Animal Kingdom

The last of the major WDW parks to be built was Animal Kingdom. (There are also minor ones like the two water parks, and the virtually extinct Pleasure Island, home of the Adventurers’ Club, which we won’t go into.) For once it seems as if Disney Corp was on its own track, neither banging up against some local competition or reviving/extending some idea from the past, until you remember all the True Life Adventureland programming from the old Disney days, and the fact that the studio pioneered nature programming. The TV show was divided into those 4 categories: Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland. I’ve already admitted that Fantasyland was my favorite. Frontierland came in second. This was back at the height of the popularity of Westerns, remember, into which Disney tossed the Davy Crockett mythos, which became one of the first real television fads. If you’ve ever wondered why Westerns were so popular in the 40s and 50s, it might help to recall that the parents of adults in those years were, indeed, the pioneers of history. The so-called Old West wasn’t that long ago from their perspective. So the tales and culture were still fresh, with recent generational spin on them. It wasn’t old history, it was virtually the history of the people watching it. There’s more to the popularity than this, metaphorically and culturally, but that’s not an insignificant part of it.

My third favorite “land” was Tomorrowland, and I did eventually become quite the SF fan as a youth. Unfortunately, if you watch any of those old science shows today, I guarantee you will not be able to stay awake. Many people credit Disney as one of the people who made the space race happen, instilling in the youth of America a desire to explore the moon and Mars and whatnot, and that’s certainly true, but still, you’ll need lots of Red Bull today to get through them. They’re just…stodgy. And dated. Let me tell you, that Wernher von Braun was no Davy Crockett!

And finally there was Adventureland, the 50s version of the Nature Channel, which was my least favorite. Later on as an adult I got into this sort of thing, but as a kid, watching dancing scorpions was a lot less interesting to me than watching dancing hippos. What can I say? When the adventure was somebody Indiana Jonesing through the great unexplored, fine, but when it was True Life? True life was as stodgy as Wernher von Braun. (If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs. von Braun.)

So Disney was a pioneer in nature programming, although they did get a lot of flak over anthropomorphism. Today in this kind of programming you see animals doing whatever animals do; back then, the Disney folk thought you had to make, ta-da, a narrative out of it. Big surprise. In any case, nature is in the Disney DNA, so the idea of a nature park isn’t a stretch at all. Originally the plan was to combine real (extinct and active) and imagined animals in separate lands, but of course that never happened. Animal Kingdom comprises a DinoLand (a take on the roadside Dino park of the Southwest, the sort of thing you’d see on Route 66), an African quarter (with a safari and a walking tour), an Asian quarter (with another walking tour and Expedition Everest, a coaster visit with the Yeti), and some odds and ends, making it, in essence, a Disney zoo (which is a word that they don’t like to use, but let’s call a place with a lot of animals that you walk by and look at in simulated environments what people usually call it). AK is the least popular of the parks with the general public, who see it as a half-day park, because it doesn’t have all the E-ticket attractions of even DHS, but I like it quite a bit. In fact, it’s how I’ll open the Disney Debate Adventure.

As I’ll explain next.