Fresh, Clear, Well-Seasoned Perspective

Before I start diving into the nitty-gritty stuff, I thought I'd take a moment to explain my position vis-à-vis Disneyland—the formative experiences that led me to view the park the way I do.

I grew up in the 1980s in the San Fernando Valley—more than a stone's throw from Disneyland, but still close enough for a day trip without even having to get up very early. A stone's slingshot-launch away, you might say. My parents divorced when I was quite young, and my mom's income sat us firmly in the lower middle class. So trips weren't frequent, but my sister and I could count on going at least once per year, sometimes twice (once with each parent).

I remember crowds being pretty light; we rarely waited more than 45 minutes for anything, even on Saturdays. Possibly, the 1982 discontinuation of the ride coupon system in favor of the unlimited one-day pass had priced enough people out of the market to thin the herd, but more likely than that, Disney's reputation just wasn't that great at the time. Right up until the end of the Eighties, the animation studio was in a serious slump, and that surely reverberated onto the park. My classmates teased me for preferring Disneyland over Six Flags Magic Mountain, which was far more thrill-heavy and had the wisecracking Bugs Bunny as its mascot. Disney was considered baby stuff.

I loved it anyway. I developed something of an obsession. I would save the souvenir maps (in those days, the free ones were multi-page booklets) and between trips, would spend hours poring over them, studying them, trying to figure out what made the place tick. Even at the tender age of less-than-ten, I sensed something there that no other theme park could replicate—not Knott's Berry Farm, not Universal Studios, and certainly not Magic Mountain, whose charmless tangles of unadorned roller coaster track were clearly visible from I-5 whenever we passed it on the way to my dad's astronomy club. On the much rarer occasions that we visited Magic Mountain, I would complain that the coasters lacked “scenery.” It wasn't until much later that I learned a better word for what I was missing there: theming.

To me, theming is the Disney magic. Rides are fun, but you can get those anywhere. Even meeting Disney characters, while always a part of my childhood trips, was never crucial because I was no fool—I knew those were actors in costumes. It was fun to play along, but it wasn't the thing I looked forward to. What I looked forward to—although I didn't consciously know it yet—was the extraordinary attention to detail, the commitment to quality placemaking that made visiting Disneyland not just a theme park, but an exercise in seamless escapism. I was a smart child of smart parents and never for a moment mistook the park's illusions for reality, but the make-believe came very very easily, and that was more thrilling than any inverted coaster.

And then there's the sense of design. Disneyland was and is loaded with distinctive design motifs, and I absorbed these at a very young age. When bored in school, I used to doodle the spiral-veined leaves of the Alice in Wonderland ride and color them in that eye-popping palette of pinks and cool greens. The exterior façade of “it's a small world” was another favorite of mine—all those squares and circles and triangles and golden pinwheels jumbled up together, the alternating rough and smooth textures, and the clock face that ought to have looked sinister with its overhanging brow and robotic features yet somehow...didn't. The leering, candle-clutching gargoyles and bat-shaped stanchions of the Haunted Mansion enthralled me every bit as much as the actual ghosts did. From Adventureland's grinning tiki totem poles to Tomorrowland's upswept needle spires, the park was crammed with visual elements that simply could not be had anywhere else.

It's worth remembering that this was before the rise of the Internet. Nowadays if I want to “see Disneyland” when I'm not there, all those unique design elements are a Google Image search away. When I was a child, if it wasn't in our family photo album, the only place I could see it was at the park itself. Or else in my memories of past visits and my feverish anticipations of future ones.

This is a recipe for madness, but it's a kind of madness willingly, even eagerly entered into. To paraphrase a coffee mug witticism: I didn't suffer from Disneyland-mania...I enjoyed every minute of it. Even the censure of my classmates, which could be extraordinary in its viciousness, could not dim my ardor. I felt like a member of a secret society, persecuted by the mainstream for my slightly-superhuman knowledge. And it all hinged on the fact that Disneyland was special. There was nothing remotely like it within my reach. Maybe the closest I could come, between visits, was watching on VHS the handful of animated films that had counterpart rides in the park, and even that wasn't very similar, because the classic dark rides were more abstract and less like straight summaries of their respective films than the newer ones are.

This leads me neatly to my next point, which is that the presence of film and other IP tie-ins at Disneyland was much different when I was a young kid. For starters, it was a lot smaller. Prior to 1987, there were the Fantasyland dark rides and spinning rides, the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes and Mike Fink Keelboats in Frontierland, the Swiss Family Treehouse in Adventureland, and the TRON Superspeed Tunnel in Tomorrowland. Every other attraction was an Imagineering original.

I think this started to change with Star Tours (1987), which was both the first “E-ticket” level attraction to be based on something outside the parks, and the first attraction of any kind to be based on an IP not owned by Disney. (At the time, that is. Irony ahoy!) Maybe once those two barriers were broken, all bets were off, because it wasn't until after Star Tours that we got other firsts like animated character rides outside Fantasyland (Splash Mountain was the first of those, in 1989) and dedicated character meet-and-greet spots. I'm not saying it all went to hell after that, because there's some really great stuff post-dating that decision, but that does seem to have been the start of the trend to use Disneyland as a promotional vehicle for films and characters.

It might also have been the first ride to present an explicit plot in real time. Prior to that, “narrative” in rides was limited to hints and suggestions, or—in the case of the classic dark rides—highlights and set pieces. Things were left sketchy enough that you could exercise your imagination to fill in the gaps. The narratives of newer rides, by contrast, tend to be unambiguous.

What this all adds up to is that the Disneyland of today is a very different beast from the one I remember from my early childhood. The mystique that fascinated me then seems to have declined in numerous small ways, and my judgments of new developments depend to a large extent upon whether they further this decline or reverse it. I make no claim to total objectivity.

But I like to think I've accumulated enough experience over the years to wield a competent perspective. May my readers find it illuminating.