Beginning of the End

“What I don’t understand,” said a longtime Walt Disney Company observer, “is why no one in the media, especially the Internet, seems to have picked up on the fact that they’ve [Disney Parks and Resorts] retired the use of The Happiest Place on Earth.”

It was late spring and the Disneyland Resort had just wrapped up three days of celebrating the grand reopening of Disneyland’s classic 1959 Submarine Voyage as the new Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. It was this same weekend that members of the media began hearing from reliable sources within the company that Disney Parks and Resorts was planning on extending its Year of a Million Dreams promotion and the new Disney theme parks’ tag line, Where Dreams Come True, for a second year.

As it turned out, the two pieces of information were not mutually exclusive.

“To me, this whole ‘our guests came up with Where Dreams Come True’ is intended to replace [Disneyland’s] The Happiest Place on Earth.” My source was referring to remarks frequently made to the media during the first year of the Year of a Million Dreams promotion by Mike Mendenhall, then Vice President of Parks and Resorts Marketing.

During that weekend at Disneyland, I did hear that during the first year of a Year of A Million Dreams, Disneyland Resort personnel had been instructed not to use the phrase The Happiest Place on Earth “with guests, in marketing materials, press releases, or on letterhead, napkins, or paper goods of any kind.”

“The idea,” my source continued, “is to replace The Happiest Place on Earth [and tag lines associated with the company’s four other resorts] with the single Disney Parks’ expression, Where Dreams True. There will be no individual identity for the parks, just a single Disney Parks brand.”

Absolute Denial

The implication was clear. Disney Parks and Resorts, in an effort to create a unifying brand for all eleven of its theme parks worldwide, was quietly attempting to move the phrase The Happiest Place on Earth into Yesterland, a term popularized by webmaster Werner Weiss, whose website of the same name chronicles the history of discontinued Disneyland features and attractions.

I called the marketing department for Disney Parks and Resorts at the company’s headquarters in Burbank, California to ask if the phrase The Happiest Place on Earth was being retired.

“Actually, they’re all in a meeting,” said the young woman who took my call. “May I take a message?”

Several hours later, I received a call from a gentleman in Disney Parks and Resorts Orlando, Florida media management office.

This gentleman did not hesitate to tell me that no such request had been made of the Disneyland Resort cast nor are they (Disney) even considering it. For the record, “the phrase The Happiest Place on Earth is officially part of the Parks and Resorts and Disney Company lexicon.” He went on to say everyone at Disneyland was free to use the expression as they wished.

That pretty much ended the story right there. I wrote back to my original source and said, “As you know, when the [Disney] company doesn't want to confirm that a piece of news is true, their practice is to not to return inquires; thereby, neither confirming nor denying a story.”

Disney Parks and Resorts media management had returned my call and flatly denied they were trying to retire Disneyland’s fifty-two-year-old tag line.

Go Ask Alice

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said my original source just a few days ago on the way to dinner. We had been discussing our earlier conversations about the retiring of The Happiest Place on Earth. In fact, my source felt rather strongly that someone at the Walt Disney Company was being less than candid or frank, either with the gentleman from Orlando I spoke with or me.

“You’ve been to the park [Disneyland],” my source continued. “Have you seen The Happiest Place on Earth on anything in the past year, heard it during announcements, seen it in press releases?”

I couldn’t say that I had. A quick search of the Disneyland Resort News found that none of the press releases for the past six months contained the phrase The Happiest Place on Earth. Nearly 70 percent of those same press releases did use some form of the Where Dreams Come True expression.

Previous Disneyland promotions have also had catch phrases of their own; however, as many Disneyland park fans have observed, the park’s original tag line was still used throughout the park on all manner of collateral material during those promotions. “Heck, it used to be part of the Disneyland sign out on Harbor [Blvd.].”

This was fairly serious. My own research was beginning to back up the notion that Disney Parks and Resorts was in the process of phasing out Disneyland’s famous tag line.

It was also fairly rare. Fortune 500 companies—much less members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average—don’t, as a general rule, go on record and deny something when there is evidence to the contrary.

They will obfuscate, mislead, or, as previously mentioned, simply refuse to comment, but almost never do they make unqualified statements that can later be disproved.

Origin

No one seems to know for certain exactly where the phrase The Happiest Place on Earth came from. The closest anyone seems to have come to pinpointing the coining of the phrase is Walt Disney Biographer Neal Gabler.

On page 532 of Gabler’s extensive biography, Walt Disney The Triumph of the American Imagination, Gabler quotes an interview with Reverend Glenn Puder, who delivered Disneyland’s opening day invocation and was married to Walt Disney’s niece. Although the dedication of Disneyland read, “To all who come to this happy place…” Gabler says that “Elsewhere, he [Walt Disney] would call it the ‘happiest place on earth.’”

Whatever its origin, thanks to the popularity of Disney’s weekly television series, the phrase soon became part of the American lexicon and today is known the world over. Whether they’ve visited Walt Disney’s original Magic Kingdom or not, for over half a century, the words The Happiest Place on Earth have come to mean one thing to people everywhere: Disneyland!

“Maybe they have just set it aside for the ongoing Year of a Million Dreams thing,” said my source. “But your own research seems to confirm what I’ve been telling you.”

“I just think it’s a shame. That phrase has been connected with Disneyland since it opened, and nobody seemingly realizes that it’s gone away,” perhaps forever.

[As a direct result of the purchase of Pixar Animation Studios by the Walt Disney Company, C. W. Oberleitner now owns two shares of stock in the Walt Disney Company.—Editor]