Disneyland as a Museum

A while back, I wrote a small snippet about how I believe Walt Disney embraced both past and future simultaneously, and without reservation. It merits a lot more exploration, and I expect I’ll do so over many posts, as it can be best explained within specific contexts. In that spirit, I’d like to respond to a piece about how Disneyland is a museum.

Contrary to most “responses” on the internet, this is not a rebuttal, nor is it intended to be a mere rehashing of the original points. I’d like to make a counterpoint in the musical sense; to harmonize a bit, adding my own thoughts on the subject.

Age relives fond memories of the past

Disneyland as a museum seems obvious to me, simply walking down Main Street in any Disney park. Even in 1955, that was largely a relic of years gone by, lovingly preserved in a controlled environment for the enjoyment of future generations. Even by the narrowest of definitions, I’d argue that Main Street alone qualifies as a museum exhibit.

Likewise, other lands in the park harkened back to days gone by, from the westward expansion represented by Frontierland, to the global exploration represented by Adventureland. America in the 1950s didn’t resemble any of these environments, but Walt felt they were worth remembering and reliving, so he created a place to preserve them.

Fantasyland is a variation on the theme. Some consider it a recreation of medieval Europe, and while that may be true in form, I believe the spirit of the place is altogether different. Fantasyland is a recreation of a child’s mind, back when we believed in fairy tales. The fact that these fairy tales were born in Europe centuries ago is merely an artifact of the migration of Europeans to America. The locale is irrelevant to the success of the land.

I’ll voluntarily leave out New Orleans Square for this article, not for lack of merit, but simply because I came to know Disneyland (as opposed to the Magic Kingdom) rather recently, so I don’t have as much history with this area of the park. Rather than fail to do it justice, I’ll leave it for more someone knowledgeable to tackle.

Youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future

The remaining land in the original park is Tomorrowland, which presented an entirely different environment. Here, you have a place that has never existed, but might someday. Sure, everybody knew the future wouldn’t look quite like Tomorrowland, but we could hope and dream, and imagine the possibilities.

To paraphrase the Sherman brothers’ anthem for EPCOT Center’s Future World, it was a little spark, meant to inspire questions and exploration. But like the article I’m responding to, we’ll leave Tomorrowland aside for now and focus primarily on the historical aspects of Disneyland the museum.

Environmental reproductions

A useful distinction to be made, especially in the early days of Disneyland, is that each of these historical exhibits presented something that had once existed outside of Disneyland. In his dedication for the park, Walt’s line about age reliving fond memories of the past clearly referred to people who, like himself, remembered the main streets of their youth, which, by definition, existed long before a theme park could recreate them.

That was the context in which Disneyland was born, and it’s important to remember that. People walking down Main Street remembered that time of their own lives. People walking through Frontierland either remembered pieces of it from their youth or had heard direct accounts of westward expansion from their parents and grandparents. These weren’t abstract environments meant to inspire some generic sense of nostalgia, they were very real reproductions of actual environments that people could recognize.

Bridging the generation gap

It’s also useful to note that the timeframes represented in Disneyland at its opening were generational. In 1955, the turn-of-the-century Main Street was over 50 years old. A man walking down the street with his 6-year-old grandson could remember what life was like when he himself was 6 years old. Turning the corner to Frontierland and Adventureland, he could recall stories his parents and grandparents had told him as a child as well.

Disneyland didn’t recreate America of 1945, or even 1935. It recreated environments that older generations could finally share, in full color and a third dimension, with younger generations. Yes, the events of the previous 40 years were marred by war and conflict, which Walt likely avoided intentionally, but I believe that connection between generations was of key importance.

Here’s were we can also circle back around to Tomorrowland, and point out that it was a way for the younger generation to give their elders a glimpse into their own minds. They imagined a future that their grandparents would never see, if not for Disneyland. Tomorrowland gave them not so much a physical place, but a visual, tangible vocabulary by which to share that vision with others.

Gone too soon

I point out all the generational bits to drive home a fact we all know, but which sometimes seems to get overlooked. Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966. Disneyland was just 11 years old when Walt last saw it. A 6-year-old who walked down Main Street on opening day was, at most, 18 years old. TO put it in further perspective, the youngest Disney park in the United States reached that same age two and a half years ago.

11 years doesn’t constitute a generation by anyone’s math. That 6-year-old on opening day wouldn’t have been able to walk their own 6-year-old child down main street in just 11 years. Walt Disney died before ever seeing a truly amazing thing happen to his park: Disneyland itself became an experience that could be shared from one generation to the next.

Everything about Disneyland seems focused on that generational bond, but Walt never lived to see the park itself become part of that bond. He may have envisioned the day that would happen, and perhaps he even had plans for it, but we’ll never know what those plans might have been.

An evolving vocabulary

Today, Disneyland and other Disney parks have a long enough history that they’ve become their own shared vocabulary among generations. Long-standing attractions, such as the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Jungle Cruise, provide context for a bond between that 6-year-old on opening day and her 6–year-old granddaughter today.

This is part of why preservation of the park itself is so important. This shared environment provides the context for a set of experiences and interactions that form the basis of what Disneyland was all about. Very few among us can walk down Main Street in 2015 in hopes of reliving Marceline, Missouri as we remember it from 1905. Instead, we relive Main Street as existed when we first experienced it at a Disney park.

The exhibit has become the artifact on display.

For me, it’s less about simply preserving history for its own sake, but rather for what it means to the people who experience it and share it with each other. Aspects of our youth need to be preserved so we have some common ground with which to explore Disneyland with a new generation.

However, the Tomorrowland aspect is also still true. Disneyland also needs to represent the youth of today, and give them a way to not only explore the world they live in and will soon inhabit, but to also share that world with those who don’t otherwise have the context necessary to understand it. Disney parks can, and should, work both ways.

Serving two masters

And this is where the Walt Disney Company has a very hard line to walk. Disneyland was a much easier place to manage when it simply recreated lands that existed outside of Disneyland. You could tweak things, update them or completely replace them easily enough, all within the context of portraying some other environment that hadn’t really changed at all.

But now the museum we use to house these artifacts has become a set of artifacts itself, all of which must be presented within the very framework meant to experience them. They can’t just build a new “Disneylandland” park, which simply recreates Disneyland of yesteryear, thereby freeing up Disneyland itself to change and evolve more rapidly. It simply doesn’t scale.

It gets more complicated by the fact that the Magic Kingdom set a dangerous precedent in 1971: it recreated most of the original themed lands of Disneyland. It was 16 years later, but most of the lands were identical to those of Disneyland, at least in terms of theme and time frame. By that point, Frontierland was becoming much less of a real memory for living guests, and the Main Street of their youth would’ve been different from 1905 Marceline, Missouri.

Yet here we had a faithful reproduction of a 1955 concept, which established the notion of a “Disneyland-style” park. This term suggests not just a layout, with a main street and hub-and-spoke design, but also a collection of specific lands and attractions that don’t necessarily achieve that original goal of Disneyland: to connect generations of guests to each other through a shared space.

Instead, we have a park that opened in Hong Kong in 2005, whose first experience is that of an obscure American town a century before. The best that could be said for that concept as a shared experience is that guests in Hong Kong could share the “Disneyland” experience with their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere. It’s a bit too self-referential for my taste.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that it was a bad choice to model the Magic Kingdom so closely after Disneyland. I believe it was the right thing to do, given its appeal to primarily American guests and its temporal proximity to the opening of Disneyland. But I don’t think the similarities should’ve implied a template that all future parks should follow, regardless of other environmental and cultural differences.

The trend that began with the Magic Kingdom was made potentially problematic when it was introduced in Tokyo. I’ve never been to any of the Tokyo parks, but from all accounts I’ve read, Tokyo DisneySea is really the gem of that resort, and I expect that’s due in no small part to being a wholly original concept and design, crafted specifically for Tokyo.

Shanghai finally seems to present an opportunity to try a new approach, better-suited to the location, timeframe and culture of its guests. It has the chance to start a fresh cycle of experiences, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be the most successful Disney park outside the United States.

Where to go from here

Unfortunately, this all leads us right back to what I feel is the biggest challenge facing the parks today. How do they preserve the history and legacy of not only the parks but also the memories of guests, while also anticipating a new legacy, yet to be defined by a new generation? How do you bridge a generation gap when its shores are constantly shifting?