Imagineering Theory: The Disney Animated Canon And Area Themes, Part 2

Hi there. In case you weren't here last week, I'm taking a look at all 55 (soon to be 56) films in the Disney Animated Canon and assigning each one a themed area in the Disneyland Resort.

That's enough preamble.

Imagineering Theory: The Disney Animated Canon And Area Themes, Part 1

It's a major challenge keeping up a weekly posting schedule (nearly 18 months now, go me!) and from time to time I run low on inspiration. This is one of those times.* So for the next few weeks, I'll be doing something...straightforward. Please don't be disappointed if there are no astonishing insights or beautifully written passages for a while; I need to go on some sort of auto-pilot. Consider it a necessary compromise between my usual practices and putting the blog on hiatus.

Beyond Blue Sky: The Time Machine

Because you are a good person at heart, the Blue Fairy has teamed up with Cornelius Robinson to give you a gift: a real working time machine, good for one trip into the past, and the return trip, and no more. To minimize the risk of changing history and damaging the timestream, you may only stay in the past for one day, and it is highly advised that you spend that day in a place where your actions have few or no repercussions for the outside world.

Might as well go to Disneyland, huh?

So...how far back do you go?

Do you drop in on Opening Day and shake Walt Disney's hand? Maybe pop back and see one of the New Tomorrowlands—'59, '67, or '98—when it was genuinely new? Are you more tempted by the prospect of revisiting your own nostalgic memories or seeing things that were gone before you had the chance to know them?

Not gonna lie—I'm going with Option A. I'd rather go back and see things I miss than things I missed, if you follow. Nonetheless, I'm actually gonna set my time machine to a point slightly before my earliest solid memories of the park. Target Year: 1980.

Source Materials: A Few Excellent Moves by the Horticulture Department

Source Materials is my new label for posts about things from outside Disney theme parks that influence decisions about what to include inside the parks. For instance, I have retroactively re-classified my two-part post about heraldry in Fantasyland as a Source Materials post. There probably won't be too many of these; most of the stuff that would qualify has been gone over, extensively and in more depth than I think I would muster, by other bloggers. (Check out the sidebar for some of them!)

It's June now. What can I write about that goes well with June?

Gardening? Did I hear gardening? Gardening it is. It turns out to be a fertile* subject where Disneyland is concerned. The park's Horticulture Department is quite the unsung hero, producing magnificent work pretty much across the board, from the obvious:

to the subtle:

People certainly notice the lovely trees and garden beds throughout Disneyland, but only rarely is attention deliberately drawn toward them. It's even rarer that the specific choices made by the Horticulture Department get any focus, even though they're often brilliantly on-the-nose. Magnolia trees in New Orleans Square and edelweiss around the base of the Matterhorn are just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce).** In many cases, the appropriateness is more than just geographic.

Here are a few of my favorites.