It hurts me to say this because Walt Disney World holds a landmark place in my heart. But the Carousel of Progress, in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney World, is watchable only as an artifact of an American narrative we no longer want to tell. Queue up and watch the 21 minutes of patriarchal late capitalist GE-approved “progress.”
The ultimate takedown of Walt Disney World as an ideologically loaded place is in the book Vinyl Leaves. And the Carousel of Progress, perhaps the longest running stage show in America, is perhaps the most ideologically loaded place in this most ideologically loaded place, as it commits itself to a story of American progress. The Carousel is a stage show in which an audioanimatronic family discusses the theme of progress. The show is divided into stage sets upon which the audience (and not the stage) revolves. Each stage set features the family in a different technological era from the turn of the 20th century onward to the near future.
And what is progress to the Carousel of Progress? Well, the GE-sponsored show seems to link progress almost exclusively with… the purchase of more and more GE products in each stage set’s period of time. In each stage set, the father of the family narrates and directs traffic, identifying all of the new technological advances that have enabled he and his family to overcome previous inconveniences. It now takes the mother of the family Sarah “only five hours to do the wash,” we find out in the first stage set in 1900 – as Sarah irons the laundry. Now Sarah has time to engage in “canning and cleaning the oven.” In each stage set, what I have previously (and painfully) labeled as “traditional gendered behavior” is performed throughout.
Disney apologists might point to the final scene, in the near future (around 15:25 in the video), as evidence that progress has suddenly taken not just a technological, but also a social component. The maternal character now appears dressed in business attire and she sits in front of a laptop. She is now the most knowledgeable about the household technology, and the father character is now wearing an apron and doing the cooking. Of course, he is terrible at cooking, and the family longs for the day when technology will liberate the father from his kitchen responsibilities. “One day,” the son hopes, “everything will be so automated that [Dad] will never have to cook another Christmas turkey again.”
The final scene was the product of a 1994 update – the only stage set that has ever gotten an update (other than to the theme song, which has alternated historically between “It’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” and “Now is the Time” and back again since the show’s conception in 1964). The final scene is a departure in script from the previous final scene of the near future. (The video of the original Carousel, whose embedding is disabled, is here – the final scene starts around 4:01.)
As such, Walt Disney World had every opportunity to include in the script lines that explicitly confirmed that progress has a social, as well as a technological, component. One of the family members could have made a comment about Sarah working, for instance. Instead, the main changes from the original near-future stage set is to update the technology, the interior design of the living room, and the clothing, which was vaguely Star Trekked, and remove the embedded GE sloganeering (We Bring Good Things to Life!™). Yet in other ways, the update is a step backward in its story of progress from the original. For seven seconds (6:19 – 6:26) in the original scene, we see a minority female journalist reporting live from Walt Disney World about holiday celebrations – the only dark-skinned face in Tomorrowland. That image is not in the update.
Perhaps I would be willing to accept certain limitations on any improving of the Carousel of Progress. Disney could say, for example, that the show is beloved and one of Walt Disney’s most personal creations and that they don’t want to gut the thing. They could say that they only want to periodically update the final stage set. But if so, that stage set can do more than just imply that Sarah is a liberated woman by putting wire-framed eyeglasses on her robot face.
A quick postscript: If you do watch the show, you’ll be treated to many other instances worth criticizing, such as the antique exercise machine helping the daughter lose a few pounds for her boyfriend.
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This makes me glad that I’ve never been to WDW and so haven’t gotten attached to any of the attractions there. Come to think of it, I don’t spend too much time in Tomorrowland in Disneyland either, although off the top of my head the only characters I associate with it are Michael Jackson/Rick Morranis, Buzz Lightyear, and Darth Vader.
They used to have a similar attraction at Disneyland, but an employee got caught between the turning walls and died, so they closed it down and never re-opened it. It eventually got changed into a slightly different “technology” attraction that’s more like something you’d see at a science museum.
Sure, the Carousel of Progress is bad, but you should see what’s at Epcot. I haven’t been there in a few years, but the last time I went, I was horrified to see what looked like African American animatronic characters set up in the “pickaninny” style, as well as other racist caricatures. The giant golf-ball-looking “ride” (sponsored by AT&T at the time) about telecommunications was the worst. And, of course, the gender bias is well in place at the Epcot attractions too. If WDW would put some money into updating any of these now-run-down attractions, they could liberate them of their hideousness, but I’m not holding my breath.
ekf, where was this? There are definitely some pretty bad caricatures in the parks (the Jungle Cruise, as much as I love it, is awful in places), but I can’t remember anything really egregious in Epcot. Well, the Mexico ride, but that was mostly crimes of production design, and it’s been revamped recently. As for Spaceship Earth (the golf ball), the “future” parts of the ride make a concerted effort to show a lot of diversity.
Mostly, the thing to remember about Disney World is that they are completely blind to the race, gender, and sexuality of the people whose money they want. That is, if you have money, they want to separate you from it, regardless of who you are. Plus, they’re constantly walking a line between making their attractions more diverse and pissing off the people who claim to speak for American morality– see the frothing wingnut reaction to Disney hosting Gay Days in the parks and opening thier wedding pavilions to commitment ceremonies.
Have you seen “Meet the Robinsons”? [Spoiler alert] Walt’s legacy is alive and well – progress is defined in that movie as the technological achievements of white, blonde, blue-eyed male lead. The only non-white characters in the utopian future are also non-human: Italian frogs, a robot, and a black female hat named Doris who was created to serve the white characters (she rebels, they try to kill her and fail apparently). Doris creates the dystopian future of black-female-hat-dominance where white people are enslaved in service of the hats, which is bad, whereas black female hats get in the way of paradise by being uppity.
They also introduce the fear of non-white reproduction – Doris actually gives birth to a little-Doris at one point – and the future is overrun with black female hats created presumably by the original Doris. The only man in the film who is against the white man’s progress is an idiot who is controlled by Doris.
They introduced a female scientist early in the film, but they took great pains to portray her as incompetent, before finally showing her “happiest day of her life” as the day she got married (it should go without saying that the ideal future is heterosexist). Her big contribution to the future is not technological, but nurturing, as she adopts White Boy Genius. They also had a taming of the shrew narrative, with this angry little girl who once says something to the effect of “my frogs only attack people I don’t like” growing up to be Boy Genius’s gorgeous, nurturing, sentient-talking-Italian-frog-teaching-to-sing wife.
Sorry, I don’t mean to derail the thread – I saw this white male supremacist piece of crap last week and I’ve been ranting about it ever since.
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned that it was reeeally fucking boring and the theme song was a sonic shit sandwich. I couldn’t take anymore, so I skimmed the last two thirds. My favorite part: “This new Al Jolson movie’s gonna come out, and he’s gonna talk, and sing…”
…and wear blackface. Oh boy!
Shira, if you don’t mind, I have a response to your assessment of “Meet the Robinsons,” but I don’t, as you said, want to “derail the thread” anymore, so I’ve posted it on my own blog. If you’re interested in reading and/or discussing further, please feel free to click my name. :)
And, uh, sorry Mikey, for not technically having anything to contribute to your post.
Merely by reading the words “Walt Disney World” I got “It’s a Small World” stuck in my head. Thanks a lot, Mikey.
There’s that tired old mistake about the Wright brothers being North Carolinian again – that’s the hardest part of the video for me. They designed their flyer in Ohio, they built it in Ohio, and they only travelled to North Carolina to fly it because of the Tar Heel State’s abundant hot air.
Mnemosyne, it was called “America Sings” and it was gone long before I ever visited the park :p Its particular horror story has almost become legendary — makes me wonder whether they’re ever going to try and make a ride out of it.
Wouldn’t it rock if they would do a “carousel of progress” for equal rights?
I wonder who they would get to be corporate sponsor?
Slight correction, Mnemosyne: Deborah Stone died in 1974 and America Sings didn’t close until 1988, since which time I have MOURNED ITS PATRIOTIC CHEESINESS EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE; THERE, I SAID IT.
Disneyland put in breakaway walls after the tragedy, although it’s a gross indictment of their intelligence that it took a tragedy to give them that idea.
Oh, and, overheard on WDW resort bus: “Carousel of Progress? You mean Carousel of Crap?”
Apparently it was Walt’s favorite contribution to the 1964 World’s Fair. I don’t think the old man had any taste left toward the end.
Wow, even before Jesse Helms…
Just for you, Lauren:
“It’s a world of acne, a world of germs.
It’s your brand new dog coming down with worms.
It’s the notes being played
By a cockroach parade,
It’s the real world after all.
It’s a world of ulcers, a world of cysts.
It’s the hole in the road that you never miss.
It’s the cheap underwear
Creeping up to your hair,
It’s the real world after all”
There’s more, too. Lots more.
My favorite part is the breathless mention of carphones and laserdiscs.
I don’t think something like this would be possible anymore, as technology is no longer that impressive – the 2007 version of this ride would have the grandpa complain of the teeniness of the new ipods…why in his day, ipods twice as big! – and it updates too fast. Anything you did would be ridiculously outdated by the next year.
Oh, and also all of the salient points about the sexism and racism. Although that’s kind of par for the course for any disney product, with a few notable exceptions.