This year, Walt Disney World turns 50. Not that you’d notice, even if you do frequent sites like this one. Despite the best efforts of park security, ticket prices, and zoning laws, the world with a small w has breached the castle walls.
According to the annual earnings report, Disney park closures due to the ongoing pandemic cost the company $6.9 billion in 2020 alone. Disneyland and California Adventure remain shuttered, with the rest operating at varying degrees of low-capacity. Last April, the company furloughed 100,000 employees from its parks and hotels. In November, it was announced that 32,000 of them would be fired outright by March of this year. That news came just a few months after Disney executives bounced back from their 15% pay cuts and two weeks to the day that another earnings report celebrated a fourth-quarter $720,000,000 healthier than expectations.
If you check any of the usual forums, mourning is reserved for attractions now indefinitely delayed if not cancelled outright. The sudden retirements of famed Disney Imagineers Joe Rohde and Kevin Rafferty were met with expected tributes, but also woeful projections of what this could mean for the Magic Kingdom.
What about the Tron coaster and the new Cirque du Soleil show and the Star Wars resort and the drastic transformation already announced for Epcot’s 40th anniversary in 2022? What of everything that would’ve, should’ve, could’ve come after that?
The last time the company painted itself into this corner, the internet was too young to hold it accountable.
When Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took the reins in 1984, a single Disney stock cost just under a dollar. By the end of 1989, it cost about eight. The ‘90s looked so bright they were branded – The Disney Decade. More parks. More attractions. More resorts. Onward, upward, and happily ever after.
“This is the ‘90s – the decade we re-invent Disneyland,” said Eisner to a room full of popping flashbulbs and pointing microphones in the Disneyland Hotel. It was overdue, considering the original park hadn’t seen a new land since 1972’s Bear Country. If anyone doubted the company’s commitment to its crown jewel, they had not one, but two primetime TV specials to change their mind.
Disneyland’s 35th Anniversary Celebration aired on February 4th, 1990 as an incarnation of The Wonderful World of Disney, not quite a month after Eisner’s press conference. It is, to put it mildly, a potent cultural artifact.
The special is framed as something the cast of Cheers (minus Ted Danson and Kirstie Alley) is watching at the bar instead of the usual, preferred mudwrestling. Tony Danza takes a Zoom call from Miss Piggy in the queue of Star Tours. Ernest P. Worrell waxes nostalgic about his first trip to Disneyland with his grandfather, who looks stunningly like Ernest P. Worrell. Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff tie it all up in a neon bow with their rendition of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Executive produced by Halloween’s Debra Hill. Directed by Animal House’s John Landis.
The Celebration has the texture of fresh-spun cotton candy and only a little more nutritional value. It deserves closer inspection, if only as evidence of a company much looser around the collar – they dull the blow of Ronald Reagan’s appearance by having Woody Harrelson mistake him for an audio-animatronic. But time has borne it out as the less substantial of the two 1990 programs.
The Disneyland Story borrowed the name of the first ever Wonderful World of Walt Disney broadcast and premiered sometime after that 36-year TV staple ended. It’s hard to find any material on it at all besides the fact that it played on KCAL-TV in 1990, during the few years Disney owned the license.
Even if Wonderful World had held on, The Disneyland Story would’ve been an odd fit. If anything, it would’ve been more at home on Turner Classic Movies.
It opens with the cognitive dissonance of Sleeping Beauty Castle and Alan Silvestri’s Back to the Future score. To the average viewer, it’s confusing. To the average theme park fan, it’s blasphemy. But there is a reasonable excuse – train-based time travel.
Night Court star Harry Anderson emerges from a film-noir fog at the Main Street Station of the Disneyland Railroad. “This train usually goes around the park,” he says, “but today it’s going someplace else.” From the cushy confines of Walt’s personal Parlor Car, Anderson rolls into Disneyland history through the miracle of archival footage and rotoscoped fireworks.
For all but the most dedicated Disney scholars, it’s worth watching for the raw material alone.
Walt’s famous “Welcome” speech is just the jumping off point for opening day coverage. Qualified by Anderson as “the biggest live event in television history,” the grandeur of the broadcast hasn’t faded, even in black-and-white. Bob Cummings, Ronald Reagan, and Art Linklater take turns introducing attractions and atmospheres to the world. Cro-Magnon ancestors of the Seven Dwarfs invade Fantasyland. The future of Tomorrowland is established as a purely scientific prediction of the future, specifically the distant utopia of 1986. Then Walt blows his cue on national television, losing some luster and whispering to the cameraman, “I thought I had a signal.”
May not be much in the grand scheme, but The Disneyland Story pokes more holes in company mythology than any similar program would in the Airbrushed-Cigarette Era.
Visiting politicians are remembered in jazzy montage. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gets a special shout-out for being barred from visiting at the height of the Cold War. Day-one headlines spiral in, no punches pulled – Disneyland Shatters Illusion, Gripes Tarnish Disneyland’s Glitter, etc. Similarly blunt coverage underlines the company’s early ‘80s doom and gloom. Fat Cat Chasing Mouse may just be a retroactive way to set up Michael Eisner as saint and savior, but it’s a sacrilegious admission by modern standards.
Make no mistake, though, The Disneyland Story is still hagiography.
The fact that the cost of the park wasn’t deducted from employee paychecks is treated as an act of generosity by Uncle Walt. The grueling construction is doubled-timed away to the tune of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” with Disney villains occasionally interrupting to berate the workers. So threatens the evil queen: “You know the penalty if you fail.” Third-shift crews earn their own gratuitously stylized music video set to Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight.” The inside of a robot pirate’s skull gets more screen-time than a single employee’s face.
Disneyland is celebrated as an old friend, the cast members as flesh-and-blood animatronics in its life story.
Any past signs of weakness are admitted only out of present arrogance – The Walt Disney Company is ironclad and unstoppable once again.
The special ends with a boldly called shot, or rather five.
Anderson offers a peek into the future from his time-traveling train. In 1991, an ambitious stunt show based on the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would swing into Frontierland. In 1993, a Little Mermaid attraction would make its overdue debut. In 1994, George Lucas’s continued collaboration would bear terrifying fruit with Alien Encounter. In 1996, presumably after another sequel or two, Dick Tracy’s Crimestoppers would finally bring the man in the banana suit to theme parks. In 1999, Roger Rabbit would arrive in high-tech style with Baby Herman’s Runaway Buggy Ride as part of a massive Hollywoodland expansion.
Besides a horse-drawn hearse being purchased for the Indy show, none of this ever came to pass.
The ‘90s would be a long decade for losing. Euro Disneyland scorched the bottom line in 1992. Major additions now seen as wins started as compromises, with Animal Kingdom ditching an entire land and California Adventure opening as a rough draft. Smaller projects around the world got nickled, dimed, and bankrupted outright. Eisner quietly stopped making so many televised appearances.
Despite programs like this softly assuring visitors to the contrary, The Walt Disney Company was no longer a boutique business run by people who knew the name above the door. For the first time since rumblings of that hostile takeover a decade prior, the paying customers knew too much – they knew they were paying, and not necessarily for pixie dust. Despite its best efforts, The Walt Disney Company was unmistakably corporate.
The Disneyland announcements feel eerily similar to the Epcot announcements from 2019. Major attractions overhauled. Major attractions added. Every last one of them branded, one way or another. It seemed the very identity of the park would forever nipped and tucked away, even with assurances to the contrary.
Without the websites to record such things, it’s hard to say what the contemporary response was to the announcements. But then again, without the websites to record such things, who’d really go to Disneyland six years later and ask Guest Services what happened to the Dick Tracy ride?
The gift of forgetting no longer exists. The wider internet and outlets like this one will always have the coverage available, exciting as the day it was announced. It’s the reason Disney no longer needs TV specials like The Disneyland Story to get the point across – there’s a captive audience happy to do that legwork now.
It also might be the reason The Walt Disney Company has once again assumed monolithic status, no longer a corporation, but an all-encompassing lifestyle. Annual passholder Facebook groups are full of fans taking every melted Mickey Bar as a betrayal of their relationship with the Mouse. A bakery opened at Disney Springs last weekend and immediately racked up an 11-hour wait, despite there being another location of the same bakery a mere thirty minutes away. All social media circa March 2020 is lousy with the grief of visitors unsure when they’ll hug Chip or Dale again.
The intention of this comparison, Disneyland’s 35th to Walt Disney World’s 50th, is not condescension. That would defeat the purpose of it appearing on ThemeParkTourist.com.
The point is perspective.
Disney is now one of the largest media conglomerates in modern history, promoting that rank by default back to the dawn of man. Thanks to the unprecedented wrench in the gears that is the novel coronavirus, the parks are in worse shape than they ever were during the Disney Decade. Given the forced departure of so many Imagineers, the future’s looking stagnant, too.
It’s all the more frustrating in the bigger picture. Last December, shares of The Walt Disney Company reached an all-time stock market high of $170 a share. The massive asterisk is that for the first time since Eisner, theme parks aren’t pulling the cart. Disney is in the streaming business now, Country Bears and cast members be darned.
The lesson is that every cancellation, delay, and modification has a reason. It’s fair to express disappointment, but only when the deeper costs are factored in. More than a few life-long fans are bemoaning the loss of Disney’s annual pass program for its west-coast parks. But that’s not personal. It cuts costs, controls crowds, pushes tickets, etc. It’s one more move from an unfathomably large entity designed to mint money. Identify it as such, make peace with it, and save the tears for Splash Mountain crew instead of Splash Mountain wildlife.
Despite no announcements of festivities, passes for the Magic Kingdom’s 50th anniversary on October 1st sold out by January 12th. There will still be complaints about the Tron coaster and the Guardians ride and the Star Wars hotel by then and, in all likelihood, no further updates.
Where’s the Dick Tracy ride? is now a valid question. Anybody can bring up a dozen reported variations of the same press release on their smartphones. But the ease of access, the volume of information makes the human factor behind it all even harder to spot.
Take The Disneyland Story as a cautionary tale and magic trick.
No announcement is set in stone. There’s a reason Disney doesn’t promise much until shovels hit dirt.
All company lore should come pre-packaged with a boulder of salt. Archival footage may not lie but editing can. Not all of the Walt quotes they hang on construction walls are actually Walt quotes. The signature two-finger Disney wave probably has more to do with the aforementioned cigarettes than it does grace.
Most vitally and most deceptively, the people who make the magic happen are not just as important as the audio-animatronics – they’re more important. In fact, they’re all that matters. Any attempt to blur that line is just propaganda.
So whenever the next refurbishment gets pushed or another attraction closes without any planned replacement, click on the expected coverage, but remember The Disneyland Story. Try to name all, if any, of the five announcements that came to nothing and how much their absence mattered in the long run. Then consider the anonymous people written off with “After Midnight” and yelled at by cartoon characters in the literal trenches of Disneyland.
The Walt Disney Company is more corporate and more vague about that fact than ever. There’s no Walt, no Eisner to point at as a steadfast ambassador. It owns too many superheroes, space pilots, and studio catalogs to worry about that now. Who wants to think about another 30,000 employees losing their jobs when there are thirty new shows coming to Disney+?
Now that customer service is a legitimate biohazard, the PR conflict between people and magic has never been muddier, but the difference needs to be absolutely clear.
The real one only gets a few minutes of screen time in The Disneyland Story. But fingers-crossed for that Dick Tracy ride.
