Category — A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis

A Friday Visit With Jim Korkis: Muppets and Mama Melrose

by Dave

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!

THE STORY OF MAMA MELROSE AT DISNEY’S HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS

By Jim Korkis

In the back of Disney’s Hollywood Studios is an Italian eatery called Mama Melrose’s Ristorante Italiano, and there is an interesting story behind how it got its location and its name.

When the park originally opened in 1989, the plan was to showcase Jim Henson’s Muppets in the back of the park where Mama Melrose’s is today.

The never-built Great Gonzo’s Pizza Pandemonium Parlor would have been run by Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat. Things would constantly be going horribly wrong both offstage in the kitchen and in the dining area itself to entertain guests as they dined on Italian food.

When Henson passed away in early 1990, negotiations with the Disney Company fell apart and so the Imagineers conceived of a different kind of Italian restaurant.

According to the official storyline, a young girl in a small Sicilian village in Italy fell in love with the magic of Hollywood movies while she worked in her father’s restaurant. Her father loved her dearly and shared with her all his special secret recipes that made his restaurant such a favorite place for people to eat.

At the age of sixteen, she sailed for America and found a movie career as “a stand-in for actresses with names like Gina, Sophia and Anna”.

While she waited with the other extras between scenes, she cooked up Italian dishes with a little California flavor for her friends. Realizing that her dreams of stardom were not coming true, she opened her own Italian restaurant on the back lot.

The new restaurant provided meals for a variety of Hollywood types from actors to the film crew to even producers and directors. Her flamboyant approach to life reminded the Hollywood studio moguls of the town’s eccentric Melrose Avenue, so they nicknamed her “Mama Melrose.”

It was a name that was so descriptive of her that it stuck and even today, no one can recall what her actual name might have been.

The restaurant became the location “where Italy meets California in the heart of the Backlot.” It was housed in a warehouse that was used for storing film equipment with an exterior façade that was used by motion pictures studios for shooting films based in New York City’s Little Italy.

Mama and her friends converted the interior with what little funds they had into a family restaurant. The lack of funds is why the interior still has industrial-looking light fixtures, high ceilings with clearly visible air ducts, brick walls covered with graffiti, and worn floor boards in places from the moving of heavy film equipment.

To make the massive space appear more inviting, Mama decorated with whatever she had available: Hollywood memorabilia that she gathered during her years in the film business and numerous items from Italy in order to remember and honor her family back home.

That is the reason that the interior is such a mishmash of everything from Italian paintings to Hollywood movie posters to records of famous Italian singers to pennants of California sports teams to license plates to cooking utensils.

It suggests the home of a mother who accumulated many knick knacks as physical reminders of so many memories.

And, according to the Imagineers, that is how this charming restaurant got its name and unique interior design.

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Thanks, Jim! And note Josh has a recent review of Mama Melrose here.

Come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis! In the meantime, check out his books, including The Vault of Walt, Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South?, and The Book of Mouse, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.

A Friday Visit With Jim Korkis: Summer Magic on Main Street U.S.A.

by Dave

“SUMMER MAGIC” ON MAIN STREET USA

By Jim Korkis

While most Disney fans know that Main Street U.S.A. is set during the time period of 1890-1910, only a few know that Walt Disney World’s Main Street also pays special tribute to one of Walt Disney’s favorite live action movies, Summer Magic, first released on July 1963.

In Summer Magic, after the death of her husband, Boston widow Margaret Carey moves her family of two young sons and an exhuberant teenage daughter to a house in Beulah, Maine. Daughter Nancy Carey (played by Hayley Mills) has written to Osh Popham (played by Burl Ives), the caretaker of an absent millionaire’s abandoned big yellow house.

The headstrong and imaginative daughter writes such an exaggerated tale of heartbreaking white lies that Osh lets the family rent the house for a pittance and contributes labor and material to refurbish it.

While the family is happily adapting that summer to their new life in a rural East Coast community, their snobbish cousin Julia (who loves all things that are French) shows up to stay and causes some anxiety for Nancy. Eventually, Julia learns the error of her snooty ways.

The film is a sentimental snapshot of a time period and a rural lifestyle that Walt Disney remembered fondly.

While no Burl Ives Streetmosphere performer sits rocking away on a nearby porch, strumming his guitar, his character in the film has a prominent location on Main Street.

In the lower part of one of the front windows, at the southwest corner entrance to the Emporium facing toward the Roy Disney statue at the flagpole, is the name “Osh Popham” listed as the proprietor of the merchandise store.

Osh was the shopkeeper, constable, carpenter, postmaster and good-natured storyteller of the small town of Beulah, Maine.

The Chapeau, the hat shop in Town Square, is supposedly owned and operated by the two Carey girls. The sign outside lists its street address as “No. 63” which was the year the film was first released.

According to the official back story for The Chapeau created by WDW Imagineers

“Nancy (Carey) moved to Main Street after spending many happy years with her family in the “yellow house” in beautiful Beulah. She had set out to seek her fortune, but she wanted to do something artistic, something that would bring happiness to people.

“And at the height of ragtime and hometown Easter parades, nothing could compare to fine headwear! So Nancy enlisted her notoriously fashion-conscious cousin, Julia Carey, and opened a small millinery and hat shop, where together they would design, make and sell hats of all sorts for the ladies and gentlemen of Main Street. They dubbed their new venture The Chapeau, a suitably highbrow name reflecting the time Julia spent in the fashion capital of the world, Paris.”

From 1992-2012, the background music loop for WDW’s Main Street featured three instrumental versions of songs written by the legendary Sherman Brothers for the film: “Flitterin’”, “Beautiful Beulah”, and the title tune “Summer Magic”.

I suspect most guests never realized that these sprightly tunes were not authentic turn-of-the-century songs, just as most guests are completely unaware of these two tributes in the park to a classic Walt Disney live action film.

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Category — A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis

A Friday Visit With Jim Korkis: Muppets and Mama Melrose

THE STORY OF MAMA MELROSE AT DISNEY’S HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS

MORE DISNEY WORLD HISTORY POSTS FROM JIM KORKIS

A Friday Visit With Jim Korkis: Summer Magic on Main Street U.S.A.

“SUMMER MAGIC” ON MAIN STREET USA

MORE DISNEY WORLD HISTORY POSTS FROM JIM KORKIS

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