You’ve probably heard about a group of people called the “Disney Adults.”  A Disney Adult is a super fan of anything and everything made by the Walt Disney Company, as well as someone who outwardly expresses their fanhood to world.  The reason some people have singled out this group by giving them a label is because a large part of what the Disney Company produces is primarily meant for younger audiences, and a Disney Adult seems to be out of line with the target audience for their products.  To outsiders, seeing this group expressing themselves through their Disney fandom comes across as bizarre behavior, making a lot of them feel like there is something wrong with Disney Adults.  But, being a Disney Adult is not any different than most other fan communities out there.  One of the reasons it seems that Disney Adults are being singled out and in some cases ridiculed is just because of the sheer enormous reach that the Disney Company has on our culture.  In reality, fan culture has reached maximum level within human culture in general, built up over decades of blockbuster entertainment in film, television and music and spread even further throw the internet.  The rise of the Disney Adult community has been a result of this new era of pop culture being brought to the mainstream and having fans brought together through online spaces.  A lot of people who grew up with certain forms of entertainment are more and more likely to retain that fanhood well into their adult years and beyond.  That’s why you see more people these days gleefully showing off their identity as a fan.  But there are many critics who look at this as something insidious, particularly with communities like Disney Adults, who outsiders think are behaving abnormally for someone their age.  Like all fan communities there are good and bad people among the Disney Adults, but the fact that some people find the very idea of there being a community like that at all being a negative is absolutely a very closed minded way at looking at it.

I should stress this from the outset that I myself would probably fall under the Disney Adult category.  Disney Animation was the first thing that I ever latched onto as a kid, and it’s followed me throughout my life all the way into adulthood.  If you have been following this blog over the years, you can tell that it still fills a big part of my life, given my reports from the D23 events in Anaheim and my many editorials, reviews, and Top Ten Lists based around the House of Mouse.  But, as I’ve grown older, I’ve also let in a lot more influences enter my life from all corners of cinema.  My favorite film isn’t even a Disney film anymore, but rather one made by Columbia Pictures; that being Lawrence of Arabia (1962).  But, even as I’ve branched out, Disney still holds a special place for me.  How that translates into me Disney Adult?  Well, my encyclopedic knowledge of the Disney Company’s history is extensive, and I do exceptionally well with Disney based trivia.  I’m also have every Disney and Pixar Animation film in my home video collection; and I’ve repurchased many of those same titles with every format.  I’m also a Disneyland pass-holder and a D23 club member, and I attend many Disney related events in the Los Angeles area, including the already mentioned Expos.  But, where is my bar in Disney fandom.  I’ll confess I do have blind spots when it comes to the company’s history.  I know almost nothing about most of the Disney Channel Original Movie library, nor do I watch any of the programming on that network as well.  I also am not afraid to call Disney out when they do something that I don’t like, such as their heavy reliance on remakes and sequels in recent years to cash in on nostalgia, as well as some of their anti-labor practices, especially towards their theme park employees.  I’m also a fan that doesn’t outwardly show off their fanhood.  I don’t wear mouse ears when I’m in the parks and I only own a couple of T-Shirts with Mickey Mouse on them, which I also hardly ever wear.  I’m subtle with my fandom, but I also don’t look down on those who choose to be more outwardly expressive with their love of Disney.

When I visit Disneyland, I do see the phenomenon of Disney Adults playing out in front of me.  There are a lot of adults who dress head to toe in Disney gear, and many are doing so alongside their children as a fun little thing they bond over, but there are adults without children who do it too.  And these are adults of all age types getting deep into their fanhood.  I’ll see people as young as college age all the way to seniors in their mobile scooters proudly wearing their Mickey Ears and lining up to collect that newly released souvenir popcorn bucket.  I’ll see just as many enthusiastic fans of all ages at club events as well, especially at D23.  And there is variety in the Disney Adult community, with other fandoms now being added to the mix like Star Wars and Marvel.  People of all walks of life: race, gender, sexuality, you name it, Disney Adults is a big tent community.  Are there bad apples in the group?  Of course, just like any other.  I’ve read accounts from former Disney Parks employees that they’ve had some bad encounters from Annual Pass Holders who felt entitled to special treatment and often took their frustrations out on them.  Internally, these bad apple park guests have been dubbed by some parks cast members as “Pass-holes.” Also, there is a part of the fandom that unfairly uses their privilege as a pass-holder or member to horde special event merchandise, making them unavailable to the casual buyers, and some even do this as a means of re-selling those souvenirs on eBay or other online marketplaces.  But these are less fans and more opportunists than anything, often taking advantage of fans who are less privileged than they are.  This also gets into another downside of this fandom, which is that some will become too deeply involved in this kind of fan culture, and it will cause them to spend outside their means, which is where the predatory practices of the re-sellers becomes a major problem.  And this goes to another issue that people can have with Disney, even amongst fans.  Disney, like most other corporations, wants to milk as much money out of their customers as possible, and that’s why they don’t put much effort into the oversight of this re-seller market and in some cases fan the flames of the situation by creating false scarcity.  This isn’t indicative of the fandom as a whole, but it does show that there are indeed some problems that need to be addressed, amongst fans and also with Disney itself.

To outsider observers, being Disney Adults seems to come across as a bit like a cult.  But, this is a very narrow view of what the community is actually like.  The bad apples aside, there is a lot of harmony and fun to be had when interacting with other fans, no matter the age group.  What a lot of people seem to mistake about the Disney Adult community is that they think this is Toxic fandom.  What I observe in circles at Disney events like D23 is the very opposite of toxic.  Everyone is open and welcoming in those spaces, and it’s a place that brings people together regardless of how strongly they feel about any given aspect of the Disney company.  This is honestly what most fan based meet-ups are like, from comic and anime conventions to simple table top game groups at your local comic book and hobby store.  True fandoms want to bring more people into their orbit and you’ll find so many people eager to share their time with outsiders and hopefully find common ground.  When a fandom turns toxic is when they practice gate-keeping.  Beware any fan who tells you that you have to follow certain rigid rules or believe the way they do in order to be considered a true fan.  There are the odd Disney Adult who looks down on others because they don’t have the same fan bone fides as they do.  But this is a very, very tiny minority of the people that I have encountered amongst the Disney Adult community.  Some of the best discussions I’ve had at D23 were when we were all just waiting in line to get in.  I get to share all my thoughts about what I liked and disliked from Disney in the last couple years, and the people I shared that with did the same, and never once do we ever shame each other for thinking differently.  Unfortunately, if you live in an always online world where toxic fandom seems to reign, these kinds of positive conversations never get to be seen, and it leads many so-called “fans” to position themselves as being authority on what constitutes a good and bad fan.  This is where the idea of Disney Adults being a toxic group of cult like man-children has taken fruit, from these online spaces that feed on negativity, and pass judgement from afar without looking at the community from a grounded point of view.

Disney Adults are not the first to face this kind of scrutiny from critics.  Many years prior, another devoted fanbase was also looked at as being abnormal.  They were called Trekkies; a term referring to hardcore fans of the beloved sci-fi franchise Star Trek.  Star Trek was a mainstream hit television series from the 60’s that everyone was familiar with, but over the years it’s fanbase developed into something far more elaborate than what most other pop culture phenomenoms had seen.  Trekkies began to show off their fandom by appearing at fan conventions in costumes based on the show.  People were giving the Vulcan hand gesture to each other, and quoting lines like “Live long and prosper” in their everyday life.  Some even went as far as to learn the entirety of the Klingon language, and could converse with other Trek fans in that language fully if they wanted.  Back when the Trekkie community was beginning to become a larger presence in fan circles, many outsiders found a lot of this extreme fandom a little unsettling, believing that this was cultish behavior.  For a while, Trekkies were looked down upon.  A lot of critics would falsely assert that Trekkies were lonely and friendless, and probably virgins as well.  A famous Saturday Night Live sketch, in which Captain Kirk himself William Shatner appeared, had the actor speak in front of a group of Trekkies, telling them to all “Get a Life.”  This condescending attitude towards Trekkies changed over the years however as not just Star Trek fandom became more mainstream but also fan culture as a whole.  Now, people of all walks of life proudly declare themselves a Trekkie, including even some heads of state.  And fans of all sorts of other popular culture properties likewise freely express their love for the things they are drawn to.  It’s all part of the cultural shift over the last couple decades, where what was considered the lower artforms like comic books, TV shows, and video games are now getting more recognized as high art.  It’s no longer childish to be considered a fan.

But, some will still associate extreme expressions of fanhood with immaturity.  At the moment, the Disney Adult seems to be the type of fan that many people spotlight as the epitome of immaturity.  One complaint that I hear a lot is that many people consider adults without children visiting Disneyland as a sign of creepy behavior.  It follows the misconception that spaces like Disneyland are meant for families with children only.  Disneyland, nor any other theme park for that matter was never meant to be just for kids and their parents only.  Walt Disney himself scoffed at the assertion that his company only made stuff for children.  Walt intended for his movies and his theme parks to be for people of all ages; as he put it, “the young and the young at heart.”  The reason Disneyland exists today was mainly because he wanted to share in the fun with his own children, and not just watch them have all the fun on the rides.  That’s the great allure of all the best things that have come out of the Disney Company; they remain timeless, and you never grow out of it.  But the best thing that has come out of this multi-generational appeal is that the community of Disney Adults has grown out of it.  Just like Trekkies and many other fan communities, Disney Adults have found fun together through their own modes of fanhood.  At Disneyland, there are special fan organized events that have risen up over the years, such as Dapper Days where people dress up in retro, dapper style clothing when they visit the park.  Disney doesn’t put on these events, but they allow them to go on within their parks as long as the fans don’t break any park rules.  One such event, the annual Gay Days where LGBTQ Disney fans gather at the parks, became such a big deal each year that Disney itself embraced it and now they organize their own Pride Event in the park alongside the unofficial Gay Days that fans put on.  Sure, theme parks are a great place for families to vacation and have fun together, but adults who are there by themselves are just as deserving of having fun there too.

For a lot of adult fans of family friendly entertainment, a major reason they are drawn to these things is because of the way that it helps to soothe the soul.  For a lot of adults, these types of fandoms are an escape; a way of holding onto something they cherish at a time when life can be hard.  We work long hours and have to deal with the hardships of growing old and seeing a lot of the things that we took for granted suddenly turn into a problem.  When things like that happen, it becomes therapeutic to cuddle with a stuffed animal that you kept since childhood, or re-watch that cartoon you liked from years back that brings back warm memories.  It’s more than just finding comfort in nostalgia; it’s keeping a part of you grounded in the things that make you happy.  Sure, people can sometimes take nostalgia too far and become obsessive with it.  But for the most part, being a dedicated fan of something that was special to you in childhood is not a signifier of immaturity.  A person is not regressing into a childlike state just because they still like things from their childhood.  If anything, fandoms are showing a remarkable amount of complex ingenuity in how they go about showing  their fandom, particularly in lengths they go in contributing to the economy.  There are adults out there that are perfectly willing to spend lots of money shopping for toys on eBay that they remember having when they were young.  Also, a lot of toy companies cater just as much to adults as they do with children.  LEGO produces special lines of model sets just for the adult crowd alongside their ages 3 and up toy sets.  Also, the Funko company sees the majority of their sales coming from adult collectors for their vinyl figure dolls.  It’s a positive sign that the culture no longer looks down on fan communities but instead is actually finding ways to cater to them.  You will still see the occasional YouTube channel try to shame one fan base over the other as a means of stirring controversy as clickbait.  But, in general, adult fans of cartoons and the like are just as mature as any other group.  From CEOs who have action figures displayed in their office to a construction worker who spends their break time playing Pokemon, every adult has that little piece of their childhood they hold onto for comfort in their personal spaces.

So, while Disney Adults are currently finding themselves ridiculed by corners of the internet, they should not be discouraged from continuing to love the things they love.  If anything, they have been unfairly maligned for the perceived sins of the Disney Company itself.  Sure, Disney has it’s fair share of things to be scrutinized and condemned for in it’s history, but none of that should reflect back on the people who still consider themselves devoted fans.  A lot of these Disney Adults are aware of the bad things that happen in the orbit of the Disney Company, and you will find that a good many of them will be among the first to express their displeasure at what Disney has done.  It doesn’t make them any more or less a fan as a result.  Disney Adults are not naïve people, nor are any other fan communities like the Trekkies or several others.  I’ve seen it myself as a Disney Adult, with Parks fans in particular always being suspicious whenever a ride gets replaced at Disneyland or any of the other theme parks.  What I don’t see in the Disney Adult fan base is immaturity.  If anything, there is actually a greater showing of sophistication coming out of the Disney Adult community than I have seen with most other fandoms.  Disney Adults are well informed and active, often showcasing a wealth of knowledge about the entertainment industry as a whole, framed through the lens of Disney.  With my own positive experience within this fan community, it has allowed me to avoid judging other fandoms that I am not a part of harshly.  I am far from being a devoted fan of the Star Trek franchise and will probably never become a Trekkie myself, but I would never begrudge anyone who was one themselves.  In fact, I actually do admire the Trekkie community itself, even as I don’t understand it.  And that’s what fan culture as a whole should be; free of tribalism.  Even when we don’t belong to a certain fan community we should never look down and shame anybody who does belong.  There are so many worthwhile fandoms to be a part of, and in many cases you might find a community that actually helps to make your life better as a whole.  I’ve been a fan of Disney since childhood, and it’s given me a great many memories to cherish, like my first visit to the Disney Studio Lot in Burbank when I was 12, or the many times I’ve gone to the D23 Expo and met other fans just like me.  The best part of fan communities is finding that you are not alone and that there are many people out there who will share that enthusiasm with you.  So, this Disney Adult hopes to convince many of you out there reading this that you should be proud of the things you love, even the stuff that makes you come off as a little childish.

On July 17, 1955, the gates were opened to a place that would change the world of entertainment forever.  After a full year of construction and over $17 million in costs (over $200 million adjusted for inflation) the happiest place on Earth known as Disneyland was ready to meet the world.  In the 70 years since that day, the theme park industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry that has been not just been a boon for tourism and leisure, but also a place to showcase new technological advancements.  Nestled in a Southern Californian suburb called Anaheim, Disneyland may no longer hold the title of the world’s most visited theme park (which is held by Disneyland’s Florida based equivalent Walt Disney World), but it still stands out as a trailblazer and trendsetter in the parks industry.  The Disney company not only looks at the original park as a proving ground for the layouts and implementation of all of the worldwide theme parks they have created, but nearly all other theme parks out there also take a page from the Disneyland textbook.  But, even with all that success, Disneyland was not a success overnight.  It took several years for the park to finally recoup it’s costs, and it almost went under in it’s opening months. The survival of the park is a testament to Walt Disney’s original intent for vision.  In his own words, “As long as there is imagination left in the world, Disneyland will never be finished.”  The park has evolved over the years, replacing outdated attractions with new cutting edge experiences, and in 70 years they have managed to make use of every inch of those 63 original acres of land, and even after all this time they are still not done.  What looked at the time to be Walt Disney’s greatest gamble has turned into his greatest achievement, and perhaps the greatest gift he left for the world in his lifetime.  Of course, beyond just being any old amusement park, Disneyland brought the art of cinema to life, as Walt Disney used his showmanship skills to telling stories in a new way that allowed all of us to visit to actual be a part of the adventure.

Of course Walt Disney didn’t invent the idea of theme parks altogether.  Amusement parks had long been a staple of American culture, dating back to the turn of the century.  The Grand Expositions, including the one held in Chicago in 1893, became these extravagant playgrounds for visitors of all ages, as well as places to demonstrate cutting edge technology.  In the early 20th century, new attractions like the roller coaster started to be become staples of these amusement parks.  While Walt Disney was starting up his fledgling studio in early Hollywood, Californians were frequently going to the beachfront piers, where roller coasters and Ferris wheels were built over the water.  One of the most famous of these, the Santa Monica Pier still operates today, though the original wooden coaster has long been replaced by a newer steel coaster.  Similar parks of that era like Coney Island in New York and Kennywood in Pittsburgh have also withstood the test of time.  But, there were a few specific inspirations that fed into Walt Disney’s imagination when he first conceived of his own park.  One was a trip he made to the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark.  On his trip there, he was stunned by the way that the gardens incorporated it’s rides and attractions around carefully cultivated landscaping; a far cry from the carnival atmosphere of the amusement parks in America.  The second inspiration was Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  The large green space that lies just south of the city of Burbank, where the Disney Studios is located, is nestled on the slopes of Mt. Lee, the mountain that’s home to the Hollywood Sign.  In addition to numerous hiking trails and the Los Angeles Zoo, the park is also home to a now century old carousel.  Walt would frequently bring his two daughters to the park and watch them ride on the carousel.  Walt stated in interviews that while he was happy to see his daughters having fun in the park, he also found that he was bored just sitting on a nearby bench watching them have all the fun.  This prompted him to dream of a place where both the kids and the adults could have fun together.  Now, what Walt was dreaming of making was not impossible to make a reality; but was he the right person to do it.  He was a movie maker; what did he know about how to build theme park?  But as the world would soon learn, theme parks had a lot to learn from him.

At first, Walt Disney looked to build the park in the strip of land between his Burbank studio and the nearby Los Angeles River.  However, it became very evident right away that the land itself would’ve been too small for what Walt Disney had in mind.  Instead, Disney looked across the entire Los Angeles metro area for a plot of land big enough for his park.  He found that piece of land 40 miles away in Anaheim, where an orange grove was being put up for sale by the Dominguez family that owned and operated it for many years.  The grove was just in the right spot, with the construction of what would be the Santa Ana Freeway passing just north of the property.  The land was also big enough for future expansion and a colossal parking lot.  Though it undoubtedly made Walt’s brother Roy nervous, given that he was in charge of all the company’s finances, he nevertheless did what he could to make his brother’s dreams a reality.  The Dominguez farm was purchased and Walt was ready to build.  But he needed something to help get the banks behind his proposal.  Thankfully, being in charge of an animation studio was a great benefit to Walt because he had some of the greatest artists in the world on his staff.  In 1953, he selected one of his artists named Herb Ryman to draft up a rough concept of what this park would look like.  While there are some key differences, it is astounding just how much Ryman’s early concept actually translated into the park we see today.  It’s an ingenious design.  The park is shaped much like a wheel, with one entry lane (which would become Main Street U.S.A.) that leads guests into a central hub and then the spokes of the wheel would be lanes extending from that hub out into all the other sections of the park; or as they would be called Lands.  And at the north end of the hub, a Castle that would be the centerpiece of the park.  The overview map that Herb Ryman drew up would be the blueprint for everything that followed.  While Disney was busy getting things ready for the construction of his park, he realized that things were quickly going to outgrow his operations at the Burbank studio.  So, he set up shop for a new department of his company in nearby Glendale that would solely be devoted to the design and development of his theme park.  This new department would be called WED Enterprises, but over the years we’ve come to know it by it’s newer name, Walt Disney Imagineering.

Construction began in earnest in the Summer of 1954.  Not a moment was wasted as Disney was hoping to have the gates open the following summer.  For the residents of Anaheim that would pass by, they were seeing strange sights as they were seeing things like castle turrets and space rockets appearing in the skyline.  But while construction moved at a frantic pace, Walt Disney needed to ensure that there were going to be people lined up to see his new park.  It just so happened at the same time that he was approached by ABC television to consider producing something for this new medium called television.  They certainly hit Walt at the right time, since he was eager to get the word out about his park.  What came about from this new deal was that Disney would produce a weekly anthology series that broadcast new and classic productions from the Disney studios.  And while Disney was filling that airtime, he could also bring awareness to the public of his park project.  This was one of the first ever examples of cross promotion ever on television.  But, Disney didn’t just treat this show like an hour long advertisement.  Each program would be made under the highest quality standards that Walt himself would approve.  In addition, he would be personally involved, acting as the host of the show himself.  Naturally, he would name this show Disneyland, and it would themed around the different lands that he was planning for his park.  Episodes themed around Fantasyland would be where classic Disney cartoons and feature films would be broadcast as part of the show.  Adventureland would present nature documentaries, including Oscar winning ones that Walt had previously produced.  Frontierland would present new original stories based on historical legends and tall tales, including the story of Davy Crockett which in itself became a cultural phenomenon when it first broadcast.  And Tomorrowland would be a showcase for scientific explorations, including shows that presented ideas about how to get us to the moon.  The show premiered in October 1954 and was a huge success.  Over the years it would go by many different names in it’s long run including The Wonderful World of Color and Walt Disney Presents.  But, the original title of Disneyland did the trick, because by the time the Summer of 1955 rolled around, people were already aware of the name Disneyland, and the many lands it housed.  Towards the end of the first season. Walt finally used his opportunity to showcase what was in store for Disneyland, and the world was ready to finally see it.

The park opened to the world on July 17, 1955, with a nationwide live broadcast to celebrate the occasion, hosted by Art Linklater and future president Ronald Reagan.  In the Town Square of Main Street, Walt delivered his address to officially open the park to guests, declaring, “To all who come to this Happy place, welcome.  Disneyland is your land.”  From then on, the park earned it’s nickname as the happiest place on Earth.  But, it wasn’t all happy at the beginning.  Opening day saw the park overwhelmed by guests, many of whom got in with counterfeit tickets.  There were also a lot of parts of the park that remained unfinished, including spots where the cement pavement hadn’t quite dried.  But, Disney was able to get over the hump of it’s bumpy opening, and in a couple of years Disneyland was one of Southern California’s biggest tourist destinations.  In 1959, Disneyland saw it’s first of many upgrades, with an overhaul of it’s East end that saw the introduction of iconic attractions like the Monorail and the world’s first tubular steel coaster, Matterhorn Mountain.  But Walt Disney wanted to do more than just have Disneyland be an amusement park like so many others across America.  He wanted to use the park to experiment with new technologies that not only would enhance guests’ experience, but would also be useful in the movie making process as well.  A big opportunity came when WED Enterprises was given a commission to develop attractions for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.  This not only gave a huge boost to the budget for WED, but it also granted them a perfect testing ground for a new experimental technology they were developing; Audio-Animatronics.  These Audio-Animatronics gave the Disney Imagineers the chance to program robotic figures with incredible lifelike movement, and have their movements programed onto an automated computer system that ran on audio cues.  The audio-animatronic characters were a huge leap forward in theme park engineering, and after the World’s Fair concluded, Walt brought the attractions home and implemented them into Disneyland.  They included the shows Carousel of Progress and Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, as well as a true icon with the catchiest of theme songs, It’s a Small World.  But Walt Disney had even bigger plans.  An expansion of the park’s west side themed to the city of New Orleans was being planned, which would included two massive rides that heavily featured the audio-animatronic technology; Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion.  And then there was his most ambitious plan yet for a “Florida Project.”  But sadly, in December 1966, Walt Disney passed away after a losing battle against cancer.

By the time of Walt’s death, there was no doubt in the world that Disneyland was a resounding success.  And the theme park industry was never going to be the same ever again.  Walt’s brother Roy guided the company through the years immediately after his passing and saw his final dream become a reality when Walt Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida in October 1971.  Shortly after that Roy himself would be gone.  But Disney’s Imagineering never stopped working through all the changes, and since then the Disney company has opened four more resorts around the world, located in Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai respectively.  Disney World has also seen 3 more theme parks added to it’s sprawling property, including Epcot, the Disney Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom.  Meanwhile, Disneyland itself gained a sister park built in what used to be the parking lot called Disney’s California Adventure, opened in 2001.  But, the Disneyland effect would be felt industry wide.  Amusement parks like those wooden pier beachfront attractions fell out of style, especially in California with the Santa Monica Pier being a rare survivor.  Now parks had to be carefully planned and themed, offering not just a place for cheap thrills, but rather a true escape from the outside world.  A great example of this was just up the road from Disneyland.  Boysenberry farmer Walter Knott saw his little farm grow in popularity over the years, especially after his wife Cordelia’s Chicken Dinner restaurant became a huge draw for the community.  To accommodate the crowds, he built a themed western town attraction next to the restaurant which he called Ghost Town.  After several years, Ghost Town expanded to include rides, including a mine train and log flume, designed by some former Imagineers from Disney.  Further expansions added more and more rides, and soon there was no berry farm left, but instead a theme park in it’s place.  But the name still stayed and today Knott’s Berry Farm has become a beloved theme park in it’s own right.  But the interesting thing about Disneyland’s influence is that more movie studios didn’t jump into the theme park industry like Walt did; instead choosing to license out their IP rather than build a park itself.  The exception though was Universal.  Universal, which long had drawn tourists to it’s studio lot for tours, expanded out and created a theme park of it’s own adjacent to the studio in Hollywood.  It’s also been a catch all for all the IP properties not held by Disney, including Harry Potter (Warner Brothers) Transformers (Paramount) and The Simpsons (formerly Fox and now ironically held today by Disney).  In the theme park industry, Universal has become second only to Disney and are continuing to grow; even in Disney’s back yard nearby in Orlando.

But one thing that Universal’s competition with Disney has managed to do is to increase the presence of IP based themed attractions across the theme park industry; which has been both a good and bad thing.  One thing that unfortunately has been sacrificed over time is the way that theme parks could create their own unique stories; ones that didn’t have to be based on a familiar movie or television show.  But, in recent years, theme parks have increasingly latched themselves onto characters that already have a built in familiarity in order to spotlight their new rides and attractions.  Disney of course drew upon it’s own vast library of titles to inspire new attractions; including one unfortunate case where they used one of their most controversial movies, Song of the South (1946) as the inspiration for one of their most popular rides; Splash Mountain.  And while their new park technology was advancing even further, the studio executives were more comfortable trying the tech out on brands with built in recognition rather than giving it to original ideas.  Disney even sought outside their company for potential brands to take a chance on their new tech.  One of those interested parties was filmmaker George Lucas, who was very interested in a flight simulator concept being devised for the park.  He believed that it was a perfect way to bring his Star Wars universe to life by having guests feel like they are really flying through space.  In 1987, Star Tours officially brought George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise to life at Disneyland.  A few years later, Lucas would collaborate with Disney again on an enhanced motion vehicle concept that would of course be developed for an Indiana Jones ride in Adventureland.  The worlds crafted by George Lucas seemed to perfectly fit within Disneyland, and after Disney gained control of Lucasfilm in 2012, it wasn’t long before an entire land was designed to fully immerse guests into the world of Star Wars, which became Galaxy’s Edge, opened in 2019.  Other sectors of the Disney company have also been given lands of their own in Disney Parks, including Marvel and Pixar.  But there has been a decline over time for attractions that stand on their own independent of IP influence.  Even the stuff that was developed as original ideas for Disney theme parks have inspired their own movies, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, and Jungle Cruise.  Over time, parks have become less worlds of their own and more living advertisements for the sake of corporate synergy.

But there is no denying that Disneyland is more than just any theme park.  There is an aura about the place that still endures even after all the changes it’s gone through over time.  You can still feel the love and care that went into every wall, every pathway, and every little surprise around the corner.  It’s a place for all of the senses.  The way the texture of the faux rock work feels on your skin as you place your hand on it while waiting in line for Big Thunder Mountain.  The sound of the Mark Twain’s bell and whistle echoing throughout the park.  The smell of popcorn wafting in the air from the carts along the pathways.  The taste of churro or a Dole Whip on a hot summer day.  And of course all of the sights that our fondest memories are built on.  This is what sets Disneyland apart.  It’s the one and only park with Walt Disney’s personal touch.  And though many parts of it was recreated in parks around the world, you can definitely tell that Walt’s inspirations were what made this park special to him.  His favorite hobby was building model trains, and what else would be encircling the park than a full sized steam locomotive.  There of course is a carousel at the center of Fantasyland, just like the one Walt took his girls to in Griffith Park.  And if you look above the fire station in Main Street, as well as above the entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean, you’ll see secret apartments that Walt built just for himself when he would pay a personal visit.  Though the man is long gone, his influence still reigns over both the Disney parks as well as theme parks around the world.  And the world is better for it.  Theme parks are escapes, and the better the illusion the better the fun.  Walt Disney and his Imagineers used their know how from the world of film-making to improve the theme park experience, from set design influencing the architecture of the parks to using visual effects tricks like animatronics to make the rides all that more immersive.  It helped that many of Walt’s favorite film artists managed to transition so seamlessly into working on projects for Disneyland, like Mary Blair, Marc Davis and of course the songwriting team of the Sherman Brothers.  70 years and still going strong, Disneyland truly has earned that title of the happiest place on Earth.  Though there are many like it, Disneyland is still the gold standard on which all other theme parks today are judged by.  It’s both a place for cutting edge advancement, but also a shrine to a much simpler time.  You can still see much of the original park still standing there today, including the iconic Sleeping Beauty Castle that still sits in the heart of it all.  As a long time guest myself, having gone there almost every year since I was little, it still hasn’t lost it’s aura for me.  Above it’s entrance a plaque reads, “Here you leave today and enter the worlds of Yesterday, Tomorrow, and Fantasy.”  For me and many others, Disneyland is the closest place we can get to seeing the impossible become possible.

You’ll never go in the water again!  That was the tagline of the monumental blockbuster film Jaws (1975) when it first premiered, and was there ever a tagline that hit it’s mark exactly as it did.  Hollywood was no stranger to creature features.  The whole B-Movie Sci-Fi craze of the 1950’s and 60’s was littered with movies about mankind battling the forces of nature as they run amuck.  But, Jaws was very different from those classics of the past.  It was grounded and devoid of campy cheapness.  It was a film that managed to transcend the the creature feature genre and grab a hold of it’s audience in a way that the industry likely did not expect.  It was a movie that made it’s premise feel real, and for a time, it did in fact make people afraid to go into the water.  Jaws was adapted from a novel of the same name by Peter Benchley, who had a part in adapting his own book into the screenplay alongside screenwriter Carl Gottlieb.  While the story had some of the same tropes as many other creature feature stories, Benchley’s novel rooted it’s premise in a far more grounded story about the people charged with saving their town from a rabid great white shark.  It’s a simple story, but enriched with not just the man vs. nature aspect but also with the friction that occurs between the people involved as they embark on their quest.  It’s just as much a character study as it is a story about hunting a shark.  While the movie had a lot of potential to be a fun action adventure, it would achieve a much greater status in the annals of movie history by falling into the right hands at the right time.  Jaws status as a classic is inexorably tied to the personal growth of the filmmaker who made it; Steven Spielberg.  Jaws was the movie that propelled him to the next level as a filmmaker and he wouldn’t be the icon that he is today 50 years later had it not been for the trials the he was put through in the making of this movie.

Steven Spielberg was an ambitious go-getter right from the start of his career in Hollywood.  Legend has it he snuck off of the famous Universal Studios tour when he was a teenager and wandered around on his own.  He was spared from disciplinary action after a film librarian at the studio was impressed by his ambition and he was granted a three day pass to revisit.  That three day pass expanded into a full time gig as Spielberg became a regular assistant on the studio lot.  He used his odd jobs to help finance a short film called Amblin‘ (1968), which got him noticed by a Universal executive named Sid Sheinberg, who signed the then 20 year old filmmaker to a 7 year contract.  Spielberg would direct several episodes of TV series made on the Universal lot, and he won high marks for his professionalism and ability to run productions on time and on budget.  Spielberg eventually got his chance to direct feature films for Universal, which included the critically acclaimed films Duel (1971) and The Sugarland Express (1974).  But while these movies were well regarded, Spielberg hadn’t had that big break out hit that would turn him into a household name and give him the creative freedom to do what he wanted as a filmmaker.  Thankfully, he still had the favor of Sheinberg, who by 1971 had elevated to the position of President at Universal Studios.  And it was not long after that the novel Jaws was optioned by the studio.  Based on Spielberg’s success with the movie Duel, which featured a story about a man being hunted by giant freight truck, Sheinberg believed that Steven had what it took to make this story about a killer shark work on the big screen.  Spielberg was more than happy to take up the challenge, but given what happened over the next couple years, Spielberg may have had some second thoughts about the assignment.

The making of Jaws was to put it lightly a bit of a “shit show.”  As skilled as Spielberg was up to this point, he had yet to make a movie as complicated as this one.  For one thing, half of the film was going to be set out in open water.  While you could do some of that on a studio controlled flood tank, of which Universal actually has one of the largest in the world, Spielberg believed that you needed the authenticity of being stranded out in the middle of open sea to really convey the terror of the shark’s presence.  So, the production set up shop in Martha’s Vineyard, with the small island community playing the part of the fictional Amity Island from the novel.  The sleepy, tightly knit community provided a good setting for the production of this movie, but it also was a crucial lifeline for the film once it moved into it’s oceanic phase.  In order to make it look like they were out in open water, they had to film several miles out in order to make the island disappear over the horizon.  But Martha’s Vineyard also had the benefit of having shallow waters all around it in a twelve mile radius, with the bottom being only 30 feet below the surface, making salvaging much easier if something went wrong.  And that it did.  Not only were they confined to filming on boats for most of the film shoot, but they were also dealing with three mechanical sharks that would be playing the monster.  Two of the sharks were open on opposite sides in order to create greater mechanical movement depending on the shot and the angle they were capturing it from, while the third was fully skinned and meant to bob up and down in the water, mainly for the shots showing it swimming.  But these sharks would prove to be a nightmare to maintain.  Filming out in the open sea meant that the salt water would constantly wreck havoc on the mechanical instruments puppeteering the sharks, and the sharks would constantly experience multiple issues that delayed shooting for extensive lengths of time.  Salvaging the sharks from the sea floor was also a common occurrence.  The shark problems being a constant nuisance throughout the film shoot caused Spielberg to jokingly name the sharks Bruce, which was the name of his lawyer.

Given all the production woes, Spielberg was constantly worried that he might have the project taken away from him.  He had gone from delivering on time and on budget to massively going over schedule by weeks.  But, it was through these trials that Spielberg really found himself as a filmmaker, developing skills that would carry him through the rest of his career.  While the sharks were giving him trouble, Spielberg used this opportunity to become a problem solver.  He would fill the down time between shooting with the sharks by working on shots that would build the atmosphere of the movie.  His team devised a scene that was not in the original script where Richard Dreyfuss’ character Hopper conducts an underwater investigation of a boat that was potentially attacked by the shark.  The scene is famous for a jump scare as a severed head pops out of one of the holes in the haul of the boat.  So while the scene doesn’t show the shark itself, you still get a sense of the terrifying power it holds after seeing what ends up to it’s victims.  And through all of this, Spielberg learned that it actually worked to the movie’s benefit to show as little of the shark as possible, which helped to make the shots later in the film when he does appear have a lot more impact.  They would only be able to get a handful of shots of the sharks actually working, but they would not be wasted, and thanks to the expertly handled building of dread throughout the film, Spielberg achieved his goal in making the shark absolutely terrifying.  It’s all a trick of signaling the presence of the shark without actually seeing him.  There are several underwater shots that signify the shark’s point of view as we see him swim up towards his victims who are bobbing around on the surface.  Then the movie cuts to the actors as they react to the shark capturing them in it’s razor sharp bite.   Couple this with John Williams’ iconic pulse-pounding musical score that signals the dreaded presence of the shark, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for making us forget that this is just some mechanical shark.  In the end he becomes almost as terrifying as the real thing, and we only ever get 4 total minutes of screen time with him.

But it’s not just the shark that makes Jaws an iconic movie.  Steven Spielberg also lucked out in getting the right actors for the part.  An interesting side note about the director’s history with the source novel is that when Spielberg first read it, he found himself rooting for the shark because he found the human characters so unlikable.  One of the great things about this movie adaptation is that Spielberg managed to make the human characters relatable and worth following to the end of the story.  And it mattered to have the right actors in the rolls too.  Roy Scheider was already a well respected up to this point in his career, having already garnered accolades for his work in the Oscar-winning The French Connection (1971).  He would provide the perfect everyman element to the character of Sheriff Brody.  Rising star Richard Dreyfuss would also bring a wonderful kinetic energy to the film as the cocky, self-made shark expert Hooper.  The working experience between Spielberg and Dreyfuss must’ve really been fruitful as Spielberg would cast him as the lead in his next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  But perhaps the most memorable character to come out of the film was the mysterious Captain Quint, played by an absolutely magnetic Robert Shaw.  Quint enters the film with one of the most memorable introductions in movie history, scrapping his nails across a chalk board in order to get the townsfolk’s attention at a community meeting, and with his salty Irish brogue he delivers a character that’s as tough and mean as the shark he hunts.  With echoes of Moby Dick’s Ahab, Quint becomes just as much of a wild card in the story as the shark, and his dynamic in contrast with the two more pragmatic heroes helps to give the movie personalities that are indeed capable of being interesting, independent of the shark.  One of the greatest additions to the film’s story is the scene where the three men have a bonding moment in between shark attacks and share their own stories to each other.  Here, Quint tells the other two about his time on the ill-fated U.S.S Indianapolis; a ship famous for sinking in shark infested waters after delivering the atomic bomb to the navy posted in the Pacific.  The monologue Quint delivers, which was written by an uncredited John Milius, is chillingly told by Robert Shaw, creating one of the movie’s most iconic moments.  Through that and many more moments like it, Spielberg managed to make this more than just a creature feature, but a truly human story about survival in the face of overwhelming terror.

In the end, the movie went overschedule by a staggering 100 days.  Spielberg was worried that this would be the movie to end him, just as he was finally starting to get a foothold as a filmmaker.  No studio would ever hire a director who ended up going three times over schedule like that.  While he still had the favor of Sid Sheinberg at Universal, that might’ve ended as well if the movie failed to recoup it’s costs, which also went massively over budget.  This was going to be the final film on his contract anyways, and there would be no need to renew if they couldn’t trust him anymore.  So, with a lot weighing on his shoulders, Spielberg would assemble his film together in the editing room, hoping that all that hard work translated into a coherent film.  The movie was orignally slated for a Holiday 1974 release, but because of the delays that the film shoot suffered, Universal had to push the release to Summer of 1975.  This was seen as a bad omen for the movie.  Back in those days, summer was seen as a dumping ground for the movie studios as films that were always considered valuable were released towards the end of the year, hoping to garner awards attention.  Summer movies were the throwaway genre flicks that the studios didn’t see much value in since they never grossed as much as the prestige films.  But, things would be different for Jaws.  The delay almost became a blessing in disguise because it not only gave Spielberg the right amount of time to assemble a stronger movie out of his edit, but by the time the film was released, it would be playing in a less crowded field at the box office with no relative competition.  The film opened on June 20, 1975 in one of the widest releases seen up to that point.  Initially wide releases were reserved for maximum saturation for films that studios had no faith behind, but for Jaws, a movie that received instant critical acclaim and wide audience interest, it would be a foundational shake-up for the industry as a whole.  Jaws became a monumental success at the box office, shattering every record in the books, including becoming the first film ever to cross the $200 million mark in it’s original release.  Jaws not only was a success story, it also fundamentally changed Hollywood forever.

If there was anything that has come to define Jaws in the annals of movie history, it’s that it started what would later become known as the era of the Blockbuster.  While Jaws wasn’t the movie that helped to coin the term blockbuster, as previous films like The Sound of Music (1965) and The Exorcist (1973) also were given the label, it was nevertheless seen as the movie that would usher in a new era where movies like it would be the driving force in the commerce of Hollywood.  After the fall of the old studio system and the rise of New Hollywood, the driving force in Hollywood through much of the 60’s and 70’s was auteur driven films from the newest crop of maverick filmmakers like William Friedkin, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese.  Spielberg came up through this generation, but he was also set apart from it given his studio connections.  With the success of Jaws, the studios began to fall out of favor with the auteur driven cinema of New Hollywood, which was already starting to see declining returns due to out of control productions like Sorcerer (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Heaven’s Gate (1980).  Now they wanted to have the next Jaws.  There were plenty of cheap copycat movies that tried to capitalize on Jaws success, like Orca (1977) and Piranha (1978), but it wasn’t another Jaws clone that would continue the Blockbuster era into the next decade.  Spielberg’s friend and colleague George Lucas would follow Jaws’ example by releasing his new space opera adventure film Star Wars (1977) in the summer season, and in the end, he too would see a phenomenal success during it’s release, even surpassing the record setting grosses of Jaws.  In the years that followed, the Summer season was no longer viewed as Hollywood’s dumping ground, but would instead be where Hollywood would premiere their biggest tentpoles, capitalizing on audiences off all ages that were out of school and looking to cool off from the summer heat.  And both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg would continue to feed the studios’ appetite for new blockbusters, delivering more in the coming decades with big franchise like Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park.  But all of this change was the result of the turning point that Jaws marked with it’s massive success in the face of all the factors that worked against it.

Steven Spielberg may have been the man who sparked the beginning of a new era in Hollywood, where the Blockbuster would come to dominate, but Jaws was also the movie that forged him into the kind of filmmaker that would continue to survive and grow in the changing Hollywood landscape as well.  The challenging and mostly frustrating production of the movie would be his trial by fire as a filmmaker, and out of it he developed problem solving skills that have made him the most consistent and reliable filmmaker in the business.  Spielberg became the great instinctual storyteller that he is today thanks to the creativity he had to rely upon in order to make Jaws come together.  And even after 50 years, Jaws still is the thrill ride that brings you to the edge of your seat and hasn’t lost any of it’s, shall we say, “bite” over the years.  It’s gone on to have this legendary aura around it, becoming one of the most oft-quoted movies in Hollywood history, especially with Roy Scheider’s now iconic ad-libbed line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  You can still see regular screenings of this film in cinemas all over the world, including a recent one at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April where it played with a pristine 35mm print at the Egyptian.  It also has managed to become a mainstay at the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, where the Studio Tour has a brief encounter with Bruce the Shark as a part of it’s showcase.  But that’s not the only lasting legacy of Jaws at Universal.  While Spielberg has gone on to make movies at every single studio in Hollywood, he still considers Universal his home base, and when he set up his own production company Amblin Entertainment, he chose to set it up on the Universal lot, next to the bungalows that he once worked out of as a page boy and assistant all those years ago.  You can still see Amblin’s offices just off the main route of the Studio Tour to this day.  Jaws made the Spielberg that we know today, and though it may have been a nightmare at the time, there’s no doubt that Spielberg is proud of what he accomplished with the film.  Those grueling 150 days of shooting set the stage for the next 50 years of Spielberg’s life and he’s still not done yet.  We may have been afraid to go back into the water that fateful summer, but we’ve always returned back to this movie again and again, and that will continue for the next 50 years as well.

It is really quite interesting looking at a movie like Brokeback Mountain (2005) in the context of the 20 years since it’s release in theaters.  For a lot of things, it was a pivotal film for many different things.  It solidified director Ang Lee as one of the industry’s greatest filmmakers, earning him his first Oscar for directing, a landmark as the first Asian filmmaker to win that prestigious honor.  It was also a crucial film in the budding acting careers of Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams.  It was also a major touchstone in the all too brief body of work for actor Heath Ledger who sadly would be lost to us in a short couple of years after his appearance in this film.  But, above all else, Brokeback Mountain stood as a monumental step forward for queer themed movies in Hollywood.  In the 20 years since this movie came out, there have been many social progressions in queer representation in cinema, with the presence of queer characters and storylines no longer being niche, but rather a natural part of the fabric of the culture.  But, 20 years ago, things were quite different, and Brokeback Mountain stood out much more as a provocative statement in it’s time.  Over the years, we’ve seen attitudes change, and it puts Brokeback into a different frame now in retrospect.  Does it still resonate with a culture that has seen so much change in 20 years, or is it becoming more of a relic of it’s time.  There are many ways to dissect Brokeback Mountain as a work of cinema, but it’s place in queer cinema is where it has stood out the most.  It certainly wasn’t the first movie centered on queer themes to be made, nor even the first mainstream film to center on queer characters.  But it perhaps was the most profound statement made in it’s time about how Hollywood as a whole wanted to deal with queer rights in society which was to be fully supportive of it.  And that was crucial as the fight for queer rights in America were reaching a breaking point.

One of the  most provocative things about Brokeback Mountain was that it was telling an overtly queer story in a genre that typically was associated with hyper masculinity; the Western.  The movie was adapted from a short story written by American author Annie Proulx.  It covers the story of two cowboys named Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist who are hired to herd sheep in a grazing range near the titular Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.  Out in the middle of nowhere with only each other for company the two form an attachment which eventually turns into sexual desire.  After the weeks long assignment ends, the two men go their separate ways.  They both find new lives and jobs, get married and have children.  But, there’s always that nagging draw in the back of their minds about the time they spent alone at Brokeback Mountain.  They eventually reunite, and sneak away on camping trips which cover for their romantic flings.  Over time, this secretive arrangement they’ve made for themselves takes it’s toll on their relationship as well as on their marriages.  They know that if their secret gets out, it’s more than just public shame for them; in certain parts of the country it also means death.  For the sake of their sanity and what’s left of their relationships with their broken families, they part ways for good.  Years later, Ennis learns that Jack did in fact run afoul of the wrong kinds of people who looked down on their love, and it leaves an empty place in his heart now with no one else to share his secret love with.  Annie Proulx wrote her story as a reflection of what she observed in rural North America.  She would spot lonely men in country bars who often appear to be looking at the other men, but had to put on a rugged exterior in order to throw off suspicion.  She didn’t know for sure what these men were hiding, but it gave her the inspiration for writing about cowboys who had to hide their secret homosexual desires behind the aesthetic of a rugged outdoorsman, as she stated herself in an interview, “I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”

Her short story was acclaimed when it was first published and immediately garnered the attention of screenwriter Diana Ossana.  Ossana sought Annie Proulx’s approval to adapt the story into a feature script, which Proulx agreed to despite reservations about whether it could be done.  While Ossana was an accomplished writer in her own right, she also had a writing partner on this screenplay that would be crucial for the adaptation; acclaimed writer Larry McMurtry.  McMurtry was very much the godfather of modern Westerns with an impressive body of work that included dozens of novels and short stories.  He’s perhaps best know for his Lonesome Dove series, which was turned into an acclaimed TV mini-series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall.  Movies that were based on his novels have also become classics, including neo-Westerns like Hud (1963) and The Last Picture Show (1971).  McMurtry and Ossana had collaborated on a few novels before and they had a great rapport together.  Larry loved the story that Ossana brought to him with Brokeback Mountain, and he had the Western bona fides to give it that genuine rugged American cowboy flavor.  They completed their screenplay almost a year after the original publication of the story in 1998, but the film would languish in development for a couple years.  Hollywood was still hesitant to invest in a provocative and unapologetic story about gay love, especially as the conservative Bush administration was coming into power.  New Queer Cinema icon Gus Van Sant expressed interest in the script for a while, with the intent of casting Matt Damon and Joaquin Phoenix in the roles of Ennis and Jack.  That eventually fell through as Gus became more intent on filming his Harvey Milk biopic project instead.  Eventually, producer James Schamus at Focus Features decided to take a chance on the film, and he handed it over to his long time collaborator Ang Lee.  Lee was an interesting choice to tackle this project, as he was very versatile filmmaker.  In between this and his Oscar nominated martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lee was just coming off his failed attempt at a Marvel super hero movie, Hulk (2002), proving that he was open to making any kind of movie regardless of genre.  It wasn’t Lee’s first attempt at a queer themed storyline, which was 1993’s The Wedding Banquet, but it would be his first attempt at a Western.  Still, Brokeback Mountain had extraordinary luck in not only having a team of prestige writers and filmmakers in their corner, but with Focus Features involved they were getting the backing of a major studio as well.

Brokeback Mountain was released at a very crucial time in American society.  We were entering a hotly contested debate over the matrimonial rights for gay and lesbian couples in the United States.  In 2004, Massachusetts became the first US state to recognize same-sex marriage as a legal right for it’s citizens.  This set off a firestorm from the religious right, saying that it was an affront to “traditional marriage,” and they began to push back on this groundbreaking advancement in gay rights.  Unfortunately for many in the queer community, the anti-gay right wing had the political muscle to get push back.  Republican president George W. Bush and his administration used this as a wedge issue in their re-election campaign and were pushing for more bans on same-sex marriage across the country.  Sadly, the majority of states did ratify these bans into law, including deep blue California with their controversial Proposition 8.  There was even a move to write a ban of same-sex marriage into the Constitution with a “traditional marriage amendment.”  This was the flashpoint that Brokeback Mountain was brought into; a moment where the debate over same-sex marriage was the primary focus of the American “culture wars.”  In a way, this was both a blessing and a curse for the movie.  One, it was a prestige film that was going to garner more attention because the subject it was tackling was very much a focal point of the cultural conversation at the time.  But, it was also going to become the poster child for this same era of conflict, and become the target of the same backlash that the queer community was facing during this time.  The movie would be the talk of the town, but also the focal point of a debate that it may not have been built for.  Regardless, the movie premiered to critical acclaim when it first released in the Fall of 2005, and it was for the longest time seen as the clear front runner in the Oscar race for that year.  It’s eventual loss to Crash (2005) of course would set off another firestorm of it’s own.

The Oscar controversy aside, Brokeback Mountain would have a more lasting effect on the industry that did lead to profound change not just in Hollywood, but in the culture as a whole.  With a solid box office and substantial collection of awards to it’s credit, Hollywood was finally seeing that queer themed films were actually quite valuable and worth investing in.  This was helpful for Gus Van Sant’s previously mentioned Milk (2008), which became an Awards season success just a few short years later.  But it wasn’t just with prestige films that we were seeing this change happen.  The stigma of queer representation in movies became less and less of an obstacle and more of a feature of the industry.  Gay characters were popping up more and more on the silver screen and on television, and not just as a stereotype there to be made fun of.  The same evolution was also happening across the country, with a backlash starting to grow against the backlash to queer rights.  The incoming Obama administration took a much different approach towards the LGBTQ population.  While initially playing things down the middle, then Vice President Joe Biden stirred the conversation again by rightly pointing out how absurd these same-sex marriage bans were.  Eventually the administration embraced the idea of decriminalizing same-sex marriage, and California’s Prop 8 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, thereby nullifying all bans on the books and making it legal in all 50 states.  How much Brokeback Mountain had a hand in this change is uncertain, but the movie certainly put focus on the conversation that was desperately needed, and perhaps helped to strengthen the resolve of Hollywood to no longer ignore this very vital community in the culture at large.

It is a much different world now than it was back when Brokeback Mountain was first released into theaters.  Attitudes towards same-sex relationships have certainly changed.  The stigma around same-sex marriage is almost completely gone, with now a vast majority of Americans having a positive opinion about it, with only the most rabid religious fundamentalists having any issue with it today.  Even still, there is still a lot of people out there trying to silence and erase queer voices in media.  The Trump administration in particular has courted many people intent on rolling back queer rights into his government, while also hypocritically proclaiming himself to be an ally for the queer community.  The times have changed, but a movie like Brokeback Mountain faces a challenge in trying to remain a relevant factor in this conversation.  Does it hold up in these changing times.  One thing that has negatively effected it’s place in queer cinema is surprisingly the way it deals with the relationship between it’s two characters.  One of the ways that Hollywood has dealt with garnering sympathy for the rights of queer people in society is to turn their stories into tragedies.  It does play into the underdog aspect of wringing sympathy from the viewer towards the plight of this persecuted community, but it does also send the wrong message to people who are still struggling with their identity.  This is what a lot of people today identify as the “kill you gays” trope, where a gay character is often doomed in the narrative as motivation for the plot.  Queer people don’t deny that the hardships of their struggle for rights need to be documented, but they also believe that these stories should also be balanced with stories of affirmation and triumph as well.  The fact that Brokeback Mountain ends on such a downer may be crucial for it’s own story, but what kind of message does it send to a young viewer still struggling to come out to see that queer relationships often end in heartbreak or tragedy.  It’s perhaps why much more queer themed movies today try to show more triumphant stories about love and adversity than the tragedies that often flavored their presence on the big screen before.  It also helps that many more of these movies are coming from a more insider perspective, made by queer filmmakers for the purpose of being inspirational.  Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurty and Ang Lee are all well-meaning in telling this story, but they are also coming at it from an outsider perspective, which comes across as being more about pity than anything else.  It’s a good thing that we are moving beyond movies like Brokeback Mountain and presenting queer characters and storylines that don’t have to be marked by tragedy in order to be successful.

It works much better to look at Brokeback Mountain on it’s own merits as a story about love blossoming in the unlikeliest of places.  Ang Lee’s involvement serves well here, because he is never once trying to thrust the message of the movie to the forefront.  He presents the film as an unexepected love story framed within the aesthetic of the American West, and how that contrast plays out.  There’s no cinematic flourish to the love-making scenes in the movie; they play out in a very realistic way, with both men not really knowing exactly what to do in the situation.  There’s a naturalistic flow to Ang Lee’s direction, with him playing the scenes out as honest to life as possible.  It’s not a titilating movie or a preachy one either.  He’s concerned first and foremost with the lives of these characters, and how the forces of society are weighing down on them.  It helps that his actors approached the material with the same kind seriousness.  The film’s most standout performance, however, belongs to Heath Ledger.  Ledger, who had been a rising star in Hollywood for some time, was finally given the oppurtnity to play a role with great emotional depth, allowing us all to see what he really was capable of as an actor.  And we saw the making of a superstar with this performance.  Ledger’s performance as Ennis del Mar is a total transformation, showing emotional depth and command over a character that is truly impressive.  You also don’t even feel like he’s acting, as he just embodies this character wholly.  It’s through his performance that we especially feel the schism between the way a man like him presents himself publicly, with a stoic cowboy exterior, and how he feels internally with his desire to embrace the man he loves.  Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is a bit showier and doesn’t quite stand up as well as Ledger’s, but the chemistry between the actors still works.  The real surprise though is Michelle Williams as Ennis’ lovelorn wife Alma.  The actress, who up to that time was most well known for the primetime soap Dawson’s Creek,  was finally given the chance to act in a film where she could really show her dramatic chops, and she has since become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated and awarded actresses.  Sadly, Heath Ledger was unable to see the legacy of his performance play out after his untimely death in 2008.  But there was one positive outcome of his work in this movie that still literally lives on to this day.  Both Ledger and Williams fell in love during the making of this movie, and they had a daughter together named Matilda who was born in 2005, right when the movie was hitting theaters.  Now 19 years old, Matilda is carrying on the torch of her late father and keeping his memory alive.

It’s undeniable that Brokeback Mountain is a pivotal film in the history of queer cinema, but it’s also a good thing that Hollywood has also moved past it.  As queer themes have become more mainstream in movies not just on the outskirts of Hollywood, but by the actual studio system itself, the more provocative films of the past now look like time capsules of a different time period, when things were not so great.  But, that also doesn’t mean that these films should be forgotten either.  We need to still see where we once were to know how far we have come.  Brokeback Mountain was made to make a statement at a crucial time when it almost looked like we were about to enshrine discriminations against same-sex relationships into the Constitution itself.  With gay marriage now not just the law of the land, but also embraced by the vast majority of Americans, the statement made by movies like Brokeback now seem quaint and irrelevant.  But, complacency often leads us to forgetting the importance of our hard fought for rights and it can lead to an erosion of those rights over time if we are not careful.  That’s why movies like Brokeback Mountain are still important, because it reminds us of the struggle and what it took to get where we are as a community.  When it first came out, Brokeback Mountain was undeniably provocative and stirred a conversation worth having.  As a young twentysomething closeted gay man when this movie first came out, I too struggled with how to respond to it.  I shamefully tried to dismiss it too, running away from my own feelings because the movie was very much showing me the struggle that came with being queer in America.  But over time, I saw why the struggle was necessary and I was able to accept who I am without fear, and in turn, I accept the movie much more now as a cinematic milestone.  I acknowledge that I am a better man today, and while I still have some reservations about the movie (particularly with it’s tragic gay tropes), I do now wish to celebrate it for what it did for queer representation in cinema.  Back then, some of us wished we could quit Brokeback Mountain, but now with the world once again challenging our rights in the queer community, we need this movie and the many more films of the Queer Cinema movement to inspire us to fight for a better future again.