"A Form of Participatory Art"

"The cri­ti­cism that theme parks are fake is a sur­face one, one that fails to prop­erly meet the medium where it’s at. It's easy, of course, to look at the nos­tal­gia of a Main Street, U.S.A, and the castle up ahead and to write off Dis­ney­land as a rosy, ideal­ized take on Amer­ica. This is the undis­cern­ing view; Dis­ney­land is a present­a­tion of an Amer­ica that never exis­ted, one dis­rup­ted by a castle that also doubles as an exten­ded hand."

Todd Martens at the Los Angeles Times praises theme parks.

"Accidental Architect"

"All of this work with the Disney people over the decades began because of that one young man and the love the Disney people had for me." 

Sam Weller at The Paris Review presents an old interview with Ray Bradbury about Bradbury's influence on architecture.

"The Difference Between the Traditional Old City and the New Theme Park"

"Moore's seeming prescience about the conditions we now call 'neoliberal' (POPS are quintessential neoliberal spaces) accrued from his astute observation of California in postwar transition. You might say that Moore, and his essays, are historical vessels so vigorous that an era seems to pour through them. The new freeways that sped his statewide journeys, the massive water infrastructure that fed his beloved public fountains, the public university campuses that he admired (and where he worked)—in retrospect these were high points of a receding vision of hyper-modernization and civil engineering spurred, especially from the New Deal on, by federal, state, and municipal munificence. The impact of such public investment, to draw on a key word in Moore's essay, was 'equalitarian.' But when he praised the Disney maintenance crews for working better than corresponding public services (those 'handsomely costumed young people' who 'sweep away the gum wrappers almost before they fall to the spotless pavement'), and when, in a later essay on electronics, he would claim that 'our new places … are given form with electronic, not visual glue,' Moore was delicately gauging the more general societal turn, from the 1960s to the '80s and up to today, towards privatization and away from large-scale planning, top-down technocratic expertise, and public policy advocacy."

Simon Sadler at Places introduces Charles Moore's "You Have to Pay for the Public Life" from 1965.

"A Future, in Other Words, Where the Movie Industry as We Know It Ceases to Exist"

"The U.S. film business, meanwhile, has arguably been in slow-motion decline since Dwight Eisenhower's administration. The typical American bought more than 20 movie tickets a year in the early 1940s, a period in which Disney pumped out Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi in three consecutive years. But ticket sales plunged after the rise of television in the '50s, and they're still falling: The typical American bought fewer movie tickets in 2017 than in any year during the previous two decades. Among the key demographic of 18-to-24-year-olds, North American movie-theater attendance has declined 17 percent since 2012, a sign of more bad news to come for Disney.

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic wonders, "[w]ill Disney destroy the movie theater?"

"The First Truly Ostentatious Olympics"

"What transpired, five years later, was both far bigger than Cushing could have envisioned, and far more influential. Buoyed by emerging technology, televised live to Americans for the first time ever, and overseen by Walt Disney himself, the Squaw Valley Games were glitzy and star-studded and futuristic. They were also the first Winter Olympics to embrace the concept of an Olympic Village, where athletes bunked up to four to a room, challenged each other to games of ping-pong, danced in jitterbug contests, and watched free screenings of films. Disney paraded a series of Hollywood luminaries to northern California to entertain the athletes and participate in carefully choreographed opening and closing ceremonies; Bing Crosby and Roy Rogers made appearances, Danny Kaye performed, and Marlene Dietrich posed for a photo with the German hockey team."

Michael Weinreb at The Atlantic tells the story of the 1960 Winter Olympics.

"What Happened to Walt's Tomorrow?"

"The future was exciting, optimistic, radiant, and at Tomorrowland, it was a place you could visit and enjoy, marveling at what was to come.

"But at some point in the last six decades, Tomorrowland went from a land of possibility to a land of nostalgia. Today, on that same land in Anaheim, California, stands a retrofuturistic attraction, full of old-fashioned, cutesy ways of thinking about space travel, transportation, and robots. Even the 2015 Tomorrowland movie flopped. Disneyland seems to have lost its passion for futurology, letting what was once an innovative, optimistic, imaginative Tomorrowland slip into a symbol of yesteryear."

Rachel Withers at Slate discusses the eclipse of the future at Disneyland.

"The Best Part of Man's Life Is His Childhood"

"From Main Street, U.S.A. and Frontierland 'as [the Western City] would have looked years ago,' with its 'colorful tramways, pulled by horses [that] traverse the main streets; outmoded taxis; affable, smiling policemen turn around, seemingly having just jumped out of a very old film; and just over there is a store where they sell everything from "revolvers" to bags of gold, gifts, and cowboy hats.' He then boards the train 'through a desert where skeletons and Indians look at you with their dead stares' before disembarking to get his ticket for the Mark Twain Riverboat and travel down the giant Mississippi River, remarking 'the ship is terrific, the river formidable.'"

Menachem Butler in Tablet discusses Elie Wiesel, who died today, on a 1957 trip to Disneyland.

"Report: Rising Disney World Ticket Costs Prompting Many Parents To Leave Children At Home"

"'Just walking up Main Street, U.S.A. and seeing Cinderella's Castle in the distance—I would have loved to turn to my son at that moment and see him smile,' said Jessica Huebel shortly after hugging both Chip and Dale in Frontierland. 'But my husband says we'll barely have enough gas money for the trip home as it is.'
'I just hope prices don't keep going up too much,' she added. 'Otherwise, during the next visit I'll probably be riding Big Thunder Mountain Railroad by myself."


From The Onion.

To All Who Come to This Happy Place

The Los Angeles Times marks the sixtieth birthday of Disneyland.

"Michelangelo and Walt Disney Are the Stars of My Show"

"Instead of France and Britain, Mr. Moses got Thailand and Pakistan. Esquire dismissed the majority of foreign pavilions at Flushing Meadow as geopolitical 'small potatoes.'

"What the critics didn’t understand was that a world’s fair, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Children marveled at Disney’s Audio-Animatronics and beamed with excitement as they rode with their families in a new Ford Mustang. Old and young alike gaped in wonder at the Picturephone, with its video screen allowing callers to see each other (and predating Skype by decades), as well as the life-size replica of NASA’s Saturn V rocket engine that would, in just a few years, power the Apollo mission to the moon."

Joseph Tirella in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 New York World's Fair.

"Bad Things Happen Everywhere"

"So after scripting a story set there ('Escape' also includes flirtatious French teenagers, a possibly demonic child and a mad scientist straight out of the 'Lost' mythology, all in the service of indicting Disney's culture of forced cheer), he began figuring out ways to shoot it. He scouted locations by bringing his own children to Disneyland, then cast-no name actors—Roy Abrahmson, a man who just last month was serving as a limo driver at the Emmy Awards, plays the lead—before he began shooting in Anaheim and Orlando. Production often involved guerrilla tactics, such as scattering his iPhone-enabled crew throughout the park so the whole thing didn't look like a movie shoot. Moore was so scared that Disney would catch on that he edited the movie in South Korea."

Steven Zeitchik in the Los Angeles Times talks with John Sloss about Sloss's new movie Escape from Tomorrow, made surreptitiously at Disneyland and Disney World.

Iron Gap-Toothed Mouseketeer

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for modiste Lilly Pulitzer, documentarian Les Blank, actress Annette Funicello, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian discusses Thatcher's effect on British pop music.

In the Realm of the Diff'rent Shindig

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for historian Gerda Lerner, disc jockey Jimmy O'Neill, film director Nagisa Oshima, Disney designer Roger Broggie, Jr., actor Conrad Bain, former Orange County treasurer Robert L. Citron, and advice columnist Pauline Friedman Phillips.

"As Memorable for Its Utter Tastelessness as for Its Technical Accomplishments"

"As cultural history, this is an impressively researched, convincing argument. But Sperb is on shakier ground as a polemicist. He implies that the company has whitewashed (so to speak) its past by burying a moral embarrassment while still reaping profits from it. And ashamed as I am to type this, I’m not sure he’s being entirely fair to Disney."

John Lingan in Slate reviews Jason Sperb's Disney's Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South.

To a Deluxe Apartment in the Sky

The New York Times runs obits for bassist Bob Babbitt, comedy writer Tom Davis, radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, actress Ginny Tyler, screenwriter Frank Pierson, astronaut Sally Ride, actor Sherman Hemsley, restaurateur Sylvia Woods, prison warden Vincent R. Mancusi, and art collector Herbert Vogel.

The Great Mosquito Goodfella Chronicles

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of illustrator Leo Dillon, singer Herb Reed, writer Ray Bradbury, Disney designer Stan Jolley, and ex-mobster Henry Hill.

When I See an Elephant Fly

"Under his supervision, the Disney studio was inhospitable to minorities, few of whom were said to have worked there and they were virtually verboten on the screen, except to be ridiculed. Disney's was a white, Protestant, middle-class studio and fantasy. Minorities need not apply.
"How much of this portrait was the product of a smear campaign by Walt's enemies and how much a product of Walt's own unenlightened attitudes is difficult to determine."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times explores whether Walt Disney was a racist.

Sound and Vision

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for record producer Jim Dickinson and Walt Disney's first star, Virginia Davis.

"The George Washington of Popular Culture"

"Even more to the point, his films have probably been overshadowed by the theme parks, the passion of his later years, in which he and his corporate heirs came as close as anyone could to the odd but lucrative goal of perfecting ersatzness."

Bruce Handy reviews Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination in The New York Times.

And Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times contrasts Disney's public images.