The End of the World (as we know it)

Atleast thats how some people feel about the changes currently taking place (or rumored to be taking place) at "it's a small world" in Anaheim.

At EPCOT Center, for years and years before the travesties of EPCOT '94 and now Epcot, we were treated to an opening narration set to the music of "We've Just Begun to Dream."

The narration stated the facts about the park that changed Walt Disney World from a resort destination into a science, education and entertainment capital:

"Walt Disney was a dreamer and a doer, a man who believed in the world and it's problems. He believed that people could develop solutions to problems, if equipped with information and technology."

The Latest in Hostile Fannitudes! 

Though the debate has died down considerably while the actual rehab on "it's a small world" at Disneyland progresses, I'd like to take a few minutes and discuss the devil's advocate position on the "proposed" changes to the attraction.

First of all, no one ever said that Mickey and Minnie Mouse would be added, that the rainforest would be replaced or that the scene replacing it would be a tribute to America's cultures and architecture.

These rumors swirled in the rumor mill of the internet until they churned out the other side and straight into Glendale, where they fueled some serious hostility amongst the Imagineers. If your paying public is disowning you the way these people claimed to be, you've got not only some serious creative pitfalls but also a major business problem...

But that was just the thing. These rumors came from the "other side". The so-called "Disneyana" community read into the situation and posted their opinions and thoughts, as internet bloggers (myself included) are prone to do. They may or may not have been accurate in their statements, but it hardly mattered because some of them made a huge fuss and created a serious controversy.

Now, WDI isn't entirely innocent here, either. To add to the speculation, they decided not to respond at all. When they didn't respond with Florida's Mr. Toad and Submarine Voyage, or the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland, it meant curtains for those beloved attractions. The "changes" that were "proposed" for "it's a small world" were considered by most to be accurate depictions of the future. They were delivered by a group that, for better or worse and whether I personally agree with their sentiment or not, is rapidly becoming a serious concern to WDI and The Walt Disney Company as a whole: the bloggers.

A few weeks after the Small World debate had really died down, another incident regarding the Florida version of Toy Story Midway Mania fueled serious opposition within the ranks of the Imagineers. A blog posted an article regarding a serious problem with the audio in the attraction, and condemned WDI for not paying enough attention to the details. This opinion was posted just a day or two after the cast previews for the attraction had been completed, so the Imagineers were still very much in the test and adjust period, and were still in the process of handing Toy Story over to park operations.



The Imagineer's response was less than pretty. It was issued to the offending website and to the Orlando Sentinel, who ran the story and created a minor stir. The Imagineer in question called out the Disney "Fan Community" and stated that WDI is not concerned with these people because they aren't the paying guests.

I'd call this response right and wrong. As a company, you should be concerned with every member of your audience. You should care what they say to a degree. When WDI says, though, that they don't build attractions for the "Disney Fan Community", they are 100% correct. As a business, Parks and Resorts caters to families. Disney is still a family entertainment company, like it or hate it, for better or for worse, forever.

The Disney Fan Community may have its share of interested fathers or armchair Imagineers, but the diehards are mostly not from that particular arena. This isn't good or bad. It simply is what it is, and when the Imagineers say they build their attractions with their audience in mind, they are telling the absolute truth. Otherwise, we'd have seen amazing things like WestCOT and Port Disney come to life.

The major issue at Walt Disney World is that less than 5% of the guests there are repeat visitors or from a local audience. The majority of guests are vacationing families, many of them coming from international destinations, so WDI has to adjust what they do in Walt Disney World accordingly. The audio problems in Toy Story Midway Mania were really just the straw that broke the Florida camel's back, and sent WDI over the edge and into an admission that they no longer cared a nickel for what this particular faction of the Disney audience had to say. This was probably because everything they've done in the past fifteen years has been lambasted and thrown into the garbage can by this same group of people.

This is because the audiences' needs have become different from the needs of a repeat viewer. For the same reason film and television are now regarded as two very different mediums, Disneyland and Walt Disney World have different audiences and require different business practices and creative initiatives in order to stay alive.

The sad part is that most of the times in the past fifteen years that Imagineering, and the company in general, has been put to the gallows by the fan community, the fan community has had the opinion that has made more sense. The really, seriously even more sad part is that the paying customers- those aforementioned families and their character-hungry children- haven't agreed often with the fan community.

There was a time when there was no faction. Disneyland, as John Hench stated, "is good for you." It was good for everybody. Disneyland, in fact, still is good for most people. Disneyland's management has made far fewer mistakes than Walt Disney World's, and the reason is as plain as day:

Disneyland is not run as an outpost of the empire, under control of people who make their decisions without taking into account what their "superiors" in Burbank and Glendale might want or think or how they feel...they simply do. Until recently, Disneyland executives had a handle on things that was so in tune with what their superiors in Glendale wanted that there was barely a moment when both parties not only knew what was happening, but they agree that it should happen.



Mary Blair presents a mural to two nuns at the hospital across the street from the Walt Disney Studios, Burbank, 1943. The Mural remained in the Hospital Nursery for many years.

A Designer's Perspective

Thats really where our story begins. There are only a few key points I'd like to make on the creative side of things.

Imagine for a moment that you are an Imagineer. Imagine that you are a WDI Creative Executive. You've been told to look long and hard at Disneyland. While California Adventure has been placed in the more than capable hands of MGM Studios designer Bob Weis, Disneyland has been placed in the care of Tony Baxter and his team- of which you are a member.

As you review Disneyland's overall story concept, its thematic structure, and study long and hard all of its genius elements of placemaking and theory that have been put into place over the past five decades, first by Walt Disney himself and then by three generations of the most creative Imagineers the world has known; you begin to notice the displacement that took place after the conclusion of the 1964/65 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, New York.

After the fair, Walt (as promised) moved three of the four key attractions intact to Disneyland in Anaheim and moved key set pieces of the fourth to a shed along the Disneyland Railroad. His test for Disneyland East had been successful, but it would still be another three years, an amount of time surpassing what Disney had left, before any land would be purchased east of the Mississippi River.

For now, the UNICEF pavilion desperately needed a home at Disneyland. It was placed near the conclusion of Disneyland's story, between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. It isn't until late 1992 that this becomes a serious problem. With the January 1993 opening of Mickey's Toontown, the "Small World Promenade" becomes misplaced. It used to lead guests from the fairy tale realms of the imagination into the exciting conclusive statement of the future that was Tomorrowland.

After the addition of Toontown, the attraction sits between a natural extension of Fantasyland and the hulking mass of Space Mountain in Tomorrowland, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

If we look at Disneyland as a continuous story experience, we see that the majestic Matterhorn provides us with our final vantage point within the story. It is the last high point before we venture out of the realm of America and into the realm of our futures as people of the world. "it's a small world" made the perfect transition point. It's thematic message was very clear: You've been through turn of the century small town America. You've seen the jungles through a scrim of 1930s American romanticism. You've experience New Orleans, the queen of the delta, the American Frontier and the forests of the Pacific Northwest where animals can talk. We've shown you the stories that are central to our pathos as Americans and as children.

Now, here are the other nations of the world, and as we cross into Tomorrowland, here is what our future together can bring us. With the addition of "it's a small world" to Disneyland, Walt not only had a highly entertaining, high capacity attraction with a knock-out hit song, he also had a point of transition that was setting up what he wanted to do with his new Disneyland East project. The themes of the World's Fair weighed heavily on Walt Disney, and he saw the promise of tomorrow as a major opportunity to create new things; new cities, new experiences in entertainment, new destinations where people could live, work and play without ever getting behind the wheel of their own car. Small World introduced, for the first time in the history of Disneyland, the Global Concept.

Walt Disney stands at the scale map of EPCOT inbetween takes. According to Marty Sklar (WDI Ambassador to the World), the joke here was "If this map is to scale, that makes me 6 1/2 miles tall!"

Fast Forward to 1993. Mickey's Toontown now exists as a natural extension of Fantasyland. Here are the classic fairy-tales from your American childhood (not inconsequentially all retold and put in new forms by Walt Disney and his company), and here are where the most classic of all those characters actually live. Mickey's Toontown is a fantastic story extension onto the whole of Disneyland. After all, in the mythology, this is really Mickey AND Walt's park, and it turns out Mickey was the one who went so far as to offer Walt the land next door to Toontown to build Disneyland!

However, now "it's a small world", with its brilliant but non-specific design, is now a transitional element dropped into the middle of a scene. If we think of Disneyland as a motion picture, where the attraction once served as the fade and the statement between the world of fantasy and the world of tomorrow, we've now taken that fade and dropped it into the middle of the World of Fantasy scene. Not a good thing!

The Official "Seal" of Mickey's Toontown, which opened behind "it's a small world" in 1993 and changed everything.

The Other Side

I'm going to play devil's advocate. While I agree that the inclusion of any sort of "Up with America" tribute scene in the attraction is a major mistake, as is the addition of Mickey and Minnie when so much thematic space is devoted to them just fifty feet beyond Small World's door, I think the addition of some link to Fantasyland is a wonderful idea.

"it's a small world" has sat in a very difficult location for fifteen years. To make Disneyland's story cohesive, and avoid the same issues that have plagued Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in recent times, something needs to be done to link the attraction with its surroundings. You don't see Space Mountain towering over Fantasyland, and you don't see Splash Mountain plopped down in the middle of Fantasyland.

The Arguments

Argument: You are ruining Mary Blair's brilliant designs!



Answer: The additional Disney characters will be similar to the ones employed at Hong Kong Disneyland, and the dolls will be in the original style of the brilliant Mary Blair.

Argument: Adding Mickey and Minnie is a ploy to sell more toys.

Answer: First of all, Merchandising and their lack of coherent attraction-specific merchandise design is an issue for another post. Secondly, at this point, we are being told that Mickey and Minnie will not be added to the attraction.

Argument: The rainforest is the most brilliant piece of design in the show! You can't remove it!



Answer: I Agree. Removing any part of the show for the addition of something that breaks with the transitory theme of the attraction and compromises its place in Disneyland's story arc is not a good idea. At this point, we've been told that the rainforest sequence will also remain intact.

Argument: Adding an "Up with America" tribute in place of the rainforest is sacrilegious!

Answer: Lets keep in mind where this particular rumor came from. The Hong Kong version of the show, the first to feature characters from the animated films, is in Hong Kong. When bridging cultures, as we saw with The Haunted Mansion's transition to Phantom Manor for Disneyland Paris, Imagineers must alter attractions to reach the cultural limitations of the area the attraction will be constructed in. For example, the French don't relate to ghost stories in the same way that we do, and they associate ghosts more with the old west of America than with the south. Because "it's a small world" is now being placed in a different cultural environment than the one it was designed for, and because in China "Disney" is synonymous with "America", an America scene in Hong Kong is totally appropriate where the same scene in America might not play. In short, its all about the guests and what they can and cannot relate to.



Argument: Any change to Disneyland (or its "classic" attractions) should be prevented in the spirit of preservation.

Answer: (the oldest trick in the book, but its still in the book because it works)

"Disneyland will never be complete. It will continue to grow as long as there is Imagination left in the world."



But the simple fact is this: As a dreamer and a doer, Walt's dreams had the thing that allowed them to become reality. 

They had the ability to change.