While the Magic Kingdom lacks some of the innate charm and immense detail of its older, smaller brother out west, it definitely shares the DNA of Disneyland.
Though Walt Disney's park has a much larger number of attractions, most of the changes made to the Magic Kingdom's opening day lineup have been positive.
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As Walt Disney World marks its 47th birthday and Epcot marks its 36th, News 6 is counting down with:
10 best things to happen to Walt Disney World since Oct. 1, 1971
10 best things to happen to Epcot since Oct. 1, 1982
1. Tom Sawyer Island (1973)
The park's earliest additions are among its best, and Tom Sawyer's Island remains an underrated gem. Even if you never set foot on the park's first mini-land, the lush greenery, the fort and the rafts enrich the entire back half of the park. While it is certainly short on high-tech and thrills, it remains a beautifully transportive place that also allows children a place to play the old-fashioned way.
2. Pirates of the Caribbean (1973)
Amazingly, the park's first major new ride and second mini-land opened just a few months after Tom Sawyer's Island. That's one reason I've long had a bit of skepticism of the "official story" behind Pirates.
It goes something like this: When WDW opened, Imagineers thought Florida was too close to the real Caribbean to include the last ride supervised by Walt Disney, but so many guests asked "Where are the pirates?" that Disney quickly whipped up a greatest-hits version for Florida.
Yes, there absolutely were plans for "Thunder Mesa" -- a mini-land set to include a ride designed to top Pirates called "The Western River Expedition," but that was meant to go roughly where Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain are today. Also, the Pirates building tops the California original in almost every way. Florida's Pirates features what is really the first themed queue: making the wait in line part of the story.
Last but not least, Caribbean Plaza is not just a gorgeously detailed and evocative area, it also solved a major design problem: turning one of the park's most crowd-choking dead ends into one of the best transitions in any theme park.
None of that sounds like a rush job to me. There's also a more patently false "official story" about how Country Bear Jamboree came to Disneyland, crafted around the same time.
3. If You Had Wings (1972)
The Kingdom's first new ride was a small addition to the park that leaves a large legacy through to today, even though its sets and props were chopped up in 1989.
Why is this simple omni-mover ride still so fondly remembered? Well, we have to start with its ear-worm of a title song, written by the masters behind Pirates and Haunted Mansion, but there was much more. IYHW was one of the few free rides from the start and a blatant commercial for Eastern, WDW's first official airline.
It also made extraordinary use of space with an insane number of clacking 16 mm film projectors. The style of the ride deeply influenced Epcot's El Rio del Tiempo (now the Gran Fiesta Tour) with its clever mix of screens and dimensional sets. IYHW's ending included larger-film-format "speed rooms" that really evoked what it was like to, say, drive a race car. A variation on that ending was also used in Epcot's late, great World of Motion ride.
The sponsor-heavy message was, in itself, a proving ground for EPCOT Center's model.
Finally, you can still travel the exact same ride path today, with vehicles modified from the 1972 original to let you control the car's point of view. That ride is "Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin."
4. Space Mountain and Tomorrowland Expansion (1974-75)
Other than Cinderella Castle and Spaceship Earth, is there a more iconic WDW building than Space Mountain?
Envisioned almost from the start, it took a few more years for technology (and Disney's budget) to catch up. Not just the park's first roller coaster and the world's first roller coaster in the dark, Space Mountain is also the first coaster track designed with the help of computers and the first to be computer controlled.
For its time, the ride was a terrifying cutting-edge thrill. It's still a lot of fun, even though it is pretty tame by modern coaster standards. The entire area it sits in doubled the size of Tomorrowland and included the equally innovative and beloved WedWay PeopleMover.
5. Main Street Electrical Parade/SpectroMagic (1977 and 1991)
While WDW's Electric Water Pageant on the Seven Seas Lagoon provided the soundtrack and inspiration for Disneyland's original attempt, the Main Street Electrical Parade most people know and love debuted in 1977, after the enormously successful Bicentennial celebration and the retirement of its extremely ambitious "America on Parade." No surprise, a patriotic finale float debuted just two years later. MSEP was a first of its kind and a whole lot of fun.
When it "glowed away forever" the first time in 1991, it was replaced by a next-gen, equally innovative version that topped it in most ways: SpectroMagic. MSEP has come and gone from the Magic Kingdom two more times since then, including a "one summer only" run in 2010 that lasted six years.
Sadly, during those six years, SpectroMagic was first neglected and, later, destroyed. Let's hope rumors of an all-new night parade come true by the time the MK turns 50, but I wouldn't be shocked to see MSEP return again at some point at some park.
6. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (1980)
I have a special affinity for Thunder because it was dedicated on my 10th birthday.
While a version opened at Disneyland about a year earlier, our larger one was designed first. The park's second coaster and second "Mountain" was the first major addition since Space Mountain (five years earlier) and last until Splash Mountain (12 years later). It also helped balance out crowds by luring people back to Frontierland.
The ride owes its origins to the plans I mentioned earlier for "Thunder Mesa," but after that enormously expensive area was put on permanent hold, imagineer Tony Baxter championed making the mine train ride what it is today. A portrait of Baxter was added to the ride five years ago, along with some interactive queue elements.
7. Splash Mountain (1992)
Someone recently described Splash Mountain to me a,s "It's like if 'It's a Small World' had a big drop."
The newest true E-ticket in the Magic Kingdom was also inspired by Baxter and also debuted in California first. The Anaheim original solved a bunch of needs at once: more thrills for teens, a way to enliven the park's dated and empty "Bear Country" area and a way to make use of a vast cast of beautifully-designed animatronic animals from a truly bizarre show that was closing, called "America Sings."
Most of the Splash Mountain cast in Disneyland came from that show with very few modifications. How could they fit in with the look and feel of the amazing Brer Rabbit sequences from Walt's otherwise lamentable "Song of the South?" The characters from that 1946 film were designed, in large part, by a legendary animator named Marc Davis. The "America Sings" cast was designed in 1973-4 by a legendary imagineer. Yep. That was also Marc Davis.
While I have great affinity for the Disneyland version, I think the Florida version tells a more coherent story and has overall more ambiance.
8. New Tomorrowland '94 (1994)
Tomorrowland is a pesky thing, because it quickly catches up to today.
When "Flight to the Moon" opened a few weeks after the Magic Kingdom debuted, flying to the moon was already old hat. NASA quit going there in real life a year later. So after just three years, it was replaced by the more ambitious and much longer-lived "Mission to Mars," whose storyline would seem pretty familiar to visitors of Epcot's Mission: Space.
"New Tomorrowland" was meant to change all of that by taking a science fiction-over-science fact approach. With its neon and metal, it took some design lessons from the 1992 Discoveryland in Disneyland Paris, but it aimed at creating a timeless "Future that Never Was." The first element was the 1993 revamp of Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress.
Unfortunately, the Carousel has a bad case of the same old Tomorrowland problem. When General Electric paid to move it from California to Florida in 1975, it came with a whole new script. That script was updated again in 1981 and 1985 but hasn't been touched since 1993: hence the embarrassing references to laser discs, high-def and an ancient version of virtual reality.
Parts of the 1994 revamp have aged well, like the animatronic alien lounge singer Sonny Eclipse. Other parts have long since been eclipsed: "The Time Keeper" CircleVision 360 movie is now "Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor," and 1994's most ambitious, controversial and scary addition, "Alien Encounter" lasted just eight years. It's, let's politely say, mediocre replacement "Stitch's Great Escape" played for 12 years before going seasonal in 2016, last operating in January of this year.
Aesthetically, what's old appears to be new again. Most of the 1994 theming is being slowly removed and replaced with paint jobs and logos that evoke the 1970s original.
9. FastPass (1999)
It will surprise no one who has ever set foot in a theme park that waiting in line is the worst part (well, other than, maybe, attractions like "Stitch's Great Escape").
The first attempts at solving that problem were elaborate queues like the one built with "Pirates of the Caribbean." The 1999 version of FastPass was the second.
The idea was simple: Insert your paper ticket in a machine and get a slip of paper telling when to come back and skip to the front of the line. A computer program kept track of how many people were "virtually" waiting to help balance those with FastPasses versus the much larger number of schmucks still in line the old-fashioned way.
Guests loved it, but it wasn't totally altruistic on Disney's part. The people that sold the idea convinced the money men and women that if you weren't tied up in that boring old line, you would gladly spend more time and money shopping and eating -- the profit centers of a theme park.
Turns out, shockingly, most of those people decided to spend their time waiting for another attraction instead. As it also turns out, guests complained what a drag it was to have to actually go all the way to one side of the park to grab a FastPass, then go somewhere else while "virtually waiting." Those complaints (along with yet another attempt at increasing guest spending) led to today's Magic Bands and FastPass+.
I love and use FastPass, but there are unintended consequences. The parks often feel more crowded because, instead of standing in line, those guests are roaming the parks. Also, rides like Haunted Mansion and Spaceship Earth were designed as real people eaters. Ride operators will tell you FastPass makes those types of attractions less efficient, but since every guest is promised at least three FastPass+ rides a day, they have to be part of the system.
10. New Fantasyland (2012-2014)
It's hard to believe the first parts of "New Fantasyland" are already six years old, and the Magic Kingdom's last major attraction is already 4 and a half.
The park's newest area is also one of its loveliest. In contrast to the 1971 "royal tournament tent"-style buildings, New Fantasyland was designed to be, at its heart, a lush outdoor enchanted forest. From an operations perspective, it also added back much-needed ride capacity lost over the years due to changes and closures, it gave the ever-larger crowds more places to be and it added three new princess meet-and-greets to help fill a seemingly never-ending demand.
In the process, we lost an opening-year attraction, "Snow White's Adventures," but gained the far more picturesque "Seven Dwarfs Mine Train," along with a people-eating dark ride based on "The Little Mermaid" and, naturally, more places to spend money eating and shopping, a la Potter.