It’s hard for “the kids today” to understand what it was like to be a Disney fan in the days before the internet. For those of us outside the Disneyana hotbed of southern California, pretty much all we knew about the parks came from what Disney deigned to tell us in its official publications. This meant a new picture book about the parks every five years or so, and, of course, the much-anticipated quarterly arrival of Disney News.

For those of us on the east coast, who were unlikely to even know anyone who had ever been to Disneyland, any real impression of that park whatsoever had to come from one of two sources. First, there were the re-runs of Walt’s old Wonderful World of Color shows that aired on the Disney Channel and every afternoon on the local syndicated station. Every once in a blue moon, if you were lucky, you’d catch something like From Pirates of the Caribbean to Tomorrowland, and that would give you a hint of what the park had been like in Walt’s day. Most then-current news of what was going on at Disneyland, however, came from Disney News. With only a couple of articles a year focusing on some aspect of the park, though, any picture or bit of information had to be picked apart obsessively to try and get a feel for the park as a whole. And with so little information to go on, it’s bizarre what little details would stick in one’s mind.

That brings us to today’s post. “Disney Serendipity” was the name of a feature that ran in Disney News during the early to mid-1980s. Photographed and (presumably) written by the mysterious Dawn and Max Navarro, these two-page spreads covered, in the words of the column, “Serendipity – that wonderfully rare word used to describe the finding of valuable or agreeable things that you really weren’t looking for, but were happy to have found.”

These features focused on the more obscure aspects of the Disney park-going experience, typically involving shopping or dining (and never failing to mention the corporate sponsors of each shop or restaurant). When most news tended to focus on major new attractions or park entertainment, these “slice of life” pieces were a real window into what the real Disneyland and Walt Disney World experience was like for visitors. Maybe that’s why they made such an impression on young readers, who thought “Wow – the restaurants in Disneyland are different than they are in Walt Disney World!”

Here’s a column from the Fall, 1984 issue of Disney News.

Continue reading Serendipity – Disney Dining, 1984