Disney/OKC Trip Reflections, as Time Floats By

The grind has started once again, and there were some ideas I wanted to get to before I fully forget and give up the connection.

One: Epcot has the "countries" in the back, around the lake. Each lives down an alley, and in the alley every stereotype of what many Americans think that place is like. "Italy" is really the peach colored buildings from Tuscany and marble columns from our dreams of Rome and palazzos of Venice. "Germany" is, at Epcot, reduced to what we think of Bavaria, lederhosen and Oktoberfest all the time. "Japan" has been reduced to Kyoto postcards, "China" the forbidden city.

As a visitor, you can tell they spent a ton of money to make everything look like, well, what they wanted it to look like. One thing that makes me nervous is that for many of the visitors, this may fulfill their desire to go visit the real thing. I felt the same way about Harambe and the Nepali village from the Animal Kingdom the following day, but in reality, it's easier to convince Americans to visit Europe or Japan than east Africa or the Himalayas.

Two: How much control do you give to your toddler, and how much peace do you want to experience in any given day? My toddler wanted very much to drive the greet car during our visit to the Autopia at the Magical Kingdom. When our turn came up, there was no green car, but it seemed like there may have been one in the next group of cars.

I had to decide in a fraction of a second whether to let my kid dictate the terms of our driving experience (as in, let people go ahead until we got a green car, a complicated move that would require perfect timing) or just take what was present at the time (and have a less than ideal ride). I chose the latter, and had a screaming boy for the entire ride. I'm not sure if he actually got the lesson, that you can't always get what you want, but I was trying.

Three: The redesign of Mickey Mouse and his crew:

A few years back the Disney people tasked animator Paul Rudish with updating Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, Daisy, and many other canon characters from the animated shorts people my age and older grew up with. I guess the feeling was the characters were falling behind the 90's and later wave of animation created by Genndy Tartovsky and his comrades at Cartoon Network. Of which, Paul Rudish is an alum.

Which has also lead to complaints that the redesign is an awful Cartoon Network-ification of Disney hallmarks.

In the cafeteria/food court at the Pop Century, and on one of the channels in the room, these cartoon ran on a loop, and I tried to figure out how I felt about them. And then the "Mumbai Madness" episode came on, and I was hooked.

I am a fan. It is different, but in my position at work and as a father, I've learned that you can't have a knee-jerk reaction to change. These cartoons could suck, but if so, they should suck on their own merit, and not just because they're new. And, luckily for fans of animation, the generally don't suck, they're clever and enjoyable, and get back to the heart of what an old-timey Mickey cartoon was about, with the occasionally updated adult joke.

Four: Getting to see the Dolman family for only a few total hours over thirty hours of visiting has turned the entire thing in my memory to dream-time understanding. After a week in Orlando, a few hours in Oklahoma was already going to be tough to wrap your head around, and now, three weeks later, it's faded even further. Love the entire family, of course.

Five: Now that the summer is totally and fully over with, the trip to Italy has receded even further into the memory and taken on even more of the dream-time understanding in the recesses in my imagination.

Cass, in his own wonderful way, still remembers parts, with his, "Daddy, mommy, daddy, mommy, airplane!" and "Daddy, me, daddy, airplane ride!" and the like, and as his language develops more, these trip may fade into simply impressions--sounds, smells, visuals---that could shape his worldly views.

And that's fine with me.

Long live the Summer of Plane Trips!