Proof That I Am No Smarter Than A Disney Lab Rat.......

Disney, the magical kingdom, knows villains.  They practically invented villains, as far as kids in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are concerned.  Captain Hook?  Shere Khan?  The Queen of Hearts?   Yeah, my references are old school Disney.....or just old, but regardless.....the contemporary Quentin Tarantino shiftless-gun-toting-slacker type who has infiltrated modern filmdom still can't compete with my memory of certain big, bad, animated evil-mongers saying stuff like, "Off with her head!"

But - as I've touched upon before - Disney, the corporation, has its own brand of more subversive villain walking its halls in the form of Marketing People.  (Probably those responsible for inventing the cartoon villains, right?  Takes one to know one.)  They study babies in laboratories, clearly, and figure out ways to infiltrate the infant subconscious before they've even seen their first animated feature film.   B. and I witnessed this firsthand today at the mall.  We met for lunch and then afterward, decided to let Z. loose in the nearby play area which featured a rather interesting assortment of ginormous foam-y plastic-y foodstuff replicas that the kids could climb all over.  No sign of the industrial-looking monkey bars from my own youth here....because why climb something that looks like it comes from an oil refinery's garage sale when you can scale the side of a giant cupcake? 

Anyway, B. and I were having fun observing Z. crawling all over a watermelon slice the size of a Volkswagen when another mother wandered past carrying a Disney store shopping bag, which fatefully happened to hang at about Z. eye level.  Z. stopped in her tracks, her jaw dropped, she gasped and then reached toward this apparition as if it were made entirely of chocolate ice cream and was furthermore being toted by the Stay-Puff marshmallow man in one hand while he was walking a puppy with the other.  I can vouch for the fact that Z. has never seen a Disney movie or cartoon before in her life.  Yet she was compelled to stop whatever fun she was in the midst of (in this case, preparing to scale a giant hot dog the size of three sofas stacked end to end) and actually gasp in excitement.  What could possibly look more appealing to a toddler than a giant hot dog?  Apparently a plastic shopping bag.  It seems those evil Disney marketing geniuses have encrypted some sort of enticing visual code invisible to the adult eye, naturally, but - when scanned by a toddler retina - will produce behavior comparable to that displayed by control group test subjects after a three day long chocolate-ice-cream-marshmallow-fluff-and-puppy binge.  And the Disney folk have hidden this code on the side of an otherwise innocuous plastic shopping bag festooned with Tinkerbell's no-strings-attached-come-hither smile.

We were sufficiently fascinated by Z.'s reaction that we figured we had to visit the Disney store.   (See, they don't need hidden code to lure the parent types in....they just have use the code to elicit cute behavior from our youngest, most pliable offspring in order for us to take the bait....)  And so we visit the Disney store. 

This Disney store joint is bad news.  Wall-to-wall toys and costumes and stuff - beloved, familiar Disney character stuffed animals (some the size of city buses), and shiny fairy wings, and sparkling tiaras, and action figures, and glitter-encrusted little-girl-sized luggage sets, and dishware, and fuzzy slippers, and DVDs, and games.   As you're taking all this in, a loop of your favorite old-school Disney cartoons from when you were a kid intermingled with the new generation of Disney cartoons plays on the big, shiny, Big Brother-y flat screen TV that hovers over you.  Yep, those Disney Marketing villains are pouring you a big ol' nostalgia cocktail that packs quite a wallop.  As you hear the mice from Cinderella singing in the background, this weird, relaxed, happy reminiscence slowly overtakes you and your wallet.  You are powerless to resist these memory-laden visual and audio cues, because they have been thought up by the squadron of clever behavioral scientists that Disney has squirreled away in their labs working side by side next to their baby-hypnotists and encrypted-code shopping bag artistes.  And, it turns out, you are no match for their scientific wiles.

This nostalgia bomb is a weapon from Disney's psychological warfare arsenal that I didn't even see coming, and worse still, this is not how I envisioned this scenario playing out at all!  I could maybe see Z. begging me for a Tinkerbell costume, and I'd be rolling my eyes at the frivolity of it all and saying no as I steered her toward something more practical, like socks or a toothbrush.  I didn't picture myself jumping up and down, shrieking, "This is so cute!  You have to have this, because I never did!!!" when she's still at a stage in which she's perfectly content to play with empty cardboard toilet paper tubes. 

Boy, it's humbling to realize I'm no smarter than a Disney-employed lab rat.

But see, I was a kid when dinosaurs roamed the earth (or at least when Captain Stubing was charting his big ol' boat on a course toward love, exciting and new), and back then, beneath the pterodactyl-filled skies, us kids played outside with stuff like rocks and sticks and dead cockroaches.  As a special treat, we got to go see movies like Snow White or Dumbo or Cinderella in an actual movie theater once in a while - but they hadn't invented stuff like Cinderella glitter-encrusted, carriage-shaped travel luggage made especially for little girls yet, and even if they had, I was being raised by Midwesterners.  Midwesterners don't do Cinderella glitter-encrusted, carriage-shaped travel luggage made especially for little girls.  If you were traveling somewhere (like the Midwest), your stuff was packed in your mom's trusty gray Samsonite along with her stuff, and that was the end of the story.

And this is when the memory of your mom's trusty gray Samsonite comes flooding back to you, and you are suddenly and irrationally convinced that you grew up not middle class at all, but Grapes of Wrath poor.  Furthermore, this Cinderella glitter-encrusted, carriage-shaped travel luggage made especially for little girls is only, like, $30, and you realize that you can live vicariously through your daughter by purchasing it, enjoying a second childhood for yourself in the process! NOW how much would you pay for that Cinderella glitter-encrusted, carriage-shaped travel luggage made especially for little girls and a second childhood?!?!  Why, $30 is a bargain! 

Well.......that's what the greedy voices in my head were saying as I stood inside the Disney store in catatonic, slack-jawed awe, anyway.  It was kind of eerie, as if I'd just been hypnotized by that googly-eyed snake from Jungle Book.  Somehow we managed to tear away from this den of materialistic hedonism not too much the worse for wear, with only some Aristocats jammies-with-feet-attached, and some Dumbo jammies-with-feet-attached, and a $3 Disney princess make-believe cell phone in tow.  B. and I parted ways outside the store, and I actually considered doubling back to buy Z. a Tinkerbell costume, which would have just been a regular wear-everyday-just-for-fun costume purchase, since Z. already has a Halloween costume lined up.  Many yards outside the store, I was still shaking off its creepy voodoo.  It would take a bigger person than me to walk back into that Disney store and walk out without buying anything, so in the future, I'll have to plan my visits to coincide with more practical considerations, like the likelihood of winning the Lotto any time soon.....

(To be totally honest, however, the time spent with B. and Z. having this little adventure was worth more than any big ol' pile of money to buy the stuff with.  I know B. and I were having as much fun as Z., at least.  Maybe more, if our shrieks of delight and cries of "Oooooh!  Sparkly!" were any indication..........)

And now, on with my morning!  Although I can't help thinking that this blueberry muffin would taste just a bit better if it were sitting on a Mickey Mouse plate.......

Comments

[mom]

YOU are hilarious. Great, great post.