Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. P. Telotte is a professor of film and media studies at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is coeditor of the journal Post Script and author of many books on film and media, including Disney TV, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir, and The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader.

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The Mouse Machine

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................viiIntroduction: Main Street, Machines, and the Mouse..................................11. Sound Fantasy....................................................................232. Minor Hazards: Disney and the Color Adventure....................................423. Three-Dimensional Animation and the Illusion of Life.............................564. A Monstrous Vision: Disney, Science Fiction, and CinemaScope.....................815. Disney in Television Land........................................................966. The "Inhabitable Text" of the Parks..............................................1177. Course Correction: Of Black Holes and Computer Games.............................1418. "Better Than Real": Digital Disney, Pixar, and Beyond............................159Conclusion..........................................................................179Notes...............................................................................191Works Cited.........................................................................203Index...............................................................................211

Introduction

I

Disney's gift, from the beginning, was not as is commonly supposed a "genius" for artistic expression ... it was for the exploitation of technological innovation. -Richard Schickel, The Disney Version

In the Disney theme parks, appearance is everything. The company's insistence on accurate research and detailed reproduction is well known, and the Disney Main Street, while what Stephen Fjellman has described as "a romanticized, idealized, architecturally controlled" creation (170), supposedly modeled on the downtown of Marceline, Missouri, where Walt Disney spent his formative years, quickly affirms the corporate emphasis on detail. The parks are also notoriously clean. Attendants-or "cast members," as employees are all termed-constantly walk the streets and pathways, picking up trash, wiping and polishing, watering the decorative flowers and shrubs, and generally making sure that there is little to mar the planned illusions. In addition, perspective is carefully controlled, so that guests see things-and are encouraged to take photographs-from calculated vantages, ones that afford the most picturesque views and that avoid glimpses of all that is "backstage." As a consequence, much of what allows for those attractive appearances, what makes the parks work, is never seen. For example, just underneath Main Street (and the other streets in the Magic Kingdom, as well as part of Epcot) snakes an elaborate complex of passageways, or "utilidors," as Disney terms them, providing quick access to all areas of the parks and holding the water, gas, and compressed air pipes, electrical wiring, computer cables, heating and air-conditioning ducts, and so on, that make these immense structures function so efficiently and entertainingly. The appearances here are, in fact, designed not only to provide guests with a pleasurable experience, but also to obscure the fact that these parks are not fantasy worlds but great technological wonders, with their creation and propagation reminding us of how accurately Richard Schickel estimated Walt Disney's true genius.

By remaining largely invisible, those technological underpinnings are supposed to make the parks seem to work by magic, thereby adding to the "magical" atmosphere that Disney sells-as a vacation destination, a purveyor of television and radio programs, a retail sales source, and a film studio, among other things. Of course, at times the appearances do fail. Rides inevitably break down; cast members, playing one of the Disney characters in a full body costume, have been known to faint; in 2006, a forty-nine-year-old tourist died of heart failure after riding Epcot's "Mission: SPACE" attraction. And when doing so can contribute to the company's profitability, Disney itself does lift the curtain and let us glimpse the mechanisms at work. Visitors to the Magic Kingdom, for example, after paying the usual park admission, can also take the rather pricey "Keys to the Kingdom" tour, a four-to-five-hour guided exploration of the utilidors, the waste treatment plant, parade staging area, and various other logistical and operational components unseen by the usual park visitor. Other Disney parks have also added versions of this behind-the-scenes experience, such as Epcot's "Behind the Seeds" tour of the high-tech food and plant cultivation that supports the park and its restaurants, or Animal Kingdom's "Wild by Design" excursion that shows how the park operates and cares for its animal inhabitants. As Disney has learned, revealing how the "magic" works can prove a rewarding experience for visitors, as well as a lucrative extension of the company's larger synergistic strategy; in fact, such revelation provides further evidence of Disney's status as what Janet Wasko terms "the most synergistic of the Hollywood majors" (Hollywood 53).

The aim of this book is to follow the company's lead in this regard, to offer a selective look at some of those often-unseen-or unconsidered-technological supports or developments that, in film, television, and the theme parks, have been crucial to the success of the Walt Disney Company and, at times, also a clue to its limitations. The result, I hope, is a very different, if admittedly limited kind of studio history, one in which we focus on both the manner and the implications of the company's investment in technology and technological culture. Certainly, wherever we look at the company that bears the name of one of its founders-and throughout this study we shall use the Disney name mainly to designate the company, but at times also its original driving force, Walt Disney-we see the traces of both this technological development and a technological attitude that have become almost as fundamental to the company's identity as its trademark cartoon characters: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and the rest. Yet those seemingly real figures and the fantasy realm they inhabit often, and even purposely, distract us from the technology that, as in the theme parks, operates just below the surface, making possible the various fantasies the company sells. By exploring the technological context for the various Disney creations, the literal foundation of the many Disney worlds, we can better understand not only Disney's phenomenal development from a small Poverty Row film studio to one of the largest and most influential media and entertainment companies in the world, but also its powerful appeal to a contemporary worldwide audience, an audience that seems increasingly aware that it inhabits a thoroughly technological, mediated environment-one to which Disney lends a most inviting and even seductive countenance.

This technological perspective should also shed some light on Disney's role within that contemporary media environment. For even as it has branched out from its early primary function as a small cartoon studio to become a key presence in television, radio, the Internet, book and music publishing, theme parks, theater, and the more amorphous leisure industry, the studio has retained something of its original character, a kind of technological...