Welcome to weekly blog post number 17. For today’s post I am going to be talking about an activity we did in class and what I thought of it. For today’s post I will be talking about Disney, a little about its creation, and what has changed about Disney ( more specifically Disney World) in the last 70 years. I also want to say that I personally have not been to Disney World so I don’t have an inside view on what it is like there. Enjoy the post.
I want to mention the creation of Disney because I think it is not only cool but important as well. Disney started when Walt Disney committed to his dream of drawing cartoons. I was thought to be foolish as there was not really any cartoon at the time, but his animations were an instant success. I think that people like Walt are what drive change in general, taking new ideas that are maybe overlooked and making something that the world cherishes.
Moving on we get to the opening of Disney world, which was Walt’s “Crown Achievement”. At the time there was nothing that was able to compare to this attraction. The popularity of his animations in addition to the rides and games made this theme park another instant success.
I want to focus on some of the rides in this post, specifically the storybook land Canal Boats. We took a closer look at this original attraction ride in class with my group and noticed some changes and some things that were never altered once.
To begin with the thing I found most absurd the original version of the ride was just a boat floating through a small canal with piles of dirt on either side. No miniature castles or houses, no decoration, no nothing, just dirt that was left over from construction. The crazier part was that people actually went on the ride.
In addition to that we also noticed how all the staff were male for a good portion of the time. After a little research we found that the reason for this was because the father was usually the one who read stories to the children or something like that, and so Disney thought it would be fitting for an all male staff. Of course nowadays the staff is mixed gender but I thought that was fascinating, and at the time was probably a strategy that made sense.
Other than that the ride has basically stayed the exact same. Besides some new additions as new Disney movies are made, really the layout is the same, the entrance in the whales mouth is the same.
Overall I did not expect this ride to be this similar. In the second example involving the staff we can see that 1950 was a very different time from now, and yet the ride still remains the exact same with a few changes here and there. I think that is what surprised me the most.
That’s all for now