• 1 Disney now owns and runs twelve parks around the globe, with six parks in the United States alone. (...)
• 2 Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 159.

2And yet, for all its appearances as a self-enclosed and self-sufficient business, Disneyland (just as later Disney parks) does not operate in realms of fantasy entirely divorced from the outside world.1 Indeed, this paper’s primary intent is to evaluate how Disney’s showmanship has helped the company enlist the technical or financial support of major outside corporations, whose products and messages are carefully woven into the parks’ narratives of progress and prosperity. Shopping and exposure to corporate messages have become so integral to the visitor’s experience and to the Disney parks’ business model that some sociologists such as Alan Bryman now speak of “Disneyization,” meaning “a mode of delivery [and] staging of goods and services […] to increase the appeal of goods and services that might otherwise appear mundane or uninteresting.”2

• 3 For a literature review on Disney theme parks’ glorification of private corporations, see: Alan Bry (...)

3But, while the parks’ promotion of capitalism and, more particularly, corporations has been widely noted, the specific terms of their participation in the parks’ overall business model or their implications regarding the political economy of the media have seldom been discussed.3 Instead, critics have primarily focused on how the presence of corporations affects the parks’ ideological subtext, especially with regards to the themes of technological progress and consumption. This article will consequently examine how Disneyland’s unique business ecosystem has allowed the Walt Disney corporation to pitch itself as the corporations’ ideal partner for their communication efforts with the general public, evidencing transformation in the United States’ post-World War II economy as well as mass media’s role in the process.

• 4 For examples of fan-oriented books, see: John Hench and Peggy Van Pelt, Designing Disney (New York: (...)
• 5 The Walt Disney Company, a notoriously secretive company, has now closed its archives to outside re (...)

4The analysis will rest in part on essential, yet often overlooked (at least in academic discussions) primary sources by Disney park designers, managers, and collaborators, including fan-oriented books published by the Walt Disney corporation, as well as more confidential internal documents collected by fans or held in university archives.4 While the occasionally self-serving dimension of documents intended for external audiences may of course invite caution, such first-hand accounts provide much needed new insight into the creation and management of the parks’ commercial environment. Those documents will be complemented by equally untapped secondary sources, such as works of fan scholarship, including fan-published autobiographies of park managers, “unofficial encyclopedias,” or chronicles of the parks’ creation stories.5

• 6 This distinction goes to the Fleischer Studio, whose Felix the Cat spearheaded the studio’s licensi (...)
• 7 Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Disney Editions, 1994), 106–8.
• 8 J.P. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 20 (...)

7Though not the first animation studio to capitalize on the sale of its characters for use by others, Disney was the first to most systematically employ this model for its development, using almost any opportunity to cash in on outside companies’ willingness to associate their brand with Disney’s rising star.6 Less than a year after his first public appearance (in the 1929 short Steamboat Willie), Mickey Mouse’s likeness already graced school writing tablets (the first Disney merchandise recorded) or embroidered handkerchiefs. Throughout the 1930s, the studio’s mascot seemed to drive sales almost as fast as it captured the nation’s hearts, saving Depression-hit companies from bankruptcy on at least two occasions. Selling more than 235,000 units within four months, a $1 Mickey-and-Minnie windup handcar reportedly helped bring the Lionel toy train company back to solvency after months of sluggish sales. Ingersoll Waterbury likewise found a surprise hit with its Mickey Mouse watch, selling 11,000 units at New York’s Macy’s on the day of its release and allowing the company to expand its staff from 300 to 3,000 in a matter of weeks.7 Such examples of success helped keep Disney’s licensing office busy throughout the entire decade, securing agreements with seventy-five manufacturers in the United States, forty-five in England, twenty in Canada (not to mention six in France, Spain, and Portugal, each).8

• 9 Disney’s entry into merchandising and, more specifically, the sale of goods marketed toward childre (...)

8Not restricted to sole licensing partnerships, Disney’s merchandising efforts largely hinged on the cooperation of outside companies eager to exploit the popularity of Disney’s characters, as exemplified by the spectacular development in the 1930s of the Mickey Mouse Clubs. Developed in close cooperation with toy manufacturers, theater operators, and department store owners (where membership cards were procured), the club’s role was to tie together the consumption of Disney films and Disney toys, boosting audiences and sales for both at once. Meetings were held in movie-theaters and took on the form of Saturday matinee programs, mixing talent contests and other “character-building” activities with a healthy dose of Disney shorts. Designed as a mutually beneficial arrangement, the scheme not only allowed theater operators to fill their venues when virtually no adult would patronize them; by forcing recruits to regular trips to the department stores’ toy section, it also encouraged the year-long consumption of toys, retailers and toy manufacturers hoped.9

• 10 In a 1931 letter to Carl Solloman, Roy Disney – Walt’s brother – thus notably wrote: “The sale of a (...)

9With over 1,500 chapters and somewhere between 150 and 200,000 members by the end of the decade, the clubs proved an overnight sensation—at a time when parents were desperate to provide cheap forms of leisure for their entertainment-starved kids. One of the club’s effects was to turn Disney shorts into advertisements for consumer goods branded with Mickey Mouse or any other of the studio’s characters. Disney managers conversely reasoned that the pervasiveness of Disney products in households kept kids “Mickey Mouse minded” and worked as a “daily advertisement” for cartoons, earning the studio the loyalty of young audiences.10

• 11 In 1953, the park was slated to open with a total of 73 rides, exhibitions, and attractions, and 93 (...)
• 12 Bryman, Disney and His Worlds, 159.

10It is no surprise, then, that ever since its opening in 1955, Disneyland has presented itself not only as yet another offering in Disney’s ever-expanding media galaxy but also as an additional vehicle for the sale of products more or less closely related with the Disney brand. To some extent, consumption has been elevated to one of the park’s underlying themes and motifs, with shopping itself promoted to the status of entertainment. Somewhat reflected by the parks’ near-equal shops-to-attractions ratio (there currently are 50 shops and restaurants to 49 attractions at Disneyland), this conflation of shopping with entertainment results in part from staging techniques that immerse shoppers into canonical story worlds to increase the appeal of products on sale.11 The presentation and sale of real products and services in Disneyland’s imaginary locales provides a good case of what Alan Bryman calls “hybrid consumption” (otherwise known as “shoptainment”), that is the “transformation of shopping into play”—when, thanks to the park designers’ showmanship, “consumption becomes part of the immersion into fantasy.”12 As a result, shopping comes to be framed as part of a broader media experience, yet again tying consumption with images and narratives primarily associated with the Disney brand. By the park designers’ own admission, the purchase of souvenirs is critical to the visitor’s symbolical participation in the park’s fictional worlds—offering a tangible payoff to an otherwise immaterial and momentary experience:

• 14 By this expression, one refers to the process by which emotions are sold on the marketplace. As suc (...)
• 15 WED Enterprises, You’re Onstage at Disneyland.

11Disneyland’s blending of real consumption and imaginary participation is central to what some critics have identified as the parks’ “commodification of emotions,” suggesting that far more than mere material goods, what visitors pay for in the parks is some form of symbolical and emotional gratification.14 As a 1962 training manual puts rather bluntly: “The guest pays us to make him happy”—a somewhat crude rendition of Disneyland’s original mission statement, “We create happiness.”15

• 16 Consumerism is here used in the sense of the Oxford English Dictionary: “Name given to a doctrine a (...)
• 17 Disney’s vision of progress through technology comes loaded with a good dose of nostalgia for the v (...)
• 18 To drive its point even further, Disneyland Paris’s Main Street arranges its commercial environment (...)
• 19 Wright, The Imagineering Field Guide to Magic Kingdom, 22.
• 20 Wright, The Imagineering Field Guide to Magic Kingdom, 30.

12A prominent case in point of how Disney’s showmanship serves to create an atmosphere conducive to consumption, Main Street USA (the park’s obligatory point of entry) houses no major attractions but instead is almost exclusively devoted to shopping. Recreating the Main Street of a mid-sized city in the Gay Nineties, the land’s underlying theme is, quite unabashedly, that of joyous consumerism—the celebration of an age of newfound prosperity and material abundance for all, as a result of mass production and mass consumption.16 Disney’s is a business-friendly take on the Gilded Age—one expunged of all traces of social strife and discontent (in what was otherwise a turbulent era) and where business is presented as inherently conducive to technological and economic progress.17 This vision of a post-scarcity America is supported by the street’s vibrant visual environment, as exemplified by the shop’s oversized windows (lower than usual, so that children can peer inside), their constantly replenished shelves, as well as their extremely ornate façades, whose lavish decorative details and elaborate millworks bear witness to advances in mass production techniques.18 As one official Disney guidebook has it, Main Street is a tribute to “Walt’s heartfelt patriotism,” “a place where people are friendly, hard work is rewarded, and everybody shares a dream for a better life.”19 It is the very spirit of American capitalism and its virtues that the land’s Emporium at Orlando’s Magic Kingdom aims to demonstrate. Meant to convey the success story of its imaginary owner, the store’s flourishing business is made especially apparent by its luxurious expansion. The new wing’s modern Edwardian style provides a striking contrast with the Victorian decoration of the store’s original location, suggesting growth over time as well as conveying something of the owner’s Protestant work ethics, whereby profits have been systematically reinvested in the means of production.20

• 21 To some extent, those deals drew from Disney’s experience with ABC – a partnership critical to Disn (...)
• 22 As a 1953 training manual notes, “Most of Main Street’s shops are operated by companies that were b (...)
• 23 As the above-quoted manual explains: “The Disney Team is much larger than just the Disney organizat (...)
• 24 In this area, the park suffered a few misfires, as shops – at least initially – were “operated firs (...)
• 25 Those prohibitively expensive participant contracts were seldom welcome by the parks’ purchasing de (...)

14One such form of corporate partnership in Disneyland is the sale of commercial leases to outside companies. Born out of technical and economic necessity, these partnerships allowed lessees to provide technical help and expertise in sectors of business (especially the service industry) initially unfamiliar to the Disney corporation. Just as importantly, those deals allowed the company to not only offload the costs of staffing and operating a number of shops and restaurants, but also collect rents, providing a much-needed source of additional revenue at a time when few investors backed Disney’s project yet.21 At the park’s opening in 1955, Bank of America was thus left in charge of running and staffing Main Street U.S.A.’s bank.22 Somewhat more surprisingly, five agribusiness giants were made responsible for managing restaurants serving the products they had become most famous for. Those were Frito Lay, Aunt Jemima’s, Chicken of the Sea, Swift & Co, and Maxwell House.23 These early partnerships most likely served as opportunities for skills transfers from the outside in, when the Disney corporation grew confident that not only shops represented a steady source of extra revenue but also that it could run them itself.24 A great many leases were therefore not renewed upon their expiration, and so did Maxwell’s Coffee House close within two years—only to be taken over internally. In addition to leases, other commercial partnerships were struck for the sale of distribution rights to a few corporations essentially paying for exclusive access to Disneyland’s closed market—much in contradiction of the park’s apparent glorification of economic competition. Those deals restricted not only the items that visitors could buy (with Kodak the sole purveyor of film), but also what products restaurants could use (such as Oscar Mayer hot dogs or Borden milk).25

• 26 The least furnished of all lands upon Disneyland’s opening in 1955 (possibly because the farthest r (...)

15Not just restricted to leases or distribution rights, commercial deals with outside companies also involved the sale of advertisement real estate, with parks serving as showcases for the products and know-how of American titans of industry. By “sponsoring” an attraction, companies would not only attach their names to it but also display their products in thematically appropriate environments, exposing them to millions of captive visitors. Initially limited to the attractions’ queue areas, corporate exhibitions grew into attractions in their own rights—as exemplified by the wildly popular Monsanto Home of the Future. Designed and built by Monsanto, the attraction was meant to demonstrate advances in the plastics industry, as applied to construction and home appliances. Naturally enough, Tomorrowland’s attractions offered countless opportunities for sponsorship by technological corporations like General Electric, Bell Systems, or Monsanto—which, from 1955 to 1972, took on alone the sponsorship of four attractions in total (see Table n° 1: List of Disneyland’s 33 participants, 1967).26

• 27 Koenig, Realityland, 153.

16Even corporate lessees operating restaurants and businesses at Disneyland came to regard their involvement primarily as publicity stunts, as the exorbitant leases soon demanded by the Disney corporation eventually made all hopes of breaking even irrelevant. Lessees, Disney managers argued, were to regard their participation from a pure publicity standpoint and content themselves with basking in the park’s alleged “halo effect”—namely, the privilege of associating the participants’ operations with one of the United States’ most beloved institutions.27 In truth, Disney managers were only taking advantage of motivations that had been apparent all along. Food conglomerates such as Aunt Jemima’s or Frito Lay had, of course, no particular interest in running a restaurant of their own, if not to reinforce their brand’s image and connection with the country’s culinary traditions by making their homes at Main Street U.S.A. or Frontierland.

• 28 Such was the association between television, advertisement, and consumerism that Robert Sarnoff, pr (...)

17As both a retail outlet and a medium, Disneyland is also at least in part the product of similar conditions which gave rise to the shopping center and television, as well as served similar objectives. Both developments supported new marketing techniques for the promotion of consumption. Madison Avenue was quick to make television its medium of choice, allowing the advertising industry to develop its scope and methods dramatically over the decade.28 The development of malls and large national retail chains likewise made the United States’ retail environment increasingly compatible with product standardization and mass consumption.

• 29 Much in the way that the names of products were directly incorporated into television series titles (...)
• 30 In the words of Victor Gruen, an architect and key promoter of the shopping mall in 1950s and 1960s (...)

18In this regard, Disneyland’s twin function helps address the nature of its relations with outside companies, which are at once tenants in Disneyland’s commercial environment and advertisers on its “show.” The Walt Disney Company thus adopted the standard television practices of corporate sponsorship of entertainment or product placement within show content.29 Disneyland likewise replicated not only the form and function of 1950s malls but also their mode of operation and tenant selection. The park presented the same inward-looking, pedestrian, and semi-public environment, surrounded with ample parking space and in direct proximity with major thoroughfares (in Disneyland’s case, the Santa Ana Freeway, completed 1956). Crucially, it also borrowed shopping centers’ practice of “merchandising,”—the fine-tuned assortment of shops and lessees, reflecting identical efforts among mall developers and operators for the creation of a planned market environment.30

• 31 As the table suggests, other sectors of industry represented in Disneyland included air travel (TWA (...)

20Unsurprisingly, major corporations represented in Disneyland (many the product of mega-mergers and near-monopolistic operations) were from sectors of industry identified with post-World War II economic growth, whose contribution to and promotion of consumerism was essential in shaping new ways of life. This was especially true of the automotive industry, represented by car tires manufacturer Goodyear, oil company Richfield, or carmaker AMC, briefly Circarama’s sponsor (1955-1960). A leading contributor to the United States’ economic growth, the car industry at one point employed up to one-sixth of the country’s total workforce and soon established itself as a decisive promoter of the consumerist lifestyle, through its practice of planned obsolescence, its reliance on the advertising industry, or even its indirect contribution to sprawl and resulting malls. Also, prominently represented in the parks were the agribusiness sector (which in the 1950s witnessed a boom in processed, and especially frozen, foods), the plastics industry (with polymers like DuPont’s polyethylene the new material of choice for mass-produced consumer goods), or the service sectors. The presence of both INA-Insurance Company of North America and Bank of America notably spoke to America’s new suburban, consumerist condition. INA emerged from World War II one of the United States’ largest insurance companies thanks in part to its tremendously successful all-inclusive homeowners policy, while Bank of America and its rivals thrived by providing credit (home loans or consumer credit) on levels unseen since the 1920s.31

• 32 As Richard Foglesong notes, those attractions – General Electric’s Carousel of Progress, Ford’s Mag (...)

21Disney’s showmanship served corporate interests so well that cooperation with outside companies expanded well beyond the confines of Disneyland to the New York World Fair of 1965-1966, where Disney’s Imagineers (the Disney corporation’s term for park designers) designed four pavilions—three of which were funded by corporations (the fourth, by the State of Illinois). Upon the fair’s closure, all pavilions were repatriated to Disneyland, providing for the park’s cheap and rapid development.32

• 33 By charging “primary sponsors” a minimum of $35 million for a ten-year lease, the Walt Disney Compa (...)

22Disney’s work at the fair was to set a precedent for the funding of parks and attractions, with development and construction costs gradually passed on to “sponsors,” now forking out between 80 to 90% of the funds for the attractions of EPCOT. Developed in close cooperation with large American corporations, the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” was designed as a kind of permanent world fair where Disney hoped to serve as a “middleman” between consumers and faceless conglomerates suffering from a trust deficit (for a complete list of “primary sponsors,” see table n°2).33 As former president of Imagineering Marty Sklar explains:

• 35 In both versions of the attraction’s script, alternatives to oil are presented as experimental, whi (...)

23Against a payment of at least 35 million dollars (but sometimes twice that amount), participants were given made-to-measure pavilions to educate the public on significant contemporary issues in the areas energy, transportation, food, or communications—more often than not reflecting the interests of corporations and turning the Disney company into their more or less willing mouthpiece. Exxon’s now-defunct Universe of Energy was thus generally dismissive of renewable energies (not to say entirely silent on global warming), while Kraft’s (now Chiquita’s) Living with the Land presents the future of agriculture as a high-tech, dirt-free venture, mostly dependent on corporate innovations.35

• 36 For a first-hand account of the Disney corporation’s efforts to secure funding from national govern (...)

24EPCOT’s considerable sponsorship fees meant that the participants’ prominence in the park’s environment was increased considerably, should it be only because the pool of sponsors was now reduced to a handful of mega-corporations only—each the exclusive representative a major field of US industry. Some of Disneyland’s historical participants (Bell, GE, Kodak or Coca-Cola) expanded their presence to EPCOT, while a few newcomers (GM, ExxonMobil, United Technologies or Metlife) were brought in. The situation was somewhat different at World Showcase: while funding was initially sought directly from national governments, the majority of national pavilions ended up funded by business consortiums from the countries represented.36

• 37 By requiring sponsors to shoulder somewhere between 80 to 90% of their pavilion’s construction cost (...)
• 38 Tim Onosko, “Tomorrow Lands,” OMNI, September 1982.
• 39 Sklar, Dream It! Do It!, 178.

25The unprecedented sums expected from Exxon and other sponsors also meant that their participation alone largely determined the park’s coming into existence, hence their considerable influence over the attractions’ contents and “subjective” treatment of facts, as one Imagineer regrets.37 While initially adamant that the shows were not “propaganda,”38 Marty Sklar has recently come to acknowledge that “we were undoubtedly very naïve about how many suggestions they [corporate sponsors] would have—and how vocally they argued for their point of view. […] Let’s just say there were a number of “facts” we thought could be more objective.”39 That the Disney company came to be so reliant on outside corporations for EPCOT’s creation is hardly a surprise, since the project was originally intended if not as a park, at least as a “showcase for the American free enterprise system” (loaded rhetoric at the time of the Cold War). As Walt Disney declared in his 1966 “EPCOT film”:

• 40 By the mid-1960s, the urban crisis had become so apparent that, in the absence of significant impro (...)
• 41 US Steel was left in charge of developing steel frames and prefabrication techniques for the constr (...)

26This televised address to the people of Florida was designed to sway the state’s lawmakers into adopting a law presented as vital for the project’s completion—one that would grant Disney with a private government, complete with powers normally held by Florida counties and cities. Another example of how Disney’s “showmanship” allowed the company to rally both corporate and government support by weaving “grand narratives” of technological progress, EPCOT was at the time of the address conceptualized as a real, futuristic community of 20,000 inhabitants. Drawing directly from Disneyland’s hub-and-spoke layout, EPCOT was thus to serve as test-market for the very corporations behind the city’s innovative transport, building and communication technologies. While ultimately not completed in the form originally presented by Disney, this grand narrative proved enough to secure the cooperation of Florida legislators, who overwhelmingly supported the adoption of Disney’s proposed “Reedy Creek Improvement District Act.”40 Just as importantly, Disney’s tales of progress through private initiative helped secure the technical cooperation of four industrial and technological giants in the overall design and construction of not just EPCOT but of the entire Disney World resort—a gigantic undertaking twice the size of Manhattan island, with US Steel, Monsanto, RCA Systems and Aerojet General Corporation developing new technologies for prefabricated construction, communication networks, or innovative trash collection systems.41

• 42 Walt Disney Productions, “Vast Walt Disney World Site to Become the Vacation Kingdom of the World,”(...)

27Keen to publicize their involvement in EPCOT, those corporations came to adopt Disney’s utopian rhetoric, testifying (if only publicly) to the persuasiveness of Disney’s vision for a better future driven by private corporations. This is especially apparent in the following sentences, excerpted from a 1969 press release published upon the start of Disney World’s construction—“a major step toward the realization of Walt Disney’s master plan” and “his concept for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” in Disney C.E.O. Donn Tatum’s words.42 Drawing an explicit connection between the Disney corporation, American industry, and the onward march of progress, Edward J. Bock, Monsanto’s president and CEO thus stated:

• 45 Kraft was the first corporate sponsor to pull out in 1992, soon followed by Coca-Cola, Kodak (both (...)

29With the completion of EPCOT in 1982, the Disney company had become almost entirely reliant on outside companies, whose contribution no longer represented a source of extra revenue but became central to the park’s contents and business model. However, there is now every indication that the system of partnerships has come to its end. Nine of EPCOT’s original “participants” have failed to renew their sponsorships of attractions over the last decade, leaving only four official sponsors in the park—General Motors, now represented by its Chevrolet subsidiary, Hewlett Packard, Siemens, and Chiquita. As some Imagineers readily admit, many pavilions were vanity projects for their sponsors’ CEOs, to the effect that sponsorships were often nixed upon the latter’s retirements. What’s more, the pavilions’ benefits were hard to measure and, if anything, never seemed quite worth their initial costs.45

• 46 Hollie Muir Packman and Fred L. Casmir, “Learning from the Euro Disney Experience,” International C (...)

30Also, while the parks’ environments have for more than sixty years now been carefully calibrated to encourage consumption among visitors, Disney’s formula has proved not entirely foolproof—as famously demonstrated by the economic woes of Disneyland Paris. The French park’s troubles have resulted not so much form low visitor turnout (only marginally below initial projections) as from disappointing per-capita sales in the park’s many shops and restaurants. Indeed, using their astounding (and until now unparalleled) success at Tokyo Disneyland as an indication of their appeal on foreign markets, Disney managers had mistakenly come to believe that demand for Disney merchandise was universal, in complete disregard of the Europeans’ thriftier spending habits.46

• 47 For examples, see : Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information, Studies in (...)

31Yet, beyond the shopping patterns of individual visitors lie larger scale issues: the parks’ systematic promotion of consumption and free-market competition suggests that parks (like much of the media) serve functions essential to capitalism itself. Over the years, the Disney company has made itself something of an unavoidable meeting point between the country’s corporations and the general public, shedding light on features and processes central to the media’s role in a capitalist economy—as notably argued by proponents of the political economy of the media.47 First identified in the pioneering work of economist Dallas Smythe, such features and processes notably include synergy, audience commodification, audience labor, and, finally, the “consciousness industry.”

• 48 Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Oxford: Polity, 2001); Janet Wasko, (...)
• 49 Eric Smoodin, Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (London: Routledge, 1994), 3.
• 50 For example, the technology for the World Fair’s and, later, Disneyland’s PeopleMover was inspired (...)
• 51 Created in 1994, the Disney Institute turned to providing professional development courses in 2000. (...)

32Synergy (and its corollaries, diversification, concentration, and integration) has surely become the most outstanding and discussed of all of the Disney corporation’s modes of operation, 48 with the park acting as the catalyst for the closer integration of the company’s various business operations. Walt’s entry in the theme park business prompted the studio to diversify its lines of business and expand horizontally to other media (such as television), and vertically to non-media sectors (such as retail or service), allowing the company to grow into “a sort of Tennessee Valley Authority of leisure and entertainment”49 and now the world’s second largest media conglomerate. Disney synergy occurs not just within (with the cross-promotion of transmedia franchises from one media platform to another) but also without, with skills and technology transfers from the outside in and vice-versa. From the outside in, with lessees and sponsors extending their help and expertise in the studio’s first step into the service industry, the creation of location- or theme-appropriate content for Disneyland’s or EPCOT’s attractions, or even the use and development of proprietary technologies in the parks.50 From the inside out, with the Disney company now in the business of showcasing and repackaging corporations, or even training outside employees to the parks and hospitality industries’ highest service standards.51

• 52 Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication, 149.
• 53 Dallas W. Smythe, “On the Political Economy of Communications,” Journalism Quarterly 37, no. 4 (196 (...)
• 54 Dallas W. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and (...)

33Yet another way in which parks fulfill media functions otherwise essential to industry in a capitalist economy is by selling and “producing audiences, en masse and in specific demographically desirable forms, for advertisers”52—a process first identified as audience commodification by Smythe.53 Far from the media’s end product, content fulfills purely instrumental functions and serves merely as “an inducement (gift, bribe or ‘Free lunch’) to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their loyal attention.”54 While participant affairs now represent only a marginal aspect of the parks’ business model, Disney was initially quick to capitalize on corporations’ interest in using parks as yet another advertising channel, making their contribution crucial to Disneyland’s or EPCOT’s overall feasibility and success.

• 55 For examples, see: Eran Fisher, “How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on (...)
• 56 Wasko, “The Study of the Political Economy,” 264.
• 57 Smythe explains that: “Because audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it command (...)
• 58 Bryman, The Disneyization of Society, 107.
• 59 Thibaut Clément, Plus vrais que nature. Les parcs Disney, ou l’usage de la fiction de l’espace et l (...)

34Somewhat anticipating later debates about online media, prosumerism, and the blurring of labor-leisure boundaries,55 Smythe elaborated that as audiences are sold to corporations, so are they put to work. Maintaining that “audiences’ exposure to advertising should be considered labor that added value to the audience commodity,” audience labor was thus to be considered as the inevitable corollary of the audience commodity. 56 That corporate exhibitions were originally branded as “free” (when other attractions required admission tickets, before the adoption of all-inclusive entry tickets in 1982) paradoxically points to their transactional nature, allowing the audience’s attention time to serve as payment for their educational or entertainment value.57 Yet audience labor in the parks far exceeds what has only recently been termed “the attention economy” and extends all the way to an underlying cognitive or emotional economy. Much in the way that the employees’ work is presented as mere play,58 so are visitors required to perform some tasks—such as exhibiting appropriate attitudes or feelings, with audience’s emotions literally put “on show” and a key ingredient to the entertainment on offer in the parks.59

• 60 Dallas W. Smythe, Counterclockwise (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 250–51. For structuralist, (...)
• 61 Upon the announcement of Universal Studios’ arrival in Orlando, the Walt Disney Company rushed for (...)
• 62 Ellis W Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State, (...)

35While already discussed at some length, the ideological function of the parks might likewise be best understood within the framework of Smythe’s political economy of the media—a role that Smythe refers to as “the consciousness industry,” that is to say the “pervasive reinforcement of the ideological basis of the capitalist system” for the production of “audiences prepared to be dutiful consumers.”60 In their efforts to promote corporations, parks likewise serve an overt ideological agenda especially conducive to the consumption of industry’s products, that is to say: the promotion of capitalism as an expression of American genius (as suggested by Main Street U.S.A.’s very name), the presentation of corporations as engines of progress, and their naturalization as the inevitable product of the free enterprise system. Yet, parks usually operate as closed, harmonious, and tightly regulated markets (the product of Disney’s “invisible hand”), sometimes even shielded from legal obligations otherwise imposed on competitors.61 Such ambiguities (namely, that monopolistic or government-supported business operations might serve as valid examples of the United States’ “free enterprise system”) might help present the public with a more readily acceptable version of free-market capitalism—one apparently free of cut-throat competition and other destructive excesses. Disney’s program for the voluntary cooperation of benevolent conglomerates likewise helps suggest that private companies are best left to their own devices, exempt from red-tape, or even acting as substitutes to government itself. Yet, as the product of allegedly mutually advantageous arrangement between the Florida state and the California studio, Disney’s private government built on earlier patterns of business-government cooperation (which the Disney studio experienced firsthand, as one of the nation’s foremost suppliers of World War II propaganda), expanding it to areas well beyond the Cold War-era Military-Industrial Complex. Maybe even more significantly, Disney’s rationale for EPCOT appealed to 1920s notions of “business progressivism” and “associationalism” of the kind supported by Herbert Hoover—in which self-regulating businesses would contribute expertise in the areas of “scientific rationalization” and “social engineering” and essentially form a private government conducive to “national reform, greater stability, and steady expansion.”62 Much in the way that Main Street was a vision of Gilded Age America tinged with nostalgia, so was EPCOT’s vision not of the future, but of the past.