "Old Times on the Mississippi". This series of seven articles is the absolute basis of the Liberty Belle spiel, and although nowhere in the work does Clemens once mention Horace Bixby by name, any cursory examination of Clemens' personal history will dredge this name up. It is the stuff of legend that Clemens was once a Riverboat pilot, and "Old Times on the Mississippi" proves the tall tales true with comic anecdotes, technical specifications, atmosphere and nostalgia. In the shadow of the book does the Liberty Belle spiel become a fount of rich history.

One of the secondary functions of Disneyland and The Magic Kingdom is teaching; histories and architectural styles are taught with mere glances, while films, novels, plays, music and all other media are annotated vigorously and continually. Although probably not everyone was led from Mr. Toad's Wild Ride to The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad to Kenneth Grahame's beautiful The Wind in the Willows as I was, but youthful expeditions on Tom Sawyer Island at Walt Disney World may one day bear fruit as assigned readings of Mark Twain in high school become as nostalgic and enjoyable as hey deserve to be. It would probably be impossible to construct a full list of references for something like The Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean, but memories of everyone from Charles Dickens to William Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson echo through Walt Disney World like a chorus.

The full text of Old Times on the Mississippi.
Further information on Clemens and Bixby.
Full text of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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Passport to Dreams Old & New For Further Study list:

Old Times on the Mississippi, 1876, Mark Twain - nonfiction.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Warner Brothers Pictures 1935, Dir: William Dieterle
The Tales of Hoffman, London Pictures 1949, Dir: Michael Powell
Tiki Modern, 2007, Sven Kirsten, Taschen Books

On Walking Attractions

In the industry of theme entertainment, much has changed since the sophisticated Disneyland model entered the marketplace in 1955. Once, the roller coaster was a competitive market, but the tide has gradually turned away and coasters are becoming smaller draws year by year. Anybody who remembers when it seemed like “virtual reality” would soon dominate all creative, entertainment output will recognize the pattern, even more abbreviated. In truth, Disney designed rides have gone through so many “fads” that the origin of them today seems slightly obscured. It’s a fairly safe bet that, for example, most people under the age of 30 wouldn’t consider anything that doesn’t move in a linear direction on some kind of guidance system to be an “attraction”. And yet it is illuminating to consider that, in 1955, by far the bulk of the Disneyland attractions were “self guided” in nature, including most of Tomorrowland. In light of this - and the next 50 years of theme design – there is a compelling argument that the “Walking Attraction”, as much as the “Theatre Show”, “Dark Ride” or “Roller Coaster” is its’ own unique aesthetic mode of attraction, worthy of its’ own careful considerations.

This is not to say that the self-guided attraction is actually thriving in today’s market; if it is built at all today it is likely to take the form of a queue experience funneling the spectators towards a motion based ride. This is a logical if unenviable fate for the original aesthetic mode of the themed experience; the spectator is waiting her turn in line anyway, and there might as well be a highly themed walkthrough attraction as a preface. This reaches its’ apotheosis at Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure and Animal Kingdom’s Expedition Everest, where the queues are done with a great deal more care and detail than the rides themselves.

Perhaps the inevitable decline of the number of Disney self guided attractions is an end result of the fact that it’s very hard to straddle a line between a museum (One Man’s Dream) or a corporate exhibit (Transcenter) to make a walk-thru feel like an organic creation. The original EPCOT pavilions were sometimes good and sometimes bad at this, but were usually done with a degree of aesthetic class and cleverness not often found in today’s Innoventions or Project Tomorrow displays.

I have identified three basic groupings of the self-guided attraction:

Type A: Defined Path, Defined Boundaries

Type B: Open Path, Defined Boundaries

Type C: Open Path, Open Boundaries

“Type A” of the self guided attraction may be regarded as the linear attraction, where the flow of peoples is projected in a linear fashion through a series of rooms or exhibits. This flow of peoples is essentially similar to the forward flow of vehicles on a track, where variances in speed and direction can slow down the entire chain. This is the mode which the indoor attractions would all eventually become based on, but an especially desirable example here is the Swiss Family Treehouse because it is not only a linear attraction, but one which is essentially an outgrowth of the Adventureland area itself. The Treehouse is a form of interactive public art, where spectators from the ground level can enjoy viewing the tree and spectators on the tree can enjoy viewing the ground. Both views are different but essentially analogous. The Treehouse is a pastoral which flatters both itself and the areas it views, especially at Walt Disney World where the Adventureland Veranda loop of facades were built to be viewed from on high. It has its visual interest but the primary focus is on the view and the privileges it presents.

The Treehouse is also unique and interesting in that it is the most complete example of the “phantom population” – the debris and signifiers of a “local” population Disney goes to great lengths to suggest inhabit its’ parks, going about day to day business, which of course never exist. The Treehouse, remarkably, is an open house for a house literally inhabited by nobody, but the emptiness is never uncanny thanks to Buddy Baker’s “Swiss Polka”. For an attraction with only one moving part – the fascinating water wheel – it feels very little like a static tableau.

This quality is thanks to the fact that the Swiss Family Treehouse is really part of Adventureland, and although is may be “gated”, the life it has is the life of Adventureland’s shops and attractions and walkways. It does not answer but it once again invokes the essential question of whether the themic unit of a Disneyland “-Land” is the original walking attraction.

“Type B” of the self-guided attraction is best typified by Tom Sawyer Island, which is an area where the direction and speed of the experience is open, but the boundaries of the area are defined and controlled. Tom Sawyer Island, an area defined by a river with only one point of entrance and exit, is mythologized by its’ remote nature. But the Island recreates the mythical state of youth, and the big river and circling steamboat elevate the experience to a fully convincing illusion of the great outdoors, which is of course absurd because the entire island is manmade and crisscrossed with electrical lines and utilities.

The free-roaming nature of the Tom Sawyer Island attraction goes a long way towards creating the illusion of a totally unrestricted environment in strong contrast to the single direction demanded by the Treehouse. The Island offers a degree of uncertainty, facilitated by the design of the cave walk-through attractions - the caves are large show buildings buried in dirt, and as such the Island is a mound of earth where one can never see the attraction’s other shore, creating surprise when one comes across the old mill, or the entrance to another cave.

Those caves, in particular - self-contained Type A walking sub-attractions placed in a Type B environment - are the dark heart of Tom Sawyer Island, it’s true reason for existence. Nowhere else in Disney attractions is the illusion of being in a truly unrestricted environment where things could genuinely go wrong played out so carefully and effectively, the true Haunted Mansions where all bets seem to be off. The “adult” characters on the island – blacksmiths and a fort guard at Walt Disney World, General Jackson at Disneyland – are distracted or rendered harmless, furthering the illusion of free reign in what is actually a very controlled sector. In Type B attractions, Tom Sawyer Island especially, the designers stress choice over a linear path. What defines it is the controlled entrance and exit, the turnstile or the ticket booth.

This pattern, of course, is the pattern which the Disney parks emulate – one is presented with labeled choices through which one may wander. The illusion, however, on Tom Sawyer Island (where the area behind Fort Wilderness seems to go off into “nature”) as everywhere at Walt Disney World, strives to be a "Type C" attraction – all possible choices and all possible directions. Type C attractions most often function as exhibit halls, the Halls of Chemistry of Disney history. As such they tend to be small pockets set down inside the larger park, unguarded and unticketed, and most resembled those dreaded arcades, museums and corporate exhibits Disney’s team of designers often seek to differentiate themselves from.

The earliest in Disneyland history – the Penny Arcade – begat increasingly complex versions, and the mode of Type C self guided attraction which has most repeated itself arrived with the 1967 New Tomorrowland, with its’ Bell Telephone preshow to the Circle-Vision America the Beautiful film, and especially the Monsanto exhibits at the exit of the Adventure Through Inner Space, an area with a fashionable 1967 look and feel quite removed from the Claude Coats stark dark ride which ostensibly prefaced it. The most exhaustive use of the Type C walk-thru attraction occurred in 1982 at EPCOT Center, where nearly every Future World pavilion had an adjoining exhibit at its’ exit as well as a sponsored space in Communicore. The most influential may have been Image Works, a free-flowing digital playground which was the template for many a children’s science museum nationwide, but the most complete and complex execution of a Type C attraction was and is Communicore, which has a poorer modern-day equivalent in Innoventions.

Communicore represents the total integration of varying types of attractions within a unitary whole because each self-guided attraction was an extension of the traditional attractions ringing it. EPCOT Center‘s didactic messages and inspired executions took form in a variety of concept exhibits and interactive pieces working overtime to validate the park’s humanist aims. The triumph of Communicore lay not in the content, but the concept – whereas previously different attractions existed throughout a Disneyland-type park sharing only an apparently linked physical or narrative similarity, Communicore posited a theme park where all types of attractions can be united under a conceptual or intellectual common element. One doesn’t need to see the Swiss Family Treehouse, for example, to understand aspects of the Jungle Cruise, but a trip through the Universe of Energy in 1982 was greatly expanded by Communicore’s Exxon Energy Exchange. This minor facet is just one example of EPCOT Center’s explosion of aesthetic norms in themed design, the most important innovation in the field in the last quarter of the 20^th century.

Ironically as the number of self-guided exploratory type attractions has dwindled, the definitions and rules governing such non-traditional attractions has exploded open. Under the A – E ticket system Disney defined anything requiring a ticket to be an attraction. With the disbanding of this system in 1983 (following, ironically, the walking attraction’s greatest achievements), many different areas can now sport the title “Attraction”, such as Walt Disney World’s minor Fantasyland Pooh playground, or EPCOT Center’s loud but benevolent Club Cool.

And yet the variety of things available at Disneyland and Walt Disney World has been slowly shrinking, as each Stateside attraction moves towards being a water-sprizting scent-wafting 4-D roller coaster with each passing year. As such, the state of the self-guided attraction is in a state of flux, as those low-tech Type A and B attractions not already endangered are becoming increasingly rare. Yet if Imagineers are disinterested in considering the self-guided tour as a viable mode of entertainment, a hybrid attraction of the past may be worth considering for the future: the 1975 Space Mountain, where the queue and post-show were self-contained Type A attractions – past displays of RCA products.

The ultimate problem with trying to classify the successes or failures of a walk-through attraction at Disney is that, on a certain level, everything begins to resemble one. Particularly with Disney’s constant attention to detail does something like Main Street, USA begin to appear to be an attraction, or perhaps Disneyland’s Riverfront. It’s hard to draw an exact boundary between attractions and non-attractions in Disney theme design, and even the rule that an attraction is something guarded by a turnstile cannot hold because Disneyland herself is bermed in in all directions and gated. In the days of the individual attraction tickets one could buy herself a ticket only good for admission. Although this functioned as a extension of Disney’s old policy that tickets never expire, it also functioned as an economical solution for those only in seek of all the myriad rewards Disneyland offered that weren’t inside, in the dark.

Kraft Shingles

For those who follow / know / care about the Walt Disney World Village / Marketplace / Downtown Disney, I've noted an important development in this area in the past few months. Like many Walt Disney World structures, the Village is getting fully reshingled, a change long overdue. Unfortunately, unlike the many Magic Kingdom buildings getting authentically redone, Disney has opted to go with plain tar shingles for the Village rather than the more costly and pretty wood shingles. As any Village fan will tell you, the Village's beautiful cedar shingles were one of the most distinct and charming things about the place, and the replacement of these with plain commercial grade shingles is a poor substitute indeed. Chalk this one up to just one more element of one of Disney's most discreet yet accomplished bits of urban planning which will soon be forgotten.

I'll discuss the Village in a great deal more detail in the upcoming weeks...

Amazing Quote of the Hiatus #3: "There are moments in everyone's life when even the beautiful simplicity of the video screen seems beyond one's capabilities." - EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow

Unfortunatley...

I'm still technically on hiatus here, but I thought I'd give a general heads up that I was able to look through Walt Disney World: Then, Now & Forever - by Jeff Kurtti and Bruce Gordon - last night and I regret to say that I was duly unimpressed. Their very nice Disneyland: Then, Now & Forever was an interesting way to organize information, where one could go from Big Thunder Mountain to Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland to Rainbow Ridge Pack Mules by turning a few pages. That book becomes a pretty disorganized mess near the end as the desire to create a pictorial souvenir which was also a Disneyland history book begins to manifest, but this flaw is apparent throughout the WDW incarnation.

Too much attention is paid to Animal Kingdom and Disney-MGM Studios which are still fairly close to their original forms, and too little to The Magic Kingdom & EPCOT. Those moments where good information is being imparted are often overshadowed by a far sloppier layout than the first book, and subjects come and go at a chaotic whim. Worse, most of the pictures in the book are Pana-Vue slides commercially available at Walt Disney World in the first few years and still common in second hand markets. These pictures can be downloaded for absolutely free online, which makes the book even more superfluous. The comparative lack of text, lack of new pictures and information, and chaotic disorganization utterly does the book in.

I'm not sure how to diagnose this. Kurtti is no stranger to Walt Disney World history and his very nice, text heavy and graphics light Since The World Began from twelve years ago is still the best Disney-authorized beginner's look at the history of the Florida Project. He also had a hand in the 1997 - 2000 publication A Magical Year-by-Year Journey, which published solid information and unusual pictures in a logical format. Moreover his just-published Walt Disney's Legends of Imagineering is a concise, cutting and essential book and his text for that project shows a writer who has evolved from a chronicler to a critic. I am very hesitant to blame Kurtti for putting out a subpar product.

Length restrictions may have had a role. Disneyland: Then, Now & Forever doesn't have enough space to fully be all it can be, and that book is covering two parks, three hotels and a shopping district. The WDW version is covering over twice the amount of subjects in roughly the same number of pages, and some of the omissions are unfortunate. The resorts are given a very brief mention and there is fairly little said about the Shopping Village or the golf courses. If You Had Wings is relegated to a photo caption about Dreamflight. Although I realize that my level of obsession with Walt Disney World minutia is coloring my perception of the book, if you came to the book expecting lots of weird pictures and unusual information, you'll be a little let down.

In a larger sense the book is pretty indicative of Disney's larger attitude towards Walt Disney World's history, which is that there is none. Disneyland is successfully marketed as the "history park" while Walt Disney World's varied past is often and sloppily swept under the rug. While the Disneyland volume is well-resourced enough that we can be shown cool things like an original Show White painted flat, the Walt Disney World volume seems parched for content. Was Kurtti given too little to work with and too little space?

It pains me to say this, but after being thoroughly annoyed by the book I must warn people with my level of interest in Walt Disney World to purchase with caution. Give the book a through inspection. I declined to buy it. Others with a less strong expectation of WDW history reportage may want it, but consider this an advance warning that it will not be for all tastes. Of course I may be an outlier because I considered Realityland to be a crashing disappointment also. Let's hope that The Art of Walt Disney World, supposedly forthcoming, proves more exciting.

Amazing Quote of the Hiatus No. #2: "The sounds and sights of Tomorrowland are sometimes young... and sometimes old!" - A Pictorial Souvenir of Walt Disney World, 1972

On Hiatus

Hi everyone, I've decided to put this blog on hiatus for a few weeks until I can get some stuff relating and not relating to Disney sorted out, as well as hopefully take a break to keep the work fresh. Rest assured - I have no intention of letting this place slide into sedentary mode, but I may not be making my "one a week-ish" "deadlines". What we can hopefully look forward to is some fun short silly posts just to keep me on my toes. In the meantime, here's some links back to noteworthy material from the past few months. Oh yeah, and happy 2nd birthday, Passport to Dreams!

Magic Kingdom: Snow White's Adventures: Original Version / The Early Film Presentations / Two By Yale Gracey / Phantoms of Influence

For Further Study: #1, #2

Coffee Series: #1, #2, #3, #4

Amazing Quote of the Hiatus: "Audio-Animatronics is a unique application of spaceage electronics, combining and synchronizing voices, music and sound effects with the movement of three-dimensional animated objects."