At Disney’s California Adventure, guests can experience Golden Dreams, a film about Whoopi Goldberg’s influence on hundreds of years of California history. At the end of the film, there is a montage of scenes and photos of significant events in California’s past. One of the short clips depicts the fall of the Berlin wall, prompting many people who went to American public schools to ask themselves, “Where exactly in California was the Berlin wall located?”
Those of you who remember correctly that the Berlin wall was in the Soviet Union probably wonder what its fall is doing in a film about California. The fact is that the wall-fall footage has three links to California:
- Ronald Regan, who ordered the U.S.S.R. to take down the wall, used to be Governor or California,
- The handles of the sledgehammers used to destroy the wall were made from California pine, and
- The wall itself, although appearing to be made of concrete, was actually a light-weight structure fashioned under the direction of Hollywood movie-set designers.