We Name the Nameless

A couple weeks ago, I shared a tidbit about having made up my own names for the individual members of America Sings's Gander Quartet*, since they never had official ones, and teased that I might do an entire post about this weird habit I've developed of doing just that. Let it never be said that I'm content to be a tease...

Sentimental Paleontology: Pop! Went the Weasel

Tomorrowland is a mess. This much is a largely agreed-upon fact in the Disneyland fan community. Saint Walt's Utopian Dream of the Future has Lost Its Way and become a ghastly mishmash of attractions with vague technology, science-fiction/fantasy, and even cartoon themes—mostly from IPs Disney has purchased, as opposed to creating in-house. It's probably true that the area is more inconsistent than ever before, but if we're completely honest with ourselves...we have to admit that “theme confusion” in Tomorrowland is nothing new. It arguably goes right back to Opening Day, when budget shortfalls forced Walt to fill Tomorrowland with corporate sponsors who had much more to say about what they were doing in the present than about what they would do in the future. But those exhibits at least had a scientific or technological bent that worked with the area.

So let's try a different approach. What was the last major Tomorrowland attraction to be straightforwardly futuristic rather than taking a sideways leap into science-fantasy or sillier? I think you could make a case for Space Mountain, which debuted in 1977.* It is first and foremost a roller coaster (in the dark!), but it appears to take place in a setting where people hop into tiny rockets and go zooming around the asteroids for fun. That's fanciful, but it's at the harder end of the science-fiction scale. Personal spacecraft launching from a space station are a believable future technology.

But even by the time Space Mountain made the scene, Tomorrowland already hosted a ride that had nothing to do with the future or outer space or science or technology.** That ride was America Sings, a brief history in four acts (plus an introduction and an epilogue) of American music as demonstrated by audio-animatronic cartoon animal characters. Described so brusquely, it almost sounds like a parody of Disney attractions, like the sort of thing that would be featured in an episode of The Simpsons lampooning the whole institution, while those in the know would be aware that all of those individual elements could be found in abundance throughout Disneyland, but never all in the same attraction.

But they were all in the same attraction. America Sings was sort of a distillation of Disney park tropes of its era. It was installed in 1974, timed for synergy with the upcoming American Bicentennial. But why in Tomorrowland? Even as a young child, I realized how weird this was. Why not, say, Main Street, which already had patriotism as a major theme?