With the unsettling closure and uncertain future of a vast original area of Disneyland which has remained mostly undisturbed since park opening in 1955, it seems fitting to reflect upon some things which made it memorable. This is the first of a series of pieces, and also the most indirect — it’ll take me six paragraphs to make my real point.
One thing every parent knows is the delight of “the unexpected moment” when your child comes upon a character at a Disney park without warning.
There’s less of that these days, with “Character Meet and Greets” having been turned into controlled experiences and fewer instances of the characters simply walking the parks and freely mingling with the guests. (You tend to see much more of this at the Tokyo Disney Resort.)
On a trip to Disneyland when my daughter was about 4 or 5 years old just under a decade ago, we entered the park early, passed through Main Street, and were taking the walkway up to Sleeping Beauty Castle that curves to the right, past Snow White’s Grotto. The white marble statues of Snow White and the Dwarfs were a gift from the Ambassador of Italy, I explained to my daughter. They reside in a man-made grotto with a waterfall.
On the walkway itself is a full-size replica of the wishing well from the film Snow White. If you lean over and listen, you will hear Snow White singing. My daughter was listening intently, looking into the well, and when she turned around there was Snow White — pretty, indeed, as a picture. But live she was and my daughter’s eyes grew round. Like silver dollars. Snow White knelt, took my daughter’s hand, and for the next five minutes, nothing in the world existed except my daughter’s conversation with Snow White, who was naught but kind and gentle, and most interested in my daughter’s life at that moment. This is the true magic of Disneyland.
It was so early that there were no other people in the immediate area.
It still happens on occasion, and sometimes even adults get sprinkled with pixie dust. To get from the mainland to Tom Sawyer Island you take a small wooden raft on which you stand for a few minutes. And who piled in right after about 20 of us last November but The Bootstrappers, a rogue bunch of pirate musicians standing mere feet away. It was unexpected, and we were thoroughly delighted … children again for a brief two minutes.
The rafts to Tom Sawyer Island, and the island itself (designed, it is said, personally by Mr. Disney) closed on January 11 and will undergo the chop — literally in this case, since half the island is being removed — to make way for a massive 14 acre new land devoted to Star Wars.
What exactly will remain of Tom Sawyer Island is unknown to us for the next 18 months, but for the moment, let yourself be serenaded by The Bootstrappers as you make your way across the Rivers of America.
