The staff cafeteria is immaculate, lit with fluorescence and perked up by leaf-green supergraphics. Four dwarfs and a brown nylon-shag bear stand at the counter, ordering chipped beef. Their human faces, pinheads emerging from their neck-holes, look tiny, naked and grumpy. Across a wide cinder-block corridor whose ceiling is wreathed like a battleship's with gas pipes and power mains, more ducks and mice are disappearing into the mask room. REMOVE YOUR HEAD AND PLACE ON TABLE AFTER ENTERING, a notice Commands; the racks are full of familiar visages, the icons of one's childhood, Mickey and Pluto and the others blown up to preternatural size, then guillotined; their eyes goggle from the shelves like big affable poached eggs. There is even a set of coolant waistcoats, their design a spin-off from NASA; they circulate a chemical refrigerant round the body. In this humid and swampy acreage of Florida, every hot duck on Main Street contains a hotter man wildly signaling to be let out.
Farther down the corridor is the computer room, which controls the "audio-animatronic" displays: banks of thick cassettes slotted into a blinking steel wall, 14-track tape loops piling and swishing inside their moon-shaped Plexiglas boxes, running across the heads like sepia fettucine. Every second, millions of impulses skitter down the cables, linking the Real-world beneath the podium to the Magic Kingdom: the Bear Jamboree plunks and toots, holographic phantoms squeak and gibber among the cobwebs of the Haunted Mansion, and in the antechamber of the Moon Rocket in Tomorrowland, a robot scientist holds a conversation with a scarcely less robotic Disney World hostess.
It was through these latitudes that Ponce de León stumbled in 1513, seeking the fountain of perpetual youth. It was not there. Now it is. The Walt Disney World coat of arms—a terrestrial globe wearing Mickey ears, set in a capital D—is no metaphor but a frank statement of intention. The place is the last example of idealized, high-despotic city planning, a rich hick cousin of all the imaginary and perfect townships that architects from Filarete in the 15th century to Boullée in the 18th wrought from their schematic, authoritarian fantasies but never managed to build. Unlike Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, it exists on a plane of unremitting kitsch, sustained by the most advanced technology ever brought to the service of entertainment.