Sunday was a day of closure at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The Big Thunder Ranch Barbecue closed, along with the petting zoo. Mickey fought Maleficent one last time in Fantasmic!, and the last boats to Tom Sawyer’s Island — long since taken over by pirates anyway — chugged away. The Rivers of America, an area from the very beginning of Walt Disney’s vision, have closed. Temporarily, of course, as even the Disneyland Railroad that circles the park will stop running for at least a year as the park begins its next massive phase of development.
It’s all necessary so that that next phase can remain a surprise, and so that when the Mark Twain steam boat paddles around the Rivers of America again, we’ll stay convinced that we’re somewhere on the mighty Mississippi for a moment, and not catch glimpses of a galaxy far, far away.
Today, Disneyland released an artist’s rendition of the redesigned attraction on its official blog, so we can look toward the future of being able to look back into the past. It’s a little more compact than it had been for 60 years, but it does look like the park will preserve as much as possible. It looks like Mike Fink’s Keelboats will return, as well as the traditional Indian Village. (Is that at Walt Disney World, too? It seems to me that was a key location for [amazon text=Kingdom Keepers&asin=1484704029].) Will pirates still lurk on what was once Tom Sawyer’s island? More importantly, in a year or so will you all be happy to have this back that the Rivers of America will become as popular as Star Tours?
