Your Souvenir Guide

'This is our planet/you're one of us.'

I did not know him. One could argue that his own family didn't know him. But there are two ways in which I could begin to understand Michael Jackson, if I were to put my mind to it. Like me, Jackson was raised a Jehovah's Witness, and like me he rejected that faith when he realized that there was a deeper well of art and imagination that the Witnesses wouldn't ever allow him to touch. And like me, he loved Disneyland.

I was there on the day he moved in. Even then, my friends and I had no difficulties in making Michael Jackson the butt of jokes -- crude stories that placed him in sexual congress with everything from Emmanuel Lewis to Bubbles The Chimp. Even then, we knew that Jackson's world had gone sideways, and that there were things about him that we probably didn't want to know. But none of that prevented us from showing up at Disneyland late on the night of September 20, 1986, hitting up the Main Street Candy Palace for a bag of sour balls ("because long lines mean sour balls," said one of my friends), and getting into the ninety-minute queue for Captain EO.

We cracked wise about Michael Jackson as the line rolled up Main Street, past the building that would become Star Tours ("Get ready for the ULTIMATE THRILL EXPERIENCE!") and into the Magic Eye Theater, recently converted from the Space Mountain Stage. We talked shit about Michael Jackson even as we put on our 3-D glasses and the Magic Eye Theater darkened to an enveloping canvas of stars. We snickered nervously as Jackson entered the film and issued an unconvincing ultimatum ("We're goin' in").

And then, suddenly, Michael Jackson was dancing and singing, and every one of us was struck dumb. I was amazed, even giddy, as I watched the consummate performer do what he was put on this planet to do. He jackknifed his body in ways that made it seem like his voice and movements were coming through him, not from him. In a film packed with $16 million worth of special effects, he was the only one that was absolutely convincing. We were scarcely out of the theater for thirty seconds before we decided to get in line again.

In the wake of Michael Jackson's death, I find that I'm several distinct states of mind on the entertainer. There are those who mourn the last mega-star the music industry is likely to produce, and I understand that. There are those who say good riddance to bad rubbish, who say that we shouldn't mourn the loss of a man who mutilated his face out of self-loathing and conducted personal relationships whose intensity became a matter for the courts, and I understand those folks, as well. I sympathize with those who pitied him, those who worshipped him and even those who didn't get a flying fuck about him. Michael Jackson tried to be all things to all people, and his passing is the passing of an idea.

Today, though, I'm thinking of the overgrown kid who was raised in a prohibitive religion, dreamed of flying in a spaceship and battling aliens, and achieved a dream a bunch of us had as children: He wanted to live at Disneyland. For ten years, he did just that. And though I'm just likely to cringe at the thought of what he became as I am to marvel at the thought of what he once was, I'm glad he had me to his housewarming party.

'Disneyland for Haters'

A few weeks back I got a voice message from my father, who to my certain knowledge is the only person on this planet who bothers to check this bl-g from week to week. He commented on the last post -- my hat-tip to Pogo's luminous "Expialodocious" --  with a Wally Boag imitation: "Buenos dias, senor. Your entries are getting chorter and chorter."

And further and further between, yeah, I know. The thing is, the life of a freelance writer is one of constant, er, writing, and I've been focusing my energies on writing assignments that get me paid. Also -- and here I'll appropriate Al Lutz's tired refrain -- I only post entries here when there's something to post. In Lutz's case, that's when he has a tall-enough stack of third-hand information, while I only make posts when I'm feeling it. I started this bl-g because I was missing Disneyland, and I thought that writing about the place would bring me closer to the Park.

I don't imagine I'm your only conduit to the Anaheim?Orlando/Burbank megalopolis, and there are plenty of other excellent Disney theme park bloggers out there to keep you current, from the Disney Blog crew to Those Darn Cats. If you're keen to read about Disneyland on a daily or weekly basis, visit them, along with the many fine sites listed in my sidebar. if you're keen on reading me every single day -- hey, stranger things have happened -- read The Spellout, my Seattle-based guide to keeping yourself entertained for $25 or less.

Having said all that, I didn't start this post to tell you that I'm too busy to write this post. I have been writing about Disneyland, just not here. The latest edition of the Las Vegas Weekly features a travel piece, "Disneyland for Haters," that I wrote in response to the many people I know who refuse to go to Disneyland for reasons either material ("too expensive") or ideological ("I hate the way Disney sanitizes fairy tales"). In the piece I make attempts to refute the more popular arguments against -- the cost issue, the crowd issue, the "I heard Disney's California Adventure sucks" issue -- and to get these Disneyland haters to drop their guard long enough to get a Dole Whip and a ride on "Pirates of the Caribbean." In my experience, that's all you need.

I wish the piece could have been longer. There's a strong chance that this idea -- a Disneyland guide for stuck-up hipster assholes with a core of pure nerd, like myself -- could expand into a full guidebook, if I ever manage to find the time. There's a bunch of stuff, including a novel that's going through first edit, queued up before it. But I wouldn't rule it out. There's a lot of Disneyland haters out there, and I'm never too busy to take one under arm, lead him to Dole Pineapple's fountain of Castalia, and make him drink.

Read "Disneyland for Haters" here.

"Never give. And done. Oh! Never be. This sings songs, us. Sings this."

Last year I posted a link to the work of Pogo (nee Nick Bertke), the Perth, Australia-based electronic music artist who sampled bits of dialogue from "Alice in Wonderland" and refashioned them into downtempo techno jams. He's done it again, this time with "Mary Poppins," and it's one of the most beguiling, hypnotic and frankly gorgeous pieces of techno I've heard. It puts me in mind of The Field, but with more charm and feeling. (That spoonful of sugar really does go a long, long way.) Download "Expialidocious" free here*, and when you're done, check out what he did with "The King and I."

EDITOR'S NOTE, JUNE 30, 2009: As of yesterday, "Expialodocious" is no longer available for download. I might suggest that Disney find a way to partner with him to get this music on iTunes, but I know better than to ask the Mouse to smile upon adaptive use.

Life Imitates Pixar

This photo was taken this morning in my Seattle neighborhood of Ballard. The house is real, and the balloons were added by a local PR firm promoting "Up." Many of them had popped by the time I took this photo, but you get the idea.

The house belonged to a local hero, the late Edith Macefield. The 86-year-old refused to sell her longtime home even as the offer topped $1 million, and stayed put as that grotesque commercial development went up around her.

Edith's life story is here, and is as bittersweet as Edith's life was long. And while I don't want to tell Disney its business, I think Edith's story would make a fantastic movie, too.

"Boys, this is Bob Benchley."

Once again, my good friend E invited me onto the Walt Disney Studios lot to have lunch at the studio commissary. I managed to take a few more shots before that conspicuous-tourist-with-shopping-bags feeling got the better of me. (I also paid a visit to the studio store.) I love both faces of the Disney Studio -- the original buildings and bungalows from Walt's time, which gives the Studios the feel of a homey state college campus, and the huge f---ing buildings from Eisner's time, which gives the Studios the feel of a southwestern gothic cathedral. The full set of images is here.

S. C. Jones draws the line at "Disneyland Week"

Here's a right pretty thing: My friend S.C. Jones, an illustrator with a distinctive line and a mind that more often than not strays into the bizarre, is creating a series of Disneyland illustrations in anticipation of a family trip to Anaheim. He's posting them in his Facebook group, "Sarcasm Nightly," here - a fresh one every day. Be sure to check out his other illustrations, as well - they honor subjects of equal social importance, from pandimensionality to Falco.

It's a small, small world of anecdotes

Here we go again. Bob Welch, a columnist with Eugene, Oregon's Register-Guard, writes:

A friend of mine once experienced the ultimate Disneyland fear: getting stuck for an hour on the Small World ride. The theme song repeated itself so many times that the guy was permanently traumatized regarding international relations.

This is only the most recent appearance of the most persistent of the urban myths associated with Disneyland. The "stuck on It's a Small World" story is the "call is coming from inside the house" of Disneyland horror stories, and it refuses to die. Every time a columnist or brick-wall standup comic needs a shorthand for "I went to Disneyland, but I swear to you I have a penis," this workhorse is put into service.

Frankly, I'm sick of hearing it. If you hate the repetitive song or are squinked out by the singing dolls, fine. And if you've been stuck in the backup of boats near the end of the ride for ten minutes or so, hey, welcome to the club. But enough with this "My friend/cousin/tax attorney was stuck on Small World for an hour" crap. I don't believe it ever happened. Generally speaking, Disney attractions are evacuated in the wake of a shutdown, and cast members mercifully shut off the music while they clear the ride.

I'll tell you what. If you have a video of a Small World breakdown that is longer than a half-hour in length - continuous footage, no edits - I want to see it. I will eat every last one of these words with rooster sauce on 'em if you produce the film. I've searched the living crutons 'n' fondue outta YouTube and have yet to find a "stuck" video longer than three minutes in length.

I would wager that many of you have been stuck on It's a Small World for up to 15 minutes. And I freely admit that those 15 minutes could seem like an hour. But surviving a real-time, one-hour breakdown? I should think that's a story you wouldn't waste it on your friend, the newspaper columnist who's stuck for a lede on his Disneyland story. That's a story for Guinness.

Where's the "Cat from Outer Space" reboot?

 

WALT DISNEY PICTURES

Disney delivered a one-two punch of fan service today. They cast the lead in the 150-million-dollar "Tron" reboot and announced a McG-helmed prequel to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." This is the geek equivalent of the Rapture. As I write these words, Harry Knowles is prostrate on the floor of his office with his venerated articles of Disney memorabilia, and he's speaking in tongues.

I am modestly excited for the "Tron" redux. Roger Ebert once suggested that remakes should be made of recent films that didn't quite meet expectations, and though "Tron" is close to thirty years old, I think it qualifies in that regard. It took years for Hollywood to catch up with "Tron's" breathtaking visual design, and longer still for the film to find an audience halfway conversant in the language of computers - so by that reckoning, "Tron's" time is now.

Director Joseph Kosinski needs only do three things to preserve the goodness of the original "Tron," and to improve upon it. He needs to cast Jeff Bridges, and he has. He needs to make the sequel look as good, if not better, than the original movie - and judging from the product reel on his website and the bootlegged trailer from last year's ComicCon, he's going to nail it. And most important, he needs an ear for dialogue, which the original film doesn't have.

It's this last element that has me concerned. If the "Narnia" films taught us anything, it's that Disney has no problem launching a submarine with screen doors.

That awkward segue brings us to "Captain Nemo." I've often wondered what a "20,000 Leagues" reboot would look like, but now that a prequel is actually in production I have to admit to a sinking feeling. Nemo's pre-story is a magnificent tragedy, which James Mason reveals in pieces over the course of the original film.

I am not what is called a civilized man, Professor. I have done with society for reasons that seem good to me.

What you fail to understand is the power of hate. It can fill the heart as surely as love can.

You call that murder? Well, I see murder, too. Not on those drowned faces out there, but on the faces of dead thousands! They are the assassins, the dealers in death. I am the avenger!

Here's a question: Do we really need to see Nemo's heart being broken in any detail? One of Nemo's defining qualities is his mystery - while he had no problem with destroying the warships that represented the death of his family and his original self, he didn't feel the need to sign his work, preferring to allow civilization to believe the destruction to be the work of some occult hand. Delving too deeply into that mystery in a prequel may not change the course of "20,000 Leagues," but it will surely change our approach to it - perhaps robbing the 1954 film of the very thing that gives it a soul.

And by the way: McG, if you're gonna make this thing, please have the decency to bill yourself as Joseph McGinty Nichol. McG isn't an auteur's name; it's a nom de cheeseburger.

My six Disneyland-related resolutions for 2009

1. I will redesign and re-launch Your Souvenir Guide. All I have to do is procure a TypePad Pro account, to design a nameplate evocative of the typeface used in Disneyland's mid-1970s guidebooks, and to finally put the swell custom domain I purchased early last year domain to use. And oh yeah, I should put a forwarding message on the old Blogger account, encouraging readers to change their syndication feed. I'll get right on that. 2. I will renew my annual passport. Done. Did it in October, when I suspected I might be laid off from my journalism gig. (I was, three weeks later.) Now I only need find a way to get to Anaheim on the cheap to take advantage of that nearly-free admission. I reckon all I need to do is raise some freelance writing jobs, in the midst of the worst economic climate we journalists have known in a generation. Um, yeah. I'll get right on that. 3. I will finish "Project X." This bl-g is actually the by-product of a project I've been laboring on for several years. Both the project, and this bl-g, have languished for long enough. It's time to make the churros, baby. 4. I will run in the Disneyland half-marathon. Late last year, when my abdominals made a surprise first-time appearance from underneath years of accumulated Dole Whip-gut, I began to wonder, hey, why can't I be one of those forty-something guys who runs a marathon? I mean, we see them all the time in prescription drug ads, and they seem happier and healthier than we did in our twenties. Couldn't I be one of those guys, radiantly glowing as he runs through a frenetically-waving crowd of underpaid kids in Disney character suits? Could happen. I'm going to run a half-marathon in Seattle this June. If I finish with a good time, it's on to Anaheim in September. 5. I will visit Walt Disney World in December, the financial climate permitting. I told my family and two darn cats that I'd be there, even if Disney did take away my beloved Adventurer's Club. I'll find other ways to hoopla. Number 6. is kind of obvious: I'll post to Your Souvenir Guide more frequently. Hey, I gotta find ways to keep these post-layoff idle hours usefully occupied. At least one article per week. I'll get right on that.

Space Mountain 1977, remembered

We'll never have another 1977. It was the year of the New York Blackout; the year that punk and disco exploded in our big, fat, stupid faces; and it was the year that George Lucas' "Star Wars" and Disneyland's Space Mountain opened within two scant days of each other. Holy shit. "Star Wars" opened on Wednesday, May 25, and Space Mountain on Friday, May 27.

If there's anyone reading under this bl-g who's under the age of 30, I want you to fully understand and appreciate what life was like in those medieval times. I won't say life was better -- most popular music was every bit as trite as the new stuff, and we wore some ugly earth-toned clothes -- but listen: There was no Twitter, there was no Ain't It Cool News. There were no spoilers, so we had no idea what a Chewbacca was, or what superspace penetration felt like.

Now, imagine what it was like to be ten years old in that world. That was me. I rode Space Mountain shortly after it opened -- one, maybe two weeks -- and saw "Star Wars" not long afterward at the Big Newport. Since then, I've seen "Star Wars" and its lesser derivatives so many times that I scarcely recall the emotions that accompanied my first viewing. By comparison, every time I go on Space Mountain, I feel it.

From the first time I laid eyes upon it, I was awestruck by the "Mountain" itself. The John Hench-designed structure, like Oscar Niemayer's similarly-shaped Brasilia Cathedral, is the Taj Mahal of Googie architecture. In his 2003 book "Designing Disney," Hench says that the attraction's conical shape and exterior beams were dictates of the track layout.

Space Mountain begged to be cone-shaped; it wanted to echo the expanding spiral of the ride inside ... In the construction of the building, the engineers selected precast concrete and steel T beams for the main roof structure. They wanted the beams facing inside the building, but I wanted them facing outside, to provide a smooth surface on the interior on which we could project images.

The exterior of Space Mountain looks much the same today as it did in 1977, with a few unfortunate cosmetic changes. The second-story queue used to overlook an open-air theatre, where Da Doo Ron Ron and Kids of the Kingdom played neutered uptempo rock for same-sex couples to dance to. It was roofed over and enclosed in 1984 to accommodate "Captain EO." I don't miss particularly the theater itself, but in enclosing a space that was not designed to be enclosed, some terrific views were cut off and the queue level was awkwardly transformed from a balcony to a roof. They've never quite fixed it.

Anyway, as the queue rounded the balcony, I peered down into the theater and into the two-story video arcade (would it kill them to reopen the Starcade's second level again?), and before I knew it I was inside Space Mountain for the first time. I can clearly remember its silver, diamond-shaped hallways, antiseptic blue rubber flooring, and the constant, nerve-wracking audio drone that still plays inside the Mountain today. ("You are go for Earthside launch.")

I remember peering into the "sneak preview" windows -- walled over in the recent refurbishment -- and watching the green-glowing "rockets" whip past. I started to get nervous. By the time the queue reached the expansive "Space Port," I was ready to launch into orbit without help. The tight spaces, low lighting and that everlasting ambient wash of voices and synthesized bleeps do an outstanding job of building tension. (You're barely aware of the queue today; thanks to FastPass, they run you through it at a sprint.)

At the head of the line I asked for, and got, a front row seat. I raised my hands aloft through the first lift hill (red arrows pointing the way upward), the "meteor tunnel" (also changed in the last refurb) and an early iteration of the second lift hill (very low-tech, with blue-tinted mirrors creating a "to-infinity" effect. Then the coaster reached the top of the Hench's cone, and my hands slammed down on the handrail and stayed there.

If you've never been on Space Mountain and aren't sure you're brave enough to try it, here's a test which you can do in your own home. Simply spin in place for a minute or so, then shut your eyes and fall to the floor. (Or do as I do: Drink an excess of gin shortly before bedtime.) This will result in a disorientation that feels something like floating, ass-over-teakettle, in a weightless void. Disney's Imagineers simply figured out a way to replicate that sensation for 2,100 riders per hour.

The new Space Mountain, gutted and reconstructed in 2004, is so much like the old that there's little point in comparing the two. The track was exactly rebuilt and the effects updated. The "com chat" is the same, and the space port looks more beautiful than it ever did.

In the final analysis, though, it affords the exact same experience I had three decades ago. I still feel the same fear, joy and wonder as I once did. For an attraction that predates some 90 percent of the parkgoers who queue up to ride it again and again, that's nothing short of remarkable.

There is more I could tell you about Space Mountain 1977, but it wouldn't mean all that much to you. I could tell you that the on-ride soundtrack -- both the current Michael Giacchino composition and the Dick Dale vamp that preceded it -- was not part of the standard equipment the ride came with; it was added in 1997. I could tell you about the all-too-brief period when the ride's exit was themed to "The Black Hole." I could tell you about how it felt to exit the building without being forced through a souvenir shop.

But none of that is what makes Space Mountain great. Disneyland's Space Mountain is "Star Wars" and punk rock and "Saturday Night Fever" and the New York Blackout, all made one single, glorious whole. It's all about believing, just for a moment, that you are riding the engine at the center of the universe. At that moment, you are ten years old, like me.