Word: disneyland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blood visitors to the Meet the World pavilion are ushered next door into a kind of epilogue to the show: a National Panasonic model of the ideal Japanese home of the future, featuring four members of a robot-simulated family, plus dog, attending to their own techno-gadgets. Tokyo Disneyland is not your average theme park...
...years become something of a national pilgrimage site. In 1987 roughly 1 million schoolchildren, who would previously have been taken to Japan's great historical sites, were brought to the park. Last week, as people across the nation gathered at shrines to usher in an auspicious New Year, Tokyo Disneyland stayed open for 36 straight hours, serving as a kind of alternative temple. By day's end 200,000 votaries had observed the country's most important holiday at its favorite playland...
...this may seem a far cry from Walt Disney's original conception. But in a deeper sense, it may be its ultimate realization. For if the Disney parks of Florida and California offer squeaky-clean visions of a perfect society, the Disneyland that flourishes in Tokyo is even cleaner and more utopian. Yet even as the Japanese version reproduces virtually every feature of its American models, it turns them into something entirely Japanese. Melvin, Buff and Max, the antlered commentators at the Country Bear Jamboree, speak in the grave basso profundos of Kurosawa samurai. Alice in Wonderland has Oriental features...
...role he definitely plays is to support another of Japan's driving principles: pleasure as big business. Foot-high dolls of his consort Minnie in kimono go for more than $60 in Tokyo Disneyland, and the number of ice creams sold there in a single year would, if piled up, reach 14 times as high as 12,388-ft. Mount Fuji...
...producers of children's shows reply that the programs are entertaining without the toys and that merchandising tie-ins are hardly new. Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club was conceived in part to help promote Disneyland, and even critically acclaimed shows like Sesame Street have toy spin-offs. Nor, say industry spokesmen, does a hit show necessarily mean a stream of kids lining up at the toy counter. NBC's The Smurfs, for example, is one of Saturday morning's top-rated children's shows, but the like-named toys have not been big sellers...