Trivia
Name 4 movie actors who have been turned into AAs (audioanimatronic figures) at Disney parks. And while you're at it, figure out the brackets of the worst of WDW.
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Princesses from a different perspective
Previously we analyzed Disney princesses from the post-contemporary point of view. That is, we concentrated on the antifeminist aspects of the idea, the thought of women being bred for their (presumably non-existent) Prince Charmings, the Disney wedding where your fairy tale dream comes true, the pure when-are-you-going-to-grow-up-ness of the thing. Which is all well and good, but then again, I would imagine that a lot of people get married at WDW simply because they enjoy the resort because it’s fun, and they’re going to honeymoon there anyhow (it is a very popular honeymoon spot) so why not make it a destination event for the actual wedding? Everyone in the world isn’t caught in the lockstep of some sort of pomo mindset, in other words. As I said yesterday, I simply get into the fun aspects of Disney when I’m there, otherwise why would I bother to go? And I would imagine that most other people do likewise. You can make it a pretty miserable experience, I guess, if you’re so inclined, but you can make anything a pretty miserable experience when it comes to that. Enjoying Disney requires that you take it at face value. So be it. But, since we sooner or later we’re all post-contemporary philosophers, sooner or later we all go beyond face value.
One of the major complaints about Disney is the capitalist critique, if you will. (That old Lefty Baudrillard was of this position to some degree.) It is not so much the nature of the dreams being sold on the Disney market, but the commodification of those dreams, i.e., the actual selling. You go on the ride, and as you exit, you are bombarded with souvenirs of that ride, a concept of mementoes simulating the recently experienced simulacra that boggles the po-co brain. On a less theoretical bent, the common anti-business complaints are that rides that are no longer popular are replaced or updated with more popular (read, more financially successful) elements rather than revered as monuments, that classic films from the vault are travestied by made-for-video sequels, that new products are created simply to make money, heaven forbid! Where is the purity of Old Walt?
Yeah, right. The Disney corporation learned the art of selling secondary merchandise almost the moment Mickey pulled on that steamboat whistle. Walt and Roy may have had different approaches to money, but both brothers understood that money was necessary to run their business, and that it was a business, however creative it attempted to be. Walt was not a television pioneer, finding new ways to create for the medium, he was a television pioneer finding new ways to build and support Disneyland. Tell me, if you can, how the Mickey Mouse Club was a pure creative gesture. Old Walt was a master of promotion. He was also, coincidentally, a visionary: they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, his biggest vision was probably his worst: EPCOT. If he had built it the way he originally imagined it, he finally would have killed the corporation, in that the modernist, planned, inorganic city was about to disappear from the drawing boards right when he was proposing it. The original EPCOT is pure modernist urbanism; you don’t see that much anymore… But it never came to that, and what Old Walt did do—creating a seemingly timeless animated film mythology, creating the concept of the theme park—were pretty impressive.
There are a lot of people who harp endlessly on today’s Disney Corp as a mindless moneymaking machine, who accuse the company of having no soul, of letting people down, etc., etc., etc. When the company screws something up, it’s not seen as a mistake, it’s seen as an evil-empire attempt to undermine the original purity of Disney essence. For example, one big harp these days is The Tiki Room Under New Management, which takes an old “classic” attraction (which introduced the original animatronic figures) and attempts to update it. The attraction, to put it simply, was dying on the vine, running to empty houses because it was old and tired. Its oldness didn’t intrinsically make it classic; compare, say, Pirates of the Caribbean, which is almost as old, and still held up. Tiki was always old-fashioned, which is not the same as timeless. I simply can’t envision Walt insisting on keeping an unpopular attraction open just because it had sentimental value to him personally. Present management attempted to modernize the Tiki Room and, well, flopped. But it’s not a horrid travesty, it’s just a bad idea that isn’t as much fun, in context, as the old show was, in its day and its context. The room doesn’t get down like it used to. Too bad. But hardly reason to indict the company as craven devils. Just people who made a mistake, I’d say. They made some others, too. But probably some of these same mistake-makers are the ones who got Expedition Everest awesomely right. You win some, you lose some. The update of Pirates, with Jack Sparrow, works fine, so sometimes you can tweak without harm. Old Walt had his stinkers too, you know. For instance, there’s a big flap these days about the inherent racism of Song of the South, but if it ever is re-released you’ll discover the other reason they should keep it in the vault: it sucks (except for the animation). So there’s plenty of nasty stuff one can say and think about what was mostly the Eisner Disney, but there was some good stuff too. It’s a business, and businesses have their up and downs. Sometimes they even die. Life is like that.
So in Old Walt’s day it was dolls and watches and all sorts of comparable tsotchkes supporting the corporate machine. One of the latest attempts to derive value from preexisting materials is Disney’s princess push. This has been going on for a while now. It appeals to little girls’ desire to dress up—I’m not sure if little boys have that same desire, or how it’s expressed—and works it in with a basic theme that has run through Disney works since Snow White, which is princesses. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as in, I’d like to be a princess myself, if it meant getting to loll around all day while somebody else cleans the place up. There’s worse things in the world for five-year-olds to daydream about. Disney capitalizes on the daydream by providing outfits, and at the parks, outlets, to wit, character meals. The little girl make-believe princesses get to hobnob with the “real” princesses. It’s sort of cute, actually. We’re riding an early bus to EPCOT one morning, and there’s a little girl in one of the standard princess outfits (you can get Meg, Belle, Cindy, Snowy, Jasmine, or Sleepy, and maybe some others I didn’t recognize) and before we get off at our destination the driver asks her and her family to stay behind. At the bus stop, after the non-princess riffraff debarks, the little princess is met by a welcoming committee with cameras and balloons and general hoo-ha which has to pretty much make a little kid’s day straight out of the gate. Only we non-princess riffraff could see the other little princesses debarking from their magical coaches to comparable attention. Then, I guess, it’s on to Norway (why Norway?) and the “real” princesses in the banquet hall. Throughout the week we saw princess upon princess. Some go whole hog, complete with footwear and hair extensions. Some manage at most to toss on a Cindy tee shirt. Whatever. They like it, it looks like fun, Disney provides a special entertainment, plus plenty of merchandise including costumes, thus at the same time capitalizing/commodifying its creative content. Win-win? Probably. It’s hard to see the harm in that.
I will point out that our group (grizzled forensicians, for the most part) did quickly conclude that Disney was missing a bet by not including Evil Princesses. Not every little girl wants to be Sleeping Beauty. Being Maleficent looks like much more fun, especially a young Maleficent. Or the Wicked Queen of Snow White, only younger. Young Cruella. Young Lady Tremaine? There’s others. A whole marginally goth market worth exploiting. They do have a Pirate Princess concept, but they need to take it to the next level. I would love to go to the parks and see not only little good princesses but a raft of little evil princesses, a collection of Charles Addams mini-Morticias to balance the Force, if you will. They do push Disney Villains, to the point where there’s even perennial rumors of a Villains Park, or at the very least, a Villains attraction (a Bald Mountain roller coaster is what I’ve heard). So if kids love villains, and princesses, why not villain princesses?
To the question posed earlier, do boys like to dress up, the answer is yes, to a degree. Show me a little boy and I’ll show you someone who probably wants to wear pirate clothes. Back in my day it was also cowboy clothes. I was quite the little buckaroo, let me tell you. (You’ll have to imagine that for yourself, there being no photos extant, but I even had a coonskin cap, which may explain the present state of the top of my head: who knows what they put in those coonskins?) The fact that there isn’t a comparable present-day young villain operation for boys to match the young princesses for girls, or a young heroes operation, or whatever, indicates that Disney, which no doubt has done its marketing homework, has probably concluded that it just wouldn’t work as well, so they concentrate their efforts elsewhere. So it goes.
Along these commodification lines, students of merchandising would do well to study the develop of the Fairy franchise, led by Tinker Bell. She has achieved star status in the geegaw category, and is the lead character in a series of fairy books, set, I think, in some very specific fairy universe, filled with new fairy characters. She has a movie forthcoming. Study this to study the extension of a pre-existing brand into a new franchise. Will it work? Too soon to tell. If you can name any Disney fairies five years from now other than Tink, then it did.
So what’s the bottom line then on Disney princesses? Well, if you’re a little kid, it’s cute, although if you’re still at it as an adult, it’s arrested development. Is Disney doing it to make a buck? Of course. So have they earned their buck? That’s the key question, I’d imagine. And from the looks on the faces of the families involved, I’ve have to say yes.
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Fair(y) Use
On another note, but not entirely, while we’re on the subject of Disney, and following the the Mark Helprin editorial in Sunday’s Times, the whole side note of copyright is worth looking into on this video. It makes obsession look positively maniacal, but also explains C in a circle in the most devious way possible short of bringing Sonny Bono back from the dead, plus it’s hilarious. Enjoy.
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Reassurance
Going to WDW and going to Universal in the same trip raises numerous questions. The attractions at the two Universal parks are fairly good, and some are excellent. There’s plenty of theming and narrative, some pretty much at the level of Disney. So why is Universal unsatisfying, while Disney is totally satisfying?
There’s a good book entitled Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, which accompanied an excellent exhibit about ten years ago. It’s funny how that word reassurance is so apt to the Disney experience. It applies to all the creative content, from the movies to the television shows with Old Walt to the parks. It is not that the Disney experience is comfortable, because that would imply a lack of drama. Sitting on the couch doing nothing is comfortable. Knowing that you will survive whatever happens is reassuring. Big difference.
At a core level, there is something about the Disney myths, or the way Disney approaches myth or legend, that strikes beyond the simple narrative level. This could be for a variety of reasons. The stories Disney tells are key narratives of existence, especially childhood, incorporating the various aspects of those key narratives: lost parents, growing up, not growing up, learning to be independent, friendship, romance. The milieus are larger than life—the West, the Jungle, the Future, Fantasyland, Old Hollywood—and we bring to each of them plenty of our own baggage, so we complete what the theming starts. In other words, Disney is about key stuff, or it is connected to key stuff. Add to this that some of this narrative material has been processed by us for our entire lifetimes in various formats: for instance, we’ve seen Snow White over and over, and we’ve also seen the dwarfs in all sorts of situations above and beyond the story, we’ve heard the songs in other contexts, we’ve seen that witch transformation maybe a million times in various clips—Disney's Snow White is a part of us. So is most of the other Disney material, depending on your age. But even if you’ve never heard of Walt Disney, you still know the Snow White story, and Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and you are already reassured by the concepts. It is all a part of us, even if, specifically, it isn’t.
There’s more to reassurance than the literal narratives, though. At the parks, we are reassured by the landscaping. The forced perspective, of course, which brings everything down to a more manageable, albeit often subconscious, notch. But also the use of all sorts of flora. At the park one is surrounded by flowers and trees and bushes and shrubs and topiaries: a veritable botanical garden. We send flowers to a hospital room because when you don’t feel good, they are a bright, beautiful, aromatic counter to our bad feelings. They make you feel better. They also make you feel better out in the world. We plant gardens around our houses rather than surrounding them with concrete. Cities are less comfortable than farms. So at Disney, not only are we surrounded by stories that reassure us, we are surrounded by flora that reassure us. This is subtle, but check out the flora at Universal and compare. Big difference.
So we have Disney giving us stuff to think about that’s more deeply connected to our psyches than Universal, which traffics in popular movies that come and go. The best film of the lot would probably be E.T., which is informed by the Disney values but, in the end, is just a movie and does not create in us those values, as does the animated features we started watching in the crib. Jaws, The Mummy, Back to the Future (emeritus)—these are not classics, really. They are not the stories we want Wendy to tell us over and over again when we are the Lost Boys. Additionally, Disney gets us at a sensual level of sight and smell, with gardens everywhere. And the third big piece of what makes the difference is aural. Compare the music at Disney to the music at Universal. At Disney, the music is mostly soft and gentle and, yes, reassuring. It wafts through Adventureland or Tomorrowland or wherever we are, appropriate, backgroundish, undemanding, themed, reassuring. There is nothing like music to set the mood, of course. At Universal, on the other hand, you are mostly bombarded by hard music, rock with strong backbeats, often very recent stuff to appeal to the presumably hip teenage crowd they wish to attract with their parks (and there’s no question that Universal, at least in Islands of Adventure, is aiming at a teen crowd as a counterstrategy to Disney’s family appeal). A little boom bucka boom goes a long way, even if you love rock and roll. It makes you want to dance, maybe, but it doesn’t make you want to hug everybody and love your family. The music of reassurance that Disney provides as a soundtrack does do that.
Sight, sound, mind—it’s the Twilight Zone! No, seriously, it’s an all-encompassing environment, well themed to make you happy, to make you enjoy the adventures you are undertaking. And for the most part, it is for the whole family. Sure, a few rides are age-specific, but the most thrilling of the thrill rides that Disney has are nothing like the Hulk or the Dueling Dragons. Compare Dr. Doom’s Dumb Drop vs Twilight Zone: I wouldn’t bother going on the former, but I do the latter for the theming alone. But the real point is, a place that is designed for families will be more reassuring than a place designed for teens. At some point, sitting in the Seuss area of IOA, aimed entirely at the kiddie contingent, Marc pointed out that there was a welcome lack of teenagers. Teenagers are LOUD, bubbalah. It doesn’t bother me—I wouldn’t be doing this job if it did—but it’s a big difference to be surrounded by families comprising all ages and by teenage groups comprising just, well, teenagers.
I still maintain that Spiderman is, in execution, the best simulation in any of the parks. Better than Star Tours, if you’re just talking about the ride as a ride. But if I never rode Spidey again, I wouldn’t mind. If I never rode Star Tours again, I’d miss it. Star Tours, in a word, has heart. Spidey doesn’t. And Old Walt knew all about heart (for instance famously claiming that the lack of heart was the reason Alice did poorly at the box office), and put it into most of what he did. His own, to begin with. And the hearts of his characters, after that. The Disney characters have heart, and we respond to that heart. On top of that, the parks have all our senses covered in every way possible to reassure us that our lives will have a happy ending. Wishes and dreams will come true.
What could be more reassuring than that?
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