"For those of us who remember the carefree time it recreates, Main Street will bring back happy memories. For younger visitors, it is an adventure in turning back the calendar to the days of their grandfather's youth."
Walt Disney
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Disneyland's Main Street and its idealized Americana always disturbs me a little bit. When Walt Disney was originally designing the park in the early 1950s, he was inspired by his childhood home near Marceline in Missouri, as well as Disney set designer and artist Harper Goff's Colorado hometown of Fort Collins.
However, 70 years after the park's opening in 1955, Main Street's anachronistic turn of the millennium facade doesn't necessarily evoke a carefree time in the same way.
Part of my disquiet is because it reminds me of April 2000: THE THIRD EXPEDITION*, one of the stories in Ray Bradbury's magnum opus, The Martian Chronicles. The Third Expedition to Mars successfully lands on the Red Planet, only to discover that the nearby community is a perfect evocation of early 20th Century America, an impossible dream composed of wind-up phonographs, ice-cold lemonade, porch swings, fresh-mown grass and white picket fences, inhabited by the crew's beloved long lost relatives and childhood friends. Astonished and overjoyed, the crew abandons their ship to celebrate with their families and friends.
Later, lying in bed in the room he shares with his brother in his parent's house, the ship's captain begins to suspect that something is horribly, horribly wrong:
And here we all are tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift, and become another thing, a terrible thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street, a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth ...
His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid.
And when the captain finally tries to act on his suspicions and flee? He never makes it to the door...
- Sid
* Titled Mars is Heaven in its original standalone Planet Stories magazine publication in 1948.
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