One of the Walt Disney World’s greatest strengths has always been the power of nostalgia– a timeless wonder that has transcended generations. How many of us, when we think of Walt Disney World, think straight back to fond childhood memories or our first visit? We may remember the sweet bliss of a rice cream or a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar under the hot Florida sun. Perhaps we recall the familiar sound of the monorail rolling in or our emotions stir at the sound of the Main Street Electrical Parade song. We can still smell the scent of cinnamon rolls and caramel apples on Main Street or recall the feel of the steering wheel the first time we drove on the Tomorrowland Speedway.
Despite the timeless magic of Walt Disney World, change is inevitable, and it has come in droves over the past twenty years. While some of these shifts were expected, like park expansions and the arrival of new attractions, others have been complete surprises, like Disney’s game-changing purchases of both Marvel and Star Wars. Some of the changes have been good, breathing fresh life into the Most Magical Place on Earth, while others have forced us to say goodbye to some of those childhood memories.
How has Walt Disney World changed the last twenty years? Let’s count the ways…
1. Explosive growth in size and spaces
Image: Disney
WDW has grown exponentially, not just in attendance but in sheer practical size. It’s ironic that twenty years ago—1999—was something of a keystone year for the parks. The Asia pavilion at Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened (featuring the Kali River Rapids and Maharajah Jungle Trek—Expedition Everest wouldn’t open until 2006!). Epcot’s Horizons and the Magic Kingdom Skyway closed while Test Track, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and The Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster all opened to much fanfare. All of that happened just in 1999.
Over the last twenty years, almost all four of Disney’s parks have undergone some sort of dramatic expansion or renovation (Epcot is just barely catching up to the pack with major renovations beginning on Future World). New Fantasyland brought a much-needed new face to Magic Kingdom’s most classic section, turning it from a tired copy of Disneyland’s version into its own sprawling fairytale dreamscape. The World of Pandora finally filled the long-abandoned space originally meant for the shelved Beastly Kingdom expansion at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It drew crowds in droves to the park, and it is likely that Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge will do the same for Disney’s Hollywood Studios, which also just had another expansion in the form of Toy Story Land.
Outside of the parks, resorts and recreational activities have multiplied to meet increasing guest demands, to the point that in 2014, Disney opted to expands the off-property Disney Wilderness Preserve (run by the Nature Conservancy) by 3000 acres to make room for further development closer to the parks. We’re still just barely seeing the tip of the iceberg of what these new projects will bring, but there’s no doubt that Walt Disney World continues to grow more and more massive in the years to come.
2. The rise of intellectual properties
Image: Disney
Intellectual properties—the characters, stories, and icons under Disney’s creative ownership—have always been a key part of Walt Disney World’s development. While Walt spent his final years focusing most of his attention on trying to develop E.P.C.O.T., even he ultimately capitulated that his Florida project would need ties to familiar Disney properties just like Disneyland. It’s hard to imagine Walt Disney World without Mickey and Minnie, Peter Pan, or Disney’s princesses and heroes.
While Walt Disney World twenty years ago was plenty full of iconic Disney characters and stories, original stories still reigned supreme as source material for attractions. Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion, Spaceship Earth, Test Track, Expedition: Everest—all of these adventures relied on tales woven not by filmmakers or cartoonists but conceived by Disney Imagineers and founders. Expedition: Everest, Mission: SPACE, and Soarin’ proved to be the potential last of this dying breed of attractions.
An extreme shift to emphasizing intellectual property tie-ins was one of the hallmark changes that came with the changing of the guard from Michael Eisner to Bob Iger as CEO (though Eisner had already initiated the trend by the end of his tenure). Today, more and more classic attractions are being renovated to facilitate the addition of IP’s, like the transformation of The Living Seas to The Seas with Nemo and Friends. The Great Movie Ride was closed to make way for Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railroad. Epcot’s Norway pavilion has been completely taken over by the arrival of Frozen. Even beyond classic Disney properties, the company is making full use of their access to Avatar, Star Wars, and even the Marvel Cinematic Universe within the bounds of their deal with Universal Orlando Resort.
While the shift to emphasizing intellectual properties has led to the development of some outstanding attractions and remarkable lands, there is a part of us that can’t help but miss some of that old Disney parks originality in attraction development.
3. Immersion becomes the future of theme parks
Image: Disney
Twenty years ago, the average theme park experience largely centered around spectator experiences. While Disney has long stood on the cutting edge of immersion and hands-on fun in their attractions, there were some unspoken rules about visiting theme parks. Kids could play pretend, but for adults, the experience was mostly about observation—even in thrill rides, guests were woven into the ride’s stories as passengers without much in the way of active roles in the stories. Nostalgia and spectacle were the primary ingredients most attractions aimed for.
The breaking point for immersion becoming the king buzz-word in theme parks didn’t even happen at Walt Disney World. It happened at Universal Studios with the opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
Universal Orlando Resort may have its share of foibles, but they did something spectacular with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. They created a themed land so immersive that just walking through it was an attraction in and of itself—a magical realm that invited guests to become characters in their favorite stories. A generation raised on video games, comic books, and adoration for adventurous experiences had become the target audience for Walt Disney World vacations. The unspoken rules were being broken, and for the first time, both kids and adults were being invited, if they dared, to dive into the mists of make believe.
Disney didn’t take long to plunge into these waters. The World of Pandora at Disney’s Animal Kingdom proved a staggering success, proving immersive theme park lands were the future. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge has already echoed this success in Disneyland and is already taking guests into new territory never before explored by theme parks—a land where hands-on play is key, where every cast member is an actual cast member in the story, and every guest is invited to role-play as part of the adventure of a day in that galaxy far, far away. In these new lands, you don’t just ride a ride to celebrate your favorite stories—you become part of that story, even as a wanderer through the land itself.
4. The evolution of edutainment
Image: Disney
One of the biggest areas that set Disney parks apart from their competitors twenty years ago was their talent for making learning fun. Epcot, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and even Disney’s Hollywood Studios all emphasized elements of education in their attractions, like history and culture in Epcot, the study of nature in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and explorations of the magic of making movies at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Edutainment isn’t necessarily dead at Disney parks, but it has been seriously diminished over the years, especially when compared to the emphasis on IP’s and even immersion. Some great attractions with educational elements still remain, including Turtle Talk with Crush, Kilimanjaro Safaris, and Spaceship Earth, but attractions with Disney’s classic edutainment value are becoming harder and harder to find.
This is one of the changes in Disney parks that admittedly leaves us a little sad. How many children were affected in ways that changed the course of their lives by things they learned at Walt Disney World? How many young people were stirred to curiosity about space exploration, history, telecommunications, the arts, and zoology thanks to a little spark lit at The Most Magic Place on Earth? The idea seems silly, but I can say on a personal level that Disney edutainment attractions played a significant part in planting the seeds for my own career in the film industry. As The Seas With Nemo and Friends proves, education and intellectual properties don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We can only hope this particular aspect of Disney yesteryear will still make a comeback. There are so many ways it could, especially considering another major change in Disney parks the last twenty years…
5. A digital revolution
Image: Disney
It cannot be overemphasized how much the transformation of our culture by technology has changed the Disney parks experience. In 1999, the internet may have been going strong (strong enough that we all thought the world would end when our computers tried to switch over to the year 2000), but it really hadn’t affected Disney parks that much. Information for making reservations was easier to come by, and more and more people had digital cameras, but that was it.
Consider the impact of smartphones. Almost every Walt Disney World guest now carries a handheld supercomputer that can store thousands of pictures and videos on a whim, transmit their vacation via social media to almost anywhere in the world (even in a livestream), that can make and manage reservations for dining and Fastpass+, and even provide interactive entertainment in line thanks to the Play Disney app.
Even without a smartphone, try imagining a Walt Disney World vacation without a MagicBand. It still happens, but the convenience of MagicBands is undeniable—a simple bracelet that can be used as a room key, portable payment device, a Fastpass storage unit, and a magic wand to unleash personalized pixie dust at any given moment. Think about how Photopass has changed how we handle theme park photos. Disney now has the ability to transmit ride photos directly to guest’s personal devices without them even (technically) needing to scan their band. That is wizardry at work.
This digital revolution is nowhere more apparent than in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. In Galaxy’s Edge, guests can turn their smartphones into an in-world Star Wars Datapad capable of hacking terminals, tuning into communication frequencies, scanning crates to learn their contents, and automatically translating Aurebesh. The information tied to guest MagicBands will track their experiences within the park and even affect character interactions. Let’s also not forget how video game culture has transformed the parks, bringing elements of virtual reality into attractions like Avatar: Flight of Passage and gamifying into rides like Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run.
6. The dining isn’t what it was
Image: Jett Farrell-Vega
There have been so many great developments in Disney dining the last twenty years, both in the opening of some absolutely stellar restaurants like Jiko: The Cooking Place and Monsieur Paul and in the advancement of immersive dining like we’ve seen in The World of Pandora. However, not all of the changes to dining at Walt Disney World have been positive.
Longtime fans of Disney dining will agree that quality at many of Disney’s restaurants took something of a downward spiral after the arrival of the Disney dining plan around 2005. Dining plans provided an easy way for Disney to guarantee a price per meal for guests, but theoretically, it also potentially meant losing money if food costs were too high. Many classic Disney dining locations that were known for top notch food twenty years ago have dramatically lost quality, such as the shift in Epcot’s Garden Grill from farm-to-table feasts to a bland thanksgiving theme or the diminishments in quality at Magic Kingdom’s Liberty Inn. Guests are growing more and more vocal that the food at Disney parks just isn’t what it was.
The good news is that Disney still has some great food. Most of the resort’s signature restaurants like Jiko: The Cooking Place, The Flying Fish, and Tiffins all serve incredible cuisine, and even many of the mid-level restaurants like Tutto Italia, Jungle Navigation Co. Skipper Canteen, Satul’i Canteen, and Tusker House have plenty to delight guest palettes. Just don’t assume that because a Disney restaurant was outstanding twenty or even ten years ago that you’ll still have the same experience today.
7. Character greets are COMPLETELY different
Image: Disney
Twenty years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for guests at Walt Disney World to find characters wandering the streets of any given park. While character-heavy areas like Mickey’s Toontown offered specific meeting spots, finding characters was often something of a roll of the dice, and once a character was spotted, they could drift just about anywhere.
Theoretically, the arrival of smartphones and digital cameras is what changed character meet-n’-greets. Whereas in the days of physical film, guests could only afford to take so many pictures, digital cameras allowed guests to take thousands of them, slowing down character encounters significantly. Keeping guest traffic moving during character meet-n’-greets became harder and harder to control, especially if the character was just drifting. It wasn’t long after smartphones became popular that Disney shifted almost completely to the character greet model we know today where characters appear at a specific greeting location at specific times, with handlers present to keep lines moving.
8. DVC became king
Image: Disney
In 1999, the Disney Vacation Club had four resorts, with only two in Walt Disney World—Old Key West (which had until 1996 simply been called “The Disney Vacation Club”) and the Boardwalk Villas. Construction had just begun on the Villas at Wilderness Lodge. While the DVC was growing in popularity, many still viewed it as a novelty for those who could afford to take multiple Disney vacations a year.
Since then, Disney has opened ten DVC resorts at Walt Disney World alone with two more coming soon (Disney’s Riviera Resort and Reflections- A Disney Lakeside Resort). The Disney Vacation Club has grown so much that it seems like Disney can barely keep up with demand, with reservations for DVC resorts becoming harder and harder to nab for members, partially due to a thriving points rental industry. There’s nothing wrong with this—it’s a great arrangement for DVC members who have managed to turn their DVC points into an investment with returns, and it allows families to enjoy DVC resorts and prices without the staggering cost required to buy into DVC.
However, DVC’s popularity surge among members and renters has certainly tipped the scale on how the program works and on Disney’s priorities in building resorts. Many of DVC’s benefits don’t have the same bite they used to. New resorts are being built with somewhat restrictive rules that have some guests concerned if new DVC memberships are really worth the investment. Despite this, however, there’s no doubt that the Disney Vacation Club has proven to be one of the company’s most impressive successes the last twenty years.
9. The many faces of Disney Springs
Image: Disney
There is possibly no portion of Walt Disney World that has gone through more changes than Disney Springs, formerly Downtown Disney, formerly Pleasure Island/Disney West Side, formerly the Disney Village Marketplace, formerly the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village… you get the point.
By 1999, the-shopping-district-that-would-become-Disney-Springs had already gone through four major rebrandings. Throughout its life, the district had been a shopping village, an entertainment hub, and a nightclub district all trying to maintain a vague sense of Disney connection. It remained known as Downtown Disney and Pleasure Island until 2006, when the Pleasure Island nightclubs closed.
Downtown Disney suffered from a severely floundering sense of identity until it was rebranded (again) in 2013 as Disney Springs. Rather than trying to completely bury the remnants of its teeter-tottering past, Disney Springs was unified as a shopping superhub with four sections—the marketplace (home of the old Disney Village Marketplace), the Landing (which replaced Pleasure Island), the West Side, and a new Town Center section full of upscale shops from both unique and well-known retailers.
Disney Springs isn’t perfect, and we still aren’t sure its fully found its identity yet. However, the curious conglomeration of its past selves into what it is now has produced a very nice getaway both for Disney guests and for locals. The district, overall, feels more unified and charming, and doesn’t seem like quite the Frankenstein of ideas it was before. We can certainly raise a “Kungaloosh!” to that.
10. Changes to attractions
Image: Disney
Changes to classic attractions are an unfortunate reality in all theme parks. Over the past two decades, we saw Maelstrom make way for Frozen Ever After, Horizons become Mission: Space, The Magic of Disney Animation become Star Wars Launch Bay, and even The Great Movie Ride wasn’t spared to make way for Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railroad.
The changes we’ve explored all had dramatic effect on Disney’s attractions, especially the still-growing emphasis on intellectual properties and immersion. For one thing, more and more properties that purists wouldn’t consider “Disney” have quickly become mainstays in the parks, like those from Avatar, Star Wars, and Marvel. Star Wars alone has completely altered the face of Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney has used every chance they can to squeeze Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy into the parks—one of the few MCU properties they are allowed to use in Orlando.
Some of the most significant changes to attractions the past twenty years have also been due to changes in the culture. For example, while many fans might have bemoaned the change of the wenches auction in the Pirates of the Caribbean to a goods auction manned by a Grace-O’-Malley like pirate redhead, there is some merit to the way those changes echoed the changing values of our culture. Indeed, for Pirates of the Caribbean, this wasn’t a particularly new song and dance as similar renovations were made in 1997 to transform the lusty pirates chasing frightened maids into nervous pirates being chased by angry women with brooms. The more digitally connected we’ve grown in our world, the more the horrors of things like human trafficking and the abuse of women has been brought into the public eye and reflected on afresh. For many, the scene was no longer iconic—just a disturbing reminder of real darkness in the world. Disney shifted with the tides.
These changes certainly aren’t all bad, even if there is much we miss about the Walt Disney World of yesteryear (especially the prices!). The good news is that even if the Most Magical Place on Earth has undergone a lot of changes, there are many signs that the best might be yet to come, and we can’t wait to see it!
What are some other changes you’ve noticed in Walt Disney World over the last twenty years?
