Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.
PRINCE CHARMING REGAL CARROUSEL
By Jim Korkis
The Fantasyland carousel in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom was first built in 1917 by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, which created some of the most beautiful horses of the era.
It was carved by German and Italian carvers to express the patriotism that was prevalent in the United States after the First World War. The carousel was named “Liberty”, and was one of the largest carousels ever built, being some sixty feet in diameter.
The first home of the Liberty Carousel was at the Detroit Palace Garden Park, where it stayed until it was rehabilitated in Philadelphia in 1928 and set up in Olympic Park in Maplewood, N.J., for the next 39 years.
The Liberty Carousel originally had 72 horses and also two chariots (not four, as is reported in some articles). The distinctly American horses were black, brown, gray, and white.
Their saddles included items that celebrated the American frontier. Carved figures of Lady Liberty holding shields that featured a red, white and blue flag emblem decorated the interior top circle.
The carousel included eighteen landscape paintings of American scenery. Just below them was a running board decorated with golden American eagles. Sadly, over the years, less skilled craftsmen would slop paint and lacquer over the horses, eventually obscuring the intricate and uniquely engraved features underneath.
The Philadelphia Toboggan Company built 89 carousels before 1929 and the Great Depression. The Liberty Carousel was No. 46, and is one of only a dozen or so of those classic originals from the company that still exist and operate today.
Olympic Park closed in 1965. By that point, the Liberty Carousel had fallen into a state of disrepair and was slated for almost-certain demolition. Antique carousel horses are in such demand that it was planned to sell them and the decorations off individually.
By 1967, Disney had located and acquired the antique masterpiece for the Magic Kingdom.
All of the horses were shipped to Disney shops, where craftsmen were surprised by the detail and artistic grace uncovered when all the years of paint and grime was removed down to the gleaming maple of the horses. Months of Disney artistry went into the rehabilitation.
The chariots were removed, and the carousel was filled out to 90 horses when Disney purchased some antique horses that were made by two other well-known producers of carousels: the Dentzel Company and the Parker Company.
The horses were sanded down carefully to the original wood so that no detail was lost. Sanding down to the actual wood could have resulted in damage and loss of detail, so, today, they are only sanded down to roughly the level of primer and no further. Then the horses were primed and painted white.
The horses are white for two reasons. First, since it was Cinderella’s carousel, the white horses allude to the white horses that pulled Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. Second, one of the things Disney discovered with the King Arthur’s Carrousel at Disneyland (the two “r”s in the title of the ride is correct) was that when people rode a carousel, they first tried to get on a white horse because it was considered the “hero” horse.
For its first decade or so of operation, the Disneyland carousel featured horses of different colors until Imagineer John Hench made the decision to make them all Arctic white. Every guest no matter what their size gets a chance to ride a “hero” horse.
In 1997, one of the original Liberty Carousel chariots was located in a Disney warehouse, and was rehabbed and reinstalled on the ride. For decades, the attraction was named Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel, but was renamed Prince Charming Regal Carrousel in 2010.
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Thanks, Jim. And come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!
And in case you are wondering, yes, it’s “Carrousel” in Fantasyland and “Carousel” in Tomorrowland!
In the meantime, check out his books, including The Vault of Walt
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