Back before Buena Vista Street there was Sunshine Plaza. And every year for Halloween the plaza would become Candy Corn Acres — a farm that would produce oversized candy corns but lacked any actual treats for consumption. Yes it was tacky and random but I liked it. My affinity for it probably spurs less from the display itself and more from that time in my life I associate it with.
Circa 2008 I had just moved back into my dad’s house and found myself with a lot of free time. Instead of doing something productive to ensure that I could stop living in my dad’s house I choose to waste time on the internet watching YouTube and listening to a new form of media called podcasts. Back then the shows I listened to were mainly actually radio shows that chopped their broadcasts into segments and posted them online. As a result I was completely ignorant to the blossoming world that was growing right under me.
One evening I wondered to myself if there were any Disney-centric podcasts and ran a search not expecting many, if any, results. To my surprise, I found several. The first podcasts I downloaded were (and this is true) The Laughing Place Podcast and Aaron Wallace’s Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Pod. Both of these were great, but as a nearly-west-coaster I was interested in finding a show that covered Disneyland. That’s when I stumbled upon Disneyland News Today hosted by a little British kid named Luke Manning. At the time I actually didn’t realize how young Luke was — 14 or so at the time — but started to pick up on clues throughout the months that I listened.
I was instantly hooked on these shows and was soon consuming far more Disney news and info than I ever thought possible. Listening to these shows also increased my impulse to head back out to Disneyland and soon I was sneaking my way out there once every other month or so.
A few trips in I decided I wanted to try my hand at podcasting and running my own Disney-fan site. I racked my brain for a URL that was Disney enough without being too overt (for the record, I’ve always thought that “Laughing Place” was brilliant for that reason).
The name I eventually settled on was “Somewhere in Particular,” which was supposed to be a reference to Mr. Toad’s trip to nowhere in particular. I justified this with the fact that Mr. Toad was now a Disneyland exclusive ride and that the show and site would be about somewhere in particular: Disneyland. If that wasn’t bad enough, I branded my Twitter to go along with my new site name and became @SIParticular — a name that no one knew how to pronounce leading many to just refer to me as “sip”. In hindsight and even at the time I realized this was a pretty terrible name, but I was too anxious to get everything up that I didn’t care.
All of the Disney sites I followed included photo report updates of what was new in the parks. Thus for my next Disney trip I made sure to get a new digital camera (or, as we call them now, “cameras”) in order to document all the new sights I encountered on my visit.
As luck would have it, I arrived just days before Halloween Time at the Disneyland resort began. This was back when DCA actually hosted the Disneyland Halloween parties and much of the Halloween theming aside from Haunted Mansion Holiday occupied that park.
When I arrived at Disney’s California Adventure (yes, it still had the apostrophe ‘s’ back then) I was overly excited to see that the Candy Corn Acres displays had already been installed. I walked towards them wide eyed as I reached for my camera and proceed to snap shots of every detail. I also waited patiently to get the perfect shot of Heimlich as he popped out of the giant candy corn near the plaza’s fountain.
At the time I felt like I had gotten a real scoop. I even confirmed with a Cast Member that this was indeed the first day the displays had been open. Of course what I had forgotten was that if no one follows you it’s nearly impossible to break news. Not to mention that this wasn’t the first year Candy Corn Acres had existed and thus the level of excitement anyone had for it dissipated quickly.
Regardless I spent hours uploading, editing and categorizing my hundreds of photos when I got home and immediately posted them to my site. I think it might have been one of maybe three photo reports that went up on Somewhere in Particular before I abandoned the project. I also got one podcast episode in before I realized that what I wanted to have a podcast for wasn’t to talk to myself about Disney but engage in conversation with others about it.
A few months later I declined to renew my domain name, changed by Twitter handle to my real moniker and went back to just being a podcast listener until I joined The Disneyland Gazette in 2010 (with many of those same people I used to listen to on DLNT). By then DCA was under heavy construction and Candy Corn Acres was a thing of the past.
As I said, Candy Corn Acres wasn’t great. In fact you could probably argue that it was another example of what was wrong with DCA 1.0 with its half-baked attempts to court guests. But, like DCA, I too had to realize that what I was doing wasn’t working. For one, I had spent money on a camera and trips to California instead of saving up to move out of my parent’s house at the age of 22.
Secondly, instead of taking the time to flesh-out my ideas and bring others on board, I was too hasty and proud to think that I would fail. What seemed like a great idea at the time might have brought a few smiles, but ultimately needed replacing.
The next year I not only moved out of my dad’s place but I moved to California. I even got the company I worked for to pay for me to move and I situated myself equal distance from work and Disneyland — a much more reasonable solution than driving out from Arizona once a month. Since then I’ve felt transformed, but that doesn’t mean I still don’t get nostalgic about those lazy and misguided days if not only to remind myself how much I’ve grown.
So RIP Candy Corn Acres, Somewhere in Particular and Kyle Burbank 1.0.
Photos by Tanya Hickman of Crossbone Cuts
(I apparently deleted the hundreds of photos I took during that trip…)