The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century

Disneyland was a radically new site for the playful crowd when it opened in July 1955. Shaped by its Southern California setting with its culture of optimistic Midwestern migrants, the film industry, and automobile and suburban society, this 160-acre site on former orange groves in the sleepy town of Anaheim promised much. Walt Disney insisted that he had created a new kind of pleasure park, free from the dirt and danger of the carnival world of freaks, barkers, and thrill rides. It was designed for baby boomers and their parents from middle America, offering entirely new forms of entertainment. And, although Walt Disney died in 1966, his vision of the playful crowd remained for decades thereafter in his company’s careful cultivation of Disneyland and, after 1971, Walt Disney World in Florida. For some, Disney’s transformation was a blessing, substituting clean, orderly, and family-oriented fun for the grimy disorder and working-class and minority crowds of America’s declining urban amusement parks and seaside resorts.

At the same time, others found Disneyland an example of the culture of the “midcult,” the aesthetic of a lower-middle-class corruption of gentility, the sentimentality and false optimism of the Saturday Evening Post and Readers’ Digest, and the uprooted culture of the suburbs, torn from both highbrow European traditions and earthy and vital immigrant and rural cultures. Disneyland was a particularly powerful, even emblematic example of commercialized tourism in the twentieth century, a “pseudo-event” (Daniel Boorstin), or a “simulation” (Jean Baudrillard), a “hyperreality” (Umberto Eco), or an example of “hypermodernity” in its obsessive concern with efficiency, predictability, calculability and control.¹

Again and again, critics claimed that the passively received image from Hollywood had replaced local and organic visions of life. Disney, too, has been seen as central to a deplored trend of cultural “globalization,” running parallel to “McDonaldization” and synthesized with it as “McDisneyfication.” George Ritzer identifies it as part of the rise of a bland culture of international corporate placelessness. ² Ritzer has argued that in simulating enchantment, Disney and similar organizations actually disenchant at a deeper level, by stripping out the magic and layers of meaning that go with complexity and disorder.³ Disneyland sought to control and tidy nature and history, or indeed to invent its own version of them, not mock, bend, or parody them as did Coney. Disney’s obsessive control of the “fun” required that the company treat the audience as children. Even when it seemed to celebrate the playfulness and delight of the child in its the architecture, Disney did not foster the play of children.⁴

Disney’s intellectual defenders have repeatedly denounced these critiques as elitist and ascetic. Typical is the response of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who in 1958 insisted that Disney critic Julian Halvey “truly loved Disneyland but is not man enough, or child enough, to admit it. I feel sorry for him. He will never travel in space, he will never touch the stars.” Intellectuals like Halvey “steadfastly refuse to let go and enjoy themselves.”⁵ While critics have consistently dismissed Disney crowds as manipulated or self-satisfied, defenders of Disney have too often denied the need to ask the serious question, what makes so many consumers identify Disneyland as the “happiest place on earth” as claimed by Disney publicity. More important still, what changes have occurred in contemporary sensibilities to make the Disney experience a central attraction of the playful crowd in the second half of the twentieth century?

The Disneyland phenomenon cannot be simply encapsulated in the familiar cultural debate between defenders of a populist commercialism and the jeremiads against consumerist modernity. We need a longer view. Walt Disney challenged, but also borrowed, quite explicitly, the industrial saturnalian values and practices of 1900s Coney Island. He visited Coney in its decline, and reacted sharply against its “tawdry rides and hostile employees,” its dirt and lack of planning, and its uncultivated patrons. It was East Coast, metropolitan, and working class; and its customers did not spend enough. It was an “other” against which Disneyland could be defined by contrast, like a photographic negative.⁶ But Walt Disney also borrowed from Coney Island. His object was cultural inversion, a counter-world to everyday experience—just as was Coney’s, even if Disney’s carnival corresponded to a culture very different from the urban working-class immigrant of 1900. Disney’s saturnalia was expressed not in the childlike play of young adults breaking from work and family constraints but in the child-centered play of families seeking temporary escape from a world of suburban consumerism while encountering it again in a different form.

Disney deliberately departed from Coney’s self-abandon in thrill rides and fascination with the boundary worlds of the freak and afterlife. Yet Disney offered movie-themed rides that had a lot in common with Coney’s scenic railroads. Disneyland’s Tomorrow- and Adventurelands (and later Disney World’s Epcot and Animal Kingdom) presented fantasies that were, in important senses, modernized versions of Coney’s Trip to the Moon and exotic villages. Disney embraced more scientific understandings of space travel and rather less overtly racist views of “primitive” tribesmen, but there remained continuity.

Disney believed that his park revolutionized the old fairgrounds and amusement parks by eliminating the “maze of criss-crossing streets and sidewalks.” Again, this was not as new as he thought, for the three parks at Coney Island attempted to use their colonnaded lagoons and well-policed pavilions to eliminate the noise and confusion of the Bowery and Surf Avenue. The key difference with Disneyland was that it was far more systematically organized into “scenes” like in a movie that created visual coherence. Its central architectural principle was separate “lands” or themed areas that radiated from a Plaza marked by Sleeping Beauty’s castle.⁷ But this design was made possible by the fact that Disney had far more space to spread out and had more control over his attractions (unlike the Coney Island parks that leased out space to independent showmen).

The resulting experience was not merely manipulated, sentimentalized, or sanitized. Rather, Disneyland expressed a playfulness that attracted a mass audience as much as had Coney fifty years before, but responding to the desires of an expanded and transformed American middle class. Disney offered a consumerist saturnalia, both expressing and in interesting ways protesting a new commercial culture, driven by the evocation of childhood wonder and the nostalgic longings of the “child within” and expressed through a playful reenactment of Disney’s cinematic creativity. In the following analysis of Disneyland and (to a less extent Walt Disney World), we will try to show how the Disney enterprise has come to define an important form of the playful crowd that emerged in the mid-twentieth century.

Although scholars dispute just when Disney first thought of building his park, by the mid-1940s, he was surely exploring other ways of expressing his imagination than in his recent movies (e.g. the cartoon feature Fantasia in 1940 which had been a commercial failure).⁸ According to art historian Karal Ann Marling, he wanted to “build something tangible and true, something perfect, a place where nothing could ever go wrong,” unlike his own studio, which was ridden with labor strife. He certainly was not thinking of the conventional amusement park full of the mechanical rides and sideshow attractions that had survived from the late 1890s. Despite the advice of amusement park owners consulted by touring Disney staff in 1954 that “if you don’t put up a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel, you’ll go broke,” Walt had other ideas. In his oft-quoted words, he wanted “some kind of family park” not like those “dirty, phony places run by tough-looking people.” Disney recalled: “It started with my taking my two kids around to zoos and parks. While they were on the merry-go-round riding 40 times or something, I’d be sitting there trying to figure out what you could do that would be more imaginative.”⁹

Despite Disney’s claims of originality, he drew on a vast reservoir of architectural fantasy and commercial amusement to create the aesthetic of his themed environment. Most proximately, he owed a debt to the international exhibitions of San Francisco and San Diego and amusement parks at Long Beach and Santa Monica. He borrowed also from the whimsical architecture used to attract customers to southern California restaurants, gas stations, and bakeries. Southern Californians were accustomed to buying bread in a store masquerading as a storybook “Dutch” windmill.¹⁰ The same playful architecture had been exhibited seventy years earlier in Coney Island’s Elephant Hotel. Marling traces Disney’s landscape design and many architectural themes to his fascination with shadow box miniatures that led him to commission playful reproductions of frontier and small town American buildings in Disneyland.¹¹ His nostalgia for late-nineteenth-century trains (manifested in his own building of a miniature hobby train at his home) and his attraction to the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948 with its models of scenes of historic Americana deeply influenced his decision to build a scaled-down train around his fantasy scenes in Disneyland.¹²

Disney clearly reflected the sensibilities of middle-class America in the 1950s, certainly not genteel in the tradition of Coney’s Manhattan or Oriental Hotels, but also not the aesthetic of West Brighton of 1900. While even the “upscale” Dreamland park of 1903 freely mixed Bible-inspired scenic railroad rides with side show attractions, Disneyland rejected the entire tradition of freaks, fortune tellers, and even shooting gallery stalls and stayed away from now controversial themes of death and the afterlife. There were not even trained animal acts, clowns, or other standard circus entertainments (beyond an unpopular Mickey Mouse Club Circus that lasted only one season in 1956). In the early years, even the tradition of the roller coaster and other thrill rides was absent. Disney rejected the carnival or fairground ambience and the personnel who went with it. As one reporter noted, there were “no shouting nasal carnies” and “no Little Egypt girlie shows” at Disneyland.¹³ Middle-class discomfort at the sight of gypsies, Egyptian Fakirs, Indian snake charmers, and other “exotic” show people finally had won the day. No longer would these visitors have to endure the shouting and outrageous lies of barkers and the intrusive huckstering of sellers of food, drink, and trinkets of dubious quality and cleanliness. No longer would there be the irritating confusion of competing demands on their coins. Long Island’s “Playland” in the 1920s had surely anticipated all this change, but Disney not only rejected the old (now working-class) carnival tradition, but also systematically replaced the culture of the sideshow and show people. He went much further than the tamed amusement park mixed with genteel elements of promenade, gardens, picnic grounds, and tower by which Playland distinguished itself from Coney Island.

Rather, he created a new complex of commercialized entertainment. Instead of the exotic and oriental, he offered the cute and cartoonish; in place of the noisy and cheesy competition of the stalls, he offered integrated themed attractions with much more subtle appeals to spend (for example, licensed merchandise in shops disguised as part of the ride or show). Employees, from security staff to ride operators, were people like the visitors—clean cut, “normal,” and middle class, not members of a mysterious subculture of the “carnival” immortalized in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Carousel” (1945). By reaffirming middle-class values through numerous clues (order, cleanliness, but no longer religion), Disney made people comfortable, even in crowds of thousands.

Disney’s appeal to middle-class sensibilities was not purely negative or bowdlerized. He blended the emotional “release” of fantasy and abandon with claims of uplift. Genteel codes of self-improvement, what the English Victorians had called “rational recreation,” made Disneyland acceptable to suburban consumers in an era of seedy amusement parks, but that code had been adapted to a new “play morality” in middle-class families, first identified in the 1950s by anthropologist Martha Wolfenstein.¹⁴ Publicity claimed that Disneyland was “a place for people to find happiness and knowledge,” both a “city of Arabian Nights” and “a metropolis of the future.” As we shall see, Disney claimed the mantle of the popular educator of history and science, but he also made clear that this learning was to be a family experience. A plaque in Disney’s Town Square expressed what would be learned and by whom: “Here age relives fond memories of the past and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”¹⁵ Disney was a place for the old to tell stories inspired by Disney nostalgia and for the young to learn of their future and how they were to surpass their elders in a playful, childlike way.

Disney modeled his park on the international exhibition. In doing so, he followed a long historic trend away from the uplifting programs of art, history, and science so prominent in Chicago’s White City pavilions of 1893. Instead Disney celebrated middle-class American self-understandings through appealing references to scientific progress and a virtuous past. As cultural historian Neil Harris notes, Disney succeeded by co-opting the genteel culture of the exhibition without engaging in “its heavy didacticism,” wrapping Victorian ideals of progress, world adventure, and distinct American myths about pioneer virtues in “childhood nostalgia,” thus giving the educational and uplifting goals of Disney a playful quality, making them part of a cross-generational act of story telling.¹⁶

Disneyland was an artifice, created out of featureless orchard land, miles from the ocean, mountains, and even desert. It surely had nothing to do with the sacred places, those majestic creations of nature or history that had inspired feelings of the sublime in nineteenth-century American tourists. Still, Disney re-created in steel, concrete, and fiberglass cues to those feelings in most of his “lands.” Most think of the cartoonish world of Fantasyland when they think of Disneyland, but that took up only a quarter of the park. In Adventureland Disney evoked genteel ideals of sublime vistas of faraway places and, even more, he promoted late-Victorian bourgeois values—the white European’s superiority and duty to explore the world. In Frontierland, Disney featured America’s imagined history, with its rugged images of the American West. And in Tomorrowland, Disney promoted the power of progress.¹⁷

Yet, Disney never intended that any of these places be simply outdoor museums or to imitate the “official” and didactic qualities that characterized natural or historical museums for most of the twentieth century. Disney saw his uplifting mission from the perspective of a boy, a middle-class boy, perhaps a reader of early-twentieth-century magazines like Youth’s Companion or St. Nicholas where boys (and even some girls) of 10 or 12 read about exciting places far away and the promise of new technologies. That same “boy” might have also read Zane Grey westerns. Disney assumed the mantle of this boy’s culture in his TV program, “Disneyland,” which premiered in 1954. Repeatedly, Disney publicity evoked the middle-class child’s imagination. Frontierland was supposed to inspire the “pioneer spirit of our forefathers,” not only in civilizing the American West by subduing nature and the Indians, but also in the testing of the individual’s moral fiber in the face of adversity. The past was to teach a patriotic and moral lesson just as fifth grade social studies classes were intended to do. But Disney’s “history” had other objectives like attempting to re-create a socially binding emotion: Frontierland was to “give you the feeling of having lived even for a short while, during our country’s pioneer days” so that “all of us, whether 10th generation or naturalized Americans, have cause to be proud of our country’s history, shaped by the pioneering spirit of our forefathers.” Most of all, despite claims that “our country’s past is accurately reproduced in Frontierland,” Tom Sawyer’s Island there promised to be “a playland out of a youngster’s dream” where “everything an adventurous boy could want” was to be found, including “Injun Joe’s Cave and the Tree House.” Frontierland was to be a storybook version of history. The Golden Horseshoe Saloon featured, of course, the “tallest glass of soda pop” and the show girls did a wholesome version of the Can Can. Adventureland taught the boyish pleasures of “traveling to mysterious far-off places,” offering a romantic travelogue which evoked memories of reading Hardy Boys and Tom Swift adventures or accounts of distant places in St. Nicholas or National Geographic magazines.¹⁸

Tomorrowland was where visitors “step into the future atomic age” and the “challenges of outer space and the hope for a peaceful and united world.” It was an extension of the adventure and frontier theme with its appeals to courage and challenge, but with a Rotarian undercurrent of one-worldism and Victorian progress. A 1959 press release expressed this bourgeois optimism in full voice: “Science and technology have already given us the tools we need to build the world of the future … we will prove with the new Tomorrowland that today is the future.” The future is not a fantasy, but “is here if we use our tool right now.” There one could find a Home of the Future and Hall of Chemistry, where visitors could see “how innovative uses of plastics could shape our homes of tomorrow.” Somewhat more exciting, but equally didactic in conception, was the Rocket to the Moon (designed with the assistance of Werner von Braun of NASA and space authority Willy Ley.) TV screens (rather than dioramas) showed “passengers” their travel path. Unlike Coney Island’s Trip to the Moon, there were no moon fairies or moon cheese. Once again, the didacticism was tempered with childish romance and science fiction. The first version of Tomorrowland included the “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” based on Disney’s recently released adventure movie and Jules Verne’s turn-of-the-century fantasy of deep-sea travel. The most popular attraction in Tomorrowland was Autopia, where little children could drive their own cars (and adults could pretend to compete with them) at 11 miles per hour.¹⁹

These “lands” were not ultimately to be sites of learning, or even entertaining erudition. Disney’s simulations of the Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer’s island, his Jungle Cruise, and even the Rocket to the Moon appealed to a storybook imagining of places where the lines between fiction and fact were blurred. Of course, they intensified, romanticized, bowdlerized, and otherwise adapted schoolroom versions of history, nature, and technology. They also reduced the world’s geography to a “simulacrum,” in David Harvey’s language, while presenting a dominant narrative of American pseudo-history, helping to create a hegemonic “common sense” about the past, the world, and America’s place in it.²⁰ But in doing so, they were copying in three dimensions the tradition of the child’s storybook. With the child in the lead, these “Lands” were to be accessible to all members of the family, despite conflicting interests and differing attention spans.

In fact, what made Disney an especially middle-class cultural experience were his efforts to make his park a place of positive family interaction, in “happiness” as well as “knowledge.” The problem for him was not that amusement parks did not appeal to adults, but that they excluded parents from a playful time unless they first excluded their children. His objective was not to let adults become kids without the burdens of children (as was the case in Coney Island and even the early Playland), but to create a setting “where parents and children could have fun together.”²¹

This playful crowd became acceptable to the middle classes because it was visibly composed of many independent family units presumably sharing time together. Adults became parents relating both to the delights of their children and to their own “inner child.” In turn, the young enjoyed parents and other grown-ups who temporarily abandoned their authoritative and serious roles as adults to glory in the childlike and children. These families were supposed to be interacting not with the “mass,” but with each other around the shared goal of childhood wonder. Disney was often quoted as saying: “we don’t aim at children…. Everything we do … we do at the family level. We try not to insult any age level. We try to get the right balance. Adults far outnumber kids at Disneyland and I call them honest adults, not afraid to shed a tear of nostalgia and romance.”²² Disney created neither a park just for kids or for regressing adults. It was a place that not only reached the sensibilities of every age group, but also claimed to bring all to a common experience of delight, free of the obsession, refinement, pedantry, and other forms of life’s advance beyond the holy wonder of the child.

All this fastidious concern with negative middle-class feelings about amusement parks, the childlike version of uplift, and the family-focused play may strike the reader as merely confirmation of the typical critique of Disneyland as bowdlerized carnival. But this would reduce it to the pallid and saccharine. Disney’s “happiest place in the world” created a new positive and vital form of wonder, middle-class perhaps, but also in tune with the broader consumer culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Disneyland codified new forms of “happiness” around three essential ideas: 1) putting the visitor into a cinematic fantasy; 2) creating real excitement around the child and the childlike (taking the essential attraction of the freak and circus show and transforming it into the cute, encapsulated in cartoon characters and their stories); and 3) partially replacing the quest for novelty with the appeal of nostalgia (reliving the “inner child”).

From the beginning, Disneyland rejected the old cluster of mechanical rides and circus sideshows for carefully reproduced and mechanized sets from his movies. While for New Yorkers of the 1900s, appealing scenes came from mental images of Renaissance Venice, ancient Rome, the mythical Baghdad of the Arabian Nights or even popular understandings of hell and heaven, for Americans of the 1950s, such scenes originated mostly from movies and television and were already visually familiar to visitors. Characters and dramatic scenes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Dumbo (1941), Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), and Third Man on the Mountain (1959) were made into rides. The thrill of Disney came neither from the physical sensation of the roller coaster nor the sensual/sexual tease of the Human Whirlpool, but from realizing the “dream” of a fantasy place. In fact, the object was not primarily to transport the visitors to a historical site or even to evoke the sense of being in such a place, but to propel them into a story, peopled with familiar characters from a Disney movie.²³

Movie-based rides encouraged patrons to identify emotionally with a familiar “scene” and to feel fulfillment by transforming the memory and passive viewing of a movie like Peter Pan into the multisensory experience of flying in Peter’s pixiedusted ship over London as he triumphantly returns the Darling children home to their nursery. Similarly, Mr Toad’s Wild Ride simulated the most exciting action scene in the movie, giving riders the sensation of being chased through London by police and crashing through walls. Moreover, the visitor is greeted with “inside” jokes which they understand because of their familiarity with Disney culture.²⁴

In ways, all this was simply a new version of the religious pilgrimage where a three-dimensional site (a ride instead of a church or holy city) gave physical depth and reality to a set of stories and symbols (based on movies instead of scripture) and allowed the faithful to walk in the steps of the divine (or in this case to ride through a fantasy space of Snow White or Tom Sawyer). Pleasure, if not renewed faith, came from seeing the familiar cartoon figure in “life.” In this way, Disney creations had much in common with the scenic railroads and dioramas of old Luna Park’s Trip to the Moon and Dreamland’s Fighting the Flames. The references in Luna Park or Dreamland attractions to current events, faraway places, or even Bible stories shared much with Disney’s efforts to place visitors into a story. But Disney’s references to movies and cartoons were far more effective commercially than were the scenic railroads and fantasy attractions of Coney. Instead of relying on a common folk or religious culture or access to news, Disney created his reference points through his own successful commercial fantasies. Disney could build on the profitability of “tie-in” marketing, selling Mickey first as a cartoon and then as toy, comic book, and eventually a theme park. His references could be controlled and coordinated because he owned them. While interest in the Johnstown Flood of 1889 waned soon after the opening of the diorama, references to Dumbo or Peter Pan remained powerfully attractive for decades thanks to the enduring ability of Disney to reintroduce the company’s movies and characters to new generations of viewers without loss of appeal or novelty. The “cartoon sensibility” of Disney’s architecture, its whimsical colors and playful decorations, reminds us of the childlike and whimsical facade of Dreamland’s Lilliputia (the “city” of dwarfs) and the oriental excesses of Frederic Thompson’s Luna Park. However, even when Dreamland subverted the pretension of the White City with a Shoot the Chutes that dropped revelers into the lagoon of a mock majestic plaza, it still had a tower as the focal point modeled after a stately European monument. By contrast, Disneyland’s focal point was Sleeping Beauty Castle, inspired more immediately by a cartoon than by the architectural fantasies of King Ludwig of Bavaria. The difference was subtle, but Disney’s park created the “liberating sense of the limitless malleability of pictorial space” (notes Beth Dunlop), and a child-like playfulness compromised at Coney Island with its associations with classical columns, rectangular pools, and towers (especially at Dreamland).²⁵

This leads us to the second theme that constituted Disney’s idea of wonder, the appeal to “timeless” childlike delight and the “cute.” Disney took pains not to overwhelm his visitors, but rather to delight them with toy-like buildings that would attract children. As often noted, this effect was achieved by such devices as constructing the train that circles Disneyland to 5/8 scale and the use of “forced perspective” that made buildings appear taller than they were by making higher portions of buildings successively smaller, reducing the physical intimidation of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, for example, while making it look real. Disney buildings evoke the feeling of a toy, and, as Walt Disney noted, “the imagination can play more freely with a toy.”²⁶ At the same time, the Disney scene is not mere order and kitsch. Because the overall impression is reassuring, elements of topsy-turvy can run through the design of Disney parks. In all this the buildings appealed to the delight of children.

The fact that most Disney stories and buildings took the perspective of a child allowed a cross-generational bonding insofar as grandparent, mother, father, teenager, and child were expected to enter into a shared “innocent” fantasy. Absent from Disneyland was any encounter with the fears and fascinations of adult life, disasters, death, and the hereafter. Such themes had become taboo for children, while adults preferred to shift their gaze toward the fresh imaginings of young life. This was more than “taming” the imagination, defanging the old world of the carnival. Disney exploited the growing appeal of a relatively new source of wonder, expressed through the aesthetic of the cute child. Pictured in comic strips, dolls, child movie stars, magazine illustrations, and ads from the 1900s, the cute child had the look of wonder, often with a slight tinge of impishness. The cute was a celebration of the seemingly untethered delight of innocence. Although this “wondrous innocence” could be evoked by the child’s discovery of nature, in the twentieth century it was sparked also by commercialized fantasy and novelty.²⁷

Part of Disney’s achievement was his success in inducing adults to encourage children to “act out” the cute in wide-eyed enchantment with Disney cues. Disney once bragged that his greatest creation was “the smile on a child’s face.” Many have noted how Disney cutesified nature, history, and even artistic styles by making the mysterious, dangerous, and even mundane full of childlike wonder. Instead of earlier adult responses to the young, Disney believed that nothing should awe or frighten the child and all stimuli should cause delight.²⁸

The result was the culture of the cute, which emerged not simply because of the family’s need for a lowest common denominator of culture (set at the child’s level) nor even because of adults regressing into play in order to escape from the terrors or tedium of modernity. Instead, the cult of the cute was more the result of a need to replace the magical charm of belief in the supernatural and fascination with disaster with the child’s belief that “dreams can actually come true.”²⁹

The play and imagination of the small, dependent child, which was shaped by modern parental expectations and modern commercial entertainment, defined Disney’s appeal to the cute. The story of the emergence of cute is a complex one, but it can be illustrated in recalling the transformation of Mickey Mouse. Mickey first appeared on the screen in 1928, not as a figure of childhood innocence but as a rascally rodent, having more in common with the rebellious and violent tradition of working class and adult-oriented slapstick comedy, the roguish behavior of comic strip characters (like Ignatz Mouse from the “Krazy Kat” strip or the Katzenjammer Kids), or even the threatening posturing of masked mummers and Mardi Gras paraders. Within a few years, however, Disney had made Mickey “small, soft, infantile, mammalian, round, without bodily orifices, and nonsexual,” a perfect example of “neoteny.” He had become a classic form of the cute, following in the pattern of the Teddy Bear (1906) and the Kewpie doll (1912). The neotenic transformation not only evoked protective feelings in adults, but also made Disney’s animal characters appear innocent and thereby less threatening in their desires and behavior. Moreover, this Disney look replaced the natural, sometimes dangerous animals at the circus or in animal acts at old Coney Island. The middle-class embrace of the innocent allowed Disney to transform the freak show and circus into his menagerie of loveable mice, dogs, and ducks. The dangerous elephant electrocuted by Frederic Thompson in 1903 had become the childlike Dumbo with big floppy ears that allowed him to fly while children and their parents could ride on his back in Fantasyland. Disney still provided pleasure and wonder in the inversion of social standards (as in earlier forms of saturnalia). Disney’s cartoon animals were often feisty, sometimes rebellious (as in Donald Duck’s nephews), or even silly (like Goofy), but they were now “naughty but nice” like small “innocent” children. That was essential to the appeal of the cute and is often missed by critics.

Disney rides played on the presumed child’s fantasy with over- and under-sized objects, making it possible for families to ride in The Mad Hatter’s tea cups. The Small World ride (1966) offered a classic Disney look of the cute. On this boat journey, we see big eyed, big headed mechanical children of different shades of skin and dressed in all the stereotyped costumes of the world of nations, who despite cultural differences are really the same delightful young, making the world “small” with their incessant dancing to, playing, and singing a catchy tune ending with words, “Though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide, it’s a small world after all.”³⁰

For decades, Disney ads featured not textual appeals but pictures of the cute: People sized Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy delighting small children, or granddads and toddlers laughing together riding Dumbo. Like the Coney Island of Steeplechase and Luna, Disney encouraged adults to play the child, riding mechanical toys, but they also put on the cute by wearing Mickey Mouse ears. At Disneyland, brags Disney publicity, we find “the dancing eyes of a grandfather wearing an orange-billed Donald Duck hat.” The idea was more than to feel like a kid, but to put on the mummers’ mask of the cute, even reversing roles, not across classes as in the old Mardi Gras tradition, but across ages.³¹

The cute was as different from the genteel appeal of the majestic and sublime as it was from the carnivalesque world of the plebeian playful crowd. It was not the only replacement for the late Victorian dyad of the genteel and plebeian (as we shall see in the next chapter), nor the only modern form of the child-focused family. The cute was also different from the pleasure complex of the “cool” youth, older than the cute kid, and freed from adult supervision and imagination, who was attracted to the anti-cute. The dark and violent images of science fiction, gangster stories and monster movies as well as the exhilaration of pinball games and roller coasters were associated with youth and the cool by the 1930s. In the same decade, Disney had his first successes with commercializing the cute. But Disney specialized and had nothing to do with the emerging culture of the cool. Even haunted houses would only come much later to Disney and they would be systematically cutesified. It was not until the late 1970s, a decade after Walt’s death, that his company made compromises with the cool.³²

Playing the movie and glorifying the cute redefined the playful crowd for Disney’s middle America in the 1950s, but he brought still one more element of change. Not only did Disney rally the family around the child’s imagination and even invite the old to regress to their own inner child, but he also encouraged them to “recall” the worlds of their own childhoods. For Disney that meant the time of his own youth, a magical era of childhood wonder, 1900s America, expressed in his romantic reconstruction of Main Street U.S.A.

Disney’s hubris succeeded because his idea of the romantic past coincided with the emergence of modern commercialized nostalgia. In the 1950s, fantasy was no longer just or even particularly for the young, but for the old waxing nostalgic about the worlds of their youth. For Disney, “helping” adults return to the place of their childhoods was, at least, as important as appealing to children—even more so. It was only in 1993 that Toontown opened for kids to play in their cartoon world, but the iconic Main Street U.S.A. was the most essential construction of Disney’s original 1955 park. It became a time and fantasy “tunnel” through which all must pass to get to the happy “Lands” of fantasy, adventure, the American frontier, and even of tomorrow. In his widely distributed park guides published in the 1960s, Disney himself noted “Many of us fondly remember our ‘small home town’ and its friendly way of life at the turn of the century.” The year 1900 was perhaps a time for discovery and rapid technological and social change, but for Disney it was also a time where the intimacies of the strolling town were still happily spared from the dangers and speeds of the soon-to-emerge car culture. Only a quaint 1905 horseless carriage “that pops and sputters down Main Street” was allowed to pollute the gentle world of the horse tram and pedestrian. Corporate and chain stores had not yet driven out of business those little shops that Disney so lovingly reproduced, the Candy Palace, Penny Arcade, Swift Market House, and Hills Brothers Coffee House. This nostalgia for small towns was repeatedly reinforced in the movies (think of the Andy Hardy series of the late 1930s or It’s a Wonderful Life of 1946). The postwar flight to the suburbs made Main Street U.S.A. powerful nostalgia. Disney, at this time in his late fifties, could lecture his customers: “When you visit the apothecary, … we hope you’ll visualize, as I often do, your own home town Main Street, or the one your parents and grandparents have told you about.”³³ Disney envisioned that this aspect of the park would promote conversation across the generations that would continue as families entered the storybook “lands.”³⁴

Main Street recalled a youth that was foreign to most young visitors, and, over the years, it was alien even to parents and grandparents as fewer were raised in small towns. However, Disney’s fantasy of his youth, because it was made delightful, became the nostalgia of subsequent generations. This was possible in part because American nostalgia was not about returning to an ancestral village. After all one family in four moved every year in the 1950s, and mobility and marriages across ethnic and neighborhood groups meant that there was often no obvious home to return to. Migrants from across the Atlantic were even further from their “roots.” Going home in such a setting, meant “returning” to a romantic idea, one easily blended and idealized in an all-white, all-American Main Street U.S.A., a 1950s romance about the beginning of the twentieth century that still continues to represent nostalgia.³⁵

But this nostalgia was much more than a retreat into an idealized American past. Disney’s dream of Main Street represents a kind of protest against both suburban sprawl and the dirt and alienation of big city centers, two lasting consequences of modern consumer capitalism. Rather than either harking back to the Renaissance European Square (attractive to turn-of-the-century immigrants and culturally aspiring Americans at Coney Island) or attempting to dazzle visitors with novelty lights and neon (as were Americans in 1900 New York at both Times Square and Coney Island), Disney offered an idealized past of small towns and frontier life. European grandeur and the image of ever changing spectacle that appealed to immigrant visitors of Luna Park and Dreamland in the 1900s had long faded.³⁶ Main Street U.S.A. was both a protest against the contemporary city, “unpleasant places for parents to live with their children,” as noted Walt,³⁷ and the suburb where many sought sociability, but often found status seeking and a car culture that impeded the neighborliness that presumably prevailed in the small towns of the past.³⁸ Since the 1920s, Robert Moses and many other planners had been finding solutions to the disorder and grime of the city and its paired site of Coney Island through the promotion of sanitized, geometrical modernity in the form of suburbs, parkways, state park picnic grounds. By contrast, Disney returned to the idealized urban setting, the walking city. And he safeguarded this by obliging grateful City Councils of Anaheim over many years to block the construction of any buildings that defiled this vista of Disney magic.³⁹ As a form of commercial saturnalia, Main Street U.S.A. was an alternative and protest against the contemporary reality of progress and innovation.

In 1955, Disney made it clear that “Disneyland will never be completed” and planned to add and change attractions to make “each return visit … a new experience for our guests.”⁴⁰ Yet, for at least twenty years, Disneyland remained faithful to Walt’s nostalgia for the 1900s, building merely modernized versions of early twentieth-century dioramas and other middle-class attractions. Early changes were adjustments, such as replacing the slightly didactic Canal Boats of the World for the more playful Storybook Land Canal Boats (with scenes from Disney movies) that worked better with toddlers in Fantasyland. Disney infantilized the old scenic canal boats of Luna Park as families rode through an entrance shaped like the mouth of Monstro (the whale that swallowed Disney’s Pinocchio). The appeal of Disneyland to the small fry led to new Fantasyland rides in 1958 (the Mad Tea Party, a spinning ride in tea cups, and an Upside Down Room from Alice in Wonderland). The 1959 construction of the Matterhorn, a track ride on make-believe bobsleds up, through, and around a replica of the Swiss mountain, which ended in a “glacier lake,” represents a slight break with the Disney vision. Although really a very mild roller coaster, it still has as much in common with Coney Island’s scenic railroads as it does with a modern thrill ride.⁴¹

Tomorrowland was a site of frequent change because of its unfinished state in 1955 and because the theme of “tomorrow” continually needed to be updated as tomorrow became yesterday. Walt Disney built America’s first Monorail in 1959, presumably the wave of the future, and opened Monsanto’s House of the Future in 1957 with promises of the wonders of plastic.⁴² Still, even the new Tomorrowland harked back to an earlier era. The rather crude 20,000 Leagues under the Sea disappeared, but it was replaced with the Submarine Voyage where patrons looked out of portholes to see the submerged lost continent of Atlantis as well as the polar icecap, a curious mix of fantasy and celebration of technology that shared much with the Trip to the Moon of the 1900s. Also in 1959, Disney updated another nineteenth-century tradition, the diorama, when he built models of the Grand Canyon along the route of the Disney train (showing the canyon at dawn, dusk, and in a lightning storm probably drawing on the pop classic, The Grand Canyon Suite of Ferde Grofé). Again, appealing to the child’s imagination was a new diorama along the same rail route in 1967—Primeval World with dinosaur models. Disney revived and improved the nineteenth-century tradition of the panorama and cyclorama in the America the Beautiful film (1959) shown on a 360-degree screen in Tomorrowland. The next year, Frontierland offered another version of the old scenic railroad, Nature’s Wonderland, a series of scenes of waterfalls, deserts, and even a Graveyard of Dinosaurs, Rainbow Cavern, and an Old Unfaithful Geyser, simulating, in a short ride, the excitement of the Old West. While the Matterhorn may have been a concession to thrills, Nature’s Wonderland promised awe and inspiration through the innovative artifice of its scenery, a traditional bourgeois tourist’s gaze, not the more modern pleasureseeker’s vertigo. Long after Disney’s death, Disneyland planners conformed to his nostalgic vision. ⁴³

Disney’s development of Audio-Animatronics, a magnetic tape–driven system that coordinated sound with movements of mechanical characters and objects, was central to much of the innovation in the 1960s. Still, Disney stuck to the appeal of the cute and Victorian fascination with mechanical ingenuity. The Enchanted Tiki Room (1963), a sentimental musical production featuring four talking birds (representing stereotypical Irish, German, French, and Spanish personalities) was the first use of audio-animatronics. Soon appeared the patriotic Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, featuring the speaking and moving figure of the President (1965), It’s a Small World (1966), the Pirates of the Caribbean, a whimsical boat ride through scenes of a brigand attack on a hapless sea port (1967), the Haunted Mansion, “a delightfully dreary adventure suitable for every age” (1969), and the Country Bear Jamboree, using the same format as the Tiki Room but in a wild west setting of cute bears, moose, and raccoons (1972).⁴⁴ Some were technically more sophisticated versions of old amusement park “dark rides;” others were little more than updates of the automata that had fascinated nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans. All remained within the world of the nineteenth-century dime museum and middle-class attractions at Luna Park and Dreamland.

The Disney company was relentless in pursuing Walt’s didactic themes after his death, not only with uplifting messages from Lincoln but also with an updated Flight to the Moon (1967) with far more accurate simulations of contemporary space travel (including the sensation of a rocket thrust). The moon show was appropriately replaced in 1975 (after the 1969 Lunar landing made this attraction “history”) with the next American space adventure, “Mission to Mars.” The 1967 renovation of Tomorrowland brought also the Adventure Through Inner Space (a tour of the atom) as well as a more prosaic audio-animatronic lesson in General Electric’s Carousel of Progress (showing the impact of electricity on homes since the 1890s).⁴⁵ Until the late 1970s, at least, Disney continued to provide a link to the uplifting goals of late Victorian middle class culture (while affirming corporate American’s inheritance of those values).

Even more important, innovation was less a theme in Disney than Coney Island, despite regular upgrading. In part, this was because Disney used steel, reinforced concrete, plastic, and fiberglass instead of wood and “staff” to construct his fantasy world, making it almost as durable as Blackpool’s brick and iron pleasure palaces. After a season, Luna Park’s artificial turrets and Dreamland’s felt and canvas flames and devils in Hell’s Gate looked tawdry; and their owners were obliged to engage in a ruinously rapid turnover of attractions. By contrast, quality, long-lasting construction made possible slower, more deliberate transformations at Disneyland, enhancing rather than compromising its “trademark” look. Even more important here was the profitability of Disney, based as it was on a far more affluent crowd than visited Coney. There were no nickel rides or 25 attractions for 25 cents as at Steeplechase Park, or even the inflation-adjusted equivalent. Instead, Disney was able to lavish its park with details of which Frederic Thompson could only have dreamed and thus made return visits interesting. There was always more to see, even if little changed.

Most important, Disney’s advantage was that his park was less about novelty for its own sake than something more complex. The company solved a problem that had plagued Coney’s amusement parks, whose novelty-based thrills brought crowds in, but could not keep them coming back because the new, once experienced, was no longer new. Crowds returned again and again to the beach, but the amusement parks had to produce novelty year by year, and this they could not afford to do. Disney instead emphasized the past (nostalgia), the future (technological optimism), and “timeless” fantasy, not the present new. Indeed, the present and thus immediate change, was to be escaped at Disneyland. Novelty was thus secondary. The Disney package worked especially well for evoking the imagined “past” and “timelessness,” but less so for the future, as witnessed by the need to renovate Tomorrowland numerous times and then to increasingly stress science fiction fantasy rather than future technology.

The core reason for Disney’s success may be in the bonding of nostalgia and “timeless” cuteness across the generations. Rides and other attractions did not get “old” because oldsters expected to return to their pasts at Disneyland and adults picked up visual cues throughout the park that they should feel romantic about that past. At the same time, adults “passed” on to the next generation these same sites and experiences, which, for the very young, were truly new. Their “newness” was supposed to be enjoyed, not simply as novelty, but as “timeless” wonder, that same look and presumably feel of delight shown on the five-year old’s face in 2000 as had been on the face of her parent 25 years before. This many explain why core attractions in Fantasyland remained for decades: Peter Pan’s Flight, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Dumbo The Flying Elephant, and the Mad Tea Party, staples from the mid-1950s, remained into the twenty-first century. And the nostalgic appeal of Tom Sawyer’s Island, the Rivers of America and the Mark Twain steamer remained iconic to Frontierland a half century after their construction. Even the now campy (and racist) cannibals seen on Adventureland’s Jungle Cruise have survived. Although hardly an attraction for contemporary teens, these “frontier” and “adventure” rides continue to create wonder in the young and evoke nostalgia in the old. This self-referential nostalgia for the invented traditions of Disney itself is an impressive illustration of the durability of his ideas.

By 1967, a dozen years after the opening of Disneyland, 60 million had visited the site and had made Anaheim into a major entertainment town.⁴⁶ Yet, despite the congestion of cars and crowds in and around Disney’s California site that led the company to colonize the open spaces of the central Florida marshland for its new venture in the mid 1960s, Disneyland made every effort to reduce the anxiety about crowds that seemed to obsess middle-class visitors. And, it has survived for a longer period than most of Coney’s amusement parks, whose down-market crowds eventually helped to drive away the middle classes.

Disney tried to filter out the “dangerous classes” by an informal policy of exclusion (prohibiting “hippies” in the 1960s, for example), and by discouraging the poor through high-priced attractions (the all inclusive one-day ticket by 2003 cost $37 for children under the age of 10 and $47 for “adults.”)⁴⁷ This not only eliminated the “freeloading” poor who paid little and took up space in their wandering through the crowd, but also relieved anxious middle-class family groups from concern about their presence. After all, many middle-class families had moved to the suburbs to be far from these people and had carefully avoided buses and trains to avoid physical contact with the “Coney Crowd.” Disney invested heavily in keeping his grounds squeaky clean and well-landscaped, a policy that not only reassured crowds and made the crush seem more bearable, but also had the effect of encouraging visitors to use ubiquitous waste baskets instead of littering. Disney’s landscape director, Bill Evans, claimed that Walt Disney, inspired by his visit to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, made sure his landscaping was “so beautiful that no one would dare toss a candy wrapper or trample the grass.” The clean and orderly look of the place, noted one journalist in 1965, “sort of restores one’s faith in humanity. Some of it rubs off on every visitor.” As John Hench, one of the important early designers for Disney insisted, “Walt’s thing was reassurance. The message is you’re going to be O.K.”⁴⁸

The famous Disney look and demeanor of the staff (or “cast members” as Disney insisted on calling them), clean cut but cheerful, polite but friendly, reinforced the social tone of an orderly but playful experience. Disney training materials (from the 1980s) gave the cast explicit instructions on grooming for a “neat trim appearance” with no extremes to distract from the show. Women, for example, were not to wear more than two combs in their hair; they could use mascara, but not eye liner; and were expected to wear black shoes with a plain toe and defined heel. Depending on their “roles” and “costumes,” their skirts should be from three inches above the knee to three inches from the floor. In the mid 1980s, management still held to Walt’s ideal of 1955 when he said, “I don’t want anybody hired who has anything to do with an amusement park.” For years, the company combated contemporary fashion, prohibiting, for example, in 1958 the beehive and ducktail hairdos on young staff. By 1965, regulations on men’s hair were relaxed slightly, allowing side burns to drop from “the corner of the eye to mid ear.” Across the years, cast members, when they were “on stage” in the sight of “guests,” had to present themselves as perpetually cheerful. This meant that they had to “present a positive image at all times,” “sit erect and look attentive” never look “too tired to be bothered” or cross arms giving guests a “do not disturb” signal. Staff were to anticipate the needs of guests, solve any problems quickly, and end any encounter with guests on a positive note. Cast leader training even involved study of lifestyle and attitude differences across age (based on the curious principle that most people’s values were determined by events and the culture they experienced by the time they were ten years of age). By reaffirming middle-class values through numerous clues, the Disney Company tried to make its customers comfortable, even in crowds of thousands.⁴⁹

Disney designers became famous for moving crowds efficiently. Lines of people waiting for an attraction snaked back and forth and were treated to eye-catching and mood-shaping sights and sounds to allay boredom and anger. Even Disneyland policing maintained a low-key image. Walt Disney quickly dropped his contract with Burns Security in 1956 and hired instead moonlighting teachers and others accustomed to working with youth to police his crowds. Dressed in blazers and without weapons, Disney security relied on psychology to prevent flare-ups between guests. Costumed staff, Disney officials claimed to the press, “make people feel as if they’re at a party” of a sedate and respectable kind, and thus less prone to argue or fight even when unhappy.⁵⁰

Disney had perfected these techniques, but he had by no means invented them. Coney Island amusement parks, especially Luna and Dreamland, featured controlled admissions (expelling undesirables and using entrance tickets). The difference was in the fact that Disney has been able to maintain the social tone for almost 50 years. One of the key differences was that Disney eliminated much of the “intervitality” of the crowd. First, the family nature of the attractions and their relatively high cost discouraged groups of young people on the prowl for the opposite sex. Second, nothing promoted the formation of autonomous throngs as appeared on the streets of Coney Island and Blackpool in the interwar years. The street parade traditions of the European Carnivals and Easter processions and the Coney Island “Mardi Gras” were co-opted by Disney performers who made the crowd into spectators rather than actors. It was the animatronic characters at the Enchanted Tiki Room and later the Country Bear Jamboree that swapped wisecracks, not the crowd itself. It was costumed Disney characters, not autonomous Krewes as in New Orleans Mardi Gras or cheerfully inebriated throngs as in Blackpool, who acted “goofy.”

Key to Disney’s success at maintaining a middle-class social tone was its almost “trademark” commitment to treating the crowd as friend and family units. While commentators note that adult visitors far outnumbered children (citing ratios of 4 to 1 or greater), these figures are suspect in part because Disneyland charged older children (today from ten years of age) adult prices. A rare Disney survey of 1958 suggests more subtle statistics: only 61 percent were over 17 years old, while 11.5 percent were between 12 and 17 and 27.5 percent under 12 years of age. Disney publicity touted the 4 to 1 figure in 1971 but did so in the context of attempting to overcome a reputation as a kids’ destination and probably to reach out to new markets, especially elders, to compensate for the decline in the birth rate.⁵¹ The surprising number of adults (whether or not one accepts the 4 to 1 ratio) reflects, in part, the fact that groups of parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents had shared the Disney experience with a smaller number of young children.

What worked in 1955 during the first year of Disneyland still worked 45 years later, despite much social and economic change. In a visit to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Florida in 2000, Gary Cross noticed how dads in their forties appeared to regress to their youthful years of parenting while 16-year old sons obligingly reverted back to six-year olds. Visual and audio cues encourage this intergenerational exchange by almost hypnotic suggestion, sending these fathers and sons back to that time when they first shared “Toy Story” or “Dumbo.” Contemporary ads continuously stress the magic of childhood across the generations, often showing kids playing the tour guide to their elders or in shock at the childlike and playful regression of their parents. These were the mini-stories that continue to charm twenty-first century adults, just as did similar humorous exchanges illustrated by Norman Rockwell over half a century earlier.

Disney’s lasting appeal also encompassed the nostalgia of older adults for their youth and for a mythical time of intergenerational harmony and respect, which seemed particularly poignant with the rise of assertively independent youth cultures. In addition to the sentimental anchor of Main Street, new nostalgic themes appeared with new cohorts of older visitors. As early as 1957, Disney tried to increase night-time audiences by appealing to adult tastes. In 1960, Disneyland first offered Dixieland concerts and antique car shows on Main Street U.S.A. in order to attract older visitors. Vaudeville ’67 featured the Mills Brothers and Rudy Vallee for a graying crowd. By 1965, Disneyland was featuring swing bands (Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, the Glen Miller Band, etc.) appealing to memories of the youth of couples in their forties and fifties at the time. In the 1970s discounts were offered during May on “Senior Citizen Days.” In 1974, Disneyland presented the easy listening sound of Lawrence Welk’s big band, familiar to millions of Middle Americans from his weekly TV variety show. While Dixieland and Swing remained staples into the 1990s, programmers responded to a new group of nostalgic adults with vintage rock music, as in the “Blast to the Past” festival in 1988 that featured late 1950s rock and car shows.⁵²

The appeal to an older audience went beyond nostalgic music and commercial artifacts. Especially from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Disney attracted mature audiences with the promise of a clean show, free of rebellious unkempt youth. In a letter to Disneyland in 1969, an older guest thanked the company in this age of “hippies and delinquents … for hiring such fine and outstanding types of youth. It restores an elder’s faith.” Disney exploited this longing in the image of wholesomeness projected in its female tour guides who dressed modestly in red kilts and jackets and were selected based on their “natural charm and a happy personality.” Each year, one of them became a “Disneyland Ambassador,” to represent the park across the nation and beyond, like a Miss America beauty queen.⁵³

Underlying all this was a somewhat faltering faith in the universality of the suburban and small-town culture from which many of Disneyland’s visitors came. The company’s efficient publicity machine received an endless stream of free advertising on the feature pages of provincial newspapers. Disney was also extremely adept at appropriating symbols of a bygone era of American rural and small town life and exploiting suburbanite nostalgia for long lost community centers. This was most evident in Main Street U.S.A., but was reinforced by the building of the New Orleans Square in 1966 (Walt Disney bragged that it was far more clean than the original) and the rustic village of Bear Country in 1972. The Disney marching band recalled fading traditions of small-town America. Moreover, Disney planners coopted town traditions like the annual lighting of the Christmas tree and “Candlelight Caroling Ceremonies” as well as Independence Day parades and State Fair festivals (in the fall). Beginning in 1972, Disney even improved on this celebratory culture by offering daily summer performances of the Main Street Electric Parade with elaborately lit floats and costumed Disney characters. Any summer night that a visitor came to Disneyland was the night of the big parade.

Even if the voluntary organizations of middle America were no longer up to the task of organizing American Bicentennial celebrations, Disney stepped up to the plate with 15 months of daily parades offering colorful mobile musical stages that presented Disney’s version of American greatness (complete with the first Thanksgiving and Betsy Ross’s first flag) led, of course, by Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Lest the audience not see the connection to the older tradition of town parades, high school bands would compete for the chance for guest appearances. While Disney appealed to this “general” white middle-class audience, gradually the company recognized the persistence of ethnic identity. Beginning in 1969, Disneyland celebrated Irish culture on St. Patrick’s Day and Mexican customs on Cinco de Mayo.⁵⁴

Disneyland also appealed to youth, obviously not teens in rambunctious groups, much less protesters or minorities, but young people suitably fitting the Disney image. As early as 1961, just when the company was reaching out to oldsters, Disneyland presented “Grad Nite,” an alternative all-night party for graduating high school kids. This annual event was both well-supervised (one adult chaperon for every 20 grads) and alcohol-, violence-, and sex-free. High schools throughout the west sent 8,000 dressed-up kids to this 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. event. By 1968, 100,000 participated in multiple Grad Nites. As early as 1957, Disney had experimented with Date Nite on weekends, offering rides and tame youth music in the summers, and an alcohol-free New Year’s Eve Party that attracted clean-cut (not the countercultural) youth of Los Angeles and Orange County.⁵⁵

These largely conservative appeals served the park well throughout the 1960s and 1970s (as attendance rose from 5.9 million in 1960 to 10.8 in 1979, with particularly sharp increases in the troubled late 1960s, increasing from 6.7 million in 1966 to 10.3 million in 1970). The 1970s and especially 1980s, however, proved to be disappointing for Disneyland with declining attendance between 1981 and 1984. Only special promotions, including car giveaways, could raise attendance to 11.9 million in 1985. Of course, a rocky economy was partially to blame and for years Disneyland was hampered by the diversion of funds and energy to Disney’s Florida enterprises. The limited land holdings in Anaheim also blocked diversification. Still, in the early 1980s, the old Disney formula was no longer working anywhere.⁵⁶

The company faced a problem far more daunting than the hippies and protesters of the 1960s and early 1970s—the decline of the cute and the rise of the cool. The decrease in births in the 1970s translated into smaller numbers of young families in the 1980s. Probably more important, the child’s, especially boys’ attraction, to the mystic of the frontier, global adventure, and science upon which Disney built three of his “lands” was in decline. The “Star Wars” trilogy and its licensed products (1977–83), along with a more cynical popular culture that “bled” into children’s culture, challenged these older ideals. Part of that change was the downward push of the cool when children abandoned the “cute” culture imposed by their parents at younger ages. The striking manifestation of this was the youth’s attraction to the thrill rides that their parents and grandparents had rejected decades before in the old amusement parks.⁵⁷

Company officials began to recognize the need to adapt to the demands for a more thrill-seeking audience with new more daring rides designed to appeal to teens and “tweens” (10- to 12-year-olds). Despite attempts to appeal to a cross-generational audience as well as distinct age groups at different times and seasons, Disneyland was obliged to adjust to the independent, older child, especially in the context of increased competition from other amusement parks in the region. From the late 1970s, Six Flags Magic Mountain of Valencia California catered to teens with thrill rides like Free Fall (a 55 mph drop in two seconds) and a series of roller coasters (especially Revolution, featuring a scary loop and the Colossus noted for its height). By 2003, Magic Mountain offered 16 roller coasters. Even the once staid Knotts’ Berry Farm adapted to change by opening the Wild Water Wilderness complex in 1987 and a teen night club and restaurants serving adults alcohol in the mid 1990s. Sea World of San Diego offered an alternative to Disneyland, a clean and more modern image of childhood wonder around a theme of nature and ecology that appealed to “soccer moms” (and recently this park too has introduced thrill rides).⁵⁸

As early as 1977, Disneyland began to adapt, premiering the first of a series of more thrilling rides with Space Mountain. Though advertised as an educational ride in a space capsule followed with displays of future uses of electronics on the exit ramp, Space Mountain was really an indoor roller coaster, a gut-wrenching experience of “twisting and banking” as the rider “plunges into swirling galaxies, past shooting stars, and meteoric showers.” In 1979, the sedate Mine Train through Nature’s Wonderland was replaced by the embellished roller coaster, the Big Thunder Railroad. Although featured as a re-creation of the Bryce Canyon in the era of the 1850s, youth were attracted to it as an energetic thrill ride through caverns, waterfalls, the “dangers” of an avalanche, and the scary scene of a “dinosaur gulch.” While hardly as fast or as heart-pounding as the new roller coasters elsewhere, it was a compromise with an amusement park tradition that Disney had purposively shunned in 1955.⁵⁹

Instructive is the list of attractions that did not survive to 1985, the thirtieth anniversary of Disneyland: the Carousel of Progress, Monsanto’s Hall of Chemistry, the Story of Aluminum, Frontierland’s Indian Village, Hobbyland (an exhibition of model planes), the Mickey Mouse Club Circus, and the sedate Flying Saucers ride. Disney did not entirely abandon the didactic tradition of presenting science and “history.” The Tomorrowland of 2003 still featured “Innoventions,” an interactive display of new technology and an exhibit commemorating the history of NASA, even though few line up for admittance to these concessions to tradition.⁶⁰

Most of the new rides thus appealed to the “cool” rather than the cute, nostalgic, or the genteel values of progress and patriotic history. Disney staff recognized the marketing power of George Lucas and his Star Wars trilogy and accommodated changing youth taste by hiring the film-maker to produce several space fantasies for Disneyland. Although Tomorrowland had always had its science fictional quality, never was it so brazen as in the Lucas projects. In 1985, Lucas presented Captain Eo, a 12-minute three-dimensional film and light show fantasy starring singer Michael Jackson who struggles against horrible aliens to save a “music starved planet.” Another Lucas project was the 1987 simulated space ride, Star Tours, an early example of the use of film coordinated with moving seats to give a small theater audience the sensation of a thrilling journey into the world of the Star Wars movies. Not even a shadow of pretense of real science was offered as Star Tours replaced the semi-educational attraction of the Adventures Through Inner Space.⁶¹

Of course, Disneyland had hardly capitulated to the demand for “white knuckle” rides among teens and young adults of the period. In fact, it reinforced its old commitment to the “cute” by refurbishing Fantasyland in 1983 when it added “old world” facades on existing rides. More important, however, was Disney’s careful compromise of the cute with the cool. The opening of Mickey’s Toontown in 1993 was an important update of classic Disney cute. This new “land” finally offered children and their parents a chance to see where Mickey and other Disney characters “lived.” But this was far different from a walk through a storybook land of miniature sets. Toontown was sardonically suggestive of Hollywood in the 1930s (complete with a Toontown sign on the side of a hill similar to the icon of Hollywood). Despite the tone of safety and sweetness (for example in the Gadgets Go Coaster and the Jolly Trolley), a frenetic and even slightly cynical quality saturated Goofy’s Wiseacre Farm. Roger Rabbit Car Toon Spin, a dark ride featuring strobe lights, menacing bad guys, and hard mechanical images, was softened only by cartoonish whimsy. All this is a far cry from the sweet romance of the old Fantasyland.⁶²

In 1994, Disneyland increased its commitment to meet the needs of the cool child with the 3-D movie Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. Drawing on a 1989 Disney movie, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, that featured a bumbling scientist who clumsily reduced his children to the size of bugs with his new invention, Disneyland’s new attraction centered on the illusion that the audience is shrunk by the scientist on the stage screen. In addition to the 3-D effects of a snake and other objects popping out at the audience, air, water, and moving seats are used to give the audience the sensation of mice scurrying under them, a giant dog sneezing on them, and giant people shaking the auditorium. Even more in the 1995 Indiana Jones Adventure, thrills prevail over wonder, memory, or uplift. “White-hot oozing lava, careening boulders, vicious vermin and snakes” are encountered on this ride that “hurtles you helplessly through the cursed Temple of the Forbidden Eye!” The delight in the future, the distant, or timeless past are replaced with background stories of technology run amok or of a world out of control. ⁶³

By the summer of 2003, Tomorrowland was no longer touted as a place to discover the future in the technological breakthroughs of today. It was simply a “place of imagination and beyond,” as proclaimed a continuously running TV ad (seen at local hotels). The ad featured thrill rides to promote Tomorrowland as well as the other “lands.” The old images of the delighted child, the romancing couple, and the nostalgic elders remained, of course. But a new crowd of autonomous youth could no longer be ignored or opposed by Disney. The culture of the cute had to make room for the culture of the cool.

Disneyland had to adapt to the social change that surrounded it. In the late 1980s and 1990s, it relied increasingly on local crowds. Despite ongoing publicity about how Disneyland attracted notables throughout the world, it was predominantly a California attraction (53 percent of visitors came from California and 76 percent of that group from the southern half in 1958). Later statistics showed little change. As population increased in Orange and Los Angeles Counties, Disneyland became the amusement site of a densely populated area, not unlike Coney Island of the early twentieth century. And with this, Disneyland became a magnet attracting youth, but no longer necessarily the clean-cut teens of white suburbia. Instead these areas were becoming more mixed ethnically, with Hispanic and Asian newcomers. A 1987 survey of customers found that 60 percent of local 18 to 24 year olds had been to Disneyland in the past year as compared to only 29 percent of over 55 year olds. Disney continued to try to filter out the “trouble making” youth, for example, by ejecting teens with spiky black and teased hair in 1985 and withdrawing the annual pass of teens caught swearing loudly in 1992. However, company staff found themselves confronted with a problem: They depended on local, youthful crowds, and thus periodically offered off-season discounts to Orange County residents and bargain season passes. Yet, with the rise of two-income families, it was tempting for parents to drop their offspring off at Disneyland during school vacations and on weekends, in effect making Disneyland “baby sitters.” Moreover, these changes created a youthful “gang” society within the park. Press reports of increased crime discouraged some families from visiting. The tendency of local youth, increasingly of minority racial and ethnic origins, to “hog” benches and congregate in large groups, only accelerated this trend.⁶⁴

By 2003, the old Disney “magic” certainly remained for many who still brought their children or grandchildren to Anaheim for that joy of innocent wonder; and many came to remember their first time at Disneyland as children or when their children were still young. Yet the park was no longer as clean, the paint as fresh, the staff as polite and cheery (or middle-class white) as oldsters remembered.

Walt Disney’s vision of the playful crowd survived long after his death in December 1966. His company transported his formula to Orlando, Florida with the opening of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in 1971. Although Disney never saw his “World,” his fingerprints were everywhere on it. As often noted, Disney had wanted a property so large and unimpeded by outsiders that his company could completely control the environs and keep staff busy designing new projects for the “next 25 years.”⁶⁵ There was to be no jungle of cheap motels nearby, nor any roadblocks to indefinite expansion. Disney had bought land in central Florida with the acreage of Manhattan and gained legal control over utilities and zoning regulations Walt Disney World could thus become the perfect expression of the Disney vision, uncompromised and unfettered. At the same time, Disney World emerged and developed when the Disney vision was being challenged and had to adjust to social and cultural change, accommodating the “cool” in children and new demands for age-segmented play in adults. A brief review of the story of Walt Disney World will serve as a summary of the persistence and adaptation of the Disney version of the playful crowd.

Disney World became much more than an amusement park. From the beginning, it was conceived as a cluster of resorts that distant visitors would make a destination. Disney World, thanks in large part to air travel that had only recently become feasible for middle-class family vacations, became a national, indeed international destination. It became very popular with a British tourist public in the late twentieth century. Located far from major cities, and from the ocean and the beaches that made Florida famous, Disney World was able to attract 28.4 million visitors by 1990, easily the biggest tourist draw in the US with out-of-town visitors spending an average of nearly a week at the site. In 1997, Walt Disney World attracted almost twice as many visitors as had traveled to Britain from the United States (38 million to 19.2) and more than 25 times the number who had visited the White House (1.5 million).⁶⁶ While its first project in 1971, the Magic Kingdom, was basically a replica of Disneyland, plans were soon underway for a second park. Before his death, Disney had planned to use part of his vast Florida real estate to create a model urban utopia, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot). The cost and complications of this dream proved too much for Walt’s successors, who, in 1982, opened instead a permanent world’s fair under the same name. They divided it into a cluster of futuristic exhibits (Future World), sponsored by major corporations, together with international exhibits (World Showcase), a semicircle of idealized replicas of tourist sites.⁶⁷

The company drew upon Disney’s earlier successes at the New York World’s Fair of 1964, building a classic icon to the future in a gigantic geodesic dome (Spaceship Earth). Within it was placed a leisurely ride that passed a series of audioanimatronic tableaux sprinkled liberally with gags that told the story of human communications. Nearby are the pavilions of Future World promising to teach the wonders of the imagination (sponsored by Kodak), motion (GE), energy (Exxon), and land (Kraft at first, and from 1992 Nestlé) with entertaining stories of the history and future of technology. All this was classic, if Disneyfied, World’s Fair fare with no fast rides, and seemingly little to appeal to thrill-seeking kids. The equally important World Showcase, a semicircular area across an artificial lake from Future World, was a distant relative of the World’s Fair villages depicting African, South Sea, or even European life. Instead of phony natives, however, Disney was careful to recruit on six-month stints pleasant young English-speaking college-age nationals from each country in the Showcase. A miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower is featured in the French site and a detailed reproduction of St Mark’s Square identifies the Italian pavilion, while a lookalike of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven and an eighth-century pagoda mark the Chinese and Japanese exhibits. Instead of mysterious (or tacky) replicas of the villages of “darkest Africa,” Epcot visitors received a classic world (especially European) tour of the middle-class traveler, seeing the high points without any of the travails of travel.⁶⁸

In 1989, Disney World opened a third park, Disney-MGM Studios. The concept was borrowed from Universal Studios’ park built near Hollywood in 1964, which combined movie-based rides with tours of stage sets and real movie and TV productions. By 1989, no longer was it possible to base a theme park primarily on Disney’s appeal to children’s imagination or the nostalgia of grandparents for the early twentieth century. By that time, Disney’s magic in producing children’s programs had declined and most of those grandparents were gone. Nostalgia had moved up a generation to a group with fond memories of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood and the classical movies of that period. Instead of the nostalgia for small-town America, Disney MGM romanticized the Golden Age of movies with a “charming” scaled-down reproduction of 1930s Hollywood Boulevard, ending at a replica of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. This classic theater was the home of the park’s flagship attraction, the Great Movie Ride, with exciting video clippings from famous movies and stars seen from cars shaped like sound stage vehicles. The Backstage Tour allows visitors to stroll through TV and movie sets. For the small fry, Disney bought the rights to Jim Henson’s “Muppets,” a collection of puppets that were familiar to all American children (and most adults) through more than 20 years of TV and movie appearances. Jim Henson’s MuppetVision 3-D was the first of a new wave of three-dimensional movies with in-theater special effects.⁶⁹

Yet, Disney’s Florida complex went far beyond a collection of rides and uplifting exhibits. From the beginning, company executives devoted considerable energy to building a series of hotels, golf courses, campgrounds, and water parks making Disney World an enveloping experience of destination tourism that the small California site never could be. In 1971, Disney opened not only the Magic Kingdom but also Fort Wilderness (a camping compound) as well as two hotels, the Polynesian Resort and Contemporary Resort. Golf courses appeared in 1973; an open-air aviary (Discovery Island) and Lake Buena Vista Village and Community (a themed shopping center with a cluster of hotels and a golf course) emerged between 1971 and 1975; and a water park, River Country, opened in 1976.⁷⁰

All of this certainly would have pleased Walt. The essential themes of the cute, nostalgia, and playful gentility, remained. However, just as Disneyland had to adapt to change, so did Walt Disney World. Despite the success of Epcot in its first full year in 1982, the company faced a major downturn in revenue in the early 1980s, especially from its movie business. Only in 1984, with the succession of Michael Eisner, a successful movie producer, to the helm of the company, did the company’s fortunes begin to turn. Eisner’s revamped company began subtly to change the old Disney formula by accommodating the youth culture of the cool and creating age-segmented entertainment in response to the decline in the ideal of intergenerational play. The former shift parallels changes in Disneyland; the latter is more evident in Florida where space and other resources allowed for its expression, but is also reflected in changes in the Anaheim site in 2001. A few examples from the 1980s and 1990s will illustrate these points.⁷¹

While Epcot was certainly a boastful continuation of the genteel tradition of uplift in science and world travel, by the 1980s it could no longer evade the demand for “excitement.” The park got the message when it added to its program of entertaining education a ride called Body Wars, a simulation of going through the blood stream in pursuit of bacteria (1989). Using a format similar to Lucas’s Star Tours, this “ride” was almost purely an emotional rush.⁷² In 1998, Epcot found a better way of illustrating General Motors’ “World of Motion” display than amusing audio-animatronics. Disney engineers built “an incredibly cool ride” called Test Track presumably based on a behind-the-scenes-look at automobile development, that consisted of riders participating in a series of car endurance tests on a milelong track, complete with 50 degree hairpin turns, careening through a series of pylons, and being subject to arctic cold and desert heat before the vehicle was crash tested. Developers promised riders a “big adrenaline payoff.”⁷³

Soon after the opening of Disney MGM Studios, the company was preparing to accommodate the increasing demand for thrill rides for the youth who had no nostalgia for old MGM movies. Disney introduced a relatively tame, but imaginative, theme ride, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror in 1994. Instead of joining a long line in front of a mechanical device, customers enter a decrepit hotel and wind their way through its lobby and into its basement where eventually they are led into an elevator. A mood of dreadful anticipation is created, even though few recall the not-so-successful horror story about an old Hollywood hotel and its ghastly elevator upon which the ride is based. The ride itself is a trip to the top of the elevator shaft and then a 157 foot drop in two seconds followed by repeated rides up and down. It is really a very elaborate version of a common vertical lift and drop ride found in many amusement parks, but wrapped in the dramatic foreboding created by Disney artists and architects.⁷⁴ Appealing to the ever increasing demands of the “tweens” and teens for “cool” rides, Disney followed the Tower of Terror with the Indiana Jones Adventure that appeared both in Disneyland and MGM Studios (1995) and an indoor Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster in 1999 that catapults riders from zero to 60 miles per hour in three seconds, and winds and twists them through a thrillpacked course with “multiple complete inversions,” while 1950s rock music blares from speakers in each car.⁷⁵

Other indications of a shift toward the thrill ride can be seen in the evolution of Disney water parks. The first, River Country (1976), located in the rustic setting of Fort Wilderness with its western appeal (campground, Fort Apache Playground, and horseshoe courts), is an attempt to recover the “Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole,” with rope swings, barrel bridge, and a water slide. Nothing could be more of a contrast than Typhoon Lagoon (1989) with its 95-foot artificial mountain, nine water slides, snorkeling pool, rain forest, and especially its wave-making machines that overwhelm fun seekers with waves of up to seven feet in a gigantic pool. No longer was there any attempt to make a cross-generational appeal combining adult nostalgia and children’s freedom. The third water park, Blizzard Beach (1995), is both more exciting and more fantastic than the other two. Built on a “story” about a freak snowstorm in Florida that led some overenthusiastic entrepreneurs to construct a ski resort, the park looks like an Alpine resort with the snow “melted” into a tropical lagoon. It features a 120-foot high Mt. Gushmore with a number of exciting water slides. The nostalgia and cross-generational play of River Country was abandoned for the sardonic and for fast-paced thrills.⁷⁶

At the same time, Disney World shifted its appeal toward a more adult audience. It built on earlier adult resorts at Buena Vista, but increasingly with adult fantasy themes: The Grand Floridian Beach Resort (1986) was designed to evoke “memory” of the days of the gilded age when the rich discovered the south Florida beach. Soon the somewhat less lavish Swan and Dolphin hotel resorts were built near Epcot. Beginning in 1988 with the Caribbean Beach Resort, Disney erected other themed hotels around simulated travel to exotic places and times (with Port Orleans, 1991 and Coronado Springs, 1997). In 1994, Disney also opened a string of inexpensive family hotels themed around movies, music, and sports and featuring gigantic icons (cartoon characters, guitars, and sports equipment). These were designed for young families, presumably with parents still willing to defer to children’s fantasies. But the main trend was accommodating adults. In 1989, the company opened Pleasure Island, a 16-acre complex of restaurants and night clubs (most of which serve alcohol) as well as a teen dance center and roller rink disco for the evening entertainment of visitors who have had enough of family fun and seek to be with their own age group. In 1996, Pleasure Island became part of an expanded Downtown Disney complex. That year appeared Disney BoardWalk modeled after the Atlantic City of the prewar era with a luxury Inn and numerous shops and nightclubs. Disney World even opened a Sports Complex in 1997 with facilities for amateur and professional sports of all kinds.⁷⁷

By the end of the 1990s, Disney World had invested fully in the idea of entertainment for every stage across the life course. By 1995, a Wedding Chapel was offered to couples willing to buy one of Disney’s wedding packages. The chapel included many Disney touches: a glass-enclosed pavilion on its own island located on the Seven Seas Lagoon with a backdrop of Magic Kingdom’s Castle. The World also appealed to thousands as a honeymoon site.⁷⁸ In 1996, the Disney Institute opened to offer exciting short recreational education courses in animation, orchestra conducting, golf, gardening, and sixty other “if onlys,” activities that adults always wished they had learned when younger. The appeal to childhood memory remained, but the Institute was primarily to be a chance for adults to “learn” alone without the children. It even provided seminars on “quality services strategies” for business groups (under the title of “Service, Disney Style”). Activities were provided for children of various ages as well, allowing family members to separate and to discover what interested them personally. With “courses” on animation and tours of Disney architecture and design, the Disney Institute provided the “backstage” view of Disney theatrics, adding a new dimension for admiring “intellectual” patrons. The Institute grounds were notable for the lack of the usual Disney merchandising, including only a small gift shop.⁷⁹

In 1998, Disney World took the concept of age-segmented, life-stage entertainment a step further with the launching of Disney Magic Cruise Line that brought families to a special “deserted Island,” the Castaway Cay. While the ship included a Mickey Mouse shaped pool, it also featured a pool for adults where Disney music was never played. Staff kept children amused at the Oceaneer’s Club (featuring story telling and Captain Hook décor) while teens and adults joined separate clubs for age-appropriate group activities. On the island, a beach designated for families with small children was separated from other beaches for teenagers and adults, all in an effort to accommodate the desire of older children to be free of parents and younger siblings and to allow adults who were not into “the family thing” to enjoy themselves.⁸⁰

The clearest example of how Disney accommodated the social and cultural changes of the 1980s and 1990s was the opening of the fourth theme park at Disney World, Animal Kingdom, in 1998. Eisner called it “a celebration of animals that ever or never existed.” This marriage of theme park and zoo was hardly original: Sea World and Busch Gardens had long featured live animals and highlighted threats to wildlife in exhibits and shows. But Disney, responding to a slump in business in the early 1990s, decided to re-create an African Savanna and Asian Jungle on a 500-acre site (nearly seven times the size of Disneyland’s amusement area). The central focal point of the wildlife park is a 145-foot concrete Tree of Life with an ancient, rugged look of nature. The close observer will see friezes of 325 animal sculptures. The Tree became a hub for the “lands” of Africa, Rafiki’s Planet Watch (a themed nature and ecology center), Asia, DinoLand, U.S.A. and Camp Minnie Mouse (animated animals). Like other Disneylands, the Animal Kingdom made animals into cute characters, even props of story lines for the rides and attractions. The success of the feature-length cartoon, Lion King, set the tone and advertised the Animal Kingdom with its cutesified animals learning to live in harmony. Its happy time live show, “The Festival of the Lion King,” encourages audience participation while dazzling the child within with song, tumblers, and stilt walkers performing in the frenetic style of modern circuses.⁸¹

Still, Disney made direct appeals to a new middle-class obsession, no longer with technological progress as in the original Tomorrowland or Epcot, but with a stress on “authenticity” and conservation. The African and Asian buildings have purposively weathered walls with cracked and faded paint. Boats and trucks are dented and painted in rust. Even potholes were built into the safari road. And, in the quest for authenticity, Indonesians from the island of Bali worked for three years carving animal figures on buildings and Zulus from South Africa built thatched roofs for the themed village of Harambe. The Animal Kingdom’s Killmanjaro Safari copied modern zoo design by creating ecosystems rather than simply displaying animals in cages, but took the idea to its ultimate extreme. Not only did Disney place the gazelles, elands, ostriches, zebras, and many other animals close to visitors (though behind hidden trenches), but Disney turned the traditional viewing of animals into a ride and story during which guests travel in “authentic” African safari trucks on a 20-minute voyage chasing would be “poachers” while snapping pictures of the animals in their natural habitats.⁸²

This new gentility again was not enough, nor was even the old tried and true Disney formula of the cute animal. The appeal of the thrill ride and anarchic, even slightly “rascally,” adult-defying world of the cool could not be ignored. At the very center of Animal Kingdom, within the Tree of Life, was placed a trend-setting attraction: It’s Tough to Be a Bug!, a 3-D film with special in-theater effects similar to those seen at the Honey, I Shrunk the Audience attraction in Tomorrowland. Inspired as usual by characters from a Disney film, this spectacle features plenty of special effects to spook squeamish parents and grandparents (including the Termite-ator, who blows his nose on the audience with water jets).⁸³

On the West Coast, in 2001 the company followed the same pattern in a new theme park, Disney’s California Adventure to complement the 45-year-old Disneyland. Though the new park imitated Disney-MGM Studios with the Hollywood Pictures Backlot and continued its travel simulations with rides like Soarin’ over California in the Golden State attractions, Disney finally broke from its old hostility to the Coney Island tradition by including a replica of the old seashore amusement park, Paradise Pier, a land in California Adventure. Though Disneyfied, the Pier features “iron rides,” including the faux wooden roller coaster, California Screamin,’ and the Ferris (Sun) Wheel. The now familiar age-segmented scheme guided the decision to offer sophisticated fare like tapas at its restaurants and drinks at a new nightlife zone called Downtown Disney (modeled after a similar Orlando project). The earlier Disney message of childhood nostalgia had not disappeared, but, by the 1990s, it was not the only message.⁸⁴

In many ways, Disneyland represented the triumph of the genteel over the plebeian crowd. Disney certainly would have agreed with the critics of the massed throngs of revelers at Coney (and Blackpool). His goal was neither to titillate nor to promote vertigo in his shows and rides, but to inspire, uplift, and to make people “happy.” He copied the tradition of orderly and clean promenades of the Victorian park and did everything possible to reduce the feeling of congestion and anonymity that so distressed genteel visitors to Coney Island. And like the reformers of the first half of the twentieth century, he tried to defuse the threat of the alien crowd by focusing play not on the young adult or working class seeking an escape in the impersonal throng, but on the face of the very personal “innocent” child. This targeting of child-like wonder freed Disney from the formal, status seeking, and didactic qualities of 1900 gentility. Disney was and is “fun.” The formula worked for many years, and continues still, because “happiness” built around cinematic fantasy, childhood delight, and nostalgia continues to meet the needs of middle-class America.

Gradually, however, even Disney has had to adjust to changing taste as the culture of the cute and nostalgic has been overtaken by new trends and expectations. In the 1980s and 1990s, Disney was obliged to accommodate the “cool” and adapt to the segmentation of entertainment preferences across the life-cycle. The company has even reached out toward a playful form of adult education at the Disney Institute, a new longing for environmental “authenticity” at Animal Kingdom, and a wide range of simulated places and times at Disney’s many themed resorts. Although basic themes remain, Disney’s Lands have changed, in fact, to become many things to many people. In the process, they have become attractive to many British long-haul holidaymakers, especially families with young children. But neither Britain in general, nor Blackpool in particular, has ever created anything quite like Disneyland. There are British theme parks, but nothing to approach the scale or nature of the Disney enterprise. What the British created and why and how it differed from America’s Disney will be the topic of our next chapter.