disneyland

You are not in Disneyland,_ he said. __he little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.

Compared to the rest of the world, it's like we're living in Disneyland.

People who go to Disney who have magic in themselves experience magic there, just as people who go to the grocery store who have magic in themselves experience magic at the grocery store. The principle is simple: fun, joy, and happiness, are something we bring to life, not something life, circumstance, or situation bring to us. There are truly no magic kingdoms, only magic people. Fun, joy and happiness are choices, orientations, approaches, attitudes, a way of living in the world, not the world itself...

Eventually I would learn that the enchanting tree was one of the resort's signatures, one of those subtle delightful touches that resonate on poetic, artistic, and even spiritual frequencies.

Fantasyland was designed as a home for some of the classic characters [from those films], and as a symbol of the magic, hope and beauty of the human imagination.

Whatever form it might take, enjoy the magic! Remember, Disneyland is all about you.

The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I__e ever seen for fireworks_ I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I__e had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that__ why I wanted to head here this time. I know it__ ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago__ngels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth__verything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we__e already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we__ remember it. Maybe that__ what I__ doing with this whole trip__ooking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn__ that the damnedest, craziest thing you__e ever heard? Must be the dope talking.(pp.253-254)

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.

The purpose of Disneyland is to make people smile.

To paraphrase the famous Walt saying, Cast Members are there to work so Guests can play.

Walt also had a humorous sign posted outside the mansion, recruiting ghosts who wanted to enjoy 'active retirement' in the "country club atmosphere' of this 'fashionable address'. Interested ghosts were to write to the 'Ghost Relations Dept. Disneyland,' and were told,'Do not apply in person.

Few seem to be able to eat a turkey leg at Disneyland without splattering tsunami scale grease, so grab plenty of napkins or wear a bib, tablecloth or scuba suit.

For many, it's a once-in-a-lifetime, long dreamed-of and longed-saved-for trip. Pennies have been pinched and sacrifices made to make the vacation a reality. All Guests' wallets will be separated from a great deal of money, like trout expertly filleted, but it will be a curious;y painless experience, for all but a few, the trip will be transcendently and sublimely worth every sacrifice and penny.

It wasn__ a party that a Republican could understand--the marijuana smoke sweet on the air, the occasional cocaine sniffle, cold Mexican beer, good food, great conversation, and laughter--but a Parisian deconstructionist scholar might find it about as civilized as America gets. Or at least the one I met, who was visiting at UTEP, maintained. Somewhere along the way, he claimed, Americans had forgotten how to have a good time. In the name of good health, good taste, and political correctness from both sides of the spectrum, we were being taught how to behave. America was becoming a theme park, not as in entertainment, but as in a fascist Disneyland.

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

On some level, with its carrousels and castle and cowboys, its mysterious jungle and its animated characters, Disneyland is a highly idealized elaboration of our childhoods. It can be seen as a portal through which we revisit (maybe even heal) our youth.

When I was young and I was forced to watch Disney films, I would fast forward the good guys, wasn't interested in princes and princesses, only by the villains.