Word: disneyized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hiaasen's ire stems mostly from the creation of Disney World, virtually right in his own backyard. He hates what the theme park has done to his home town of Orlando, attracting people to a purely synthetic, artificially reassuring fairyland while treating the neighboring real world of South Florida as an offensive trash heap...
This claim seems labored for one reason: most families don't live in Disney World. Whatever escapism the theme park provides, people ultimately go home and face life outside the Magic Kingdom. Disney World is a private enterprise that has but a passing influence on most families' lives. But one of Disney's newest ventures attempts to extend its brand of corporate manufactured reassurance into public, not private, spaces, a concept that has made critics more temperate than Hiaasen cringe in dismay...
About two years ago, the folks at Disney founded the town of Celebration, Fla.-a town of everyday people, in their everyday homes, living everyday lives-after it realized that it had no other use for land that it purchased as a possible extension of Disney World. From the beginning it saw Celebration as a noble social experiment, a model community for the next century. Disney contacted some of the world's leading architects to design the town. Educational experts planned a progressive school system that would largely do away with a formal curriculum and assessment of student performance through...
Considering their approach, it's surprising that Disney officials didn't call the place "Utopialand" and be done with it. But in choosing the tamer name of "Celebration," perhaps they sensed that the community would eventually have to make a transition from a town planner's dream to a regular suburban society, with real pitfalls and real problems. But can a place like Celebration, designed by the designers of fantasy worlds, truly succeed as a free-standing community...
...answer, for now, is no. The town government (mostly Disney officials) won't immediately let the residents take charge of certain aspects of their lives-everything from decorating rules to educational policy has been carefully determined by the town's founders. There's something disturbing when such uniformity results from a single corporation's vision. According to a recent New York Times report, one woman in Celebration had to remove red curtains from her window, since the only approved colors for curtains are white and off-white--pure, clean and uninvigorating. Eventually, if the people of Celebration are to establish...