Woo-hoo! Get ready for the ride of your life
As Disney World in Florida turns 50, Chris Leadbeater charts the ups and downs (and loop-the-loops) of the world’s most thrilling theme parks
It would be a risk, in a time of ongoing chaos and confusion, to imbue a theme park’s birthday with too much significance. Covid is still afoot, travel restrictions are still in place and for all the bright news of the past fortnight, the US border will not reopen to British and European tourists for another five weeks or so (“early November” is mooted).
Nonetheless, it is tempting to view events in Florida over the past 48 hours as a sign that we are inching back towards normality. On Friday afternoon, one of the world’s biggest entertainment brands forged ahead with an anniversary that has been half a century in the making. Oct 1 marked an exact 50 years since the inauguration of Disney World in the humid flatlands of the Sunshine State – and out in Orlando, the tickertape cascaded.
There will have been sighs of relief in the executive offices and the staff access tunnels alike. Disney World may be one of the globe’s most popular attractions (it was the most visited holiday resort on the planet in 2018, pulling in 58million customers), but it has not been immune to the pandemic. When it shut its gates on March 15 last year – then kept them closed until the next July 11 – it was only the ninth unplanned closure in the park’s history. Of those previous occasions, seven were for hurricanes; the eighth was on 9/11. Here is a destination that stands at the forefront of the Disney empire – four distinct amusement parks, two water parks, 27 themed hotels, a shopping mall. And yet, for four months last year, it was as locked down as everyone and everywhere else. When it finally reopened, it did so at 25 per cent capacity – an unthinkable plunge in footfall and revenue.
The celebration that began two days ago will not recoup all those losses, but it should feel like a fresh start. One of the birthday novelties will be Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, a 3D ride based on the Pixar movie about a Parisian rat who dreams of being a chef. While that may not sound like the greatest innovation (the film came out in 2007), the fact that the attraction is a copy of the original, which was installed at Disneyland Paris in 2014, is a reminder, if one were needed, that Disney resorts are a multicontinental thing.
That the Ratatouille ride is at Epcot also feels pertinent. The second of Disney World’s four separate theme parks is arguably the wider resort’s soul – in that it can be traced back to the formative vision. When the idea was first discussed in the Sixties, Walt Disney saw the complex not as an enclave of rollercoasters and drop towers, but as the “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow” (EPCOT) – an “ideal city” of 20,000 residents, with commercial, residential, industrial and recreational zones, connected by a state-of-the-art transport system. The plan stalled with his death in December 1966.
Briefly rudderless, the company baulked at continuing with the scheme, and when his brother Roy took charge, the focus switched to building a bigger, better version of Disneyland, which had opened in California just over a decade earlier. The result, in 1971, was the more on-message Magic Kingdom, with its Cinderella Castle and Main Street USA. The Epcot that followed, in 1982, was a much-diluted version of the Sixties blueprint, with a “world’s fair” vibe, and educational rides about electricity and future communications. It has been remodelled further since. Its next new ride, coming in 2022, will be a Guardians of the Galaxy rollercoaster, slotted into what was once the “Universe of Energy” pavilion.
Whether as an imagined utopia or a Marvel tie-in, Epcot is a long way from the simple pleasures that Disney appreciated while watching his daughters Diane and Sharon on the carousels at Griffith Park in Los Angeles in the Thirties – and moulded into Disneyland, 25 miles south-east of the city in Anaheim, in 1955. But even then, he was only borrowing from a heritage of public entertainment that went back 500 years.
To be strict in definition, there is a difference between an “amusement park” (which is simply a collection of rides) and a “theme park” (which performs the same song and dance, but with an over-arching concept). But however you analyse it, the theme park concept originated in Europe. It emerged from travelling carnivals, circuses and country fairs – but it arguably solidified in Denmark, where Bakken (bakken.dk), in Klampenborg, can trace its lineage to the late 16th century. It was here, in a pretty location, eight miles north of Copenhagen, that spring water was discovered, on the edge of the Oresund strait, in 1583. This natural alternative to the unsanitary conditions of the capital was promptly marketed to paying customers. Over time, hawkers and stall-holders arrived, to amuse and feed the crowds. And although the site did not gain its most famous ride – the 47mph wood-carriage thrills of the Rutschenbanen (literally, “roller coaster”) – until 1932, Guinness World Records acclaims it as the foundation stone.
There would be others in its wake. The Wurstelprater (praterwien.com) – an emblem of
Vienna, with its elegant ferris wheel – came to be in 1766, when Josef II opened an imperial hunting ground to his subjects. Bakken’s better known Danish sibling, the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen (tivoli.dk), unveiled its merry-go-rounds and bandstands in 1843.
This was also the year that the UK’s amusement park acorn, Blackgang Chine, was planted. While you can make a case for Vauxhall Gardens in London having been the country’s first such playground (its firework displays and acrobats were born of the Restoration, in 1660), this little relic, near Ventnor on the Isle of Wight (blackgangchine. com), was a mould-breaker – a site purpose-built to draw visitors to the coast as the Victorian tourism boom took root. The tree grew, spread its branches – Dreamland,
in Margate, in 1880 (dreamland.co.uk); Blackpool Pleasure Beach (blackpoolpleasurebeach.com) in 1896.
By now, America was catching on. Lake Compounce (see panel) – founded, almost at the centre of Connecticut, in 1846 – claims to be the oldest amusement park in continuous operation in the US. True, it lacks the profile of Coney Island, the Brooklyn sideshow that began luring New Yorkers to the beach, via horse-drawn streetcar, in 1829 (though it had to wait until 1897 for the rides of Steeplechase Park to arrive). But then, neither has ever had the quirkiness of Santa Claus Land, the theme park devoted to Father Christmas that opened in the Indiana town of Santa Claus in 1946. It lives on, to an extent, in its descendent, Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari (holidayworld.com), whose sections serenade Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July – as well as the festive season.
The amusement park has expanded hugely in scope and scale since the Victorian era, but will always be underpinned by an unpretentious search for excitement that appeals to the toddler and teenager in us all. So perhaps it’s apt that another of the 50th birthday additions to Disney World is “KiteTails”, at Animal Kingdom. This wind-powered show features kite re-creations of various four-pawed Disney characters, Simba, Baloo, King Louie etc, afloat on the breeze – an antidote to pandemic stress in its child-like innocence.