Kathy Merlock Jackson - Disneyland and Culture: Essays on the Parks and Their Influence

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

The chapter by Robert Neuman first appeared in The Journal of American Culture 31:1 (March 2008): 8397, and is Wiley-Blackwell Publishing; reprinted by permission.

The chapter by Richard V. Francaviglia first appeared as Walt Disneys Frontierland as an Allegorical Map of the American West, Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Summer 1999): 155182, and is Western History Association; reprinted by permission.

A shorter version of the chapter by Suzanne Rahn appeared as Snow Whites Dark Ride in Bookbird 38.1 (2000): 1924.

This book makes reference to various Disney copyrighted characters, trademarks, marks and registered marks owned by The Walt Disney Company and Disney Enterprises, Inc.

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e-ISBN: 978-0-7864-8745-5

2011 Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West. 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 or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design by Kelly Elliott; Mickey Ears logo is Disney Enterprises, Inc.

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the memory of Ray Browne
and to Pat Browne,
whose enduring work in popular culture
changed the way we look at the world,
enriching and inspiring generations of scholars

On July 17, 1955, Walt Disney unveiled to the masses the project that had consumed him for the previous several years: a theme park in Anaheim, California, that he called Disneyland. Now over a half a century old, the park and what it wrought have no doubt exceeded Disneys wildest dreams. Not only was Disneyland a success that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors and spawned various Disney-themed parks worldwide, but it also had a pronounced cultural effect in areas as diverse as the uses of public space; trends of architecture, entertainment and tourism; identification of heroes; interpretation of history; and modes of celebration. That is what this book is about. It is not so much a chronicle of Disneyland, for that story has been told many times over, but rather an exploration of the cultural impact of what may have been the greatest leap of imagination from one of the twentieth centurys most creative and whimsical futurists.

Disneyland opened at the height of the postWorld War II baby-boom era, and it was baby boomers and their parents who first caught theme-park fever, embarking on what later came to be regarded as the essential vacation, ones childhood pilgrimage. When visiting Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World in central Florida, families entered a place already familiar and comfortable due to the popularization of Disney characters and storylines via Disneys prodigious use of televison. Debuting in 1954, Disneyland on ABC showcased the four realms of Disneys theme park: Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland. Relying on a large archive of classic animated films and combined with new material, Disneyland won over viewers, making Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, and Davy Crockett as recognizable to American families as their next door neighbors. The following year The Mickey Mouse Club began, confirming Disneys understanding of the link between television, movies, beloved characters and stories, and the need for a place to celebrate them. Disney vowed that his park would be clean and safe, and within this sanitized environment, visitors felt protected, entertained, and open to new ideas, sensations, and images. Innovative landscaping, architecture, transportation and business practices enhanced the Disney experience, creating what company executives called Disney magic.

The magic spread, too powerful to be self contained. Disney masterminded not only media products and recreational facilities but also ways of looking at the world, making sense of our environment, interpreting history, and finding connections. Disney strategies of themeing and corporate synergy permeated American culture. Today the children and grandchildren of the postwar baby boomers have embraced elements of Disneys theme park concept and transformed them in new ways.

The essays in this book speak to this transformation.

The Art of Time and Space

MARGARET J. KING and J. G. OBOYLE

[Walt Disney World] was not just an amusement park, but an environment stimulating new ideas.

Francois Barre, director
Parc La Villette Museum, Paris
[qtd. in Schooner 39]

Walt Disney did not invent the theme park. He did not even create the name. To Disney and his team of designershis ImagineersDisneyland was simply the park. The term theme park came into public usage several years after Disneylands opening, coined by a journalist at the Los Angeles Times when it became obvious that Disneys creation could not be faithfully described with the terminology of the traditional amusement park (Blake 439).

But naming something is not the same thing as understanding it. Popular confusion of the two media is still the rule rather than the exception, complicated by the fact that many amusement parks added themed elements or themed areas to their amusement cores, then retitled themselves theme parks. Today the terms theme park and amusement park are used interchangeably but in origins, design, intent, and effect the theme park is as different from the amusement park as a performance of the Brandenburg Concerto is from a punk rock concert.

For Walt Disney and those who worked on the prototype model in the early 1950s, it was enough to talk about what the parks do, and how they do itwhats inside, what it looks like, and what sort of experience it creates. The tradition of saying Theres no way to explain it: youve just got to see it for yourself (Blake 425) was enough for the first generation of Imagineers when there were no other contenders for the theme park title. Today, however, the evolution of the theme park as a major cultural and commercial force, along with the contemporaneous and interconnected revival of the amusement park as a high-tech industry, makes it both necessary and possible to compare and contrast the two institutions and develop the following working definition of a theme park.

Theme Park: A social artwork designed as a four-dimensional symbolic landscape to evoke impressions of places and times, real or imaginary [King 837].

The theme park/amusement park dichotomy runs much deeper than terminology. Amusement parks are limited experiences. They are, by definition, places of amusement. Their attraction lies in the immediate physical gratification of the thrill ridewhat the late Disney President Frank Wells called soft adventuresthe apparent defiance of Newtonian laws of action and reaction, the exhilaration of speed, the push and pull of gravity, the rush of adrenaline response to the illusion of potential bodily harm. The theme park, on the other hand, is an environmental art form, one that owes far more to film than physics.

Unlike amusement parks which can grow by accretion, adding a roller coaster here or a carrousel there as the capital budget allows, a theme park, or each themed area within an expanding theme park, must be planned, built, integrated, and unveiled as a unified design in order to preserve its thematic integrity. This detailed holistic evocation of a place in time is one of the major elements that distinguishes the theme park from its distant cousin the amusement park.