These Original Fantasyland Dark Rides Have Desperately Unhappy Endings

“Fantasyland is dedicated to the young and the young-at-heart, for they are most susceptible to nightmares. All that lurks here is graphic death, horror, and eternal damnation. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.” — Fantasyland Dedication Plaque, July 17, 1955 You want happily ever after? Go to Universal or something. We’re peddling unhappy endings here. […]

What if Disneyland Arrived 60 Years Too Late?

Try to imagine, just for a moment, a giant space monster punching Father Time right in the teeth. A punch hard enough to jar loose sixty years. A half-dozen meaningless decades. A skip on the record player of history. Now imagine that this cataclysmic punch occurred in 1901. History shrugs it off. Life finds a […]

Bold New Worlds – Seven Dwarfs Mine Train

Yesterday I posted about how strange it is for frequent guests to suddenly have new experiences to enjoy. The Seven Dwarfs mountain has been isolated in the middle of New Fantasyland for what feels like a decade. We all remember when it was just a wee bump of steel in the middle of a dirt […]

The Great Iconic Food Race

I have a love-hate relationship with Universal Studios. By which I mean, I love to hate them. For an entire decade and a half, they deserved all the hate and then some. Universal Studios Florida was a masterpiece of ugly when it opened. Islands of Adventure left so many opportunities on the table. They were […]

Circus Bear Mix-Up

I have no wish to rant about Storybook Circus, but there’s Another Part of Me that wants to. Circuses may have been magical in the first half of the 20th century, but today they conjure up negative associations with animal cruelty, carnival freaks, and child endangerment. Which come to think of it are pretty much […]

The Last Scary Adventure

I was reminded this week of a long-standing mystery. One of those obscure things that is always nagging at the back of my brain. And I realized that the time was fast approaching when I might never get an answer. More about the mystery later, but you see, we’re about to lose another one, and […]

Ever Evolving

One of the great things about Disney parks and Walt Disney World in particular is that stuff is always changing.  Even Madonna would have a hard time reinventing herself at this pace. It’s well documented that Walt wanted it this way.  He’s famous for saying that he wanted something he could endlessly tinker with, like […]