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!

Imagineering Theory: Why It Matters That Disneyland Came First

Here's an experiment to try sometime: Locate a cross-section of Disney theme park fans from various parts of the United States and put them together in a room. Make sure you have at least a couple Southern California and Central Florida locals in the group. Let them talk about whatever. If no one has brought up the parks in the first five minutes, introduce the topic yourself.

Measure the resulting heat and consider whether it might be enough to drive a turbine and constitute a source of clean energy.

There's a weird sort of tribalism that afflicts Disney theme park fans. Hardly anyone is an unbiased aficionado of the entire phenomenon; you're either on Team Anaheim or Team Orlando, insisting that your “home” resort (i.e. the one you're most familiar with—hardly anyone can afford to become familiar with both) is the better of the two. They have more parks, but ours are less of a hassle to get to. Our Castle is cuter and friendlier, while theirs is grander. Our food is better, but their hotels are better. We have the Matterhorn, they have the Hall of Presidents. Our version of “it's a small world” kicks theirs to the curb, but they got a better Fantasyland expansion. We lost the Country Bears, they lost Mr. Toad. And so it goes, ad infinitum.

But sooner or later, a West Coaster will pull out the ultimate trump card: Disneyland came first. Not that the Floridians will concede the argument, but it is at least an irrefutable point with no ready counterpart. Disneyland did come first. So instead the Floridians will claim that it doesn't matter. Big whoop, they'll say, not necessarily in those exact words. There's nothing inherently special about firstness; if anything, that just makes Disneyland the rough draft and Walt Disney World the polished product.

But I think it does matter. For one thing, there is something inherently special about firstness, which is why firsts are commemorated—why the Magna Carta is such a big deal and why Neil Armstrong is just a bit more celebrated than Buzz Aldrin. Beyond that, there are aspects to Disneyland's firstness that I think impact its quality, and our perception of its quality, for the better.

Imagineering Theory: The Frontierland Problem

BREAKING NEWS: Moana is fantastic. Go see it.

We Disneyland fans often enjoy discussing the Tomorrowland Problem—i.e., how do you go about portraying “the future” in an age when technology progresses as quickly as it does in this day and age? What you don't hear about much is the Frontierland Problem, which I will identify in a moment. To the best of my knowledge, this phrase doesn't even exist as a widely recognized term for a phenomenon that most guests may not think about, or want to.

The Frontierland Problem, in brief, is this: How do you depict a superficially exciting but very ugly phase in American history in a theme park setting, without either whitewashing the nasty parts or bumming out your guests? It's a problem that might not have arisen had Disneyland been built in any decade other than the 1950s, when white American machismo (of a clean-cut variety that seems paradoxical to modern eyes) was perhaps the dominant value in American pop culture. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in the Western genre of film and television, which had its absolute heyday in the Fifties. In any other decade, Walt Disney—or at least his advisors—might have deemed the Frontierland concept not nearly marketable enough for mainstream audiences, and chosen a different theme for this largest of the themed lands, or at least diminished the “American history” presence in favor of nature or modern-day America* or something else related.

Might have. It is by no means certain. But it is well worth looking at all the small ways in which the sights to see in Frontierland have been tweaked over the years, as the guest base has grown more diverse and less forgiving of the whitewashed, white-centric Old West narrative. The Indian attack was removed from the backstory of the Burning Cabin and the Indian War Canoes were retooled into the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes,** leaving only allied tribes among Frontierland's Native population. The Golden Horseshoe's long-running show, featuring mild burlesque elements, came to an end. Gunplay was progressively downplayed. It's safe to say that mainstream America no longer considers Westward Expansion a period of unalloyed heroism on the part of white settlers and the U.S. Cavalry.

And that leaves both Management and Imagineering in a bit of a fix. What do you do when the entire theme of an important land has gone out of fashion? For the time being, the answer seems to be “Put it off for another day.” Tomorrowland is suffering from a lack of solid direction, but Frontierland is suffering from neglect, to the extent that large chunks of its real estate were deemed expendable in order to make way for Star Wars. The closest thing to a new permanent attraction it has received in over twenty years is the out-of-place Pirates' Lair overlay of Tom Sawyer Island. Granted, adding attractions to a land whose atmosphere relies on a sense of wide openness is automatically tricky business, but it's no wonder Frontierland's overall popularity has been declining when it never has anything new to say, when its former messages have become unpalatable but it has nothing meaningful to replace them with.

So what can they do? Well, in some respects the experiments are already being performed.

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.