Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Fantasyland Theatre (1965-1981) Destruction

It's been some time since the last installment of my destruction series. Today we'll travel back to January 1982 and get a look at a bulldozer pulling down the Fantasyland Theatre structure. While Disneyland retained the roof of Snow White's Adventures, the Fantasyland Theatre/Juice Bar/rest room structure was torn down completely to facilitate construction of the Fantasyland Basement, Pinocchio's Daring Journey, and the Village Inn (later renamed the Village Haus for reasons unknown to me--hopefully for better reasons than the renaming of the Golden Bear Lodge).

First up is the bulldozer poised down below with a line running to the top of the building...

A simple mechanical action and gravity does the rest:

The still photos don't really give you the destructive effect, though; to compensate, I've created an animated GIF, which gives a better sense of the demolition process. Click the image to enlarge.

Oh, and it's a big anniversary day today. In 1960 both the Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland and The Art of Animation opened; in 1966 "it's a small world" opened. ( and Disney A-Z and The Nickel Tour say "it's a small world" opened on May 28. If it did open on the 28, it was not dedicated until May 30.)

6 comments:

outsidetheberm said...

Oh, that's painful to watch...

Still we're drawn to it.

Major Pepperidge said...

Arg! Interesting, but.... AR

:-)

Vintage Disneyland Tickets said...

Aren’t they going to take down all the pretty facades to sell on EBay? Ok, that 79 Datsun pickup truck looks so wrong in these pictures. THANKS!

Vintage Disneyland Tickets said...

Ewwwww... I just read why the changed the name from "Golden Bear Lodge", thats a pretty gross tale indeed...

The Viewliner Limited said...

Unfortunate, but never-the-less... great shots.

Unknown said...

Maybe they changed the name of the Village Inn, to avoid being confused with the restaurant chain.

LOVE the destruction photos. Though I can't stand the thought of destruction of anything there now.