Disney’s California Adventure Park’s ninth birthday came and went on Monday, February 8th. Neither the Disney blogosphere nor Disney themselves really seemed to notice.
Posing with the A of California outside of DCA.
Hardly a surprise, however, as DCA has kinda been like the black sheep in the theme park family. It gets just enough love and affection from management and fans alike to keep it going, but not enough to make it into something spectacular. Since it’s inception — when the idea for WestCOT turned into the theme park we know today — to the plans that were unveiled in 2007 to change the park into something different, DCA seems forever doomed to be a mishmash of ideas that were scraped together for a theme park.
When Disney’s California Adventure opened back in 2001, it was part of a greater reconception of the Disneyland Resort area. New hotels were added, as well as the Downtown Disney shopping area, to help make DL feel more like it’s sister resort back east in Orlando, Walt Disney World.
Initially Disney had planned to turn the area into WestCOT – the west coast version of WDW’s EPCOT Centre. WestCOT would be broken into two different areas, Future World and the World Showcase. Future World would contain many upgrades of the popular attractions from Epcot, such as Horizons, World of Motion, and Spaceship Earth. The World Showcase would have a similar feel as its east coast sibling, with the intention of putting the world on display for guests. However rather than focusing on individual nations like Epcot does, WestCOT would focus on varying continental regions – Americas, Africa, Europe, and the like.
Unfortunately WestCOT was marred with various problems, including protests from the residents who lived spitting distance from the park (too much light pollution, apparently), as well as the issue of purchasing enough land to make the idea a reality.
In 1995 the idea was scrapped, and execs decided to come up with something new.
That idea was Disney’s California Adventure. Construction started in 1998. What opened in 2001 was the 55-acre mishmash, that was meant to make the guest feel like they were stepping into a picture postcard of California. Each area of the park is meant to represent California’s “storied past and exciting future.” The various areas include Sunshine Plaza, Paradise Pier, Golden State, Hollywood Pictures Backlot, and a Bug’s Land. The Golden State area itself was broken down into several mini-areas: Condor Flats, Grizzly Peak, The Bay Area, Golden Vine Winery, and Pacific Wharf.
While several of the elements were done with what one would expect from Disney (the Condor Flats area with Soarin’ Over California is one of the best themed areas I’ve seen Disney do in a while), a lot of the park feels like they took whatever pieces they could and smashed them together. It’s very disjointed. The Golden State was meant to showcase California’s natural treasures, yet Condor Flats, and Pacific Wharf are hardly natural treasures. Neither KP or I could figure out what A Bug’s Land had to do with California, except for the fact that bugs aid farming… but then, bugs are everywhere around the world.
DCA’s numbers were hardly what the execs were hoping for. People had complaints about everything, from the feel of the park, to the ticket prices, to the fact that many of the California landmarks featured in the park were within an hour’s drive of Anaheim.
My biggest faults with it were the disjointed theming, the lack of great restaurants to eat at (across the way at Disneyland there is a wide variety of sit down and quick serve places… while DCA was mostly quick serve), and the temperature! DCA had a lot of concrete and due to the way it was laid out, a lot of walking. Because the park was so new the tree were very small, so shade was unlikely. Get a hot day and all the air-conditioned seating was jam-packed.
In 2007, however, Disney made it their mission to redesign the park in hopes to make it more cohesive and attract more visitors.
Sunshine Plaza will become Buena Vista Street, and have more of a feeling like Hollywood when Walt Disney first arrived back in the 1920s. The Hollywood Pictures Backlot will become Hollywoodland, a vision of what Hollywood was like in the 1930s. Paradise Pier is going to be rethemed to feel like a Victorian-era boardwalk. A new land is going to be built, Carsland, which will focus on Radiator Springs and the characters from Disney-Pixar’s Cars.
Lightning McQueen in the Pixar Play Parade at DCA.
Disney’s California Adventure has lots of great attractions and shows that don’t often get a lot of credit because the disjointed feel of the park really takes away from it. But Soarin’ Over California, Grizzly River Run, and Tower of Terror are some of Disney’s best attractions. It’s really nice to see that Disney is pumping funds into the park, trying to make it into something more cohesive. But KP and I always talk about what theses updates will end up as. Will it be just more of the same mishmashed pieces smushed together in an attempt to make a park? (I mean really… Carsland? What does that have to do with California?!) Or will this actually bring DCA together into something that has the same magic as the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, or Animal Kingdom?
(We’re wondering if it’s going to feel more like Disney’s Hollywood Studios!)
Guess we’ll wait and see what happens! Happy 9th Birthday Disney’s California Adventure!
