Word: disneyized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Foote is right. Disney's America will idealize and sentimentalize history the way Disney's movies have idealized and sentimentalized nature. So what? Bambi and Dumbo are delightful, enduring children's treasures. They are not meant to be PBS documentaries...
...heart of the case against Disney is not the fact of development but the content. Were the site slated for a new research campus for the Harvard School of Public Health with housing for several thousand (as Disney proposes), I doubt that McCullough and the other intellectuals on the committee would be in such a tizzy...
What they loathe above all is the meaning of Disney. William Styron denounces the still hypothetical park for "its inevitable vulgarization of our heritage." Barbara J. Fields waxes poetic about the value of the past, then declaims boldly that "such things cannot be consumed as entertainment, experienced by carnival rides, pictured on mugs or T shirts, or simulated by animated wax figures." Shelby Foote expresses "fear that the Disney people will do to American history what they have already done to the animal kingdom -- sentimentalize it out of recognition...
...talking about an amusement park here, not Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Disney builds playgrounds for children -- loud, clangy, vulgar, kitschy playgrounds. One might as well denounce comic books for not being literature. Or Davy Crockett movies for vulgarizing Tennessee history -- and sentimentalizing bears. How many adult couples do you know who dress up, hire a sitter and head out for an evening at an amusement park? For that matter, how many adults do you know who frequent restaurants where teenagers, dressed in giant mouse outfits, snuggle up to them and offer a kiss for the camera...
That's Disneyland and Disney World and Disney everything. I know. I am an expert on Disney. I've done Catastrophe Canyon five times and can recall every diorama of the Great Movie Ride in order. I've seen it all in the company of my son, age 9, who loved every innocent, campy, vulgar...