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In celebrating the centennial of the Disney Studios, it is also important to note cultural challenges to Disney’s representation and how the studio/corporation responds. This includes looking beyond their cartoons and films, but also into their theme park offerings, which are arguably extensions of Disney’s animation innovations. To do this, we drill into three popular Disneyland theme park attractions that are simultaneously cinematic and controversial, placing Disney in a delicate balance between the need for renewal and their fan’s reactions to change in any form. Indeed, sometimes it seems that Disney is not responsive enough or that they are too reactive. Our contention is that, in recognition of Disney as a cultural influencer, their attempts to improve representation in the theme parks will help lead to a better small world.

Ten-Bel was built in the Canary Islands in the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, it was one of the largest holiday resorts in Spain and a pioneering site of touristic development in the south of Tenerife. More than five thousand tourist beds were integrated into a modern architecture with large green areas, where the guests were offered a wide range of leisure activities and international shows. In the 1980s, however, the lack of investment led to a loss of prestige, and it became increasingly difficult for Ten-Bel to compete with the growing number of new offers in the nearby tourist areas. At the beginning of the new millennium, after several unsuccessful attempts to renovate the complex and make it more profitable, the resort was split up and sold off in parts. This confusing division occurred without first finding a solution for the municipal utilities, which were centralized for each tourist complex and did not offer an individual option for the new owners. In addition, there was no agreement on the maintenance of the common areas and parks. These were left in a state of dilapidation. Ten-Bel is an exceptional case, not only because of its outstanding architecture, commercial success or innovative management, but also because it illustrates the problems that arise when a tourist complex is converted to residential use. It is a paradigmatic example to examine the beginnings of touristification in Spain and the contradictions of this new utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Cultural Cold War, and specifically during the Armed Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mark Twain became an object of propaganda between the United States and USSR. The U.S. state–private network of intelligence agencies, corporations, media conglomerates, lobbies, and other institutions set about a process of indoctrination that converted Twain into an iconography serving national interests. While the Twain Doctrine has long since ceased to dominate Twain Studies scholarship, it still operates upon the general public. This essay surveys its precepts and gives several examples of its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a long time, Shanghai's urban tourism has presented a single-core agglomeration pattern with the Bund area as the core, with the phenomenon of overcrowding in the core area during holidays. The opening of Disneyland in 2016 has had an important impact on the development of Shanghai's urban tourism, including the spatial network of tourism flows. This study selects the travel notes of domestic tourists to Shanghai from Ctrip.com and sorts out a total of 1419 pieces of valid spatial information before and after the opening of Disneyland. With the help of social network analysis, it analyses the influence of Disneyland on the spatial network of domestic tourism flows in Shanghai. The results show that Disneyland has become a new spatial growth pole of Shanghai urban tourism, with an obvious network nuclear Overhauser effect, which is conducive to alleviating congestion in the Bund area, but the correlation effect of Disneyland on other tourism nodes is not obvious. The connection between high-grade tourism nodes is further enhanced, and some low-grade tourism nodes are more marginalized, showing the Matthew effect of nodes and the combined effects of nodes. Accordingly, this paper puts forward three suggestions. First, to strengthen the optimal design of tourism routes and enhance the connection between Disneyland and other tourism nodes; second, to upgrade low-grade tourism nodes, enhance recognition and strengthen integration with core tourism nodes; and, third, to strengthen top-level planning, provide comprehensive support for Disneyland, enhance its industrial linkage effect and spatial network effect, and promote the sustainable development of Shanghai's urban tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014–15 Disneyland measles outbreak that began at the California theme park in December 2014 sparked an international conversation regarding measles, vaccine hesitancy, and vaccine policies. The outbreak capped a year with the highest number of measles cases reported in two decades and came amidst increasing trends in nonmedical vaccine exemptions in California and elsewhere. Because of its sensational story line and spread among unvaccinated populations, the outbreak received a high level of media coverage that focused on vaccine hesitancy as a primary driver of the outbreak. This media coverage and the ostensible public support for vaccines that followed led some to hypothesize that the outbreak might have a “Disneyland effect,” or a positive influence on the uptake of pediatric measles vaccine. This article reviews the facts of the outbreak and its context, and explores the evidence for the Disneyland outbreak causing an influence on U.S. pediatric vaccine-related beliefs and behaviors.

Disneyland is one of the most Instagrammed locations and its mediation reveals cultural changes related to place and identity. Using a grounded approach to analyze the posts of influential Instagram users who tag their posts at Disneyland, this study shows how place is mediated through new logics developed on social media. Instagram users favor fantasy elements of Disneyland, such as escapism and childhood nostalgia, over other historical elements of the parks and its midcentury U.S. American values. Disney has responded by synergistically integrating new media logics, as seen in the creation of vibrantly colored, limited-run food and merchandise. The intersection between Disneyland and Instagram shows how place is being transformed for the lenses of consumers seeking experiences, food, and merchandise in late capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the closing of the Walt Disney theme parks at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fans of Disneyland and Walt Disney World produced videos re-creating their favorite rides and attractions for a viral social media trend dubbed #homemadeDisney. The typically short (usually 30–90 seconds) videos from #homemadeDisney turned ‘guests’ into ‘cast members’ (staff) and smartphone owners into living room ‘imagineering’ ride designers. Participants engaged in a form of shared make-believe (Walton 1990) by assembling household objects as props, improvising ride elements, and performing as theme parkgoers for one another. The extensive collection of social media videos analyzed for this article reveals how fans interpreted attractions through a shared mimetic grammar (Milner 2016), the ride aesthetic (Telotte 2008), and the playful nature of the theme park experience.

Thematic design is a praxis employing architecture yet distinctly independent from it; a postmodern, interdisciplinary language for the planning and execution of built environment projects. This lexicon has its roots in film grammar, first expressed with the opening of Disneyland Park in 1955. One key mechanic of these environments is the role played by multiplane camera technology in articulating immersion. As developed by the Disney organization for animation, this complex apparatus allowed numerous planes of artwork to be photographed simultaneously, addressing problems of parallax and depth. A half century before computer-generated imagery (CGI) and virtual reality (VR) made their debuts, the multiplane provided a technological simulation of a scripted virtual world. This article briefly outlines how animators, filmmakers, and art directors leveraged the effects of this early "virtual reality" device-characters inhabiting environments and moving through disparate planes-and fused these ideas into the built environment with the design of Disneyland Park. Through both exterior schema and the interior scenography of dark ride attractions, multiplane immersion forms the conceptual and structural antecedent to the first-person point of view virtual environments as now visualized by contemporary game engine software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current coalescence of virtual reality, architecture, and experiential design is a vibrant space of theory and practice. As new technologies become even more efficient and affordable in the coming years, this intertextuality will only increase in focus. Both broader lay user adoption and transformations in architectural practice suggest a near-future in which our environments for living, work, and play are increasingly conceived virtually, constructed virtually, and also augmented virtually. This world has been a long time coming. There is a lineage of developments both technological and cultural that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries which have steadily moved us away from an architectonic, programmatic spatial regime and towards the holistic construct of game engine software and the immersive nature of virtual interactions. We characterize this as an evolution of the human relationship to the image, which was changed irrevocably with the introduction of the cinema. This article briefly describes a shared post-cinema humanity: the intertwined history of animation, motion pictures, themed spaces, video games, and now the game engine and virtual reality (VR). We posit that beginning in the 1920s, four spatial regimes beyond traditional architecture have evolved: the filmic, thematic, electronic, and holistic. It is our desire that this preliminary framework will provoke new dialog around the intermingling of built and virtual spaces in the context of architectural displacement and cinematic subsumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

He was fed up with the little brat and just wanted to be by himself for a while. He wanted to ask his wife if she minded if he took [...]