Greg Maletic: Revisionism
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Revisionism
By Greg Maletic

Back in the early ‘90s, I lived and worked as a software engineer in Huntsville, Alabama. While living there I recall a lot of fanfare about rededicating a local school. I’m making up names here, but let’s say the school had been called “Horace G. Reynolds Elementary�?, and it was about to become “Neil A. Armstrong Primary School.�? (The space program is big in Huntsville.) The rationale for the change? Kids didn’t know who Horace G. Reynolds was. Upon first hearing this I nearly choked. Wasn’t that the point of dedicating the school to Horace Reynolds in the first place?

Al Lutz’s October 3 MiceAge column reports a rumor that is either controversial or not, depending on your tolerance for riding that little motorized raft over to Tom Sawyer Island. The island will be re-themed to Pirates of the Caribbean--or so says the rumor--and the reasoning is simple enough: kids today like Jack Sparrow better than Huck Finn. As Al Lutz notes while discussing recent updates to the island…

(Before I go on, let me say this: if you live in the U.S. and your twelve-year-old kids don’t know who Huck Finn is, they’re not educated properly. And if you’re between the ages of twenty and thirty and are confused by the fence whitewashing reference, you have more important things to be doing than visiting Disneyland.)

Back to my argument. I don’t mean to be an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud, but there are a couple of problems with the sentiment that Huck Finn isn’t relevant to audiences in the 21st Century. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876. The book was just as irrelevant to me in 1976 as it is to kids today in 2006. When I was ten, I would have rather run into Speed Racer on the island than Huck Finn. That doesn’t mean Disney should have replaced Harper’s Mill with a Mach Five simulator ride. The fact is that Tom Sawyer Island educated me about those books and made me want to learn about them. (Good for me, because they’re something everyone needs to know about.) Relevance to the audience isn’t--in fact, can’t be--the number one consideration when designing Disneyland. You might as well make the argument that all of those old buildings on Main Street are meaningless to kids under ten and should be replaced with MySpace kiosks.

Disneyland isn’t a museum, nor is it an educational institution. But I think you have to accept the argument that the park needs to teach and introduce its guests to new concepts and stories in at least a tiny way. If Disneyland is just a place to re-experience all of those DVDs you have sitting on your bookshelf, is that really interesting? Doesn’t Disneyland have its own story to tell?

Of course, that’s the big question: -does- Disneyland have its own story to tell? As I discussed in a previous column, I don’t know that it does anymore. The story used to be the story of America, filtered through Walt Disney’s sensibilities. In its absence--and the absence of any suitable replacement--it’s hard to tell whether Jack Sparrow deserves to boot Tom Sawyer out of the park or not.

Since Disneyland now seems to be fairly weak in the “guiding principles�? department, how then do you decide to change the park? You’re reduced to using other criteria. Here’s mine. Let me seemingly contradict myself and state that even though I would prefer it not happen--I love Tom Sawyer Island--I can accept Jack Sparrow taking the place over. I can accept that launching more Jack Sparrow-related product at the park will create a big marketing splash. What I don’t accept is the idea of “relevance�? as the rationale for the change. It can’t be, else Disneyland inevitably turns into an elaborate outdoor shopping mall. I do, however, accept “plussing�? (Walt Disney’s term for “improving�?) as a reason to change Disneyland, and if I can be convinced that putting pirates on the island will make it a better, more fun place--and it seems a plausible enough argument--then I think Disneyland’s owners may have an opportunity to do themselves proud.