The "Weenie", according to Disney-Speak. Weenie was actually an old carnival term, and the meaning is derived from the idea that a dog is drawn to a hot dog the way a person is drawn to a large, central object. Of course, at the carnival, this was always the roller coaster or chief attraction, and also the most expensive. Usually the Ferris Wheel was the tallest attraction in a traveling carnival, so it would be placed closest to the roller coaster in order to draw people in that direction. The idea, after all, was that upon reaching the weenie, the "customers" would spend their hard-earned cash.
Disney took the term and applied it to a narrative, story-based infrastructure, so that it became the central point of their overall story: Sleeping Beauty Castle was the very first Disney Park icon, at Disneyland. Walt wanted the castle to be the centerpiece of the park because it was the centerpiece of the idea of the park's primary attraction, Fantasyland (at that time, the only land to look and feel like anything close to complete).
Sleeping Beauty Castle, interestingly, underwent a last-minute name change for promotional purposes. The castle was originally called "Snow White Castle"- it is unclear if the name implied ownership to Disney's first princess- and in 155, Sleeping Beauty was well under way. To help promote the film, Walt renamed it to Sleeping Beauty Castle. If you look at the actual castle from Sleeping Beauty, it looks a lot like Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom. Is it pure coincidence that the restaurant inside that castle, upon its opening, was called "King Stefan's Banquet Hall"? King Stefan, aside from supposedly being "Walt Disney's favorite character", was the father of Princess Aurora, not Cinderella. This particularly story has never been discussed by anyone with access to the information, and its entirely possible that the reasons have been lost to time- or atleast to a vault somewhere on Flower Street.
Anyway, Sleeping Beauty Castle is 77 feet high. The Matterhorn, added to Disneyland in 1959, towers above the castle, but the placement of "Holiday Hill" where the Matterhorn was constructed was ideal because of the angles it could then use to play off of the castle. That way, the architecture blended seamlessly with Fantasyland, provided a unique backdrop for the Submarine Voyage (let us not forget that Mt. Prometheus served as thw backdrop for the real Nautilus in Jules Verne's story), and looked accurate with the castle's immaculate charm.
Alas, an entire book can (and, now, has been!) written about Disney's mountains, so we will save that topic for another day. The question is, if we are a designer at WED in 1953- we've just come over from animation, and Walt has charged us with figuring out a design for Disneyland's castle that works with the surrounding ideas and architecture. What do we do?
The answer turned out to be the combination of several key historical sites. The castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria was a major influence, as much as architecture from classic fairy-tales. The blending of real life and fantasy locations created Sleeping Beauty Castle. Disney Legend and Imagineer Herb Ryman was the man charged to create the look of Sleeping Beauty Castle. The design wasn't quite right until Herb turned the top portion of the castle around backwards, so that the front actually faces Fantasyland's main courtyard.
Little did the Imagineers realize at that time, but Sleeping Beauty Castle would only be the very first Icon. The grandfather of them all, so to speak. More were on the rise, literally and figuratively.
When Walt began to plan in secret for his "Florida Project", referred to at one time as "Project X", the theme park was viewed as a means to an end. It was not to be a direct copy of Disneyland, but his focus was on something far more grand than what he had achieved in Anaheim. Walt wanted to create an working, living, breathing community in the heart of Central Florida. He wanted to call this futuristic place EPCOT: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
We're getting ahead of ourselves. In December 1966, Walt Disney passed away. Prior, the theme park at Walt Disney World would have been far more similar to Disneyland. Now, not only did "Disney World" become "Walt Disney World" in honor of the man who started it all, but the theme park became the center of development. For many years, Disneyland was referred to as "Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom", a term Walt first used while promoting Disneyland in the early 1950s.
Florida's Magic Kingdom Park would have the same central layout of Disneyland, but would feature a castle far grander in scope and scale than the Anaheim original. Walt had always wanted Disneyland's castle to be small, so as to not appear imposing to younger guests. John Hench, Walt's premiere art director at WED and a master of color, set out to design Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.
In his wonderful book Designing Disney, Hench talks about the idea of ceremony and ritual and how those concepts have a heavy bearing on the way guests experience a Disney show. In one interview, Hench talks about what he refers to as "Sensory Information". He stands with his interviewer in front of Cinderella Castle at Florida's Magic Kingdom, and discusses the minute detail of several gargoyles high on a distant windowsill: Hench uses the gargoyles to make his point clear.
If they are there, the guest understands that everything feels right. There are a thousand tiny details in the Castle Hub area and if any one of them, from the balloons to the music to the gargoyles high and nearly invisible on the castle weren't there, the guest wouldn't quite notice it, but they'd know that something wasn't right. This, in Hench's definition, is the true art of Imagineering. The details of a show are what make it blend cohesively with reality and in many cases become the reality.
Disney's version of "reality" is of course enhanced, and it differs depending on which experience the guest might choose. At Animal Kingdom, the enhanced reality needs to feel natural and flowing, at EPCOT it needs to surround us and tower over us, to bombard us gently with beautiful ideas and visions and sounds of the future and the world we have created.
At Disney's Hollywood Studios (formerly Disney-MGM Studios), the enhanced reality must feel as though it has stepped directly off the silver screen and into the world around us. At Disneyland Park, the reality must present us with a view of America and its history and future through the eyes of a wonder-struck child. At Magic Kingdom, the reality must be the fantasy that was embedded in our lives at a young age. The great challenge of the designer is to walk in the shoes of a guest experiencing stories, ideas, locations and characters beloved to them, and to be able to successfully create the reality for each of these things.
The Disney Icon must embody the central theme of a themed entertainment experience. In example, Grauman's Chinese Theatre at the Studios park in Florida was the very thing that one might expect to see at the far end of an idealized Hollywood Boulevard. A giant movie palace of the 1930s, replete with spires and window displays and a courtyard touched by a million young stars and starlets. It had what designers refer to as a "payoff". Payoff, in terms of design, is the opposite of contradiction.
Now, when guests reach the end of Hollywood Boulevard, they are met with an image that is by nature contradictory; They don't make hats that big, and one certainly doesn't make much sense at the end of a 1930s idealized version of Hollywood Boulevard....
Or Does it?
If you look at the prototype icon of Sleeping Beauty Castle as Disneyland, it really doesn't "make sense" in "reality" to find a fairy tale castle at the end of a turn-of-the-century Main Street, USA.
Next time, we'll look at the concept of "Enhanced Reality" as it relates to Disney's Icons, and how the development of Spaceship Earth provides the first example of a "thesis attraction" for a themed environment. We will also discuss how perhaps the problem with the sorcerer hat isn't the lack of image, but the lack of payoff and the inherent contradiction it creates from longshot to close-up.
Thanks for coming to the very first Icon-O-Class!
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