To all who come to this happy place: Welcome.
Disneyland is your land. Here,
age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise
of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the hard
facts that have created America
- with the
hope that it will
be a source of
joy and inspiration to all the world.
Disneyland Dedication Plaque, July 17, 1955.
The idea for Disneyland was both revolutionary and evolutionary. It
was revolutionary because Walt Disney created a different kind of
amusement park from the gaudy carnivals of the day, and it was evolutionary because its creator expanded upon themes in animation, establishing them first in a "land"(Disneyland) and later a ''world"
(Disney World,
Florida). Today, the
products of
a Disney " universe" are
widely available throughout the American sphere of influence, in Third World countries, and even
revolutionary socialist societies. Disneyland (over which Disney
had the most personal control, and on which this paper will primarily focus) expresses the
values of a culture that
shaped its creator' s personality, and that of other Americans born of this century. As mass entertainment, the Disneyland tour is not value free. On
the contrary, Disneyland
customers are active participants in a mass-mediated morality play of utopian proportions. The Disneyland experience both transmits and reinforces the ideology of its creator and of its largely white, middle-class, suburban participants. Disneyland is, in fact, a model of a postwar American utopia, with political, economic, and social implications.
