Bringing out the big guns.

Twice now Disney has sent out prominent Company figureheads to defend the changes being made to "it's a small world." These people are high-ranking individuals that, over the years, Disney fans have come to respect due to their impact on the Walt Disney Company. In open letters sent to Disney fan site LaughingPlace.com, Imagineer Marty Sklar and Disney Archivist Dave Smith have both come out to try to hush the backlash Disney has received from the fan community surrounding the changes being made to "it's a small world."

Both of these Disney legends have tried, and failed, to persuade fans that these changes are okay by reminding us that Walt Disney was the biggest proponent of change in his Magic Kingdom.


MARTY SKLAR

We all agree that “It’s A Small World” is a Disney classic. But the greatest “change agent” who ever walked down Main Street at Disneyland was Walt himself. In fact, the park had not been open 24 hours when Walt began to “plus” Disneyland, and he never stopped. Having started my Disney career at Disneyland one month before the park opened in 1955, I can cite countless examples.

DAVE SMITH

To remind those who are complaining that Walt Disney never intended Disneyland to be static. To a reporter when Disneyland opened he said, "Disneyland will never be completed; it will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world." He continued those thoughts to Pete Martin who was working on his biography, saying that Disneyland is "something that will never be finished. Something I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to. It's alive. It will be a live, breathing thing that will need change. A picture is a thing, once you wrap it up and turn it over to Technicolor you're through. The one I wrapped up a few weeks ago, it's gone, I can't touch it. I wanted something alive, something that could grow, something I could keep plussing with ideas; the Park is that.

The point these big guns are missing is that this has never been an effort to end change, but change must be appropriate to theme - something that Walt Disney worked so hard to establish, strengthen, and maintain at his park.

The question that Marty Sklar and Dave Smith have been unable to adequately answer is how will Disney characters strengthen the theme of "it's a small world"?

How will famous animated characters strengthen the message of world peace that the anonymous, united Children of the World are signing?

How will Stitch and Cinderella make this prayer for peace more clear and more relevant to today's audiences?


What do you say, Marty? Dave? Anybody?