August 29 - Chicken of the Sea Pirate Ship and Restaurant

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

July 31 - Casey Jr Circus Train

On this day, in 1955, the Casey Jr. Circus Train ride finally opened for business in Fantasyland of Disneyland. With Walt Disney's love of trains, it's almost amazing that there was only two train attractions when Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. The major one was the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad, with narrow-gauge steam driven locomotives that circumnavigated the park and made stops in three (now four) different lands. The smaller ride was not only designed with smaller riders in mind (who might be afraid of the bigger train) but would capitalize on existing Disney characters as well.

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Even though it's an inanimate object, the Casey Jr. Circus Train is really just as much of a character in Dumbo as anyone else involved with the circus. He has his own theme song and everything. So he naturally translates into an attraction with character of its own. The Circus Train runs on a two foot wide track as opposed to the three foot wide track of the Disneyland Railroad. While being a third smaller might not seem like a lot, anyone of the adult persuasion will have no trouble feeling the loss of space. Which is okay, since Casey isn't really designed with adults in mind. Small pints love it and the ride is short enough that their parents don't mind. Too much. Especially if you get to ride in the cage car. That is pretty fun.

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There are two trains that can run at a time, one loading while the other is zipping around the track. Each train consists of an engine, a calliope car, two open cars with seats, two wild animal cage cars and a caboose. The engine however is not what powers the train. The calliope car is what runs the whole shebang. It houses a diesel engine that runs the calliope, creates the steam pressure for the whistle and brakes and moves the train around the track. At one point, Casey chugs his way up a hill and can be heard chanting "I think I can, I think I can" just like in the movie. For anyone who is a fan of Dumbo, or mini trains in general, it's a sweet ride.

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And Casey is one of those rides that's been around since Disneyland's opening day. Sort of. It was available to ride on July 17, but it was experiencing a lot of operational troubles (much like the park in general). Not many people actually got to ride it that first day. When the park opened for paying guests the next day, Casey was not one of the things they could do. The circus train was the first ride to be closed for future enjoyment. Safety checks were run that second day in the hopes that Casey could open but it would be almost two weeks before all the kinks were worked out and the first paying guests got to tour Storybookland from a train instead of a boat.

April 3 - Midget Autopia

On this day, in 1966, the Midget Autopia ride burned its last gallon of gas in Fantasyland at Disneyland. The attraction got its name from being the smallest of the three Autopias in Disneyland. You heard that correctly. At one point there were three different versions of the same ride spread out across Disneyland. The original Autopia was an opening day attraction in Tomorrowland. It’s multi-lane, limited access design was actually a precursor to the American highway system (President Eisenhower didn’t authorize real interstate highways until 1956). If you’ve ever driven around one of the Autopia tracks and gritted your teeth when you get bumped from behind, you’ve actually experienced a pretty mild version of an Autopia accident. The original cars didn’t have the benefit of a guide rail or bumpers. When folks took them out for a test run before the park opened, it was more like a demolition derby than a driving course. They smacked into each other so much, the cars were nearly destroyed. Bumpers were retrofitted around the remaining cars for opening day, which limited the damage the vehicles took but not necessarily the spines of the riders. Static bumpers eventually turned into spring-loaded bumpers (which absorbed some of the impact) which led to the inclusion of a center guide rail, keeping accidents to minor rear ends only.

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The popularity of the Tomorrowland Autopia led to a slightly smaller duplicate of the ride to pop up in Fantasyland in 1956. Originally called the Junior Autopia, since it wasn’t as big, the second version benefited from the mistakes of the first one: it had that center guide rail from day one. In 1959, the Junior Autopia was closed, expanded and reopened as the Fantasyland Autopia, now basically indistinguishable from its Tomorrowland counterpart. In 1957, the Midget Autopia opened at the edge of Fantasyland near the Storybook Land Canal Boats. Not only was the track shorter, but the cars were smaller as well. While adults were a necessity on the other two Autopias (at least for kids too short to reach the gas pedal), they weren’t allowed to ride the Midget version.  

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After the Midget Autopia closed to make way for the installation of It’s a Small World, Walt packed it up and shipped it to Marceline, Missouri. For the next eleven years, visitors to the city’s Walt Disney Municipal Park could get a little taste of Disneyland in the Midwest. As parts for the ride became scarce, Marceline was forced to close the attraction in 1977. A single car is still on display at the town’s museum. The ride’s cement track actually survived until 2016, when it was finally demolished to make way for a new swimming pool.

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Disneyland’s two remaining Autopias dueled with each other all the way until September 1999 when they were both closed down, demolished and a single, larger Autopia was built in their place. The attraction proved so popular over the years that versions of it currently exist in Walt Disney World and Disneyland Paris and were once part of Tokyo Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland (the latter two only recently being removed to make way for new rides). And if you think affection for one of the loudest, smelliest rides in all of Disney has waned at all, you clearly missed the uproar when folks thought the Tron coaster was going to replace it in the Magic Kingdom (don’t worry: the track will be a little shorter but the two will live side by side for years to come).

February 27 - Dorothea Redmond

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On this day, in 2009, Dorothea Holt Redmond passed away in Hollywood Hills, California. Born in Los Angeles on May 18, 1910, Dorothea became an architecture student at the University of Southern California earning her degree in 1933. She loved school so much, she rolled on into the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, earning a second degree in illustration in 1936.Two years later, she began working at Selznick International Pictures, the movie studio created by David O. Selznick, as the first woman to ever be hired as a Hollywood Production Designer.

The men Dorothea worked with were typical of their time (not that times have changed all that much in the last 81 years). Absolutely offended that anyone thought a woman could design a movie set, they insisted that she get her own, fully enclosed space to work, decidedly separate from them. I'd place money on the fact that the peace and quiet she got from that arrangement helped fuel the extraordinary work she produced. It wouldn't be long before Dorothea was considered the best illustrator working anywhere in the motion picture industry.

One of the people to notice Dorothea's talents was the director Alfred Hitchcock. Her aesthetic dovetailed perfectly into his own, giving him visual cues he could pass on to his cinematographers to help enhance the look of his films. Starting in 1940 with Rebecca, Dorothea and Alfred would work closely together on seven of his films, including Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. While the director was notoriously hard to work with, Dorothea declared him to be one of her favorite people in the industry, a sentiment which probably did as much to foster their relationship as her designs.

Not only did the Selznick studio bring Dorothea professional notice, it also brought her the love of her life. While working on pre-production designs for both Gone With the Wind and Rebecca, she met Harry Redmond Jr., who was working on the set of The Prisoner of Zelda at the time. They married in 1940, designed and built a house together and lived happily for the next 69 years.

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After her work in the film industry, Dorothea took a position with an architectural firm working under Charles Luckman and William Pereira. She designed interiors for both Los Angeles International Airport and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Later she was part of the team in charge of the Seattle Space Needle, but it was her firm's involvement in the Disneyland Hotel project that eventually earned her a place in this blog.

In 1966, WED Enterprises lured Dorothea away from her architecture career designing mundane things like airports and needles and introduced her to the exciting world of Imagineering. One of her first assignments was New Orleans Square in Disneyland. She helped shape the look of stores, restaurants and even created an apartment above the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction that would have been Walt's new residence within the park. The area, almost complete at the time of  Walt's death, was never used until 1987, when it became the Disney Gallery. It was refinished in 2008 to look exactly as Dorothea design it and to serve as the Disneyland Dream Suite, which was given to random guests to enjoy until its closure in 2014.

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Dorothea was also instrumental in helping bring Walt Disney World to life. She was in charge of the design team for Fantasyland and parts of Main Street, USA. And if you enjoy the mosaics as you walk through Cinderella Castle, you have her to thank, whether you're visiting Florida or Tokyo Disneyland. Fellow Imagineer Marty Sklar always felt that her sketches of places were extraordinary in their ability to bring a place out of imagination and into reality.

In 2008, Dorothea was made an official Disney Legend for her lasting contributions to Disney parks around the world. Less than a year later, she passed away at her home from congestive heart failure. She was 98.