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After Disney died last week, thousands of visitors poured through the gates of Disneyland as usual to drink in the fantasies that he had manufactured for them. Some went galumphing through the sparkling air atop elephants, others drifted down the Congo, past the snapping jaws of crocodiles and the whalelike surfacing of rhinos. Birds and flowers sang in one enchanted room; a land-fast 80-ft. rocket took off for the moon in simulated flight. Yet in all the gaiety and glare, in the whomp of bands and the bray of a calliope, only one elegiac sign reminded pleasure seekers that the man was no more who created this fairyland: the flag was at half-staff.
Three thousand miles to the east, long lines of moviegoers formed along the 50th Street side of Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, prepared to stand in numbing patience as long as necessary to see his latest film, Follow Me, Boys. Perhaps later there will be a special monument, but now not even a meditative ceremony—just the show going on. Disney was dead, but not his vision of innocence, nor the dreams he made.