Foxx Fur, whose Passport to Dreams blog I return to time and time again for her detailed dissections of Disney’s theme park & resort design, is out with a wrap up of how good (or bad) 2014 was for Disney’s domestic theme parks. Okay, technically, the full reviews ended in 2011. Foxx Fur just hasn’t had the heart to continue them since then, too depressing. Instead this year, we get a take down of epic proportions on three huge mistakes Disney made in 2014.

To be fair, there is some good stuff to be happy about in 2014, New Fantasyland finally opened its final attraction “The Seven Dwarfs Mine Train” and it is a charming dark ride (albeit with some unforgivable errors at the end) and the Magic Kingdom also got a parade it deserves in “Festival of Fantasy.”

But three major changes are pretty much unforgivable from the author’s perspective.

I haven’t been to Disneyland in much too long. When I was last there, you could still visit Walt Disney’s un-used apartment above New Orleans Square. It was great having that previously private space open to guests, even if it was as a store. When it became the Dream Suite, that space was lost to guests. I knew that the expansion of Club 33 in 2014 cost guests another space (the Court of Angels), but I didn’t realize how badly it mangled Walt Disney’s vision of New Orleans Square destroying perspective and genericizing facades that were previously some of the best examples of Imagineering in any of the parks. Read More »Passport to Dreams Annual Disney Parks review is a must-read