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For once, a politician was guilty of understatement. Today Greater Orlando, with Walt Disney World as its golden profit center, is one of the nation's fastest-growing areas in population, revenue and new-tech industry. The people who live and work in Orlando are there for the same reasons as those who visit: because of its proximity to an all-ages fun-time wonderworld. Here is a metropolis whose success has been erected on the American family's itch for entertainment. Not since Southern California sprang up around the burgeoning Hollywood film colony has a region owed its riches, if not its existence, to show business. Where parents once took their children to Manhattan for a weekend of Broadway and the Rockettes, now they get their fill of live entertainment in Disney World and the clone worlds that have attached themselves to Walt's empire like parasite parks.
In these satellite attractions, kitsch battles ferociously with schlock, and the two styles often end up married. Kitsch: Medieval Times, a dinner theater that combines the art of knightly jousting with the bloodlust of pro wrestling. As the Red Knight attacks Blue with his mace and Blue responds with his sword, a spectator cries out, "Your mutha wears chain mail!" Schlock: Gatorland Zoo with its Gator Jumparoo show, in which thousand-pound alligators lurch out of the water to snap their jaws around dead chickens suspended from a wire. For connoisseurs of arcane Americana, the Orlando area also offers an Alligatorland Safari Zoo (feed the animals with Purina Monkey Chow), a Reptile World Serpentarium ("Time your visit to be present during one of our three daily venom programs") and an Elvis Presley Museum, with displays of Elvis' high school yearbook (his major was shop), a portrait of Jesus that Elvis gave his parents when he was 15 and, for 50 cents, a photostat of the King's death certificate.
In central Florida, Disney, not Presley, is the king of leisure-time attractions. But Sea World is surely prince charming--an inviting and meticulously run theme park dedicated to the proposition that almost any fish or aquatic mammal can be trained to do almost anything. (Not so over at Cypress Gardens, where the host of the Little Critter Show became exasperated when one of his fowl performers, Quack Nicklaus, blew a stunt. Keened the trainer: "There's only so much you can teach a duck.") At Sea World the dolphins do backflips in sync; a walrus sprays his audience on cue; seals eat fish dangled by children; there are even a few humans doing water-ski daredeviltry to pre-Beatles rock in the Beach Blanket Ski Party show. As at Disney World, Sea World works hard to elicit one of two reactions from its visitors: awe ("Isn't that amazing!") and awwww ("Isn't that cute!"). Because Sea World's stars are live animals and not electronic humanoids, the reactions are genuinely effusive.