Think the new Storybook Circus could have been better?

HouCuseChickie

HouCuseChickie

Well-Known Member
I'm mixed...I love that Dumbo is now a breeze and the kids still love Barnstormer/Goofini. I think my kids probably would enjoy the Casey Jr area if we went during one of the warmer months, but my older one was really sad that Minnie's house is gone. She saw it once when she was 4 back in 2010 and she's still pretty heartbroken that it's gone. The Big Top stuff is cute, but considering we're not big shoppers or snackers...it's really wasted on us.
 
Figgy1

Figgy1

Well-Known Member
HouCuseChickie said:
I'm mixed...I love that Dumbo is now a breeze and the kids still love Barnstormer/Goofini. I think my kids probably would enjoy the Casey Jr area if we went during one of the warmer months, but my older one was really sad that Minnie's house is gone. She saw it once when she was 4 back in 2010 and she's still pretty heartbroken that it's gone. The Big Top stuff is cute, but considering we're not big shoppers or snackers...it's really wasted on us.
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I'm still heartbroken over loosing Toon Town!! I could spend quite a while just taking ing the sights there was so much detail!!
 
MarkTwain

MarkTwain

Well-Known Member
I don't know, something about it worked for me. It felt like a return to the old-school style of almost quaint, not over-the-top (yet still convincing) theming we haven't seen at the Magic Kingdom since the park opened. It managed to keep some of the more effective components of Toontown Fair, while having a stronger sense of permanence and not feeling like a cheap ripoff of Disneyland's Toontown. Having a legitimate and fully-themed Fantasyland Station is a huge plus for the park as well.

This [long] Passport2Dreams article sums up my feelings nicely:

http://passport2dreams.blogspot.com/2012/09/lightning-in-bottle-storybook-circus.html


Twenty years of theme park history across all of the major industry players have conditioned us to associate areas of the park for children with distorted fiberglass architecture, limited texture, balloony scenic elements, and a less than attentive regard for fine detail. It is very much to the credit of Storybook Circus that it whole heartedly rejects all of these things. I think this is very much responsible for the initial surge of very enthusiastic reviews this area has received, although that initial wave was reviewing only a tiny sliver of what the area will eventually become. Still, some of the early positive coverage was in large part due to an immediate instinctual understanding that Storybook Circus was not to be Toontown Fair Mach 2, but a new kind of "kid zone".

I personally think that this time around Imagineering has finally delivered something that fulfills the demands of being an area "for kids" which also offers something for adults. It's an area that won't look absurd or dated in ten years because it turns the clock back to a design sense that existed before the concept of a kid's area did. It is classical, and so it has an inherent longevity.

...

Storybook Circus is a great deal more ambitious than it needs to be, and that begins with the fact that it is an area with a history. It doesn't have a backstory, contrary to the tedious modern Imagineering tendency to explain every single thing with a convoluted and impossible to comprehend motivating narrative. Storybook Circus invites scrutiny but pleases in the same way the original areas of the Magic Kingdom do: by implying more than it says. One doesn't read Storybook Circus, she reads into it.

The Circus is set up in an area which clearly previously existed before the Circus' arrival. Dumbo is set in Florida, but the Circus is not a Floridian one; it's set up somewhere in the Midwest, what was probably a little cow town called Carolwood Park. Carolwood Park contributes pre existing railroad tracks, billboards, barns, and train roundhouses to Storybook Circus, and gorgeously crafted rambling stone walls - implied farmland. Along with the heavily vegetated areas, this Circus brings to mind an atmosphere vintage and rural, some vaguely defined sense of pre-modernity. It's the imagined rural youth of American myth.

...

The railroad had previously provided important conceptual links on Main Street and Frontierland, but it grows into a central role in this area. When you enter, you're directly facing a train and train roundhouse - that's the introductory statement! Your other options include arriving on a train, or walking in via Tomorrowland and directly facing a train. WDI has covered all of the bases here. The entire area is, in fact, motivated by the train, because the Circus arrived on it. You can actually see the train spur line that branches off the Walt Disney World Railroad leading to a train turntable where the individual acts and circus wagons split off to set up. You can follow the wagon tracks in the "earth" as they roll off the turntable, a trail of peanuts embedded in the ground alongside animal tracks leading to Dumbo, monkey tracks towards the Barnstormer (where Goofy co-stars with a monkey), and so on. None of these subtle details are at all obvious or vie for your attention. This is the great thing about the Circus: it has a motivational integrity but you have to go looking for it.

And of course by being called Carolwood Park, being set in the Midwest, in some far off once upon an Americana, the area brings in the ghost of Walt Disney's childhood. Disney harbored a fascination with the circus, of which Dumbo is only the most obvious example. There are also a scant dozen shorts, Toby Tyler and Fun and Fancy Free, and the fact that Disney bought and restored an entire Circus wagon train and ran it through Disneyland to a Circus he staged inside the park twice daily.

...

I think the secret of the area's success is that for the first time Imagineering has created a satisfying dimensional representation of the feeling of Walt Disney's animated output in its' golden era. There is a pervasive simplicity, a rural feeling, a naive charm. I think this accounts for the area's already sterling reputation: it's the first thing Disney's built since themed design went permanently sophisticated with EPCOT Center that feels the way Disney things used to feel. It feels simple and unpretentious and naive in the way the rest of the Magic Kingdom does.
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I'll add that I wasn't expecting to like it going in, either. I generally hate carnival theming (Chester & Hesters, Paradise Pier, even the tournament tent rooftops remaining in Fantasyland grate me), but something seemed to work for me. It feels like they tried to play up more of the quaintness than the tackiness we've previously seen in Disney's carnival theming.
 

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