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In 1962, my father bought a sliver of land on the
northwestern shore of Lake Bryan, near the southwestern border of Orange County,
Florida. Two years later, Walt Disney Productions purchased a major tract
of property 1/8 mile to the north. The house my father built
in 1967 ended up being less than a mile from Walt Disney World Preview Center that
opened in 1970 and the WDW Village complex that opened in 1975.
My brother Brian* and I spent our formative years in that house and the
all-but-literal shadow of a brand new WDW. The closest playground was
at the Lake Buena Vista Travelodge, the closest post office was in the Preview
Center building, the closest medical facility was the same walk-in clinic where
sick WDW visitors were sent for treatment. The nearest restaurants and
stores - even the Stuckey's - were also on or surrounded by WDW property.
So Disney's dominance in our
childhoods was pretty ghastly, but we didn't know anything was wrong.
We
just - as with any other kids our age - liked the monorails and the Magic Kingdom. I had
nightmares about swimming with Jungle Cruise hippos and Brian wondered what
was back there beyond the musty dark Haunted Mansion portal from whence doom buggies
flowed endlessly. And we could not get enough of If You Had Wings, because it was free and absolutely
mesmerizing. Beyond those fixations, however, WDW provided us with an
introduction to - or a prism through which we came to view - significant aspects of
the world around us (foreign cultures, U.S. history, space exploration,
classical music and
English literature among them). The main difference between its impact
on us as individuals was that Brian, being a paranoid hedonist, thought WDW was
pretty much the
ultimate pleasure zone (full of patently non-threatening fun) and
I, an antisocial idealist, regarded it as the perfect example of how the rest of
the world should be: immaculately planned, strikingly efficient and unfailingly
cordial ... even to someone of a contrary demeanor.
Many other people had already made that observation. Long before WDW opened,
California's Disneyland had been
lauded many times over for operating under aesthetic and functional principles of the highest order.
The formula was repeated in Florida, only on a larger scale,
displacing alligators along with orange groves and giving the master planners a
chance to shape thousands of acres as they wished. They started off
wonderfully. The original WDW's architecture
was non-confrontational; each individual feature complemented the next;
transitional areas and open spaces were pleasantly landscaped; traffic flow (both
human and automotive) was logically configured; employees were
well-groomed, well-spoken and friendly - almost to a fault. The company
took great pride in such assessments and made sufficient mention of the effort
required to ensure utopian outcomes in its press materials and souvenir
publications. For an effete misfit like me growing up around a place like
that, it was Pollyanna from day one.
Even after we moved to Windermere (several miles north of WDW)
in 1978, the proximity was
still telling. On summer nights we heard the Magic Kingdom's fireworks
from our bedrooms. We ran into Michael Iceberg at the post office and
played Pac-Man at the Ready Market while Bob Matheison bought milk. It's a
testament to our mother's fortitude that our visits to the park remained
frequent; she single-handedly couriered the two of us out there for twelve-hour
stretches several times a year. And
although neither of our parents ever worked for
Disney, every third person in our neighborhood and schools did, had, or - as was
our case - would.
In 1980
I wrote to WDW inquiring about the possibility of a future job (I was eleven,
i.e., a somewhat sad and damaged youth).
They sent me this handout outlining how one is "cast
for a role in the WDW show." I flaunted it in front of Brian, who at
that age had only ever received mail from Ranger Rick, and he expressed
enthusiasm at the prospect of one day being a costumed character.
Unfortunately he said this in front of our father, who vehemently proclaimed that no son of his was going to
"dress up like a damned chipmunk." The outburst was so upsetting to Brian that he
stabbed our father to death in a fit of anxiety**. As Aunt Colette
says, "La vie est folle!"
By the time I was sixteen and legally employable, my disposition toward working
at WDW had cooled. I
had seemingly outgrown my childhood ties to Disney and ensconced
myself within a typical young man's framework of punk rock,
the occult and girls. But my first girlfriend, although she was a nice teenage witch who loved The Clash,
worked at Mickey's Mart in Tomorrowland.
Life is like this: one week you put away your Fox & The Hound lunchbox, the next
you are black-magicked into applying for a job at Disney World. By
November 1985 you are wearing white knee socks, pouring Cokes and serving fried fish
in the Columbia Harbour House.
There was nothing
less subversive in the way of a career, but it provided a fascinating
re-introduction to WDW - approaching it from the tunnel system and crawling
through its countless back rooms. I got into dark spaces behind childhood
preoccupations ranging from If You Had Wings' projector platforms to rainy Tiki Room picture windows.
The park turned into a giant funhouse, magnificent except for my costume and the tunnel's pungent odors (a
third-world potpourri of dead birds, wet French fries, cleanser, urine and cigarettes). Fortunately, at
seventeen I claimed an
elusive ounce of goth cred by landing a transfer to the Haunted Mansion.
It was the first time something I'd always wanted
to do lived up to my expectations.***
In fact, it was so maddeningly grand that I
insisted Brian come out and join me as soon as he turned sixteen and finished
his community service work. Soon he was dressed like a Logan's Run paper
boy, slinging cardboard-flavored pizza at the Plaza Pavilion and gazing with
wonderment upon the massive bank of Wometco vending machines in the Main Street Break Room. Yet he never
wore a
chipmunk suit, at least not for Disney. Those were great years. I trained
at lots of other attractions (as a Jungle Cruise skipper I waded among the scary hippos), fell for other girls in
polyester and took friends on ill-advised tours of off-limits areas. Brian
got turned on to pot**** and kept losing his wallet.
When we
worked at WDW, it was still
largely
as it had been in its first ten years; there were still many
original employees lurking about, still the basic assortment of original rides
and shows. All these years
later, anyone who grew up with WDW, worked there or
visited often between 1971 and 1986 probably remembers it as an altogether
different place than it had become by the early 1990s. Undoubtedly
there was far more to do at the resort by the time it reached its 25th birthday,
but seminal aspects of its cohesion had slipped. The distinct sense of
personality that reigned before the prominent appearance of non-Disney brands,
beginning with the construction of the Disney-MGM Studios in 1988, was eroded.
This went far beyond the tradition of corporate sponsors whose logos adorned the
entrances of shops, restaurants and attractions; WDW later turned so heavily to
outside influences for presence (Star Tours, Rainforest Cafe, McDonald's, et
al.) that the line between its own entertainment legacy and that of others would
be blurred and, perhaps, indistinguishable for its younger guests. Other
factors contributing to the transformation included a failure to keep the parks
and resorts maintained to original quality standards, lapses in employee
courtesy and growing visual discord in the form of postmodern architecture which
broke dramatically from Phase One elevations and color schemes.
Although
those developments were regrettable, the part of WDW's evolution that directly
affected me was seeing attractions, shops and restaurants disappear or undergo
strange alterations. When the Mickey Mouse Revue was shipped to Tokyo in
1980, it didn't resonate too deeply because it wasn't being destroyed and seemed
like it might come back someday (insert laughter), but it was
weird. In 1985, RCA's Home of Future Living
(Space Mountain's post-show exhibit) was dismantled and replaced with RYCA-1,
which was utterly hollow and hard to rationalize. Two years later, while I was stacking
Milwaukee's Best cans at the Ringling Academy of Base Art Studies, Brian called
to tell me that If You Had Wings had been turned into an Eastern Airlines-less
shell of its former self called If You Could Fly. It really felt wrong; even though the ride's makeover and eventual closure were logical (it
was tailor-made for a sponsor that pulled out), that didn't make the thought of
it being gone forever any less sad. It was like losing a really cool
grandparent, except you don't ride most grandparents through a Puerto Rican
fortress. If You Had Wings was my first significant struggle with the concept of
impermanence, and it was about to get worse as more WDW elements vanished or
suffered perplexing overhauls with far greater frequency from the late 1980's
onward - not just in the Magic Kingdom, but also at EPCOT Center and the
hotels.
Consequently
it seemed urgent that I cultivate a lo-fi archive of things that hadn't
been axed yet. That collided with a habit of making crummy Xeroxed newsletters,
yielding what may
have been the first (worst) WDW-inspired fanzine: Jane, Our Teenage Daughter.
Based on the exploits of a guerilla-minded Carousel of Progress animatronic, JOTD ran afoul of the law four separate times between 1989 and 1990. Although
it wasn't clever
or interesting, it did aid in my search for old WDW junk. Before the end of my employment at Disney, I'd
begun a timeline of things that had gone missing and
obtained generous input from total strangers in the form of photographs,
videos, and tapes of extinct attractions.
This was the "Age of Dave and Mike" that you hear so
much about but, just like the "Age of Enlightenment," don't want to know what it
means. That Dave is Dave Ensign, who has been my comrade in Disney
rapaciousness for 20 years. Not only does he claim half-ownership of a
leafy hillside next to Frontierland's Indian camp, he is also an expert on
solenoid valves, Jungle Cruise maintenance manuals, fiberglass, Tex Avery and
gas station Cokes. If one person could single-handedly resuscitate WED
East or sculpt all the figures needed to make the Western River Expedition, it's
Dave.
Then there were a lot of other people who soiled their hands by
associating with me in the early stages of this project: Gerald Walker,
Dave Hooper, Dave Smith, Mike Hiscano, Mike Cozart and Ross Plesset. All
of these gracious guys significantly expanded my knowledge of WDW back when I
actually had time to absorb, retain and record the details.
One
thing I learned during this period of intense education was that some people in California who had grown up
with Disneyland were paying tribute to that park's history in far more
impressive ways than I could have hoped to ape for WDW, most notably the late Randy Bright's Disneyland:
Inside Story and Jack and Leon Janzen's horrifically wonderful magazine,
The "E"
Ticket.
Bright's book was
so cool because, although written by a Disney employee, it didn't feel like it
had been approved or edited.
Bright was a WED "Imagineer" who worked at the park as a teenager. His
affinity for Disneyland, and its significance in his life, was fully apparent in
his text. He also compiled a fascinating appendix, entitled "Sequence of
Disneyland Attractions," that traced all the major additions to the park since
it opened. Unfortunately
Inside Story is no longer in print.
The
Janzens' massive grass-roots effort to drag out the most arcane facts
about Disneyland are unsurpassed in the world of fandom.
Like Bright, they
grew up with the park and were still infected as adults. They initiated a noble quest to produce
a visual and written history of the Disneyland's earliest years which
has brought forth scads of previously unseen images and
stories from WED personnel who made it all happen.
Having already written about WDW when introduced to
The "E" Ticket, I realized then that
what I'd done was gibberish and, worse, that the Janzens
would probably not be devoting much print space to Disney's
Florida parks. By that time it was also unlikely that Brian, having moved
on to other employers (Church Street Station) and other interests (Nintendo), would join me
in an East Coast brother-based venture along those same lines.
After some stupid false starts, and with the crucial help of my wife Amy (references
to WDW blueprints are only possible because she Erin Brockoviched at the Florida
State Archives), I
got off to a real start in 1994 with another crummy Xeroxed newsletter.
This time it was called Widen Your World, a phrase ripped from the last scene of
If You Had Wings. I offered free subscriptions on a "send me stamps"
basis. Within a year there were, inexplicably, over 100 people sending
stamps and it was getting creepy. At the same time Amy was learning HTML
code and showing off. With her assistance, WYW became a website in April
1996. There are three main reasons why it's still here:
> It puts me in touch
with people I wouldn't otherwise know - people who have early WDW in their bloodstream
and who have been incredibly helpful with their
comments, memories and old photographs or have simply written to say
they like the site, even if they're lying.
> It's the most direct means of passing on my photographs,
audio, video and written information with the widest possible audience. I
swore I would never try to make money with this stuff and so far it's worked out
well. And if you happen to notice that some people have taken content from
my site and used it toward a commercial end, there's no need to ring the alarm.
I know, I just don't have the time to worry about it.
> Many people younger than me don't know what If You
Had Wings was and might think the former site of 20,000 Leagues had
always been a Pooh playground. They're not likely
to learn about these things from sources within the park itself. Although there have been a
few instances of WDW
covering its own history, like 1998's WDW
Resort - A Magical Year-By-Year Journey, accurate written records of WDW's
past attractions (especially as compared to those for Disneyland) are scarce. Take for example
Bruce Gordon & Dave Mumford's Disneyland: The Nickel Tour, which upon
its 1995 publication became the biblical
account of one theme park's march through time (first editions of
this thick volume sell used for up to $1500). Jeff Kurtti wrote a more
slim take on WDW's history, 1996's Since The World Began, but his
first visit to WDW was in
1987 - at which point WDW was sixteen years old. He acknowledged that fact
in his book, the focus of which was on general WDW history vs. lost features,
and hence left certain territory unexplored. So even if WYW is not definitive or vital, it is
helping to fill a gap. There are other
sites out there now with a changed WDW as their raison d'être, which improves the odds that A)
more obscure information, photographs, audio and video
will enter the public arena and B) I will be heralded as a
visionary and receive a wicked scepter that, when you look through a
tiny hole at the top, shows Orson Welles piloting the Admiral Joe Fowler around
Devil's Elbow.
If you'd like to see some of the ingenious ways that
other people are demonstrating an appreciation for early WDW elements, start
with these sites:
Passport to Dreams Old and New
Virtual Toad
Utilidors Audio
Broadcasting
WDW
- A History In Postcards
Waltopia
Maybe WDW management will eventually get
serious, as so many of its employees and visitors already are, about the nostalgia and
- this was Miami Mike's idea - convert the old
Preview Center building into an 'Early WDW museum.' Until then people may
choose to
keep suffering along with my renditions.
In case you somehow didn't notice, this site has major drawbacks. One
is that it isn't updated often. Another is that it's not
comprehensive ... if there's nothing factually or visually new for me to add to
the public record of
past attractions, I put it off. And then it's cynical, but after seeing Mr. Toad's
Wild Ride gutted, the Penny Arcade turned into a store and former Swan Boat hostesses
relegated to desk jobs, come on! At eleven my reverence for Walt Disney
and his corporate successors was ludicrous, now I just violently love
their best work. Once Roy O. Disney (who deserves tremendous credit for
seeing WDW through to opening day after his brother died) was gone, fallibility
slowly spread company-wide.
And although Michael Eisner was at the helm when WDW began to really change in
nature, some of the
same people who built the place shelved dynamic Marc
Davis concepts, marginalized other huge WED talents and abandoned Walt Disney's most ambitious project
(by turning EPCOT the city into EPCOT Center) a full ten years before Eisner
arrived on the scene. Other writers can present the "balanced" take
on that; after hearing firsthand tales of how it happened, my Pollyana needs a good scrubbing.
Today WDW is in a strange position; it's seeing
some truly interesting and not altogether bad changes afoot. Where things will head in the next ten
years, with largely new management in place and show quality standards seemingly
on the brink of a comeback, is kind of an exciting unknown. We won't see
If You Had Wings or Horizons reappearing, but maybe the Carousel of
Progress will keep spinning and Spaceship Earth's cave people will live on for
years to come. And consider the possibility that they would have the good
sense to rebuild Mr. Toad's Wild Ride on that patch of land that used to be
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea ... a move that could be made for a reasonable
amount of money and would speak volumes to their fan base. It could
happen.
* Brian was also born after my father bought the
property, so why my parents opted not to use the same spelling of the name Brian
as the lake goes down as one of those questions that follows you around, like
"how long might this question follow me?"
** This is only partly true.
*** I had not yet taken a prostitute to Ponderosa.
**** In 1980 WDW had 27,443,666 employees and half of them were constantly high.
As Walt Disney often said, that's twice as high as the island of Manhattan.
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