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One would be wrong to suppose that Disney—or the "imagineers" who carried this project forward after he died in 1966—planned his World from the outside in, starting with an audience and then successfully condescending to it. "I don't make films exclusively for children," Walter Elias Disney once remarked. "I make them to suit myself, hoping they will also suit the audience." As on film, so in the environments: Disney was nothing if not an expressionist, and he built the old Magic Kingdom in Anaheim, Calif., and the new one in Orlando to please himself. Disney World is a pure feat of self-projection in which neurosis and imagination are rendered equally concrete. One instinctive response is to turn away from Disney. After all, the promotional goo about magic, warmth and wonder that has been ladled over him and his works in the past 20 years would make even Bambi puke. But Disney's really interesting side was not the fabled rapport with children (from all accounts, he was about as innocent as Bobby Riggs and somewhat less likable) but the grip of organization—first in his art itself, and then in the area of business and social manipulation—which made Disneyland and Disney World possible. He turned himself from a cartoonist into the Old Master of masscult, and from there became a Utopian environmentalist.
By now there is no way of approaching the confused feedbacks between "high" and "mass" culture in America without running into Disney at nearly every twist of the discussion. And so, among culture critics—his traditional enemies—there has been a growth of very serious interest in Disney. As Peter Blake, editor of Architecture Plus, put it: "Walt Disney did not know that such things as vast urban infrastructures, multilevel mass-transit systems, People Movers, nonpolluting vehicles, pedestrian malls, and so forth were unattainable, and so he just went ahead and built them. In doing it he drew on all kinds of resources that no other city planner had ever before considered seriously, if at all... it seems unlikely that any American school of architecture will ever again graduate a student without first requiring him or her to take a field trip to Orlando."