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The
Magic
KIngdom
Altered WDW Theme Park
Located:
North end of WDW property
Opened: October 1, 1971
Contributing
Disney
Personnel:
Walt Disney,
Roy Disney,
Richard F. Irvine,
Gen. Joe Fowler,
Gen. Joe
Potter,
Claude Coats,
Marc Davis,
Bill Martin,
George McGinnis,
Tony
Baxter,
thousands of others
Descendant of:
Disneyland,
Anaheim
All images copyright
The Walt Disney Company.
Text 2009 by
Mike Lee
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Last Update to this page: June 27, 2009 (expanded text, additional images, corrected links)
Once referred to by the company as the "crowning
jewel" of Walt Disney World, the Magic Kingdom has
remained the resort's most popular park since its
opening date of October 1, 1971.
Based on Disneyland's winning arrangement of
nostalgia, history, fantasy and futurism, Florida's
Magic Kingdom did not face the same type of
economic uncertainty that followed its older sibling's
July, 1955 debut. Within two months of admitting its
first guests, the park was drawing monstrous holiday
crowds that tied traffic in knots from Winter Haven to
Orlando. This successful visitation only dipped
seriously once, during the energy crisis that began in
1973, but shortly rebounded with a ferocity that has continued, if not
intensified, to the present day. Compare some video from the
1980s and 1990s to a modern-day trip to the park ... there used to be days where
you could walk through the lands at a casual pace without tripping into untamed
hordes. Now you only see that if there's a hurricane coming.
No one who has visited both Disneyland and WDW's
Kingdoms denies that the former has the upper
hand in terms of intimacy. The Florida version was designed to
handle many more visitors than Disneyland and was built on a
substantially larger scale. The results can be off-putting
to people who grew up with the California park and, even after 38 years of tree growth,
visitors
to the WDW Magic Kingdom will sometimes notice how some of the
buildings look like warehouses with too little
trimming to mask their volume. The closure of the Skyway,
however, helped diminish that perception by making it harder to see the park's
many big rooftops. The total rebuilding of
California elements, like its Fantasyland in 1983, have not yet made it to WDW with the same
sense of grandeur and today's Disneyland is so well-manicured compared to WDW's Magic Kingdom that one could believe they
weren't run by the same company. Those disparities notwithstanding, Florida
is
where Disneyland's designers honed their craft - correcting many
crowd flow issues and topping much of their previous work with improved versions
of Disneyland attractions (making later renovations less crucial) or all-new
creations. It's also where millions of people have their first exposure to a themed Disney experience and love
it, even without the Matterhorn.
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Growing up next to the Magic Kingdom and working there for years certainly made
the park personally significant to me, but those were almost coincidental
factors. What was of equal
meaning is that within the park's 90-something acres once existed the most
impressive combined applications of spatial design, functional harmony,
architectural detail, color theory, thematic content and conceptual diversity to be
found in a single location. Between 1971 and 1986, no other place in my
sphere of reference* did so much, so well, for such multitudes, amongst so vast
a selection of backdrops and motifs. Disneyland may have run a close
second, but WDW's first theme park once represented a marriage of form, function
and scope that made it supreme by implementing the lessons of
Disneyland on more ambitious and cohesive levels.
As the park matured, it began to surrender
many of its early attractions, shops and restaurants at an exponentially
increasing pace. From the first losses
(Adventureland's Safari Club arcade
in 1972 and
Frontierland's Westward Ho shop
in 1973) to the ones that really began transforming the Kingdom's character
(The Mickey Mouse Revue in 1980 and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea in 1994), there
have expired enough rides and other venues to populate an
entirely separate park - albeit one that will never get
built. The same goes for a wide variety of plans that
were considered for the Kingdom but came short of
reaching the construction phase.
Widen Your World is committed to propagating recollections of those lost, forgotten or
changed institutions. The related
pages show a clear bias in favor of components
related to the park's first fifteen years, when WDW's
crowning jewel sparkled with a radiance that was
perhaps imperfect but as brilliant as a place conceived by man
could actually be.**
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