America as Disney's Land: The Fantasy vs. the Reality : Culture: A nation mirrored by the company's creations re-examines the image reflected in its corporate agenda.

By FAYE FIORE

Sept. 25, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

The upstairs bedroom that belongs to 8-year-old Kelly Urso is a veritable shrine to “101 Dalmatians.” She has the bedspread, the pajamas, the notebook, the lunch box. So in love is she with the Walt Disney Co.’s animated spotted dog that her dad plunked down $150 for a real one.

But downstairs, in the basement that belongs to Kelly’s 39-year-old father, is a bunker recently converted to run the Walt Disney Co. out of the state of Virginia. Tony Urso is installing a second phone line, buying a second computer in his escalating war to stop Disney from building its fifth theme park next to his hometown of Haymarket. He traded the beloved Washington Redskins vanity plates on his blue Bronco for a set that says NO DZNEY. Kelly and her sister had to see “The Lion King” with their grandparents.

The split loyalties that manage to peacefully coexist in the Urso household are not unlike the ones that have lately left the country confused and divided over Disney. As this entertainment giant sets out to define America in a 3,000-acre theme park, so does the nation struggle to define a company with a cultural impact so profound that Mickey Mouse is a symbol for America abroad.

Like it or not, the Walt Disney Co. has helped rear two generations of Americans in the past 50 years, influencing everything from our moral code to the way we stand in line at the bank.

But do we love ‘em or do we hate ‘em? Is Disney the genius creator of “Beauty and the Beast” or a big-footed, money-grubbing developer? We subscribe to the Disney Channel as one of the few things on television a parent can trust, only to blast the company for a worldview so sugarcoated it makes one’s teeth ache. We affectionately dub its creator “Uncle Walt,” only to read in a controversial biography that he was really a booze-addled anti-Semite in cahoots with the FBI.

“It drives you nuts,” said Karal Ann Marling, professor of American studies and art history at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches an annual course on Disney. “On the one hand, this company is part of the fiber of who we are. On the other hand, it’s a company, and we don’t like them when they act like one.”

Now Disney developers want to put Disney’s America--a $650-million tribute to the nation’s history--smack in the cradle of democracy, and our ambivalence is bubbling up all over. Even as some of the country’s most revered historians warn that Disney will “vulgarize history,” Northern Virginia businesses are hanging out banners proclaiming “We Love Mickey.” When it comes to Disney, America can’t seem to make up its mind.

It was 1955 and the Walt Disney Co. was on the verge of setting off a cultural revolution. “Davy Crockett,” the frontier television show starring Fess Parker, was a baby-boomer smash, and Disney decided it might be profitable to slap the Crockett image on lunch pails, pencil boxes and various other kid equipment.

“They ran out of fur for coonskin caps. No craze had ever made so much money to that point in time, something like $300 million,” said Margaret King, a cultural historian retained by the Walt Disney Co. to assess the company’s cultural impact. “It was the first time marketers realized that children could influence the way their parents spend money.”

That was neither the first nor the last time that Disney would fundamentally alter what it meant to be a child growing up in America. It is impossible to measure an average child’s exposure to Disney in a day. From home videos to classroom instructional films to shopping mall outlets, the corporate presence is overwhelming and pervasive: Disney lays claim to the No. 1 box office hit of the summer (“The Lion King”); the No. 1 Broadway show (“Beauty and the Beast”); the No. 1 network TV series (“Home Improvement”); the No. 1 music album (“Lion King” soundtrack).

Disney has influenced American culture in more ways than most of us realize--or care to acknowledge. If the space program gave us Teflon, the Walt Disney Co. gave us the twisting “switch-back” lines we stand in at the bank and springy asphalt that keeps the feet from tiring. The monorail at the Houston airport is modeled after the one at Disneyland. The Victorian architecture of the redeveloped downtown in Medina, Ohio, is said to have been inspired by Disneyland’s Main Street USA.

“Almost anybody who knows about urban development, restoration and design has been to Disneyland or Disney World,” said Richard Francaviglia, director of the Center for Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, who has written extensively about the Disney influence on American towns.

Years of Disney moralizing has to some degree shaped American minds. Some experts suggest that it was the Disney nature films of the 1950s that gave rise to the ecology movement a decade later; that it was the anti-war message in Disney movies (one character in the middle of an Alamo battle notes that war is “the most untheatrical method of suicide”) that planted the seeds for demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

“Those (Disney) experiences shaped those of us who were at Woodstock,” Marling said. “I can’t imagine the Vietnam War protests in some ways without all of us having sat around watching ‘The Walt Disney Show.’ ”

With this resume of goodness and success, Disney officials expected to be roundly cheered when they announced they would pay homage to America with “virtual reality” re-enactments of Civil War combat and other epic events, not to mention a 27-hole golf course, 2,300 homes, 1.9 million square feet of shops and businesses--all of which would entice 6.3 million tourists to pour an estimated $48 million a year into the Virginia state treasury.

Disney officials expected resistance from no-growth residents opposed to Bermuda-shorted and fanny-packed hordes invading their pretty countryside. They were not surprised when amateur astronomers grumbled that Disney lights would mess up their view of the skies. But never did they anticipate that what began as a local land-use dispute would explode into a national “referendum on Disney,” as CEO Michael Eisner put it. The company was stunned.

“We continue to be dumbstruck that the critical pencils have been so sharpened before we’ve done anything. This is very early in the design process,” said Mark Pacala, general manager of Disney’s America. “We are not just Mickey Mouse animators. We are a much richer, more contextual company than that.”

Seldom have the plans of a single company attracted such international scrutiny. The mayor of Haymarket, population 483, found himself being interviewed by the BBC. Countless editorials and opinion pieces have warned that Disney will “plasticize . . . sentimentalize . . . sanitize” American history, some authored by historians who concede they have never once set foot in a Disney park.

The great debate went all the way to Congress, where this summer a Senate panel heard testimony on the virtues and vices of Disney. Is Disney worthy of countryside so pristine George Washington might still recognize it? Will Disney’s synthetic version of history just four miles from the sacred site of two Civil War battles ruin the real thing? Can Disney be trusted to honestly interpret America’s sometimes shameful past?

“EEEK A Mouse! Step on It!” a Washington Post headline shrieked as some of the nation’s most revered historians--David McCullough and Shelby Foote--allied with the landed gentry who live out there--Robert Duvall, Willard Scott--to turn back Disney.

The frenzy was fueled when a Disney executive predicted a park exhibit that would “make you feel what it was like to be a slave.” Eisner later recanted the notion, but not before critics went wild over the idea of human bondage as seen through the eyes of Mickey.

“I would have no objection to kids learning what a frontier village looked like. I might want to go myself,” said William Styron, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his novel about slavery, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” “But trying to deal with the fundamental horrors of American history--with 250 years of slavery--in an amusement park? It’s ludicrous. They can’t do it. No one can.”

Some academics point to the company’s film legacy as evidence that Disney is capable of treating history in ways that are “not all sweetness and light.” In “Tonka,” a 1958 account of Custer’s last stand, at the Little Bighorn, the Sioux are the good guys and Custer is an “untrustworthy, racist, lunatic, glory hunter.” In “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” a Cold War-era film in which an ultimate-weapon submarine ultimately destroys itself and everyone else--is regarded by many critics as an early argument against the nuclear arms race. Even Disney’s portrayal of women has become more socially correct, experts argue, with a love-struck Snow White yielding to an ambitious, aspiring archeologist named Ariel in “The Little Mermaid.”

But even Disney’s defenders are quick to note that when one mentions the Walt Disney Co., “Tonka”--later retitled “A Horse Named Comanche”--is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind. Mickey Mouse’s public image may be well intact, but the corporation is at a crossroads, experts say, and the battle in northern Virginia is proof of it.

“Disney is our national storyteller, the primary cultural ‘imprinter’ of what it means for children to be American,” said Jamie O’Boyle, a Philadelphia-based cultural analyst who has spent years studying Disney. “But if they come in and act like a hard-boiled, profit-minded, bottom-line company, we are going to treat them accordingly.”

Jack Kapp, the mayor of Haymarket, answers the door in his stocking feet. He runs a busy wallpaper business, but always finds time to talk Disney, the biggest thing to happen in Haymarket, he says, since Union troops sacked it in the Civil War. If this town didn’t already exist, Disney might have invented it. Haymarket has two dentists, one doctor, one bank, two beauty shops, two full-time police officers and 95 houses.

It looks for all the world like Mayberry, but it isn’t. The town cannot afford public water; the residents get theirs from eight wells, four of which were declared contaminated when they were tested three summers ago. People don’t know each other all that well anymore, so much of their time is spent on the road commuting to jobs somewhere bigger. The recession hit Haymarket hard; Gossam’s Hardware Store, which grossed $1 million in 1989, brought in just $383,000 last year.

“It’s a wonder I’m sane. This place is a desert,” hardware store owner Tim Everett grumbles in his store one afternoon beneath a mounted deer’s head, a hunting cap stuck irreverently on its antlers. “Every time a business leaves, nothing comes in to replace it.”

If Disney builds its park across the road, Haymarket gets water. The beleaguered roads that lead to and through it get rebuilt. There will be a summer job for Mayor Kapp’s teen-age granddaughter and a tax windfall for Prince William County, where schools are so crowded some children are learning in trailers.

This is the face Disney loves to show, the economic messiah it longs to be. Already the company is working hard at being a good neighbor, setting up its neat headquarters in what used to be the telephone company and donating $1,000 to the LaFayette Day celebration. Some people in Haymarket are virtually blushing from all the attention. “Zippity Doo Dah!” a local paper squealed.

Although there are still some 70 permits to secure, the project last week won the blessings of the Prince William County Planning Commission and is almost certain to get county supervisors’ approval in October.

But as ever, there is a flip side to this success-in-the-making story, one that spotlights Disney’s least flattering face--corporate, the side that made $8.5 billion in revenue last year, the side that once paid its CEO $203 million, the side, critics say, that has behaved more like a ruthless company than the American institution it is supposed to be.

Disney officials bought the options on the Virginia land in secret, retained one of state’s most influential law firms and hired powerful lobbyists, one of them former Jimmy Carter press secretary Jody Powell, to steer their project through the state Legislature. They waited until the last possible day to ask the Legislature for an unprecedented $163 million in road improvement bonds, then threatened to walk away unless they got what they wanted. They got it. Not since the National Rifle Assn. has an organization lobbied the state capital as hard as Disney has, angry critics charge.

If an oil company practiced such strategy, it might be called savvy. But Disney, which has moralized for half a century about virtue and fair play, is held by the public to a different standard. Glimpsing Disney in a real estate deal is a little like watching Mother Teresa play the slots. There’s nothing illegal about it, it just doesn’t seem right.

“If Disney were a country, it would be Israel,” cultural historian King said. “Their reputation is almost a burden. There are things they cannot do with impunity that other companies can.”

Equally infuriating to opponents, however, is a sort of corporate arrogance that has haunted Disney from Long Beach to France. “We have the right to build,” Eisner and other executives insist again and again of the Virginia plan. They dismiss as “cheap-shotness” any criticism of the park’s rides and attractions, of what Disney might do with the subject of slavery, “until the day the gates open in 1998.”

It is difficult to envision such words coming from the lips of Walt Disney, experts say, a man who used television to inform the nation of Disneyland’s long construction. By the end, the citizens felt like stockholders, Disneyland was theirs, they had seen its birth.

Corporate Disney today might do well to spend a little more time thinking the way Walt did, several experts agreed.

“I see Disney defending the (Virginia) park, they are defensive and not very forthcoming, which is really silly,” Marling said. “I don’t think Walt would have asked the people to just trust him. Walt would have explained. They are part of the fabric of our lives. It’s time they acted that way.”

Disney officials vigorously disagree. The corporation is “revered, loved and admired throughout the entire world,” according to Pacala. They say Disney has behaved admirably in Virginia, pointing to several concessions already made to appease a worried community by expanding wooded areas, banning diesel engines at the park, even floating balloons to make sure that the tallest of the planned structures could not be seen from the tranquil countryside.

But winning the public seems harder lately. Disney’s proposed park near the Queen Mary in Long Beach was scrapped in recent years after environmentalists and residents revolted. A small but vocal group of Anaheim homeowners has been protesting the noise and traffic that would result from a proposed $3-billion Disneyland Resort project. Protesters in turtle suits picketed the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting in Florida last year in opposition to further development in the habitat of the endangered gopher tortoise around Disney World.

This is not the first time that Disney has come under public fire in its long history. Before World War II, British censors banned “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as too violent and forbade anyone under 17 from seeing it. (The ban was lifted after a public outcry.) Film critics initially decided the classic “Fantasia” was a big bomb. Hippies stormed Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer’s Island in 1970 in an anti-Establishment protest, stripped naked and smoked pot, according to O’Boyle.

“They recognized Disneyland, correctly, as a metaphor for America,” O’Boyle said, suggesting that one reason we can’t make up our minds about Disney is because Disney is us.

It’s like spotting the wires in a magic act. When we look too closely, we don’t like what we see--a Fortune 500 company lurking behind a lovable cartoon mouse.

“Disney is so closely tied in with a national psyche of who we are, the things we like about ourselves, that we don’t like the idea there’s a corporation behind it,” O’Boyle said. “As much as anything, this is about us.”

It Started with a Mouse

Since Mickey Mouse made his debut as “Steamboat Willie” in a 1928 cartoon, the Walt Disney Co.’s creations have become an integral part of American and world culture. Theme parks, a chain of specialty stores, movie studios and a cable television channel all have spun off from the big-eared icon with red knee britches and white gloves. Some of the points made by Disney boosters and critics:

Movies and Television

Pros:

* Nature movies encourage an interest in the environment.

* Television programs and films celebrate fairness, self-reliance and sense of community.

* Nature films demystify the wilderness by personalizing animals.

* Historical programs foster “good guys” and heroic traits.

Cons:

* Movies humanize animals, giving a distorted view.

* Simple stories simply told lack depth and diversity.

* “Evil element” of a story is there only so the good side can eventually triumph.

* Historical accounts are sanitized, sometimes to extremes.

Theme Parks