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Walt Disney World Resort - Magic Kingdom, Part 1
Index
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| Cindy's Castle during Christmas |
A little pixie dust, a little bother, and you can live happily ever after. Or at least until the Visa bill comes in.
We want the redhead, the 999 grim, grinning ghosts, a great big beautiful tomorrow, and your own happy place. And we all get it in the end.
We want to go to infinity and beyond, yet stay in a small world, then go into space but end the day on Main Street USA. And never walk under the dirty bird without a hat.
This is the park Walt wanted to do right. A place where he could control everything. And I'm sure even Walt would have been surprised at just how well he succeeded.
Disneyworld opened on October 1, 1971. At the time, it was the Magic Kingdom, the Polynesian hotel and the Contemporary hotel, all connected by monorail. It hadn't changed when I first visited in 1977. Hop on the monorail to the Poly, have an adult beverage, monorail back. It was...fun. :-) But you can read about that in the general Disneyworld section.
What Magic Kingdom is about, is Classic Disney. In a way, Magic Kingdom is still Walt Disney World to me. Everything else is just a bonus.
Had Walt and the Imagineers had foresight as good as our hindsight,
I doubt there'd be a place called the Ticket and Transportation Center
(aka the TTC.)
I'm sure they were sure that this would be a central parking location, with monorail and boat service to any of the parks they would build. For instance, World Showcase was once supposed to be it's own theme park, right next to the TTC.
Didn't turn out that way, and it turns out the monorail is prohibitively expensive to build to remote parks like Animal Kingdom. Bus service is much more economical.
I'm also sure that if they could have dreamed of the attendance of this park, that they wouldn't have bottlenecked the trip back to the guest's car twice.
Of course you bypass all of this if you're staying on-site using Disney's transportation system. Disney's busses also bypass the TTC parking lots, so the buses sail right through...
Ticket and Transportation Center
Entrance
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Main Street U.S.A, is supposed to be reminiscent of Walt's childhood home at the turn of the century (albeit the 20th century); Marceline, Missouri; forced perspective, blah, blah, blah.
What Main Street really is, is the entrance and exit to Magic Kingdom, and in a way, the credits for the park. All along the street, in plain view but rarely noticed by the guests, are the people who made Disney famous. Almost every second story window has a name, mostly in the guise of advertising, of the imagineers, the cartoonists and the people who made Disneyworld happen. After all, Walt was a movie maker. All of his productions had to have credits...
It is also, of course, one long store from the train station to the hub, where one can eat and buy almost anything Magic Kingdom and Disney World...
Main Street U.S.A.
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The hub is the central location of Magic Kingdom, from which 'spokes' branch off in every direction to the different lands. In the center of the hub is the bronze 'Partners', a statue of Walt and his alter-ego Mickey. Surrounding 'Partners', are smaller bronzes of the characters that made Walt the man he was.
Main Street U.S.A. / Hub
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Cinderella's Castle (almost a real castle compared to Sleeping Beauty's castle in Disneyland), is Magic Kingdom's icon. I'm sure you've seen it, so here's another 30+ pics of it.
More pictures of the Castle dressed up in it's Christmas Dress, the Castle lights, can be found in the Christmas section of Magic Kingdom...
Cindy's Castle
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End Magic Kingdom - Part 1
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04/17/2010 - Entire page re-imaged, rewritten