Italian novelist Paolo Giordano went to Disneyland all by his lonesome and filed a report for the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:
“I take no rides in Disneyland, not even one, but I go into the reassuring auditorium where they show the return of ‘Captain EO’ in amazing 3-D and the temperature change is severe. Mothers extract sweaters from their bags, but the children have no intention of wearing them. They are thinking how funny they look with those big 3-D glasses on their faces, even though 3-D is no innovation for them; it’s nothing special, like this place Disneyland is nothing special. It looks a little old and there’s much more future in the Nintendo DSs, iPods, PlayStation Portables they’re carrying in their pockets.
Only small children still marvel—the Asian girl sitting at my left side, for example, she’s terrified by the dark and the wild assault of people trying to get the best seats and by Captain EO himself who—I’m discovering now—is Michael Jackson, close to his original color and surrounded by a group of tiny farting monsters. He has a mission to accomplish that later results in him dancing amid androids and repeating ‘We are here to change the world,’ which more or less is what he’d said throughout his career. When the seats start bouncing to the beat of the bass drum, I think that one of the ways Michael Jackson changed the world was to build a place similar to this one, a colorful trap for children where he decided to live, and the reason why he did it appears to me at once to be clear, tender, dreadful and incomprehensible.”
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A little Captain EO:
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Tags: Paolo Giordano