“There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow': Historic Memory and Gender in Walt Disney's “Carousel of Progress”

Abstract

The Disney corporation has been a major purveyor of popular history throughout the twentieth century. From cartoons to television shows, feature films to amusement parks, Disney has shaped and reshaped the presentation of the past for an audience of millions. With the creation of enormously successful amusement parks in California and Florida, Disney history became part of tourist itineraries throughout the world. Disney's interpretations of history, however, are not static. A look at one attraction in particular, the Carousel of Progress, suggests how Disney has transformed the presentation of the history of women and the family over the past thirty years. Disney's of family life reflects a persistent nostalgia for a pleasant, highly controlled past and an equally well ordered future, in the context of an ever-changing The Carousel of Progress is a Disney stage attraction that uses audio-animatronic robots to portray the evolution of technology in the American home. The Disney corporation claims that this show has entertained more viewers than any other theatrical presentation in world history (Bierman 223). Since its introduction as a General Electric-sponsored attraction at the 1964 New York World's Fair, the show moved to Disneyland in California, and then in 1975, to Disney World in Florida. An examination of four versions of the Carousel from 1967 to 1995 indicates how history has been interpreted and reinterpreted by Disney to tens of millions of people.' A comparison of each act of the play, looking particularly at the depiction of gender roles, should demonstrate not so much how gender roles have actually changed, but rather how those changes have been constructed as a kind of collective memory of the history of women and the family during the twentieth century. The Carousel is a combination play, advertisement, and amusement park ride. The audience sits in seats that rotate around a stage to view an affluent white robot family in four different eras: the pre-electric turn of the century, the 1920s, the 1940s, and the most up-to-the-minute present. The setting is the kitchen and its ever-improving wonders, with side glances at other parts of the house. At the end of each act, a catchy musical refrain (There's a great big beautiful tomorrow...) builds while the seats rotate to the next scene and the next historical era. Family life has of course transformed dramatically during the course of the last century. Perhaps most significantly, women have entered the paid force in droves; at the same time, the rise in divorce and single-parent households has made the two-parent family, with a full-time mother at home, anomalous, representing at best a tiny proportion of current American families.2 Equally buffeted by change has been the nature of historiography since 1964, particularly as the disciplines of women's history and family history have developed. These conceptual approaches barely existed when the Carousel first turned. For example, a topic like the evolution of domestic technology has been subject to increasingly sophisticated analysis, much of it suggesting that labor saving devices don't always save (Cowan, Strasser). Hence, a comparison of different versions of the play might suggest the degree to which social change, or at least its historiography, has influenced Disney's construction of the past.3 The Disney corporation has enormous influence on the historical consciousness of popular culture in the United States (Watts). As Michael Wallace has suggested, Walt Disney has taught people more history, in a more memorable way, than they ever learned in school... (158). The Carousel of Progress is a case in point. During the show's first two decades, an estimated 100 million people sat in the revolving chairs to view the products of General Electric and the shifting depictions of the evolution of family life.4 The current venue for the show-Disney World in Orlando, Florida-is the world's top tourist destination, hosting over 33 million people a year (Jackson, 99). …