Although the addition of Buena Vista Street and Cars Land heralded the grand rededication of “an all-new” Disney California Adventure in 2012, the transformation of a large part of the park as a whole had actually begun years prior. This was a long term strategy for the company, built out in phases over the course of a decade. The last of these changes came in the spring of 2019. Because I’m cataloging some ten years worth of changes, this post is considerably longer than usual. I thought about breaking it up, but decided it’s better to have it all in one place.

The initial opening day concept for Paradise Pier was a seaside boardwalk, common along the California coast during the first half of the twentieth century. Evoking places like Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, and Mission Beach in San Diego, Paradise Pier ironically recalls the exact sort of places that Walt Disney was reacting to in designing Disneyland. In a literal sense, this themed area is the anti-Disneyland.

This rendering on the opening day commemorative poster map makes the area look far more rich and compelling than it actually was. In early promotional literature, the land was described like this:

Add a dash of the bygone days of California’s legendary surfside boardwalks to the excitement of a seaside resort and top it off with a heaping helping of Disney magic, and you’ve got Paradise Pier— a land at Disney’s California Adventure park dedicated to the fantastic “Golden Age” of amusement parks, jam-packed with wild attractions, delectable diners and unique shops. It’s “Fun in the Sun for Everyone!”

Too bad that like much of the park, Paradise Pier was designed and constructed on the cheap. It had a tacky quality about it; all concrete, metal, and plastic. If the Imagineers were going to keep this boardwalk area (it would too expensive to tear it out completely) they needed to add some warmth to it. Some paint and plaster. Twinkling popcorn lights. Like what works so well next door at Disneyland, what was called for was the sweet smell of nostalgia.

The Gingerbread Begins

During 2007, Victorian flourishes began to be installed along the boardwalk. This was part of the addition of the Toy Story Midway Mania! attraction which opened on June 17, 2008. The façade and roof for the show building and the attached gift shop recall the late 1800 to early 1900s. Here are the beginnings of a historic boardwalk that is more in line with Main Street U.S.A. over at Disneyland.

Curiously, there were some part of the land that already had similar trappings. When the original Cove Bar opened in 2001 with the rest of Disney’s California Adventure, it had a lot more personality than the rest of Paradise Pier. Real wood. Popcorn lights. So Toy Story Midway Mania! was a kind of natural extension of that design sensibility, with an expanded budget and greater vision.

This attraction was insanely popular when it opened, but it’s essentially just a virtual shooting gallery combined with the dark ride format. I certainly would never wait 180 minutes from it.

A classic Mr. Potato Head animatronic stands at the entrance to the queue. The figure is (somewhat) interactive with guests and can verbally respond to what people look like when they pass by.

There were a handful of really nice flourishes added at this time. This shingle for the attraction’s gift shop, Midway Mercantile, is extremely elaborate (and expensive). The sign is surprising to me, because other parts of this Paradise Pier renovation appear to have subject to budget cuts. This single piece made it through unscathed however. Nice to see.

This 2007–2008 renovation introduced what I’ve already commented on over at Buena Vista Street. And that’s the old timey typeface designs of Letterhead Fonts. I don’t recall seeing any of their turn of the century and early twentieth century revival scripts and block lettering until Toy Story Midway Mania! opened. Now their faces are all over the resort, at both California Adventure and Disneyland.

Here you can see the gingerbread vibe of Toy Story Midway Mania! right smack in the middle of the rest of Paradise Pier, which remained in its original 2001 guise for another decade. Note the Mickey Mouse ears set behind the coaster loop, which many fans disliked.

The design of the land was intended to be a homage to California boardwalk amusement zones, many of which featured a classic “woodie” roller coaster as their centerpiece attraction.

The conceit here—which I will admit is kind of unique and a very Disney thing to try—is that the signature coaster of Paradise Pier, California Screamin', is a steel coaster designed to resemble a vintage wooden one. This allows it to have features that typically aren’t part of a woodie, like a vertical loop. Disney promotional materials described the concept as such:

Imagine a roller coaster modeled after the traditional wooden coasters of the 1920’s. Now add a launch that takes you from 0 to 55 miles per hour in under five seconds, a loop-de-loop around a glimmering silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head, over a mile of track reaching heights of 120 feet, and a 108-foot drop at 50 degrees — and you’ve got California Screamin’, the adrenaline rush of the century!

It’s a type of launched coaster in which linear induction motor (LIM) and linear synchronous motor (LSM) systems propel the coaster train from a dead stop up the lift hill using electromagnets. This to me is a disconnect. I think the steel-as-wood theming would have been more successful with a traditional lift hill. There’s something about that clackity-clackity-clack as you slowly ascend.

Paradise Pier opened with an assortment of carnival-style games called Games of the Boardwalk: Boardwalk Bowl, Dolphin Derby, San Joaquin Volley, Shore Shot, Angels in the Outfield, New Haul Fishery, and Cowhuenga Pass.

The original designs of these games and the shops next to them and were garish and completely over the top, just like much of the rest of the original Disney’s California Adventure. A re-themed Games of the Boardwalk opened in April of 2009 featuring Disney/Pixar characters: Goofy About Fishin’, Bullseye Stallion Stampede, Casey at the Bat, and Dumbo Bucket Brigade.

Getting into the Swing of Things

DCA opened with a fairly standard, off-the-shelf swing ride called the Orange Stinger. Still offered as the Zierer Wave Swinger, it was customized by the Imagineers and enclosed in a giant peeled orange. And why the “stinger” in the name? Because when you got on board you were supposed to be a bee. The seats were fashioned as bumble bees complete with cute little stingers, and the sound of buzzing bees accompanied your journey. I’m not sure what bees have to do with oranges (although initially the swings featured an orange aroma which was deactivated when it was found to attract actual bees). Disney described the ride like this:

Climb into one of the friendly bumblebee cars and buzz off on your swing-ride journey inside this huge, four-story-high California Orange. It even smells like oranges!

I don’t know why they felt the need to add a swing ride to the park, since nearby Knott’s Berry Farm has had their own Wave Swinger since 1987. You can find them all over the world.

The Orange Stinger reopened on May 28, 2010 as Silly Symphony Swings. I had ridden the prior incarnation of it maybe once. But this redesign is, to my thinking, a total success. First of all, the turn of the century Victorian stylings begun with Toy Story Midway Mania! work very well here. Similar swing rides were popular at amusement parks during that era (the Zierer Wave Swinger is a revival of the format).

Second, there’s a story for the attraction and a connection to Disney IP now. The Silly Symphonies were a series of 75 animated shorts made by Walt Disney Productions between 1929 and 1939, and they demonstrated the potential of synchronized sound in cartoons. Although not part of that series, The Band Concert (1935) provides the theme for the swings. In that short, Mickey Mouse is a symphony bandleader being foiled by Donald Duck (a flute player) when a cyclone hits before a performance of "The William Tell Overture." This is the reason that guests get swept up into the air, and the same music plays for the duration of each swing cycle.

From Golden Dreams to Under the Sea

On June 11, 2010 a new outdoor nighttime show called World of Color debuted. Using sophisticated digital projection systems, synchronized sound, and complex water fountain effects, it’s essentially the next generation of Disneyland’s Fantasmic show.

The show required redevelopment of the edge of the lagoon in the center of Paradise Pier into a viewing area which was called the Paradise Park amphitheater area.

When DCA opened in 2001, just across from the Paradise Lagoon sat a theater attraction called Golden Dreams. This was a 22 minute, 70mm movie about the various people who have been coming to California since the time of the Spanish.

If the Golden Dreams entrance looks familiar, that’s because it’s based on the rotunda at The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Beaux-Arts style structure was erected for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It was originally built of plaster and cloth fiber and intended to be temporary. During the 1960s it was rebuilt in concrete and its restoration was completed in the mid-1970s. The rotunda is still there today.

Outside the plain warehouse-like building that housed the theater was a mural providing a preview of the show’s storyline. To the left is Queen Califia for which the state of California is named. During the show, Califia was an animatronic statue who came to life and narrated the proceedings. She had the face and voice of Whoopi Goldberg (who was later named a Disney Legend in 2017).

Golden Dreams was the kind of uplifting, “history light” presentation that Disney developed for The American Adventure at Epcot in the late 1970s (in that show, Mark Twain hangs out with Benjamin Franklin; it’s that’s kind of thing). Challenges and Triumphs etc. The show was a whitewash of edutainment, and it wasn’t very popular either. Most California Adventure guests watched it only once.

The part of the park that was home to Golden Dreams was originally known as Bay Area, a sort of sub-area of the larger land Golden State. As such, the storefronts and restrooms just across the way are rendered in the late 1800s Queen Anne style of San Francisco’s famous “painted ladies”, particularly the houses located in the Lower Haight district.

Golden Dreams last ran on Sunday, September 7, 2008. Its large show building was razed the following summer. What replaced it two years later was a themed façade that, just like the Victorian makeover of Paradise Pier, harkens back to the seaside boardwalks of the turn of the century.

These resort areas, whether along the California coast, sitting on the Great Lakes, or dotting the Eastern Seaboard from New England to Florida, were lavish constructions that flourished during the first couple decades of the twentieth century. Today, the few boardwalks which still stand are faint shadows of their former glory or, like Cedar Point, have been transformed into contemporary theme parks.

Again, we return to the notion that successful theming—pretty much by definition—is deeply and inexorably tied to nostalgia for some long forgotten (or not quite ever existed) imaginary past. If the Disney Imagineers were not going to abandon the idea of Paradise Pier altogether (which I mentioned above would be too expensive to remove) then dialing into the boardwalk vibes of the early twentieth century makes perfect sense.

Disney fans had been waiting for some kind of dark ride attraction based on The Little Mermaid (1989) for almost 30 years. The loose animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale was a massive hit. And also a sing-along one (the movie won Academy Awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song for "Under the Sea"). It basically started the famed Disney Renaissance single-handedly.

The Little Mermaid - Ariel's Undersea Adventure opened on on June 3, 2011. Like the best Disney dark ride attractions, it’s reductive but totally effective. As I describe in my article for The International Journal of the Image, "From Image as Place to Image as Space: Pinocchio, Pirates, and the Spatial Philosophy of the Multiplane Camera," the actual plot of a film is discarded by the designers in favor of a series of evocative moments linked together with music and movements of lyrics and/or dialog. You don’t have to have seen the movie to enjoy the ride (though it certainly helps to have nostalgia for the songs).

The imagineers are known for recycling certain elements from retired attractions. Famously, all the animatronics were salvaged when American Sings (1974–1988) was closed and were reincarnated within Splash Mountain a year later. Here the statue of King Triton on the top of the show building is actually from the water fountains of Triton’s Garden (1996–2008) at the entrance to Tomorrowland in Disneyland.

Also recycled was the rotunda from Golden Dreams.

Commentators at the time observed that the state of California has a different permitting process for new construction projects versus retrofitting and remodeling projects. Which means that retaining the rotunda and portions of the entrance area means that Disney could file for the project permits in the less expensive category. I suppose this is an incentive to reuse site materials and parts of the original structure.

Thankfully, and in complete contrast with how the original California Adventure park was conceived and executed, Disney did not spare any expense or forego any detail with this new show building.

None of this is required to sustain the theme of the attraction, but it certainly adds to the grandeur of it.

The “Undersea Kingdom” aesthetic is something that was common at the turn of the century amusement areas at Coney Island, New York, especially Luna Park.

Here the design is a bit cleaner, but the reference is clear if you’re familiar with the history.

Again, details, details everywhere. The exterior queue is just as elaborate as the show building.

The imagineers are famous for embedding “Hidden Mickeys” of three circles throughout their environments and attractions. Some are subtle, some are obvious. There is some debate over whether the Mickey Ears design as deliberately incorporated into design details actually counts as a “Hidden” Mickey. Either way, this wrought iron along the queue is a nice touch.

Subtle underwater notes are everywhere. Here at the entrance to the interior queue the window glass frames are irregular and suggest floating seaweed.

This air ventilation grill incorporates a tiny clamshell patten.

Elaborate light fixtures again suggest seaweed.

The support poles of the brass queue rails are capped with sea urchins.

Colorful Spanish tile designs put us “under the sea” as we prepare to board the attraction.

Ariel's Undersea Adventure runs on a more advanced iteration of Disney’s patented Omnimover system. This unique, continuously moving ride system was first developed for Adventure Thru Inner Space (1967–1985) in DIsneyland’s Tomorrowland, and then, beginning in 1969, was most famously used for The Haunted Mansion “Doombuggies” at Disneyland and around the world. Here the vehicles have been appropriately rendered as colorful clamshells.

Across the way, little has changed at DCA’s “Little San Francisco.” The corner location was converted into a Little Mermaid gift shop, and the buildings have been repainted, but that appears to be it.

A Different Day in Paradise

As I’ve mentioned before, the original 2001 design of California Adventure was—more than anything else—extremely tacky. Many parts of the park lacked effective theming, or when there was a theme, it was executed in the most obnoxious, loud, late-90s way possible. This particular northwest corner of the park, while technically part of Paradise Pier, was designed to evoke the historic Route 66 (as Cars Land would much later, and far more effectively).

Pizza Oom Mow Mow carried a Tropical / Surfing theme, with some Hawaiian and tiki motifs. But again, the emphasis was on loud and tacky. Lots of cheap props, like lifebuoys and road signs. If you’re tacking up “SPEED LIMIT 30 MILES” and “BEACH ST” then let’s face it, the designers are both out of ideas and out of budget. And surfboards. Lots of surfboards, in case you missed the theme. The menus are on surfboards. The tables are surfboards. Surf, Surf, Surf. And pizza.

On the back wall at the far left was a surfboard hanging all by itself, adorned with signatures of designers who worked on the California Adventure project.

Before the park opened, this particular surfboard was on display at the California Adventure Preview Center (1999–2000). Notice the signature above at the upper right, “Burke.” This is not an Imagineer autograph. Where the board was placed on the wall at the Preview Center was not terribly difficult to reach. I was visiting Disneyland one day with a group of high school friends, and we noticed this was a fun opportunity for a prank. One friend provided the makeup pencil, and another supplied the autograph. So there you have it.

This corner of California Adventure was also once home to various tributes to Roadside Americana or what professor types call novelty (memetic) architecture. This was a trend which began early in the twentieth century—wildly exaggerated structures designed to grab the attention of passing motorists. Architecture historian Jim Heimann calls this movement California Crazy. The donut shop shaped like a giant donut. A Dutch bakery as a windmill. Or a dinosaur selling sunglasses. Thus (the extinct) Dinosaur Jack’s Sunglass Shack pictured here speaks exactly for itself.

That same “crazy” California boom was when the billboard industry established itself. Many of these were as zany as the architecture they sat alongside. This tacky Corn Dog Castle along with the Dinosaur Jack and Pizza Oom Mow Mow all closed in the fall of 2010.

Replacing that entire corner of DCA is Paradise Gardens Park, which was technically split off from Paradise Pier. The wild mouse roller coaster just adjacent to the northeast opened in 2001 as Mulholland Madness and was just as tacky as the rest of the park. A re-themed Goofy's Sky School coaster opened on July 1, 2011 along with the gardens park area and two reimagined restaurants.

Paradise Gardens Park also includes Golden Zephyr, Jumpin’ Jellyfish, and the aforementioned Silly Symphony Swings and The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure.

One thing that California Adventure desperately needed for years was areas dedicated to sitting in the shade, and Paradise Gardens Park delivers wonderfully Not only is it lushly landscaped, but the park’s Paradise Garden Bandstand serves as a prime location for live music and the entire area extended the Victorian stylings begun with Toy Story Midway Mania!

Pizza Oom Mow Mow reopened as Boardwalk Pizza & Pasta.

Paradise Garden Grill was formerly Burger Invasion Hosted by McDonald’s, a building so ugly that apparently I didn’t even photograph in 2007 or 2008. Once again the well-designed, period-accurate signage on the exteriors of both restaurants sport typefaces from Letterhead Fonts.

Every little detail in this park is as well considered as in Main Street USA across the way at Disneyland. The architecture is appropriately Victorian gingerbread. Paint treatments are lively in hue yet subdued in value, and all the trims are lined with popcorn lights.

These metal mansard roof treatments are a nice touch.

Thoughtful, historic uses of wrought iron for signage throughout, along with Letterhead Fonts typeface designs. However inside the park’s restrooms there’s a surprise.

The restroom interiors were never remodeled. Here we have tile work that suggests the original Route 66 motif of this “California Crazy” corner of DCA.

Even the floor has a highway on it.

You’d never know it from the elegant signage outside. I don’t know if this was just a budgeting oversight and that Disney will remodel the interiors eventually, or if it’s an intentional nod to the original incarnation of the land. The imagineers are known for recycling elements of extinct attractions or areas, but this is far more blatant.

From Paradise to Pixar

The final phase of this area’s transformation began with the opening of Pixar Pier in 2018. Which meant saying goodbye to the original Paradise Pier signage and lettering set in ITC Benguiat designed by master typographer and illustrator Ed Benguiat.

The new signage features the every reliable Imagineering favorite typo foundry, Letterhead Fonts. And there has been a fair amount of structural and color work done to the original buildings. There’s no way around it, the original pier looked cheap. And the historical ties to classic boardwalks might have been intended but was lazily executed.

This time around it’s clear that the designers did their homework, and referenced actual examples like Luna Park at Coney Island. Owning to the Orientalism which was in fashion at the time, many of these boardwalk parks featured minarets and onion domes with festive flags and bunting.

The slow, phased buildout that began back in 2007 really paid off, in that it gave the Imagineers time to make considered choices. There was no rush to the finish line; they’d complete the overhaul section by section, making sure that each new phase was consistent with the prior ones.

But there are still playful elements that link the new pier design to Pixar’s lore. Atop the entrance sign is an animatronic Luxo Jr. which is the mascot of the animation studio. Based on a Luxo ASA Norwegian lamp, Luxo Jr. and Sr. were the stars of Pixar’s first computer animated short Luxo Jr. (1986).

In a stroke of good luck, the old pier and the new have the same initials, meaning that any existing monogram work throughout the land could remain.

Note that the back to back P’s are in the original Benguiat typeface and not a Letterhead Fonts one.

To the left as you enter Pixar Pier is Knick's Knacks. This gift shop is named for Knick, cousin of Frosty the Snowman, from Pixar's fifth short film, Knick Knack (1989). “Nome Sweet Nome, Alaska” is a nice touch.

Across the way to the right is the Lamplight Lounge.

This is another reference to Luxo Jr. and you can see the lamp with the small ball from the animated short in several different guises, here in stained glass.

Above the walkway between these two buildings is a new awning structure. If you look carefully, there are laser cut metal silhouettes of every single character that has ever appeared in a Pixar film.

The ITC Benguiat on the reverse of the entrance sign has also replaced with a face from Letterhead Fonts reminding guests that “Adventure Is Out There!”

The rest of Paradise Pier received a full Pixar makeover too, effectively stripping all of the “California” boardwalk elements away.

The Incredibles (2004) was a huge hit movie for Pixar, so it was a natural IP to bring to DCA. California Screamin' closed on January 8, 2018 and reopened as the Incredicoaster on June 23 as a natural tie-in with the premiere of Incredibles 2 that same month. To me the design of the queue area and coaster station is kind of obnoxious. It looks like a contemporary burger chain.

This is a noted clash with both the rest of the pier buildings at the entrance and with the Victorian gingerbread of Toy Story Midway Mania! right next door. So it’s jarring for me. Despite the terrible paint job, there is one nice touch however. Notice the exaggerated roof.

The house where the Parrs reside in the sequel film is a spectacular, exaggerated mid-century modernist palace. It looks like a Bond villain’s lair. Just lovely. The Incredicoaster station is based on the sharp, elongated A-frame building. I just wish they had kept the material design of the original rather than repainting everything to look like In-N-Out Burger.

The A-frame was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the design of tiki bars and restaurants.

Midway Mania fits even better now that the rest of the pier has been given a victorian touch. The Mickey Mouse ears have also been removed from the coaster loop.

The designers even reevaluated color choices that were made when Mania opened. Compared with the photo at the top of this post (sort of pink and orange on pink and orange) there is now a playful yet high contrast treatment that makes the sign far more readable.

Games of the Boardwalk became Games of Pixar Pier the same day the Incredicoaster opened.

The façades are all perfectly Victorian now, and all the games are themed to Pixar characters. I suppose if we have to have carnival games at a Disney park, this is the best they’re going to get.

It’s an opportunity for smaller supporting characters to have their moment, like Bullseye, Jessica’s horse from Toy Story 2. Curiously, this game remains unchanged from the Games of the Boardwalk 2009 makeover. The other three became La Luna Star Catcher (La Luna, 2011), WALL·E Space Race (WALL·E, 2008), and Heimlich's Candy Corn Toss (A Bug's Life, 1998).

Pixar Promenade is a meet and greet area for Pixar characters. The design is just fantastic. It looks just like the original 1908 architecture I found at Lakeside Park in Denver, Colorado.

The retail locations have all been redesigned and renamed as well. Bing Bong's Sweet Stuff honors Riley Andersen’s imaginary friend—a pink elephant—from Inside Out (2015).

The attraction that’s undergone the most changes over the years has been the park’s Ferris wheel, and with the opening of Pixar Pier it’s hopefully reached its final state. Disney promotional literature had this to say about the original version, the Sun Wheel:

Modeled after Coney Island’s 1927 “Wonder Wheel,” Paradise Pier’s Sun Wheel takes Guests on a Ferris wheel-ride high above Disney’s California Adventure park. You can play it a bit safer by riding one of the cool stationary gondolas; or for a real thrill, climb into one of the purple-and-orange gondolas, which ride on interior rails so they slide inward and outward with the centrifugal force of the wheel’s rotational movement!

That isn’t just PR—the Sun Wheel is actually a pretty close copy of the historic Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. Built in 1920, it was named an Official New York City Landmark in 1989. You can still ride it today.

With the development of the Paradise Park amphitheater area in 2008, the Imagineers decided to redesign what would essentially serve as a massive backdrop for World of Color. The wheel was repainted in Mickey’s classic red, yellow, black, and white colors and his face replaced the sun as the centerpiece. Note that it’s the “original Mickey” design from the 1920s and 1930s—not modern Mickey Mouse—so it’s a better fit both for World of Color and the boardwalk setting. It became Mickey’s Fun Wheel in May of 2009 and water show debuted the following year.

At last, the wheel has became the Pixar Pal-A-Round with the opening of Pixar Pier. Particularly nice is the architectural work at the entrance, which is very Luna Park.

The final attraction to be remodeled for Pixar Pier was Jessie's Critter Carousel, which opened on April 5, 2019. Formerly King Triton’s Carousel of the Sea, it had a theme tied to The Little Mermaid. This was a total disconnect from day one—a seaside amusement park setting with no Disney characters in sight, except for this single carousel attraction. As befitting the original DCA it was also cheap and tacky. Now Jessie the cowgirl, first introduced in 1999’s Toy Story 2, has taken over, unifying the new pier with the Pixar motif.

Lastly, there’s a large gate next to Boardwalk Pizza & Pasta. This is what it looked like for the park’s first seventeen years or so. It’s good, but not great.

With all due respect and deference to Ed Benguait, I think the new Pixar Pier lettering makes for a superior mark. The incorporation of the ball from the Luxo Jr. short is great.

This was a long post, but a great way to close out the year. I’ll go shorter next time.

Continued in Part 8.

Technical Note on Image Sizes*