If you search “runaway railway” on YouTube right now, 18 of the first 25 results are full ride-throughs of the Hollywood Studios attraction. Ten of those 18 videos are in 4K, a resolution twice as crisp as most consumer TVs. One of them was shot with a 360-degree camera so you can even get a good look at the ceiling if you’re into that sort of thing.
The Disney Parks don’t bother much with physical media anymore – the annual planning videos they used to mail out now stream directly from DisneyPlanning.com – and they don’t have to. Now that you, me, and the Petersons from Paducah are walking around with cameras that can record the ceiling of It’s A Small World in HD on accident, there’s no reason for Disney to keep paying the postage.
But in 1980, still three years away from Sony releasing the first consumer camcorder, Walt Disney World media was a little tougher to come by. Eight-millimeter film offered seven or so minutes of memories, minus sound. Disney picked up the slack in the late ‘70s with souvenir reels in Super 8, complete with newsreel narration and an organ score fit for a funeral home.
Enter VHS
At the same time, the Victor Company of Japan introduced a new media format that would beat out its competition, usher in the home video industry, and remain in production until 2016. The Video Home System was here to stay, and A Dream Called Walt Disney World would be the Florida Project’s first ever VHS tape.
Today, you can walk into any given thrift store and buy VHS tapes two for a dollar. VCRs will take up no less than an entire load-bearing wall. Any of them can be yours for the price of a fast food value meal. By the dawn of the 1980s, blank tapes cost about $25, just over $70 today. Even if you settled for a middle-of-the-road Sears model VCR, it would set you back $1389.88 before taxes. That’s almost $4,000 today, or about 12 of those 4K TVs most people don’t have in their living rooms yet. The prices would fall across the board in the following years, but in ’80 or ’81 – the video lists one year and the case lists another – a VHS tape from Walt Disney World wasn’t just a souvenir, it was a showpiece.
The setup
When the Petersons got back to Paducah, they’d tell the neighbors all about Walt Disney World. If anyone took the bait, they had a rewindable opportunity to show off both their magical vacation and their tastefully wood-paneled VCR. A Dream Called Walt Disney World was a 25-minute commercial, as much for its medium as its source material.
Enduring this crash course in Video Home System history is my scenic route to saying A Dream Called Walt Disney World is weird.
If the promise of theme park home video coverage enticed you enough to click on this, you’re probably familiar with the ‘90s planning videos that most kids ritually sacrificed to their VCR. Those have a distinct rhythm, structure, and language. By the ‘90s, everybody with a TV had a working knowledge of Walt Disney World. Where it was. What it had. Whether or not they could afford it.
This is a different animal. The Magic Kingdom was only ten. It was shy a mountain. The Jungle Cruise skippers still packed heat. Even the footage of Walt himself feels different. He tells the familiar story of founding Disneyland to play with his daughters and later points to the wall-sized map of his beloved ‘Florida Project.’ But there’s little mythology here. Sure, his name is on the clamshell case no fewer than nine times, but the deification and reinterpretation of his every last quote is still decades away. Even if you clock it from 1981, the footage from his press conference was only 16 years removed. For reference, that would be like the 2020 planning video including footage from The Incredibles. Doesn’t seem so long ago, does it?
Fixing a very real problem
A Dream Called Walt Disney World presents a resort in quiet peril. The 1979 energy crisis flattened attendance, despite the retirement of pay-as-you-ride ticket books in favor of a $9.50 all-in-one admission fee. EPCOT Center, still a hard-hat zone with a year to go, isn’t mentioned. Soon after it opened, a Goldman Sachs analyst would condemn it as “a one-shot, upward blip for Disney’s earnings.” Corporate raiders weren’t far behind. None of this panic seeps through the tape – there’s a montage dedicated entirely to ice cream – but considering how much this angles the resort as a world away from everyday troubles, it’s worth remembering.
Fair warning: some copies start with the Sorcerer Mickey bumper for Walt Disney Home Video that YouTube comments tell me traumatized a lot of unsuspecting children.
If you can make it past the Mouse, there’s an ominous narrative opening to A Dream Called Walt Disney World. A little girl cautiously wanders the postcard greenery in front of Cinderella Castle. It’s shot low and imposing. “If you’ve ever had a dream and had that dream come true,” coaxes narrator Dick Tufeld, no less than the voice of Lost in Space’s iconic robot, “then you know a little something about the magic of Walt Disney World.” The girl opens the gates, sees her big-headed cartoon friends, and smiles all her fears away. Then the band wakes up with music that sounds stunningly similar to Ralph Burns’s Wally World fanfare from National Lampoon’s Vacation and the singing starts.
A lost legacy
“The Magic of Walt Disney World” is a cotton candy cousin to opening day Epcot classics like “It’s Fun to Be Free.” The title twinkles in over a helicopter shot of the Castle spires against a red clay sunset, still a sight to behold in fuzzy 4:3. “You turn around and then there’s more than you ever dreamed of!” promise the choir as vignettes of laughing guests and exotic entertainment fade and zoom into one another. There’s even a bumbling cameo from Brer Bear some 11 years before the Magic Kingdom got a Splash Mountain. It’s peanut butter and jelly for the tourist soul. Walt Disney World looks warm, welcoming, and worth the then-unthinkable $1.31 a gallon to make a pilgrimage.
Even with just 16 of its 25 minutes spent on the only park, A Dream Called Walt Disney World covers bases no planning video has in the 39 years since. The PeopleMover earns more real estate than Space Mountain. The Country Bears and the Adventureland Steel Drum Band both get a turn in the spotlight. Instead of later videos’ Order-Of-Longest-Line editing, each land is given its intentionally isolated due. If one of the Peterson’s guests got up for an ice-cold Tab at the wrong time, they’d sit down assuming Fantasyland was in an entirely different theme park than Liberty Square. It’s a refreshing reminder, sometimes forgotten in the heat of battle/vacation, that each area is more than its Fastpass-eligible attractions. Some of those attractions, too, play very differently from their eventual reputations. The Haunted Mansion is introduced with raw Gothic menace, shot low and shrouded in ash-blue fog that could’ve rolled right off The Legend of Hell House. All Pirates of the Caribbean footage belongs to the Disneyland version, though that’s just the start of a misleading tradition that would only get worse in the 1990s.
The back nine of A Dream Called Walt Disney World, once you’ve seen the greatest hits, is the more interesting for any fellow armchair historians. As further helicopter shots remind, there wasn’t much to the resort at the time. But don’t tell that to the narrator. “Once you’re here, just getting around is half the fun.” This is a must-watch for the Disney Transportation devotees. Boats. Monorails. Golf carts. Wagons. Horses. Cars on Main Street. Buckets over Fantasyland. Double-decker buses. Normal-decker buses. All set to a cocktail-jazz cover of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah and juxtaposed with the slickest editing tricks of 1980. It’s a carefree time capsule of a better yesterday, when Monorails still might’ve been the future and you could wage bumper boat war on the Seven Seas Lagoon.
A better yesterday when all Contemporary guests wore safari suits the color of gender reveal parties. That’s no slam against the current tourist fashion. I just like safari suits. The exterior looks mod as ever, but the interior has never looked better. A breezy marvel of glass and translucent trees, blushing orange in the lounge light. The Polynesian, by contrast, looks like an all-inclusive resort on the other side of the globe. If you never witnessed its original lobby and wonder why it’s still mourned to this day, Dream makes a compelling case. Every couch was guaranteed a sun-streaked tropical view and a natural soundtrack of softly rolling waterfalls.
Even as the minutes tick down, A Dream Called Walt Disney World finds time to explain how the flamingo pool worked on Discovery Island. It finds time to show an artistan hand-crafting lamps at Cristal Arts in the Walt Disney World Village. Goofy may or may not water-ski. At the time, spending a week at Disney was not a foregone conclusion. By the end of the decade, park media didn’t need to convince anybody to book their flights; there’s a reason Disney never bothered with too many more souvenir tapes, but started offering planning tapes for free. It’s a subtle difference – here’s what you can do here vs here’s how you’ll be spending your time here – but Dream defines it with a word.
On the transition from Magic Kingdom to Vacation Kingdom, the narrator rattles off a list of the park’s guiding principles. “History, prophesy, adventure, fantasy.” Each a philosophical placeholder for its respective land. The last word is “Nostalgia.” Today, the Peterson’s grandchildren and their neighbors’ grandchildren and most Paducah residents are nostalgic for Walt Disney World. It’s baked into the brand. But in 1980, nostalgia only meant Main Street USA.
In 1980, Walt Disney World wasn’t quite Walt Disney World yet. In 1980, it was still a dream you had to buy a tape to prove you had.
