Fiesta Fun Center - Disney's Contemporary Resort
When Walt Disney World opened in 1971, the Contemporary was all business. Ballrooms. Conference centers. Convention space. It was a shrewd move aimed at a crowd that might otherwise dismiss the Disney name. The effect was literally historic - in the Ballroom of the Americas, during the 1973 Associated Press Managing Editors conference, Richard Nixon stared down the barrel of a TV camera and said, “I am not a crook.”
There’s something to be said, however, for overkill. The resort had more room for meetings than it ever needed, considerable demand notwithstanding. A conference room on the second floor became the coats-only Gulf Coast Room, the only fine dining on-site until the California Grill picked up the slack. The Sunshine State Exhibitorium, a cavernous banquet space off the lobby that screened older Disney films when not in use, became the Fiesta Fun Center.
Considering the Center withered away long before the age of digital cameras, footage of its original incarnation is hard to come by. But given the few scanned photographs and glowing accounts of those who remember it, and they all remember it well, the Fiesta Fun Center was what 10-year-old dreams are made of.
The windowless, corporate cavern was turned into a complete entertainment ecosystem. The movie screenings continued, now in a dedicated theater that alternated free and ticketed releases. An elaborately designed shooting gallery occupied an entire corner. A snack bar provided the finest in adolescent fuel. Arcade games, pinball machines, and skeeball lanes lined the walls. Air hockey, foosball, and pool tables made aisles in between. There was even a caricature artist on hand to properly capture each child’s autonomous glee.
In a sense, it accomplished what Disney Regional Entertainment couldn’t. The Fiesta Fun Center was an ordinary arcade on a Disney scale. It lasted decades on almost entirely off-the-shelf entertainment, warmly branding itself into the memory of any kid lucky enough to stay at the right hotel at the right time.
The trick about naming a resort “Contemporary,” though, is that it has to stay that way.
By the 1995 makeover that rechristened it the “Food & Fun Center,” the arcade was looking awfully conventional. No more movie theater. A ticket redemption center replaced the shooting gallery. It still had the snack bar and plenty of games, for a while.
In 2007, the games moved up to the Grand Canyon Concourse in the former Fantasia gift shop, a significantly smaller footprint. In 2018, the diminished arcade became Pixar Play Zone, the resort’s upcharge daycare center, but by the following year it reopened as the Game Station Arcade.
It offers more games per square-foot than just about any other arcade on property these days, but as anyone who knew the Fiesta will tell you, it’s just not the same.
The Adventureland Arcades - Magic Kingdom
Plenty tears are shed for the Magic Kingdom’s dearly departed Penny Arcade, but few guests mourn Adventureland’s two arcades, if they remember them at all.
Without the research of Disney historians like Mike Lee and his site Widen Your World, there would be almost no record of Adventureland’s first arcade ever existing. Coverage in the months before Walt Disney World’s grand opening mentioned a shooting gallery somewhere in the land. The earliest maps mentioned a “Safari Club” on the same side, but opposite end of the Adventureland-Frontierland breezeway as that land’s much more famous shooting gallery. By the summer of 1972, the alcove had been rebranded “Colonel Hathi’s Safari Club” and turned into a gift shop.
During its extremely brief existence, the elusive Safari Club was not a shooting gallery. In what is now the Island Supply Sunglass Hut, the Club offered a selection old-fashioned arcade games custom-built for Walt Disney World. Most of the 20-odd cabinets gave players a pivot-mounted gun and plenty of exotic little targets to mow down. The room shared backstage space with the adjacent Frontierland Shootin’ Arcade, lending credence to the possibility of the Club being originally intended as a full-fledged shooting gallery. Whatever the reason - pointless competition with the Shootin’ Arcade, the disconcerting chance to hunt animals just spotted on the Jungle Cruise - the Safari Club didn’t even last the Magic Kingdom’s first full year of operation.
Fortunately, the Pirates of the Caribbean brought a replacement with them when they arrived fashionably late in 1973. Like the rest of Plaza del sol Caribe, however, the Caribbean Arcade wasn’t quite ready for guests until the latter half of 1974.
Situated in an arched chamber off the ride’s exit market, this arcade offered similar hand-made amusements to the Safari Club, only with pirates in the line of fire instead of primates. But there was more to the Caribbean Arcade than its shorter-lived predecessor. One machine allowed paying customers to print whatever they wanted on a gold doubloon. Another dispensed postcards bearing the concept art of Imagineering legend Marc Davis. Fortunes were available from an appropriately themed teller.
The Caribbean Arcade coaxed enough quarters to last the decade, closing around 1980 after a brief name change. Several different variations of paid photo-op moved in over the years before the space, like all the other distinct stores around Plaza del sol Caribe, was sealed off for backstage use.
Today, there are no dedicated arcades anywhere in the Walt Disney World theme parks. Unless state law changes, we’ve almost certainly seen the last of them. Respects can be paid in quarters or tokens.
Comments
Hey Jer: my dad; Van Rensaler Rogers, CSA BA - (CLeveland School of Art) 1938 or 9 or so and Mom also CSA abd, (all-but-degree) 1942? were friends of Walt’s; and dad moved into Walt’s former Cleveland Arcade no-elevator service nose-bleed altitude level Arcade floorspace when Walt left.
After working a bit, for Walt or Mr Walt as Dad called him, Dad n Mom went on to structurally develop the USA version of Industrial Manufacturing Corporation’s Version of Trade Show exhibiting.
Dad’s company dba Rogers Display Studios aka RDS, later The Rogers Company.. Dad had overwhelming customer loyalty