Disney Parks Were Never Meant to Be Museums. That Doesn't Mean Nothing Is Sacred.

There may be no sentence in Disney fandom more historically accurate and more frequently abused than some variation of this one:

Walt never wanted Disneyland to be finished.

The sentiment is real. Disneyland changed while Walt Disney was alive. Attractions disappeared. Others were rebuilt. Technology improved. Entire areas evolved. The park that opened in 1955 was not the park Walt left behind eleven years later, and treating every attraction that survived long enough to become somebody's childhood favorite as permanently untouchable would eventually turn a living theme park into precisely the thing Walt Disney did not build.

A museum.

But there's a problem with using that history as a universal defense of whatever Disney wants to change next.

Change was never the point either.

Disney is currently undertaking what the company describes as the largest capital investment plan in Disney Experiences history, with new lands, attractions, cruise ships and destinations underway around the world. Walt Disney World alone is in the middle of enormous transformation. Magic Kingdom is expanding with Cars and Villains. Animal Kingdom is building Tropical Americas around Encanto and Indiana Jones. Hollywood Studios is getting Monstropolis. Elsewhere, new attractions based on Coco, Avatar, The Lion King and other established stories are moving through development.

This is not a company afraid to build.

That makes this an unusually good moment to ask a harder question.

What does progress owe the things already here?

The Difference Between Change and Progress

Theme parks present a peculiar stewardship problem because they are both creative works and physical places.

Movies don't have this problem in quite the same way. Disney can make a new version of The Little Mermaid without destroying the animated film. Pixar can make another Toy Story without removing the previous one from existence. The original work remains available for the audience that loves it.

A theme park has geography.

Something new frequently requires something old to move, change or disappear.

That means Imagineering cannot simply create. It must edit.

Editing is one of the most important creative acts there is, and good editors are not preservationists. They cut things. They reorganize them. They recognize when something that once worked no longer does. But a good editor also understands the difference between material that occupies space and material that gives the whole work its character.

Disney's parks contain plenty of both.

There are attractions whose disappearance produced little more than temporary disappointment. There are others whose absence would fundamentally alter the identity of the place around them. Age alone doesn't tell us which is which. Neither does attendance, merchandise revenue, guest satisfaction or whatever other number happens to fit neatly into a spreadsheet.

Some things become valuable because they are popular.

Others become valuable because they help explain where you are.

That's harder to measure.

It is also why arguments over theme park changes so quickly become emotional. People aren't merely arguing about ride capacity or intellectual property. They're arguing about memory, identity and whether the version of a place that mattered to them will still be recognizable when they return.

Nostalgia can make those arguments unreasonable. It can also make them easy to dismiss when they aren't.

There is a difference.

‘Nothing Is Sacred’ Is Not a Creative Philosophy

The easiest response to resistance is that Disney parks have always changed.

They have.

Main Street changed. Tomorrowland changed. Fantasyland changed. EPCOT changed almost continuously. Attractions we now describe as classics often replaced something else, and attractions once treated as revolutionary eventually became dated.

If preservation had been Disney's governing principle, some of the most beloved things ever created for the parks would never have existed.

But history does not tell us that every change was therefore wise. It tells us only that change happened.

The interesting question is what survived it.

Disneyland is still recognizably Disneyland not because every opening-day attraction remains intact, but because enough of its underlying creative grammar survived the edits. Main Street still establishes an arrival. The castle still provides orientation. Lands still attempt to transport rather than merely decorate. Certain attractions have become part of the vocabulary through which generations understand the place.

That doesn't make them immortal.

It makes the burden of replacing them higher.

A mature creative institution ought to be capable of saying that some things deserve more consideration than others without concluding that nothing may ever change. In fact, that's what stewardship requires. If everything is sacred, the institution eventually stops creating. If nothing is sacred, eventually there is no institution left to inherit—only a valuable address where one used to be.

Disney appears to understand this distinction at least some of the time.

One of the most interesting announcements from D23 this year came not from Florida or California but Disneyland Paris, where Hyperspace Mountain will make way for a reimagined Space Mountain: De la Terre à la Lune. The attraction will recover the Jules Verne inspiration that originally defined the Paris version of Space Mountain, including its original name and musical score, while being refreshed for a new generation.

Think about how unusual that is.

The instinct of a modern entertainment company is generally to move toward the recognizable franchise. Disneyland Paris is doing something more complicated: moving an attraction away from Star Wars and back toward an identity rooted in Jules Verne, nineteenth-century futurism and the creative personality of the park itself.

That isn't nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.

It's an acknowledgement that sometimes the thing you inherited possesses a value that cannot be improved simply by attaching a more famous intellectual property to it.

At Walt Disney World, Carousel of Progress presents a different version of the same problem. Disney is updating the attraction again, including a refreshed 1980s scene and new performers in the roles of the family. Disney's own history of the attraction emphasizes that it has never actually been static; scenes, dialogue, technology and performers have changed repeatedly while the underlying idea has endured.

That's preservation through evolution.

The attraction survives not because nobody touches it, but because somebody understands what can be touched without destroying the reason it matters.

That may be the most useful definition of stewardship Disney has available.

What Are We Actually Preserving?

There is another danger here, particularly for those of us inclined to care about Disney history.

We can become so concerned with what Disney removes that we stop asking whether what we're defending is actually good.

Old is not the same thing as important.

Longevity can be evidence that something has enduring value, but sometimes an attraction survives because replacing it hasn't yet risen high enough on a capital plan. Some experiences become charming precisely because they are artifacts of another era. Others simply become old.

A serious argument for stewardship cannot amount to demanding that Disney preserve whatever existed when we were twelve.

That isn't stewardship. That's autobiography.

The standard has to be more demanding.

Does this thing contribute something distinctive to the identity of the park? Does it represent a form of storytelling, design or craftsmanship that would be difficult to replace? Does it connect generations without depending entirely upon their familiarity with a commercial franchise? Does it make the place around it more coherent? Most importantly, if it disappeared tomorrow, would Disney have lost something more significant than capacity?

Those questions won't produce unanimous answers. They shouldn't.

But they are better questions than whether something is old.

They are also better questions than whether something is new.

The current expansion cycle gives Disney an opportunity to demonstrate the difference. Tropical Americas is replacing DinoLand U.S.A., but the announced Indiana Jones attraction is being developed with an original storyline designed specifically for Animal Kingdom rather than simply importing an existing Indiana Jones ride. Imagineering says the adventure will connect to the ancient Maya and to the park in a way specific to Animal Kingdom.

That's worth noticing.

The question isn't merely whether Indiana Jones belongs in Animal Kingdom. The more useful test is whether Imagineering has found a way to make Indiana Jones belong to this Animal Kingdom.

Those are very different ambitions.

The same will eventually be true of Villains Land, Monstropolis and every other major addition now under construction. Their source material may be familiar, but familiarity isn't automatically the enemy of originality. An attraction based on an existing film can still contain extraordinary original design, music, architecture, technology and storytelling. Disney's parks have been proving that for decades.

The concern begins when the park itself becomes secondary—when the land exists primarily as a physical container for recognizable intellectual property rather than the intellectual property being adapted in service of a coherent place.

That distinction is subtle on a presentation slide.

It is not subtle when you're standing there.

The View From Main Street

The tension here isn't really between old attractions and new ones. It's between inheritance and stewardship.

Disney inherited an extraordinary amount of affection. Some of it belongs to characters and stories. Some belongs to particular attractions, places and traditions. And some is harder to locate at all: a sense of what Disney ought to feel like, accumulated over generations by people who experienced very different versions of the company.

That inheritance has value. It can also become a trap.

If Disney treats everything people remember fondly as untouchable, nostalgia becomes a veto on creation. The company gradually turns itself into the museum nobody actually asked for. But the opposite mistake is just as dangerous. If longevity and affection are treated merely as obstacles to redevelopment, Disney can become very good at replacing things without understanding what made them worth caring about in the first place.

Neither approach requires much judgment.

Stewardship does.

It asks Disney to understand the difference between something that is merely old and something that has become part of the institution's character. It also requires enough confidence to recognize when yesterday has done its job and something better deserves the space.

There will never be a formula for that. There probably shouldn't be. Attendance figures can tell Disney whether people are riding an attraction. Guest surveys can tell them whether people say they enjoy it. Financial models can estimate what another use of the land might produce. None of those things can fully answer whether removing it makes the park better, or merely newer.

That's where creative judgment enters.

The Disney parks we inherited are themselves products of that judgment. They exist because generations of people changed what came before them, sometimes radically. They also exist because those same generations carried certain ideas forward. Not necessarily unchanged, but intact enough that someone arriving decades later could still recognize what mattered about them.

Main Street is an appropriate metaphor for that responsibility precisely because it isn't history.

The America it presents never really existed. It is cleaner, kinder, prettier and more coherent than the country that inspired it. It leaves things out. It smooths rough edges. It remembers some things more generously than they deserve to be remembered.

But perhaps literal history was never the point.

Main Street represents an ideal: not necessarily who we were, but who we might like to believe we could have been. A community with a sense of place. Neighbors who know one another. Craftsmanship worth noticing. Optimism without embarrassment. A past reconstructed not because we should return to it, but because some of the values we associate with it are still worth carrying forward.

That's the perspective we mean when we talk about The View From Main Street.

It isn't nostalgia, and it isn't an argument that Disney should become whatever it was during some preferred moment in its history. Disney has fallen short of its own aspirations before. So have the people who built it. Ideals are useful precisely because the institutions and people who hold them don't always live up to them.

The point is to remember what we were trying to be.

Then look forward from there.

Disney should keep building. It should take risks. It should replace things. It should occasionally make decisions that upset people who loved what came before. A company whose greatest achievements were born from imagination cannot make preservation its highest creative ambition.

But neither should it confuse motion with progress.

The question isn't whether Disney is willing to change what it inherited. History has already answered that.

The harder question is whether we understand it well enough to know what should come with us.

— Walter B. Good