The KZfaq recommendation gods have blessed me with this video. Come on over, Defunctland subscribers!

This video is fantastic!! I figured you were a well known creator with a very established channel. Damn was I surprised to see that you’re just starting out! You deserve so much, and I am happy to be one of your first few subscribers :)

I have absolutely no recollection of this place at all, but I was born here. It was always so strange to put “Celebration” as my birth place, but I haven’t known anything about it as my family moved away from Florida shortly after I was born. Thanks for the video and thanks YT gods for the rec! ♥️

Fascinating documentary. My family have lived here since late1996 when we did participate in the original lottery. Our two boys attended Celebration school with great success. In spite of Disney denials, during the early months we were the early family that constantly met "paid" dog walkers in the downtown parks. So clean our excited dog Casey loved to walk and baptize hundreds of trees long before any other dogs. Both our sons graduated with full scholarships and went on for great professional careers. Today's Celebration is similar to what was hoped but now has become so large and spread out you'd never recognize what was dreamt for in the early days. There is NO affordable housing and virtually no shopping within walking distance. To be honest it is now a town dominated by wealthy seniors. Quite a few second homes owned by the elite from many larger American towns. Easily half the town now owned by foreign investors. In our case 3 of our neighbors have never stayed in their vacation homes more then a few weeks a year. Walk around Celebration at night and much of the year it is more like a ghost town. Crime exists but you'll seldom hear or see anything about it. In the end, it is a great town .Much like Walt wanted it is a veneer of the original plans and will probably stay that way forever.

I can't imagine the hours of research you have dedicated to this project. It is the most comprehensive, truthful look into Celebration I have seen. Congratulations and thank you.

Great job on this! I have dreamed of reopening the theater here someday as an entertainment flex space and arcade. The last person who tried this couldn't work out the right deal with Lexin, but I'm hoping I can

Walt would be horrified at how car dependent the US has become.

This is the best researched and presented about Celebration I've ever seen. EPCOT and Celebration have always fascinated me because while the original plans grandiose and even kind of bizarre, I think Disney (the man) was way ahead of his time in recognizing that the postwar "build baby build" philosophy toward zoning and community planning would have disastrous consequences for the sense of community in American towns. We still haven't really reckoned with that problem today-- but Disney wanted to try, half a century ago, and he had the resources to set some powerful precedents-- he just didn't have the time. I have to wonder whether the world would be any different if that man had been granted five more years of life. Celebration was a failure that I don't think necessarily deserved to fail. Cotino and Asteria deserve to fail, and I pray they do.

Thought I’d check this out for a few minutes and ended up watching the entire thing straight through. Very professionally done - your year of hard work easily shows. Thank you.

I just moved to Celebration less than 2 months ago and I hope I never have to leave! It’s very uplifting to live in such a vibrant and beautiful community. Thank you for such an informative video!

Tyler, I’m only on the 4th chapter but must stop to give you kudos!! Unbelievable work here. This feels like award-winning research and documentary narrative - I hope somehow you get that due! I am a Floridian, 90s Disney girl who remembers all this WELL. We were all so excited about Celebration. I especially loved the Disney Institute. I took MANY classes there and was always blown away by all they offered to us “regular” people who just wanted to have fun and learn something new - and under some of the best professionals around! Amazing. There was a lot of cool, groundbreaking stuff Disney was trying out during this time and I really respect that.

Great video! We've lived in Celebration since June 19th, 1996 and what you have reported is pretty accurate. We're still here and both of our kids went to the K-8 and then the HS. We still love the town.

I live in Celebration and love living here. Just the other day on a Celebration Facebook group a Celebration neighbor posted that they had a flat tire and were too old to change it and needed help. Neighbors sprang into action and in a couple of minutes there were several people ready and willing to come help. This is a beautiful town but the hearts of the residents are even more beautiful despite what anyone might say. This town is a treasure. I love Celebration. ❣️

It's interesting to see elements of how ahead of its time it was. Like the school segment really stood out, our elementary schools here in town are largely groups around tables now instead of individual desks, and incredibly successful. And I had the same reaction, oh wow this is so different than what I had, but I gave it a chance and my kids have done so well by it.

Honestly, as a Celebration resident it’s a pretty nice and awesome town, it’s always expanding and it’s always renovating into something new and cool. I do wish it was in the hands of Disney still, but with the stature of the town today, it’s a pretty nice town still and I think it is getting somewhat better.

Collect your “I was here before this channel blew up” ticket here 🎟️🎟️

it’s a damned shame that this idea didn’t take off in the states. suburb culture has isolated people there. remote work and the pandemic made it worse, now many people spend all day on their private territory and only occasionally venture out into the public. a lack of exposure to other people’s lives makes the idea of “other people” feel like an abstract concept, because there is no physical proof of it in front of you. like the trend of calling other people “npcs”, some people nowadays can’t imagine that others have inner worlds. maybe that’s why so many people act rude in public now. we’re too isolated from one another. everyone in the grocery store is a stranger that we’ll never see again, so why care? each person is no different than an npc. communities like celebration are needed for humans to thrive, not just survive.

I enjoyed watching this. I watched the whole documentary! I lived in Orlando and Kissimmee throughout my teenage years. My family knew that I would visit Celebration frequently. The restaurants, the culture, and the attractions all fascinated me, and it made my family feel very at home. I always wondered what it would be like to live in Celebration, go to Celebration School, and be one of the neighbors in the community. Even today, I find myself intrigued by that thought and always hope to one day be able to own a home there. This made it even more intriguing. However, I’m not too sure if this is something I can commit to now. It has a lot more growth, but I do admire how the townspeople helped build it and continue to make it even more beautiful.

Great documentary! 👍 My husband and I lived in Celebration for 6 years. For 5 of the years we rented a garage apartment (which was beautiful) Then the owners decided to sell their house, so we rented a condominium for our final year living there. The town center always had plenty of people walking around (mainly tourists) but even though the town’s motto was: ‘The front porch community’ I never saw anyone sitting on their porches, or even outside (other than walking their dogs) The only thing that I liked about Celebration was living so close to Disney World.

I rarely comment on KZfaq videos, but I have to commend you on this documentary. I expected it to be around 10 or 15 minutes long, so I was surprised to see it was nearly 2 hours. I watched the entire video and was very impressed by the thorough research, interviews, and editing. The documentary was engaging and well-structured. Well done!

Wow. What a great and informative documentary of Celebration. I was just a little kid when I lived there for 6 years in the late 90s to early 2000s. I don’t live there anymore and I truly miss it. There are so many things I didn’t know about the history of celebration and even the current celebration. To be honest with you, watching this video in its entirety brought back so many memories for me. It really made me tear up and also filled with joy at the same time. You just got yourself a new subscriber!! Thank you. Please do more of these long documentaries! I would love to see what you do in the future! 😊

I love seeing a beautifully made documentary with a nuanced point of view! You happened to be the first person/video to tell me about Celebration and its history, and I'm glad you were. I loved being able to hear about the opinions of the people on the inside, especially from people who were trying to and wanted to make it work, like the teachers and residents. This was an interesting and fascinating watch, thank you so much!

A first class quality piece of work : extremely well researched, thoroughly and fairly presented. I’m a local and learned loads of new things. Thank you.

this was such a fantastic, well put together video. i am so so impressed with your video creation skills and i am proud to say this is a documentary i will recommend to everyone i know :)

This video is 🔥!!! How’s this dude only have 400 subs?

Amazing, AMAZING work you made! I subscribed to your channel after the few minutes of this video 😊😊😊

this is so so good. impressed with how little (not any?) stock imagery you've used. brilliant doc

Great work, I know you put many hours into this project and it shows.

I have been binge watching any sort of theme park adjacent deep dive videos recently, and this was perfectly up my alley as i have visited celebration many times. my family would go to orlando yearly to visit with a family doing the disney marathon, and we would get food at restaurants right around the corner from the old theater. i remember walking around it vividly from our car to the restaurant and liking the way it looked

Commenting for the algorithm but also to document that this guy’s at 967 subs right now - this channel is going places

Wow, what an amazing video. You really took the time and care to tell the story of this town. Thanks for a great documentary!

Dude this is stellar work. Awesome vid. Glad to find you early on!

great content but please turn your keyboard lights off - during your interview with the woman who lived in the town you can see them flickering on and off. keeep up the good work

I attended Celebration School from 1999 = 2002, and I missed the chaos of the first two years. I know the school sent a disclaimer with your transcripts explaining that they did things differently, and that many of my classmates didn’t get into their first choice universities.

Incredible documentary!!! Looking forward to your next productions!!!

Such a great video, super thorough and engaging! Hope more people see this soon!

Not sure how I ended up here, but you did an amazing job on this.

amazing video!!!! everybody knows about celebration but nobody ever talks about it and this deep dive was incredibly fascinating!!!

The algorithm was algorithming when it put this on my feed. Sunscribed.

Great video man, its a shame you only have 1k subs, ill do my best to pass this around like a business card. great example of Florida history and an even greater example of a documentary.

Fantastic video. Excited to be one of your first few hundred subscribers, cant wait for you to blow up soon!

What an amazing documentary!

Amazing video! Huge fan of Disney history and oddities. My family stayed in celebration at a hotel last year and piqued my interest about Celebration. Thanks for the video as it answered all my questions.

Tyler, you totally are the next Kevin Perjurer from the DefunctLand KZfaq channel. Great start to your channel!! I'm liking Forward to seeing where you go and how you grow

What an amazing film. Thank you for this!

Extremely well done, great job!

I never lived in celebration but I have heard about it, this is probably the most detailed and well rounded documentary about this subject! The only other videos that I recall that talk about this subject was those "Celebration is a cult" type videos and one from a true crime channel, but I've never knew it had a school system! I'm not sure why but when you began talking about that section my eyes lit up lol Their concept did seem unorthodox to many but I liked the whole "community learning" aspect of it all. Especially how I was a student who had trouble learning in public school, math especially, and always felt like I was...punished?? or made to feel like I was the "dumb/low achieving" student when most of the time, I just needed the concept to be explained to me in a different way and given more time to fully process it. It's a shame that when restructuring the celebration school system they couldn't work out a compromise to not only please the parents who wanted a traditional school system but keep some aspects of their original vision. Idk, I don't know much about schools and the educational system but I just liked that "community learning" concept.

This was excellent! I have subbed and I patiently await more documentaries.

Well done Tyler. Great work.

This was a fantastic documentary! Really interesting to learn the history of the town and what it's actually like.

Amazing video! I spent a lot of time in Florida growing up and was a teenager when Celebration was being built. It sparked my fascination with New Urbanism that continues to this day.

Loved this. Great work!

I live o my a few minutes from Celebration and love to visit whenever I can. It’s a pretty town with great trails connection. I would live there if it weren’t so expensive. Though, just outside the town in the surrounding Osceola County and SR192 area is one of the most uncomfortable places to witness. My wife worked in the schools here and there were so many children who lived in the run down hotels illegally.

This is extremely well done and put together 👏

This is an awesome documentary! I'm a huge Disney fan and somehow had never heard of this town? My husband laughed and told how common knowledge it was? Lol! Oh course he worked for the Disney Store back in the early 90's.

Thank you!

Excellent documentary!!!

Interesting documentary! Great job.

Excellent video, very well researched and presented! 😊 thanks for the entertainment

Amazing!! Thank you!

incredible work

I have family that live there. When I visit them I feel like I’m on a movie set. It’s like a real utopia

Great documentary!

This is so interesting !! I srsly hope you get a lot of traction in this

Thank you for this; I just moved to north village celebration earlier this year love it here, my son starts kindergarten at the school this August

I disagree with Jackie - the school isn’t the heart of the community anymore, purely because less people are having children. In a Disney town, I see a strong likelihood of getting millennial Disney adults, which are likely not to have kids. Her experience is valuable, but I think she is looking at community from the lens of history and her experience. You have to accommodate the lifestyles of who you want to live there, otherwise it will fail.

Awesome job dude!!

I love it when the KZfaq algorithm recommends me videos like this, I'm only a few minutes in but holy cow you should have a ton more subscribers

Awesome video bro!

Incredible video!

awesome video!!! i love orlando lore videos

This is fantastic and so well done!

Thank you for making this. I like this better than each chapter as a video. I just listened, and it was great to hear about this. Back in 1994 my family and I went to see the town, and we loved it. I wanted to move here knowing it had fiber and cool stuff. I don't know what fiber internet was like in 1994?

great video!

Love the video! It is so well researched! One thing I would suggest is choose less repetitive music next time please 🙏 or at least play it for less time in the video

Amazing work.

Such quality work! Deserves much praise. I LOVED the Opening Credits/Info with the blue grid and the line looping around the neighborhood. I'm not even a Disney Superfan and I watched the entire Doc. Great work and so well done!

subbed

Well done 👏 🎉

Ah, what a splendid revelation on Master Tyler Thompson's channel! To think, in the year of 1994, our grand entertainers at Disney waved their magical wands and conjured up an entire town, aptly named Celebration! The whimsy and charm of such a place spring to life splendidly in your telling, dear Tyler. As Baron Whiskerwald, I am thoroughly enchanted and tickled by the notion of living in a town spun from the dreams of storytellers. Bravo for unearthing such a delightful tale!

Hello from Cambodia! Great Channel!! :)

As someone who went to a K-7 Elementary school with about 30 students per class. A K-12 100 student classroom sounds like hell

Lived in celebration my entire life im 19

I was recommend this 2 #DisneyDiva ❤

I was 14 when my family was one of those families that won the lottery and moved into the apartment above at the time was the Village Mercantile, directly across from the Bakery. My father worked for Honeywell construction who was in detail installing on phase 1. I have home video because my father was at the time a Vlogger in his day and have hours on hours of footage if interested to do an interview for more content you can contact me. Great video, but there’s more, especially from the school perspective and Apples influence in the technology advancement for our different education styles we were being taught! I knew Mrs. Flanagan she was my teacher in the portables before the school opened, I’m in that picture of the group that was taken in the Teachers Academy at that time! WOW! 😅 I also dated her daughter Hillary, she was a sweetheart!

Very interesting but did anyone else really just want to ask Peter to slant his camera down.

great video! thoughtful entertaining and informative, I appreciate the work you put into the video.

I visited Florida for the first time this past winter, mostly to see family that moved down there. It struck me how much of it is either brand-new and very shiny or run-down despite not being all that old (most of that stuff being probably about 40 50 years old).

Hey I live there 😊

Wow, super interesting!!!

Rip Walt and Roy ❤

Purchasing with shell companies... is now illegal.

Nice to see what looks like my horrible, audio-botched upload of the BBC documentary The Town That Disney Built. Yours is the more interesting documentary.

This documentary was brilliant and really interesting... but the thing I can't stop thinking about is that Disney said to the school you're going to teach 100 kids and all the teachers went okay, let's do some baseline tests and split them up... because you actually can't teach 100 kids. Who were these educational experts behind this? It sounds like they misunderstood a lot of pedagogy coming out of Finland at the time.

Liked, subscribed and link posted to /r/Documentaries.

The twin theater will probably a hard sell to a new circuit the best bet would be to convince AMC to open a AMC classic location in that theater.

Hi Tyler, Fantastic documentary! Did you attend Hopewell Valley HS in NJ? You used pieces of video from that school and who I know. Just curious.

Celebration? I think living at Disney World would be hell. If you think an HOA has a lot of rules, imagine how strict WDW would be.

We have a neighborhood close to where we live in SC called Baxter Village that is more like what Disney had invisioned for Celebration.

It’s unfortunate most communities are not New Urbanist today