Beyond Blue Sky – Four Disneyland Headcanons

Disneyland tells a lot of stories...a lot of extremely incomplete stories. Even the longest, most intricately designed ride hasn't enough time and space to give us all the details. We're left with a sharply abridged narrative, or perhaps even just a series of vignettes with no explicit “plot” to connect them.

It's like I keep saying: this park is awesome.

A story told piecemeal is practically an engraved invitation to fill in the gaps with your own interpretations, speculations, and headcanons.* These bits of fanfiction might be as simple as names assigned to animatronic characters who don't have official ones, or as elaborate as a “how they met” story for all 17 Country Bears. The vast majority will probably fall somewhere in the middle.

Here are four of mine.

The Enchanted Tiki Room is Mobile

This theory, first proposed by my sister, is based on two quotes from Fritz, the Germanic** parrot emcee. First, there is his very first line after being awakened at the start of the show:

Fritz: Ach du lieber, I almost fell out of mein upper perch! Glad to see you all aboard—er, ashore...wherever you are!

You might be able to chalk that one up to some linguistic awkwardness before he's fully awake. But then there's this little tidbit, during the introduction of the Hawaiian War Chant sequence:

Michael: And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have something really big for you!

Fritz: Ja! The birds stand still, und the Tiki Room flies away!

Just a joke, you say? Fritz is the biggest yukster of the four emcees, but in combination with each other, these two lines give pause. He wakes up uncertain as to where the Tiki Room is, and later on, he drops a quip about it being able to fly. What if he's actually letting slip a fact about the room's true nature?

It's a common fantasy trope: the enchanted building or “location” that wanders about. Baba Yaga's hut on fowl's legs, castles in the clouds, The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday...what if we could add the Enchanted Tiki Room to their ranks? I imagine it roaming from island to island between shows, dematerializing in one spot and materializing in another.

How lucky we are that it happens to be there when we mosey on by!

What are you telling us, Herr Papagei?

The T. rex Skeleton on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is a Fossil of the T. rex in the Primeval World Diorama

From this...

...to this?

This headcanon is admittedly more perfunctory than the previous one. It doesn't enhance our understanding of either train ride if they happen to contain the same prehistoric predator in two very different conditions. I just like it for drawing lines of connection between two key attractions that otherwise would not overlap.

As for supporting evidence, consider the narration we get as the Disneyland Railroad leaves the Grand Canyon diorama:

Narrator: That was the Grand Canyon as we know it today. But it wasn't always this way.

The implication is that we are being taken back in time to witness the same location during the Mesozoic Era. So we can suppose that the T. rex in the Primeval World is battling a time-displaced Stegosaurus in the vicinity of what will eventually become the Grand Canyon. It would strengthen this theory if Big Thunder Mountain could be narrowed down to that general area. So...can it?

Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

Big Thunder Mountain, Anaheim, CA

That's not a bad resemblance at all, once you correct for lighting. Of course, Big Thunder Mountain's real inspiration was Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah...which, as it turns out, is located less than 150 miles from the Grand Canyon. A T. rex could make that distance in less than a week without even trying. Furthermore, the formation of Bryce Canyon's sandstones began during the latter half of the Cretaceous period. It's easy—and poignant—to imagine a big dinosaur fleeing the volcanic devastation depicted in the final scene of the Primeval World diorama and finding a new territory to the north...only to become the victim of a flash flood and wind up part of the new landscape.

The Finale of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is a Hallucination

Most Fantasyland dark rides take the form of highlights from the movie the ride is based on, recontextualized to make the guests the point-of-view characters. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is an amazing exception, consisting in its entirety of events that weren't depicted in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. (This movie is second only to Song of the South in being overshadowed by the ride it inspired, so you might be surprised to learn that the “wild ride” never appears on-screen and is only mentioned after the fact, as the cause for Toad's arrest.) In fact, the end of the ride is blatantly non-canonical—in the movie, Toad comes through his adventure with nary a scratch, whereas the ride would have us believe he died and went to Hell.

Or would it? I tend to think something else is going on here. Not only would it be extremely out of character for Disney to subject the usual target audience of dark rides to such a grim fate, but as eternal punishments go, this one is awfully specific. Why does the Devil look just like the judge*** from earlier in the ride?

"GUILTY! Thank you, that is all."

"MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Why is the dragon bright green when everything else is tinted red?

It may interest you to know that it's not the first Green Dragon to appear during the wild ride:

So both of these anomalies have precedents from earlier in Toad's/our reckless joyride. It's the sort of thing you would expect if he/we weren't in Hell at all, but suffering a concussion-induced hallucination after oh, say...colliding with a train.

Captain EO Takes Place in the Star Wars Universe

This theory speaks for itself, more or less, and I'm sure I'm not the first to wonder if the visual similarity between these two George Lucas outer space adventures was deliberate and not, as some have suggested, a cost-saving measure (re-using props and sets, etc.) or evidence of Lucas's paucity of imagination. The differences are as obvious as the similarities—the tone of Captain EO is much more whimsical, and it trades Star Wars's epic themes for a much cozier story about idealism and beauty (and Eighties hair).

Surely if the two do share a universe, they don't share it very closely. But Star Wars, for all its vastness, implicitly occupies just one galaxy. Perhaps Captain EO and his bumbling crew of Muppets roam a different one entirely, where the Force exists in a different form...specifically the form of magic rainbows powered by pop music which transform evil cyborgs into backup dancers.

So there you go...four of the places my mind wanders to when prompted by the tantalizing hints provided by Disneyland. What are some of yours?

* Headcanon: An unconfirmed speculative guess about a work of fiction that you like so much you decide to treat it as canon until and unless it is proven wrong.

** I say Germanic and not simply German because if he is instead Austrian or Swiss, then his feathers (like those of Michael and Pierre) match his national flag.

*** It must be noted that in the movie, this character was the prosecutor.