Teenage Idiocy on Tom Sawyer Island

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Sally Korsh is a retired commercial Real Estate lawyer who lives in Weston, Connecticut. She was born in Pasadena, California and grew up in the greater Los Angeles metropolis area. As a child and teenager, Sally visited Disneyland approximately 15 times due to her geographic proximity to the park in the 1960s and 1970s. She attended college at the University of California at Santa Barbara and law school at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. As a young adult, she visited Disneyland rarely. Her interest in Disney and visits to the parks were renewed upon her 1992 marriage to Kevin Korsh and the birth of their daughters, Johanna and Karina. Although Sally and Kevin moved to Connecticut shortly before the birth of their daughters, her parent’s lingering physical proximity to Disneyland resulted in approximately ten more visits to the park as a young mother with her family in the early 2000s. Her lifelong hobbies include Golden Retriever adoption and nature conservation.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: Tom Sawyer Island is an artificial island in Disneyland. It features scenes and character references to the Mark Twain novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Visitors are transported around the island on a railroad car. It was rebranded in 2007 to combine Tom Sawyer’s fictional universe with elements from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the island featured a settler’s cabin that was supposedly set on fire by Native American animatronics. The informant alleges that these Native American animatronics had the capacity to dance. These simplistic portrayals of Native Americans on Tom Sawyer Island were gradually removed in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Social context: The interviewee first observed this superstition as a young teenager during one of her many visits to the Disneyland parks in the 1960s and 1970s with her peers from school. The superstition became a popular and risky ritual among her male Middle School and High School classmates.

Item:

The informant alleges that many teenage boys she knew believed in the following magic superstition: if they were able to escape the confines of the railroad car on Tom Sawyer Island and dance with the Native American animatronics, they would get a girlfriend.
The following is a transcript of the legend as it was told to the collector in February 2018. Some words and phrases have been omitted from the original to allow for easy reading.

Transcript:

“A bunch of kids thought the greatest and most rebellious thing ever was hopping off the rail car on Tom Sawyer Island and going off to dance with the Native Americans. It was considered a pretty legendary accomplishment if you managed to pull it off without getting caught. One of my friends even told me the boys at my school said the idea behind it was that if you could pull the stunt off, you would get a girlfriend from all the attention.”

Informant’s Comments:

Collector’s Comments:

This item interested me as an example of how much our culture has changed since the late 1960s. I found it interesting to learn that at this time, such reductionist portrayals of Native Americans were the norm and kids joked around with them as a part of their lore.

Collector’s Name: Karina Korsh

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Dartmouth Folklore Archive