It’s the Magic Kingdom, the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth. It’s an American—now global—icon with its roots firmly planted in a mythical past that may or may not have existed. It’s a mouse house. It’ll transport you from a pioneering past to an imaginary world formerly the exclusive redoubt of opium eaters. It’ll test your patience, assault your senses and leave you wondering about the state of humanity. And, it’ll drain your bank account.
It’s Disneyland.
People—locals, visiting writers—frequently conflate Whistler with Disneyland. Not even close. Whistler is granola and a one-bedroom apartment with four roommates; Disneyland is magic mushrooms and Xanadu. Whether your trip is good or bad depends on your version of reality.
Disneyland opened in 1955, smack in the middle of the post-war, somnambulant decade marked by a growing middle class and the baby boom. At least in North America. Anyone on this continent who ever went to a movie or had a television was both immersed and brainwashed in Disney culture. It was ubiquitous and largely unavoidable.
Disney was everywhere in popular culture. For a wide swath of the boomer cohort, Disney was popular culture. Throughout the decade there were re-releases of the groundbreaking, full-length animation films of the earlier decades—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, films that created the link between cinema and character marketing.
Animation—an expensive, time-consuming process in that pre-computer world—gave way to feature films with human characters: Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Davy Crockett, Old Yeller. They and the occasional animated films, Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty, reeled kids in and stoked the furnace of all things Disney.
And then all hell broke loose. Disney came to television. To fund the construction of his nascent theme park—something that had been incubating in his head since 1948—Walt Disney launched the first television show that was one long commercial: Walt Disney’s Disneyland, in 1954. Not only did it leave a country salivating for a theme park that wasn’t yet open, it was solely responsible for a generation of kids wearing a dorky hat with a faux racoon tail trailing down their backs.
It was followed by The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955—who can forget the closing scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket with a platoon of grunts marching off singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song?—and the Sunday evening cultural phenomena Walt Disney Presents and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, the latter of which was largely viewed in black and white by all but the fortunate few who had access to colour televisions.
The television shows eventually faded into irrelevance, and if they live at all, they live only in syndication or on YouTube. The Disney films regressed from art spawning marketing to pure marketing with the purchase of Pixar by Disney studios in 2006, and a subsequent parade of thinly-disguised commercials designed to separate you from your savings.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, “Why is he boring us with this nonsense?” Fair question.
I unexpectedly found myself in Disneyland last month. That’s because I unexpectedly became a grandfather almost seven years ago. By marriage, not blood. But the distinction is lost on children who only know me as grandpa. And checking with friends who have both children and grandchildren, visits to Disneyland seem to follow that path of procreation like gesundheit follows achoo.
And my takeaway is this: it is one continuous freak show.
Other than the post-holiday, over-extended period of mid-January/February, September and October are supposed to be as uncrowded as the place gets. I’d hate to see it at its peak. Pre-covid, visitors to the park numbered 18 million annually. The first day we got to the end of the line to get through security, I thought there were about that many people there. I needed binoculars to see as far as the security gates.
There are a lot of things you can’t bring into Disneyland. These include the one-inch-long Swiss Army knife I always carry. As a weapon it’s useless. But to dig slivers out of your fingers, file a ragged fingernail or cut off tags from grandkids’ stuffed toys they’ve convinced their parents they can’t live without, it’s very useful. Fortunately there was an over-crowded stroller—allowed—to hide it in.
Whatever the longest lift lines are you’ve ever waited in, they’re nothing compared to the lines you’ll wait in repeatedly for everything from rides to food at Disneyland. If you want to and are able to pay more than just the entry fee, you can pare down the wait times.
There are several tiers of extra payments you can make depending on a ride’s popularity and your willingness to go into debt to keep your kids from howling. According to an analysis done by the money management website LendingTree, 18 per cent of visitors go into debt to pay for their trip to the Happiest Place on Earth.
Most of those folks racking up debt, 87 per cent, believe the experience is worth it. Disneyland reaches something in their psyche that produces an almost dopamine effect.
Turns out it might not be just the park and associated memories of everything Disney. The park is redolent with machines called Smellitizers. I am not making this up. There is a guttural connection between smell and memory and emotion, and the folks at Disney tweak the very air you breathe to make sure you enjoy yourself.
While the secret of the scents is, well, secret, they didn’t seem to be working all that well when I was there. Unless I was passing a cart selling the ubiquitous turkey legs, the predominate smell I noticed there was an uncomfortable combination of popcorn and farts. From Frontier Land to whatever they call Star Wars land, every lineup of people smelled of popcorn and farts.
I blame the concession food that is strategically positioned every 100 steps or so. To give you an indication of just how frequent you’ll stumble across food carts—not to mention actual restaurants—the millennial parents I was with had devices that measured our steps. The daily average was about 18,000. You do the math.
I felt more out of place at Disneyland than non-skiers feel in Whistler during the winter. I was surrounded by people totally immersed in the culture. People who have annual passes. People who wear the regalia as daily wear. People who looked like their daily caloric intake was several times the recommended amount, and all came from the food carts.
It was trippy. The grandkids loved it. I had a blast. And when the rest of the grandkids are old enough, I’ll find a convenient excuse to be doing something else.
