The Most “Magical” Celebration?

In a trend started with Disneyland’s 50th anniversary 16 years prior, there really couldn’t have been worse timing for Walt Disney World’s 50th Anniversary. After the September 11th attacks and the self-imposed Dark Age of the early 2000s that had so hampered Disneyland’s, Magic Kingdom’s celebration just so happened to fall in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. (In other words, stock up on supplies ahead of Tokyo Disney’s 50th in 2033 – some other global cataclysm seems assured.) But “The Most Magical Celebration on Earth” must go on… 

New Attractions

No one could really fault Disney for missing the deadline on the two E-Ticket attractions theoretically meant to bookend the celebration – TRON Lightcycle Run at Magic Kingdom and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at EPCOT. At least that latter has been officially announced to open sometime in 2022, meaning it’ll at least catch the tail end of the 18-month 50th Anniversary. (October 1, 2022 would be a smart move since it's EPCOT’s 40th and the start of a new fiscal year, but no official date has been given.) 

Likewise intentionally delaying EPCOT’s Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure 18 months to become the celebration’s sole attraction anchor makes sense from a financial perspective. If it had opened in May 2020 as planned, the resort would have literally no new rides to show for the biggest celebration in their history, so a single, fun family dark ride is something.

Basically, it's not Disney's fault that the 50th Anniversary fell in the midst of a health crisis, and thus, no one's to blame for the best-practice health protocols the resort's practicing – like limited admission, park reservations, distanced character greetings, and reduced entertainment offerings. But unfortunately, the ramifications of the pandemic and its timing also created some serious frustrations from an image point of view... 

New Upcharges

Unfortunately, the parks’ extended COVID-19 closure also gave Disney license to end several popular, “free” (read: included) services like Magical Express airport transportation, FastPass+, Extra Magic Hours, and complimentary MagicBands, which all re-appeared as optional upcharges just in time for the 50th, earning Disney some deserved negative press when they’d least like it. While their removal does mercifully signal the end of Disney World's six-month-out-pre-planning-required phase, the almost comedically inept Disney Genie and its hilariously complex Disney Genie+ upcharge counterpart make up for it.

That’s just part of why a recent Theme Park Tourist poll found that over a third of our readers say they’re done with Disney World, and this time they mean it – probably not the place executives hoped they’d find themselves at the launch of their global marketing campaign. In other words, Disney started 2021 with plenty leveled against it and against its “Most Magical Celebration on Earth.” But to make matters worse, fans were surprised to find just how little Walt Disney World’s historic celebration seemed to celebrate Walt Disney World history....

New Statues

As part of a viral marketing campaign leading up to the 50th, Disney slowly announced – one by one – fifty new statues that would soon take up residence around Walt Disney World. Made of gold and coated in an iridescent shine (befitting the celebration’s shimmering color palate), the statues would stand like memorials around the four parks – 50 odes to 50 years. Instagrammable, shareable, and merchandisable, it’s easy to imagine these statues taking up the same role that the golden vehicles of Disneyland had; testaments not just to rides left from opening day, but rides of the past, present, and future! The attractions that have made memories for millions and millions of guests over five decades!

No such luck. One-by-one, the statues were revealed to be… you guessed it… Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars characters. Just two of the fifty represented characters designed by Imagineers for the Parks – Orange Bird and Figment – both of whom were swiftly and dutifully replaced with movie characters in an associated 50-toy release through McDonald’s Happy Meals. 

Here at Theme Park Tourist, we did a little thought exercise and art project by imagining which 50 rides we would’ve cast as golden statues, and we came up with a pretty good list (see our Magic Kingdom selections above)! Why shouldn’t those statues have been landmarks of the rides that have shaped the parks? Why shouldn’t there be an ode to 20,000 Leagues in Fantasyland? A statue commemorating Alien Encounter in Tomorrowland? A golden memorial to Body Wars outside the Play Pavilion at EPCOT? The Great Movie Ride on Hollywood Blvd.?

Unfortunately, this simple opportunity to showcase a little Disney World history, appeal to fans, and memorialize the resort’s most beloved rides – past, present, and future – in a really beautiful way was skipped for... characters.

And that’s just the start… 

New Nighttime Shows

Two requisite nighttime extravaganzas launched on October 1. 

It’s probably not fair to hold EPCOT’s Harmonious up as a harbinger of the 50th. Like Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, the show was actually meant to debut last year but was rescheduled to launch in October 2021 to bolster the otherwise empty list of new offerings. Perhaps best understood as a “high-tech, no-holds-barred, international World of Color” (but in our opinion, lacking the emotional flow or abstract artistry), Harmonious brings some of Disney’s lesser-nighttime-spectacular-ized films to the forefront (think Hercules, Moana, Hunchback, and Coco) in what’s theoretically a nod to World Showcase’s pavilions. 

It’s somewhere on the good-to-great scale depending on whom you ask… but at the end of the day, it’s yet another “nighttime same-tacular” that could just as easily play at Magic Kingdom or Hollywood Studios or Animal Kingdom. Especially positioned as an offering of the 50th, one has to wonder if its temporary, placeholder predecessor – “EPCOT Forever” – at least made more self as a self-referential celebration of the park and its history. In a year when looking back would make sense, EPCOT hosting a show with “One Little Spark” as its recurring motif makes a lot more sense than yet another show about wishing and dreams and animation and… characters.

The second, Disney Enchantment, can’t quite so easily be forgiven… It is definitely a show devised specifically for the 50th Anniversary by nature of including the custom-made anthem of the 50th, “You Are The Magic.” To be fair, its first and perhaps most irredeemable sin is replacing “Happily Ever Ever,” a similarly-scaled castle projection show and fireworks extravaganza that’s pretty agreeably “better” in just about every way.

But quality, flow, and story aside, the biggest issue with Disney Enchantment is that here – at the park that’s turning 50 – the show makes approximately zero attempts to actually… you know… celebrate Magic Kingdom. Whereas Disneyland’s “Remember…” was a literal masterpiece in the way it used the park as the IP (and by the way, is still in the park’s seasonal fireworks rotation), Disney Enchantment is your standard singalong projection show, even sharing a majority of its films with Harmonious! (We reviewed both shows – including pointing out their unfortunately same-ness, in a standalone feature.)

Neither of the two new nighttime shows positioned as thee landmarks of the 50th even seem to recognize that they’re set in parks with nearly a century of combined history… “EPCOT Forever” and “Remember… Dreams Come True” actually feel like a pretty perfect duo compared to the relative copy-paste shows ostensibly meant as celebrations… 

But it’s no accident. After all, though fans may be disappointed by the direction Disney World’s 50th went, they certainly couldn’t be surprised… On the last page, we’ll look at the reasons we think the 50th Anniversary left out the history of the parks themselves and where Disney can go from here…