it's an updated world, after all

I've never considered myself a Disneyland purist. Sure, I grew up a mere 15 minutes from the park and have enjoyed an annual pass for the past 13 years, but change at Disneyland always seemed to bring exciting things: the updated Tomorrowland, Videopolis, Disney's California Adventure. And while this change also brought about the demise of some favorite attractions such as the Skyway, the Peoplemover and Adventures Through Innerspace, I still saw it as a good thing.

Until the talk of revamping "it's a small world". For some reason, the proposed changes to this boat ride with the mind-numbingly infectious song struck a bad nerve with many people, and, sad to say, I was among them. Those little boys and girls had been singing their hearts out since 1964, and now the Imagineers wanted to change the colorful children's view of the world, to make it more Disneyfied by adding classic movie characters to the country displays. Screams of Commercialism! echoed throughout many of the diehard Disney fans, most fearing that Mary Blair's designs would be forever ruined. Then, word about the possible removal of the New Guinea rainforest section popped up, and the jokes and snarky comments about clearcutting quickly spread.

I finally had my chance to check out the upgrades and updates last Sunday. The first change I noted was the boats. The substituted the dirty and worn fiberglass vessels from the 1970s with newer, more colorful boats that even felt lighter than the old ones. And the flume through which they traveled had been widened. Which, for me, was a fantastic change because the last time I rode in one of those boats was a Gay Day event about two years ago. With a large group of bears. The boat lodged every few feet -- not to mention all the water that poured in during the initial turn when the boat started to capsize -- so what normally would have been a 15-minute ride, lasted 45 minutes. I'm sure there's a video somewhere of our group grabbing the sides of the flume to pull us through the entire attraction. (We'll see what happens this year....)

As for the insertion of Disney characters, well, that turned out to be a bit underwhelming. Thankfully, they didn't add the actual characters. Instead, the Imagineers dressed certain dolls/children as Alice in Wonderland or Mulan or Ariel (from The Little Mermaid). Quaint and unobtrusive, in my opinion. They also piped in fragments of those films' scores, blending nicely with the "it's a small world" theme. For other characters, they inserted odd, distorted versions of them, like a flat Pinocchio or an overly pastel Timon and Pumbaa. The Imagineers also added an American section -- finally! Though the three immobile Children of the Corn in front of a flat farmhouse on one side and the stereotypical cowboy twirling a lasso while three indian maidens "danced" on the other was a bit underwhelming. But the rainforest was saved by moving it into the Pacific Islands area.

So I'm very indifferent to all the changes. Nothing seemed as exciting as when Disneyland first updated The Haunted Mansion for Hallowe'en, but I realized that the changes weren't made to impress me. "it's a small world" is about children. Back when it first opened, way back in 1964, many of the Disney characters we know today didn't exist. Kids today know those characters because they've grown up with them and probably associate them with those countries represented in the attraction. Let them be the ones to decide if the revamping was bad or good. And from what I saw and heard on Sunday, kids loved it.

Image from The Theme Park Insider.