91. How Fake Museums Are Used in Theme Parks with Shaelyn Amaio
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
Museums can be a shorthand for truth, or for history, or for what a culture values. Disney theme parks all around the world use fake museums as a tool to immerse visitors in the themed environment. This detailed world-building can make the imaginary universe more real—or provide a setup to subvert a narrative.
But these fake museums aren’t the only ways the Disney theme parks present history to visitors. Public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio describes how the parks “traffic in the past.” By removing references to the present or a future with consequences, parks like Disneyland free the visitor from responsibility for what happened in history. Since the opening of Disneyland in 1955, there have been several iterations of Disney theme parks, each reflecting the way we think about knowledge and history in the times they were built.
In this episode, Amaio describes examples of fake museums in Disney theme parks, details how corporate-sponsored edutainment can reflect the public's anxiety, and explains why EPCOT has the most museum-like spaces at Disney theme parks.
“The Disney theme parks traffic in the past, that is their main currency. You have in the Magic Kingdom most of the areas of the park are themed to different historic moments. The one main exception being Tomorrowland, which is kind of set in this retro- futuristic never. And so if you are only looking at the past and this future that will never be, then the past doesn't have any impact. There's no responsibility for what happened in the past.” - Shaelyn Amaio
Gallery Continues ⏭️
In this episode, we walk through the types of Disney theme parks, and how each era of park treats history in a new way. By the early 1990s, Disney was on track to develop yet another type of park—a theme park that presented actual history in an edutainment context called Disney's America. In episode 17 of Museum Archipelago, we cover its spectacular failure. Disney’s idea would have put a park showcasing “the sweep of American History”—including the institution of Slavery and the Civil War—within a fun theme park environment just outside Washington, DC.
“The most difficult challenge won't be to tell important stories about history or to deliver an enjoyable experience for our guests, but to achieve both of these goals without having either one dilute the other.” - Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner [not a Museum Archipelago guest]
Archipelago at the Movies🍿Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
At the climax of the 2001 Disney animated film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the villain says, "if you gave back every stolen artifact from a museum, you'd be left with an empty building." Which is a good point.
Atlantis is a movie where the main character works at the Smithsonian. It's a movie that goes deeper than any Disney movie on presenting colonialism and its discontents. But at the end of the day, it's a movie that pits the villain imperialist against the good imperialist, and doesn't seem to realize it's doing it.
Today on Archipelago at the Movies🍿Atlantis: The Lost Empire with the one and only Rebecca Reibstein.