Just trying to raise everybody's blood pressure. Happy friday!
But in all seriousness, the castle is not visible, even from areas of the hub. Trees and other foreground obstructions like ODVs and Rocks block a vast majority of it from view in many viewing locations.
The argument that Disneyland's castle has to be small to fit the scale of disneyland doesn't make sense. I have heard it for a decade and I finally will explain why this is ridiculous. The castle in Paris is twice the height of Disneyland's. Orlando's is more than double. Their buildings, however, are not twice as tall as those on our main street. Their Main Street is not twice as wide as ours. The castle takes up roughly the same surface area on the ground at the end of the street, it just reaches higher into the sky so it is visible over people's heads and other obstructions like trees. Disneyland's castle is so small that if you stand in town square and draw lines down the building facades and the street toward the center to create one point perspective, it doesn't even push above the height of the street wall on main street. In the recent halloweentime commercial playing on cable tv right now, the castle has the same architecture, but has been CGI'd to make it more prominent in the shot. When standing at the back of fantasyland and looking toward the castle, Peter Pan's flight and Snow White's scary adventures facades dwarf it in the foreground. Some argue that it is to scale with matterhorn; are the other mountains in Disneyland and Castle parks around the globe subject to this same requirement? Space mountain, big thunder, splash mountain... none of these structures are expected to be taller than their respective castles, and many a space mountain are visible at the same time as their park's castles. It seems like an odd design decision that has been defended but actually doesn't do anything to benefit either participating structure. At the time of Disneyland's opening, the trees had not grown in and the castle functioned as an icon that oriented guests within the park. You could look at it and know how to get around the place. Every castle park has followed the hub spoke and wheel tradition, and the castles still function in this way, except for Disneyland's, which is no longer visible from within most of the park. So in this way, the castle is no longer performing its basic functions as it set out to on opening day. Finally, the original concept artist/designer for Disneyland's castle went on to make dramatic changes to its design, more dramatic than any other subtle changes made to the magic kingdom park, when they opened their second castle park in Orlando.
I know, it is a really charming design. It is walt's original and many of us who grew up with the park would hate to see it go and don't trust the current imagineering teams to give it a superior replacement. However, I often feel like we are preserving the past in exchange for inferior show quality and guest experience. I live in hollywood, where spanish style and french chateau apartment buildings, hotels, and single family homes dot the landscape. Jim Henson's office on la brea blvd looks like fantasyland. The castle is of the same design style and scale as many homes around mid-city/wilshire, west LA, hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz. I don't think anybody looking at the paris castle would equate it with single-family homes; there, it operates on the scale of iconic institutional architecture. The castle was considered to be replaced in 1984 with Tony Baxter's new fantasyland, and ultimately they decided against it, but how different would the park be now had they gone through with it and the public embraced the new castle? Arguments against changing it because it is the original and too sacred are silly to me, when I consider that St. Peter's Basilica, the home of the Catholic Church, was relocated and rebuilt once, and then the current Vatican City location was added on to and modified by several architects for centuries. Sleeping Beauty Castle is more sacred than the capital of the Catholic Church now?
Disneyland has become extremely crowded in recent years. Widening of midways is going on all over the park as well as the reconfiguring of queues for guest comfort. With a taller castle, we could create viewing areas for nighttime spectaculars in several lands, and do projections on the side and back for viewing from tomorrowland and fantasyland to better distribute crowds and ease congestion.
Okay, I said my bit. Let's argue! Happy friday and don't forget to vote.
