The Collector's Encyclopedia of Disneyana
looks like a cool resource to have. It does focus a lot on the toys and collectibles from the 1930's, '40's and '50's. Tons of pictures with descriptions. Since it is a 1992 edition, i wouldn't use it for values, per se. But it will be fun to do a little window shopping with it! 
I just finished listening to Lou Mongello's Audio Guide to Walt Disney World: Main Street USA.
The Audio Guide clocks in at just under two hours (slightly longer than his weekly show) and you will love every second of it. The Audio Guide follows the same philosophy behind the WDW Radio Show. Lou wants nothing more than to help you have a great vacation. He shares the little details with you in hopes that you will slow down a bit, look up and take in everything around you.
The Art of Walt Disney World: From Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdom by Christopher Finch is one of the classic Disney books that gets revised fairly often. You have to be careful if you go to purchase one, since there are so many different types of editions. The newest edition to my collection is the Concise Edition. It is only 160 pages, whereas the revised edition is 506 pages.
For those of you who have been hanging around awhile, you know that The Disney Geeks love the Disney Mountains. In last week's poll question, Splash Mountain was voted the second favorite Disney mountain by you. We hit you with Expedition Everest first because of its win, but this week we bring you some tasty tidbits about the runner-up, Splash Mountain.
Michael Eisner became a proponent of building Splash Mountain the first time he saw the models that the Imagineers had built. It was a tenuous time for the Imagineers as their budget had been strangled by previous Disney bosses. The timely entrance of Eisner and his immediate buy-in to the Splash Mountain concept may have saved the Imagineers. See the quote from Disney War in our previous post, The Daily Figment 27. In fact, Eisner is credited with naming the attraction as well as suggesting it be presented as a mountain. Its working name was the Zip-A-Dee River Run. Marty Sklar recalls Eisner wanting to name the ride after the surprise hit Splash with Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah that Disney lucked into. He even suggested adding Hannah's mermaid character to the attraction. Imagineers waffled on the name but held fast to the long understood and respected "Darryl Hannah ruins any attraction....guaranteed" mentality that permeated flume ride construction methods since the early 1400's.
Eisner tested the patience of the Imagineers by bringing his teenage son to the initial showing of the Splash Mountain model, calling his son an 'expert on theme park rides'. He was, in fact, their target market. Eisner's 14-year old son bought in once he saw the ride had the world's longest flume drop. This record was previously held by Andre the Giant's bathroom. 
Hat tip to Boing Boing for this link to Wired.
Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, The Carousel of Progress and It's a Small World were all rides created by Disney for the 1964-1965 World's Fair and imported to Disneyland after the Fair. Disney also created a ride for Ford called The Magic Skyway, but Ford would not allow the ride to be relocated to Disneyland. Disney was able to bring the dinosaur animatronics to Disneyland to add to the railroad train scene after Tomorrowland for the Grand Canyon/Primeval World diorama.
If you read Jeff's article and then take a look at the article and videos on the Wired site, you can see the similarities between the General Motor's Futurama Pavilion from 1939 and the 1983 Horizons Pavilion at Epcot Center.
Both Horizons and Futurama had a positive message about the future and what we could expect. In 1939, GM was forecasting that everyone would own a car and that the National Highway System would provide effortless and congestion-free transportation. To a family coming out of the depression in 1939, this would be an extremely positive message about the future. If you remember Horizons, it still looked at technology, but with three distinct thoughts. There was the historical future with very Jules Verne-inspired ideas, a whimsical look at the future from the 1950's and 1960's and finally, a more more modern approach using technology as a communication tool. A lot of the ideas found in Horizons dealt with technology enriching our lives, mostly through video-chat but also with advances in agriculture and technology. Life in space, undersea and throughout the earth shows that we still need technology to bring us all together.
Finally, let's take another look at 2719 Hyperion. Jeff wrote a post back in early 2007 about his dreams for a New Horizon Pavilion. Enjoy!
Futurama graphics appearing on this post courtesy of 2719 Hyperion.
Visit The Journal of Ride Theory and Dannys Land. Dan was interviewed by Wire for the Futurama article.
Here is one that my wife won in a multi-book auction. Obviously geared towards the Disney Geek-In-Training, it has over 900 entries, most of which are fully illustrated.
- Your "port of entry" for Walt Disney World adventures. Monorail trains, ferry boats and motor trams carry arriving guests from this area across and around the Seven Seas Lagoon to the Magic Kingdom. Ticket booths for the Magic Kingdom, Guided Tours, Guest Relations, Public Lockers and Lost & Found are located here, as is the "pet motel" - the Walt Disney World Kennel Club.6. Transportation & Ticket Center
--p. 11 The Story of Walt Disney World
The Transportation & Ticket Center was created with the intent of allowing day visitors and resort guests to leave their car while visiting the Magic Kingdom or while on a week-long vacation. You park and use Disney transportation for your entire stay! No need to drive anywhere. Of course, if you visit any internet forum the Disney transportation vs. car debate has pundits on both sides.
As often as not, the rumors always surface about expanding the monorail line to the Disney Studios and the Animal Kingdom. When the Epcot loop was built, the running total per mile was estimated at one million dollars. Wow. That's a lot of cheese. Originally, the monorail was planned to travel to the Lake Buena Vista area, or the Downton Disney Marketplace as we know it today. As what frequently happens, the best-laid plans of mouse and men go astray. This plan was shelved after the energy crisis on the late 1970's.
> What is the most significant architectural feature of WDW?
The castle, of course. It's the thing people want to see.
> What is the weakest Epcot country?
Despite my instinct to say American Adventure, which I find pedestrian and think the design of the building is horrid (I'm also allergic to the Voices of Liberty), I admit that people like it, so I vote for Italy, which offers a lot of... well, nothing, for everyone. It wasn't even finished, and boy is it obvious! UK has a similar problem, in addition to being an aesthetic outlier, due to the fact that the bulk of the structures are around you the minute you enter it. Since the cash to build that Music Hall behind the park in the back of the pavilion never appeared, it's never really felt whole.
OK, let's be honest. The Africa pavilion SUCKS and needs to be demolished.
> What is your favorite Disney guilty pleasure?
The possibilities! Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo? Monkeys Go Home? The Gnome Mobile? Return of Flubber? What to choose?
I admit I'm at something of a loss on this since my definition of a "guilty pleasure” is rather obtuse, so I'm going to go ahead and say it'd be Maelstrom. The attraction ought to be awful - it has no cohesion, no pace, is too short, has terrible writing, and an awful last scene, but I'm happy to see her every time. For those of you who usually run through the theatre, stay for the movie next time: the nonsense of the attraction is actually extended by the film, where we are told, through Soviet style film syntax, that Norwegians flying a helicopter is the same thing as Vikings rowing a boat!
> Where do you spend most of your time online when in the Disney-sphere? (ed. note--this was a clear cry for attention from Imaginerding.com)
These days I just kind of make the circuit through my blogs and log off, minus an occasional stop at MouseBits or Jim Hill. I can't deal with forums anymore, since the airing of bottomless opinions is pretty tiresome to me by now. I'd much rather be drawing or watching a film or whatever it is I actually do with my spare time. =)
> You are the CEO and you have to cut one division: film, animation, parks, music, ABC, or ESPN. Where do you start cutting?
Jeez. I'd just LOVE to cut ESPN, being an eternal enemy of sports, but I know money comes in there. I'd like to be wise and cut film, since Disney hasn't produced anything good in years, but I understand that some people actually liked whatever than fantasy film with the big cat, possibly a leopard, and oh yeah....that other one with the guy with eyeliner battling Cthulu. Yeah. So that could be a bad idea.
Here's a radical idea: cut the parks and sell them back to WDI. Betcha maintenance standards wouldincrease!
> Do you have any money we can borrow or have?
No, but I do have a basket of unclaimed Halloween candy, mostly mini M&Ms and Mary Janes...
LOL. Aren't I supposed to be the starving artist and you the Lauded Librarian? ;) And Company, of course...
> What do you consider the most historically significant or defining moment in Disney history?
Well I can't really say I have an opinion on the other parts of Disney history since I'm not, nor do I claim to be, an expert on those, but I think the biggest thing in themed design history is probably Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln - the first convincing but fake person ever. That was a real moment where WED showed the world something new.
> How do you feel about Disney's stance to remove Song of the South and other period specific pieces from its association?
Well first of all I understand that I apparently have a thicker skin than most when dealing with racial issues, but I really think the hoopla surrounding Song of the South is grossly overvalued. The animated sequences and James Baskin are wonderful, but the film is a crashing bore. There's live action and animation combined in Three Caballeros also, why doesn't anyone care about that?
I guess I really don't understand what's so terrible about the film. A snotty young white kid learns to be a better person through the cultural experience of the Southern black folks. Uncle Remus is one of the few significant positive black images presented on screen in the 1940's. He may be a fictional stereotype, but he has heart and integrity.
I think it's sad that there isn't a better rounded black onscreen image to cull from in the era; between the extremes of Stepin Fetchit and Paul Robeson, there wasn't a lot. So I understand that the reason to attack Remus is that there is no other representation of that kind of figure around; white characters and white images abound in cinema, but black figures are the narrowest margin until the late 50's. Still, I don't think attacking a generally positive, moral, serious and integral black character when his only other competition is Stepin Fetchit or Eddie Anderson isn't really reclaiming much ground.
Is the world ready for Song of the South again? I don't know. I don't hear much apologizing for Haddie McDaniel's character in Gone With the Wind these days, but then again, that film may finally have been absorbed in the cultural ether of banality from which it emerged in 1939. I was recently watching King Vidor's really excellent 1929 film "Hallelujah!", which is a morality play set in the world of Southern black culture, music and religion. Everyone's still apologizing for that very intelligent and naturalistic depiction of a certain era, so Gone With the Wind may be an abnormality.
I think when Disney finally lets Song of the South out again, the world will collectively go "Oh... that's what were upset about all this time?", shrug, and go on. It really is not a good movie.
> If you could change one thing about a Disney Movie, what movie would it be and what would you change?
I had to think long and hard on this one, but here she is:
When I was a kid seeing Hunchback of Notre Dame in a theater is probably the key thing that sparked my interest in much of what obsesses me today. That first shot, where the camera rushes towards the cathedral through the clouds with the chorus chanting in Latin and the bells tolling, floored my eleven year old self and I still haven't really recovered from the power of that moment. That's probably the film that made me aware that people can *choose* to do things in films, that they don't just happen, and that every moment, especially in animation, is there for a very specific reason.
OK, so that having been said, Hunchback is a film uneasily perched on the cusp of greatness; its' need to still be the 1996 Disney summer blockbuster means the seriousness and artistic integrity of the film occasionally succumbs to nonsense. I don't have a big problem with the Festival of Fools being silly, nor do I have a problem with the Gargoyles being silly, but their song and occasional interjections, especially in the otherwise splendid "Heaven's Light", is too much.
So I say: scale back the gargoyles a bit, and the film is really way beyond Walt's standard. It's probably the most artistically significant film Disney made during its' second major animation era.
Passport Recommended Reading List:
We would like to take a moment and thank Foxxfur for her contributions to our site. We are going to make a formal anouncement about her post on Imaginerding's sister site, The Minute-By-Minute Guide, but we felt like we should tell everyone about it now. She has volunteered to write posts for the blog about how a local sees the Walt Disney World theme parks. We are very excited about this opportunity!
Don't forget to stop by her site and leave her some Disney Geek love.
Book Review
This release was heralded as a true, in-depth look at Walt Disney's life. Not quite the glossed-over corporate biography by Bob Thomas nor as dark and mis-leading as Hollywood's Dark Prince. It has also been compared to The Animated Man by Michael Barrier. 
Disney That Never Was: The Stories and Art of Five Decades of Unproduced Animation looks like it is an an absolutely amazing book. The book is filled with concept artwork and the stories behind the stories never told. It will take a long three-day weekend to take it all in. This would make the perfect Christmas present for any good animation buff.
There hasn't been a flurry of Book Updates in awhile because I haven't wanted to inundate you with so many posts (especially with all of the great Geek Links). I have about 15 books my wife got me over the past two weeks, so some updating is in order! appeared in 2002 with a slew of other Disney-management style titles. Eisner was at the top of his game in the mid to late 1990's and everyone was trying to cash in. This edition is the 2007 updated version. In addition to Disney, the book also covers the Men's Wearhouse, The Cheesecake Factory, Griffin Hospital and others.
The day after Thanksgiving is typically one of the busiest shopping days of the year. is a two-hour long DVD about the history, construction, secrets and general awesomeness that is Walt Disney World. Hands down, it is one of the best video-related productions on WDW that we have seen. Each park is covered, including a lot of behind-the-scenes information and construction. Anyone who has visited WDW will enjoy this DVD. Trust us, you will learn something by watching it. And besides, what else are you going to do for two hours?
We continue our series about disussing the 1976 map of Walt Disney World found on pages 10 and 11 of The Story of Walt Disney World.
Before opening, Dick Nunis fought for a $400,000 wave machine for the Seven Seas Lagoon that would lap waves on the shore of the beach at the Polynesian. Dick hoped that professional surfers would be able to put on shows and that children and body surfers would be able to enjoy the inland ocean experience. The wave machine worked, although it mostly eroded the Polynesian's beach. As a side note, Dick Nunis would ride the first wave at the opening of Typhoon Lagoon, almost 17 years later.
Since October 26, 1971, the Electrical Water Pageant has made the nightly trek across the Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake. It was also the inspiration for the Main Street Electrical Parade, which premiered at Disneyland in 1972 and the Magic Kingdom in 1977.
Additional Geek Resources:
--pp. 29, 75, 78, Since the World Began
-p. 92, Window on Main Street: 35 Years of Creating Happiness at Disneyland Park
The Disneylands That Never Were arrived last week. It looks like it will be a fun read. According to the jacket, it purports to discuss the rides, attractions and shows that never quite made it off of the drawing board.
Rock Band has just been released for next-gen video game consoles. Not quite as hyped as Halo 3 (yes, we did Finish the Fight!), Rock Band is being anticipated by more gamers simply because the play is so much more intuitive and easy to grasp. A good friend of mine bought it today and gave it two very sore thumbs up (and eight sore fingers)!
and Guitar Hero II, they did a little work for the Mouse.
The winner of our latest poll was Expedition Everest with 43% of the votes. Splash Mountain came in a close second with 40%.
In addition to being short on thrill rides, Animal Kingdom was short on attractions around the whole park. The first mega attraction to hit the ground was a planned dragon coaster. However, when Imagineers dug a little deeper, they returned to the roots that made the parks resonate with so many. They turned to the concept of the mountain as the attraction. The team project leader, Joe Rohde, obviously felt a strong attachment to the mountain based attraction concept:The mountain is a very, very potent mythological symbol, a symbol that if you experience this, something will happen to you, you will change.Two very's. Now that's potent! In true Imagineering fashion, Disney went ultra potent with their symbols. Mount Everest and the Yeti combined to create a large, fast thrill ride with a few surprises and a close encounter with a very un-Disney like beast. There is nothing tame about this Yeti.
To create a credible environment, Imagineers, along with scientist and biologists, made several research trips to the Himalayas. They concentrated on places where the Yeti lore was historically focused. They talked to locals, immersed themselves in the local mythology, and ate Himalayan dirt. (Ed. note- I made that last part up. I am sure they ate something on their travels, but I doubt it was dirt.)
> What is your favorite place to be at WDW?
Ah-HA! Trickier question. On the beach of the Polynesian in the late summer afternoon, World Showcase on a cold winter day before Christmas, Downtown Disney Marketplace very early in the morning and in Caribbean Plaza at dusk.
> What is your favorite restaurant?
Before quality began to slip there I loved Spoodles. Then it was Citricos, still a very special eatery to me. I was utterly bowled over by Jiko earlier this year and went back in short order. The quality of the food and the expertise of the wait staff really staggered me.
Did you know that Disney doesn't know how to brew coffee? Places like Boma and Kona Cafe offer French press pots of coffee for an OK price, but if you ask them to brew the coffee to your specifications, they'll fight you on it. Disney trains the staff to brew the coffee six minutes, which will turn even the finest, lightest roast beans to sludge (by contrast, when I brew coffee in a press pot I wait 3 minutes maximum). So I was staggered when the Jiko staff asked me how long to brew the Kenya AA in the press pot, I asked for what they thought, and they responded *two minutes*. As a result of this Jiko is the only place I've ever had a properly prepared African coffee.
Kona Cafe's press pot is made with a Kona blend with a surprisingly high amount of real Kona in it, one of the most valued beans in the world. It's worth your $6 if you can get them to prepare it right!
> What is the first thing you want to do on your next trip?
To Magic Kingdom? Ride Haunted Mansion.. see Country Bear Jamboree... walk down Main Street. Climb the treehouse.
> What is your favorite fireworks show?
I don't like anything loud so, as you can imagine my favorite fireworks show is one not seen and not heard. I run to Impressions de France if Illuminations is coming up.
Despite this, I cried my way right through Disneyland's Remember... Dreams Come True (those parts that weren't Wishes, of course).
> Where did you develop your love of Disney?
Walt Disney World, undoubtedly. Disney Afternoon helped me get my fix when we were back in Connecticut, especially Tale Spin and Gargoyles and Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers. Later it was Disney Channel and Vault Disney. Finally I just moved to Florida.
> If you had to choose parks or movies, which would it be?
Umm... is there a third option? Like death or something?
> Which character do you associate with the most?
As I've said, Minnie, when I'm feeling playful and happy. Marian, when I'm feeling romantic or sensual.
The other character I love is SEGA's Amy Rose, who represents, I feel, my more aggressive, competitive side.
They're my girls, and they make me happy.
> Does any forensic evidence exist linking you to the Kennedy assassination?
No, but I've always wanted to restage the Kennedy assassination in the Magic Kingdom: the embankment replacing 20K could be the Grassy Knoll; next to that, between Mad Tea Party and Toontown, is a big green fence... and what's right across the way? The
Speedway.
Actually I once wrote a short film where James Stewart arrives in a courtroom to make the case linking the Kennedy assassination with MAPO and the Hall of Presidents, since the real presidents are actually MAPO robots manufactured by Communists... shot in
Oliver Stone type nonsense-o-vision!
> Would you make any major changes to the current design of any of the parks?
I wish Splash Mountain wasn't in Frontierland, perhaps an aesthetic link between Fantasyland and Liberty Square... no, sorry, that sucks now that I think about it... the best place would be for it way behind Big Thunder, back in Tom Sawyer's wilderness...
I'd also like to make MGM's layout less obnoxiously confusing.
Passport to Dreams Recommended Reading List, Part Two:
Next Week: The last and final chapter--for now!
