Word: disneyized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spirit of the place, Universal and Disney studios also double as playgrounds where tourists can experience "real" versions of screen phantasms. Universal offers a bumpy encounter with a robotic King Kong, whose breath is banana scented. Not to be outdone, Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park has created participation shows like the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, where visitors pretend to be extras along with actors who pretend to be extras on sets that pretend to be sets...
Millionaires in jeans is the stuff of ordinary boomtowns. But not every boomtown has the Mouse as its Medici. When the $5.8 billion Walt Disney organization established itself near Orlando, it settled on a 43-sq.-mi. property (twice the area of Manhattan) and won from the Florida legislature a sovereignty often compared to the Vatican's. Above all, it brought to Orlando the power of the Disney ethos, which can never be overstated. Executives have traveled to the park to learn about the Disney style of management, which trains employees to cherish Walt, despise stray gum wrappers, follow...
...about 20 miles away at Disney World, many tourists hold just the opposite: the best place to vacation is the place where you can only dream of living. "It brings you back to a moral, clean time that today we've lost," says Shirley Schwartz, 44, of Wayne, N.J. Praise of Disney World by its patrons often turns into condemnation of the disorder and unsightliness in the rest of America. "Do you see anybody here lying on the street or begging for money? Do you see anyone jumping on your car and wanting to clean your windshield -- and when...
What it says is that Disney World is predominantly white and middle class -- and so is Orlando. The city, like Disney World, offers relief not just from the pressures of geography (it is flat and still undeveloped) and of history (more than half the area's population arrived during the past 20 years) but, most of all, from contending ethnicity. In that sense, Orlando is a new psychological frontier, a jumping-off place for a society that revels in the surface of things, even if deeper problems remain unaddressed...
...community support. Orlando faces all the pressing burdens of a boomtown, from lengthening traffic lines on its highways to pollution in its lakes, but the region will not raise taxes to deal with them. (Orange County has lowered its property-tax rate almost annually since 1969.) In the post-Disney real estate explosion, bureaucrats, farmers and tire salesmen have become instant millionaires, but so little money has been spent on the overcrowded regional school system that some classes have been taught in gym storage rooms. About 15,000 people pack the Orlando Arena for every game of the Orlando Magic...