Ron and Chuck in Disneyland Discovery

I'm back again and looking at the content I have written when I return, I have a nasty habit of disappearing after writing one or two posts for the year. I will try to produce a little more content, in spite of my busy work schedule, and other projects I've been working on. While I have been away, I came across a fascinating short underground film from 1969 entitled...

The film is unknown to the general public, remaining obscured. I never heard of the film, until a screening of it was held in one of my college classes. While some may view the film as cheap, boring, and predictable, there is more to the picture than what is captured on-screen. The point of this review is to raise awareness for this forgotten film, by discussing its significance in aesthetics, culture, and history, as well as how it has aged over time. 

It is practically common knowledge that Disneyland is considered one of the iconic amusement parks in the world. The film documents the park's appearance in the last summer of the sixties highlighting attractions such as The Jungle Cruise, It's a Small World, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, Dumbo, The Flying Elephant, and Mad Tea Party. Furthermore, the film features an extinct attraction entitled Mine Train Through Nature Wonderland before Big Thunder Mountain Railroad took its place. The display of attractions and the shops and restaurants in Main Street U.S.A., help serve as a time capsule to see how much the park has changed and how much has remained the same over time. 

Of course, Walt Disney's television program Disneyland (at the time of the short's release, renamed The Wonderful World of Color) would visually promote the park. And in terms of films, movies have been made involving the park before this picture, whether it was a documentary short, entitled Disneyland U.S.A. (1956) or a comedy starring Tony Curtis in 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962). Plenty of visual material from the fifties and sixties shows how Disneyland appeared at the time. However, there is a big difference in how this film presents Disneyland itself. 

Rather than getting permission to film on location, it was an unauthorized shooting in the park using a 16mm film camera and a tripod. Typically, when people used video cameras in the park, it was to take photos of their family or the attractions around them. It was rare and unusual for people to consider making a story-based film in a famous amusement park. In modern times, using the theme park for guerilla filmmaking is considered a norm. YouTube personalities visit the park illegally to create videos centered around their visits while providing commentary. A famous example is Tony Goldmark, better known as “Some Jerk with the Camera,” who frequently visits theme parks (especially Disney and Universal) to perform skits, review the attractions, or give fun historical insight. Half of his material even has a semi-plot tying his skits and commentary together. 

It is not the internet alone that guerilla filmmaking in the parks became popular. Two full-length films have done the same thing. The Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) features a scene of the film's director Banksy placing an inflatable doll resembling a Guantanamo Bay detainee by the tracks of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, causing the documentary subject Thierry Guetta to get arrested after Banksy flees. Another film, Escape from Tomorrow (2013), ambitiously takes what Disneyland Discovery and Exit Through the Gift Shop did even further. The film is not a short, nor does the illegally filmed park footage show up in sequence; it is presented as a one-hour and 45-minute film. And the movie is not filmed as a silent film or a documentary; it is a horror film that was not only partly made in Disneyland but filmed in Disney World. Regardless of whether the content of the two films is good or bad, they did show the art of making guerilla films in theme parks, which can be traced back to Disneyland Discovery as an early example of this concept. 

Particularly, what makes the short film special, outside of how it is made, is the premise. The film plays out as a typical romance story. Two people meet at the right place at the right time, date, make love, and live happily ever after. The subject is as simple as the romance in Disney films at the time of their releases, such as Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), just minus the singing and the action. How is the premise intriguing if it is by the numbers to the Disney romance formula that can easily be used as a promo for the park? The reason is that the film does not involve a heterosexual couple. It instead revolves around a gay couple. 

Though films at the time were able to show more adult-rated material after the lifting of the Hays Code a year before the film’s release, it was not common to see a positive depiction of gay people. When gay people in movies were not subtly hinted as gay, they were either portrayed as silly and over-the-top stereotypes played for comedy or as sexual predators stalking straight men and children. What this film offers that was not a norm of the time is a proper representation of a gay couple. Neither of the film’s characters falls under the negative stereotypes Hollywood was using at the time. Both are presented as down-to-earth human beings whose love for each other is presented just as healthy and happy as the heterosexual couple that society and media like to think is the only appropriate and natural relationship, which is not the case.

Illegally making a film inside Disneyland is daring enough, but presenting a gay couple in the movie raises the stakes. Since gayness was crucially considered a taboo topic back then, it was unfortunately only natural for a family-friendly entertainment business like Disney to avoid showing a gay romance. Like most of popular entertainment during this period, the Disney company’s films, shows, and park primarily catered their family material to white nuclear families. After all, most of Disney’s promos regarding the park usually showed their target demographic, and the romance in their movies always centered on a heterosexual romance. To see a film associating a gay romance with the Disney brand at the time was shocking and ambitious. 

The first scene, when the two guys meet, plays itself like something out of a Disney movie (since neither character is identified, for the analysis, I will address them by the color of their shirts.) A master shot captures the man in the yellow shirt attending the popcorn stand on Main Street, U.S.A. In the same shot, as the man debates if he should spend money on popcorn, a man in a light blue shirt standing by the stand moves his arm forward to offer him some. A medium shot captures the yellow-shirt man standing and staring at the stranger, quickly followed by a cut showing the blue-shirt man up close. The image cuts back to the yellow-shirt man as the camera zooms in on him as he eats some of the popcorn with a sweet smile. The camera zooms in on the smile of the man holding the popcorn box, where the audiences get a closer look at his adorable face. The two stand together until the yellow-shirt man leaves, only to stop in his tracks to look at the man he just met. The other man slowly walks towards him. Both men gaze at each other again through close-ups capturing their cheery smiles, signifying their attraction. Further creating a romantic mood, the film uses the song A Dream is a Wish from Cinderella. Since the film has no dialogue, nor could the filmmakers get away with singing a song in the park, the use of the song serves as their musical love ballet, like how all Princesses meet their Prince in that era.

The only place not filmed in Disneyland is when the characters visit Disneyland Discovery, which in the context of the film, is located across the Rivers of America in Frontierland. After the characters visit most of the park's famous attractions, the characters head into the restricted area. The framing and lighting for the area appear as mystical as the forest where Aurora would meet Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty or Snow White riding horseback to the prince’s castle after bidding her seven friends and the animals goodbye. The two young men frolic around in the forest to suddenly halting as the man in yellow places his arms around the other man’s neck. The camera zooms on the man in yellow's face showing a sincere look of love. The man in blue gently moves the other man's hand off his neck and lowers them down by holding his hand, followed by the camera zooming in on their hands clenched together. The two slowly walk through the forest hand and hand until stopping to embrace each other. As they kiss, the camera circles them to capture their magic romantic moment while constantly dissolving, showing them making out and holding hands in the nude. Just as the film's soundtrack used A Dream is A Wish to enhance the magical romantic mood, and serve as a musical moment, the song When You Wish Upon Star shares for the same purpose for the scene. The song is practically the company's theme song, and never would the writer nor the company ever guess that it would ever associate with erotic nudity or gayness. 

Even though the film was not aimed to have a theatrical release, it did not slip past the Disney lawyer's radar. Upon finding out about the film, they demanded it to be trimmed down to 15 minutes, excluding any signs and symbols that the park the characters are in is at Disneyland. The film was trimmed, but the title remained the same, and Disney's iconic locations (including the Sleeping Beauty castle) were still displayed. The Disney lawyers were about to sue the film's director Pat Rocco for filming in their park and using their copyrighted music. However, they dropped the case, fearing the lawsuit would consequently give the film publicity, which could attract a larger audience than originally intended, making the film famous. Ironically, decades later, Disney went from trying to shut down a film about gayness in their park to now having gay pride celebrations in their parks. However, while the parks are also marketing to gay audiences, their animated movies have yet to create a love story centered around a gay couple. So even with all the years of progress from Disney, the short still touches upon a subject that Disney is uncomfortable fully displaying in their films unless the character's gayness is hinted at or shown in a blink and miss moment.

In an interview recorded in the National Gay Lesbian Archives, Pat Rocco expressed regret for Disney lawyers not going through with the lawsuit since it would have made it at least known to the public. That does not mean the film does not still have a chance to be known to the general public. The film displays Disneyland as a time capsule historically and politically. The guerilla filmmaking aesthetics would be the earliest examples of making an unauthorized film at the parks before it became mainstream. The romance between a gay couple is treated with the proper representation compared to how films at the time portrayed gay people. And the fact that Disney has yet to display an explicitly gay couple as the center of attention in their films makes the film more relevant, given the setting and how the romance is played out. The short has remained off the radar for too long and deserves more attention from modern audiences. Unfortunately, the movie is hard to find, but if anything in this review interests you, I promise you it is worth the search.