Word: disneyized
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...with long odds, an entrepreneur must know when to give up and when to adapt. Robert I. Earl owned an Elizabethan "theme restaurant" in Orlando called Shakespeare's of Church Street that provided an evening of light wassailing and big eats; last year he moved his operation closer to Disney World and changed the restaurant's name to King Henry's Feast. Why? "People who come to Orlando want to have fun," he told the International Drive Bulletin, "and too many people thought Shakespeare's was something serious and cultural...
...Disney had, of course, savored that triumph long before Jim Bakker was born. And having tasted success with Disneyland in California, he looked for a larger playground. His gaze fell on central Florida. Twenty years ago, the region was not much more than scrubland, orange groves, gas stations and $5-a- night motels. It was a place vacationers drove through, as quickly as possible, on their way to Miami or the Gulf Coast. But just before his death in 1966, the Man with the Mouse had bought, secretly and at the fire-sale price of roughly $200 an acre...
...once, a politician was guilty of understatement. Today Greater Orlando, with Walt Disney World as its golden profit center, is one of the nation's fastest-growing areas in population, revenue and new-tech industry. The people who live and work in Orlando are there for the same reasons as those who visit: because of its proximity to an all-ages fun-time wonderworld. Here is a metropolis whose success has been erected on the American family's itch for entertainment. Not since Southern California sprang up around the burgeoning Hollywood film colony has a region owed its riches...
...central Florida, Disney, not Presley, is the king of leisure-time attractions. But Sea World is surely prince charming--an inviting and meticulously run theme park dedicated to the proposition that almost any fish or aquatic mammal can be trained to do almost anything. (Not so over at Cypress Gardens, where the host of the Little Critter Show became exasperated when one of his fowl performers, Quack Nicklaus, blew a stunt. Keened the trainer: "There's only so much you can teach a duck.") At Sea World the dolphins do backflips in sync; a walrus sprays his audience...
...Walt Disney World, the snappy patter is left to the guides on the trams that whisk visitors from the car lot to one of the two main parks: the Magic Kingdom--which is basically Disneyland East--and the sprawling Epcot Center. (One-day admission: $23 for adults, $19 for kids.) "No smoking--foreign, domestic or homegrown," one guide sasses near Epcot's 18-story Spaceship Earth geosphere. "You know what Epcot means?" another asks near closing time. "Every Person Comes Out Tired." In fact, the acronym stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It was Disney's conceit to create...