Reimagining Magic Kingdom: An Armchair-Imagineered Blue Sky Build-Out of Walt Disney World’s Iconic Theme Park

“Armchair Imagineering.” For Disney Parks fans, it’s a skill that’s learned early, and practiced often. Almost inescapably, theme park aficionados can’t help but to imagine what could be; what we think should be; what we would do if we were given creative control of a theme park we love and an unlimited budget to make it happen.

If you’ve been around Park Lore for long, you might have already stumbled on my hand-illustrated, ideal build-outs of Disney California Adventure, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Universal’s Islands of Adventure. It takes dozens of hours over the course of months to draft out these imaginary redesigns, so it’s probably no surprise that those park build-outs are some of the projects here at Park Lore that I’m most proud of, and reader comments, private emails, and shares on social media regarding them are some of the kindest, most creative, and most thoughtful feedback I ever receive.

So I guess all of that fueled me enough to finally do something I never thought I would: to tackle a “Castle Park.” And not just any Castle Park…

Today, we’ll walk through my armchair-Imagineered redesign of the one and only MAGIC KINGDOM. (Insert screaming face emoji.) All six of Disney’s Castle Parks are revered, beloved places whose every square foot has been infinitely photographed and mapped to millions of memories. And the older they get, the more cemented they get, making the half-century-old Magic Kingdom practically a historical landmark. So I ask that you bear with me as we walk through this imaginary version of Disney’s second theme park…

Along the way, I hope you can appreciate my attempt to find balance for Magic Kingdom! Ideally, you’ll see me try to preserve its past and honor its roots, embracing the elements of ’70s design, Bicentennial Americana and utilitarianism built into it. But in the spirit of my other build-outs, I think you’ll also see me be realistic about the park’s future. There’s no use pretending that Magic Kingdom will somehow be exempt from the company-wide effort to position parks-as-brand-loyalty-centers, so this build-out will acknowledge that any attempt to realistically shape this park must include contemporary characters. Will it come together to create a cohesive whole? I’ll let you be the judge…

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The Magic Kingdom Problem

I’ll start this Build-Out with an admission and an apology: I don’t really like Magic Kingdom.

Throw your tomatoes, but first let me explain. There’s a lot I appreciate about Walt Disney World’s original theme park in a historical sense. It’s cool to see the park embodied as the “operationalization” of the “Castle Park” model; how Magic Kingdom served as a best-of the then-16-year-old Disneyland, with many of California’s later additions (Small World, Haunted Mansion, PeopleMover, etc.) built-in or at least anticipated from the get-go. And there are definitely aspects of Magic Kingdom’s ’70s design (so monumental and master-planned versus the home-spun Disneyland) that I respect.

But at the end of the day, Magic Kingdom reads to me as too… mature. Too self-assured. Too study, maybe. It’s got none of the naive charm and warmth of Disneyland; none of the texture, depth, and over-the-top romanticism of Disneyland Paris; none of the fluidity, optimism, and momentum of Hong Kong; none of the reinvention or divergence of Shanghai. Its defining quality might be that it prototyped Tokyo Disneyland’s crowd optimization which is, y’know, not exactly sexy.

Every Castle Park makes its case on the international stage with at least one signature, one-of-a-kind E-Ticket that no other park can offer. Not Magic Kingdom. Many Castle Parks have seasonal overlays to their classic rides. Not Magic Kingdom. Disneyland is renowned for its delightful dining – both Quick Service and Full Service. Not Magic Kingdom.

Among its sisters, one could argue that the thing that makes Magic Kingdom a must-visit is that we’re told it is. It’s thee Castle Park of the Castle Parks. It’s so engrained in pop culture that you need not even say “Magic Kingdom.” Just say you’re going to “Disney” and you’ll conjure images of the correct castle – the one you see at the beginning of the movies. And by nature of being thee Castle Park, it’s also thee Disney Park. When someone says they went to Disney World, asking which park is often met with, “There’s more than one?” Which means, of course, they went to Magic Kingdom.

Disney has successfully built a generations-long cultural campaign that rings anxiously in the ears of middle class parents unless and until they take the pilgrimage to Magic Kingdom (and ideally, make it an annual affair). If you have one day in Florida, it’s Magic Kingdom you’re supposed to go to. (One-day tickets to it even come at a premium versus the other three Walt Disney World parks; ostensibly to promote redistribution of crowds, but realistically to serve as a “tax” on convention-goers and disloyal day guests just looking for the Instagram shot.)

Given that Magic Kingdom has practically always been and looks likely to remain the #1 most-visited theme park in the world, that siren song clearly works. For better or worse, that means Disney doesn’t need to invest heavily in Magic Kingdom. Revelatory additions and expansions are few and far between (with Disney instead focusing on the eternal, rotating investment cycle needed to convince visitors to give one of its other three underbuilt parks a try.)

The late, great, famously outspoken Disney Imagineer Rolly Crump probably put it best (to Disney’s chagrin) when he told The New York Times in 2018, “[Magic Kingdom] had no feeling of Disney. Disneyland has charm. Disneyland freaking hugs you and kisses you. When you go to Disney World and you see the castle, you want to genuflect … and that disturbed me. […] It was a lot of good architectural pieces, but I looked at that and thought to myself, ‘What the hell is going on here?‘”

Crump’s larger point – that in Disney World, the individual contributions of Imagineers were washed away, melded into the beginnings of a corporate Disney Parks style guide – is difficult to argue with. Even Walt Disney World’s biggest fans can probably agree to some extent with the complaints Disneyland loyalists fling in the Florida park’s direction: that it’s dull; beige; that it’s uniformly rated bland, boring, innocuous “G” versus other Castle Parks’ PG with thrilling, PG-13 touches; that Magic Kingdom is corporate… even soulless.

In my Park Paths art series, we physically saw how Magic Kingdom (above) intentionally replaces Disneyland’s intimate little arterial paths with wide, sun-drenched plazas; how it loses the organic shapes for something mathematical and precise; how rides take their dutiful place along walkways rather than walkways flowing around rides. At Magic Kingdom, you can never stray too far off of the built-in, master-planned circuit designed to efficiently drop you at each ride’s front porch. There are few hidden gems; few opportunities for discovery. Few places where, for even a moment, capacity is sacrificed for show.

And I can appreciate the ’70s-ness of that, and how revolutionary it was to master-plan the park for crowds, and how – by the way – it does work, saving Magic Kingdom from having the same infamous pinch points as Disneyland. But Disneyland does freakin’ hug and kiss you, and even though millions and millions of people around the globe would profess to love Magic Kingdom, I’m not sure they’d feel that it loves them back.

Okay, okay – in my Build-Outs of California Adventure, Hollywood Studios, and Islands of Adventure, I went out of the way to say that I don’t really think you can do this kind of armchair Imagineering unless you fundamentally like the park you’re designing on top of. So now, having explained why I don’t really like Magic Kingdom much, why would I take it on?

Maybe it’s precisely because it lacks those definitive, foundational qualities of the other Castle Parks. I wouldn’t find it worthwhile to “Build-Out” Disneyland, because it’s already a very good, very full park, and with a lot of care and thought behind its contents. I don’t feel that same reverence for Magic Kingdom, and I don’t think Disney or WDI does, either. This is the kind of park I think a Coco or Encanto or Zootopia land could be dropped into without too much pushback, because, y’know, it’s not really hallowed ground in the same way that Disneyland is. It’s historic and beloved, of course, but not so venerated that guests or even Imagineers see it as protected.

That’s why, when we hear Disney executives reduce Disney Parks to “…the global hub where Disney stories, characters, and franchises come to life” and Disneyland fans recoil in horror, I look at Magic Kingdom and go, “Eh, kinda.” In Florida, I think it’s somewhat inevitable that Moana will join the Tiki Room, for example. And more to the point, that any pushback to it would be Very Online, and very quickly drowned out by the resort’s uniquely global audience with its seeming allegiance to The Walt Disney Company as a brand versus the local, vocal, Park-allied audience we see at Disneyland (who would largely prefer that “TWDC” spun the park off into a standalone business and got their grubby hands off of it).

Setting the Stage

Still, heading into a Blue Sky Build-Out of the second Disney Park ever, there’s a lot that simply can’t be changed. Unlike my build-outs of California Adventure or Hollywood Studios, you won’t see me wipe entire lands off the map. Things at Magic Kingdom are far more beloved; more complex; more interconnected. But there are major expansions one can make to Magic Kingdom along the margins, and many changes to be made within the boundaries of the Railroad itself. As always, it’s important to me that these Build-Outs are at least reasonable. I want to challenge myself by working with what’s really available, imagining a theoretically-possible built-out state for this park.

Walt famously spoke of “the blessing of size” when it came to the company’s Florida Project; of having “enough space” to bring to life whatever dreams the studio conjured. And obviously, Disney World is huge, even if we as fans often overestimate how much real estate is actually available. (The region is, of course, a swamp, as well as a delicate, protected ecosystem whose waters feed the Everglades.)

But it’s difficult not to compare the availability of expansion space around Disneyland (above)…

…to the expansion pads accessible to Magic Kingdom. In Walt’s tradition, the latter scenario would leave any armchair Imagineer salivating regarding the possibilities. So having not done any land development studies or environmental impact studies, you’ll have to forgive me for deciding to move indiscriminately beyond the park’s existing footprint.

Before we even head off, know that I’m employing three tried-and-true methods for expanding Disney’s Castle Parks:

1. Re-routing the Walt Disney World Railroad. The layout of Disneyland’s Railroad has been adjusted countless times to accommodate for new attractions. Magic Kingdom’s has also been edited, but less so. That’s because the park factored several large rides into its layout from the start (Haunted Mansion, Small World, etc) and has built right over the Railroad since (Splash Mountain, Pirates, Space Mountain, TRON) with just slight track adjustments needed. Now, I’ll expand Magic Kingdom’s Railroad out to the park’s existing perimeter road and canals to access previously unused acreage to its north and west.

2. Re-routing the Rivers of America. Fans lost their minds when Disneyland’s Rivers of America was resculpted in 2016, shortening its layout to access the long-dreamed-of expansion pad north of the River that would become Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. Turned out, it wasn’t a huge deal, and actually, the new, rocky, waterfall berm that resulted looks beautiful. Sure, the Riverboat’s path is shorter and less “remote,” but the Rivers actually feel stronger for being enveloped in sights and sounds. A similar edit of Magic Kingdom’s waterway doesn’t seem nearly as radical now, especially if it can open up additional acreage for expansion.

3. Building beyond the berm. Okay, okay, Magic Kingdom doesn’t have a berm. (It doesn’t need one, because it has no neighbors from which to be shielded.) But in the grand tradition of Hong Kong Disneyland (whose Grizzly Gulch – Mystic Manor – Toy Story Land trio created an unprecedented “outer loop” around the Rivers of America), I’ll try to create an “outer loop” beyond the Railroad to finally access that north-of-the-River expansion pad that Big Thunder and Haunted Mansion make difficult to reasonably reach. (That’s something Disney itself has been teasing with the so-called “Beyond Big Thunder” initiative.)

With those (significant and very, very ambitious) edits, we end up with more space to work, as indicated by the map above. Remember, I really try to keep these Build-Outs reasonable. In Walt Disney World, we probably could use just about every square foot of expansion space indicated above, simply trusting that on-site support facilities can be relocated elsewhere on property. (That’d be nothin’; Disneyland’s horses went from having an on-site ranch to having a 45 minute commute from Norco, California so that Galaxy’s Edge would fit in the park.)

But that is, of course, “easier said than done,” so you’ll hopefully see me maintain plenty of backstage facilities and, again, think reasonably about how that space can or should be used. Of course, you’re here for the ideas, not the limitations. So with that said, let’s begin our “Grand Circle Tour” of a reimagined Magic Kingdom, where I hope we’ll emerge with a park that feels not just fuller, but more fully something. What that something is, maybe we’ll find out together!