Word: disneyland
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...Disney creations gradually gained a more substantial reality in 1955 when Walt Disney founded Disneyland. Since that time, his animated figures have been gaining increasing reality through technological improvements, and Disneyland itself has become too real to be an amusement park. In conceiving of Disneyland. Disney again played a merely conceptual role in terms of actual design, although he personally designed Tom Sawyer's Island. This, taken with Main Street USA, indicates that Disney was primarily interested in pristine nostalgia for a lost boyhood mythology of the nineteenth century Disney must have felt exiled from this world when his father...
...Disneyland represents a total defeat of the anxiety that is Los Angles. It is a repository of American myths in their well-scrubbed korm, spotless and inert. It is also California's version of Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny, the City of Nets. In this city, anyone can do anything he likes, all sensual pleasures are available, and there is no crime, except for one: the inability to pay, which is a capital offense. And Disneyland is also a global village: one entire world, with scaled-down continents (Disneyland, like the outside world has seven major bodies of water), all psychological...
...Disneyland is not staying still, no sir. In 1955, the park opened with 22 attractions, and it now has fifty three, scattered over its 73 acres, 3.8 million people visited the park in its first year, and now it attracts 9.4 million people annually, 105 million visitors altogether, which should mean that half the US has seen its idealized reflection, not counting repeaters, of course. While the numbers grow, Disneyland is also adding a broad new "land," which should be extremely exciting. This one is called Bear Country and pushes the American mythologizing ever further, since it concentrates...
...Disneyland has also reproduced itself, and is indirectly related to an accredited University. These two developments came about through the money made by the original. The new Disneyland, that is, Disneyworld, is even more all-inclusive than its mate. For the onslaught of fantasy into reality has continued since this new park has the status of a real-life city in the state of Florida. Soon it will have its own government and pay taxes like a city (although a totally non-functional one.) One can imagine a series of non-functional cities appearing across the nation, offering fake hotels...
...Disneyland's search for validity may have led it beyond the normal distinctions of real and unreal by donating money and trustees several years ago to an institution devoted to exploring all the arts--California Institute of the Arts. C.I.A. reduces anyone's current conception of college arts programs to mere child's play. A prominent faculty is grafted onto the furthest reaches of California artistic explorations which are aimed at smashing the barrier between the artistic object, the artificer, and his lifestyle, C.I.A. is its own global village, teaching music from India, Africa and China along with conventional Western...