Dizzy Disney
Today Kim takes daughter Carolyn, her husband John, granddaughters Charlotte and Evelyn, as well as sister-in-law Lisa to Disneyland. Carolyn and her family will stay for three days while Kim and Lisa return after one day of Disney overdose. Carolyn and her family are addicted to Disney as much as anyone can be. She and John got engaged at Disney World and they have each spent milestone birthdays there (she at 30 and he at 40). Carolyn even traded in a second week of honeymoon in Tahiti (compliments of dear old Dad) to spend that week in Disneyland. Now that’s Disney commitment. Kim can spend one day or so a year at Disney, which is about one more than I can handle. Lisa just needs a break. She is caregiver to my seriously ailing brother-in-law and being around some people all having fun should be good for her.
Last year Kim and I went to Florida for a week and while Kim spent about four days at Disney World, I was able to do one and then spent the next three visiting friends around the state. The only think I find harder to understand than people who can spend so much time in the land of Mickey Mouse are people who can stand to live in the state of Florida. I have at least three things against the state, keeping in mind that it would probably be more if I hadn’t been born in the state (Fort Lauderdale to be precise). I don’t like the tropics, so that’s strike one. I don’t like going where elephants go to die and that’s strike two. And last, but not least, I don’t like the political bent the state has taken and especially don’t like the current governor cum presidential candidate (not to mention the denizens of Mar-a-Lago).
Disney has always been an enigma to me and it has lately become an extreme enigma at that. I have a family photo of my mother taking my sisters and I to Disneyland in 1956, during its first year of operation. I always think of Disneyland as a place carved out of the orange groves of Southern California. I think it comes from some movie I saw in black and white that showed Walt Disney surveying some Orange County land parcel where Disneyland would eventually stand. I also remember in 1962 when I went west to visit my father for the first and last time in my childhood, he picked me up in San Diego in his Cadillac and drove me up the 5 past Anaheim and I could see the Matterhorn. That was built in 1959, so I hadn’t ever seen it before and it sure looked intriguing from the freeway. I remember my father telling me we would go there during my visit (he lived with his new family somewhere in the San Fernando Valley). I don’t think he got around to doing that during my visit, so it was like all the other promises he made to me in my life…it sure sounded good… But I didn’t hold that against Disneyland. In fact, I remember the pleasure of never missing the opening of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which ran from 1961 – 1969. It was only one of the nine Disney shows that ran from 1954 (the year of my birth) well into the 1980s. It was a hallmark of Sunday night programming in the years when TV ruled our lives (like it doesn’t still?)
I even remember all the hoopla in 1971 when Disney opened Disney World and started to make Disneyland their second string attraction. I can even distinctly remember in 1982 when they opened Epcot Center and started bringing the world to middle Americans. They then took Disney to the world with Tokyo Disney in 1988 and EuroDisney in Paris in 1992…and the rest is just history as they have dominated the children’s entertainment programming for more than 70 years so far. It is the 6th largest American corporation with over $40 billion in annual revenues and a market capitalization of $156 billion, which used to be real money until the tech world eclipsed everything.
The hardest thing about Disney at this point for me is to know how to feel about it. I know my kids love it and that should be enough, but it is more complicated than that. When I went last year I found myself replacing my disdain for the Disney theme park experience with respect. I saw so many people with pure joy in their eyes as they wandered around the park with families or friends, that I decided it was petty of me to think anything but good thoughts about a company that could make so many people so happy.
Then Bob Chapek, the then-CEO of Disney got into a fight with Governor Ron DeSantis. It was all about some silly Florida legislation that was effectively anti-LGBTQ by virtue of forbidding elementary school teachers in Florida from mentioning the existence of gays to their young students. The bill became know as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and it became the poster child of the ESG movement in corporate America, where corporations respond to the wishes of their stakeholders to stand for important issues in the face of the ongoing culture wars that crop up every day. The politicization of corporate America had begun for real and it both cost Chapek his job (Bob Iger, the long-time Disney CEO, stepped back onto the bridge of Disney’s ship). Since I am a fervent advocate of ESG policies in corporate America and since I am very pro-LGBTQ in a live-and-let-live sense, not to mention not being a big fan of almost everything Ron DeSantis stands for and how he operates, I was glad to see Iger stand up to DeSantis and outmaneuver DeSantis at every turn. As someone said at the time, “Bob Iger does not lose”.
But now we have the next chapter in the modern-day Disney sage with the streaming services that Disney was counting on proving to be harder to monetize than expected and the first the writers and now the actors going on strike against the disparity in payouts to content creators versus corporate chieftains like Iger. As I was just getting used to praising Iger for being the stand up guy for the younger stakeholders of the world and for doing the right thing against the darker forces of the MAGA world, he has thrown a monkey wrench into that image. He has suddenly taken on the high profile of corporate greed saying that the writers and actors are not worthy of what they seek and that they need to wise-up, the implications being that they are trying to get blood out of a stone when the world is changing and its getting harder to make a buck in the content game. Naturally, that does not sit well with people who can read a proxy statement and learn about the huge and growing multiples that the corporate chieftains like Iger earn relative to the lowly worker bees on the corporate ladder. Iger now looks like the leader of the survival-of-the-fittest club and an unsympathetic one at that.
That is usually the mantra of the Republicans I know, the Uber-capitalists that believe the market is always right and the buyer must beware. You eat what you kill and you kill or be killed. Hoo-ah! And here I thought Iger cared about his younger and more empathetic stakeholders when he actually didn’t want DeSantis doing anything that might hurt Disney’s profitability. He and Disney are now off that pedestal I may have wrongly placed them on and we are back in the land or corporate fat cats trying to bust unions because they can. It all makes me dizzy about Disney so its just as well that my only task is to chauffeur my kids back home from Anaheim in a few days.