Bragging Rights

I have literally been a regular Disneyland visitor as long as I can remember. In fact, one of my very earliest memories is of visiting Disneyland! With as many visits as I've racked up over the years—it must be in the hundreds by now—I've also picked up, well, some stories. Anyone with the money can walk in the front gate, ride some rides, and leave. That's a typical Disneyland experience. I've managed to have some fairly atypical experiences there—incidents that were enviable, or especially memorable, or just plain silly.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the Unusual Things I've Done At Disneyland:

The Second Sense: The Music of Tomorrowland

Quick! What's the first thing you think of in association with the phrase “Disneyland music”?

If you're like most people...uh...probably nothing, actually. Most people are not familiar enough with Disneyland to have an automatic response to that phrase. But if you're in the minority that are, then you probably instantly thought of “Yo Ho” or “It's a Small World (After All)” or “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” Or “In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.” Maybe “Baroque Hoedown,” which wasn't composed for Disneyland but is almost exclusively known as the Main Street Electrical Parade theme.

In any case, it probably won't be something from Tomorrowland that pops into your head. It's not that the area has no music to call its own—on the contrary, it has lots, both now and in the past. It's more that Tomorrowland's unique melodies have been progressively downplayed over the years as more IP has moved in, bringing its own accompanying soundtracks. It's been nearly fifteen years since any new compositions were created for Tomorrowland, but fortunately, there's a lot of good stuff to hear if you know where to listen!

(And a lot more to be found on Disneyland retrospective albums and in niche collections!)

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!

Movie Screens

Pretty short one this time. I've had this idea knocking around for a while and I want to try putting it into words to see if it holds up when stated plainly.

There are two Imagineering trends that we hardcore Disney theme park fans tend to criticize: 1) the abandonment of original ideas in favor of attractions that lean on film IP for their ideas, and 2) the over-reliance on screens and projections at the expense of three-dimensional sets and complex animatronic figures. The object of both is, naturally, maximizing revenue (luring in guests with already-popular films and characters) while cutting costs (screens take up less space and are easier to construct, maintain, and adjust than three-dimensional infrastructure).

But I'm starting to think the two trends are connected in another way. A way that speaks volumes about the company's artistic philosophy in this day and age.

First, let's backtrack a few decades. I think I'm just old enough to remember when Disney theme parks openly lauded their technology as technology...not just to the theme park buffs but to mainstream audiences. “Come see this cool thing we built,” advertisements would say.* They freely admitted that they were creating sophisticated illusions and invited people to be impressed by the ingenuity on display. Disneyland took on the role of a stage magician, wearing top hat and tails and wowing audiences with sleight-of-hand tricks that had us all wondering “How did they do that?” but never for a moment doubting that it was a trick.

I'm not sure when that started changing, but the transition is certainly complete by now. The goal these days appears to be total suspension of disbelief. Disney doesn't want guests to be awed by how lifelike the animatronics are...because they don't want people thinking about them being animatronics. They want them to be bowled over by the prospect of being in the presence of the characters, in a kind of imposed celebrity worship. I don't know why they went in this direction—surely they don't expect anyone over the age of about six to actually be fooled, and surely popular characters have the same draw whether we're mutually pretending they're real or not, but it is what it is. The magician has traded their tuxedo for a purple robe sprinkled with stars and a pointy hat, and insists we play along with the notion that the otherworldly spirit in the summoning circle is real, and evince awe that the wizard can call up that spirit, as opposed to the less fashionable spirits at the command of other wizards.

The upshot is that the more Disney de-emphasizes the craft on display in their parks, the less reason there is to put a lot of effort into that craft. Imagineers used to advance their tech for its own sake as well as for the entertainment value, but now, with the sole benchmark being “How well does this convince the kiddies that they are meeting their heroes?”, all that matters is that it looks right. Building an animatronic that really looks and moves like a beloved character is hard. Creating a movie that really looks and moves like the character is...well, it's automatic, since these characters came from movies to begin with.

TL;DR: The increased use of screens on rides isn't just for economic reasons; it's also because Disney has become so fixated on getting people to play along with the delusion that the characters are real that the company has forgotten how to be proud of invention for its own sake.

I dunno. Just a thought I had.

* Not in those exact words.

Imagineering Theory: Three Transcendent Rides

I keep saying that having a popular IP tie-in isn’t enough. Even the most expensive, state-of-the-art ride needs to have something to say beyond “Look! It’s that movie/those characters you like! (Now go buy the merch!)” Otherwise, the movie can do a fine job all by itself and there’s no need for anyone, on either end of the transaction, to spend the kind of money that theme parks cost these days.

It’s easy and fun and even satisfying, in a snobbish sort of way, to expound at length about the failures: those attractions whose slavish adherence to recreating some aspect of their source material results in lackluster experiences. I’ve done that enough on this blog. This post, at least, is about…not the successes, but a handful of rides that go above and beyond mere success. These few rides have built on their source material so well that they have transcended said material. You don’t need to know the first thing about the movies that inspired these rides—and indeed, many people don’t—to appreciate them for what they are.

Armchair Imagineering: A Proper “Studios” Park

There seems to be a broad consensus among theme park fans that Disney's worst results come about when it tries to poach Universal's fanbase by creating parks (and sometimes sections of parks) where the “theme” is: movies. The main reason for this consistent failure is, I think, that Disney is too wedded to the concept of “magic.” The thing that makes Universal Studios Hollywood unique is not which IPs it can lay claim to, but that it is entwined with a working film studio, and its centerpiece attraction (as well as various others over the years) is all about showing its guests, in some detail, how filmmaking works, how the illusions are created. Other Universal parks don't have this going for them, but some of the mojo rubs off on the brand.

But Disney won't do that, because for some reason the company hates admitting that what it does is artifice. Maybe the decision-makers actually don't think much of guests' imaginations,* so they assume they have to trick us into believing it's all really truly reeeeaaaaaaaaal or we can't be counted on to purchase Princess costumes and toy lightsabers. Whatever the reason, the “Studios” parks end up being dumping grounds for rides based on movies that don't fit the themes of a Kingdom-style park or Epcot or DisneySea, but they're still movies, so they totally work in a park where the theme is movies, right?

Right?

Does it even need to be said at this point that I disagree?

If Disney really wants to duke it out with Universal, it has to be willing to go all-in—to say not only “Aren't our movies awesome?” but also “And here's how we make them so.”

And then it has to do its rival one better by focusing on not just the most popular movies under its already vast and still-expanding umbrella, but those movies that best demonstrate “movie magic”—the ones that advance the artform in some significant way, the ones that enjoy not just box-office success but critical acclaim. By the same token, the company needs to be willing to highlight the differences in how the various studios it has absorbed tell their stories, instead of just blithely subsuming them under the homogenized banner of Disney-ness and pretending that Elsa, Spider-Man, Chewbacca, and Dory are all natural companions to each other.

This Armchair Imagineering post offers a rough idea of how they might do that in a hypothetical “studios” park.

In addition to this bold premise, I continue to champion the idea that there is a broad middle ground between the biggest bestest most elaborate thrill rides on one hand, and the humble character meet-and-greets on the other, and Disney needs to get back to offering more of that middle ground.

Intrigued yet?

It Came From the Fandom: Yesterworld Entertainment

(My excuse this time around is that I'm on vacation and taking it easy. I'll have something more interesting next week.)

Our subject this week is Yesterworld Entertainment, a YouTube channel focusing on theme park attractions that are either extinct, or have been heavily altered over the years. The curator addresses not just Disney parks, but Universal Studios and even films and video games, and occasionally does long-form podcasts with other theme park vloggers. The presentation is straightforward, with an abundance of photos and video clips showing what once was. Most YouTube channels can't tell me anything about Disneyland that I don't already know, but I've learned a lot from Yesterworld. There's no attraction too big or too small for this channel, as long as it has a detailed history. As of this writing, the most recent video is this one about Peter Pan's Flight:

Give it a watch! There's enough here to keep any theme park fan busy for hours or days!