Images of Main Street: Disney World and the American Adventure

Abstract

When Dean Koontz wishes to evoke an image of innocence to contrast with horror and dread in Watchers, he introduces a shared love for characters between intelligent and good dog, Einstein, and his equally intelligent but evil nemesis, Outsider. In fact, this shared love for Mickey and his friends saves Einstein from murderous Outsider, originally named Other, when sight of a home video box softens his heart and leads him to show mercy on his intended victim for sake of their common memories. These memories were their only happy ones when they were experimental animals in a National Security Agency facility. As schmaltzy and sentimental as this summary may be, use of characters works in book just as it does for millions of people who share dream of Disney's Main Street U.S.A. of a pure innocence where mischief of Huey, Dewey, and Louie are boyish fun in contrast with lurid headlines that greet us daily. The entire Main Street experience is designed to evoke nostalgia for an Age of Innocence. In fact, there are a number of Main Streets at properties, each tapping into a different era and range of emotions: colonial period, frontier, and the future, for example. It is pointless to murmur that these depictions are romantic fantasies, for that is indeed point. Moreover, this very fantasizing reveals a great deal about special relationship Americans have with and manner in which has managed to bring American cultural fantasies to life, externalizing almost inchoate romantic images of people. Indeed, at times this Disney-influenced version of reality has resulted in criticisms from right as well as left. The action of Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 resolving to boycott because Walt Co. was providing health care benefits to companions of gay employees and its hosting of homosexual theme nights is a case in point (Book of Year 199. owns those people who bought their image of America and then used that image against them. It is instructive to examine some of these various Main Streets in World and compare them with a British view of America's Main Street at American Adventure amusement park in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, England, near Robin Hood's Nottingham and Sherwood Forest. Main Street, U.S.A., World Disney occupies a special place in American landscape and culture, states Michael Pollan; Few companies are as skillful at making places, at shaping physical environment to affect our behavior. Disney's theme parks deserve credit for helping to keep alive not only a large part of America's vernacular architecture but, on Main Street, very experience of walkable streets and pleasing public spaces-this at precisely time when Americans were abandoning real Main Streets for their cars and suburban cul-de-sacs. (58) Getting to Main Street U.S.A. for most visitors is an adventure in itself. In addition to months or years of planning and dreaming to visit secular Mecca that World has become, there is trip from parking lot or ticket and transportation center to enter park itself. Others have written of park's controlled environment and Walt Disney's determination not to have area around World be spoiled by other commercial ventures. Part of that plan is Disney's desire to rouse sense of a journey from mundane to magic in their guests. For most guests, there are two choices in reaching park from ticket and transportation area: monorail or steamboat. Experienced guests, many of whom have gotten tired of time it takes to leave mundane and experience magic, look quickly at lines to monorail and then to steam boat's dock to note whether boat has just left or is arriving. …