I’m gonna tell you something: whoever put X, Y, and Z together at the end of the alphabet had a real vendetta against listicles (and rightly so). Instead of coming up with some cockamamie reverse-engineered terms here (“eXtraordinary entertainment!”), I have decided to instead use X, Y, and Z as free spaces to squeeze in three final things I think might inform and elevate your first visit to Disneyland. And actually, coming untethered from needing to use a particular letter makes this difficult. So here are my three free-space additions to our Disneyland 101 prep.
X – Pirates of the Caribbean
The 1960s were a time of tremendous growth for WED Enterprises (today, Imagineering). After the success of Disneyland, Walt and his team were called away from the park to create attractions for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where corporations were eager to draw on Disney’s showmanship to advertise their products, services, and brands. For the World’s Fair, WED produced four shows. And because they were playing with “company money,” WED was able to prototype new concepts on someone else’s dime.
For Pepsi-Cola, Disney produced “it’s a small world,” powered by a flume based ride system capable of carrying thousands of guests per hour; for the State of Illinois, they created “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,” a then-incomprehensible audience with the sixteenth president brought to life through humanoid Audio-Animatronics (and just one year after Animatronics had made their debut in the Enchanted Tiki Room). At the fair’s end, those two attractions (plus “Carousel of Progress” for General Electric, and the technology behind the “Ford Magic Skyway”) came back to Disneyland.
But the innovations also lead to the ride that’s often called “Walt’s Magnum Opus.” Originally, Walt had planned for a walkthrough wax museum of piratical vignettes to be set in the basement level below the “New Orleans Square” he was planning as a Frontierland expansion. But armed with the technology and prestige that his shows for the Fair had brought, the idea grew. Pirates of the Caribbean eventually opened in March 1967 – just four months after Walt Disney died.
A popular story holds that at its opening event, an interviewer asked his family, “Aren’t you sorry that your father never got to see it?” Allegedly, his daughter responded, “But he did see it!” And indeed, Walt had been instrumental in the ride’s design.
Pirates of the Caribbean is pretty universally understood as the best “classic” dark ride on Earth; a staggering, atmospheric, astounding attraction that showcases how far Imagineering had come in just the dozen years(!) that separate it from the simple, backlight dark rides of Fantasyland. Pirates is an epic thing that is worthy of (and has received!) academic study. It is a historic, beloved thing that is every ounce an “E-Ticket” even sixty years later.
Often imitated (Magic Kingdom, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Shanghai Disneyland all have versions) but never duplicated (Disneyland’s is a staggering sixteen minutes long; twice as long as Orlando’s), the ride remains a showcase of Imagineering at its early height, and far and away the one ride that best embodies Walt’s life’s work.
Y – Avengers Campus
If you’ve read my exhaustive and outrageous three-part history of Disney California Adventure (which begins here!), you know that after a very grand “reset” that saw the park officially re-dedicated in 2012, some very odd things have happened. One of them is hthe story of Avengers Campus.
Disney officially acquired Marvel in 2009. Back then, it looked like Disney (which had only just acquired Pixar two years earlier) was just looking for a merchandisable “boy”-oriented counterpart to its “girl”-dominating Disney Princess product line. But obviously, inheriting the brand new Marvel Studios gave Disney something genuinely unprecedented. The first 23 films of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” famously netted about $22 billion – an average of about a billion dollars each. Disney had shaped one of – if not thee – defining pop culture franchises of the 21st century; a juggernaut that appeared unstoppable.
There was just one downside. Thanks to a pre-existing contract that predates Disney’s acquisition of Marvel, Disney’s only serious competitor – Universal – owns the exclusive theme park rights to nearly every Marvel superhero East of the Mississippi, in perpetuity (legal speak for, basically, forever). As a result, Disney was slow to bring the Marvel superheroes into their theme parks, and when it did happen throughout the 2010s, it was almost entirely in the form of re-skins of existing attractions – not from-scratch builds.
Marvel received its first official U.S. Disney Parks attraction in 2017 when Disney California Adventure’s Lost Legend: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror became Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! It was a controversial choice given that the art deco “Hollywood Tower Hotel” looming over the park’s Hollywoodland became – in Disney’s words – a “warehouse prison power plant” based on “the beauty of an oil rig.”
Even if the resulting ride is a jaw-dropping delight in its own right, there’s really no question that it was kind of a step backwards for a park that had just underwent a billion dollar reimagining to focus on historic Californian locales. Still, Imagineers argued that eventually, the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride would make sense in the context of a Marvel-themed area earmarked to take shape around it.
That land finally opened in 2021. Despite being conceptually equivalent to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland, Avengers Campus is a different creature entirely. For one, whereas Galaxy’s Edge is slavishly devoted to Star Wars canon, Avengers Campus smartly severs itself from the timeline of the MCU altogether. Instead, this Multiversal land is set in a different spur of the timeline than the one we see on screen altogether – one where heroes who are lone gone from the MCU can coexist with those just being introduced through Marvel Studios films and Disney+ Original Series.
Embedded in the environment of Avengers Campus is the story. This complex was once a manufacturing facility of the one and only Stark Motors – under the purview of Walt Disney-esque futurist Howard Stark himself. But today, the red brick warehouses and industrial facilities have been grafted on with steel and glass, overtaken by laboratories all powered by a massive arc reactor at the land’s entry. The result is a Silicon Valley-esque tech campus designed to train the next generation of heroes – y’know, us.
Hence why you’ll find Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Ms. Marvel, and other heroes all descending en masse, coexisting with the Worldwide Engineering Brigade (a tech lab of grad student whiz kids developing pioneering new hero tech), Pym Labs (experimenting with miniaturization by way of legendary pym particles), the alien prison of the enigmatic Collector, oh, and the ruins of an Ancient Sanctum predating even Stark Motors.
Avengers Campus doesn’t necessarily have the astounding scale and scope of Galaxy’s Edge. It also doesn’t have a much-needed Avengers crossover E-Ticket ride (yet… one has been promised for years, and is allegedly coming one day, but given the current state of the MCU, who knows). But it’s certainly a lot of fun. And sure, like just about every addition to the park since 2012, it doesn’t make a lick of sense in Disney California Adventure. But Imagineers suggest that if you squint, the land is sort of like an IP-infused “Tomorrowland” for the park; meant to embody California’s green, future-focused, innovative, Silicon Valley spirit just, y’know, with superheroes. It’s not a bad framing… especially since the land’s rides do have a common thread: collaboration as the real superpower. See if you can pick up on that thread as you ride, dine, and of course, shop.
Also interesting: both Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland have their own Avengers Campuses, each with unique ride lineups… and each with references to their fellow facilities around the globe. In a way, it does create an interesting cross-continental network of interconnected Marvel attractions, and the idea that there are multiple Campuses works in-universe since the Avengers probably would want to recruit and train heroes around the globe! Kind of an interesting concept!
Z – Walt Disney
Any time I tried to approach a “First Timer’s Guide to Disneyland” in my old way – as a chronological tome – it always began by necessity with a lengthy biography of Walt Disney – an effort to help you know this enigmatic man as the young risk-taker, cartoonist, innovator, and entertainer he was. It feels like such an important and unskippable thing because in our world today, “Walt Disney” feels as real and tangible as Chuck E. Cheese or Mr. Clean. Even when his name is invoked – as in Walt Disney Studios or Walt Disney World – it’s often in a breath (“Wal’disneywurld”), failing to recognize that before “Disney” was “Disney,” it was a last name. In an era of Disney + Pixar + Marvel + Star Wars + National Geographic + ESPN, you’d be hard pressed to find the third grader who knows who Walter Elias Disney was at all, much less that he was a historical figure.
I highly, highly encourage you to watch at least the first episode of The Imagineering Story docu-series on Disney+ (produced by the incredible Leslie Iwerks, whose father and grandfather worked alongside Walt in pioneering new film techniques that changed cinematography forever). But suffice it to say that if Disneyland is nothing else, it’s the living testament to Walt Disney’s life.
In battles best left to online discussion boards, Disneyland loyalists are known to trumpet that Walt Disney himself never actually stepped foot in Walt Disney World. That’s not a dig; it’s a fact. Walt Disney’s life and Disneyland’s overlapped by more than a decade. He was the prime mover of the park’s formation, and of every decision thereafter. At least up until the 2000s, it wasn’t unusual to meet Cast Members who worked at the park since the 1950s, and who had known Walt personally.
It does matter that this was the little “family fun park” that Walt Disney cashed out his life insurance to start. It matters that Walt and his team were writing the rules as they went. It matters that “Walt always had breakfast there” or “This was Walt’s big project in the ’60s” or “Walt had Marc Davis do that, and Rolly Crump worked on that for him, and Walt saw something in Mary Blair and had her do this.” It matters that – at least in part – Disneyland is a museum, with historic corners that ne’er shall be invaded by modern Disney IP.
Because Disneyland is the place Johnny came with his grandparents and will one day come with his grandkids (see, “K”), people here remember seeing Walt at the park. For its local (and vocal) audience and the (California-based) Imagineers who shape it, Disneyland is hallowed ground… a special place that’s respected and revered, and connected to Walt Disney in a way that even the property that shares his name in Florida is not.
I leave you with something you can’t miss. Walt Disney famously had a private residence at Disneyland – a humble studio apartment on the second floor over the fire station on Main Street. Disney “lore” holds that when Walt was staying there, he’d turn on a lamp in the window so that Cast Members would know he was on-site. Today, that lamp is kept lit at all times. It’s a little way of communicating that Walt Disney is still part of Disneyland, and always will be.
“To all who come to this happy place: welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here, age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.”