#eric avila

From fashion to pop culture, the series examines how through decades America’s style and iconic moments reflected the country’s political and social climate. Stars: Eric Avila, Jeffrey Banks, Todd Boyd

Home movie at Disneyland shot in 1956, a year after the theme park opened. Transferred to HD by Jeff Altman, although originally shot by his grandfather on 16mm.

I've been reading about urban/suburban/post-suburban spaces, specifically in regards to Orange County. Here's a snippet from "Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Film Noir, Disneyland, and the Cold War (Sub)Urban Imaginery" by Eric Avila.

Disneyland is a complex cultural phenomenon, and there are other aspects of the theme park that underscore its significance to the transformation of urban culture and society at mid-century. Nonetheless, when viewed comparatively alongside simultaneous cultural developments, the theme park illustrates a broader cultural transformation that accompanied the changing configuration of the postwar American city. In its spatial organization, as well as in its thematic emphases*, Disneyland asserted a repudiation of the noir sensibility that captivated the American public at the outset of the postwar period. By the mid-1950s, as the heyday of film noir began to wane, a new set of film genres won favor over the public--science fiction, musicals westerns--that not only upheld traditional models of social order but also delivered the kind of happy endings that were absent from film noir. Disneyland appeared at this cultural moment, delivering its own happy ending to the mid-century transformation of urban life, at least for those who acquired the privileges and comforts of suburban home ownership. As film noir rendered its obituary for the modern city and its new mass culture, Disneyland heralded a new spatial culture that stressed order without complexity, pleasure without danger, and sociability without diversity.

*Avila describes Disneyland's spatial order as a method of figurative distinction between suburban whiteness and racial otherness. For example, Frontierland was described by publicity materials as "a land of hostile Indians and straight shooting pioneers." Adventureland included stereotypes of African Americans as it beckoned visitors to "the sound of native chants and tom-tom drums," where the Jungle Cruise featured "wild animals and native savages." The racial dimensions of the Disneyland experience surfaced where images of black and Indians prevailed but also where such images did not appear.

Main Street, USA, promoted as "everybody's hometown"...reiterated Disney's populist idealization of a WASP folk. Richard Hofstaeder noted in the Age of Reform the latent xenophobia within the populist sensibility, which, although seeking to maintain "the primary contacts of country and village life" also cherished a vision of "an ethnically more homogeneous nation." That vision guided the design of Main Street, USA, where the absence of mammies, Indians, and savages reified Disney's racialized and deeply nostalgic vision of the American "folk."