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Snow White and Her Adventures

Image: Disney

As one of Disney’s most beloved films of all time, and the beginning of Walt’s animated film empire, it was only natural for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to be featured as an opening day attraction at Disneyland. Walt wanted to entirely remake the amusement park experience, transforming rides from a run of the mill exercise in physics into a truly immersive new world. What better way to do that than to put guests inside some of the most beloved properties in the Disney vaults?

Walt’s idea was brilliantly simple. Inside the attraction, guests would take the leading role in a reimagining of the familiar story. For example, rather than simply flying WITH Peter Pan, guests would BECOME Peter Pan as they soared high above London on their way to Neverland. The concept was never fully communicated to guests, though, and in some ways it fell flat. For rides like Peter Pan’s Flight, guests simply left scratching their heads, wondering why they never saw Peter. At Snow White and Her Adventures, however, things were a little different.

What was largely forgotten by 1955 was just how dark and frightening portions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were to 1930s audiences. The film drew on the great Gothic tradition from which such novels as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and such early horror films as Nosferatu were also drawn. In the years immediately preceding Disney’s take on Snow White, Universal began its legacy of horror, putting its own spin on those traditions to develop such classics as Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a sensation for many reasons, not the least of which is that Disney intentionally heightened its emotional touchstones to ensure that it resonated with adult audiences whose sensibilities usually precluded cartoons. In many ways, it ranks among the best of the Gothic films, from its sense of scale to the rawness of its most tragic moments. Rather than shying away from or sugar coating the horror sequences, Disney made them intentionally and purposefully frightening in a way that was uncommon at the time.

While Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 focused primarily on pornography and violence, the British Board of Film Censors and Mussolini’s censors in Italy had banned horror movies altogether. Yet, as a cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was allowed to play in its entirety. Many young people who grew up with censorship had never been exposed to the emotional notes that were masterfully hit in the film’s forest and transformation scenes. Even among American audiences, no one expected the terror of those scenes to feel so real.

Movie posterBut that was 1937. By the 1950s, more sophisticated audiences were taking in low-budget monster movies. The horror industry had moved on to jump scares, and the Gothic storytelling style was increasingly seen as quaint and even boring. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, re-released in 1944 and again in 1952, still had a lot going for it, but its horror moments had lost the bulk of their impact.

Walt had a tremendous knack for keeping his finger on the pulse of the public. To bring Snow White’s story to life, he recreated some of the film’s most emotional moments, including the forest scenes and the witch’s transformation, in one of the first amusement rides to take full advantage of black light. With its short, quick trip through the story, the attraction traded Gothic story development for the best of traditional scary dark rides amped up as only Disney could do. The results were legitimately frightening, even for then-modern audiences. Yet it was not this original version of the ride that became the stuff of legends.

The Florida Project

 public domain

Walt and his team learned many valuable lessons from Disneyland. Most of all, they learned that in order to fulfill one of their biggest dreams, that “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world,” they really needed the benefit of space. Disneyland seemed enormous when it opened, but it was quickly pinned in by a plethora of T-shirt shops and motels that sprang up to take advantage of the tourist trade.

Never content to sit still, Walt wanted to improve upon what he had created at Disneyland, while simultaneously embarking on his biggest adventure yet—building a fully functioning, futuristic city that would serve as a model for urban planning and development. Under pseudonyms and mysteriously named subsidiary corporations, Disney began buying up enormous plots of land in Central Florida, knowing that if the company’s name got out, prices would skyrocket. Yet many in the area correctly guessed what was coming next.

The Florida Project was officially announced in 1965. Fresh off a smash success at the 1964 World’s Fair, Walt laid out his ambitious new plans to a disbelieving but largely supportive public. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1966, before he could bring his greatest dream to life.

Magic Kingdom

In the years following Walt’s passing, Disney management tried valiantly to maintain a course that would have pleased the big boss. The Magic Kingdom was a bigger, bolder, more immersive version of Disneyland that smoothed out some of the original park’s rough edges. It also took some new risks.

The 1960s and 1970s

Cinderella Castle

Although only 16 years had passed since Disneyland opened, the United States and, indeed, the world had changed dramatically by the time the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971. The 1960s were a tumultuous time marked by women’s liberation, civil rights, and protests against the war in Vietnam. The movie and music industries, as well as the burgeoning counterculture movement, were grounded in psychedelic and flower power imagery. 

Yet, while the growing youth movement had shifted radically from the beliefs and ideals of its parents’ generation, those parents were often the ones with the money to pay for vacations to theme parks. Disney faced the immense challenge of needing the Magic Kingdom to be forward-thinking and hip and cool enough to attract the flower children, without alienating their more conservative parents.

The way the company married these very different groups was nothing short of masterful. Like Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom got a Main Street USA and a castle (this one belonging to Cinderella instead of Sleeping Beauty), and plenty of family-friendly rides and attractions. 

Yet overall, the Magic Kingdom’s lineup was just a little bit edgier than Disneyland’s attractions. This is especially apparent when comparing opening day Magic Kingdom rides to their opening day Disneyland counterparts. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and Snow White’s Adventures are among the most glaring examples.

1971 Fantasyland

Image (c) Disney

While Disneyland’s Mr. Toad follows a fairly traditional dark ride layout and feel, Walt Disney World’s version amped up the experience by giving it a second track. Guests had a largely different experience depending on whether they boarded on the left or right, and at numerous points the two tracks raced directly toward each other, giving riders the sense of an impending collision before veering off at the last moment. Both the Disneyland original and the Walt Disney World version featured a head-on train crash followed by a trip to Hell, but the Walt Disney World attraction was, as Walt liked to say, “plussed.” The Disney company still uses plussing today, tweaking and tinkering and adding just a little bit of extra magic to existing attractions.

Snow White’s Adventures was the Magic Kingdom’s plussed version of Snow White and Her Adventures. Just like Walt had ramped up the scares in the 1955 original to capture audiences who had grown immune to the horror of the 1937 film, the Disney company needed to upgrade the attraction once again to appeal to the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1970s.

The technological advancements alone are well worth mentioning. Thanks to dramatic, rapid advances in technology, Snow White’s Adventures featured characters that were far more realistic than was possible when Snow White and Her Adventures was built. In addition, the legendary Claude Coats was put in charge of Fantasyland development. His artistic style drew heavily from the Gothic traditions, creating an even darker and more ominous backdrop than that of the original ride.

 
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