The Story of Rongo

In the garden of Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, Rongo is portrayed as a playful god with a bounty of tropical fruits and a penchant for flying kites. The real story behind this deity is a little more complex and disturbing than the made-up riff on how he could have discovered electricity if only he had a key lying around.

Rongo.
Photo: University of Wellington.

Disney Enchanted Tales and Magic Kingdoms

Ashley and I recently downloaded two new games from Disney Interactive: Disney Enchanted Tales and Disney Magic Kingdoms. Both follow the pattern of many app games, in which one places buildings and decorations on a playing field in response to missions that get you more tokens with which to buy and place more buildings. For those without patience, they offer special tokens for real money that finish these missions more quickly and allow you to buy special buildings. Not all such games are made equal, so how do these measure up?

Both are enjoyable enough, though Magic Kingdoms offers you more to do at a time. It has become a running joke between us that Enchanted Tales is a game you play for 30 seconds at a time, once every half hour. By the time you collect tokens and set your characters on their various tasks, you've frittered away maybe a minute at most, and you can go do other things. Magic Kingdoms has a short enough turnover that you can play for a little longer before setting one character or another building on an optional four hour mission, slipping on your shoes and coat, and going to work. Of course, you could play Enchanted Tales for longer if you wanted to pay to do so, but who wants to do that?

In Magic Kingdoms, the slightly newer of the two, you have been tasked with cleansing a generic Disney park of an evil curse put on it by Maleficent and replacing the different rides, so you can attract guests, and harvest them for "Happiness" which in turn allows you to lift more of the curse. As you go along, more characters, areas, and rides are unlocked.

Unfortunately, Magic Kingdoms doesn't deliver on the implications of the original D23 announcement, which was that it was essentially a Disney-branded form of Roller Coaster Tycoon. Armchair Imagineers might salivate at the idea of building their own Magic Kingdom exactly the way they want it, with all the rides they want. Magic Kingdoms doesn't allow that. Because of the nature of this type of game, you're stuck building what they tell you to build and doing what they tell you to do, with your only real input being where you place things. I've already had to place my first Pixar attraction, which has already disproved the advertising jargon. No Disney park of my dreams would have a Pixar ride in it.

Magic Kingdoms aesthetics are fine for the most part, if a bit too cutesy in some places. It's a chunkier, more plastic looking, "Little People" version of a Disney park. It actually seems to most closely resemble the concept art for Shanghai Disneyland's tacky "Mickey Avenue." The rides are an amalgam of attractions from different parks, with a few generic classics (Space Mountain) and some specific references (Alice's Curious Labyrinth, the Disneyland Paris It's a Small World facade, Mickey's Fun Wheel). I just wish these aesthetics were applied to a game more like Roller Coaster Tycoon, with more flexibility and creativity.

Even though Enchanted Tales can only be played for 30 seconds at a time, it is a much cuter game with a more robust aesthetic. The premise is that after the "Happily Ever After," a little girl's quilted bedspread comes alive with magic, on which these fairy tales continue to unfold never-ending. The game allows you to choose from two stories, Beauty and the Beast and Frozen.

Being who we are, we of course chose Beauty and the Beast. Missions give you tokens with which to buy buildings and decor for Belle's village and the Beast's castle, which are stitched into the quilt. The characters are rendered in a charming, cartoony style, while the buildings and decor have a very cute quilted look. A close inspection of the trees and sheep show that they are sewn together like living dolls. It's an absolutely darling concept. The missions are filled with little jokes and references that make them equally adorable. For example, you can make Gaston "stomp around wearing boots" or make the bookseller "match wits with Gaston" in a chess game.

 
Between the two games, we've found Enchanted Tales to be the more engaging thanks to these sorts of references and the more ingenious aesthetic. Magic Kingdoms is also being judged against what one thought it was going to be versus what it actually ended up being, which is a hard stick to be measured by. We had no preconceptions coming into Enchanted Tales, to its benefit. Our interest in Magic Kingdoms is already waning, but we'll probably still keep playing both until we reach that point in all such games where you've done everything and gotten everything that you don't need to pay for and there's nothing left to do but tap on a bunch of buildings to collect tokens that you can't spend anyways.

Songs from the Tiki Room - Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing

Let's all sing like the birdies sing... Boo bububoo bububooo...

As I noted the last time we took a look at a song from Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, Imagineers did not operate in a cultural bubble. They were very attuned to the popular music and trends of their times, especially those they grew up with. To the exception of The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room, written by the incomparable Sherman Brothers, most of the music sung by the birdies were actually popular Big Band Era hits.

Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing was first written in 1932, by the team of songwriter Tolchard Evans and lyricists Stanley Damerell and Robert Hargreaves, along with Harry Tilsley. The first recording of the song was by Henry Hall, the English Big Band leader most famous for The Teddy Bears' Picnic.

Like many songs of the time, the Max Fleischer Studio made Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing into the focal point of an animated short. Released in 1934 as part of their Screen Songs series, it was directed by Dave Fleischer and starred Artie Dunn and Les Reis performing the title song. Screen Songs were a continuation of the Fleischers' Song Car-Tune series, which included the first animated films with synchronized sound, released in May of 1924 (predating Steamboat Willie by four years). Each of the Car-Tunes and Screen Songs featured a sing-along sequence inviting the crowd to join by following the bouncing ball. The tradition continues with the invitation to sing like the birdies, at least at the Disneyland USA version of the attraction.

 

Snow White, the 1916 film

In 1916, the very first screen adaptation of the Brothers Grimm's iconic fairy tale Snow White flickered across the nickleodeon screens all over America. In one of these darkened theatres in Marceline, Missourri, the film left an indelible impression on the mind of a young patron by the name of Walt Disney. When young Walt would come of age, the memories of this magical film inspired him to return to the story of the fair-skinned princess and her companions as the subject for the first ever feature-length animated film.

To say that the 1916 version of Snow White inspired the 1937 Disney version is an understatement, for the inspiration runs deep. So deeply, in fact, that it would not be inappropriate to say that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is an outright remake of the silent film. Similarities reach out further than the common source material, as there are some conventions in the silent film that echo two decades later.

However, this original version is considerably different in its own way. At the expense of dwarven sing-alongs, the story is more fully developed. A full half of the film passes before Snow White escapes the Queen's death plot in the shadows of the Dwarves' forest. In that time we are introduced to Snow White's true mother, the ugly stepmother Queen Brangomar turned beautiful by the witch Hex on the condition of receiving Snow White's still-beating heart, Prince Florimond the love interest, Snow White's gaggle of handmaidens, Berthold the huntsman and his family. As you may glean simply by the fact that these characters have names, we enter more richly into the world of Snow White than in other versions.

We also have here a version that is truer to the Brothers Grimm version than later renditions. That has pluses and minuses, however. The incomparable romance of the young woman's sexual awakening with love's first kiss was the invention of that boy from Marceline. The Grimms were far more practical.

But don't take my word on it. Watch the complete silent film version of Snow White for yourself...

Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear

Disney's maligned classic Song of the South features three animated sequences pulled from various writings of Joel Chandler Harris. The story of Brer Rabbit's Laughin' Place is derived from one of his last books - Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories from the Old Plantation - while the other two come from his first, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings. We already looked at the story of the Tar Baby. This time, we're looking at the story of how Brer Rabbit tricked Brer Bear... minus the musical introduction.

From chapter XXIII...

Brer Rabbit's Laughin' Place

Uncle Remus stories furnished Joel Chandler Harris with a lifetime worth of material. His first book - Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings - launched his literary career in 1880. In 1883 and 1892 he returned to his fable-telling alter-ego, amidst other literary works published at a rate of one a year. In 1904, 1905 and 1907 he published several more tales. Sadly he passed away in 1908 at the age of 60, but left behind enough material for several more books, published in 1910, 1918, and 1948... Two years after the release of Disney's Song of the South.

Of the three animated vignettes in Song of the South, the story of Brer Rabbit and his Laugin' Place hails from one of the later books: Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories from the Old Plantation (1905). It is astonishing to think of how many stories Disney's production staff must have gone through between Harris' nine Remus books, just to pick out three good ones for film. This is especially true given the difficulty in mentally translating the regional dialect preserved by Harris into a modern one. That amount of work, as well as the technical accomplishment of the film itself, makes it doubly unfortunate that Song of the South cannot be seen within the United States and Canada.

Nevertheless, let us commence with another wonderful story about how Brer Rabbit outwitted his adversaries...

The New Rivers of America

Image: Disney.

On the very day that Disneyland closed down the Rivers of America to begin installation of the new Star Wars-themed land, the Disney Parks Blog posted a beautiful piece of poster-worthy concept art showing what the new northern reaches of the far frontier are going to look like.

Since the concept art left too much to the imagination as to what the new shape of the river will take, I took the liberty of transposing it onto a Google map of Disneyland. Here is a speculative map of Frontierland's future...

Plausibly, the river could even be truncated more than that, but I think this gives a reasonably accurate idea of what to expect. The new Disneyland Railroad route will come out of Splash Mountain, cross over Critter Country, then swing back behind the Hungry Bear to a new route directly along the Rivers of America. It will then carry over between Star Wars Land and Frontierland, adjacent to Big Thunder Trail. Another trestle bridge appears to carry the train over guests who are veering off to A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Given the situation, I think this is about as good as it gets. It looks as though the two major features that were at risk of being lost altogether - the Native American village and Mike Fink's cabin (the former burning settler's cabin) - are just going to be shifted south along with the new waterfront.  The new alignment appears to provide some much-needed visual interest to both the railway and the river. For guests aboard the train, they will now receive a much more rewarding view of the river and a dynamic stretch of crags and waterfalls to cross. For guests on the river and Tom Sawyer Island, the old time, frontier-looking steam trains will actually be clearly visible from Frontierland for the first time in decades. The new waterfront does lose a certain aspect of the far-flung wilderness, since there will be virtually no time along the Mark Twain Riverboat's trip where you will be completely immersed in forest, but under the circumstances it's a relatively small price to pay.

Though having made my pitch for respecting Disneyland as a museum, and kvetched over the mounting losses of Disneyland's quiet spaces, I haven't been overly concerned or pessimistic about this project. I don't think I've ever met anyone who is dead set against any changes ever happening to Disneyland, which is part of what can make the blanket rebuttal of "Walt said Disneyland would never be complete, so any changes Disneyland does are automatically pre-approved and you can't be critical of them!" so frustrating. That is usually followed with crude dismissals about critics being emotional, nostalgia-driven haters of everything new, which unnecessarily muddies the discussion. Please, please just end that tiresome cliché. The question is always how necessary the changes are and how well they were done. Does the change actually improve the experience? Or does it diminish the experience? Is the change coherent? Does it respect the integrity, themeing, and pacing of the park, land, or the attraction? Does it respect the historicity of the park, which is important for a park only really set apart by its historicity? Is it merely a change for the sake of marketing or cost-cutting? Is the change any good?

I like the addition of Constance and the Hatbox Ghost to the Haunted Mansion, because they are coherent with the characters, technology, humour, and themeing of the ride. I dislike the addition of Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones to Pirates of the Caribbean, because they are incoherent with the characters, technology, and storyline of the ride, introducing far too many problems into the ride's narrative and mood than the changes are worth. I don't mind the addition of Disney characters to It's A Small World because they are relatively innocuous, but I don't like the addition of an America section because it literally looks like it is from a different ride (which it is, having been imported from the Paris version). The new animatronics and effects in the Matterhorn Bobsleds and Peter Pan's Flight are great, except that you can now see the edges of Neverland floating out in space. The Finding Nemo overlay to the Submarine Voyage is lame, for the same reason that any ride built around watching somebody else having an adventure is lame. It would be impossible for any person to argue that New Orleans Square was not an improvement on the Swift Chicken Plantation, or that taking the Court of Angels away from the average guest does not in turn diminish New Orleans Square. Given Disney's uneven track record in actually improving something that they "plus" or alter, receiving news of another renovation is justifiably met with apprehension. I'll never forget the announcement of Disneyland's Fantasy Faire at the D23 Expo in 2011, where the only applause was reserved for the news that they weren't completely tearing out the bandstand. Fantasy Faire did turn out to be a charming little extension of Fantasyland, but it says a lot when "exciting news" is met with anything less than excitement.

Anyways, that this project has involved a mere truncation of the river rather than an outright loss of Tom Sawyer Island, the Rivers of America, Mark Twain Riverboat, Sailing Ship Columbia, Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes, and Fantasmic means that I'm not particularly offended by it. I was more offended by the addition of the Pirate's Lair to Tom Sawyer Island than by this decimation of its inaccessible north end. Tom Sawyer Island lost more of its historical and thematic integrity in that renovation and the various closures and demolitions that went with it, leaving the Tom Sawyer Island in Walt Disney World as the far more authentic version (which is a sad growing trend... Magic Kingdom is becoming the repository of what Disneyland used to be, both in what it has and in what it blessedly lacks). For what they have to work with, the changes look like they will actually add some interest to the far end of the Rivers of America.

For most people, the ultimate question is whether the addition of Star Wars Land will be worth this truncating of the Rivers of America, and the loss of Big Thunder Ranch. I'm sure that any Star Wars fan would automatically answer with an emphatic yes. As someone who is not a Star Wars fan, I actually prefer the idea of building a separate land for the franchise than the alternative, which was the rumoured evisceration of Tomorrowland. Hope springs eternal that Tomorrowland might yet be rehabilitated. Some people have raised concerns about where Star Wars Land is placed, but I don't think that is any more off-putting than having Mermaid Lagoon right as you leave Mysterious Island and across the river from the Arabian Coast at Tokyo Disneysea. As long as Star Wars Land is sufficiently hidden behind rockwork and train trestles, then I don't have to see or go into it. Star Wars Land lets me ignore Star Wars, which is a benefit for someone like me who goes to Disneyland because they like Disney.

I'm still holding out hope, and concern, that this new rockwork will be able to hide the sightlines into Star Wars Land. We'll see exactly how tall those rocky spires and red mesas tower when the thing is built. It probably would have been better to have set Star Wars Land on Tatooine or Jakku than whatever forest planet it is supposed to be. I'm assuming that this concept art is also showing us the back walls of the Star Wars show buildings. Time will tell, and then we can start heaping the real praise, or scorn.