Earlier this month, my wife and I returned to Tokyo Disney Resort for the first time in three years. From 2014 to 2019, we visited Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea at least once a year. Those last few years especially, I had stepped up the frequency of my visits, going through an intense theme park phase as I wrote photo reports and other articles for sites like TDR Explorer and WDW News Today (WDWNT). This involved taking thousands of pictures—not quite 20,000, but close enough.
Resurfacing in a Changed Disney Seascape
This section has been updated with new information as of March 2024.
The pandemic brought an end to my theme park photo expeditions, and I haven’t actively contributed anything to WDWNT since 2019, though it looks like they reran one of my articles in 2020. When I checked back in on my old author page, however, I was dismayed to see that most of the photos in my articles are no longer displaying. You can still see what I wrote in some cases, but the photo element was a big part of those articles, too, and I was hoping they’d have a longer shelf life than three years.
I’m not sure if it’s because they redesigned the site or just ran out of storage space and the ability to keep the lights on everywhere. I do remember having to compress my photos for WDWNT before uploading them. To further complicate matters, the 2018 articles I wrote have disappeared from the site entirely, while the remaining 2019 articles are all now individually attributed to a WordPress developer named Iain. When I reached out to the site’s management about this, a representative told me, “It’s a developer issue,” which can’t be fixed on their end. This means that, outside my author page, I’m no longer receiving credit for my work below each headline.
It’s somewhat ironic that there are all these broken image links and missing or misattributed articles now, given that WDWNT is known for running maintenance reports where they decry the shabby state of rides and such at Disney World. This is one of those moments, as a writer, where I’m left feeling like some online version of the elderly Johnny Cash, looking back on the “empire of dirt” he’s built in the blogosphere.
More Drama With WDWNT
For context, my sister—who, like my parents, is a Disney World Annual Passholder—was a WDWNT reader. On the one hand, they do pay their contributors (whereas the early stuff I wrote for TDR Explorer was done on a volunteer basis). On the other hand, it turns out they’re not the best custodians of potentially evergreen content online. They’ve also had a rather contentious relationship in the past with the denizens of #DisTwitter and the Walt Disney Company itself.
This is something I became aware of toward the end of my writing stint, which overlapped with Bob Chapek’s tenure as head of Disney’s Parks and Resorts division. In mid-2019, Tom Corless, the founder of WDWNT, said in a YouTube video that it was “at war” with the company after the official Disney Parks Blog alluded to it as an “unscrupulous” news source.
My favorite part in that video is how Tom is surrounded by some of the same plush dolls of the Country Bears that my wife and sister own. Suffice it to say, there’s plenty of petty drama in the Disney fan community, but I remain a freelancer who’s not invested in that or affiliated with any theme park sites now. My main target audience for that kind of writing was just my family back home in Central Florida.
20 Photos of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at Tokyo DisneySea
Recently, my mother was surprised to see some pictures of a fully operational 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride in a Google Photos album I sent her after our return to DisneySea this month. She didn’t even know DisneySea had that ride. I would have loved to send her the link to the 2019 article I wrote about it, but again, all the image links in that article are now broken.
In lieu of a full rebuild of all my missing Disney park pics (most of which you can still find scattered across various albums on my in-house Photos page), here’s a scrapbook of 20 old photos, just of the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride at DisneySea. It’s the best I can do.
