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-- The most dramatic innovation was the theme park, a spiffy, sanitized version of the old amusement park. Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World, were dazzling essays in salesmanship. The rides (such as Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Scary Adventures) promoted the films. The Disney characters strolling through the parks served as free commercials for the Mickey Mouse back scratchers, Goofy bikinis, "Totally Minnie" fashions and Donald Duck notepaper (with the warning READ MY LIPS) on sale in the parks' stores. And in creating roller-coaster rides with a story line, Disney helped shape the course of movie narratives. George Lucas designed the Star Tours ride for Disneyland, and is planning an Indiana Jones attraction, but he is only returning a big favor. Lucas' movies are essentially Disney theme-park rides transferred to film. They fit perfectly into the Disney world -- a world of high-tech thrills and genteel Americana. A monarchy of make-believe. A Neverland for the whole family.
This Disney land was always a world so rich and rigid that it was ripe for satire. In 1954 Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book burlesqued the Disney cartoon world, with its talking animals wearing three-fingered gloves, its ducks in sailor suits but no pants, and a mouse named Minnie "with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse, ten times bigger than the biggest rat." This was mild stuff compared with a 1967 parody that Mad Alumnus Wallace Wood drew for Realist magazine. In the cheerfully scabrous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy," Walt's creatures behaved exactly as barnyard and woodland denizens might. Beneath dollar-sign searchlights radiating from the Magic Kingdom's castle, Goofy had his way with Minnie, Dumbo the flying elephant dumped on Donald Duck, the Seven Dwarfs besmirched Snow White en masse and Tinker Bell performed a striptease for Peter Pan and Jiminy Cricket. Mickey slouched off to one side, shooting heroin.
Walt's corporate scions were suitably outraged by this, but the worst was still to come. It is one thing to be defamed; it is another to be ignored, as the studio pretty much was after Walt Disney's death in 1966. Most galling of all, other people were working the old Disney wonder, and making it work at the box office. The Star Wars trilogy was putting a high-tech spin on the old Disney legerdemain. So, brilliantly, were Steven Spielberg's films: Close Encounters of the Third Kind used When You Wish upon a Star as a theme, and E.T. was "Bambi from Outer Space."
In spirit, all these blockbusters -- among the top grossers in movie history -- were closer to the cartoon classics than the late-'70s Disney product was. Without its founder, the studio floundered, producing modest cartoons, lame sequels and sci-fi thrillers without art or heart. However conscientiously Ron Miller ran the shop, he was no match for Lucas and Spielberg. As if by osmosis, these young outsiders had learned the master's lessons of film artistry and audience manipulation. Miller was Disney's son-in-law, but Lucas and Spielberg were Walt's true heirs.