parktrotter

Think about it: that drunken pirate on Pirates of the Caribbean ride who rocks back and forth on the cannon, while shooting at his friends and singing “yo ho,” has been doing that for twelve-plus hours a day nearly every day for 41 years. No wonder he looks a little worn out.

To repeat, here is one of the essential strategies of a Disney theme park: set up some little thing, like a mannequin singing a song, and drive people past it once every ten seconds or so. I mention this here mainly because, toward the end of our trip, it started to freak me out a little. It is so easy to imagine the pirates bored to death–and so easy to see why robots always turn on their human masters.

But another Disney strategy is to sit the park visitors still and run the repeating exhibit past them. Just from thinking about this subject, I have this other piece of deathless verse stuck in my head:

On this very special night

We wish we may we wish we might

Have the wish we wish tonight

In a Christmas fantasy.

The words from the song that plays during the Christmas parade that runs down Main Street during the season. It was, for me, the last straw.

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