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The star of stars at Sea World is Shamu, billed, without fear of contradiction, as the "world's most famous performing killer whale." (Actually there are three Shamus, one for each Sea World park.) The Shamu Celebration veers toward the icky, especially when the heavenly choir from a burger commercial sings reverently, "It's what Shamu means to you and to me." And when a trio of the behemoth's trainers present their what-I-love- about-Shamu testimonials, the onlooker half expects one of them to say, "My whale, I think I'll keep her." But it is a thrill to see a 4,000-lb. killer whale balance a human on its nose, or pirouette on point, or just swim protectively with its new offspring, the 8 1/2-month-old Baby Shamu. Several ^ times a day, a child is selected from the crowd to be kissed by Shamu. At one show, the little girl of the day was asked her name. "Erin." "And where are you from, Erin?" "Holiday Inn."
At Walt Disney World, the snappy patter is left to the guides on the trams that whisk visitors from the car lot to one of the two main parks: the Magic Kingdom--which is basically Disneyland East--and the sprawling Epcot Center. (One-day admission: $23 for adults, $19 for kids.) "No smoking--foreign, domestic or homegrown," one guide sasses near Epcot's 18-story Spaceship Earth geosphere. "You know what Epcot means?" another asks near closing time. "Every Person Comes Out Tired." In fact, the acronym stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It was Disney's conceit to create an absolute monarchy, a magic kingdom for real, in which 20,000 people would work and live in a totally controlled futuristic environment: no slums, no landlords, no voting control. Fortunately the plan fizzled, and Epcot became what it has been since its opening in 1982: a combination world's fair and science fair with the Disney touch.
What remains of the monarchist dream in Disney World is a benign dictatorship of style, a triumph of art over nature. The lightning bugs in the shrubbery by Cinderella's Castle are tiny synchronized bulbs. In a 3-D short called Magic Journeys (to be replaced this September with a Michael Jackson film, Captain Eo), a boy blows milkweed toward the audience, and 586 viewers shiver with delight. There is more magic that the customers never see. A Swedish pneumatic garbage system moves 50 tons of discarded glop a day. The costume room holds l.5 million items of clothing (eight per employee). The huge computer centers under the Magic Kingdom and Epcot control each attraction's speed, music, lights and vocal spiels. In the bakery, Chef Dominic Robertiello can produce 100 pies, 35,000 cookies and 14,400 muffins every day.
All the visitors behave here, even when waiting in line 45 min. for a Frontierland hot dog. All the employees smile, even the teenagers in French Foreign Legion uniforms sweeping up cigarette butts in front of the imitation- Aztec Mexican pavilion. (Average "life-span" of a piece of street trash before being removed: 4 min.) During the Magic Kingdom's afternoon parade of Disney characters, a sanitation man in old-fashioned vest and black pants materializes to scoop up some horse dung. When the crowd cheers him, he doffs his hat and salutes.