News Magic Kingdom's Main Street Confectionery closing for refurbishment

[lazyboy97o]

Moving forward in time, Disneyland Paris’s Main Street is based, not just on real main streets, but also on Disney’s previous main streets. It is a copy of Disney World’s almost down to the building, but even more “Disnified”. More ornamentation, more vibrant colors. It skews farther towards the fantastical than it’s predecessors. It’s a Disney version of a Disney version of a real Main Street. It’s even more heightened, but the real Main Street is still there.

I generally agree with your point, but not this particular bit. The reuse of the facades from the Magic Kingdom was the result of Eisner seeing The Untouchables and getting cold feet about the 1920s Main Street. It was a time saver, but the decision was made to plus the whole thing. There is extensive research and care that went into all of the tectonics and ornament of Main Street, USA at Disneyland Paris.

Indeed, you wonder to what extent WDI is still staffed with people from a theme park background and if they receive any mentoring from those who do have decades of experience, or if those with experience are just trotted out for Disney+ shows about the glory days.

I think it's more than the only experience is theme park experience. That's the point of reference that is being imitated. It's a copy of a copy of a copy.

 

[yensidtlaw1969]

I generally agree with your point, but not this particular bit. The reuse of the facades from the Magic Kingdom was the result of Eisner seeing The Untouchables and getting cold feet about the 1920s Main Street. It was a time saver, but the decision was made to plus the whole thing. There is extensive research and care that went into all of the tectonics and ornament of Main Street, USA at Disneyland Paris.

I think it's more than the only experience is theme park experience. That's the point of reference that is being imitated. It's a copy of a copy of a copy.

I agree - it seems to be forgotten that the story of the first Imagineers is them essentially creating the Theme Park medium out of their rich experiences in design and construction for Film. Their reference points were wildly different from the ones being used today - which somehow manage to be both too little and too much focused on what Disney has already done.

It's becoming painfully clear that, outside of very rare cases, the design process is being refocused to work backwards from what makes engineering sense for a theme park that seeks to streamline its operations instead of forward from what would simply make for an exciting experience for the guest. All the edges come pre-sanded because that makes more sense on paper.

 

[Sir_Cliff]

I think it's more than the only experience is theme park experience. That's the point of reference that is being imitated. It's a copy of a copy of a copy.

I agree - it seems to be forgotten that the story of the first Imagineers is them essentially creating the Theme Park medium out of their rich experiences in design and construction for Film. Their reference points were wildly different from the ones being used today - which somehow manage to be both too little and too much focused on what Disney has already done.

It's becoming painfully clear that, outside of very rare cases, the design process is being refocused to work backwards from what makes engineering sense for a theme park that seeks to streamline its operations instead of forward from what would simply make for an exciting experience for the guest. All the edges come pre-sanded because that makes more sense on paper.

Very interesting and good points.

This is perhaps a tangent, but I also find the approach to inserting backstories evident here in the Sweetest Spoon contest a weirdly clunky characteristic of modern WDI. My impression is that in the past Imagineers came up with a big concept and then thought about the kinds of shops, etc. that would make sense within that environment. Occasionally there were names of proprietors included on signs, etc. and in attractions you would kind of meet characters like Trader Sam, but it was left to your imagination to fill in the blanks in a way that is a little similar to how you travel through the world more generally.

Now, it seems like they hold a high school creative writing competition every time they open a store. The stores are then decorated with artefacts to support weirdly elaborate back stories about characters no-one knows or cares about. In this case, they have even pasted the stories up in the store lest you were interested in reading about the immigration history or partners of these characters you've never heard of while you're buying your Skittles.

It seems a bit of an amateurish way to think about theming and backstory to me. Sometimes, less is more and it also seems backwards to shoehorn a story into the space that guests then have to read to understand rather than working from shared references that guests will instinctively recognise as being from a particular time or place.

 

[ToTBellHop]

This is exemplified in Mickey Avenue in Shanghai Disneyland, which is exactly that, a Toontown version of Main Street. Victorian looking buildings, but with cartoon proportions and cartoon proprietors.

I think it really comes down to this. As Disney’s own portfolio of content, architecture, etc has grown, they have relied more and more on their past work, rather than anything from the real world, for inspiration. The original Disneyland and Magic Kingdom Main Streets were Disney versions of real main streets. These new main streets are Disney versions of Disney main streets.

Main Street in Disneyland and Magic Kingdom are theme park versions of an actual Main Street. They’re sanitized, and exist in a heightened reality, but they’re based on real main streets that existed in the real world.

Moving forward in time, Disneyland Paris’s Main Street is based, not just on real main streets, but also on Disney’s previous main streets. It is a copy of Disney World’s almost down to the building, but even more “Disnified”. More ornamentation, more vibrant colors. It skews farther towards the fantastical than it’s predecessors. It’s a Disney version of a Disney version of a real Main Street. It’s even more heightened, but the real Main Street is still there.

And now you have things like Mickey Avenue and this redo to the confectionery which heighten the reality even further, to the point where these spaces aren’t even inhabited by real people anymore, but by cartoons. It’s completely removed from what actually inspired it. It’s been put through the Disneyfier so many times that the original source, an actual real life Main Street, is lost.

Can we blame Disney for mimicking the real world less and less? The real world is a dumpster fire people are trying to escape. I find the Confectionery changes as minuscule compared to Genie+, which actively makes it more frustrating to visit the parks. The last thing I want at WDW is more stress than real life!

 

[ToTBellHop]

Very interesting and good points.

This is perhaps a tangent, but I also find the approach to inserting backstories evident here in the Sweetest Spoon contest a weirdly clunky characteristic of modern WDI. My impression is that in the past Imagineers came up with a big concept and then thought about the kinds of shops, etc. that would make sense within that environment. Occasionally there were names of proprietors included on signs, etc. and in attractions you would kind of meet characters like Trader Sam, but it was left to your imagination to fill in the blanks in a way that is a little similar to how you travel through the world more generally.

Now, it seems like they hold a high school creative writing competition every time they open a store. The stores are then decorated with artefacts to support weirdly elaborate back stories about characters no-one knows or cares about. In this case, they have even pasted the stories up in the store lest you were interested in reading about the immigration history or partners of these characters you've never heard of while you're buying your Skittles.

It seems a bit of an amateurish way to think about theming and backstory to me. Sometimes, less is more and it also seems backwards to shoehorn a story into the space that guests then have to read to understand rather than working from shared references that guests will instinctively recognise as being from a particular time or place.

Haunted Mansion comes to mind. For decades, there was no discernable story until they gave Phantom Manor one (which was recently further emphasized), which most of us drooled over. In response, they retconned the earlier versions but it really doesn’t work on a ride that already existed. I understand why they did it, but it was sloppy.

Personally, I never really cared that Phantom Manor had a story. It’s the score, I want!

 

[Sir_Cliff]

Haunted Mansion comes to mind. For decades, there was no discernable story until they gave Phantom Manor one (which was recently further emphasized), which most of us drooled over. In response, they retconned the earlier versions but it really doesn’t work on a ride that already existed. I understand why they did it, but it was sloppy.

Personally, I never really cared that Phantom Manor had a story. It’s the score, I want!

Haunted Mansion is really the perfect example of this. If you wanted to, you could amuse yourself imagining a backstory, but it wasn't designed to necessarily have one.

On a side note, while Phantom Manor is a great attraction and particularly so since its recent refurb which corrected some of the elements that didn't quite work, I seem to be one of the rare people who don't think a clearer, linear story necessarily improved the DLP versions of Haunted Mansion and Pirates. The consensus around the latter attraction in particular seems to be that it represented some kind of correction of the issues imposed on the original due to the need to get under the berm that were then reproduced at WDW and TDL. I honestly think the pacing in Paris version doesn't work quite as well to build the drama, whatever the logic behind it. In PM, it ultimately works as a whole and is kind of fun, but that Western village at the end is also very cartoony in trying to literally show you what happened.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Very interesting and good points.

This is perhaps a tangent, but I also find the approach to inserting backstories evident here in the Sweetest Spoon contest a weirdly clunky characteristic of modern WDI. My impression is that in the past Imagineers came up with a big concept and then thought about the kinds of shops, etc. that would make sense within that environment. Occasionally there were names of proprietors included on signs, etc. and in attractions you would kind of meet characters like Trader Sam, but it was left to your imagination to fill in the blanks in a way that is a little similar to how you travel through the world more generally.

Now, it seems like they hold a high school creative writing competition every time they open a store. The stores are then decorated with artefacts to support weirdly elaborate back stories about characters no-one knows or cares about. In this case, they have even pasted the stories up in the store lest you were interested in reading about the immigration history or partners of these characters you've never heard of while you're buying your Skittles.

It seems a bit of an amateurish way to think about theming and backstory to me. Sometimes, less is more and it also seems backwards to shoehorn a story into the space that guests then have to read to understand rather than working from shared references that guests will instinctively recognise as being from a particular time or place.

Backstory is both a creative crutch and fun.

The first Disney attraction to really have any sort of major backstory development is The Haunted Mansion. While the attraction opened without one, Ken Anderson developed a number of backstories while he was tasked with coming up with something that would be more than just the same spook house seen at every other amusement park.

It’s really outside of Disney where we see the backstory explode. In the late 70s and 80s you have venues like Seville Quarter, Church Street Station, Atlanta Underground where clubs and restaurants are leaning into the nostalgia play but going more over the top adding in things like backstories and characters to distinguish themselves from more mainstream venues using a similar old times aesthetic. The backstory adds an identifying distinction.

Gary Goddard is probably the one who really made the elaborate backstory a thing. Six Flags Power Plant was built around a whole elaborate backstory. That was the hook for the Six Flags with no rides. The park didn’t last long but it is still remembered as this amazing technical, theatrical and storytelling achievement. That same sort of elaborate backstory was then applied to projects such as Pleasure Island, Euro Disneyland, Disney-MGM Studio Backlot and Tokyo DisneySEA. The backstories sort of fell off with the cheaper park but have been coming back.

Backstories help you distinguish something. They’re purpose is to help guide the design team. As a design team grows there is almost a need for the backstory to grow. If you and another person are two are tasked with “theming” a a small town shop you don’t need to write a lot down. It’s easy to review and come to consensus. Add 30+ people into the mix and now you have to write a lot down so people know what is going on. Add in a culture of meddling, fear and indecision and you have to write down a whole lot more and you the backstory starts to become sacred.

Now we also have a whole generation of designers who always wanted to be theme park designers. Those elaborate backstories are part of what they found so fascinating. This tool is now part of the draw. Coming up with these elaborate stories is fun. You get to create this whole elaborate world. That they’ve always been forced and homey means it’s okay to force a homey story to reach a predetermined conclusion. And because these backstories have become so much of the identity it becomes important to more explicitly share them with the public.

 

[yensidtlaw1969]

I agree with so much of this.

Any time you visit and old-town Main Street and walk into a shop you'll find evidence of who owns (or owned) it and what they'd do there - but you'll basically never see it spelled out to the extent we see from WDI these days. "Show, don't Tell" really bears repeating - any sufficiently authentic representation of a period shop will have clues baked in about who owned it and how they'd operate, but if you're taking pains to spell it out you've missed the point. It's subtext, not text. The audience should be able to feel it, they should not have to read about it. You can take the steps to give us 2 + 2, but if you respect the audience you'll let them add it up to 4 by themselves.

The Haunted Mansion is very similar, though it somewhat flips the equation - There are all these ghosts here in this house, and they're all doing different things and dressed in different styles, and your imagination can't help but speculate for yourself who these characters are, what they did, how they died, and how they might have ended up here. It gives you 4 and allows you to solve for x, and the only wrong answer is the one you don't like as much. Seemingly a thousand stories were created in development, but by the time it was opened all that was left were the kernels of those situations. This means there are a thousand possibilities of what's "really" going on in all those little vignettes. Phantom Manor as initially designed took a brilliant step of creating a new attraction off of the same framework, focusing closely on 2 characters while still offering a deep, rich mystery about who they are, how they got there, what the other ghosts have to do with them, and what their ends would be. They didn't rob you of the chance to fill in the blanks for yourself, they just concentrated it down to the dynamic of a more central set of characters that carried their own dramatic weight and built on a different set of tropes.

So much of that was thrown out the window with the 2019 refurb, and now the story comes more prescribed than ever - I can't imagine guests would have taken to Phantom Manor the same way if the refurb storyline had been there from day one. There's less drama, less tension, less mystery . . . just a girl in a house and her creepy dad, who both died in an earthquare and the house became haunted. They throw in a twist at the end, but it's nowhere near as satisfying as all the speculation you could do before about what went on in that house. The less I say about it the better . . . they really screwed up the formula, in my opinion.

You'd think it'd be clear that mystery in storytelling is not a liability, but an asset . . . especially in a medium like themed design where guests return over years and years. This extends to things like the Main Street shops, but especially in a Ghost Story! Is the Haunted Mansion popular 50 years later because it's so evident from your first ride what's happening there? Or because it's fun to keep turning over in your mind and go back and see it all a new way?

 

[yensidtlaw1969]

Backstory is both a creative crutch and fun.

The first Disney attraction to really have any sort of major backstory development is The Haunted Mansion. While the attraction opened without one, Ken Anderson developed a number of backstories while he was tasked with coming up with something that would be more than just the same spook house seen at every other amusement park.

It’s really outside of Disney where we see the backstory explode. In the late 70s and 80s you have venues like Seville Quarter, Church Street Station, Atlanta Underground where clubs and restaurants are leaning into the nostalgia play but going more over the top adding in things like backstories and characters to distinguish themselves from more mainstream venues using a similar old times aesthetic. The backstory adds an identifying distinction.

Gary Goddard is probably the one who really made the elaborate backstory a thing. Six Flags Power Plant was built around a whole elaborate backstory. That was the hook for the Six Flags with no rides. The park didn’t last long but it is still remembered as this amazing technical, theatrical and storytelling achievement. That same sort of elaborate backstory was then applied to projects such as Pleasure Island, Euro Disneyland, Disney-MGM Studio Backlot and Tokyo DisneySEA. The backstories sort of fell off with the cheaper park but have been coming back.

Backstories help you distinguish something. They’re purpose is to help guide the design team. As a design team grows there is almost a need for the backstory to grow. If you and another person are two are tasked with “theming” a a small town shop you don’t need to write a lot down. It’s easy to review and come to consensus. Add 30+ people into the mix and now you have to write a lot down so people know what is going on. Add in a culture of meddling, fear and indecision and you have to write down a whole lot more and you the backstory starts to become sacred.

Now we also have a whole generation of designers who always wanted to be theme park designers. Those elaborate backstories are part of what they found so fascinating. This tool is now part of the draw. Coming up with these elaborate stories is fun. You get to create this whole elaborate world. That they’ve always been forced and homey means it’s okay to force a homey story to reach a predetermined conclusion. And because these backstories have become so much of the identity it becomes important to more explicitly share them with the public.

I once read somewhere "Backstory is like Underwear - you need it for support, but something's wrong if we can see it".

 

[Animaniac93-98]

This is perhaps a tangent, but I also find the approach to inserting backstories evident here in the Sweetest Spoon contest a weirdly clunky characteristic of modern WDI.

I think the reason why in this case the backstory is a contest, is that it was a way of having several characters/entrants who could represent various minorities. Instead of having one made up proprietor who happens to be a POC, we get a whole gallery of misc personalities.

It's ultimately ridiculous in this case because it looks like the backstory started with a checklist of backgrounds they wanted to include and then worked backwards from there to see how they could tie that into a store that sells MARS candy. It's so superficial to the experience and so unlikely to be noticed by guests that it looks like what it is, cynical corporate marketing disguised as "inclusiveness". The sloppy execution of the story's presentation just adds another layer of disappointment.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

I once read somewhere "Backstory is like Underwear - you need it for support, but something's wrong if we can see it".

But some of us are really into and turned on by backstories!

 

[TikibirdLand]

But some of us are really into and turned on by backstories!

Man, that took a left-turn really quick!

 

[CntrlFlPete]

anyone know how long the pictures of cartoon people have been up at the ice cream shop on Main Street? I am starting to think all the Main Street shops are run by cartoons.

 

[Squishy]

anyone know how long the pictures of cartoon people have been up at the ice cream shop on Main Street? I am starting to think all the Main Street shops are run by cartoons.

Emporium is ran by Chapek

 

[JoeCamel]

anyone know how long the pictures of cartoon people have been up at the ice cream shop on Main Street? I am starting to think all the Main Street shops are run by cartoons.

Emporium is ran by Chapek

They are...

 

[MisterPenguin]

But some of us are really into and turned on by backstories!

Man, that took a left-turn really quick!

Headline: Back-story Fetishist Explains Himself In Great Detail

 

[castlecake2.0]

Some additional theming elements have been added above the registers. Now we just need some stuff on all the blank walls.

 

[RSoxNo1]

So is Box Office Gifts the permanent location now for ear hat embroidery in the Magic Kingdom?

 

[MagicHappens1971]

So is Box Office Gifts the permanent location now for ear hat embroidery in the Magic Kingdom?

I believe Big Top does it as well

 

[Bocabear]

Backstory is both a creative crutch and fun.

The first Disney attraction to really have any sort of major backstory development is The Haunted Mansion. While the attraction opened without one, Ken Anderson developed a number of backstories while he was tasked with coming up with something that would be more than just the same spook house seen at every other amusement park.

It’s really outside of Disney where we see the backstory explode. In the late 70s and 80s you have venues like Seville Quarter, Church Street Station, Atlanta Underground where clubs and restaurants are leaning into the nostalgia play but going more over the top adding in things like backstories and characters to distinguish themselves from more mainstream venues using a similar old times aesthetic. The backstory adds an identifying distinction.

Gary Goddard is probably the one who really made the elaborate backstory a thing. Six Flags Power Plant was built around a whole elaborate backstory. That was the hook for the Six Flags with no rides. The park didn’t last long but it is still remembered as this amazing technical, theatrical and storytelling achievement. That same sort of elaborate backstory was then applied to projects such as Pleasure Island, Euro Disneyland, Disney-MGM Studio Backlot and Tokyo DisneySEA. The backstories sort of fell off with the cheaper park but have been coming back.

Backstories help you distinguish something. They’re purpose is to help guide the design team. As a design team grows there is almost a need for the backstory to grow. If you and another person are two are tasked with “theming” a a small town shop you don’t need to write a lot down. It’s easy to review and come to consensus. Add 30+ people into the mix and now you have to write a lot down so people know what is going on. Add in a culture of meddling, fear and indecision and you have to write down a whole lot more and you the backstory starts to become sacred.

Now we also have a whole generation of designers who always wanted to be theme park designers. Those elaborate backstories are part of what they found so fascinating. This tool is now part of the draw. Coming up with these elaborate stories is fun. You get to create this whole elaborate world. That they’ve always been forced and homey means it’s okay to force a homey story to reach a predetermined conclusion. And because these backstories have become so much of the identity it becomes important to more explicitly share them with the public.

I was in my 20s in college when the Power Plant opened... It was so freaking beautiful...It would have made it if they had at least two real rides, but what a spectacular and amazing piece of thematic design. It is so sad that it was completely lost to the world...and it is impossible to find a lot of documentation about it now.