The
Disneyland Resort sure loves to celebrate Christmas. Not only do
thematically specific decorations go up in most areas of both parks,
but a handful of attractions get made over into holiday-specific
versions of themselves.* The most notable might be the shows and live
entertainment offerings, nearly all
of which, from the humble and homey Dapper Dans to the extravagant
fireworks display, are in holiday mode at this time of year.
Disneyland has hosted any number of Christmas
parades over the years. Across the Esplanade, World of Color is
on its secondholiday
version. But there’s one live show that has so far bucked the
trend: Fantasmic!
It’s
not hard to see why—Fantasmic! is possibly the most complex and
intricate performance in theme park history. Not only does it involve
multiple types of live performers and special effects, but it was
designed from start to finish to be a satisfying whole. It tells a
complete story with a three-act structure (something almost never
done in theme park entertainment), and the musical score is as much a
symphony as a medley. It's amazing that something like this was
achieved once;
doing it all over again with
a more specific theme
would be almost unfathomably difficult.
But what is Armchair Imagineering
for, if not indulging in these wild Blue-Sky ideas? Come brainstorm
with me...
(Well,
okay, technically for now you're going to read while I
brainstorm, but I welcome any and all contributions in the comments.)
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.
I
have never been what you’d call a huge fan of World of Color. For
all the massive promotion when it first debuted, it has always struck
me as distinctly inferior to Fantasmic!
The reasons for this are numerous, but among them is that World of
Color has always seemed so very commercial. From the very
first iteration, it has come across as having the primary purpose of
waving popular characters and recent or upcoming films in guests’
faces, spurring the purchase of merchandise and movie tickets. The
previous holiday version, World of Color: Winter Dreams, was
especially blatant about this, betraying its own theme—you know,
winter—with the use
of the song “In Summer” from Frozen.* They tried to pass
it off as an ironic juxtaposition, but not many people were fooled.
They knew a shameless advertisement when they saw one.
Thus
it is with delight that I inform you that the new holiday
version—World of Color: Season of Light—does not give me this
impression at all. Instead of using the show to promote the
characters, it uses characters to illustrate the themes
of the show. There are no Disney songs in this one—just
well-known Christmas tunes as performed by equally well-known singers
(and one absolutely marvelous surprise, about which more later). Each
song is accompanied by appropriate footage from Disney films
and shorts, and the hey-look-at-our-new-movie vibe is kept to a
minimum.
That
said, it’s still fairly one-dimensional as a presentation.
World of Color is by its very nature something of a one-trick pony,
lacking the multiple facets of something like Fantasmic! or even a
parade. So this is gonna be a pretty short post, focusing on some of
the highlights that really stood out to me as making this one
special.
“Baby, It’s Cold
Outside”: The obligatory Princess/romance sequence uses this
fairly infamous song, but there’s a twist—it’s the Idina
Menzel/Michael Bublé
cover, which swaps out some of the dodgier lyrics for more
family-friendly ones. Combined with the footage of Princesses
pulling away from their love interests (when we all know these
stories have fully consensual, mutually fulfilling happy endings),
it does a lot to redeem the song for modern sensibilities.
“Mele Kalikamaka”:
This segment starts with clips from Lilo & Stitch. Then
it continues with clips from Lilo & Stitch, before
concluding with clips from Lilo & Stitch. I fully
expected it to tease Moana at some point, since that film
comes out in just a few days. But it didn’t. That alone speaks
well for its sincerity—it would have been so easy
to throw in a promotional clip or two, but they resisted the urge.
“Wizards in
Winter”: This was the big surprise I mentioned earlier. Everyone
knows who Trans-Siberian Orchestra is these days, but I don’t
think many people are familiar with their work beyond the rock
remixes of “The Nutcracker” and “Carol of the Bells.”**
However, if just one of their original Christmas compositions has
achieved any sort of penetration into public recognition, it surely
must be “Wizards in Winter,” thanks to a YouTube
video of someone’s elaborately synchronized home exterior
Christmas lights that went viral some years back. Accordingly, this
segment—the most over-the-top part of the whole show, making ample
use of the laser grid as well as the fire jets—purports to
be someone’s elaborately synchronized home exterior Christmas
lights. The someone in question is Goofy, who is probably the only
character in the Disney lineup who might believably use fire jets at
Christmas.
Is
there anything I would do differently? Absolutely. Well, maybe.
For
example, there's a segment featuring music from “The Nutcracker”
as sung, a cappella, by the Pentatonix...and illustrated with the
dancing hippos and ostriches from Fantasia.
Except...Fantasiahas
a “Nutcracker” segment, and it's not the one with hippos. (It's
the one with dancing mushrooms and thistles that makes you wonder
what the animators were on when they created it.) I'm being
charitable and assuming they went that route in order to keep the
tone light and portray explicit ballet dancers, but it still creates
the impression that they missed an obvious target at close range.
Another
aspect that seemed kind of odd was the complete absence of any
acknowledgement of Hannukah. The Disneyland Resort's holiday shows
can normally be counted upon to provide at least a token round of
“Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,” making the lack of such this time
around a pretty glaring omission. I would rather they leave it out
than force it if they couldn't find a natural place for it in the
lineup, and anyway California Adventure has no shortage
of diversity celebration this season, for which I have nothing but
praise.
So
it's not perfect. But it still stands head and shoulders above any
other iteration of World of Color, and I highly recommend it as the
perfect way to cap off a day enjoying California Adventure's Festival
of Holidays.
* Among other songs from
said movie.
** Which are actually
entitled, respectively, “A Mad Russian’s Christmas” and
“Christmas Eve – Sarajevo 12/24.” People don't pay attention.
I
wanted to make this something spectacular. It's been nearly two years
since I began this blog, and I've managed a post a week the entire
time, plus one or two extras. I hoped to find some major source of
inspiration and give my readers an early-early Christmas gift of
something astounding.
Then...Tuesday
happened.
It
was the most severe gutpunch I have experienced in my life, and it
killed most of my desire to write. I spent most of Wednesday in
something like a sick daze. I'm getting better as I process it, but
it's so rough. I thought so much
better of my countryfolk than this. I honestly don't know how
I'm going to get through the next four years (or however long it
takes to impeach his orange ass and discredit his entire
administration). But I will
try to continue my posting rate. I have posts brewing from before
this catastrophe, and hopefully my psyche is resilient enough to
recover and keep providing content (in addition to all the real-world
activism I will most assuredly
be doing).
Because
we still have Disneyland. We still have that. I'm going to need it
dearly in the near future, to escape the horror of reality once in a
while. That's what it's there for, isn't it? To be a better
place than the world we live in?
So
I offer you this for Disneyland Dilettante Post #100: 100 Disneyland
Delights. Little bits of joy a day at the park can provide, even in
these scary times.
Walt
Disney loved miniatures. This interest seems to be part of a broader
fascination with extremes of size that gave us Mickey Mouse’s
battles against giants in “The Brave Little Tailor” and “Mickey
and the Beanstalk,” the immense dinosaurs and minute pixies of
Fantasia, Alice’s
size-shifting escapades in Wonderland, the tiny animal sidekicks in
films such as Pinocchio
and Cinderella, and
perhaps even Adventure Thru Inner Space. A dramatic change of scale
is a dramatic change of perspective,
and Walt was all about seeing the world in unconventional ways.
Combine that with the delicate and nimble touch required to craft
miniature models, and it's not hard to see why he loved them so much
that he decided to put an entire country of them in his park.
Okay,
help me out here. When did Halloween pumpkin carving become
so...awesome? When I was a
kid, riding my giant ground sloth to the playground, everyone I knew
just drew a few triangles and circles on a pumpkin and cut them out
with a kitchen knife. I felt fancy if I managed to include pupils in
the eyes. I remember starting to see those specialty carving kits
with the gnome-sized miter saws when I was in my teens,* and sometime
between then and now, it just exploded
as an artform.
Pumpkin
has become a medium of sculpture in its own right—a feat all the
more impressive when you remember that these globoid gourds are
available only seasonally and the resulting creations are necessarily
ephemeral. Despite its fragility, in the hands of an expert carver
the flesh of a pumpkin can hold fine details as well as soft wood,
and its translucency allows for subtle shading effects that only
become apparent when the candle inside is lit. At the extreme end, we
get stuff like this:
Most
people probably don't have it in them to create anything that
elaborate—I know I don't—but “rough image of a face” is no
longer the default. Between the aforementioned carving kits and the
widely available pattern templates, even the average neighborhood
candy-giver is as likely to have pumpkins carved to resemble
miniature scenes, or favorite media characters, as simple faces.
And
occasionally, they turn to a Disney theme park for inspiration.
Disney
jack-o-lanterns, per se...those are everywhere. Always quick to jump
on the bandwagon of anything child-focused, Disney prints loads of
pumpkin templates, in little booklets themed by character family.
You've got your Mickey & Friends, your Princess, your Winnie The
Pooh, your Pixar, probably your Jake and the Neverland
Pirates. If you want a design
specifically related to the parks, though, you're on your own.
Naturally.
Nonetheless,
some people pull it off, and it is my very great pleasure to show you
some examples of their work. I had to work a bit harder than I
anticipated (with some much appreciated help from The Sister) to
collect all these...it turns out that Googling “Disneyland
jack-o-lantern” doesn't bring up many examples of homemade carvings
by private citizens.
I
have a love-hate relationship with Cars Land. The
Cars franchise may well be Pixar's weakest concept,* and it really
has nothing to offer me in particular. There are several reasons, but
for our purposes here, the main one is that I'm not interested in
cars. Never have been. And especially in the context of a theme park,
where I prefer to be surrounded by things I don't
see and hear every hour of every day. If it had been my decision to
make, I never would have put Cars
in a Disney theme park, especially not to the extent of building an
entire huge themed land.
And
yet...
And
yet...
I
cannot deny that Cars Land, apart from the dumb name, is really,
really well done. I
mean, look at this:
And
that's not even the town part. This is the town part:
This
is Imagineering at its placemaking best. The attention paid to detail
here is phenomenal. You walk into Cars Land, and you're there,
in a tiny town in the American Southwest, with jagged cliffs of red
sandstone in the distance. I'm sure it helped that they had the
setting pre-rendered in three digital dimensions for their
convenience, but they still had to figure out how to create it in
three actual
dimensions, and it's stunning work.
A
lot of cleverness went
into the execution. The businesses of Radiator Springs have been
translated into typical theme park fixtures. The hippie VW bus's
“organic fuel” station is a beverage stand, the paint shop is a
clothing store, the souvenir shop is...a souvenir shop. Businesses
with no ready counterpart have either been adjusted or made the sites
of rides. But the area's tentpole attraction, Radiator Springs
Racers, isn't located in the town at all—it takes place on the
outskirts, amid those magnificent buttes seen in the top photo.
I
actually haven't been on it many times—three or four, total, since
it opened.
This is because a) it's in the park I don't favor, b) it's Cars,
and c) the wait time frequently tops two hours. But I never regret
riding it. It's too dang good...maybe the best execution of a ride
concept in years.
Actually,
calling Radiator Springs Racers a ride is underselling it. It's three
rides in one, plus a fantastically immersive queue that expands on
the source material in a charming way. I'll start with the queue
since—as mentioned above—we're going to be standing in it for a
while.
