Walt Disney designed his extraordinary theme parks as homages to America’s history, spirit, and way of life. This has always been particularly apparent when entering Main Street U.S.A, with its idyllic depiction of an early 20th-century small town, and in Frontierland, with its celebration of America’s settlement of the West. Now Disney’s current leadership has announced that it will be demolishing essentially all of Frontierland at the Magic Kingdom in Florida.
Disney announced that it plans to fill in the entire Rivers of America waterway and eliminate Tom Sawyer Island. Disney already shuttered the Frontier Shootin’ Arcade earlier this year to make way for a Disney Vacation Club member lounge. After all of this destruction, there will be essentially nothing left of Frontierland at Walt Disney World, save for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad — but that’s a ride, not a land. (For now, Disneyland’s Frontierland, in California, will survive.)
In place of all this, Disney plans to build two new rides based on “Cars,” the 2006 film that Pixar made for Disney.
The planned destruction of iconic Frontierland matters on an educational and cultural level, not just an entertainment level. The Magic Kingdom is the most-visited amusement park in the world, attracting nearly 18 million visitors annually. That’s more than the combined populations of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. No doubt, many children’s perceptions of America have been influenced by what they’ve seen and experienced there, just as Walt intended. Here’s what he said about Frontierland:
Here we experience the
