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In 1962, my father bought
a sliver of land on the shore of Lake Bryan in
southwest Orange County, Florida. Two years later, Walt Disney purchased a much larger tract
of property 1/8 mile to the north. My parents built their first house on the edge
of Walt Disney World's border and had two boys in it before the resort opened in 1971. My brother Brian
and I spent our formative years in the nearly literal shadow of all that Disney wrought;
the closest playground was at the
Lake Buena Vista Travelodge, the closest post office in the old Preview Center building
and the closest doctor in the same clinic where WDW
sent sick tourists for treatment.
So
Disney's
presence
in our childhoods was dominating, but we didn't know anything was
wrong. As with most other kids our age, we just really liked the place
... we had nightmares about swimming with Jungle Cruise hippos, debated which
of Mr. Toad's two tracks was superior, got freaked out by
the guy in the zebra mask in If You Had Wings and pondered at length what lurked beyond the musty dark Haunted Mansion
portal that spat out an endless flow of doom buggies. Beyond
those fixations, WDW by virtue of proximity also provided us with an introduction to - or a prism
through which we came to view - major aspects of the world around us (foreign
cultures, U.S. history, space exploration and classical music among them).
The main difference between WDW's impact on us as individuals was that Brian,
being a paranoid hedonist, thought it was the ultimate pleasure zone (full of
patently non-threatening fun) and I, as an antisocial idealist, regarded it as
the perfect example of how the rest of the world should be: immaculately
planned, overtly efficient and unfailingly cordial ... even to someone of a
contrary demeanor.
Other people had already made that observation. Long before WDW
opened, California's Disneyland had
been lauded for operating under aesthetic and functional principles of the highest
order. The formula was repeated in Florida, only on a larger
scale, displacing alligators along with citrus groves and giving the master planners a
chance to shape thousands of acres as they wished. They started off
wonderfully: early WDW architecture
was non-confrontational but dynamic; each feature complemented the next;
transitional areas and open spaces were pleasantly landscaped; traffic flow (human
and automotive) was logically configured; employees were
well-groomed, well-spoken and friendly - almost to a fault. For an effete misfit like me growing up around a place like
that, it was Pollyanna from day one.
As proof of my hopelessness, in 1980 I wrote to WDW inquiring about the possibility of a future job. They
sent a handout outlining how one is "cast for
a role in the WDW show." I flaunted that in front of Brian, who had only ever received mail from Ranger Rick, and he expressed enthusiasm
at the prospect of one day being a costumed character. He
said that, unfortunately, in front of our father, who vehemently proclaimed that no son of his was "going to
dress up
like a damned chipmunk" for a living. This upset Brian to the
point of attacking Dad's
right leg with a butter knife. Later they made up and Dad redeemed himself
by taking us - after much hesitation - to EPCOT Center on opening
day. He then proceeded
to horrify radio interviewers by saying the park bore no resemblance to Walt
Disney's plans for a city of the future.**
By the time I was sixteen, my
disposition toward working at
Disney had cooled as I looked for meaning in Bauhaus and the opposite
sex. My first girlfriend, however, worked at Mickey's Mart in Tomorrowland and suggested her
employer as a way of lining my empty pockets. Reluctant capitulation
had me closing out 1985 as a Foods Host at Liberty Square's Columbia
Harbour
House. This provided a surprisingly fascinating re-introduction to WDW. Dozens of childhood questions
about how the place worked were answered in a matter of days.
The mere business of approaching the park from the tunnel system was almost
worth enduring its various odors (a third-world potpourri of dead birds, wet French
fries, cleanser and cigarettes). Better yet, any employee who had the interest could
easily get to If You Had Wings projector platforms and
rainy Tiki Room picture windows when no one was looking.
Through sheer good luck, at seventeen I landed a
transfer to the
Haunted Mansion
simply by asking for it. It was the first time something I'd always wanted
to do lived up to my expectations*** and that
costume was the living end. When Brian turned sixteen he applied for a
job at WDW too. Before long he was dressed like a Logan's Run extra, slinging cardboard-flavored pizza at the Plaza Pavilion and
gazing with wonder upon the massive bank of Wometco vending machines
in the Main Street Break Room. He never wore a chipmunk suit, at least not for Disney, but he
had lots
of fun. Over the next several years I
worked a lot of other rides, wore many shades of polyester and took friends on ill-advised tours of off-limits areas. Brian
got turned on to pot**** and kept losing his wallet.
Back then there were still
many original employees in the park, still most of the original rides and
still
a feeling
of the place we knew as kids. All these years later,
anyone familiar with WDW between 1971 and 1986 probably remembers it as a
very different place than it had become by the mid 1990s. There was more to do
at WDW by the time it turned 25, but its personality had changed. The cohesive
identity that permeated the property - before the rampant
appearance of non-Disney brands - started to drift around
1988. The logos of corporate sponsors had always adorned the entrances of shops and attractions,
but by the
1990s WDW was turning so often to outside influences (Star
Wars, Muppets, Rainforest Cafe, McDonald's, et al.) for presence and content that the line
between its creative legacy and that of others would be blurred
or, perhaps, made indistinguishable for its younger guests. At the same time, the parks and
resorts were aging and the task of keeping them up
to Disney's high standards became less manageable. The resort's original designers were also aging and had either retired
or no longer held great sway; postmodern architecture and design motifs that broke dramatically from Phase One elevations and
color schemes began to pop up across property. And it became much harder
to retain employees who delivered the level of service for which the company was
once known.
Although those
developments were regrettable, the part of WDW's evolution that first affected Brian and me
adversely was seeing things we loved
disappear. When the Mickey Mouse Revue was shipped to Tokyo in 1980, it didn't
resonate too deeply because we thought it might be returned someday. In 1985, Space Mountain's voyeurific Home of
Future Living was replaced with RYCA-1, a poor follow-up, and it made WEDway rides less
fun. Two years later, If You Had Wings was turned into an Eastern
Airlines-less shell of its former self called If You Could Fly. This felt really
wrong; even though the ride's situation was logical (it was, after
all, tailor-made for a sponsor that pulled out), that didn't make the reality of
it going away forever any less sad. It was like losing a really
cool
grandparent, except you can't ride most grandparents through a Puerto Rican fortress full
of traffic cops, marching bands and flamingos. If You Had Wings
became my
first meditative struggle with the concept of impermanence, which only got worse
as more early WDW elements vanished or suffered perplexing overhauls with
far greater frequency from that point forward.
I had made some audio recordings in the parks and taken some photos as a kid,
but when my favorite things started to seriously keel over I went a little crazy
on building an archive of that which hadn't been axed yet. Being an
employee helped, and led to a misguided newsletter (Jane Our Teenage Daughter) on the topic, a timeline of things gone missing and
lots of generous input from total strangers in the
form of photographs, videos, and tapes of ex-attractions.
Massive help came from specific individuals who
shared the same obsessions. "Miami Mike" Hiscano has
been contributing to this project since its inception and is one of the
most knowledgeable and generous WDW fans you could hope to find. Ross Plesset
has also gone out of his way countless times to arrange interviews
and drive down bits of information that would have
been lost were it not for his diligence. Others who soiled their hands
by associating with me in this project's infancy include Mike Cozart, Dave
Ensign, Dave Hooper, Christopher Merritt, Robert Boyd, Dave Smith and
Gerald Walker.
One thing I learned during that
time period, when I was REALLY spending time on this stuff, was that some
people in California who had grown up with Disneyland were paying tribute to
that park's history in far more impressive ways than I could ever hope to ape
for WDW, most notably the late Randy Bright's Disneyland: Inside Story and Jack and Leon Janzen's horrifically wonderful magazine,
The "E" Ticket.
Bright's book was so cool because, although written
by a Disney employee, it didn't feel like it had been
"approved." Bright was a WED Enterprises "Imagineer" who
worked at the park as a teenager and
whose affinity for Disneyland was fully apparent
in
his text. He also compiled a fascinating appendix, entitled "Sequence of
Disneyland Attractions," that traced all the major additions to the
park since it opened. The Janzens' massive grass-roots effort to dredge
up arcane facts about Disneyland were unsurpassed in the world of theme
park fandom. Like Bright, they grew up with the place and were still
infected as adults. They initiated a mad quest to produce a visual
and written history of Disneyland's
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earliest
years which brought forth scads of previously unseen images and stories from WED
personnel who made it all happen.
Their work made everything I'd
written about WDW look like gibberish, but
it also didn't appear that they would get around to covering Disney's Florida parks. So with
the crucial help of my wife Amy (who knew what secret files lurked
in the Florida State Archives), in 1994 I had a crummy new fanzine called Widen Your
World - a phrase borrowed from the last scene
of If You Had Wings. WYW became a website in 1996. The main reasons why it's still
here are:
1. Convenience.
It's an easy way to pass on information, photos, audio and video
to a wide audience. The flip side is that, as the oldest site to cover WDW's
history, content from WYW has been lifted by others (even by Disney itself
a couple times - how flattering!) for years and often not credited.
I can't stop that, but I do promise that everything presented on WYW as original
material or the product of original "research" is exactly that. Anything else is credited to the proper
sources.
2. Posterity. When I die,
some council or another will surely commission a Delacroix-style
painting of Luis Arias, Nicole Golden, Micah Harvey, Steve Hill
and me enacting some 1988 Magic Kingdom
nocturnal tomfoolery. Until then, it's only mentioned on this site.
3. Instruction. Many people younger than me
don't know what If You Had Wings was and might think the former site of 20,000
Leagues had always been a tribute the company's late 80's/early 90's animated films.
They're not likely to learn about these things from sources within the park
itself. Although there
have been a few instances of WDW covering its own history, like 1998's WDW
Resort - A Magical Year-By-Year Journey,
accurate records of WDW's past attractions in book form are
scarce.
Take for example
Bruce Gordon & Dave Mumford's Disneyland: The Nickel Tour, which upon its
1995 publication became the biblical account of one theme park's march through time. No
one on the company's payroll seems to have both the intimate knowledge of
WDW's history combined with the resourcefulness and drive needed
to round out a similar publication. There have been some less massive
attempts, but most of them tended to shortchange WDW's first 15 years
(one made zero mention of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride) and seem to suggest that
the place just gets better with time. In the immortal words of Nicolas
Fehn, "No! ... " So even if WYW isn't vital - and it's certainly
not everyone's cup of tea***** - it has filled some gaps.
Along the way it picked up the support and input of some phenomenal
modern-day WDW
historians and researchers,
including Chris Foxx, David Koenig, Eric Paddon, Spencer Cook, Martin Smith and Michael Sweeney. Assembling a complete list would be very difficult,
but I have tried on the
"Credits" page.
There
are of course many other sites out there now
with a changing/changed Vacation Kingdom as their raison d'ętre. Some of them are, of
course, better than others. Some are simply amazing. If you'd like to
see some of the ingenious ways that people are demonstrating an appreciation for
vintage WDW and related topics, I'd suggest these first:
Passport to Dreams Old
and New
Virtual Toad
Imaginerding
Walt Disney World - A History In Postcards
Imagineering
Disney
Mesa Verde Times
The growing interest in this Florida
subject matter has led to a surge in the amount of
early WDW information and media entering
the public arena. As the legions of people who grew up with the parks in those
early years (or simply want to know more about that time period)
make themselves increasingly known, maybe WDW will get equally serious about its rich
history and offer something more than silly pins to mark its dearly departed. As Mike
Hiscano sagely suggested, the company could easily convert the old Preview Center building at Lake Buena Vista into
an "Early WDW Museum" along with a retro-based merchandise outlet. The
mere thought of it underscores the kind of opportunities the company is missing
to preserve its past.
Whether they pursue something that cool or not, between the exponential
proliferation of online resources and WDW's own efforts, there
should be no shortage of options for those seeking details on the resort's
history. As for this site, it still has a little unfinished
work before it's where I'd think it's just a matter of routine upkeep. I never
intended to spend 20 years paying amateur tribute to lost dark rides, but
with that mistake behind me I feel more like pressing on slowly than stopping cold. So WYW
will probably round out more over the next few years and provide
just one account of what WDW was like back before so much of its original self
faded away.
* They lived there for several years before
Brian was born, so why they wouldn’t spell his name Bryan is
inexplicable. Maybe so he wouldn't be gettin' all cocky and
shit about "his
lake."
** This was true. It did not, however, make Horizons or World of Motion
any less amazing. Or the old Spaceship Earth paper boy any less annoying.
*** I had not yet taken a prostitute to Ponderosa.
**** In 1985 WDW had roughly 20,000 employees and
half of them were constantly high. As Walt Disney often said, that's
twice as high as the island of
Manhattan.
***** WYW
is 2.6 times more likely to anger Disney fans than other sites, including Hidden Nikki's Mousekeblog and eharmagic.com |
