Took in Hong Kong Disneyland with my two kids just last week. Disneyland is fantastic—don't get me wrong. It is one huge work of art, revealing the genius of one mind. But it also struck me, this time, as a little outdated. Main Street USA, for example, reproduces a small town main street in the US circa, I'd say, 1910-1920. When Disneyland opened in 1953, that would have been thirty to forty years ago—the childhood of grandma and grandpa, or of Walt Disney. It would have been a wonderful attraction for them, evoking their own distant childhoods. Now it evokes no one's childhood, and, I think, loses its prime raison d'etre. When, as here, they build a new Disneyland, they really should update it accordingly—right now to around 1970-1980—in order to reproduce the original effect.
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| Main Street in Anaheim Disneyland, 2010. |
On the other hand, inadvertently, “Tomorrowland” worked more or less like Main Street USA for me. The vision of tomorrow it presents is absolutely the future foreseen in the space-crazy, science-mad fifties, and now looks fantastically dated; not like “tomorrow” at all, but like 1953.
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| Tomorrowland, Anaheim, 2010. |
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