Walt Disney World's early years
Image: Disney
Walt Disney World opened on October 1, 1971 with one park, Magic Kingdom, and two resorts, the Contemporary Resort Hotel and the Polynesian Village Resort. Its opening day ceremony, like Disneyland's, included celebrities, parades, and, of course, characters that included the "Fab Five" (aka, Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Pluto, and Goofy) as well as characters from Alice in Wonderland, Song of the South, Bambi, The Three Little Pigs, The Jungle Book, and more.
Disney World kept its character interactions close to what Disneyland previously established. There were daily parades that included the characters as well as live musicians. The characters were also available to meet in the parks, although they, like Disneyland, would pop up randomly without an announced schedule. And for many years, in both parks, the model remained unchanged.
When EPCOT Center opened on October 1, 1982, it threw designers and Imagineers through a loop, character-wise at least. It was thought that since EPCOT would be about showcasing the world and introducing guests to the future, they wouldn't be interested in meeting characters.After all, why would someone want to meet Mickey when they were learning about the history of automobiles or sipping on European wines? They also thought that just seeing the characters would destroy the theming. Thus, it is incredibly hard to find any evidence of Disney characters at EPCOT's opening ceremony or during its first few years of operation. The closest we get was a series of "it's a small world" inspired doll characters, who are dressed in costumes and outfits from around the world.
For a few years, the only established character that could be found in the park was fan-favorite Dreamfinder from the Journey Into Imagination dark ride. Along with his purple dragon friend, Figment, Dreamfinder would often meet guests and sign their autograph books around Future World. Dreamfinder could be found around Epcot up until the mid or late 1990's.
Slowly, Epcot realized that when people visited Disney World, they wanted to meet their favorite Disney characters. Starting in the 1980's, various classic Disney characters would roam around the park. In Future World, you may have been able to find them in their "future" space-age clothes, while around World Showcase they wore outfits representing various cultures. In fact, you can find old photos of Chip and Dale wearing straw Chinese hats, Pluto wearing a Mexican sombrero and poncho, Goofy in a Scottish kilt, Minnie in a Japanese kimono, and Mickey in an American Revolution-era suit and hat.
It's wasn't long before other characters started roaming around Epcot. While the original plan for Epcot was to have the park based in reality without fantasy characters and creatures, didn't it make sense to see Alice wander through the gardens in the UK as well as Belle and the Beast explore the streets of France? Not only did these appearances give guests the character interactions they craved, but it added a sense of life to the pavilions, along with the traditional dancers and musicians previously seen in World Showcase.
Like the early years of Disney, the 1980's and 1990's continued the tradition of random character appearances, although they were now occasionally mentioned in park guides. The characters rarely had set lines, and although guests might organize themselves into a line for a quick picture, the characters, for the most part, we free to walk around. However, as the years changed, so did technology, and character interactions were about to change forever.
The invention of the digital camera
Image: brett jordan, Flickr (license)
Older Disney guests may remember the 2000's had a shift in character interactions. Maps now featured keys and icons pointing out where guests can find a character. A entertainment guide from Disney California Adventure in 2001 lists specific characters meeting in specific locations and times. Slowly, every character was soon assigned a meeting location and a set schedule. But why?
The answer - the rise of the digital camera. The first digital camera was built 1975 by Kodak, but it was eight pound prototype that took only black and white images. Since then, digital cameras evolved. The first consumer camera (or at least, the first one sold under $1,000) was the 1994 Apple QuickTake 100 and was followed by other clunky and expensive cameras. However, the first popular digital camera was the 1997 Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5/FD7. This camera let photographers take the memory card out of their camera to put directly into their computers. Another great invention? The 1999 Kyocera VP-210, the first camera inside of a phone! Throughout the late 1990's and early 2000's, digital cameras became less expensive and less bulky, but with more memory and battery life.
More pictures = more character demand
Image: Disney
But how can a camera affect when and where Mickey Mouse takes a picture? Well, back in the "old times" one role of film would hold 20-40 exposures, or photos. While guests visiting Disney would most likely bring more than one roll of film, or would be willing to buy more in the parks, the fact is that there was limit on the amount of photos people would take on their vacation. So if they were strolling along Main Street, USA and saw Mary Poppins roaming around, they may stop, say hello, take a group photo, and move along. After all, they may only have 35 exposures left in their camera for the day, and families who traveled on budgets had to be conscious of the amount of money they were willing to spend on film.
While the earliest digital cameras stored about as many photos as an average film camera, soon they could hold hundreds, then thousands of photos. And if someone took a photo they didn't like, it was easy to delete it and get more memory space. People were no longer limited by the amount of photos they could take, and this opened up vacationers to many more photographic options - now people could take as many photos as they like without "wasting" anything.
So now when a family wants to take pictures with Mickey Mouse, they're not going to take just one photo and move on. No, now they have the option of taking a group picture, a bunch of individual pictures, and a picture with just the kids or just the adults. They can afford to take a dozen photos in less than a minute. And now with nearly everyone over the age of thirteen connected to the internet via social media, they certainly need to take a selfie or two for their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. So now instead of someone casually passing by a character, perhaps stopping to say hello and asking for a quick picture, people tend to demand multiple photos. In today's world of social media and sharing, vacation pictures are no longer developed weeks later and stored in a picture album. Now people like to instantly share vacation pictures as they are taken, showing their friends and family what they are doing in real time. And with today's "pic or it didn't happen" mentality, people need photos to show their friends exactly what they are doing the moment it happens.
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