August 29 - Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship and Restaurant

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 1955, the Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship and Restaurant opened for business in Fantasyland of Disneyland. At the very beginning of Disneyland, most of the restaurants in the park were sponsored by (and in most cases actually run by) what’s known as third party companies (meaning they aren’t Disney and they aren’t a guest, they’re a third wheel to the business equation). Aunt Jemima, Swift Meats and Carnation, for examples, all had their fingers in the pies sold around Walt’s playground. Which is just one of the many reasons I roll my eyes whenever someone starts grousing about various sponsorship deals at the parks today and decrying the Michael Eisner era of corporatization. Eisner didn’t invent sponsors, folks. Roy Disney did to help pay for stuff, so get over yourselves.

Image courtesy lowgif.com

One of the restaurants that wasn’t quite ready for opening day was the one being sponsored by the Chicken of the Sea tuna company. It was going to be shaped like Captain Hook’s pirate ship, the one that Peter Pan flew back from Neverland. In the frenzy to actually get Disneyland built however, there was a miscalculation in the amount of available room in Fantasyland to keep simultaneous projects going. The Pirate Ship restaurant ended up being constructed behind Main Street USA instead. That of course led to the problem of how to get a giant ship from there into its lagoon nearly half a mile away. There was no longer a clear path to move it by land, so this version of the Jolly Roger got to fly into place as well. Tinkerbell was apparently unavailable to lend some pixie dust to the project so a giant construction crane was use instead.

When the Pirate Ship opened a little over a month after the rest of Disneyland, the restaurant instantly became an icon of the park. Guests could buy tuna burgers, hot tuna pies and tuna sandwiches at the counter service restaurant. Seating was outside around the pond. In 1960, the rather plain pond was turned into a pirate lagoon with the addition of Skull Rock, also based on the movie Peter Pan. The triple waterfall feature, the added vegetation, the sandy beaches strewn with treasure chests and the colored lights at night helped make the ship one of the most popular places to eat, or at least rest your tired feet, in all of Disneyland. All of which wasn’t apparently enough to convince Ralston Purina, who bought out Chicken of the Sea in the early Sixties, to renew their sponsorship.

Image courtesy icollector.com

By 1969, the Chicken of the Sea mermaid was removed from the ship and the restaurant was renamed Captain Hook’s Galley. For the next thirteen years, the restaurant continued to operate and thrive in its cozy location. Then disaster struck. As Fantasyland was undergoing a major renovation in 1982, it was decided to move the Pirate Ship over to the Small World lagoon in order to improve traffic flow through the area. Unfortunately, the mostly wood structure wasn’t destined to survive that much activity. Parts of the foundation had been replaced by concrete over the years to help survive being partially immersed in water but construction crews discovered that subtle rotting damage to the rest of the structure had taken too much out of it. With nothing budgeted for restoration or for building an entirely new one, the brittle ship was bulldozed and simply disappeared. Some care was taken to pry some of the plasterwork off the ship’s stern but it was improperly secured in the truck that was to haul it away. The truck went over a speedbump too quickly, the plasterwork shifted violently and disintegrated into a thousand pieces.

Image courtesy flckr.com

While you can no longer enjoy lunch at the beloved restaurant in Disneyland, you can currently pretend that you can in Disneyland Paris. A replica of the Pirate Ship and Skull Rock lagoon opened in that park’s Adventureland in 1992. A restaurant in its own right for nearly twenty years (also called Captain Hook’s Galley), the location no longer sells food but is still an area that can be explored and enjoyed. Now if there was only somewhere nearby to get a hot tuna pie and some root beer…