Sentimental Paleontology: Pop! Went the Weasel

Tomorrowland is a mess. This much is a largely agreed-upon fact in the Disneyland fan community. Saint Walt's Utopian Dream of the Future has Lost Its Way and become a ghastly mishmash of attractions with vague technology, science-fiction/fantasy, and even cartoon themes—mostly from IPs Disney has purchased, as opposed to creating in-house. It's probably true that the area is more inconsistent than ever before, but if we're completely honest with ourselves...we have to admit that “theme confusion” in Tomorrowland is nothing new. It arguably goes right back to Opening Day, when budget shortfalls forced Walt to fill Tomorrowland with corporate sponsors who had much more to say about what they were doing in the present than about what they would do in the future. But those exhibits at least had a scientific or technological bent that worked with the area.

So let's try a different approach. What was the last major Tomorrowland attraction to be straightforwardly futuristic rather than taking a sideways leap into science-fantasy or sillier? I think you could make a case for Space Mountain, which debuted in 1977.* It is first and foremost a roller coaster (in the dark!), but it appears to take place in a setting where people hop into tiny rockets and go zooming around the asteroids for fun. That's fanciful, but it's at the harder end of the science-fiction scale. Personal spacecraft launching from a space station are a believable future technology.

But even by the time Space Mountain made the scene, Tomorrowland already hosted a ride that had nothing to do with the future or outer space or science or technology.** That ride was America Sings, a brief history in four acts (plus an introduction and an epilogue) of American music as demonstrated by audio-animatronic cartoon animal characters. Described so brusquely, it almost sounds like a parody of Disney attractions, like the sort of thing that would be featured in an episode of The Simpsons lampooning the whole institution, while those in the know would be aware that all of those individual elements could be found in abundance throughout Disneyland, but never all in the same attraction.

But they were all in the same attraction. America Sings was sort of a distillation of Disney park tropes of its era. It was installed in 1974, timed for synergy with the upcoming American Bicentennial. But why in Tomorrowland? Even as a young child, I realized how weird this was. Why not, say, Main Street, which already had patriotism as a major theme?

Well, for a couple of reasons. One is that Main Street is not well suited to containing major attractions. It functions as the themed queue to the rest of the park (as well as the gift shop at the end), and you don't put anything in the queue that's big enough to distract from the thing the queue is leading to. “Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln” is about the limit of excitement you can have there.

The other reason—sadly the one that probably actually drove the placement—is that Tomorrowland had the right sort of infrastructure. The Carousel of Progress had shuffled off to Buffalo Orlando in 1973, leaving the Carousel Theater vacant. I actually don't know which came first—the decision to move the CoP or the basic concept for America Sings, but a rotating theater which had hosted the history of electrical appliances segued easily enough to the history of music, even if it was out of theme.

The results were...mixed. The animatronics were excellent, based on designs by Imagineering superstar Marc Davis and at least as technically sophisticated as those unveiled in Disneyland's other singing animal revue, the Country Bear Jamboree, just a few years prior. The two leads, Sam the Eagle (not the dour Muppet but a much more genial fellow voiced to perfection by Burl Ives) and Ollie the Owl, were especially expressive, with mobile eyes and eyebrows that allowed them to emote even though their beaks were constantly smiling. Inventive stage blocking, trapdoors, and spotlights allowed a succession of vignettes to unfold and then re-fold without interfering with each other, getting plenty of scene mileage out of what were actually fairly small sets. It was cute and quirky and using music as its specific subject matter, rather than the history usually favored by patriotic shows, allowed it to cheerlead for the United States without seeming bombastic, jingoistic, or cloying.

Nonetheless, it was lacking in certain key ways. The stage sets were interesting, but the theater interior itself was pretty stark. Possibly it had to be in order to facilitate the spinning, but when compared to the highly themed rustic cabin that housed the Country Bear Jamboree, you can't help but think it needed more than blank white walls and plain flip-down seats. Also unlike the Jamboree, instead of fifteen or so identifiable personalities, America Sings had a cast of several dozen, only a handful of which were named and even fewer of which came across as actual characters. The rest were more like avatars of a single line or verse of a popular song, popping into existence in order to sing it and then vanishing again. There was something very...free-floating about the whole thing—it was an enjoyable show, but in no way did it seem to be part of a larger world. You couldn't imagine these characters having a life at home or even backstage. This was probably exacerbated by the theme-wonkiness of having it in Tomorrowland, but I honestly don't think it would done much better on Main Street or anywhere else. It's hard to imagine this fitting in anywhere in Disneyland:

The basic form of the Carousel Theater remains solidly in the Tomorrowland aesthetic, but I'm pretty sure that paint job skipped straight to Zeerust-by-way-of-American-kitsch without ever being considered legitimately stylish or futuristic. Nor would a different building, in a different land, have addressed the issue of these characters being too cartoony for most of the park's themed areas (at the time), too grounded in American culture for Fantasyland, and too...not bears for Bear Country. Ultimately, of course, most of them wound up moved to Bear Country—which was in consequence renamed Critter Country for just that reason—and re-purposed as the cast of extras in Splash Mountain. It is a testament to the quality of their design and construction that they were entirely suitable for such re-purposing fifteen years after their debut.*** But at the time of that debut, they really didn't suit any part of the park.

So what happened? How did the Imagineers—the ink barely dry from updating their resumes with the triumphs of the New York World's Fair, New Orleans Square, and the 1967 makeover of Tomorrowland—drop the ball on this one? It's pretty simple, actually: All those triumphs were begun under Walt's leadership. America Sings was the first big project they had undertaken without his input. The Disney corporation in general was in a pretty sorry state after Walt's passing, but I think the theme park end of things handled it a little better than the animation studio, if only because the production cycle of a theme park attraction is a lot longer than that of a movie and they had more time to figure things out. America Sings paled in comparison to its recent predecessors, but it was nowhere near as bad as some of the stinkers coming out of Disney Animation around the same time. (Here I am mostly thinking of The Aristocats. Ye gods, what a disaster that movie is.)

Final verdict? America Sings was a middle-of-the-road effort that mainly suffered from a lack of solid direction, hence its various thematic mismatches. Between its easily available soundtrack and Splash Mountain (and the G2 droids in the queue of Star Tours), enough good stuff survives to this day that its not that much of a loss. And with that said, I'm sort of out of Important Insights about the ride, at least ones that fit together readily, but I'm not quite done talking about it. So the rest of this post is going to be a ramble.

When I was a kid, I didn't get why Sam was holding an arrow at the start and end of the show. He didn't even do anything with it; it was just there. As I grew older, I looked back and realized he was supposed to be the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States—explaining not only the arrow, but the shield on his chest in those scenes. As I got older yet, though, I started to question the arrow again. The eagle on the Great Seal has a bundle of arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other, representing the duality of war and peace, and is always depicted facing the olive branch to show that the United States prefers peace. I get that the animatronic needed one hand free for gestures to enhance its acting, but in that case...shouldn't Disney have privileged the olive branch over the arrow? Is the Mouse House secretly hawkish?

There is one aspect of America Sings that I really miss and can't see even on the surviving videos, because it didn't film well. The segues between acts involved this great disco-ball sparkle effect (how Seventies!) that would be thrown over the set and spread to the walls of the theater while it rotated. So it was like seeing the scene dissolve into a moving starfield, and then when the lights came back up, it was a new scene.

The four different acts all followed the same structure: First the Gander Quartet sang a quick medley, then there was a series of various individual performances, at some point the weasel would pop, and then the act would end with a big energetic group number...except the Old West segment, which finished with a soloist singing a very mellow version of “Home on the Range.” I just find it interesting that they varied it up that way. The end of the Old West segment marks the halfway point of the show—maybe that's why?

Speaking of the Gander Quartet, I have given them names—Firth, Sexton, Barrett, and Bates. Get it? No? (Maybe one of these days I'll do a post about the various names I have assigned to animatronic characters that don't have official ones.)

The 20^th Century got short shrift in the program. After devoting a segment apiece to the musical traditions of the pre-war South, the Old West, and the 1890s music-hall scene, the show crammed the fourth segment with everything from the early Jazz Age up to then-contemporary folk rock. And then ended with geese in newsboy caps covering Three Dog Night alongside hippie bullfrogs and punk chickens. You can't tell me that's not weird.

In the end, maybe that's what we should take away from this: America Sings was weird...but not in an obvious way. It was weird in that all its individual components were so Disneyland, but came together into something that didn't comfortably belong anywhere in the park. It was weird in its very premise—a show marking the 200^th anniversary of the United States' founding without actually mentioning said founding or any of the historical figures connected with it, because of its laser focus on the musical history of the United States, but also not mentioning any of the people who originally created or performed the music, because it was so much cuter and more fun and less legally fraught to have a cast of cartoon animals that could sing Fair Use-length snippets of Elvis songs without specifically resembling Elvis. But we didn't notice that weirdness at the time, because—again—it was so Disneyland.

There's probably a reason it was never duplicated in another park.

Links:

Yesterland's entry on America Sings

Wikipedia article on the attraction

DisneyWiki article on the attraction

BONUS: Animator James Lopez has been working, on and off, on a 2-D animated fan film of America Sings, using the actual soundtrack as the audio. Though the project is far from complete, he has posted videos of his progress—consisting mainly of storyboard animatics, with a few clips of line animation and completed animation—on Vimeo, and the first one (below) has also been uploaded to YouTube. What impresses me is not just how much the fully animated bits look like the Disney house style, but specifically like the Disney house style of the period when the ride was built. With a costume change, these guys would not look out of place as background extras in Robin Hood. Take a look!

* Okay, maybe Rocket Rods in 1998. But I never got the impression that it was supposed to portray a futuristic transportation system like the PeopleMover (which it replaced) or Disneyland Monorail. It was just a thrill ride that talked up the history of Tomorrowland ride vehicles, and past ideas about futuristic transportation, in the queue.

** Except in the sense that all attractions use machinery to create their effects. If you think that counts as Tomorrowland theming, please step forward to receive a complimentary ding alongside the ear. Dork.

*** It helps that Marc Davis had also done character designs for the animated portions of Song of the South, the movie on which Splash Mountain is based. In fact, some of the America Sings critters were re-used designs that got left out of the movie. There's a reason Disney never throws anything away.