Delusions of Grandeur in Fantasyland - A Compendium of Weird Disney Trivia

• Disney secretly purchased 27,433 acres of swampland (formerly known as "Mosquito County") in Central Florida in the mid-’60s for about $180 an acre. Today, Disney World encompasses 30,500 acres (43 square miles), approximately the size of San Francisco and twice as large as Manhattan.

• Throughout the Disney Theme Parks are signs that designate Kodak "Picture Spots", apparently designed for tourists who are too stupid to recognize scenic views.

• For the New York City premiere of Pinocchio in 1940, Walt Disney hired 12 drunken midgets in Pinocchio outfits to dance about on the theater marquee.

• In its first year, Disney World surpassed the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (7 million visitors), Gettysburg (5.2 million visitors) and Yellowstone (2.4 million visitors) as a tourist destination. Approximately 46 million tourists visit the park annually.

• Walt Disney required all of his staff members to punch in and out on time clocks even if they were just going to get a drink at the water cooler or take a trip to the shitter.

• Astronauts Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper and Jim Irwin took the first ride during the grand opening of RCA’s "Space Mountain" in January 1975.

• Walt Disney relied mostly on the music of dead composers to score Fantasia so he wouldn’t have to shell out any royalties.

• EPCOT’s 3-D film Captain E-O was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, directed by George Lucas and starred "the gloved one" himself, Michael Jackson.

• At the end of "Carousel of Progress", tourists find themselves in the uncomfortable position of giving an ovation to a bunch of Audio-Animatronic robots.

• Walt Disney became a domestic spy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation starting in the early 1940s and helped usher in the infamous Hollywood Blacklist.

• Disney’s Touchstone Pictures has produced such cinematic masterpieces as Krippendorf’s Tribe, Ernest Saves Christmas, Cocktail and Three Men and a Baby.

• Walt Disney accepted a special medal from the League of Nations using the voice of Mickey Mouse.

• Disney’s Dolphin resort boasts a restaurant called "Juan & Only’s" and a bar called "Copa Banana."

• The CircleVision 360 film Wonders of China: Land of Beauty, Land of Time, which is narrated by eighth-century Chinese poet Li Bai, does not provide any insights about the massacre in Tiananmen Square or the Tibet situation.

• Exxon’s "Universe of Energy" fails to include any mention of the Valdez oil spill.

• The courtyard at Disney’s All-Star Sports Resort contains two 40-foot-high Coca-Cola cups, one of the most egregious attempts at product placement in the history of advertising.

• Mickey Mouse Club "Mouseketeers" were required to address Disney as "Uncle Walt."

• "Audio-Animatronics" figures of Abraham Lincoln and George Bush both have speaking roles in Disney’s "Hall of Presidents."

• In 1996, the National Labor Committee filed a report that detailed worker abuses in Haitian factories manufacturing Disney apparel. It was reported that Haitian workers took home about 28 cents an hour while Disney CEO Michael Eisner garnered $189 million in salary and bonuses that year.

• EuroDisney has strict rules for its Parisian employees—no facial hair, no long hair for men, no jewelry and no fingernails past the ends of fingers.

• "Anyone caught cursing was fired immediately, even so much as a ‘damn’ or ‘hell,’ no matter who they were or how important they were to the show." —Original Mouseketeer Cubby O’Brien, quoted in Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince

• The late, great jazz singer Peggy Lee had to go to court in order to force Disney to fork over residuals for her voice-overs in the video release of Lady and the Tramp.

• "I don’t want the public to see the real world they live in while they’re in the park...I want them to feel they are in another world." —Walt Disney, commenting on the opening of Disneyland, 1955

• For its Caribbean cruise line, Disney purchased a former drug-runners’ island called Gorda Cay and renamed it "Castaway Cay."

• Rick Moranis starred in Disney’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids;Honey, I Blew Up the Kid; Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves...

• A dozen exotic animals died at or en route to Disney’s newest theme park, the $800 million "Animal Kingdom", including four cheetah cubs, two rhinos, two hippos and four "unidentified creatures."

• "In EPCOT, there will be no slum areas because we won’t let them develop." —Walt Disney

• The immense water tower with mouse ears at Disney-MGM Studios has been nicknamed the "Earffel Tower."

• After Disney management became concerned over the influx of punk rockers in its Pleasure Island nightclub, "The Cage," the bar was transformed overnight into a disco dance floor called "8 Trax" with employees outfitted in bell-bottom pants.

• In 1989, five Disney employees were charged with slaughtering endangered vultures at "Discovery Island."

• Some of the Disney security force dress as tourists and blend in with the crowd, keeping an eye out for shoplifters pilfering precious merchandise.

• Disney costume characters have to endure temperatures of up to 130 degrees in those giant, unwieldy heads.

• Disney designers are called "imagineers."

• The Walt Disney Company forced three daycare centers (Very Important Babies Daycare, Good Godmother Daycare and Temple Messianique) in Hallandale, Florida, to remove five-foot-high murals of Disney cartoon figures from their walls under the threat of legal action.

• Although Disney had a strict rule against drinking on studio property, Walt himself was known to imbibe regularly in his office during the afternoon.

• According to the book, Vinyl Leaves, Michael Jackson has a special suite at one of the Disney hotels "where he keeps his Disney memorabilia."

• In 1988, Disney was fined $150,000 by the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation for hazardous waste leaks.

• Disney’s Hollywood Records division released the Insane Clown Posse’s album The Great Milenko in 1997.

• Tourists strolling through Epcot’s "World Showcase" will not be able to find any representations of Third World countries such as Bangladesh, Paraguay or Nigeria.

• Walt Disney’s original name for Mickey Mouse was "Mortimer Mouse."

• One of the most popular and enjoyable attractions at Disney, "Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride," was replaced with something called "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" in September 1998. A group of disgruntled "Toad" fans developed a Save the Toad web site to no avail.

• Disney’s "Pleasure Island" is a complete rip-off of Church Street Station in downtown Orlando.

• In the months before his death, Walt Disney made a series of films of his ideas for the theme park that were played at monthly staff meetings so he could keep control of the enterprise from beyond the grave.

• More appropriate acronyms for Epcot include "Experimental Polyester Clothes of Tomorrow," "Eisner’s Paycheck Comes on Time" and "Every Pocketbook Comes Out Trashed."

• Disney withdrew plans for a history theme park called "Disney’s America" near Manassas National Battlefield in Northern Virginia only after receiving a mountain of criticism from such esteemed historians as Shelby Foote and C. Vann Woodward.

• "I’ll never forget when we were all fighting for a twenty-five cent raise, it came over the papers that Eisner made a $43 million bonus. And we were fighting for a quarter." —Unidentified Disney employee, quoted in Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World

• Disney World receives an unprecedented degree of autonomy as part of the "Reedy Creek Improvement District," which allows the company to have control over its roads, utilities, licensing and inspections. Disney even has its own nuclear power license.

• "Far from being the world’s favorite uncle, Disney was a vicious anti-Semite and hater of communists, who for twenty-five years was a Hollywood spy for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI."—"The Mouse That Bores," A User’s Guide to the Millennium, J.G. Ballard, 1996.

• Walt Disney once did business with Howard Hughes, who was a Hollywood producer before he retreated into self-imposed exile at the top of the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.

• Disney costume characters who are on the verge of passing out or throwing up in the hot Florida sun have to endure keeping their cartoon heads on under the threat of immediate dismissal.

• "We want you to feel what it was like to be a slave." —Robert Weis, chief imagineer on the abandoned "Disney’s America" theme park

• Cars at Disney’s "Grand Prix Raceway" reach top speeds of seven miles per hour.

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