Waterless Sub Lagoon, October 19, 1972

Today's photos are especially-nice views of the Submarine Lagoon, completely drained of water for a refurb. Seeing that these are from October of 1972, I am pretty sure that I saw the lagoon in this state with my own peepers. October was typically the month for Navy Nite (though I could find no records of it for 1972). I do remember trying to take photos of the lagoon at night with my little Kodak Instamatic. Sure, the tiny flash cube will do a great job illuminating that large area! I wound up with several pictures that were almost entirely black, with a few pinpoints of light. 

ANYWAY, it's still cool to see the reef looking as if the workers were nearly done decorating it with new shells and seaweed, and painting the corals with bright colors. 

Here's a second view, from the Monorail platform; we don't see the lagoon quite as well, but it's still a nice composition with the intertwining Monorail and Peoplemover tracks.

Details

Here are more DISNEYLAND DETAILS - photos that have zoomed in on some tiny aspect of a ride or building. Both of these are undated, but definitely from the 1950s.

First up is a detail that fascinated me as a child... the big blue eye of Monstro the Whale, the "host" (?) of the Storybook Land Canal Boats. I guess most hosts don't swallow you, but Monstro has always thought outside the box. I would happily watch a 30 minute documentary about how this eye was made; is it cast resin? The iris was surely hand-painted on the inside of the clear semi-sphere. The addition of the blinking eyelid (perhaps once a minute?), along with the occasional spray from his blow-hole made him feel just a little bit "alive".

I've seen a number of photos of the Mark Twain in which you can see somebody looking down at the turning paddle wheel at the stern. I feel like it's usually a boy, or an older man, but I'm sure plenty of girls and women have looked too. I wonder how long those wooden paddles can last, being constantly wet? Do they still use wood, or something that just looks like wood? I just scanned another slide that is almost exactly the same as this one, but I'll share it some other time.