Okay. Let’s get down to business.
The first time I went to a Disney park, according to my mother, who is an unreliable source, is 1955. This is the year Disneyland opened. I maintain that the first year I went was 1958, and that in 1955 we only got as far as Las Vegas because as soon as my father encountered his first one-armed bandit, we were staying put. We saw the entertainer Ted Lewis at a nightclub and my mother and I both recall that distinctly; I also recall being babysat at some desolate Vegas motel the likes of which were torn down during the Nixon administration. What little kid would recall “Me and My Shadow” but not Main Street USA? What do you say to that, Mother Menick?
In either case, my exposure to Disney was at an early, impressionable age. I was also a committed devotee of Walt’s various television shows. I had a little rocking donkey that I would watch TV from those Wednesday nights when the Disneyland show came on, or as my father put it, I would sit on my ass watching television. (His sense of humor was severely stretched by those one-armed bandits in his future.) I watched other shows too, but in those days, Disney was the Cadillac, and everything else was local and low-grade. Disney meant big feature films that blew you away. Everything else was, in our household, referred to as Farmer Brown cartoons, with a lot of barnyard animals chasing one another around. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed those Farmer Brown cartoons. But, well, they weren’t Dumbo.
I watched Disney’s various TV shows probably until they went off the air (and then I started watching the Disney channel when Kate was born, using her as a convenient excuse). This means that my entire life I sat there and watched old Walt introduce whatever, making him a very real person in my little life. He connected to kids well, unlike, say, Ed Sullivan, who I also saw every week and who had the personality of a fire hydrant. As you probably know, the creation of the physical Disneyland was to some degree financed by ABC, in return for which Disney created his TV show. That show, especially in the early days, was directly involved in marketing the park even before it was built, and even as the park was able to stand on its own and the show moved away from its original home on ABC, the connection to the park remained. Each show was either a segment from Fantasyland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland or Frontierland, the same divisions as the physical park. Week after week we saw stories connected to the concepts of these lands, and often we saw stories about the park itself. The park promoted the TV show, the TV show promoted the park, etc. Disney was always marketing his stuff eleven ways to Sunday and back again. Don’t forget that we also had the Mickey Mouse Club, which was on every day for half an hour further beating Disneyana into our little brains.
For kids of my generation, this stuff was mental opium. There was no resisting addiction to Disney, and no desire to do so. The Mouse wasn’t perceived as evil then (although there was a nascent critical literature, which I admit I didn’t read much of in Miss Marino’s third grade). The need to go to Disneyland became palpable. And I was lucky enough to go a number of times because we had relatives who lived out west in Salt Lake City (they were the town’s token gentiles), and my father worked for an airline, which in those days meant readily accessible, and free, airplane transportation. This was a magic combination.
So I saw Disneyland very early on, either the year it opened or shortly thereafter, and although unlike locals in California I didn’t haunt the place, I saw it every few years, just enough to inspire but not deflate a sense of awe. There was no other place on earth like Disneyland. My brain was completely Disneyfied by both the place and my exposure to the other Disney products, having been raised on the television show and, of course, the feature films. Nothing was as sure a bet for parents as dumping their kids at a Disney film matinee while they went off doing whatever adults do when their kids are at the movies. (I don’t know what that is because when Kate went to kid movies, I went with her.) So Disney was not only a part of my regular life, but contained a magical place where that part of my life achieved its apotheosis.
Of such are the attics of our brains stuffed and organized.
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