When Disneyland closed its gates on Friday, March 13 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeff Reitz was less than a week from marking 3,000 consecutive days of visiting the park. In the days leading up to that last day, for everyone Reitz knew, he became sort of the poster boy for the many Disney theme park fans who would be heartbroken by the unavailability of their happy place.

“My phone started blowing up,” Reitz recalls of the day the closure was announced, “people sending messages that when they heard the news, I was the first person they thought of. At the time, it felt as if I had lost a member of my family and people were sending condolences. I thought, ‘Okay, what am I supposed to do with this?’”

For the past six weeks, Disney theme park enthusiasts of all kinds have felt that version of mourning in different ways, and for different reasons. Some of them are simply near-daily visitors; others have turned Disney Parks fandom into part of their income. For all of them, the closure of Disney’s theme parks around the world has been a significant part of adjusting to the new reality created by the pandemic.

“I’m a single guy. I have no other constant in my life in terms of a spouse, or family.”

Brent Dodge, who lives in the Orlando area and visits Walt Disney World on a near-daily basis, has written several Disney Parks-themed books and maintains the website From Screen to Theme. For him, the park closures have been an emotional experience. “When the news came in, a friend was with me who’s known me for years,” Dodge says. “She said, ‘I’ve never seen such heartbreak on your face.’ For me, it’s the most constant thing in my life. I’m a single guy. I have no other constant in my life in terms of a spouse, or family.”

Jon Alan Hale — a Disneyland Resort regular who has logged more than 12,700 rides on Radiator Springs Racers — feels the absence more in terms of his connection to the many cast members he has developed relationships with over the years. “They’re the whole thing,” Hale says. “I’ve been posting some stuff on Facebook with memories about them over the years, and how nice it’s been to get to know them.”

For Reitz, the way the streak ended in some way made it easier to deal with. “It was sad when I didn’t get to choose the day, but I was happy I didn’t have to choose the day,” he says. “If March 31 was my last day of going, and I was seeing other people posting on April 1, that would have been harder.”

A common thread among the fans, however, seems to be that the closures have in some way gotten easier to deal with over time. David Erickson — a vlogger who operates the popular Disneyland-focused YouTube channel Fresh Baked Disney — notes that “it’s just become the new normal. We were just counting the days when it first happened, and it’s been six weeks now. So we’ve just gotten used to it.”

“In terms of revenue, we’re feeling it really hard.”

Erickson is also one of the many parks fans who have turned their enthusiasm into revenue streams, whether through publishing, Patreon subscribers, or YouTube advertising. The inability to generate new theme-park content from within the parks themselves has had an impact on that income, and forced many of them to re-think how — or whether — to keep generating new content for their audience. “Some folks have pivoted their channels to keep creating content,” Erickson says. “But I vacillated on whether to do something like that. I’ve felt that our channel is a purely Disneyland channel. We did a few diary episodes, but I don’t feel like that’s where it belongs. In terms of revenue, we’re feeling it really hard.”

Chris Provost — who operates the YouTube channel Provost Park Pass with his wife, Amanda, and had a planned 2020 world tour of every Disney theme park cut short by the closures — has chosen to develop different ideas for new content in the absence of in-park videos. They’ve tried out home versions of Disney theme park recipes online, and created a makeshift version of a Disney Park in their home for a video that went viral in England. Yet for them, these ideas as much about keeping the magic alive for themselves as it is about generating content. “We’re literally just doing things we want to do,” Provost says. ‘We’re not trying to think, ‘What would be a YouTube video?’ Amanda loves food. One of the things we really love when we go to DCA [Disney California Adventure theme park] is the Animation Academy. So she’s drawing characters because it helps her pass the time, get the fix of that Disney love.”

Trying to fill that theme-park-shaped hole is something all fans are trying to do. Many are tyring recipes to recreate their favorite theme park treats at home; others, like Hale, are loading up on Disney content on Disney’s recently launched streaming service Disney+. Erickson and his wife, Liz, held their own version of Disneyland’s Dapper Day — where people come to the park dressed up in a vaguely retro style — at home. Others simply have a lot to do by virtue of still being employed; Jeff Reitz, for example, works at the VA hospital in Long Beach, and has had his job transition into screening clients and employees at the door of the facility.

But some acknowledge that their attempts to stay connected to the parks have also been challenging. “I do a run every day,” Dodge says. “At first, I’d run to [the Walt Disney World] property. But I haven’t done that for about a week now, because it’s difficult being there while not being there.”

Nearly everyone agrees that the parks they’ll return to when they ultimately do re-open will be in some ways radically different than the parks were when they closed. Capacity might be limited, operations for attraction queues will likely by adjusted for guest distancing, parades and fireworks might not return, and security procedures might include some form of health screening.

That uncertainty has started to sink in for most people, even as they long for the parks to reopen. Provost notes that, during a live-stream for their YouTube page, he asked viewers in an unscientific poll whether they thought they would be ready to go back to Disneyland as soon as it reopened. “I thought majority would say they would be going Day 1,” Provost days. “But I think 7 out of 10 people said they would be waiting. I was surprised.”

“I think I’ll be there opening day, if only to chronicle the event,” Fresh Baked Disney’s Erickson says. “Not necessarily to say, ‘I’m at Disneyland, I can meet Mickey Mouse.’ It will be work. I’m not afraid per se. I want to have a normal time, but that can only happen if there are no protocols that are excessive. If they open, in a way that I think is too early, it won’t be Disneyland.”

“It’s not a ride or a show I miss; I just want that feeling.”

The Disney Parks that people love might not be the parks they return to in all of the same ways, but fans are still eager to return when it’s safe to do so. Yet a near-universal sentiment is that what people are missing isn’t a specific attraction, or their favorite snack, but an emotional connection that’s impossible to replicate. “For me, going to the park has always been about how it makes me feel,” Erickson says “I’m kind of a homebody. When I’m at Disneyland, I just feel different. It’s not a ride or a show I miss; I just want that feeling.”

“I just miss walking down Main Street,” Dodge says. “A lot of people have said, ‘Is there a ride you miss?’ I just miss that feeling of walking down Main Street, hearing the music, smelling the smells. I’ve jokingly said to people several times, ‘I’m pretty sure I will hug that castle.’”

Happy Place Interrupted was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The 8th Port

Rather than “lands” DisneySea is organized around “ports of call” of which the park originally opened in 2001 with seven, an allusion to the “seven seas”. While DisneySea has seen additions to these ports over the years, especially in American Warterfront, as of yet there hasn’t been a completely new port added to DisneySea’s original roster. DisneySea’s eighth port has been a long time coming, with a few changes in scope and location along the way.

A new port for DisneySea was first officially mentioned by the OLC (the company that owns and operates the Tokyo Disney Resort) in a press release in 2014, with no real details given other than announcing plans for an expansion to DisneySea to be completed by Fiscal Year 2017.

This expansion area was planned to sit to in the southwest corner of the park in between Discovery Bay and Lost River Delta (relative to the park entrance this is the back, leftmost corner), mostly inaccessible and remote, largely only coming to guest attention when taking a cruise on the Transit Steamer Line.

In April 2015 more details about this expansion were announced, revealing it to be a Scandinavian port themed to the hit film Frozen. The timing makes sense with Frozen only revealing itself to be a blockbuster franchise during the tail end of 2013, and Epcot announcing a Frozen overlay to an existing attraction in September of 2014, so obviously Frozen development was in the air at Disney during the time and they were repurposing the work and capitalizing on the film’s success as much as possible (lazy or efficient: your choice). No budget was given for the expansion itself, but the press release announced a combined budget of 500 billion for expansions to the entire resort over the next 10 years.

After this detailed announcement things got pretty quiet, with 2016 press releases that alluded to the future expansions decidely more vague, not mentioning any specific location or particular theme. This curiously quiet trend continued well into the original estimated opening date, making it all but apparent that plans had changed. It wasn’t until June 2018 when the OLC revealed details of their new expansion proposal, scrapping the original Frozen-themed port for a much more ambitious expansion that would include 3-sub lands and a brand new hotel. The area went unnamed at the time (I dubbed it “Port FantaSEA” on Twitter) but was revealed to be called “Fantasy Springs” in May 2019 with the area planned to open Fiscal Year 2022.

Most recently in January 2020 a small delay was announced, moving the opening to Fiscal Year 2023. In Japan fiscal year 2023 = April 1, 2023 through March 31, 2024, so for those of us that don’t wear a monocole and tell time in money years the expansion is currently planned to open roughly between late 2023 and early 2024.

This latest update was give just prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, of which we’re currently in midst of as the time this article was published. All Disney theme parks are currently closed and the ramifications on current construction projects are not yet known. Given its progress prior to this event Fantasy Springs will certainly be completed, but don’t be surprised if an additional delay is eventually announced.

Theme: new, new Fantasyland

The 2018 announcement has described Fantasy Springs as “Themed to magical springs that lead to a world of Disney fantasy” with the OLC further elaborating “the new port will consist of three areas inspired by Disney films that are beloved by Guests of all ages — Frozen, Tangled and Peter Pan”

Reading between the lines a bit it’s clear that Fantasy Springs is an attempt to make a Fantasyland of sorts for DisneySea, an area containing a mix of Disney Fairy Tale properties in one cohesive environment. Arguably this makes the Port an IP-based land, and based on concept art somewhat of a mix of a the Fantasyland approach of the past (several properties showcased in a cohesive land) and the IP-central approach of the present (a single film property meticulously realized and recreated). DisneySea is no stranger to IP: the park’s Mermaid Lagoon focuses on the Little Mermaid, while Lost River Delta and Arabian Coast heavily lean on Indiana Jones and the Aladdin, respectively.

The attractions have been noted in the original press release to be “newly developed expressly for this project”, with OLC CEO Toshio Kagami later stating of the expansion “We’d like this to become the only one of its kind in the world”.

Put together, I think these statements can be translated to mean no attractions will be clones of existing attractions nor the basis of clones elsewhere. This is especially good news as it seems to mean the Frozen attraction will not simply be a clone of Walt Disney World’s Frozen Ever After, itself an overlay of 1988’s Maelstrom. Frozen attractions are also currently planned for Hong Kong Disneyland and Walt Disney Studios Paris: the latter of which has revealed plans that certainly make it seem like clone of the overlaid ride at Epcot. As described by the OLC, the Frozen attraction:

“[…] will be a heartwarming attraction that tells the story of Elsa and her beloved sister, Anna. Guests will board boats and experience the sisters’ heartfelt journey while enjoying iconic songs from the film and encountering surprising thrills”.

Tokyo DisneySea seems set to have the world’s definitive Frozen attraction.

The form of the other three attractions are currently grist for the rumor mills. The main Peter Pan attraction potentially taking the simulator route similar to Animal Kingdom’s Flight of Passage:

“One attraction will fly Guests over the jungles of Never Land into a battle with Captain Hook and his crew of pirates. Guests will join Peter Pan in an adventure to rescue Wendy’s younger brother, John, who has been kidnapped by Captain Hook and his pirates. Guests board boats and follow the Lost Boys down a river. When Tinker Bell sprinkles the boats with pixie dust, Guests find themselves flying through Never Land on an unprecedented adventure that features iconic music and dynamic 3D imagery of the characters from the film.”

A second minor attraction themed to Tinkerbell and fairies that sounds like a mix of a play area and Disneyland’s Pixie Hollow.

“A second attraction immerses Guests in the oversized world of Pixie Hollow where Tinker Bell and her fairy friends live and work.”

The Tangled attraction sounds like a boat ride perhaps not too dissimilar from Na’vi River Journey.

“Guests will board gondolas for a romantic boat tour of Rapunzel’s ‘best day ever’ as she journeys with Flynn to the lantern festival. Countless flickering lanterns illuminate the attraction’s climactic scene while Rapunzel and Flynn sing an iconic song from the film, building to an unforgettable finale.”

Hard to judge from these rather general descriptions, but executed well each attraction could be a delight and make for a compelling a well-rounded area. We’ll see.

Scope: huge

Operationally the Port represents a massive expansion in budget, scope, and size. The expansion has a published budget of 250 billion yen (approximately 2.3 billion USD) and a size of 100,000 square meters (~24.7 acres) including the theme park area and hotel. For reference, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge had an estimated budget of $1 billion USD for 14 acres, making Fantasy Springs roughly twice the size and given twice the budget. Even adjusted for inflation, Fantasy Springs alone has a larger budget than the entire California Adventure theme park. Combining DisneySea’s original budget (335 billion yen or ~3 billion USD) and adjusting for 2020 inflation (~4.6 billion USD) with the expansion (~2.3 billion USD) and you end up with DisneySea costing nearly 7 billion USD. For reference the newest Disney theme park, Shanghai Disneyland, had a budget of roughly 3.4 billion USD in 2016 dollars. It’s hard to compare apples to apples with all the various park expansions but it seems likely that DisneySea is set to be most expensive theme park of all time by a good margin.

Aside from the four attractions, Fantasy Springs will also feature three restaurants, one main gift shop, and notably feature an attached hotel, making DisneySea the first Disney theme park with two connected hotels (the other being the Mira Costa that is integrated into the park’s entrance and Mediterranean Harbor area). The Fantasy Springs Hotel seems geared to the high end, with 475 “deluxe-type” and “luxury-type” rooms, promising the finest accommodations in the entire Tokyo Disneyland Resort. The hotel’s name, as of yet, has not been revealed so this article simply refers to it as the “Fantasy Springs Hotel”. The hotel’s theme and integration into the rest of the Port isn’t quite clear, but the concept art has a distinctly Gaudí-esque influence that I quite like.

Location: big changes to Bayside

Logistically the port is somewhat annexed from the rest of the park, located in what will be a dead end not too disimiliar to how Mickey’s ToonTown is integrated into Disneyland. For this reason it will be the only port within DisneySea that the DisneySea Transit Steamer will not travel through as the river that runs through each of the existing DisneySea Ports will not be able to continue through it. Speculatively, I imagine the Springs of Fantasy Springs will be considered the water source for the waters of the park or something to that effect, providing at least some story-based connection to the rest of the park where a physical one is impractical.

Fantasy Springs abandoned the original “Frozen” expansion pad location adjacent to Lost River Delta (meaning that pad is still available for future use), opting instead to use a much larger area that was used as a parking lot for Tokyo Disneyland, located at the back of both Disneyland and DisneySea and adjacent to Bayside Station (a Tokyo Disneyland monorail stop for 3rd party hotels like the Hilton).

Let’s take a closer look at the area below.

And here’s the area from above:

Speculation

Fantasy Springs is currently a construction zone, as seen in these photos circa October/November 2019.

However, I got to wondering what this will eventually look like on a map when it’s completed. Looking at all the available concept art and liberally remixing existing map structures, I came up with this:

If you’re not familiar with the Tokyo Disney Resort, I’ve labeled the map below. The three lands on the top belong to Tokyo Disneyland, the three lands to the right belong to Tokyo DisneySea, and the left and bottom represent Tokyo Disney Resorts strip of “partner” 3rd party hotels aka where you should probably be staying unless you’re splurging. As part of its expansion efforts Disney is notably moving into this formerly 3rd-party area with the Fantasy Springs Hotel as well as a Toy Story Hotel presumably similar to the one in Shanghai.

Logistic Repurcussions

Looking at this top down view the expansion in light of the resort as a whole, a few interesting things stick out. First is how this hotel may change the dynamics of park entry. I’m assuming park entrance from the new Fantasy Springs Hotel will be limited to guests staying at that hotel, otherwise the adjacent 3rd party hotels arguably have better park access than those staying at the Tokyo Dinseyland Hotel or even the MiraCosta.

Second, the two new Disney hotels coming to the Bayside Station Area will likely significantly improve the value of Bayside Station area in general. Whether you’re staying at the new Disney Hotels or not there will be a huge huge jump in food, shopping, and just general “walk around and explore” options for those staying in this vicinity, on top of the shops, restaurants, and activities, already present at the 3rd party hotels in the area. While this could potentially raise the value and thus the cost of the rooms in the area, I’m guessing we see the opposite effect with both increased available rooms and increased competition causing the Bayside staton 3rd party hotels to maintain their current status as best bang-for-your buck value at any Disney Resort in the world, if not increasing it.

Third, notice just how close Fantasy Springs is to Tokyo Disneyland, with Mickey’s Toontown and and the new Beauty and the Beast expansion of Fantasyland practically touching Fantasy Springs. Given the thematic similarities between Tokyo Disneyland’s Fantasyland and Fantasy Springs some sort of park entrance to/from Tokyo Disneyland would seem both logistically and thematically satisfying, literally bridging the two parks via their sister areas. Alas, I’m guessing such an entrance would end up a operations headache, especially for the Tokyo Disney Resort where park-hopping is a much more limited thing vs. the US and Paris resorts, but I still wonder if it’s at least built in to the planning as a potential option for use in the future if not immediately.

Design

Focusing in on Fantasy Springs itself, we see how the ambitious new land is defined by four main features: the new hotel, the area themed to Frozen, the area themed to Peter Pan’s Neverland, and the area themed to Tangled.

This subarea-based design approach is not foreign to Tokyo DisneySea, with most ports using the approach to various degrees. American Waterfront for example opened as two sub areas (New York Harbor and Old Cape Cod) and eventually expanded to add a third (Toyville Trolley Park). Given this, I’m not too concerned that the subdivision-based design is out of character for DisneySea, although most of the existing ports have done a decent job at worst and amazing job at best of making these distinct areas work as a larger whole and it remains to be seen how well Fantasy Springs accomplishes this with three such distinct properties at play.

Anticipation

At best Fantasy Springs won’t open for over three years, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s in store. Details on the attractions, the hotel, the restaurants, and entertainment will all slowly trickle out between now and then. There’s a lot to look forward to for theme park fans, whether it involves actually taking a trip or enjoying from afar via photos and videos and whatever replaces TikToks in 3 years. At some point we’ll be able to dissect it, critique it, and I’ll be able to write an overly wordy and detailed review, but for now let’s all bask in the anticipation for the largest theme park expansion in history.

Fantasy Springs Fantasizing was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

According to Gary Snyder’s The [DIS] Influencer , Disney has been manipulating the media and Disney fanbase via a sock puppet who is one of the earliest and perhaps most famous Disney fan “online” personas. Disney and one of their most prolific theme park critics are realy one and the same, and it’s been this way since 2002. And it all originated from a long term scheme to futher Bob Iger’s career. Allegedly.

Who is Gary Snyder? He writes articles about the media and sometimes Disney, ones that sometimes get pulled. He’s part of a very powerful family in media, one that seems to not get along so well. But Gary Snyder, his background and his motives, is a topic for another day. Right now we’re struggling with not just “is any of what he said true?” but “what did this man actually say?” His article is a bit of a wild ride, making it diffucult to separate facts from speculation, sources from his own opinions.

Below I’ve broken down his entire article by each key section of text as to what it is actually saying and implying, and what sources are at play were applicable. I’m trying to be as impartial as possible here: my goal is not to judge his claims but to make them clear: the screenshots are his text and the captions are my intepretation. Nothing I do here is going to make Snyder’s claims any more or less believable, but hopefully we’ll all at least agree on what claims he’s actually making. Onward.

DISsecting “The [DIS] Influencer”

Postscript

Al Lutz’ responsse: Al’s recent article has since been updated to be from “the Real Al Lutz”

Micechat’s response: denials, with a post that has been edited several times. Claims they may have proof this is untrue: “Stay tuned”

Kevin Yee’s (co founder of MiceAge) response:

Whoa now. Sunday just got juicy!!

Some facts:
1. I was Al’s co-founder on MiceAge — I had a front row seat, so I know whereof I speak below.
2. It is true that Al has Parkinson’s
3. I haven’t written for MiceChat in a long time. Last I looked, they were using the name “MiceAge Update” rather than Al’s name directly; there was something of a retirement more or less for Al. Could he still be writing occasional articles? Yes, sure. Especially if someone helped him.
4. The very idea that Al didn’t write for MiceAge during the SaveDisney years is laughable. That was definitely him. Sure, he had sources, and I suppose they could have included folks in the Iger/Mucha camp. But don’t you remember him ridiculing the way Zenia’s name was pronounced? Definitely his own voice in those years, so the central premise of the article is wrong.

Since Mr. Synder outed several real names, I suppose it does no harm to reveal he is, in fact, Spirit of 74. Several of you picked up on the tone before I could confirm it.

Knowing that Spirit is the author of that article should change several things for readers. He was frequently a critic of Al, and with Al now sidelined by disease, this feels like a hit piece designed to “win the argument” several years later, and take Al’s reputation down a notch.

It was all Al during those SaveDisney years, and he was nowhere close to co-opted by corporate. As noted above, his sources could have included Iger, sure. He could have promoted Iger over others, sure. But nowhere close to what you see with Influencers these days taking handouts and writing “reviews.” Al was never comped into anything.

Todd Porter’s response: nothing yet

Forum member “TP2000” response: denies he is Todd Porter and claims he has no clue why he was drug into this

Gary Snyder’s response: nothing yet, but he and perhaps his brother have been now alleged to be some infamous Disney forum members.

Gary Snyder’s Wild Ride was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Four mansions scattered across the globe, each unique yet imbued with the spirit of the last. The enduring legacy of the Haunted Mansion.

The original Haunted Mansion opened in 1969 after its completed facade sat for six years, teasing Disneyland guests in Anaheim, California throughout the 1960s. Part of the park’s then freshly opened New Orleans Square, the mansion has a demure, antebellum feel of the American South (even if partially based on a location in Baltimore). Famously the grounds of the mansion are immaculate, with Walt Disney famously quoting “we’ll take care of the outside and let the ghosts take care of the inside”, highlighting his concern with public perception of his then new entertainment enterprise.

The attraction was a hit, in the way of not just being popular but becoming a cultural phenomenon. The Haunted Mansion eventually transcended the physical into the iconic and ideal, as much a symbol as an actual place. A keystone of each visit to the park. The thing you wrestled with in your childhood years, approaching with fear and delight: a perfect recipe for lifelong fascination. Growing up with it, it symbolized many key developmental milestones: fear, anxiety, mystery. If you first experienced this later as an adult and don’t quite get the fuss, facing the mansion during your early years was big part of it.

The Haunted Mansion was pegged early for Disney’s first expansion, the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida in 1971. They took the re-do opportunity to lengthen the attraction and give it a bit more build up, but overall it was the same Haunted Mansion as the one in Anaheim, at least on the inside. Things are different on the outside, instead going for a distinctly Gothic architecture more befitting the colonial area it resided in: the Magic Kingdom’s Liberty Square. This move would start a trend whereby each Haunted Mansion would claim residence in a different land in each park it appeared in. This Haunted Mansion at the Magic Kingdom is also left to be a bit more overgrown and unkempt compared to the Anaheim version, another trend that would grow with the later two versions that would appear across the Pacific and Atlantic, respectively.

Tokyo Disneyland was the first international expansion in 1983, largely funded by a separate company (the now beloved OLC) under Disney’s supervision. They took the Orlando version, but this one somewhat curiously placed in Fantasyland, as ghosts have a far different cultural place and connotation in Japan than in America. Seeing the Haunted Mansion steps from Dumbo and across the way from Peter Pan is one of the more jarring examples of cultural distinction seen in Tokyo’s park from an outsider perspective. Notably, while structurally identical to Orlando’s mansion, Tokyo’s version begins a trend of increased disarray, with the grounds severely overgrown and (purposeful) signs that the mansion is not being cared for such as the broken window.

When Disneyland Paris (then Euro Disneyland) opened in 1992 it took an entirely different approach, remixing the Haunted Mansion to have a bit more of a literal story, a completely different ending, and calling it Phantom Manor. While the name has changed and a few scenes altered, the bones are still 100% Haunted Mansion and most casual visitors would be hard pressed to tell the difference early in the attraction, with more pronounced differences occurring as you delve deeper until you reach an entirely unique finale. In Paris the mansion is part of Frontierland, which in Paris takes place in the fictional town of Thunder Mesa. Frontierland is a “big deal” land in Paris: the idea being that Europeans have nothing like the American West, thus making it exotic and fascinating (three of Disneyland Paris’ too-many-hotels are also themed to the American West). Phantom Manor goes all-in on appearing not just unkept but fully dilapidated, a sign of both cultural difference and how the theme park landscape had changed from Walt’s early concerns about differentiating from dirty carnivals. Also of note is the manor bears an almost subconscious similarity to Hitchcock’s Psycho house, with Western Victorian Second Empire architecture, but was likely not influenced directly by it and instead by early 1950s designs for Anaheim’s mansion.

The fifth Disneyland opened in Hong Kong in 2005, but it was not built with a Haunted Mansion. While the cultural hurdles with spirits and ghosts were surmountable in Japan, I think the issue was simply deemed too risky with Chinese culture. The park later got an attraction known as Mystic Manor which arguably fills the spot of the Haunted Mansion in a thematic sense — a place of residence where weird things happen — but it’s overall a completely different beast from any of the four Haunted Mansion based rides. Shanghai Disneyland opened in 2016, and while grander in scope than Hong Kong Disneyland, it also opened without a Haunted Mansion.

The photographs here all higlight the Mansions in their recent form (circa 2015–2019) during the day. I think this is the best way to highlight thier raw physicality and place in the day-to-day of each visitor, rather than the perhaps more typical choice of a stylized night shot. Notice a theme of gates separating the viewer from the Mansion in each composition, although in the photo of Tokyo’s Mansion it’s not the attraction gate you might expect.

Even if/when Disney builds a new Disneyland outside of China, I don’t think there will ever be another Haunted Mansion. Just four special mansions in four cities around the world, all leading to the same seance calling not just 999 ghosts, but an emotional touchstone that still resonates to this day.

Four Mansions was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Sky is the Limit

When I was a kid there was nothing better than a day at Disneyland, the pinnacle of my childhood aspiration. Given a limitless birthday wish a trip to Disneyland was my immediate answer. If the sky was the limit, Disneyland loomed above all else. It was aspirational, not something I got to do all that often, but also real and achievable, unlike asking for every Nintendo game ever made (my number two choice).

For many of you the answer wasn’t Disneyland, but the Magic Kingdom or Epcot at Walt Disney World. Despite this, I don’t think your Walt Disney World ever really encroached upon my Disneyland reality, nor vice versa. I was vaguely aware of Walt Disney World as a child, but it wasn’t part of my everyday fabric. Walt Disney World entering the life and consciousness of a young Southern Californian was surprisingly rare. I did end up going to Walt Disney World on the rare occasion, usually under the guise of some other vacation circumstance, not necessarily more or less exciting than the Disneyland I knew and was part of my everyday. Walt Disney World had no practical effect on how I perceived the world, it did not raise the sky any higher, disappearing from my everyday as quickly as it entered. The “other” Disney parks were not a secret but in a sense invisible: they did not make their way into my life and I had little reason to concern myself with them or give them much thought because I had Disneyland always orbiting my consciounsness. Our individual realities tend to consist of what’s tangible, the things that are presented to us regularly.

These days things are much different, the exploits of others and their adventures in the world around us are everyday constants, monetized first by companies and then ourselves. Thanks to the internet I read about, hear about, see photos and even video from Walt Disney World every single day. Same with Tokyo Disneyland. Disneyland Paris. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Unlike my more innocent youth, it’s harder to be part of an isolated bubble of “my own” Disney park. Disney’s theme parks across the globe are more visible than ever to all of us, a prevalent ecosystem seeping about the social ether, ebbing and flowing within the digital world. My Disneyland, or your Magic Kingdom, or somebody else’s Tokyo Disneyland are no longer the isolated, one of a kind realities they once were, instead in a state of constant, worldwide compare and contrast. Even if I’m actually at Disneyland, if I dare open Twitter or Instagram or YouTube I’m going to see the near real-time exploits of somebody at a different Disneyland. There’s always more out there, always something just out of our reach.

At this very moment somewhere on the internet somebody is arguing that Disneyland in Anaheim is the best of them all because it has so much history. Somebody else is extolling that Walt Disney World cannot be matched because nothing compares to its sprawling vacation kingdom. Another is talking about how the attractions in Tokyo are superior to anything in America. That Disneyland Paris is more beautiful than Anaheim’s Disneyland or Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom could ever hope to be. That Hong Kong is the most charming and quaint. That Shanghai is more advanced than the rest. The sky that used to be occupied by just one place is now a constellation of 11 parks in 6 resorts spread across 4 countries. Vloggers push it. Podcasters push it. Bloggers push it. Instagrammers push it. I push it. While Disney doesn’t necessarily try to convince us to visit any but the resort closest to us, Disney still necessarily needs to push them all into the limelight. Disney theme parks are no longer isolated and singular, instead placed on a global stage, showcased to the entire world.

How can I feel that same warm contentment during my trip to the Magic Kingdom when I know DisneySea is better? How can I delight in Disneyland’s charms knowing the people across the Atlantic in Paris are experiencing a prettier park? No theme park is universally better than the others, so there’s always greener grass looming in the back of your mind. Are all these people at a better theme park than me? Are they having more fun than me? The sky is no longer the limit, but we’re all still stuck within our own atmosphere. Like everything else these days, information overload can lead to feeling inadquate, even while being at the happiest place on earth.

Isolationism vs. Globalism

One can argue that these parks all existing on the global stage simultaneously has no real practical effect. Just because we’re constantly exposed to Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland and Shanghai Disneyland I’m not necesarily more likely to hop on a plane and visit them. I have no idea what percentage of people who have been to any Disney resort have been to more than one Disney resort, but my guess is it’s pretty low overall. The logic here is not too hard to follow: to the average person, these parks are all “Disney World” or “Disneyland” and are seen as largely interchangeable. Anybody who lives in Los Angeles or Orlando who has visited an international Disney park has invariably been asked “why would you waste your time when we have that here?” Disney tends to behave in ways supporting this mindset, very rarely encouraging visiting more than one resort or even acknowledging that others beyond the one you’re near at the time even exist.

On the flip side, the idea that these parks are interchangeable refuses to take hold despite Disney’s best “One Disney” efforts. Epcot is indelibly linked as a uniquely Walt Disney World experience distinct from the Disneylands around the world. Tokyo Disneyland demanded a unique resort fitting Japan, ending up with the incredibly unique DisneySea. When Hong Kong Disneyland faltered under claims it was just a smaller clone of Anaheim’s Disneyland it reacted by opening 3 brand new, unique mini lands with two unique, marquee attractions. One of the clauses of Shanghai Disneyland coming to be was that it must have a unique Disney castle, the biggest of them all. Hong Kong’s subsequent reaction to Shanghai Disneyland was to announce expansions unique to Hong Kong and to modify its castle to be distinct from a mere Anaheim clone. If the goal is to make these parks copy-and-paste versions of each other, Disney is doing a horrible job.

Deep down I think Disney would love to clone these parks and rides the world over essentially franchising like a McDonald’s and call it a day, but they know it simply won’t work. The parks don’t work in isolated local bubbles anymore: the existence of one influences the rest. People, like myself, who have been to many or all of them will make lists, compare and contrast. The lucky few may plan not should they go to their local Disney park, but which of the many Disney parks should they visit this time? The presence of these global parks is likely not having drastic effects on travel and spending patterns, but perhaps it’s having effects on the expectations and aspirations of all of us. These parks are in competition with each other, if not for actual dollars then for mindshare. If Hong Kong can’t differentiate itself enough from Shanghai Disneyland, it could completely falter. These parks have to make names for themselves to spur interest and remain relevant.

The globalization hasn’t gone unnoticed. The New York Times wrote an article exploring whether the people who have visited every Disney theme park are deranged (tongue-in-cheek) or not, but the subtext of that article is that all these parks are becoming more visible to the average person. As theme parks become a cornerstone of media conglomerate empires, and as technology globalizes us and social media creates a cold war of FOMO between us, these trends will not slow. Universal is following closely behind Disney and will soon be in 4 countries with 5 separate parks. Success in a new country requires unique selling points to generate buzz, and uniqueness and quality are now defined on a worldwide scale.

While Disney largely expects you to visit the park closest to you, it’s not quite that simple. The existence of all these options can weigh on the customer who may naturally wonder what they’re supposed to do with so many options. Are we expected to visit all of them as unique destinations? Are they considered interchangeble like a nice chain restaurant, making going out of your way to visit more than one rather pointless? Disney historically hasn’t done a good job of answering these questions, not really prepared for the parks to compete on a global stage very much beyond Walt Disney World’s ability to pull Europeans on holiday despite Disneyland Paris.

In the social, global era Disney is forced to acknowledge and embrace all these parks rather than playing coy, needing some sort of messaging about who these different parks are for and why any of them is worth your time compared to the rest. When somebody from Southern California or Orland visits France they know there is a Disneyland in Paris, but Disney doesn’t provide them much guidance on whether they should be planning a visit or not. It’s simply not a scenario they tend not to acknowledge, never making clear whether Disney feels Disneyland Paris would be a redundant waste of time or a unique, compelling experience. This sort of feigned ignorance isn’t something they can continue to get away with on the global stage: Disney needs hard answers to these questions.

Part 3: Individuality and Quality

This leaves Disney in the difficult position of selling a single Disney theme park experience but also selling 11 distinct theme parks across the globe. While perhaps the Americans don’t spend too much time hopping to the opposite coast and settle for their “local” resort, the Japanese didn’t stop visiting Disneyland in 1983. Europeans didn’t stop visiting WDW in 1991. These are still aspirational travel destinations despite the accessibility of local versions.

The catch to this is it only works when the parks sell themselves as offering something substantially unique compared to their global counterparts. Shanghai Disneyland for better and worse is a very unique Disney theme park and certainly more compelling than if it were simply yet another clone of Anaheim’s Disneyland. Sure, the mainland Chinese don’t exactly have easy access to Aneheim’s Disneyland but they’d still pick up on the fact that the world was somewhat nonplussed by an Anaheim clone, in turn dampening the social buzz of a more franchised, cloned version of Shanghai Disneyland (if this hypothetical situation sounds familar it’s because this essentially happend to Hong Kong Disneyland and is a big part of why Shanghai ended up so unique). Tokyo Disneyland is wonderful but it’s the incredibly unique Tokyo DisneySea that turns the Tokyo Disneyland resort from a “cool to see every now and then” destination into a “must do every time I’m in Japan” event. These theme parks can and should inspire that desire, yearning, and aspiration. They need to capitalize on the FOMO, that there’s always more experiences out there to be had, no matter how great your “home” Disney resort happens to be. While perhaps it’s not going to suddenly cause thousands of Americans to change their annual WDW trip to one to Disneyland Paris I do think there is monetary potential that remains untapped because Disney isn’t selling their global parks roster quite right. A strong global presence doesn’t hurt your local’s connection to their home park but strengthens it, making us feel part of something much larger and layered, investing us deeper.

The individuality alone, however, isn’t enough: people also need to feel like their unique experience is matching the unique experiences elsewhere. Disney needs to acknowledge that their quality can’t vary drastically by park or region, they can no longer count on isolation and meeting only local expectations. If 2001 happened today and Disney tried to open a park as compromised as 2001’s California Adventure the same year it opened something as extravagant as 2001’s DisneySea, California Adventure would be annihilated on social media and in terms of global capital. Expectations are now anchored globally: your highest high is the new expectation everywhere, and your lowest low will get blasted on a global stage. We again can look to China for this, where the lavish Shanghai Disneyland has somewhat taken the social capital and buzz from the more modest Hong Kong Disneyland. Hong Kong Disneyland recently announced an aggressive expansion plan including a more lavish castle. Shanghai Disneyland raised the bar and Hong Kong Disneyland was forced to react. Similarly, nobody was really bragging about going to Walt Disney Studios Paris — indisputably Disney’s worst theme park — until it started getting a few unique rides such as Crush’s Coaster and areas such as La Place de Rémy to put it in the global conversation. The common Disneyland brand gets them in the door, but ultimately the parks are defined by their unique selling points.

World Showcase in Reverse

A great individual theme park is one thing, but a network of theme parks placed strategically across the globe affords unique opportunities a single park in an orange grove never could. What Disney has done across 6 resorts (more if you count places like Aulani) is to create a true international gateway.

What I’ve come to appreciate about these worldwide Disney parks is their somewhat ironic role as a lens to local culture. We tend to lump theme parks into the tourist/vacation category but I’ve come to see them as a way not just to view tourist culture but to get insight into the local culture as well. At this point Orange County and Los Angeles annual passholders literally overwhelm Disneyland in California. Central Florida passholders and cast members similarly flock to Walt Disney World during their time off, intermingling heavily with the vacationers visiting from afar. I’ve come to know Tokyo Disneyland as an extremely Japanese experience, not for its very American foundation but as an accurate example of something actual Japanese people enjoy and integrate into their lives. In terms of a trip honestly representing a culture, the young people of Japan probably aren’t hanging out at the Tokyo Skytree or visiting their 12th temple in as many days: they’re hanging out with Duffy and riding Big Thunder Mountain. The Disney theme park setting in this sense serves as a bit of a cultural control group: providing the foundation of something familiar which in turn allows the variations in how a different culture interacts with it and expresses itself to be that much more apparent. The Imperial Palace certainly has more historical significance, but Tokyo’s Cinderella castle may be a more relevant destination to the armchair ethnographer trying to experience how the Japanese actually spend their time today.

Disney theme parks playing a role in cultural exploration is nothing new. World Showcase was a concept that gestated for a while before being introduced in the Epcot theme park that opened in Walt Disney World in 1982. In the spirit of a World’s Fair, World Showcase is a safe space to introduce Americans and the foreign visitors to Epcot to a variety of cultures all in one convenient place, with 11 countries currently represented in individual pavilions. World Showcase is a prime example of themed design as idealized fictions: while these pavilions are not the “real” Mexico, China, France, etc. they attempt to take their most compelling qualities, especially in terms of architecture and food, and distill them into an idealized experience celebrating that culture. Disney was actually dedicated enough to getting the cultural components right that they did and continue to use citizens and exchange students from the actual countries to work within the pavilions. World Showcase was designed to be both a bridge and a gateway drug for these cultures. The general idea was that the small, idealized taste given to you at Walt Disney World would spark your interest and perhaps motivate you to take your next vacation to experience these locations and cultures first hand.

World Showcase as a cultural bridge is a great idea in theory, especially in the pre-internet era, but in the modern era the execution of the concept may actually be backwards. Instead of planting other cultures within the safe space of a Disney theme park the more effective strategy may be to plant Disney within other cultures. As new Disney theme parks have spread across the globe I know far more people who have travelled abroad to see them and subsequently explored the country and culture in which they are located than those who booked a trip to China after really enjoying their meal at Nine Dragons. Disney theme parks end up being a perfect motivator and bridging tool: a safe, familiar, semi-neutral space from which to branch out and experience foreign culture. My own desire to explore China finally crested to the “commit” point once Shanghai Disneyland opened in 2016: sure I was planning to visit anyway, but it never hurts to have yet one more carrot at the end of the stick. The far-off but still uniquely compelling Disney Parks thus become aspirational, fulfilling the hole your local park left when you got an annual pass and turned the aspirational into the everyday. The parks you visit regularly and the parks you dream about tend to be two different groups.

The international network of parks in many ways closes the loop with the World Showcase of Epcot, finishing what Epcot’s World Showcase starts. Not only are you introduced to idealized cultures for those in Europe, China, or Japan you’re given an excellent incentive to visit them in the form of a Disney park with its own unique flavors and cultural twists. The more I think about it, the more incredulous it is that Epcot’s China, Japan, and France Pavilions don’t include small exhibits showcasing the Disney Parks located within them. If Disney can’t sell their own theme parks to people who already proved they are interested in them by visiting one in the first place, something is very wrong. Adventures by Disney dabbles in this, but there should be a well-oiled machine in place to grab mindshare and dollars by convincing guests that their European vacation absolutely should include a few days at Disneyland Paris, that no trip to Japan is complete without a trip to Tokyo DisneySea.

A Whole New World

Accepting Disneyland as global is inevitable: it’s already happened by Disney’s own design and they’re now stuck promoting the individual parks on a global scale if they want all of them to succeed. The genie is out of the bottle, and it can only go down one of two paths. One is where Disneyland is cloned and stamped worldwide and truly franchised, making each one feel that much less special in the process. This is the worst case, one I hope Hong Kong Disneyland taught Disney to avoid, but as some of Paris’s and Shanghai’s most compelling attractions get pasted into Walt Disney World I do question if they really appreciate how much these choices that kneecap one park to give a boost to another are going to shoot them in the foot long term.

The other path is the one where Disney embraces that even under the same Disneyland brand the local parks need local flavor. This isn’t the franchised Disneland, but the Disneyland that is forever unique and always special. The Disneyland that embraces it’s cultural distinctions and variations, that allows itself to not just be a single compelling tourist destination but a collection of compelling destinations. The Disneyland that never ends, with more always just over the horizon.

As Disney presses istself upon us more and more as a daily lifestyle, we need these unique, international parks that we can’t visit daily to represent the rare, aspirational treat that the Disneyland of our childhood used to represent. To keep the brand compelling it must be larger than life, something that can’t be “conquered” by a single vacation to Florida. Always leave them wanting more, but be sure you actually have more to give.

World Showcase was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An exploration and review of Shanghai Disneyland

“What if I could do it all over again?” is a question most of us will ask ourselves at some point in our lives. How great would it be if we could take a second shot at things, this time with the benefit of hindsight and experience, the lessons a lifetime of successes and failures, all the accumulated resources and knowledge available from the very start. A second chance would mean doing it without compromises, without limitation.

Shanghai Disneyland is a Disneyland built on a cultural blank slate, using billions of dollars worth of resources, decades of experience standing on the shoulders of creative geniuses, porting the most successful brand in the world. Shanghai Disneyland, unlike the Disneyland of 1955, is a safe bet.

Shanghai Disneyland is an arranged cultural and corporate marriage, an American company planting itself in very foreign soil, a gamble on shaping a culture as much as being accepted by it. Shanghai Disneyland, like the Disneyland of 1955, is a huge gamble.

The park that opened as Shanghai Disneyland on June 16, 2016 represents this duality, a very prominent yin and yang running through its core. Shanghai Disneyland is limitless opportunity and calculated constraint. Shanghai Disneyland is a safe bet and a huge risk. Shanghai Disneyland disappoints as much as it succeeds. Shanghai Disneyland is American yet stripped of America. Shanghai Disneyland is the sixth Disneyland in over 60 years and yet still figuring itself out. Shanghai Disneyland is the best and worst of Disney theme parks. Shanghai Disneyland is a funeral and a birth.

Shanghai Disneyland is modern Disney.

It’s fun to do a new park from the ground up […] and say so if you were going to do a new one from the start without any of the confines we’re familiar with, which changes would you make?

— Bob Weiss, President of Walt Disney Imagineering

Part 1: Remaking and Exporting Disneyland

The idea of “Disneyland” has been an enormous success — a new concept in art and entertainment opened back in 1955 that to this day remains a cultural touchstone and huge profit driver for the Disney corporation. The success of Disneyland can make us forget that the original park that opened in the orange groves of Anaheim California back on July 17, 1955 was built on compromise. It can be difficult to remember that a place so successful and so pervasive today was originally a gamble against all odds, another Walt Disney “folly” predicted to fail. Many necessary concessions in size and scope were made for Disneyland to become a reality. Upon opening, Disneyland immediately began fighting its own limitations and scrambling to catch up to its own success. Expansions and improvements were constant under Walt Disney’s watch, from Tomorrowland’s essential rechristening in 1959 to the first land expansion with New Orleans Square in 1966, but the park was always and forever working within the constraints of its 1955 conception. The park was limited as businesses built on the adjacent land Disney could not originally afford to buy were already boxing in the physical space. As a resort Disney didn’t even own the single hotel, contracting the Disneyland hotel out due to monetary constraints. As showcase of technology, advances that would eventually reshape the attractions and very design of the original park were constantly developing.

What would a Disneyland look like if it were conceived from the beginning with the confidence of 60 years of success, designed with over 60 years of theme park experience and the latest breakthroughs in technology and engineering, and constructed with a nearly infinite budget only a multinational company worth more than 150 billion dollars could provide? Shanghai Disneyland is the closest we’ve got to answering to that question. Shanghai Disneyland is the first truly modern Disneyland.

Its worth exploring exactly why Shanghai Disneyland is the first modern Disneyland given it’s not the first time Disney has attempted at to export the Disneyland concept beyond Anaheim. In many way Disneyland is a victim of its own success, mired in trepidation of straying too far from its Anaheim roots. Disneyland has been spawning itself regularly since 1971 with now six Disneylands (one of them is called “The Magic Kingdom” but it’s a Disneyland in concept like the rest) scattered across the globe — sometimes slightly larger, sometimes slightly smaller, sometimes slightly prettier, but overall so remarkably similar to the Disneyland in Anaheim it’s hard to argue that Disneyland hasn’t franchised itself. The differences between the Disneyland that opened on the outskirts of Los Angeles in 1955 and the one opened on the outskirts of Hong Kong in 2005 are surprisingly minimal. Aficionados may delight in the small differences between them, but taken as a whole they’re largely the same experiences with the exact same beats. Disneyland as a concept has been nothing if not resilient, remaining steadfast despite time, place, and culture.

Disney got its first chance to take another shot at the Disneyland concept with Walt Disney World and the Magic Kingdom in 1971. It was a chance to build Disneyland again, this time with more money and more space. The most interesting thing to note about this venture is that Disney took this mostly as an operational second chance rather than a conceptual one, with the differences between the areas outside the theme park most pronounced: Walt Disney World was a sprawling resort while Disneyland was just a theme park and a hotel. The differences between the theme parks from the perspective of a visitor, however, were more subtle. Yes, the Magic Kingdom was larger than Disneyland and the resort’s land more insulated from the outside world, but conceptually, the park was essentially an East Coast installment of Disneyland with mostly minor tweaks. Disney did not take the opportunity to try something completely new, like they would with Epcot the next decade. They didn’t try to reconceptualize the core concepts of Disneyland: they didn’t remove the nostalgic charm of Main Street to instead celebrate the bustling urbanism of a growing city, an approach 1991’s Euro Disneyland almost took. They didn’t try to execute those same Disneyland land concepts in a different way: Tomorrowland’s technological optimism was not replaced with the cultural optimism we would see later in 1982 with Epcot’s World Showcase. The Magic Kingdom was neither a sequel or reimagining of Disneyland: it was a damn good remake.

A remake of Disneyland made sense at the time: while it was moving from the west coast to the east coast, it was still moving within America. 16 years did not result in too much innovation in the industry that the constantly evolving Disneyland itself had not already adopted. Given Disneyland’s rapid evolution between 1955 and 1971, even the techniques were largely identical, with the Magic Kingdom actually playing catch up with the industry’s pièce de résistance, Pirates of the Caribbean, a ride only found at Disneyland at the time of the Magic Kingdom’s opening. The park’s stability was somewhat necessary to the risk of the larger Walt Disney World project: taking a chance on reconceptualizing Disneyland or throwing it away and and trying something new was going to make a risky project only riskier. The Magic Kingdom was neither the time or the place to take Disneyland down to the foundation and rethink everything.

But what happens when you try to take Disneyland outside American soil? What happens when Disneyland gets in the export business?

Exporting Americana

We have dedicated this happy place to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America.

— Walt Disney

Disneyland’s holistic appeal is captivating and ethereal, lightning in a bottle. Disneyland is many things and to this day it can be difficult to adequately summarize the emotional whole from the sum of its parts, a testament to its genius. Disneyland is a foundation, it’s a turning point, it’s pride, it’s optimism: these are universal ideals, but this distinct combination of them, through the lens of Walt Disney and his team, had a distinctly American perspective. Disneyland is Americana.

Disneyland is so effective at what it does its easy to think of it as a place to be taken lightly, a place to just turn off your brain and simply have fun, but this neglects that Disneyland’s core definitively asks philosophical questions and makes bold cultural statements. Main Street’s nostalgic charm seems to subtly ask “maybe it was better back then?”, opening your visit by having you question if maybe we’ve lost our way a bit. Tomorrowland at its best and in its prime seemed to boldly and optimistically tell us that the future will definitely be better, a sadly controversial topic to this day. Frontierland can be seen as a reflection of how far we’ve come and what it took to get here. Adventureland celebrates the untamed and the taming of nature herself, the yearning to explore and the conflicts that can arise. Fantasyland celebrates the imagination and myth associated with childlike wonder, implying it to be an important component of the life Disneyland celebrates. These are the ingredients of Walt’s Americana. As the concept of Disneyland has expanded to the East Coast with Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, the Americana arguably became more pronounced, swapping Anaheim’s New Orleans for an even more nostalgic and on-the-nose celebration of America’s origins with Liberty Square and an army of robotic American presidents.

Things were potentially a bit more complicated in 1983 as Tokyo Disneyland opened. Disney, however, got a get-out-of-jail-free card with Japan: the Japanese company funding Tokyo Disneyland specifically requested a “foreign” experience and wanted the very American Disneyland, just as it was. This resulted in Tokyo Disneyland, a Disneyland where Walt’s Americana was very much part of the fabric, with pieces literally lifted from both US parks, but that same context serving a very different purpose to the local crowd. Where Americans experienced an intangible sort of nostalgia with Disneyland, the Japanese experienced a curious sort of cultural exploration, the Americana serving just as well as curious settings for them as they served as ideals in America. In Tokyo, Tomorrowland was Space as much as it was optimism, and the American Frontier of Frontierland became more about the settings of the exotic Wild West in Tokyo’s Westernland. From Tokyo Disneyland’s perspective Disneyland still needed the Americana, but the visitor didn’t necessarily need to connect to it in the same way or for the same reasons. The genius of Tokyo is that the culture allowed for the same execution to result in a different experience: it worked from either perspective. Tokyo Disneyland was a huge success in Japan, setting the stage for Disneyland’s export business.

Next up for international expansion was Disneyland Paris. Starting as Euro Disneyland when it opened in 1992, Disneyland Paris faced a bit more concern about cultural fit and perceived cultural imperialism, resulting in some notable tweaks both instituted and planned. The entire park has a bit more whimsy, with its Frontierland perhaps a bit more focused on fantastical narratives while simultaneously representing American West. Tomorrowland was replaced by Discoveryland, meaning the 1950s optimism of tomorrow was replaced with a sort of French retro-future. Despite cultural consternation, the park that was built wasn’t all too different conceptually from the three Disneyland’s that preceded it: the place still dripped with Americana right from it’s very American, nearly perfect Main Street. Most important in the story of Disneyland Paris the fact that, unlike Tokyo Disneyland, this very American institution and its very Americana park didn’t have the smoothest cultural landing. Euro Disneyland has struggled to integrate itself for decades, facing financial hurdles and underperformance: Disney’s first commercial misfire. The resort and its struggles have been a challenge not just for Paris but for the entire Disney company, changing the course of an entire decade of theme park development. Decades later the park has taken root, but the lesson learned is that when that initial Disneyland seed doesn’t sit quite right in its cultural soil, the repercussions can be disastrous. While perhaps the prettiest Disneyland of them all, Disneyland Paris might be the first example of the park’s American ties causing trouble.

After the problems faced in Paris, Disney’s next cultural expansion to Hong Kong in 2005 played things incredibly conservative both financially and conceptually. Hong Kong Disneyland actually regressed more to a somewhat limited version of its 1955 incarnation rather than pressing forward with the gains and flourish of 1972 or 1991. The park lacked some of the more Americana areas of Disneyland such as Frontierland or New Orleans Square or Liberty Square, but as much for financial reasons as anything and otherwise was pretty much a copy/paste of the design and approach of Anaheim’s Disneyland. The main lesson Disney learned from Paris was not of thematic and conceptual fit, but one of fiscal trepidation: the park was designed small scale to achieve profitability rather quickly, not necessarily designed to shake things up conceptually or further attempt cultural concession. Hong Kong tried to fit in a bit more via subtraction, not addition. Disney paints the picture that they were purposefully bringing American to Hong Kong and it wasn’t a cost-saving measure to simply clone a smaller-scale version of Anaheim’s Disneyland and call it a day. Wing Chao of Walt Disney Imagineering at the time noted “we’re bringing Disney America… to Hong Kong”, tauting the American spirit in the architecture and ambiance of the park. Even Disney fully acknowledges Hong Kong Disneyland as an American institution in approach and design.

Hong Kong Disneyland becomes an interesting case study due to its approach giving the park a sort of cultural duality. On the one hand the park functions as an alternative, idyllic, freshly minted clone of Anaheim’s incredibly popular Disneyland but without the crowds and headaches seen in Anaheim. On the other hand, the Disneyland with perhaps the most reason to be unique and the most opportunity to try a new approach and speak through a new conceptual and cultural voice instead ended up the most derivative Disneyland ever made. While the park didn’t share Paris’s overbuilding woes, it did suffer from dual problems of poor cultural fit and an underwhelmed public. Hong Kong Disneyland was too conservative and didn’t resonate the way it was expected to. Like Paris, it has been struggling to overcome these hurdles to this day. The lessons of Hong Kong Disneyland’s cultural and conceptual conservatism would play a key role in shaping Disney’s next move in China.

From 1955 through 2005 Disney experimented with some some small tweaks and experiments in the Disneyland approach, but the overall themes and execution have never strayed too far from the original. Even outside of America, Disneyland has always been built on a foundation of Walt’s Americana. Hong Kong showed that perhaps Walt’s Americana wasn’t immutable.

“As you know, Disneyland park is a sort of a monument to the American way of life.”

— Walt Disney

Part 2: Authentically Disney and Distinctly Chinese

“[In China] It’s hard for us to wash out of your mind nostalgia for Disneyland, because it’s not relevant”

— Bob Weiss

The lessons of Hong Kong were not forgotten as Shanghai Disneyland gained development momentum 2000–2009. The cultural gaffe and financial struggle of Hong Kong were still fresh in the minds of executives who were there for it, including now CEO Bob Iger. The cache of the Disney brand is rather low in Mainland China, Disney’s films and characters more a foreign curiosity with limited nostalgic value than the cultural staple they are in the US. The mainland Chinese government of Shanghai, unlike that in Hong Kong which by all accounts gave Disney a sweetheart deal, would not be so easy. It was clear that a different approach needed to be taken with Shanghai Disneyland, not just on the surface but to the core. A park with different themes and different perspectives was needed in Shanghai, necessitating a different execution than the Americana cloning of previous attempts. To lay roots in Mainland China Disney was forced to use a blank slate, to reconceptualize Disneyland in 2016. To make Shanghai Disneyland work Disney had to export Disneyland without Walt’s America, the very soul of Disneyland as we have always known it.

“A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes means nothing to China.”

— Matt Almos, Director of Live Entertainment, Shanghai Disneyland

Disney itself refers to Shanghai Disneyland as “authentically Disney and distinctly Chinese” a “unique blend of Disney magic and China’s cultural spirit.” How, exactly, does one design a “distinctly Chinese” Disneyland rather than a distinctly American one?

Perhaps the most direct route to a distinctly Chinese Disneyland would be to take Disneyland’s cardinal ideals — nostalgia, optimism, patriotism, childlike fantasy and whimsy, respect for the past, exploration of the foreign and unknown — and instead of coloring them via Walt’s American lens, translate them from a distinctly Chinese lens. The Chinese spin on a nostalgic and idealistic historical inflection point in their history, for example, may have nothing to do with a turn of the century Main Street, and instead resemble the post 1980s turning point of historical China and modern China. The Chinese take on optimism may look less like rockets to the moon and plastic houses of tomorrow, perhaps focusing more on hopes of cultural integration. This form of a distinctly Chinese Disneyland sounds incredibly intriguing, with great potential to speak volumes about Chinese culture in the same ways Disneyland did about America in 1955, but one can quickly see the pitfalls of attempting such a park. Such a personal viewpoint is probably not something a foreign company is suited to make and would need an auteur on the scale of a Chinese Walt Disney, somebody the very American Walt Disney Company is probably ill-equipped to provide. Disney is more fit to reflect China than define it. A distinctly Chinese Disneyland would need to reframe the cardinal concepts of the original from a Chinese perspective.

Another problem with this approach is that the constellation of ideals composing Walt’s Disneyland not only had Walt’s Americana spin, but the very choice of those ideals represented Americana as well. Perhaps the true core of of Disneyland is a rather loose set of ideals that capture the aspirational spirit of a people and culture, in this sense it may not be nostalgia or patriotism that best define the Chinese. Perhaps a better approach for a distinctly Chinese Disneyland is to not translate Walt’s ideals, but to use Walt’s methods to focus on a different set of ideals more representative of Chinese culture. As an American I can only speculate what the theoretical Chinese Walt Disney of 2016 would choose to focus on as core concepts to summarize the idealistic Chinese experience, but I’d wager you’d end up with a different set of lands than Main Street, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland. A distinctly Chinese Disneyland would not only need a Chinese point of view on Disneyland’s core concepts, it would need to develop Chinese core concepts of its own.

A third thing to keep in mind, something to always keep in mind on this topic, is the role of the Chinese government. Shanghai Disneyland is a joint venture between The Walt Disney company, which owns 43% of the park, and the Chinese government, which owns the other 57% via the Shanghai Shendi Group. Despite it’s deceptive appearance as a fancy playground for the child in all of us, Disneyland has definite opinions. China may not be the best place for a theme park with opinions, with China increasingly treating entertainment and communication as instruments of its power, the range of topics and opinions Shanghai Disneyland can have will necessarily be constrained. Any discussion of the past would have to stick to the government’s approved version of it, any vision of the future would need to fit in with the government’s vision, and the park’s attraction roster has had influence from the Chinese government since inception. For Shanghai Disneyland to even exist, it had to give up some of its agency. A distinctly Chinese Disneyland would need to be careful about what it has to say.

These three factors ultimately led to the Shanghai Disneyland that was eventually built, arguably the only Disneyland that could be built in mainland China by a foreign company where the government is a majority stakeholder. Shanghai Disneyland’s ultimate solution to the Americana problem is rather simple: rather than attempting the risky proposition of translating American nostalgia, romance, or optimism through a Chinese lens, it jettisons the concepts completely. Shanghai Disneyland is America sans Americana, and succeeds in working around much of the cultural imperialism that shook Euro Disneyland and even Hong Kong Disneyland.

What fills their void is not a new collection of concepts to represent the Chinese experience necessarily, although Chinese ideals inevitably shine through in Shanghai Disneyland. The core of Shanghai Disneyland is not so much representing a mindset or moment in time, but instead a sort of aspirational escapism. Rather than Walt Disney’s “this is who we are” Americana, Shanghai Disneyland’s approach is more a “we are free to play as something else” Chinese declaration. A focus of Shanghai Disneyland as a place to relax, reflect, and escape are common themes you’ll see in promotional materials and press releases. Open space was a key driver in the physical design, also a key tenant of the park’s emotional core as well. Shanghai Disneyland is a statement about leisure and enjoyment and possibility, a set of canvases encouraging you to explore yourself more freely. Shanghai’s greatest strength is in cutting anything that could bring complicated cultural baggage and conflict with this playful freedom. Robotic politicians are controversial enough in America, but would likely bring even more emotional conflict to the Chinese people, as if even their leisure were under scrutiny and surveillance (which it probably still is, but we’re talking illusions here). American ideals too may cause consternation — there is no Frontierland in Hong Kong, for example — so these also had to go.

If not Americana, what is Shanghai Disneyland? To listen to Bob Iger tell it, Shanghai Disneyland is largely about building a relationship between China and the Disney brand.

“An immersive park experience the Disney way is something that people will remember for the rest of their lives, and that goes a long way in terms of not just creating word of mouth, but in terms of creating people’s interest in passion for our brand and everything that it stands for and everything that bears its name, as a for instance. So it becomes very, very important, not just in terms of awareness but appreciation”.

— Bob Iger

It’s easy to take Bob’s business speak as a sign of a jaded and shallow purpose to Shanghai Disneyland, but taking the Disneyland approach and expanding it to China is no less noble than doing the same with the Eastern United States in the 1970s or Europe in the 1990s. Beneath the business practicals, building a relationship between American culture and China is far from the least noble business decision the Disney company has made… it doesn’t hurt that there’s a boatload of potential money to be made in doing it. Shanghai Disneyland is an arranged marriage designed to benefit both Disney and the Chinese.

“Shanghai Disneyland is a booster rocket for people’s appreciation of Disney.”

— Bob Iger

Part 3: Exploring Shanghai Disneyland

Aside from Bob Iger, another Bob played a key role in Shanghai Disneyland: President of Walt Disney Imagineering Bob Weiss. He and his team were tasked with coming up with the open, Americana-free, authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese version of Disneyland. The core of the park is your typical Disneyland 1955 hub and spoke design: an entrance shopping-heavy entrance, leading way to a more open hub to various themed lands. Shanghai Disneyland opened at 320 acres, roughly three times the size of the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. The entire resort encompasses 963 square acres (including Shanghai Disneyland, two hotels, Disneytown, and Wishing Star Lake) at nearly twice the size of Anaheim’s Disneyland resort, built for $5.5 billion USD.

The seven themed areas described below are what debuted on opening day in 2016, with an eighth opening recently in April 2018.

Opening Act: the Disneytown, Mickey Ave, and Gardens of Imagination trifecta

Disneyland’s Main Street is the park’s opening act at every Disneyland prior to Shanghai, designed as a mixture of palette cleanser, a shopping center (before the idea of a shopping mall was prevalent), and idealistic nostalgia trip. As such, Main Street tends to be pretty dense, with stores and restaurants interspersed with small attractions criss-crossing with entertainment and transportation, eventually ending with a larger hub area leading to the rest of the theme park. Shanghai Disneyland rethinks this approach by accomplishing the same essential goals as Main Street, but across three separate but integrated areas: Disneytown, Mickey Ave., and the Gardens of Imagination. The tripartite approach threw me at first, my expectations constantly wanting me to draw parallels of any one part to the entirety of Main Street: only as I started accepting Shanghai Disneyland’s unique rhythm did it all start to click.

Disneytown

“In the early parts of development and design, we started thinking about wanting to incorporate parts of Shanghai’s history, Shanghai’s heritage. And then yet, have it so that it’s integrated with a Disney storytelling element. So we created this concept of a timeless village. The attitude of the intimacy of neighborhoods ended up becoming the different districts we created for Disneytown.”

— Doris Woodward, Senior Director, Executive Producer, Shanghai Disney Resort

Disneytown is a shopping and dining center immediately adjacent to Shanghai Disneyland, an outdoor mall to oversimplify. The Disney resort mall is a familiar concept for Disney with all resorts save for Hong Kong having one: starting with Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village at WDW and now Disney Springs, Disney Village at Disneyland Paris, Ikspiari at Tokyo Disneyland, and Downtown Disney adjacent to the Anaheim parks. The twist with Shanghai’s approach is that it has incorporated the shopping and dining area into the resort and park experience more than ever, to the point its actually doing some of the thematic lifting. The area was designed to have a familiar, old Shanghai architecture to build a sense of familiarity and nostalgia with Chinese visitors, not too unlike the Main Street of 1955 was designed to do with the adult guests of the time. The area is touted as a “natural extension of the Disney experience for theme park guests” with the restaurants offering views into the theme park by design, blurring the lines between Disneytown and the theme park itself. The merging of the theme parks and shopping districts is perhaps inevitable: while Walt Disney World has a bit of a “you’re stuck here” thing working for it encouraging guests to visit its Disney Springs, the more urban Disney resorts face stiff competition from their easily accessible surrounding areas. Offering a sliver of the theme park experience as part of the shopping expeerience is a unique aspect that other neighboring malls can’t replicate.

As a visitor, the Disneytown is integrated enough that popping out for lunch, dinner, or for drink during or after your day at the park seems like a much more natural extension of your visit rather than something that breaks the immersion of your visit. It’s nicer than Anaheim’s Downtown Disney or Paris’s Disney Village, and much more accessible than Walt Disney World’s Disney Springs: in terms of design and approach perhaps the platonic ideal of the theme park adjacent mall concept. A criticism is that while it’s a very nice shopping center, at the end of the day it’s still just a shopping center. It doesn’t attempt to bring anything new or innovative to the shopping experience like say the Metreon attempted back in the 1990s. These sorts of places are ultimately defined by their tenants, which come and go, but the foundation of what is there at Disneytown works well and it will serve its purpose for Shanghai Disneyland well for some time.

Mickey Ave.

“Main Street in our other parks was relevant at the time because Walt [Disney] grew up in a small town and wanted to replicate a small town feel. And so, we’ve been doing that forever in our parks. Because this was Shanghai, a new market, we wanted this to be completely unique and different from all our parks and we said, ‘Why not make it about our characters?’–because the characters are really the foundation of our company.”

— Larry Davis, Executive Producer/Creative Director, Walt Disney Imagineering Shanghai

Mickey Ave. is interesting, a place I had the most trepidation about upon announcement but one I began to appreciate more and more as I visited the park and understood its role as part of a larger whole. In terms of placement and practical role it’s the parallel to Main Street, USA in other Disneylands as both represent shopping-focused park entrances. Conceptually, however, it takes a different approach from Main Street’s American nostalgia and can best be thought of as a bit of Toontown (Anaheim and Tokyo Disneyland) combined with Buena Vista St (Disney California Adventure) and Hollywood Blvd (Disney’s Hollywood Studios). Main Street as a concept is something Shanghai Disneyland purposely purged under the assumption that the Midwest American nostalgia was not relevant to China but it didn’t replace it with a more Chinese relevant nostalgia, instead opting for a more Disney-centric approach befitting the park’s goals of introducing the Chinese people to Disney characters and brands. We somewhat take for granted that Disney characters are strewn about an idealized small town even though it makes no thematic sense: Mickey Ave. very much solves the problem of giving these characters a place to belong as part of the park’s opening act. Unlike most Disney lands, Micke Ave. is not really a recreation or idealization of some location from the past, instead a more unique melting pot of old-school Disney with some old Los Angeles inspirations.

Practically speaking I found Mickey Ave. to work, although it does feel smaller and less enveloping than the whole of Main Street, a negative side effect of the park’s three-part opening act design. Mickey Ave. is pretty much limited to shopping and a bit of dining, the whimsical counterpart of Disneytown, as much transition as destination. In this sense Mickey Ave. can feel a bit too limited to fully flesh out its promising concept. Even when accounting for the activity seen in the adjacent Gardens of Imagination, the area lacks the liveliness of Main Street’s trains and cars, or Buena Vista Street’s Red Car Trolley, or American Waterfront’s Big City Vehicles and Electric Railway. Mickey Ave. also highlights to me just how much Main Street leans on history, both real and implied: the Fire Stations, the Main Street Cinemas, the Mr. Lincolns, the Penny Arcades. Mickey Ave., fitting Shanghai Disneyland’s goal of approachability, has none of this historical connection and can end up feeling a bit shallow for it. The Disney character details replace these things, and they’re well done showing a fair bit of subtle restraint, but also lack that visceral connection to (idealized) reality Main Street provides and uses for depth. The lack of these things also means the area lacks all those minor attractions that add layers and, more importantly, spaces to simply hang out and reflect. I’d love future expansion of the area add something like a Disney Gallery or Blue Sky Cellar type space, an area to showcase the future of the park and soon enough celebrate the history of the park, an area to simply slow down and soak things in. However, part of the reason this area doesn’t have much of that is it transitions to a third area designed very much to do exactly that: the Gardens of Imagination.

Gardens of Imagination

Practically speaking, the Gardens of Imagination is the hub of the park. In terms of a Disneyland that is distinctly Chinese, the Gardens may most reflect where the park’s design choices have been geared to Chinese culture. The area is vaguely aimed at older visitors, representing part of the nostalgic and idyllic puzzle of the park’s entrance trifecta. Where Mickey Ave. is somewhat devoid of attractions and space compared to Main Street, it begins to compensate here with the area feeling more like a whimsical park within a park rather than a simple hub connecting the other areas of the park, this one complete with simple, nostalgic attractions such as traditional carrousel and a version of Disney’s perennial Dumbo the Flying Elephant spinning attraction. It’s an interesting solution to incorporating these more simplistic rides of Disney’s and the world’s past while not having them disappoint when placed next to the more impressive and grand attractions in the rest of the park, a problem the parks with more history have not quite worked out. The Gardens of Imagination roughly encapsulates the Griffith Park that sparked the idea of Disneyland to Walt Disney to begin with, and in such is both the Chinese and Disney soul of the park. One can have a downright enjoyable and relaxing time in the Gardens of Imagination itself without ever moving on to the rest of the park, walking the paths, viewing the castle, dining at the tea house, even enjoying some simple rides.

In terms of execution the main issue present in the Gardens of Imagination is a microcosm of the park’s larger issue: the open space of the design can at times come across as a bit barren and empty vs. expansive and refreshing. I have a feeling some trees and growth are going to do a lot to improve this aspect with time, giving it even more character and depth. The more I attempted to get out of my own head and my expectations of what a “hub” is supposed to be, the more I came to appreciate this area of the park: a palette cleanser for all, and the final part of the park’s three-part transition process. A nostalgic shopping center transitions to a whimsical, Disney shopping area that transitions into an idyllic garden/park, which itself transitions from the nostalgic carrousel to the whimsical Dumbo before allowing you to move on to Tomorrow, Adventure, Pirate Adventure, or Fantasy.

Fantasyland

“The ‘authentically Disney’ in Fantasyland is around the characters and the stories that we tell. The whole land is based on our traditional films and our new films. Those stories come to life here; the characters come to life here. The ‘distinctly Chinese’ part of it is how those stories are told, how the guests perceive them. We have Chinese and English on our graphics. We have food offerings that are distinctly Chinese. The stories themselves — while they’re not Chinese stories — we think the guests will relate to them in terms of a hero’s journey. Traditional Chinese story arcs are very similar to the story arcs of our Disney stories as well.”

— Jodi McLaughlin, Executive Producer, Walt Disney Imagineering Shanghai

Fantasyland started as a fairly compact medieval fair concept back in 1955, but more idealistically and recently becoming a bit of a vaguely European village with the area’s 1983 redo. Anaheim’s Fantasyland is charming but a bit tight, with perhaps the Platonic ideal being the version in Paris that was expanded to be much larger while still maintaining that quaint European village charm. Shanghai’s Fantasyland is an entirely different beast, more similar to the the New Fantasyland expansion that debuted in the Magic Kingdom in 2011. The area is large and open, and while featuring a large castle with a little village of shops the sheer size gives it an overall aesthetic that’s more environmental and sprawling, making Anaheim and even Paris feel dense and urban in comparison. It’s the only Fantasyland where you can’t see the back from the front: Fantasyland begins to fade into the landscape in Shanghai.

In terms of attractions, Shanghai’s Fantasyland contains a version of Winnie the Pooh, an Alice’s Tea Party clone in Winnie the Pooh form called Hunny Pot Spin, Peter Pan’s Flight, Seven Dwarves Mine Train, Voyage to the Crystal Grotto, as well as an Alice In Wonderland themed garden/maze and the Once Upon a Time castle walkthrough. It’s a well rounded assortment of attractions, but the biggest problem is that none of them stand out as particularly impressive for what is a flagship land at a brand new Disneyland theme park. They range from the decidedly modern and solid (Dwarves) to okay but disappointing (yet another version of Pooh that doesn’t live up to 1999’s Pooh Hunny Hunt) to the anachronistic clones that cling too close to the the past (Peter Pan’s Flight… more on this later) and a maze garden that is nice but already somewhat eclipsed by it’s Parisian cousin. Voyage of the Crystal Grotto is the only really unique attraction and an exceptionally notable misfire: while parallel in purpose to the Storybook Land boat rides found in Anaheim and Paris, this one ends up being a lot less charming in its replacement of quaint models with plastic and static character moments. As a sort of leisurely tour type attraction in a park otherwise devoid of them it works okay, but hits a decidedly Shanghai Disneyland uncanny valley of being too involved to be charming but too limited to be impressive. Of any attraction at Shanghai Disneyland with the most potential for a redo to turn it around, this is it: I think treating it more like the Jungle Cruise and focusing on one story with impressive outdoor animatronics would work much better (Fantasia Gardens, please).

Fanatasyland and Shanghai Disneyland itself are dominated by the Enchanted Storybook Castle, maintaining the approach of all other Disneylands. Enchanted Storybook Castle is thankfully not a clone like Tokyo or Hong Kong’s opening-day castle, instead taking a unique approach that is a bit more ornate and more chateau, arguably a bit more realistic and a bit less sexy. In person Enchanted Storybook Castle ultimately impresses, it’s sheer scale commanding attention from afar and overall fitting the sort of aesthetic the Shanghai park seems to speak in. At times, especially from a few key sightlines, the castle blurs that line of being a whimsical “Castle” and being a more realistic castle in the estate/mansion/somebody-could-live-here sense. I found myself drawn to this aspect of it, surprisingly providing a bit of a historical connection to old Europe that the park doesn’t trade in too often. However, the fact that the castle can at times feel whimsical and at times stately I think highlights one key but not dealbreaking flaw: it tries to be too many things at once. It’s not Hench’s delicate, dreamlike Cinderella Castle. It’s not Anaheim’s squat and impossibly demure and cute Sleeping Beauty Castle. It’s not the whimsical beauty of Paris’ Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant. It has aspects of all these things, which causes it to sometimes work and sometimes feel discordant: are you delicate right now or powerful? Are you cute and charming or confident and stately?

In terms of the interior it’s very clean and very white, probably the most regal and ultimately impressive of them all. It features a walkthrough more on the scale of Tokyo Disneyland’s Cinderella’s Fairy Tale Hall than Anaheim’s Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough, but Shanghai’s being the more impressive and layered of the three, although lacking a bit of the low-key charm of the Anaheim walkthrough. The walkthrough is one of the few that lets you keep your own pace a bit, and even offers some quiet dare I say Court of Angels type areas that offer no real purpose other than to look pretty and offer a place to stop and reflect. The castle, in a Disney first, features not just a walkthrough or a restaurant but both, with the Royal Banquet Hall taking on a similar role to Cinderella’s Royal Table at the Magic Kingdom.

Treasure Cove

Most Disneyland’s that aren’t in China celebrate the American Old West and westward migration as a simultaneous celebration of American history and a romanticized role play of the era. In this sense, Treasure Cove is very much Shanghai’s Frontierland analog, romanticizing the exploration and mystery of a pirate’s life. it’s often posited that the Disney of today would not build Frontierland but instead build Davey Crockett land, reflecting the popularity of the character at the time, and Treasure Cove actualizes this hypothesis, grounding itself not in the romantic exploration of the Sea a la Tokyo DisneySea and instead grounding itself in the mythical piracy of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise.

Like Frontierland and New Orleans Square in Disneyland or Frontierland and Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom, it is best to consider Treasure Cove not only as a distinct area but as part of a larger whole shared with Adventure Isle, both seemingly considered together as an Adventureland concept early on but with Treasure Cove receiving the go ahead to flesh itself out a bit. While the land is unmistakably Pirates of the Caribbean Movie Franchise land, its design actually ends up more an allusion to the characters and does manage a balance of feeling generally about a concept insomuch as it is about a particular movie franchise. Unlike Universal or Disney itself with Carsland, Treasure Cove is not recreating any specific movie locale, instead modeled off a small port village that feels like it could be appropriate to any number of famous pirates. Closest in spirit to Disneyland’s more modest Frontierland, the area really only has one true ride, Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure, as well as a lavish show (Eye of the Storm: Captain Jack’s Stunt Spectacular) and the human-powered Explorer Canoes which are arguably shared with Adventure Isle. The area has a few interactive areas in the spirit of Tom Sawyer’s Island or Fortress Explorations, Shipwreck Shore and the ship Siren’s Revenge, but nowhere near as lavish as either and curiously treated as attractions complete with turnstiles, which lends to them feeling less like atmospheric detail and more like simplistic attractions (as the parks’ attraction roster grows I can see these areas being demoted from full blown attractions and the turnstiles removed). Like it’s predecessors Blue Bayou or Paris’s Blue Lagoon (now Captain Jack’s), PotC shares a space with a wonderful indoor eatery, Barbossa’s Bounty, which is a quick service restaurant with amazing atmosphere and great food that allows you to watch the boats from the attracton go by. This sort of of approach, where Disney takes a great concept but goes about it in a unique way, is the best version of franchising.

Treasure Cove works fine but ultimately feels a bit shallow: there’s very little here that’s not the two main attraction buildings, not offering all too much for a guest strolling through but not looking to ride something or see a show. The interactive areas definitely help, but they can come off a bit “here’s a play area, kids” rather than feel like a natural, integrated part of the landscape. While PotC: Battle impresses (see below), the land itself doesn’t quite live up to New Orlean’s Square or even the depth of the fictional town showcased within the original PotC attraction. Treasure Cove feels a bit like a compelling but unfinished thought: the land has tons of room available for expansion and I’d love to see something less directly tied to the PotC films worked in to help flesh it out over time, with more nooks and crannies added to give the land the depth it lacks right now.

Adventure Isle

“For the guest experience [in Adventure Isle], I’ve summed it up in a little motto, ‘Seek Adventure, Discover Yourself.’ What we really want is for our guests to immerse themselves in this world and find out who they are — find out what they’re drawn to, how they’re wanting to challenge themselves, what gets them going — but obviously in a very entertaining and fun way.”

— Stan Dodd, Producer/Creative Director, Walt Disney Imagineering Shanghai

Adventure Isle represents the other side of the water to Treasure Cove, the Adventure Isle portion more clearly an Adventureland analog, probably the most pure conceptual analog between Shanghai’s modern Disneyland and the American Disneyland. In keeping with Shanghai’s approach, this take on Adventure is less rooted in known locales such as Africa or “Polynesia”, and instead focuses on a “lost world” island inhabited by the fictional Arbori people, discovered by a group of fictional explorers known as the League of Adventurers. The area is dominated by Roaring Mountain, which houses the flagship Roaring Rapids attraction as well as the Camp Discovery trails. The land also features a rather lavishly queued version of Soarin’ Over the Horizon and the Tribal Table restaurant.

Camp Discovery is a highlight as there’s really no equivalent at any other Disney park, a rope trail loosely inspired by the world’s most dangerous hike. Rope trails aren’t the exclusive domain of theme parks, but none are as lavish as this. It’s great to see Disney move forward with a new avenue, exploring physical activity and attraction as a single walkthrough hybrid type attraction. However, this may be one experiment we don’t see imported elsewhere as the attractions is made feasible primarily by the labor rate in China that allows the attractions 39 operators to be cost effective. That said, Disney playing to the strengths of the locations it builds its parks to highlight their unique advantages is exactly what they should be doing. Camp Discovery may be the most uniquely Shanghai Disneyland attraction in the entire park.

Adventure Isle takes its operational cues not from other Adventurelands in the various Disneyland locations but from California Adventure: the area is practically a re-theme of Grizzly Peak at Disney California Adventure. Both feature a river raft ride through an iconic mountain, a version of Soarin’, an interactive play/trail area, and a Quick Service restaurant. The contrast here is interesting as Grizzly Peak is one of DCA’s better areas, with enjoyable iconic attractions and with a National park theme befitting California’s natural beauty. This latter bit in particular I think is where Grizzly derives a lot of its charm, evoking the 1950s, road trips, and a hint of state and national pride. Adventure Isle in contrast has a vague exotic mysticism about it, but lacks those true-to-life hooks. It feels harder to connect to Adventure Isle, which perhaps says something about how foreign visitors may feel when they visit Grizzly Peak. Adventure Isle is ultimately the more technically impressive of the two: it’s rapids ride having at least one animatronic, the restaurant a bit more impressive, the Soarin queue a bit more impressive, the play area much more lavish and organic. However, the aesthetics of Adventure Isle can tend to feel a bit tepid, with none of the lushness of the jungle-happy Adventurelands or Redwood forest feel of Grizzly Peak. Once again, I think the lack of allusion to the depth of the real world creates a bit of a vacuum.

Tomorrowland

“When guests come in to Tomorrowland, our greatest aspiration is that kids to adults will be inspired to think about the future, and think about a hopeful future. We’ve tried to define what an optimistic future looks like. When guests leave Tomorrowland, I hope they are filled with optimism. I hope they get a sense of a hopeful and bright future that we all have if we all participate in it. That’s the goal of Tomorrowland. You don’t just come and witness the future, but you are part of it when you are here.”

— Scott Drake, Executive Creative Director, Walt Disney Imagineering Shanghai

“How do you build an optimism for the city of the future?”

— Melissa Barry, Walt Disney Imagineering

Tomorrowland started in Disneyland as an outlet for American optimism about technology and industry, eventually becoming a bit of a statement on cities, infrastructure, and transportation, before ultimately confusing itself as an area vaguely about space and then even more vaguely about Star Wars and Buzz Light year. Disney has struggled since the 1980s to really give Tomorrowland much of a point or even keep it current with tomorrow, so seeing the company tackle the concept yet again with Shanghai Disneyland was intriguing. The Tomorrowland we got in Shanghai is a Tomorrowland of sleek minimalism, but I’m not sure it has a point or makes much of a statement. Somewhat sadly, this makes this Tomorrowland mostly an improvement on the confused hodgepodges we’ve been getting as the older Tomorrowlands morph into indistinct conceptual confusion. The area is surprisingly conceptually clean, almost as much a zen garden for introspection as it is any sort of statement about tomorrow. It’s not cluttered with old relics of 1950s optimism or 1980s sci fi, for better or worse. Conceptually, however, I’m not sure this Tomorrowland ever even attempts to make any sort of point. It lacks Discoveryland’s “the past of the future” introspection, and it doesn’t seem to want to convince you that the future will be any better or worse than the present. Other than Buzz LightYear Planet Rescue, it doesn’t even hit you too hard with the “Future=Space” conceptual laziness Tomorrowland started to increasingly adopt before it became the home of Buzz and Jedis. Tron Light Cycle Power Run is a great attraction taking the Space Mountain approach and injecting it with new life, but conceptually the attraction makes no real sense if you’ve never seen those movies. Space Mountain at least insinuates that you’re going on a rocket through Space, a concept with some intuitive appeal, but riding futuristic motorcycles through an indoor EDM festival for reasons unknown tends to feel a bit vapid if you think about it too hard. Disney pays a lot of lip service to Shanghai’s Tomorrowland being about optimism and aspirations, but the park plainly does not support any of this. The closest the park gets to having any sort of point is ironically the park’s least technologically advanced ride: a spinner that insinuates hey maybe we’ll have jetpacks in the future. I’d settle for a future that didn’t have lazy spinner rides, especially in areas of the park supposedly about technological progress.

If this all sounds a bit snarky, it is, but don’t get too superior about any other Tomorrowland in contrast: they’re all pretty much as vapid now, with the Magic Kingdom a People Mover and Carrousel of Progress ahead but aesthetically the worst. Tomorrowland overall no longer makes any sort of point, and this one is disappointingly no different. With a blank slate opportunity providing no real answers and especially with Star Wars having been elevated to full-land status, I have no hesitation in declaring that Disney officially has no clue what to conceptually do with Tomorrowland. If tomorrow is not about space or transportation or civic and cultural advancement or Star Wars it’s apparently about the #aesthetics.

Toy Story Land

Toy Story Land didn’t open with the park in 2016, instead debuting in April 2018, but for all intents and purposes the area was part of the original opening plan with portions of it actually built and operational but vaguely disguised when the park opened. Toy Story Land is Disney’s version of a participant trophy: a Studio Park transplant with very shallow ideals and offerings mostly designed as a brand recognition tool and Disney’s relatively cheap, slightly better than an amusement park park capacity expansion. Toy Story Land now inhabits every Disney resort aside from Anaheim (which instead has a different form of Pixar-via-Amusement-Park with Pixar Pier) and Tokyo, making it as prevalent to Disney parks worldwide as something like Frontierland. Toy Story Land is very much part of modern Disney, so no surprise it finds itself in a cardinal position in Disney’s newest Disneyland.

There’s not much deep to be said about Toy Story Land and it’s three simple attractions, and I haven’t visited it yet in person so I won’t say much other than I hope future park expansions try much harder than this one.

Logistics and Operations

We’ve been discussing the conceptual aspects of Shanghai Disneyland quite a bit, but the logistical and operational aspects of it are also telling. How much have theme parks evolved since 1955? From the perspective of a guest in an operating theme park, Shanghai Disneyland’s blank slate truthfully hasn’t resulted in too much innovation. Charitably you could say the park is minimal and refined, ignoring falling into the trappings of being currently modern only to become dated later, but you could just as easily argue the park offers little advancement or convenience compared to the park experience from 1955.

Transportation

Whereas the Disneylands of and following the Walt Disney era were replete with park-wide trains and skyways, eventually dabbling in peoplemoving and monorails, Shanghai Disneyland offers absolutely nothing beyond your own feet. It seems that the company that brought you the Peoplemover and introduced America to the monorail and built a train line to serve as its park’s border has lost all interest in transportation as a topic or even as a practical luxury. Some of this may be a bit cultural: many will arrive to the resort on a very modern train that pulls in to a very nice train station, and there is perhaps little nostalgia in China for trains or public transportation in general, but I’m sure several practical or whimsical innovations could have been employed. The park is huge and spread out: perhaps a river encircling the park with boats nostalgic to Chinese culture dropping of guests in each land could have been both practical and enjoyable. There is a ferry that can be used to cross Wishing Star Lake from the Shanghai Disneyland Hotel, a nice cue taken from Walt Disney World’s Seven Seas Lagoon, but it comes off a bit more practical and a bit less magical than its Orlando cousin.

Connection

This is a park designed and built in the smartphone connected internet age, but getting a Fastpasses with your phone seems to be the peak of the park’s location technology. There’s nothing to track your location or ease payment for foreign visitors as with the Magic Band system implemented in Walt Disney World, or something even grander representing the near decade of technological growth since that initiative. China has, shall we say, an interesting relationship with the internet, so part of me does wonder if this was a defensive move on Disney’s behalf as much as it was some failure or oversight. Bracelets tracking your every move and purchase may come off just a bit too dystopian in mainland China, with ownership of the data a potential sticking point between Disney and the Chinese government. This is all speculation of course, but as it stands the park is either a refreshing throwback to simpler times or stubbornly old fashioned, depending on your perspective. The Resort does have a nice app to track wait times throughout the park, serve as a map, and even serve as your ticket. Again, nothing is wrong here per se, but it seems like a wasted opportunity to rethink how we approach theme parks and waits and lines and guest dynamics. Perhaps we would have seen this if this was a park designed for America, but Disney very obviously did not want to rock the boat too much in China.

Food

In terms of food, Shanghai Disneyland does fairly well to chip away at poor reputation of theme park food, although perhaps not revolutinarily so. Per Disney only 10% of the food in the park is Western, with 20% Asian and 70% Chinese. The park itself has only a single, restaurant-style eatery located within Enchanted Storybook Castle. Aurora in the SDL Hotel was wonderful, offering a sort of California Grill meets Napa Rose meets Cruise Ship experience. The park food and snacks seemed varied and balanced, with the usual staples and fun deserts, as well as more regional depth and seafood and less hamburgers and hot dogs.

The Future

The park is designed for expansion, which at this moment in time you could say is to a fault: there are vast expanses of open land everywhere. Bob Iger noted that they wanted to build a beautiful place that people can walk around and sit and enjoy, touting the park’s grassy stretches for people to sit out on a nice sunny day and sit on grass, play frisbee, or have have lunch. This goes back to some of the “authentically Chinese” design principles of the park that I think throw the expectations of foreign visitors that see these patches as unused space and see guests using them as signs unruliness. Open space is at the core of this park, and for somebody coming from the density of Anaheim’s Disneyland it may be shocking, but it is definitely one of the aspects that makes this particular Disneyland feel unique compared to the rest. This park is the anti New Orleans Square, the anti Diagon Alley. This design ethos may have an odd effect on the park’s feel for a Disneyland veteran, but it’s also one of the first real design lessons Disney has learned from the past: the park can rather easily expand for quite some time before it starts needing to get creative with space management. Shanghai Disneyland is a long-term bet and has given itself the blessing of size even without the huge (largely unused) space of a resort like Walt Disney World.

The Resort

The resort itself is an odd marriage: it feels most similar to perhaps Disneyland Paris, but with a touch of the design approaches of Walt Disney World. A brand new resort for a brand new theme park is a balancing act: you don’t want to underestimate as with Disney in 1955 which essentially had nothing but a single hotel Disney didn’t even own, but you also don’t want to go full Eisner and overbuild to the point you drag the entire theme park industry down with you. The Shanghai Disneyland resort shows Disney perfecting their resort approach to a science: two hotels, a shopping district, a theater, a lake and park, and a train stop round out the resort very well. The parking is well situated, essentially walking distance reducing tram and bussing needs. The park has its hotel placement and expansion pretty well established, with Shanghai Disneyland hotel anchoring the future “Lake” hotels and Toy Story Hotel anchoring future “non-lake” hotels. Both are probably less walking distance than the Disneyland Hotel is from Disneyland in Anaheim. I particularly like that they built a public park along with the resort, a space to unwind and relax a bit without feeling like your pockets are expected to be emptied at all times. That Shanghai Disneyland’s 983 acres had room for a train station and a public park while Walt Disney World’s 37 square miles seemingly do not I think brings up how much of Walt Disney World’s potential both public and private goes wasted. I wish the Anaheim Disneyland Resort was this well thought out and accessible.

My only real nitpick is again with transportation around the resort itself: if you’re not taking the ferry from the Shanghai Disneyland hotel you’re taking a bus or walking. The resort on the whole is very walkable if you don’t have mobility issues, but getting to or from the Toy Story Hotel can be a bit of a magic-breaking bus ride. Some of the pathways technically involve Wishing Star park, which closes, also leaving your late night park exit or Disneytown Adventure resulting in a bus. A monorail or some other transportation whisking you around Wishing star Lake while stopping at each hotel and the park itself would have made the nascent resort perfect for it’s current size: optimistically I want to think they saved these more whimsical transportation decisions for future expansion, but more realistically I think these things will simply never come.

Shopping

The shopping district Disneytown is Disney’s most integrated yet, essentially a de facto part of Shanghai Disneyland itself, as discussed earlier. It’s clean and lovely and seems to only suffer from problems of local interest. Unlike the locals of Anaheim or Orlando, there doesn’t seem to be a strong desire to hang out in the outskirts of Shanghai when not in the park or sleeping in the hotel. Again, part of Shanghai Disneyland’s mission is to build this interest and develop these fans, so perhaps Disneytown’s low crowds are not unexpected and will be looked back fondly in 20 years when the place is overflowing with local passholders lifestyling on the social network de jour.

Hotels

Shanghai Disneyland opens with two hotels: the Shanghai Disneyland Hotel, and the Toy Story Hotel.

The Shanghai Disneyland Hotel is the flagship hotel of the resort, done in an Art Noveau style. This style has become somewhat of a go-to for the company’s more opulent looks as of late including cruise ships and Club 33 in Anaheim, essentially replacing the Victorian style found in the Grand Floridian, Disneyland Paris Hotel, and Hong Kong Disneyland hotel. The hotel is quite nice but perhaps a bit small in terms of amenities and sprawl compared to the US hotels. It reminds me most of the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel in scope, with a bit of WDW’s contemporary thrown in. The hotel features two restaurants: Lumiere’s Kitchen at the bottom for you character meal and buffet needs, and Aurora up near the roof for upscale dining. There’s also a small bar, Bacchus Lounge, to unwind with a snack or cocktail. If there’s a fault its that the hotel doesn’t feel particularly “Disney” other than the Disney details embedded througout the design: it’s not themed per se, or transportive to another time and place in the way the Grand Californian or Mira Costa are, instead more generally refined in a particular style. It also has nothing like a Trader Sam’s found in the Polynesian or Disneyland Hotel of Anaheim providing energy and libations well into the night, although Bacchus Lounge is probably a step up in terms of accessibility from many of the international hotel bar options seen in Tokyo, Hong Kong, or Paris. The standout experience for me was dining at Aurora up top with views of Shanghai Disneyland, an experience not really available anywhere outside of Walt Disney World. I found Aurora to be subtle but ultimately quite impressive, with food, service, and ambiance all top-tier by Disney standards. Easily the best meal I’ve eaten on Disney property outside of America, with a refined modernity that outlclasses something like California Grill.

The resort’s other hotel is the Toy Story Hotel, not located along Wishing Star Lake but on the far side of Disneytown stradling both Toy Story Land and Tomorrowland. It’s more of what I’d call a Toy Story decorated hotel rather than Toy Story themed, mostly resembling a surprisingly minimal and modern lower-cost hotel with Toy Story iconography throughout. I honestly find this approach a bit more straightforward, subtle, and palatable than what Disney does with the value options at Walt Disney World’s All-Star, Pop, or “Art of” hotels but vastly prefer the Shanghai Disneyland hotels aesthetics and accessibility. The hotel features one eatery, the Sunnyside Cafe, but there’s not much reason to visit this hotel if you’re not staying here other than its exterior making for a surprisingly good selfie wall.

Part 4: The Yin and Yang of Shanghai Disneyland

Rather than trying to discuss each and every attraction in the park, I think the successes and failures of Shanghai Disneyland can be summarized by exploring two key attractions: Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure and Peter Pan’s Flight.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure, nostalgia lifting things up

Remaking Pirates of the Caribbean is possibly the most suicidal idea in themed design. “I’m going to make an update to Citizen Kane” is not something a filmmaker would wisely attempt: Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC) is a similar landmark in theme park attractions and immersion, that moment where all the technology and all the right people hit at just the right time to create the medium’s first real example of fully immersive world building. To this day the very scope remains unmatched — No ride creates a seamless journey through a single fictional location at the size and detail of PotC’s nearly 16 minutes in length and 125+ audio-animatronic figures. The caves, the town, the colorful Pirates: they all seemed to be not part of a ride but to exist as a sort of alternate world the ride lets you peer into. This was certainly impressive in 1967 when the ride opened in Anaheim, but it remains impressive to this day: a true classic. The very idea of remaking Pirates of the Caribbean borders on insulting. It should be a folly, watching Icarus ride a train made of wax off a cliff into the sun in a fantastic wreck of hubris.

So it was a bit surprising to see a new Pirates of the Caribbean ride, Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure (“PotC: Battle”) announced for Shanghai Disneyland. Even more surprising is that the ride is good. Damn good.

PotC: Battle was led by imagineer Luc Mayrand and feels like Disney flexing every technical and imagineering muscle it currently has into one impressive dead lift. Aside from the unique directional boat system of the ride, most of the technology on display here has technically been done before, but it is synthesized into one cohesive whole better than ever — a trait it shares with it’s 1967 ancestor. It utilizes the zeitgeist of current theme park design, projection screens, but in PotC they’re not the sole focus except in key scenes and work more in synergy with the physical sets than seen in anything Universal or especially Disney has done prior. The ride is not an audio animatronics calvacade like its forbearer, but there are several here and they’re all incredibly lifelike and immersive. Like it’s predecessor, PotC still feels very physical and visceral — perhaps not to the extent of PotC’s open-world like Puerto Dorado but much of the world still feels explorable, a rarity in the projection era of theme parks.

A huge key to the success of PotC: Battle is that it never feels like a rebuff or replacement of the original PotC. It would be mildly silly, but I really could see the two attractions being located in the same land simultaneously and it would still work because while PotC: Battle references the former, they’re approaching the same concept from two very different vantages. They both have their strengths, with the original (especially pre-2005, Jack Sparrowless) version representing a more atmospheric, semi-historical, and jaunty open-world tour of Pirate antics and the newer PotC: Battle representing a more bombastic, fantastical, and linear narrative approach. Luc Mayrand defines PotC: Battle as “storytelling… a continuous story that you’re in… a completely dimensional movie” which is very much the zeitgeist of attractions today and very much not the “cocktail party” atmospheric approach of the original 1967 PotC. In this sense each version seems to have strengths and weakness relative to the other based on design choices and nothing to do with the 50 years that separates them. You can enjoy both versions of the attraction simultaneously, two different preparations of the similar ingredients: they were not created as an either/or proposition.

PotC: Battle impresses with it’s spectacle, connects to Disneyland’s past, and showcases what the attractions of the future can and should be like. In short, PotC: Battle is a total rethink of what a flagship Disneyland attraction should be like in 2016. It took a core “Disneyland’ concept, perhaps the most core attraction of all time, and rethought it with a modern lens. This means yes it has screens and yes it’s directly tied to some sort of movie franchise, but ultimately it feels like the kind of impressive spectacle for 2016 that the original PotC was for 1967. Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Sunken Treasure perfectly realizes what a blank slate Disneyland should be. A Disneyland where every attraction was rethought in the way PotC:Battle was would be fantastic, a thrilling new perspective that doesn’t obsolete the magical Disneylands we already have while still paying homage to them and offering something interesting and new. The Shanghai Disneyland represented by PotC: Battle is a Shanghai Disneyland that complements the Disneyland we already know while pushing it in new directions.

Unfortunately, the approach Disney took with PotC: Battle proved somewhat more the exception than the rule for Shanghai Disneyland.

Peter Pan’s Flight, nostalgia weighing things down

Not every attraction in Shanghai Disneyland is on the scale of PotC: Battle, but even smaller attractions benefit from its essentially approach. Another attraction that does this well is the Seven Dwarves Mine Train, opened first in the Magic Kingdom in 2014 but likely originally developed for Shanghai Disneyland and then ported to the Magic Kingdom before it ever opened there (something similar happened with the Space Mountain concept for Disneyland back in the 1970s). It too feels like an appropriate rethink, a Fantasyland attraction for 2016 rather than 1955, more environmentally integrated and technically impressive than the “book report” Fantasyland carnival tent dark rides that the Fantasyland originated with and to a certain extent are still defined by. It’s maybe not a literal rethink of the 1955 Snow White’s Adventure dark ride, but it’s a reasonable rethink of that film as a basis for a Fantasyland attraction, one that impresses in its own ways, trading in some of the carnival dark ride charm for more grandeur and spectacle. Like PotC: Battle, Seven Dwarves Mine Train avoids comparisons with the past simply by being its own, modern thing. You can easily enjoy both Snow White attractions for their own charms.

Shanghai Disneyland also has a Peter Pan attraction in Fantasyland: Peter Pan’s Flight. Peter Pan’s Flight is probably the most popular of all the Fantasyland dark rides from 1955, a version of which has been cloned to every Disneyland except Hong Kong Disneyland. While I wouldn’t say it’s the most atmospheric of the original Fantasyland dark rides (that would be Snow White’s Scary Adventure), or the most charming (either version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), but it’s certainly the most magical and the most technically impressive, hitting just the right notes to make it a perennial favorite with some of the longest lines in Fantasyland wherever it resides. The idea of a Shanghai Disneyland blank slate approach to Peter Pan, approaching Pan the way they approached PotC: Battle, is intriguing and exciting. Attractions such as Universal’s Forbidden Journey have made great strides in what a fantasy ride themed around flying can be and feel like, and that same sort of technology upgrade and rethink in approach to Peter Pan could be amazing. So what did we end up with Shanghai Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight? Basically the same ride from back in 1955 with some small upgrades and some of the rough edges sanded off. 2016’s Peter Pan’s Flight is very much 1955’s Peter Pan’s Flight.

Being the same basic ride as the 1955 classic means it’s not a bad ride per se, indeed it’s objectively the best version of the beloved attraction, but the context of it being built in a 2016 park, a park that is rethinking what Disneyland needs to be and can be, a park with no historical constraint forcing it to be designed the way it is, throws it all off. With that Walt nostalgia, Americana, and literal 1955 connections excised, Peter Pan’s Flight in Shanghai Disneyland feels a bit more like a relic of the past than the charming connection to the past it does in the other Disneylands. In other Disneylands you feel like you’re experiencing slices of the 1950s or 1970s or 1980s with Peter Pan’s Flight, your mind filling in gaps and readjusting expectations based on the attraction’s history and possibly your own childhood connection to it. In a park so new it doesn’t yet have any nostalgia, a park so new there’s no reason 1955 should be limiting what’s possible, Peter Pan’s Flight in the context of Shanghai Disneyland feels like half charming attraction and half museum piece about what attractions used to be like. It’s still a lovely ride of course, but the upgrades serve as much to bring contrast to its simplistic roots as they do to impress. I wonder if the Chinese who have never grown up with this ride will find it as charming, if building a more impressive 2016 version of the attraction and letting go of the past would have ultimately made more sense for this park. For me, there is something warming about having such a literal connection to the Disneylands I already know and love, but this appeal to nostalgia is the same smoke and mirrors that makes Hong Kong Disneyland simultaneously appealing and disappointing. Of any Disney park, Shanghai Disneyland should not be the one appealing to nostalgia as a shortcut to charm.

Shanghai’s Peter Pan’s Flight is objectively and technically by far the best version in the world, but the ways in which it is better are ultimately subtle and perhaps not worth flying halfway across the world to see except for the most die-hard Peter Pan’s Flight Fan. For the Chinese locals, an upgraded version of a 1955 attraction they have no connection to may still seem curiously limited and dated, especially contrasting with something like PotC: Battle which freed itself from any shackles of its past in order to be impressive in the context of today. That the past was so brazenly let go with PotC: Battle and so conservatively held on to with Peter Pan’s Flight is the yin and yang of Shanghai Disneyland. For every modern, cultural twist piquing interest there’s a tepid conservatism holding things back.

Part 5: Writer’s Block and the Blank Slate

At its best, Shanghai Disneyland is a deceptively original theme park. We often forget how much Disney is cribbing their designs from real historical locations, or more recently, recreating movie locations. Shanghai Disneyland’s design certainly draws various inspirations, but even its one land focused on a single movie property is wholly unique to the theme park itself. These sort of blank-slate creative spaces are incredibly rare overall in themed design, and Disney honestly doesn’t get enough credit for creating a flagship park that largely throws these crutches and shortcuts aside. This approach allows another benefit of Shanghai Disneyland: it’s nearly devoid of cultural and historical baggage, free from the technical and cultural limitations of the past and free to connect to its local audience in ways the American Disneyland would never allow. It can’t be understated that there are very few barriers to entry with Shanghai Disneyland. You don’t have to have been going to Disneyland your entire childhood to appreciate it. You don’t have to have a warm nostalgia for the America of the 1950s to appreciate it. You don’t have to be American or appreciate America at all, really. You don’t need to make literal connections to esoteric bits of Walt Disney trivia to appreciate it. The park is too new and too straightforward to need a 368-page guide to navigate your visit effectively. From a worldwide perspective, Shanghai Disneyland is self-contained, modern, and more accessible than any Disneyland.

The above does not come without cost, however. At its worst, Shanghai Disneyland lacks the hooks and connections to reality and history to give the concepts it touches upon any real gravitas. Without standing on the shoulders of idyllic American small towns, or idealized Los Angeles, or the history of New Orleans, etc. Shanghai Disneyland is forced to provide its own backstory and layers and visceral connections, and it does so to mixed success. To be fair, this same flaw can be seen in nearly every Disneyland the world over as the present of the company slowly begins to overwrite the past. Disneyland as a concept is becoming disconnected from the broader cultural landscape, instead self-referential to the landscape of its own brand and intellectual property. As an example just look at the direction of Disney’s own hotels: in the past Disney hotels used to reference unique locales and cultures, but more recently they tend to reference Disney characters, Disney brands, and even Disneyland itself. If Disneyland is a cultural pastiche, modern Disneyland’s culture is Disney itself, and Shanghai Disneyland simply fast-forwarding to the cultural place all the Disneylands of the past are heading. You won’t learn all that much about China from Shanghai Disneyland, while you could frame a pretty solid lesson of American ethos, culture, ideals, and even a bit of history around a trip to nearly any other Disneyland.

Ultimately Shanghai Disneyland is not the modern Disneyland it could have been, but it is still very much a modern Disneyland. As a theme park Shanghai Disneyland solves very few problems Disneyland did not solve in the 1950s and 1960s, arguably removing as much as it adds to the dialogue. A vast park full of open space and yet the only mode of transportation within the park is one’s own feet. A park with no clever answers for how to deal with long lines in a culture that struggles to respect them. A park built in the internet and cell phone age, but one that makes very little use of either to improve the experience. Granted, the cultural challenges may have required that the park learn to crawl before it learned to walk, but I can’t see this justifying operational solutions that amount primarily to “just do nothing at all”. Shanghai Disneyland is not an innovative theme park, which doesn’t make it a bad theme park, but does represent something of a wasted opportunity. Shanghai Disneyland may have been blank slate, but it wasn’t all that much blue sky.

Setting the stage for future nostalgia

Shanghai Disneyland needed to accomplish two incredibly difficult goals. The first was to extricate the specific American cultural ties from its DNA. In this, it succeeds. Shanghai Disneyland is a Disneyland sans Americana and it somehow still works. This is no small achievement, and a hugely important first step in porting the Disney experience to new people and new cultures not necessarily tied to the American viewpoint or so willing to accept it. This is in sharp contrast to a park like Hong Kong Disneyland, which has simply ported the American Disneyland experience arguably to a fault. Hong Kong Disneyland has an overly reliant connection to the Americana Disneyland, which creates a dynamic where the park has a quant appeal to American and longtime Disneyland fans, a sort of alternative Anaheim Disneyland preserved in a time where crowds weren’t so rampant. However, this aspect of Hong Kong Disneyland’s appeal is ultimately masturbatory and represents a missed opportunity to explore new ground and broaden appeal beyond an ode to Americana. Hong Kong Disneyland is absolutely charming, but it’s essentially cheating to accomplish that charm, trading on Disneyland nostalgia in turn trading on American nostalgia. Shanghai Disneyland takes the risks Hong Kong should have and while it doesn’t always stick the landing, it is doing a lot of heavy lifting that no other Disney park since Disneyland in 1955 has been forced to do.

A side effect of expelling the Americana from Disneyland is that one could argue Shanghai Disneyland is short on charm. This highlights that Disneyland’s charms may in fact be America’s charms: turn of the century motorcars and arcades, barbershop quartets, 1950s polynesian culture, borderline naive optimism about the future. That’s not to say that charm is the exclusive domain of earnest Americana, but perhaps 60 years of history in turn built on a nation’s pulse is something that’s difficult to replicate when starting from scratch. Even parks such as Tokyo DisneySea or World Showcase in Epcot lean heavily on motifs and history of the world around us: recreating Italy, or New York, or Morocco or Arabia. DHS recreates LA, DCA idealizes California itself. From a certain perspective Shanghai Disneyland is perhaps Disney’s most original theme park, leaning very little on real world locations and history, or even meticulously recreated towns or alleys we’ve seen in films: Shanghai Disneyland is full of almost completely original and fictional worlds. Something must be said for attempting a theme park of this scale of this importance, in that manner. No other Disneyland has faced these handicaps to connection, and thus to charm, that Shanghai Disneyland has. In many ways this is commendable, although it perhaps does not completely solve the vacuum left in this wake. If not leaning on the world or Americana or the past or recreated film locations Shanghai Disneyland is still responsible for developing its own charm and here it struggles, justifiably so, just a bit.

The second goal for the park was for it to find its own voice to replace that Americana it gave up, to find a heart and soul to anchor the experience on as replacement. It’s here where Shanghai Disneyland at times freezes up. It doesn’t quite throw up its hands and take the Studios Park haphazard approach, but there’s undeniably a less poignant core to the park. Shanghai Disneyland does not explore Chinese material culture nearly as deeply as past Disneylands did American, instead celebrating ideals such as tranquility and open space. This was, arguably, a necessary concession to getting the park built in the first place, but it can at times feel like a speech where the speaker has yet to make their point. Shanghai Disneyland gets kudos for being the first truly unique Disneyland since 1955, but possibly loses just as many for currently doing very little with the opportunity. When given a blank slate, Shanghai Disneyland seemed to develop a bit of writer’s block. Maybe over the years Shanghai Disneyland will define its own cultural impact and find its voice, its own development and history traveling along with those of the Chinese people and carving its own path, but in the meantime it tells pleasant but shallow tales and impresses you with its splendor. So for now we continue to wait for the park to find its own voice, unfortunately not knowing whether the appropriate question is “when” or “if”.

The worst parts of Shanghai Disneyland may be more oft-putting from the perspective of a seasoned Disneyland veteran attuned to the concept’s history because they put blatantly in our face what the modern Disney company is doing with the concept even outside of Shanghai. Without the remnants of 1955 or 1971 or 1982 to distract us, we’re forced to accept the present at face value, and the present scenario is that some key aspects of this company many of us hold dear are long gone. Shanghai Disneyland is absolutely not unique in this, but necessarily the most blatant as there are no fossilized remnants of the past to convince us otherwise. Shanghai Disneyland’s disinterest in transportation is perhaps no worse than the utter disregard for the Peoplemover in Anaheim Disneyland since 2001, or the stasis of the monorail system in Walt Disney World since 1982. On the flip side, Shanghai Disneyland flexes creativity the Disneyland brand hasn’t really seen since inception, and is the first Disney theme park to even attempt approaching something from a vantage other than “Walt’s Americana” or “Hollywood Movies!” since DisneySea in 2001.

Shanghai Disneyland is not Disney’s worst theme park, like the pre-redo California Adventure or Walt Disney Studios Paris, both representing dents in Disney’s once untarnished quality armor. It’s not Disney’s biggest disappointment, like the current incarnation of Epcot, setting up expectations it gets nowhere near delivering. It’s not Disney’s most vapid theme park, like anything with “Studios” in the title which claim to do little else but repackage movies to be enjoyed in theme park form. Shanghai Disneyland is a small miracle, a gambit to cultural expansion unlike anything done before, but nonetheless Shanghai Disneyland is currently Disney’s most wasted opportunity, a crown it steals from Hong Kong Disneyland. In contrast, Shanghai Disneyland is now the most unique Disneyland, making it potentially the most interesting Disneyland when looking forward rather than backward. For the first time in a long time Disneyland is a bit unpredictable, an almost complete 180 from the tepid conservatism seen with the last new Disneyland we saw prior to Shanghai. As great as Walt’s Disneyland is, we didn’t need yet another clone of it moving forward and I’m happy to see the company move on rather than franchising it and bastardizing it any further. I’d rather watch a park like Shanghai Disneyland make a clean break and grow into its own vs. watch the company mutate Walt’s Americana into something it was never designed to be. I’m incredibly curious where Disney takes China and where China takes Disney, the blossoming Hong Kong vs. Shanghai rivalry already proving exciting on the Hong Kong side of things and potentially creating a theme park duopoly to dwarf what is seen in the US with Disneyland and Walt Disney World. The Shanghai Disneyland resort in 20 years may very well be the most exciting location in Disney’s roster — the only one not following the exact same cookie-cutter paths of America, Paris, and Hong Kong’s near future, or the increasingly character-based kawaii path of Tokyo — but for now we have the unknown.

Shanghai Disneyland is a bold statement from the Disney company in reconceptualizing Disneyland as a truly worldwide phenomenon, accessible to any and all. The big question is whether the blank slate approach ends up vapid and dictating that Disney should be tailoring these Americana-less Disneylands with their own local flavor and charm, or if this approach allows that connection and charm to develop with time. With Shanghai Disneyland the people of China have a Disneyland that is perhaps not as distinctly theirs as Bob Iger would like us to believe, but they certainly have the first Disneyland untangled from American ideals and cultural touchstones. I can’t say what this means to the people of China from their perspective, but I imagine it’s something incredibly important for Disney’s seed to thrive in this particular soil. Shanghai Disneyland is a blank slate for Disney and China to fill out together. Shanghai Disneyland’s nostalgia is now being written, its charms still being developed: the blossoms may take time.

Will Shanghai Disneyland allow Disney and China bring out the best or the worst in each other? The answer to that question will be Shanghai Disneyland’s, and the Disneyland brand’s, future legacy. For now the answer is “a little of both.”

“We didn’t just build Disneyland in China; we built China’s Disney.”

— Bob Iger

America sans Americana: Shanghai Disneyland was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Manhattan 100 years old, built 17 years ago, thousands of miles from New York, fraying the lines between what is, what was, and the fantastic. This is Tokyo’s Gotham.

This ethereal urban fantasy is part of a theme park in Tokyo, the lighting-in-a-bottle that is Tokyo DisneySea. Tokyo DisneySea opened in 2001, next to 1983's Tokyo Disneyland, taking cues from the classic Disneyland approach but with a more worldly lens. The area (“port of call” in DisneySea parlance) is known as “American Waterfront”, and is probably the greatest themed land that is or ever will be, appropriately located in the greatest theme park on the planet.

American Waterfront is a gargantuan area focused on simulating the east coast of the United States in the early 20th century. It’s actually split into 2 sub-areas: Old Cape Cod and New York Harbor, both incredibly distinct. The focus here is on New York Harbor: the way it simulates and romanticizes the streets and seaboard of Manhattan in the early 20th century is astounding. A the twilight of the industrial age, it captures an excitement and energy as humanity started to construct marvels on par with those of nature herself. Bustling streets lined with shops as motorcars putter by and trains pass overhead. Towering hotels and grandiose steamships. Seaside amusement parks. Broadway shows. American Waterfront is more fully realized than most other theme parks on the planet, let alone the singular lands within them.

The nooks and crannies of a New Orleans Square or Diagon Alley. The spectacle of a Frontierland or Carsland. The kinetics of Tomorrowland in its prime. Teddy Roosevelt holding babies and fighting bears while you drink whisky. Everything that matters.

One late afternoon in Tokyo I ran around with my trusty Mamiya 645, a roll of black and white film, and photographically soaked in the city. The Mamiya is an older style medium-format camera, a rough approximation of the photographic technology available in 1920s New York (technically I would need a large-format camera and a tripod, but that is forbidden in DisneySea), making the trip through the looking glass a bit more complete. A fantastical simulation of street photography 100 years ago, in the Gotham that never was, and always will be.

Tokyo’s Gotham was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Epcot just celebrated it’s 35th anniversary, a cause for celebration to be sure, but in Epcot’s case also a reminder of how much Epcot has changed. Epcot is in many ways timeless, and certainly successful, but in a larger sense Epcot may ultimately be best described as a failed experiment. The second theme park concept to come from the company that invented it with the iconic Disneyland and its Florida incarnation the Magic Kingdom, expectations for what became Epcot began sky high, perhaps too high to realistically meet. The park itself was actually conceived via a concession, that Walt Disney’s big dreams of building the city of the future would not be tenable without him, his death instead transforming the project into a theme park focused on world culture and technological progress. A smaller concept, relatively speaking, but one still incredibly lofty with Walt Disney’s dreamer heart at its core. While E.P.C.O.T no longer stood for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”, the theme park lost the acronym and kept the name under the auspicion it still represented the core of those ideals. Now Epcot Center (Editor’s note: the park changes names quite a bit, but always some variant of “Epcot”, so we’re sticking with that name from now on), the park, to live up to its name, had to change the world. No pressure. Per Epcot’s promotional materials, the 21st century started on October 1, 1982: Epcot’s opening day. The park’s dedication still proclaims that Epcot will “entertain, inform, and inspire” and “instill a new sense of belief and pride in mans ability to shape the world that offers hope to people everewhere.”

Did Epcot change the world? Yes, for a bit. For roughly a decade, give or take, Epcot’s Future World was our 1980s futurism and its World Showcase our world cultural ideal. It perhaps didn’t change the world in the direct way Walt Disney hoped the experimental city of the tomorrow would, but in terms of inspiring a generation of optimists Epcot came through. But not everything was rosy, the park was perhaps a bit too edutainment, with several rides equating to essentially documentaries, and complaints of Epcot being “boring” were not uncommon as it never garnered quite the pull of the more magical kingdom next door. Disney characters started to make their way to the park during the 1980s to transfer some of that Disney magic to the fledgling park. During the 1990s we started to see celebrity tie ins and zaniness added to what were straightforward science attractoins, and the addition of thrill rides, many replacing early Epcot attractions like World of Motion and Horizons that symbolized the heart and soul of the park’s original mission. By the late 90s to early 2000s the park’s focus was muddled and the unchanged 80s futurism started to feel dated. Epcot’s identity crisis was in full effect. This identity crisis has continued for 20 years, with the only end in sight an end that looks a hell of a lot like Disney’s Hollywood Studios and every other movie-franchise filled theme park. The trajectory of 1982 Epcot and 2017 Epcot could not be more different: despite sharing the same name and same land and a large chunk of the same architecture, they aren’t the same place. The Epcot we all think of when we think of Epcot, the dreamer Epcot, has been gone for quite some time. It’s been hard to accept. People with strong ties still don’t want to admit this. They loved Epcot in the past and they still like Epcot today, and that emotional continuity can be confusing, clouding the reality at hand.

I don’t quite have that continuity, with Epcot a more tangential part of my childhood at best. I was able to catch a glimpse of Epcot when it still pursued its own mission, and was able to skip that time where it gradually stripped that away. It’s easier for me to separate the Epcot of old from the Epcot of today, to separate the promise of Epcot from the current reality of Epcot, to see the current Epcot for what it truly is. As such, perhaps this is something only I and others in a similar position, can adequately illuminate. To really understand the Epcot of today and tomorrow, perhaps you need to let go of the past. Perhaps you need to be on the outside looking in.

View from the Outside

I was a Southern California kid, so theme parks were Disneyland to me, with a heaping side helping of Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios Hollywood. Walt Disney World to a pre-internet, Disneyland-immersed youth always felt like an odd curiosity more than the childhood beacon it is to many of you. I didn’t spend all that much time thinking about Walt Disney World because it was far away and I had Disneyland right here. I was too young to appreciate the Vacation Kingdom aspect of it all, but I was cognizant enough to know that it was simply impractical for a family with Disneyland less than an hour away to be trekking out to Florida to get something similar.

As such I visited Walt Disney World, and thus Epcot, only twice during my childhood: once in 1987 as a typical 1980s kid and once in 1993 as just barely a teenager. Given my close connection to Disneyland it was Epcot, and during the 2nd trip MGM studios, that were most curious to me: the oddities representing things that had no true analog to in Southern California. As such I wasn’t ignorant of Epcot growing up, but it didn’t hit me with that same imprinting stamp that many childhood trips to WDW do for many. My first trip in the mid 80s I largely associate with Future World: a place seemingly precision-designed to fascinate 80s kids. However, I have a vague recollection of Dreamfinder and Figment, a sense of awe at Spaceship Earth, and that same “this is nice but this is kind of boring” vibe about World Showcase in general that most kids have.

I didn’t visit Epcot with a full appreciation of its full history and aspirations until 2009. This followed that odd adult “awakening” that many of us have with these parks, where I suddenly had a deeper, more academic appreciation of them and their history, that beneath the commercialism of it all was a fascininating art form unlike any other. My interest piqued and my curiosity thirsty, I began diving down that rabbit hole with Walt Disney and Anaheim and eventually leading to Central Florida with WDW and Epcot. Leading up to that trip, I now realize I was probably never as excited for any theme park trip until visiting Tokyo a couple of years later. With WDW I had this giant resort full of history at my fingertips, largely unspoiled to my experience compared the familiarity I had with Disneyland as an annual pass holder in Southern California. Of all of WDW, I was most excited for Epcot: a place I had been before, but one I probably hadn’t fully grasped or appreciated.

Reality Check

On that trip, while I enjoyed Epcot immensely as predicted, I realized I was visiting the history of Epcot as much as I was visiting the current Epcot, and the divide starting becoming apparent. The clean, aspirational architecture was still stunning, more distance from the 1980s leading it more to timeless than dated. The scale and scope of the original concept was still scattered about and impressive, but the cracks in the parks purpose were easily apparent. Even when it was on message, the execution would often shakily shoehorn in pop culture, or misfire with odd, semi-annoying purple dragon with no real personality. Attractions in World Showcase had undeniable charm and quirk, but I could also understand complaints that they were lacking in execution and “wow” circa 2009. Other bits, like a tour of transportation, or glimpse at the world of the future, were long gone.

The transition continues today, with attractions based on cultural mythology now changed to focus on the film Frozen. Attractions based on Energy closed to make way for comic book heroes. I’m not the only one to notice this: you’d be hard pressed to find an Epcot fan who does not admit the park has certainly changed from its original purpose. The variance lies in how much the individual believes the original Epcot is still there, and how much of it has any bearing on Epcot’s future. Could management suddenly divert course back to the original vision with an exciting announcement of attractions and refreshes that fit with the original vision. Yes they could, but they won’t. No “but”. No “maybe”. The spaceship has sailed.

Visiting Epcot feels very different than visiting a place like Disneyland back in Southern California. Disneyland has deep history, but exploring it mostly feels like a discussion of one continuous entity — like discussing the past of one person who has, like we all do, changed subtly with time. Epcot instead feels like talking about two completely different people. There’s no mistaking that the significant Epcot of the past, the Epcot on which we pinned hopes and dreams, the Epcot we celebrate 35, died years ago. Echoes of it exist of course, but the potential of its first 15 years does not erase the reality of its last 20. Are many of the structures and themes of the original Epcot there? Of course: the original foundation is hard to erase, and this is why Epcot is still exciting and relevant today. But this does not mean nothing has changed. No place has perhaps changed so much while visually changing so little, as Epcot.

Epcot’s history will always be vital, and the memories of those that experienced it will always be meaningful, but the pregnancy of Epcot’s past does not ameliorate the reality of its present. Epcot is no longer quite as aspirational. Epcot is not nearly as optimistic, Epcot is no longer a leader. Epcot is no longer “Epcot”, and treating it as if it is breeds nothing but frustration. Epcot is not an irrelevant theme park and certainly not a bad theme park. It has great theming, wonderful food and drink, and enjoyable attractions. Aspiration and execution are separable, and the reality is that the former has declined rapidly even while the latter holds steady or even improves with time. This is the turmoil, confusion, and eternal contraction of Epcot: Epcot is getting better as it gets worse. Epcot doses not have the same goals despite having the same name. Epcot is not the same place as it was despite literally being in the same place. This all leads many to believe the original Epcot is still here, with us today. In truth, we’re all just role-playing the original Epcot at the current Epcot. Epcot’s lack of aspiration didn’t suddenly turn it into a horrible place: it’s still a wonderful theme park that in many respects remains untouched by anything else in the industry. Epcot is no slouch, but it’s no longer that wide-eyed kid with infinite potential: it has settled into a more modest role to ride out the rest of its life. We’re all going to keep enjoying Epcot, but it’s not going to change our lives like it once did. It’s not going to live up to its father’s expectations.

No Turning Back

It’s at this point that we have to address the “what if’s” that certainly cloud our judgment. What if Disney turns things around and moves back to the original concept? What if there’s a management change and Disney installs somebody at the top with more vision? What if the Future World attracts a corporate sponsor who truly believes in Epcot’s cause? If only these things would come true! But these things aren’t going to happen, and even if they did, they would be only the first step in an arduous journey that Epcot’s stewards are not interested in completing. Epcot is the most ambitious theme park ever conceived, but its ambition overreached its capability. Epcot flew too close to the sun, requiring conceptual caretaking, commercial and technical investment, international relations, political relations, and public expectations to evolve in ways that the current Disney company isn’t equipped or interested in pursuing. Epcot has strayed enough to the point that pulling off its original vision for the present and beyond is more easily and affordably accomplished with a blank slate than overhauling what is already there. At this point, Epcot isn’t Epcot enough to turn back into Epcot.

Epcot will live on, as a symbol of what a theme park could aspire to. A theme park that aspires in the way Epcot did is still in our hearts, and perhaps in our future, but that park will not be Epcot, and given current trends likely won’t be from the Walt Disney company. The torch still burns, but for the time being awaits new hands. Even if we accept that the old Epcot has left and is not coming home, I can’t lose respect for brazen concept at Epcot’s core, and I’ll never lose hope that a theme park will once again aspire to be so much. I know, however, if and when that happens again that theme park won’t be called Epcot. Epcot is gone, forever a symbol of what can be and a cautionary tale of how it can all fall apart, something to reminisce about while waiting in line for an attraction based on a film, just like you do at all the other theme parks.

Epcot, the old Epcot, the optimist Epcot, the dreamer Epcot, died when it was forced to do the one thing its heart could not bear: Epcot died when it became generic.

Epcot, From the Outside Looking In was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Disneyland is inarguably a lens of Americana, and Halloween in its modern form is a particularly American tradition. As I walk through the gates of Hong Kong Disneyland during Halloween, however, I somehow feel both and neither.

Hong Kong Disneyland is very closely patterned after the original Disneyland in Anaheim. I’m from America, from California, from Disneyland, so the familiarity of seeing my home teleported thousands of miles away is breeding as much eerie unease as it is comfort. There are mountains behind Sleeping Beauty Castle. Main Street is paved with bricks. This land is celebrating the same holiday as back home, but it feels somehow different. Its all an exact copy on the surface, but the details belie the truth that all of these things are foreign: appropriations, adoptees, and infiltrators. Halloween, Disneyland, myself: we’re all a long way from home.

The unease is exciting. I embrace it, even as part of me continues to fight it. There’s something compelling about it the whole situation, something personal.

A walk down Main Street allows the rabbit hole to go even deeper, with Halloween decor exactingly placed the way only an idealized small town can in an idealized abstraction like Disneyland can. It feels more festive than decorative, something America perhaps struggles with as holidays increasingly fulfill a well-defined role in the established churn of commercial seasons. In China this holiday is still relatively new, adopted from media and Hollywood and propagated by theme parks like this one. They, like we, struggle with the commercialism of it all, the new Halloween, not really appreciating the idealized small town origins we Americans associate with the “old” Halloween. Perhaps Main Street’s idealized Halloween is a necessary history lesson of sorts for Hong Kong, a hazy idealization providing context to the beast they have unleashed on themselves, an implanted memory of something that never actually happened. From this lens I start to see Main Street as more than the nostalgia of America’s past and more as the Rosetta Stone that allows other cultures to translate and better understand the ideas and practices they adopt from us. Main Street feels is more a tool of influence here. Disneyland, Main Street, myself: we’re strangers in a strange land, during a stange time, influencing as much as we are influenced. Will this place accept us or will it reject us, spitting us back across the ocean? I usually don’t feel this way on Main Street. It feels like a dream.

As I walk the park and as day become night, the layers of the onion keep revealing themselves. The entire situation is a transplant: an adopted area representing the past of an adopted culture, celebrating an adopted holiday. Simulations of adoptions of cultural appropriations inevitably leads to mutations: the same ingredients don’t lead to the same dish here. Hong Kong’s interpretation of this thing we call Halloween, despite having the same Main Street and Disneyland as a starting point, comes out different, more vital and visceral. Despite being home to the most famous Haunted House of all time, Disneyland has typically shied away from legitimate fright of the horror movie variety. That thrill, like a roller coaster, where you delight in perhaps being in danger without ever actually being in danger. Halloween’s newest caretakers in China are not as concerned with these things, and more embracing of Halloween’s ability to straddle the border of comfort. This place itself is a foreigner, not unwelcome but still alien, so unease comes a bit more organically. Things are more foreboding, with less focus on “wacky villains” as Disney likes to play them up in America and a bit more about the darkness. The park does a good job playing up atmosphere, maybe by just letting it’s own impossibilities and contradictions lay bare. Allowing contradiction and unease is different than pretending to have them.

The key attraction this year is called the Nightmare Experiment, a Haunted House (or “maze”) like those prevalent in the US at all places not owned by Disney. This one, like everything else about this holiday here, is slightly different. While it avoids violence or gore, it once again features that atmospheric foreboding and unease. That sense that these villains and characters are up to no good. The sense that these strange characters and their strange practices might not have your best interest at heart. The sense that you may be in danger. This balance and restraint makes it a truly remarkable experience, something America’s quest to outshock itself is perhaps losing. Disney’s restraint combined with China’s relative lack-of is a unique fusion, like the perfect seasoning to a beloved old dish that was admittedly a bit bland. These emotions usually aren’t served with these contexts back home. It’s refreshing. It’s unnerving. It’s delightful.

At Hong Kong Disneyland Halloween is actively happening around you: it’s not just decorations, but appropriation and infiltration. Here Halloween is a process, actively defining and mutating itself, a participant in its surroundings as much as decor applied to them. There’s an unease to it all because the role and impact of this place, this holiday, this tradition, is still a bit unknown. You can’t quite predict what you might see or feel. You are witness to strange new things, yourself an agent of change of what you see. These traditions come from home, from you, but context is creating an entirely new beast that you can’t predict or control.

And then it hits you, the final macabre twist: Halloween isn’t happening to you here, but you and Halloween and Main Street and Disneyland and Americana are happening to everything around you. You are part of the discomfort, the familiar yet unfamiliar, the unease: it can all be traced back home. This odd Twilight Zone of familiar ideals struggling for a comfortable fit in a new shell is not happening to you, but happening because of you.

There’s nothing like Halloween at Hong Kong Disneyland. You are Halloween at Hong Kong Disneyland.

Strangers in a Strange Land was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week Daniel Miller of the Los Angeles Times has been detailing Disney’s past, present, and potential future political relationship with the city of Anaheim in a two-part article. The piece is interesting because it delves into a lot of the political complication behind theme park development that often gets overlooked as fans wonder why the new lands, parks, and hotels we imagine don’t get built.

In the first piece, Disneyland Resort’s Mickey and Friends parking structure is used as both a literal and symbolic representation of the complicated relationship. The parking structure is currently the main parking location for the resort, created along with creation of the Disneyland Resort back in the late 90s when the original parking lot made way for California Adventure.

Mickey and Friends has an interesting history for a mere parking lot. It was famously a pet project of Michael Eisner and a massive failure in the concept of “speed parking”, opening as the largest parking structure in America (since dethroned). Some might be surprised to know that the parking lot was not paid for nor is currently owned by Disney. As part of the arrangement made to expand the Disneyland Resort, the city of Anaheim funded the parking lot itself with 40-year bonds, and is currently leasing it to Disney for the sum of $1 per year. The city owns the land beneath Mickey & Friends, leasing the rest from a third party. When the lot is paid for at the end of the 40 years, ownership will be transferred to Disney, and in the meantime Disney operates and maintains the lot and pockets all revenue.

To oversimplify what led to Mickey and Friends, Disney told Anaheim it wasn’t going to invest billions in the expansion of the Disneyland Resort back in the 90s, and all the concomitant jobs it would create, unless it got certain concessions from the city, including a parking lot. This was an interesting time, with political maneuvering by Disney about instead potentially expanding into Long Beach with what eventually became DisneySea to put the pressure on Anaheim. Ultimately Anaheim agreed that Disney’s resort investment was worth it and paid for the parking lot and other concessions in order to get it.

Symbiosis

This is and continues to be the core of the delicate balance between the two: Disney’s continued investment into Anaheim and Disney’s insistence on Anaheim creating conditions favorable to do so. Disney argues their presence creates huge benefits for Anaheim, and Anaheim has traditionally agreed and given concessions to Disney to spur Disney’s continued investment. Per Miller’s article:

Disney has negotiated these pacts with a carrot-and-stick approach — one that has often included the company’s threat of directing its investment dollars elsewhere. The agreements have spurred development of billion-dollar projects, including the California Adventure theme park and the forthcoming Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge area at Disneyland.

The upside to Disney’s continued presence is irrefutable, with the company essentially putting the city on the map back in 1955. Of all the jobs in Anaheim, 20% come from Disney, which doesn’t take into account how many ancillary hotel, restaurant, etc. jobs that are indirectly created due to Disney’s sheer presence. The Resort district currently generates 43% of the Anaheim’s general fund tax revenue (171.9 million), meaning nearly half the money Anaheim has to play with for city needs comes from Disney itself. Disney is was, and is, crucial to the city of Anaheim.

What Miller’s piece is exploring is that the new Anaheim political guard including Mayor Tom Tait are beginning to realize that Disney’s own bottom line and competitive market pressures may likely force Disney’s continued investment regardless. Miller’s piece does a good job detailing the various deals Disney has acquired, as well as more socio-economic pressures creating some displeasure with Disney’s usually dominant hand in such deals. Anaheim is facing issues with jobs, homelessness, and crime – as many cities are – and the disparity of Disney’s pristine resort district and the rest of Anaheim infrastructure are beginning to raise eyebrows. Why does a city with a Golden Goose as golden as Disney need to struggle at all?

Future Imperfect

Why does such a wealthy company like Disney need so many concessions and breaks to do things it arguable would need to do anyway? The Disneyland Resort is in dire need of a new hotel, with occupancy high and rates even higher in Disney’s three current hotels. Disney recently agreed to build a new hotel, the fourth it would own at the Disneyland Resort, dependent on massive tax breaks from the city of Anaheim. Disney says they wouldn’t have begun on this hotel without the tax breaks, but I struggle to believe this given how the Disneyland Resort is currently bursting at the seams. Anaheim’s city new city council and mayor seem to agree with me.

On the horizon is more trouble, with the Disneyland Resort in a somewhat similar position to where it was back when it was created for California Adventure: expansion and growth are leading to a dire situation with infrastructure including lodging and especially parking. Getting to and from the Disneyland Resort can be qualified as nothing more than an ordeal, with arriving at Mickey and Friends to reaching Main Street taking as much as an hour. Mickey and Friends often reaches capacity due to the huge annual pass holder population, causing more confusing and rerouting to the Toy Story lot. Disneyland Resort is in dire need of not only expansion, but an infrastructure redesign that creates something streamlined and sensible and befitting a company that prides itself on creating pleasant customer experiences. The experience you get when you enter the park is meticulous and thoughtful, but the hour you spend getting there is one of the worst opening acts in the business.

Backscratching

As we’re wont to do here at Madness Kingdom, let’s look closely at Disney’s most recent deal, the one that seems to have broken the Anaheim camels’ back, and break down the numbers. Which back is getting scratched more?

Disney was granted a 20-year exemption from an entertainment tax, a potential per-ticket tax the city would charge, as part of the deal to create the Disneyland Resort with California Adventure back in the 90s. The 20-years exemption was up in 2015, so naturally Disney sought to extend it for 30 more years. The carrot on the stick they used to negotiate this was $ 1 billion in development at the Disneyland Resort by 2024, with an extra $500 million leading to an extra 15 years, or 45 years total exemption for $1.5 billion in investment. This exemption was approved by Anaheim, and Disney has committed to $2 billion in development over the next decade: Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge and “another major project”. All-in-all, a pretty typical Disney-Anaheim deal, but one the new Anaheim guard has called into question. Losing the ability to tax Disney for 45 years has been tough to justify.

Looking more closely at the deal, Disney’s 1.5 billion in investment would generate $26.8 million annual tax revenue. A theoretical $1 per ticket entertainment tax, exempted through Disney’s deal, would generate roughly exactly the same (assuming Disney’s attendance remains roughly flat for the next 45 years). From Disney’s perspective, Anaheim is getting roughly $27 million per year either way so it’s win-win that the resort gets an expansion and Anaheim gets its money. From Anaheim’s perspective, they’re wondering why they aren’t getting $54 million per year from Disney: the $27 million from the tax, and the $27 million from the expansion Disney was likely going to do either way due to market pressure. Are the concessions and breaks from the city really necessary to spur Disney’s investment at this point, or is investment a foregone conclusion? Per Miller’s article, it may be the latter:

Theme park experts and analysts who cover Disney said that incentives Anaheim gave to the company decades ago may have been necessary to get it to expand its resort property. But now that Disney’s presence is so firmly established in Anaheim, the company’s threats to hold back investment in the resort are probably less realistic, especially as competition has grown, Foglesong and others said.

The impact of a theoretical $1 ticket tax to Disney’s bottom line is unknown. On the one hand it could be absolutely nothing, with a $1 price increase per ticket passed on to customers who likely wouldn’t even notice amidst prices that have risen 67% due to Disney itself in the last decade. Worst case scenario is Disney loses $27 million by choosing hold ticket prices constant to avoid (theoretical) loss of customers due to a price increase.

On the surface, Disney stance doesn’t look so great here: the $27 million is very little to them and they could likely pass the cost to customers with little ill effect. However, I think Disney’s argument here is not about $1, it’s about the slippery slope on which that dollar is resting. What is $1 now could easily become $2 later, then more: it’s a lot easier to raise a tax than it is to create one. This is not so much a fight over $27 million a year, a loss of which Disney would hardly notice, but about control, a loss of which could have long-term ramifications to the company’s bottom line. Disney has always maintained tight control of its US resorts and is not about to secede ticket pricing to the volatility of city governments.

You Can’t Undo a Resort

Prior to the Disneyland Resort, the situation in Anaheim was very different. Disney certainly could have kept Disneyland as a single park and single hotel in Anaheim, focusing its investments on Florida and international expansion. This would have represented a huge loss of potential revenue for the city of Anaheim and I think the city was right to do what it needed to get Disney to pull the trigger to build California Adventure and plant deeper roots in Anaheim. However, with the creation of the Disneyland Resort in 2001, the situation has drastically changed and Disney has revealed its hand. They can’t let the entire resort of two theme parks and three hotels and a shopping center crumble or lie complacent. Revenue from the Disneyland Resort is high and outperforms all resorts aside from Walt Disney World in Florida, Universal slowly nipping at its heels in Hollywood, and the optics of Disney neglecting its historic heart could be devastating. The Disneyland Resort is in dire need of hotels and parking and infrastructure improvements no matter how much Anaheim wants to tax Disney for them. When it comes to the existing Disneyland Resort, Anaheim has the upper hand. You can’t put the entire Disneyland Resort on trailers and move it to Long Beach.

At the same time, Anaheim certainly doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds, and there’s always a danger that while Disney is beholden to make what is currently there competitive, Anaheim can create conditions so that large future resort expansion, that kind that happened in 2001, is instead directed to Florida or China. Data might predict a 3rd gate in Anaheim should be coming soon, and current crowds at the resort certainly support demand for one, but the political climate in Anaheim does not. Anaheim certainly doesn’t want to mortgage the future to get some sidewalks repaved now.

(Lack of) Progress City

Most depressing about all of this is not the conflict between Disney and Anaheim itself, but the potential of what that relationship could be. Of all Disney’s resorts, Disney’s relationship with Anaheim has the most potential to be the Progress City we were always promised in Florida. Disney would have to build a city from scratch in Florida (and Celebration didn’t work out quite as hoped), and international complications preclude much civic involvement abroad, leaving Anaheim as Disney’s most viable city partner. Anaheim and Disneyland, a city and resort that grew up together, both aspiring to be greater than their humble beginnings, but with desire, need and capability for interesting change and ideas. Cutting edge public transportation methods (for their time) such as the monorail and peoplemover debuted in Anaheim, at Disneyland as proof of concepts for cities, but have never made their way to the city themselves. The pieces, the potential, has always been right there. Anaheim could be a cutting edge city providing an example of symbiotic corporate and government relations, redefining how we think of tourist destinations and transit and infrastructure. The Disneyland Resort could be the hub on which the entire city derives benefit and growth.

We could be gliding through Anaheim from train stations to Disneyland on monorails and peoplemovers or the next great transportation breakthrough, but instead of experiencing a city of progress we’re stuck watching a city and a corporation bicker about who has to pay for the next gigantic parking lot.

Mickey and Friends and Enemies was originally published in Madness Kingdom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.