The Mecca of the Mouse

By Seth Stevenson
Updated Tuesday, March 25, 2008, at 7:30 A.M. E.T.

From: Seth Stevenson
Subject: The Wide World of Disney World
Posted Monday, March 24, 2008, at &;17 A.M. E.T.

Soon after checking in to my hotel room, I discover a mouse in the bathroom. Three mice, in fact. One is imprinted on the bar of soap. One peers out from the shampoo label. And a third, ..r inspection, is a washcloth—ingeniously folded by hotel staff to create two protruding, terrycloth ears.

I’m growing used to these rodentophilic touches. Earlier today, as I drove into the enormous Walt Disney nation-state here in Florida, I noticed a tall electrical stanchion topped with a pair of Mickey ears. Soon after, I spotted a water tower with the ears painted in black. When it comes to branding, Disney’s aim is total immersion.

Which is good, because that’s my aim, too. I’m here to envelop myself in the Disney World experience. I’ve obtained lodging deep within the compound, at a Disney-owned resort. I’ve bought a $280 multiday pass, granting access to more Disney attractions than any person could reasonably endure. For the next five days, I plan not to stray beyond the borders of the Disney empire. (Don’t worry, that still leaves me 47 square miles, an area roughly twice the size of Manhattan, in which to roam.)

Why on earth would I, a childless adult, visit Disney World by myself? Basically, to figure out what the hell’s going on in this place. Because America has clearly decided it’s hallowed ground.

More than 100,000 people visit Disney World every day. I went when I was a kid. Nearly all my friends went. A few went more than once. Heck, I know Jews who weren’t bar mitzvahed but did go to Epcot.

Somehow, this cluster of amusement parks has grown into a rite of American childhood. Kids are born with homing beacons set for Orlando. Meanwhile, parents—despite the hefty costs—often seem just as eager or more so to make the pilgrimage.

My question is: What exactly are we worshipping at this mecca?

Day 1: Epcot

I drive the three minutes from my hotel and ditch my rental car in the lot. After swiping my pass-card and getting my fingerprint scanned (a new security measure), I enter through Epcot’s gates. Once inside, I’m immediately jaw-dropped by the looming mass of Spaceship Earth.

It’s tough to ignore—being a 16-million-pound, 180-foot-high disco ball. One of Walt Disney’s personal rules for theme-park design involved a concept he curiously termed the wienie. A wienie is a show-stopping structure that anchors the park. It is meant be iconic and captivating, so that it lodges in your visual memory forever.

Spaceship Earth is perhaps the wieniest of all wienies. And it announces right off the bat that Epcot will not be your standard kiddie fun park. Over at the Magic Kingdom, the wienie is the fairy-tale Cinderella Castle. Here, it’s a geodesic sphere inspired by the theories of R. Buckminster Fuller.

When I enter Spaceship Earth, I board a ride tracing the history of communication—from the first written symbols to the advent of the personal computer. It’s low season now, so there’s a mercifully short wait for the ride. That’s the good news. The bad news is that once the ride is under way, I discover that it’s a vague, aimless snooze. Toward the end of it, we pass what I believe to be an animatronic Steve Jobs. He’s pneumatically gesturing inside a replica of a 1970s California garage.

When the ride is over, we spill into an area called "Innoventions." It’s sponsored by a company called Underwriters Laboratories, which specializes in product-safety compliance. Among the fun activities here for kids: Try to make a vacuum overheat! Also: See if you can fray the cord of an iron! (I’m not kidding about this. There are 9-year-old boys with furrowed brows attempting to cause product failures.)

Several other exhibit halls surround Spaceship Earth. According to my guidebook, they feature "subjects such as agriculture, automotive safety, and geography." Well gosh, that’s what being a kid is all about!

Inside a pavilion labeled "The Land," I find myself being lectured on sustainable development. The lecture is delivered by the animated warthog from The Lion King. I can overhear the nice mom behind me trying to distract her whimpering toddler. "Look honey," she says, reading from her Epcot brochure, "the next ride is a ’voyage through amazing greenhouses and a fish farm!’ " The kid cries louder.

Though I was only 8, I still remember the day Epcot opened in 1982. The TV networks treated the event as news, airing live coverage. Every kid in my third-grade class was desperate to see this wondrous new place.

Once the fanfare faded, though, we began to sense that Epcot was a slightly odd duck. Disney had purposefully designed it to appeal more to young adults than to their offspring. It was bound to disappoint all but the nerdiest of children. It had been the largest private construction project in all of American history—requiring three years and $1 billion to complete—and in the end, it was essentially a tarted-up trade expo.

A perusal of Disney history suggests that Epcot was in some ways the brainchild of the man himself. What Walt envisioned was an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—a real town, serving as a laboratory for cutting-edge ideas about urban planning. But after Walt died in 1966, his dream was gradually perverted into the theme park we see today.

Sponsors were called in to defray the huge costs, and in return, Epcot’s "Future World" exhibits became an ode to giant corporations. The automotive safety ride is brought to you by General Motors. The agricultural science ride is compliments of Nestlé. In his tome Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (the title refers to the fake leaves on a Disney "tree"), mildly paranoid anthropologist Stephen M. Fjellman writes that Epcot’s attractions are meant to "convince us to put our lives—and our descendants’ lives—into the hands of transnational corporate planners and the technological systems they wish to control."

When I leave the Future World area, I walk around the Epcot lagoon to the other half of the park. Here I enter the "World Showcase." It consists of 11 separate pavilions, each dedicated to a different nation.

I like the idea of the World Showcase. And some of the architecture—the faux Paris street scene, for example—displays an astounding talent for mimicry. But if you’ve ever actually been outside America, this nod to the rest of the world is mostly just insulting.

Half the pavilions have no cultural content at all. The Morocco complex is just souvenir stores selling carpets and fezzes. The ride meant to encapsulate Mexico is a collection of slapstick Donald Duck skits. (Donald loses his bathing suit while parasailing in Acapulco, Donald flirts with some caliente señoritas, etc.) I guess none of this should surprise me. Lots of tourists view travel abroad as basically a chance to shop for regionally themed trinkets.

By the early evening, it’s getting dark, and both kids and adults are getting crankier. A lot of strollers get wheeled into corners as moms whisper-shout, "Settle down, Hunter" and "You stop that right now, Madison." I’m also noticing a lot more people buying the $8.50 margaritas available next to the Mexico pavilion.

I take this as my cue and head back to the parking lot. Tomorrow’s another day—and another theme park.

The keynote attraction of Disney’s Hollywood Studios, listed first on the park brochure, is something they call the Great Movie Ride. This ride purports to trace the history of American cinema. "Travel through classic film scenes and Hollywood moments," the pamphlet promises.

Eager to see what sort of curatorial stamp the Disney imagineers might put on this topic, I line up, wait my turn, and hop aboard a conveyor pod. Soon, I’m rolling along past various iconic movie stuff. There’s Jimmy Cagney cracking wise. There’s Humphrey Bogart wooing Ingrid Bergman. And oh, look, it’s Sigourney Weaver battling an alien. (To my great disappointment, we at no point pass Debbie doing Dallas.)

There are two big problems with this ride (besides there being no Debbie). First, as best I can tell, the kids sitting all around me have no idea who any of these actors are. Never seen any of these movies. They perk up solely at references to films that were released after 2005.

Second, these aren’t video clips we’re watching: Those famous scenes are being performed by animatronic robots. They have waxy faces and whirring pneumatic limbs. Frankly, they’re weird. And they, too, leave the kids completely cold.

I’m sure "audio-animatronic" creatures were nifty when Disney pioneered them in the 1960s. They became possible after Wernher von Braun lent his pal Walt Disney some magnetic computer tape—the same kind that was used by NASA to synchronize its launches. (Pause to contemplate: Wernher von freaking Braun! He gave the world not only the V-2 rocket and the Saturn V superbooster, but also the means to create an android Sigourney Weaver. Perhaps the greatest innovation of all!)

In 1964, an animatronic Abe Lincoln wowed the crowds at the New York World’s Fair. People were convinced he was a live actor. Impressive achievement. Four decades later, though, who’s impressed when a mannequin blinks and raises its eyebrows?

Sadly for Disney, many well-known rides throughout all the parks—even the famed Pirates of the Caribbean—still rely on animatronics as a central selling point. I’m guessing that within a decade all these robot performers will get phased out. Robot Humphrey and Robot Sigourney will get powered down one final time, then tossed on a pile in some dark, archival closet. A few classics—maybe android Abe—will be left out on display to appease the nostalgists.

However dated, it’s still very Disney—this notion that the ultimate entertainment is to watch a machine impersonate a human. It hints at Disney’s core philosophy. If I had to choose a single word to describe the Disney theme parks, that word would be inorganic. Or, as a cultural studies post-doc might put it: "Blah blah simulacra blah blah Baudrillard." As has been noted in many a dissertation, we visit Disney World to savor the meticulous construction—physical, mythical, and emotional—of a universe that’s completely fake and soulless.

But oh, how beautifully soulless it is. Upon leaving the Great Movie Ride, I walk down a facsimile of Sunset Boulevard. Here, I notice the asphalt under my feet has rubbed away in spots, revealing the old streetcar tracks beneath. Of course, there never was a streetcar. And its tracks were never paved over to make way for the automobile age. And that pavement was never subsequently eaten away by the ravages of time. In fact, this entire fake history came into being all at once, fully formed, plopped on top of some Florida scrub land. As famed Baudrillard scholar Michael Eisner announced at the opening of the park in 1989: "Welcome to the Hollywood that never was and always will be."

I think it’s these interstitial moments—the seamlessness and the attention to detail—that really stun Disney visitors and stay with them long after they’ve left. The rides are great, sure, but every amusement park has rides. Disney creates fully realized narratives.

Consider the Tower of Terror, located at the end of Sunset Boulevard. It’s just a classic drop tower, where the goal is to send your stomach up into your sinuses. A regular amusement park would put you in a windowed gondola, crank it up high, and drop it. But here the complicated back story is that we’re visiting a haunted, 1930s-era Hollywood hotel. The hotel lobby contains accurate period furnishings—battered velvet chairs, musty lampshades.

As I wait in line, shuffling forward, I eavesdrop on the couple behind me. The woman (I’ve gathered she’s from a show-business background) is marveling at Disney’s set design. "Look at the distressing on all the surfaces," she says with real admiration. "That’s not easy to do. You can’t just let the set hang around and age for 50 years." She’s right: The place is yellowed, stained, and cobwebbed to a perfect patina. You’d never guess the whole thing was built in 1994.

After passing through the lobby, we’re shown an expensively produced film about the hotel’s haunted past. Then "bellhops" in Barton Fink-ish costumes lead us to our seats. And then, at last, the actual ride happens. It’s about 45 seconds of screaming our tonsils out as we plummet down an elevator shaft. All that effort and ingenuity wrapped around such a simple thrill. But this is precisely what draws folks all the way to Disney World instead of to their local Six Flags.

When the ride’s done, I go back outside and watch people strolling down Hollywood Boulevard. It turns out that the most far-fetched fantasy in Disney World isn’t the magic spells, the haunted buildings, or the talking animals. It’s the fact that there aren’t any cars.

For the mostly suburban Americans visiting here, this whole pedestrianism concept is at once liberating and bewildering. People don’t seem ready for it. On the one hand, they adore walking with their children in a totally safe environment (one that’s outside and is not explicitly a shopping mall). On the other hand, they’re getting extremely winded.

It’s pretty far to walk the whole park. "Slow down! Stop walking so fast," I hear over and over—sometimes from fat adults, other times from their chubby children. They sweat through oversize T-shirts. They breathe heavily with every step. Their plump calves go pink in the sunshine, contrasting with their bright white sneakers and socks. Self-propulsion appears to be a wholly unfamiliar challenge.

Still, the rewards for their efforts are many. Around any given corner there might lurk Power Rangers, mugging for photographs. Sometimes a troupe of fresh-faced teens will suddenly materialize and perform dance numbers from High School Musical. Later, you can buy a multipack of High School Musical socks at one of the sidewalk souvenir stores. (OK, I actually bought some of these socks. They were for my 26-year-old sister. We share a refined sense of humor.)

As the afternoon wanes, and I grow tired of the masses, I duck into the least-attended attraction I can find. It’s called "Walt Disney: One Man’s Dream." Inside, there’s a small museum dedicated to Walt’s life and a theater screening a short biographical film. There are about 12 people in the auditorium when the film begins. One family leaves halfway through because their toddler is cranky.

Poor Walt, I think to myself. One day you’re chilling with Wernher von Braun, inventing lifelike robots. The next day you’re just some dude who drew a mouse.

(Hey, let this be a lesson to you, High School Musical brats. There will come a time when no one will be buying your licensed hosiery anymore. Who will sing and dance with you then? Allow me to answer: You will sing and dance alone.)Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.