“Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” So reads a plaque at the entrance of Disneyland, the first message presented to magic-seekers upon passing through the park’s turnstiles and entering the Happiest Place on Earth.
Walt Disney opened Disneyland in 1955, and 70 years on, its famed worlds of Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland and Main Street, U.S.A., are still thriving in Anaheim, drawing milli ons to its memorable attractions like Space Mountain and theJungle Cruise.
But today, alongside those iconic original concepts, the Mouse House has tapped into another exciting world: corporate synergy. Don’t let the cold terminology fool you — pixie dust still abounds, just with a keener sense of connecting every facet of the company.
“I think this all starts 70 years ago, when Disneyland opened. Since that time, Disney’s influence on the world has been absolutely profound and has changed everything about the way we think about storytelling,” Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences, tells Variety.
While the Fantasyland of 1955 featured rides inspired by animated Disney features “Dumbo” and “Snow White,” 2012 saw Disney California Adventure usher in a completely new way for fans to connect with beloved Disney film titles. Cars Land, inspired by Pixar’s hit “Cars,” crafted a larger-than-life re-creation of the movie’s Radiator Springs setting on Route 66.
“We have been relentless in terms of our endeavor to tell Disney stories at scale and in immersive fashion and through technology,” D’Amaro says, crediting Disney’s famed Imagineering team with those creative and technological innovations. “This is just a creative powerhouse, who are so in tune with our filmmakers that those films just jump off the screen into real life. You feel like you’re living that story, which is what all of our fans want to feel. There’s really nothing like it in the world. And as we’ve gotten better and better at this over time, as we listen to our fans in terms of what they want, our storytelling has become more ambitious.”
Disneyland and California Adventure constantly evolve, with Cars Land, featuring the Radiator Springs ride, inspired by Disney/Pixar hit “Cars.”
Since the introduction of Cars Land, fans have clamored for more immersive experiences of that ilk, and the Imagineers have been eager to deliver. In 2019, Disneyland opened Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a painstakingly detailed land transporting guests to the remote frontier planet of Batuu, populated with the likes of Kylo Ren, Chewbacca and playful next-gen robots called BDX droids.
It’s the bread and butter of the modern Disneyland: crafting a one-of-a-kind universe with E-ticket attractions like the high-tech Rise of the Resistance, coupled with inspiration from both the “Star Wars” films and its successful suite of games (BDX droids first appeared in the 2019 video game “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order”).
“It all starts with the mission to tell the best stories in the world. Everybody’s completely aligned with that, and we are incredibly fortunate that we’ve created an ecosystem of complementary businesses that are there to entertain our fans wherever they are, wherever they want to meet our stories,” D’Amaro says. “It’s a huge opportunity for us to make the stories explode into our fans’ lives.”
That alignment between Disney Experiences and the studio begins on day one, he says. “We’re getting increasingly sophisticated and better at aligning all of these businesses very early on, such that in the earliest stages of a script being developed, or the idea of a story, all these business units are coming together so that it’s seamless to our fans.”
The shiniest new figurehead of that studio influence can be seen in the form of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, a “Princess and the Frog” log flume attraction that took the place of Splash Mountain last year.
“We knew that our guests wanted to see more of Tiana. We knew that Splash Mountain was a popular attraction, and we thought that the merger of those two things coming together would create an unbelievable experience, an incredible story and attract new generations of fans to our theme parks,” D’Amaro says, adding that the attraction has become one of the most popular in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
The ride (on which you will get very wet) doesn’t just tell the story of the 2009 princess film. Instead, it imagines a new story set a year after the film’s conclusion, as Tiana and Louis search the bayou for a band of musical critters to play at her carnival celebration.
“If you go back many years, we were taking the story that you saw on the screen and we were replaying it in physical form inside of our theme parks and experiences — and we were doing that incredibly well,” D’Amaro says. “But what we realized is that our fans had this insatiable appetite for our stories and continuing those stories. So we’ll work very early on with script writers and our studio partners to talk about telling the story behind the scenes, the story that guests might be guessing about.”
Synergy with the studio will be on full display in the coming years, with a “Coco” attraction and a land inspired by “Avatar” both heading to Disney California Adventure.
“Walt said, ‘As long as there’s imagination left in the world, Disneyland will never be complete,’ and that’s true of everything that we do in all of our businesses,” D’Amaro says with reverence, adding that there are more projects in development concurrently today than ever before in the company’s history. “We have very, very ambitious plans to continue to invest, to listen to our fans, to surprise and delight them everywhere that they are. It’s just a really, really special moment in Disney history.”
