Greg Maletic
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It shouldn't be shocking to anyone that Disney Imagineers would attempt to create a zoo on the grounds of Walt Disney World. Over the past two decades, Disney has systematically recreated any non-Disney diversion interesting enough to draw visitors away from Orlando for more than four hours. When guests started leaving the Disney grounds at night to have adult fun at Orlando's Church Street Station -- voila! -- Pleasure Island, Disney's own nightclub and entertainment complex, popped out of the shores of Lake Buena Vista on Disney's property. Universal announced intentions to build a movie studio-based theme park in Orlando, and before Universal even had a chance to break ground on its first non-Burbank operation, Disney created its own park in the form of Disney-MGM Studios. One of the last remaining non-Disney tourist draws lies 100 miles to the southwest of Orlando in Tampa's Busch Gardens. As much as children love the fictional animals of Disney's animated films, they enjoy the real ones even more; as a result, Busch Gardens has performed well even while operating under the shadow of the Disney brand name.

Beyond the obvious revenue benefits, the lure of creating a zoo must of have been nearly irresistible to Disney's Imagineers. The original, classic zoo stands as the Cro-Magnon forerunner to Disney's own Disneyland Park. Furthermore, years of jokes about Disneyland's plastic lions and tiki birds must have eaten away at them; the ability to show their stuff with real, live animals had to be seen as an opportunity that couldn't be missed.

A slew of design successes in the 90s--Disneyland Paris and its excellent Space Mountain, Disneyland's Indiana Jones and Roger Rabbit rides, MGM's Tower of Terror--provide ample evidence that the 90s were a golden age for Disney's attractions, bettering the high standards set by earlier, genre-defining classics like Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. While I was keenly aware of these achievements, my visit in late 1999 to Disney's Animal Kingdom park had me concerned: was this new park going to be "smart" enough to pull off what it was attempting? Listening to opening day interviews with the Disney executives, it was clear that Disney was aiming higher with this park than with its others (Epcot excluded), attempting to raise social consciousness while entertaining. An exciting goal, no doubt, but exciting primarily because it's almost never been successfully done before. Educational things are rarely fun (at least not to most people), and fun things are rarely educational. I never thought Disney particularly succeeded in combining education and fun at Epcot; could they really pull it off in this different context?

The entrance to the park, termed "The Oasis," is a lush jungle of tropical plants and birds. For a Disney entrance, the Oasis was disappointingly pedestrian: instead of a grand vista of the enjoyments to come I saw a lot of trees. There's an often-repeated quote from Walt Disney concerning the layout of park attractions--"there's got to be a 'weenie' at the end of every street"--and in this, Animal Kingdom fails miserably. It's hard to tell you're even walking in the right direction, let alone walking towards something that might hold interest. Using the signposts as our guide--and not our own sense of navigation, dictated by the grounds--we arrived at the center of the park.

The centerpiece of the park is an elaborately carved concrete "Tree of Life," holding an attraction called It's Tough to Be a Bug. It's a 3-D movie in the vein of Captain Eo or Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, with a little more audio-animatronic showmanship built in. Filled with the little practical gimmicks that made Honey, I Shrunk the Audience so popular, I spent most of the movie feeling a little skittish, wondering what was going to hiss, attack, or rush by my feet during the course of the show. Not surprisingly, the now-standard "spraying of water" occurred, along with an irritating "hit" on the back when I was getting a simulated wasp sting.

After seeing so many Disney 3-D films over the past few years, I couldn't help feeling that this shtick had gotten a little old. Although the show's practical effects caused the audience to sit up and laugh at themselves, the effects seemed less entertaining than simply clever. (My brother, having not been at a Disney park for a period of five years or so, noticed that an old taboo had been abolished: virtually every new attraction involved spraying water on guests, and this included shows as diverse as Tough to Be a Bug, Alien Encounter, and Winnie the Pooh. I suspect that if It's a Small World were developed today, spitting animals and water-gun-toting children of the world would somehow make their way into the attraction. This is progress?)