Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, even in the world of Disney park tributes

When you're a Hidden History hunter, practically every anomaly gets you to question whether there's an inside connection. After all, there are no accidental "71s" in the Magic Kingdom, and all those random numbers you see on pipes usually look like some variation of birth dates and years. Photos of kids have to come from somewhere - is it a stretch to think maybe the Imagineers used pics of their own kids?

When you get to an attraction rich with inside jokes like Carousel of Progress - lots of Hidden Mickeys (sorcerer hat, abstract painting, nutcracker, sorcerer plates) and at least one Imagineer call out (to Herb Ryman, whose name can be seen through the window in the 1920s scene) - you're on high alert.

You know especially that the bulletin board and dry erase board in the finale scene are full of insider things.

On the dry erase board, you've got a reference to 1401, the address on Flower Street in Glendale where Imagineering is based.

There's the famous post-in note saying "Marty called -- wants changes" in reference to then-head of Imagineering Marty Sklar.

So when you take your zoom lens and locate a business card on the same corkboard, the tendency is to think you've hit upon another reference and homage. Take this business card from just below the Marty reference:

Perhaps your first thought, like mine was, is that Roger Everett must be an Imagineer associated with the project, who found a way to make himself timeless! But it doesn't appear to be. I couldn't find evidence of Roger Everett having worked at Imagineering (this is not conclusive, btw), so I turned to an open Google search.

What I found online is that "Roger Everett" is the name of someone who actually does carpentry work in the Orlando area. In other words, probably there is no Imagineering connection, but this could be a tribute of sorts. One assumes Mr. Everett assisted in the 1990s refurbishment of the attraction, and got to include his calling card as a kind of... er, calling card... in the finished experience.

So it's not a smoking gun connection to an Imagineer. That makes this a red herring search in a way, but as the title of the post says, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.


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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.

Carousel of Progress sexism analyzed

Surely most visitors to the Carousel of Progress notice how the family's father (John) is all sorts of sexist to his wife, Sarah. Here is a short list of ways he is disrespectful to her in today's show:

• 1900: He assumes it's appropriate for her to spend all her time washing, canning, and cleaning
• 1920: He passively-aggressively tells the dog not to interrupt while Sarah is interrupting (and otherwise assumes Sarah is just doing her job sewing on the hot porch while he relaxes indoors)
• 1940: He laughs off Sarah's irritation that the food mixer was ruined by the paint-mixing project, and that she has to wallpaper the rumpus room all by herself

Sounds pretty sexist, eh? The thing is, you have to know the attraction's history to understand what the sexism is there for. There are a couple of things at play:

The attraction was originally meant to unspool in 20 year increments, culminating in 1960
The ride debuted at the 1964-1965 World's Fair, so it was perfectly logical for the four scenes to take place in 20 year increments: 1900, 1920, 1940, and 1960. What was significant about the 1960s? It was women's liberation! The ride showed casual/ingrained sexism in the first three segments precisely to show how much things had advanced by the 1960s! The sexism, in other words, was very much an ingrained part of the ride's message. In the 1960s scene, the Mother held her own, and even put the Father in his place a few times. It gave the ride a kind of symmetry that made sense.

The attraction has been re-recorded and updated twice since its original version
There have been updates to the attraction, renaming the mother (Katie vs. Sarah) and changing the specific phrases here and there. Most significantly, the 1990s update created a finale scene supposedly set around the turn of the NEXT century (2000 or so), and so it postulate a world of visor-based video games and laserdiscs (yeah, it got a few things wrong).

Think about the functional effect of the updates, though. We jump from 1940 not to 1960, but to 2000. That's a huge jump. The family is essentially intact, though perhaps far younger than they should be for a forty-year jump.

There is no longer the context of women's liberation, though. The year 2000 (to say nothing of 2013) isn't really associated with equal women's rights, because, duh, that movement happened forty years ago.

So the ride jumps from male sexism to a fully integrated household of 2000 with no further word on sexism. I'm not suggesting that's a weakness of the script. To call attention to the sexism now would be a worse mistake. But it does point out that the sexism of the first several scenes is highly out of place, since there isn't a context-setting 1960s scene to balance it all out.

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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.

Hidden Disney detail: the father's newspaper in Carousel of Progress is out of place... but it's interesting anyway

You know that first scene in Carousel of Progress, when the Father tells us it's around the turn of the century and the robins are back for the season? It's meant to be Valentine's Day (each scene is a different holiday - Fourth of July, Halloween, and Christmas are the other ones) around 1900. My zoom lens tonight caught a detail that, for a change, doesn't belong. It's the newspaper gripped by the father, and it's out of time.

The paper carries the date July 25, 1863. That would make it a 40 year old relic by the time the father brandishes it when us visitors come to his "house"!

Sorry it's a little bit out of focus when this zoomed in.

So, the date is wrong. Maybe they just wanted to use something that LOOKED antique to our eyes, so they grabbed a real newspaper that looked like it would fit. End of story? Maybe.

Look again at the paper. We see "Leslie's" and "trated" - a Google search takes but a moment to turn up Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, which War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (edited by M. Paul Holsinger) tells us was a weekly publication started in 1855 and reaching up to 200,000 subscribers by 1861.

The real Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper logo.

After the Civil War started, it became a solidly Union newspaper. It went into decline after that and finally closed by 1922.

And July 25, 1863? The siege of Vicksburg was the story that day. It came just after Gettysburg, and was seen as a turning point for the North in the war.

Now look at what the Father is holding in his hand:

Is this an image of the Siege of Vicksburg?

So while the Father *could* have easily subscribed to Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1900 (it wasn't out of business for another 20 years!), the particular issue he's holding would be quite old by the turn of the century.

It's likely that the Imagineers wanted something that looked good and seemed period-appropriate. It's a bit unusual for them not to opt for authenticity to the 1900 time period - Disney designers usually do want authenticity, when given a choice - but they probably figured that it was far enough away from the audience to pass muster. And they *did* use the name of a real newspaper.

That newspaper had a July 25, 1863 issue, which fortunately exists as an electronic archive. Here's the image:

and here's a closeup of the newspaper (first), compared to the Disney attraction (second):

 

Looks like a match for the Battle of Vicksburg! It appears the Imagineers really did recreate an entire issue of the Frank Leslie Illustrated Weekly faithfully.

The paper is definitely an anachronism--an object "out of time" in the 1900 house of the Carousel family. But at least it looks authentic, and has an interesting history.

What is the Frank Leslie connection? Apparently, Walt Disney himself had been taken with the Leslie weekly's coverage of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, which predated his birth. Walt's fascination with that Exposition would later find form in the Main Street in Orlando (check the candy story, general store / glassblowing store for further proof -- coming in a future post).

But did Walt commission this? Confusingly, the evidence points to no:

Unless that's the same newspaper (unlikely, given the shape), Walt's era Father had a different paper. That means the Frank Leslie connection was added later (likely in the 1990s). Do we dare credit Michael Eisner and his insistence on details? In this case, it seems warranted. Someone demanded things look authentic, and a second someone grabbed for a newspaper Walt would have liked. We're definitely in the post-Walt era here, constantly second guessing what Walt would have done.

Updates
12/23/13: the newspaper was correctly identified as coming from July 25, 1863, and reference to Battle of Manassas Gap removed (which had been on July 23, 1863)

12/24/13: Walt photo added and speculation about his relationship to the newspaper. 

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Kevin Yee is the author of numerous independent Disney books, including the popular Walt Disney World Earbook series and Walt Disney World Hidden History.