Featured Attractions

Monday, August 3, 2015

A Mickey Mouse Revue


When Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom park was being designed, Roy Disney threw out a few of his brother's thoughts about design. For example, Walt Disney wanted DISNEYLAND to feel welcoming and non-threatening to children. That's why Main Street and Sleeping Beauty Castle were built at what Walt felt was the perfect scale. Roy, on the other hand, wanted to show the world how wealthy the company had become since 1955. Therefore, he poured money into a bigger castle and Main Street. This being Roy, however, the extra money spent on Main Street and the castle meant that budgets elsewhere had to be cut. The biggest victim was Fantasyland.

Rather than building the Fantasyland of his brother's dreams, Roy chose to build the cheaper "medieval faire" Fantasyland that Walt had settled for when budgets ran out in 1955. 

Another misbegotten budget cut was felt at the all new Mickey Mouse Revue.




This lively audio-animatronics show featured Mickey and friends giving a fun, musical performance.



This show was the first attempt to answer a common complaint heard from DISNEYLAND guests- that their children had missed seeing Mickey Mouse in the park. By putting Mickey in a show, guests could guarantee their children would see him by attending the show.



However, as budgets got cut across the project, this show was one of the victims. The pre-show area, where guests looking to watch the show would be asked to wait for the next one to begin, was downsized so that it could only hold 300 guests. Not a big deal right? Except for the fact that the theater was designed to hold 500 guests. This meant that the theater could never be full, even when it was "at capacity". This flaw doomed the show since clueless management assumed the show wasn't popular. It was shut down in 1980 and moved to Tokyo Disneyland, where it had a successful run of over twenty years.