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MCComposer
04-15-2004, 12:01 PM
I just wrote a paper about Disneyland for my first year writing class. If anyone is interested, here it is. It's 8 1/2 pages just so you know what you're getting into. Let me know what you think.

The Disney Way
It is the self proclaimed “Happiest place on earth.” It is a social symbol of childhood dreams and memories. It is a place where millions flock each year to experience the magic. It is Disneyland. Millions of people have grown with Disneyland memories. From the days of B- and E-ticket rides to Indiana Jones. The park is populated by an array of pirates and fairies and bears (oh my!); chills, thrills, coasters, castles, fairytales, fantasies, Autopia and audio-animatronics. Nowhere is quite like Disneyland.
Walt Disney’s inspiration for his self-titled theme park came from his experience with his daughters at amusement parks. Long-time Disney Imagineer, John Hench, relates this story in his book, Designing Disney Imagineering and the Art of Show:
Walt liked to take his two small daughters on outings around the city, often visiting local amusement parks:
Disney, while enjoying the time with his daughters, found that he and the other parents were often bored sitting on benches, eating popcorn, and watching the kids on the rides. Added to this growing discomfort was the general squalor of many of the establishments.
Hench, pg. 2
So Walt came up with the idea of building an amusement park that would appeal to children and their parents. He wanted to create, in his words, “something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic.” (Hench, pg. 2) He conceptualized a land where people of all ages could experience the excitement of adventure and the magic of imagination all in one place. He sought to fabricate an entire world that would surround its visitors with the sights, sounds, and smells of fantastic kingdoms, hometown nostalgia, and exotic adventures. And to this end, he built Disneyland.
Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom, opened on July 17, 1955 in Anaheim, California. MousePlanet (an unofficial Disney website/periodical) writer, Mark Goldhaber, describes the scene on opening day:
The sidewalks were still wet. The landscaping wasn't complete (Walt had landscaping chief Morgan “Bill” Evans put Latin signs on all the weeds to make it look intentional). The water fountains were not functioning (following a plumbers' strike, and there was no time; Walt had to make a choice between having the water fountains or the toilets work on opening day).
And yet, it was a rousing success.
Goldhaber, 2004
Disneyland was to become the home of the infamous mouse who began it all. From opening day, the Magic Kingdom personified the realization of childhood fantasy. The classic (and clichéd) youthful daydreams were brought to life in this giant play-land.
As progress was made in the design, Walt’s objective in building Disneyland became the pursuit of creating a place in which the guests would be relieved of thoughts of work and the troubles of the world they left at the gate and so they could concentrate on the captivating surroundings of the recreational paradise. In order to separate the guests from the world, the construction was began by encompassing the entire park with a “berm” of earth about ten to twelve feet high. The berm obscures the visitors’ view of the outside world, thereby putting the places beyond out of sight and out of mind. The guests are told that they are about to leave their familiar environment via engravings above each of the two small tunnels through which guests enter the park. The placards read: “Here you leave today and enter the world of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy.” And from this point, the visitors are immersed in a virtual world, simulated through everything from the music to the architecture, the costumes to the garbage cans.
Disneyland was built upon this hyperreality, this imagined, ultra-romanticized past. It is through the shrewd utilization of the supposedly fantastic and magical that Disney has built its empire. Disneyland is the ultimate incarnation of the all-encompassing theme park. After all, it was the first theme park. The Disney predecessors were amusement parks, “funlands” built for the apparent reason of amusement. At any amusement park, little effort is made to mask the fact that a Ferris wheel is a Ferris wheel. This is the sort of thing that one will not find in Walt Disney’s park. (The Ferris wheel at Disney’s California Adventure is at a different park built in the miserly Eisner era of Disney, a.k.a. the Dark Years.) Walt wanted to immerse the guests in an experience different from going to a boardwalk. He did so through the introduction of story and theme to the amusement park, transporting his guests to a different place and time.
The whole park is a show. Walt himself proclaimed it as such. Each ride is an attraction complete with a “back story” and plot. Disney employs designers called Imagineers who dream up and bring to life every aspect of the park. They refer to their projects as shows. Each ride is a show, a little play, with parts played by the robotic figures called audio-animatronics and real live Cast Members. All of the employees at the park are referred to as Cast Members, from ride operators to ticket-takers to waiters, they are all characters in the giant production that is Disneyland. Each cast member is trained in guest relations and courtesy in addition to their training on specific attractions. The goal was to provide the optimum experience to each and every guest, because, after all, they are not mere customers, they are guests in the park and should be treated accordingly. By creating the fictitious hyper-realities, the guests experience an unreal life that preoccupies them enough to distance them from their toilings about the real reality.
Because what Walt wanted to do had never been done before, he had to find ways to make it all happen. He was in innovator, always entertaining people in unprecedented ways, and it all began with the park itself. His visionary nature helped to produce the most revolutionary amusements ever imagined (or imagineered). Disneyland provided the world with an array of brand new experiences. The Disneyland Railroad, Walt’s passion, encircles the Magic Kingdom, defining its outermost reaches with a ring of foliage that obstructs the view of the real world. Every aspect of Disneyland has been controlled to provide the perfectly fake world. The plant life is scrupulously attended. The water in the Rivers of America and all through the park is dyed green to hide the mechanics beneath the surface. The employees are costumed in attire appropriate to the “lands” in which they work. His innovations have become the standard of design for the entire entertainment industry. He always pushed his Imagineers to utilize the latest technology and develop their own to provide the most cutting-edge, unique experience for the visitors. For instance, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, a dual-track roller coaster that winds through the icy caverns of a scaled-down version of the actual Swiss mountain peak, was the world’s very first tubular steel roller coaster when it opened in 1959. This tubular steel construction is now the standard of even the newest coasters being built. Possibly Disney’s most infamous creation is audio-animatronics. This brand of robotic figure was debuted in the Tiki Room show at Disneyland when it opened in 1963. The birds in the show were Disney’s first audio-animatronics. Animatronics were originally powered by pre-computer mechanics but have developed into the highly advanced A-100 series that includes figures like Indiana Jones and Abe Lincoln. Now hundreds of these figures can been seen at Disneyland performing their preprogrammed routines over and over. The quality and realism of Disney’s animatronics remains unmatched by any other theme park. These standards have lived beyond Walt and when the $100 million endeavor, Indian Jones Adventure opened in 1995, passengers embarked on their journey through the Temple of the Forbidden Eye in one-of-a-kind, state-of-the-art motion-simulator ride vehicles that weigh around seven tons. They were, and still are, the most technologically advanced ride vehicles ever built. It is this unique marriage of technology and show that defines the Disney style as established by Walt. The largest influence was probably the park itself. Ever since the 1955 opening, new amusement parks have sought to incorporate the theming style and integrated experience that Disneyland pioneered. No park has matched it, not even the other Disney parks.
The brilliance of the plan was almost an afterthought, for the economic success of the park was a result not of Walt’s marketing genius (which was also quite amazing) but of the sincerity and high standards with which he built Disneyland. His Imagineers meticulously designed Main Street U.S.A. in the style of every Midwestern Main Street of the 1890’s. Although reminiscent of this nonexistent “every-town”, this quaint, nostalgic thoroughfare is inescapably Disney-fied. The Main Street buildings are not built at full size. The designers decided to scale down the buildings to make them more friendly and less daunting. The storefronts are built at seven-eighths scale on the ground floor and about two-thirds on the second, with the scale diminishing still on those buildings that have a third floor. The trees along Main Street are also kept small to match the scale of the buildings and not reveal the trick. By creating this miniature environment, the guests are given over to the fanciful nostalgia of this over-romanticized false history. “The Main Street façades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing.” (Eco, City of Robots, pg. 190, emphasis added) Disney doesn’t only dress up and old dark ride to look like Pinocchio, they dress up the stores too. By doing so, customers get wrapped up in the old-fashioned décor and costumed cashiers even though they are just buying a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt for forty-five bucks. The packaging, the service, and the cleanliness are all great features, but guests most certainly pay for them. Yet if the stores were not themed to their appropriate lands, the illusion would be destroyed and this is the sort of inconsistency that one wont find at Disneyland.
Amidst everything, Disneyland has one unique feature that sets it beyond the realm of just a theme park. Try counting how many times you see and hear the word “magic” in one day at the park, it’s a lot. They advertise with magical allure and adorn the foliage with twinkling lights, fly an iridescent Tinker Bell through the sky, and underscore your trip to the park with “When You Wish Upon a Star.” In spite of the flashy pictures and catchy tunes, the fact remains that Disneyland delivers. There is something truly magical about Disneyland. I am among the thousands who will agree that Disneyland is “The Happiest Place on Earth.” On one of my visits, I met a girl whose little brother had approached his mother saying, “Do you know what heaven’s like mom?…Disneyland with no crowds.” People have a special understanding of the Disney magic. One fanatic said, “What I like about Disney is the level of entertainment. It is like one big stage. Everything around you is a prop! Everything is themed just perfect and the shows are first class. It just has a magic that no park can touch.” Another tells; “[Disneyland] is still the one place I can go and relive all of my yesterdays - still finding new tomorrows to relive again. I could go on for ever...Disneyland will always be the magical kingdom!” A Disney Cats Member said “When I was walking through the empty park after closing that first night I stopped by the Partners statue and I swear I could feel Walt's presence…That is one thing that no other amusement, or even Disney park, could ever copy.” Disneyland definitely has a special place in many people’s hearts. This is why people have to keep going and why they will. Disneyland has a history that nowhere else has. It is a land of memories for many; “I started going to the park in 1959...45 years later, I can still see the little girl I was having a magical day. I was there with my son a few weeks ago and there were times I found myself looking out into the crowds searching for my mom. Though she is now deceased, she used to sit in the crowds and watch us as we rode the rides.” Beyond the amazing theming and beautiful designs the magical special effects, Disneyland possesses its own unique brand of entertainment and a near-spirituality that distinguishes it from the hundreds of theme parks that it inspired.
I, like so many others, have grown up knowing Disneyland. For me, it lives up to its mantra of being “The happiest place on earth.” When at the park, I can still just stop and look around at the seas of people and the ever-smiling foam rubber heads and it makes me happy. There is something inherently magical about this place. Over six decades ago, Walt Disney set out to create a Magic Kingdom where young children and the young-at-heart could go to enjoy an experience that was truly an escape. Free of the worldly woes, Disneyland guests are able to immerse themselves in this masterfully designed and controlled environment where characters and adventures of their youth coexist with the ever-changing fantasy world where something new is always waiting around the bend. The concept was crazy: turn an orange grove an hour south of Los Angeles into a giant, self-contained world where nothing is real and reality is the last thing on anyone’s mind. But Walt Disney had a vision and held fast to it, and with Disneyland’s 50th anniversary fast approaching, one must agree that he must have done something right. I go to the park when ever I can and when I do, I give myself over to the fantasies. I don’t care if the tree are plastic and the smiles are painted on, the efforts of the Cast Members and the vision of one man with a mouse work together to create this place where everything is always somehow okay. People will argue against the Disney Corporation till the day it takes over the world (oh, I mean…uh), but when I am at Disneyland watching the fireworks of “Believe, There‘s Magic in the Stars,” Tinker Bell flies through the night sky and I get teary-eyed. That is the Disney magic and in spite of any word against it, the fact cannot be denied that it touches at least one person in way that goes beyond fiberglass and concrete. At Disneyland, the magic is real.
When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.

Cancer Norm
04-15-2004, 12:13 PM
:eek: Wow! Could you uh, please send me the Cliff-Notes to your book?

stan4d_steph
04-15-2004, 12:54 PM
With something that long, you should consider putting it up on a website and posting the link. That post doesn't have any paragraph breaks in it, which makes it very difficult to read.

MCComposer
04-15-2004, 02:12 PM
With something that long, you should consider putting it up on a website and posting the link. That post doesn't have any paragraph breaks in it, which makes it very difficult to read.

Good idea...how do I do that?

Cadaverous Pallor
04-15-2004, 03:21 PM
I, too, would like a more readable version.

I'm sure you know how to put paragraph breaks into something, so I guess you're asking how to post it online somewhere else.

If you have Microsoft Word, just type it up, then Save As Web Page. Then get yourself a free website (here's one - stormpages.com) and upload it. Simple 'nuff.

poohray
04-16-2004, 12:32 AM
Hi MCComposer. Very nice essay excellent grammer and good punctuation.

David R
04-16-2004, 07:25 AM
Nice essay. Thank you for sharing it.

MonorailMan
04-16-2004, 09:32 PM
Sounds good to me. :)

What a good idea. Also, Line Breaks ARE your friend. :)

wendybeth
04-16-2004, 10:09 PM
Great job, and thanks for sharing it! ( You'll have to keep us posted on what grade you get, okay?) :)