Castle in the middle. Railroad traipsing around. Man-made “mountains” concealing family rides. A meandering waterway through an American frontier landscape. The periodic hoot of a steamboat whistle.
That’s the formula that made Disney parks great. It’s repeated at Disneyland in California, Magic Kingdom in Florida, Disneyland Paris, and Tokyo Disneyland—they all establish and celebrate the mythology of America with the same building blocks of theme park iconography.
Well, they were the formula.
After July 6, Disney’s basic all-American theme park recipe will be gone forever at Magic Kingdom near Orlando, the most popular theme park in the world.
Riverboat, island, and more to close forever
While the drastic change was teased last summer in a shady way, on Tuesday Disney officially announced the final removal of the Rivers of America waterway, the Liberty Belle paddle steamboat (which opened with the park in 1971), and Tom Sawyer Island (1973) with its caves, trails, and fort—Disney institutions all. On July 7, they will be just a memory of a memory.
It’s a lot to lose at once—what will Disney be without its steamboat whistle?—representing most of the northwest quadrant of Magic Kingdom.
Rivers of America and the adjacent Frontierland are the most explicit representations of American promise that the Disney parks offer, tying together the mythology of cowboys, pioneers, Native Americans, the literature of Mark Twain, and the mystique of the American West.
In a stroke of irony that’s wholly appropriate to the way things historically tend to go in the United States, the prototypical pioneer landscape is being replaced by . . . the automobile.
Piston Peak, a zone themed to the animated Cars franchise that will contain a giant rally race-themed thrill ride, is being built in place of the soothing Americana.
The depressing symbolism of the change seems to have escaped the notice of Disney executives.
Why is Disney demolishing Rivers of America?
Disney has not told us why it thinks that bulldozing the area is necessary, but educated guessers say the cost of maintenance, especially when compared to the income that can be generated from the same real estate, sealed its fate.
Walt Disney, who introduced Disneyland in 1955, intentionally put the park in theme park, making sure his creation was stocked with plenty of pleasing panoramas and strolling grounds, much like Copenhagen’s calming Tivoli Gardens, which his designers openly emulated. Walt would even spend his anniversaries with his wife on the riverboat he built in his California park.
Back then, living in the past was considered a virtue. Disneyland’s appeal was built on it.
But the masters of modern Disney’s balance sheets prefer to calculate the income potential of every square foot, and a walk-through island that can only be reached by intermittent raft ferry service doesn’t make enough cash to earn its keep, or so it’s assumed. Atmosphere is optional, but ROI is mandated.
Never mind that for many guests, nostalgic atmosphere is a principal reason to go to Disney to begin with.
In the 1970s, guests raised on TV westerns were more likely to take the time to explore the trails and man-made caves and simulated frontier fort of Tom Sawyer Island. But today, visitors are more likely to spend every free minute queueing up for more high-concept attractions, and Disney’s Lightning Lane upcharged ride scheduling system has squeezed most of the idle free time out of vacationers’ schedules.
The portents of abandonment have been accumulating. Guest-powered canoes and towering keelboat service around the island were terminated decades ago. Aunt Polly’s, which in the 1970s was a lazy place to grab fried chicken on the island and watch the boats ply the water, hasn’t operated as a full restaurant in nearly 25 years and its seating area (pictured below) has been mostly abandoned.
The island and its riverboat remained for so long because, at heart, Disney is a company that banks on nostalgia. Much of the entertainment the company produces, from movie remakes and sequels to theme park rides, exist to stoke and monetize warm feelings for beloved characters, stories, and settings.
So it’s frankly astonishing to watch Disney flee so abruptly and definitively from the deliberate placemaking that established its theme parks as the world’s most popular. Rather than come up with a fun new use for the area—at the Paris park, a roller coaster romps around the riverboat-encircled island—Disney will simply destroy it.
It’s also incredible to see a move like this announced just 2 weeks after Disney’s head-to-head rival Universal Orlando opened a $7 billion theme park that has gathered wide acclaim for prowess in design and atmosphere.
Very few details about the Cars ride that will replace the area have been announced, although Imagineers did tell some journalists that they intend to mitigate the expected noise with additional plantings.
This year, Disney has been busy closing other attractions that guests used to view as institutions, among them MuppetVision 3-D, which plays its final performance June 7 after more than three decades; It’s Tough to Be a Bug!, which closed in March after more than a quarter century; and DinoLand USA, an entire land at Disney’s Animal Kingdom that is being wholly changed.
Those were blows to many fans (including composer Andrew Barth Feldman, who wrote this catchy music video ode to the Muppets). But as good as the new addition has the potential to be, for those fans, the loss to nostalgia is incalculable. A Disney castle park without an all-American waterway and steamboat breaking up the thrill rides is considered by many Disney die-hards to be anathema. The erasure, it’s feared, will move Magic Kingdom further from guests’ childhood associations. The change threatens to make Magic Kingdom more like every other amusement park—or at best, more similar to Disney California Adventure park, which is widely said to suffer from a lack of plausible atmosphere.
Would it be so hard for Disney to put Cars a few hundred yards away and retain this under-built vista for the sake of breathing room, heritage, and honoring the DNA of the company’s parks? The company isn’t talking.
Although the Florida resort is rife with unbuilt acreage for expansion, the company reportedly doesn’t want to spend the millions of dollars it would take to prepare additional land for development for this Cars project.
From government to national parks to entertainment, Americans are living through an age of vandalism of their institutions by people who would rather destroy them than work to reform them.
The Magic Kingdom that the world grew up with is about to lose one of its essential experiences. When you’re in the nostalgia business, that’s a dangerous thing to blow up.
