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Confession: I don’t which one is Chip and which one is Dale

Image: Disney

What’s the functionality of the utilidors? The first thing that you need to understand is that they’re not built like a basement. Again, that’s not possible with the water table. Instead, the Magic Kingdom utilidor system is literally the ground floor of the park. Otherwise, flooding would represent an ongoing concern.

What we’re really discussing here are the kinds of rooms that you’d find at the bottom of any large facility. Disney sticks all of the stuff that it needs in its utilidors, hiding them away from public sight. Since the corridors run across the park, anything is movable in only a few minutes, whether the object is food, merchandise, or even garbage. No matter the awkward shape of the pathway, however, a cast member is never more than ten minutes away from their destination. In other words, utilidors enable a clever kind of logistics.

Think of the setup in Disney terms. Let’s say that Florida is suffering from 100-degree heat or, as they call it, Tuesday. Imagine that some unfortunate soul in a chipmunk costume feels the effects of the blistering sun during their shift at Frontierland. Their early onset heat stroke causes half of Chip and Dale to need to get to an air conditioned area immediately. Meanwhile, the other half of Chip and Dale needs a partner. Otherwise, Magic Kingdom offers an incomplete character meet and greet.

Had this set of events transpired at Disneyland, a replacement Dale (I’m arbitrarily choosing him as the weaker chipmunk) would have to dash across the park to Frontierland. Now is the moment when I remind you that time is a premium at Disney theme parks. Any instance when guests wait in a line that doesn’t move negates the premise of “Happiest Place on Earth.” Every second counts.

Image: Disney

The backup chipmunk has two options. They can suit up before sprinting from their current location to Frontierland or they can run to the spot and then put on the costume. Either way, they’re carrying a chipmunk outfit, which is a bit tough to hide from observers. If they head to the building and then suit up, guests wait impatiently. During these moments, theme park tourists are doing absolutely nothing when they’re supposed to be enjoying their visit.

Should cast members put on the suit before making the trek, they have twin concerns. The first is that they’re breaking the illusion of their current themed area. A Frontierland chipmunk outfit in Adventureland would irritate Walt Disney, which we (think we) know from the earlier story. The second is that guests often interrupt costumed cast members. Children see giant fuzzy costumes, and they want to hug. It’s quite beautiful, really, but it’s also a disruptive job element. Over the past 60 years, Disneyland has developed some viable strategies for these various hurdles. None of them are ideal, though.

The utilidors are an inventive solution for multiple reasons. These (effectively) underground pathways hide the inner machinations required to maximize the efficiency at Magic Kingdom. Here, a single notification will allow a secondary Dale to suit up and sprint to Frontierland. The guests on the floor above are none the wiser to this movement. For them, the illusion of the themed land never breaks. One cast member vanishes and another one arrives. It’s a reliable bit of Disney pixie dust that solves one of the company founder’s greatest aggravations.

Underground governance

The utility of the utilidor system is unmistakable. But how does it work? That’s a complex question with a nuanced answer. How would you describe the pipe system that supplies water to your home? How do you receive electricity? How does the food delivery service in your region work? For that matter, how do the roads tie together there? Each of these explanations is understandable on their own. Finding the connector that ties them together is the difficult part.

The world in which you were raised already enjoyed lots of groundbreaking technological innovations. Odds are that you didn’t have to build your own water supply or run electricity into your home.  Even if you’re an urban planner, few of the roads you use are ones you designed. At best, you improved their functionality.

What does all of this have to do with Disney and utilidors? To a certain extent, they’re all matters of governance. By that, I mean that someone controls the supply of food, water, and power to your home. They also craft the roads that make a path to/for you. In other words, those who came before you worked to build more convenient access to all your basic needs. The utilidors are like that for Disney.

When plotting the construction of Magic Kingdom, Imagineers and park planners parsed through 15 years of data at Disneyland. This information was basically the fount of all theme park wisdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What they learned from their research and, in many instances, firsthand experience was that the original Disney theme park was a good start rather than the end-all be-all of its kind. Disney employees understood that they had many potential areas of improvement. Most of them involved a buzzword I mentioned earlier, logistics. With Magic Kingdom, think of it as a combination of organization, coordination, and management.

 
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