I have a few odd interests. One of my main ones is Disneyland. One aspect of that is Disneyland sounds. I have a few sounds and soundtracks stored on my phone, and I play them in the car. It puts me in a nostalgic mood. My son, who is 13, is driven crazy by this. Given that I play the Haunted Mansion foyer music in the car when I pick him up from school, it’s fairly understandable.
“Turn that depressing music off!”
Then he made a mistake. He said “Why do you even listen to that stuff, anyway?”
So I started telling him about what these sounds were. I switched to the Submarine Voyage soundtrack, and as the captain says “Make all preparations for getting underway,” (I like playing that as we drive off) he started to hear.
“This is from the submarine ride, and you’d go underwater and do things like pass by sunken ships with divers trying to get treasure out of them. Above them were sharks circling overhead. Oh, and in this part of the recording, they’re traveling by a sunken city, with a volcano going off in it.” It was really cool. It made me want to learn about the ocean and what was in it.”
“What happened to it?”
“They closed it for a few years. Then they turned it into that Finding Nemo cartoon ride.” He seemed a bit disappointed. “Oh, that’s for little kids.”
“Yes. It is now.”
I changed the music to the opening of Carousel of Progress. We listened to the sound effects and I was explaining that this was the beginning of the show, and you faced a gigantic sized color organ that showed all different colors in response to the sounds. And it as a great show, because it showed progress, and the entire theater moved around the center and the shows were all interconnected and at the end you got up out of the audience went up an escalator into the center of the building to see a huge model of the city of tomorrow that Walt Disney really wanted to build.
He says he remembers some of that from Florida. Why did they take it out? I tell him to put in some musical that had nothing to do with science or progress. That eventually got ripped out, too.
“What’s there now?”
“Star Wars meet and greets. But when were were last time it was basically, nothing. We’ve gone in it; it is where ASIMO was. Last time we were there you could play Xbox games.”
“Oh.”
But I have fun listening to the recordings, and I put it on some bits of of Flight to the Moon, telling him “Now, on this ride, you went into this big room, and it sort of shook and the seats moved and you watched films that was there showing you flying through space. In the beginning there was this great mission control set filled with audio animatronic robots and bunches of them controlling different rocket ships. When I was 13, it was amazing, but it did get a bit old and creaky towards the end.”
“What is there now?”
“A really bad pizza place. We ate there once. It’s terrible.” He remembers it.
“What about the rockets?”
“They are gone.”
So he asks “Why did they do these things?” “Because they were blisteringly incompetent. These are the things Walt Disney put in. But, Walt Disney died a young man because he smoked too much and got lung cancer. When that happened, they suddenly became clueless and threw away half the decent things in the place.”
“What about that rocket ride that spins and goes up and down? We went on that.”
“Oh yeah, that’s another thing that’s been changed. Here is a picture of what it used to be. See this giant platform? The ride looked like a real rocket that really sent people to the moon. You were up 3 stories in the air, and it was a lot of fun. You’d go up in this elevator to the ride like you were going on an actual rocket. They ripped this out, put it on the ground, and turned the old ride into god knows what that spins. Here’s a picture of the new thing.”
“Oh, I remember that. Why did they do this?”
“I don’t know, but look back at the old ride. See this thing under the Rocket Jets? That was the People Mover. You got on it, it was kind of quiet, and you rode around all over the place. They ripped that one out, too, and put in a new ride that went faster, but because they had no idea what they were doing, it was shaking apart all the buildings and the ride was constantly breaking down, so they closed it and the track now just sits there rotting.”
“Well, why don’t they do something with it like let people at least walk on it or something?”
“I don’t know. It just is rusting there.”
“What was in where the Star Wars ride is now?”
“Oh, here’s the sound track to that. It was really great, you would shrink down to the size of a molecule, and you would learn all about what molecules and atoms were. It was really fun, you got to go inside a snow flake, and it made me want to learn more about science! But it got old and they replaced it with the Star Wars ride. It’s fun, I suppose. It just doesn’t make me feel like I want to bother learning about anything.” We listened as the soundtrack started “For centuries, man had but his own two eyes…”
“What about the other side?”
“There they had this really cool movie that was in a giant circle all around you, they went all over the country and showed you different things from all over. it was very patriotic. It was amazing to see. It felt like you were actually moving as you watched it!”
“Was this the first place that had this kind of movie?”
“I’m not sure, but I think so.”
“So what’s there now?”
“Uh…well. A shooting gallery with cartoon characters…”
He likes science a lot you see. He liked going into Innoventions to see ASIMO. He asked about what’s going on in there. I told him “It’s got more Star Wars things. I don’t know. But it’s probably not going to be around much longer. Who knows.”
I got sick of talking about Tomorrowland and started playing the narration of Nature’s Wonderland. I started telling him about that one.
“This was a huge, gigantic train ride that you would take and you’d see beavers building dams, you’d go through tunnels, there would be these great waterfalls you went behind, and then you’d go out to the desert where there would be geysers and balancing rocks and things like that. All sorts of animals all over the place. It was like a 15-minute ride through a national park.”
“Is it still there?”
They ripped it out. It wasn’t fast enough, so they put in a roller coaster that lasts maybe 3 minutes. Peope like it. Mostly those who don’t remember the old ride. Oh, they also put in a sidewalk and a farmhouse. There used to be a BBQ restaurant, too. But that’s all gone now. They’re putting in more Star Wars.”
“Oh.”
I said “This is why I really was a big fan of the place. It had all these sorts of things, and I still remember them. You used to be able to shoot guns out of a wooden fort, you used to be able to do science related things, there were boats, trips under the polar ice cap, rocket ship rides…isn’t the science stuff kind of cool a little?”
“Yeah, a little.”
Yes, at one time it was cool and fun and had stuff to learn and inspire. Now for him, it’s more than a little bit lame, and I told him it’s so different now than what it used to be. I have a lot of nostalgia, but he finds the place rather dismal. I was trying to get him enthused over it.
And you know what? He got pretty interested in what used to be there, because it was interesting stuff. It wasn’t about cartoons or stupid space movies, it was about us, our planet, and progress. It was about me, and it would have been about him.
That is until they destroyed it. They destroyed what it was, destroyed what Walt Disney created.
But what do I know. When I used to go it was ten bucks to get in and not all that crowded. Now, it’s a hundred bucks to walk in, and it is so mobbed you can barely move. Obviously they know how to milk the place and make a lot of money with it.
So, again, what do I know. Other than it’s now nothing but a junky money machine that is so constantly advertised everywhere in our culture that people have mindlessly responded and willingly give the place whatever they ask, and for a poor offering.
So what do I know? I know that this was a real conversation that we had, and he would have loved to see the sorts of things that they once offered. Once they inspired. Now they sort of do nothing at all. He really doesn’t care about the place, and actually did not want to go there at all on our last Southern California visits. He much prefers Universal Studios. In fact, we’re going to LA again in April chiefly to see Harry Potter at Universal.
What a shame.
My kid doesn’t even want to bother with Disneyland. I do, but only because I remember what once was. I doubt he’ll ever care at all. When I was his age, going to Disneyland was a once yearly fantastic treat that got me so excited I couldn’t eat. Now it’s…not that.
But, hey. They’re making money, and that is all that matters. What difference does it make if you have turned your Plastic Fantastic into just Plastic? What difference does it make at all?
Ka-ching!