[…] Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience — fed by video games and smartphones — is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.That quote was setting up a New York Times feature on the Disney Operational Command Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando. It’s a Michael Crichton world where computers, software and digital maps monitor crowds and deploy extra boats/cars on rides to cut waiting times; Disney characters are told when and where they are needed, according to crowd restlessness; restaurants are watched, and staff are told if any tables have been missed. Parades can even be arranged so as to encourage the crowds towards emptier parts of the park.
All of this got me thinking about my last trip to Disneyland Paris - one of the smaller, younger cousins to the original. The Times’ observation that the Disney parks are “primarily built around nostalgia for an America gone by” rang true. Most obviously they play on popular awareness of the Old West, of Victorian America, and of various periods up to 1950s America. But beyond the History class past, Disneyland really gets you pining for Back to the Future, with all of the cultural baggage of that title. Whatever the country, or version of the parks, Disneyland is the American 1980s. The parks are built around, and encourage, a particular way of imagining how the ‘80s felt.
By the 1980s I don’t really mean the ten years with the right numbers. All decades bleed into each other, the 1980s interacting with the ‘70s and ‘90s. The particular start and finish years depend on what lens you are using to view them (developments in car design, music videos, politics…). It’s seemingly easier for us to comprehend the past if it’s divided into colour charts of ten-year fashions, trends and events. So, by the 1980s we mean the selected examples of cultural production, technology, news-making events and people that we currently associate with that time period.
Opening in April 1992, Euro Disney was planned and built at the close of the 1980s, and it shows. But the refusal to update is not stinginess; the most noticeable 1980s shrine is the Walt Disney Studios Park, which didn’t open until 2002.
Back to the Renaissance
Disneyland Paris, 2008: Arrived Disney. Prima donna kids everywhere with huge Disney Store bags. Parents with high-end cameras trample the innocent as they film their children dancing to the piped music. Hundreds of Americans looking for a little piece of home. Tanned little kids with perfect hair - mini male models with the right clothes and almost the right attitude.No imagineers here, just slowly following suit with America’s Walt Disney World. Newly opened Tower of Terror, big deal! When it opened it was the third copy of a 14-year-old original - an original imagineered back in those years when America could name a disaster-in-a-skyscraper ride with ‘tower’ and ‘terror’ in close proximity unselfconsciously. Aerosmith, Armageddon, Michael Jackson, Star Wars…Disneyland Paris is a time machine to America 20 or so years ago. A time that has retrospectively come to be imagined as having been one of pre terror. The time of Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, of funny Simpsons episodes, of American confidence fuelled by the world’s (selective usage) awe and admiration for its cultural production and projection of itself. That’s why all these people come; they still feel it. It is Michael Jackson town.
That look the parents give you. The distain and horror as they see that their little princess has to share their overpriced fantasyland with thousands upon thousands of other people’s princesses. Little children fighting over the goods, pushing adult strangers aside as they continue their parade.
The music and people go on and on. Pouting, tubby children in black clima-duped vests and shorts shouting where they want and what they want. Running for the biggest rides, the rock and roll. But it’s all so old.
Disneyland’s America is specifically that of the earlier 1990s, when the 1980s were still fresh on the cultural tongue. You want to see bum bags, HI-TEC trainers and fashions aping the high school clique-wear you saw in everything from the Breakfast Club and The Lost Boys to Saved by the Bell. McCauley Culkin is stuck as a child here, and Jackson at the height of his powers, with no complications. Back when I first went to Euro Disney, about a month before those first Chandler allegations were made, I sat and watched Jackson in the Captain EO short movie they used to show in the Disney parks - all 3D, lasers and smoke (and now shown again, in tribute). It was all in context then, in 1993, when the 1980s references weren’t that old and Jackson was still in orbit (he gave his Superbowl performance that year).
Disneyland Paris today shares something with Michael Jackson (the person, the brand and the legend). Both attempt to get you back to the 1980s, whether you were 30, 20, 10, or not yet a twinkle back then. It doesn’t matter how or even if you experienced those years, it makes you think about them and imagine/invent them all over again. Despite their subsequent output and existence, Disneyland and Jackson play off the cultural position they held in the very early 1990s, and encourage your nostalgia. Jackson stays in a time warp where his later releases and erratic behaviour somehow seem more distant than his huge, bombastically marketed successes of the 1980s – nearly thirty-year-old successes. If the Disney parks are backward looking then it’s for a different reason.
From the mid-1990s onwards, the MJ marketing machine had no alternative but to encourage us to look back, but the Disney parks actively choose to make their Finding Nemo, WALL·E and Toy Story 3 successes play second fiddle to Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio – the old standards. Somehow, for Disney, the context of the 1980s and early 1990s movie industry/culture industry seems a better one for selling their movies. It was the period that gave birth to the Disney renaissance – Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King…and Disneyland Paris has tried to create that time/place physically, as an environment where you and your family walk around their films. You walk down the faux boulevard as the 1994-invented Tower of Terror rattles through its ride programme, and the music for Beverly Hills Cop blasts through the speakers. The odd thing is the four-year-old lapping it all up.
Why not? The ‘80s were fun, perhaps more fun than now. They were the age of children as adults as children. Who tried to live that concept, if not Michael Jackson? The early 1990s were when (despite a recession in real life) daydreams and Hollywood sustained the idealistic wave of the 1980s - everybody living in Father of the Bride/Beethoven/Home Alone capacious dolls houses with huge, regularly-visiting extended families to fill the rooms, and a collection of toys to rival Tom Hanks’s in Big (apt for our 1980s Disneyland reading, along with Vice Versa, 18 Again! and Like Father, Like Son. Late ‘80s movies really embraced kids as grown ups/grown ups as kids). Those years, or their movies, brought a sense that, no matter how much you jerked off or fooled around in your classic American youth, health, wealth and happiness would be yours in adulthood (like Marty McFly, you’d get the girl and the truck).
The jury’s out on the truck, and on anything else the ‘80s-to-‘90s seemed to promise with their cultural statements. It is concerning that those statements are now viewed, with nostalgia, as being traditional - as displays of traditional values, of traditional moviemaking, of a traditional childhood and family life… That perspective is not just Disney’s; the annual selection of 1980s movie remakes attests to that. Kick back, let yourself blur nostalgia, tradition and conservatism for a while, but remind yourself that you’re revisiting this stuff with some self-awareness, or sense of irony. Your past is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.
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