The Magic Kingdom, December 1978
I have a number of 1978 slide scans for you, featuring the Magic Kingdom. Florida, that is!
First up, it's TIGGER, the bounciest tiger that ever bounced. It looks like grandpa has taken his granddaughter over to meet this celebrity. Any idea where they are standing? I have no idea. I wonder if that girl still remembers this meeting over 40 years later?
Here's the Friendly Indian Village, not dissimilar to the Disneyland version, although their shiny boy is not really that shiny. Subtract 10 points from Gryffindor. Just as in Anaheim, the peaceful Indians are working at various crafts, or preparing food. You can see the Chief on that rise.
Happy and Doc have ditched the other five Dwarfs so that they can get all of the love and attention for themselves. I don't blame them one bit. I assume that this was somewhere near Cinderella Castle, but don't really know. Look at all those palm trees, even California isn't this tropical. That little girl in red pants waves shyly to Doc (while dad takes the opportunity to grab a smoke), very cute. If you look just to the right of Happy's green hat, you can see the back of a blond head (wearing blue).
Hello, Alice! She's sitting cross-legged on that bridge thingy (what do you call those, anyway?), and it appears that she is having a conversation with the folks nearby. Maybe she was telling stories of her adventures in Wonderland. (What do you think, is wig? Or no wig?).
33 comments:
Major-
If that's really Alice's hair - she has a lot to apologize for.
Thanks, Major.
Major-
Also...I believe Alice has plopped herself down adjacent to the walkway leading to the Crystal Palace - a very small part of it can be seen in the first image.
I believe that's the Crystal Palace in the first pic.
The most wonderful thing about Tiggers, is Paul Winchell's voice.
#2: That taffy-pulling contraption in the foreground doesn't look too efficient. They need to add a second wooden pole. Also, they need to come up with a another flavor besides elk liver. After a while, elk liver taffy starts to loose its appeal.
Major, WDW Shiny Boy isn't just less shiny, he doesn't appear to be shiny at all. He needs a different name. How about "Matt"? Looks like his sister, "Semigloss" and their pooch, "Rustoleum" are looking at something in the river; probably the remains of a duck ruckus.
#3: What is that tag/sticker on Smoking Dad's shirt? It has a picture of Goofy on it.
Smoking Dad's son in the Mickey t-shirt also has a tag, His has Mickey on it. Actually, it looks like a pin-back button.
#4: The CM makes a fetching Alice, and somewhat quirky, sitting cross-legged like that. Very much in the 'Alice' character.
I vote 'wig'. It looks a little too perfect and pure at the top.
That porch is part of the side wings of The Crystal Palace Restaurant. The structure is beautiful and is inspired by the San Francisco Arboretum Pavilion in Golden Gate Park. The Crystal Palace structure is duplicated at Tokyo Disneyland as well.
The beautiful victorian and tropical gardens, bridges and walkways of Walt Disney World’s , Hub , Plaza and the gardens leading to each land of the Magic Kingdom were recently destroyed to make treeless viewing for the fireworks shows and tacky castle projection distractions. The rich well designed landscaping now looks like a combination of a parking lot to a drive-in movie theater and cattle holding pens for a Railroad siding!!
My suggestion : skip the fireworks show and go see The Carousel of Progress!!!
Here's a street view of that bridge today. If you move forward, you can see where the moat enters the tunnel that goes underneath the fireworks viewing area. Thanks Major.
Note that the teepees all have “doors,” and they are all closed except for one. I wonder if that was to keep critters out? Maybe the open one was actually a themed trap.
JB, those cards pinned to the father & son’s shirts are probably passes which were good for all attractions except the shooting galleries. No worrying about those pesky A, B, C, D, and E tickets. They were available through the Magic Kingdom Club, which was a discount program available to corporate participants and the uniformed services. You had to show the pass for ticketless entry into attractions, and it was just easier to pin them to your shirt rather than pull them out of your pocket over and over again. My wife’s family would get souvenir buttons to pin them on clothing like this family did. My mother, being more frugal (we were a military family, after all), just handed us safety pins.
Suddenly reminded of the smell of Coppertone. We would start the day on the launch from the Fort Wilderness campground, and my mother would hand us our passes and pins and start passing around the sunscreen. To this day, I associate the smell of sunscreen with WDW.
As many have said, Tigger is outside The Crystal Palace. It's now a character dining place featuring Pooh and friends, but I don't know if it was then. I've been to it, and it's cute. I have watched the castle become covered in "ice" at sundown during the holidays from pretty much that exact spot. Very beautiful.
I agree that the demolition of the lawns around the castle was one of the biggest crimes WDW has pulled (among many many crimes). Mike's assessment is spot on. Also, it has made the whole area much hotter in the summer. Miserable, really.
Alice (and it looks like she understands the character) is on the pathway that leads to the castle proper. Directly behind her is the path that leads to Adventureland. Behind the photographer a ways is the path that leads to Liberty Square.
This was probably The Magic Kingdom at its best.
Great pics!
Major, Tigger is just outside of the Crystal Palace!!! ;-)
It looks like grandpa, from the first photos, is also in the last two photos. He's standing on the bridge in both pics. We can see in the first and last photo, that his camera has one of those removable adapters for the flash cube. By the time I was using one of these Instamatic cameras, I was buying the "Flip Flash" bars, which attached directly to the camera, so the adapter was not needed.
Andrew, thanks for that link. It looks like there might be some ducks just outside of that tunnel. I wonder if they have full access to that tunnel, or if there is a barrier at some point that prevents them from using it to get to the other side of the Plaza? Or maybe crocodiles live in there, now that they've enclosed that part of the moat?
Ah, now this is MY Magic Kingdom! A couple years before I got there, but basically the same. Dinner with Pooh & the gang at the Crystal Palace was my first-ever character meal (as an adult; when I was a kid we were strictly quick-service, and as others have pointed out it didn't become character dining until later) and I really didn't know if I'd enjoy it. It turned out to be a ball. The characters really got into it, more than I'd seen them do before. They had turned the old Swan Boat dock into an overflow waiting area, which was lovely. The people at the next table were celebrating a graduation, and invited us to share their cake. I was wearing a souvenir t-shirt from Sleepy Hollow, and they were pleasantly surprised to learn that it was a real place. On top of that, there was a lot of good vegetarian stuff on the buffet. I wonder if I'll ever feel comfortable eating from a buffet again. Good memories.
@JB, love Matt, Semigloss, and Rustoleum! Reminds me of Uncle Traveling Matt from Fraggle Rock. You would THINK that Florida's boy would be even shinier, what with the humidity. Maybe they gave him an extra coating of Scotchgard to keep the moisture out.
The design of the t-shirt on the little boy next to Happy looks sooo familiar, but I can't quite place it and I can't make out the words. Little girl in red pants looks like she's going in for The Big Hug.
I agree that getting rid of the green space around the Castle was an aesthetic disaster, but I also think it was probably a necessary evil. Foot traffic and crowds in the Hub were an absolute logistical and safety nightmare.
Definitely a wig on Alice. And it could use a good flipping.
Major, I think this is my first look at the WDW FIV. Good to see Shiny Boy and Chief Wavy’s eastern cousins. There are no papeese in sight, maybe they are undercover in the teepees? Or carried off by critters?
JB, you have nailed the names. Spot on.
From the other comments, it sounds like WDW has suffered from the same insensitive manglement displayed in Disneyland. I’ve been hearing that nearly every meal or activity at that Park has to be scheduled in advance, which doesn’t sound very magical at all.
Alice’s pose is interesting, echoing the Caterpillar sitting on the mushroom. I have no idea whether her hair is real or not, but it’s real enough.
JG
TM!, that's actually a flash extender rather than an adapter. The idea was to move the flash away from the lens a few inches to prevent "red eye" after they discovered Visine wasn't very effective with cameras. You could still attach a flash cube (electrically triggered) or magicube (a.k.a. "x-cube", mechanically triggered), depending on which one the camera was designed for, directly to the camera.
The flip flash was a later invention and used a different socket shape so you couldn't use flip flashes on cameras with flash cube sockets without some sort of adapter, which I'm not sure were available (although there were adapters to convert either to electronic flashes). The flip flash design reduced red eye because the bulbs were triggered from the top down to the middle before you flipped it, which automatically provided several inches of separation from the lens plane.
Chuck, thanks for that information! I didn't know that. I remember my great-grandmother's camera had one of those flash extensions. (She used it to take pictures of the chicken that she brought with her to the park.) I guess I never looked that closely at her camera, to realize it had a different socket than my instamatic camera.
I remember that I got a 110 camera for Christmas as a kid and it had the flash extension. I had completely forgotten about it. I even remember seeing it in the box when I first opened it, which is weird. I actually have a couple of pictures I took with it, and (for 110) they're pretty good.
Nanook, I like to comb my hair to look as much like a wig as possible. It’s just my thing.
Nanook, “Alice has plopped”, for some reason that made me laugh!
JB, I call my apartment The Crystal Palace, but that’s another story. Paul Winchell’s voice is awesome! Native Americans loved taffy (who doesn’t?), and it’s funny, flavors like elk liver and deer heart are actually more satisfying and wholesome than you would think. Soon all you want is the taste of raw flesh! And I guess maybe “Matt” is the only name that would apply. Not “Satin”, surely!! I’m not sure about that tag on Dad’s shirt, but I think it might be some sort of pass. Yes, Alice is cute, and yes, I think it’s a wig!
Mike Cozart, I guess everybody knew it was the Crystal Palace… except me! That’s OK, I will never claim to know anything about WDW that I haven’t read somewhere. It really does stink that they messed up all of that beautiful landscaping all for the sake of fireworks and castle projections. Meanwhile during the day the place looks like garbage. I guess they considered it an acceptable trade-off.
Andrew, thank you for that street view link!!
Chuck, I think maybe the “critters” that they wanted to keep out of the teepees are also called “human beings”. Though raccoons can be a nuisance too. Thank you for the confirmation on the passes, I know that when such things were first introduced, I was very happy to not have to deal with the old ticket books. But now I sort of miss the ticket books! Everyone wants to ride the E-ticket attractions as often as possible, and I don’t blame them, but think how many people used those C-tickets and B-tickets on things they might have normally skipped! We always had all of our A-tickets left over, I guess we just weren’t A-ticket people. The classic smell of suntan lotion is a very powerful memory generator, for sure!
Stu29573, Another vote for the Crystal Palace! Character dining, ugh, the whole idea does not appeal to me. I guess if I had a six year-old it would? Even then I doubt it. “You can eat over here by the dumpster with me, and if I hear ONE WORD, we’re heading home!”. I’d be a great parent. Those awful lawns, I’m glad they’re gone, those blades of grass never made one cent for the Disney company! I didn’t even think about how more concrete = more heat. So dumb.
TokyoMagic!, ha ha, noted! You’re right, there’s Grandpa again, I didn’t even notice that it was the same guy. I remember those “Flip Flash” bars, though I don’t think we ever had them for our cameras. Maybe they only fit on specific models? Only a true expert can solve The Mysteries of the Ducks (starring Meryl Streep and Danny Trejo).
Melissa, maybe I have misjudged a character meal - to be honest I don’t really know what goes on, I just assumed that every few minutes (just as you are about to take a bit of your meal), a character would stop by your table for a few minutes, and nod and gesture. And then your scrambled eggs would be cold. Wow, nobody ever invites me to share their cake! I was never that crazy about open buffets anyway, so I won’t miss it that much. “Fraggle Rock”, a show that completely escaped my notice until long after it was over. I’ve never seen so much as one second of it. It almost looks like that boy’s t-shirt says “OUTDOOR - (something)”. Sports? Not only did they get rid of all that greenery, but they also put in that awful stage area. They ruin everything!
JG, it’s funny, I once bought a batch of Disneyland slides, and there was a shot of the Indian Village that looked SO strange to me. I just couldn’t figure out what was “off” about it, until I realized that it was a photo of the FIV in WDW! I’m with you, the concept of having to plan out every meal six months (or more) in advance sounds unpleasant. Spontaneity was a lot of the fun of a trip to Disneyland, in my opinion. “What do we want to do now??”.
Chuck, I actually have an attachment on my camera that increases the odds of “red eye”. I like it when it looks like everyone is a T-1000 robot with the flesh still on the steel bones. The old “squirting Visene” camera attachments were problematic to say the least. You answered my question about the Flip Flash, they didn’t work with our older cameras.
TokyoMagic!, thank goodness your grandma used that flash extension so that her chicken didn’t have “re eye”!
Stu29573, I had some sort of cheapo Kodak camera when I was a kid, but every photo I ever took with it looked like garbage. I don’t think the camera was the issue.
Once when I was a kid, I bought myself a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 110 camera off a clearance rack at Kmart. I wasn't into TMNT, but it was marked down to something like one or two dollars, and my old camera wasn't working too well. I figured, what's the difference; it's just turtle-green instead of black. When I got the first set of pictures back I realized the catch - there was some mechanism behind the lens that added a small line drawing of one of the turtles' heads to the bottom corner of every picture. It's funny in retrospect, and I wish I still had any of the pictures I took with it.
A couple of pictures from my visit to the Crystal Palace in 2011 here. It's funny; Tigger doesn't look a day older than he did in 1972. The stripes must be very flattering.
The Crystal Palace at WDW no longer features the character meet n greets or character dining. The buffet style restaurant began offering about 12 or so items that are modernized versions of some of Walt Disney’s favorite foods and this has been very popular with Magic Kingdom guests . The restaurant also now serves beer and hard cider as well as some other hard beverages - another type of Walt’s FAVORITE FOODS!!
Does anybody remember the KODAK DISC CAMERA in the 80’s? When that camera came out it set photography technology back two THOUSAND years!!! Whoever the clucks were that came up with that idea I Hope were physically removed from the industry. They took the worst most useless photographs ever!! There was another Kodak camera in the 90’s that worked like a Polaroid camera but produced photographs the size of scotch tape!!
It’s no wonder KODAK went under - while photography and film companies were advancing with film advancements and the progression of digital photography, the folks at Kodak were “reversing” photo technology with hokey novelty clown cameras.
I remember disc cameras very well. When I worked in 1 hour photo finishing, we developed it as well as everything else. The funny thing is that I can't remember how we fed it into the machine. Strip film was attatched to a plastic leader, and locked in a light tight box. The leader grabbed cogs in the machine, which pulled the film out of the canister and through the chemicals. Obviously that wouldn't work with a disc. I do remember that the little cases popped open kind of like a floppy disc, so I'm pretty sure we took the film out of the case in a dark box. But I have no memory of what came next.
But, yeah, with a negative smaller than 110, they were pretty sad.
Kodak believed that customers wanted small, easy-to-load, point-and-shoot cameras for convenience and drove their research and marketing in that direction for decades, looking for the perfect, foolproof pocket camera for snapshooters. Hence 126, then 110, and finally disc film, with each iteration being that much smaller than the last. While 126 (which used 35mm film stock) and 110 (which used 16mm film stock) weren't bad film, many of the cameras produced to shoot these films (particularly 110) had cheap, plastic lenses and fixed-exposure irises, which led to a lot of murky and indistinct pictures (matte finish printing popular at the time didn't improve on the quality). Disc film was just too darned small to produce high-quality images.
The long-term irony of course is that customer convenience in a pocket-sized package is where photography eventually migrated, although not on film.
And now I want a Kodak smart phone.
Melissa, I think it’s hilarious that all your photos had one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles superimposed on them! But which turtle?? Leonardo perhaps?
Melissa, awww! Nice! Pooh looks so plush and huggable, too.
Mike Cozart, the current offerings at the Crystal Palace sound much nicer for the average guest (than the character dining option). Beer, hard cider, and “other hard beverages”, a real sign of the times. Walt loved his evening snort, as did most adults of that era. I do remember the Kodak disc camera, and even bought some photos from them… as you said, they were the WORST. How could Kodak allow something like that out into the market to sully their good name? No wonder they failed. I think the Polaroid-like camera was more of a novelty for children. Weren’t the tiny photos like stickers? It really is a shame that the people at Kodak couldn’t see what was coming in the world of photography, and maybe actually innovate neat products, instead of… well, failing miserably.
Stu29573, well, I don’t have much experience with disc cameras beyond the few photos that I purchased, but my gosh, those were so terrible. Think of how much it must have cost to design and build that specialized machinery required to develop the disc film!
Chuck, I think you are right, and of course the general public probably DID want something small, easy-to-load, and easy to use. As you said, many of those cameras had cheap plastic lenses, much to the chagrin of people like me all these years later. Want to zoom in for details? Because there won’t be any! Oh those matte-finish photos (or worse, the “linen finish”!), what a nightmare. Plus we have photo prints from that era that have all turned either brownish orange or purple-magenta. Awful!
Melissa, if you still had those TMNT photos - they would be the hit of this blog! It reminds me of the cameras that added the date in red - SMACK DAB ON THE PHOTO. Major will have some fun with some of my dad's photos - removing that unfortunate feature.
Does anyone remember the Polaroid camera deal back in 1983?
A free airline voucher came with the purchase of each camera. The cameras were so crappy that the prices came WAY DOWN. I purchased two for $23 each (the number that pops into my brain, if I remember correctly) and we used the vouchers for free airfare to Florida/WDW. By the way, I sold the cameras for about what I paid for them, at a garage sale.
I love everyone's comments today!
I used to love those Polaroid commercials with James Garner and Mariette Hartley.
Melissa : I TOTALLY remember those commercials with James Garner and Mariette Hartley !!! There were so many of them people thought they were married to each other - myself included. Mariette Hartley is such a sweet American type girl but on most of her appearances on COLUMBO , CANNON and BARNABY JONES she is usually cast as a murderer or an accomplice to murder!!
I had a 110 camera for a while, I definitely remember taking it to Disneyland in the late 70's. No idea where the pictures went, but they were probably "linen texture" prints anyway.
I ditched that camera when I fell heir to a second-hand Mamiya SLR. I had a lot of fun with that camera, but over the years, it was a lot of work to drag it around and the digital revolution was just what I needed.
I'm glad there are experts and amateur enthusiasts like Lou, but I am more than happy with my iPhone camera and I take a lot of pictures with it. Not every photo has to be a work of art for it to help me strike a memory and recall a time and place and a loved one.
JG
Oh ..... “just one more thing.....” : Andrew Duggan ... the Father in the 1970’s and 80’s Carousel of Progress ALSO always plays a murder or somebody protecting a murderer in COLOMBO , CANNON and BARNABY JONES ..... it’s always weird to see the beloved Carousel of Progress father and know how many people in the 70’s he killed on tv!!
JG, I am thrilled we have iPhone cameras! So much easier, and the pictures are terrific. My dad's last camera was digital (right before iPhones came out) - he loved it.
Hey, Stu, if you're there . . .
I just now tried leaving another message on your blog, but your site keeps telling me something about "blogger won't connect" blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's 'out there' waiting for you to OK it??
(Major, sorry I'm doing side-business here.)
Like everyone else familiar with the place, I consider the new Hub at WDW to be a fancy parking lot. Though like the others who have been there for fireworks, I don't miss the claustrophobia of the crowds before the changes. Having done mass casualty event planning, it's the place I felt the most nervous of something causing a stampede.
I'll break ranks with the junior Gorillas on the Disc camera. It was an engineering triumph of mechanics and optics for the time. Prints would have been better than the 110 or 126 formats that preceded them - not as good as 35mm SLR, but that was an enthusiast format at the time. The big problem was that prints depended on using Disc-specific processing equipment to get the pictures to look correct. Few developers (drugstores, Fotomats) were willing to spend that kind of money initially and ran the film through other processes, and the pictures came out terrible. With the bad initial reputation, it never caught on and Disc processing didn't ever catch on.
Kodak was a big sponsor of Disney, and Disc cameras were introduced at about the same time as EPCOT Center opened. To help advertise the camera, Kodak would lend them for free at the EPCOT camera center if you bought film from them.
I like the camera as a relic of the era, so I bought one off eBay a few years ago and replaced the guts with a digital camera. I took it on my last trip to EPCOT in 2019 before they began the major changes to the park (that are still ongoing).
Chuck, I'm not aware of a Kodak smartphone, but I know there's a Leica smartphone
Mike, I'm a big fan of the old TV westerns, and Royal Dano is always showing up and sounding like Mr. Lincoln!
Major-
"Plopping" just seems to be the sort of thing that would feel right-at-home in Wonderland - and by extension - the Crystal Palace Restaurant. I'm tickled I could make you laugh - as the opposite has been true on a daily basis-!
Dean, I bet that Leica smartphone takes gorgeous pictures. My dad's digital (that I mentioned) was Leica's first digital, in 2006 - and it took beautiful pictures. I can only imagine how much they've improved over the past 15 years or so. I would be concerned about the phone-end-of-it, as smart phones just don't seem to last long. At least not in my experience.
I don't miss film photography, but oh, how I longed for a 35mm SLR when I was a teenager. I finally bought a used one and I well remember hearing that "professional" shudder sound and the joy of advancing the film.
Sunday Night, have you shared any of your photos with us, here?
If not, please do.
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