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This chapter addresses charges against the Disney Company as a monopolizing transnational corporation that exports mediocre tastes as its territory and power has expanded internationally. The term “Disneyfication” has come to broadly define any landscape developed to communicate with multiple audiences and stimulate consumption. While impressive and potentially troubling, Disney’s efforts to establish the Florida resort as a self-governing entity did not make it impervious to “moral” threats, economic decline, and enterprising competitors. The chapter also provides observations about Disney World’s state of health as an entertainment destination and questions its sustainability for the future. Despite Walt’s controlling vision, it is Disney World’s employees and visitors who continually reinvent the place, ever more on their own terms. This concluding chapter begins by considering further the Company’s development into and current existence as a powerful multinational corporation. The chapter then ends by looking at how Disney World has surprisingly evolved after Walt.

This chapter turns to the third case study concerning the imagining of Africa through popular culture. This chapter primarily engages the ways in which, like Mattel’s world of Barbie, the world of Disney — particularly the Walt Disney World Resort — creates a symbolic and metaphoric control of the world through its depictions of other worlds and cultures. Many instances can be found in the Walt Disney World Resort that present different perspectives of Africa. The problem with these perspectives, however, is that they all share some basic elements that work to create implicit messages about Africa as natural, inferior, and subservient to America. Like Barbie, the act of costuming is central to the construction of these messages, and is most evident with the “it’s a small world” ride. The chapter thus further examines and explores the implications of this ride for how Africa is perceived within American culture.

This chapter travels to one of the most popular honeymoon destinations in the world: Disney World. Over a week, Essig interviewed honeymooners and couples celebrating their anniversary to ask why Disney World is “the most romantic place on earth.” Through these interviews, Essig considers how whiteness, childhood innocence, and Americanness structure the Disney honeymoon and modern love more generally.

Chapter 5 focuses upon the profound influence that World’s Fairs, particularly those in the United States, had upon Walt Disney. The fairs offer keen insight into the conception and planning of Disney World, especially Epcot. Disney’s work developing attractions for the 1964–65 World’s Fair in New York City, offers evidence of his fondness for these grand events. It also illuminates his desire to build an ideal city. Divided into Future World (devoted to technology) and World Showcase (a sampling of international cultures), Epcot prompts us to reconsider which products, technological revolutions, and social movements point the way toward “progress.” It also prompts Americans to reconsider the kinds of relationships they want to foster with their global neighbours.

Chapter 2 investigates Disney World as a pilgrimage site predicated on its rites of passage, temporary communities transcending normal social constraints, spatial planning, corporeal, symbolic transitions, and/or liminality. Disney World, particularly the Magic Kingdom, is compared to Santiago de Compostela in Spain because Santiago de Compostela emerged as a pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages and remains popular to this day. Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney are examined in relation to St. James, the patron saint of Compostela. Although comparisons to traditional pilgrimage centers and devotional figures point out distinctions between touristic and spiritual practices, the book suggests that many Disney World visitors engage in a quasi-religious pilgrimage. Today pilgrimage may be less a matter of a journey’s risk than a site’s ability to generate memorable experiences.

Chapter 3 explores Walt Disney’s desire to create his own Garden of Eden while aligning this urge with examples of landscape tourism. Landscape tourism is when one visits a place where natural elements were “corrected,” mapped, and marketed as respites from daily existence. Rising from the swamps near Orlando, Florida, Disney World enjoys a warm climate and an ample buffer zone, setting it apart from the everyday world’s imperfections. First, this chapter contains brief introductions to literary and artistic prototypes that established and propagated images of Paradise. Then, the chapter considers how the landscape has been cultivated throughout history to accommodate varying visions of paradise, such as formal gardens and ideal cities. These models for Paradise were designed to foster communities of like-minded people, improve upon daily existence, and intensify feelings of aesthetic pleasure and moral fulfilment. Disney World sits well alongside these models of paradise because Walt intended his theme park to prescribe and reinforce “proper” behavior, thus imbuing Disney World with utopian, if often unattainable, ambitions.

Chapter 4 looks at tourist destinations, most closely Las Vegas, which employ theming techniques and loose historical references to create immersive experiences for wide audiences. The founding and development of Las Vegas offer striking similarities to Walt Disney’s Florida resort. Both were remote, inhospitable locations subsequently transformed into thriving tourism sites. Each utilizes themed attractions and spaces, with an intensity of showmanship elevated far beyond most other American amusement places. Furthermore, both Las Vegas and Disney World are firmly embedded in our collective consciousness as benchmarks for escapist fantasy. A comparison between them reveals much about evolving notions of “public” space, community, and spectacle in American culture. While inducing consumptive impulses is clearly a primary goal, the resulting fantasy spaces are not easily dismissed as solely commercial. Increasingly popular, planned communities often developed near such tourist destinations, including Disney’s Celebration, to attempt to perpetually extend the “holiday” state-of-mind.

This chapter, like the previous one, focuses on particular facilities at the Walt Disney World Resort where there exist certain implications for the perception of Africa in American popular culture. In this chapter, the focus is on Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge (DAKL), which focuses solely on Africa and Africans. To be specific, DAKL presents an Africa south of the Sahara, a geographic divide that distinguishes between Arab Africa to the north and black Africa to the south. A closer look at DAKL reveals that the experience is conceived as a safari which re-creates the African savanna in Florida. At the lodge, visitors can eat African food, watch African animals roam, and learn about African cultures. The problem that the chapter addresses, however, is similar to the problems in representation that were evident in the previous cases. Like them, the Africa at DAKL is nature and animals, operating as stereotypes and thus producing negative resonances and problematic implications.

Chapter 1 reflects on the impetus for Walt to build Disney World. It also reflects on Walt Disney’s carefully crafted dual persona as a savvy businessman and dedicated visionary. A discussion of the Disney Company’s synergistic business model is provided so that its successes and failures are better comprehended. The chapter also briefly examines the postmodern ideas that remain key to Disney World’s physical and conceptual operations, particularly its use of simulations. This first chapter is intended as a foundational one, offering information on the history and evolution of the Disney Company and its parks, preparing the reader for the following chapters that combine contextual research and critical analysis with a more internal dialectic, and creating experiential accounts of Disney’s parks.

This short chapter analyses Stanley Elkin’s postmodern novels, and in particular The Magic Kingdom, which describes the trip to Disney World organized for a group of terminally ill children. The harshly satirical tone of the novel represents a strong criticism of Disney’s appropriation of the magic of fairy tales. Elkin’s style is reminiscent of Basile’s harsh, vulgar, and disrespectful approach to fairy tales.

This chapter introduces the intrinsic purpose and aim of the book: the imagining of Africa through popular culture. The book focuses on three case studies, each of which has repackaged African visual culture for the American consumer. These cases involve Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and the Walt Disney World Resort. The study focuses primarily on the way in which visual culture reinforces, challenges, and represents social relations, especially as they have been articulated around racialized identities in the past twenty years. The first task in this study, then, is the analysis of how three companies used African visual culture, and how they have generated ideological understandings of Africa for an American public. The second task involves the investigation of the way that African visual culture focuses Americans’ understanding of themselves, particularly around black and white racialized identities.

Bradbury’s long association with WED (later Walt Disney Imagineers) resulted in the 1982 opening of EPCOT and the Spaceship Earth geodetic sphere that he had worked on for more than a decade. Chapter 17 describes the milestones of Bradbury’s participation in Spaceship Earth’s ride display, themes, and audio narration, and his opening-day experiences at Disney World. This cross-country trip included rail and automobile mishaps, and Disney executives, including Roy Disney, were able to convince Bradbury to return to Los Angeles by way of his first airline flight. Chapter 17 includes brief context for the Disney Studio filming of his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Rather than being aimed at family filmgoers generally, Hollywood Verne adaptations began to polarize around either adults or preteens in the later 1960s. A bifurcation emerged as Verne became a name attracting not only children but also mature filmgoers as he emerged as an author for adult consideration. The Verne cycle evolved in approach and function, embracing the ethos of an age of social and generational transformation. A certain exhaustion of the existing trend became evident as filmmakers, in the search for fresh perspectives, turned away from adaptations toward pastiche and satire of the author’s stories, using characters, icons, and vehicles in narratives and contexts outside of those the author created. New variations on his ideas or futuristic elements beyond Verne’s vision or intent developed, while still retaining canonical elements, plot structures, and thematic motifs. This was also the rationale allowing for a series format in several Vernian animated television presentations, and the first Verne television series would demonstrate this form as a viable style for bringing Verne to the screen.