Carl Hiaasen by Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World Page A

but cut an untidy swath). The absolute worst thing Disney did was to change how people in Florida thought about money; nobody had ever dreamed there could be so much. Bankers, lawyers, real-estate salesmen, hoteliers, restaurateurs, farmers, citrus growers—everyone in Mickey’s orb had to drastically recalibrate the concepts of growth, prosperity, and what was possible. Suddenly there were no limits. Merelyby showing up, Disney had dignified blind greed in a state pioneered by undignified greedheads. Everything the company touched turned to gold, so everyone in Florida craved to touch or be touched by Disney. The gates opened, and in galloped fresh hordes. The cattle ranches, orange groves, and cypress stands of old Orlando rapidly gave way to an execrable panorama of suburban blight.
    One of the great ironies upon visiting Disney World is the wave of relief that overwhelms you upon entering the place—relief to be free of the nerve-shattering traffic and the endless ugly sprawl. By contrast the Disney resort seems like a verdant sanctuary. That was the plan, of course—Team Rodent left the park buffered with thousands of unspoiled acres, to keep the charmless roadside schlock at bay.
    As Orlando exploded, business leaders (and therefore politicians) throughout the rest of Florida watched and plotted with envy. Everyone conspired for a cut of the Disney action, meaning overflow. The trick was to catch the tourists after they departed the Magic Kingdom: induce them to rent a car and drive someplace else and spend what was left of their vacation money. This mad obsession for sloppy seconds has paid off big-time.By the year 2000, the number of tourists visiting the Orlando area is expected to reach forty-six million annually. That’s more than the combined populations of California and Pennsylvania storming into Florida every year, an onslaught few places on earth could withstand. Many Disney pilgrims do make time to search for auxiliary amusement in other parts of the state. High on the list is the southernmost chain of islands known as the Keys, where I live, and where only one road runs the length of the archipelago. Maybe you can appreciate my concern.
    Disney’s recent ambitions in Times Square are modest compared to its original mission in Florida: to establish a sovereign state within a state, a private entertainment mecca to which every working family in America would be lured at least once and preferably several times. And that’s exactly what has come to pass. Disney World is the most-visited vacation destination on the planet; kids who went there in the 1970s are bringing their own kids today, perpetuating a brilliantly conceived cycle of acculturation. Every youngster who loves a Disney theme park—and almost all of them do—represents a potential lifetime consumer of all things Disney, from stuffed animals to sitcoms, from Broadway musicals to three-bedroomtract homes. With this strategy Disney will someday tap into the fortunes of every person on the planet, as it now does to every American whether we know it or not.
    And though the agents of its takeover are omnipresent and not always identified, it’s still unnerving to enter the non-Disney Virgin Megastore in Times Square and see Kathie Lee on the ultralarge TV screen. This would be Kathie Lee Gifford, the talk-show hostess whose signature line of fashion clothing was revealed to have been manufactured by waifs in squalid overseas sweatshops; the same Kathie Lee whose husband, football legend Frank Gifford, briefly took up with a flight attendant who arranged for a tabloid to publish grainy photographs of the tryst.
    Here on the megascreen, though, Kathie Lee appears domestically serene. She’s singing a tender-type love song titled “Forever and Ever,” which (according to the graphic on the video) is available on a Disney record label and featured in a Disney full-length animated film. Glancing around the store, I notice I’m not the only