Disney California Adventure

I suppose, if you had the money, you’d go to Walt Disney World if you had to take a plane no matter which park you were going to. Or anyway if it were at best a days-long drive. This had never occurred to me, because it was about an hour and a half from our door to Disneyland, when I was a kid, so we went to Disneyland. We only stayed in a hotel once, and I don’t know why we did that time. Even when I visited in college, I rented a car and drove home at night. No wonder most people visiting Disneyland are Californians, or Arizonans or Nevadans.

When Walt started Disneyland, Anaheim was mostly orange groves. Walt bought four hundred acres. The area around his acreage was bought by hotel chains, restaurant chains, souvenir shops, and on and on. The area across the street became the Anaheim Convention Center. Disneyland was boxed in. And you can spend a full day at Disneyland and not see everything, but it was still mostly more local people. In the ‘90s, the executives at Disney decided they needed to create a park that would bring more tourists from outside California, ones who had come to the state to see more than just the park.

Things needed to be rearranged. A parking structure, for a while the largest in the world, replaced the Hundred-Acre Wood Parking Lot, and a whole new park was built on quite a lot of that lot area. It was intended to bring the interesting bits of the state into a single place, making a more desirable tourist area for people from outside the state. The initial plan was WestCOT, a West Coast version of EPCOT, but eventually, the California theme replaced it. Slowly.

The penultimate time I went to Disneyland, it was a couple of months before the park opened. Downtown Disney hadn’t even opened yet, wouldn’t for another month or so. The hotels were starting to open, though. The next time, the last time I was there, was in 2011. The park had been open for ten years and still didn’t feel finished. Buena Vista Street and Hollywood Land were there but felt deserted. A Bug’s Land was there—I expressed joy to my partner that Dave Foley was getting those sweet, sweet ride announcer bucks—and Pixar Pier was still Paradise Pier. The Little Mermaid ride had opened a few months earlier.

I’d like to go back, now that it’s a full park. Many of the pictures I have quite clearly show a park in transition, one that wasn’t all there. I know we went to the drawing class three times, because it was air conditioned and had seating, and there were other people there. But I think we got lost looking for Muppet*Vision 3D and Mike & Sulley to the Rescue. There were crowds at Paradise Pier and lines for the rides, but it felt a lot of the time as though the actual paths around the park were deserted.

In a way, though, California Adventure was emblematic of its era in Disney. It was opened incomplete, very much a half-day park. The infamous Superstar Limo was about the only ride anyone could name. The fact that we went a decade later and it still felt unfinished is worrisome. And not in the “a Disney park is never truly finished” way but in the “everything feels under construction” way. There are several prominent new rides, indeed two whole new lands, to appear at Disneyland in my lifetime, but it never felt as though you could only really have a good time if you came back in five or ten or fifteen years. Even when I was there, that was how California Adventure felt.

Would the park even exist if Walt had managed to buy two or three times as much land back in the ‘50s? That’s an interesting question. And frankly, even as a Disney person, you should absolutely just explore more of California instead. You don’t need to see the Disney version of Monterey when the actual Monterey is just up the coast. So sure, San Fransokyo isn’t a real place, and there’s an interesting thought of having a park that’s fictional places set in California. And honestly, yeah, there are lots of people with no interest in actually going for a hike in Yosemite, and a theme park version is what they want. Maybe more of it should’ve been ready for day one.