The iconic stature of Fantasyland can end up being a curse for designers. For some people, Fantasyland is a synecdoche for the entirety of Disneyland… it’s where all the princesses, fairy tales, and lovable animated characters live, after all. And the castle. That giant freaking castle that seems to be growing exponentially with each new park debut, no longer symbolizing the land behind it but the entire park around it. While the other lands allow the designers some leeway to get creative, Fantasyland is such an iconic landscape that carries the burden of such firmly entrenched expectations that it can be hard to deviate from the standard blueprint too far in pursuit of more innovative design. And because that iconic landscape is mostly defined by the strength of its precedents, that means that Fantasyland is the one land that feels the least like a modern immersive theme park, and more like a traditional early-Disney themed amusement park. It’s always seemed somewhat odd that, despite being the park’s flagship land, it always seems to lack a truly flagship E-ticket attraction comparable to the headliners of adjacent lands. Even in 2016, it still follows the amusement park ethos of a diverse collection of mid-ticket attractions spread out over a nicely landscaped yet thematically unambitious (and slightly unfocused) environment. It would almost be charming, if only Shanghai Disneyland wasn’t a park that has utterly abandoned charm in its pursuit of grand spectacle. As such, it’s probably the one land in Shanghai Disneyland that never quite gels the way it’s supposed to.
It’s not for lack of effort. Moving Dumbo and the Fantasia Carousel out into their own separate zone makes a tremendous amount of design sense now that spinning flat rides have basically been banished from the vocabulary of top-tier immersive themed environments. Enchanted Storybook Castle is a legitimate attempt to finally make this oversized piece of placemaking into the multi-experiential attraction it’s always wanted to be. And individual attractions, whether based on beloved originals such as Peter Pan’s Flight or inspired by new concepts, such as Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, show an ambition to further push the land’s biggest attractions closer to that revered E-ticket designation.
Let’s start with the Enchanted Storybook Castle. As mentioned in the introduction, the castles have always been the nexus of Disney theme parks, but the nearly 200 foot tall Enchanted Storybook Castle has become a gravitational black hole. The biggest, but not necessarily the best; it lacks a sense of authentic architectural design and instead is rather easily identifiable as a giant show box affixed with some elaborate facades. That’s because it’s the first castle to fully program out its interior in a way that’s more than just a “discovery moment” for those willing to explore off the main pathway. Instead you get one big “wow moment” by stepping into the central atrium and standing in stunned disbelief at the towering volume above you, a seemingly too-delicate chandelier suspended in the middle of this grand void. As stunning as this moment is, it’s also fleeting, as once we’re done looking up we’re quickly looking around for signs of where to move next.
Surrounding us on all four sides in the central atrium are four quite lovely mosaics representing the four seasons by way of The Princess & The Frog (spring), Tangled (summer), Brave (autumn), and of course Frozen (winter).1 From a distance these might look like fairly standard marketing art for a collection of (all recent) Disney princess movies, but on closer inspection the detail and craftsmanship is genuinely impressive. Wish I had close-up photos of all four, but they were popular selfie opportunities with the locals.
Off to either side is the Royal Banquet Hall and the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, checking off the necessary dining and retail element. Beneath the castle is the finale for the Voyage to the Crystal Grotto boat ride, but because the loading platform is some distance away it’s a bit of a stretch to call it one of the castle’s attractions.
The main attraction is the “Once Upon a Time” Adventure, which occupies much of the upper levels of the castle and where the entrance can be found in the rear of the building. The attraction failed to open with the rest of the park’s grand opening but was online a few months later. As such, this was the one attraction in the park that I missed virtually all word of mouth prior to my visit and had vanishingly little idea of what it actually was, but as I waited in the 40 minute (!) queue I had plenty of time to form hypotheses and expectations that this would be something akin to Enchanted Tales with Belle in Florida, which has a mind-blowing magic mirror effect that I had been eager to witness in person.
We begin by pulsing groups of 15 or so into this small chamber, where an open book with mapped projection and Pepper’s ghost effects begins the story promisingly, if not a little ambiguously for non-Chinese speakers.
Then we march up a long-ass and totally not-ADA-compliant stairway to reach the main level of the attraction. While the views of the atrium are impressive on the stairway, once inside the attraction completely abandons any sense of relationship to the interior or exterior architecture and becomes just another walk-through in a black box. The adventure begins.
So the mind-blowing magic mirror effect here apparently got value engineered into a door that slides away when they turn the lights down. Erm, okay. On the other side, I wasn’t expecting Snow White from the entrance, but sure, I’ll take it. The juxtaposition of old-school animation clips from 1937 with the rest of the modern environments was oddly delightful.
The clear issue seen in all of these videos (I’ll summarize here since I’m sure no one’s going to watch them all the way through) is that no one knows how they’re supposed to move through this attraction. The entire scenes consist of a simple song with embedded media, which after several seconds begins to feel like it’s supposed to be exit music encouraging us to move into the next room… which, absent a facilitator, is exactly what everyone did before we realized that no, this literally is the entire experience.
Later scenes add a bit more complexity and interest to the proceedings, but they’re still all basically “watch this embedded animation media as we play this entire song.” We’ve all been there, Disney; no matter how cool you think your music is, when you try to make other people listen to it the whole way through, they’re always going to get restless and ignore the best parts.
Of course there has to be a Happily Ever After moment (with embedded fiber optics) at the end.
Aaaaand… that’s it. About 50% too long with 50% too little content, the “Once Upon a Time” Adventure is a potentially decent walk-through attraction that fell victim to attempts to make it a higher ticket attraction than it really is. If it had borrowed more from Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty castle walk-through, making it free flowing (eliminating the queue that sets expectations high and patience thin) and allowed the scenes to loop instead of pulse (allowing guests to linger as long or as briefly as they like), they might have ended up with something I could recommend in more instances than just for Disney attraction completionists or if the line is nearly non-existent.
Moving clockwise around the Fantasyland loop we first encounter Voyage to the Crystal Grotto, a sort of next-generation take on the Storybook Land Canal Boats at Disneyland.
Unlike Disneyland, Shanghai allocates tons of space for broad queues that rarely seem to be used.
There’s something of a story tying together this attraction that’s otherwise an IP mashup.
We ride in these large, Jungle Cruise-style boats with hard canopies equipped with an incongruous-looking retractable roof, somewhat disrupting the quaint aesthetic it’s going for.
Away we go. Some recorded narration (in Mandarin) apparently sets the mission and backstory here, but afterward the entire attraction is completely sans commentary until the very end.
We ride past large scale sculptural scenes of popular Disney movies with music and dancing fountains, starting with Beauty and the Beast.
Like “Once Upon a Time” Adventure, this one had us wondering if something, anything was going to happen before moving on. It never does. At least this time we were on an attraction vehicle and couldn’t accidentally skip ahead to the next scene too early.
Next up, Aladdin.
Again, none of these characters are animated. And they’re so large, they’re completely lacking in any charm.
I did notice the uniquely delicate painted patterns on the characters, which at first I thought might have been some Chinese artistic element. But I’ve later learned that, no, they in fact were just painted that way in an effort to make these scenes slightly more interesting.
Another case of putting (attempted) spectacle before story or feeling in Shanghai Disneyland.
Next up: Topiaries!
Because: Reasons!
Mickey’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice scene at least had a rotating Mickey figure and water features that are kind of relevant to the story.
Tangled!
Okay, so we’re back to absolutely nothing happening in this scene. I’m told this scene has some good effects at night, but given my limited time over two days I wasn’t intending to find out for myself.
Mulan!
Mulan definitely gets a much greater presence in this park than she does at any other Disney theme park, for reasons that should be obvious.
Little Mermaid!
Or, as the Chinese know this scene by: Seafood!
Seriously, because one of Shanghai’s most famous dishes involves crayfish, which I’m sure nearly everyone traveling domestically to Shanghai Disneyland will associate this scene with.
Up until this point we’ve basically been in a water parade where we move and the floats stay stationary. But there’s a grand finale behind these doors you won’t believe!
It’s dark in here…
That’s right, it’s… more gushing water!
And mapped projection diarrhea everywhere!
Shit. I think I see some undigested bits of story in it.
Oh! Now I get it! It was the crystal all along! Who woulda thought?
And the moral of the story is… you better start learning Chinese.
We end the experience by waiting to advance to the unload platform next to these… actually kind of lovely murals. Perhaps the best part of the entire ride?
Sarcasm aside, Voyage to the Crystal Grotto is undoubtedly the weakest link in Shanghai Disneyland. While it’s not actively unpleasant in the way Stitch Encounter at the Magic Kingdom can be (still my vote for worst Disney attraction in the world), the biggest challenge it presents is that it takes up way too much space. Sitting in the middle of Fantasyland, it forces the rest of the land to be laid out like a giant donut with virtually no programming on the inner ring, loosing critical density and thus energy throughout the entire land. If I were to pick a candidate attraction for early replacement, this would be it.
Around the corner is Peter Pan’s Flight.
Like the rest of Fantasyland, a lot of the space allocation goes to these oversized queuing structures that aren’t really themed as anything.
Again, Fantasyland’s low-density layout means that show buildings sit out in the open, only lightly themed enough to resemble a Universal Studios attraction.
Inside features this nice mural on which you can occasionally see Tinkerbell fly across.
The loading platform, featuring drop ceilings and ceiling fans.
One big improvement are the four-passenger vehicles that greatly aid capacity.
We begin through the bedroom, meeting the main characters, before flying up and over a miniature London and through the stars to Neverland.
The ride itself is… really good. In fact, I’d probably rate it my favorite version of the Peter Pan attractions.
To be fair, Peter Pan is usually one of my least favorite of the Fantasyland dark rides. Too short, and while the initial flight sequence is a delight, the second half becomes a confusing muddle of non-sequiturs for those only vaguely familiar with the movie, like me.
So, if I’m getting the story right, a misbehaving flying child encourages other children to break out from their home at night, travel to an island of offensive native stereotypes, where they promptly assault and murder a physically disabled man?
But this version of Peter Pan’s Flight finally fixes the confusion in the second half; various projection effects such as water splashing against the rocks when we “land” or Peter Pan flying between scenes to establish continuity help the story stand without relying on our familiarity with the source material.
In fact, this is probably the best recent example of Disney Imagineers finding ways to modernize and improve upon a classic attraction without compromising the spirit of the original.
Very well done, possibly the best attraction in Fantasyland.
The back loop of the park features no major attractions, but some shows (like a Frozen sing-along, ugh), and food outlets, like the Tangled Tree Tavern. All based on modern Disney films.
We eventually arrive on the other side of Fantasyland in this 100 Acre Woods sub-land. It’s not particularly elaborate or immersive.
Hunny Pot Spin is a Winnie the Pooh-inspired replacement for the traditional Mad Hatter’s Tea Party attraction in Fantasyland.
Looks cute and fun. Didn’t ride.
The marquee attraction of this mini-area is The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh dark ride.
Large outdoor queues with minimal themed integration are a recurring theme in Shanghai Fantasyland.
The indoor loading platform. Yikes.
Is this the ugliest, most half-assed loading platform ever in a Disney theme park? Where to begin? The big ugly industrial drop ceilings in clear view? The flat white office lighting? The visually distorted flat “page” panels held up by thick dark columns? The generic “prison bar” queue rails? The painted drywall everywhere? Or the fact that, while technically a similar design as Florida’s or Hong Kong’s, in this case it’s all made 100% worse by how oversized this entire room is?
Hunny Pot vehicles. Also same as Florida or Hong Kong.
Admittedly, it’s kind of amusing to see the very British literary style of A. A. Milne rendered in Chinese lettering.
Getting on the ride I was fearing the worst and… it’s actually not terrible. Apart from the Mandarin narration, it’s virtually the same as Hong Kong Disneyland’s version, which is to say it’s at least better than California’s.
I also love the fact that Disney’s one acid trip dark ride (that I’d argue can easily be reinterpreted as a parable for drug addiction) is now one of the most prolific of Disney’s dark rides, appearing at all but one Disney resort in the world.2
Hooray! Pooh continues to feed his honey addiction.
The end.
I had to come to the conclusion that the budget got eaten up by the ride, with the station area getting value engineered into oblivion. Right here you can see what must have been the exact line where the scope of work covered under the attraction’s budget ends, and is picked up by the much healthier budget for the gift shop on the other side.
Surprise! The gift shop is actually somewhat cute and charming, and completely different in style from the ride platform it’s attached to.
We got Fast Passes for several rides in Fantasyland. Note that when you go to use your FastPass, the staff will also require you to show your admission ticket so they can compare the tiny serial numbers in the bottom corner to make sure the right FastPass is paired with the right ticket. It’s as tedious as it sounds. Apparently FastPass scalpers are already a big problem in Shanghai Disneyland.
Next up: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train.
I’ve yet to experience the version in Orlando, so I was curious to try this version, which to my knowledge is essentially identical.
The station area is well done, with perhaps the only immersively themed queue in all of Fantasyland.
Seven Dwarfs Mine Train features “above the rail” suspended vehicle design, marking a new take on an old form that’s been absent for well over a decade. The detail work in the faux wood vehicles is gorgeous.
It’s too bad that the coaster itself, also delivered by Vekoma with heavy Imagineering influence, is something of a non-event. Apparently the swinging vehicles are inadequately engineered to withstand almost no lateral force; as such, the track is banked to ensure the cars swing as little as possible, basically only due to whatever speed difference there is around a curve between the front and back of the train. This caution against lateral force spills out into other aspects of the coaster design, creating an all-around limp handshake of a ride, even by Disney family coaster standards. I’d suspect the majority of riders won’t even be aware of the swinging dynamic unless they’re told to look for it.
The ride is divided into three segments: the first small gravity coaster segment hidden on the back side of the ride, an indoor dark ride segment with the second larger lift hill, and the final gravity coaster segment where the iconic “big” drop and bridge segment happen. The dark ride segment is easily the standout, featuring seven quality audio-animatronic dwarf figures (at a time when it seems most new attractions save their budget for just one or two big figures) in a charming, lustrous mine setting. While not exactly a story, there’s enough progression and variation within this (still too-short) sequence to still provide some light structure to a scene that easily could have the same theme song and random action slathered over it from beginning to end. The final coaster segment marginally improves on the first, but just when it seems to get going with a fun little double S-bend, you run into the brakes. The brake run features just a simple landscape cottage scene instead of the more detailed version featured in the Magic Kingdom with the Evil Queen.3 Overall it’s not a bad ride, some parts are even quite good, but it does seem to represent a failure to fully execute on the original vision.
Lastly, Fantasyland features the Alice in Wonderland Maze, the second such maze attraction at a Disney park after Paris, although the first advertised to be base on the live action Tim Burton version of the movie. When this was first announced, I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt this signaled a big red flag, as the Burton Wonderland film is decidedly more… challenged than the animated original. Burton’s singularly idiosyncratic aesthetic mixed with recognizable actors (who will presumably all age much faster than the attraction itself) seemed like a poor fit for Fantasyland, a shortsighted synergistic ploy attempting to force Disney’s new obsession with live action remakes into relevance, all with little regard for what would actually make a lasting and quality guest experience. The last thing I need on any attraction is more of Johnny Depp’s countenance, let alone on two separate attractions right next to each other in the same park.
If that was an imagined worse-case scenario, the actual maze probably turned into as close to a best-case experience as I could have expected. Both the movie’s fussy CGI photorealism and likenesses to the live actors have been reduced back into simple and effective animated forms, which are then physically expressed with an aesthetic that fits comfortably within Fantasyland while updating it to something slightly darker, more detailed, and more mature than the loopy pastel phantasmagorias of the existing Alice attractions. Most importantly, the maze offers some moments of intimacy and discovery that are otherwise sorely lacking across the rest of Fantasyland. Let’s take a tour.
The maze begins with these illustrative panels that introduce guests to the story of Alice in Wonderland, as the story is admittedly much more convoluted than the average Fantasyland fairy tale.
Next, we step through one of these three doors. I’m unsure of the story significance of this; apparently they open different doors at different hours or days, but they all almost immediately re-merge on the other side.
Walking deeper into the maze, the Enchanted Storybook Castle does somewhat spoil the sense of disorientation and immersion into the maze. At least it looks impressive.
Freaky faced flowers:
Steampunk animal oddities. (I don’t remember these from the movie, but nevertheless they look cool.)
Into the cave that cuts under one of the park’s main thoroughfares:
A Cheshire Cat illusion appears and vanishes here, just barely still visible. Tried to wait to get another photo, but he proved more illusive than I imagined, so I moved on.
Emerging on the other side into the much more open and angularly structured courtyard of the Queen of Hearts. I appreciate that this maze contains very distinctive environmental zones.
Of course, (especially being in China) this entire maze is basically one giant selfie festival, even with makeshift queues forming for the most popular photo locations. The Queen of Heart’s bulbous head is nearly impossible to get a photo of without someone throwing a V-sign in front of it, but even things like a particularly elaborate fencing detail are likely to attract some poses.
Finally we get to the hedge maze itself, which offers a choice to go left to get lost, or go right for a shortcut to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. As there are few selfie opportunities in this maze, the vast majority of participants chose to go right. The entire maze was a ghost town.
It’s not hard. You pretty much have to will yourself to get lost in here.
Finally, at the end is the Mad Hatter’s tea party, featuring a delicious spread (non-edible, yet filled with small interactives) and of course more selfie opportunities!
While far from groundbreaking, the Alice in Wonderland Maze was overall still a compelling experience, one that I’d rate highly among the park’s attractions and even among Fantasyland attractions globally. Of the six significant Shanghai Fantasyland attractions, there seemed to be a pretty even breakdown in quality, with two needing a lot of work (Once Upon a Time and Crystal Grotto), two being basically competent if somewhat uninspired (Winnie the Pooh and Seven Dwarfs), and two that well exceeded my expectations (Peter Pan and Alice). It’s clear that Fantasyland has gobs of space for expansion in Shanghai Disneyland; the question is now if they can use that potential to elevate the entirety of the land.
It took me long enough, but I finally made it to the Magic Kingdom. I’ve been to Disneyland in California, Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, and even held a season pass for Hong Kong Disneyland, but somehow it took until 2012 to check off my list the most popular theme park in the world, even though it’s the only Disney resort located in the same time zone as my hometown. My Magic Kingdom abstinence even turned into something I was oddly proud of, since there was nothing unique to claim from being counted among the millions of Disney World customers that can make the hobby of tracking down obscure parks and coasters so addictive, but I could claim something unique about the chronology through which I would eventually visit the parks. Before taking off for Florida I joked that being a theme park critic and having never been to the Magic Kingdom is a bit like being a film critic and having never seen Star Wars. It was finally time that I rectified this oversight. And now that I have, this begs the question: how does the Magic Kingdom fare against its counterparts, and did it serve as a suitable finale to my two-and-a-half year, round-the-world tour of Disney parks and resorts?
To answer: not that well; and no, I visited the Disney parks in the opposite order I probably should have. This isn’t to say that the Magic Kingdom is a bad park, or even bad for a Disney park. It’s probably the best overall introduction for newcomers to the (Not-Always) Wonderful World of Disney. It summarizes the best aspects of each of the Disneylands in Anaheim, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong, without actually doing better in any category than what each of those other parks specializes in. Anaheim has the best overall collection of rides, Paris has the most detailed and beautiful landscapes, Tokyo has a scale and tech advantage in many of its attractions and entertainment, Hong Kong has much more intimacy and (more recently) originality, and the Magic Kingdom has…? Truth be told I had a hard time coming up with any aspect of the Magic Kingdom that I liked more than at any of the other parks, and the short list that I could manage are only the exceptions that prove the rule. It might have the best Haunted Mansion version in the world, although this win is slight in comparison to the landslide victories that Anaheim’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Tokyo’s Splash Mountain, or Paris’ Big Thunder Mountain have over the Floridian versions (among many others). The Carousel of Progress, PeopleMover, and Country Bear Jamboree are three charming curios from an earlier era that can no longer be found at Disneyland, and thus are some of the only “Only in Florida” attractions that the Kingdom can lay claim to. (Tokyo also has a Jamboree, but that’s the better version only if your first language is Japanese.) And I suppose there will be a few good things to say about the additions in New Fantasyland once that’s completed, however I didn’t find the dress rehearsal that fantastic, and Shanghai Disneyland might very well steal the land’s thunder in a couple of years anyway.
Come to think of it, the biggest distinguishing characteristic that sets the Magic Kingdom apart from other theme parks is located outside the park boundaries. To reach the front gates from either the parking lot or Ticket & Transportation Center you have to cross the Seven Seas Lagoon by ferryboat. The intended effect of this nautical journey is most likely to create a sense of removal from the outside world by crossing over a (meta)physical barrier into a separate magical realm. Disney’s design philosophy has long placed tremendous value on barriers and gateways, for the way that they help us realize the exact point at which we change cognitive paradigms. Possibly the most famous is the railway tunnel separating the ticket booths and Main Street, U.S.A. with a plaque indicating “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy”, but you’ll also notice tunnels, bridges, special doorways, or bodies of water in the queues or at the start of the layout of most attractions in the park. The Seven Seas Lagoon ferry ride is by far the largest scale example of this design theory put into practice at a Disney park, making it a perfect example of how important this feature is to Disney’s design philosophy, especially since the ferry ride comes at the expense of the practicality. Arriving early in the morning a half hour before the gates are set to open while the mist is still hovering above the water’s surface: that’s Disney magic, and it’s achieved just through placement and timing, without needing any expensive themed props to dress it up. Trying to get back to the TTC after a long, tiring day and ten minutes before the bus is scheduled to depart: that’s Disney frustration, the kind that has given many stand-up comedians fodder for a routine about the toils and contradictions of taking the family on vacation.
Yet there’s no denying that, for whatever its faults (and there are many), the Magic Kingdom is a cultural experience of nearly unrivaled magnitude. It singularly reassures more people than anywhere else in the world that the American dream can come true, and it’s nothing if not fascinating to watch others have a minor spiritual revelation in the presence of such sublime kitsch. While people used to travel just to see the image of the Madonna, or even as recently as a film society screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “La passion de Jeanne d’Arc” before the introduction of VHS, now theme parks like the Magic Kingdom fill the role of the irreplicable work of art that becomes a pilgrimage site for the masses. Immersing an audience for twelve consecutive hours in an environment where every perception is controlled by the artist is a degree of creative control that the avant-gardes of the 1920’s could only fantasize about, and especially as other media become increasingly digitized and oversaturated in their channels of mass distribution, in the coming decades the Magic Kingdom could become one of the last vestiges of society where the artist’s message is received as a postmodern “holy experience.”
Main Street, U.S.A.
The “opening credits” for the Magic Kingdom are found in Main Street U.S.A. Literally. The names painted on the second floor windows are all for Disney Imagineers, although I was too thick to notice this until I read about it after I returned home. The concept of public authorship is strangely absent from theme parks when compared to other creative arts and entertainments,1 so I appreciate the effort Disney puts into it even though their idea of title cards is still my idea of Easter Eggs for fans. I suspect this goes back to the distinction between art and hyperreality. If we recognize something as art we demand that an artist is presented along with it (even if that name is unrecognized to us; “who directed this”, “who painted that”, etc), but a hyperreal theme park environment demands that its makers remain hidden behind the curtain of conscious thought, lest the illusion of hyperreality is destroyed. Thus I think Main Street is probably better categorized as the “prologue” or “introduction” to the Magic Kingdom. It’s the “once upon a time” origins story for Disney: a familiar everyday setting (although still a little fantastical) which inspires the daydreams of the fantastical worlds we’re about to springboard off to, either by foot or by train. That, and it’s also where you can go to eat and buy stuff you probably shouldn’t eat or buy, at least not during this economic recession. This is now the fifth Disney Main Street (or equivalent) that I’ve briskly walked through on my way to better things. Sure, once the afternoon crowds fill in I’ll return to fulfill the geek’s duty to look at all the detail, but after a half hour I still can’t find very much that isn’t cover-up for a gift shop. I’ll take the next train that comes in, going clockwise around the park for the rest of the review. Just as Main Street is the prologue, Tomorrowland is definitely supposed to be the final act before the curtain call, right?
Walt Disney World Railroad
Whenever I encounter a theme park attraction that takes the form of public transportation, the most crucial factor for me is that it needs to function efficiently as such. I loved trains as a kid, but I still knew that if it wasn’t taking the scenic route (while aboard the Walt Disney World Railroad you spend a lot of time looking at subtropical shrubs, maintenance roads, and a few weathered dioramas while a narrator describes the much more exciting attractions remotely passing by) it had to get us from Point A to Point B faster than we could have managed by walking. Where the Main Street Vehicles fail in this regard, the Walt Disney World Railroad is a moderately useful piece of infrastructure if approached with a proper strategy. If the locomotive has arrived just as you’re getting off Splash Mountain and Storybook Circus was already your next intended destination, then the railroad will momentarily seem like the best ride you’ve ever taken at the Magic Kingdom. If you want to go from Main Street to Space Mountain and the train has just left the station, then you’re better off hiking it. Some might insist that the railroad’s “Disney magic” can’t be quantified using such utilitarian standards, but considering the average visitor will only ride nine attractions in a day I suspect more people use the train in the second scenario rather than the first. And that’s a shame.
Grade: C-
Adventureland
In a post-Animal Kingdom Walt Disney World, it might be reasonable to wonder if Adventureland still has the same relevancy for audiences. Of course the two are very different; Adventureland is a bit like reading a comic book, while Animal Kingdom tries to be like a National Geographic documentary. Still, I can’t help but shake the feeling (especially in the inevitable comparison between the Jungle Cruise and the Kilimanjaro Safaris) that Adventureland was designed for a different generation than those who visit today. Mixing African, Polynesian, Caribbean, and even Arabian influences under one generic label could easily be regarded as a mistake by today’s more culturally sensitive audiences… and probably more by kids than adults. As a 1990’s kid when environmentalism and conservation became really mainstream, you had to know things like the difference African and Indian elephants to do your kid duties correctly, and any anachronisms or anatopisms were to be immediately called on with that smarty-pants attitude kids have. (Okay, maybe not all kids were this way, but still…) Today Adventureland is probably the most self-consciously comedic of the Magic Kingdom’s lands, to distinguish itself from the “authenticity” of the Animal Kingdom, and the theme is more a pastiche of American popular cultural (especially between the 1930’s to 1970’s) than it is about the “real” foreign cultures it caricatures.
Jungle Cruise
On the surface the Jungle Cruise is a guided tour of a hyperreal tropical river basin with numerous robotic animals and exotic sets to look at, but there are a couple layers of subtext to peel back to understand what the Jungle Cruise is really about. First it’s kind of a corny, outdated attraction, so the skippers tell a continuous line of jokes either to poke fun at or distract us from the obvious fakeness of the sets and stiff movements of the creatures. The skippers know it’s all a hoax, the passengers know it’s all a hoax, and both sides know that the other side knows they know, but this knowledge can only be indirectly acknowledged through the metaphorical wink-winks that are exchanged after every punch line. However, since the jokes are also kind of corny and obviously recycled, there becomes a second layer of subtext on top of this. The skippers know the jokes they’re telling are lame (revealed by their droll delivery of obviously scripted material); the audience knows the jokes are lame (watch folk’s faces for the slight “so-bad-it’s-good” cringe while forcing a laugh at the skipper’s “you must be in da-Nile” punch line); and each side knows the other side knows they know… yet we continue to mutually play along and pretend it’s all a laugh riot. Maybe this format of employing multiple layers of metatextual irony to avoid actually making a better attraction could work if the skippers were given more freedom to experiment with their own material (surely plenty of skippers must be aspiring stand-up comics in need of a day job?), but after several laps the only variable I encountered was the guides’ level of perkiness brought to the same series of worn out puns, which varied Goldilocks style between gratingly chipper, tiredly sarcastic, and one that was “just right”.
Grade: C-
Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room
This was on my list of must-do’s for its long history dating back to the Golden Age of Disney in 1963 at the California park and copied for the Magic Kingdom’s debut in 1971. This audio-animatronic musical show feels distinctly a product of the 1960’s, and not in an entirely good way. The show’s “cast” consists of 150 robotic birds suspended from the ceiling that sing songs with several tiki heads and jumping fountains, and most of these figures are limited to binary position flapping mouths and one or two other simple movements. Thus when the entire chorus joins in on “The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room”, part of the music’s instrumentation is supplied from the sounds of hundreds of air pistons and clacking plastic parts triggering in (near) unison. Focusing on so many small moving parts from a distance can get tiresome after more than one song, so it’s probably better to just relax and listen to the music and comedy sketch interludes, both of which are also somewhat dated. Cultural stereotypes are a dominant form of the Tiki Room’s humor (the center four “host” parrots are indistinguishable apart from their strong Mexican, Irish, French, or German accents), while the music is firmly in the Disney tradition of feel-good sing-a-long-songs with a Polynesian inflection. It’s too bad the show’s best joke doesn’t happen until we’re already on our way out, when the birds sing an alternative version of “Heigh-Ho” that urges us out the door we go.
Grade: D
Pirates of the Caribbean
Vastly inferior to the much longer California version, and the updated Jack Sparrow/Blackbeard overlay hasn’t helped matters in Florida either. Even in California I find Pirates to be a ride (institution, really) that starts strong but fizzles into tedium by the end, and shortening the layout in Florida has only compressed the timeline rather than trim out the fluff. The first several scenes form one of the best dark ride sequences ever built, establishing the attraction as not simply another pirate yarn but something that could speak deeply to the nature of one’s childhood stories and dreams, as well as the hopes and fears they inspire. The pirate’s voyage begins in the dark of night across moonlit water and in the deep recesses of a cave… all Jungian archetypal symbols that represent the unconscious. The nightmarish quality to this opener makes it so that when we finally dock in Puerto Dorado it feels less like a scene change in a literal narrative than the arrival in our own metaphysical dreamscape. Sadly this sensation is fleeting, as the narrative devolves into a standard-issue (and, honestly, kind of dull) treasure hunt story told with stiff robotic figures that can only convey emotion through raised eyebrows, cocked heads, or other exaggerated motions that a programmer can substitute in the absence of living facial expressions. Despite the obvious potential for this story to be a morality play about the greed and recklessness of a pirate’s life,2 it instead ends with Jack Sparrow sitting atop a pile of gold and loot victoriously, a decidedly materialist “happy ending” that contradicts the abstract journey through the collective unconscious required to get there. The happy ending becomes all the happier when we’re spat out into a gift shop a few moments later so that we may collect our own pirate’s loot, although the only take-home for me was a nagging feeling that I had witnessed a potentially good attraction that had been compromised by outside interests uncommitted to making a truly great attraction.
Grade: C
Frontierland
Of the original lands that opened in Anaheim in 1955, I think Frontierland benefited the most from the move eastward when Walt Disney World opened in 1971. The Magic Kingdom is a much more spacious park than Disneyland, and while some areas lose their energy or intimacy within the additional negative space, the extra breathing room vastly improves a naturally themed environment like Frontierland’s American west. Helping matters is the fact that real ghost towns and sun-baked desert landscapes are a considerable rarity in Florida compared to California, thus giving more purpose to paying to see a theme park’s interpretation of the material. Also the attraction selection is an marked improvement: In addition to Big Thunder Mountain, Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland has Splash Mountain, the Country Bear Jamboree, and Tom Sawyer Island, whereas Disneyland’s Frontierland has the Rivers of America, a kid’s playground, and pirates (?). During a day at each park I “stop by” Disneyland’s Frontierland, and “go to” the Magic Kingdom’s.
The Country Bear Jamboree
This is yet another Disney-produced musical show that can be performed by pushing a start button. While I’m not typically a fan of the genre, I was most keen to try it out after being told by David Younger (of Theme Park Theory) that Marc Davis’ work on the Country Bear Jamboree perhaps best represents an example of auteur theory as applied to a theme park attraction. Although I’m uncertain how much I can attribute the presence of an auteur to this show’s successfulness, it does have a unique brand of off-beat humor that I honestly found fairly charming. The show and its creators seem deeply endeared to the tradition of American folk and country music, even as they simultaneously finds ways to mock its eclectic cast of performers. (My favorite bit: the deadpan performance of “Blood on the Saddle” by the oblivious Big Al character with his out-of-tune guitar.) It also helps that the bears’ cartoon expressiveness is brought to life by some of the most detailed and elaborate audio-animatronics in the Magic Kingdom, and there are nearly twenty different performers brought on and off stage ensuring that the show never becomes repetitive. Apparently the Jamboree has been shortened by about six minutes after a recent refurbishment; I’d be curious to see the material I missed.
Grade: B-
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
The physics that govern roller coaster designs are the opposite of what their dramatic structure should be. A good show needs to have a big finish, but roller coasters by their nature usually start with their biggest tricks and then become tamer near the end as energy is lost to friction. Despite WED Enterprises’ intense focus on story and the advantage of having three lift hills to moderate the energy throughout the ride, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad still falls victim to this common mistake of coaster design. The first cavernous lift hill that’s threaded through a split waterfall: spectacular. The first gravity-driven section with several drops and tight curves including a trick-track past a ghost town: pretty fun. The second gravity-driven section with the one hill that almost produces airtime and a couple close headchopper effects: getting a bit repetitive, but still fun. The third lift, with the ominous tremors and off-kilter rails: good, now the tension is mounting. And then the final gravity driven section: wait, that’s it? It’s over? It’s not a particularly thrilling coaster before that point yet I’m willing to enjoy it for what it is, but in the last act the themed storyline is horribly at odds with the actual coaster experience. The setting around the third lift seems intended to build tension, while the final gravity-driven section on the other side (by far the slowest and gentlest part of the layout) functions as the coaster’s denouement. Missing from this arc is any sort of emotional climax, which is a gaping big hole to have from a story structure perspective. Even many of the Arrow Dynamics mine trains built for regional amusement parks up to a decade prior to BTM’s debut usually had a better sense of dramatic layout construction, and using a tighter budget than Disney. California’s version is the same way, although it seems Imagineers did realize the problem and took steps to correct it on subsequent international entries in the Big Thunder canon by including a bat cave (Tokyo), an underwater drop (Paris), and finally a “dynamite” LIM launch (Hong Kong, as Big Grizzly Mountain). Of course there’s the theming on Big Thunder: there’s more of it, but it’s just more that whizzes by, and apart from the first lift it does little to transcend the original mine train coasters at Six Flags besides distracting us with more visual clutter.
Grade: C
Splash Mountain
If there’s something in the nature of roller coasters that works against the rules of theatricality, then inversely there also seems to be something in the nature of log flumes and water attractions that fits naturally to dramatic structuring. Since log flumes can’t easily sustain high speeds and navigate complex maneuvers, they instead rely on only a couple of big drops that can be used to signify key dramatic points in the narrative where an “emotional shock” is needed, particularly if placed towards the end to function as a grand climax (adjusting the drop height is an easy way to quantify the emotional impact of a plot point), and the rest of the slow-moving trough sections can be used to develop and flesh out other elements of the themed storyline without rushing by them. Although Knott’s Timber Mountain Log Ride established the basic principles of the log flume in a theme park setting, it was Splash Mountain that cemented the rules of the genre by carefully integrated the flume dynamics to fit Freytag’s pyramid of dramatic structure: Introduction (“How Do You Do?”, with the outdoor establishment of the rural Georgia setting, Slippin’ Falls, and indoor establishment of the principal characters); Rising Action (“Ev’rybody Has a Laughing Place”, the double indoor drops and dark cave sequences); Climax (the iconic drop into the briar patch); and Resolution (“Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”, the return trough channel to the station). At over ten minutes in length it has plenty of time to immerse riders each of these story chapters so the emotional transformation from beginning to end can be noticeably felt, even if it suffers from a few issues such as an overly long delay between the drop climax and the final show scenes, or some animatronics and set pieces that seem in dire need of a refurbishment. Nevertheless Splash Mountain is a prime example of how to merge traditional amusement park thrills with immersive story-based entertainment, and has helped cement the log flume attraction as a neoclassical Disney favorite.
Grade: B
Tom Sawyer Island
As the welcum sign says, if’n you like dark caves, mystery mines, bottomless pits, shakey bridges n big rocks, you’re probably bound to enjoy spending some time on Frontierland’s Tom Sawyer Island. The river rafts required to reach the island act as a natural choke point for the entrance so it should usually be one of the least crowded areas in the Magic Kingdom, and the unpolished rustic appeal of trails through the trees with various gags to explore at your own pace in whatever order you’d like makes it a refreshingly different kind of activity for the Magic Kingdom. The paths are even made with real dirt and woodchips, now that’s what I call “attention to detail”! Of course it could be easy to argue that this is no substitute for hiking in an actual National Park, but since it’s at Disney I think it’s perfectly fine to have someplace where you can momentarily escape when you start to feel overwhelmed by how much “Disney” there is everywhere else. A word of warning, the floating barrel bridge should not be attempted to cross by anyone who’s recently thrown back a few bottles.
Grade: C+
Liberty Square
If the overall tone of Adventureland is “silly” and the tone of Frontierland “romantic”, then Liberty Square must represent the Magic Kingdom’s morbid side. By my count there are at least 1038 dead people in Liberty Square: the 999 ghosts haunting the mansion, plus 39 dead presidents in the Hall of Presidents. How else to make the thematic connection between this small area’s most important attractions than that they all feature old American buildings filled with magically reanimated corpses? The Revolutionary American architecture is a nice diversion from the cartoonish fantasy in the rest of the park, and is completely unique to the Magic Kingdom, although there are already a lot of tourist attractions that do this sort of thing on a larger scale, and with more educational value, too. Not that it matters much as Liberty Square is also home to one of my favorite attractions in central Florida.
The Hall of Presidents
I suspect many patrons enter the Hall of Presidents out of a sense of civic duty rather than from any innate desire to sit through an austere 20 minute multi-media presentation on American history when they could have ridden the Haunted Mansion within the same timeframe. I don’t “want to” see the Hall of Presidents, I “should” see the Hall of Presidents. Of course we could also be there from an innate desire to gawk at the spectacle of technology that seemingly lets dead presidents return from the grave, even though Disney tries to underplay the significance of our collective tech fetishism to the show’s patriotic importance (perhaps similar to the way Nascar might try to gloss over the universal appeal of watching their race cars crash and burn). However, be forewarned that the majority of the show’s running time is devoted to a Ken Burns style documentary (narrated by Morgan Freeman) that briefly summarizes the presidencies of Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, the other Roosevelt, and Kennedy. When they finally do bring the presidents onstage there’s little more than a spotlight roll call with Freeman reading down the list while each man only gives a subtle nod, seemingly underutilizing the hi-tech figures especially since we can’t observe them up close in detail. Obama (and an earlier bit by Lincoln) are the only two AAs that are ever given talking time, and the format oddly seems to encourage the interpretation that 200+ years of presidential history were all quietly anticipating the eventual Obama administration, although most likely this is an accidental by-product of Disney’s showmanship tendencies that require a big grand finale. Credit goes to at least attempting to make the show as non-partisan as possible, and Walt Disney’s message that every president has been equally important to the success of the American democratic experiment is a noble one, even if most informed people in the audience are likely to subtitle the show in their own minds as “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”.
Grade: C
The Haunted Mansion
Before anything else we first must face the question of suicide. It is only after we fully confront this unanswerable problem that we can start the party that is life. More than forty years since its debut, the Haunted Mansion (along with its western and eastern counterparts) remains the most radical attraction ever built at a Disney theme park due to its complete reversal of the traditional ghost story arc. Here it begins with the macabre death of the main character (the suicidal remains of the mansion’s “ghost host” narrator dangling above our heads) and then rewinds the horror backward until we’re dancing along with the undead in a jazzy graveyard jam. Where a lesser attraction might have tried to use the “hitchhiking ghost” illusion in a serious context, in the Haunted Mansion we’re obviously meant to laugh at the final reflected image of ourselves as we seemingly become undead spirits, a final gag that becomes the punchline to one long joke about mortality. This isn’t to say that every element of the Mansion fits perfectly to the story – there’s an attic scene between the ballroom and graveyard filled with trick portrait photographs that disrupts the continuity of the mansion’s transformation into a lively and festive atmosphere (Roland Barthes wrote that death is implicit in every photograph due to the way they consciously remind us of the person or world “that-has-been”, so such a scene would have been more appropriate towards the beginning of the storyline), and I still think the rooms are filled with a little too much technological showmanship for the mansion to ever feel truly haunted (compared to the creaky low-tech spooks that inhabit, say, Knoebel’s Haunted Mansion, where the ride’s history and thus the presence of death become omnipresent). Still, these are relatively minor shortcomings for an attraction that daringly manages to transform our initial existential dread into something that eventually becomes quietly life-affirming. In the end the Haunted Mansion offers no answer for how to best “find a way out”, but it doesn’t matter so long as it helps us live to laugh another day.
Grade: A-
_______Fantasyland_______
It seems ironic that “fantasy” has become such a narrow genre label within contemporary usage. Nowadays if you label something “fantasy” that always, always, always implies a setting in (or loosely resembling) Medieval Europe (maybe Classical or Renaissance Europe if it’s particularly imaginative fantasy), and you can be sure that you can’t throw a stone without hitting an elf, dwarf, wizard, or dragon… yet flying spaghetti monsters remain completely invisible. Since when did we become so dependent on the brothers Grimm and J.R.R. Tolkien to feed our imaginations? I applaud attractions like “it’s a small world” if only because they try to escape the confines of old Europe in creating a unique aesthetic setting that can still be called “fantasy”. Then again, I absolutely do not want to see Figment from Epcot’s Imagination pavilion anywhere near the Magic Kingdom, so perhaps I should be careful in what I ask for.
“it’s a small world”
“it’s a small world” is the one attraction at Disney parks that has given me more grief in my role as a critic than any other attraction. On the one hand, it has a completely original artistic style that rejects hyperreal simulacra while conveying a simple, non-pandering message for world peace that resonates across generational divides, and in the process has made one of the deepest footprints on the pop-cultural landscape of any theme park attraction ever built. But on the other hand… it’s a small world. A small world where the music is stuck in an endless reprise and the thousands of dolls will never cease dancing like they’re at a house party thrown by Sisyphus. A small world where no matter what country I’m in it all looks like a jellybean factory recently blew up nearby, and the kaleidoscopic shapes and colors will burn imprints into my retinas after ten minutes of exposure. And a small world where no matter how slow my boat seems to be floating down the channel it will still inevitably get backed up for several minutes behind other boats just before reaching the unload platform. Perhaps the solution to my grief is to not approach “it’s a small world” as a critic, but simply as myself. In that case, speaking for myself, on the outside I probably appear with glazed eyes and mouth slightly agape, but inside I’m still smiling a bit at the excessively simple and simply excessive pageantry of the whole ride. I guess that means that I must enjoy it on some level, even if I’m never going to be its target audience. However, also speaking for myself, I find that the world usually seems the most wondrous when I’m aware of its vastness, not its smallness.
Grade: C+
Peter Pan’s Flight
At most other parks the longest lines usually come before the newest and biggest rides. But the Magic Kingdom isn’t like most other parks, and here the longest line usually comes before Peter Pan’s Flight, which is neither the park’s newest, nor biggest. This is one of the original “drive-thru movie” style dark rides, and I’ve honestly never had much love for the genre so its “classic” status means little to me. As a form of storytelling, it’s only a little more effective than a movie trailer. While trailers and dark rides are each a unique medium with their own special rulebooks for the delivery of a neatly crafted emotional arc over a brief span of a couple minutes, both are ultimately subservient to the originating feature length film, unable to stand on their own artistic merits without it. Peter Pan’s Flight is a small but detailed ride with only a couple memorable effects, cast in the shadow of a giant name that seems to be the real reason for drawing in the longest lines in the park. Or the long lines are because it’s indoors, there’s no minimum height limit, and single-bench vehicles provide less than ideal throughput. Either way, FastPass is highly recommended.
Grade: C-
Mickey’s PhilharMagic
Here’s a litmus test for the quality of any theme park 4D cinema: would you want to watch the same short film if it were offered as a DVD extra for your home television? It’s all too easy for such attractions to gloss over a weak story with an abundance of 4D special effects, in which the hero’s conquest over the evil villain becomes a barely memorable plot hiccup in comparison to that time the comic relief guy spit his drink on the audience. Mickey’s PhilharMagic would probably fail such a test, although part of that might be because I’ve already seen roughly 80% of the material on DVD (well, VHS). Most of the short film consists of a musical medley from their most popular animated films, tied together by a plot involving Donald Duck becoming a mistaken sorcerer’s apprentice to a magical orchestra. (Despite the title, Mickey remains off-screen for the vast majority of the show’s runtime.) It recalls enough Saturday morning cartoons that I can find it relatively entertaining, although I’d be lying if I didn’t admit its biggest appeal is the chance to sit in the dark air conditioning for a few minutes. The other parks at the Disney World resort have much better 4D cinema attractions.
Grade: D+
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
This is a competently-made dark ride that uses a variety of artistically inspired set pieces and special effects to tell a compelling story in the 100 Acre Woods about the perils of hard drug abuse. In it, Pooh ignores his neighbor’s pleas for help during a hurricane that threatens to destroy his community so that he can find his next fix from his recently depleted honey stash. When none is to be found, his charlatan friend Tigger convinces him to steal honey from his neighbors. After surviving an out-of-body hallucination caused by honey withdrawal, Pooh wakes to find his community underwater and his best friend about to drown. He again ignores this when he discovers a stash of honey in a tree large enough to put his whole body inside. The community eventually reconstructs, and Pooh finds that the best way to manage his honey addiction is to consume even more honey. It’s like the family friendly version of “Requiem for a Dream”, except Pooh doesn’t have to have his paw amputated at the end. (Um, spoiler alert.) And yet people still think Universal is the edgier of the major theme park operators in Florida…
Grade: C+
Mad Tea Party
Interactivity can improve almost any flat ride experience, a claim of universality which cannot be made by most other categories of amusement attractions. The more intense interactive flat rides can become a first-person physics experiment, while the gentler rides can become a social activity; both types possibly benefit from increased mental stimulation over the monotonous motions of non-interactive flat ride counterparts. With an inert disk at the center of the seating that requires riders to join together to set their tea cup in motion (the amount of muscle you put into it directly controls how fast the cup spins; no button pushing or cord yanking here), the Mad Tea Party is an enduring example of rider interaction done right, even decades before “interactivity” became an amusement industry buzzword.
Grade: C-
Dumbo the Flying Elephant
Some theme park fans might like to think that Disney’s storytelling and placemaking abilities allow their parks to completely transcend the ordinary amusement park experience, yet this possibly ignores the fact that at least two of their most iconic and popular attractions are essentially glamorized carnival rides (Dumbo and the Mad Tea Party, maybe a few others). This isn’t to denigrate these rides at all, only to point out that even at Disney you can’t deny the simple pleasures of spinning around in circles that make fairgrounds so popular. Of course the Magic Kingdom does it with a lot more class, and I even get an odd satisfaction just from thinking about all the extra capacity the new dueling arrangement offers. I can only assume this comes from spending too much time in slow-moving queues at other parks where I must entertain myself by mentally calculating the estimated throughput numbers. Still, regardless of how classy the presentation is within the Storybook Circus of New Fantasyland and how fast the line moves, I must ask now that I’ve done it once: am I ever going to voluntarily ride Dumbo again?
Grade: D+
The Barnstormer
It’s not Disney’s fault that the Vekoma Roller Skater would go on to become more popular than head lice since the Barnstormer’s 1996 debut, with a total of four now residing in central Florida alone. But even if Disney had signed an exclusivity contract with Vekoma (which would have been a bum deal for Vekoma, as they’ve managed to sell 75 other Roller Skaters worldwide, with a third of those being identical clones to the Barnstormer, sans chain lift and transfer track), it still would have been identifiable as a stock product. It’s one of the few Walt Disney World attractions that seems to exist first and foremost to fill a generic ride category (Magic Kingdom doesn’t have a children’s coaster, so let’s add one), with the details of where, how, and why it should fit in the rest of the themed environment being a secondary concern. (Even the much maligned Primeval Whirl had more thematic justification of the stock model spinning mouse choice in the context of the roadside Americana theme.) It’s not even defensible as a way to absorb capacity on a busy day since a maximum of 16 riders per dispatch still sucks by Disney standards. What sane individual waits an hour in line to experience twenty seconds of weaving helices? At least with the Great Goofini makeover and second train it’s leagues better than its single train, looney tunes styled Anaheim cousin, but that isn’t saying much.
Grade: D
Under the Sea: Journey of the Little Mermaid
Well… it has a good queue line. Once we board the clamshell vehicles we’re then treated to a four minute thesis on the shortcomings of theme park attractions as a narrative art form. Much of it is technical in analysis: omnimovers demonstrate the completely the wrong choice of ride system for this particular story. Unlike the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean, which are very open-ended stories told via mood across space, the story of the Little Mermaid is mediated by events across time, and therefore requires a much more linear sequential ride format with clearly defined scene changes to advance the narrative. Both Peter Pan’s Flight and Adventures of Pooh are reasonably competent at this; the individual cars enter a room, a short scene plays out in front of them, and then you exit into the next room, where each door or dark threshold between scenes acts like the spatial equivalent of a cinematic cut. However, with a continuous chain of omnimovers it’s impossible to present any completed action directly to the audience for more than two seconds. Events and dialogue have to be open-ended and unfold in an infinite loop, so that you can enter and exit the scene at any moment and still have it work. But it doesn’t work with this story. Much of the action driving the plot on Under the Sea is still “closed”; meaning, as you enter Ursula’s chamber, you’re likely to hear the second half of a certain line of dialogue, followed by an empty pause (where in film we might expect a cut), and then only catch the first half of her next line (which must convey the same basic idea as the first line we partially missed) before being scooted out into the next scene. This short-form narrative doesn’t even play like a trailer for the feature film; it’s more like randomly skipping ahead on the playback bar of the movie. So incoherent is the plot in Under the Sea that I had to read a synopsis afterward to figure out that Ursula is not the one responsible for the celebratory ending where Ariel and Prince Eric are united. Thus the thesis ends with a basic question of aesthetics: why retell this story at all if it wasn’t going to be retold well? The answer, however, is only too obvious; it simply has nothing to do with aesthetics.
Grade: D
Tomorrowland
Apparently the future already happened and we all missed it. Ignoring the quality of the attractions within it and just focusing on the environment, I think this might be one of my least favorite themed lands anywhere on Walt Disney World property. The main midway in particular is very visually cluttered, and despite the futurist theme it feels like the most outdated section of the park. This outdatedness would have been okay if it was the future as envisioned by a previous generation; perhaps from Walt’s perspective in the 1960’s as seen in the Carousel of Progress, or from Jules Verne’s fiction as seen at Disneyland Paris’ magnificent Discoveryland? However, here it’s not a coherent representation of anyone’s vision of the future, either past, present, or fictional. Cartoonish flourishes interrupt the sleek chrome aesthetic, advertisements for attractions (or even vacation properties) compete for precious attention resources, and after navigating through the dense black hole of tourists bottlenecked in the narrow arcade midway, the space then opens up in the back with Space Mountain and Carousel of Progress both seemingly located way out in the middle of the Florida swamplands. Movie-based attractions have become popular in recent years, yet proper science-fiction stories are almost completely extinct in Tomorrowland. Of the Pixar films they chose to include both Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story, but not WALL-E? A revamp is rumored once New Fantasyland is complete, and I say it can’t come soon enough.
Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor
This interactive comedy club using digital puppet technology based on characters from Monsters, Inc.3 will most likely require some patience from its audience members. Comedy is a subtle art that thrives on spontaneity and subversiveness, both increasingly hard resources to cultivate at the Magic Kingdom. The show is padded with a lot of pretty tepid puns and corny one-liners (the staged bits involving the curmudgeonly Roz seem particularly uninspired and stagnate the show’s pacing considerably). However, if you’re lucky your patience will be rewarded (hopefully more than once) during an interactive segment when an unexpected reply from the audience is met with a perfectly timed ad-lib from on stage (or, more accurately, from behind stage). Who knows, maybe you’ll also discover a gem from the audience-submitted jokes they read at the end, but the legal disclaimer during the preshow warning of the many rights given up by participating (including human) meant that the best texted-in joke they could collect from our group was the one asking how to make a hanky dance. Yeah, you can show us the exit now, thanks.
Grade: D+
Stitch’s Great Escape
This is an excellent attraction for people who are either at a third grade maturity level or who might get enjoyment out of S&M activities. First you’re strapped down to your seat by a rigid horsecollar, then the lights are turned off, whereupon you’re subjected to five minutes of being sneezed on, jumped on, burped on, and sometimes spit on by a hyperactive blue creature called Stitch (voiced by a guy who has evidently swallowed an entire helium balloon). If that all sounds like too much fun, don’t worry because there are plenty of laborious talking exposition scenes added to the beginning and end of this experiential show to keep it from ever getting too exciting. However, to my eyes the best part of this attraction is that the authoritarian intergalactic penal system depicted in this story could potentially inspire a lively discussion about Michel Foucault’s thesis in “Discipline and Punish” afterward. This is how you make Disney magic, people.
Grade: F
Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin
It’s a first person shooter video game layered on top of an omnimover dark ride, and it gives you a joystick that lets you spin your car in circles as much as you want, whenever you want. How can this not be fun? Well, it’s not quite as fun at the very end when they rank your final score, and I realize that where I thought I had spent the last five minutes gunning down baddies like a mofo, in reality I rated only a few levels above Helen Keller. C’mon, Disney is supposed to be the place where dreams come true, so why do they have to shatter my delusion that I have a secret special ability that can make me a ninja assassin the first time I pick up a plastic laser gun? Of course I suppose that they shouldn’t make you feel good about your high score achievements too easily because apparently there are people who really can max out the score to 999,999. At that point I say they deserve to feel truly special at the end of the ride and are free to gloat over my paltry five-digit score, because what else can such people possibly have in their life that’s good?
Grade: C
Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover
True to its name, the Tomorrowland PeopleMover is able to move a lot of people in a short amount of time, which makes it a great attraction to fill between Fast Passes during the afternoon rush. The LSM-powered cars serve little practical purpose beyond letting you rest your feet for a few minutes in the shade while being chauffeured in circles around Tomorrowland at a breezy golf cart-paced clip, but honestly that alone is more than enough to make the PeopleMover better than the majority of mass transit themed attractions. While getting to take a tour through the inside of Space Mountain is cooler in concept than it is in reality (it’s dark and there’s a lot of screaming pre-teens, like you’re watching the worst slasher movie ever), the ride is well worth it just for including along the route the original EPCOT “Progress City” diorama envisioned by Walt Disney, back when the concept was still a fully functioning master-planned city rather than an educational theme park. The model is a little dim and dusty looking today; the forgotten promise of a future where we could all live happily together in a poverty-free, centrally organized, and technocratic community that had absolutely no similarities to communism.
Grade: C-
Space Mountain
I suspect that for many people Space Mountain was their first time ever on a “grown-up” roller coaster, meaning it was also the ride in which they decided whether to ride any more roller coasters in the future. While it’s a very fun ride that has justifiably earned it many adoring fans, it also has to be said that it can be a very intense and sometimes jarring ride as well, since roller coaster design in 1975 was still not much more advanced than plugging radians into straight lines and then hoping the steel fabricated product can complete the circuit successfully without killing anyone (at least outside of Germany). I personally enjoy the extra aggressiveness and retro quirks, but I worry that the experience might be “too much” for a first-timer assigned to the back row, prompting them to stay away from larger (but gentler) coasters they might encounter elsewhere in Florida. Despite technically being the largest of the five Space Mountains built around the world, I also think this one is probably the worst.4 More than the outdated engineering and special effects, it’s the absence of a soundtrack giving the layout a sense of organization and meaning that is most critically absent; the freely echoing sounds throughout the dome always subtly reinforce the perception that it’s all a very chaotic experience. A much more literal space travel theme (seemingly not updated since the Apollo space program, minus some colorful in-queue videogames) isn’t enough to hide the fact that Florida’s Space Mountain isn’t about anything, other than to deliver some roller coaster-type thrills in the dark. By the way, whose bright idea was it to put the loading and unloading platforms on the far side of the dome away from the rest of the park?
Grade: C+
Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress
In the queue and during the introductory show scene there are several reminders that the Carousel of Progress was originally designed for the 1964 World Fair. These messages partly function as an advisory implying that we should be prepared for a lot of cultural outdatedness, but also to justify that it’s okay because this was one of Walt’s most personal projects he worked on before his death, and so the message behind it is timeless. Thus begins the audio-animatronic show in four acts, in which we move from scene to scene (each representing the American family home during different eras of the 20th century) via a carousel mechanism. Perhaps tellingly, the early (and relatively unchanged) scenes taking place in the 1900’s and 1920’s are the most convincing in part because we can barely even apprehend the gulf of time from our perspective at the present, while it’s the final scene (updated several times, most recently in the 1990’s to predict what the year 2000 might look like) that earns the most unintentional guffaws. While the presentation is uniquely and delightfully “Disney”, the philosophical message behind it is in support of some pretty hardcore technological determinism. Maybe that’s a good thing? After all, the Carousel seems to propose an extremely optimistic interpretation of modern human existence: our lives will be continually made better by technology as we age, so like the narrator we can happily sit around enjoying our increasingly automated homes, waiting for the linear trajectory of science and industry to arrive at a singular conclusion that somehow always remains just out of reach within our lifetimes. Well, it’s optimistic depending on what you want out of life. The script suggests that the value of progress is as an abstract cultural force (there’s always a great big beautiful tomorrow to look forward to) rather than any specific concrete result of progress, although it leaves open the question of how we determine the value created by technological development (either in concrete or abstract) in the first place. In the 1940’s our narrator optimistically speculates that households will soon be able to use the newly-invented television to learn Greek and Latin. By the last scene the family decides that soon everything will become so automated that they won’t have to do anything for the rest of their lives except exist as a nuclear family unit of happy consumers. This leaves me to assume that they’re close to realizing the ultimate of all human values, upon which point the carousel of progress will finally come to a stop.
Grade: B-
Summary
The world’s most popular theme park is proof that popularity is not purely a factor of quality, although as one of the ultimate products of pop culture there’s no reason to delay twenty years before finally taking the trip across the Seven Seas Lagoon.
With so much simulated history saturating the always pristine and perfectly maintained Disneyland, it can be easy to forget that this place has a real historical legacy of its own. Any place else in the world with a pop-culture pedigree as powerful as Disneyland’s would do everything they could to preserve and advertise that history, but Disneyland always looks like it was built yesterday even when it looks like it was built in the 1870’s. However, one look at the diminutive Sleeping Beauty Castle centerpiece, not even 80 feet tall and rather square in appearance, reminds us that Disneyland had (relatively) humble beginnings. It wouldn’t be difficult to replace this castle with one of the larger, more elegant designs found in Paris or Shanghai; but to do so would be sacrilege, this tiny castle must be preserved for future generations, and everyone at Disneyland knows that. It’s the most photographed structure in the park not because it has a remarkably sublime presence or beautifully replicates any European landmarks, but because it represents its own history as the icon of Disneyland. Looking at it in person I thought that anything more would have been less, because perfection would have made it blend in too easily and I never would have stopped to realize these were the same walls Walt used as the backdrop when he inaugurated the park over half a century ago. You can even walk inside the castle through a stylized diorama of the Sleeping Beauty story, although it has clearly been updated with modern holographic technology.
Just as the castle is the most famous visual landmark at Disneyland, Dumbo is probably the most famous attraction, despite being one of the smallest and simplest in the park’s line-up. I don’t know why it’s so famous. It must have been when Harry Truman visited the park and refused to ride anything that was a symbol for the GOP. This fame can cause problems because the popularity of the attraction easily exceeds the low capacity that’s inherent in these types of circular flat rides, mitigated only by the fact that it runs very short ride cycles. With half-hour queues for a minute-long circular flight that could be found at any other amusement park or carnival, the balance of customer cost-benefit is tipped heavily towards the unfavorable side making Dumbo quite possibly the worst attraction at Disneyland. I did not bother to test this hypothesis for myself as my interest was as limited as my time, especially as the original iconic attraction built by a fledgling Arrow Dynamics was removed by the early 80’s with the current generation model opening in 1990. Does anyone know if the 1955 equipment still exists in a museum anywhere? If you’re going to wait that long in line, make sure it’s for something that is completely unique to Disneyland.
It’s a similar song over at King Arthur Carousel, except: A; there are more than 16 seats. B; the ride lasts longer than a minute. C; Not only has it operated continuously since Disneyland Day 1, it’s a relocated antique Dentzel model dating back to 1922. Normally Disney attractions try to embellish their sense of history through weathering techniques to give a greater sense of gravitas, but here is the rare (and somewhat bizarre) case in which the reverse is true, as Disney’s efforts to keep the machine looking fresh renders a weightlessly ahistorical, indifferent impression at first glance.
If there is one attraction at Disneyland with a lasting historical legacy that it proudly wears on its sleeve, it would have to be the Matterhorn Bobsleds. Walt Disney was notoriously adamant that the loud, visually intrusive wooden roller coasters of his day had no place in his Disneyland, but also realized paradoxically that his park would not be complete without a roller coaster, and so he challenged Arrow Development to devise a system that would be smooth, quiet, and easily disguisable within the alpine mountain structure envisioned for the empty space between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland.1 The result of this experiment was that the 1959-built attraction became the first tubular steel tracked roller coaster ever built, a designation that makes riding its rails feel akin to witnessing the first screening of the Jazz Singer. Considering how radically tubular steel coaster technology has permeated and shaped the entire theme park landscape today, it seems almost miraculous that we still have the originating design, largely unchanged from its first format.2 The rails maintain a delightfully quirky quality that predates computer design, and the braking mechanisms consist of small under friction skid pads not dissimilar to traditional wood coaster technology. The mountain exterior is almost the same as it was in 1959 save for minor cosmetics and plugging a few holes, and the interior retains the powder blue cavern walls with cartoonishly oversized illuminated crystals and icicles that make modern-day hyperrealists cringe with embarrassment (although these features were part of a 1978 refurbishment, as the original mountain had an empty interior that was more Space Mountain than Expedition Everest). The rolling stock, also necessarily redesigned over the years, maintains the tradition of simplicity and freedom that characterized roller coaster vehicles before speeds, g-forces, and the accompanying litigation required riders to be boxed in and shielded from the onrushing reality around them. The seating design is so low and minimalistic we sit nearly flat on the floor, either with plenty of room to stretch our legs, or snug and cozy if shared with a riding partner on our lap.3 Buckling the singular seatbelt, the brake pads release and we begin our alpine expedition.
We climb the lift hill in almost complete darkness through the center of the mountain, and at the top is a long plateau where the howl of a nearby yeti is heard. Reaching daylight, our bobsled glides around the precipice over the whole of Disneyland before curving downward and gaining momentum. A surprise encounter with the abominable snowman causes a last-second defense maneuver deeper down into the mountain. The convoluted track dips and twists along a high-speed chase in and out of the Matterhorn, sometimes dangling over the edge of a cliff in broad daylight, sometimes threatening to file our digits down through tight rock and ice caverns, sometimes submerging us into an impenetrable fog of darkness, and frequently playing tag with competing bobsled teams as we all run away from a second yeti attack.
Towards the end we open up into the outdoor section of the bobsled run, racing for the home stretch while dodging a few waterfalls. Approaching the base of the mountain, our bobsled hones in on a small lake as a landing spot and we brace ourselves for impact. Ker-sploosh! Sorry Big Thunder Mountain, but this is a splashdown finale done right. Fully submerged track with water displaced by nothing other than the force of the vehicle nose hitting it, it feels uncontrolled and comes with a real sense of danger that a rogue splash could find its way squarely into our face (my worry is fueled by those earlier waterfalls that weren’t shy about their disrespect for the vehicle clearance envelope). It’s a genuine final highlight to an always superb ride that creates the singular lasting impression for the roller coaster to be remembered by.
After only one ride I had no question that the Matterhorn Bobsleds would be my single most favorite attraction at the Disneyland Resort. It’s not just the retro charm that appeals to me (although that’s obviously a valuable dimension), but the Matterhorn is simply a really good roller coaster design, irrelative of the era it was built.
It starts with the rolling stock, of which I am always an advocate for unrestrictive, minimalistic designs. The spacious inline seating maintains comfort and smoothness while creating a high degree of exposure that dramatically heightens the visceral experience, wherein 27 miles per hour never felt so fast. The layout is another success, a long, intricate design that emphasizes flow and continuity over a sequence of divisible big moments. There are no pauses in pacing thanks to a single lift and the use of small skid brake pads for the ride’s blocking, which are installed along any sort of bend or slope where needed, creating uninterrupted action without sacrificing dispatch frequency. (Why have ‘advances’ in block braking technology worsened roller coasters in this regard?)
Yet despite the layout’s simplistic continuity and limited range of maneuvers, the non-computer aided track design imbues the experience with plentiful character (and a few occasions when you may need to brace yourself) that assures no two moments are ever alike, especially when variations in the indoor/outdoor thematic setting are introduced. I would have imagined the first tubular steel coaster would have been full of perfectly straight rails bridged by simple geometric curves, much like the steel wild mice of the era, to save on bending costs. But the track on the Matterhorn seems to have been personally sculpted by Karl Bacon and Ed Morgan’s own hands, such is the array of uniquely shaped curves, dips, and banking transitions that all flow into each other. The top-to-bottom descending layout also manages to hold speed from beginning to end so the thrills don’t start to wear off as it progresses; in fact it sometimes may feel like it’s getting faster the closer we get to the finish line. Because the layout is hidden by the mountain and the two track layouts are completely different, I can never memorize the Matterhorn no matter how many times I’ve ridden it or viewed the video, which always renews a sense of discovery and suspense before each ride that is missing from most coasters.
This would not have been possible without the alpine mountain design, which beautifully hides the layout from view so the coaster’s exact nature is never completely understood in its entirety without access to the blueprints. More than just a façade or a series of props distributed along the track, the mountain represents a perfect fusion is achieved between the theming and the roller coaster, such that it’s nearly impossible to imagine one without the other. Theme and ride are dual aspects of the same singular entity, with the former providing shape and structure for the latter, and the latter providing purpose for the former. Visually the ride is extremely economical, adding only exactly what is needed at each point along our journey, and indulging in nothing more. The retro-stylized interior (the “ice” on the cave walls looks more like icing on a cake) makes for a more humbled ride, one that shifts attention onto the experience itself rather than constantly beckoning us to remark on how clever the Imagineers are.
I realize that so far I have done nothing but gush praise about the Matterhorn, which might not make for the most interesting of reviews, but I don’t know what else to say since the Matterhorn is just about perfect for what it does. It is a fun, joyful roller coaster that I could probably ride a hundred times over and it would never fail to bring a smile to my face. How do I criticize that? The only thing I could possibly imagine adding to the Matterhorn would be an onboard soundtrack, but even that could go wrong in about a million different ways if the music isn’t perfect… and even if it was I’d still be slightly hesitant about it.
Actually, there is one thing I can criticize the Matterhorn for. It was the first modern attraction to regard a traditional exposed roller coaster structure as shameful or aesthetically displeasing. While a wooden coaster probably would not have been appropriate for Disneyland and the Matterhorn is perfect the way it is, its success also introduced and reinforced this notion that a roller coaster is made better by hiding it or making it appear to be something it really isn’t (this is true even of California Screamin’, a steel coaster disguised as a woodie). It’s a sentiment that remains subtly ingrained in nearly all dialogues concerning theme parks to this very day, and I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude for roller coaster enthusiasts to have about their own hobby.
“it’s a small world” was closed for refurbishment on the day of my visit. This might have been a stroke of luck for me, as not only did it mean I wouldn’t feel obligated to ride it and could use that time for an additional lap or two on the Matterhorn, but I also wouldn’t have to write another confused impression in my review and risk a backlash as happened last time. Be that as it may, I should mention that in the time since Disneyland Paris I’ve come to the realization that, despite spontaneously developing acute symptoms of wannabe hipster cynicism when I’m nearby this happiest cruise that ever sailed, from a creative design philosophy “it’s a small world” might very well be my ideal Disney dark ride.4
The reason I say this is because “it’s a small world” is one of the few rides (if not the only) in Disneyland that clearly subscribes to the auteur theory. This is a concept within cinema that states there should be a single individual responsible for the creative direction of a work (the author, aka “auteur” in French). Doing so makes the final product become a personally expressive work of art rather than an industrialized process in which everyone labors as an assigned task and creative vision arrives through committee consensus. In this case, one recognizes that “it’s a small world” very much ‘belongs’ to Mary Blair, even though many other people were involved in the creative process. It has a distinctive visual appearance makes it a genuine work of art, unaffected by cliché and the creative constraints of hyperrealism. This authorship gives the ride a warmer, more humanist feel since it functions as an act of personal expression. Although the status of auteur theory within cinema has more recently been questioned, I think at this stage in the history of theme park design a more powerful presence of auteur theory could only result in a very positive evolution in the creative quality of attractions and settings, especially as so many new theme parks spend millions of dollars to create disappointing, uninspired products. I’m still about as interested in Small World as I am in really good children’s picture books (translation: I am not interested), but that doesn’t mean I’ll deny the effort of artistry of either.
With Small World down my search for dark ride perfection at Disneyland seems to be running out of options. The question of whether it’s possible for a theme park attraction to use the grammar of dark rides to construct a compelling narrative and aesthetic experience that’s able to stand toe-to-toe with similar great works on the screen, stage, and page has so far turned up empty. Although I’ve found aspects to be admired in Small World, Pirates, and Haunted Mansion, I can’t say that any of them answers everything I’ve been looking for. Pirates’ success in framing the attraction as an act of storytelling becomes undone with a third-act emphasis on hyperreal imitation in the Uncanny Valley; Mansion’s brilliant narrative arc via the careful cultivation and transformation of mood is overshadowed by its hyperactive technophilia; and Small World’s artistic merits are in service of an idea that’s too twee and simplistic for my tastes (I have to judge on content as well as style). Looking toward the future, Tomorrowland appears fairly barren in high quality dark ride offerings, so if I’m going to find an 11th hour savior it’s going to have to be in one of Fantasyland’s old-school animated film based attractions.
I’ll start with the largest and most sophisticated, Peter Pan’s Flight. This attraction’s most obvious selling point is the inverted seating arrangement in “flying ships” suspended beneath an overhead track. This allows a greater level of immersion as the scenery envelopes us on all sides including below us, which allows for a particularly nifty scene when we soar higher and higher over an expansive model of London aglow after nightfall, seemingly carried aloft as much by the overhead track as by the ebullient “You Can Fly!” musical theme. While the technology and quality of a few of the sets are impressive considering this is an opening day original (although I do wonder how much of the ride today bears any resemblance to the version that debuted in 1955) it’s still a far cry from the efforts seen on later endeavors within the park, and the story does nothing for me. Basically re-creating the feature film in three minutes, my brain was put on overload trying to recall vague bits and pieces from childhood memories that could assemble the mad rush of images and sound clips into anything remotely resembling a coherent story. No doubt there’s a degree of unimpeachability in any attraction that’s managed to last for over half a century, but the ride is a direct precursor to trash like the Monster’s Inc. dark ride in neighboring California Adventure: both attractions that leech off their host movies for storytelling survival. While respecting this attraction’s heritage, I also think the suspended flying mechanism could use a little more updating. The cars occasionally bump and jerk around on the track in a way that’s not conducive to the illusion of sailing on a current of air. Factor in a low capacity that frequently is the cause of long queues, and we’ve got a ride that’s best not duplicated and left alone as the historical relic it is.
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is another “classic” dark ride with little electric buggies that buzz around past 2D sets on a journey to nowhere in particular. It has one major advantage over its contemporaries in the fact that almost no one who rides it has seen the movie it’s based on, and so the story is allowed to stand on its own two webbed feet. The narrative structure is more aptly suited to the dark ride format, being an episodic series of mostly unrelated misadventures that don’t require complex character motivations to explain the plot. It’s also decidedly more “PG” than one might believe. Aside from a nightmarishly psychedelic cartoon visual design throughout the entire attraction, the wild ride ends with a deadly train wreck, where we are then sent to (this is true) a fire and brimstone spewing Hell. And then the ride is over.
After initial reactions of “what the hell” (literally) I realized that this was exactly the sort ending that should please all the arty-farty pseudo-intellectuals like myself who always characterizes Disney as wimpy storytellers who only produce unrealistically happy endings. We exit in a state of aporia, the illusion of stasis as we giddily boarded our vehicle now shattered and replace with a sense of disresolve. It forces us to confront the experience after it’s over, and we can either deny that it had any significance or accept the absurdity of Mr. Toad’s scenario. This sounds like a gold mine for any theme park philosopher to discuss. So, have I found my masterwork dark ride at Disneyland?
The mere presence of an edgy, unhappy conclusion and an impressionistic acid-trip visual design shouldn’t by itself make the ride particularly deep, especially when every creative writing and art student has at some point in their academic career experimented and failed with such tactics. The attraction is definitely one of the better dark rides at Disneyland, and is willing to go to some darker places to make a lasting impression on the children and adults who ride it, but apart from binding the scenes and gags together with a central character and a vague story arc, does it have any significant value that elevates it above similarly oriented classic dark rides, such as Knoebel’s Haunted Mansion? Given that much of Mr. Toad could be interchanged with its spiritual successor, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, without significant alteration to either attraction’s mood or tempo, I’m inclined to answer “no”.
Snow White’s Scary Adventures takes nearly the same technology from Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and applies it across the Fantasyland plaza to a story that everyone is familiar with, based on Walt Disney’s biggest critical and commercial cinematic success. Like Mr. Toad, Snow White’s Scary Adventures pushes the threshold on whether parental guidance should be recommended for young children. In particular a scene in which we navigate through a dark forest of rotting trees with knotted bark frozen into menacing faces and branches extended as spindly fingers is far ghastlier than anything found inside Indiana Jones’ Temple of Cartoon Doom.
While the storyline is slightly better paced than Peter Pan, with more emphasis on mood than action, it suffers from the same setback where many of the events require our knowledge of the movie to draw the proper causal connections between scenes. Who’s the hag with the apple, what are the dwarfs’ roles in all of this, and why does Snow White spontaneously get a sparkly new boy toy at the end? Our experience is greatly enhanced if we’re familiar with the film to bridge the unexplained storyline gaps, but if we do have that familiarity then the dark ride feels derivative. (Although I’m not certain if even the movie adequately explains that last question…) Not that it matters too much since the moral of the story basically is to reaffirm our presumed heteronormative values, which is about as much depth as we could ever hope to extract from any of the myriad Disney princess-snags-a-prince movies. I’ll pass.
And then there was one.
Although it shares most of the same technology and storytelling methods as the other Fantasyland dark rides, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey does not have nearly as rich a pedigree. Walt Disney was never involved in this attraction’s creation, as it opened nearly three decades after the others, copied from a plan designed to fill out Tokyo Disneyland which had opened a few months earlier, and replacing the former Fantasyland Theater. It was yet another attraction designed to strictly copy the key scenes of the film it was based upon, an indication that it was probably the result of a by-the-numbers committee decision rather than an impassioned creative spark of an Imagineer burning to tell a story.
Yet unlike Snow White there’s no major psychosexual subtext, and the villainous characters have been reduced to minor background roles where they act at most as modifiers, rather than drive the narrative. The first couple of scenes are a bit confusing, but the ride quickly finds its rhythm, focusing on images and emotions rather than trying to string together a series of events. Once it does this, Pinocchio’s Daring Journey somehow manages to become a little bit of a masterpiece, one that exceeds the film it is based on.
Pinocchio’s journey is fundamentally an existential quest for authentic being; his desire is to become “a real boy”. Whenever Pinocchio tells a lie and betrays his authenticity, he experiences the horror of being forever publicly marked by his transgression as his nose grows another inch. The story’s Italian origins imbue it with strongly Catholic themes, most notably the idea of original sin and the collective guilt it inspires. At the center of this story is Pleasure Island, a not-too-subtle metaphor for at least a couple of deadly sins, and as we later learn, the price of admission to indulging in this electric playground’s many pleasures is very steep to pay. It is here that the story of Pinocchio becomes most perfectly fitted to a dark ride specifically at Disneyland: a place where everything is a lie and its citizens are all marionettes attempting to pass as humans. Unlike in a movie or novel, inhabiting the three-dimensional space of Pleasure Island implicates us all as equal sinners within the story, our status as silent observers removed as soon as we realize that right now at this very moment we’re participating in the exact same activity that’s about to condemn Pinocchio. The following scene as we pass by crates of naughty children transformed into donkeys sobbing for their mothers as they’re about to be shipped off into a hellish eternity of indentured slavery never ceases to turn my blood cold, and anyone that can ride through this and not feel a little bit like a scared, helpless child again must already be dead.
After that, only a confrontation on the dark, turbulent open seas with the leviathan itself can save our souls, even as it threatens to swallow us whole…
The only thing I could do without is Jiminy Cricket’s “wish upon a star” morale at the very end,5 but otherwise the happy ending feels rightfully deserved for once, as the proper resolution after being taken to some very dark corners during Pinocchio’s search for meaning and truth. Imagine how many children would be emotionally scarred if it were to end with the whale? But Pinocchio does manage to become a real boy, and we may feel as though we’ve shared in the same emotional growth. The attraction has the right balance between technology and simplicity, using only what is needed to make the story come to life while never distracting us from the experience by calling our attention to the Imagineer as the clever special effects wizard (here the Imagineer is only the humble artist and storyteller). Pinocchio’s Daring Journey is a truly great dark ride, quite possibly my favorite dark ride in all of Disneyland, and I think it should be one of the first examples referred to if anyone is interested in making a new dark ride into a genuine work of art.
entrenched expectations that it can be hard to deviate from the standard blueprint too far in pursuit of more innovative design. And because that iconic landscape is mostly defined by the strength of its precedents, that means that Fantasyland is the one land that feels the least like a modern immersive theme park, and more like a traditional early-Disney themed amusement park. It’s always seemed somewhat odd that, despite being the park’s flagship land, it always seems to lack a truly flagship E-ticket attraction comparable to the headliners of adjacent lands. Even in 2016, it still follows the amusement park ethos of a diverse collection of mid-ticket attractions spread out over a nicely landscaped yet thematically
unambitious (and slightly unfocused) environment. It would almost be charming, if only Shanghai Disneyland wasn’t a park that has utterly abandoned charm in its pursuit of grand spectacle. As such, it’s probably the one land in Shanghai Disneyland that never quite gels the way it’s supposed to.
to be. And individual attractions, whether based on beloved originals such as Peter Pan’s Flight or inspired by new concepts, such as Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, show an ambition to further push the land’s biggest attractions closer to that revered E-ticket designation.
Let’s start with the Enchanted Storybook Castle. As mentioned in the introduction, the castles have always been the nexus of Disney theme parks, but the nearly 200 foot tall Enchanted Storybook Castle has become a gravitational black hole. The biggest, but not necessarily the best; it lacks a sense of authentic architectural design and instead is rather easily identifiable as a giant show box affixed with some elaborate facades. That’s because it’s the first castle to fully program out its interior in a way that’s more than just a “discovery moment” for those willing to explore off the main pathway. Instead you get one big “wow moment” by stepping into the central atrium and standing in stunned disbelief at the towering volume above you, a seemingly too-delicate chandelier suspended in the middle of this grand void. As stunning as this moment is, it’s also fleeting, as once we’re done looking up we’re quickly looking around for signs of where to move next.
Aaaaand… that’s it. About 50% too long with 50% too little content, the “Once Upon a Time” Adventure is a potentially decent walk-through attraction that fell victim to attempts to make it a higher ticket attraction than it really is. If it had borrowed more from Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty castle walk-through, making it free flowing (eliminating the queue that sets expectations high and patience thin) and allowed the scenes to loop instead of pulse (allowing guests to linger as long or as briefly as they like), they might have ended up with something I could recommend in more instances than just for Disney attraction completionists or if the line is nearly non-existent.
random action slathered over it from beginning to end. The final coaster segment marginally improves on the first, but just when it seems to get going with a fun little double S-bend,
you run into the brakes. The brake run features just a simple landscape cottage scene instead of the more detailed version featured in the Magic Kingdom with the Evil Queen.3 Overall it’s not a bad ride, some parts are even quite good, but it does seem to represent a failure to fully execute on the original vision.
If that was an imagined worse-case scenario, the actual maze probably turned into as close to a best-case experience as I could have expected. Both the movie’s fussy CGI photorealism and likenesses to the live actors have been reduced back into simple and effective animated forms, which are then physically expressed with an aesthetic that fits comfortably within Fantasyland while updating it to something slightly darker, more detailed, and more mature than the loopy pastel phantasmagorias of the existing Alice attractions. Most importantly, the maze offers some moments of intimacy and discovery that are otherwise sorely lacking across the rest of Fantasyland. Let’s take a tour.
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