Every few years we spend the vacation week between Christmas and New Year's in Disney World. I love Disney, really, and I love watching my children love Disney, but truthfully after the first visit the magic kind of wears off. At some point you can no longer suspend the conscious reality that those bears in the County Bear Jamboree aren’t really singing and they aren’t really bears. Yet wherever you go these robotic happy creatures are constantly popping out and singing Zippity Do Da (or “Symphony Do Da” as my son Ben confused the words). But then he is the one who calls Disney, "Dizzy World."
Every morning we were the rise and shiners trudging across the well-clipped lawn of the Coronado Springs Hotel to catch an early breakfast in The Pepper Market (a food court made to resemble a Mexican village square) in order to be at the gate when the parks opened. Each time we rounded the corner of a quadrangle of hedges a little bunny rabbit hopped across the sidewalk in front of Ben and dashed back under another row of tightly packed shrubbery. Ben ran after it hoping to catch the furry animal. I thought that was rather cute, but it happened five mornings in a row at exactly the same spot and exactly the same time, and by Wednesday I began to question whether that bunny was real. On Thursday after it tumbled out across our path yet again, I was certain it could not be real. What real bunny keeps a schedule perfectly timed down to the nanosecond? But the rabbit looked so convincing with none of the robotic tail waggings and head bobbings given to all other Disney animals, I was left perplexed. Maybe Disney trained live bunnies to dash across the paths of their guests each morning giving us yet again a sense that we were having a true adventure; when in fact, like everything else at Disney, it was just part of a staged production show.
In The Magic Kingdom you can circumnavigate the whole two and a half acre park by riding the steam train on the Walt Disney World Railroad. This allows you to see Tomorrow Land, Adventure Land, and Frontier Land. Across the lake on Tom Sawyer’s Island, a log cabin is on fire. After our interminable fourth trip around, my son Joey commented, “You’d think Disney would have put that fire out by now.” In everything else, Disney Imagineers are hyper-vigilant in their attention to detail- roping off sections of the street for parades and sweeping up spilled Funnel Cake powder- so the lack of attention to fire safety was indeed perplexing.
The train ride also allows you to pass an undeveloped marshy area from which the park was carved out. Just to keep this side of the park interesting, Disney placed robotic alligators on the side of the marsh to signify some imagined danger to the train occupants. According the Unofficial Guide to Disney World (2005), every now and then a real alligator swims up the canal, reaches the marsh, and takes a bite out of the plastic imposters, thus creating the irony of fake alligators suffering real wounds inflicted by genuine prey. Now that would be worth a few circular rides on the Walt Disney World Railroad.
It isn’t that I mind Disney’s efforts to provide adventure with no risk – their Asian Jungle cruises, African safaris or even the space mission to Mars (though I didn’t appreciate the very real G-forces imposed on my motion sick body), but sometimes I want to see the real bunnies. I want my children to see the rabbits, the armadillos, and the swamps filled with alligators. I want us to experience real life from a safe distance as required of real alligators and real life from an up close and personal view. I want my children to know that real bunnies really do run away and live in hollowed out parts of trees, not in clay fashioned briar patches singing “Zippity Do Da.” But I guess that is the challenge in a quick and easy world to find, as someone once said to child named Virginia, the “most real things in the world.” Happy Holidays!
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