Page 31 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

significance and possibilities of theming, but its basic principles can be discerned
in a number of forerunners. Two types of precursor stand out. One is amusement
22 parks that had incorporated elementary theming features at an early stage. Coney
Island’s Luna Park and Dreamland Park provide examples of this, in that attrac-
tions were clothed in exotic and sometimes erotic motifs. In Luna Park, attrac-
tions such as recreations of the Johnstown flood of 1889, the eruption of Mount
Vesuvius and the subsequent fall of Pompeii, and a Trip to the Moon provided the
rudiments of theming, as did attractions relating to cultural, geographical and
historical themes. 15 Regarding the latter, Kasson writes:
For its opening season Luna [Park] boasted a Venetian city complete with gondoliers, a Japanese gar-
den, an Irish village, an Eskimo village, a Dutch windmill, and a Chinese theater. The following year,
the park added a reproduction of the Durbar of Delhi and attempted to re-create its splendor. 16
A journalist proclaimed that this last exhibit ‘was such as to make those who wit-
nessed it imagine they were in a genuine Oriental city’. 17 The use of indigenous
people from the areas concerned, encouraged the sense of the realism and exoti-
cism of these areas of the park.
It is not known whether Coney Island influenced Walt’s thinking in the design
of Disneyland. In fact, both Luna Park (in 1946) and Dreamland (in 1911), with
its Lilliputian village of dwarves and ethnographic villages, had burned to the
ground by the time Walt was looking around for ideas for the park that was ger-
minating in his mind. Moreover, the Coney Island amusement parks represented
for him the kinds of tasteless venue that he was seeking to avoid. He did send a
team to the area for ideas, though primarily, they identified features to avoid
rather than to include. 18 Instead, Walt tended to gain inspiration from parks like
the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen for the kind of environment he was seeking.
This park merged rides and other attractions with carefully and gently landscaped
gardens. Walt was impressed by its cleanliness, its family atmosphere, the use of
music, the quality of its restaurants, and the courtesy of its employees. 19
A second type of forerunner is the exposition or world’s fair which acted as a
means of displaying modernity’s wares by suffusing them with a sense of contin-
uing scientific and technological progress and with utopianism. A number of writers
have drawn attention to the continuities between the Disney theme parks and
20
expositions and world’s fairs. Kasson, for example, notes how the Midway of the
Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 contained many themed elements that
almost certainly would have had an impact on the Coney Island parks:
Fairgoers threaded their way on foot or in hired chairs among a hurly-burly of exotic attractions:
mosques and pagodas, Viennese streets and Turkish bazaars, South Sea Island huts, Irish and
German castles, and Indian tepees. 21

A later example of this kind of theming was at the New York World’s Fair (1939–40),
which contained representations of Shakespeare’s England and New York City at