Back in the Day: The Disney Store

Those of you who don’t remember the Disney Store before the early 2000s, you really missed out. 

Nowadays, if you want Disney merchandise, all you have to do is go to DisneyStore.com. 

But in the 80s and 90s, it wasn’t that easy. Until the first Disney Store opened in in the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, California on March 28, 1987, Disneyland and Walt Disney World were really the only retail locations Disney had. In a world before online shopping was as easy as it is today, having a retail store that sold Disney merchandise outside of the parks was amazing. The stores were an extension of the parks, and they strove to capture that same atmosphere. 

I can remember dragging my poor mother through the mall to get to the Disney store. It was the center store in a large, 2 story high rotunda. 

The facade of the store was big and inviting, with a film motif and large display areas for promoting new movies and sales, just like the original store at the Glendale Galleria below.  

Photo courtesy of The Walt Disney Company

The store had shelving along all of the walls, and above the shelving, there were more statues and scenes. 

These photos are from Loren Javier.
Head over to Flickr to see more of his photos.

All along the sides of the store were walls of shelves perpendicular to the side walls, which formed little nooks. Each nook had a theme to it: One would be for a certain movie or character, the next would have stationary supplies and coloring books, another would have t-shirts, another would have dolls, and so on and so forth. 

But the best part of all was the back wall. 

Photo courtesy of the Disney Store's official blog

I am amazed that I was never yelled at for running in a Disney store, because I always booked it to the back wall, which had a pyramid of stuffed animals piled up to the base of a movie screen.

The movie screen showed clips from Disney movies and announcements of new products or movie releases, and would also play clips from the "Disney Sing Along Songs" videos. I would actually sit on the floor at the base of the stuffed animal pile and watch the screen like I was in a real movie theater. 

Photo courtesy of the Tampa Bay Times

Looking at photos now, the pyramid was probably only about 4’ high, but in my memories, this thing was a mountain! Stuffed animals piled so high over my head, I’d never be able to get to the one up at the tippy top. 

By 2001, there were 700 Disney Stores operating worldwide, and mounting cost of operation and the loss of key executives who had driven the success of the Disney Stores led The Walt Disney Company to convert Disney Stores into a licensed operation. In 2002, the Japanese stores were sold to Oriental Land Company (which owns the Tokyo Disney Resort), and most of the North American stores were sold and licensed to The Children's Place in 2004. 

In my opinion, when this happened, SO much of what made the Disney Stores special was sucked away. Hoop Retail, the Children's Place subsidiary operating the Disney Stores, bought the stores with the intention of making money, not keeping the feeling of the Disney parks alive. Almost all of the stores were remodeled and lost all of the statues and character displays, and in an effort to keep prices down, the company cut back on the quality and quantity of merchandise. 

By 2008, Hoop Retail filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sold the Disney Store back to The Walt Disney Company. (The Oriental Land Company sold the Japanese stores back to Disney in 2010.)

In November 2009, Disney announced that they were planning a massive "re-launching" and re-branding of all Disney Store locations, spearheaded by Apple's Steve Jobs, who pioneered the Apple Retail Store concept. They wanted to go back to the days when going to the Disney Store was an experience, but in a much more modernized way. Many of the new stores, including the new Times Square New York Flagship Store, now have interactive displays and technology, such as hidden Mickeys that pop up every few minutes, or mirrors that have images of the Princesses pop up and tell you how beautiful you look in that Cinderella dress. 

Photo courtesy of Mel, from her blog.

When Hoop took over, the store in my local mall moved from the extravagant storefront in the middle of the mall to a generic storefront next to The Children's Place and behind an escalator. 

It moved into a new space and was updated and it's opening tomorrow. I'll be there with my friend Kevin of 2 Men and the Mouse to cover the event, and I'm excited to see it. Hopefully it will bring back some of the old feelings from the original store. We'll see tomorrow :)

Double Standards and Disney Princesses

I have always been a defender of the Disney Princesses, and Disney in general. Disney is a big deal for me. But it’s really about more than loving the movies; it’s about respecting them for what they are and what they taught me growing up.

The Disney Princesses get a lot of harsh criticism about everything from the designs of their bodies to their personalities, but the thing that they’re criticized for most often is the supposed negative messages they give to little girls. People see the first three (Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty) and instantly think, “These movies tell girls that all they have to do is wait around for a man to come and save them.” That’s an obvious view to take if you don’t look any deeper, but more on that in another post. There are two Princess movies specifically which came out back to back that get a HUGE amount of criticism for their heroines’ actions; The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. I’ll look at each one individually to start. (And just so you know, this criticism really does upset me. My face was hot by the time I was half way through writing this.)

The Little Mermaid

So, let’s set up the story first. A young mermaid named Ariel who is obsessed with human culture wishes that she could become a human herself. She’s constantly going up to the surface to watch them and collecting their artifacts, even though this gets her in trouble. One day, she sees a ship passing overhead and goes go up to the surface to check it out. On the deck, she sees and instantly falls for a handsome human prince named Eric. When a storm suddenly comes up and Eric is thrown overboard, she saves him from drowning and returns home, wishing now more than ever that she could be a human so that they could be together. Her somewhat over protective father finds out about her hoard of human things and after trying again to dissuade her fascination with humans. After she blurts out that she’s in love with the human prince, he decides that the only way to get through to her is to destroy all of her collection, including the life-sized statue of the prince that also fell off of Eric’s ship, leaving her devastated. An evil sea witch named Ursula uses Ariel’s emotional state to trick her into trading her voice for the ability to be a human for three days. If she can get the prince to fall in love with her and kiss her by the third day, she’ll remain a human. If not, she’ll turn back into a mermaid. Ursula obviously has ulterior motives for doing this, but we’ll skip that for now. So Ariel agrees, gets turned into a mute human, and ends up being taken back to the prince’s castle when he finds her in distress on a beach. During the course of two days, it’s pretty obvious that Prince Eric is falling for her, but he is stubbornly intent on finding the girl who rescued him and sang to him (which he obviously thinks can’t be Ariel, because she can’t talk). But just when he’s decided to give up the search and let himself fall in love with her, Ursula decides to stop Ariel from getting that oh so important kiss by transforming herself into a human and using Ariel’s voice to magically entice Prince Eric into marrying her. Hilarious hijinks ensue when Ariel’s aquatic friends stop the wedding, Ariel gets her voice back, Ursula’s spell on Eric is broken, and he realizes that Ariel really was the girl he was searching for all along. But unfortunately, it’s too late, and Ariel turns back into a mermaid and is taken back under the sea by Ursula for a final battle for control over the ocean. Ariel and Eric take turns saving each other, the good guys win, and Ariel’s father, sees that she really does love Eric and that maybe humans aren’t really that bad. He uses his power to turn her back into a human, and the two live happily ever after.

Now, there are a lot of great lessons one can take away from this movie; There’s the typical good triumphs over evil and love conquers all, but what about other, more subtle messages, like when you stop looking for who you think is the perfect person for you, you might see that you already have that perfect person standing right in front of you? Or how about don’t be afraid to go after what you truly want?

But what message do the haters take away from this movie?

Really? THAT’S message you see?

First of all, let me clear something up here. Ariel wanted to be a human BEFORE she even knew that Prince Eric existed. She sings a whole damn song about how much she wants to be a human and have human experiences like walking and dancing and wants to be “Part of Your World”. THEN she sees Eric and falls in love with him, and that’s the extra umph that Ursula needs to get her to agree to make the deal. Secondly, Eric fell in love with her as a human, yes, but he never knew she was a mermaid before that. He only saw her head and upper body, not her tail. He thought she was a human from the beginning. But when he watched her turn into a mermaid right before his eyes, he didn’t go “OMG GROSS WHAT WAS THAT HALF FISH THING I ALMOST KISSED?” He said, “I lost her once, I’m not going to lose her again,” and went into the water after her to save her and her father from Ursula (how he held his breath that long I’ll never know). And then afterwards, he woke up on the beach to her as a human and they were married. He never said to her, “Girl, I think you’re hot, but only from the waist up. If you want to be with me, you’re going to have to do something about that tail.” He didn’t ask her to change for him. You never know, maybe he was ready to be a merman for her but she beat him to the punch.

Let’s move on to the second movie.

Beauty and the Beast

Again, we’ll set up the story: We get an exposition about a young prince who was turned into a beast for being “spoiled, selfish, and unkind.” This spell was cast on the entire castle and everyone who lived there, and the only way that the spell could be broken is if the prince could learn to love someone other than himself, and get her to love him in return, within a time limit. Fast-forward to present day, and we meet a young woman named Belle. She lives in a small town where everyone thinks she’s weird because she reads all the time and doesn’t think that the town hottie Gaston is all that great, because he’s an egotistical jerk. One day, her father, who is apparently her only living relative, gets lost in the woods and stumbles upon the enchanted castle, and the Beast promptly puts him in his dungeon for trespassing. When the family horse returns home without her father, Belle decides to go looking for him, and the horse brings her to the castle. She goes in, and even after seeing how terrifying this beast is, she willingly takes her father’s place as the Beast’s prisoner so that her older, sickly father can live. The Beast is obviously affected by her selflessness, but doesn’t really know how to respond to it, other than by not locking her in the dungeon and giving her a room and free reign of the palace, with one exception; she can’t go into the west wing, which is apparently his private sulking grounds. Belle breaks this exception, and he (to put it mildly) loses his temper with her. She flees from the castle, and he realizes that he’s just blown it with probably the one person who he could get to break the spell. He decides to go after her, which is a good thing, because when he finds her, she’s about to be ripped apart by wolves. He saves her, getting very badly hurt in the process. When he falls over unconscious, Bell starts to get back on her horse and head for home, but realizes that this guy just saved her life, she can’t leave him there to die in the snow. So she somehow gets him up on her horse and takes him back to the castle. She starts nursing him back to health, and they get into a fight about who’s fault his injuries were. Now the Beast has never been called out on his shit before, so he’s kind of taken aback by it, but then starts to soften up. They start spending more time together, and she notices that he’s changing, becoming more gentle and acting less like an animal and more like a person. He realizes that he’s falling in love with her, and that he’s never felt this way about anyone before and doesn’t know what to do. So he gives her the castle’s library, knowing how much she loves books. After a night of dinner and dancing, the Beast asks Bell if she’s happy there with him. She says yes, but that she misses her father. He shows her is magic mirror, which shows Belle her father, lost in the woods yet again after attempting to come back and rescue her. The Beast tells her to go and find her father, that’s she’s no longer his prisoner (although it’s clear that he hasn’t thought of her as that for a while). She thanks him and leaves, taking the mirror with her so that she can remember him. Watching Belle leave, the enchanted objects in the castle realize that he’s finally learned what it means to love someone. After Belle returns home with her father, incites a mob riot to go kill the Beast, and breaks out of the basement she was locked in, she returns to the castle to stop Gaston from killing the Beast. Once he sees that she came back for him, the Beast loses his ‘just go on and kill me’ attitude and starts fighting back. He gains the upper hand, but rather than following his animal instincts and dropping Gaston off of the side of the castle, he puts him down and tells him to get lost. But just as the Beast gets to Belle, Gaston stabs him, and ends up falling off of the castle anyway. The Beast apparently dies in Belle’s arms, but she tells him that she loves him just before the spell’s timer runs out, and he’s transformed back into his human self, along with everyone else in the castle, and they live happily ever after.

So, what are the lessons we can take away from this movie? Again, good triumphs over evil and love conquers all? Sometimes you have to really look to see the good in people? Don’t judge a book by its cover? If you let down the walls you’ve built to keep people away, you might let the love of your life in? Don’t be afraid to be different? Don’t be a selfish ass hole or an enchantress will make you learn your lesson the hard way?

Nope.

First of all, Stockholm syndrome is a form of traumatic bonding, “which describes ‘strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.’ One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat” (source: Wikipedia.org). I don’t really see Belle going through that much trauma or abuse, and I don’t see the Beast as an aggressor. She wasn’t violently kidnapped or forced to stay in the palace, she willingly gave up her freedom to take her father’s place. And yes he freaked out on her when she went into the West Wing, but he didn’t do anything more than yell at her and scare her. I really don’t think those are grounds for a Stockholm Syndrome diagnosis for Belle. And okay, I get it that it’s a little awkward that she starts out their relationship as his prisoner. But she really stops being a prisoner the first time she leaves the castle. After he saves her, she almost gets on her horse and books it again. It’s her compassion that makes her stop and think about what it would mean to leave him bleeding and unconscious in a snow storm. And she could have plopped him back on the bed and said, “Well, I’ve done my good deed, I’m peacing out before he gets up”, but she starts nursing him back to health because she is a good person and wants to thank him for saving her life, and THEN begins to fall in love with him when she notices the change in him.

And look at the Beast. Here’s a man who was turned into a “hideous beast” when he was eleven years old (Yes, eleven. Do the math people. The rose will bloom until he’s 21, and Lumiere sings “Ten years we’ve been rusting”) for being selfish and mean. And we never hear any mention of his parents, so he’s either an orphan, or they were taken away from him as part of the curse. Can you imagine all that as an eleven-year-old? I don’t blame him for being angry and bitter!  Then Belle comes along and she is the first person who isn’t a servant and afraid of him to treat him with any sort of kindness in ten years, if not more. Because of her kindness and compassion, he falls in love with her, and becomes a better person. And Belle falls in love with him because she recognizes that he’s changing and making an effort for her, and that under that terrifying exterior and bad temper he truly has a good soul.

(The other argument against this movie that I’ve heard is that Belle doesn’t know about the curse, and falls in love with a beast, therefore it’s a movie about beastiality. And to that argument I say fuck you, stop trying to ruin childhood for everyone. She’s in a castle were almost every inanimate object talks, ruled over by a beast who talks, wears clothing, and has a portrait of a human in his west wing, where she’s not allowed to go. She’s a smart girl, and I think she can put two and two together.)

We’re always told that relationships are an equal partnership, and that they require compromise. So in the first movie, we have a girl who makes a compromise to be with the man she loves. And it’s not like she gave up a lifelong dream because her new boyfriend didn’t like it, it really was a question of logistics. One of them would have to do something if they wanted to be together, otherwise they’d have to build some kind of pool/river system in the castle. But we criticize her for making that compromise (and fulfilling a dream of hers in the process). Then in the second movie we have a woman who is selfless and compassionate, and a man who recognizes that and wants to change his selfish ways and become a better person for her because he loves her, and we STILL FEEL THE NEED TO CRITICIZE THE WOMAN! Why don’t we criticize the Beast the same way we criticize Ariel?

Because the Beast’s change is seen as a positive one because he did it for a woman, and because Ariel’s change is seen as a negative one because she did it for a man.

Double standards are alive and well, people. Even in something as simple as how you react to a children’s movie. And even if they are geared towards empowering women by saying that she shouldn't have to change for a man to love her, it's still a double standard if you say that it's ok for a man to change for a woman to love him.