Fridays with Jim Korkis: The New Main Street Confectionery
By Dave Shute
Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.
THE NEW MAIN STREET CONFECTIONERY SHOP
By Jim Korkis
In September 2021, a new expanded Confectionery shop opened on Main Street. The shop is now sponsored by Mars Candy, and features previously unavailable sweet treats including many that are from Mars. Old fashioned photos of the founders of M&M and a beloved horse they had known as Snickers are displayed.
(c) Disney
Walt Disney World’s Main Street has always had a candy shop, although at opening in 1971 the area was split between the candy shop and the GAF Camera Center. There was always a “show kitchen,” like the candy shop at Disneyland, where guests could watch cooks making various treats like fudge or caramel apples. In the 1980s, Kodak took over the camera shop and Sees briefly sponsored the candy shop.
The candy shop expanded into the camera shop location when Kodak moved to the Town Square Exposition Hall in 1998. The new storyline of the candy store was that Thomas and Kitty McCrum were the owners and operators of the shop. McCrum was a reference to Dr. Thomas McCrum, a dentist in Kansas City, who helped a young Walt Disney out financially. It was also a sly joke that a dentist was selling cavity-causing treats that might generate some business for him.
After attending the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 (basically the World’s Fair) that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus “discovering America”, McCrum incorporated into his shop some of the same type of mechanical wonders he saw in the Exposition’s Hall of Machinery.
Those additions included small mechanical inventions placed on shelves with descriptions relating to the process of creating confectionary goods and overhead a constantly moving chain of wire baskets filled with treats.
That storyline is given a brief acknowledgment in the new shop, on a framed newspaper article from the Main Street Gazette written by Scoop Sanderson, one of the fabled street citizen characters, that states, “Yesterday marked the official groundbreaking for the forthcoming expansion of Main Street Confectionery, a development thanks in no small part to the equally-groundbreaking chocolate innovations of local treat-makers, Mars. It is their creation, the Milky Way chocolate bar and the immediate and consistently overwhelming crowds it has drawn to the Main Street Confectionery that has made today possible.
“Joining the Mayor as participants in the Town Square ceremony were both Kitty and her husband, Dr. Thomas McCrum, who had the distinct honor and privilege of temporarily – and carefully – wielding the Mars candy company’s renowned ‘sweet spoon’. On behalf of themselves and the Mars company the McCrums celebrated with and thanked the citizens of Main Street for the overwhelming response to the Milky Way bar that will make this new chapter of chocolate possible.”
The larger square footage creates a showcase store with beautiful in-laid marble, brass railings and blue bunting, suggesting an event that showcases home confectioners across the nation in an award ceremony called the Sweetest Spoon.
Cartoon drawings depict some to the winners of the award and they feature Disney’s latest attempt at diversity. The winners include Agata Kaminski from Chicago, Illinois, a Polish chef known for her paczki; Willie Anderson, a young black man from Tulsa, Oklahoma known for his pound cake; Toshi Hayakawa, a Japanese cook who is also a Main Street firefighter known for his Mochi; Sonia Sanchez from Brooklyn, New York who is Puerto Rican and known for her cinnamon sugar; Dr. Alsoomse Tabor of the Blackfeet Nation, Montana who is a paleontologist known for her famous fruit leather, and Saul Fitz of Beulah, Maine a Jewish tailor who makes chocolate regelach.
Beulah, Maine is a reference to the Disney live action movie Summer Magic (1963). Two Beulah residents, Nancy Carey and her cousin Julia, according to the Imagineering back story, opened The Chapeau hat shop on Main Street that was sacrificed for the recent Confectionery expansion. I guess that it is the Circle of Life to remove two immersive storytelling themes and replace them with one generic shop.
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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!
In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, Off to Never Land: 70 Years of Disney’s Peter Pan and Final Secret Stories of Walt Disney World!
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