Widened World

As of July 8, Widen Your World has been renamed Widened World everywhere but on this blog. Widened World is a different version of the website I started in 1996. I'm keeping this blog as Widen Your World so the name will still have a presence and so I can let you know if anyone else out there is using the WYW name but isn't really me (as happened with Omniluxe).

Anyway, widenedworld.com

Scanned Document Links

Document Scans & PDFs (As Best I Knew How to Make Them)

The links below are / will be to full document scans, probably in pdf format. By the time I learn how to do something the process of forgetting kicks in almost immediately because I do too many things. But I can forget how to make a pdf and learn from scratch again. Maybe.

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Project Florida, 1967

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Walt Disney World Pictorial Souvenir, 1977

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Florida Festival at Sea World (1979-1985)

A Strange Place, Under-documented

There are a few unique things about which I have memories, real experiences and specific information that are also A. Of any interest to others and B. Previously not in a free online record. Among those things is Florida Festival, the daytime/nighttime shopping, dining and entertainment complex under one odd roof owned by, and operated just across the street from, Sea World from 1979 to 1985.

Florida Festival was Sea World's attempt, partially successful, to emulate Walt Disney World's Shopping Village (later Downtown Disney and Disney Springs) and Bob Snow's Church Street Station in downtown Orlando. Emulation in terms of drawing visitors who were done with their day in a park to something where they might spend some time and money in another spot that also carried a theme or brand along with it. Other than just being, for example, a restaurant with a theme like Steak & Ale or Sweden House.

From what I've seen in online posts by others, Florida Festival was primarily the idea of William Jovanovich (1920-2001), the director of publishing company Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich (HBJ). At the time of Florida Festival's operation, HBJ was the owner of the Sea World parks. Jovanovich was a creative-minded person who, beyond running a publishing company that also held theme parks, was the author of several fiction books. In addition to overseeing the Florida Festival era of Sea World, Jovanovich was apparently the person who decided that San Antonio, Texas needed its own Sea World park. It got one in 1988. Unlike Florida Festival, Sea World of Texas is still operating and has been profitable for the majority of its timespan.

I'm starting this post with some scans and intend to come back to add more information over time. Maybe.

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Florida Festival Brochure 1980 Scan 1

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Florida Festival Brochure 1980 Scan 2

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Florida Festival Brochure 1980 Scan 3

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Orlando, Florida 1930s - 1990s Various Images

I was born in Orlando in 1969 and lived within fifteen miles of downtown Orlando from then until 2025. The Orlando I knew as a kid was in the first phase of being transformed from a small city (just one building above fifteen stories,1971's 19-story CNA Tower) to a mid-size city adjoining one of the world's five busiest tourist regions that would reflect character and influences from nearly everywhere.

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Bill Baer Television Store on Mills Avenue c. 1966
Image source: Orange County Regional History Center

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Bill Baer Record Store Ad c. 1970
Image source: Orange County Regional History Center

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Intersection of Interstate 4 and International Drive c. 1979
Image source: Bill Cotter

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A "different" Beefy King location on South Orange Blossom Trail
c. 1968, with the original location still on Bumby Avenue as of 2025
Image source: Orange County Regional History Center

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Monster Cereals & Jim Henson Company Muppet Collaboration 2025

Monster Cereal Muppets!

Things I loved separately as a kid have often overlapped over the past 50 years and this is was the most recent example, with the news coming out mid-summer 2025. I had only planned to buy them for using the boxes as decor, then saw that there was too much good stuff to not scan for the benefit of anyone online and/or those who weren't able to pick the cereal up on their own. It could easily sell out and it's possible that no one else will do this much scanning. I'm also including relevant images I found online that aren't my own scans.

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Inequitable Depictions of American Indians in Western River Expedition Concept Art & Models

A Lot of Marc Davis Indians

The mere fact that, in 2025, there's an expressed preference for the term American Indian by some Native American members of various tribes in this country, when the term Native American seemed like the right nomenclature by general consensus for decades, gives a layperson like myself (with some, not much, Native American blood in my veins) pause before wading into observations on this topic. What's considered respectful today may not be so tomorrow, and it's less likely that I could stay even halfway "accurate" without looking things up repeatedly. I try to. Usually.

I've always thought all the art of Marc Davis should be accessible to the general public (in the same way as should the art of Norman Rockwell) and can't now say, "except his race-based caricatures." I also wouldn't, even if tempted, just post a bunch concept art along those lines and just add, "Marc Davis, 1968" The internet needs more than that now. I understand why.

I also think I understand why Marc Davis, based on the very limited amount of time my friend Ross Plesset and I were able to spend interviewing him and his wife Alice (just once, in 1999), as we looked at most of his Western River Expedition art, chose not to comment very much on his depictions of American Indians in the 1960s. I asked if he had been compelled by anyone else to change any of the 1968 art that he revised in 1974 to minimize the number of Indians in his ride concepts, and he simply said no. It is a fact, though, that by 1974 the ride plan included far fewer Indians than were depicted in the totality of the 1968 plans.

This stuff I bring up not just because it makes no sense to ignore it, but also because Marc Davis is culturally relevant and will probably remain so for a long time to come. He was a key figure in the content of both the Walt Disney Company's animated films and Disney's theme parks. Davis created the character Maleficent, animated and defined the modern look of the character Tinker Bell and took a dominant role in developing attractions like the Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion and several others. He was also one of just a handful of people on Walt Disney's staff whose talent was openly praised by the boss.

The Walt Disney Company shifted its approach to a lot of race-centric things when I was just a baby in 1969. That was the first year when a new Disneyland attraction, in this case the Haunted Mansion, opened with a front line operating cast of both black and white employees. 1970 was not just the year of The AristoCats, with a Siamese cat who played the piano with chopsticks, it was also the year that the Walt Disney World Preview Center opened in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Two of the first fourteen women hired by WDW were black (the twelve others white) and all were in the group promotional photos for the Preview Center. Three years prior, Disneyland had yet to put a black cast member in a front line tour guide role. That finally happened in 1968. So 1968 to 1971 best represents the time period during which the Disney company pivoted considerably on matters of race representation in their workforce. They were arguably ahead of the curve in American industry.

That was also the time period during which Marc Davis produced the art seen here and WED Enterprises artists sculpted models based on that art. Some of it has not been previously reproduced online or in published documents to my knowledge. High quality versions of the art are very rare. Davis created some stereotypical depictions of Indians but was also assiduous in his research of other cultures, of their manner of dress, their architecture and their art. He was not coming at other cultures from a place of malice or with an intent to degrade. He was trying to infuse his work with maximum humor, and that left other considerations in the backseat at times. You can see that the features of some characters being exaggerated is sometimes the only quality of certain Davis drawings that fall into the category, but he regularly exaggerated the features of white people in his art also. He was an animator at heart, and this informed most of his work. Caricaturizing was one of his most essential skills.

Something Davis drew that I first found to be an extremely funny concept was that of a American Indian woman playing a trumpet as part of a medicine show ... in the same way that seeing Deborah Kerr as a Scottish noble picking up and blowing a horn in Casino Royale was funny. The humor being that both were completely unexpected. A key difference being that in doing so, while both characters are playing against type, the only type that an American Indian woman could be in the context of American popular culture would be that of someone whose ancestors and peers had their way of life largely destroyed and then marginalized by European immigrants. In this regard, using her as even an accomplished trumpet player for this scene feels wrong to me now. 

Whether one uses terms like racist or racially insensitive or stereotypical in conjunction with looking at the art in 2025 feels less relevant to me than just thinking about how the Walt Disney Company presents, addresses, obscures, hides or ignores things along these lines. While you would almost need to deliberately search for this particular Marc Davis art in 2025 to encounter it, that's not true of everything. It's still possible for Disney film viewers and Disney theme park visitors to find content that depicts American Indians in unfavorable ways with minimal explanation ... in ways that no prominent entertainment company would knowingly depict black people in the 21st century.  

Image sources: Anonymous, Mike Cozart, Walt Disney Company, Marc Davis in His Own Words by Christopher Merritt and Pete Docter (2019) 

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Walt Disney World Preview Center c. August 1971
Image source: Randotti history site

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Western River Expedition Model & Owl Displays at Walt Disney World

At Walt Disney World, from May 1973 to early 1981, a scene from a planned attraction called the Western River Expedition was on display in the post-show exhibit area of the Walt Disney Story on Main Street USA.

The boat ride was slated to be part of a multi-attraction feature of the Magic Kingdom's Frontierland area called Thunder Mesa. 

The WRE display on Main Street USA included a scale model of the proposed ride's Town Scene, with cowboys, can-can girls and horses joining together to continue a musical theme that began in a prior scene.

Adjacent to the model was an audio-animatronic owl who spoke to guests about his role in the  upcoming ride and gave a brief history of the technology that brought him to life. 

Retouched 1995 photo of WRE model as it appeared when shipped back to the
Walt Disney Archives from where it was rediscovered in Florida several years prior
Image source: Marc Davis In His Own Words, 2019 Christopher Merritt & Pete Docter
 

Original scan of 1995 photo of WRE model as it appeared when shipped back to the
Walt Disney Archives from where it was rediscovered in Florida several years prior
Image source: Marc Davis In His Own Words, 2019 Christopher Merritt & Pete Docter

Model mentioned in a May 1973 issue of WDW
Eyes & Ears Newsletter

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Audio-Animatronic Owl near the WRE model c. 1975
Image source: Jerry Klatt

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Link to owl audio on WYW's YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alrrkt60KF0

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Audio-Animatronic Owl near the WRE model c. 1975
Image source: Jerry Klatt

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