but there are more important things to hate.

What comes to mind today, Pearl?

While it's kind of loathsome, they do make a day chasing around after kids remarkably painless. I went with the kids when they were six and four because Buck had an Orlando conference, and it was not terribly unpleasant.

1: Oh, Republicans.

I didn't go to Disney until I was something like 40 years old, celebrating my parents' 50th anniversary. It was pretty great. I've been back once with my kids.

I'm pre-disposed toward being all superior about Disney-like consumerist trash, but I gotta tell ya, I went on a Carnival cruise with my wife, and had big fun, and I like the current version of Times Square a lot better than the Times Square of 30 years ago.

Just so long as it doesn't bleed into self-hatred, HG. That can be damaging.

If you are vacationing in Orlando (with or without children) your destination should be The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at the Universal Studios theme park.

Duh.

but I gotta tell ya, I went on a Carnival cruise with my wife, and had big fun,

Whenever Austin has SXSW or one of the other big draws, some friends of ours rent out their house for the week and take a cruise. They generally break even on cost, and they sound like they have a lot of fun.

Our vacations are used up visiting family and friends, but if family or friends were lobbying for something like that, we'd probably go along with it and enjoy ourselves.

In that case the best part would be writing about it later on the internet though, right?

That's always the best part. I do love blogging.

My parents have always loved Disney World. We went a few times when I was a kid and I'm not sure there was any time when I enjoyed it more than they did. They always liked amusement parks in general a lot-- though I don't think they've been to one since I was young-- and Disney World was some kind of combination amusement park / children's museum / aquarium all in one place. I guess I don't really see why people would hate it so much? It's not someplace I have much interest in going now but as kid-friendly vacation options go it doesn't seem terrible.

Most of our family vacations were more about hiking in the mountains and whatnot, or occasionally going to Boston or DC to take in the historical sights and museums and whatnot. But I guess I don't really see what's wrong with the occasional "consumerist trash", to use pf's phrase?

Whatnot whatnot.

The most explicitly consumerist parts might have been avoided by my parents' policy of never stopping in a gift shop or, in general, doing any shopping while on vacation.

6 gets it right. Took Rory to Disney when she was small because we were visiting friends who lived close. It was okay. Took her to Harry Potter World last spring, just her and me, and it was super amazing fun. She asked just yesterday if we could go back. Anyplace that makes a teenager want to hang out alone with her mom clearly involves some real magic. Also, I really liked the butterbeer.

(We went fairly nuts on the consumerist crap, so if that stuff is anathema to you maybe you won't have as much fun.)

Phillip Glass just wrote an opera about Walt Disney. If it comes around, I might take my lack of kids to it.

We went to the California one when I was 4 and the Florida one when I was [?] and I had a swell time.

Then there was the thing when I was in my junior year of high school and the American Junior Academy of Sciences meeting was in Anaheim along with the AAAS meeting, and I was one of the two Kentucky delegates, and they had some kind of dinner / reception for us at Disneyland with lots of long speeches and some kind of supposedly entertaining show and it was terribly boring. So a few of us decided to sneak away from the speeches and explore the park. I was inordinately nervous about skipping the mandatory event, but it was terribly fun and exciting, and that's how I became the inveterate rule-breaker that I am today. Um.

My grandparents (well, now just my grandmother) live about 20 miles from Disney World, so we went a lot as kids. I've taken mine a couple of times. It's much smaller than it seemed when I was young.

(The Magic Kingdom part, that is.)

I guess I don't really see why people would hate it so much?

Because the Disney movies are omnipresent and princess crap is more infective than pinkeye? And the programming on the Disney channel is generally insidious and awful and perpetuates all sorts of horrible stereotypes you'd rather not see spread? Because Disney sues elementary schools that have painted Disney characters on their walls?

My elementary school had Disney paintings on its walls. They might have been sued, but if so, I never caught wind of it.

We went to Disney World when I was a kid, and Universal Studios, which at the time was a California-only thing. I preferred Universal Studios because Cylons and Jaws. (But hey I totally dug Disney World, too.)

I've been to Epcot a lot more than Disney because public schools in Florida kid themselves that Epcot is an educational and reasonable destination for a field trip. Or they used to. Epcot was built to feel dated from the moment it opened, which is kind of charming and kind of boring.

I thought it was called Apricot when I was an adorable toddler.

I regard Thomas Kinkade pissing on a statue of the IP Terrorism Bear at the Disney Hotel in Anaheim to be one of the great act of performance art in my lifetime.

I went to Disney a couple of times growing up, but dozens of times as a parent (helped in the latter by a combination of a relative employed by Disneyworld and parents living nearby.) The secret bliss of Disney as a parent is that it truly is an authentically kid-friendly place, which sounds incredibly obvious, but is under-rated. You can go out to nice restaurants and kids are welcomed, not just tolerated. You can hang out by the pool, and there are lifeguards every ten feet, watching obsessively, plus slides and fountains and other kids to play with. In the parks, everything is geared toward amusing children. Vacationing with small people can feel like a lot of work. At Disney, not so much. There is something around every corner to keep them amused.

You can definitely have a horrible time at Disneyworld if you go there determined to ride on every ride and stand in every line, but if you go there looking for your children to be amused, supervised, and welcomed while you relax, it can be quite pleasant. (And some of the nicer restaurants at Disneyworld really are world-class.)

You know those uninteresting, unimportant things that stick in your head forever even though you can't remember your password for your work computer? One of the guides at EPCOT cracked the hilaaaaarious joke that EPCOT stands for "Every Person Comes Out Tired" and, yep, I still remember it.

That is a good one.

One thing that's a giant turn-off for me is that it's a fairly cheap vacation if you log a million hours scouting online deals and reading up exactly how to game out Disney, and it's massively expensive if you just decide, naively, to take your kids there for vacation. A one day ticket is close to $100 or something?

9 is the mere surface of why to hate the cultural imperialist consumerist american capitalist intellectual property rentist mind-destroying cinematic full-animation evil that is Disney...but it's a start.

Never been to a D-park. I think I watched part of the Lion King but nothing else since the 60s. Am very suspicious of Pixar.

Obviously not. Growing up thousands of miles away, in enlightened, erm, well-wrapped up Scotland. Didn't go to any Disney like things either. Thorpe Park a couple of times as a teenager, and that was it.

A friend's daughter is Disney princess obsessed at the moment. I'm wondering how long they'll resist the siren call of Eurodisney.

19: Well, yeah, I get all of that, and it's a reason to not like Disney as a corporate entity. (Although the omnipresentness doesn't really fit well with how I remember my childhood-- teachers would occasionally show Disney movies in class but all the kids thought they were kind of boring, as far as I can remember, my one middle school friend who was really weirdly fascinated with The Lion King notwithstanding.) But I think very few people-- certainly not my parents-- have that kind of political thinking in mind when they take their kids to Disney World. And the park considered on its own seems a lot less objectionable than many other things the corporation does. It seems kind of like being opposed to vacationing at the Smithsonian Museum because the US government is involved in drone strikes and the drug war. (I ban myself.)

You say obviously not, but when I've flown to Europe from Orlando, the plane has been full of super sunburnt Europeans.

31: Sure, I don't think it's particularly heinous to visit the park. But you asked why people would hate it, and I think it's because of the general ill-will towards the brand.

My sister took her daughter to Eurodisney when she was that age, but I think the kid decided she preferred Centre Parcs.

re: 32

Oh sure. But I'm old, remember (40). Only really rich people flew to the US when I was a child and through to my late teens. It started getting more common for ordinary people I'd guess around 20 years ago. I don't think I met anyone who'd ever been to Disney until I was in my twenties, when I had a girlfriend whose family holidayed in Florida. They were, arguably, fairly rich, though.

re: 34

My mum took my brother when he was about 9. On a sort of split holiday deal, where he got to spend a couple of days at Eurodisney, and she got to spend a couple of days sight-seeing in Paris. They didn't like it at all [either Eurodisney or Paris]. The only thing my brother spoke about when he came back was the food. He had a fish stew with whole octopus and tentacles, and thought that was the greatest thing ever. And he resented that my mum wouldn't buy him frogs or snails.

He/they certainly had a much better time on holidays with my sister and her kids at Butlins.

32: One of the most vivid memories of my trip to pre-EPCOT Walt Disney World was mounds of pasty British beef broiling under the sun and queuing for breakfast at McDonalds. Other memories of the trip include an observation made while waiting for the fucking rat parade to start (recounted here last year--almost to the day!-- a lot folks weighed in on Disney in that thread).

A musical link via ttaM from that thread.

My Dad grew up right where Disneyland was built. He used to play in the orange groves that it was on. When we visited he was quite maudlin about the whole thing but my sister and I didn't care because giant mice and slides and roller coasters and did I mention the giant mouse?

35: Only really rich people flew to the US when I was a child

That is part of why 37.1 struck me at the time--everyone looked working class and many were wearing a t-shirt mentioning one of the dailies. Presumably it was some manner of a promotion/package deal. A big one, judging by the numbers.

37.2 written without seeing that ttaM had posted just above.

Personally, I like to believe that Skynet will play "It's a Small World After All" through every public speaker system in the world as it launches the missiles.

re: 39

Sure. By the early 90s you'd have working class people flying. Possibly a tad earlier. My girlfriend's family were working class, but had money as her Dad had literally worked his way up from apprentice to factory owner. You'd have seen them strolling about sunburnt in Celtic shirts looking every bit the uncouth Brit abroad, rather than looking like sophisticated international traveller types.

re: 37.last

God, I love that track. The whole album it's from is amazing.

I don't think most Disney stuff is worth hating but I have a four-year-old daughter and am working my way up to a hearty loathing of the Disney Princess marketing machine. It is hard to fight because it is distasteful and ineffective to put pressure on one's child *not* to like certain characters or play certain kinds of pretend games. But there is something coercive and creepy about the degree to which this particular set of characters takes hold of the imagination of many young girls, even leaving out concerns about reinforcing gender roles and overvaluing social status and appearance.

My parents went to Disney World on their honeymoon. I went at 3 and at 9. I really loved it as a nine-year-old, but I probably loved the pool at the hotel just as much.

re: 43

Yeah, my friend's daughter is pretty deep into the clutches of their evil plans. It's surprising how early it took hold. The friends deny having an agency in this at all -- 'She just acquired all this stuff by magic' -- but I understand they are fighting against a fairly powerful machine.

42.1: This would have been '79 or '80. Probably not that common, I just happened to run it to it on my one visit.

33: Yeah, fair enough. But I guess this thread is one of those things that makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable and out of step in a way that's maybe sort-of class-based although I'm not sure "class" is the right word. The reasons for hating Disney World seem fairly sensible to me now but would have seemed pretty alien from the point of view of the family I grew up in. Which means I expect my parents, say, would tend to see it as a kind of snobbery, and I'm not sure they'd be entirely wrong. There are lots of terrible things about corporate and consumer culture in America, and lots of ways that we're all complicit in it, so being particularly critical of one of those-- which happens to correspond to an unusually kid-friendly vacation experience that lots of families enjoy-- makes me a bit uncomfortable.

There's something similar in the UK with Butlins. Lots of families love it, but it's definitely sneered at (or was) by SWPL types.

I find the Disney empire in general to be pretty fascinating--from Walt Disney as urban planning/monorail visionary, the "no moms movies," to its interesting corporate culture* and its undisputed place at the very pinnacle of something or other. Historically important.

That said, I once again link The Disneyland Memorial Orgy.

47: Sure yeah, it's snobby as hell. One of the great cultural signifiers of our time.

Nobody here has been much into hating on the Disney vacation, though. That's kind of a strawman.

Growing up, I always viewed Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (which we watched in black and white) as something special beyond "regular" TV. Not sure why, but I did.

I hated on it in the link in 37. We did have a Disney World vacation planned for the kids one Christmas, but God created a family emergency to cancel it. So my kids got one visit to Disneyland as a side trip when were visiting friends in California. (And I don't believe any of them have been to any of the parks since).

Yeah, I think the class signifier (and I agree that's somewhat at issue here) has much more to do with frequency of consuming Disney content and buying/owning Disney merchandise than taking a trip to the theme park.

I liked Disneyland when I was four and loved the hell out of Disneyworld and EPCOT when I was like eleven.

We are totally going to Disneyland, at least, with Zardoz. Disney as a corporate entity etc. okay but what they did with those parks is really impressive and fascinating and largely unreplicated. Probably we'll go with some of my friends from LA. To 26 the one I remember was something like "Endless polyester costumes of torture".

Zardoz? Is that the current baby name? Excellent. LB can knit a little red nappy/braces-bandolier combo.

Zardoz is what we're calling it, and will probably continue to call it here, yeah.

I'm not knitting for the current babysplosion. I suppose if I started now, I could turn out a sock each, but that many babies is beyond my capacity. And I have meatspace babies to knit for (neighbor/girl-Buck's-known-since-she-was-nine) is due next month, and I have responsibilities.

I'm all pleased by the prospect of babysitting: what with living a block away, I'm expecting to get honorary grandma/aunt status in terms of doing impromptu babywatching.

We are, as per a previous thread, using Řehoř, for unpronounceability reasons.

[All babies, all the time]

57: Poor O was "Fucko" until like 2 wks post-birth.

I went to Disney a couple of times growing up, but dozens of times as a parent (helped in the latter by a combination of a relative employed by Disneyworld and parents living nearby.) The secret bliss of Disney as a parent is that it truly is an authentically kid-friendly place, which sounds incredibly obvious, but is under-rated. You can go out to nice restaurants and kids are welcomed, not just tolerated. You can hang out by the pool, and there are lifeguards every ten feet, watching obsessively, plus slides and fountains and other kids to play with. In the parks, everything is geared toward amusing children. Vacationing with small people can feel like a lot of work. At Disney, not so much. There is something around every corner to keep them amused.

I do find this prospect enticing. Also, as someone who's never been, I think I might also enjoy it sheerly on the level of being a novel cultural experience.

One thing that's a giant turn-off for me is that it's a fairly cheap vacation if you log a million hours scouting online deals and reading up exactly how to game out Disney, and it's massively expensive if you just decide, naively, to take your kids there for vacation.

And this is indeed very offputting.

47 is fair enough, but I don't really know what one should conclude from accusations of snobbery, even if well-founded. Some parents decline to have a TV, which can be seen as a form of snobbery, but the fact that millions of Americans partake, robustly and enjoyably, of it doesn't indicate that you should too, on pain of being a snob.

I doubt that's the argument in the first place, though. It's fair enough to just go with 'different strokes for different folks'.

One of my cousins was strangely obsessed with Disney World (not sure she's ever been to Disneyland), and ended up going every couple of years throughout her childhood and teenage years. (She's from Missouri too, so these weren't day trips or anything.) In college she did some sort of semester-long work program there, in which she got to work in all kinds of different jobs at the park, though not as a character. She went back at least a time or two after that semester. Strangely, she now has two daughters and hasn't taken them even once.

(The cross-contamination with the insidious Disney princess and Disney Channel stuff is also very offputting, whether it be snobbery or no.)

if you log a million hours scouting online deals and reading up exactly how to game out Disney

My brother is a huge Disney fan -- the one in Florida -- and I believe his approach is to suss out a convention being held in town at the time of his visit, and somehow or other pretend to be an attendee. I forget exactly how this works: does he actually go to the convention site and score a badge, when then gets him into the Disney place at a significant discount? Something like that. Maybe he actually registers online for the convention beforehand, which one would hope can be done for free.

65: that's ingenious. /Jew

I will not pay to wait in lines.

66: Yeah, I was pretty surprised. My brother! Does things like that?! He tends to go for a three-day weekend, and I think the weekend pass is pretty pricey, so he saves himself a couple hundred bucks.

I had the impression when I was a kid that trips to Disneyworld were extremely commonplace and my family never went because we were poor, weird, or both. I felt pretty much the same way about belonging to a church, owning two cars, single family homes, cable TV, and stay at home moms.

I know now that I grew up in a weirdly affluent/conservative area and I have accordingly revised my understanding of what is normal. I sort of figured that the people I grew up with went to Disneyworld on vacation because their families were suspicious of cities, black people, and Europe. This thread is making me feel like I need to recalibrate again.

My parents took me to Disneyland as a kid. The motel had a pool with a waterslide which was the part I liked best.

Disneyland turns me into an insane nostalgic conservative. I can't believe that they PC'd up the Pirates of the Carribean, and god damn it why isn't there a burning settlers cabin while you are on the Mark Twain? Also, I want the keel boats back, the park was MUCH better served by the A-E Ticket system, California Adventure should not exist, etc etc.

I've been weirdly reluctant to take my own kid to Disneyland, but purely out of laziness. Also I want to go to Club 33 so bad but haven't been able to yet, so that kind of casts a pallor over the whole experience.

I have never been to Disneyworld, but I have been to Disneyland upwards of ... 15 times? Probably more. It was only 4 hours away growing up, October is a great month to go and it happens to be my birthday, and I had a number of friends in high school and university who were Disney-obsessed and so I went too. I always had a great time; I get sick on bigger roller coasters but the kid-friendly ones are perfect for me, I love the churros every four paces, and it just always brought out the little kid in me in the best possible way. However, while I enjoy it and would like to visit again, especially with kids should I ever have some, I never got the Disney mania exhibited by some of my friends, and I feel a little ashamed about how much I like it (for all the reasons listed above re: Disney's evil empire).

Also the reason my Dad lives in Los Angeles is basically Disneyland. His parents did a trip West to see it when it opened in 1955, and he liked it so much he decided to move when he grew up. It could happen to your kids!

38, 73: I lived not too far north of Disneyland (Google says 5.5 miles) for a little over a year and a half (close enough to hear the nightly fireworks). Never went during that time, but dropped off/picked up a number of visitors at the entrance.

I probably loved the pool at the hotel just as much

I took the ex's boy when he was six and we had an absolute blast running around to everything* for 5 or 6 days--Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, some water park. And at the end of the trip I asked him what his favorite part was and he went with the hotel pool. Sigh. You know they have pools back home, right?

Also 6 and 13 are exactly right. We went back just for Harry Potter World a couple years ago and it was fantastic. Likely going back later this year, as long as I have to be in dreaded Florida for work reasons anyway.

*Except Epcot. Epcot sucked even worse than I'd remembered it sucking from when I went 25 or so years ago.

Heh at 'only 4 hours away'. US sense of driving distances is different from the UK.

Four hours from Glasgow would pretty much take you to anywhere in mainland Scotland, and you could get Manchester or possibly even Birmingham driving south. No sane person would consider 'Birmingham' as a day trip sort of distance.

77: Even here in the Upper Midwest, people are fairly nonchalant about drives of that range. I think virtually everyone who grew up in Mpls. has a story about the mad time they and their friends decided to jump into the car and drive to Chicago (~6 hours, depending on how willing you are to risk speeding tix in Wisc.), often for a concert, and then drive straight back.

We never went to any Disney thing ever. I guess I would have been sad to think that was going to be the case when I was 8 or 9, but the more I heard about the lines and other unpleasant aspects, the less it sounded like fun. I did watch a lot of the Disney stuff on ABC, and went to pretty much every Disney movie that was released up until I was 17 or so. But that was more of a homey experience, and didn't engender all that much interest in the parks.

77: I concede up front that this is a little crazy, but one of the reasons we ended up in Lubbock instead of at a comparable place further east was that from Lubbock we could make it back to LA in the car in a single (very long but doable) day--i.e., about 18 hours.

We had a massive kid-parent blow up on one vacation over our preference for the pool over yet more time touring Colonial Williamsburg (in our defense the trip had also included Monticello and Mount Vernon). And then thirty-some years later my kids staged a mini-revolt when we visited.

76: It's funny that I still write things like "only four hours away," as I seem to have picked up the UK aversion to driving more than 30 minutes at a time. (I know you happen to commute far more, but man, suddenly things seem a lot farther away than they did in the US.)

Oh, and to be fair, we rarely did it as a day trip but rather an overnighter.

Growing up in the dense northeast US and not having one of those families that took car vacations, anything further than an hour or so felt like a huge schlep to me; then I moved to Texas and people would think nothing of making a day trip to Houston (~4 hours) or the coast (I don't even remember how long, because I could only bring myself to do it a few times). It's only the last few years that the thought of drives longer than 3-4 hours or so do not fill me with dread. (Eventually my gradually-increasing airplane phobia started changing the calculus a bit; so now a dreaded 6.5 hour drive to Cleveland vs. the mortal terror of flying is pretty much a toss-up.)

79: I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've heard of anyone moving to Lubbock because it's in a convenient location.

We went to DW once when I was about 4 without realizing it was Easter Sunday and the place was packed with kids on Spring Break. Apparently my parents were miserable, but I don't really remember much from that trip. I do remember EPCOT a little. A couple years later we went to DL, which I do remember pretty well. I liked it. Both of these trips were combined with visits to family in the same general area.

I suppose I've done day trips to the coast reasonably often. About 2-3 hours from Oxford to, say, the Isle Of Purbeck.

I went to Disneyland a few times while visiting relatives in southern California before "graduating" to Magic Mountain, which is more oriented towards older kids.

Is saying "going to Disney" a regional thing? I've never heard it without "land" or "world" after Disney.

If you loved Purbeck, like I love Purbeck, oh! Oh! Oh! Oh what an isle!

Like fa, I have never heard "going to Disney", only "Disneyland". Or -world, I guess.

Even though I don't care at all, not one bit, some part of me is drawn to the as-yet-unclaimed pedant territory of differentiating Disneyland (one word) and Walt Disney World (three words). What is my problem?

90: I was wondering what the official usage was.

Also I'm virtually certain someone, somewhere has already staked out that pedant territory.

92: oh god yes. Just not in this thread.

I see I mentioned Magic Mountain in the other thread too.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone in conversation say "Walt Disney World."

Even though I don't care at all, not one bit, some part of me is drawn to the as-yet-unclaimed pedant territory of differentiating Disneyland (one word) and Walt Disney World (three words).

To each his own way of earning fame.

95: the internet disney park nerds call it WDW.

93: Ha! I used WDW specifically in 37 after seeing someone, somewhere decrying "Disney World" (or even worse, "Disneyworld") while double-checking something.

Four hours from Glasgow would pretty much take you to anywhere in mainland Scotland, and you could get Manchester or possibly even Birmingham driving south. No sane person would consider 'Birmingham' as a day trip sort of distance.

And yet, I've been led to believe that the British equivalent of Disneyland is a place called "Alton Towers" located somewhere near Birmingham.

84: The ability to make that drive has made a real difference in our quality of life, to be honest--especially since we love so much of the area in between. I can't tell you how many times we've driven through Fort Sumner, Cloudcroft, White Sands, Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Winslow, etc., depending on the season, the time we have to make the trip, and whether we're headed to San Diego or LA.

YMMV, but IIRC I've never heard anyone say "WDW' in conversation.

FWIW.

the internet disney park nerds

This phrase really shouldn't have surprised me, and yet it did.

93, 98: Ah, ok, it was k-sky@42 in that linked thread. But he helpfully linked to a definition of "doryphore" in order to raise our level of discourse above WMYBSALB and the like.

The doriphore...is the type of questing prig, who derives intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.

re: 99

Well, it's just amusement rides, I think. There's none of the child-friendliness and character driven stuff. I've never been, though, as I have a morbid fear of most amusement rides. Roller-coasters terrify me.

But you are right that people make fairly long trips to go there.

The url for Walt Disney World Resort does not include "Walt". I think they're sending a mixed message.

We went to Disney World/Epcot every year that I was a kid, but probably only in the off-season because we had FL resident passes. I also remember doing a school trip to Epcot (which was my favorite trip), another school trip to Typhoon Lagoon and Wet 'n Wild, and then we spent part of our belated honeymoon at Universal and Islands of Adventure.

First time: WDW with the family, age 8, I was too scared to go on Space Mountain.

Second time: Disneyland with family, age 12, I enjoyed Space Mountain.

Third time: Disneyland with college improv group; driving out of my friend's mom's house, we totalled the car, but three of us decided we could do it by bus. After all, Disneyland's somewhere in Los Angeles, right? (It's not.) When we got there, Seth, who'd banged his head, was complaining of dizziness, so we all went on the Teacups to meet his baseline.

Fourth time: WDW with college improv group, uneventful.

Fifth time: Disneyland for friend's 40th birthday; I overestimated my stamina and more or less sat in one place for two hours waiting out my nausea after the California Adventure roller coaster.

On one level, I subscribe to all the bobmcmanusismo about Disney and the desert of the real etc, but mostly it just exhausts me. Can't wait to take my kid!

107: Wikipedia leads with The Walt Disney World Resort, commonly known as Walt Disney World and informally as Disney World.

And incorrectly as Disneyworld and epigrammatically as Disney.

109: so we all went on the Teacup

The teacups marked a small turning point in my life so to speak. When I went with my kids they were thrilled that I (whose taste in rides tended towards higher, faster, upside-downer twistier, whateverer in stark contrast to my wife) could and was willing to spin the damn things very fast. Once. Midway through the second time I became extremely dizzy and it marked the beginning of a precipitous decline in my ride enthusiasm in general. (I also had to deal with the palpable disappointment of my children, "No daddy, spin it faster!")

Yeah, I can't stand spinning anymore.

You should sit down on those things anyway.

I was just there two weeks ago! Conference in Orlando, but actually getting into the park was part of a vendor meeting so you had to get tickets from the vendor, go to the meeting (in Epcot) then you had until closing to wander around plus they sponsored a dinner at Germany. I got the obligatory 1 L beer. I went on the two rides that weren't there last time I went (1995), Test Track and Soarin'. Very well done. Also Captain Eo was playing again, I guess they brought it back when MJ died and it was so popular they've kept it going even though the theater is getting pretty ratty. Also went to Universal but not into the park itself, another vendor event rented out Margaritaville so we were in the artificial commercial area outside the park. Yet another vendor event (have I mentioned that this conference is a bit junkety?) was at the equivalent shopping area for Disney which is actually not very close to the parks at all, have to take a bus between the various Disney parts.
I went at least every year as a kid until about age 10- my grandparents lived nearby, brother and I would fly Piedmont as unaccompanied minors including one time they forgot to hold the connection in Charlotte (which they're supposed to do since unaccompanied stranded minor = BAD) and the only other flight that night was to Jacksonville so my grandparents had to drive up to get us.
Other times when the whole family went we would drive NY to Orlando nonstop. Always went past South of the Border when it was closed at like 3am so I never actually knew what was there aside from the fact that in retrospect the billboards are really racist.
We were experts before they had the guides that let you cheat, riding in the nose of the monorail, etc. We also figured out that if you want to ride the monorail for fun but don't have the kind of ticket that lets you, at the end of the day when people are leaving ask for their finished ticket that did allow monorail rides. But that was then, now they have crazy shit like scanning your fingerprint to match you to your ticket.
After that I went twice with high school band to perform at the parks, once in MK and once in Epcot. I think I still have the Tshirts somewhere.
I don't think we'll bring the kids, the aforementioned conference was the last one that will be in Orlando. We have taken them to Efteling, supposedly the inspiration for Walt to build his parks, they liked it even though they were pretty young at the time (2 and 4) so they didn't do the roller coaster.

I do not have a cute nickname for my kid. This is driving my mom crazy.

We never took vacations when I was a kid, but I did go to Disney World once as a teenager with a band trip. It was fun, but I think it would have been more fun had I been younger.

I have heard the Harry Potter part is wonderful.

115.1: to be fair, Blume's mom is sort of nonplussed by "Zardoz", especially after I made her a special card with imagery from the movie on it.

Imagery is probably too strong. Maybe go with some of the words:

The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was, but the gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth ... and kill!

Always went past South of the Border when it was closed at like 3am so I never actually knew what was there aside from the fact that in retrospect the billboards are really racist.

This sentence is a tour-de-force of specificity that I'm really pleased to have grokked.

"The penis is evil, so try my new double-strength circumcision."

the billboards

My single visit to Walt Disney World as a kid involved driving from Chicago, so it was all "See Ruby Falls".

Anyhoo, SP, Chris Sims went to South of the Border so you don't have to.

YMMV, but IIRC I've never heard anyone say "WDW' in conversation.

For our trip when I was 9, my parents took us out of school in the middle of January to go when the park wasn't busy. They told me ahead of time, but didn't tell my sister until the day we were leaving because they thought she'd be unable to keep the secret at school. So I went around for close to two weeks taunting my sister by mysteriously (annoyingly) referring to "WDW" and how we'd be there soon.

120: See Seven States!

We drove from Nebraska to both Disney parks (land/world), but not on the same trip. We also drove to Canada so we could see ice in the sumner.

In total, over 900 barn roofs in nineteen states were painted by Clark Byers for Rock City.

By the way, to essear in 103, it goes deep, dude.

And by "we", I mean my dad. Mom wasn't big on driving so she'd only take the wheel for 30 minutes or so each day.

121: I already did, though, but just to urinate and purchase fireworks. This was twenty years before his visit, so tacky/racist/depressing, but in slightly better repair.

126: I love the internet. Just looking at the very top of the post I love the conjunction of Walter Benjamin and the cartoon (presumably My Little) pony.

126: Yeah, rec.arts.disney was a revelation to me back in the day. (Also provided good warlording material.) But they were just getting warmed up.

121- Holy shit. Now I view never going there as one of those split-universe things, how might my life have turned out if we'd timed our trips to be there when it was open.

130: yep. My god, the hidden mickey scene alone.

126: I love the internet. Just looking at the very top of the post I love the conjunction of Walter Benjamin and the cartoon (presumably My Little) pony.

The Benjamin tag reminds me of one of my long-ridden hobby horses, namely, "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" is a really bad translation of "das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit", which refers not simply to reproduction but specifically to the reproducibility of the artwork.

one of my long-ridden hobby horses

You know they tore Walter Benjamin's Translation Rodeo out of Frontierland when Toy Story 2 came out, right?

From link in 130:

And just why was the attraction [Matterhorn] added to "Tomorrowland" in 1959 in the first place?

And never answered in the article

Third Man on the Mountain, Rennie, MacArthur, Janet Munroe, 1959

Growing up with that shit, Disney did tie-ins and cross-promotions and spent bucks pushing their next piece of product. Relentless hard sell at little kids.

135: yeah but why was it added to Tomorrowland?

Don't they translate that slightly differently now? I've certainly see it as something else in the past (and not just here.)

My dad went to Florida a lot for work in the late seventies, early eighties, so when I was about twelve we went over and stayed for a couple of weeks with the family of a colleague he was friends with. They'd stayed with us in location a couple of years before. So we went to Disney World, the Everglades, some other things I guess.

We've done theme park things here (it's a 3 hour drive to Alton Towers, and we've done a day trip there. With a one month old baby. Hmm) although none of mine are that keen on the rides. Kid B went to 'near Paris' with a friend's family last year and they all went to Eurodisney - she enjoyed it, but wasn't so enthusiastic as to make everyone else desperate to go. I'd like to go to Harry Potter at Universal, though I can't see it happening.

In location? In London.

Disneyworld is awesome. Disneyland is good. Went many times as an adult, always had lots of fun. Disney Paris and Disney Hong Kong, too. Hate on, but it really is fun.