VirtualOrgy: DisneyQuest and the Fall of the American Empire
(Because the large size of this essay, I have split it into two separate pages. By the way, since writing this essay DisneyQuest has been closed, citing "lack of popularity.")
Contrary to what might be believed, I did not end up at DisneyQuest as a result of some postmodern dare by the overcaffeinated and possibly-tainted staff of the latest
Uberslacker-Smartass-Central-pop-culture zine. No, I was at DisneyQuest because I was bored and drunk, a particularly lethal combination in this city of Big Shoulders of ours. It was Labor Day Friday and the place where I was temping, good Corporate Structure that they are, had let their white-collar bourgeoisie out of work at noon, allowing us to celebrate the proletariat holiday in slightly guilt-ridden fashion. I had been drinking downtown with my friends since two that afternoon, it was now six, we were splitting up, and I was half-staggering my way home via the el station when I saw It.
It, for those who don't know, is a five-story Las-Vegasesque monstrosity in the middle of Chicago's tourist district, next door to the ESPN SportsZone, across the street from the Hard Rock, the Planet Hollywood and the Rainforest Cafe, within a quarter-mile of the Nike superstore, the Virgin superstore, the GAP superstore, the Viacom superstore, the Banana Republic superstore and yes, the Disney superstore. The front of the building is covered in a 50-foot-high sparkly turquoise glass facade, in which is embedded the multi-colored logo of DisneyQuest, yet another deconstructivist rendering of the 50-year-old Mouse Icon, this time done in scribbly-yet-professional,
loose-yet-market-tested looping crayolian lines.
The concept of DisneyQuest is pretty easy to understand: take a Six-Flags-style
amusement park, rides and all, and cram it into a five-story enclosed structure in the
middle of an urban environment. And how, may you ask, does one do that? The same
way all Hollywood action movies are now made -- virtually. DisneyQuest has a
rollercoaster, a log flume, a funhouse, shoot-em-up games and everything else one would expect from a warm Saturday in July. But instead of rickety wooden structures, the wind in your hair and the sun on your face, these rides consist of hydraulic chairs,
goggle-glasses, and videoscreens that would put the Jumbotron Corporation to shame. It is computer-generated amusement. It is Showbiz Pizza injected with steroids. It is Chuck E Cheese gone horribly, horribly wrong.
I watch from the sidewalk as the ever-looping two-minute video commercial runs loudly to the annoyance of the yuppie passersby. "Design your own space-age
rollercoaster -- then ride it! Be transported directly into a comic book! Ride the rapids
with Pocohontas -- and actually get wet!" I let the diznee-hypnosis break through the
haze of my five bourbon and cokes. Hmm. DisneyQuest. I have money in my wallet,
after all. Hell, my big plans for the night were to go home, get stoned and masturbate. I
push my way through the revolving doors.
You have to hand it to Disney when it comes to at least one thing -- they do know how to build a structure that simply oozes upcoming excitement from every corner. The lobby of DisneyQuest looks like an overbright, primary-colored corporate foyer, complete with custom hand-tiled floor, a large three-dimensional bronze version of the logo built within an antique-looking astronomical dome, and oversized, faux-classical busts of Disney characters lining the walls, curiously tweaked to subconsciously remind one of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will without quite ever making the connection too closely. The lobby is designed to handle a massive crowd of several hundred, with snaking black ropes strung throughout the room, but as I walk in it is only me and one other couple purchasing tickets. Maybe it's a slow weekend.
DisneyQuest works much the same way as DisneyWorld did in 1976 when my family
first went. Everything inside the structure, from the "rides" to the individual videogames, costs an arbitrary amount of "points" in which to partake. For $16 one receives a hard-plastic debit card, on which you are credited with 70 points. In true
Book-of-Revelations style, this "mark of the Beast" is required for entry to each sinful
pleasure, the points being automatically deducted as you pass through each entrance gate. And just like a good Reservation-run casino, there are "Disney ATMs" every twenty feet inside the building, where you can continue to add points to your card for additional money all night long. For $32 you can go hog-wild and purchase a special gold card which allows for unlimited passage into all diversions for a fourteen-hour period. I make a quick glance at the list of attractions and wisely decide to purchase the limited $16 card.
The emotional apex of the lobby is the mysterious "VenturePort" elevators at the south
end of the room, oversized gold doors with perky waiting attendants. They carry the
same unnamed excitement, in miniature form, that I experienced all three times I went to DisneyWorld as a child, riding the monorail up to the grand archway of the Magic
Kingdom, the fabled Gateway to Fun that would set my heart racing. Even being the
fully-adult, drunk, cynical little shit that I am now, I can't help but to feel a bit of the
same excitement as I run my card through the curiously-bureaucratic magnetic swipe and climb aboard my urban rocketship.
Another thing you have to credit to Disney -- they have become masters at making even
the most mundane detail of the entertainment experience something unique and magical. In fact, the success of Disney has created an entire cottage industry, complete with its own invented vocabulary ("imagineering," "total consumerist environment"), surprise successes (just how many Hard Rocks are there now?) and dismal failures (did someone say "Fashion Cafe?"). Who else but Disney would think of turning a two-story elevator ride into a fully-animated 45-second extravaganza, complete with mirror-derived three-dimensionality and synchronized flashbulbs from the ceiling as the elevator "blasts off?"
The opening of the VenturePort on floor 3 is like Willy Wonka opening the tiny musical
lock onto the fabulous Chocolate Room, where "everything is edible...I mean eatable...I
mean, you can eat everything you can see!" The lobby of the third floor
is like the original first-floor entranceway but exploded; almost...okay, Išll say it...a
disneyfied version of Disney , if you can imagine such a thing. It's a subtle
joke that works only for those of us adults who are forced to work in Corporate America: the floor of a downtown skyscraper as if it has been taken over one late night by magical fairies and tool-wielding elves and extras from Maurice Sendak stories. The kid in us is ready to run with a mad dash towards the neon lights poking out of four recessed hallways in each corner; the adult in us is wishing our workplaces would look like this come Monday morning.
Like all Disney enterprises, DisneyQuest is split into four sections which run up and
down the height of the building: "ExploreZone," the toddler-and-grandma section of the
park, with very quiet rides and lots of benches; "ReplayZone," a Disney attempt at
recreating Coney Island, complete with bumper cars and skeetball; "CreateZone," a series of hands-on computer games which fulfill the charge of "educational" much the same half-assed way that "Barney" fulfills the definition of "children's programming;" and "ScoreZone," the laser-blasting, light-sabre-wielding, video-arcade quadrant for the snot-nosed teenager in all of us. I, of course, head straight for ScoreZone.
A third thing in which to credit Disney -- their quest for complete and utter cross-product promotion is almost complete. Nothing in DisneyQuest is a stand-alone product. The bumper cars are called "Buzz Lightyear's AstroBlaster;" the Sonic-Hedgehogesque "jump around and collect things" 3-D videogame is riddled with characters from Hercules . Even the 30-foot-high full-body multiplayer video pinball machine (I kid you not) has somehow been designed to evoke a "Mighty Ducks" hockey theme. (And by the way, how Disney has been able to get so much mileage publicity-wise out of such a dismal commercial failure as The Mighty Ducks is completely beyond me.) The Disneyfication of America is getting closer and closer to realityABC, a national broadcast network owned by Disney, shows nothing but Disney-owned cartoons on Saturday mornings, Disney-owned movies on Saturday nights, and sports on Saturday afternoons sponsored by ESPN, a Disney-owned cable channel which makes a curious amount of cameos in the same Disney-owned movies being shown on ABC on Saturday nights, which are turned into Disney-owned spinoff cartoons run by the Disney-owned ABC on Saturday mornings, with between-air breaks recorded in Times Square, a Disney-owned piece of land in New York City containing Disney-owned Broadway theatres showing Disney-owned stage musicals based on Disney-owned movies which are re-broadcast on Saturday nights by Disney-owned ABC, with advertisements for DisneyWorld, Disneyland, DisneyQuest and the Disney Channel scattered throughout. Whew! It is of course dangerous, evil and possibly the fourth sign of the Apocalypse. But one can't help but to admire their pure, unadulterated sense of greed, much like we silently cheer for Michael Douglas in Wall Street even as we loathe him.
ScoreZone is a 14-year-old's wet dream, a four-story video arcade crammed with every sit-down, stand-up, drive-a-car, ski-the-slopes, shoot-a-gun virtual-reality arcade game ever invented in the history of time. I see virtual activities in ScoreZone that I think boring even in real life, like a fishing game where a physical rod and reel are connected to a video screen and you spend your time lazily skimming a digital fly across the surface of a digital pond, occasionally jerking the physical rod to get a rise out of the bored-looking digital fish. No...really . There are ten different car-racing games, six different motorcycle games, four skiing games and a game where you actually pilot a 747 across three connected television screens comprising 180 degrees of motion. Unfortunately the videogames are all rigged to work with the Disney Debit Cards (5 to 8 points per game) and the entire "family-oriented" arcade is in actuality overrun by surly teenaged boys who have chosen to skip everything else in the building and continually plug their cards into the games hour after hour, much to the relief of their exhausted parents who have cut off their umbilical cords and are currently on the other side of the "park." Much as I try, I cannot find a free moment the entire evening to play the "Star Wars Trilogy" videogame, possibly the most kick-ass-looking videogame I've ever seen in my life. It reminds me of my teenaged 1985 visit to DisneyWorld, where my exasperated parents would say goodbye to my brother and me each morning at nine and we would spend the day hitting on girls and riding Space Mountain a dozen times in a row.
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Copyright 1999, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.
