Discovering Millions of Ways to Hype 50th

The pressure was on, and Disneyland publicist Joe Aguirre felt it. Instead of dropping off to sleep at night, he’d noodle. While driving home, large figures involving hot dogs and popcorn flashed through his head, and he found himself thinking of nutty ways to make them interesting. Sure, Disneyland has served up 56,472,815 hot dogs and corndogs since 1955, but, please, how about some perspective?

All in a day’s work for Aguirre, asked by his bosses to create some interest from Disneyland trivia as part of the park’s planned 50th anniversary celebration this summer. Aguirre’s task: Take raw numbers and add some sizzle.

“We wanted it to be different, to be bigger and to use more interesting figures than have been in there in past years,” Aguirre says as we talk outside company offices in Anaheim. “It would have been fairly simple to list the attractions and the numbers, but then you see all these zeroes with a 2 and a 3 ahead of them, and how do you convey how huge that is in significance?”

Take the Matterhorn. “Our Matterhorn is 147 feet tall,” Aguirre says, walking me through his thought process. How do I tell the story of how many trips our bobsleds have taken? How tall is the real Matterhorn, and how do you convert that to miles?”

And that led Aguirre to compute that the 222.6 million Matterhorn riders required the sleds to traverse 12.5 million miles of track -- enough to have climbed and descended the real Matterhorn more than 2.2 million times.

Sensing Aguirre’s pride of authorship, I ask for more. Space Mountain and It’s a Small World were obvious, he says. If you added it all up from the two attractions, respectively, how many round trips to the moon would riders have taken (more than 18) and how many circumnavigations of the earth (more than 191)?

Then there was the hot dogs-corn dog issue. What is a crazy way to present that? Aguirre wondered. Someone in a brainstorming session tossed out Frankfurt, Germany.

Intrigued, Aguirre crunched some numbers. Until then, no one knew that Disneyland has sold enough hot dogs and corndogs that, if stretched end to end, would extend from Disneyland to Frankfurt and on to Moscow.

Not that there weren’t disappointments. One involved the Dumbo ride. “One of the early ideas was that because it’s going in circles, how about telling how many millions of miles it’s gone,” Aguirre says. “I talked to our industrial engineering people, but there was no easy way to figure that. We settled on the number of people [61.1 million] who had ridden it.”

He asked the food-service people to consider all the popcorn sold (43,650,078 boxes) as a liquid with a measurable volume. “What large object would you put that in?” Aguirre wondered. The Rose Bowl? Alas, he couldn’t find a number for the volume of the giant stadium.

You might think that someone who devoted three weeks of his life to this stuff would be somewhat loony. Before meeting him, I pictured Aguirre as perhaps a distant cousin of Gyro Gearloose or Prof. Ludwig von Drake.

No such luck. He’s a normal-looking 50-year-old guy who got his start 30 years ago as a ride operator at the park while attending Cal State Fullerton. He just doesn’t seem prone to the wacky remark.

He had three weeks to finish the project and confesses to some wariness before turning it in. “I wasn’t sure how they’d react. I was thinking, ‘Boy, I hope I haven’t gotten a little too crazy in the ways I presented some of these.’ ”

The higher-ups liked it, and that probably means it’ll become part of Disneyland lore, much like the “Most Popular Disneyland Souvenir of the Past 50 Years” that Aguirre researched. That, of course, are the Mousketeer ears, with 78,617,280 sold.

Naturally, Aguirre didn’t stop there. That’s enough ears, he computed, to accommodate every American today under the age of 18.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be

reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.