After-Action Report: Enchanted Tiki Room

I had so much fun assembling last week's post about hosting an Enchanted Tiki Room-themed luau that I decided to dedicate this week's article to the attraction itself.

Having already written one of these for the Jungle Cruise, the obvious thing to do is a compare-and-contrast between these two Adventureland attractions from Disneyland's first decade. So here it is: In addition to the two points of commonality already mentioned, the Jungle Cruise and the Enchanted Tiki Room both heavily feature comedy involving audio-animatronic tropical animals. And that's about it for similarities.

The Jungle Cruise is a boat ride, the Enchanted Tiki Room a stationary show. The Jungle Cruise evokes Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, while the Enchanted Tiki Room evokes Hawaii. The animals in the Enchanted Tiki Room are all birds, while the Jungle Cruise showcases a few birds, lots of mammals, some reptiles, and even fish and insects. The Enchanted Tiki Room is about one-and-a-half times as long as the Jungle Cruise—over twice as long if you include the pre-show. The Enchanted Tiki Room revolves around music; the Jungle Cruise decidedly does not. The Enchanted Tiki Room presents a pre-programmed show that never varies, while the Jungle Cruise, thanks to its live spiel, is different every time.

Do I have to keep going?

Actually, there is one really noteworthy point of contrast between the two attractions, and that is the style of humor. As I surmised in my Jungle Cruise post, that ride has possibly ensured its survival by embracing sarcasm. The Enchanted Tiki Room, on the other hand, not only holds onto its sincerity, but—judging by the poor reception to its Orlando counterpart's snarky “Under New Management!” makeover—seems to be better off for doing so. I suspect, as I explained in said post, that guests prefer to have the sarcasm confined to the Jungle Cruise where they can keep an eye on it...but that doesn't explain why the Enchanted Tiki Room continues to play to mostly full houses when it keeps on offering its increasingly outdated air of genteel, martini-in-one-hand drollery (complete with celebrity impressions that were a little past their sell-by date even in 1963).

Well, okay. It also offers air conditioning. And frosty, delicious Dole Whips at the attached Tiki Juice Bar, and you're even allowed to eat them inside now. We cannot discount these as factors in the show's appeal, especially when the mercury breaks 90.

But that can't be all there is to it, because there was a stretch in the early 2000s where things were looking pretty dire. The birds were molting, the thatch was deteriorating, and the crowds—who may not always know what they want, but are pretty sure they don't want shoddy maintenance and dismal, uninviting entryways—were walking right past it in droves. The outlook was grim over here in Disneyland Fansville—we thought for sure they would either give the Enchanted Tiki Room the Under New Management! treatment or shut it down entirely. And we weren't sure which prospect was worse.

Fortunately, sanity—or at least sentimentality of the more productive sort—prevailed, and the Enchanted Tiki Room was extensively renovated and given an eye-catching new entrance gate and sign, hinting at the merriment within:

You might not go in, but you'll at least know it's there. Audiences rediscovered the Enchanted Tiki Room and it has enjoyed reasonable success ever since. Hell, once you factor in its presumably low operating costs (small servos don't eat much power) and the extreme popularity of the Dole Whips, it might be that the Tikis turn a profit.

Fancy that.

But that doesn't change the fact that the show itself is, well, an unchanged fact. It's been altered in small ways over the years—the sponsor changed from American Airlines to Dole, the program was trimmed in order to fit in an extra performance every hour, the sound system was updated, the pre-show was rearranged—but the Enchanted Tiki Room hasn't had anything new to say since the day it opened. The parrot emcees still emulate Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier; the rock-and-roll revolution rolled right past them without disturbing a feather.

You'd think that samey-same-sameness would be dangerous in a park that caters mostly to locals. Didn't I cite the Jungle Cruise's endless capacity for variety as a factor in its enduring popularity with repeat guests? (Spoiler: I did.) But humans are paradoxical creatures, and so I'm gonna go right ahead and cite the Enchanted Tiki Room's lack of variety as a factor in its ability to keep drawing crowds after 50+ years.

See, it's not just the Enchanted Tiki Room. It's Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room. It's there because Walt really dug audio-animatronic figures.* More interestingly, though, it was the last big project he oversaw before the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair forever changed the way the Imagineers designed and built major attractions. Other artifacts of this period, of Disneyland's infancy, still exist of course...but the great majority of them have been significantly revised in the meantime. The Fantasyland dark rides had their layouts and effects completely revamped. The Matterhorn got ice caverns and Yetis and changed its address. The Submarine Voyage first changed from a military to a scientific endeavor, then closed, then re-opened with a Finding Nemo theme and underwater LCD screens. Tom Sawyer Island has become a pirate haven. Even many of the shops on Main Street have gradually morphed into completely different entities than they were in the early years.

But the Enchanted Tiki Room has thus far avoided this fate, making it, in a sense, a rare glimpse into the mind of a Walt Disney who was still naïve...but right on the cusp of a huge discovery. Not yet having begun to dream of big robotic dinosaurs and pirates and presidents, he was still completely charmed by little robotic talking birds—and his enthusiasm rubs off on us every time we watch the show. Has it ever occurred to you how strange it is that people clap for these performers? They're machines; it's not like they can hear or appreciate the applause. But for that brief period of time, we believe: Parrot-occhio is a real bird!

And they're interesting characters. The script of the show only permits little flashes of their different personalities, but it's enough to make me want to know more about them and their enchanted room. I have questions. Like: Contrary to the song lyrics, not all the birds sing words. Only the parrot emcees and the cockatoos on the Birdmobile do...so why is that? Did they learn language from humans? Is that why the emcees, despite apparently being native to the area, all have different accents? Were they mascots aboard sailing ships before settling down in the Tiki Room? Do they live there, or just convene there for performances and birdie business? Hang on...is it the room that gives them the power of speech? Who built the Tiki Room (surely not the birds themselves!), and what became of them? There don't seem to be any native humans around. Maybe the Polynesian gods whose idols dot the exterior garden built it. That would explain how it came to be enchanted.

I love the Enchanted Tiki Room for making me ask these questions. It may be small and simple, but it's a perfect example of why I almost always prefer non-branded concepts for attractions over existing IPs. The latter usually just tell you an abridged or scrambled version of a story you already know. The former inspire you to imagine new stories. How many web pages are dedicated to unriddling the history of the Haunted Mansion based on the “clues” scattered throughout the queue and ride?

The Enchanted Tiki Room predates the Haunted Mansion, of course...or does it? The Tikis opened their doors in 1963—the same year that the Mansion's exterior was completed. I can't find any information as to the exact date the building shell was declared finished, so it may be that there has been a physical Haunted Mansion in Disneyland longer than there has been a completed Tiki Room. We all know why the Mansion sat empty for six years—the Imagineers put it on the backburner to work on the World's Fair stuff, and by the time they were done with those, a walking tour seemed laughably inadequate and so they scrapped most of their plans and started redeveloping it as a ride. This much is common knowledge among Disneyland cognoscenti...but I'm wondering now about the Tiki Room connection.**

There were elaborate attractions in Disneyland before the Enchanted Tiki Room, but they didn't have the same sense of inviting mystery about them. Either there was no story to tease out (the Matterhorn, without its interior scenes, was just a model of a real-world location), or a tour guide—live or recorded—explained it to you in real time. There was no need to wonder what happened at the Burning Cabin: they told you straight up, Indians did it. I think the Enchanted Tiki Room might have been the first time a Disneyland attraction presented you with something astounding...and then made no attempt to tell you what was going on. The birds and flowers take their sapience for granted and are far too concerned with performing competently to delve into the metaphysics of it.

And maybe once Walt and the Imagineers realized they could do that, they wanted to do more of it. The World's Fair projects catapulted attraction technology to new heights with more efficient ride systems and increasingly complex audio-animatronics, but in terms of attraction storytelling, they were still fairly hand-holdy. The narrative triumphs of Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion must have come from somewhere else. Maybe—maybe—the Enchanted Tiki Room provided that initial spark.

If true, this puts the Tikis at a very interesting crossroads indeed. The show isn't just the farewell performance of the old ways, or the first big flourish of the audio-animatronic era. It's literally the bridge between the two—a bridge that has been maintained over the years, so that we can still cross back over it and experience a piece of early Disneyland history for ourselves.

In its simple and corny way, the Enchanted Tiki Room made the Golden Age of Disneyland.

Maybe.

But even if not, it's still special just for being what it is—a tropical hideaway where (some of) the birds sing words and the flowers croon (and the tikis drum and chant and the gods get a little tweaked off about it all). Long may it bloom!

* Contrary to popular trivia, the Enchanted Tiki Room was not the first Disneyland attraction to use them—the Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland beat it by three years. But it was the first to use them as the main feature and to coordinate them into a complex show—still an important milestone!

** For discussion of more potential connections between the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Haunted Mansion, check out this article on the absolutely magnificent blog, “Long-Forgotten Haunted Mansion.”