After-Action Report: “it's a small world” (Part 2)

“it's a small world” debuted to the world it celebrated at the New York World's Fair in 1964 and moved to Disneyland two years later. For most of its history, changes were minimal—a new color scheme here, a remastered soundtrack there, a different sponsor*—but starting in the Paul Pressler era, management decided it was okay to mess with it to a more significant extent. So how'd all that work out? Well...

“it's a small world” Holiday

Late in 1997, I received the news that “it's a small world” was going to be turned into a Christmas ride, with the dolls singing “Jingle Bells” instead of the normal theme song. My initial reaction can be summed up as follows:

“What.”

Fortunately, the execution of this concept turned out to be much better than the rumor suggested. Rather than “Jingle Bells” replacing “It's a Small World (After All),” this version of the ride alternates the two songs, and they work surprisingly well in tandem. The exterior receives possibly the most gorgeous array of Christmas decorations of any location in the park—Small World Promenade is lined with fourteen wreaths representing some of the countries and regions depicted on the ride, the clock tower sports more wreaths and a Santa hat, and the geometric shapes comprising the façade are edged with colored lights. You can't tell me this is not a powerfully cool view:

The interior, though, is less impressive. While equally slathered with Christmas decorations, the stylistic designs used for them are...inconsistent. Some look very naturalistic—I believe the garlands in the Africa scene are made from actual raffia—while others are just flat shapes with stark paint jobs. In the latter case, the object was probably to mimic the folded-paper-sculpture appearance of the classic sets, but it doesn't really come across. They're also inconsistent in how culturally specific they are. We see poinsettias and luminaria in Mexico, mock-ups of giant gingerbread cookies and ribbon candy in Europe...but the same generic holly sprigs and glittery ornaments in pretty much every scene. The French children aren't putting out their shoes for Père Noel, the Scandinavian children aren't making paper hearts and straw stars, all the references to The Nutcracker are in England rather than Russia for some reason, and the Pacific Island children have put Santa hats and beards on the Moai.

And let's not kid ourselves—despite the liberal use of the generic “holiday” in both the name of the overlay and the multilingual greetings sprinkled throughout, this ride is about Christmas, with a dash of New Year's Eve. It's the secular version of Christmas, with plenty of trees and candles and a total absence of creches and Bibles...but it still heavily implies that everyone in the world celebrates this holiday. There is no indication that any of these children are actually observing Hanukkah or Diwali. Even the children in the Arab countries have their red bows and wrapped gifts, which I tend to think many actual Arabs would find pretty imperialistic and insulting. The point of “it's a small world” has always been that strife between nations doesn't make sense because of the things that all humanity holds in common. It rather undercuts that message if you take something we don't, in fact, all hold in common, and pretend that we do...or worse, imply that in the world depicted by the ride, world peace has been achieved because the West managed to impose its culture on the entire planet.

This doesn't mean “it's a small world” Holiday is a bad idea. We don't all celebrate Christmas, but we all celebrate something, and most places where Christmas is not commonly observed still have something going on around that time of year. It would be pretty easy to re-dress some of the sets to show off that diversity. They already do this to an extent by portraying some countries as celebrating the New Year instead.

For all its flaws, I like “it's a small world” Holiday. I've always been a big fan of Christmas decorations in general and interestingly themed ones in particular. I love those wreaths along the Promenade, so much that I once made myself a set of tree ornaments based on them. The façade is really spectacular once the lights come up at dusk, and there's even a cute little show projected onto it every fifteen minutes, right after the doll parade.

And even if I didn't like it...it's only seasonal. I can tolerate just about any nonsense they might commit with regard to a classic attraction as long as I know it's only going to last a few months. I didn't even bat an eye when they put Indiana Jones props all over the Jungle Cruise in order to promote the fourth Indy movie. It was stupid, but it was temporary.

Unfortunately, the other major change—actually a pair of changes—made to “it's a small world” since I attained the age of majority is a) much less charming and b) year-round.

“The Spirit of America” and Disney/Pixar Characters

In 2009, after an extra-long refurbishment period, “it's a small world” re-opened with five words guaranteed to make long-time fans of any art form reach for their medication: “More relevant to modern audiences.”

This phrase is pure Marketing pablum, trotted out whenever a long-running franchise is changed in a way that is likely to be received poorly by its existing fans, because it sounds marginally better than “I'unno, we just felt like changing something.”** If you accept it at face value, it comes across even worse, because running it through the translator yields something like “The dumb kids we used to sell crap to have grown up and developed some taste, so we need to rope in the next generation of dumb kids.”

Why they thought this would fly with a ride that a) was consistently popular with two whole generations of Americans just the way it was and b) wasn't and still isn't a big source of themed souvenirs anyway, is beyond me. Marketing people come from another planet.***

See here's the thing. This isn't the first time I've said this and it won't be the last: Disneyland is primarily a locals' theme park. Most of its guests have a pretty good idea of what to expect, because they've been there before, several times. And maybe this means some of them usually bypass things like “it's a small world” in order to spend more time on thrill rides. Changing things up is a great way to raise the profile of a lower-tier ride and get more bodies standing in line for it...but there are two caveats.

Firstly, the extra people in that line are people who would have been at Disneyland anyway. “We weren't going to spend our family vacation at Disneyland, but then we heard they changed one of the scenes in that Small World ride,” said no one ever. If you're familiar enough with something like “it's a small world” to care about it being changed, you're already a fan of the park and don't need to be convinced to visit. Nor are you likely to plan an extra visit just to satisfy your curiosity about the updates sooner rather than later...unless you're an Annual Passholder, in which case your excitement doesn't translate into additional ticket sales.

The second caveat is that unless the changes constitute a definite improvement in the ride, the boost in popularity will only be temporary. It may take a while to cycle through all the people who care enough to specifically check it out, but eventually, they will all have seen the new version and the queue will subside to its previous level. Not that this matters much to Disneyland's profitability, since per the first caveat, they were only in that queue instead of somewhere else in the park, rather than somewhere outside the park.

You might be thinking (stepping, for some reason, into the role of a Marketing alien), “No problem! Just change the ride in a way that the existing fans like! Then they'll keep coming back for the new version and also tell all their friends how cool it is!” To which my reply can only be: Dude, have you ever seen loyal fans? The one thing they're practically guaranteed not to like is change. Especially when the stated purpose of the change is to draw in new people, which is very easy to interpret as a statement that the existing fans don't matter. Loyal fans like to feel that the loyalty goes both ways.

And this isn't like remaking a movie or shaking up the cast of a comic book series. In both of those cases, the original still exists and the original fans can continue to enjoy it. But a theme park ride is a fixed, singular object. If Disney turns Small World into something you don't like, that's it. You can't go back and ride the old version. This tends to heighten the feelings of disappointment and general negativity when a theme park ride remake rubs fans the wrong way.

And indeed, the 2009 changes have not gone over well with the majority of existing fans of Small World and of Disneyland as a whole. They—oh, who am I kidding—we tend to be disappointed by the general saturation of film tie-ins in the park. We don't like that no new attraction gets built without an existing property to attach it to. We definitely don't like that Pirates of the Caribbean was turned into a tie-in for the movies, the Submarine Voyage was turned into a tie-in for Finding Nemo, and Tom Sawyer Island was turned into a tie-in for...the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. These changes are troubling, but they pale in comparison with the move to populate “it's a small world” with a sampling of Disney and Pixar characters. This doesn't just feel cheap, it feels...dirty. If any Disneyland attraction can ever have been said to have a truly pure heart, it was this one, and it's been hijacked to promote brand identity. What used to be a celebration of the beautiful diversity of human culture while simultaneously indicating that diversity is no barrier to understanding, is now a 15-minute game of “spot the characters.” Children who might otherwise have learned something about the world and its peoples are constantly distracted by sudden blips of recognition: Oh, look, there's Alice! There's Cinderella! There's Simba! There's Nemo!

Some have defended the character dolls with the argument that kids like them, and Disneyland is supposed to be fun, not school, and anyway a Disney ride should have Disney characters. And now my blood pressure is rising just thinking about it, because oh my god, you ignorant bastard, did you really just imply that enjoyment and education are mutually exclusive, and besides which, THE RIDE ALREADY HAD DISNEY CHARACTERS!!! WHAT DID YOU THINK ALL THOSE MULTINATIONAL DOLLS WERE?!! RENTALS FROM HANNA-BARBERA????

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I'm all right now. I'm good. Sorry if I scared you. I'm obviously not fond of the character dolls, but I find them downright pleasant compared to that particular defense of them. Just...ugh. Some people are honestly beyond help.

Fortunately, for those of us who did grow up loving “it's a small world” in its original state, the character dolls are not too intrusive. The human ones use the very same facial model as all the other children, and at least some of the animals are made with that papier-mâché texture that makes the classic ones look so distinctively folksy. If you were so inclined, you could let your eyes sort of slide over them, the way you do with the Jack Sparrow animatronics on Pirates. (I'm not the only one who does that, right?) If that doesn't work, you might take solace in the fact that a heartwarming tribute can be found in the choice of characters—if you ever wondered why England got both Alice and Peter Pan, it's because Mary Blair worked extensively on both movies...as well as on Cinderella and The Three Caballeros, both of which are also featured. So yeah, it could be worse.

But 2009 also brought another big change to the ride, and while you could argue that this one is more defensible, there was a reason it hadn't been done that way from the beginning. And the execution was rather sloppy. And you can't possibly ignore it. I am referring, of course, to the “Spirit of America” scene, installed where the rain forest used to be. (A reduced version of the rain forest has been moved to the previous room, next to the South Pacific volcanoes.)

I fully believe that riders had been asking why there was no United States scene on the ride. And I understand why they would ask—in a ride about the nations of the world, you would expect the U.S. to be represented. Isn't it the most powerful and influential country of all? Isn't Disneyland, you know, located there?

The answer to both these questions is obviously yes...but that's precisely why Small World was originally built with no America scene. Both Disneyland and the World's Fair being located in the U.S., Walt and the Imagineers planned the ride with the assumption that mostly Americans would be experiencing it. And because the U.S. is so powerful and influential—as well as so geographically vast—it's probably more feasible for Americans than for the citizens of any other country to go about their daily lives not really thinking much outside their own borders. And when we do think about other countries, our own is never far from our minds. It does us good to get out of that “America first!” headspace from time to time. So the ride was made initially with no references to the U.S. at all (except for Hawaii, which is far outside the cultural mainstream of the nation). At some point, a cowboy and Indian were added to the finale room, but not only were they an afterthought on the part of the designers, they functioned as an afterthought for the riders, prompting a sort of “Oh yeah...” reaction. You realized that you'd actually forgotten about the U.S. for fifteen minutes or so, and with any luck, you didn't mind.

In this day of globalization and the Internet, maybe Americans are more consistently aware of the rest of the world and an America scene is more appropriate for the ride. But “The Spirit of America” takes it too far in the other direction. Instead of being conspicuously absent, the U.S. is conspicuously conspicuous. It commands an entire room all to itself, with sets on both sides of the flume. Its position right before the finale further inflates its perceived importance, in a “saved the best for last” sense. To the best of my knowledge, no other scene in the ride has a title as such; I have no idea why they decided to give one to the America scene, unless out of a conviction that America is super-special and needs to have attention drawn to its “spirit,” unlike lesser countries which are just there.

Are you squicked out yet?

Then there's the fact that the scene is just badly done. Its creators drew on unused Mary Blair concept art pieces for their inspiration, but something must have gotten lost between concept and execution, because even first-timers have been known to observe that it seems mismatched with the rest of the ride. I myself find that the set pieces are too large for the space they occupy. And those Midwestern farm children are downright creepy, with the way only their mouths move. Other singing dolls on the ride sway in time to the music. These “children of the corn” just sit there, holding their arms rigid at weird angles, flapping their lips.

Forget my medication; I'm reaching for my exorcism kit.

Of all the distasteful elements of “The Spirit of America,” this one is the most baffling. Why, exactly, did they think it would be a good idea to set up the dolls like this? Who signed off on that plan, and how handsomely did the Prince of Darkness reward them for their service?

And that's about all I have to say on the matter. The changes made to “it's a small world” in the last twenty years have been really hit-or-miss. Hardly anyone has anything bad to say about the annual Christmas makeover, but people are fairly divided over the more recent and permanent changes, with long-time fans generally coming down against (but not enough to make them stop riding) and others thinking it's all good (but not great). On average, the ride is as popular as ever...but it's not any more popular than ever, which is presumably what the suits wanted.

Maybe it can't really be improved. Maybe Small World is one of those rare attractions that was born perfect, thanks to its creators' enormous talents and purity of intentions. It's certainly been very high on my list as long as I can remember, and despite what's been done to it for reasons less pure by talents less enormous, that's not likely to change any time soon.

* Admittedly, Mattel was a much better pick for a ride all about children than Bank of America.

** For example, this was Disney's excuse for redesigning the Princesses to have more jewelry and busier hairdos. To be more “relevant.” As if we're expected to believe little girls were writing them letters complaining that they just didn't get Cinderella without her ears visible.

*** Golgafrincham.