Extinct Attractions – One Man’s Dream in Disneyland

Welcome to Extinct Attractions. This week, I’ll be taking a look back at One Man’s Dream, though likely not the one you are thinking about.

The Pixar Place Hotel (reimagined from the former Paradise Pier Hotel) officially opens at the Disneyland Resort on January 30th, so its arrival is just a few days away. Over the past few weeks, a number of the restaurants in the hotel have started to open their doors, so that guests can get a feel for the new cuisine in the area. All of the eatery options look more appetizing than they had before the remodel, so it’s exciting to see that the changes are thus far successful.

The one thing about the hotel is that there is no real nightlife scene, but that’s common at the Disney Resorts, though it wasn’t always the case.

During the 1980s, Michael Eisner looked to make Disneyland a nighttime destination for younger audiences and introduced Videopolis, basically a dance club tucked into the back of Disneyland. The area would feature DJs and musicians and a lot of dancing, but it quickly came to an end after a series of gang fights started in the parking lots after people had been enjoying the club.

To balance things out, Disneyland decided to move the complete opposite way and rebrand the theater as the Fantasyland Theater with the first show debuting on December 16, 1989, going by the name of One Man’s Dream.

Disney had large ambitions for what it could do with the space, so One Man’s Dream was brought in with the intention of only sticking around for a couple of months. Luckily, they were able to take most of the ideas for this new show from its sister park in Tokyo which had debuted One Man’s Dream as part of their 5th anniversary celebration. I won’t dive too much into the Tokyo version this week, but it was longer and a bit more robust than its Disneyland counterpart.

Via Van Eaton Galleries 

Disneyland celebrated its 35th anniversary with the 35 Years of Magic Celebration throughout the entire year of 1990, so in a way One Man’s Dream was the unofficial start to the celebration with a banner hanging outside of the theater to commemorate the event. Nowadays, all of the big anniversaries last for a year or longer, but generally don’t start until closer to the actual date of the anniversary, so it was interesting to see how they approached it differently then.

One Man’s Dream began in black and white as a fun homage to the earliest days of the Disney company when color wasn’t even an option on the table. Mickey and Minnie were standing outside of a cottage when they received some colorful flowers that they were then able to use to bring color to the stage with various pieces of shrubbery flipping around in real-time and creating a beautiful effect and transformation into color with a cool culmination as a spinning table took black and white Mickey and Minnie away with their colorful versions appearing in their stead.

Via DAPS Magic 

With the whole world in color, the real fun began with a wide swath of characters emerging from the wings with Peter Pan, Pinocchio and the Three Little Pigs (plus the Big Bad Wolf). But that wasn’t all as Snow White, the rest of the Fab Five and Chip and Dale emerged to add to the character overload and really get the audience excited for the celebration that was about to begin.

After the introduction, it was time to fall down the rabbit hole with an Alice in Wonderland section of the show that was pretty standard by theme park show levels with Alice just singing around the stage with a few dancers dressed as flowers popping up out of nowhere to sing along.

Via DAPS Magic 

Next on the docket was a scene based on The Aristocats, which sounds exciting considering that that film almost never gets love in the theme parks. But there was one major caveat in that the cats looked an awful lot like the ones from the musical Cats in that they were a bit creepy. Then sang “Everybody Wants to be a Cat” before a little dance break and then “He’s a Tramp” from Lady and the Tramp, which didn’t make total sense, but hey they tried.

The show then had a really cool transition where the entire stage basically flipped inside out and King Louie from The Jungle Book emerged to sing “I Wanna Be Like You” that eventually featured some can-can dancing from his fellow monkeys while he swung his arms around like he just didn’t care.

Via DAPS Magic 

The following Peter Pan section got a bit crazy and one could really feel the Tokyo influence of sparing no expense when half of a pirate ship appeared on stage along with a group of pirates singing “A Pirate’s Life” around a tied up Wendy. I had never heard that song included in a Disney Parks attraction before, so it was sweet that they included one of the lesser known tracks.

But that wasn’t all as Hook and Smee then popped up to cause some trouble before a performer dressed in a full crocodile outfit emerged to run around the stage. I’m not going to lie, his getup was pretty silly looking, but it fit the chaos as Peter Pan came in to win the fight against Hook. To celebrate, Peter and Wendy then flew around the stage to “You Can Fly” in what was a true whirlwind of a scene.

Via DAPS Magic 

It was a tough act to follow Peter Pan and company, so Disney brought out the big guns in terms of Snow White, Aurora and Cinderella all showing up in extremely sparkly dresses to dance with their princes. To the tune of instrumentals of songs from their films, they danced around the stage along with some background dancers to provide a nice break before the chaos of the theater show that was about to take place.

A stage facade emerged next from the shadows with the penguins from Mary Poppins marching across the stage to reveal that we would first be watching a ballet which happened to feature Daisy and four dancers doing a form of ballet (when Daisy wasn’t falling down). Next up was the opera where Goofy did his best matador impressions, though it got him in some hot water where he needed to run around the stage. And the bit ended with the theater where Mickey came out in Shakespearean garb and this amazing hairpiece that was basically a bowl cut and something I truly could not believe had been approved for the show.

Via DAPS Magic 

As the show began to wrap up, a Hollywood marquee appeared and some tap dancers treated us to a little ditty followed by “Hooray for Hollywood” and all of the characters coming out in some dapper looking outfits and doing red carpet walks. You don’t often see almost all of the characters going through a costume change mid-show, so it was pretty cool the level of work that they put into making it happen.

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But the red carpet had to end somewhere, that somewhere being a finale of dancers in what was basically an 80s club in an inadvertent homage to Videopolis. Mickey and Minnie came out dressed in their best dance clothes and Mickey, of course, got super into the dancing and pop and locked his way all over the stage.

Overall, One Man’s Dream was a lot of fun and most certainly a product of the 1980s and Tokyo Disneyland. It wasn’t afraid to take some risks in its approach, making it so much more fun and unlike anything that we would see today in the parks. But alas, the show was always intended to serve as a placeholder, so it closed less than six months after it opened on April 29, 1990 to make way for Dick Tracy Starring in Diamond Double-Cross, but One Man’s Dream journey wasn’t over yet. For that story, you’ll have to check back in in a few weeks.

Via Instagram 

As always, don’t forget to check out my interactive maps of the Disney Parks throughout the years where you can watch or learn more about all the attractions from every Disney park around the world.

Thanks for reading and have a magical day!