Tokyo Disneyland

Urayasu, Chiba, Japan – Monday, June 27th, 2011

My visit to Tokyo Disneyland is tinged with a slight feeling of guilt. In 2011, shortly after the park reopened following damage sustained by one of the largest earthquakes to ever hit Japan, and with the Fukushima nuclear disaster still unfolding every day. These events were not only a stark reminder of “the world of today” outside the gates that I was privileged to leave behind, but also, due to the accompanying tourist slump, led to the realization that the seemingly ideal conditions I got to enjoy at the (once) most popular theme park on earth were made possible because of the catastrophic humanitarian situation unfolding elsewhere. 

Of course there was little need to actually feel guilty, since at that point in time the stress was on the Japanese economy, including its tourist sector, needing all the help it could get. But in traumatic times people want to unify around shared experiences, and an escape to a theme park becomes a symbol of hope and reassurance that exists outside the bounds of ordinary discourse, lest that symbolism starts to shatter. So it made me feel just a bit guilty, with everything else happening in the background, to not only take the resources to go to Tokyo Disneyland, but to come away from it just to say that this theme park is honestly kinda shit.

In my view, Tokyo Disneyland is bottom-ranked of the Disney “castle” theme parks, and second-to-last out of the entire collection, clearly besting only the Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris. The park looks a lot like one of those bad “Asian knock-off Disneyland parks,” and that’s because in some ways… that’s actually what it is!

Licensed by the Oriental Land Company, Disney only agreed to the deal because they were hurting for cash while trying to finish Epcot, which opened the year before Tokyo Disneyland’s debut in 1983. WED Enterprises kept all their A-list talent with experience from the previous two Anaheim and Orlando theme parks busy on Epcot, while a less-experienced team was assigned to Tokyo, asked to design a park that was a mix of copied elements from Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom but with little understanding of the philosophy that made those parks actually work. In essence, the same process used by any number of fake Disney-inspired copycat parks out there, only bearing the imprimatur of the real D.

The result is a park full of awkward “knock-off-isms”: weird juxtapositions and sightlines from reshuffled elements, a focus on operations and capacity over show quality, vestigial features copied from elsewhere that have lost their original purpose, and a general lack of care, cleverness, and charm that indicates real thought went into the design. The challenges are most obvious right from the entrance, a copy version of Main Street U.S.A. bizarrely renamed World Bazaar. A steel and glass canopy was added overhead, ostensibly to protect pedestrians from the rain, although it introduces multiple unfavorable consequences: 

  • It forces the compression of the land to keep it all under a manageable roof size.
  • It still ate most of the land’s budget, leaving a Main Street without detail, grandeur, or even street curbs.
  • It creates an echoing din that kills any attempt at good music and sound design for arriving guests.
  • It’s fugly.

And as if the design wasn’t bad enough, look at a map and that dumb, thematically mismatched name really seals it as exactly what you’d expect from a “cheap Disney knock-off” park… and frankly, there are real fake Disney parks out there that have a better entry zone than this.

From that low, the rest of the park represents somewhat of an improvement, mostly by virtue of having seen more updates since the original 1983 design after Disney got serious about the potential of Tokyo Disneyland. But that also means the boundaries between the old and the new become more conspicuous, and the obviously band-aided and patchworked park suffers from an inconsistent identity as a result. Unlike Hong Kong Disneyland, where the biggest issue was that it opened too small, Tokyo Disneyland was cursed with scale, leaving the sprawling park with infrastructural issues that can’t be ameliorated just by building beyond the original berm.

One of those issues is that the park was built almost completely flat. Other theme parks use gentle elevation changes to create sight blocks and moments of reveal, and to prevent a distant horizon point to create the impression of an endless mob of people. Tokyo Disneyland not only is mostly on level, but it also intentionally built its pathways to be as wide and unadorned as possible, apparently to accommodate crushing holiday crowds and large parades. An agoraphobe’s nightmare. The themed environmental design suffers as well, as the facades have been pushed far apart from each other with little sense of depth or intimacy, often functioning more like themed backdrops at the borders of the endless paved seas. Despite having lands themed to the old west or the uncharted jungle, natural landscape design is relatively minimal compared to other parks, often relegated to planters and small tree clusters along the edges when needed to conceal buildings or transition spaces. And those massive midways themselves are, inexplicably, painted in flat, textureless mono-colors that correspond to the land identification guide, as if the designers literally referenced a Disneyland fun map for their color studies.

While expansions have improved things (and this analysis is obviously from well before the Fantasyland expansion was ever a thing) Tokyo Disneyland feels hopelessly stuck in the 80’s, the Disney theme park equivalent of one of those old dinosaurs of a shopping mall. Even if some of the store tenants have tried to update to the 21st century, it only underscores the anachronism of the whole thing. Not aiding these perceptions of outdatedness is the fact that OLC has also resisted many of Disney’s initiatives to update insensitive cultural content from many of their older attractions, reasoning that concerns around representation and inclusion aren’t as important for a Japanese audience, which… isn’t how that works… but at least western fans can continue to celebrate these parks for having more orderly queues and parade crowds?

For a lot of people Tokyo Disneyland offers a specific kind of 80’s nostalgia that’s not so different from the eras of 50’s nostalgia or even turn-of-the-century nostalgia that have informed so much of the Disney parks’ identity. Even old shopping malls still have dedicated connoisseurs working to preserve their memories. I might have been more amenable to the quirkiness of this particular kind of nostalgic character if Tokyo Disneyland didn’t also demand so much, overwhelm so much, intimidate so much, with its huge size and complex crowd dynamics. Nostalgia is always better in small doses (and without the lingering taint of racism that usually goes with those older eras).

But certainly my explanation of Tokyo Disneyland is missing many of the details that have won it legions of fans, which I suspect may be found more within the “soft tissue” of the park: the characters, shows, parades, foods, and the hyper-local park culture, which I’ll admit were not my main focus. And some of the individual rides are pretty good… but let’s not get carried away just yet. That’s what the rest of this review is for.

Adventureland

Basically a version of the Magic Kingdom’s Adventureland, but with a section of New Orleans Square around Pirates of the Caribbean, primarily to include the Blue Bayou restaurant popular on the Disneyland version. Equating New Orleans and the jungle together in the same “Adventure” category is one of those things that I can’t help but feel might indicate a slightly problematic intent, even if it will probably be that way forever so long as pink stucco and wrought iron next to tropical palm planters continues to look cute to Japanese teen girls.

Pirates of the Caribbean

Halfway between the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom versions, but the pirates still chase the women on turntables in this version. (Japan’s gender gap also continues to rank at or near the bottom among developed economies, so there’s that.) Oddly, the detail I most remember about this version was it was the first time I took notice of the then-recently added fog screen where Davy Jones appears and, in response to the haunting refrain of “dead men tell no tales…”, says:

“Ah! But they do tell tales! So says I, Davy Jones!”

Really an all-timer for the worst line of show writing in an attraction script. Just in awe at how succinctly each word is unwanted and unnecessary. The fact that you can watch the fog screen media reset several times is the icing on the cake. (Thankfully this effect has been removed from the Anaheim version in more recent years.)

Jungle Cruise

The only version of the Jungle Cruise in the world not offered in English. But chances are you already know the spiel, as all the classic gags are here in this version largely similar to the Magic Kingdom installation. More than an opportunity to see funny animatronic animals and cringey animatronic natives, it’s refreshing to enjoy being surrounded by real trees and foliage for a little while within this otherwise very urbanized Adventureland.

Western River Railroad

Is this attraction part of Adventureland or Westernland? The theming is definitely meant for Westernland and the track is mostly routed through Westernland. But it’s smack dab in the middle of Adventureland, sharing part of the station with the Jungle Cruise on one side and the Enchanted Tiki Room on the other. My guess is a train had to go somewhere because that’s what the other two prior Disney parks had, even though it couldn’t have multiple stations (apparently due to Japanese regulations that would qualify it as public rail transport, thus requiring a set timetable and fares) or even fit the one station it did have inside Westernland. Attractions getting placed in the wrong theme zone, even if they no longer serve their original purpose, just so they could be checked off the list… another telltale “knock-off-ism.” (Also it was closed for refurbishment during my visit so it was all a moot point anyway.)

Westernland

Not Frontierland, but Westernland, since “frontier” doesn’t adequately translate in Japanese. (Little wonder, as each culture has its own history and geography for a very different sense of what frontier could mean. One of China’s greatest literary works, Journey to the West, may momentarily confuse western readers when they learn it refers to a journey to India.) Anyway, this land is largely a cul-de-sac leading to Big Thunder Mountain. The design is tighter and more carefully thought-through than pretty much any other land, and the broad paved spaces sorta work to evoke the open expanses of the west. Combined with a few nice corners of natural landscaping around the riverfront and Critter County immediately next to it, this is likely the most successful of the original themed zones at Tokyo Disneyland. Still a far cry from, say, Disneyland Paris’ Frontierland.

Big Thunder Mountain

Fairly similar to the Disneyland Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, but it fixes the third act problem by actually giving some meat to the section after the third lift. This finale segment kicks off with a drop down into a tunnel infested with flying bats, a great special effect I’m surprised to see was never replicated in the stateside versions. After this tunnel the dinosaur skeleton splashdown is still used to signify the finale, but is combined with a much steeper drop concealing one last speed run through a narrow mine shaft. While not quite on the level of the magnificent Parisian version with its bottomless drop underneath the river, the Tokyo version probably represents the ideal of what the archetypal Big Thunder Mountain experience should have always been. One of my picks for the top three attractions in the park.

Rivers of America & Mark Twain Riverboat

Along with Jungle Cruise, this is one of the best places to enjoy a sense of nature inside Tokyo Disneyland, making it a welcome respite from the crowds and hot pavement that define much of this park.

Splash Mountain

Turns out, the best ride in the park is the racist one! Back in 2011 I wondered how long Splash Mountain would be sustained in Japan given the very particular cultural meaning behind its Southern folklore storyline that was certainly lost on the Japanese audience. It turns out, being able to understand and remember the cultural significance of its references is precisely what ended the U.S. versions and allowed the Japanese iteration to continue for another zip-a-dee-doo-dah day. Indeed, the Japanese audience seems to have an attachment to their Splash Mountain even more than American audiences do. In the 1998 Japanese movie After Life, the recently deceased are asked to pick one memory to replay for the rest of eternity, to which one teen girl’s first choice was her ride on Splash Mountain at Tokyo Disneyland. That’s just the reputation it has! Whether or not it should eventually lose the Song of the South storyline is not something I’ll take a position on here, but I’m still glad I got to appreciate the weird glory of this ambitious log flume, which is by far the most elaborate of the three worldwide installations (especially for its breathtaking queue). It’s also the only Splash Mountain performed in deep-fried southern-accented Japanese, certainly a zenith of globalism’s effect on culture.

 

Fantasyland

Emblematic of the type of park Tokyo Disneyland is, you turn the corner from one of the park’s best areas, Splash Mountain and Critter County, and are suddenly confronted with: an unadorned Dumbo spinner sadly sitting in the middle of a giant asphalt pad like a parking lot carnival ride, situated in front of an airlifted Haunted Mansion facade from Florida. Putting the Haunted Mansion in Fantasyland is weird but not inconceivable (imagine having “the spooky house at the edge of the woods” as it often goes in these stories) but the whole thing is such a jarring juxtaposition of incompatible elements with second-rate execution it’s hard to believe this is part of what many fans rave to be Disney’s best resort. I’m also not convinced that the large Beauty & The Beast village expansion on the opposite end of Fantasyland will improve the underlying problems with this land; if anything, I might expect it to get worse by further heightening the contrast in build quality and decentering the placemaking by putting a second big castle weenie behind the first one. But I guess I’ll need to return to judge for myself…

The Haunted Mansion

Despite being a massive abode, to me this attraction never seemed to find its home within the Disney parks. Disneyland’s is a New Orleans plantation house, which promises Southern Gothic mystery until you go inside and it’s all the generic haunted house architecture and tropes from northeastern and European roots. The Mansion at least looks the part in Florida, but as the major E-ticket anchor to Liberty Square it twists that land’s patriotic theme into a slightly unsettling and sinister read of American history (certainly not helped following the 2017 renovations to the Hall of Presidents). Paris had to twist the theme into the more story-heavy Phantom Manor to make its western setting work, and Hong Kong invented a whole separate standalone land for it’s Mystic Manor despite looking a lot like neighboring Adventureland. Tokyo’s is certainly the most out-of-place of the global set from the outside, but once you get inside it’s possibly the best preserved of the classic Haunted Mansion experience, including the screaming pop-up ghosts that made for the closest thing to a real jump-scare I’ve ever experienced on one of Disney’s Mansions.

Fantasyland Dark Rides

Three classic dark rides are found in the main plaza of Fantasyland, which still retains its medieval faire appearance of banners and tents rather than the quaint European village update that came to Disneyland the same year Tokyo Disneyland opened its gates. Peter Pan’s Flight is pretty similar to the Magic Kingdom version, while Pinocchio’s Daring Journey is much the same as Disneyland’s. Snow White’s Adventures, while losing the “Scary” from the title as in the Disneyland version, actually puts even more emphasis on the spookiness of the adventure. Riders begin inside the witch’s chambers and save the house and mine scenes for the middle, at which point the danger lurking outside is much more apparent. The layout even finds ways to further shorten the time between offing the witch and unloading the passengers by skipping the simple “they lived happily ever after” title card that was at least a nod to a happier resolution after the act of geronticide. I never expected Snow White to be one of Disney’s most hardcore attractions, but here we are.

It’s a Small World

The fourth version of It’s a Small World I’d ridden in just over a year. At least it has the full facade, unlike the Magic Kingdom version, which would be the final version I’d ride the following year. I have nothing more to add. I’ll yield any extra words for this one to give more to say on the next attraction.

Pooh’s Hunny Hunt

The world’s first trackless dark ride, with vehicles so fleet and agile it’s astonishing to believe it was made all the way back in the year 2000. It’s the rare example of a technologically ambitious prototype where the technology itself still holds up well twenty years later. Often regarded as the best attraction at Tokyo Disneyland with queues to match, as well as the go-to example used to shame the shortcomings of the four tracked “Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” versions of the ride around the world, Pooh’s Hunny Hunt has no shortage of adoring fans either in Japan or from abroad. Which is just fine, as it doesn’t need me to count myself among them.

Pooh’s Hunny Hunt is a prime example of a themed attraction getting hijacked by an exciting technology and over-generous budget, which ultimately leads to distractions and the detriment of the story it should be telling. After a boarding procedure intended to trick people into thinking it’s a familiar tracked dark ride experience, the first scene very intentionally blows out those expectations during the reveal of the massive scope of the sets and technological ability of the trackless vehicles. This is a ride that’s not shy to show off its $130 million budget, which really begs the question if the charming, humble stories A. A. Milne are the right fit for such a bombastic modus operandi. More than for the story, so many features of this ride mostly seem included for the intent to make riders think what an elaborate and cleverly designed attraction this is.

The story beats are ostensibly all familiar to the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh rides, which themselves are based on the classic Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day animated featurette. However, Pooh’s Hunny Hunt differs by mostly excising the blustery day elements from the storyline. To fill the gap it extends the scenes for the initial character introductions in the 100 Acre Woods and, more significantly, the Heffalumps & Woozles “honey hallucination” scene, both of which get massively amped up to show off the capabilities of the trackless technology and increased show budget.

Look, I get it. Everyone loves the Heffalumps & Woozles scene. I like it too. It was Disney’s attempt to explore the psychedelic aesthetics of the acid-induced counter-cultural movement when the original animation was made in 1968. But when that scene alone becomes a full two-fifths of the entire narrative duration, it indicates that the ride both, A): is missing the point of it, and B): has major pacing issues overall. Heffalumps & Woozles drags on way past the point at which the point has been made, thus elevating it from a symbolic third-act turning point into the crux of the entire story. And it’s not like the blustery day scenes are the problem with the other installations. They drive the dramatic conflict, provide the story its moral bearings, and ultimately offer Pooh’s reconnection to his community. Remove that and it becomes a sickly-sweet wish fulfillment narrative. It ultimately gives Pooh all the honey he wants just because he can have it, a moral that underscores the attraction’s own inability to know when to cut back on the sweet stuff.

Toontown

I might have skipped this land if it didn’t have Gadget’s Go Coaster that I needed to add to the list. Largely identical to the Disneyland version but with a chain lift instead of tire drives and Japanese-mandated catwalks along most of the layout. Why these parks that attract visitation in excess of 15 million per year think a children’s coaster with a single 16-passenger train is a good use of space and resources, I’m not certain. While I was at it, I also checked out Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin. I don’t know if this is the apex of 90’s Disney dark rides, but it’s certainly among the “most 90’s” of 90’s Disney dark rides. The vertical falling scene and stretching portable hole are both simple effects done very well. I never know if I should try to steer my car straight to appreciate the scenes or crank in like a tilt-a-whirl, which it obviously challenges you to do.

Tomorrowland

For better or worse, Tomorrowland is the land that feels most distinctly specific to Tokyo Disneyland in all its dated, boxy cream-white modular futurism glory. Although the land shows its age in a way that’s still a little too recent to lean fully into the nostalgic fun of retro-futurism, it at least has managed to maintain its consistency and avoid the onslaught of random neon and awkward character placement that other Tomorrowlands have had to contend with. Plus, it actually manages to make the multi-level design work.

Space Mountain

After riding the slick, smooth, soundtrack-synched versions of Space Mountain in Anaheim and Hong Kong, I was excited to see what the original vintage Space Mountain experience would be like. Unfortunately this was the one major attraction on the refurbishment schedule during my week in Tokyo, making it the final coaster (out of many, many before it) that I missed during my Asia travels.

Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters

Rode it because as an omni-mover dark ride it’s a capacity sponge and thus I didn’t have to wait long at the end of the day. I spent five minutes of my life on this version of the attraction, and I don’t feel like spending more than that amount of time ten years later to write about it. This ride grows like a weed at every Disney park around the world, and I don’t know if there’s a way to get rid of it (other than unleashing the ants).

Star Tours

The second and final time I got to ride the original version of Star Tours, both times narrated in languages I didn’t understand after being introduced to the ride in Paris the year before. For all the debate over the value of introducing lateral content in the newest incarnations of Disney’s Star Wars attractions, it’s interesting to note how much of the original Star Tours was also invention, even as its reputation became a poster child for the ethos of “give the people what they want.” Named for and based around a space tourism agency (which is a level of capitalist development unlike anything seen in any of the movies), featuring a new original character as the lead (voiced by Pee-wee Herman himself), it really ought to feel entirely separate from the Star Wars galaxy seen on film. But you still get to fly around in space and you even get to do the Death Star trench run, which our pilot has “always wanted to do”, a sentiment shared by most riders. No, Star Tours didn’t include everything one might expect from a Star Wars experience, but it did seem to do the most important things near the top of the list, so fans got off satisfied and the new ideas introduced are today largely celebrated rather than scorned. Which begs the question whether there’s a crucial difference in design philosophy between then and now, or if it’s the audience expectations that have changed?

Captain EO Tribute

Jackson. Coppola. Lucas. Huston. Has there ever been an attraction that had this much starpower behind it, or one that has relied so much on the names of its A-list talent as the primary reason to get people in the door? Originally running from 1986 to 1998 and brought back for a few years after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009, Captain EO, like so much else in Tokyo Disneyland, was very distinctly an 80’s product, but one with more warmth and heart than most other attractions from that era. I can’t tell how much of the cheesiness of this 4D film was an artifact of its age or a deliberate creative choice by its creators. It’s easy to laugh when Michael uses his energy palm beams to transform the menacing sci-fi henchmen into a dancing troupe with big hair and tight pants. But for the most part, the creative talent involved was all given the budget and freedom to do what they do best on screen, and once Jackson has the space to fully command the stage on screen, it’s hard to be cynical. (Of course, that was a decade ago; there’d be a lot more reasons to be cynical if Disney ever tried to bring the show back for a third run today.) I’m all for giving people more creative freedom to make weirdly personal stuff for theme parks, so I certainly can’t fault Captain EO for that, even if it’s not the kind of weird stuff I’d personally ever think to make.

Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek

This ride had the longest lines all day, so I didn’t get to it until relatively late in the evening. Staring up at the monster-sized corporate atrium inside the queue, I was worried that Ride & Go Seek might suffer the same downfall as Pooh’s Hunny Hunt as a modest ride in story and concept that’s brought down under the weight of its own inflated budget and expectations for itself. Fortunately that ended up not being the case. Here, the technological innovation was an interactive dark ride quite literally made dark, with interactive flashlights for riders to illuminate the scenes by their own hand, and with certain effects reacting when lit up. While the ride is no less ambitious than Pooh’s Hunny Hunt, by turning the lights down it brings the focus in much closer, allowing riders to delight in the small discoveries that they themselves feel they’ve made. It’s not interactive in the sense that you’re gunning for a high score, but rather the flashlight mechanic serves as a kind of editing device, allowing riders to direct their own story in real time by finding and framing each scene. And on a more primal level, isn’t playing flashlight hide-and-seek or imagining monsters in the dark exactly the type of childhood fun (completely innocent but has the feeling of danger and transgression if you’re under ten) that a family theme park ride should evoke for people of all ages, especially suited for a story like Monster’s Inc.? A real winner and one of my top three rides at Tokyo Disneyland.

Evening at Tokyo Disneyland

As evening approached I made my final strategy to complete the park. To be honest, I had to learn the crowd dynamics while I was at the park and in retrospect made some downright embarrassing strategic blunders. In the morning I had skipped FastPasses for Pooh’s Hunny Hunt or Monsters, Inc. and got my first for Splash Mountain instead, which I later discovered was one of the few rides that had an even quicker single rider line. Normally if that was the case it’d be difficult to complete the full attraction roster in a single day, yet I didn’t wait more than 30 to 45 minutes for anything, even riding Hunny Hunt twice using the standby queue both times, and had time for several more re-rides.

The first time I queued for Big Thunder Mountain in the morning I ended up next to a large friend group visiting the park who were interested in the lone gaijin in line with them and got to asking me a bunch of questions. Later that evening, in a stroke of pure coincidence, I somehow ended up in line again next to the same group, also for Big Thunder Mountain. After getting a photo together and entertaining them with some more stories and conversation, one of the girls of the group who had been leading the conversations, Aoi, suddenly got embarrassed and had to admit something to me. In what I recall were close to her exact words:

“I just want to say… I love you. Do you want a Japanese girlfriend?”

Wow, I… didn’t know what to say! A little concerned about the apparent age differential (not to mention that I was leaving Japan in 36 hours) I avoided committing to any sort of relationship while offering several compliments, and suggested that we could ride the coaster together. We all had a grand ol’ time together on the wildest ride in the wilderness, but as we disembarked it became clear that our paths were not aligned and it was never meant to be; they were going for dinner, while I had already eaten and had a FastPass to burn. We all bid our farewells, and thus concluded the story of how I had a 15 minute relationship at Tokyo Disneyland.

With the sun fully set and the lights flickering on, Tokyo Disneyland becomes a marginally more attractive space with the darkness hiding more of the ugly corners, although the wide pathways with limited lighting near the center at times feels like wandering into a dark abyss.

After making my way back down World Bazaar (that will never not sound weird) it was time to call it a wrap on my day at Tokyo Disneyland. While certainly far from my favorite Disney parks in the world, it was still one of the world’s largest theme parks with plenty of good among the not-as-good. It’s a park that clearly understands its niche with local visitors even if more traveled theme park fans might find areas to critique. The final park on my Asia tour scheduled for tomorrow, however, was more clearly designed to please the taste of serious theme park aesthetes. Would it live up to its promise?

Next: Tokyo DisneySea

Previous: Hanayashiki & Tokyo

Tomorrowland

Disneyland – Anaheim, California

There’s a contrast in themed environment design philosophies between the eastern and western hemispheres of Disneyland. The lands in the western side (Adventureland, Frontierland, New Orleans Square) are all about hyperreal imitation of real-world environments. Their goal is to copy the look and feel of the Congo, Old West, or New Orleans as perfectly as possible, such that one might be tricked into forgetting they’re even located inside Disneyland. The eastern hemisphere (consisting primarily of Fantasyland and Tomorrowland) in my opinion has a much better design philosophy. In these lands the Imagineer is given freedom to invent and create from a blank canvas, rather than simply imitate an already familiarized picture with only occasional creative flourishes. Because these environments exist nowhere else in the physical universe, we’re allowed to see the theming “as it really is”, unique and singular to Disneyland. One’s aesthetic judgment is therefore not as limited to how well it mimics the real thing, but can include a much broader set of criteria such as creativity, color selection, architectural innovation, etc. What does Fantasy look like? What does the future hold? There are no pre-established rules, and so Disneyland is given the freedom of interpretation.

That’s the theory. However, the dual aspect of this creative freedom is that the Imagineers now also have a much greater creative responsibility in these lands to make environments that are as vivid and beautiful as those based on real world locales. The beauty of French Quarter New Orleans is the ultimate product of centuries of aesthetic and architectural development by a myriad of great minds and even diverse cultures, while the look of Tomorrowland must be birthed from a single scratchpad during a relatively short development period. And to be honest, I’m not sure if the Imagineers have proven themselves to be up to this task. The eastern hemisphere has not nearly as many trees as the western side, and is generally lacking in the same degree of texture and depth found in Disney’s rendition of Africa or the Old West. In particular, Tomorrowland is very two-dimensional, vanilla color schemed, and with lots of open concrete areas. There are few trees or plants, and where they are present they look very out of place with this sterile vision of future architecture. Disney’s land of the future, sleek though it may be, seems to be founded on an idea that biology is too messy to have any function other than in test tubes.

A note to future readers discovering this page deep in the cyber archives: please, have better aesthetic tastes than what Disneyland believed you would have! All the hard work we’ve done in our contributions to history was made in the hope that the world you’d proudly inherit wouldn’t look like a dull, bastard descendant of architectural brutalism (but with less practicality). We invented for you pastel and earth tones for a reason!

In short, Tomorrowland is not a particularly interesting place to walk around and explore. A lot of people like to note that the ironic problem with Tomorrowland was that it quickly became “Yesterland”, but I don’t think that’s a problem anymore since the design has shifted from a showcase for future technologies to a science-fiction version of Fantasyland. (If that is true, then Children of the Future, you can partially disregard my previous warning.) However, I think the area would be benefited from a lot less George Lucas and a lot more Jules Verne. More color, more texture, more whimsy. Disneyland Paris’ Discoveryland is a step in the right direction.

The first attraction in Tomorrowland might have taken its original inspiration from Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but has been pretty well replaced with Finding Nemo paraphernalia. I speak of course of the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, situated between the Matterhorn and the rest of Tomorrowland as we enter from Fantasyland. Although intrigued by the dramatic possibilities should a leak form in our vessel requiring a mid-ride Titanic reenactment, at first I was skeptical that the concept could work as a worthwhile attraction. The clear water pool takes up a sizable chunk of real estate in the land-strapped Disneyland, yet from a spectator’s position I was unconvinced that seeing a pool of this size from beneath the water level would really be anything worth queuing 45 minutes for. My reasoning was that since a submarine voyage is limited to passive spectatorship of amazing vistas from an unusual vantage point, a theme park attraction would have to be done on a much larger scale than Disney could afford before it would start attain any worthwhile value. A glacially-paced tour of a swimming pool filled with artificial coral and our vantage distance limited to a few meters squinting out of a tiny porthole didn’t exactly seem like a formula for great entertainment no matter how you dressed it up.

After giving it a ride, I found I had underestimated Disney’s showmanship ability. First of all, climbing down into a dark, claustrophobic ride vehicle via a small opening on the top is a very different loading procedure than anything I’ve encountered in a theme park attraction before, and much of my interest was sustained just by observing all the unusual tasks required to make the Submarine Voyage work. That’s true of many attractions Disney, as they rarely buy off-the-shelf attractions so there’s often a sense of discovery for uber-obsessive theme park geeks. There are also numerous animatronics and effects not visible from the surface, and I forgot that there would probably be sound played inside the submarines as well. This becomes the attractions’ most valuable asset as there’s a complete, reasonably involved storyline… although, most of the story elements are lifted directly from the film (of course). It even takes a “dramatic” turn near the end when the submarine enters a tunnel and we encounter a deep-sea angler fish and an underwater volcano (we can’t see the tunnel, of course, but the water becomes much darker). The attraction is still quite limited as an experience (Tokyo DisneySea’s “dry” submarine dark ride involves guests a bit more by giving them a flashlight control) and I think it’s a good thing more Submarine Voyage rides haven’t been built, but it’s still worth a voyage if the queue is short, just for the quirky differentness of whole thing. If only they could make the portholes a little bigger and build it at a place like SeaWorld where we wouldn’t have to pretend to ooh and awe at robotic fish.

(A quick note, due to the limited time in the park, we ended up skipping a number of Tomorrowland attractions such as Buzz Lightyear, Autopia, Innoventions, and the closed-for-renovations Star Tours. All of these attractions could be found at Hong Kong Disneyland or Tokyo Disneyland except for Innoventions, which I will cover there.)

I’m not exactly sure why they call it the Captain EO Tribute since it’s exactly the same thing as the original Captain EO except for the world outside is no longer in the 1980’s, but regardless of how it pays tribute to itself, it was a big attention grabbing rerelease (for a limited time… hopefully) so I would be obliged to see it. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Captain EO is a 1986 George Lucas produced 4D science fiction musical film that ran at Disney parks until the mid-90’s, starring Michael Jackson as the titular El Capitan. Supposedly the most expensive film frame-for-frame at the time, it’s the ultimate nostalgia and cheese fest for Generation Xers still reeling from the collective shock of the King of Pop’s death. My aunt Christine (a big Michael Jackson fan) loved it. It’s got dancing and music and comic relief puppets and Michael going “ah hee hee!” more than once, as well as a call for social consciousness that’s incredibly vague but still lends it more depth than the pure idiocy that’s de rigueur for most of today’s 4D theme park movies. Plus it’s directed by Francis Ford Coppola and includes Anjelica Huston in the cast, two positives that couldn’t be claimed by Honey I Shrunk the Audience.

From my Generation Y perspective, what made the price of admission worth it was the humorously absurd sight of an attacking robot army getting transformed by the King of Pop’s magical palm light beams into a leotard-and-big-80’s-hair clad dance troupe during his space mission to conquer an evil space warlord through the power of music and love (or something like that).1 Granted, perhaps I’m not the best person to review Captain EO since most of the cultural achievements of the 1980’s that I admire are better categorized as either holdovers from the 1970’s or early forbearers to the 1990’s, and Captain EO is certainly neither of these things. Whatever. It’s silly, feel-good fun that you can tap your toes to, and it’s one of the rare cases of Disney pulling something less than polished out of their closet for the sake of remembering a bit of our cultural history. Not that my remembrance of Captain EO would ever be a specific reason for me to dread the onset of Alzheimer’s.

My tour of Disneyland is nearly complete, and before wrapping it up I should give a quick summary of what I’ve learned. The amount of creative design and money spent per square foot of land the park occupies has to be some of the highest density anywhere on the planet. Almost nothing is accidental which is what makes it so great for analytic park fans such as myself and Disney’s many, many devotees. The Anaheim park in particular has the best and most complete set of attractions at any Disney theme park worldwide.2

Yet when forced to choose the best of these attractions, I often found myself preferring rides in which the least amount of capital investment was spent. The Matterhorn and Pinocchio are my favorite roller coaster and dark ride at Disneyland, a selection I suspect I share with extremely few other individuals. Both utilize relatively simple technology to tell a story or craft an experience. The difference between these and higher profile attractions I was far less charitable towards (Big Thunder Mountain or Indiana Jones Adventures) is that their allowed to tell their stories and focus on their experiences as theme park attractions, rather than as a imitation of something that wants us to believe it has no affiliation with the artificial world of the theme park. In my opinion the best rides at Disneyland embrace their artifice, and in doing so it allows the potential to create art. Which brings me to:

Space Mountain

I must first ask: How do we visualize a “space mountain”? The name creates a paradox. The “mountain” implies something huge, concrete, and physically dominating, but then “space” multiplies it by zero and turns that mountain into a strange physical manifestation of the intangible nothingness. Perhaps we’re supposed to visualize a planetary mountain like Olympus Mons, but the presentation is far too clean and man-made for that connotation to work. The white, conical structure with a few steel icicles dangling away from gravity gives the basic impression of a mountain, but a very abstract, conceptual one that looks like nothing else found in the known universe. Except, of course, for Space Mountain itself.

The nebulous name and appearance is well-suited to the roller coaster contained within, which has a similar ineffable quality. There’s a beautifully orchestrated story arc to Space Mountain, but it’s not told using ordinary language. Any literal “space adventure” narrative is underplayed and abstracted to the point that it nearly ceases to exist, instead relying on music and our non-visual senses to create a compelling experience, only loosely tied together by a general sci-fi aesthetic bookending the beginning and end. Before riding Space Mountain I imagined that it would have been filled with dioramas of planetary scenes and deep space nebulae lighting effects to keep our eyes busy and stimulated, but in a display of restraint uncommon to Disney, the core of the ride experience is highly minimalistic. Once inside the main dome where all the gravity-driven track is located, there is virtually nothing to be seen except for small pinpricks of swirling lights and maybe a dim, half-glimpsed outline of the rails ahead.

What happens once we’ve been totally deprived of reliance on our visual faculties is we’re forced into to a heightened awareness of our other senses; primarily our auditory faculties and inner ear sense of acceleration changes, although even the feel and smell of the difference in air temperature once we enter the main dome becomes a noticeable sensation. Accordingly, the music is a defining feature that makes Space Mountain the ride that it is. A very cinematic onboard soundtrack (courtesy of Michael Giacchino, who composed the music for the Incredibles as well as virtually every Pixar and J.J. Abrams production in the time since) gives shape and structure to what otherwise might have been a very disorganized roller coaster experience.3 Although you only need to provide musical cues at a few key points in the ride to create a sense of synchronicity, the soundtrack so perfectly complements and elevates Space Mountain to the next level that I’m nearly able to forgive Disney for the number on California Screamin’. It’s difficult for me to imagine riding this coaster without the soundtrack, just as it’s difficult for me to listen to the soundtrack on my computer and not visualize some of the key moments of being on the ride. Like image and sound fuse together to create cinema, Space Mountain is a singular entity of music and coaster.

The layout is in many respects similar to the Matterhorn Bobsleds, in as much as it’s composed of a long downhill run that wraps around itself with a variety of direction changes to fill a conical structure. Also like the Matterhorn there are a number of block brakes scattered throughout the layout which don’t interrupt the ride’s pace. In fact, on my very first ride (in the front row) I developed a bizarre fear because it seemed we were moving too fast and with too many direction changes for there to be any block brakes whatsoever. Normally I expect little “pauses” for brake runs throughout a coaster with dispatches of less than thirty seconds, but here the safety blocks were almost invisibly integrated in the flow of the ride layout. I worried that we would not be able to safely decelerate if there was an e-stop, and squinting through the darkness I realized if there was a stopped car we’d collide into it and I wouldn’t be able to brace at all. It’s such a nerdy technical minutia that I doubt it’s a phobia I’ve shared with many other first time Space Mountain riders. I wondered after getting off if the safety braking was set up in a way that each car had to have two clear blocks ahead of it to advance. Even though a lot of the sense of speed is illusory due to the dark surroundings, it seemed that the brakes were too short that a single section could bring a train to a complete halt without discomfort to the riders. Regardless, it’s a technical achievement that succeeds at creating a sense of increasing, non-interrupted action for a solid two minutes that extremely few other coasters are able to achieve.

I also must commend the shaping of the track itself. I know this sounds like a minor point, but it’s really essential to the successful integration of music with the track. Although the track runs very smoothly with precise calculus in the rotation of the banking transitions in the curves, it nevertheless has a very distinctive feel that gives a strong sense of orientation and velocity changes. The banking transitions for example, while smooth, are also sudden and not completely heartlined, so you can easily feel when you’re navigating a turn. The same goes for the drops, which have sharp crests and valleys with flat ramps spaced between them rather than continuous parabolic crests. So many modern steel coaster designers use a free flowing force-vector style of design to produce inversions and overbanked turns that, if put in a dark room, would feel like absolutely nothing.4 Space Mountain achieves a tremendous sense of speed and directional changes despite a top speed of 35mph and maximum banking and track grades of less than 45°, precisely because it retains a more antiquated, geometry-based track design, even after its 2005 refurbishment.

The result is a roller coaster that feels musical. Each of these somewhat hard transitions function as an individual note or beat, and the small bits of flat track between them is what gives it a rhythmic flow. Just as music is defined not so much by the noise itself but by the silent relationships between the noises, so is this style of sudden stop-and-start track design that is becoming increasingly obscure in favor of designs that feature continuous, dynamically changing curves and elements. The layout is simple and repetitive, yes, but this matches the minimalist visual style and it allows the music more freedom to shape the experience, such that anything more would have been less.

Originally I didn’t want to do a play-by-play of Space Mountain because it’s not so much about a sequence of events but rather a sustained aesthetic state, and words cannot fully describe the experience anyway; but I realized for those that have never had a chance to ride it (and, more importantly, for those who may never be given that opportunity) there are virtual no good visual representations of the ride that can be found online, and so Space Mountain is probably one of the best coasters for providing a written account. I shall try. To start, we enter the station from overhead, where the queue then descends along the edges of the station walls to the platform level. We’re ushered into the vehicles, two six-passenger cars coupled together, which are spacious and easy to climb in and out of, and feature a simple hydraulic lapbar with a rubber pull tab which makes loading so fast they don’t even need a dual-loading station to keep up the fast dispatch rate.5

[audio:http://www.rollercoasterphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Space_Mountain_Music.mp3|titles=Space Mountain Music]

In order to understand the full Space Mountain experience from this text, be sure to have a listen to the music as you read along. During the opening preludes we begin with a short lift up a red-lit incline. As the stringed instruments come in (0:26) there’s a flat turnaround with a series of flashing blue lights. At the (0:40) mark, we start the ascent up the second (and larger) chain lift, which is enclosed in a special effect “vortex tunnel”, with a projection at the far end showing a spiraling galaxy that collapses into singularity. Emerging from this tunnel (0:58), we find ourselves inside the main space dome, an awesome visual experience of rushing and swirling stars that’s amplified by the musical intensity. There’s a small left turn (around a rather fake-looking plastic asteroid, the one regrettable prop I could have done without) and then we climb the short final lift hill as a voice counts down to takeoff.

We linger over the top for a contemplative moment of silence (1:15), before gravity kicks in and the soundtrack dives into a more aggressive symphonic space-rock style. This is when the music synchronization works the best, as the first big brass notes (1:24) correspond exactly with the first high-speed turnaround, and then the frenetic strings at (1:27) come during a quick hop up into the first block section; a moment that should seem slow but is transformed into an epic and adrenaline-boosting opener, one that still gives me slight chills when I hear it. From (1:30) the music establishes a more consistent pace, which matches with the fact that the coaster track is doing a series of shallow descents and curves without any particularly big moments that stick out.

There’s a progression in both the music and the coaster at about (2:03), when there’s a sudden uphill hop into a block section that produces a little bit of airtime in the front row. A fast dip and curve anticipates the big “turning point” that kicks off the second act (2:07): a large midcourse drop that gives the coaster a sudden burst of acceleration. (“Large” is relatively speaking, as I doubt it’s any deeper than 20 feet at a 35° slope, but the context makes it feel huge.) From there we motor into a series of more curves and dips that make up the majority of the Space Mountain experience, but with more power and intensity than before. At around the (2:25) point the music picks up in agility to match the coaster track, which starts a few very fast, tight turns and switchback around the floor of the mountain, reaching the lowest point of the layout while sustaining the maximum speed for the big whirlwind finish.

Finally, around (2:37) we fly into the final brakes housed inside a warp tunnel. A few bright strobe lights simultaneously disorient us while our photograph is snapped, and we come to a smooth stop by magnetic brakes. As the music shifts to the coda (2:41), there’s a very odd effect where the dim holographic lights that line the tunnel follow the ride vehicle, which at first made me think we had come to a complete stop (my pupils were still recovering from the bright strobes seconds before), but then we went around a final turn back to the station platform and I realized we were still moving. Even after the first couple of re-rides, this effect still always managed to head-trick me, which is a neat little device to end a spectacular coaster.

I realize how lame it must seem to describe a coaster like Space Mountain in detail as I have just done. There’s a sense in which no explanation of the ride can ever truly capture it. This is true of all roller coasters – indeed, of all phenomenal experiences, to an extent – but Space Mountain exaggerates this gulf between language and experience by its limitation of sight and restricted use of typical, “meaningful” plot and storyline, and instead abstracts it to an orchestrated experience intended almost exclusively for the outer and inner ears. At a fundamental level, I think this is why roller coasters are so important. They are some of the most phenomenologically rich experiences mankind has devised, and by equating the roller coaster experience with the musical experience, Space Mountain possibly raises the bar a little bit higher on the potential of roller coasters to become their own unique artform.

The phenomenal experience is irreplaceable by language or empirical sciences.  The question of “What is it like To Be”, that is, to have experiences, whether of colors, smells, music, or roller coasters, is one of the most central to human experience, and also one of the biggest roadblocks to accepting the typical scientific view of reductive materialism as a solution to metaphysics. It has been tried and largely deemed impossible to give a true and complete account of raw phenomena in the absence of firsthand experience. “How do you explain the color red to a person who’s been blind all their life?”, is a favorite thought experiment among philosophers. That’s before we open up the Pandora’s Box that is the experience of meaning in our phenomenal experiences. We don’t experience the world simply as receptors of sense data, but we’re constantly in a state of interpreting and emotionally responding to the world around us. Space Mountain tells a deep, meaningful story to me, as I’m sure it does for many others, albeit one that takes no literal or concrete form. Can we possibly share this story? I don’t think it is possible without experience. We can only make obtuse, generalized gestures in the direction we want others to look. However, once we’ve found what we’re looking for, we’ve located what I think is at the core of the authentic theme park experience, one that transcends the shallow confines of hyperreality.

A complete discussion of phenomenology and roller coasters would require a full dissertation to even scratch the surface, so I will leave you with this: Jean-Paul Sartre, early in his career and sitting at a Parisian café, held up his drink and said “phenomenology will allow me to make great philosophy out of this glass of wine”.

I say the exact same can be said of roller coasters.

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