Walt Disney World, it could be argued, has not had a net positive effect on Central Florida, environmentally speaking at least. University of Central Florida professor of art history Keri Watson joins me to discuss her article “From the Sideshow to Walt Disney World: Florida Reimagined,” paying special attention to how Walt Disney went out of his way to shut out the natural environment and attract a certain kind of patron to his planned Orlando-area megapark.
“In all cases, there is no effort to make a park that interacts with the natural landscape of the state. In fact, it does everything it can to remove itself from the local landscape and transport guests to another world.”
Further Reading
Episode Transcript
Christopher Nank: Do you think Disney World has been a harmful presence in Central Florida, an unnatural blight on the native ecosystem? Whether you do or don’t, join me, Christopher Nank on this episode of Florida Book Club as I discussed that very topic with Keri Watson, professor of art history at the University of Central Florida and author of the article “From the Sideshow to Walt Disney World: Florida Reimagined.”
CN: I’m here with Keri Watson, associate professor of art history in the school of visual arts and design at the University of Central Florida. And she is the author of “From the Sideshow to Walt Disney World: Florida Reimagined,” which she presented at the 2017 Florida College English Association Conference. So welcome to the show, Keri. I thought you had published this article somewhere, but you haven’t, we’ve been over that. Anyway you should. I think any works that are even vaguely critiquing the effect that Disney has had on the culture, demographics and ecology of Central Florida are of vital importance. That’s my take. But I want to summarize the basic argument of your essay, which I see as something like this: Unlike amusement parks and attractions of the past, say like some that you’ve mentioned in the essay or like the mermaids at Weeki Wachee, Disney World makes no effort to incorporate, blend in with, or adjust to the Florida habitat. Instead, it’s kind of tried from the very beginning to create and enforce a separate reality through attempting to block its natural surroundings. I saw in just a commercial the other day where it’s showing like flying trains and like savannahs with giraffes roaming around them and saying, this is the experience you’ll get. I mean, it’s like, they’re taking that to the next level. I’m curious, what drew you to this subject? I want to quote something else from your essay. You’re describing the original six themed areas that opened in 1971, but you say “In all cases, there is no effort to make a park that interacts with the natural landscape of the state. In fact, it does everything it can to remove itself from the local landscape and transport guests to another world.” Part of that is wondering, you know, if you believe Disney World has been a negative presence in the state overall, but I know that’s kind of a separate question from just what drew you to this subject.
Keri Watson: Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting. I think the way I’ve approached Disney has been twofold. I actually teach a class, the Art of Walt Disney at UCF every semester. It’s a pretty big class, and the students really enjoy it. We have a lot of Disney fans, and so it’s a really interesting class because we look at Walt Disney and his influence on animation, on architecture, and of course on amusement writ large. And so I’m also very interested in world fairs, the way those have operated, and also in the sideshow. So these three areas of interest kind of coalesce in this presentation that I gave and that you mentioned. Because I think the big thing that you have here with Disney is that he invents this new genre, the theme park, as opposed to the amusement park. And a theme park is really based in film. And so you see him coming out of animation and the film industry to create, they’re almost, you know, sets. You’re entering another world, you’re entering a film scape, if you will, where everything is artifice. You see your characters from movies, whether it’s Cinderella or Snow White or the seven dwarves. They’re there, as well. Or if it’s Space Mountain, there’s these tie-ins, right? And that was what Disney was so excellent at. And he wanted, as he said, to give this wholesome entertainment to American families, whereas he saw the amusement park that he was adapting to be something that was not wholesome, right? That the sideshow was not particularly that wholesome. That amusement parks had this interest in more of the carnivalesque, right? There was this kind of bawdy, seedy underside. If you think of Coney Island and Steeplechase and those great Reginald Marsh paintings of the thirties and forties, they’re showing lowbrow entertainment, if you will. It’s more connected to the strip tease and the burlesque, than it is to this Rated G family movie experience. So like you said, in order to do that, you don’t have to make it fit in with the natural environment. And I think in early plans, there was even this notion that, at least for EPCOT, that it would be in this air-conditioned dome. Right. Cause it was so hot right. In, in Florida, um, that you would even be protected from the elements of the, of the temperature and the humidity, um, as you enjoyed these parks. So, um, yeah, I think that it is definitely, you know, I mean, there’s like Yukon bike making it like the West or the, the Mark Twain, the old Mark Twain ride that it made it like the Missouri, you know, and there was mining. And of course we don’t there’s no, there was a gold rush in Florida. Right.
CN: It should have been about a phosphate mine that that would have been a little more regionally accurate. Yeah.
KW: It’s funny though, even at the resorts there in, um, CPE beach, uh, there’s mining for gold or panning for gold, but I guess playing into this whole pirate treasure as well.
CN: And the thing is, I I’m looking at your essay, you talking about like these, these areas like main street USA and, you know, the carousel of progress and places like that, that, and this is another quote “That Walt Disney world is a completely orchestrated, choreographed and directed experience for most of the time you’re there. Right. Strives to provide that. I mean, I guess, and knowing that, like what drew him to you like to you, you mentioned like how he lobbied the Florida legislature to, to basically allow him to create this autonomous zone that was something akin to a municipality in some ways. I mean, was that something that attracted him to Florida like that this was a place where you could buy really cheap land and create this sort of vision for amusement?
KW: Well, you know, it’s actually quite interesting if you think of Disneyland in Anaheim and the establishment of the, you know, the freeway system really in car culture in America that allowed people to drive, you know, drive their car to this area. And he wasn’t able to buy as much later as he had wanted to in California. So the idea of having so much land that was undeveloped and it was available, you know, he actually had a folk scout, a few other locations for him, but Florida ended up being the one where there was, uh, the biggest potential, um, to, to buy up the land sheep and to create this, um, you know, inclusive world for, for visitors, but very different than again, like somewhere like Coney Island where you would take public transportation, right. Um, people could take public transportation out to Coney Island and it was very accessible to people without our car. So you are all already, uh, they’re looking at more of a suburban audience versus a more urban audience. And that was part of, um, of his interest. And then things like main street USA, uh, for, um, Disney, everything was about this, um, nostalgic view for this Midwestern ideal small town USA. Right. Um, and wanting to look back to that and, and even using the aesthetics of even, you know, some of his films, like the, uh, the silly symphonies and, uh, you know, uh, country, cousin and Aesop’s fables and that the architecture and space of those films even, um, reiterates his interest in American regionalism, like the paintings of grant wood that also are, uh, creating visually, um, this notion of some idealized small time past, uh, that they may or may not have ever really actually existed. Right.
CN: That’s a great point about accessibility because I’m sure as, you know, you live in Orlando. I mean, it’s like the park itself, there’s barriers of accessibility to get there. Like you have to park, you have to take a boat to get to the magic kingdom. I was thinking about it, it’s so far removed from like, yeah, just taking the subway or some kind of public transit and it needs to be right.
KW: It has to be because there’s this sense of a pilgrimage that one must undertake in order to get to this promised land, this utopia, this other world, uh, it needs to be removed enough, uh, enabled to, in order to, uh, create that sense of artifice and fantasy. And, uh, you know, that you’re in a new and different and magical world to this other world.
CN: Yeah. If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Florida Project,” I think that’s from 2017, you see that, that real big juxtaposition between, you know, how separated his from the immediate area, at least, you know, in contemporary times. I’m kind of curious, what was, what was the Orlando area like when, when construction began on this?
KW: Well, I think, you know, cow cattle and, and, uh, citrus, right. Um, you know, ranchers and land, that was right for development. Uh, yeah. Another thing that interested me, um, to brought me to this project was I teach at the university of central Florida, which has equally had a huge and transformative, um, effect, um, the local environment here. Um, and in fact, UCF is laid out, uh, with these constructs concentric circles. The plan of the campus is based on Epcot and Disney. And so, and, and similar lead to the way that well Disney world has transformed, um, Southwest the Southwest Orlando area, uh, UCF has transformed, uh, the Northeast portion of Orlando and really led to the development of Olvido and Seminole County and surrounding areas, um, because it is such a large school and has had such an impact on the area and that area where, where UCF also situated was, you know, turpentine and celery, you know, so it was all rural. I think winter park was really the only area where you had kind of really anything
CN: Eatonville, I guess I was thinking maybe, I mean, although that was that, you know, that seems to still maintain its, it’s sort of as with, like you’re saying with winter park, I mean, it, it,
KW: Winter park meet Lynn Eatonville. And even though it was taken out of Maitland, as those communities were developed is really wintering locales for, you know, industrial, you know, millionaires right. For the Northeast, they wanted a nice place to come in the winter. Um, and then you had the labor that supported that, um, Uh, you know, agriculture
CN: To some of the things that some of the points you made in the essay too, like you mentioned, there were times, and this is a point that I’ve, I’ve discussed in some other writings I’ve done when nature sort of fights back against Disney. You mentioned lane graves, the toddler from Nebraska who was killed by an alligator in 2016. Now I remember reading that this was followed by Disney, you know, euphemistically, harvesting all the alligators from that Lake and putting up more signage and barriers. I mean, do you think that the company sees itself as in a fight against the natural landscape and they’ve got the company did Disney himself, I mean, see it that way, given like sort of these outlandish and anachronistic settings that he imagined?
KW: Well, you know, it’s interesting that, um, little beach area that, that she was on, um, was at one point a beach, right. I can remember when I was little and going to Disney and you can find pictures, you know, on the internet from that eight eighties, seventies and of people, um, or I guess early eighties and even maybe up to the late eighties, people swimming there. Right. And you used to swim in lakes in Florida. We, of course don’t swim in lakes really in Florida anymore because of that, um, micro organisms, various reasons, and the warm water, uh, that I don’t think was an issue then. And then of course, as you mentioned, all of these alligators, right. But I also remember as a child, you know, going on the glass bottom boat and feeding the alligators saltine crackers, you would get, you’d go on this boat trip and you would get a sleeve of saltines and you fed the alligators. Right. That was like a thing to do. Um, so I dunno, it’s, it’s certainly, you know, we don’t really swim in our lakes, right. Because of all of these reasons, uh, um, how do you create this idea right. Of this beautiful Lake and being on the water, but not but water that you should not go in for all of these various reasons. Right. And I know at one point there was even, um, I don’t think any more of it, uh, well, before wild kingdom, one of Disney’s Walt Disney’s original ideas was to have all the, these animatronic animals. Right. So you would have these not real. And he was very into animatronics, so you’d have alligators or hippopotamus or which of course is not a weak, we don’t have hippos right. In Florida. Um, but of course with the, with the Safari, you know, while keeping the same thing, those are lots of those are not native animals. Right. Um, but that’s that, wasn’t just Disney. There’s a, um, you know, Fairchild garden in Miami is a botanical garden, which means, you know, it has species from all over. It’s not just like an Arboretum or something where you’re just looking at
CN: The botanical gardens in Sarasota is like that too.
KW: Yeah. And there was, um, uh, another one that over there by you actually, um, saying St. Petersburg, I believe. Yes. Sunken gardens, all those birds, all the tropical birds in the cages. Right.
CN: We have a pass to something gardens. It’s a really cool place.
KW: It’s but it’s not, um, it, the notion of something gardens is not that it’s recreating what Florida was like before any sort of, um, settlement there are non-native animals and plants to create that tropical lush. It’s almost like, um, a place you would see in Hawaii. Right. So it’s, it is not native either. And then of course, um, I think I mentioned in the paper, Cypress gardens, which now is Lego land. Right. And then what are the things I love about what they did at Lego land though, was that they kept Cypress gardens. Right. And they remade the Southern bells and Legos. Right. They built them in Legos and that old tree that is however old is still there. And they still do a water water-skiing show like Cypress gardens did. Um, but with, with pirates and like a Lego Ninjago, uh, you know, narrative or something instead of the, the older narrative, which is probably best to not have the older narrative Cyprus. But the idea that, that, that garden at least is still there, but that probably wasn’t very a natural Florida either. Right.
CN: It’s just with that, you know, with the seven seas lagoon where that attack occurred, you know, all these things you’re mentioning, it’s like, this is, you know, the, the Disney world is you’re saying was sold explicitly almost on the notion that this was a world apart. And you know, that this was, this attack was sort of an intrusion of the, of the natural landscape that they were unable to sort of choreograph or, or, or to exclude or to, it was like you were saying the, um, or alluding to anyway, the idea of the Disney experience is that you’re entering this other world, you know, where you can swim in the lakes and there’s not alligators or germs or things like that. Like the real world sort of escape you. And I remember that part of, you know, whether the family could Sue Disney was hinges on whether Disney actually owned the, like, they didn’t own the animals in that Lake. Those were natural inhabitants of the Lake. So they could not be held responsible for it. I remember there was a big discourse over that. And, and again, it seems so much at odds with the experience they’re trying to create where everything is very controlled and exclusives, as you’re saying
KW: Well, and there’s an article that I read years ago and I, I apologize. I can’t remember who wrote it, but that, um, that no one dies. It just me, right. That if someone has a heart attack, they’re whisked away immediately. Um, they, you know, if they, if that was a fatal, you know, incident, it would have to happen off of the property. Right. It was very much, um, that this is a very safe and secure place that like you said is magical, right. And, um, is, uh, removed, right. You don’t expect to go to Disney world and see protestors, right. Or, or anything that would ruin the facade. And in fact, um, in the early years, uh, people would watch as people entered and you couldn’t wear t-shirts with like slogans on them and your clothes had to be, you know, look a certain way, you know, for proprietary, you know, to look nice, you know, she wouldn’t want to be, uh, exposing too much skin or anything like this. And no alcohol was served there for a very long time.
CN: Right. Yeah. Yeah. You actually address that in the essay about the weeding out, in some ways of less affluent customers through like some of the things you mentioned, the high admission costs, no alcohol situating apart well away from existing public transit, these attempts to enforce notions of normative middle-class values, but preferred select, you know, white heterosexual middle-class audience that it was kind of catering to. It seems like it’s all, you know, it’s all of a piece with, with trying to retrofit the landscape itself extends to sort of its human clientele in some ways.
KW: Well, I think unfortunately, that idea, it really is part of that ideology that Disney had, uh, Disney, the man, um, of wanting to recapture this past idyllic, small town USA utopia, which is the same, I think base interest interest that is catered to, by the notion of make America great again, right up to the some idyllic notion of a world that looked us or a country, a nation that looked a certain way and behaved a certain way. Um, I do, I will say though, that I think I was very interested in, in a very specific moment of Disney and his conception of, of Disney, what Disney world. And I think as a company and as a, as a park, it had, has done a lot to be much more inclusive. Um, and, uh, and has really been even, um, adopted by, uh, what would have at one time has been, you know, sort of subcultures right. For, for Disney days. And certainly though there’s only so much you can do to keep the, to keep nature, to keep climate at Bay, uh, that we’ll find a way to intrude on the movie set of, of life.
CN: I, to say finally, I mean, kind of apropos All of denying the natural reality outside its borders, Disney world reopened in mid July, 25% capacity amid this pandemic, but you know, what do you see as Disney world’s future? Do you think it’ll continue to grow and exert a bigger influence on the area? Or do you think this current moment will produce another re-imagining of its direction and goals? I mean, you said it to evolve, you know, from what Walt Disney wanted it to be to, to its current reality. And do you see it going in this like progressing so to speak?
KW: Well, I mean, I think it’s so awful right now, right where this happened and just last week, it was in the Orlando Sentinel that Disney had been forced to lay off, you know, all their character actors. Um, and it is such a big employer. Uh, you know, even at UCF, we have I’m in the school of arts and design, never school of performing arts. So many of our students, um, you know, do internships at Disney or work as characters, or it is a large supporter of the arts, right? Uh, it used to have the animation studio there as well. We have a huge character animation department. A lot of our faculty used to work there, you know, at one point in time, there was this idea that, you know, Florida would be the Hollywood of the East, which I think Georgia has become the Hollywood of the East yet, but, um, because of various reasons, but it is sad to see it’s a huge employer. Right. Um, we have a lot of, we’re lucky in Orlando to have a lot of non flat non-stop flights to a lot of locations. Um, and that’s a benefit to people who live here because of all of our tourists. So yeah, there will, if, if we’re not able to, you know, kind of bounce back from this global pandemic in a way that, um, how, what will that look like for the arts? Uh, yeah. I don’t think certainly many of us can ever imagine standing, right. So close to strangers and touching a silver handrail that everyone like 300 people before you have touched, uh, while, you know, breathing this small space to get on a ride, to be in another enclosed space with folks. I know a lot of things are going very digital. I don’t know what that looks like for, because the, the irony there right. Is of course it’s what Disney world was, was to take a movie. Right. And to put you in that movie, but physically in this embodied space. So you, would you go back to the movie? I mean, would you have to wear VR glasses? I don’t know. What would it look like to have that experience, but in a way where people felt comfortable and safe and not a super spreader event? I, yeah, I don’t know. I really, um, it will be interesting to see, I guess, what will happen, um, with some of the things and ways of life, I guess, that we’ve taken for granted and what the magical world will be of the future. Right.
CNL Well, it, it certainly sounds like you think that Disney world has had a net positive impact in a lot of ways though, on central Florida in the way that you’re articulating it now, you know, um, as an employer, as sort of a generator of, of, of, you know, a larger cultural sensibility,
KW: I do think so. I mean, I, I think probably the, the paper that I presented might come across as, uh, as me being, uh, anti Disney. And, and I think it’s not that I’m anti, I was just interested in the way that the side show amusement parks and then supplanted by the notion of the theme park.
CN: And this is the most glaring example, even I’m sorry. Glaring is kind of a bad adjective, I guess.
KW: Yeah. But I’m also, I am very much interested in the ways in which these visual culture, material, culture, cultural constructions, um, you know, both replicate and challenge kind of stereotypical notions of what it means to be an American or, um, so that was one of the things that drew me to the topic. Um, and certainly that is also tied into this notion of the landscape, right? What the natural landscape and what would that look like? You know, I think it would be interesting to have, um, a section that was the, um, uh, ride, an attraction, a world that was created that was old Florida world or something like this, the zoo Miami has done a wonderful job of this. One of their first, you know, attractions when you go in, uh, to the, to the zoo is, uh, Everglades. They’ve made an Everglades worlds where there are, you know, the, the natural plants, the Cyprus, the science center at the Orlando science center has this as well, the big Cypress tree. But I think part of it is that, and maybe this will be changing and maybe this will change for a good thing. But I do think from the seventies to maybe the nineties, even the idea of tourism in Florida and what Florida was selling to its tourist, customers is not that right. Not the Everglades, not the airboat ride, not, uh, uh, you know, it was more beaches and amusement parks. So maybe now people have, now that we have ecotourism, right. People want, they want it.
CN: Well, those are safe activities now, so to speak.
KW: Right. Yeah. That’s so true. There are. So,
CN: Yeah, we’ve done, we’ve done a lot of hiking since this pandemic started, so. All right. Well, Keri Watson, thank you. Uh, do you have any additional comments or work you want to promote?
KW: I did just publish on Disney for your Disney fans out there who might be listening and article on representations of people with dwarfism and snow white and the seventh worst, and the wizard of Oz in the journal of literary and cultural disability studies. So. That might be of interest to some of your listeners. And I have, um, a chapter coming out in the second volume of art history and disability that is on the 1939 New York. World’s fair. Um, and, uh, the sculpture at that fair and that, that was sometimes the world of tomorrow. So that’s fair. Uh, always interesting to study. So thank you so much.
CN: Well, thank you, Keri. You are now a member of the Florida book club.
CN: Thanks for attending this meeting Of the Florida book. Join us again. Next time when we discuss George McCowen’s 1972 eco horror film frogs with two genuine Florida natives. If you have any comments, suggestions for bottles or thoughts to share, let us hear it for there’s a great video link on our website, courtesy of YouTube, where you can watch Walt Disney playing out his plans for the utopian community of tomorrow to plan for central Florida. And remember to support your local independent bookstores and public libraries. See you the next week.
