Epcot is literally exploding with life and color thanks to the 2008 International Flower and Garden Festival. Pluto proves that's its sometimes all right to let a dog in the garden. Nearby, Tic Tok is just one of the stunning elements of a horticultural vignette themed to Neverland and the characters from Peter Pan.
Predating both EPCOT Center's The Living Seas and Shark Reef at Typhoon Lagoon by decades was this slightly more whimsical themed aquarium attraction featuring a design based on the character of Tic Tok from Peter Pan. The Crocodile Aquarium was conceived for Fantasyland at Disneyland but never realized.
My family and I begin our own vacation parade as we steer the minivan south to Orlando this weekend. We will be residents of the World through the end of next week. I have prepared a few posts in advance that will appear throughout the week, and hopefully supplement with material from Walt Disney World as time and opportunity permits. If you will be at the parks this coming week, or are a cast member working the front lines, and you happen to see us, don't be shy--we'd love to meet you!
Any souvenir associated with Disney's Mineral King ski resort would most certainly have to be virtual in nature. Had the proposed Sky Crown development become a reality in the late 1960s, here is what the fashionable skiers of the day would have had affixed to their automobiles.
As a member of the Adventurers Club, one must always adhere strictly to its many conventions of etiquette. From Volume 54 Issue No. 1, Club butler Graves refreshes us on one of the establishment's most sacred and honored traditions:
Nestled amidst the flora and fauna of the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail at Disney's California Adventure is a series of pseudo wood carvings that depict Native American legends and folklore. My very favorite was Catala. Here is the inscription from that particular carving:
Navigating the details at both Mickey's Toontown at Disneyland and Mickey's Toontown Fair at Walt Disney World sometimes requires at little research. Hence we present the Toontown Field Guide, a new ongoing feature here at 2719 Hyperion.
As an always important but still subtle presence in comic book stories featuring the madcap but well-intentioned Gyro Gearloose, the Little Helper literally shines as both a loyal companion and resourceful assistant to the eccentric and often absent-minded inventor. So intentionally nondescript in nature was this character that it never was given a name in any official capacity. In its lifetime of just over five decades, it has been alternately referred to as Helper, Little Helper, Gyro's Helper and Little Bulb.
As Barks' Gyro Gearloose stories evolved, Little Helper became a surprisingly well-defined supporting character with a very distinct and engaging personality. Often, its comic vignettes ran parallel to Gyro's panel by panel actions; it was particularly adept at interacting with small animals, often using the creatures for sport and amusement, though never in a mean-spirited nor malicious manner. And in some ways, Little Helper became much, much more. As Blum further noted:
To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the first appearance of Gyro Gearloose, modern four color duck scribe Don Rosa in 2002 penned an origin story of sorts that detailed the creation of Little Helper. Tying into 1950s era comic book continuity, Rosa related how Gyro helped Scrooge McDuck retrieve his vast fortune that was lost underground in events chronicled in the classic holiday tale A Christmas for Shacktown. In the process, Little Helper is created from a table lamp accidentally imbued with the inventor's intelligence. Gyro then retrofitted the newly sentient appliance with mechanical arms and legs, and doll shoes that acted as miniature shock absorbers. It becomes, as the story's title indicates, Gyro's First Invention. At the story's end, ever wise nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie indicate that not only was the little guy Gyro's first invention, he was also his best invention--" Part helper . . . and part best friend!"
Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World possesses a visual dynamic not shared but its other Magic Kingdom counterparts, with the possible exception of Main Street U.S.A. You see its dramatic and elaborate landscape well before you step onto its retro-futuristic Avenue of the Planets. This is particularly true after sunset when light and color combine for an often stunning tableau.
Fantasyland at Disneyland is a treasure of architecture and details. Its 1983 makeover gave it a vibrancy and excitement unfortunately not shared by its counterpart in Walt Disney World. As a Florida Disney veteran, it was a thrill to be able to revisit Mister Toad and his loyal companions. But as fun as it was to take that wild ride again, I was simply amazed at the architecture and exterior details of Disneyland's Toad Hall. Sculptures of Toad, the family crest and the parked motor car are among the elements that enhance the elaborate brick and stone design.
And our often repeated mantra of "Look Up!" is here again good advice. The weather vane for Toad Hall is a visual treat as well.
In our earlier post on the Academy Theatre, we mentioned that its architect, S. Charles Lee, had done a rendering of a proposed theater building for the Disney Studios in Burbank. Lee's conception was an elaborate design in the Streamline Moderne style that unfortunately was never realized. 
This annotation from the UCLA library described Lee's intentions for the building:
Here's a wonderful and very funny Freeze Frame! related to yesterday's post about amusement parks. The amusement pier background created for the Donald Duck cartoon Straight Shooters, and later used again in Hold That Pose and Father's Weekend, features a subtle but hilarious tribute to one particular studio veteran. One of the pier's entertainment venues sports a sign advertising Hench's Palace of Pleasure, a clear reference to Disney legend and famed Imagineer John Hench.
Ironically, the most obvious and certainly most elaborate execution of this theme was in a production based in fantasy, rather than reflecting a contemporary cultural setting. While Disney's second animated feature Pinocchio was drawn from Carlo Collodi's children's story, the film's penultimate sequence on Pleasure Island owed its visual direction and design sensibilities to amusement parks and carnivals. In Collodi's original story, Pinocchio accompanies his friend Candlewick to "the land of Boobies," where they engage in unspecified play and frolic before transforming into donkeys. Disney and his artists expanded this somewhat ambiguous setting into Pleasure Island, a full-blown amusement park, replete with rides, games and carnival food that veered distinctly away from the story's 19th century Italian folktale origins. 
The sequence played to the seedier side of amusement and carny operations--drinking, smoking, carousing and fighting, serving to bring about the jackass transformations of Pinocchio and Lampwick. It was effective, yet it more reflected then-contemporary Americana and was in direct contrast to the film's otherwise European look and feel. The design of Pleasure Island was clearly rooted in real world amusement parks from the early decades of the 20th century. Coney Island's Luna Park, Dreamland and Steeplechase Park establishments were likely among the artists' inspirations.
One of the attractions common to amusement parks was the penny arcade. A popular place filled with pinball, claw and digger machines and Mutoscope movies, an arcade was a popular destination at boardwalks, piers and other similar locations. In 1941, Disney cartoon makers translated the penny arcade into animated form in the Donald Duck short A Good Time for a Dime. Drawing on amusement park architecture, the short opens with Donald standing at the entrance to an arcade, its talking clown facade inviting him inside. Animators had employed similar oversize "architectural barkers" in their designs for Pleasure Island in Pinocchio. It was a style common to early amusement park establishments, and likely also inspired in part by Steeplechase Park's broadly caricatured and iconic "funny face" that was that park's trademark and mascot for many years.
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Disney Studios produced a number of cartoons that featured oceanfront settings. Southern California was home to quite a few amusement piers, so it was only natural that animated incarnations of these beachside "fun zones" ultimately played host to the likes of Goofy and Donald Duck and his nephews. 
In 1947, background artist Thelma Witmer created an amusement pier setting for the Donald Duck cartoon Straight Shooters. While many would likely consider the
background to be a fairly generic representation of an amusement setting, the rendering bore a striking resemblance to the Venice Beach amusement pier in Venice, California. That Fun Zone's Bamboo Slide is clearly featured in cartoon form, as is the rollercoaster that long occupied a location at the very end of the pier. Operated by the Kinney family, the pier reached its peak of popularity in the 1920s when it attracted several hundred thousand visitors on busy weekends. By the time Disney produced Straight Shooters in the mid-1940s, the pier's popularity had waned and civic and political forces brought about its demolition.
The background painting in Straight Shooters would go on to be recycled for two other animated shorts. In Hold That Pose, released in 1950, Goofy is sidetracked from the zoo to a fun zone when he leads his photographic quarry, a bear, on a merry chase through a funhouse, a rollercoaster and other assorted amusement park trappings. A few years later, George Geef's day at the beach with his son Junior in the Goofy cartoon Father's Weekend ultimately takes him to the same amusement pier. Sailors on shore leave frequently haunted the piers and this is reflected in Geef's tunnel of love encounter and also his inadvertent visit to a tattoo parlor. It is interesting to note that the narrator of Father's Weekend specifically calls the amusement area the "Fun Zone," the same name given to the midway on the Venice Beach pier.
Midway hucksters and tattoo parlors were just a couple of the less than savory elements associated with the amusement piers, and those and similar negative associations served to inspire Walt Disney to build a more family-friendly amusement establishment in the form of Disneyland. It therefore should not have been surprising to Disney management and Imagineers that their concept for the Paradise Pier area of Disney's California Adventure that debuted with that park in 2001, was greeted criticism from many Disney theme park enthusiasts. Bright, colorful and clean, the area captured the nostalgia and thrills of traditional amusement venues while jettisoning the seedier
elements long associated with such places. Much in the way Main Street U.S.A. is an idealized manifestation of turn-of-the-century American life that skillfully eliminated the saloons and muddy thorofares common to small towns of that era, Imagineers cleaned up and re-imagined the amusement pier in the same manner. What was formerly without theme became a theme unto itself. It is a concept not entirely without controversy; acceptance is generally contingent upon the level of nostagia a given individual feels for the amusement park dynamic. Most visitors to Paradise Pier take no offense. Others reject it out of hand, citing the very overused and often intangible notion of Walt Disney's half a century removed disapproval.
Leonard Maltin has long been one of my heroes and role models. His cartoon history tome Of Mice and Magic opened up the world of classic Hollywood animation to me some twenty five or so years ago, and he's one of the very few film critics I feel I can trust for fair and insightful reviews. His participation in the Disney Treasures DVD series is but one of many reasons to elevate him to Hollywood sainthood.
Over twenty years before the current Mission: Space attraction was realized, concepts were drawn for a space-themed pavilion that would have debuted sometime during EPCOT Center's first decade of operation. Much grander in both scope and design, the centerpiece of the pavilion would have been a simulated journey on board a "huge interstellar space vehicle."
One last Snapshot! from Disneyland before we return to a more normal routine of posting.
The Muppet*Vision 3-D attraction can be found at both Disney's Hollywood Studios and Disney's California Adventure, but the two venues share little in common in terms of exterior and queue line theming. One of the funnier elements to be found at the west coast incarnation is The Great Gonzo's Catapult of Doom.
Mickey's Toontown at Disneyland is Snapshot! heaven. Design and color mix for pure eye candy wherever you turn. Even something as mundane as a mailbox becomes a visual treat.
A quick Snapshot! from the Happiest Place. The pet cemetery is a bit more accessible at Disneyland's Haunted Mansion than at its Florida counterpart. Freddie the Bat went on to his reward in 1847.
Even the most casual of readers here are likely to notice my slightly more Florida-based focus when it comes to Disney theme parks. This has always been more a product of geography than any intentional bias on my part. To correct this imbalance at least to some degree, I'm heading to southern California this weekend for my first trip to Disneyland in nearly two decades. To say I'm happy and excited would most certainly be an understatement of epic proportions.
On our last visit to Disney's Hollywood, we explored the Academy Theatre and its Florida counterpart, the Legends of Hollywood facade at Disney's Hollywood Studios. We're now going to take a few short steps across Sunset Boulevard and discover the aesthetic inspiration behind the Beverly Sunset, another movie palace-themed design that is home to the Beverly Sunset Sweet Spells store. Its very name gives a hint to the location and name of the southern California theater upon which it is based.
The Warner Beverly Hills Theatre was located at 9404 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Designed by well known theater architect B. Marcus Priteca, the building's large scale and elaborate art deco design made it a prominent feature in the landscape of Beverly Hills, distinguished especially by its tall neon-lit tower sign. Once a showcase for high profile films such as Lawrence of Arabia and The Sound of Music, it declined to a barely attended bargain venue prior to its demolition in 1989. It was razed to make room for a parking lot.
As a student of Disney history I have come to embrace that particular cliche. Simple and almost always overlooked details in Disney entertainment can often lead to very enjoyable and enlightening journeys of historical discovery. I recently embarked on such a journey after watching the Goofy cartoon The Art of Skiing.
Released in late 1941, The Art of Skiing was the first of Goofy's many sports-related how-to shorts. The cartoon opens with a panoramic sweep of snow covered mountains, eventually focusing in on a rustic ski lodge, within which the Goof is awakening and subsequently preparing for a day on the slopes. A sign identifies the building as the Sugar Bowl Lodge. That identification lasted just a few seconds on the movie screen, but proved a window into a little remembered chapter in the life of Walt Disney.
Among the preeminent enticements that drew skiers to Sugar Bowl in those early years were the chairlift up Mount Disney, the first such lift in California; and the lodge, designed by architect William Wurster and later featured in the Goofy cartoon. A newspaper report from November of 1939 announced:
Walt vacationed at Sugar Bowl in early 1941 with wife Lillian and daughter Diane. A photograph survives showing the three with Hannes Schroll at the resort. Of that trip, Diane Disney Miller recalled, "That was a long time ago, and I seem to myself to have been 7. There were twins, boy and girl, who were the children of the manager, that were one year younger than me. I remember that I very much wanted to learn to ski, that the twins--the boy, at least--drove me crazy, and the highlight of the trip was when Hannes took me up the chair lift, with my parents, on Mount Disney and skied down with me on his shoulders."
Other notable Hollywood personalities found their way to Sugar Bowl as well. Among them were Levi Strauss, King Vidor, Norma Shearer, Errol Flynn, Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert. In spring on 1941, exterior scenes for the MGM film Two Faced Woman were shot at Sugar Bowl. The film starred Greta Garbo and Melvin Douglas, but the two never left their Hollywood studio. Stunt doubles skied in their places for the second unit filming.
It is by no means an understatement to say that nearly every frame of the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit would qualify for Freeze Frame! status. While it has long been a fun and challenging task to identify all the cartoon character cameos in the movie, there is a wealth of details in the set dressings that are equally fun and entertaining. Newspaper clippings in Eddie Valiant's dusty office reveal some of the earlier and significant cases of Valiant and Valiant Private Investigators.
