When Euro Disneyland opens in spring next year at Marne-la-Vallee, 15 miles east of Paris f Mickey Mouse will be arriving ‘in person’ on the continent which Christopher Columbus departed exactly five hundred years earlier. The New World ambassador with the ears will be importing to the Old World another kind of utopia: an America filtered through the cinematic screen. As one company brochure puts it, “A Disney Theme Park can be described as a three-dimensional motion picture which the audience actually lives.” A pure fiction brought to life by Disney “Imagineers”, the fourth colony of Planet Disney will be more real than reel.
Weaned on generations of animation classics, every year “guests” in their millions pour through the turnstiles at Anaheim, California - a pilgrimage to Disneyland has been regarded as an American birthright since the granddaddy of theme parks opened in 1955. And these days Walt Disney World in Florida features like some latter day Xanadu on airline route-maps, while the parking lot for the Magic Kingdom could swallow its west-coast precursor and still leave spaces to spare. With a Far East beachhead established at Tokyo Disneyland, Mickey now bids for Napoleonic glory.
Designed to conjure images from ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and other films, the Espace Euro Disneyland (right) opened in December 1990 to whet appetites for the theme park and associated facilities on the 4,800 acre site. A mere 11 million people are expected to visit Euro Disneyland in its first year, helping to consolidate the theme parks as the Walt Disney Company’s most lucrative division, ahead of both film and television, and consumer goods. The brand image is already well known through various media, from Mickey emblazoned merchandise to French children’s television show, Le Disney Channel. But on top of that, Euro Disneyland stands to gain from a convoluted process of cultural double¬ exposure.
Many of the characters brought to life at Le Magic Kingdom will have passed from the pages of European folklore to the big screen of American film iconography and back again. Touching down outside Paris as costumed “cast members”, their presence lends notional authenticity to key theme-park settings like Cinderella’s Castle and Alice in Wonderland’s Maze. The likes of Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne and the Brothers Grimm might be amused to find their fictional creations re¬ exported to their continent of origin, this time as stars of a three-dimensional fantasy world. Meanwhile, outside the theme park proper, six new hotels will initially provide over 5,000 rooms in buildings themed on American genre locations, such as the Western frontier town and New York City. Manhattan, remade once as a working film set in Florida (a backlot at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park) becomes a fully-fledged faux-cityscape in France.
And Paris can look forward to its own version of Tinsel Town. By 1996, a second ‘gated attraction’ will have been added at Euro Disneyland: the Disney-MGM Studios Europe, based on the third and most recent ‘gate’ at Orlando. For film buffs and philosophers of the hyperreal alike, this will be a true paradise, constituting a third-order simulation: a French reproduction of the Florida reconstruction of an imaginary Hollywood of the 30s. Will they be Singing in the Rain, or wringing their hands on the Seine?
