Disneyland By Decades

Well, folks, we are looking straight up the barrel of the biggest event to hit the Disneyland Resort in over fifteen years by my estimation—the opening of a whole new themed land! The last thing to happen on this scale was the debut of Cars Land, and, well...the Cars franchise is a profitmaker, but that's about all it is. It doesn't have much in the way of cross-demographic appeal. It hasn't spawned a giant mythos requiring five coffee table books and a community-edited website to keep track of. It's not even within a direct flight of being a cultural phenomenon.

It's no Star Wars, in other words.

But then, very little is.

If anyone expects the premiere of Galaxy's Edge to go smoothly, I have two questions for them: 1) What are you huffing? and 2) Did you bring enough for everyone? There's no way this is not going to be a crowd control nightmare, at least intermittently and in the vicinity of the new land's entrance. Disney is expecting a horde—for at least a month after opening, merely setting foot inside will require a reservation. You can bet your sweet bippy* that this particular fact will escape the notice of some percentage of hardcore Star Wars fans, and I fully expect the disappointment to engender fistfights. I hope the park nurses are trained to recognize and treat lightsaber-inflicted concussions.

It's enough to make a dedicated Disneylander ask yet another question: How did we get here? What sequence of events brought us to the point where the world's first, most famous, and (dare I say it) best theme park a) can and b) has decided to, intimately tie its legacy to that of an outside franchise?

To figure that out, it might be helpful to look at the whole history and evolution of Disneyland through the decades, to see which trends have defined its development from those misty days of 1955 to the present. Or it might not. But either way, it'll be fun, in a geeky sort of way. This is a fun blog.

So let's do this!

The 1950s: Finishing Touches

Yeah, yeah, Disneyland, never complete, imagination, blah blah blah. It makes for a good sound bite, and a lazy justification for any and all changes made to the parks regardless of the motivation behind said changes. However, there is a world of difference between a vague philosophy of incompleteness—the conviction that there is always room for improvement—and the state of manifest rawness that Disneyland was in on Opening Day. Soft asphalt and inadequate drinking fountains weren't the half of it. Some rides just plain weren't ready yet, others were rushed to shaky completion in order to be ready...or rather, “ready.” Tomorrowland was half a blank canvas, its emptiness disguised with balloons and banners. Photos like these show just how rough everything looked in those early days, with minimal landscaping and huge unused areas just open to view:

These photos are the big red asterisks on the oft-repeated statistic that Disneyland was built in a year, and it took most of the rest of the decade to get the park into a condition of being actually presentable. The unfinished rides were gotten up and running, more drinking fountains were installed, and they stopped pretending “Canal Boats of the World” was a thing.

And then, in 1959, Tomorrowland finally became a real land with real things to do, as a wholesale remodel rolled out the Matterhorn, Monorail, and Submarine Voyage. Disneyland was finally where it needed to be in order to move forward.

The 1960s: Mad Innovation

I don't think I'm risking much controversy by saying that the Sixties were Disneyland's most successful decade in terms of the sheer imagination and inventiveness on display. Having figured out what they could do, the Imagineers determined to do as much of it as they could, and they did, and a lot of it is still with us because it's just that good. The first audio-animatronics made the scene in 1960, and they took center stage for the first time in 1963 with the Enchanted Tiki Room. And then...hoo boy...

And then the Imagineers went to the New York World's Fair, armed with corporate sponsorship budgets, and things got crazy...crazy awesome. All four of the World's Fair attractions were moved back to Disneyland, at least in part, and one of them—the Carousel of Progress—became the cornerstone for a second major Tomorrowland makeover that also gave us Adventure Thru Inner Space (which I loved) and the PeopleMover (which apparently everyone loved). And somewhere in there we also got New Orleans Square and its tentpole rides, Pirates of the Caribbean, AKA The Most Superb Theme Park Attraction Ever Constructed, and the Haunted Mansion, AKA The Theme Park Ride With Its Own Independent Fandom.

Yeah, the Sixties were a great decade for Disneyland. And the Seventies might have been even better...if only Walt hadn't died in '66.

The 1970s: Flailing In Search of a New Direction

Don't get me wrong; Imagineering accomplished some good stuff in the Seventies. Audio-animatronic technology continued to become more sophisticated, leading to things like the Country Bear Jamboree—on which subject, it's worth noting that the team acquired an entire 'nother theme park to play around in at the start of the decade. On the West Coast they were hardly idle—America Sings moved into the Carousel Theater, and the Main Street Electrical Parade was introduced in 1972 and re-introduced, bigger and better, five years later. None of this was small potatoes, and it was all good, original stuff.**

But it constituted a big change from the way things had been done at Disneyland before. The big Sixties attractions, you'll notice, really enhanced and developed their area themes. (Well, maybe not the Primeval World diorama...but it arguably isn't located in any of the themed lands, so, you know.) The attractions in the first half of the Seventies...not so much. The Country Bears represented a radical departure from the attempted historical realism that had previously characterized Frontierland, and America Sings completely ignored the themes of Tomorrowland.

And then in the latter half of the decade, Imagineering noticed that other theme parks were courting the teen crowd with roller coasters, and jumped on the bandwagon. No one really objects to Space Mountain, the Matterhorn 2.0, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, but they collectively represent the first time the Imagineers looked outside their own ranks, and indeed outside the company, for their direction in developing big-ticket rides. They still had as much talent as ever. What they didn't have was strong leadership.

The 1980's: Getting Hip

Through much of the Eighties, Disneyland—like the Disney company in general, by and large—was in a pretty bad place. EPCOT Center was a bold move and I will fight anyone who tries to downplay it, but it was arguably the last time Imagineering really tried to break new ground in terms of theme park design and execution. The sad truth is that Disney as a whole was considered passé and even babyish in the Eighties. We're into the time of my own childhood here, and I vividly remember being mocked by my classmates for preferring Disneyland, and Disney movies, over more “adult” theme parks and films.

So when the company finally got a new visionary CEO at the helm toward the middle of the decade, Priority One was apparently figuring out what the young people wanted and giving it to them—even if the results weren't especially in line with Disneyland's traditions. Michael Eisner knew how to ID pop cultural trends and capitalize on them, but he was far less artistically ambitious than Walt Disney. So the park got a string of attractions and events geared toward contemporary tastes rather than timeless ideals—Videopolis, Totally Minnie, Captain EO, and of course Star Tours. Even the Blast to the Past event of 1988, a celebration of the 1950s, would not have happened if not for a wholly current trend toward nostalgia for that particular era.

The decade closed with two major developments that really expressed the zeitgeist of the Eighties. Splash Mountain opened in Anaheim, and while—like the roller coasters—it is a excellent ride on its own merits, one of the reasons behind its creation was that other major theme parks had a log flume ride and Disneyland didn't—again, copying what was being done elsewhere. Secondly, Orlando saw the debut of a third park: Disney-MGM Studios, a blatant and preemptive attempt to woo the Universal Studios demographic. (USO opened the following year.)

The 1990's: Let's Get This Bread***

If the Eighties were mainly about figuring out what the kids are into these days, then the Nineties were about cutting out the middle man and just sticking a vacuum hose into everyone's pockets and hitting the SUCK button as hard as they could.

Pun very much intended.

It's not that nothing good came out of this decade. Two absolutely great things came out of this decade—Fantasmic! in 1992 and the Indiana Jones Adventure in 1995. But this is definitely the point when the synergitis really took hold. Even as Disney Animation was surging into new life with the Renaissance, Imagineering couldn't figure out anything to do with the new material—or maybe was forbidden to do anything else—besides promote it with temporary parades and shows. In fact, the movies increasingly included big processional scenes, and I would not be a bit surprised to learn that this was done specifically in order to make them easier to adapt in this way.

Worse than that, though, was EFFING Paul Pressler and his complete inability to think outside the retail box. The Nineties saw the “Disney Store-ification” of the parks: the closure of unique shops and accompanying homogenization of merchandise. Believe it or not, you used to be able to get non-Disney-branded merchandise in Disneyland. You still can, a little, but it's much rarer. Nearly everything has some sort of Disney character or logo on it. Because who wants a plain old cowboy hat to remind you of Frontierland when you can have a Woody the Cowboy hat?

Right?

Toward the end of the Nineties, Tomorrowland was revamped for a third and thus far final time. No one was impressed, and the only “new” attraction from the renovation that still operates is the Astro Orbitor. Even the Observatron—the kinetic sculpture perched up where the Astro Orbitor used to be back when it was still the cool Rocket Jets—no longer spins.

How depressing.

The 2000s: More of the Same

The turn of the millennium brought little improvement. Pressler was still in charge, and even though Anaheim finally got a second gate, it opened to deafening public yawns due to his insistence upon building “on the cheap” and focusing more attention on retail and dining locations than actual attractions. California Adventure started being upgraded almost immediately, but as they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and attendance remained pretty flat. This led to overcrowding at Disneyland itself as tourists who showed up expecting to park-hop found that only one park had much to offer them.

The situation was exacerbated by the immense popularity of Disneyland's 50^th Anniversary celebration—otherwise a major bright spot in the lackluster Ohs. And it's just possible that in launching a exhaustive retrospective of the park's history, the Powers That Be remembered what it was all supposed to be about and started taking steps to get back some of that former glory. The Happiest Homecoming actually wrapped up in 2006, and Pressler stepped down the following year, much to savvy fans' collective relief.

The 2010s: Stomping the Gas

The decade we are close to wrapping up has been a mixed bag in a lot of ways. Attention has been lavished on both Anaheim parks, and most of it has been pretty well received by the mainstream public, even if theme park aficionados are more lukewarm. I for one love Mickey's Soundsational Parade, the Paint the Night Parade, and give a general thumbs-up to Fantasy Faire and Cars Land...but I am less enthusiastic about World of Color, completely exasperated by Pixar Pier, and I loathe the decision to shutter the Tower of Terror in favor of a Guardians of the Galaxy ride.

And then there's Galaxy's Edge (and the under-construction Marvel area in DCA), about which I will have to reserve judgment until I get to see it. And that might take a good long while, because...well, I did mention the crowd forecast near the beginning of the post, didn't I? I'm not in any hurry, not if it means either staking out a reservation or standing in line for hours just to walk in.

But did you notice something? All of these recent and ongoing huge construction projects revolve around IP that Disney has purchased, rather than internally produced concepts. Because the real theme of the New Tens has been the Disney corporation transforming into the Blob and engulfing every hot media property that winds up on the market, then pretending to absorb them seamlessly into the overall brand. So we're now expected to recognize Iron Man and Princess Leia as Disney icons right alongside Mickey and Tinker Bell.

It's honestly rather unsettling, for both artistic and political reasons. But I guess that's where we're at now.

I don't have a witty send-off for this post, but I'm interested to hear how others in the know would characterize the various decades of Disneyland history. The park turns a whopping 64 this year, and apparently we still need it, because we still feed it. Do we ever.

* One of the five recognized bippies, the others being the sour bippy, salty bippy, bitter bippy, and umami bippy. This is probably the worst footnote I have ever written.

** Yes, the Electrical Parade almost exclusively showcases imagery from existing Disney movies, but the idea—a nighttime parade with floats entirely outlined in colored lights—had never been done before.

*** There is like a 90% chance that I am using this expression incorrectly.