Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Observations from a Visit to Walt Disney World
I was aware of the "Disney Girl" stereotype; I wasn't aware how many middle-aged women treat Disney and its merchandise with a quasi-religious fervor. This seems to inhabit a different space from the mid-life-crisis buying frenzy in men, where guys purchase all the things they coveted in their youth but didn't have the means or freedom to buy then - with the ladies, it looks more like a deeper and deeper retreat into childish escapism, a desire to return to what the world - and the Disney company - once represented for them and no longer does: possibility and wonder. Whatever the reason, I couldn't help but look on these women as "failure to launch" types, and I wonder if this is the first generation appearing that way in the Disney parks - surely there weren't 40-year-old fanatical Disney moms in the 1980s or 90s.
I had last visited WDW in 2006 and, by the look of things, that was also the last time the park had been properly maintained. Visiting the parks today as an admirer of Walt Disney The Man (TM) seems about as connected as watching modern-day Manchester United as a fan of Matt Busby - everything is a little more pathetic, a lot more expensive, and completely lost from its original intent. It's incredible how the parks had a reputation - not even twenty years ago - of being impeccably maintained experiences so detail-obsessed that even the smells were pumped in. Maybe I'm just older and seeing the things I couldn't have seen as a teenager, but the Disney World of today is about as magical as a Rainforest Café... "okay, I can see that this was probably cool when it actually worked and had a fresh coat of paint."
It was nice to see the world coming together among the attendees and their many accents, but it only made more obvious that the Mexican Spanish accent really is the most annoying sound the human voice can produce. How did that nasal, reedy, words-strung-together-without-a-breath-for-not-even-exaggerating-five-minutes-or-more dialect come to exist? This must be how British people feel about my accent.
With all of the... "cleansing"... the parks have undergone in recent years, I was surprised to still see a performing African "tribal band" in Animal Kingdom, complete with animal skins, grass anklets, and face paint. For what it's worth, they did appear to be real Africans and had a fantastic ensemble sound.
Of Walt's many ambitions for his parks, most hit a high point in the 1990s under Eisner and have been in freefall ever since - the "escapist fantasy," the unrivaled excellence, the obsession with details. The one remaining quality is the melting pot; the mix of the richest and poorest demographics in one place (even if money gets you an "improved" experience). Though I had lost the magical curiosity once felt in Disney World, I did gaze in wonder at near-aristocratic families from Istanbul and Madrid stuck in line behind a family of 400-pound wheelchair-bound Floridians stained with turkey grease. And there are tons - let me make this clear - tons of wheelchairs in the park - like, to the point where the whole place now seems primarily built for the handicapped customer.
You know that saying about Japan - that they've been stuck in the year 2000 for the last 40 years? There's something of that in Disney World too - they've been stuck in 1990 since 1970. For all their "innoventions" of the last thirty years, the greatest rides are still the original ones - It's a Small World, Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean - really all the dark rides still have a magical quality about them.
The biggest detrimental change to Disney World (and the company at large) since my last visit in 2006 is the loss of the "Disney identity" or the "Disney feel" due to their acquisitions - and obsessive marketing - of Marvel and Star Wars. Those brands feel so cheap in Disney's hands when compared with what "Disney" used to represent - Mickey and friends, the idealism of a better tomorrow, the wonder of childhood. Every area, every store, every restaurant that used to have a magical aura about it now seems weighed down with sad Marvel gimmicks or flimsy Star Wars plasticware, and the homogeneity of the parks - a homogeneity that used to be so strong as to make Tower of Terror and Toontown both feel like two places in the same universe - is completely gone.
One thing I was surprised to see thriving at Disney, given the changes in both the parks and the world over the years, was an excellent model of early fatherhood. Many new families still gravitate to the parks, and maybe it's just the now-higher ticket prices, but it seemed a majority of these had a two-parent model with fathers who were sincerely invested in their child's experience - and the wonder of a child at Disney World is really something to behold. I met and got to know a few of these families - many of the fathers were recent military veterans; maybe that has something to do with the demographic being represented.
Finally, I understand that the Disney company of today is essentially a for-profit entertainment arm of the Democratic Party inhabiting the skin of a once-neutral (okay, right-leaning) organization, and therefore has felt it necessary to purge the shadows of the past. Even so, it was frustrating to me as a fan of Walt Disney The Man (TM) that there is no archival or historical experience within the parks as relates to the company itself. Surely there must be acres of warehouses with artifacts and curios and documents from the past 100 years of the company's existence - how is nothing exhibited in the parks? This is yet another area where I've likely completely misunderstood what the Disney experience is to the modern world.
In summary, a disappointing experience only in the sense that yet another thing that was awesome in my youth - that had the potential to only grow more awesome year-on-year - has instead disintegrated into a bland, sanitized, "globohomo" experience with nothing particularly special about it. If you find yourself in the Central Florida area, I highly recommend making the trip to see some of the real, unsanitized history in the region - Kennedy Space Center, the Spanish Forts, the Dali Museum, the Circus tributes in Sarasota - and to avoid that which was once-great.
I had a similar experience, I went expecting a freakshow because of the reasons you mentioned but it was actually encouraging seeing all the families. I think most of the riff-raff is priced out of the experience which does make it better.
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I can say they for sure existed by the 90s as I interacted with some of them at that time. The "Disney Renaissance" coincided with making Disney versions of damn near everything and really pushing it into all corners of life which made this a viable archetype. Annual passes, especially those for Florida residents, were also cheaper at that time so that going to the park multiple times a year was a lot more accessible financially. In 1997 an annual pass was $269, inflation adjusted to $513 while in 2019 it was $1,119, inflation adjusted to $1,340. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the current crop of "Disney Moms" are the children of the initial crop.
I would not dispute, of course, that their numbers have increased greatly over time. I think the increase in prices and wait times along with the variety of schemes (fast pass, fast pass+, genie, apps, etc) to bypass these wait times has led to a lot more people planning their visit in the sort of obsessive, regimented way that those "Disney Moms" were in the 90s-early 2000s rather than just showing up and making their way through the parks, which used to be how almost everyone handled it. I think once you've spent however-much-time looking into different attractions and prioritizing them it's a lot easier to put disproportionate importance on the parks themselves.
It's obvious Disneylands are too scarce a resource, but I wonder where the sweet spot is. On the one hand, all these tiered priority schemes are basically free money. On the other hand, if the parks are so full, why not build a few more? Right now, there's one park in Europe and two in the US, you could build one in Texas, one in Italy and one in Turkey and all of them would be full.
Well, unless the operating costs of a park are so high right now that you have to incentivize people to buy priority passes to stay profitable, but this only makes me wish we could divorce the management of the parks from the IP somehow and let multiple competitors manage them. Doctorow was right, there are people out there who understand what make Disneyland great better than Disney itself does.
Disney has the name recognition but there is some competition. Portaventura in Spain was just as good as Eurodisney Paris when I visited as a kid, and Gardaland in Italy is apparently also a world class theme park.
EuropaPark in Germany as well.
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And both under $30 for a ticket, damn.
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Theme parks are just not a great business. For comparison, look at the stocks of Cedar Fair (FUN) or Six Flags (SIX). While obviously a tier below Disney, these companies have massively underperformed the market over a long period of time.
We used to go on family vacations to Cedar Point and my dad was so impressed by the high prices and massive crowds that he bought stock. But what he didn't see was high up front capital costs and huge maintenance expenses. Want to be cash flow negative while still paying high taxes? Build something in America.
If you want to make money, just make software bro. The tax system in America is biased against brick and mortar, even the ones that sell $12 hot dogs.
What does the tax system have to do with it? US software companies have profit margins of ~100%, at least for SaaSs. I’d go so far as to say that basically 100% of productivity gains between 1990 and today are from computers and that the tech industry itself captured the vast majority of that value. Are theme parks more productive than they were 30 years ago? What have they innovated?
Glad you asked. If I pay you to make software, 100% of your salary is deductible immediately. If I build a factory, I have to depreciate it over decades and can only deduct a little each year.
For this reason, software will have great cash flow relative to paper earnings while capital intensive real world businesses the opposite is true.
For an example, take a look at the earnings and balance sheet of Micron (MU) for the last 10 years. They have, on paper, made great profits. Where has it all gone? Dividends? Buybacks? Sadly for investors no. All the money gets dumped back into capital investment (Property, Plant, and Equipment). Warren Buffett warned against buying these type of companies where all the profits go back to equipment. The balance sheet of Micron grows apace, but investors get little.
This isn't how business works. Innovation is not necessary or sufficient to have high earnings. What have cigarette companies innovated? And yet they were the world's best investment of the 20th century. How about Lululemon? Are they innovators? Because their stock is a rocket ship to the moon.
Meanwhile Micron (MU) has been extremely innovative. Yet the stock has done nothing for 25 years.
To make money you need pricing power. You need a moat.. That's another reason software is a great business. Changing your payroll system is a pain in the ass, so when Gusto raises their prices 25% you just pay. Theme parks have no moat. If they charge too much, I can just take my kids somewhere else.
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It may be worthwhile to look into all the problems Disney had opening Disneyland Paris and the problems they've continued to have there. That's likely a factor in not expanding more into Europe.
For Texas, geographically it makes a lot of sense, but given the problems they've been having in Florida lately I can understand their hesitancy.
To your point:
Would solve this, but would be anathema to Disney itself. The modern vision for Disney parks is very clearly not Walt's, but the company is still highly attached to it.
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This was worth posting in main thread IMO.
I have a friend who, for his honeymoon and at his wife’s request, went on a very expensive Disney cruise to a Disney island. When I heard this, I did feel an intuitive sense of disgust, but I had a difficult time justifying the feeling. What’s so bad about Disney that isn’t bad about going to Burning Man? What’s the difference between someone going to Disney, and someone buying an expensive car? And hell, what’s the actual substantive difference in consequence between going to Disney and going to the Sistine Chapel, or to the Eiffel Tower?
It irks me because for a normal adult American, there really is no difference in personal benefit. And actually, there’s probably a greater benefit to going to Disney than the Eiffel Tower — the tower is ugly and irrelevant to one’s life experiences, but the one who pilgrimages to Disney is reigniting and reexperiencing the fervent and innocent feelings of youth. Someone goes to the Eiffel Tower simply because of its cultural connotation (if not I have a cell phone tower to sell you), but Disney has even greater cultural connotation plus more. Not to mention less vagrants and peddlers. Is the difference that the socially advantageous trip to the Eiffel Tower is concealed as an interest in culture and not status? But wait, are we now on the same page of treasuring and hyping Western culture? And waiting even longer (as if a Disney ride) since when is Snow White and Fantasia and so forth not frankly wonderful pieces of Western culture? Better than a glorified cell phone tower, to be Frankish.
There’s a lot of tangents I want to go on here, but instead I’ll just briefly list two attractions: the key difference is indeed whether one adjoins his identity to a cultural tradition, which we all intuitively know is valuable; another key difference is whether there is a deeply substantive benefit to one’s soul (deepest level of personality), and cathedrals can do this better than Disney, but perhaps not by as much as we wish.
Disney is largely a girl brand but you were exposed to it heavily in your childhood. It's fairly common for adult women to still have a love for Disney. Men remember it as a childhood thing they were never that into.
Basically you're having a reaction to the perceived childishness of it. Kind of like how you'd react to someone asking to go to one of those adult kindergartens.
I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be. Star Wars fandom used to skew heavily male but didn't have event locations. Auto shows seem to have a similar gender split, but they aren't child focussed. Comic cons before girls in sexy costumes started going could work. WWE and Monster Trucks fit apart from the fact that they are seen as low class.
I think that depends on which movies they saw as a kid. All the princess movies? Yeah, they probably didn’t care too much about them. But The Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, The 101 Dalmatians, The Great Mouse Detective, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Fantasia—those were all great. I’ve noticed that, among my male friends with kids, the ones who are most positively-disposed toward Disney movies grew up with movies like those, while the ones who are completely indifferent to Disney movies only saw the princess ones.
I really liked Disney's The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty as a child. I've seen The Jungle Book 30+ times.
But I haven't seen these films in the past 25 or 30 years or so. I really liked them as a young boy, but I'm not going to go to a nostalgia bend over them. I guess that is the difference between myself and these aging Disney women.
To the degree I'll revisit or relive the magic of these, it will be showing them to my child when they're old enough to withstand the screen time of a full length film.
That’s absolutely fair. I have seen a few of those films as an adult and without kids in the room, but I think all but one of those occasions was when my younger sister put one of them on when we were back visiting my parents.
I will say that I got more enjoyment out of rewatching those old Disney classics than I get watching most new movies. But the same holds true for most older movies and TV shows. I probably just have old-fashioned tastes.
I haven't seen many movies in the past few years, just a few on airplanes. They were pretty bad. The newest Star Wars was a mess. Live action Beauty and the Beast was inferior to my memories of the old animated version. Not sure why anyone had any inclination to make that movie.
At this point I'll probably enjoy watching old Disney movies with my child much more than the Disney junk I've seen recently.
I think the cliche that as movies have become more expensive, pre-existing franchises that already have fans and/or that can play on nostalgia have become more appealing to studio execs is probably true. And I'm guessing Beauty and the Beast was well into production before the The Jungle Book live-action remake made almost a billion dollars, but it probably helped to motivate Disney to fast-track all the ones that came after. And, to be fair, they kept making money, and lots and lots of money, until they didn't.
To me, the whole thing has the look of a kind of cargo cult. They saw the massive success of those old movies and thought they could replicate it in live-action for even more success, and it worked for a while, since they did get a lot of the superficial similarities right. But as they kept making more and more, the audience has been wising up to the fact that they really lack the substance that made the originals great.
What I don't get is how Disney execs could be so incompetent as to not understand this. Their flagship films like The Lion King (CGI remake) make basic, fundamental, amateur errors in things like writing, acting, cinematography, even music (the entire sequence where Nala discovers adult Simba - a pivotal, very important moment in the film's narrative - is egregious in all of these, including setting the song Can You Feel The Love Tonight during the day). From what I've heard, their more recent ones like The Little Mermaid are even worse in many ways in that regard. It's like they tried to build all the decorations of a house to look like an older house without bothering with the foundations and support structure. Studio execs, just out of naked selfish interest, should understand that it's important to get this right! And studio execs at the exact same company 30 years ago seemed to understand this! Where did all that expertise and knowledge go?
And with Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm, gets a lot of the blame, but she herself was a producer in the old Indiana Jones films, i.e. the good ones. Where did all that filmmaking expertise that she herself had go? How could she sign off on "Somehow, Palpatine returned?"
As someone fairly out of the loop for modern films, that last Star Wars film was shocking. I was amazed at how bad it was. It was ultra fast paced rushing from one thing to the next. Just a jumbled mess rather than a film.
How the old Indiana Jones films and their creators could degrade into this is beyond me. I'm hoping this was some sort of high water mark for ultra fast paced filmmaking and everyone will take a deep breath from now on.
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what. the. fuck.
I've been ignoring the Disney Death Spiral, but how do you screw that up that badly? There are furries who would kill (figuratively, right?) to be involved in the storyboarding for that particular scene. I can get why they'd skip out on the bedroom eyes, but I hope whoever was in charge of that scene isn't getting fursuit heads in their bed.
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One is low status, the other is not. End of story. It's probably downstream of that.
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You may just share DFW's view of cruises?
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From what I've heard about Disney cruises, they aren't that different from regular cruises. Yes, you can make the staff die a little inside by making them listen to your "complaint" about seeing a mouse in the restaurant for the thousandth tine. But other than that they are just regular cruises with extremely good customer service they charge a premium for. Don't compare them to Paris, compare them to a package holiday. Sometimes you just want to spend a week or two not worrying about anything.
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I think for me a lot of it is that Disney is completely commodified commercial art. It’s rarely about just telling great stories or making unique and beautiful things. And their park and cruises are that but turned up to 11. It’s a simulation of real things dumbed down until even the dumbest and most easily offended are nodding along. A lot of franchise films and shows are like that, having long since lost whatever was real and true about them in favor of selling fan-bait and pumping out the next money grab.
Burning man may be the reserve of rich idiots, but it’s not fake, not dumbed down and you don’t exit through the gift shop. The Eiffel Tower is a real place in real France full of real French people. Yes there are tourists, but there are also locals who aren’t there for ambiance but instead because they actually live there. Much of the same can be said of theater especially local stuff, or cultural events and other historical places. There’s a difference between a place created as a simulation of reality and an actual reality. The French part of Epcot is not and cannot be like real France.
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Man, different strokes for different folks, but I couldn't disagree more with this. I'll admit I appreciate the charm of the older stuff, and am also saddened by things like the franchise-ification, particularly at once-pure Epcot (Maelstrom being replaced by Frozen ride, The Living Seas becoming Finding Nemo, etc). But the folks at Disney can still engineer up a good ride, and things like Soarin, Avatar, Mission Space, and Toy Story Mania (aka the greatest ride at Disney) kind of blow those dark rides out of the water IMO, which are breathers from the Florida heat primarily, and forms of entertainment secondarily.
If I recall, Pirates of the Caribbean was it's own little culture war arena at one point, wherein they replaced the bride auction with with a girl-boss pirate.
The Snow White mine ride is excellent too, especially for kids who are just starting to ride "real" roller coasters
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I think there’s a lot more leeway in women able to indulge in childish fantasy than there is for men. A man, obsessed to the same degree with male-coded versions of escapism (basically nerd and geek fandoms) are quickly shamed into hiding it from peers lest he be tainted with loser stink. If things were equal I suspect there are just as many men who would want to spend the same amounts of time, energy and money on their favorite escapist fandoms. There’s cons, obviously, but I’ve never known an adult male who talks openly in work or social environments about how he’s going to a con and has spent hours making an Ironman suit that cost him $100 (which is probably lowball compared to what is really spent on that stuff). Women get to openly indulge and most people wouldn’t think twice about a woman who has a shire to Mickey they way they’d double-take a light saber collection or a shrine to Spock.
Men seem to be much more culturally constrained in what they’re allowed to like and to what degree they’re allowed to do it.
The purchase of star wars and marvel closed the gender gap for Disney in this regard. Men obsess over getting a black lightsaber crystal and a cocktail at Mos Eisley.
I hate these IPs with a passion at this point. Having to grit my teeth and nod as my friends circle jerk about how great the hastily retconned "lore" is for SW makes me want to put a shotgun in my mouth.
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I don't know, maybe (definitely) I hang out with mostly nerds, but from where I'm looking men seem less ashamed/self-conscious than ever to flaunt their geeky hobbies. Retro gaming setups, arcade machines, gaming computers and consoles, VR setups, etc... are proudly displayed in living rooms in a way that they wouldn't have been before, when you would only see a Super Nintendo or Playstation plugged in to the secondary basement TV only the kids use.
I grew up with videogames being a thing for boys and teenager boys that we were supposed to grow out of, and it seems men of my generation while growing up put their foot down and decided that no, videogames are not inherently more childish than watching TV shows and we have no reason to be ashamed of them.
And its not just gaming; I look at the younger generations, young men in their early 20s, and I don't think for instance being into anime is the 'red flag' for women that it was for my generation.
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Man here.
A properly done Ironman suit would cost 2K easily, more if you're hardcore purist who wants fit, accuracy, and lighty up thingies that really drive the women wild. Poorly done unpainted knockoffs a few hundred bucks.
I've a Graflex 3-cell flash tube I bought in 2001 for about 150 bucks that, along with the bubble strip from an early 70s Exactra calculator I also acquired, now looks like this. though that link is not my photo. Total sunk cost about 250 bucks, worth about twice that or considerably more now were I to strike while the iron is hot. (It's not as hot as it used to be.) Which I won't.
I am far in the low ranks of true geekdom, but I am definitely in those ranks somewhere. You shall know me by my Follano stormtrooper armor, though that's a whole nother conversation.
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By the mid-2000s, I had at least one friend with a Disney cultist family. Especially the mother. Their whole dynamic was really weird in hindsight, and it’s hard not to see the distilled consumerism as part and parcel.
Point is, I suspect there were rabid Disney moms in the decades before that.
Since I moved to Texas, I’ve been back to Disney exactly twice, both times for band events. It was alright. That’s with a per diem allowance and no desire for merch. I haven’t gone since I was paying my own way; if I’d been spending the kind of money it takes to get a family or even a couple through that gauntlet, I’d have hoped for a lot more magic.
(Except for expedition Everest, which is a great roller coaster and environment at any age. Fight me.)
How much of that is down to the park, and how much on my own age? Kids definitely get something very different out of it than their parents. The money, of course, but also the situational awareness and the suspension of disbelief. To be a Disney mom, you’ve got to stay under.
For more on the philosophy of Disney as a whole-family park, I recommend Defunctland’s video on a certain non-Disney dark ride. No, seriously. The philosophy behind Dreamworld Australia, discussed in the first few minutes of the video, perfectly captures how a Disney is supposed to work. And the rest of the video explains how it gets distorted beyond imagining.
When the narrator started talking about the Wiggles I had to check the Wikipedia to make sure I wasn't watching a mockumentary. Turns out, Australia is stranger than I could've imagined.
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Echoing @OracleOutlook, I will say the Japanese Tokyo Disneyland /Disneysea experience is one of perfect Baudrillard hyperreality--clean, well-swept, devoid of stench, and as ordered as a massively crowded theme park can probably be. Disney Sea is distinct as its own (albeit adjacent) park with its own ticket, in which alcohol may be served--and is, at pretty steep prices. Still from experience no beer is too expensive after a day of hustling around watching Mickey parades and making sure you're at the line at the right time because you bought that one ticket three hours ago that says you can line up at point X.
I've always wanted to go to that Florida Star Wars exhibit (the last time I was at Disney World was pre-Epcot, if that tells you anything). Just to see that Millennium Falcon. My own boys, alas, are aging somewhat out of the age of wonder (I am not certain I ever have) and the days when we took them in costume around Halloween to TDL are behind us (older boy was Luke Skywalker, younger Darth Vader without mask--masks on patrons aren't allowed, and only Disney character costumes, and these only at certain times of the year).
I will note that I don't remember seeing many middle-aged women in Mickey ears, but high school and twenty somethings by the bargeful. The Japanese female obsession with Disney is real. I try hard not to armchair analyze it. But I suspect it has to do with the usual shutting out the harsher realities of growing up. I once dated a girl (well, young woman, she would've been around 27, a flight attendant then) who related to me a story of how when she was at TDL "Mickey" hugged her and she cried. "But why cry?" I remember asking, and her response put paid whatever dinner it was I had bought that night: "Because I knew he would never hurt me."
I was apparently unable to match Mickey and I remember the night of our inevitable breakup as she stood there telling me she was fine just having sex, she didn't mind anything, she just didn't want to be alone--and I, of course, left her alone. At that exact moment the twin towers were coming down, September 11, 2001. Vibrates in the memory. Music, when soft voices die, etc.
It's interesting to read other women who aren't Japanese have this same preoccupation with Disney. A deep well, no doubt.
Edited for typos
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I've never been to Japan, but I have heard that their Disney parks still have the magic. Clean, impeccable service, superior rides, and marvelous theming. It is run by a Japanese organization, The Oriental Land Company, which insulates it from a lot of the poor decisions made by Disney corp.
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