Word: euros
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...French Intellectual on this week's opening of the $3.9 billion Euro Disney theme park outside Paris, quoted in a special anti-Disney supplement to Le Figaro...
...child's smile, lighting up as he enters Euro Disneyland, knows no language barrier. Nor does the thrill of fear scooting up a young French spine at the sight of Monstro the Whale at Les Voyages de Pinocchio or the dragon in Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle). When a kid alights from the Big Thunder Mountain railway and exclaims "Genial!" everyone nearby can tell he means "Awesome!" You need no French diploma to read a gamine's serene exhaustion when she staggers out on penguin legs at the end of a 12-hour...
...Euro Disney is not a French adaptation of the company's parks in California and Florida. The Gallic accent is muted. There is no Moliere's Magic Theater, no Mad Marcel Proust's teacup ride. Euro Disney is the familiar all-American park somehow landed on 5,000 acres of wheat fields and beet fields in Marne- la-Vallee, 20 miles east of Paris. The attractions do not presume to explain Europe to Europe; instead they celebrate America the bland and beautiful, and reinvent it, Disney-style. Hence the transcontinental, cross- cultural ruckus...
...when Disney executives announced plans for the park at a ceremony in front of the Paris Bourse, they were pelted with eggs and tomatoes. Where their children (who buy 10 million copies of Le Journal de Mickey) see a mouse, French intellectuals smell a rat. They called the project "Euro Disgrace," "Euro Dismal," "a cultural Chernobyl...
...fair, there is no consensus among the French. (How could there be? They're French!) The naysayers -- those who approach someone returning from a visit to the site and ask, with anticipatory glee, "Well, is it grotesque?" -- are simply not Euro Disney's customers. One must remind them that this is an amusement park, a place of diversion for children and their indulgent parents. Attendance is not mandatory. Neither is the wish of the locals that an American entertainment complex take on Impressionist colors (though Euro Disney does, handsomely) and French subtitles...