Today begins a little background on my relationship with Disney. This post was originally published in November, 2007.

Footnoted’s post on Disney sprawl (among other things) unfortunately brought back some painful memories of an ill-fated trip to Disney World.

I was working for a for-profit university and our task was to fly to Disney World to investigate the possibility of hosting a student event there. Even though I’m pretty anti-Disney, I’m not, say, a Miss Trunchbull, so I used the free ticket there as an excuse to take my then-seven-year-old daughter.

She was thrilled, of course, but had to endure a day and a half of meetings with grown-ups.

I cannot even begin to describe the idiocracy of those meetings.

And the sales guys.

Since we would be bringing quite a large group of attendees, they were willing to bend over backwards for us: Shrink-wrapping the Disney buses with our logo, adding desks to about 300 of their guest rooms, and concealing the life-sized fake-town backdrop at the “extreme stunt show” on a backlot of Disney-MGM Studios.

When they took us to lunch, it was “on the mouse.” If I heard Well, that’s the Disney difference! one more time, I was going to throw up.

Anyway, my favorite moment was when one of the sales guys leaned down to my daughter:

Sales guy: So, who’s your favorite Disney Princess, honey?
Daughter: Umm . . . (looks frantically at her mother) . . . I don’t know.
Sales guy: Oh, it’s so hard to choose just one, isn’t it?
Me: No, that’s not it. She doesn’t know who you are talking about.
Sales guy:

Today Disney spends four billion dollars marketing Disney princesses to girls. And babies. And brides. And everyone else. Amazon.com lists no fewer than 7,806 Disney Princess “products.”

My daughter and I stayed an extra day at Disney World (it rained). Disney did not get that event contract with us. And I can guarantee that I’ll never set foot in Disney World again.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14, 2010 at 6:44 am and is filed under Disney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.