Imagineering Theory: Blending Themes

Last week's post included a link to FoxxFur's amazing article about border areas at Disneyland and how gracefully or ungracefully (usually the latter, though not necessarily to the park's detriment) the Imagineers manage the transitions. If you didn't read it then, I urge you to do so now, as it is a scrupulously well-documented analysis of design details you probably never noticed before, even though the whole point is how much they stick out compared to their equivalents in Magic Kingdom.

But it got me thinking: Could the transitions be made less awkward?* Perhaps the main reason Disneyland has so many abrupt boundaries between themed lands is the lack of space for subtle “fade” effects, but here's the thing: themes are not particulate. They can be tweaked and blended. I doubt if there are any two themes or genres in all imagination that are so dissimilar that they have no points in common and no potential to be hybridized.

So this post is my attempt to do that with all the border areas at Disneyland—all the places where two or more themes collide. It probably wouldn't be possible to retrofit the actual Disneyland with these ideas, so this is more of a what-if exercise.

Before I really get into it, I want to review my base material: what are the themes that need to be blended? This is not an exhaustive analysis of all the themes and sub-themes in Disneyland, just a quick summary. The nuances will be addressed when I start looking for ways to remix them.

Main Street, USA: A small American town around the turn of the 20^th Century. Except for the period setting, about as “generic” as can be.

Adventureland: Tropical wilderness, barely explored by Westerners.

New Orleans Square: New Orleans ca. 1925 or so, plus supernatural elements. Say, is “historical urban fantasy” a thing? I feel like it should be.

Critter Country: Rural/wilderness area inhabited by anthropomorphic animals.

Frontierland: The Old West—settlers, “cowboys and Indians,” all-American wilderness, fairly realistic.

Fantasyland: Fairy tales and magical children's stories, especially if they've been made into animated Disney movies.

Mickey's Toontown: The Golden Age of cartoons.

Tomorrowland: Futurism and science-fiction.

Now, let's see what kinds of stews we can make from these ingredients!

The Hub

FoxxFur asserts that Disneyland's Hub is a hodgepodge of thematic elements from all the lands it touches (contrasted with Magic Kingdom's Hub, which is definitely of a piece with Main Street). I take what I think is a slightly different view: our Hub is primarily Main Street—it's got the same trash cans, and the Main Street Vehicles wrap around it—but bits and pieces of the other lands poke out of their respective homes into it, like little previews. If you consider the themed lands to properly begin on the other side of their respective physical gateways, then Frontierland is the only one that doesn't spill out beyond its rightful boundaries.

And this is—sort of—a problem from the perspective of thematic segues. You expect an abrupt change as you pass through a gateway, be that gateway a bamboo arch decorated with elephant tusks, a castle drawbridge, or the track of a futuristic transportation system. You don't expect to walk around the perimeter of a 1910s bakery and suddenly encounter Tiki torches. Perhaps we can do better here.

It may seem a daunting task to find points of commonality between Main Street—the ultimate in cozy comfort—and the exciting themes of the other lands that border the Hub, but you must remember that Main Street was given its particular period setting as a reflection of Walt's own childhood home, and he devised the themes of Disneyland based on ideas that had always excited him throughout his life. Clearly, these were things that people were thinking about and talking about in the 1900s—distant exotic places, the then-recent history of the Wild West (the frontier was officially declared closed in 1890), children's stories from Europe, and the prospect of progress into the future.

So all we really need to do here is establish a few points of contact—places that could realistically exist in the small town represented by Main Street, but that might serve to jump-start the imagination of a child who lives there. Because of the compressed space, they need to be pretty small—ten to twenty linear feet should be sufficient to work the transition.

Adventureland: Instead of having an eatery as the last thing you encounter before reaching the Adventureland gate, I propose a shop, specifically, an exotic curios shop. One of the townsfolk did a lot of traveling in their youth, still maintains contacts in far-flung parts of the globe, and makes a living selling knickknacks and tchotchkes from all over, bringing a glamorous touch of the beyond to this otherwise humdrum little town. You don't need to spell all this out, obviously—just have the shop there, at the end of Main Street, partaking in the same architecture as the rest of the street but with handmade-looking signage hinting at its unusual wares, and—this is key—give it a side exit facing onto the Adventureland walkway. Hey presto—we've gone from ordinary small-town living to imagining far-off jungles to actually being there.

Frontierland: This is the easy one. The themes of Main Street and Frontierland are separated not by space but by time, and not much time at that—only a generation or two. We're in a small town; the transition to Frontierland can be marked by signs that we're reaching the edge of town—sheds, farm equipment, maybe a derelict railroad signal (implying that the railway station used to be around here but has since been moved...to the park's entrance).

Fantasyland: This one is a little tougher. It makes no logical sense to have a big fairytale castle visible at the end of a 1900s Midwestern boulevard, but as an icon, Sleeping Beauty Castle is second to none. It belongs there. What is needed is some sort of mitigating feature to ease the transition from the ordinary to the magical. As it happens, Fantasyland is the land most guilty of encroaching onto the Hub, and unfortunately the bits of it that do so aren't very “transitional” at all—a Renaissance courtyard and a pixie garden are peak Fantasyland, not remotely harmonious with Main Street.

So what would be a better alternative? Interestingly enough, the passage of time itself has come to our rescue. Here in 2019, we're over a century past the time period represented by Main Street. The 1900s might as well be “once upon a time.” Several of Disney's own IPs, such as Peter Pan and Mary Poppins, occupy this time period but are unambiguously fantasies. Since we've stuck something else over at the juncture with Adventureland, we could move the Jolly Holiday Bakery roughly where Fantasy Faire is and maybe fill in more space with colorful flower beds and whimsical topiaries.

Tomorrowland: What do you get when you cross the Victorian/Edwardian period with futurism? I dunno...steampunk? But that's too big an idea to waste on a small transitional area or feature, so let's go with something simpler. Remembering what we used for Adventureland...how about a town inventor's workshop? Actually, it occurs to me that given adequate space, this would be a great place for the Carousel of Progress, and I'm suddenly puzzled as to why they didn't plan Magic Kingdom to do exactly that.

The Rest of the Park

Adventureland/New Orleans Square/Frontierland: This boundary is one of the more elegant ones in the park as it is. It helps immensely that New Orleans Square is itself something of a compromise between Frontierland and Adventureland—New Orleans is a large city rather than a wilderness, but it's distinctly American and it's in a sub-tropical climate, so there are areas of overlap built-in. It's telling that one of the Square's tentpole attractions tends, in other parks, to be assigned to Adventureland instead. The riverboat connection ties it fairly intimately to Frontierland.

Adventureland/Frontierland: The other juncture between these two lands—located a short way inside the gateways—is a bit trickier, since it doesn't have a third land to help bridge the gap (nor would there remotely be room for one). We have to find something that could comfortably belong to either Adventureland or Frontierland without a middleman, and I think I have it. Combine the mysterious jungles of Adventureland with the touch of Mexico included in Frontierland, and you get Aztec. What if, instead of the cartoonish faux-Polynesian designs there currently, the restrooms in this spot displayed Aztec-styled art that segued into more Southwestern designs on the Frontierland side? Just a thought.

New Orleans Square/Critter Country: Frontierland and Critter Country are similar enough not to really need a clever transition motif, but that's not really the point, in Disneyland. We have the Haunted Mansion and Splash Mountain directly adjacent to one another, and it's kind of a mess. This could have been helped a lot if the Imagineers had managed to work in a patch of bayou past the Mansion grounds, which is suitable for the outskirts of New Orleans while also merging with the wetland setting of Splash Mountain.

Frontierland/Fantasyland: There are two places where these two lands meet up—a corridor lined with planks between Fantasy Faire and Rancho del Zocalo, and the Big Thunder Trail. The former is fine—woodwork is a neutral enough medium—but the latter is pretty jarring, especially considering how long it is. You meander around the back of Big Thunder Mountain and it goes Frontierland Frontierland Frontierland Frontierland SUDDENLY FANTASYLAND. “Unforgivable” is a pretty strong word, but considering how much room they had to tinker with the transition, it's pretty bad that they just let the two lands smack into each other like that. Especially considering the extensive remodeling of that part of Frontierland only recently—if there was a time to smooth over the border zone, that was it, yet they didn't take it.

Anyway, the best way I can think of to spackle in this crack is to paint Native-style lithographs on the rocks lining the trail...and then the closer they get to Fantasyland, the more the figures begin to look like fairytale characters and creatures. I don't love it, but I can't think of any other intersection of the Western and fantasy genres that suits this particular area.

Fantasyland/Mickey's Toontown: This is another one that's pretty good to go already. It's a lot like the entrance to the park itself—you go through a tunnel under the railroad tracks, which provides a kind of “lifting curtain” effect so you're prepped for the sudden appearance of a new environment. Not only that, but that part of Fantasyland anticipates Toontown, with the train station deliberately themed to the latter, and the “it's a small world” façade displaying bold shapes rather than the intricate Bavarian architecture that characterizes “pure” Fantasyland.

Fantasyland/Tomorrowland: Hoo boy. See, here's the thing. There is a perfectly good genre that's a hybrid of science-fiction and fantasy. It's called, appropriately enough, science-fantasy, and one of Disney's favorite acquisitions is basically the perfect example of it. If only things had worked out so that they could build the Star Wars land between Tomorrowland and Fantasyland. As it is, the boundary zone is occupied by the Matterhorn and the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, neither of which is wholly appropriate for either land (although the Matterhorn is more fantastic than the Subs are futuristic). It's this sort of awkwardness that led me to create my writeup of International Land a while back.

Now, there's one border area that I haven't addressed in this post, for the simple reason that it doesn't quite exist yet. Time will tell whether the transition from Frontierland to Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge works well or not, although the desert planet setting, and what we've seen so far of the rockwork, suggests that it will at least look nice.

Happy New Year to all! Please note that I am still taking suggestions for subject matter to examine!

* Please note that this is a separate question from whether they should be made less awkward.