When you think of Disney, you may think of the storied, golden years of animation heralded by Walt himself; of today’s international media conglomerate acquiring Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and more; you may imagine the world’s leading theme parks with fairytale castles at their center, or pirates, princesses, and parades. One thing that you probably don’t associate with Disney? Failure.
Our Declassified Disaster series was created to share the rare instances when Disney Parks have missed the mark, with in-depth entries exploring unfortunate attractions like Stitch’s Great Escape, The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management, Disney-MGM Studios’ stalled Backstage Studio Tour, the sputtering Rocket Rods in Disneyland’s abysmal New Tomorrowland ’98, and the laughably bad Journey into YOUR Imagination. But those attractions, too, eventually close or crumble, living on only in the stories people tell about them. What happens when a mistake isn’t so easily brushed under the rug or written off? What happens when the thesis behind an entire theme park is broken?
When Disney’s California Adventure opened in 2001, Disney executives and designers quickly came to terms with the fact that they had a more permanent problem on their hands. An entire park of problems, California Adventure was underbuilt, under-funded, and devoid of the kinds of rides, characters, stories, and settings people grew to expect thanks to Walt’s own Disneyland just a few hundred feet away. And unlike a passing film or a maligned ride refurbishment, the $600 million second gate at the newly-rechristened Disneyland Resort was a problem that wouldn’t get better with time.
Our deep, deep dive into Disney’s “California Misadventure” is a two-part exploration into the history of Disney’s biggest failure (and its rise from the ashes). In this entry – Part I – we’ll trace the park’s development and step into California Adventure as it appeared on its opening day to explore exactly why fans, executives, and Imagineers agreed that it was broken at its core. Then, in Part II, we’ll walk through the park as it appeared after a grand, billion-dollar re-opening in 2012… and see why Disney may be making its most costly mistake all over again. Settle in and let’s get started.
Disneyland Park
Image: Disney
Before Disneyland, amusement parks in the United States really came in one of two forms. Some originated as Victorian-era “picnic parks” supplied with patrons via the new railroad system, adding dance halls, carousels, and wooden roller coasters over decades and decades. Others took shape as seaside boardwalks with gaudy, attention-grabbing games, food stands, and thrilling rides open to the public.
Given that those were the prevailing images of such amusement parks, it’s no surprise that when Walt showed interest in opening his own, his wife Lillian asked, “Why would you want to get involved with an amusement park? They’re so dirty and not fun at all for grownups.”
“Well, that’s exactly my point,” Walt told her. “Mine isn’t going to be that way. Mine’s going to be a place that’s clean, where the whole family can do things together.”
Image: Disney
And when the first guests to Disneyland stepped through the gates of Walt Disney’s new attraction in 1955, they would find that it was entirely unlike anything that had ever come before. Walt Disney’s park had it all: lost Indian jungles, turn-of-the-century Midwest towns, gleaming cities of the future, the reverent and romantic Old West, storybook villages… Brought to life by filmmakers and artists, the park transported guests to idealized, romanticized times and places; to the “worlds of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy” passed through a lens of nostalgia and cinema; places not found on a map, but born of pop culture’s collective vision of adventure, frontier, fantasy, and tomorrow.
If there was one thing Disneyland did not have, it was size. The original land purchase totaled about 160 acres, of which 60 was occupied by Disneyland. The rest was divided between the massive parking lot – with a larger footprint than the park! – and the various “backstage” facilities powering the property. Otherwise, the entire complex was landlocked by streets to the west, south, and east, and the under-construction Interstate-5 to the north. Situated cozily between existing streets, Disneyland was snuggly cemented in place with little room for growth.
Photo courtesy Orange County Archives
That might’ve been fine… except that once word of Disney’s land acquisition got out, the orange groves around the property were gobbled up as hotels, motels, convenience stores, and more squeezed into every square foot of Harbor Blvd. and Katella Ave., desperate to get a foothold near the young park. Of course, each built its sign taller, brighter, and louder than the rest as the sleepy farmland of Anaheim became a bustling urban landscape.
It’s no secret or surprise to fans of Disney Parks that Walt detested the encroaching battle lines of reality. And for first-time visitors, it can be astounding that, from the Disneyland Railroad, you can hear the commotion of cars; guests staying at off-property hotels can be a 5 minute walk from the parks; and the Monorail provides astounding aerial views of traffic jams on Harbor Blvd. While the ingenious earthen berm built around the park acted as a great wall to keep visual intrusions out, the fact remained that the real world was a little too close to Disneyland for Walt’s liking.
It was Disneyland’s tiny footprint, of course, that inspired Walt to do things differently in his second take.
The Florida Project
Image: Disney
Dissatisfied by the rapid urbanization of Anaheim and the way that the modern world so invaded Disneyland’s sphere, Walt and his team did something unusual: they began scouting for a space to build something else. But this time, Walt was determined to control the experience on a much larger scale. Of course, we know now that the Walt Disney Company was able to purchase massive landholdings in sleepy Central Florida (this time under false company names so as not to attract the attention of developers, who might otherwise rush in to buy the land themselves) and even work to establish the Reedy Creek Development District, a strange (and questionably legal) political arrangement where the Walt Disney Company effectively governs itself and grants its own permits.
Walt Disney famously said of his then-unnamed Florida Project: “Here in Florida, we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland… the blessing of size. There’s enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.” And it did. In Florida, Walt and company had well over 25,000 acres of undeveloped land, spanning about 40 square miles (famously, the size of San Francisco, or twice as large as Manhattan).
Image: Disney
Walt Disney World opened in 1971. Arriving guests found the headlining Magic Kingdom theme park – a younger, larger sister to Disneyland. And as Walt had predicted, unlimited land and the benefit of foresight and master planning allowed Magic Kingdom to build higher capacity attractions, to replace Disneyland’s narrow pathways with wide open plazas, and to build its infrastructure with an anticipation of international success that Disneyland simply hadn’t accounted for – larger restrooms, larger restaurants, etc.
But unlike at Disneyland, the theme park wasn’t alone. Walt Disney World was billed as the “Vacation Kingdom of the World,” and even though only a small corner of the property had been developed, it offered plenty to earn that title. Guests arriving for Magic Kingdom would park at the Transportation and Ticket Center and board a Monorail or ferry boat, looping around the 200-acre, man-made Seven Seas Lagoon (itself larger than the original Disneyland property purchase) and passing by two deluxe resort hotels. Walt Disney World offered hiking, boating, fishing, and swimming.
And it only got bigger from there.
Image: Disney
Of course, Walt Disney World today includes four theme parks, two water parks, 27 resort hotels (and growing), four golf courses, a campground, a “downtown” shopping area, and thousands of undeveloped acres all connected by monorails, boats, hundreds of miles of walking paths, an arsenal of hundreds of buses, and literal highways between destinations. The behemoth operation grew larger and larger over its four-and-a-half decade life.
And then… there was Disneyland.
Growing
Image: Disney, via AngryAP.com
The early 1990s – just as Walt Disney World was gearing up for its fourth theme park – Disneyland looked… well… quite a bit like it did in 1955: a single theme park, its gargantuan parking lot, and the nearby Disneyland Hotel.
Spurred by still-fresh CEO Michael Eisner, The Walt Disney Company planned to change that. Early on in his tenure, Eisner began to impress upon his team that Disneyland needed to change. If Walt Disney World could command stays between four and ten days, it was nothing short of a waste that Disneyland – even four decades after its opening – remained a single-day park catering almost entirely to local audiences. By far, most of Disneyland’s visitors seemed to come from Southern California neighboring states, and they’d spend one day – maybe two – before moving on.
If Eisner had his way, Disneyland could, should, and would grow into a multi-day, international resort destination, just like Walt Disney World.
Image: Disney
On May 8, 1991, the company officially announced plans for a $3 billion expansion that would take the measly Disneyland and turn it into the Disneyland Resort. In an all-at-once growth spurt, Disney would transform the tiny Anaheim resort property to a world class destination.
It would include a complete rebuild of the existing Disneyland Hotel, the addition of three new, immersive resort hotels, a 5,000 seat amphitheater called the Disneyland Bowl, the Disneyland Center shopping district built around a six-acre lake, and the cornerstone of the project: a second theme park, built on the only expansion pad Disneyland had: its own parking lot.
Image: Disney
This massive expansion would’ve equipped the resort with new parking decks, each leading to Peoplemover systems whisking high volumes of visitors to the resort’s central hub, where they would stand directly between the entrances to the two theme parks in the new Disneyland Plaza. Directly across from the Main Street Train Station and the timeless wrought iron gates of Disneyland would stand the entrance to the second theme park: the most ambitious one Disney had ever designed. Read on…
Westcot rises…
They say that the sequel is never quite as good as the original. So imagine the pressure put upon Disney Imagineers tasked with designing the follow-up park to act as an equal partner and companion of the most beloved theme park on Earth.
It would be impractical to attempt to build a park that could match Disneyland’s fantasy environments or fairytale settings. Instead, they would follow Walt Disney World’s lead. Specifically, Imagineers looked to Florida’s EPCOT Center to design a park dedicated to science, culture, technology, and innovation. As the concept traveled from the East Coast to the West, it would receive a fitting name change. On May 8, 1991, the Possibilityland: WESTCOT Center was announced.
Despite its name, Disneyland’s second gate would differ dramatically from the similar concept that acted as the second gate at Walt Disney World. Even by Westcot’s 1991 announcement, Epcot was already beginning to look dated. Its architecture and concept had rooted it very specifically in the unmistakable and distinctive style of its 1982 opening. Its wide concrete expanses, cool gray colors, and rigid brutalist architecture had created a vision of the future that was harsh, sterile, and cold to audiences of the 1990s (and would only feel more that way into the 21st century).
Westcot would set out to do things in a much more West Coast fashion, filling the park with waterfalls, forests, organic rocks jutting from the ground, and a much more naturalistic vision of tomorrow. (This cozier, warmer, more 21st-century-friendly vision of the future was so well-loved by Imagineers and executives, they planned to export it back to Florida’s Epcot as well, as we chronicled in its own in-depth Possibilityland: Epcot’s Project: Gemini feature.) Westcot would even replace the divided countries of World Showcase with a more united realm celebrating the “four corners” of the globe and the interconnectedness of culture and our shared histories, with an epic boat ride rivaling Pirates of the Caribbean connecting them all.
Image: Disney
The centerpiece of the whole park would be Spacestation Earth, a sort of Californian cousin to Epcot’s 180-foot-tall white geodesic sphere. But California’s – in fitting with Westcot’s warmer style and scale – would be nearly twice as tall – 300 feet – and gleaming gold with a lattice of white hovering supernaturally around it.
Make no mistake: the magnitude of this Disneyland Resort would be stunning. On top of building new parking decks, infrastructure, Peoplemovers, Monorail expansions, man-made lagoons, shopping districts, and resort hotels, Disney would finally have leverage to force Anaheim to clean up its act. Disney would handle the massive land acquisitions and improvements needed to build Westcot, Disneyland Center, and the new hotel district if Anaheim agreed to regulate the out-of-control hotels along Harbor Blvd. once and for all. With billions of dollars at stake, Disney wanted everything about this once-in-a-lifetime tranformation from single park to resort destination to be just right.
…and falls
The massive Disneyland Resort expansion (including Westcot) was to break ground in 1993, assuring a fully operational system by 1999. Before the New Millennium, Peoplemovers, Monorails, and shuttles would be connecting the various elements of the Disneyland Resort and its two theme parks. The problems began before a single shovel of dirt had shifted.
For one thing, Disneyland’s tight placement in Anaheim struck again. Odd as it sounds, Disneyland is surrounded by neighborhoods filled with residents, some of whom detest it. Nightly fireworks, stifling traffic, wandering tourists… (At the 2015 shareholders meeting, one Anaheim resident even waited patiently in line at the question-and-answer microphone just for the opportunity to tell Anaheim officials and Disney executives they were “going to hell” for renewing Disney’s nightly fireworks license!)
Never mind that the Disneyland expansion would’ve brought thousands of new jobs to the area or that it would’ve generated tens of millions of dollars in tax incentives for Anaheim alone. They were aghast at the idea that Disney would build towering parking decks on the edge of their neighborhoods, ushering thousands and thousands of cars from the highway into the behemoth concrete structures in their proverbial backyards.
Worse still was the notion that their quaint town would now have to contend with forecasted exponential traffic increases, the seizure of their streets for widening and rebirth as part of the Anaheim Resort District, and that this new theme park would provide a 300-foot-tall glowing sphere to reign over their properties.
Disney redrew plans for Westcot to respond to the worries, replacing Spacestation Earth with a towering white spire far less intrusive to neighborhood views. They argued that residents would never see the increased traffic since dedicated highway ramps would funnel visitors directly into the parking decks, and that Disney needed the $395 million it requested from the government to help build them, which only incensed the locals further. All the while, Michael Eisner watched the price tag for the project inflate. By the end of its concepting, Westcot’s anticipated cost was reportedly nearing $4 billion.
If you’re interested in the immensely-scaled, massively-ambitious, never-built second gate Disneyland almost got, you can dive into the full story of this alternate reality version of the Disneyland Resort in its own Possibilityland: WESTCOT Center feature – a sort of possibility-fueled prologue to the story of California Adventure.
What derailed Westcot? Simple. In 1992, Disneyland Paris opened… and crashed. The financial collapse of Disneyland Paris – which continues to languish under financial strain even 25 years later – put a stop to almost every single major project at any Disney Park on Earth in the early 1990s, and that’s true of Westcot, too. “Were at a crossroads,” Eisner told the LA Times in 1993. “We had a very big investment in Europe and it’s difficult to deal with. This is an equally big investment. I don’t know whether a private company can ever spend this kind of money. I don’t even know if there’s going to be WESTCOT.”
The whole project was quietly cancelled in 1995. Westcot was dead.
The drawing board
Image: Disney
On August 2, 1995, Eisner took a few dozen executives from the Walt Disney Company on a three-day retreat in Aspen, Colorado. Eisner knew that the team needed to re-group. They’d lost countless projects across divisions to the fall of Paris, and they needed an action plan. The primary goal for Eisner, though, continued to be what to do next in Anaheim, where he perceived limitless potential from the tiny park.
Executives were split into small groups, each tasked with coming up with a plan for Disneyland to grow. If it was the last thing Eisner did, he would see Disneyland learn from Walt Disney World’s “multi-day, multi-park resort” strategy. The difference now was that whatever they dreamed up had to cost very little.
And as any Disney Parks afficianado will tell you, those executives faced an incredibly difficult task. Disney World was intentionally designed to be “The Vacation Kingdom of the World;” a destination drawing visitors from around the globe. Almost certainly, most travelers landing at the Orlando International Airport have Disney somewhere on their itinerary. And increasingly through the ’80s and ’90s, Disney had made an even more intentional push to become a self-sufficient “walled garden” resort; to not just be the reason folks came to Florida, but to be the only place they visited while they were there.
But Disneyland is not Disney World, and California is not Florida. For Disneyland to grow into a destination, it would be competing with the rest of California! From its 1955 opening to the mid-’90s, most visitors to Disneyland were from Southern California and the surrounding states anyway (Disney historian Jim Hill calls Disneyland “the world’s most popular regional theme park”). Those visiting from elsewhere in the country or world would likely only stop in to Disneyland for a day before continuing along to the rest of California’s offerings: beaches, mountains, zoos, studios, cities, and more. How could Disneyland compete with everything California had to offer?
Eureka!
The winning idea allegedly came from Disneyland president Paul Pressler.
(Pressler, for his part, was already infamous at the time. Having been hand-selected for the Disneyland presidency after a time at the helm of Disney Stores, Pressler had a scorched earth policy for finance, infamously cutting staffing, maintenance, and upkeep at the park to bare minimums. After his later exit from the company, it took literally years to make up for the cost-cutting decisions he and his team had made as they presided over the worst period in Disneyland’s history. He would then move on to The Gap, using his slash-services-then-trumpet-financial-gain policy there to disastrous effect.)
His idea was simple: to keep Disneyland guests from leaving the resort to see the rest of California, Imagineers needed to bring the rest of California to Disneyland.
Pre-Opening
Image: Disney, via AngryAP.com
On January 21, 1998, the parking lot at the entrance to Disneyland closed. The next morning, construction started on Disney’s California Adventure. The 55-acre theme park would stand where the parking lot once had – the only large, open land that the California resort had to spare.
That October, a Preview Center opened on Main Street, U.S.A., providing guests with a sneak peek at the park’s 22 shows and attractions and 15 restaurants. What Disney didn’t explicitly explain is that Imagineers – the creative designers and storytellers behind Disney’s attractions and themed lands – were purposefully left quite in the dark during the design of the park. Instead, Pressler employed his team from merchandising and retail sectors to design California Adventure, opting for dining and shopping to be the highlight of the more “mature” park. (To be fair, the model worked well at Epcot, so Pressler and company no doubt thought this more “grown-up” Californian park could focus on food and merchandise, as well.)
Altogether, the new park, an attached deluxe hotel, and the Downtown Disney shopping district would cost $1.4 billion – far less than half of the grander expansion with Westcot that had been cancelled three years earlier – and Disney’s California Adventure itself would only take an estimated $650 million of that. (For reference: the same year, Tokyo Disneyland was joined by a second park, too; Tokyo DisneySea opened six months after Disney’s California Adventure and reportedly cost $3 billion alone.)
Annual passholders got exclusive access to the park before its official opening in February 2001, and the word of mouth they spread was… well… Uh oh.
On the next page, we’ll step into the Disney’s California Adventure Park of yesterday and experience its four districts, addressing the worries that Disney Parks fans so rightly expressed as they experienced the second gate at Disneyland.
The Golden Gates
Welcome to the new Esplanade – the central hub of the brand new Disneyland Resort. You’re facing the historic entrance to Disneyland, with its elegant wrought-iron gates and – on the hill ahead – the towering Train Station of Main Street, U.S.A. It’s a timeless entry into a romantic, idealized small town sometime at the turn of the 20th century. It’s elegant, reverent, historic, and timeless, just like all of Disneyland.
But something has changed. If you’re facing the entrance to the park, you may be used to the expansive blacktop parking lot being behind you. Turn around now, though, and you’d notice quite a difference. Directly across from Disneyland’s turnstiles is the entrance to the resort’s new theme park: Disney’s California Adventure Park. Disney promises that this new park is “the most unusual theme park in the Disney family.” You may start to get that sense even from outside the park.
Image: Disney
In stark contrast to the understated and historic entrance to Disneyland Park, the entrance to Disney’s California Adventure is larger than life. It starts with 11-foot-tall concrete letters spelling out C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A. The letters stand out against a backdrop made up of massive mosaic ceramic murals (the largest in the world) flanking the park’s entrance. They depict sights of modern California, from bustling cities and airports to wildlife and snow-capped mountain peaks. Between those is a stretched-and-skewed cartoon-perspective recreation of the Golden Gate Bridge with a metallic golden sun rising beyond it.
The unique entrance is not a bad one at all. In fact, it’s breathtaking in its scale. The pieces are meant to add together to create the illusion that you’re stepping into a giant postcard of California. However, in order to convincingly understand the effect, you’d have to A) know to look for it, and B) approach it from directly straight-on despite pedestrian traffic entering from the extreme left and resort traffic entering from the extreme right.
Image: Disney
The original entrance to Disney’s California Adventure wasn’t horrible. Truthfully, it might’ve been one of the most impressive thing about the park in 2001. However, the effect was lost on many visitors. Only those approaching the park from Disneyland’s gates could even see the desired perspective, and doing so would only exacerbate the extreme difference between Disneyland’s warm, cinematic entry and the cartoon-style entrance to the new park. Disneyland, after all, had been designed by cinematic veterans who built believable exteriors and habitable worlds; the entrance to Disney’s California Adventure was a stark contrast to that style: post-modern, concrete, and imposing.
Your first thought might be that Disney’s California Adventure is not your grandfather’s theme park. That’s on purpose. Disney hopes that this park will be edgy, hip, irreverent, and very different from the tired old Disneyland next door. Creative lead Imagineer Barry Braverman might’ve put it best: “There’s a kind of brash California attitude that we wanted to capture. Much more pop culture and MTV with a little tongue-in-cheek thrown in.” Oh no… Let’s head into the park’s four “districts.”
1. Sunshine Plaza
Image: Disney
Disneyland Park has the quaint, charming, warm, Main Street U.S.A., its turn-of-the-century storefronts recalling Walt’s idealized memories of his childhood, lit by glittering incandescent bulbs with horse-drawn carriages gliding down the street. Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida has a bustling, bright, optimistic recreation of an idealized Hollywood Blvd. in the 1940s. Universal’s Islands of Adventure has the eclectic and kinetic ancient Port of Entry representing cultures from around the globe come together in one harmonious port city; Animal Kingdom has the immersive, centering, and spiritual Oasis.
Disney’s California Adventure has… something different.
Image: Loren Javier, Flickr (license)
The uninspired Sunshine Plaza entry to the park served as a crash course in the “hip, edgy” styling of Disney’s “brash, Californian attitude.”
While Disneyland’s Main Street is alight with atmospheric ragtime music, California Adventure’s entry features music by Bob Seger, Dionne Warwick, and Randy Newman. Behind the brightly painted corrugated steel wall facades, California Adventure’s gift shops aren’t quite on par with the Emporium at Disneyland. Their interiors continue the plastic, cartoon-proportioned, postcard motif, as chronicled in Yesterland’s gasp-induing look at Engine Ear Toys and Greetings from California. They look distinctly out of a ’90s family entertainment center design manual…
But continuing along, guests would pass under the comically-stretched-and-skewed Golden Gate Bridge as the Monorail zoomed over it. While its unusual shape clearly functions as a piece of that “post card” entry, it doesn’t exactly create a Disney-style immersive world. Of course, it’s not really supposed to. As we’ll see time and time again in California Adventure, it’s not about being transported to another place and time. The place is here, the time is now! We’re on a whacky journey through modern California!
Finally, we’ve reached the namesake of Sunshine Plaza: a wide concrete open plaza centered around the park’s would-be icon. A straight shot from Sleeping Beauty Castle stood the metallic Sun Icon – previously seen as the rising sun in the “postcard” entry. The Sun Icon (nicknamed “The Hubcap” by early visitors) was truly a large bronze sculpture of the sun suspended over an impressive Wave Fountain.
Disney Imagineer Kevin Raffery probably put it best in the Imagineering Story docu-series. “And the first statement that you saw when you walked in the gate was this sharp sun. And frankly, you could’ve seen that in a shopping mall in Newport Beach, and it’s like, ‘Why is it here?'”
Image: Tony “WisebearAZ” Moore, Yesterland.com
With curling metal rays stretching out from all sides, the Sun Icon was meant to reflect the real sun, bathing the plaza in warmth. Unfortunately, the Sun Icon faced due north, leaving it cast in shadow at all times. Designers had an answer, though: telescoping mirrors would trace the real sun’s path all day, concentrating the real sun and reflecting it onto the Sun Icon so that the Sun Icon could reflect the sunlight onto the plaza. Get it? Rest assured knowing that the system never worked as intended, and Sunshine Plaza remained unfortunately dark, concrete, and chilly.
Is Sunshine Plaza a fitting companion to Main Street? The Sun Icon a fair counterbalance to Sleeping Beauty Castle? If you don’t think so, then you may already be wishing you’d decided to use your Disneyland Resort ticket at that “old-fashioned, tired” theme park across the Esplanade. But you’re inside now, so let’s press on and visit the next of the park’s four districts.
2. Hollywood Pictures Backlot
Image: Disney
Visitors to the Disney-MGM Studios are no doubt familiar with its entry – Hollywood Blvd. – and how it’s easily one of Disney’s best themed lands anywhere. The soaring cityscape, the jazz standards playing down the street, the eclectic architecture, and the countless details all help to portray the romantic and ideal Golden Age of Hollywood that we all imagine and dream of. Main Street, U.S.A. is an idealized recreation of the Midwest, and Hollywood Studios’ Hollywood Blvd. is an idealized recreation of 1930s Hollywood. It feels as if you’ve really stepped back in time.
Disney’s California Adventure has a whole land dedicated to Hollywoood, too. But instead of recreating the reverent, historic, and idealized history of Hollywood, Hollywood Pictures Backlot is as “meta” as its name implies: while it may look like you’re walking down a 1990s Hollywood Blvd., you’re on a Hollywood set… of Hollywood! Get it?
Image: Werner Weiss / Chris Jepsen, Yesterland.com
Make no mistake: the time is now (by which we mean, the late ’90s / early 2000s) and the “store” awnings are all cheetah-print. After all, it’s the age of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and the height of the paparazzi reality TV craze!
It’s here that we encounter the first of California Adventure’s rampant puns. Most of the park is filled with signs, names, and allusions to modern California locales or products. Here on this backlot set of Hollywood, the false front hair salon is advertised as “Ben Hair” (spoofing the film Ben Hur) while a fitness center is called Dial M For Muscle (spoofing Dial M for Murder). An upper-level shop is even advertised as the Philip A. Couch Casting Agency – a “joke” about Hollywood’s infamous “casting couch” sexual assault problem.
Image: Werner Weiss, Yesterland.com
And where Florida’s Hollywood Blvd. terminates in an incredible recreation of the iconic Chinese Theater, the street here ends in a towering flat façade painted with a blue sky and matte buildings, as if to imply that the street goes on and on. It’s fitting, though, since stepping near the buildings reveals that they’re mere facades. In fact, you’re encouraged to walk behind them to see how they’re flat, wooden boards only dressed to look like famous Hollywood buildings. You fell for it! This isn’t really Hollywood. It’s a Hollywood set of Hollywood! Get it?
And here in the auxiliary plaza nestled deep within the Hollywood Pictures Backlot, designers were able to dispense entirely with any insinuation of being in the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s a barren, industrial, beige plaza of overhead wires, watertowers, pipes, and other hallmarks of studio baclots.
Hmm? You say that the real Hollywood is 45 minutes north? You say that if you wanted to see “behind the scenes,” you could’ve done it at a real studio backlot that cost half as much to visit? You expected that Disneyland would use its famous storytelling, details, and design to take you to a time and place you can no longer experience? Oh well.
Hollywood Pictures Backlot is a dead end in more ways than one. There are only a few inhabitants of the district. For one, a large, beige soundstage dressed in rusted pipes and wooden poles hosts Muppet*Vision 3D (3, above). The attraction is charming enough, never mind that it’s an exact clone of the 3D film that had been playing at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida for a full decade before California Adventure opened.
Next-door is a ride so unquivocally bad, it earned a not-so-sought after in-depth entry of its own, Declassified Disaster: Superstar Limo (4). Unequivocally the worst dark ride Disney has ever designed, ever, the ride carried guests through comic book stylized versions of Hollywood’s hoity toity neighborhoods for “face-to-face” encounters with miniature figures of Disney and ABC’s C-List celebrities, narrated by a cigar-smoking “agent” leading you to your movie’s big premier.
Image: Tony Moore, Yesterland.com
Superstar Limo was so unimaginably bad that it closed barely a year after the park opened with no plans to replace it. The park was simply stronger with no dark rides than it was with Superstar Limo.
The single other noteworthy attraction in Hollywood Pictures Backlot was the 2,000 seat Hyperion Theater (2) disguised behind that studio-style sky façade. The theatre has the capacity to do Broadway style performances (though it didn’t have any noteworthy shows until 2003’s Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular, which played to full houses until 2016’s Frozen – Live at the Hyperion replaced it) even if its interior is “purposefully” scantily dressed with revealed lighting and scaffolding again meant to reinforce the (cheap) backlot style.
If you can believe it, we’re two districts in and halfway done with our walkthrough of Disney’s California Adventure in 2001. Only two districts remain… We’ll tackle them on the next page.
3. The Golden State
Image: Disney
You might find it odd that one of the districts inside of Disney California Adventure is called “The Golden State” despite the fact that “The Golden State” is California’s nickname, thereby encompassing the elements of the park that don’t fall into the Golden State district. In fact, this land is officially sub-divided into Condor Flats, Grizzly Peak, The Bay Area, Pacific Wharf, Bountiful Valley Farm, and the Golden Vine Winery. Each was meant as a small nod to the various elements of California’s vast and varied environments.
CONDOR FLATS
This “sub-land” within the Golden State district was meant to recreate a modern, high desert airfield testing new flight technologies. To its credit, the land’s centerpiece was a beige aircraft hangar housing the park’s single runaway success of a ride – the Lost Legend: Soarin’ Over California (8).
Suspended in unique hang-glider seats, Soarin’ Over California ingeniously hoisted guests high up into a curved, all-encompassing OMNIMAX screen, sending them gliding across the inspiring landscapes of the Golden State in time with an (excuse the pun) soaring musical score. Majestic, moving, and thoughtful, the ride became the park’s single runaway success and was duplicated at Epcot.
Image: Disney
Despite its E-Ticket ride, Condor Flats never quite succeeded at accomplishing what it set out to, given that the tiny fragment of land nestled into the base of the forested Grizzly Peak couldn’t exactly feel like an expansive desert runway. But what’s worse is that – in true California Adventure style – the land was decidedly modern, with metal lattice structures, rotating satellite dishes, and water-spraying space shuttle engines turning the supposed “desert” airfield into an industrial encampment rather than a true celebration of California’s aviation history and its real aviators.
GRIZZLY PEAK
Image: Disney
The next of The Golden State’s sub-areas suffered from a similar miscasting. Probably the most beautiful of the park’s original areas, Grizzly Peak simulated a densely forested High Sierras national park. Given a romantic 1950s overlay and rustic theme, it could’ve been a beautiful example of Disney’s signature storytelling and placemaking.
Instead, it was needlessly given a “hip, edgy, extreme” makeover and designers went to great lengths to assure us that this is NOT a beautiful, historic, 1950s National Park. It’s an old, rusted out park that’s been overtaken by an extreme sports company who’s left their modern equipment all around, ready for high speed action-packed thrills. Of course, the lone ride is Grizzly River Run (4), a fun but soulless rapids ride around the mountain with no animatronics, story, or noteworthy props.
THE BAY AREA
Image: Werner Weiss, Yesterland.com
The Bay Area – made of a row of San Francisco style buildings – contained only a restroom, with a recreation of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts acting as the entrance to a film called Golden Dreams (2) depicting the history of California. The film starred Whoopi Goldberg (in her second California Adventure role after Superstar Limo) as Califa, the goddess after whom California is named. The historic film might be the park’s version of Epcot’s American Adventure or Magic Kingdom’s Hall of Presidents. “Edutainment.” More than anything, it was a cop out of doing a real, reverent historical look via a dark ride or an Audio-Animatronic show.
THE REST
Image: Disney
While convincingly decorated, PACIFIC WHARF was mostly made up of window service restaurants, leaving guests to overlook its convincing detail and instead write it off as another of the park’s overbuilt food courts. Its two “attractions” were the Boudin Bakery Tour (9) – a walkthrough of a sourdough bread bakery hosted by C-List ABC stars Colin Mochre and Rosie O’Donnell – and Mission Tortilla Factory (6) – a walkthrough tour of a tortilla factory.
Finally, the BOUNTIFUL VALLEY FARM and GOLDEN VINE WINERY sub-areas didn’t contain a single attraction between them. Bountiful Valley Farm did count a Caterpillar tractor you could sit inside of as an attraction, but we won’t.
The Golden State was far and away the largest district in the park, and probably did contain the most to see. However, it was largely fluff. For those counting, in terms of actual rides, we have only Superstar Limo, Grizzly River Run, and Soarin’ Over California. Three rides total among the park’s first three lands. That’s because most of the park’s rides are contained in the final land.
4. Paradise Pier
Image: Disney
The final land in the park is perhaps the most ambitious. Paradise Pier was meant to recreate a modern seaside boardwalk amusement park. Perhaps accidentally, it did a good job of recreating the amusement piers that exist today, composite parts of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
Paradise Pier had the Orange Stinger (8) yo-yo swings – a classic amusement park ride, now placed inside of a giant, modern, neon-lit orange peel with the swings painted like bees. You’ll also find the more historic Golden Zephyr (3), placing riders in metallic blimps for an aerial carousel ride on the water’s edge.
Then there’s the modern Mulholland Madness (7), an off-the-shelf wild mouse roller coaster common at traveling fairs that casts you as a driver zipping back and forth along the streets of Mulholland Drive, all hidden away behind a cartoon, comic-book-style foldout map. What’s that? You say that Mulholland Madness looks like something from a carnival? It’s not something you’d expect at Disneyland? You were expecting this park to have a companion to Big Thunder Mountain or Space Mountain? No such luck.
Beyond, you’ll find Maliboomer (6), another low-cost addition. It’s an S&S Space Shot tower. If it looks familiar, it’s probably because a taller version already exists at your local theme park, including Knott’s Berry Farm just a few miles up the road. But Disneyland’s picky neighbors have necessitated a fun addition: plastic “scream shields” that pull down over each seat. Your first scream will probably be your last, as the shields meant to deafen noise will also deafen you if you dare scream during the ride.
Maliboomer is a distinctly modern attraction that absolutely could not have existed in the skyline of a historic boardwalk. Yet, next-door is the Sun Wheel (10), a thrilling Ferris wheel with a vaguely-1970s brass sun face affixed to its center.
Then there’s the land’s highlight and park’s backdrop: California Screamin’ (1). The roller coaster is designed to resemble a historic wooden coaster – the centerpiece of many seaside boardwalks – but is truly a cutting-edge steel roller coaster with a linear induction motor launch, accelerating guests from 0 – 55 miles per hour in seconds. It also features on-board audio by Gary Hoey and George Wilkins, scrambling together their rock ‘n’ roll music and classic carnival calliope tunes, synchronized to the ride.
Image: Disney
Also here in Paradise Pier, you’ll find an homage to the tacky roadside attractions of Route 66: a giant pink dinosaur-shaped kiosk selling sunglasses, the S.S. Rustworthy (9) shipwreck water play area; Burger Invasion! (B), a McDonald’s walk-up window dressed as a sci-fi giant hamburger spaceship; the regrettable Pizza Oom Mow Mow (F) decked out with surf boards and playing music from the Beach Boys…
As you might imagine, Paradise Pier’s identity is a bit confusing, and its story nonexistent. Half modern, half-retro, the land is decorated with “circus freak” style posters and flat, stucco exteriors adorned with glowing neon waves.
Image: Alan Huffman, Yesterland.com
The endless row of stucco shops is also covered with striped circus-tent style awnings. Puns run rampant as always (Mali-burittos as a Mexican restaurant, San Joaquin Volley as a boardwalk game, “It’s a Meatier Shower!” on a Burger Invasion billboard, etc.). The safest bet is that Disney simply did its best (and lowest cost) imitation of an amalgamation of many real California boardwalks.
The irony did not escape fans that Walt Disney had spoken at length about how he created Disneyland specifically as an alternative to the dirty boardwalks of the day. He was tired of the seaside amusement parks with un-themed thrill rides and off-the-shelf attractions. He wanted something different. So he built Disneyland. Then Disney turned around and built Paradise Pier… Oops.
The Problem
And that’s it. That is the California Adventure visitors found when the park opened February 8, 2001. Disney’s California Adventure would open with significantly less to see and do than Disneyland across the way, and fittingly it wouldn’t have as many themed lands, either. Instead of Disneyland’s eight lands, California Adventure had its four “districts”: Sunshine Plaza, Hollywood Pictures Backlot, The Golden State, and Paradise Pier.
Annual passholders got exclusive access to the park before its official opening in February 2001, and the news they sent home was… not so good.
It wasn’t just that Disney’s California Adventure was light on attractions and instead stuffed with eateries and stores. (Though that was true.) It wasn’t only that Disney characters were practically non-existent in the park and that families with children under age ten would find practically nothing to do. (Though that, too, was the case.) It wasn’t just that the few attractions the park did have were cheap, “off-the-shelf” carnival rides devoid of theme or story that directly contradicted all that Walt had wanted Disneyland to be. (But, yeah…)
Perhaps the most fatal blow to befall the park was its attitude.
Image: Disney
Consider the way Disneyland does things. The “magic” of Imagineering has always been that Disneyland was built by filmmakers who were able to make guests feel “transported” to long-lost places and times… that never really existed. Each of the themed lands of Disneyland are literary and cinematic and romantic and idealized, but contain just enough history and fact and reverence to feel real and habitable. That’s what makes us feel that we’ve truly ventured into uncharted jungles, been whisked away to the Jazz Age of New Orleans, or stepped into the Wild West.
Frontierland is “the Old West that never was and always will be” – it’s our collective imagination of what that world must’ve been like, even if it doesn’t look like any real place on the map, it feels that it could be real.
That’s what Disney does better than anyone else. Only through the collective forces of Disney Imagineers could you and I have the opportunity to travel back to the Golden Age of Hollywood; to an elegant seaside Victorian pier at the dawn of the incandescent lightbulb; to truly step into a 1950s High Sierras National Park with all the sights, sounds, smells, music, and “magic” that would bring.
Image: Disney
California Adventure did precisely the opposite. It recreated modern California: here, now, today. The park reeked of its 1990s conception and was starved of funds to such an extent that its interpretation of California read as a spoof; cheap; a joke. Modern music, comic-book architecture, puns left and right… It was practically offensive to locals’ sensibilities that the park existed at all, much less that Disney would dare call this a fitting partner to the original Disneyland.
Why come to Disneyland to see a mock-up of the real Hollywood of today?
It’s a question Imagineers had to answer. And boy did they.
Image: Disney
Disney had warned that the roads around Anaheim would likely be clogged for months as guests rushed to explore the new Disney’s California Adventure. They estimated that the park would close most weekends due to reaching its maximum capacity – 33,000 people.
On its opening day, the park saw 8,000. That’s less than a quarter of what it was built to hold.
On weekends, it averaged 10,000 to 15,000 – about a third of its capacity.
In its opening year, the park saw only 5 million visitors. The same year, the original Disneyland saw 12.3 million. Think about it: that means that in its inaugural year – when interest should be at its peak – only 40% of people who came to Disneyland bothered to see California Adventure, too.
Of those who did try out the new park in 2001, only 20% reported being “satisfied” or better by the experience. In 2002, attendance dropped 15%, no doubt thanks in part to the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, which crippled the tourism industry… but it was now undeniable: California Adventure would never be an equal partner with Disneyland.
Band-aids
Right away, Disney had to have recognized that California Adventure could not survive. The slump post-September-11th was devestating all of the tourism industry, and California Adventure couldn’t take the hit.
Disney at once began to add attractions to the park, like the hastily-constructed “a bug’s land” in 2002, built as a quick fix for the park’s need for more attraction capacity… and for rides suited for young guests.
The deck was still stacked against the park. It wasn’t just that poor word of mouth would keep California Adventure from attracting guests. California Adventure had been the backbone of Disney’s push to make Disneyland into an international destination. A national marketing campaign was pared down to a regional one as Disney offered deep discounts to Southern Californians who would try the new park. But this would not do. After the investment in the park, Disney had to choose: either let California Adventure wither and throw away any hope of Disneyland becoming a multi-day destination, or change.
That’s when Disney began adding piecemeal additions to the park, all in an effort to draw more guests to Disneyland’s starving little sister.
The park map above is from 2006. Five years after the park’s opening, you’ll see some very important additions: a Monsters Inc.: Mike & Sulley to the Rescue dark ride (filling the disgraced space left by Superstar Limo), The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular in Hollywood Pictures Backlot joined A Bug’s Land.
And sure, there’s no denying: Disney’s California Adventure needed those rides. It needed well-themed rides and family rides and rides for kids. It needed shows. It needed more Disney characters. But even as Disney invested heavily in adding new experiences to the park, it would never be enough. It was like putting Band-Aids on a broken bone.
The problem with Disney’s California Adventure was foundational. It was in its identity. The park was too modern. It tried too hard to be “hip” and “edgy” and “irreverent.” It reached too far to be “MTV” and “young.” People didn’t want a Disney park modeled after a Six Flags. They didn’t want modern music and rock concerts and puns and irreverent mockery of California. They wanted a park modeled after Disneyland: reverent, thoughtful, historic, idealized recreations of California. And even if they added a dozen new rides, a hip, edgy, modern California was not ever going to be a fitting companion to Disneyland.
A new direction
Image: Disney / Pixar
By 2007, Disney’s California Adventure was still weighing heavily on the Disneyland Resort. Still more piecemeal additions were on the way, like Toy Story Midway Mania under construction in Paradise Pier. But even with its upped attraction count and new shows, the park simply wasn’t ever going to hold its own, much less be a worthy partner. Not without a major change in direction.
Under the guidance of then-new CEO Bob Iger, Imagineers began to toy with what to do to Disney’s California Adventure. He noted: “Steve Jobs is fond of talking about brand deposits and brand withdrawals. Any time you do something mediocre with your brand, that’s a withdrawal. California Adventure was a brand withdrawal.”
Bob Iger reported in retrospect to the Wall Street Journal that there were two options: the first and simplest was to combine Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure into a single, massive park. He had Imagineers develop plans for how the two could be united into a single gate with one ticket required to experience both. The new mega-park would require new internal transportation systems, to reroute the monorail, and rebuild the infrastructure of the resort. The cost? About $1 billion.
The second option was more aggressive. It was to completely redesign Disney’s California Adventure from its foundation; to strip the park’s themed lands to the steel and rebuild them in the tradition of Disneyland, with historic, reverent, romanticized stories. Not just new attractions, but a new spirit. A new backstory and a new identity. The cost to bring the park back to life? Upwards of $1 billion.
With the prices approximately equal, Iger opted for the second: a complete redesign of the park from the ground up.
On October 17, 2007, Disney announced something absolutely, positively unprecedented: Disney’s California Adventure was going to change. Big time. The $600 million park would undergo nearly $1.5 billion as part of an aggressive five-year plan. Yes, it would add rides, shows, attractions, restaurants, and more. But more importantly, this unprecedented project would rebuild the park’s narrative; its foundation. Absolutely everything would change. Each of its themed lands would turn back the clock and become timeless, romantic versions of themselves. No more puns; no more top 40 hits; no more modern California.
For five years, the park was a circus of construction walls, drained lagoons, heavy-duty machinery, and steel framework.
Rebirth
On May 28, 2010, the park officially received a new name and logo: Disney California Adventure. The removal of the possessive “’s” brought the park in line with Disney’s current strategy but more than anything, it signaled the beginning of a new story and a new style.
The park closed for a single symbolic day and re-opened the next morning – June 15, 2012 – with eight themed lands (the same number as Disneyland) and a new grand dedication ceremony overseen by Bob Iger.
To all who come to this place of dreams: welcome. Disney California Adventure celebrates the spirit of optimism and the promise of endless opportunities, ignited by the imagination of daring dreamers such as Walt Disney and those like him who forever changed – and were forever changed by – The Golden State. This unique place embraces the richness and diversity of California… Its land, its people, its stories and, above all, the dreamers it continues to inspire.
— Bob Iger, June 15, 2012
Click and expand for a larger and more detailed view. Image: Disney
Are you ready to step into the reborn Disney California Adventure? That’s where our story is heading next, and it’s in an in-depth feature all its own. Make the jump to Declassified Disaster: Disney’s California Adventure – Part II to walk through the park as it appeared after its re-opening in 2012… and see why Disney may be making its most costly mistake all over again…
