Disneyland’s Amusing Ancestry Excursion

Disneyland can trace its lineage to several sources, and here is a preview of what we will see on this excursion, as we examine those sources and what they provided in the grand scheme of things. The pleasure parks of Europe and America provided an answer to the alienation and crowding of city life, because nature was seen as curative. They functioned as a respite or compensation for the crowding and suspicion present in cities. Tivoli Gardens was especially encouraging for Walt, because he saw in Tivoli a vision of beauty and possiblility. Ancient open spaces mixed carnival and commerce, imparted a liminal and leveling effect, and reversed the rigid patterns of everyday life.

Exhibitions on the other hand, celebrated and intensified the city, technology, and the future. Amusement parks were a mixture of all of these: affording communitas, along with commerce; fantasy and escape, along with fun. The Chicago Railroad Fair highlighted the importance of theming, while the Golden Gate International Exposition provided the theater and enchantment of the Thorne Room Miniatures whose perfect world, was able to be perfectly controlled.

Los Angeles and the surrounding environs brought the promise of eternal spring and architectural fantasy creations in abundance, accessible from one’s own automobile, while research field trips to Chicago and other cities offered other important inspirations.

Disneyland’s amusing ancestry sowed the seeds that would later blossom fully, and continue to flower magically over the decades, in the unique creation that is Disneyland.

Historical Precedents of Disneyland

Open Spaces as Entertaining Places—Pleasure Parks

Take Me to the Fair

** Amusement Parks
** Coney Island’s Influence

More Immediate Influences on Disney

** Los Angeles Streetscapes
** Take Me to the Fair Redux
** Research Field Trips

Before our excursion officially begins, we will begin with a look the word "amusement," to set the stage, because the word has an interesting ancestry and relatives as well. The word "amusement" means “the state of being amused, entertained or pleased” or “something that amuses, entertains or pleases.” The word “amuse” means “to occupy in an agreeable, pleasing or entertaining fashion. To cause to laugh or smile by giving pleasure.” Archaically, amuse means to delude or deceive, and comes from the late French muser “to stupefy,” and from Latin ad muser, to stare stupidly (AHD, 2000c, p. 62). The word muse means “to be absorbed in one’s thoughts; engage in meditation, to consider or say thoughtfully; a state of meditation” (p. 1158). In Greek mythology, the muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and the Goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne, and each of the muses presided over a different art or science. So a muse can also mean a guiding spirit, a source of inspiration, or a poet ( p. 1158).

Amusement comes from the Indo-European root, men I: have one’s mind roused; hence both to love and be mad; also to think, remember; show, warn, foretell, and other extensions. Words that derive from it in addition to amusement are the Sanskrit words mantra, meaning prayer, counsel, vedic hymns, and manas mind. Many Greek words come from men I as well: mantis—seer, matos—automatic, menthenein—learn mathema—things learned; science, and maenad—the orgiastic worshippers of Dionysus, manic—excessive attraction or compulsion. Other Greek relatives are -mancy—to show, foretell, mnemosyne— patroness of memory and her daughters the muses, as well as amnesia, and anamnesis—forget and remember. Latin links are: Amusia, amuse, amusement, musaicum, mosaic— late Latin, meaning related to the muses, as well as mentis—and mentem, for mental and mention, meminisse remember, monere, show, monitum—warn momento—reminder of human end, as well as monster deemed a premonition, and monument—public showing, and mentor— show how, which was also the name of Athena when she “mentored” Telemachus in the Odyssey (Shipley, 1984, p. 245). Going back to one's roots can lead to amazing discoveries—and so now let us bid adieu to amusement's roots and consider Disneyland’s roots, its ancestry.

Historical Precedents of Disneyland

Disneyland can be seen as the ultimate outdoor entertainment experience. Disneyland was so successful that within the first six months of it’s opening on July 17, 1955, a million people had already passed through its gates. In its first decade, one quarter of the United States population had visited Disneyland, and in its 50^th year, over 500 million people had visited Disneyland.

Nothing else was like Disneyland when it was created, and yet, it has an amusing ancestry. In this section we will take a brief look at Disneyland’s relatives, and see the family resemblances. Although Disney was the first to build a theme park in 1955 in Anaheim, Disneyland's lineage stems from several different sources. Disneyland can trace its lineage from the ancient open spaces as entertaining places of antiquity to the pleasure parks of the modern era, such as Tivoli Gardens in Copenahagen, Vauxhall Gardens in England, and Central Park in New York. Other ancestors are fairs and expositions—most importantly the World’s Fairs and amusement parks around the turn of the Twentieth Ccntury. More immediate influences were the 1948 Railroad Fair, Hollywood and fanciful Los Angeles streetscapes, and Los Angeles itself.

Open Spaces as Entertaining Places—Pleasure Parks

According to Nye (1981), the predecessors of amusement parks were urban parks and expositions. Parks are urban phenomena; they are an antidote to the suspicion, selfishness and isolation bred by cities. In Europe, in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, “pleasure gardens” such as Jardin de Tivoli in Paris and Vauxhall Gardens in London, “had tree-lined paths, refreshment stands, and fountains and featured sports activities, musical concerts, social dancing, balloon ascensions, parachute jumps, games of chance, and primitive rides.” (Weinstein, 1992, p. 133). Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, originally called “Tivoli and Vauxhall” is the oldest existent amusement park, which opened in August of 1843. Walt Disney visited Tivoli Gardens in 1950 and was especially influenced by what a beautiful place it was, especially its lights at night. He visited Tivoli Gardens several times after that, too. These pleasure gardens had all sorts of entertainments as well as refreshments and places for people to relax: “these highly theatrical settings projected their own utopian vision: a new harmonious sense of community built around the consumption of pleasure” (Harris, 1997, p. 20).

In America, historically parks are tied to the Romantic Era which saw nature as a curative and educational force. The creation of parks was a reaction to crowded cities of the Eighteenth Century. An example of this is New York’s Central Park, which sought to provide a “harmonizing influence” an escape from the city, a passive place where loftier and more cultivated desires could be cultivated without boisterous fun and rough sports.

While modern pleasure parks were compensations for industrialization and urbanization, open spaces for recreation have existed since antiquity. From the bazaars and markets of the Near and Middle East, to the Olympic games of ancient Greece; from the circuses, chariot races and gladiatorial games in the amphitheaters of ancient Rome, to the carnivals and festivals of the Middle Ages: “fairs were ancient marketplaces and the notion of devoting pieces of land to active, popular, fee-paying public pleasures also goes far back into time” (Harris, 1997, p. 20). Some of these open spaces provided periodic entertainment, and commerce inevitably surrounded them all. The marketplace influence served as a democratizing one, because markets were in- between places where hierarchy was leveled to a degree. [The "Antistructure" excursion located in New Orleans Square/Adventureland explores this in Bakhtin’s discussion of carnival.]

According to Sorkin, (1992), garden cities inspired the “park in theme park” (p. 212). Garden cities were a concept developed around the turn of the Twentieth Century, and ideologically, they were to be small cities, where traffic was strictly regulated. Garden cities were to be located on the perimeters of existing metropolises and were to function as an escape from tension and overcrowding.

Take Me to the Fair

Expositions or World’s Fairs by contrast took advantage of the urban environment for commercial, educational, and cultural purposes. They were an idealization of the city instead of an escape from it. Neil Harris (1997) speculates that perhaps it all began with a fair:

American expositions provided visions of a higher life set amid heavenly landscapes. Enveloping in their scale, their novelty, their string of surprises, they punctuated their decades like giant exclamation marks . . . . They helped spawn a series of cultural institutions from museums of art and science to amusement parks and convention centers . . . . pilgrimage sites in an emerging tourist culture, they provoked an astonishing volume of souvenirs and memorabilia. Above all, they performed as sites for self- discovery, camp meetings for a dominating middle class. (p. 19)

While Europe had many World’s Fairs in the mid 1800s, most notably the Great Exposition in London in 1851 with its Crystal Palace, America’s first major fair was the Philadephia Centennial Exposition of 1876, which not only celebrated the centennial but was “exhibiting arts, manufactures and products of soil and mine to the world” (Nye, 1981, p. 64).

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, celebrating the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival was the most influential World’s Fair. Seen by some as “the dawn of a new era,” The Columbian Exposition was the first World’s Fair to actually have a Midway Plaissance, and a substantial part of the Fair’s tremendous success was derived from this mile-long corridor of private concessions, rides, side shows, exotic international entertainments and the first Ferris Wheel, which loomed over the whole affair. “The midway was energetic, amusing, titillating, and plain fun” (Nye, p. 64). White City, as the exposition was also known, set the stage and influenced the amusement parks at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. In 1901, Hawthorn observed that the elaborate illusions of the midways were so successful because “instead of viewing a performance on a stage, we ourselves are participants in the scene” (Harris, 1997, p. 27).

One of these elaborate illusions was called Hales Tours, a precursor of flight simulators and "Star Tours." Hales Tours built upon the success of the first film showed publically—the Lumiere brothers’ L'Arrive d'un Train en Gare, (The Arrival of a train at La Ciotat Station), in December 1895. Hales Tours showed travel films in train cars, by mocking up railway carriages “on springs surrounded by a giant screen displaying the scenery from a train in America” (K.X. Jenkins, 1991, online) http://www.missinglinkclassichorror.co.uk/train.htm Sometimes located in midways, they comprised “the largest chain of theatres exclusively showing films before 1906” providing "passengers" an experience and spectacle, as “films (of train journeys) were accompanied ‘by the rocking of the car and the sound of railway clatter’, and a 'conductor' would issue tickets. For Hale, the cinematic experience served to not only provide a 'series of views' but a complete recreation of the experience of separation that characterised modernity’ " (Walsh, 1999). An exerpt from a 1909 program reads:

Hale's Marvellous Tours of the World are the last word in the practical use of the animated picture as an educative entertainment. The splendid combination of the moving pictures and the mechanical and mental simulation of the swiftly flying express train from which the apparently moving landscapes and interesting places are seen, gives all the sensations and pleasures of an actual visit to the places shown on the screen by the perfected art of the photographer and developer. (Manchester, 1909) [See PDF] http://manchesterhistory.net/whitecity/hales.html

Continued on page 2