#292 Mouse-ellaneous

Our friends at the Magic Kingdom have decided to make a position statement for good health in America by banning McDonalds. What, go to the happiest place on earth and you can’t get a happy meal? The major icons of mass market baby boomers severing ties? Fantasyland and reality land at odds?? World of tomorrow giving up on the brave new supersize world? Seems Disney is afraid of being tarred with the uncaring corporate brush that is painting Americans with a thick layer of obesity. Blaming McDonalds, or at least insinuating that it’s the major culprit in the fat food revolution, Disney is distancing themselves from the whole process and giving McDonalds a permanent pass. No truth to the rumor that a specially-dressed Goofy and Ronald McDonald are being featured in a new George Lucas 3-d inter-attraction called “the Clown Wars.” It’s certainly an interesting tack for Disney to take. When I was a kid in the fifties my mom was a server—they called them waitresses back then—at a food joint in Tomorrowland. The place served three things. Hamburgers, hot dogs, and french fries. Tomorrow-burgers, as I recall, looked astonishingly like the super-sized today burgers that Mickey D’s serves up. So if anything, Disney is being a little Disney-ingenuous. Obesity and lack of exercise. This from the company that gave us the “people mover,” that ride that proposed a future where a continuous train of transport would run for you to just walk on and walk off, and would propel you forward at the speed of—walking. That’s right, no one in the future has to walk because you’ll have a machine you can ride in that moves you along at the (deep echoing voice) speed of walking. Imagine the cuts into the epidemic of obesity that would make. No more walking to the store. No more walking on the sidewalk, no more walking to McDonalds. We can ride there.
Personally, I think Disney screwed up when they remodeled the original Tomorrowland. The speed of technology what it is, by the time they got a new ride up and running and scenery tricked out a la Disney upgrades were already out of date. Magic Mountain, the rival Six Flags Park, just slapped up the girders and let the thrill ride screaming commence. When the ride got old they tore it down and didn’t lose a droplet of sentimental tears in the process. But when Disney personalized a ride with Goofy or Pluto or Donald, kids attached emotions to it. When you tore it down you were tearing down Mr. Toads wild lily pad or Dumbo’s house, and you scarred kids for life. They should have just renamed Tomorrowland Yesterday-land, or more convolutedly Yesterday’s Tomorrowland and all the cool campy things that people thought the 21st Century would look like would be forever enshrined in the land of made believe.
America, ya gotta love it.