Disneyland's Main Street Tobacco Shop (1955)

when Disneyland first opened back in 1955 the park operationally was very different than how it looks and acts nowadays and as such the early history there is dotted with many out of place and unusual offerings by today's standards but by far in way the one thing that definitely stands out in the they'd never do that today category has got to be a small tobacco shop that could be found near the front of the park where guest back in the early days could actually pick up pipes cigarettes cigars and even Disneyland branded loose tobacco right on the middle of Main Street now obviously the tobacco shop was a real product of its time not only in an age where a lot of people did still smoke but also one where it was so common to do so there weren't even designated smoking sections at Disneyland yet and everywhere except the rides fair game to light up which is always kind of hard to imagine nowadays right with Disney completely Banning smoking in the parks of a few years ago and introducing similarly strict rules about its depiction on screen even earlier than that but even for a company is seemingly anti-smoking as Disney is and kind of has been historically they've definitely had a very interesting and storied relationship with tobacco one that perhaps can best be told through a tiny Smoky little shop on Main Street did you C for [Music] Life who did how did they do it what in the world did they [Music] do one of the very first instances of the tobacco shop appearing anywhere actually comes from the first episode of the Disneyland TV show back in 1954 this is a/4 in to the foot scale model of Disneyland when you come in the main gate pass pass the railroad station down the steps and across the band concert Park Straight Ahead lies the heartline of America an oldfashioned Main Street it's a little hard to make out in the footage but you can just barely see a sign labeled tobacco shop towards the front of Main Street and another with the word cigars on it a few storefronts down showing that some type of smoking shop had been planned for that area of the park pretty much since the beginning even if the plans for where it would be exactly were still a little up in the air ultimately though location further down the street was selected by the time plans for Main Street as a whole were completed a few months later and the store would quietly open with the rest of the park in 1955 as a small two room shop that sold a variety of cigarettes and other smoking accessories like pipes ashtrays as well as of course complimentary Disneyland matchbooks with each purchase now the reason I say it quietly opened was because unlike just about everything else on Main Street the tobacco shop didn't see any real Fan Fair even recog nition from Disney at all at the time and you'll be hard pressed to find any mention of it in a TV broadcast advertisement printed promotional material anything which is part of the reason the shop is so obscure today just not a lot of records of it and I think a big reason for that well besides the obvious was the fact that it didn't have a major sponsor behind it giving it that same kind of funding and prominence that the other stuff did because if you know anything about early Disneyland the park was basically built on Partnerships with these big companies whether it was Timex Kodak cocacola or something else there were hardly any shops restaurants or even rides for that matter that didn't have some brand or company attached to help fund it which I do find interesting because if there was ever an industry that is always been prolific when it comes to different and especially new forms of advertising it was cigarette companies who even as early as 1951 we're already sinking millions of dollars into the relatively new realm of commercial television through various promotions and program sponsorships how about a good night cigarette Ricky thank you Lucy H nothing but the best eh n nothing but Philip Morris and like we mentioned before in regards to the Park's original sponsors getting the opportunity to partner up with Disney or at the very least have your brand plastered somewhere in a park that had been getting promoted by the Walt Disney on TV for the past year wasn't one that any marketing Savvy companies were passing up especially if they had the money to spend like any of the big tobacco Brands would have so it's safe to assume that it was a decision on Disney's part not to partner up with one likely for the obvious reason of at least not so directly promoting smoking at a family theme park you know you can get away with telling the kids to buy some sugary soda over the coke corner but you might run into an issue if you got Mickey telling you to go out there and pick up some Lucky Strikes it's light up be happy go lucky it's light up time yeah might be a little too far they didn't they didn't want to do that interestingly enough though the tobacco shop actually did have some outside fun funding behind it just not from any big company or brand I was doing a little bit of digging trying to find out who actually operated the shop originally like who literally supplied and ran it since Disney wasn't the one doing that initially and The Only Name I could find was a c meerson who was mentioned as its tobacco nests in a Disneyland newsletter from 1956 oh and by the way did you guys know that the shop was originally called The Tobacco nest for some reason before pretty quickly just becoming the tobacconist spelled normally I had to look it up tobacco Nest is not a thing I don't know why they called it that anyway I couldn't find anything else about that c meerson name upon further inspection and it wasn't until I was looking into some random online auction I found for one of the signs that used to be on the front of the shop that they talked about how it was actually being sold from the estate of a Henry fennen Brock who was apparently the original owner for the Shop's first 5 years and so I started looking around for a bit more info on this guy and I wind up at a place called pentrace decom which appears to be some type of pen Enthusiast website and Hey listen you guys know me I'm not judging okay we can like pens and I end up getting a whole biography this whole tale really of this guy's life story you know how he grew up as an orphan on the Lower East Side of New York back in the 1920s and made a living by going around to all the pawn shops to buy repair and then resell the old broken fountain pens and now he traveled all over the country doing this before eventually opening a liquor store in Detroit at the end of prohibition that was subsequently closed due to claims of bad liquor and then he travels to Chicago where he's selling painted turtles as a souvenir of the 1933 World's Fair over there calling himself the turtle King he's got a whole theme and everything before eventually finding himself in La by 1936 and opening his own pens shop eventually working out a deal with the Parker Pen Company in 1938 to become a direct dealer of their pens instead of having to Hawk the old ones which would also lead to him designing and selling desks for Parker in the following years but anyway fast forward to 1954 and Henry's reading an article in the Wall Street Journal and he hears that this Walt Disney fella is making a theme park in Anaheim and recruiting companies to be a part of it so he brings the offer to Parker hoping they'll jump on board but they ultimately pass and so Henry does what anybody would do in that situation and just does it himself signing on not only to operate the pen Shop off Main Street but also the bizaar and Adventure Land the tobacco shop and all the cigarette vending machines in the park and right now you might be asking yourself there were cigarette vending machines at Disneyland oh yes of course yeah there were actually a couple again guys I got to emphasize you can smoke almost anywhere you want at this Disneyland very different time all right but the whole time I'm reading this Fen and Brock story I'm just thinking wow what a homegrown authentic only in America inspirational Main Street kind of story for a guy who would now be running what was definitely going to be Walt Disney's favorite shop on Main Street yeah we'll we'll talk about that later though it's really kind of weird how Main Street back in the early days of the park was basically like a big mall with commercial space that pretty much anyone could buy into and just be a tenant there this is long before it becomes to Main Street of today I mean this is back when they've got Prime Starbucks real estate being taken up by a fake butcher shop in a place that literally sells locks okay they didn't know what they were doing back then and it does make it interesting to look at some of the old maps and site plans and stuff like that from back then and when you see Main Street broken up into blocks you know they mean it it's not just one big connected Disney owned mall like it is today some of the storefronts are divided up unevenly like the tobacco shop which actually gets a little extra space because the cinema entrance next door kind of tapers in towards the front which is actually why the shop has two storefronts the one with the steps and a fake door that doesn't open on the right and then the real one next to it and while we're already out in front of the store I should also mention the old cigar store Indian that was in front too of course you know we should be calling it a cigar store Native American if we're trying to be accurate but since that's what these have been known as colloquially I'm just going to call it that because statues like these actually have a much bigger presence in real history as well wooden carve Indians were something that actually originated from England back in the early 1600s when tobacco was first starting to get heavily imported there from North America of course tobacco and the practice of using tobacco and rituals among Native Americans had already been happening since before the 1400s and since that Association already existed in people's minds the depiction of an Indian was what was commonly used to symbolize tobacco shops in England in the same way that stuff like red white and blue poles were used to represent barber shops or three gold balls to let you know it was a pawn shop just something outside that's easily identifiable and still works if you can't read or don't speak English I also found out that the reason a lot of these statues exist at all is because there was a huge influx of kind of out ofwork wood carbers at the end of the 1800 hundreds since the new steam ships were now being made out of Iron and Steel instead of wood there wasn't that same demand for people who could carve those big figureheads you see on the front of old Wooden Ships and you can definitely see the similarities between the two you can tell it's that same type of craftsmanship behind both eventually though the statues also made their way over to America around the 1850s and this is why you see one on Main Street to give it that authentic turn of the century field turn of the century Main Street USA is lined on both sides by quaint shops that add flavor to the nostalgic atmosphere typifying 1900 America and what a flavor it is plus the real life versions of these statues had basically already been outlawed since around 1910 when sidewalk obstruction laws first started to get introduced in America and most of the carvings they were using just got thrown out or rotted away over time because even by the 1950s cigar store Indians were already considered a novelty since they had been gone for so long another reason and they probably thought it would have been neat to have one at Disneyland It's actually kind of funny because I mentioned earlier how there isn't that much documentation of the tobacco shop at Disneyland because obviously that's not really something you want to bring attention to you know they're not taking photos and selling postcards of that storefront but one of the only reasons we have as many photos of the shop as we do is because people love taking their picture with the Indian since it's basically one of the only things you can kind of pose with on Main Street I should also note that there was a second one of these figures in Frontier land too over by the trading post that was added a couple years after the park opened in 1959 it seems to be pretty much identical aside from a different colored cape and it looks like it came out of the same fiberglass mold as the original one so I'm guessing this was just to provide another spot for that photo op maybe create less traffic jams on Main Street who knows I mean you hate to say it but the tobacco shop has got to be a pretty high trffic store back in the day because I'm telling you there is going to be hell to pay if dad runs out of cigarettes on autopia again we can't have it we you just can't have it now if we could just zoom out for a moment because this is a lot of smoking and tobacco related stuff for Disneyland because surely by now they had to have at least known cigarettes weren't good for you I mean there had been studies going as far back to the 1920s and 40s suggesting there was a possible link between smoking and lung cancer and by 1957 it was a scientific fact that smoking led to a quote increased incidence of lung cancer as per scientists from the US Public Health Service and the Surgeon General and really anyone who's using their brain can tell it's not good for you even before the science confirms it the coughing the hacking up mucus I mean you're literally inhaling smoke on a regular basis even the firemen back then knew not to do that just the rise of tobacco use at that time was really the kind of thing that only could have happened at that specific point in American history where you've simultaneously got not only the ability to suddenly industrialize the manufacturer of millions upon millions of cigarettes for the first time ever but you've also got the brand new mediums of both radio and television to now Market that same Tobacco on a whole new generation of consumers via advertising and product placement and when you look at some of the smoking statistics from back then you realize that's exactly what happened you know it's very easy to forget that cigarette use used to be everywhere in the early days of TV in the ad breaks the sponsorship segments it's belir of course the straight up commercials they'd run with the dozens of animated jingles I mean it's almost miraculous that with TV Centric early Disneyland was that there aren't more weird connections to smoking in some way even the guys they got showing up for the parks opening day broadcast have a whole history of advertising for cigarettes the only things Walt Disney ever advertised like that back in the day were cars all right fine American automobiles nothing bad there and especially with all the borderline propaganda that the tobacco companies were trying to push back in the 50s it's no wonder why smoking was still so normalized in American culture that they wouldn't think twice about having a smoke shop in Disneyland did you ever think of this before Chesterfield is the only cigarette in the country which gives you one proof of highest quality two proof of no adverse effects to the nose throat and sinuses I guess you can't really get any con concerning data about lung cancer if you never bother to check the lungs so that works and it comes from a doctor who's been examining a group of Chesterfield smokers as part of a program supervised by a responsible independent research laboratory that the ears nose throat and accessory organs of all participating subjects examined by me were not adversely affected in the 6- months period by smoking the cigarettes provided that's crazy because you would think that the introduction of tar into the human lung would count as an adverse effect but hey I'm not the doctor here and if I was the doctor here I'm sure I'd be smoking camels what cigarette do you smoke doctor the brand named most was camel yes surveys show more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette well if all your doctors were jumping off Bridges would you go smoke a cigarette with them no I didn't think so so yes all this is to say that there was some public awareness of how bad smoking was in the ' 50s but thanks to Big tobacco doing doing everything they could to undermine that fact a lot of people were still ignorant of the actual dangers until well into the 1960s but you know who did know smoking wasn't good for you early on funny enough Disney because they actually put out an animated short back in 1951 called no smoking years before the tobacco shop in Disneyland opened so you know I guess there goes pleading ignorance with this whole thing for them but to be fair I was actually surprised with how hard the animation goes against smoking with Goofy's depiction of a nick addiction not really pulling any punches or sugar coating what that looks like the average man's habit of smoking leaves its marks deeply imprinted upon his surroundings with tobacco the smoker finds relaxation and contentment well it's nice to see goofy doing his best Walt Disney impression it must have used him here as animation reference like that deer in Bambi ah that cool inhale with coffee and toast a fast exhale while leaving for work ah the soothing [ __ ] to face the day's toil I'm sorry the soothing what the inveterate smoker gets a strange desire to rid himself of the habit and the whole point of the short is basically to show how difficult it is to actually quit smoking once you start as we watch Goofy suffer through all the inescapable cravings and withdrawals that trying to quit cold turkey will leave you with what I quit smoking for I like smoking I'm no quitter get a lot of pleasure smoking I love smoking it's my hobby man I knew goofy was going to relapse I just saw him at the tobacco shop the other day poor guy's never going to get off the stuff overall though the cartoon does a pretty good job of showing what nicotine does once it gets its hooks into you and the whole thing works as a sort of halfway PSA against smoking which is actually somewhat ahead of its time since most of the famous anti-smoking stuff from that era wasn't really happen until the 1960s but when you consider the fact that the original voice actor for goofy Pinto kig was himself a lifelong smoker who actually tried to promote awareness about the health risks of tobacco it even supported those early bills that would have required warning labels for cigarettes it all starts to make a bit more sense this is back during a time when Congress was first pushing for those old cigarette smoking maybe hazardous to your health labels in the early 60s which of course you know the tobacco companies were pushing back on as much as they could and you you wouldn't start seeing until 1965 the mid1 1960s is also a very interesting era for the tobacco industry as a whole since this was right when all the negative Health implications of smoking started to go public in a much bigger way you see for years the biggest problem was the fact that the science was not getting the same publicity that the propaganda was because when people publish studies and reports about how smoking kills you that might end up in a magazine at best if it ever leaves the realm of Academia meanwhile you got every Tobacco Company out of the sun funding entire television shows just to keep smoking in your face but once the Federal Trade Commission got involved after the surgeon general's report in ' 64 and now you've got multiple parts of the government bringing attention to the situation now it's suddenly on TV in a very big way and you're not just getting the glamorized depiction of it anymore here now is CBS News correspondent Harry rezner this is the exhibit hall at the annual Convention of the National Association of tobacco Distributors and some of the products being shown to these six ,000 wholesalers last year this country produced and distributed $8 billion worth of tobacco products there are something like a million and a half retail outlets for cigarettes and $150 Million worth of cigarette advertising with the ethical and moral problems that poses for all media especially television this is the size of the economic edifice that would be threatened by any substantial and permanent change in American cigarette smoking habits meanwhile back over at Disneyland the original lease for the tobacco shop that was signed back before the park open by Henry fennen Brock would eventually expire after 5 years of the park being open in 1960 and with Disneyland now being financially stable enough on its own that it didn't need all those old small scale Le's Disney chose not to renew which was really for the best I mean seeing as how smoking was rapidly becoming more and more frowned upon by the public this is really the perfect chance to retire the shop and put an end to what was unfortunately seen as kind of a necessity to have back when habitual smoking was so commonplace and the tobacco store at Disneyland would finally close down in 1960 hold on a minute guys I got something crossed out in my script here let me just double check something all right so it turns out the tobacco shop didn't close in the 1960s I don't know why I thought I could have made such a fair assumption like that this is Disneyland we're talking about all bets are off and it would seem that Disney themselves just took over the shop after the initial lease expired because there aren't any other names that come up as an owner or operator after Fenn and Brock well except for maybe the elusive C meerson and I still have no idea who that guy is by the way see see in fact the shop was operating so hard in the late' 60s that when they were putting the plans together for Disney World over in Florida they made sure that Magic Kingdom also got its own tobacco shop now located on the other side of Main Street closer to this Park's Castle instead of the main gate this version of the shop somehow manages to be even more obscure than the original one at Disneyland because I don't think we have any photos of the inside of this one at all and only a few exist of the exterior and the sign that was in front of it but as you can probably guess we do have a picture of the Indian I'm telling you people love getting their picture with these guys which was itself another duplicate of the original one that had its own counterpart in this Park's Frontier land as well now one of the more interesting differences between the two shops was what all they sold because the first tobacco shop in California mostly dealt in pipes that were produced elsewhere and just sold to Disneyland and if you were in the market for a specifically Disney park smoking souvenir back in the 1950s you really only going to end up with something basic it probably just a little corn cob pipe that says Disneyland on it maybe one of the pouches or tins that also has the name or if you were looking to really Splurge you might even get one of the official Park lighters for a shocking price of and guys brace yourselves you're going to love this a whole dollar a dollar what am I made out of money here here what's next you guys are going to be asking me for more than 15 cents to get an ice cream I mean come on oh hey Walt you know we're actually going to be talking about you in a minute here just sit tight but by the time the Magic Kingdom Shop opened up during that first stage of Disney World as a resort you know back in the Heyday of the whole vacation Kingdom era the concept of a Disney branded souvenir was in full swing by now which means we've got many many different kinds of pipes with Walt Disney World stamped onto them and boxes of cigars with that logo printed onto the wraps even custommade Disney World cigarettes were for sale now and really I don't know where I'd be without once again internet hobbyists giving me so much info while researching obscure history like this because thanks to online pipe collectors like these guys now we can have an entire Montage of items you would never see in a million years be sold today so thank you tobacco enthusiasts this one's for you guys step right up step right up we got it all at the Magic Kingdom tobacconist we got briwood pipes chartin pipes French pipes pipes that say Walt Disney World pipes that just have little Mickey ears on them smooth pipes rugged pipes even pipes stands for when you finally get sick of your pipe and just got to put it down but we also got handmade Disney World cigars that were proudly made by Cuban Craftsmen and wait a minute are these are these legal these are Cuban is it legal if you get the seeds from Cuba and just grow them in Tampa I don't know but that is a beautiful box of cigars nonetheless and I'm not just saying that because of the' 70s artwork oh my God these cigars did you did you get these at Disney World oh no I just addressed my inquiry to the Main Street tobacconist and he sent him right over no problem and don't forget all this branding also spilled over to Disneyland too where they started to get some of the newer merchandise throughout the 70s with some different lighters and pipes to go along with that Classic Special Blend of loose tobacco and no worries it's only mildly aromatic so you're really not going to be bothering anybody when you're standing in line for Dumbo throughout the rest of the 1970s though both the tobacco stores in Disneyland and Disney World continued operating really without any issue but meanwhile back in the real world again the tobacco industry was taking its first big lump the same year that Magic Kingdom first opened in 1971 when cigarette commercials were finally banned outright from being shown on TV that is the last half hour on which it is legal to sell cigarettes on radio or television in the United States it marks as we like to say the end of an era it's been a long ERA this of course the result of a near decade long battle between the federal government and big tobacco the latter of which likely would have been completely fine continuing to bend the truth about smoking for another 20 years had the ban not been instituted and I could say that would near a 100% confidence because once they were banned from advertising in the United States they just immediately started making commercials for foreign markets like Japan instead ah yes our two greatest American exports Disneyland and cigarette commercials I'm telling you guys we were this close to not having cigarette commercials from the 80s this close to being deprived of a whole tobacco ridden Vapor wave paradise and really where would we be without that oh and speaking of the Japanese we can't forget that they also got their own version of Magic Kingdom over there in the early 80s now their version of Main Street is designed a little bit differently than either the ones in Florida or Anaheim and it doesn't feature any of the old tobacco shops storefronts from either Park and instead they just discreetly sold cigarettes that were tuck behind the counter in various other stores if you asked for them most likely just because pipe smoking historically just didn't have the same cultural significance in Japan that it did in America however that didn't stop them from having their own that's right you guessed it cigar store Indian this time with only one of them located in their version of Frontier land called western land but it wouldn't be long before the parks back over in America ended up following Japan's lead because in 1985 the second tobacco shop that opened in Florida was closed down permanently and the only place to get cigarettes in the Magic Kingdom at all was across the street from the original location at the market house where they were now being sold in that same under-the-counter manner as the stores over in Japan and the wooden statue that was in front of the old location was also moved to reflect that change but eventually cigarette sales were phased out of the Magic Kingdom altogether by the late 1980s and visitors were instead directed to purchase them at one of the resorts or some else off property surprisingly though the one over at Disneyland continued to operate without switching locations throughout the rest of the 1980s and you can even spot it in some of the old vacation planning videos from back then quaint shops of all kinds could be found throughout Disneyland it's fun looking for souvenirs no no no no no sweetie not those souvenirs okay get yourself a little mini toy or something all right finally though the Disneyland tobacco store did close its doors in 1990 where it was subsequently turned into a store called Great American Pastime that oddly enough actually sold real sports memorabilia like hats baseball jerseys a bunch of different Collectibles and even Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts at one point oh man these trunks are my favorite Disneyland souvenir before that replacement store was ultimately closed down in 1999 when it then became the 20th Century Music company which mostly sold Disney DVDs and CDs and just like that Disneyland's Main Street gets a little bit more of its character strip away you hate to see it many such cases though I wish I could say the Florida shop suffered a better fate but that ultimately became a store sponsored by Gibson that sold gift cards after the tobacco shop moved out and then it became a full bookstore under them in 1989 before that too was turned into a sports shop in 1995 that sold athletic wear and with that all the tobacco stores at all the Disney parks are gone but this wasn't the end of smoking there t no far from because in 1999 the park Institute suited a new policy that for the first time since it opened guests would now only be allowed to smoke in one of a few designated smoking areas these are moved around a bit over the years but from what I've seen on the old Maps it looks like there was one towards the end of Main Street one over in frontierland by Big Thunder another down by the Haunted Mansion in New Orleans square and also one that got added a little bit later near the matter horn and no in case you were wondering smoking still wasn't allowed indoors or on any of the rides which had actually already been the case ever since since the Park first opened way back in the Walt Disney days I guess unless you're the king of Nepal in which case it seems to be okay to smoke I don't know but definitely no smoking on the gondolas guys okay even Obama had to learn that lesson the hard way you could still kind of hang out in the park and so we went into the the gondolas and and and I'm ashamed to say this so close yours young people but uh a few of us were smoking on the godess well no no these these were cigarettes people it's called Zaza terrible thing uh I they do they kill you I stop wow it just goes to show even a man thrown out of a Disney park for smoking on the attractions can one day be an attraction himself I mean this place it's really magical but I you know what I remember about it was at the end they said uh uh you're going to have to leave sir for breaking uh the rules of the Magic Kingdom but you are welcome to come back anytime which I thought well that was nice of them uh anyway those are my memories of Disneyland and if I could just say real quick even just being a few years removed from the whole still being able to smoke in the Parks thing it's still pretty wild to see some of these old pcks of the smoking sections they had it has a very kind of uh evidenc feel to it for lack of a better word it always seems that stuff like this kind of Fades from from public memory pretty quick so to actually see people smoking at Disneyland in these photos especially in the 2000s it just can't help but feel pretty nuts these days even the idea of like a theme Disney park sign telling you you can smoke here you know a warning label about tobacco but in the Disney font oh tobacco smoke is known to cause cancer birth defects yeah I know Disneyland okay you guys are known to cause cancer for God's sake I don't want to hear it you got the exact same sign out front all right but stuff like that or even the iconic Disney World trash can but with an ashtray on top that's the kind of stuff that just doesn't even really exist anymore and it's very weird to see at least in the US Parks because all the different smoking cultures from around the world also come into play a good bit with Disney a good example of that was back in 2008 when they first tried adding smoking sections to Disneyland Paris in an attempt to curb some of the rampant cigarette use that had been happening there since it opened and the reason I say tried was because most people just didn't follow the rule and kept smoking like it was 1955 or something someone actually made a very funny video back in 2009 called Disneyland Paris finding the smoking section and it's just a compilation of people blatantly smoking all over the place they don't give a Frenchman's freck okay these guys although I will say in more recent years it seems that an effort has been made to actually enforce that rule a little bit more as even over there smoking has become a bit more unfashionable but that's nothing compared to Tokyo yeah I mention men earlier how they don't actually display cigarettes in any of the stores or even sell them openly unless you ask but they take that kind of thinking even further by having almost all their smoking areas either very far away from the other visitors on these long out ofthe way paths or they even go so far as to hide all their smokers away in these special indoor smoking rooms where everyone just stands around indoors chiefing on these things which is really just something else and in true Tokyo Disneyland Style all of them have some level of theming or decoration to them and hey you can say what you want about Japan but I'll tell you this right now none of our smoking sections have hidden Mickeys in them clearly we are the ones doing something wrong well actually as far as America goes these days we don't even have smoking sections at all at any of the Disney parks ever since they rolled out the full ban for it back in May of 2019 well some big changes coming to Disneyland involving smoking and strollers starting May 1st smoking will be banned inside Disneyland Disney California Adventure and Downtown Disney this new band officially removed any and all smoking sections from inside the parks now relocating all of them to right outside the main gates of each of them and pretty much overnight all those old Disney smoking area signs went down and new no smoking signs were put up in their place the band also extended to Disney World of course where it was definitely felt a lot more than it was on the other coast and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a policy like that works a lot better in the much smaller and very walkable Disneyland park and it does in a place like Epcot where you could very easily be 15 20 minutes away from getting out of there at any given point I mean just look at the smoking sections on the map from before and after the band you have any idea how far I'm going to have to walk now when I'm at the refreshment Outpost over here and I'm craving a refreshing smoke to go along with my refreshing Coke I mean that's a long walk for someone who's already short of breath quite unaccommodating for a park to be kicking me out to smoke when they were the ones used to sell tobacco products oh yeah that's right Epcot I know you're still weird you ain't getting away with nothing his lordship don't make me laugh but really a full-on band like this has been a long time coming considering the fact that modern Disney as a company has been very publicly anti-smoking since the mid 2000s when CEO Bob Iger officially announced that smoking would no longer be depicted in Disney branded movies something that's since been expanded to also include movies produced by them ever since 2015 and it actually kind of speaks to where the parks are as a priority for Disney in general because there are still prominent attractions that feature smoking in some form today and other ones that existed just fine up until a few years ago despite their seemingly Hardline stance on the subject but the company definitely is doing their best to get rid of it everywhere else in their history whether you want it or not because you can go on YouTube right now and find many examples of them working to edit out or cover up any depictions of smoking from re-releases of their older material even that goofy smoking short we were watching earlier is basically non-existent outside of Internet re-uploads nowadays and subtle erasers like that are a very common thing in their history that unfortunately still happens nowadays even in the age of streaming and digital media and even Uncle Walt himself's not safe with Disney getting caught a few years ago actually photoshopping the cigarettes out of his hands and pictures of them around the park which caused a pretty big stir online at the time since removing from a photo of a real guy isn't exactly the same as just taking it away from goofy in a cartoon now you're leaning more into the realm of historical revisionism and regardless of the actual intention making it feel like you got something to hide which was definitely the way most people took it because if there's one thing we should all know about Walt Disney it was that he definitely smoked cigarettes and if there's one thing that I know about Walt Disney it was that he definitely smoke cigarettes at Disneyland I mean if we can just address the elephant in the room real quick who do you think the tobacco shop was for Roy CV wood no this guy he loved that place he was there all the time and I'm sorry guys but there's not enough airbrush tool in the world to try and cover up all the cigarettes in this guy's old photos going to take a lot more than some xacto knives and a Sharpie to try and hide all this from the record all right but if I could be serious here for a second you know wrap this thing up with a real Point instead of just giggling about cigarettes at Disneyland trying to hide or brush aside any pieces of History like this that might be a little bit unsavory is exactly the wrong approach for a company like Disney to be taking especially if they claim to be as against smoking as they are because I ask you seriously what would be the more effective message to send as Disney if you were trying to keep the youth from smoking would it be actually taking the time to acknowledge the fact that the Beloved founder of your company died years before his time because of something even he admitted was a bad habit and really bring home the senselessness of that loss by imagining all the things he specifically could have done with that extra time is it better to do that or is it better to just cover up all the evidence of everything smoking related that he and the company have ever done and never talk about it to a point that some guy on YouTube now knows more about the company's own history with tobacco than the CEO probably does oh early Bob really you you knew about the Magic Kingdom tobacconist really you knew about that before my video okay right I believe that and it's the same thing with the Disneyland tobacco shop itself the fact that this thing even exists at all really just gives you the big picture of how differently smoking was looked at in American culture back then and now the widespread normalization of something that was quite literally carcinogenic could still be so pervasive that it crept its way into Disneyland and left behind a whole messy Legacy that we're really just now starting to clean up let alone talk about but I think we can all be glad that we're far away from the days and societal circumstances that spawn the tobacco shop to begin with even if life is just a little bit less catch without those old cigarette [Music] jles thanks thanks wkins always glad to help a friend of need Jackson goodbye

Channel: Theme Parks Shouldn't Exist

Views: 746,162

Keywords: park, ride, history, park ride history, theme park, disney, world, land, theme parks shouldn't exist, shouldn't exist, tobacco, tobacco shop, main street, smoking section, smoking, walt disney, walt, cigarette, pipe, tobacconist, cigar store

Id: iPYUwVZ0kq4

Length: 37min 46sec (2266 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024