Great news!

Rabid Disneyland fans have been enjoying additions such as World of Color and The Little Mermaid attraction for the past year and now even more exciting news is upon us.

Not content with the huge Cars Land addition and the reinvention of the entrance area into period specific Buena Vista Street Walt Disney Imagineering has now announced the “Hat of Dreams” project.

Given the green light by Tom Staggs and put into an accelerated schedule the Hat of Dreams is expected to open up this June along with the rest of the revamped park.

Mystery Imagineer helped DCA reinvent itself with great care.

Parkeology: Can you give us an overview of the changes at DCA?

(Name redacted at request of WDI): The expansion of Disney’s California Adventure was designed as a series of projects opening over a five-year period from when it was first announced in fall 2007. In 2008 we opened Toy Story Mania!, a 4-D interactive attraction. In 2009 we re-imagined much the Boardwalk in the Paradise Pier area of the park. In 2010 we unveiled the spectacular World of Color nighttime extravaganza and in 2011 both The Little Mermaid – Ariel’s Undersea Adventure and Goofy’s Sky School opened to great success.

This year the expansion will culminate with two exciting projects – a 12-acre expansion of the Park called Cars Land where we will bring the town of Radiator Springs from the popular Disney·Pixar film “Cars” to life for the first time in a theme park experience.

We are also creating a new main entranceway and front area called Buena Vista Street, designed to resemble Los Angeles, as Walt Disney would have experienced it in the 1920s and 1930s. We’re bringing back the Red Car Trolleys and most importantly an incredible replica of the historic Carthay Circle Theater.

Disney’s original rendering of the Carthay Circle Theater shows some of the great detail and care being put into this project.

This was the theater where Snow White premiered in 1937 so it really holds a special place in the hearts of everyone who works at WDI. In many ways it was the starting place of something big, something special and so we felt the need and had a deep desire to represent and respect that heritage.

The Beautiful original theater holds a special and respected place in the heart of the Walt Disney Company.

Very Carefully! (Laughs)

There is a quiet dignity to the theater, we knew that we must honor and respect that. We took great care exhaustively researching every detail about the theater. What you will see on opening day is the result of hundreds of people spending thousands of hours to collectively make this a stunning statement not only about the history of our company but also about what Walt Disney Imagineering can do today.

We hand made every single tile, every single sign in fact every single fixture of any sort was hand made with great skill to match the original exactly. Furthermore we used the original plans to build our theater so it is an exact duplicate even under the surface and it is stunning.

However we did not stop there, we actually tracked down the great great grandson of the original construction foreman and hired him to lead the construction on our project as well!

Hand crafted details were poured into the new project, even hand forged nails.

That’s right, the very same gene pool!

Bradly Pendleton was the construction foreman on the project; 100% total authenticity.

No, he is the tennis pro at a small country club in Encino but we found him and then let him lead us. We are that dedicated to perfection and authenticity here.

We hand forged every nail using period specific methods; we took paint samples from the original theater and not only matched the colors but also the original manufacturer as well. We hand wove the carpets using Tibetan artisans from the same village that created the red carpets for Snow White’s Premiere. We found a warehouse that still had old stock of roof tiles from the original theater when it was built in 1926. We purchased those at a cost of roughly 50 times what it would be to make them new, even knowing that they are old and brittle and likely will not meet modern building codes, but we are that committed to doing this as authentically as possible.

I have not slept more than 3 hours a night for the past 2 and half years, I stay up pouring over every photograph, rendering and model of the original theater that we can find. Our team is 100% committed to making our version of the Carthay Circle Theater the most jaw dropping, magnificent, beautiful and accurate building that the Walt Disney Company has every produced bar none.

We are all very aware that the original Disney’s California Adventure was considered a let down and a disappointment and a “pile of crap” by many of our fans and therefore we are determined not to make those mistakes again!

Expert craftspeople at work hand weaving the rugs for the theater.

Fans of the Disney Company know about how Walt would motivate all those around him to do the absolute best work they possibly could, he would often add to projects even at the last minute in a desire to “plus” the experience for the guest. Creating the best guest experience was paramount to Walt. It was never about marketing or sales, or anything else, only about creating the best park going experience and we are embracing that attitude.

Earlier this year Tom Staggs, Chairman, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, came to us with a challenge. He said he wanted more. Even though our Carthay Circle Theater is spectacular, a beautiful and wonderful recreation, authentic in every detail and a majestic new icon to the park Tom still wanted to push us to plus the experience even more. We gathered our team and hunkered down with the full resources of the Walt Disney Company at our disposal. We were given cart blanche to do anything we wanted with the only goal being to surpass all possible expectations.

And the result of this unprecedented missive was a big hat?

YES! A stunningly large hat that we are calling “The Hat of Dreams”. It is located directly in front of the Carthay Circle Theater and though it does slightly obscure the theater we feel that this is exactly what our guests want, what they demand from us and the type of product we have been consistently delivering for the past 15 years or so.

Before…

After: The Hat of Dreams as it will be seen in front of the Carthay Circle Theater. Please click on all the photos to see them full sized and in more detail.

The theme is “magic” or maybe it is “fun” I’m not really sure. But we crafted a whole story behind it to enhance the guest experience. The story goes that Mickey Mouse fell asleep one day because he was so tired having traveled with Walt all the way out to California. So he falls asleep and dreams that he is a giant mouse, can you imagine such a thing! So this giant Mickey Mouse visits Disneyland and has so much fun that he needs to rest so he lays down in this area near the park to take a nap and then he wakes up…

And his giant hat is still there…

YES! A giant hat! We are all so very excited about this. Mickey wakes up and is normal mouse size but the giant hat is still here and therefore maybe it was a dream or maybe it was real… who knows! It is sort of like the movie “Inception”.

Um, I’m not sure where to start with this. If this was in 1920s or 1930s as you said was the time-period for the new area then Disneyland did not exist yet. Forget about it. Are you at all concerned that your work on the theater will be diminished with the addition of a huge metal novelty hat?

Not just metal! That baby is going to light up like Christmas! We have thousands of yards of twinkly lights and neon jammed in there as well, plus lasers out the wazoo, it’s quite a sight to behold. And also to hear; we have over 50,000 watts of audio power blasting out techno dance mixes of famous Disney songs by some of our stars such as Miley Cyrus. We really want to have a hip edgy feel to it. As Imagineers we learn that we must be flexible, we must adapt and change and so this is a reaction to what our guests tell us they want.

Quiet Dignity

Disney sweet heart Miley Cyrus and others have contributed to the new sound track for the Hat of Dreams Dance Party

Didn’t the inspiration come from Fantasia?

Fanta-what’s that now?

This scale model shown at the press event reveals the carefully thought out relationship between the hat and the theater.

Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to seeing what type of reaction the Hat of Dreams gets you… good luck with that. 

Thank you as well and keep a sharp eye on the look out for more magical surprises yet to come!

Update:


Yes, we were really contacted by WDI and asked to remove the names of any real life Imagineers.  


To be clear (and really stating the absurdly obvious here…) this entire post (except this little last part) is an April Fools joke… there is no big hat in DCA (sadly there really is one in Disney’s Hollywood Studios) and we appreciate the sense of humor of WDI.  


You will not find bigger fans of WDI than those around the Parkeology offices.  We do not know the Imagineer who was previously quoted here and she had nothing whatsoever to do with the article. We are however looking forward to seeing her actual work at DCA this June.