Have you ever felt like you were ten feet off the ground? If you’ve ever visited Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, you should. One of the not-so-hidden park secrets is that Main Street and the other major throughways at the park don’t reside on the ground floor. Instead, Walt Disney planned a different tactic for his second theme park, one that improved on the ideas of his original one at Disneyland.
Whenever you walk around Magic Kingdom, you’re actually at least 10 feet above the ground, effectively walking on the second level of the park. In fact, certain parts of Fantasyland start at the third floor, and Cinderella Castle is even one of them! The explanation for this architectural phenomenon dates back to the early days of the world’s first theme park, when a chance sighting fundamentally altered Uncle Walt’s thinking about the design of his structures.
From that day forward, the brilliant content creator developed new tactics for handling the flow of traffic. More importantly, he plotted major changes in how cast members act and interact during their shifts as well as afterward. While Disney didn’t live to see the culmination of his vision, his Imagineers honored his wishes by building the labyrinthine maze that functions as the unknown epicenter of Magic Kingdom.
Image: Disney
You may not know much about utilidors, but they’re a key reason why a cast member can quickly fulfill your wish, respond to a crisis, or even make their way to a shift on time. From the Meta perspective, they’re also integral to Disney’s ability to keep the illusion of its various themed lands intact without incongruous sightings of inappropriate characters. Utilidors are the magic unseen that holds everything together.
Since utilidors are such a mystery, plenty of questions exist. Why did Walt Disney feel the need for them? Why was Florida capable of them when California wasn’t? How do they work and what other secrets reside inside? Can you as a non-employee get a look at utilidors on your own? Let’s answer these and many other questions as we open the doors to the puzzling first floor of Magic Kingdom, the place that Disney never shows in its brochures.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story
Image: Disney
Some cynics maintain that the story is apocryphal. They think that the incident never happened, but it gets repeated anyway since it’s better than the truth. Whether they’re right or not is irrelevant. That’s because I like the story so much that I choose to believe it, like so many great Walt Disney anecdotes.
When the creator of Disneyland unveiled his plans for the themed lands that would comprise the totality of the park, he stressed the themes almost obsessively. In his mind’s eye, the stories that he’d told subdivided into a few specific categories. He held this idea for so long that he even compartmentalized Disneyland, the early 1950s television series that pre-dated the park. Four fields summarized his storytelling philosophies on the show.
Fantasyland is the subject of much of early Disney animated fare, the type of stories we see today on ABC’s Once Upon a Time. As Disney stated, “Here is a land of imagination, hopes and dreams.” Frontierland was a throwback to the exploration era of American history, the time when pioneers like Davy Crockett could accomplish anything as long as they had access to a trusty weapon and a working ship. Disney described this land that many believed was his personal favorite as “A tribute to the faith, courage and ingenuity of our hearty pioneers who blaze the trails and made this progress possible.”
Image: Disney
The other two sections from the ABC series were Adventureland and Tomorrowland. The former would convince would-be adventurers that they were touring the most exotic parts of the world. “We pictured ourselves far from civilization, in the remote jungles of Asia and Africa.” Tomorrowland required more imagination. It allowed Disney storytellers to dream of a better tomorrow and then build a plausible path to that goal. “Tomorrow offers new frontiers in science, adventure and ideals. The Atomic Age, the challenge of Outer Space and the hope for a peaceful, unified world.” He was right, of course, but that’s hardly a surprise when speaking of Walt Disney.
When park planners readied Disneyland, they added a fifth themed area. Named Main Street, U.S.A., it was the one most befitting of a proud patriot whose war efforts had greatly aided the Americans in their World War II struggle. He loved the idea of a turn of the (20th) century re-creation of small town Americana, a place where everyone would feel at home. As he stated at the dedication, “Main Street, U.S.A. is America at the turn of the century — the crossroads of an era. The gas lamps and the electric lamp, the horse-drawn car and the auto car. Main Street is everyone’s hometown, the heartline of America.”
Reading the above, we can draw an unmistakable conclusion. Walt Disney poured his heart and soul into each themed land, making sure that the sections had individual identities that would hypnotize guests into buying into the illusion. They’d feel as if they were Davy Crockett for a time and then a bold explorer traveling on the world’s snarkiest boat. Only moments later, they’d feel swept away to a storybook fairy tale and end the day feeling as if they’d walked into the future.
Imagine the frustration Walt Disney must have experienced when the (possibly fake) incident happened.
There the creator of Disneyland stood, admiring the majesty of his achievement. Suddenly, he witnessed something that caused him to gulp. It was so out of place in his carefully structured system that he felt confident his guests would also notice it, thereby ruining his carefully themed area. Right in the middle of Tomorrowland, a cast member in a Frontierland cowboy costume strutted down the street. Someone from the 19th century was strolling through the 21st century. It was themed land culture shock.
Image: Disney
Disney had spent virtually the entirety of his fortune on his Disneyland concept. He’d even sold his dream house to finance the venture. Every detail mattered to Walt Disney, and this perfectionist bristled at anything in his parks that ruined the illusion for his guests. When he saw a cowboy standing in Tomorrowland, he had an epiphany.
The design flaw with Disneyland was that everything took place above ground. Cast members were visible to guests as they walked to their jobs. The only option was for them to wear regular clothing until they were at their assigned work station and then change there. Even that wasn’t ideal. The real estate at Disneyland dictated that everyone involved, guests and employees, followed the same paths to get to their destinations.
That cowboy in Tomorrowland changed the entire construction of Magic Kingdom 15 years later, even if he didn’t exist. From that moment forward, Walt Disney spent a great deal of time plotting ways to prevent one of the core flaws of Disneyland’s design. When he discovered cheap land in Orlando, Florida, one of the aspects of the acreage that appealed to him was its unique water table. Critics derided the region as swamp land. Where they saw useless territory, he saw opportunity.
What’s a water table?
Image: Disney
I don’t want to turn this conversation into a geology lesson, but something about the greater Orlando area is germane to the utilidor discussion. If you’re not a geologist and don’t feel like taking a quick SAT test, a water table is the upper level of an underground surface. It’s here that the soil (and any accompanying rock formation) is fully saturated with water. Using more basic terms, the water table is the soggy earth.
What’s the problem with soggy earth? Unless you’re a builder, the answer is nothing. For folks in construction, it’s a waking nightmare. Areas cursed with high water tables can’t have simple things…like basements. Whereas Disneyland oftentimes built attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion below the surface, that’s a physical impossibility at Magic Kingdom.
During the early days of park construction, Imagineers addressed this problem in a novel way. They leaned into the issue. They built Seven Seas Lagoon as a man-made solution to the swamp land problem. Builders razed the region and then filled in the artificial lake with soil from the elevated water table. Afterward, and this is the brilliant part, they took some of the dirt from the new “lagoon” to provide stability to a pre-built load-bearing ground floor. This is the place where Disney added the tunnels that we now know as utility corridors, aka utilidors.
Utilifacts
The logistics of this solution are amazing. Disney faced a seemingly impossible dilemma with construction on soft earth. They addressed it by crafting an entire man-made body of water close to the existing natural Bay Lake. As a side project, they mined the dislodged earth, thereby finding new utility. Disney moved between seven and eight million cubic yards of earth from Seven Seas Lagoon to this new construction site.
At this new position where Disney officials were more comfortable with the water table, they built a first floor that is 15 feet high, which is actually one and a half stories tall rather than a single story. It’s why the first gate at Walt Disney World rests 14 feet off the ground (four feet higher than I joked at the start of the story…you’ll never feel taller than when you walk down Main Street at Magic Kingdom). The amazing part is that the utilidors stretch across more than nine acres of land. Yes, the utilidors at Magic Kingdom are the equivalent of almost seven football fields in size.
What’s remarkable is that Disney didn’t dig a single tunnel to create their underground labyrinth. Instead, they simply started building up from the ground using prefabs. Even the term underground is misleading. It references the fact that the utilidors are under the surface of Magic Kingdom. They are NOT, however, below the ground itself. The terminology is confusing since it’s one of the strangest theme park builds to date. It’s almost a riddle. When is the ground not the ground?
The shape of the utilidor system is also fascinating. If you ever look at the blueprints, you’ll see a giant, seemingly haphazardly drawn circle or, if you’re an MMA fan, a poorly drawn octagon. The walking path bisects the middle of it. Oddly, it slopes down for a bit prior to returning to the previous height. That’s a concession to the maintenance of the moat surrounding Cinderella Castle. The most eye-grabbing structure at Magic Kingdom is also the de facto point of origin for the utilidors. To wit, the first two floors of Cinderella Castle ARE utilidors.
All the corridors flowing from the castle’s underground octagon provide direct access to various themed lands in seemingly divergent parts of Magic Kingdom. That’s by design. Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) knew where they were going to place the Seven Seas Lagoon dirt, and that prescience informed their decisions on where to position regions such as Adventureland and Frontierland. In fact, other than the middle section, the only truly straight utilidor path runs between these two lands.
The next closest section is a small walkway from what Disney maps designate as Stairway #18 (an entry point close to the gates at Main Street, U.S.A.) to Stairway #17 (near Crystal Palace). As Disney fans know, that’s an extremely short distance. Most of the other stairway-to-stairway connections running underground traverse a curved path, a concession to the above ground landscaping and construction demands.
Using utilidors, Disney employees could connect the dots from point A to point B. Even better, they could run these paths below the surface where guests would never know that thousands of cast members lurked beneath them. When you’re at Magic Kingdom, you’re standing on top of lots of people! Also – and this is just to blow your mind a bit – the combination of the elevated water table and the utilidors causes Main Street U.S.A. to reside 107 feet above sea level. And here you thought you were standing at sea level right in the middle of old swamp land.
Confession: I don’t which one is Chip and which one is Dale
Image: Disney
What’s the functionality of the utilidors? The first thing that you need to understand is that they’re not built like a basement. Again, that’s not possible with the water table. Instead, the Magic Kingdom utilidor system is literally the ground floor of the park. Otherwise, flooding would represent an ongoing concern.
What we’re really discussing here are the kinds of rooms that you’d find at the bottom of any large facility. Disney sticks all of the stuff that it needs in its utilidors, hiding them away from public sight. Since the corridors run across the park, anything is movable in only a few minutes, whether the object is food, merchandise, or even garbage. No matter the awkward shape of the pathway, however, a cast member is never more than ten minutes away from their destination. In other words, utilidors enable a clever kind of logistics.
Think of the setup in Disney terms. Let’s say that Florida is suffering from 100-degree heat or, as they call it, Tuesday. Imagine that some unfortunate soul in a chipmunk costume feels the effects of the blistering sun during their shift at Frontierland. Their early onset heat stroke causes half of Chip and Dale to need to get to an air conditioned area immediately. Meanwhile, the other half of Chip and Dale needs a partner. Otherwise, Magic Kingdom offers an incomplete character meet and greet.
Had this set of events transpired at Disneyland, a replacement Dale (I’m arbitrarily choosing him as the weaker chipmunk) would have to dash across the park to Frontierland. Now is the moment when I remind you that time is a premium at Disney theme parks. Any instance when guests wait in a line that doesn’t move negates the premise of “Happiest Place on Earth.” Every second counts.
Image: Disney
The backup chipmunk has two options. They can suit up before sprinting from their current location to Frontierland or they can run to the spot and then put on the costume. Either way, they’re carrying a chipmunk outfit, which is a bit tough to hide from observers. If they head to the building and then suit up, guests wait impatiently. During these moments, theme park tourists are doing absolutely nothing when they’re supposed to be enjoying their visit.
Should cast members put on the suit before making the trek, they have twin concerns. The first is that they’re breaking the illusion of their current themed area. A Frontierland chipmunk outfit in Adventureland would irritate Walt Disney, which we (think we) know from the earlier story. The second is that guests often interrupt costumed cast members. Children see giant fuzzy costumes, and they want to hug. It’s quite beautiful, really, but it’s also a disruptive job element. Over the past 60 years, Disneyland has developed some viable strategies for these various hurdles. None of them are ideal, though.
The utilidors are an inventive solution for multiple reasons. These (effectively) underground pathways hide the inner machinations required to maximize the efficiency at Magic Kingdom. Here, a single notification will allow a secondary Dale to suit up and sprint to Frontierland. The guests on the floor above are none the wiser to this movement. For them, the illusion of the themed land never breaks. One cast member vanishes and another one arrives. It’s a reliable bit of Disney pixie dust that solves one of the company founder’s greatest aggravations.
Underground governance
The utility of the utilidor system is unmistakable. But how does it work? That’s a complex question with a nuanced answer. How would you describe the pipe system that supplies water to your home? How do you receive electricity? How does the food delivery service in your region work? For that matter, how do the roads tie together there? Each of these explanations is understandable on their own. Finding the connector that ties them together is the difficult part.
The world in which you were raised already enjoyed lots of groundbreaking technological innovations. Odds are that you didn’t have to build your own water supply or run electricity into your home. Even if you’re an urban planner, few of the roads you use are ones you designed. At best, you improved their functionality.
What does all of this have to do with Disney and utilidors? To a certain extent, they’re all matters of governance. By that, I mean that someone controls the supply of food, water, and power to your home. They also craft the roads that make a path to/for you. In other words, those who came before you worked to build more convenient access to all your basic needs. The utilidors are like that for Disney.
When plotting the construction of Magic Kingdom, Imagineers and park planners parsed through 15 years of data at Disneyland. This information was basically the fount of all theme park wisdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What they learned from their research and, in many instances, firsthand experience was that the original Disney theme park was a good start rather than the end-all be-all of its kind. Disney employees understood that they had many potential areas of improvement. Most of them involved a buzzword I mentioned earlier, logistics. With Magic Kingdom, think of it as a combination of organization, coordination, and management.
The magic city
Image: Disney
For all intents and purposes, a Disney theme park is a functioning city. Yes, that’s especially true in Orlando, Florida, where the company has its own governmental powers, but that’s not what I mean here. Every Disney gate requires the same human needs mentioned above: power, sanitation, clean water, roads, and foods. In designing the utilidors, Disney execs invented a masterful solution to handle all of these needs out of the sight of guests.
The beauty of the utilidors is what they’re capable of doing. Within the confines of these drab walls, Disney runs their town. The pipes that handle the flow of water throughout the park are a constant sight in the utilidors. They’re also some of the largest pipes you’ll ever see.
Roughly 55,000 theme park tourists visit Magic Kingdom on the average day. The average American city includes about 20,000 residents. In building the park, WDI had to add infrastructure capable of supporting almost three times as many people. Also keep in mind that’s just average. Maximum capacity is (technically) 100,000. The utilidors are where the pipes run that support a city of up to 100,000 residents. Their gigantic size is a necessity.
Similarly, Disney has to power the entirety of park operations each day. The body of that was historically handled at least somewhat through the connecting tunnels of the utilidors. Today, Disney is gradually moving toward solar power and other renewable energy sources, but the cables, circuits, and wires still exist.
Image: Disney
Finally, they have to populate their storage space with all the supplies needed for daily operation. That’s all the foods that Disney chefs will serve. Almost all of them are delivered via truck to utilidors locations. Some of the meals you eat, especially the packaged ones, are cooked in the utilidor areas. Almost everything you enjoy at the park was housed in the utilidors at some point.
This brings us to a sad reality about the construction of Walt Disney World. The early blueprints for the resort area called for utilidors at every gate. Park planners loved this tidy concept of governance so much that they intended to adopt it everywhere. Alas, the financing of new gates is a recurring nightmare for Disney employees. They always wind up cutting corners when construction begins. In the case of utilidors, they never materialized at Animal Kingdom or Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Their deployment at the former site would have been particularly interesting given the animals stomping around above the substructures.
Alas, the only two other places at Walt Disney World that wound up with any sort of utilidors are Epcot and what’s now Disney Springs. For similar reasons, the utilidors at Magic Kingdom didn’t expand in tandem with the park. Blind spots now exist, particularly in the New Fantasyland portion of the park that Disney updated in 2012.
Taken for granted
What happens behind those secretive doors at Magic Kingdom today? Only cast members know for sure since they’re the ones with authorization to look behind the curtain. They’d be quick to acknowledge that it’s not a big deal to them. The utilidors regions of the park are somewhat similar to unfinished basements in that the overall aesthetic is bare-bones. Walls need painting, gigantic pipes run everywhere, and the mood is decidedly less Disney than the floor above.
The explanations for this are ones of practicality. Disney spends its financial resources on the places that guests can see. They presume that the cast members can deal with a Spartan existence in their underground offices. It’s not the place where the magic happens.
Instead, the utilidors are where the sausage is made. Before you get too upset that Disney employees take the utilidors for granted, take a moment to think about your office or school. How exciting are the decorations there? The cast members-only areas of Magic Kingdom are basically the cubicles of Walt Disney World. If the company opened up these sections to regular guests, nobody would go since they’re so decidedly un-Disney. And boring.
“What is your fascination with The Forbidden Closet of Mystery?”
Now that I’ve lowered your expectations a bit, let’s take a glimpse behind the scenes to see the secrets hidden within the utilidor system. What you’ll see when you pass through these hallways is lots of office space. Remember that it’s a work environment for virtually everyone lurking there. Disney cast members drive to a parking lot each morning and then ride a tram that some sarcastically describe as The Great Bus Ride to the utilidor entrance. The journey is less than half a mile, but Disney wants all the underground space reserved for logistics. Staff parking has to take place elsewhere.
When you explore the tunnels, you’ll notice that most of the cast members are walking, too. Sure, some are sprinting since they’re late for their shift or trying to handle some above-ground crisis, but foot traffic is what you’ll see the most. That’s not to say that the utilidors lack vehicles, though.
To the contrary, Disney has stocked their hidden tunnels with Pargos, golf carts that run on electricity rather than gasoline. The green energy isn’t just for the environment. It’s also a concession to the fact that fuel can explode. Park planners want to avoid catastrophe in their utilidors. While electric batteries are also technically combustible, they’re much less risky. That’s why you’ll see a decent amount of environmentally friendly golf carts whiz by. Pargo is actually a golf cart brand name if you’re wondering.
image via Flickr user pengrim™
Image: Flickr
Other vehicles enter the utilidors as well. Lots of construction and maintenance workers staff the Disney underground. In fact, one of the oddest employment stats at Magic Kingdom is that they stock about 25 maintenance employees during standard operating hours. These are the employees who fix anything broken while the park is open. After it closes for the night, the number of maintenance staff expands to almost 100. Disney performs most of its upkeep after dark. These employees traverse the utilidors to reach the attractions in need of small repairs. Sometimes, they require industrial class vehicles to perform their jobs, which is why those also are allowed in the utilidors.
The other vehicles with underground access are practical in nature. Most of the Magic Kingdom food and merchandise runs through the utilidors. Supply trucks are a constant sight. Disney also has to address emergency health issues as they arise in the parks. They have their own medical ambulances that can rush through the utilidors to aid the injured or ill as quickly as possible. Disney also allows ambulances from offsite hospitals to enter the utilidors during crisis situations. Again, it’s a functional city, and the underground area is the hidden highway that connects the regions above. In this manner, utilidors have literally saved lives over the years.
Due to the monstrous size of the pathways and the Kafkaesque nature of those halls, park planners have color-coded the walls to show the best paths to the various themed areas. Just as you have access to park maps at Magic Kingdom, the cast members working below you have wall notifications. And Disney has even allowed for people like me who are color blind. They also have written directions on the walls as a back-up when the colored identifiers are useless. Despite all the information, many cast members have stories about getting lost during their first few days on the job. The too-similar pathways confuse even the best navigators.
Behind the curtain…
Image: Disney
Other than color-coded directions, most of what you’ll see on the seemingly constant concrete walls of this hidden ground floor is inspirational quotes from Walt Disney and other famous people. The 7 Rules of a Cast Member are also visible. It’s a working area, and corporate strategists believe that every tip has a chance to resonate with some cast member. Disney always has an eye toward customer service, even in their dungeons. Of course, positive feedback is also a way to improve staff employment satisfaction. For this reason, guest feedback is also posted on some walls to make cast members feel good about all the (wonderful) work that they do.
Since many parts of the utilidors are glorified office space, the usual workday details are an everyday part of the system. You’ll notice meeting rooms and break rooms as you roam the tunnels. Sure, some irregular stuff exists, but even that has a reason. Since Disney has rules about cast member appearance, they’ve added a hair salon named Kingdom Kutters. Emp”loyees who look scruffy can take care of their appearance onsite. The line between work and downtime at Disney gets blurred, but cast members think of the utilidors as their escape, whereas their time on the main floor , aka Magic Kingdom, is when they consider themselves “Onstage.”
A few locker rooms are there as well. They’re needed since cast members have to change into their themed work clothes. Accompanying lockers are nearby for staff to store personal belongings during the day. Disney also kindly pipes in music from XM Radio, presumably to restore the sanity of cast members subjected to “It’s a Small World” and “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” hundreds of times each day.
Image: Disney
You’ll also find the cast member restaurant area. Called Mouseketeria, it’s the underground equivalent of Pinocchio’s Village Haus in terms of placement. Describing this facility as a cafeteria isn’t quite accurate despite the name. It’s more of a food court in that meal options are impressively robust. A Subway franchisee is even part of the setup, which is a bit odd since Disney doesn’t have a working relationship with the restaurant chain otherwise. Its presence in the utilidors underscores how hard Disney tries to satisfy all the needs of its cast members.
Similarly, the prices that employees pay for their Mouseketeria food is a fraction of what the company bills paying guests for much of the same snacks, entrees and desserts. Learning the employee discounts on your $15 cheeseburger would make you want to ask for an application the next time you’re at Cosmic Ray’s.
If you’re interested in seeing pictures of the facility, watch Instagram and Twitter for the #Mouseketeria and #utilidors hashtags. Also, perform Google Images searches for these and similar terms. Photography in the utilidors section is a huge no-no, but you’ll infrequently stumble on an interloper’s cache of images or possibly even a disgruntled cast member’s illicit utilidors pictures. Several videos exist on YouTube as well, some of which are quite engaging. The fact that so few of these exist in the wild underscores how protective Disney is of the space beneath Magic Kingdom.
The world’s fastest garbage
Image: Morbotron
As you explore the tunnels, you’ll notice a thunderous sound every 20 minutes. Some of those gigantic, uncovered pipes that are ubiquitous in the utilidors are an integral part of Disney’s trash system. The Automated Vacuum Collection System (AVAC) stands as one of the greatest engineering triumphs at Magic Kingdom, and it wasn’t even possible for Disneyland only 16 years prior.
During the early 1960s, a Swedish corporation deduced that they could set up tubes capable of whisking garbage to a centralized location offsite. Imagineers studied the concept and had the epiphany that the utilidors would be perfect for this implementation. Park planners hired Aerojet-General Corporation to construct a trash removal system, and Magic Kingdom became the first place in America to use a trash tube system to relocate garbage.
While the AVAC system never caught on in the United States the way that it has in Europe, it’s wildly effective for Disney. It zaps trash from Magic Kingdom receptacles at a speed of 60 miles per hour! At that velocity, a full water bottle could knock a person unconscious or worse. That’s why the trash vessels are impenetrable. It’s also why many garbage cans in the parks don’t have standard liners. The AVAC sucks the trash straight out of the can and transports it over to an area behind Splash Mountain. During the trip, it whooshes through the utilidors, and that’s why a thunderous sound roars through the cavernous hallways several times an hour.
The least Disney aspect of the utilidors is the overall cleanliness of the place. I mean that in two different ways. The company wisely dedicates most of its resources to keeping all the parks at Walt Disney World spotless. The space below ground is less important. Once you exit the park via utilidor, you’ll quickly notice a stark change in fastidiousness. The below-park area is dirtier than Disneyland Paris.
The other big difference is the large amount of debris visible. In order to keep Magic Kingdom running perfectly, the utilidors section suffers through a great deal of upheaval in a given hour. Cast members filter through items they need, quickly discarding anything that has lost its efficacy. The prop that Disney removed from the parade last week becomes the garbage strewn on the floor of an underground tunnel today. The scale of these flotsam and jetsam is rather difficult to comprehend. Magic Kingdom is notoriously impeccable in terms of order and sanitation, yet the area directly beneath it is the most chaotic office space in North America.
Not every part of the utilidors is in a constant state of pandemonium, though. One of the most orderly parts of Walt Disney World resides in a special section of the cavernous utilidors. This place is called Engineering Central (EC) today, but Disney historians reflexively call it by its original name, Digital Animation Control System (DACS). If the utilidors are the heart and arteries of Magic Kingdom, EC is the brains.
Guests who have absent-mindedly wondered who or what controls all the powerful machinery operating Magic Kingdom will discover their answer within this facility. Even though it’s underground, EC is the eye in the sky for the world’s most popular theme park. Within its walls, some of the world’s most powerful computers assimilate countless terabytes of big data. Their all-consuming goal is to optimize the efficiency of everything that takes place at Magic Kingdom.
A series of computers and other Imagineer-exclusive devices all monitor the various mechanical parts of the park above. Some test the Audio-Animatronics to predict potential failures more quickly. To a Disney Imagineer, systems functioning at 99 percent are not optimal, but they’re within acceptable parameters. Anything under 99 percent, even 98.9 percent, is insufficient and deemed in need of immediate servicing.
The staff at EC handles many duties during the day. They note crowd flow issues in congested areas, regulate problems with line queues, activate and deactivate stage lighting, handle various parade assignments, and even monitor potential fire hazards. The complexity of Magic Kingdom is such that EC systems monitor more than 100,000 data points each second. And all of this takes place in an unheralded series of rooms hidden beneath the ground of Main Street, U.S.A.
How to Get Behind the Curtain
Image: Disney
Now that you’ve read all about the brilliant labyrinth that resides directly underneath Magic Kingdom, you likely want to see it for yourself. While the videos and images above can give you a taste of the utilidors, experiencing them firsthand is highly recommended. Since you don’t work for Disney, you only have one (legal) option currently.
The Keys to the Kingdom Tour at Magic Kingdom is a five-hour informational journey through the heritage and history of the park. This tour is largely for Disney trivia buffs and those superfans who want to experience the park in a novel way. One of the side benefits is that guests get to visit some of the utilidors, starting with an entrance near Casey’s Corner.
Tour participants spend about half an hour traversing the utilidors. It’s a fascinating way to see behind the curtains at Magic Kingdom, and the cost is less than $100 per person, which isn’t horrible as far as Disney upsells go. Presuming you’re not a cast member, the only other way you’d get to see the utilidors in person is illicit, and that could get you banned for life. Nobody wants to get locked out of Magic Kingdom forever, so just pay the money and take the tour.
The next time that you need some work inspiration, remember this instance when Disney turned a problem into a pair of architectural triumphs that have stood the test of time. Utilidors might look junky in pictures, but they’re one of the greatest innovations in theme park history.
