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.
- 158
- 2
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link