UC Davis

Since Disneyland opened in 1955, many have described a trip to the theme park in Anaheim, California, as a nostalgic experience. This dissertation, rooted in critical theory, examines music’s role in this phenomenon. As such, it is the first study to substantively address music in Disneyland. Taking four attractions as case studies, I explore ways in which their music evokes nostalgia. I analyze the Dapper Dans (a roving barbershop quartet), Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room (a fifteen-minute Polynesian musical revue), the Indiana Jones Adventure (a thrill ride based on the film franchise), and Space Mountain (a space-themed indoor roller coaster), drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches to nostalgia as conceived by Svetlana Boym, Fred Davis, and others. On the premise that music’s capacity to elicit nostalgia is informed by other elements, I also place the music of these four attractions in their respective historical and cultural contexts, buttressing my observations with musical analysis. Other aspects of this study involve strategies more akin to ethnomusicology, such as interviews with Disneyland composers and performers, analyses of fan comments on Disney-related websites, and my own visits to the park, which included making field recordings. Throughout, I argue that nostalgia is crucial to Disneyfication, the process of simplifying, sanitizing, and sentimentalizing source material, whether novels, history, or even cultures to make them commercially palatable and family friendly. Further, while nostalgia is an entirely real part of the Disneyland experience, in fact a fundamental irony applies: the park’s reconstructions of historical places and eras—and their music—often stray so far from reality that they give rise to things that never existed yet nonetheless generate strong attachments among guests.