June 4 - The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh Ride

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On this day, in 1999, the first dark ride to feature the creations of AA Milne, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, began bouncing guests through the Hundred Acre Wood in Fantasyland of the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. As the popularity of the Winnie the Pooh characters continued to grow throughout the Seventies, plans were made to create a ride at Disneyland that featured them.  However, when a newly rejuvenated Fantasyland opened in 1983, the tubby little cubby was conspicuously absent. So were any explanations. A few years later, when the new area of Mickey’s Toontown was being mapped out, plans were again made for a Pooh ride. Guests would sit in honeypots they could spin like teacups as they travelled through scenes from the films. Toontown opened in 1988 and, once again, Pooh and friends were nowhere to be found. The area allotted for the attraction (as well as the ride vehicle design) morphed into Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, which opened in 1994. It would be another five years before Pooh received his due and it would happen in Florida, not California.

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In order to make room for the Pooh ride in the Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland, something else had to go. That something turned out to be Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. The removal of Mr. Toad also meant that cast members could no longer backhandedly tell guests to go to hell by suggesting they experience the Wild Ride (in one of the final scenes of that attraction, Mr. Toad did indeed descend into Hades). Both the ride and the insult can be considered minor losses. The Pooh ride does pay tribute to Mr. Toad however. Eagle eyed riders can spot a portrait of him in the attraction handing a deed to Owl (in other words, passing the proverbial torch in a legal and aboveboard manner). All that doesn't mean there wasn't plenty of controversy over closing the classic attraction at the time, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find terribly many people who wouldn't agree that the new ride is an improvement.

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The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has several design elements that make it a unique dark ride. First is the inclusion of actual pages from the original A.A. Milne stories. Some are painted on the walls and some are projections. It's the ones that are projections that make for some cool effects. For instance, in the Blustery Day section, it appears that the words are being blown right off the page as each individual ride vehicle goes by. The ride vehicles themselves are probably the best innovation, though. In most dark rides, you sit in a honeypot (or mine car or caterpillar) and get ferried past sets and moving figures and the like. There might be some quick turns, but it's essentially a flat ride. In the Pooh dark ride, you get immersed in the story a whole lot more than that. Each individual vehicle is set up so that, say, when Tigger starts bouncing alongside you, your honeypot starts bouncing along the track. And when the river creeps out of its bed and floods everything, your honeypot starts rocking like it was caught up in the current.

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In 2003, Disneyland finally got their own version of the Pooh ride, but again it came with controversy. Real estate in the California park is at a premium and, once again, park officials knew that something was going to have to disappear to make room for the new attraction. Fantasyland didn't offer any options but there was a potential space over in Critter Country. This time the classic attraction that was doomed to be sacrificed was the Country Bear Jamboree. Even though a group of guests tried to band together to save the Bears, the shows low attendance figures doomed it to extinction. Just like Mr. Toad, though, the Jamboree isn't completely gone. Eagle eyed guest can spot the mounted heads of Melvin the Moose, Buff the Buffalo and Max the Buck in the ride (although they are technically the non-Animatronic heads that used to sit in the Mile Long Bar, not the heads from the actual show). Also note that the same mechanism that was used to lower Teddi Barra from the ceiling in Jamboree now bobs Pooh up and down over a whirlpool of honey. Besides some of the scenes being in a different order from the Magic Kingdom version (and stage a little differently), the ride vehicles in California are shaped like beehives rather than honeypots.

Hong Kong Disneyland and Shanghai Disneyland also have their own Pooh rides, opening in 2005 and 2016 respectively. They are essentially the same as the Magic Kingdom attraction. No controversy was connected with either of the Asian versions since they opened with their parks and therefore didn't need to displace anything else.

May 28 - it's a small world

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On this day, in 1966, it’s a small world began sending guests on a whimsical journey of international goodwill in Disneyland’s Fantasyland in Anaheim, California. Walt was already under contract for three attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair, when he was approached by Pepsi to create a fourth one. The board of directors at Pepsi knew they were going to have a pavilion at the fair (it would be commercial suicide to not have a presence) but had procrastinated over what they wanted in their pavilion. Hollywood legend Joan Crawford was a member of that board by way of her marriage to the late Pepsi CEO Alfred Steele. She got fed up with the rest of the board’s dithering, asked her friend Walt Disney to come up with something and basically browbeat everyone into accepting whatever was presented, in spite of the fact that Walt would have less than eleven months to produce. Because Walt knew how to bring out the best in people (and had the best people to work with), everything worked out just fine.

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It was decided that the proceeds from the ride would benefit the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) so the basic theme was “Children of the World” and that became its working title as well. Because of the recent international tensions over missiles in Cuba, the theme was expanded to include brotherhood and peace (which may seem like it’s implied in an endeavor based on kids, but it really isn’t). The overall design of the attraction fell to the Legendary Mary Blair, who had already lent her considerable talents to shaping the look of films like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Unlike those projects where she merely influenced things, this overall look would be pure Mary. The simple clean shapes used in deceptively complex ways and the cheerful color palate combined to make a classic ride that endures and delights right up to today.

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Not that Mary didn’t have help along the way. The Legendary Marc Davis, as he did on so many Disneyland attractions, designed the scenes guests would travel through and many of the characters in them. His wife, the Legendary Alice Davis, designed the costumes the dolls wear and the Legendary Rolly Crump took care of the rest of the props and figures. The Legendary Blaine Gibson designed and sculpted the dolls with input from Walt himself, who insisted that every doll, no matter what country it represented, had an identically shaped face. It’s no coincidence that so many of the people who worked on this particular ride have gone on to achieve Disney Legend status (except for Walt himself, who has never been given the award; I know that it would be a fairly redundant gesture, it’s just something that makes me smile when I think about it), they are all that good.

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Which brings us to the music (I can hear some of you groaning already because, let’s be honest, the song has probably been playing in your head since you started reading this article). In its original form, Children of the World was going to have snippets of each country’s national anthem playing near the dolls from that country. It  was a plan that only sounded good on paper. In real life, it was a jumbled up, headache inducing wall of noise. So Walt brought his resident songwriters, the Legendary Sherman Brothers, into the project. He gave them just two guidelines: the song they wrote had to able to be done in a round (so it was infinitely repeatable without a beak) and it had to be easily translated into many different languages. They came back with It’s a Small World, a slow ballad about the universal theme of friendship. Walt said bring me something more cheerful. So they sped their song up considerably and replayed it for the boss. Walt liked the second version so much, he renamed the entire attraction after it. Love it or hate it, the Sherman Brothers’ ultimate ear worm has easily been played over 50 million times over the years making it the most played piece of music ever created, beating out the number two song by over 40 million plays. Of course, the fact that it is playing somewhere in the world at literally any moment of the day helps.

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The success of it’s a small world (and, yes, writing it without capital letters is the proper way to refer to the attraction) at the World’s Fair cannot be undersold. The ride’s high capacity (especially compared to other Fair attractions) meant that there was rarely a line, in spite of the overwhelming number of people who experienced it. Over the course of the two and a half years the Fair ran, over 10 million tickets were sold for small world resulting in over $8 million dollars being raised for UNICEF. At the Fair’s end, it was dismantled, transported back to Southern California and installed in its permanent home. When the Magic Kingdom opened five years later, it included a version of the ride, with the queue area moved indoors. Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland each have their own versions as well, so it’s fairly accurate when Disney claims that the sun never sets on cheerful children of it’s a small world.

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In 1997, Disneyland began a new holiday tradition with their version of it’s a small world. At the end of October, they add in almost a million twinkling lights as well as various Christmas decorations and costumes for the dolls. The soundtrack also gets changed to include international versions of Jingle Bells and Deck the Halls. The holiday version has proven so popular that it’s spread to every other park around the world except one. The Magic Kingdom ride stays unaltered (mainly to keep the change as something unique in the United States to its sister park).