parktrotter

I hate crowds. I don’t like shopping. I don’t like consuming anything, really, except fishing lures and hiking gear, about which I can be foolish. I don’t like Greater Los Angeles. Why do I keep coming to Disneyland, three times in the last five years?

In truth, after three or four days of this, I would do anything to get out, but it is endlessly fascinating for those three or four days. The attention to detail–inherited from Walt himself–remains extraordinary. There now exists, in front of a store on Main Street USA, a window with a model taken from the scene in Ratatouille in which Remy the rat and Linguini the human practice cooking with Remy guiding Linguini’s movements. In the model, a foot-tall Linguini spins on his heel, with a half-inch-high Remy in his hair; the two are contained within an intricate reconstruction of Linguini’s apartment. The display is not designed to sell anything. Doubtless there are Ratatouille DVDs for sale somewhere, probably in that very store, but the display would not help to move them–the DVDs have to be right next to the display for that trick to work. Still, we joined a little crowd of people admiring it.

It is there, of course, to add to the atmosphere. The atmosphere is what sells the park, far more than any specific attraction in the park. It is built of a million little Disney registered trademarks, including the music, from which you can never entirely escape while inside the park. And smells, too: caramel, and popcorn, and that peculiar musty-chlorinated-water aroma inside Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on.

The place is all tangled up in memories of childhood, for the native Southern Californian especially. The park managers have discovered that they have to move carefully, when they replace rides. The rides become obsolete over time (who is Mr. Toad, exactly, and why does he drive like that?). When they try to replace one, however, they always discover that every ride, even the lamest, has a devoted–and now angry–following. One solution is to upgrade without changing fundamentals: the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse becomes Tarzan’s Treehouse, the Haunted Mansion becomes The Nightmare Before Christmas, images of Johnny Depp appear all over Pirates of the Caribbean, Pirate’s Lair appears on Tom Sawyer Island (they’ve gone a little pirate-happy).

Some people are dissatisfied, but few visitors care that much. People are mostly pretty addled, here. I know Lewis is, right now.

It was a series of minor problems that put me off Disneyland itself. After we arrived yesterday, we ate, as I noted, at Goofy’s Kitchen in the Disneyland Hotel. My wife’s older brother and his wife joined us. Her brother’s company had done some work for Disney, and he had a one-year pass for himself and any guests he cared to bring to enter any Disney park any time he might choose to enter, a kind of Disney skeleton key. So even though the kids were both overstimulated and exhausted, we queued up at the monorail station.

And we stood there for a half hour before they decided that the monorail was not working any more. We walked into Disneyland and took the train into its bowels. When we tried to get out later, the train was shut down for the fireworks show. Then they cancelled the fireworks show for “meteorological” reasons, even though there was no wind and the moon was out. Honestly, it was hard to understand. The Disney employees were, many of them, a little brusque. I have had some trying service sector jobs myself (Universal Studios cashier and valet guy, and Toys R Us for Christmas), so I understand the moral exhaustion and irritability that comes with this terrain. When I visit a place like this, I always expect it to have gone downhill in my absence, and I am certain that the managers of this operation are aware that their greatest challenge is to keep the employees smiling to the guests. But against brusqueness, even The Mouse contends in vain.

As I write this–in Word, to be posted later–we are getting ready for our second day. Lewis was so exhausted as to be completely incoherent. Literally: Jen put him on the bed, where he babbled like a madman for four minutes, then fell into the deepest imaginable sleep.

Now, I’ll be a good travel correspondent, and do some travel reviewing. I’ll also be sure to note some negatives about each of the places we went, even though in balance, they were all better than I expected–except that big one at the end. So here are the corporate entities we dealt with during this very long day:

Southwest Airlines. Guinea Pig Hutch of the Skies: the aircraft was packed, and I spent my hour and a half aboard the plane with my elbows pinned to my sides, and nearly holding my breath. Is it an illusion that these value airlines pack the passengers in like shrink-wrapped food? But they were friendly, inexpensive, and on time. You cannot ask for more in an airline. Really, you can NOT.

The Enterprise car rental people at John Wayne airport. Friendly, inexpensive, on time–and they tried to sell us a larger vehicle, and insurance that we did not need, and something else, too. The people behind the desk are getting commissions for that stuff, right? Some car rental companies are better than others, where this sort of thing is concerned.

The Desert Palms Hotel and Suites. So far so good–indeed, I’m quite pleased. Everything works: shower, toilet, TV, refrigerator (as a friend said recently, “Yeah, those hotels next to Disneyland are all living off the park, and it’s just an unexpected bonus when something in the room actually works”). So far, thumbs are up. The bad news: the hotel is as close to the entrances to the parks as you can get in a hotel, literally, but the Disney Corporation has that wall of ivy between their property and the outside world, and it is arranged such that you have to walk about a mile to get around the fence and up to the gates. There are shuttles.

Goofy’s Kitchen at the Disneyland Hotel. Food was great–it was much better than what you’ll get in the park, which is often greasy and prefab, and we won’t mention the calories, which would power Anaheim, properly harnessed. It would have been more fun if I had been four years old, as I kept getting interrupted in mid meal by Chip and Dale both, who wanted attention from me. These were employees in costumes, of course. I had to get up and pretend to go to the restroom to get away from them.

Disneyland itself. A bit of a problem. More tomorrow.

We are headed out on the road, so my fabulous photoblogging is now on hold again. I am nervous about Southwest Airlines. We usually do all our flying between here and Montana, going to Yellowstone for our annual adventure there, and we do that on Delta; their commuter service is virtually our only choice, for Greater Yellowstone. People always complain about Delta, but I have never had a problem. It was Southwest I had a problem with once, when I found myself levered into a seat in the back of an overbooked flight with a bunch of students who started drinking and–hypoxic, I suppose–got drunk quickly and got loud, louder than ten babies with earaches from the pressure change. They positively screamed over the engine noise, and howled with laughter at their wit, and the flight crew kept pouring alcohol down their gullets. So Southwest means Screaming Drunk Undergrad to me. It only takes one such experience to spoil the brand.

We are staying at the Desert Palms Hotel & Suites. We’ll hope for the best, but they’d best beware. We did this last year, and chose a hotel that was–not good. Preserve your brand, people.

When I thought about Walt Disney’s apartment above the Disneyland firehouse (see below), I expected that I was remembering wrong because, if you think about it, Disneyland has inspired a whole genre of paranoid urban legends, expertly parodied in the Itchy and Scratchy Land episode of The Simpsons, from which I have taken my title. Here’s one: no one is ever declared dead while on Disney theme park property. The paranoid theory says that Walt, and the company that carries on his vision posthumously, is both image-conscious enough and powerful enough to manipulate medical records. Sadly, Snopes declares the story false .

Some other Disneyland legends, from Snopes: “Was Disneyland’s Skyway closed because someone fell out of it? “

“Was the hearse in front of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion used to carry Brigham Young’s body from his funeral to his burial place?“

“Was Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion closed and revamped after a guest suffered a fright-induced heart attack?“

That last is about as probable as a heart attack on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

James Lileks, the jack-of-all-trades Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist, has been running photos of Christmas junk found in thrift stores and making mock of them. It seems to me that in his entry for today, he misses an obvious joke (scroll down on his page for the photo).

The joke: when Hannibal Lecter sent Clarice Starling to Santa’s storage unit, this is what she found.

Back to Disneyland. I mentioned Walt Disney’s secret apartment over the Disneyland Main Street firehouse, below. It’s not an urban legend. I remember it from a puff-piece that National Geographic ran on Disneyland when I was small, and that I enjoyed because it was a puff-piece. I thought I might be misremembering, but a search for “‘Walt Disney’ apartment firehouse Disneyland” returns plenty of links, including this rather snarky one .

We still have a pile of ticket books with A tickets in them, and one with a few E tickets. I note that, insanely, the E ticket included admission to the Country Bear Jamboree and the Enchanted Tiki Room, both of which were a mistake one only made once. America Sings was another choice, and I never even found out what that was. More on the old Disneyland ticket system here .

Just inside, we bought film for the camera, which for a long time was a Kodak Instamatic that took film in a plastic canister that looked a little like the canisters for an old-timey machine gun. And then we divided: as we kids passed a certain age (nine or ten), we got turned loose on the understanding that we would be at the park bench between the Matterhorn and the Submarine Ride lagoon at two o’clock (about exactly where the photograph above was taken). We walked through Main Street, which was interesting to me only because I had learned, from an old National Geographic, that Walt Disney had a secret apartment behind the second story window above the firehouse. More on that next time.

Continuing my generic mid-1970s Disneyland trip: you parked in the oversized parking lot, immediately forgot where the car was, and joined the masses streaming toward the long row of park gates, which are much the same now as then. First you bought books of tickets.

The tickets –I haven’t thought of them in years. You needed them to get on the rides, and they came in books with the tickets arranged into five groups, stamped A through E. The people who ran the show, one guessed, were conspiring to stick you with worthless tickets: I recall that we finished every trip with leftover A and B tickets, and used the C tickets up. The best one, of course, was the green one at the bottom: the E ticket, which was good for all the best rides. They were so cherished that they drifted into the language itself, and one could describe any exciting experience as “an E ticket ride.”

More on my complex relationship with the Disney octopus:

We of course went to Disneyland. Everyone in Burbank went to Disneyland, usually about twice a year; one smart thing that Walt did from the start was keep the cost enough in hand that a family with a car was never priced out, even though families were bigger in the 1970s.

So twice a year, we made the drive. And what a bleak drive, if you think about it: an hour of nothing but concrete autobahn and light-industrial ghetto, enlivened only by the distant view of downtown LA and Dodger Stadium. We three kids sat sprawled in the back of the 1960 Chevy Impala, a car with tailfins that made the rear end look like the rear of an Imperial Star Destroyer. The car died soon after the years of which I am thinking. The backseat upholstery was sticky from exposure to tobacco smoke, and no one wore seatbelts then. No car seat even for the baby. We amused ourselves as best we could until the Matterhorn appeared on the right side of the freeway. We always had a contest to see who could spot it first, and being oldest, I always won.

I will now have to make a sharp turn, into another (but really, really different) example of Eisenhower-era Vacation Futurism. We decided tonight to go to Disneyland for a few days after I finish my quarterly grading ordeal. The trip was off as of this afternoon, but then we found a hotel that is cheaper than the Disneyland Hotel. We’ll see how barbaric.

I have a complex relationship with the whole Disney octopus. I grew up in Burbank, the Los Angeles suburb in which Walt Disney built his studio. As a child, The Mouse was always there, a few blocks away. Here’s an example: about the year 1971, if you got off the northbound Ventura Freeway at Buena Vista, you could see, from the top of the offramp, into a small fenced lot belonging to Disney. There sat a row of old Volkswagen Beetles, all painted the same color, with the number 53 all over them. Just as Lassie was played by many different collies, so was Herbie played by many different cars: these were Beetles for the original Herbie the Love Bug movies, awaiting the next sequel. The photo above nearly duplicates the scene, even though it was taken at a rally in Great Britain. Burbank is not that green.