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So Euro Disney offers few sops to European traditions. Wine may be as mother's milk to the French, but they will find only "mocktails" at the restaurants inside the park; they must get their hand stamped at the turnstile, walk a few yards to the nearest hotel bar and drown their rancor there. The Pinocchio and Star Tours rides, among others, provide French dialogue, but visitors who have no English will miss the verbal nuances that lend the park its impish wit.
The folks behind the reception desk at the Hotel Santa Fe speak an aggregate of 13 languages. Perhaps not all perfectly. Prince Charles has said that the universal language is bad English, and much of that can be heard at Euro Disney. "I gezz zare was a mizunderstood," apologizes a French staff member who boasts, "I speak British." Fractured franglais is also spoken here. At Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show -- a dinner theater where you eat chili and spareribs while watching Annie Oakley fire at cowbells that play La Marseillaise -- the host tells his auditors, "If yer hungry, let me hear you shout, 'Nous avez faim!' " But there can be charm in Babel when the tower has such comely flying buttresses, and when the 12,000 villagers (i.e., cast members) are so eager to please. Where else will you hear a pretty attendant chirp "Bon appetit!" as she hands you a box of sugared popcorn?
This arrogance, if such it is, flows from the challenge Disney believes it can uniquely meet: to entertain everyone, of every age, from every land. Walt Disney proved that this was possible with his first cartoon features and his first theme park. To aim for every taste is to sacrifice tang -- the movies and parks can lack edge; the thrills may be as flat as the main courses in some of the specialty restaurants. But it is a noble goal, beyond commerce or compromise -- especially today, in an age when every form of pop culture has at least as many enemies as fans. With Beauty and the Beast and Euro Disney, Walt's successors try and, substantially, triumph.
On a second-floor window in the park's grand thoroughfare, there is a legend: "Main Street Marching Band, leading the parade since 1884. Conductors: Michael Eisner, Frank Wells. We work, while you whistle." In fact, Eisner, Disney's CEO, and Wells, the company's president, have headed the procession only since 1984, when they turned Mickey's mausoleum -- a slumbering empire of tranquil theme parks and tepid movies -- into Walt II. Or, rather, Walt 2, for Disney has expanded exponentially, its ambition and energy personified by the two bosses. At 4 a.m. one day last week, each man could be seen wandering the park like a parent wrapping a beautiful new toy for his child on Christmas Eve, or like the child waiting to unwrap it. They were showing by example how Disney does things, with Japanese-style management that predates the Japanese system: order, loyalty, pitching in, a fanatical and productive meticulousness.