In this free-for-all-Friday Trent contrasts “Disney Adults” with “Theme Park Enthusiasts” like him.
Transcript:
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It is free for all Friday here on the Council of Trent podcast, I am your host, Catholic US apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. But Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. Today. I want to talk about the phenomenon of Disney adults. And contrast that to people who appreciate Disney theme parks, but are not Disney adults.
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I think a lot of cases, it’s either one of two camps for adults. Either you are a totally disinterested adult and you think a place like Disneyland is only for kids, and adults can’t enjoy that whatsoever, or you are a quote unquote Disney adult, someone who is somewhat obsessed with these theme parks and will go to any length to visit them, to defend them, obsessed with visiting them, praising them above other things higher than they deserve to be praised for, and taking it personally when people criticize them.
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So it’s like there’s only two camps. You either have to like, dislike Disney or be totally obsessed. I would like to defend a middle ground that I call being a theme park aficionado, aficionado, or, sorry, a theme park enthusiast. You know, someone who can appreciate these kinds of things. The reason I bring it up is because over the summer, we did a family trip out to California, and for part of the trip, we took the kids to Disneyland.
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I have three boys who were still in elementary school, and so that’s a great age for them to really enjoy. Disney. We have lower elementary school and higher elementary school. And so and they really enjoy it, right? You know, they like the characters. The rides are great for them. For the older elementary kids, the thrill rides are just like the perfect level for them.
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For the younger elementary, the themed rides are really fun and they enjoy that, so they’re at the perfect age to enjoy it. And as a parent, I, you know, get a lot of enjoyment out of it. And there are rides there that are done really well that even I as an adult, can appreciate. This includes some of the older rides from Walt Disney’s time that still hold up like Peter Pan’s Flight is done really well.
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It’s a dark ride, but you are in a, you know, a pirate ship that’s flying like in the movie. And so the track is above you and it has a nice feel to it. Better than just feeling like you’re just in a car kind of going around, which is something you might find in any kind of carnival or a theme park.
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And then there’s the newer rides like Star Wars Rise of the resistance, which is done extremely well. The sets are very intricate. You really do feel like you are on a Imperial Star Destroyer, and there’s one part in the Rye when you’re going around in this transport vehicle and you come across life size 80, 80 armored all terrain walkers and the Star Wars movies, and you see them right in front of you, larger than life.
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So it’s it’s done very well. It’s done artistically. And so I took the kids at one point we split up as a family. So Laura took the older and I took the younger. So I took the younger around because he didn’t meet the high requirement for Indiana Jones and we were having a great time. I was in one of the lines and I was standing next to a tour guide.
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So Disney has these VIP tour guides. Very expensive, by the way. If you want to hire a tour guide, they’ll get you to the front of the lines. I mean, not the front. Front of the lines. All have to go through the lightning lanes. You still have to wait. So even though you pay a lot, I think these tours are like $1,000 an hour.
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So it’s like you pay like 8 or $10,000 to take your group around, like a group of like ten people around the park. I mean, it cuts a lot of time for sure. So a lot of people certainly do enjoy that. And I was talking to the tour guide and he was just talking about, you know, taking this group in that group around.
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I told him about taking my kids and like how they’ve really been enjoying it. I told him what kind of groups like he takes around, but he takes around a lot of groups. Some of them are families, but a lot of them are just adults who hire a guy to take them around Disney for the day. And he was like, yeah, the Disney adults, I don’t I don’t fully I don’t fully understand.
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I think there were some adults he doesn’t mind. They just want to go and have a good time. But there’s others that are a bit they’re a bit obsessed. And so these have been called in the past years on the internet. They have been referred to as Disney adults. So here’s one article on that. It says the term Disney adult has become increasingly common in popular culture, describing adults who maintain a strong enthusiasm for Disney films, theme parts, merchandise, and overall brand.
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The label is sometimes used affectionately and sometimes critically. The rise of Disney adults reflects more than nostalgia. It illustrates one of the most successful long term branding strategies in modern entertainment. For decades, Disney faced a basic business challenge. Children eventually grow up a company built primarily around children’s entertainment risks losing customers as those children develop new interests rather than accepting the cycle.
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Disney’s leadership spent decades transforming the company into a brand that people could enjoy throughout every stage of life. And that makes sense, because when you thought about Disney in the 80s, late 80s, in the 90s, it was for kids, right? I mean, a lot of things in the 90s were for children. If you if you think about it, that’s why I watched another video on YouTube talking about how the 90s, like millennials, is not just nostalgia, why we enjoy the 90s.
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The 90s legitimately were a decade oriented towards children. Like, for example, going to McDonald’s, right? Going to McDonald’s was something you did with a child. McDonald’s was for kids. McDonald’s was a place for parents. If they were feeling tired to just take their kids out, go to the play place and get a cheap meal, and you get a happy meal and you get a toy with it.
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That was the purpose of McDonald’s. It was a restaurant primarily for children. And so when you look at a lot of the older McDonald’s from the 90s, they had big play places. They have Ronald McDonald, they have a bunch of stuff to attract children to come in. Now, what does McDonald’s for? McDonald’s is for people who like to get a coffee fix, get a cafe, get a coffee drink and just be able to do a quick DoorDash or a quick drive through to get something, get something in a hurry.
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In fact, since the pandemic, fast food is really relied on drive thrus, so it’s not really about trying to bring in that kid element. That’s why a lot of McDonald’s have shut down their play places, for example. They’re expensive floor space, expensive. McDonald’s, if they wanted to, would probably try to get to 100% drive thru because you hardly need any staff to run an operation like that, and it takes down a lot of your overhead costs and you don’t have to maintain a dining room.
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And so Disney was really similar that, you know, Disneyland was like, oh, you go there if you’re a kid, your parents, you know, your your parents, you’re a family, your mom and a dad, and you take your kids there. Adults didn’t go and enjoy that. There wasn’t anything really there for adults, and it was really kids that liked it, and maybe kids who liked it when they were, you know, in the 60s or 70.
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They would only go back if they took their own kids in the 80s and 90s to go and enjoy Disneyland. But it wasn’t just something that that adults just picked up. And you see something similar, by the way, was Star Wars, right? Star Wars became like this mainstream thing after the prequels in the early 2000. Well, I think episode one starts in 1999.
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But before that, though, Star Wars was really considered more like children’s entertainment. It was not like, if you remember the 90s, Star Wars was not a mainstream thing. It was something that nerds liked and kids liked lightsabers, things like that. Video there were some popular video games out. It was not a cultural phenomenon at all. That really changed with the prequels and the early 2000, and then Disney acquiring Lucasfilm.
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Was that like the 20 tens? I think, which was part of their strategy. It says here, under CEOs like Michael Eisner and Bob Iger, the Disney company broadened its audience through acquisitions, gluing Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. And the idea here was to keep that. Even as children grow up, they can still stay within the brand bubble and still appreciate Disney.
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And so you hold on to the customer for a very long time, hence the Disney adult. And so you get these Disney adults who will go to Disneyland, and they give other adults who just want to appreciate the theme park a bad name. Like if you’re an adult who says, yeah, I think Disneyland is really cool. It’s really it’s a really neat place.
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People look at you like you’re some kind of weirdo, and there’s a difference. I was watching a YouTube video from a theme park aficionado making this distinction, and he said in the video, I’m not a Disney adult. I just like theme parks. And here’s the difference. He said I was going to Epcot or Disney World once, and I saw an adult there she was wearing.
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She was wearing a bunch of goofy, like the character pins. And you had all this merchandise on and she’s walking in. She sees a topiary, you know, a trimmed hedge that looks like it looks like something, and it looked like goofy. And she looks she says, oh my gosh, guys, it’s goofy. It’s goofy. Like almost getting emotional about it.
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Like, that is a Disney. A Disney adult is someone who cannot appreciate art. They are just a slave to an intellectual property. They have been drugged up, dopamine up to recognize this property and to get their joy from it, and to promote just the fact I recognize this brand or this character. I like it, so I enjoy it.
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And that’s the key, is that they can’t appreciate the artistic elements in it. They’re just overcome by emotion with the attachment to just these characters and these properties, and so much so that whenever they see anything that Disney puts out, whether it’s Star Wars, let’s say Mandalorian and Grogu, they just see it and they go, go, go. Oh, he’s so cute.
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I love it. Without being willing to say, this is a terrible movie. It’s not even a movie. I took my kids to see it because, look, their kids and it’s not woke. And it was pleasant enough. And their children, and they like Grogu, that’s fine. But it’s a it’s not even a movie. It just felt like three episodes of a TV show stitched together, which is essentially what it was.
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So I, as an adult can recognize that, and I can tolerate it because it’s something my kids like, and it’s pretty harmless. But an adult who sees that and is not willing to say, oh, yeah, that’s pretty low quality, that’s bad. But we’ll stubbornly defend everything that has a Disney brand on it. That is a Disney adult. Same thing at the at the theme parks and of our ride changes.
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Even if it’s done really poorly, they’ll defend it. So as a kid, I love Splash Mountain. One of my favorite rides, zippy Doo-Dah, is a classic song that was one of my favorite rides as a kid. Then they got rid of it because it’s connected to song of the South, which has some ambiguous elements to it related to slavery in the South.
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Before this. Before shortly after the Civil War around that period. Disney wants to get rid of that after the George Floyd 2020 protests. So they changed it to Tiana Bayou adventure themed after The Princess and the frog. The ride is horrible. I mean, it’s not horrible, it’s passable, but it’s much worse than it used to be. So I don’t like it.
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But Disney adults would be like, this is the greatest thing ever, I love it. Okay, so that’s the difference. They’re like Disney adults can appreciate it, but I but on the other extremes, people like, oh, Disney’s a bunch of garbage. That’s not garbage. Like when you go and you walk around the park and you just take a look at all of the elements that are involved to make it work.
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It’s really fascinating. Like, you see how trash cans are painted? No CM green, a very boring color of green that doesn’t stand out. So it kind of blends away. You look at all of the little details and artwork that is put around in places, the way the lighting is done. The one thing I enjoy about Disneyland at night is I hate LED lighting.
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I absolutely hate it. It’s gross. It makes me sick. I wish we went back to sodium incandescence in cities, but Disneyland doesn’t use LED lighting. Like if you go to Frontierland, you go to a lot of places. The lighting is a much softer kind of incandescent quality, and so it has a magical element to it because that’s something that has been lost, for example.
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And so these are just little things like music piped in. Or when you walk through Star Wars land in the bushes, there’s faint animal sounds that play in the bushes, as if like there’s wild animals out there. Like I said, little details is when you go through, if you’re an adult, you can appreciate that. And so I can appreciate taking my kids to Disneyland and going around and enjoying the esthetics in a similar way that I could appreciate the esthetics, that anything that people have put their thought into.
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That’s why, like, I like haunted house houses, not necessarily to be scared. I mean, they can be scary, but I like the dramatic elements and decor and decoration that are put into the work. If it is done well, it’s the same thing anywhere else. If I go see a Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, I can appreciate the thought and the flow in it and what story it’s trying to tell.
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If I ever got to go to the Singapore airport, for example, here’s one of the most beautiful airports in the world how it’s designed. It’s something that I can appreciate. And so if people. So Disney has engineers but calls them Imagineers. Once again, it’s engineering but in a way that tries to fill people wonder. I can appreciate that and I enjoy it, and I can take a little bit of time out to enjoy something like that.
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So my kids are riding a ride and I just, you know, walk around and take that in. Or they went to bed one night at like seven. They were tired. I go back to the park by myself, and they ride 1 or 2 rides and just walk around and just kind of take in people watching and the esthetics and the design and a little secret corridors and passageways and traffic flow patterns.
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I find that to be interesting, and I can appreciate in that way how Disney uses like on Main Street, you can smell vanilla that’s piped into the air to give it that, you know, old town feel of walking by the bakery or something like that. And Main Street has the buildings are they use force perspective to seem bigger than they really are to give you, you know, they do a lot of that force perspective work.
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The castle looks bigger than it actually is, a lot of things like that. So yeah. So I appreciate that. And I think it makes me a theme park or, you know, an architectural enthusiast and Imagineering enthusiast, what I would call it. And I want to say that I can enjoy that. And please distinguish that from the adults who loathe Disney.
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And I don’t think they really Loews Disney. I think they just loathe the theme park experience, which does stink. I saw people who maybe got seven rides in in a day. They’re waiting an hour in line for each one because they start the day at 10 a.m. or 11, when the park’s already packed, instead of getting their first thing.
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Stuff like that. I get not liking theme parks because of that and the obnoxious people that might be there, but on the other hand, don’t be, you know, don’t be a weird, obsessive Disney adult that treats it like some kind of religion. Which, by the way, I may be including in future episode. So that is all for today.
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Thank you guys so much for listening and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.