There is a whole subculture fascinated with the concept of abandoned amusement parks. It’s easy to see why: it channels so many alluring ideas at once. Manufactured joy and eerie nostalgia are in abundant supply when sifting through the wreckage of saccharine old theme park rides and locations. This very corporate appeal towards outward public affection, now buried in the debris of time, is more appealing when left in disuse, than when it was all running as it was intended to. It’s in the vivid projection of childhood dreams, now dilapidated and mysteriously disregarded, now existing either as an opportunity for once-in-a-lifetime urban exploration or for thieves to collect one-of-a-kind merchandise to sell on the black market.
For a long time, Disney World could have been considered its own city. Disney owns the land and up until 2022, had the rights to their own governorship and oversight of utilities, roadways, and emergency services. This means certain functions of the theme park have historically worked differently than any other park. For example, when attractions were retired, they were not sent away, but were relegated to what’s known as “the Disney Boneyard,” a nickname for the company’s propensity for stockpiling old and disused materials, either to recycle them later for new attractions, or to keep their own history preserved behind closed walls.
Not everyone has kept their hands and feet inside the ride at all times. Stolen Kingdom is about those who break the rules. Some of them are joyous urban explorers looking to document the spaces and places normal attendees will never see. Others are criminals, who steal from the parks, and resell what they find to the highest bidder.
Stolen Kingdom is a series of conversations with both walks of life, interspersed with nostalgic footage of old rides, fun videos of the explorers’ findings, and a true crime mystery about a stolen animatronic worth half a million U.S. dollars.
It’s compelling for the same reason mega popular and highly entertaining YouTube channels like Defunctland are entertaining: it gets to the root of a cultural fascination with a dark side that must be hidden beneath the warmly smiling exterior of “the Happiest Place on Earth.”
The subjects are interesting and director Joshua Bailey shows them for who they are. Some are quite concerning. They smugly relate that they’re in it for the fame and fortune and how they want to be a legend in Disney myth making. Others just want to go rummage through some old stuff and make compelling and aesthetic videos about it.
The dichotomy between these subsets of the fandom is interesting to watch. Not all of the subjects are likeable and the documentary leans hard into that aspect. Some have little remorse, seeing their theft as a victimless crime while others are very grounded. Perhaps one of the most profound things said is that once you remove an object of interest from the park, it’s now a dead object. Its allure is that it’s sitting there. When you remove it from the park, you also remove why it’s so interesting.
The urban exploration aspect actually ends up being the most interesting thing. It’s such a specific sort of design, the kind that has inspired newly nostalgic generations to look behind the artifice of what’s presented to us, and sort of explore what it means when these objects meant to provoke joy, now provoke an eerie kind of next stage of life.
By the end, you may wish the documentary chose one side or the other, or understood that the urban exploration is the heart of the story, even though the stories of theft are much more sensational. Stolen Kingdom is interesting for its cultural fixations but not especially riveting unless the subject makes for a specialized interest for its audience.