“Grand Canyon” and the Grand Canyon Diorama

I have never been to the Grand Canyon, though I’ve spent considerable time in Arizona. My partner has, though his family never took vacations—I assume it was on their move from Texas to the Pacific Northwest or similar. Regardless, he has no interest in going back—acrophobia and the rim of the Grand Canyon are a bad combination. Still, what my family did was go to Disneyland. And as my father was a train buff, the first thing we did was ride the train. That’s my childhood Grand Canyon experience.

Ferde Grofé composed the Grand Canyon Suite in the ‘20s and ‘30s. In 1958, Walt Disney Productions set it to music. Why? I don’t actually know. I’m dealing with a lot of stub articles on multiple sites, here. The short was scenes from the Canyon itself, admittedly with the music abridged and rearranged. At about the same time, in Disneyland, a tunnel between the Tomorrowland Station and the Main Street Station was painted with scenic Grand Canyon imagery, with music from the suite playing over it. The Primeval World stuff would come a few years later.

Unlike a lot of other Disney nature films, this is just you and the music and the scenery. There’s no narration. There’s animals—arachnophobes beware, for starters. Gila monsters, tarantulas, roadrunners, cougars, and so forth. There’s snow on the canyon; the rim is a mile above the bottom and high enough to get snow. There’s the shadow of cloud on the rock formations. The Colorado River in stages from trickle to rapids. It’s lovely, and it won an Oscar for Live Action Short, but it’s not what people think of.

Meanwhile, the Primeval World diorama gets all the attention, but I’ve always liked this part, too. It’s apparently the world’s longest diorama, and it’s very peaceful. Even as a child, I was familiar with all the places you could just sit down for a while at Disneyland and still be experiencing something, and this was a pleasant one. The train may be mostly used for transportation around the park, and why not, but this stage of it is genuinely worth riding just because you go through something interesting. Each leg has a bit worth seeing, and this leg is the best.

Unsurprisingly, the Disneyland Railroad was, at the time, sponsored by the Santa Fe Railroad. It’s possible the whole thing was intended to advertise the railroad’s service through the Grand Canyon area, as there was one. Still, the film is lovely—and on YouTube—and the diorama gives us something we don’t pay enough attention to in this country. There is the genuinely breathtaking landscape of the American wilderness and a train.