What the...? Disneyland has always been considered Walt's park, he designed, lived in and visited the darn place for Pete's sake. Disneyland is considered superior in a lot of people's eyes just for that fact. There are many Disney parks, but only one has the light in the fire station window on Main Street.
*sigh* I'm done. Thanks for reminding me why I stopped posting here. Good job.
You and I usually get along really well, and I have a lot of respect for you (still will and I hope what i'm about to say doesn't offend you or anything). But let me ask you a question- Do you think that had Walt Disney still been alive to see WDW completed, that he wouldn't have visited and lived at the Florida property all the time (possibly even more than Disneyland)? I don't usually like to make assumptions but I think it's perfectly fair to assume that he most definitely would have.
The fact is that while Disneyland is the original, the one Walt walked and lived in, that's not the reason it's better than Magic Kingdom. At least not to me. It's better than Magic Kingdom because it has more attractions, superior versions of attractions it shares with MK (exceptions being Pooh and Splash when at their best), and not to mention it's currently being treated respectfully by the management team in charge. What if the opposite had been true though and MK had been Walt's original park and Disneyland the one built after he died? But at the same time both parks were still in the same exact physical condition they are in now (attraction roster, maintenance quality, etc). Myself at least, i'd consider Disneyland the superior park, regardless of whether Walt had walked, designed, and lived in it.
There are more than enough logical and valid reasons to prefer DL over MK, those are what should be taken into consideration for argument about what park is better. Just like how if one ride is cloned for another park, i'm not going to care if one is the original, i'm only going to care which is objectively the better ride (Paris has the best version of Pirates of the Caribbean despite being the newest). If a ride is both older AND better then yes it's superior, but being the original really has nothing to do with WHY it's better.
Much of what made Disneyland so great was Walt's imagineers, not just Walt himself. Many of them continued designing attractions for Disneyland and other parks long after he died, some very arguably more ambitious and incredible than what Walt himself did (the original rides in Epcot's Future World especially, plus Disneyland Paris and DisneySea). And I don't consider these attractions any less amazing just because they're newer and Walt himself didn't have much of a hand in them.
Nostalgia is fine and can make one feel all warm and fuzzy. But it shouldn't exist as the defining reason why one product is superior to another. The inherent and objective quality is the only thing i'd take into account here, and DL wins against MK in that regard. I definitely don't think that anything should be held against WDW just because it wasn't walked and lived in by Disney himself (there are plenty of legit gripes about the place).
Overall though i'd really just like every Disney park on earth to be treated with the utmost respect and quality that Disney himself stood for (quality I hear still exists at parks other than WDW). That's how it should be, though it will never happen at this rate.
