Aaron Wallace - The Thinking Fans Guide To Walt Disney World: Magic Kingdom

THE THINKING
FANS GUIDE TO
WALT DISNEY WORLD:
MAGIC KINGDOM

By Aaron Wallace

Copyright 2013 by Aaron Wallace. All rights reserved.

Published by The Intrepid Traveler, P.O. Box 531, Branford, CT 06405

www.intrepidtraveler.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

This book makes reference to various Disney copyrighted characters, trademarks, and registered marks owned by The Walt Disney Company and Disney Enterprises, Inc. They are used in this book solely for editorial purposes. Neither the author nor the publisher makes any commercial claim to their use. Note: For purposes of readability, the official names of some entities, including but not limited to Disneyland Park, Walt Disney World Resort, Disneys Animal Kingdom, Disneys California Adventure Park, Walt Disney Imagineering, and others are often referred to in the abbreviated or colloquial forms by which they are commonly known to the general public.

First Electronic Edition

Cover design by Lisa Rennie

Cover photo of Cinderella Castle by Charles Ridgway

ISBN: 978-1-937011-26-0

Distributed to the trade by National Book Network

About The Author

Aaron Wallace has always had a passion for Disney, from the movies to the theme parks and everything in between. He first started thinking critically about the companys artistic output during his time at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in both Communication Studies (with a concentration in Media Studies) and English.

Today, Aaron is a writer and an attorney, having earned a Juris Doctor degree from Wake Forest University. He is also a professional film and media critic, having published more than two hundred movie, television, and music reviews to an audience of millions. Since 2004, hes been a part of the writing staff at DVDizzy.com, one of the Internets most-accessed sites for entertainment journalism.

In addition to writing, Aaron hosts Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Pod , the webs second-longest-running non-commercial podcast dedicated entirely to Disney. The show is one of the most popular podcasts about Disney and has been repeatedly recognized by Apple as a Featured Travel Podcast. Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Pod can often be found among the top-ranking downloads on the iTunes Travel Podcasts charts. Aaron also appears as a regular co-host on The Hub Podcast , another popular show devoted to having fun with Disney.

Aaron lives in Orlando, Florida, where he visits the Walt Disney World Resort on at least a weekly basis and tweets his adventures on his Twitter page, @aaronspod. His website is available at www.AaronWallaceOnline.com.

Dedication

Jesus Christ.

My parents, Rodney and Karen Wallace, and my sister,

Nichole Wallace.

Mike Sullivan. I hope they read books in Heaven.

Table of Contents

Introduction

If Ive done my job, youll never think about theme parks the same way again. This is a different kind of travel book than youre used to, and its uniquely designed to make a Walt Disney World vacation more rewarding than its ever been before. Too often, we get caught up in the frenzy of trip planning and then rush into the parks on a mission to ride everything as quickly as we can. Theres some fun in that, but if you stop to think about Disneys rides and shows for what they are incredibly detailed stories told in a three-dimensional environment youll find that theres actually so much more to enjoy than youve seen before. Thats true whether youre planning your first trip to a Disney resort or your hundredth, and this book is written with both newcomers and veteran Disney Freaks in mind.

I believe its important to know a little something about the place youre going before you get there. You probably wouldnt plan a trip to Egypt or France without reading a bit about them first. I submit that a Disney vacation should be no different. The Disney parks are the worlds most-visited resort destinations and they enjoy that status for a reason. One of the major goals of this book is to investigate and discover the inner appeal that brings millions of people back to these same attractions year after year.

This book, the first in a projected series about the theme parks of the Walt Disney World Resort just outside Orlando, Florida, focuses on the Magic Kingdom. Of all the theme parks in the world, the Magic Kingdom is the most visited year after year. Setting aside minor diversions for the time being, this book looks at 36 major attractions in the park and explores each of them in depth. Youll learn the intriguing history behind every ride and show. Then well take a look together at just what exactly has drawn so many people to them for so many years. And on the rare occasion when an attraction doesnt quite measure up to the high Disney standard, well take a playfully irreverent look at what went wrong. In addition to new knowledge and plenty of laughs, this book will offer you a brand-new way to think about every attraction in the Magic Kingdom.

Each attraction description ends with a feature called WATCH THIS. There, youll learn about a great movie or television production that relates to that specific attraction in a surprising way. For example, Peter Pans Flight has something to do with Peter Pan the movie, but this book looks a little deeper to uncover an even more intriguing film connection. These arent necessarily movies that inspired or are referenced in the attraction, but rather films that share the same structure or theme. For those interested in the more direct connections between Disney films and Disney World attractions, I wholeheartedly recommend From Screen to Theme: A Guide to Animated Film References Found Throughout the Walt Disney World Resort by Brent Dodge (Dog Ear Publishing, 2010).

Most of the movies I cite are made by Disney and available on home video, but when theyre not, there will be a special note explaining where the film comes from and how you can find it. Not only are the chosen movies worth watching for their own sake, theyll actually increase your appreciation for the associated attractions in the Magic Kingdom.

There are six chapters in this book, each devoted to one of the themed lands in the Magic Kingdom Adventureland, Frontierland, Liberty Square, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and Main Street, U.S.A. For the most part, well move clockwise around the park, starting in Adventureland, and ending on Main Street, where the parks wonderful nighttime festivities are staged.

Thats all you need to know about the layout of this book, but a small dose of Disney basics might be useful too.

The Disney Story in Four Paragraphs

Walter Elias Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, and moved to the small town of Marceline, Missouri, with his family when he was four. The Disneys faced financial struggles throughout Walts childhood, much of which was spent moving around the country in search of work. By the time he was 18, Walt had started a career as a cartoonist and found a few small successes over the next ten years. In 1928, his life would change forever with the theatrical release of Steamboat Willie , which introduced the world to Mickey Mouse. Mickey was a smashing success and paved the way for the first-ever animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Widely expected to be a dismal failure, Snow White surprised everyone in 1937 by becoming one of the biggest box office achievements of all time, a distinction it retains to this day.

Walt made many more movies after Snow White but few of them saw real success until the 1950s, when audiences in America and around the world suddenly started clamoring for almost everything the Disney Studios produced. In addition to a string of popular movies, Walt also hit it big on television, a market most film producers didnt want to touch. The Mickey Mouse Club and serials like Davy Crockett took the country by storm. It was also during the 1950s that Walt opened Disneyland.