THE magic starts before you know it. You've barely stepped off the plane in Orlando's dazzling high-tech airport before you've been whisked into a Disney-like blender. A smoothly-efficient monorail glides to the terminal building while a silken recorded voice welcomes you to the home of Walt Disney World (WDW). Below, the shimmering pools, waving palm trees and manicured green grass of the landscaped grounds reinforce the message that you've made it to fantasyland, a bounded and cloistered universe isolated from the cares and concerns of real life.
Walt Disney World in Florida is the jewel in the crown of the Walt Disney Company, a $23-billion media conglomerate that may just be the single most powerful and influential force in the globalization of Western culture. In the wired world of the new millennium the real power to promote and consolidate consumer capitalism will lie not with the International Monetary Fund, Texaco or Monsanto but with the control over the `infotainment industry' - film, TV, music, ideas and information. What one writer has called `the sinews of our post-modern soul'. (1)
You may identify the Disney name with a trademarked signature or for its phenomenally popular animated films Aladdin or The Lion King. But the shoe-string company that a visionary young American artist named Walt Disney founded back in 1923 is today a worldwide entertainment giant.
In addition to the Orlando operation (which contains four separate theme parks), there are Disneylands in Anaheim, California, near Tokyo in Japan and north of Paris, France. The company also has its fingers in book, magazine and newspaper publishing, mainstream feature-film production and distribution, cable TV, music recording, live stage shows, real estate development, major league baseball and ice hockey, video production and sales, retail stores, product licensing, computer software and on-line services. And there's more. With its $19-billion take-over of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network in 1995, Disney edged within a hair's breadth of Time-Warner in a bid to become the world's number one media group.
At the same time, the term `disneyfication' has entered the language, used to describe the process of turning the flesh-and-blood world we all inhabit into a replica of Disneyland - sanitized, safe, entertaining and predictable. Reason enough I thought to visit the world's number one tourist attraction.
The Orlando airport last year welcomed 27.3 million passengers, making it one of the busiest in the world. Estimates are that nearly half those visitors came to visit the Disney World complex of theme parks, hotels, restaurants, bars and shops. In total Disney World draws more than 30 million tourists a year, many of them from overseas. Brits top the list of foreign visitors: nearly 1.2 million flew to Orlando last year, enough to fill ten jumbo jets every day.
Forty years ago this part of central Florida was untouched by mass tourism. It was a land of orange groves, lush wetlands, palmetto scrub and vegetable farms. There were just over 20,000 people then in Orlando, a quiet, relaxed place where `good-ole-boys' ran the citrus-based economy and the town too.
Then, in the early 1960s something strange and suspicious began to happen. Word spread that a mystery buyer was snatching up scattered parcels of bush and orange grove south and west of the city, 20 acres here, 100 acres there. By the time the buyer's identity leaked out the Disney company owned more than 24,000 acres. Eventually the company's real estate holdings would exceed 30,000 acres of central Florida.
It's difficult to appreciate the size of Disney World even after you've been there. The numbers give you some idea: 43 square miles, twice the size of Manhattan. The company proudly pumps out all kinds of statistics to give visitors and the press the proper sense of awe. What they don't talk about is the sweetheart deal they managed to swing with local and state authorities when they were first floating the scheme back in 1965.
Dazed by the promise of millions of tourists and eager to please the Disney team, the state gave the company all the rights and powers of an independent municipal government. Part of the rationale was that Disney was promising to build two communities of the future, each with as many as 20,000 residents. This was where Walt was planning to erect his Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), a technocratic vision of urban bliss smack in the middle of Florida swamp and pasture. The idea of a theme park was a minor part of the planned development.
Today the Reedy Creek Improvement Area, the legal name of Disney's quasi-government, has the power to build its own roads, operate its own sewage and water-treatment plants, run its own police and fire stations, administer its own planning and zoning and employ its own inspectors.
`It's really a state-within-a-state,' quips Ed Erickson, an investigative journalist with the Orlando Weekly. Erickson is a wraith of a man with thinning red hair and a clipped goatee. We're in the Tiramisu Cafe on Orange Avenue, north of downtown Orlando and a good half-hour drive from WDW.
Erickson is explaining how Disney's municipal status works in its favour. `Because the company can float bonds and tax itself to pay for them, it can then write down some of its capital expenditures as "local taxes",' he says. `After that it's a matter of deducting those taxes from corporate income tax, rather than amortizing them. It's legal and it saves them millions every year.'
Erickson pops another clam into his mouth and sucks at his ice tea before he races on. `Disney gets what it wants in this town,' he snorts. `The people who run Orlando work hand-in-hand with those who run Disney.'
And they protect themselves. In Florida, state law prohibits lawyers from suing people they've represented in the past. Disney hires every attorney it can. Everyone gets touched by Mickey's plump little fingers, which leaves few lawyers who can pursue legal complaints against the company.
Feeling more in touch with the local reality I jump into my rental car and head over to the I 4, the state highway which snakes up from Tampa, skirting the perimeter of the Disney territory before slicing north through the heart of Orlando.
This main access road to WDW carries 160,000 cars a day and was built to accommodate 70,000. I later discover that the infamous 1967 charter exempts the company from `transport impact fees'. That means it contributes nothing to the upkeep of the public road system which brings them their guests. Well, almost nothing. In 1985 county politicians finally got fed up with Disney's corporate-welfare stance, threatening to sue. The company eventually ponied up $14 million (not much more than lunch money for these folks) over five years for improvements to roads leading to their property. In return the county agreed not to challenge the constitutionality of the original Reedy Creek agreement.
Massive road signs soon guide me effortlessly into Disney's Animal Kingdom, the newest of the parks, a 500-acre, $800-million project which opened this past April. Animal Kingdom is Disney's first venture into real life, what one promotional pamphlet calls `the amazing reality of nature'. The main attraction is a recreation of an African savannah with imported wildlife, plants and flowers. There are lions, warthogs, giraffes, kudu, zebra and dozens of other species. Around 1,000 animals in total have been placed into a 110-acre ersatz African habitat. Before you reach the savannah and the Kilimanjaro Safari ride you make your way through the Safari Village, past the Disney Outfitters (`fine apparel, accessories and decorative items') and Island Mercantile (`Animal Kingdom themed merchandise, candy and more') to the Tree of Life, an astonishing 14-storey baobab that could only have sprung from the minds of Disney's `imagineers' - a word supposedly coined by Walt himself to describe the people he enlisted to design his first theme park in California.
The colossal baobab is made of steel and painted concrete and its trunk and roots have been carved into the features of 325 different animals. A long queue of visitors noiselessly shuffles around and around the 170-foot base of the tree slowly making their way to a cinema inside the trunk. Queues, as I soon discover, are part of the fantasy. Outside each ride or film there is a sign posted with the waiting time. It's rearely less than half an hour and more often longer. But people for the most part wait patiently. The `imagineers' are experts in crowd control; the lines twist and turn so often you can see only a short length of the queue; there's always a new vista, music plays from invisible speakers, video screens preview what's inside, posters dot the walls.
