The Dark Side of Disney (22 page)

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Authors: Leonard Kinsey

BOOK: The Dark Side of Disney
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It’s hard to get off the monorail, go through the gates at The Magic Kingdom, and not feel a sense of nostalgia. Even if you’ve never lived in a small town that has a “Main Street”, there is something in the American cultural subconscious that Walt Disney tapped into here. Some sort of zeitgeist that we can all relate to on an almost genetic level. Walking through the train station tunnel and seeing Main Street, and catching a glimpse of the castle on the horizon produces a visceral reaction in even the most jaded citizens. And Newmeyer, McGeorge, and I were about as jaded as you could be at that point. Yet we paused at City Hall, looked at Cinderella’s Castle, and turned to each other, smiling at the anticipation of a whole new sort of Disney adventure.

“Let’s do this!” I shouted, and we charged towards the castle, knowing exactly what our first ride would be. Not Space Mountain, or Thunder Mountain, or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. No, we were headed straight for The Utilidor entrance immediately northwest of the castle.

We sprinted through the rose garden leading up to the castle, taking in the sounds and smells of our surroundings. Exhilarated, running full speed, we quickly reached the location detailed in our ASCII map.

But we saw… nothing. No heavily barricaded door, no “Keep Out” sign, no semi-obvious security cameras, no plain-clothed Disney cops, no off-limits entrance whatsoever. Dismayed, we parted shrubbery, looked under the bridges for secret ladders, and kicked at the pavement for trap doors.

“Fuck!” I yelled, causing a lady nearby to glare at me and cup her hands over her daughter’s ears. “Give me a break, lady!” I shouted to her, and turned to McGeorge. “Your map sucks!” I was pissed. “I can’t believe we came all the way here, spent money on a hotel, and then it turns out the damn map is a fake! We’re all a bunch of idiots for believing some anonymous jackass on some stupid BBS!”

“Yeah, McGeorge, I’m never listening to your damn modem butt-buddies again!” shouted Newmeyer.

“Shove it, Newmeyer, my computer is smarter than you’ll ever be!” spat a flustered McGeorge as he punched Newmeyer in the arm, hard. Newmeyer immediately put McGeorge into a headlock, and they both fell on the ground.

“Get off me, fatass!” screamed McGeorge, his voice raised an octave into an ear-piercing shriek, causing birds to scatter.

Disgusted, I turned and started walking away, not wanting to be there when the Disney Police showed up.

And then I saw it. Just beyond the simple and unobtrusive Sleeping Beauty fountain was a double door with two smooth black handles, completely inconspicuous in the shadows with its bland brown and slightly dirty turquoise paint, contrasted with the shimmering ornate gold trim on the nearby castle. No warning signs, no locks, no lights, nothing drawing attention to itself in the midst of a whole park which was having the exact opposite effect on the senses. A door specifically designed to not be noticed. Brilliant.

 

The Mythical Utilidors Entrance Next to Cinderella’s Castle

 

“Guys!” I yelled under my breath. Newmeyer was on top of McGeorge, a long thread of phlegm hanging from his mouth, dangling above McGeorge’s face. McGeorge screamed, and it was so loud I just about bolted then and there. “Assholes, the door is right in front of us!” I hissed.

Newmeyer sucked the spit back into his mouth, jolted around, and jumped off of McGeorge. “What, where?!”

I pointed to the door. Newmeyer gasped.

McGeorge got up with a frenzied grin, apparently forgetting he’d come within a second of having a puddle of snot dropped onto his face. “Fuck me, that’s smart!” he laughed.

We all stood there, staring at the door. Breaking out of my stupor, I quickly realized that security would be arriving any second. “Guys, we need to get out of here, and fast.”

“Down the rabbit hole?” asked Newmeyer apprehensively.

“That’s what we came here for,” responded McGeorge.

So I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped inside. Newmeyer and McGeorge followed right behind me, and the door closed silently behind us.

And what we saw was completely anticlimactic: an ugly fluorescent-light lit room with a large pile of wheelchairs and strollers in the corner, stacked two high, and a stairway whose handrails were covered with chipped paint. A cockroach scurried across the floor.

 

Currently there are strollers stored in the entry room

 

“Lame,” I said.

“Blech,” echoed McGeorge.

“Well, at least now we know where to go to get a free wheelchair,” a chipper Newmeyer chimed in. “Seriously, I’m sure all the good stuff is down the stairs.”

I nodded in agreement, and we started the trek down the two stories of stairs. We were almost at the bottom when I thought I heard a noise, freaked out, and ran back up both flights, two steps at a time. The guys followed, freaked out by my freak-out. We got back to the top room, trying to stifle our heavy breathing.

 

Looking down the stairway from the entry room

 

“What the fuck, Kinsey?” whispered an out of breath and out of shape Newmeyer.

“Ssshhh, shut up, I heard something.”

We all listened intently. Not a sound.

“Goddammit, Kinsey!” sighed an exasperated McGeorge. “Newmeyer’s fat heart can’t handle this shit!”

I laughed, Newmeyer scowled, and we started walking down the steps again.

At the bottom was a sign warning about asbestos. “Weird,” I said, as the other guys nodded in agreement.

We opened the door and found ourselves in an empty hallway. Another door was on the left, and the right seemed to open out into a tunnel… The Utilidors! We turned right, walked down to the tunnel and stopped short. Passing by us were Goofy, without his head on, his flamboyantly gay “handler” who was talking to him “in character”, and Snow White, who Goofy was heavily flirting with.

“Now Goofy,” intoned the handler with a high-pitched lisp, “I don’t want to hear any of that sort of talk!”

Goofy grabbed Snow White’s ass as well as he could with his huge padded hand. She gasped and punched him in the nuts. He laughed, obviously protected by the costume’s padding, and tried to grope her left breast. She sighed and kissed him.

The handler continued to blabber on. “Goofy, that sort of behavior simply isn’t appropriate! Mickey is going to punish you when he gets home!”

They walked past the tunnel entrance, and we glued ourselves to the wall as they went by, going completely unnoticed.

“What… the… fuck?!” I murmured. It was like some crazy alternate reality down here, like we really had gone down Alice’s rabbit hole.

“Let’s follow them!” said an overly excited McGeorge. “Snow White is hot!”

Seemed like a reasonable plan. We certainly had no idea where we were going, so why not follow people who did? We stepped out into the tunnel… and nearly got run over by a battery-powered golf cart silently barreling down the middle of the walkway.

“Watch where you’re going assholes!” yelled the driver.

Shaken but undeterred, we continued onwards, following Goofy and his two admirers. Journey’s “Separate Ways” played through the speakers overhead, followed by Bryan Adams’ “Summer of 69”. No Disney music down here, assumably to offer a respite to the Cast Members from the constant barrage of it in the park overhead. Although whether Bryan Adams was a sanity-saving alternative to the Sherman Brothers was certainly debatable.

 

The Utilidors under Fantasyland

 

A wide variety of Cast Members passed us, costumed, half-costumed, or in street clothes, completely oblivious to our presence. It was like we were invisible. So we kept walking, even when our Goofy-led escorts turned off and went up a random stairway. The one-foot wide stripe painted along the wall of the tunnel eventually changed color, and after stopping to stare slack-jawed at a full-color version of our ASCII map on the wall, we ascertained that this meant we were entering a different “land”, in this case going from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland.

“Hey, I just realized something,” I said, turning to the guys. “We had a hell of a time finding this one entrance. It’d be a lot easier to find them by coming
out
of them rather than trying to track them down from the outside.”

“Yeah, good idea!” exclaimed McGeorge.

“I agree,” said Newmeyer. “That’ll save a ton of time. Let’s go up the next stairway we see.”

So we did, and on the way up a group of Cast Members going down the stairs squeezed past us. We nodded to them and continued on, still stunned that nobody seemed to care that we were down there. At the top of the stairs we were greeted with a scattered mess of clothing racks, filled with t-shirts ticketed with ridiculously marked-up price tags. Boxes piled high along the walls were filled with stuffed animal versions of the characters. The room easily contained $10,000 worth of merchandise, and there was nothing stopping us from grabbing a handful. But just then a female security guard turned the corner. We froze, not knowing whether to run and hide or stand our ground. I made the decision for us.

“Excuse me, M’am,” I started. “It’s our first week here, and we’re a bit lost. Just trying to get out to Tomorrowland?”

She turned and pointed the direction she’d just come from. “Right down that hall,” she said cheerfully.

“Thanks!” we all said at once, as she continued down the stairway we’d just come up.

We breathed a sigh of relief and walked down the hallway she’d pointed to, coming to a set of double doors. We opened them and were blasted with blindingly bright light. Stepping outside, as our eyes adjusted to the daylight we turned back to see a pair of white doors, framed in silver and surrounded by a blue wall. As before, nothing there drawing attention to itself; no signs, no fancy ornamentation. Just plain white doors.

 

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