Drawing on Tradition: The Princess and the Frog

Drawing on Tradition:
The Princess and the Frog
By Jeff Pepper

The Princess and the Frog represented a major paradigm shift for me in terms of how I approach and ultimately purchase access to the latest Disney entertainment.

Translation:  I waited for the DVD.  More specifically, I waited for the Blu-Ray disc.  The cost for a family of four to go to the movies now well exceeds the price of even a deluxe edition Blu-Ray package.  For the first time that I can recall, I balked at running to the multiplex on opening day to see the latest Disney animated feature, and instead patiently waited a very short three months to enjoy The Princess and the Frog in the privacy and comfort of my own relatively well-furnished home theater.  As Bob Dylan would say, " . . . the times they are a changin'."

It's not that I wasn't anxious and excited to see the company's celebrated  return to traditional hand-drawn animation since Home on the Range underwhelmed both critics and audiences in 2004.   (Celebrated, if not just a tad disingenuous--after all it was Disney itself that killed 2D six years ago.)  It's just that I had been feeling a wee bit cynical throughout much of 2009 about the Walt Disney Company's overwhelming uber-synergetic marketing machine and its relatively transparent desire to drain my checking account.

Let me just quickly and unequivocally state that The Princess and Frog was totally undeserving of my somewhat immature and misdirected contempt.  It is a wonderful, energetic and very satisfying film that, while not groundbreaking or wholly original, still manages to set itself apart from the vast majority of over-produced animated fare that has crowded theaters for the past few years.  Despite the film's reliance on tried and true Disney formula, there is still oh so much to compliment and endorse.  The songs and score by Randy Newman infuse the story with a style wholly new to a Disney feature.  Animation is top drawer, backgrounds are lush and beautiful, characters are distinct and well-realized and the story moves along at an energetic and entertaining pace.  And similar to title character Tiana's passion for making the perfect gumbo, the film adds just the right dash of sentiment that will fill and break your heart at the same moment.

What truly impressed me most was the obvious desire on the part of the film's makers to not just return to the mechanics of hand-drawn animation, but to literally draw on techniques and visual styles that could never be realized or matched in computer-generated productions.  The musical sequences "Almost There" and "Friends on the Other Side" especially feature creative designs reminiscent of classic vignettes from films such as The Three Caballeros, Melody Time and Dumbo.  To think that some bone-headed executive decided five years ago that this type of visual expression was obsolete and irrelevant is both chilling and disturbing.  Thankfully, saner minds have been restored to Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Though the disc's supplemental features are a generally slight collection of very brief sound bite vignettes by the film's directors, cast and animators, they serve to very much illustrate the passion that these individuals had for bringing about a return of traditional animation to the Disney company.  The Princess and the Frog was truly a labor of love, especially for 1980s and 1990s animation veterans such as Mark Henn, Andreas Dejas, Eric Goldberg and directors John Musker and Ron Clements.  Experiencing their joy and enthusiasm by way of what are usually standard talking-head segments was an unexpected delight.

Though not a success on the level of a Pixar film, The Princess and the Frog demonstrates that a traditional animated feature can still be welcomed and enjoyed by critics and audiences alike.   Bravo to its creators, animators, cast and crew.  You have accomplished something truly meaningful at the precise moment in time when it so desperately needed to be accomplished.  Well done.

The Lake Buena Vista Story, Part Two: 1975 - 1982

By 1976, The Lake Buena Vista Club was hosting brunch. On Mondays, one could enjoy a Night of Wine & Roses – wine sampling at the Village Spirits, a rose from the Flower Garden, then a romantic, silent flote boate cruise to the Club for dinner. Tuesdays was Dinner for Tue, with a candlelit Club dinner followed by a moonlit cruise. Sundays brought about a Champagne Brunch with stops at Village Spirits, a flote boate cruise to the Club, and a brunch with eggs benedict and roast beef. And Disney was building again in Lake Buena Vista – this time to the West of the Lake Buena Vista Club, East of the Treehouse Villas, nestled comfortably between four golf holes – the 10th and 11th to the east and north, and the 17th and 18th to the west and south. Because of this, these became known as the “Fairway Villas”.





The Fairway Villas were amongst the most dramatic and distinctive of Disney’s developments in Lake Buena Vista, as well as the most architecturally sophisticated. From Walt Disney World: The First Decade:“Designed to showcase energy-efficient housing ideas, the Fairway Villas benefit from thoughtful positioning and energy-conserving construction methods and materials.

Exaggerated roof overhangs and double-glazed windows reduce heat absorption through exterior walls during warm weather. Air-to-air heat pumps serve as energy-minded air conditioners. When an air conditioner is on, heat is recovered from its condenser to provide hot water.

To preserve the major portion of the surrounding acreage for parks and recreation, Disney planners clustered the Lake Buena Vista Villas around heavily wooded courtyards and cul-de-sacs. Planners avoid the ‘grid’ system found in many neighborhoods, where residences are uniformly built on rows of small, square subdivided lots.



Most of the Villas look out onto natural surroundings, rather than onto other dwellings. Thus, clustering not only saves more space for recreation, it retains a sense of privacy while enhancing the spirit of community.”

And an earlier 1977 magazine: “The Villas, expected to yield energy savings of 50 percent with their unique design, each have a 720-square-foot living, dining, and kitchen area and two bedrooms, one of which can be combined with the adjoining Villa. Designed for family vacations, meetings, seminars, and executive conferences, the Villa units will be arranged so that as many as four bedrooms can be rented by one tenant.”



Crazy concept art for the LBV houses

The Treehouses and Fairway Villas, of course, had nearly as many windows as walls, and the Fairway villas had their distinctive skylights, encouraging the use of Florida’s ample sunlight instead of eclectic lamps. Car parking was provided underneath the Villas in dugouts. Today these touches may not be as impressive or obvious as something like the Universe of Energy’s solar panels but in 1976 they were stylish as well as forward thinking, something few residential houses can today claim. Disney even built full-scale residential houses in the style of a ranch house as part of this development, four of them: numbers 301, 302, 303 and 304, clustered around their own little cul-de-sac away from the other Villas. These were intended to be real honest to goodness houses, perhaps in later days as retirement houses for prominent Disney officials. Each had a little car / golf cart port and was built in a different style: southwest for 301, a beach house for 302. Number 303 was a square little ranch house and 304 was a grey little number with some volcanic rock accents.







The LBV houses in later days. Top to bottom, 301 - 304

The experiment was not repeated, and today the houses which are on Walt Disney World property remain hidden off 535 and on the far side of Bay Lake, a carefully selected “population” of less than 50 people.


In 1977, the Sun Bank building went up south of the Village, near Interstate-4 and SR 535. Read some 1978 Disney literature: “The first building of the new Office Plaza, developed by Oxford Properties, US, Ltd, boasts one of the country’s most up-to-date banking systems. The five-story building is the first phase of a planned 13-building office park on a 50-acre site.” Disney was building themselves quite a little town on the outskirts of their property.

1977 brought more changes to the Village. The Shopping Village was originally built on the south-eastern side of an inlet, with Captain Jack’s Oyster Bar, as the northernmost building, facing a sylvan forest. A bit further north along the Village Lagoon (by now re-named the Buena Vista Lagoon), the Vacation Villas had, for five years, faced a little bar of land in the middle of the Lagoon as it narrowed into the canal system near the Lake Buena Vista Club. Disney dammed up an area to the north-west of the Pottery Chalet, sliced off several dozen feet of land off the Villages cozy cove - turning it into more of a bay - removed the island facing the Villas, and began construction of the Empress Lilly Riverboat.



Between it and the pottery Chalet they built the Village Pavilion, a series of interlocked structures housing three new eateries. When the Empress Lilly opened, a new dock was added on the water side of the vessel, facing Captain Jack’s. Now the flote boats would depart exclusively from the Lake Buena Vista Club and silently dock alongside the Lilly, disembarking passengers ascending a gentle ramp and emerging into the Promenade Lounge. Motorboats would ply between “Cruise Dock West”, near Captain Jack’s, and the Lake Buena Vista Club.

The 1977 expansions officially brought a name change to the Village, now the Walt Disney World Village at Lake Buena Vista.



Since the earliest days of the Lake Buena Vista Club, a canal wrapping around its north face had always widened into an elongated dewdrop of a lake, called Club Lake. And in 1978 a series of little buildings began to spring up along the shores of Club Lake, on the shore near the Club and across from it, in what would turn out to be Lake Buena Vista’s final growth spurt in over a decade… The Club Lake Villas.


Probably the most charming of the Lake Buena Vista developments surrounding the Clubhouse, the Club Lake Villas were smaller one-family townhouse type accommodations with a bedroom, a square little living room generously splashed in sunlight thanks to dramatically vertical ceilings and skylights, and a kitchenette. They were clustered in little courtyards with roundabouts between each grouping of four, and each Villa looked out across Club Lake at the far side’s grouping of Villas. A long wooden footbridge was constructed to link the Villas on the north side of Club Lake with the Villas on the south side, which had their own pool and recreation facilities. Or one could follow the golf cart path onto the Lake Buena Vista Club and her pool and marina.



In 1978, the Post Office had moved out of its’ spot in the Village to make way for an expansion of the Village Spirits shop – The Vintage Cellar – and made its way over to the old Preview Center building, where the Lake Buena Vista Post Office became the Lake Buena Vista Welcome Center, offering check in services for those staying in the Villas (a temporary building off Buena Vista Blvd, the major vehicle entryway from Preview Blvd., had served as the Welcome Center until now).



Club Lake in the Institute days

Spring 1980, a high roofed structure surmounted with a signature square tower appeared along the northern coast of Club Lake – the Lake Buena Vista Conference Center. Aimed at the corporate sponsors Disney was still courting in 1980, the “8,000 square foot facility was designed to expressly for small to medium sized meetings and seminars. Movable walls in the cedar-covered, chalet-style building allows the four rooms to be configured in several ways. When the rooms are combined into one 6,500-square-foot space, more than 500 guests may be comfortably seated theater style. The Conference Center also features advanced lighting, sound and audio-visual systems, and can handle television broadcasts, press events and multi-media shows.”

And it was this arrangement – the Lake Buena Vista Golf Course, the Motor Plaza, the Clubhouse, the Marina, the Conference Center, the Treehouses, the Fairway Villas, Vacation Villas and Club Lake Villas – anchored by the Walt Disney World Village – that was pretty much the “finished” form of Lake Buena Vista for over ten years.


What is today hard to emphasize enough about this is how unique, not only for accommodations at Walt Disney World, but unique amongst each different kind of Villa, this community was. The Polynesian and Contemporary Resorts were a pretty standardized size of room, each not especially distinguished from any other high-end resort hotel except for the remarkable Disney design work outside their four walls and the location they were in. Disney themselves certainly never made too many claims that the actual experience of the rooms in their resorts was much to write home about, and priced them competitively in the 1970’s to make staying on property not only convenient but affordable.

The Golf Resort, in comparison, offered somewhat larger rooms, and the Campgrounds at Fort Wilderness larger still, with very large cabins and additional campsites added in 1978. But the Villas were really something else, truly room to spread out in. Not only that, if one wished to ‘go shopping’ amongst each model she could compare things like beddings, staircases, interior finish and kitchen facilities to find a truly comfortable, truly perfectly tailored “best fit”. In these days before Eisner’s aggressive expansion of Disney’s hotel properties, each unit could be uniquely designed and furnished, uniquely situated, uniquely tailored to an individual’s vacation needs. Although it’s hard to fault the hotel addiction on Eisner’s part too much if he gave us great architectural works like the Wilderness Lodge and Boardwalk, but each of those rooms are identical to the others in layout and basic amenities, a far cry from those funky, unique Villas dotting the landscape across from the Village. It may seem out of place here in 1978 to bring up Eisner, but in a very real way Eisner was to alter the future of the Villas… directly and indirectly.

Of course, as of the early eighties with the excitement of the Walt Disney World ‘Tencennial’ and the opening of EPCOT Center, none of that was even foreseeable. From a May 1982 interview with Dick Nunis:

“But what [Walt Disney] really wanted to do [in Florida] was develop an area where all types of corporations, governments, and academia could come together to really try and solve some of the problems that exist in the world today. We started with the recreation area, and then began the community, which is Walt Disney World Village, and now we’re building the center … Epcot Center, and we’re going to connect it all with the monorail system. […] In addition, we have some dreams for the Walt Disney World Village. From the Empress Lilly, we’re going into a New Orleans street, and you’ll walk right into a beautiful New Orleans hotel.”


To this end, in 1981, Disney began to purchase extra monorail beams and pillars from Morrison-Knudsen, a concrete manufacturer, who had also supplied the beams for EPCOT Center at a very reasonable price. Since 1977 Disney had been publishing and promoting a little model showing an expanded Walt Disney World Village, complete with a fully realized office complex, an expanded shopping village, and a monorail and peoplemover running through it – yes, a Peoplemover. As of 1976 the Lake Buena Vista Land Company had begun to plan for a Peoplemover to bring guests from the Motor Plaza hotels into the Village, stopping at the Pottery Chalet, and then moving on. On to where? Well..

“Future plans in the commercial area include a two million square foot office park to be developed in the next ten years. The project is contemplated as the headquarters offices for major financial institutions as well as for local professional business. The shopping village will be expanded in the next ten years to approximately 300,000 square feet. A multi-modal station will become the focal point for both the city [Lake Buena Vista] circulation system and the regional transportation network. There will be medium to high density living units constructed near the village lake front to create the balance of day and night activities in the commercial center.”

This multi-modal station would comprise bus, taxi, monorail and peoplemover transportation. According to “Lake Buena Vista Peoplemover”, a project proposal published in 1976 and from which the above is quoted, the station would link in with city and regional transportation with the aim of developing a city center “completely void of the private automobile”. This is a manifestation of Disney’s then-commitment to working with the state of Florida, which even in the early 1970’s was rapidly becoming one of the most quickly growing urban areas in the country and much of the local government’s interests at the time were geared towards reducing vehicular congestion. Interstate 4 was online as early as 1957, and in 1971 Disney had quickly constructed a “STOLport”, a small landing strip meant for intra-state commuter planes, another ambitious attempt by then Florida governor Reuben Askew to alleviate traffic congestion. The Florida state flight industry dried up before it even got started, and today the Walt Disney World STOLport sits abandoned. But a transit hub is undeniably a cornerstone of a growing community, which is what Lake Buena Vista was going to be. According to Disney’s plan, the Lake Buena Vista Villas was phase one of an elaborate four-community vacation community, comprising recreation themed communities – golf, tennis, boating and horses – and a transient population of 30,000!

A transient population of 30,000? A peoplemover through a downtown area of shopping and dining? Commercial highrises? Monorails? Modern homes situated in grassy, pastoral suburbs along cul-de-sacs instead of grids? Haven’t we heard this before? That’s right, it’s nearly every component of Walt Disney’s Progress City – only spread out across a huge area instead of the compact circle Walt Disney was envisioning in 1966. Disney was building a community – a real community – or at least trying to.




Come back next week when the Villas become an Institute, an Institute becomes a rubble pile and a hurricane destroys everything!

Song of the South: A Slightly Different Perspective

Editor's Note:  At this week's shareholder meeting, Disney CEO Robert Iger made a rather harsh and firm statement about the potential home video release status of Song of the South.  Hollywood Reporter noted that Iger called the film "antiquated' and “fairly offensive," and said there are no plans for releasing Song of the South on DVD.  I addressed previous statements by Iger concerning Song of the South in a commentary from 2007 that I am re-publishing today.  I cannot tell you the last time I watched Song of the South; I know that I have not viewed it in the three years since I wrote this commentary.  I remain as generally indifferent to it now as I did then.  I have retained the original comments to the post left by readers in 2007.

Song of the South: A Slightly Different Perspective
By Jeff Pepper

There are any number of hot button topics out there that ignite the Disney faithful to debates both passionate and contentious. I typically only enter into these discussions if I feel I can provide a unique perspective of the issue at hand. I have lately come to realize that I might have a decidedly different view than most on Song of the South.

Long a subject of blogs, forums and the occasional mainstream media article, the film’s secure-in-the-vaults status has been a disappointment to American Disney enthusiasts for quite a number of years. As far back as the early 1990s, this 1946 mix of live action and animation has been deemed a potential powder keg of political incorrectness and racial insensitivity and considerations for a domestic release have always quickly died on the vine. But while Disney CEO Robert Iger seemed to send a generally discouraging message about a Song of the South release at his first stockholders meeting in 2006, recent comments at this year’s New Orleans conference seemed to indicate a softening on the subject. When again asked about the status of the situation, Iger responded:

"The question of 'Song of the South' comes up periodically, in fact it was raised at last year's annual meeting. And since that time, we've decided to take a look at it again because we've had numerous requests about bringing it out. Our concern was that a film that was made so many decades ago being brought out today perhaps could be either misinterpreted or that it would be somewhat challenging in terms of providing the appropriate context."

For any animation fan and student of Disney history, those are encouraging words indeed. Yet I have to say that I personally feel surprisingly indifferent to a Song of the South release. A decidedly different point of view from an individual who has long decried the suppression of Disney history in the name of political correctness.

In fairness, I have to say that I have for quite some time been able to view Song of the South at my convenience. Japanese and British editions have made this possible for close to a decade and a half. So in that regard I do not have the basic frustrations of inaccessibility that many possess.

Disney last made the movie available to American audiences when they re-released it to theaters in 1986. In the twenty years since, issues of content have escalated into a controversy that has ultimately overshadowed the film itself. In essence, Song of the South has by and large become greater than the sum of its parts. For at its core, and despite having provided the now-iconic strains of "Zip-a-dee Doo-dah" and vivid and colorful animated sequences, it does little to truly distinguish itself from other Disney films of the same time period. And thus comes forth my previously indicated indifference; the film is simply not worthy of all the “legend” it has come to be associated with.

As entertainment, much can be said for the film’s energetic music and well realized animated characters. Yet taken as a whole, it is an uneven, and at times disjointed endeavor. The live-action sequences tend to be slow and without spirit, marked especially by very annoying overacting on the part of its juvenile players, most notably Bobby Driscoll. And while its racial stereotyping is generally benign and without malice, it severely dates the film in a manner that will likely undermine any lasting endearment current and future audiences might have developed for it. In much the same manner that the stature of Gone With the Wind, with its similar racial undertones, has diminished over the past two decades, so likely will Song of the South ultimately become classified more as film history than timeless entertainment.

While I certainly would welcome a DVD that featured a restored Song of the South and included comprehensive supplemental material, I could make the same request for numerous other Disney feature films from the studio’s first three decades. There are other Disney productions much more deserving of either the Treasures or Legacy brand and treatment that Song of the South would likely receive should it be released in the near future.

In the end the question becomes this: Is the desire by many to own Song of the South based on an actual love of the film, or simply the result of being denied access to it? Often times it’s not so much about the cookie as it is about the fact that Mom said “No!”

 Originally published April 14, 2007.

The Lake Buena Vista Story, Part One: 1969 - 1975

(The following represents the newest entry in my Buena Vista Obscura series which I began last year with my coverage of the Golf Resort. I then put the articles on hold pending further research, which I can now proudly say has paid off with this opus. It will be posted in four parts, one each week, and represents nearly a year and a half of information gathering. Enjoy, I know I did! -FoxxFur)





“Situated in a peaceful, pine woods and water-entwined corner of Disney’s 43-square-mile Vacation Kingdom in Florida is Lake Buena Vista, the Host Community to Walt Disney World. Just off Interstate 4 and State Road 535, this nature-inspired city provides the ultimate in vacation lifestyles.”

What follows is the story of one of Walt Disney World’s most ignored and least understood construction projects. Disney themselves seem loathe to admit what they were up to, back in the early 70’s, which is a shame because the armchair Disney historian, so often so quick to condemn the seventies leadership for their shortsightedness and especially their failure to realize Walt Disney’s E.P.C.O.T. project, may be surprised to learn of the ways the company was actually working towards that goal – on a perhaps more realistic scale. Call it the second draft of the EPCOT city. Disney called it “the Resort Community of Lake Buena Vista”.

It’s debatable whether plans for the Progress City, as it was advertised at the finalie of the Carousel of Progress, in the Walt Disney Story and elsewhere, lived much longer than Walt Disney did. What is on record, however, is that the company continued to actively publicize the Progress City model, even taking time to remove a portion of it from the Disneyland Carousel of Progress and ship it over to Florida for installation along the Florida Peoplemover track in 1975. Since their own community building effort was underway by that time, had they wanted to suppress the Progress City concept they presumably would not have gone to such pains to keep the model on public display, as it still is today. So perhaps there is some truth to Disney’s old publicity claim that Lake Buena Vista was “the experimental prototype of the experimental prototype”. Where the connection may be may lie in the fact that much of Disney’s efforts in Lake Buena Vista lay in community planning, ecologicly friendly construction, and the involvement of American industry leaders and Florida state transportation.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… what exactly was Lake Buena Vista?

To answer that we have to start at the beginning, further back than the existence of Walt Disney World itself, actually. Back in January 1970, Disney opened the first little bit of Walt Disney World available to a paying public, an unassuming square building which stands today, but which was then known as the Walt Disney World Preview Center, on Preview Blvd, off state road 535 in Orlando. At this time, a natural body of water behind the preview center, called Black Lake, became Lake Buena Vista.

The name Lake Buena Vista has always struck me as the most inspiring of names for almost-fake towns, a romantic invocation, three of the best words in the Disney lexicon put in the best order possible. Buena Vista, of course, was Disney’s distribution company created out of his break with RKO in 1950. Walt Disney World did then and does now incorporate the municipalities (Disney callas them “towns”) of Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, which looks better and less commercial on government maps than “Disney World”. In any case “Lake Buena Vista” is a way better moniker than “Celebration” any day of the week for my money.

A few months after the opening of the Preview Center, construction began along Preview Blvd on the Lake Buena Vista Hotel Plaza, ready to open for guests by Walt Disney World’s second year: Howard Johnson’s still distinctive white tower, a sprawling Dutch Inn, a Royal Plaza which still is memorable for looking like the Contemporary cut in half, and a TravelLodge. By this time, Disney engineers had already begun excavation on Lake Buena Vista, carving out of a canal leading from Black Lake a wider lake which they named Village Lagoon, and kept on digging a complex canal system which eventually wound its way westward and then northward, branching and working its way north all the way past Fort Wilderness and emptying into Bay Lake. These canals still exist today and are known as the Sassagoula River by modern day guests staying at Dixie Landings and Old Key West.

Around this time, the first Vacation Villas began construction on the Village Lagoon and this, my friends, is where our story truly begins. At first, the idea behind these two-level modern little townhouse style homes is that they could be leased or sold to corporate partners to provide a company owned, Disney maintained getaway or to provide incentives or other rewards. In Disney World terms these were truly “out in the sticks”, nearby nothing except the hotel plaza and SR 535 – and this was back in the day when the Lake Buena Vista complex was not internally linked to World Drive, the major tourist artery to the Magic Kingdom – you would have to get back on Interstate 4 via 535 and continue down until you got to the formal 194 / I-4 interchange and could proceed to Walt Disney World.

Entertaining on the Villas' porch

But the Villas faced a peaceful little inlet, and there was a secluded pool, a cove for water launches, and in the earliest years they must have seemed like you had all of Disney World to yourself.

Relaxing at the Villas' pool, late 1970's

The Vacation Villas were perhaps most famous and well-remembered by longtime Disney World visitors as being the strange, low, grey buildings which faced the Walt Disney World Village / Marketplace until 2001. They were perhaps not too astonishing in design – looking more or less like any other apartment complex that could’ve been built in the 1970’s or 1980’s – but for accommodations, they were working overtime. From a 1976 Disney World publication: “For larger families and groups, the spacious one- and two-bedroom Villas provide plenty of room. Each is elegantly furnished and includes all the conveniences – kitchenware, color television, linens and daily housekeeping service. In addition, [Vacation Villa] guests receive complimentary motor coach transportation to the Magic Kingdom and the Walt Disney World Resorts.”

Above, a 1974 promotional image showing the dramatic three-level interior of the Villas. Below, a 1980 view of the outside of a Vacation Villa, and if you look through the window you can see the distinctive wallpaper and signature modern staircase at the back of the living room. A 1987 promotional image better showing the staircase and living room follows.

The Vacation Villas were not long all by themselves along the Village Lagoon. By early 1974, the Lake Buena Vista Golf Course opened alongside the Village Lagoon and extending northwards towards Bay Lake. Designed by Joe Lee, the golf course was “designed with mid-handicap players in mind [but] the Lake Buena Vista course is still challenging enough to be included on the TPA Tour.” Still one of the best and few remaining places to escape back into old Walt Disney World still operating today, the Golf Course was soon followed by its own clubhouse – the Lake Buena Vista Club.

Concept art for the Clubhouse

Opening November 22, 1974, the four million dollar Club was an unassuming little two level structure, the first floor buried to provide a charming entryway from the driveway while allowing the ground to slope away on the water side to provide diners a spectacular elevated view. Built in a Swiss Chalet style, the Clubhouse more or less accommodated just five functions: the Lake Buena Vista Club restaurant, the Lake Buena Vista Club Pro Shop, a pool, lighted tennis courts, and a boat rental and transport marina. In May of the following year, the Marina would host boats leaving every twenty minutes to putter their way across the Village Lagoon over to the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village.

As inauspicious as it may seem today, the Lake Buena Vista Club was amongst Disney’s earliest efforts towards providing a truly high-end dining experience, along with another early restaurant at the Contemporary which has similarly gone by the wayside, the Gulf Coast Room, and The Trophy Room at the Golf Resort. Here is how the Club is described in a 1976 issue of The World News in their Dining Directory Index: “Continental Cusine served in a country club setting. Sportsman’s breakfast from 7 – 11:30 am $.70 - $2.40. Luncheon served 11:30 am – 3 pm. $2.10 – $4.75. Gourmet dinners from 5:30 – 9:30 pm (until 10pm Friday & Saturday). Atmosphere entertainment. Dinner reservations necessary. $5.75 - $12.95. Full menu selection for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 6:30 am – 11 pm $1 - $7.95.” (To put this in perspective, $12.75 in 1974 is the equivalent of over $55 today, and only the Gulf Coast Room and the Trophy Room offered this sort of price point in all of Walt Disney World.)

Here’s another testimonial, this time from the Summer 1981 issue of Disney News, perhaps a bit more evocative:

“Sparkling Evenings at the Lake Buena Vista Club… Imagine yourself comfortably settled amidst the intimate atmosphere of an elegant, private club. A personable, tuxedoed wine captain glides to and fro, attending to your every need; the serving of a sumptuous gourmet meal, or perhaps, the cork-popping of a bottle of vintage wine.

As you savor your meal, you take in a stunning view of a moonlit lagoon, while a trio of strolling musicians lingers near your table, gently rendering a melodic offering you have specially requested.

After losing yourself in the musician’s stylings, you partake of the ‘house specialty’ – a fiery, devilishy delicious concoction containing rum, liquer, and whipped cream. Cares and worries are light years away.”

(The after-dinner coffee mentioned, by the way, is Café Buena Vista – almond liqueur, brandy, coffee, whipped cream and a candied cherry, according to my Cooking with Mickey Around the World from 1986.)

“Lake Buena Vista Club evenings, in particular, offer seekers of “the good life” – couples, singles, families, the young and the young-at-heart, a truly exceptional experience, enhanced by lush, foliaged surroundings, sparkling waters, personalized attention and expertly prepared gourmet meals, highlighted by such unforgettable entrees as Roasted Duck with orange sauce, Supreme of Red Snapper and Steak Diane Flambe.

Add to this gracious environment the stringed instrumentalizings of the ‘Dixie Deltas’ (except Thursdays), an outstanding selection of fine wines, and the Club’s own Café Buena Vista (that ‘devilish’ potion mentioned earlier) and you might very well be ‘spoiled’ by the time you have capped this captivating evening!”

It’s worth noting that, emphasis on alcohol aside - which was indeed a very big difference between Disneyland and Walt Disney World in 1981 – the atmosphere conjured here is pretty similar to Disneyland’s Blue Bayou. In California, Disney had to build an optical illusion of such a place. In Florida, it could be found in nature, waiting for them there.

One short lived and under documented event around this time was the conversion of the Preview Center into “Buena Vista Interiors”, a “quality contract interior decorating firm […] Personalized decorating assistance is available to corporations and individuals leasing townhomes, as well as to Central Florida residents and businessmen.” (interior view at left) Headed by WED’s in-house interior designer Emile Kuri, it’s another intriguing puzzle piece in the story of Disney and American Industry in Lake Buena Vista. This swings us ‘back round to EPCOT and Progress City, of course. From the very get go Disney (Walt) and Disney (Company) knew that much would rise or fall on the involvement of Industry in EPCOT, and part of its’ eventual conversion into a theme park may be a result of Card Walker’s inability to get as many companies interested in forking over huge sums of money during the economically uncertain seventies as was needed to make the Progress City a reality. Disney tried a number of tactics to entice these companies to sign with Disney, and the “lease or buy” program at Lake Buena Vista was one of these.

The construction of the Vacation Villas in 1972 was more or less unpublicized, indicating that Disney initially hoped to sell all of the units or buildings to various companies. “A limited number of one- and two-bedroom villas, fully furnished and complete with linens and kitchenware, are available to families visiting the Vacation Kingdom for short-term rentals.” reports Disney in 1974, several years later, but this was prefaced by the following:

“More than 100 townhomes, incorporating four distinct design styles, already are completed and are available to corporations for two- or three-year-term leases or outright purchase in full. Ideal for executive family vacations, customer entertaining, or sales-incentive-reward holidays, the townhomes come furnished or unfurnished.”

Ah-ha. If at first these townhomes were meant to be purchased in full by companies, then the establishment of a separate interior design firm to furnish these empty Vacation Villas makes perfect sense. Once Disney began publicizing these Villas outside the ‘Host Community’ and in the ‘Vacation Kingdom’, in fact, this “lease-or-buy” theme is constant. While a Spring 1974 Vacationland boasts of an “Exciting, New Lifestyle for American Industry”, a June 1976 World News edition contains the following from a certain Dan W. Darrow, manager of sales and marketing for Lake Buena Vista: “Clients would be impressed with staying in a Treehouse overlooking a fairway, and employees might work harder if they could win a week’s stay in a luxurious Vacation Villa. […] The spacious Villas are ideal for client receptions, business discussions, or cocktail parties with friends.” Those are dollar signs in Disney’s words, there, one must admit, and this sort of angle doesn’t actually vanish from company literature until around 1979, when plans for EPCOT Center the theme park were more or less primed and underway.

Opening in late 1974 and early 1975, some of the most famous and memorable of all early Walt Disney World lodging structures became part of the Lake Buena Vista complex – 60 “Treehouses”, constructed in, in what was an engineering feat for the time, an undisturbed natural wetland – the Treehouses were elevated to allow for natural drainage, as well as protect the structures from the possibility of flooding. What they actually were were a cluster of three bedrooms and a living room apiece, one bedroom on the ground floor, connected to the living room via a spiral staircase, which shared the “top deck” with two bedrooms and a bath.

The Treehouses must be counted amongst Walt Disney World’s most romantically wacky creations. Complete with an outside deck and all-electric kitchen, with parking for electric carts (one presumably left her car at the Club and the cart was free with your room) and a cart pathway which wound alongside the Walt Disney World canal system, past the Lake Buena Vista Club and eventually to the Village, the original Treehouses are emblematic of Disney’s commitment to not repeat themselves with Walt Disney World and offer something sophisticated and different.

All of this development came to the head in May 1975, with the opening of the Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village. The Village was intended to be the cornerstone of the Lake Buena Vista community, literally its downtown. It included such diverse offerings as restaurants, an oyster bar open until 2am, a lounge with jazz performances nightly, and a grocery store to give those people in Vacation Villas and Treehouses something to cook in their kitchens and kitchenettes. The Gourmet Pantry even delivered direct to those staying in the “host community”. Nearby, the hotels of the Lake Buena Vista Motor Lodge were hosting lively nightlife and dining, popular with Walt Disney World guests as well as locals and Cast Members.

The Village's waterfront in 1975

Things were looking up for Lake Buena Vista.

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Return next week when we discover Club Lake and the Convention Center!

Bonus Images:

Donald Duck's Best Christmas

Disney legend and comic book artist-writer Carl Barks is well known for his deft storytelling and often times sharp wit, and these qualities are certainly evident in the various Christmas-themed tales he put to paper over his long and prolific career. But it is also interesting to note that the Duckman never really succumbed to infusing excessive holiday spirit into these efforts, and more often than not, his tales of Christmas seemed more prone to cynicism than sentimentality. However, Barks' very first four color Christmas story, "Donald Duck's Best Christmas," does touch on themes of kindness and unconditional giving that even the bluster and self serving qualities of its title character can't completely overshadow.

Donald and his nephews anticipate their best Christmas ever; they're heading to Grandma's house via horse and sleigh, bringing presents and the Christmas turkey and singing festive carols along the way. But a curmudgeonly farmer and bad weather soon impede their travels. When Donald is nearly frozen by a plunge into icy waters, they are forced to seek shelter with a destitute family in a remote cabin. Without any thought at all, the mother and her two children quickly offer what little they have--the warmth of the fire and the last of their hot milk--to aid in Donald's recovery. Not surprisingly, Donald can only focus on his own troubles and fails to recognize the hardship that surrounds him, or even acknowledge the sincerity and selflessness of those who have come to his aid.

It falls to Huey, Dewey and Louie to act collectively as the story's moral center and good conscience, roles they typically play in so many of Barks' efforts. For when the ducks give up their trek to Grandma's and sadly turn back for home, the boys reveal to their uncle that they have in fact given away the presents and the holiday bird to the needy family. While Donald is surprisingly non-plussed by the revelation, he still remains relatively true to self by being seemingly unimpressed by his nephews' kind and genuine gesture. His self-centered, final panel proclamation gives credence to the theory that Barks' parting words in holiday tales tended to be jaded and cynical ones.

It was an odd dynamic and one that Barks scholar Geoffrey Blum commented on in a collection of Barks Christmas stories published by Gladstone Comics back in the late 1980s. Blum noted of Donald, " . . . if anything, the story has proven him eminently fallible. By giving Donald the last word, however, Barks managed to soften what would otherwise have been an unbearably preachy ending. It's the first in a long line of ambiguous morals, a device at which the artist became quite proficient. As a purveyor of wholesome entertainment for children, he could seldom finish up with a snarl, yet he was equally determined not to end on a syrupy note. Best to conclude with a question mark."

Whether or not Carl Barks was a Christmas curmudgeon is certainly open for debate. Stories such as "Letter to Santa" and "You Might Guess" were almost totally void of sentiment, but in "Donald Duck's Best Christmas," and his most famous holiday story "A Christmas for Shacktown," even the Duckman allowed a little warmth of heart to emerge from some of the panels contained within those efforts. And that, in and of itself, is a small testament to spirit of the holiday season.

Disney's Christmas Mice

. . . and we don't mean Mickey and Minnie.

A different breed of mice came into prominence at the Disney Studio during the 1950s, but they were of a different nature than the oversize icons with the big round ears that had come to represent the company. The design style of these creatures seems rooted in rodents of Cinderella, epitomized by Gus, Jacques and their many friends who helped that film's heroine ultimately realize her happily ever after destiny.

Similarly-styled mice appeared in Ben and Me, of which the title character of Amos was the most prominent. This mouse-type also extended into other Disney efforts. In 1957, McCall's magazine featured the illustrated story Walt Disney's Christmas Carol that retold the classic Dickens tale but replaced Bob Cratchtet with the character of Cedric Mouse, who in physical resemblance could easily have been a cousin of Gus, Jacques or Amos. We featured illustrations and excerpts from Walt Disney's Christmas Carol in a previous post here at 2719 Hyperion.

In an interesting twist, the studio extended this mouse-mythology into the audio arena with the release in 1958 of Mickey Mouse Christmas Favorites which was in fact Walt Disney Records first holiday album. The album combined a number of previously released selections, the most notable of which was what would become the company's perennial Christmas tune "From All of Us to All of You." But as these liner notes describe, a number of the recordings came from some freshly discovered talent:

Discovered under a stairway at the Disneyland Studio, the unique all-mouse symphony orchestra under the able baton of Ludwig Mousensky is undoubtably the first and finest rodent ensemble in the world. And, we here at Disneyland Records are proud to present their first recording, "The Christmas Concert." Here are Yuletide hymns, "Hark The Herald Angels Sing," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," "O Come All Ye Faithful," "Jingle Bells," and the popular 'Winter Wonderland." The Mousensky group's rendition of these songs is truly a delightful experience for all. Under the maestro, the orchestra, consisting of Squeeky, Zeke, Horace, Henrietta, Tubby, Tootie, Clarence, Pinky, Stuffy, Zooty, Hans, Fritz, Otto (these three were formerly with the Vienna's famed DeutschMICEster Band), Pee Wee and Frenchy give a new dimension to these Christmas favorites. All proving that Christmas is a time for both mice and men.

While the album jacket did not provide any visual representations of this "rodent ensemble," its high-pitched renditions are certainly reminiscent of those performed by Cinderella's pint-size pals.