ORANGE COUNTY FOCUS : PERSPECTIVE : A Shot of Realityland Cracks the Mickey Mystique

Few places conjure up more idyllic images than Disneyland, home of Snow White, Mickey Mouse and clean family fun.

But on the fringes of popular culture, that long-held perception is being challenged. Two recent books and a low-budget motion picture present decidedly darker views of the Magic Kingdom and the 1950s-style motels, diners and neon-framed stores that surround it.

To those authors and filmmakers, the optimism and wholesomeness of the Happiest Place on Earth mask a much more complicated, troubling reality.

The latest work on that theme is “Chez Chance,” the critically acclaimed first novel by San Clemente writer Jay Gummerman. Set along the wide boulevards and aging motels in the shadow of Space Mountain, the book focuses on the lives of a wheelchair-bound drifter and an assortment of unusual characters who live there.

Gummerman is blunt in his description of motel row: “Garish signs were so numerous, no one of them made any sense--they ran together into a huge, illuminated billboard of shamelessly promoted chaos.”

Such depictions would seem to bolster efforts by Anaheim city officials and business leaders to give the aging “Disney Resort” district a $170-million face-lift.

The revitalization plan calls for the removal of many space-age neon signs that were once an Anaheim trademark. In their place, the city envisions outdoor cafes, specialty shops and garden-style traffic medians.

But Gummerman and others question whether the renovation marks progress or simply adds another layer of veneer to Anaheim’s darker side.

“Disneyland might get a buffer, and the low-rent people might be pushed farther out,” Gummerman said in a recent interview. “But the real problems won’t be solved.”

Associating Disneyland with social ills and urban sprawl is a sharp departure from the generally glowing portrayals the park has enjoyed in countless movies, television programs and books over the last 40 years.

The positive image is so pervasive that the Oxford English Dictionary defines Disneyland as “any fantastic or fanciful land or place.”

Even crime fiction of the 1960s and ‘70s treats the Magic Kingdom and vicinity with a degree of reverence. In John Ball’s 1969 mystery “Johnny Get Your Gun,” for example, a young Pasadena boy tries to escape troubles at home by taking a bus to Anaheim for a day of fun at Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium, said Kevin Moore, the city’s central library manager.

While “Johnny Get Your Gun” and other, earlier works highlight the adventure and purity of Disneyland, “Chez Chance” contrasts the park’s popular perception with less pleasant aspects of the human condition.

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The novel’s main character refers to a prostitute he meets in Anaheim as “Snow White” and describes a drug experience as “Fantasyland.” Inside the theme park, the narrator observes that “a Pavlovian smile accompanied every near-life-size replica of a steam locomotive or castle.”

Gummerman said the novel’s local setting gave him an opportunity to contrast his pleasant childhood memories of Disneyland with his perceptions as an adult.

Piercing the Magic Kingdom’s aura is also a theme in “Mouse Tales,” the 1992 unauthorized history of the park that details melees on Main Street, unsafe rides and an incident in which rioting anti-war protesters planted a Viet Cong flag on Tom Sawyer Island.

Author David Koenig researched his book by interviewing more than 250 Disneyland employees. “I knew there were incredible stories just under the surface,” Koenig said in 1992 interview.

The hidden intrigue of Anaheim is taken to its extreme in the 1992 film noir thriller “Desire and Hell at the Sunset Motel,” a tale of murder and adultery at a motel a few miles from Disneyland.

Walt Disney Co. has always prized the park’s squeaky-clean image. The architects who designed it in the 1950s wanted to create an orderly, modern suburban experience that would improve on gritty, old-fashioned, urban theme parks like Coney Island in Brooklyn.

But soon after Disneyland opened, company officials recognized that haphazard commercial development in surrounding neighborhoods posed a threat, according to John M. Finley’s book “Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940.”

To avoid the problem in the future, Disney made sure to build its Florida theme parks on 40 square miles of vacant, company-controlled land, creating a buffer between the attractions and outside developments.

Many businesses in Anaheim’s “Disney Resort” area support the city’s redevelopment plan, saying that the space-age neon look so embraced in the ‘50s is outdated and tacky. To Gummerman and some preservationists, however, pushing aside the outlandish architecture and colorful denizens robs Anaheim of something distinctive.

“What it does is homogenize the area further,” Gummerman said. “That doesn’t seem like a great solution.”

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Defining Disney

Two recent books and a film take a sober view of Disneyland and the motel district that surrounds it, a change from the wholesome image the theme park usually enjoys in the media. But like many familiar institutions, Disneyland and the Disney name have come to embody both negative and positive qualities. Some examples:

* Disneyland: Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as any fantastic or fanciful land or place. Defined by the Random House Dictionary as any large or bustling place known for its colorful attractions.

* Mickey Mouse: Used to describe something trivial, petty, trite or commercially slick.

* Disneyland Dad: Slang term for a divorced father who does not regularly see his children.

* Disneyfication: Describes a transformation into something sanitized, overly commercial or trite.

* Realityland: The aging assortment of 1950s-style motels, restaurants and shops that surround Disneyland.

* Another Disneyland: Catch phrase employed by opponents of large theme parks and entertainment complexes across the nation.

Sources: “Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940” by John M. Findlay, Times reports; Researched by SHELBY GRAD / For The Times