What's Wrong With Disney California Adventure

Is it safe yet? Are the holidays over?

I kid, of course. I truly, genuinely, sincerely, unironically love the winter holidays...but they can be exhausting, can't they? So many obligations! And it seems like there's never enough time and money to make them quite as special as you want to, and then before you know it the whole shebang is over and rather than coming down gently, society's collective spirit drops off a freaking cliff. And there are still a couple of months of winter left, but you can't delight in it properly because in our culture celebrating winter is joined at the hip with Christmas imagery* and people will look at you funny.

Sorry, I'm rambling. What I'm really here to talk about today is Disney California Adventure. We can pretend it's my New Year's Resolution to give more attention to Disneyland's sister park...that way it won't be so shocking when I go right back to ignoring it after this.

I don't visit California Adventure all that often—maybe once every four or five visits to Disneyland. Just saying that feels a bit like a confession. After all, this is the era of DCA 2.0! Cars Land! World of Color! Ariel! Toy Story Mania! Sure, the place got off to a rough start, but it's now a World-Class Theme Park and a Worthy Companion to Disneyland.** What kind of purist curmudgeon shells out for an Annual Passport but doesn't use it to its fullest potential by lavishing just as much attention on Dee-Cee-Ay as on its elder sibling?

Name-calling aside, I guess I would be that kind of purist curmudgeon. Anaheim's second gate is miles better now than when it opened—I don't think that's even up for debate—but it's still not even close to Disneyland-quality in at least one crucial way.

California Adventure is fun, but it's not magic. To understand why, we'll have to look at the utterly clueless logic behind its initial construction and the only slightly less misguided logic behind the recent improvements.

Around about the early Nineties, the suits in charge of the Disney theme parks noticed something: While many families would spend an entire week's vacation or more at Walt Disney World—shelling out for hotels and meals on top of multi-day admissions to the parks—family visits to Disneyland were usually only one or two days long. And this was as true of the out-of-state guests as it was of the locals. They asked themselves why that was, and in perhaps the most splendid example of ass-backwards thinking to come out of a corporate boardroom in living memory, came up with the answer: They leave our property in order to see the rest of California. Therefore, if we build a second gate themed to the rest of California, they'll stick around.

Most people seem to attribute California Adventure's poor performance in its earlier years to the inherent absurdity of building a California-themed park in California. The way I see it...yes and no. This concept could have turned out completely awesome from the start...just not with the approach that was used. And it all starts with the fact that the think tank asked the wrong question. Instead of wondering “Why do guests leave Disneyland so soon?” they should have phrased it as “Why don't they stay longer?”

On the surface, these seem like two inconsequentially different versions of the very same question, but they're actually not. There is an implicit assumption in “Why do they leave?” that is not present in “Why don't they stay?”—namely, that the people under discussion have other plans. And that's a dangerous assumption to make if your goal is to get people to do your thing. Once you start thinking in terms of what your potential customers could be doing instead, you lock yourself into seeing the issue as a direct competition instead of just trying to make the best thing you can and letting it speak for itself. Which is exactly what happened with Disney's California Adventure 1.0—it was built in order to compete directly with the rest of California, to offer exactly the same things, scaled down to fit in a theme park.

How did the decision-makers not realize that this idea didn't stand a chance? If someone wants to go whitewater tubing in the Sierras, they want to go whitewater tubing in the Sierras, not stand in line for 90 minutes in order to slosh around a concrete flume in a low-budget mockup of rocks and pine trees. People visit Hollywood in order to take pictures of the Chinese Theater and maybe spot some celebrities, not troop down a pretend street past empty storefronts. Why would anyone pay Disneyland-grade admission fees in order to visit a fake seaside amusement park when the real thing is just half an hour away by freeway and comes with genuine sea breezes?

If instead the question had been “Why don't guests stay at Disneyland as long as they stay at Walt Disney World?” the answer would have been as simple as it was obvious. Because Disneyland was only one theme park, compared to, at the time, Orlando's three full-fledged parks, one water park (which had grown to four and two by the time California Adventure was completed), and several resort hotels with on-site activities. Even on high-crowd days, Disneyland alone didn't offer more than about two days' worth of stuff to do. With an answer like that, they would have realized that the key to keeping people around Anaheim longer was to build a top-notch second gate in the finest Disney tradition, for its own sake. Any theme, including a California theme, would have worked as long as it was handled properly.

But it wasn't handled properly, and the guests could tell things weren't right. I remember what the message boards were like in those days—everyone had their own ideas about what California Adventure needed in order to become closer in spirit to Disneyland. More thrill rides. More Disney characters. More live entertainment. More specific period theming. More for young kids to do. More for adults to do. Its own equivalent of Pirates of the Caribbean. Its own nighttime show. Less emphasis on California. More emphasis on California.

In light of all this furious discussion, the decision-makers made their next big mistake: they gave the people what they said they wanted. Many will deny that this could possibly be a bad move—after all, isn't it just good business to give (actually sell) people what they want? Perhaps...but even if it is, Disney parks aren't just businesses. They are also works of art, and—at the risk of sounding terribly elitist—no one ever created great art by following the polls.

Another big problem with “giving the people what they want” is that the people don't always know what they want, at least not to the extent that they can articulate it. I've been deliberately studying Disneyland since I was a child, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I had the vocabulary to describe just some of what makes it so compelling for me, above and beyond technically comparable theme parks such as Universal Studios. Much of what makes Disneyland unique operates in the background, even at a subconscious level. If you aren't looking for it, you'll probably never spot it, much less be able to put sensible words to it later. So the vast majority of guests, called upon to identify what they love about the place, seize upon the obvious—their favorite (usually thrill) rides, or the presence of Disney characters and popular IPs. They mentally boil the Disney magic down to Space Mountain and Mickey Mouse, and assume that as long as we have exciting rides based on popular Disney-owned movies, we have a Disneyland-caliber theme park.

And Upper Management, bless their greedy, artistically clueless souls, listened to those people. California Adventure got more thrill rides. It got more (lots more) Disney IP presence. It got more kiddie fare (Flik's Fun Fair) and more adult fare (nightly raves). It got its own nighttime show. The entire entrance area was completely redone with a specific period setting, including live performers in period costume. The California aspects have been progressively downplayed in some areas while being ramped up in others.

And yet—surprise, surprise—California Adventure still feels more like a jumped-up Universal park than a true member of the Disney family. Attendance has skyrocketed, to be sure, but I question how much of that is genuine enthusiasm for California Adventure, as opposed to spillover from the even more crowded Disneyland or the temporary boost these parks always get when they add something new. Long-term fans of Disneyland typically praise the improvements in one moment while noting in the next that there's still something missing.

The really disappointing thing is that it didn't have to be that way. This state is pretty amazing. It has a very complex history, extremely variable terrain, and perhaps the most diverse human population of any state in the Union...and that's before you factor in the larger-than-life status California attains in the imaginations of many. It's more suited than any other state to this treatment:

No one wanted to vacation in the micro-scaled fake California that arose in Anaheim on February 8, 2001. It didn't have anything to offer that the real California, just outside the gates, couldn't provide the real version of. But what if it had? What if, instead of being hellbent on substituting for the California that is, Upper Management had let the Imagineers stretch their creative muscles to create the California that was, that never was, that could be, and that ought to be?

What if—instead of the recent periods currently featured, or the single documentary-style film that was Golden Dreams—we had entire themed areas and well-developed attractions showcasing the California of a century or more ago? The San Francisco Earthquake, the Gold Rush, Old Spanish California (featuring Zorro, perhaps?)...all would make excellent jumping-off points for top-notch experiences. And what if we went back even further, to pre-history, using the La Brea Tar Pits as a window on the Ice Age?***

What if—instead of shoehorning The Little Mermaid into the San Francisco area based on the paper-thin connection of seaside Art Nouveau architecture—the ride started you out exploring the bottom of the San Francisco Bay before going deeper and discovering a fantastic undersea kingdom off the coast?

It's a lovely building, but this movie has nothing to do with California.

What if Grizzly River Run included sightings of grizzly bears (audio-animatronic, of course)...and glimpses of Bigfoot?

What if the Hollywood Pictures Backlot/Hollywoodland area took the history of filmmaking, from the silent era to the modern CGI-infused blockbusters, and mashed it up into a wonderful anachronism, with walkaround face characters representing the stars of different periods, and movies serving as “portals” to worlds of Adventure, Romance, and Science-Fiction?

What if the Winchester Mystery House were actually a gateway to the supernatural, and we got to explore it?

What if the innovators of Silicon Valley sent us on a rollicking adventure in virtual reality?

What if Disney actually leveraged their California-related IPs—things like Bolt, Big Hero 6, and Inside Out—to create fun and thematically appropriate attractions, instead of just grasping at straws with their most profitable Pixar franchises?

I could go on and on in this vein, but surely I've made my point by now. The problem with California Adventure was never that it was based on California...it was that it was designed and built to satisfy mercenary aims, without a trace of sincerity, with no understanding of what sets Disneyland and related parks above the mean in the first place, and with an apparent belief that the paying public was too stupid to recognize the difference between the real wonders of California and the diminished ones the park offered...or between a theme park with a soul and one without. As a representation of California, DCA 1.0 could never hope to compete with the real thing, and as a theme park it could never hope to compete with the exemplary park across the Esplanade.

And sadly, a real soul is exactly what Anaheim's second gate still seems to be lacking. It's a terrible pity that the Powers That Be failed to recognize what it really needed before the billion-dollar upgrade went underway. California Adventure may now never truly live up to its name and potential. And I will likely continue to give it a pass on most of my visits to the resort.

* Have you ever noticed how many “Christmas” songs are actually about winter, not Christmas itself? “Jingle Bells,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Frosty the Snowman”...none of them mention Christmas, Jesus, Santa Claus, or even holly, but they are played exclusively during the Christmas season. What's up with that?

** I cannot count the number of times I have seen these exact phrases on message boards, etc.

*** This one is a particular bugbear of mine. I love paleontology, and...look, you don't sculpt an artificial cliff with mammoth and smilodon fossils sticking out of it and then never go anywhere with it, okay? You just don't.