lol wait. You can see giant steel coasters all around you in Calico Ghost Town?
I rest my case.
All around you is overstating it. Pony Express, as poor as it is, only really mucks with the area immediately around it, as it is at least quite modest in size and height. Silver Bullet, while clearly visible from parts of Ghost Town, is less offensive than it could be and is accessed away from Ghost Town proper.
Should it be there? Absolutely not. Would I or the Knott family have put that ride there? No. Does it completely kill the area and deem the entire thing worthless? Hardly. Ghost Town will always have its strengths that exist apart from the strengths of DL's Frontierland, and it's still the heart of the park. Point is, both areas are good and have merit. Well worth a visit once Knott's is up and running as normal, but I imagine even partaking in their food festival would allow you to appreciate what is there on some level.
I grew up with the DL version, so I'm sure there some bias here, but the way it's been laid out at WDW doesn't make much sense to me. The riverboat landing is in liberty square, but thematically, the steam ship is out of place. The Columbia would have been a much better fit here but was strangely omitted in favor of a Mississippi stern wheeler, in an area that doesn't have much Mississippi influence and even (to the point of swaping NOS for Liberty Square) seems to be actively avoiding it.
The Country Bears were an opening day attraction (IIRC), and yet cartoon singing bears wasn't really the point of the original Frontierland at Disneyland and breaks the realism. So by the time they came to building Frontierland in Florida, the concept was already pretty much spent.
The Riverboat Landing is in the same place it is at Disneyland, more or less. It's unclear why they decided to lay it out this way, but I think it was to more consciously make Liberty Square and Frontierland better integrated into one larger area (and it wasn't the only example of this "just do it like DL" thinking in the park's planning-MK's parade route goes left at the castle and ends at the end of Frontierland to this day because that was the route DL's took at that time). They did take into account that the Riverboat was technically out of theme with an Independence-area village, and so designed Liberty Square at a higher elevation with the Riverboat obscured from Liberty Square proper. Only from Frontierland is the riverboat fully visible, which is sort of clever.
Reportedly the original plan was to give the park another Columbia as their second vessel (their first, a Mark Twain replica, was damaged beyond repair within the first decade of the park's existence), which would have certainly tied into the theme much better. However, it is speculated in
Boundless Realm (from which some of the above information is drawn) that it was replaced by the sidewheeler instead for two reasons: higher capacity and guest comfort (the unshaded Columbia deck would have been miserable in the Florida humidity). Less in theme, but certainly solved two logistical problems. At any rate, while wonderful, is Columbia fully in theme on the ROA at DL? It was a sea going vessel that circumnavigated the globe that certainly wouldn't have been seen on, say, the Mississippi. Not saying I object to its presence or don't enjoy it, but it was built because Walt wanted it and it gave the river additional capacity, not because it would have been 100% accurate in that context. The same is more or less true of WDW's steamship in Liberty Square, really.
RE: Country Bears, I think it's fine where it is in Florida. and I suppose one could take issue with it, but to do so seems to me to be akin to those who complain about the HM facades at WDW and onward becoming increasingly unkempt. Why do people object to that? Not because there's anything objectively wrong with such an approach, but because of how the HM exterior is at DL-after all, Walt said it should be well kept, and so it was at DL,. But then some people cry fowl at subsequent mansions being increasingly unkempt looking when the reality is that Walt didn't dictate many park decisions after DL and he made a conscious choice with MK to remove himself from that process prior to his passing. MK is not Disneyland, and neither are the subsequent parks. They are variations on DL built with various changes to address what they learned from DL as well as to match the demands of their corporate masters as well as their customers.
If we look at examples of breaking realism over time, we don't even have to leave Disneyland, or Walt's time there, to find examples-the Jungle Cruise was originally presented as a straight, realistic adventure and it wasn't until the 60s and the influence of Marc Davis that it became about the jokes and the comical situations of the animatronics-more fantastical, more exaggerated, etc.,There are probably people who objected to the Jungle Cruise changes in the 60s, but no one objects to it now because that's how they've known it and because said changes were made when Walt was alive, thus "legitimizing." That decision paved the way for numerous subsequent decisions, certainly including the bears. And of course, MK is not DL is not TDL is not DLP and all that.
At any rate, nowadays virtually every area of every park has been cartoonized to one degree or another, and I don't even know if you can really blame Country Bears for that. It started with the Mine Train or Jungle Cruise, really, and probably really crystalized in its modern, full form under Eisner in the 80s. But alas, this could all just be my take. Country Bears in my view enhances the Frontierlands it is a part of, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that the ones without it are diminished by its absence.
It’s from the 1999 Alice in Wonderland with Martin Short as the Mad Hatter.
