Due to the response from the brilliantly designed 1970’s Walt Disney World shopping bag seen in my previous post, I’ve dug out this beauty. If you, like myself, were an aesthetically astute child who visited Disneyland in the 70’s, then you’ll remember how captivated you were by this print and how you didn’t care what souvenir you got as long as it came in this bag. Because I like you, I’ve scanned and created a big desktop wallpaper version of it.

Here in LA, Universal Studios has launched a new ad campaign seemingly inspired by hitchhiking, panhandling, and homelessness. The billboard on the corner of their property at Barham shows a family holding a sign reading “A LIFETIME OF MEMORIES” – a bit unclear if that’s what the family was looking for, or had already achieved (and felt the need to tell you by scrawling it on cardboard?). When I saw it I thought it had to be the all-time worst ad I’d ever seen for a theme park. But after scanning their site for a photo of the billboard (because I HAD to blog about it) I discovered they’d shot a whole commercial with the “people holding cardboard signs” concept – only, the people in the commercial look gloomy and we never see a vehicle or magic Universal Studios bus come to pick them up, the camera simply drives past as if they were just another Mexican selling oranges in the median.

So I shlepped down the hill in the rain to photograph the billboard when – oh heaven – there was an actual homeless person standing on the corner holding his own cardboard sign in front of the fake family holding their cardboard sign. His name was Ruben and he hadn’t noticed the ironic nature of the composition he was part of. (I took his pic then gave him five bucks.)

Which brings me to the moment when I offer Universal Studios my own free bad PR idea: Go guerrilla marketing with this and pay the panhandlers of LA to hold your cardboard signs. They’re already standing at the busiest intersections, only now, instead of spare change, they’ll be begging to be taken to the “Jurassic Park River Plunge” – and just like the people in the commercial, everyone will ignore them.

In other theme park advertising news, Disney, wisely deciding to take their campaign in a more upscale direction, hired Annie Leibovitz to shoot celebrities playing dress up in designer versions of Disney character costumes. (A $325,000 Harry Winston tiara and Steuben glass slippers for Scarlett Johansson as Cinderella.)

It’s a smart idea and the execution is brilliant. Mostly so because they’re a tad dark in tone but also because the celeb’s expressions are more complex than the beaming smile one would’ve expected in such an ad. Look at Beyonce in the spinning teacup, she’s not squealing like a little girl, she reclining in a VIP lounge, teasing you with that hand on her lap. Granted, I don’t see a conceptual reason it had to be celebrities, but it does ensure more press and one can hardly fault a company for trying to get that.

The print versions will run in Conde Nast publications including Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue, with the aim of attracting an older more sophisticated audience.

The decision to represent the Disney parks as high-end adult amusements is not a new idea though.
John Hench, Herbert Ryman, and other designers of the original Disney parks consistently saw a day at Disneyland as such. In a 1960’s Hench rendering of the Circlevision 360 theater in Tomorrowland, women clutch their furs as if it were a night at the opera. And a late 1970’s Ryman concept painting suggests a visit to Epcot was worthy of nothing less than your Sunday best, then in 1988, he painted formal evening attire on those watching the fireworks over Euro Disneyland.

But my favorite example of promoting Disney parks as more adult fare is a 1970’s Walt Disney World shopping bag (it hangs framed on my wall) with a spectacular graphic design featuring Mickey (the walk-around version, not the cartoon) and the castle, but not a single child. There’s a couple clinking wine glasses over lobster, a chef, jazz musician, hula dancer, and nightclub singer, a man golfing, a couple in a canoe,  a woman on horseback, another playing tennis - and everyone riding Dumbo and Space Mountain, they’re all adults.

Interesting aside: When Walt was planning the Florida parks, which he didn’t live to see, he’d imagined they’d be visited primarily by a sophisticated east coast clientele which would require a more elegant theme park experience than the casual west coast atmosphere of Disneyland. Boy was he wrong about that one.

But that’s a whole other tangent, so I’ll just say, I hope the Leibovitz promos do change any perception that the Disney parks are all cotton candy and culturally empty calories because there is an elegance, maturity, and complexity built into those parks (maybe not always maintained, but there nevertheless) and it’s refreshing to see it acknowledged again.

…although not for long I’d guess.
Wally Wood created the original Illustration in 1966 shortly after Walt’s death for Paul Krassner’s publication The Realist, and Paul still sells posters of it on his site. Did Paul license the artwork to SITUATIONORMAL who made the shirt? I’ll find out in the morning. If not, then he’ll be the one issuing the “Cease and Desist.” For now they’re available at Krudmart.

The subject matter reminds me of a conversation I had with the late John Hench, one of the original designers of Disneyland. He was wondering if the success of the Disney parks wasn’t partly due to humans having a “genetic memory of the garden of Eden or some other paradise” and our desire to return to that paradise, or as he put it, “a land of free love and all the bananas you could eat.” At which point he nudged me and said, “but I don’t know what the ladies thought of it.”

UPDATE: SITUATIONORMAL did not license the artwork from Paul Krassner and has been sent the “Cease and Desist” letter as expected. I’m cuirous, whose will arrive first, the one from Disney’s Lawyers or Paul’s?

See my Disney/Disney-like tag below for more subversive Disney whoo-ha.

This is Last Stand at Big Thunder Mountain, a large-scale model of Disney’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad attraction, on display through February 3 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica.

It’s hardly a faithful representation, it lacks the exposed dinosaur bones and western town, but the inclusion of plasma balls in a tinfoil-lined cave is a vast improvement. And frankly, I think the world could use a few more models of Big Thunder Mountain.
Here’s past work I found on his site - also low-end materials - also fabulous.