What Exactly Is a Disney Adult?

At some point, liking Disney became something adults were expected to explain.

Nobody seems particularly troubled by a forty-five-year-old man who knows the starting rotation of a baseball team, owns six jerseys and travels across the country to watch other adults play a game. Build an entire room around that interest and we may even give the room its own name. Put Mickey Mouse on the wall, however, and apparently we have questions.

“Disney Adult” is a strange expression for that reason. We don't generally speak of Golf Adults, although Disney has probably already found a way to sell merchandise to them. The word adult gets attached because there is something about retaining a visible affection for Disney beyond childhood that some people find worthy of explanation.

Disney itself appears considerably less confused. Its cruise ships contain spaces and experiences reserved specifically for adults, and the idea that Disney experiences should belong exclusively to children was never particularly consistent with Disneyland's conception in the first place. Disney's historical account traces the park to Walt wondering why there couldn't be a place where parents and children could have fun together. Adults weren't interlopers who eventually discovered the place. They were part of the idea.

That doesn't make every expression of Disney fandom sensible, any more than the existence of football excuses painting your chest and screaming at strangers in a parking lot. The interesting question isn't whether adults are allowed to like Disney. It's what happens when something we loved as children follows us into adulthood, accumulating memories and expectations along the way.

When Affection Becomes Allegiance

There is one kind of Disney Adult who seems determined never to let the company disappoint them. A film that fails to connect was misunderstood. A replacement attraction deserves patience. A price increase probably has an explanation. A creative decision that looks questionable from the outside must make more sense from the inside. Eventually criticism of Disney begins to sound suspiciously like criticism of the people who love it.

None of those reactions is necessarily unreasonable on its own. New attractions sometimes deserve patience. Outsiders frequently lack information. Critics can be unfair. The problem begins when the benefit of the doubt stops being something Disney occasionally receives and becomes something Disney automatically possesses.

The instinct isn't difficult to understand. Disney occupies emotional territory that most companies never reach. People encounter its stories when they are young, associate its characters with family members, mark birthdays and vacations in its parks, play its music at weddings and introduce its films to their children. A relationship built across decades can accumulate memories that have very little to do with quarterly earnings or corporate strategy.

Research on nostalgia gives us some reason to take that attachment seriously rather than dismiss it as arrested development. Studies have found that nostalgia can strengthen a sense of continuity between past and present selves, in part through social connectedness, while other work has connected nostalgia with a greater sense of meaning. None of that tells us anything specifically about Disney fandom, but it does help explain why emotionally significant experiences from the past can remain useful parts of an adult identity.

It also helps explain why criticism of a beloved institution can occasionally feel more personal than the subject deserves. If Disney has become entangled with childhood, family and identity, admitting that Disney made something bad may feel uncomfortably close to admitting that something about those memories was foolish too.

Our memories are sturdier than that. A disappointing movie cannot travel backward through time and ruin the afternoon you spent watching The Lion King with your father. A badly conceived attraction cannot confiscate the vacation your family still talks about twenty years later. Whatever Disney does next, it does not acquire retroactive authority over what Disney once meant to us.

That should give us room to judge the company in front of us rather than defend the company we remember. Disney is perfectly capable of making mistakes while people who love it are busy explaining why those mistakes probably make sense.

When Nostalgia Becomes a Veto

There is another kind of Disney Adult who presents a rather different problem. This one is also deeply invested in Disney, but appears to have spent much of that investment becoming annoyed.

Disney was better before. Depending on the speaker, the attractions, movies, merchandise, food, service, cleanliness, creative ambition or leadership have all deteriorated since some earlier period when the company apparently understood itself. The precise golden age varies considerably, which is at least a reason to wonder how much personal experience contributes to the diagnosis.

Sometimes the criticism is right. Things do decline. Standards slip. Good attractions can be replaced by weaker ones. Prices can rise without a corresponding increase in value. A company can misunderstand what made something worth preserving, and nostalgia may draw our attention to a genuine difference between what exists and what once did.

The complication is that we were there too.

The Disney we remember is inseparable from the person who encountered it. Perhaps we were eight years old and someone else paid for the hotel. Our parents handled the transportation, reservations, luggage, meals and thousands of small irritations required to manufacture the vacation we remember as effortless. The attraction that seemed impossibly sophisticated may have been experienced by someone who had never seen anything like it before. The restaurant may actually have been better. Or we may simply have been eleven and eating dessert shaped like Mickey Mouse.

None of that makes the memory fraudulent. The experience was real and the feeling mattered. It does mean that remembering something fondly does not make us neutral historians of it.

Nostalgia becomes more troublesome when preference turns into a claim on the future. Missing an attraction is reasonable, as is believing that its replacement is worse or that Disney destroyed something valuable without understanding what it had. But the fact that something mattered deeply to us cannot, by itself, create an obligation to preserve it indefinitely.

Disneyland itself provides a useful complication. Disney's historical record describes a park that began changing almost immediately, and Walt's frequently repeated observation that Disneyland would never be completed reflected his expectation that it would continue developing. That history doesn't settle whether any particular replacement is wise. It does make permanent stasis a difficult standard to claim as the authentic Disney tradition.

At some point Disney has to make memories for people who aren't us.

The Customer Is Not the Canon

The fiercely loyal Disney Adult and the relentlessly disappointed one appear to have almost nothing in common. One can find an explanation for nearly everything Disney does; the other can find evidence of decline in nearly everything Disney changes. Yet both relationships can become strangely self-centered.

For the loyalist, affection begins influencing judgment until loving Disney becomes a reason to approve of Disney. For the perpetual critic, memory begins influencing judgment until the Disney encountered at a particular moment in one person's life becomes the standard against which everything afterward is measured.

Neither leaves much room for surprise, and surprise has been rather important to this company.

Every generation inherits a Disney already full of things somebody considers sacred. The company's history is also a history of additions, experiments and changes to things audiences already knew. Disneyland itself was conceived as something that would continue developing rather than reach a final form.

That history does not require us to applaud whatever comes next. New things can be bad, and old things can be worth protecting. But Disney has to keep making things for people who do not love Disney yet. If it exists entirely to reassure the people whose affection it already possesses, it eventually becomes a curator of previous affection. If it assumes that affection will survive whatever the company chooses to do with it, it eventually discovers that affection can be spent.

Fans face a related problem. Useful criticism requires some ability to distinguish between something becoming worse and something becoming less ours. Age makes that distinction harder because the distance between those two experiences can become surprisingly small.

Growing Up With Disney

Peter Pan offers an almost irresistible metaphor for the Disney Adult, which is probably reason enough to handle him carefully. The obvious interpretation is that Peter refuses to grow up, therefore adults preoccupied with Disney are refusing adulthood, and everyone can go home pleased with the cleverness of the comparison.

The problem with Peter isn't that he can fly, nor is it Never Land, fairies, games or his refusal to treat the adult world with appropriate solemnity. Those are among the things we would probably like him to keep. His problem is that he cannot move forward. His refusal to grow up eventually becomes an inability to become anything else.

Wendy can leave. She experiences Never Land without requiring it to become the whole world, returns home and continues becoming someone else. The experience remains part of her without becoming the boundary of her life.

There is something useful there for people who have grown up with Disney, because growing older does not actually require the surrender most discussions of adulthood seem to assume. Knowledge need not replace wonder. Responsibility need not eliminate play. Understanding how an illusion works can deepen our appreciation for the people who created it rather than prevent us from enjoying it.

Growing old is inevitable. Growing up is a choice, but perhaps we have been too quick to define that choice as deciding which pleasures to abandon.

Maturity ought to expand the number of ideas we can hold about something we love. Disney can be an enormous corporation whose decisions deserve scrutiny while also being the source of experiences that genuinely matter to us. The disappearance of something beloved can constitute a real loss without disqualifying whatever follows from a fair hearing. Nostalgia can preserve evidence of what mattered without settling what should happen next.

The same generosity has to extend beyond ourselves. Someone discovering Disney today will not encounter the Disney we did, and there is no particular reason they should. Their attachments will form around different films, characters, attractions and experiences. Some of those choices will bewilder us. That is not evidence that they are doing Disney incorrectly.

Nor does any of this relieve Disney of its responsibility to be good. Walt's expectation that Disneyland would continue changing is not a blank check for every change made in his name. The company still has to understand what it is replacing, why people cared about it and whether the new thing earns the space it occupies.

Balance is difficult precisely because both affection and criticism can become ways of placing ourselves at the center of the relationship.

The View From Main Street

Growing up is sometimes described as a gradual exchange in which wonder is traded for knowledge, play gives way to responsibility and sentiment yields to sophistication. We become serious people by surrendering unserious things.

That seems like a poor bargain.

A better adulthood might be additive. Experience should make us more aware of the machinery without requiring us to stare at it throughout the performance. We can know more about the craft, the business and the compromises behind what Disney creates and still permit ourselves to respond to what appears in front of us.

That may be especially difficult with a company whose work becomes attached so easily to memory. Disney cannot reasonably ask for unconditional loyalty because it once gave us something we loved, but neither can we demand that it preserve our childhoods because those childhoods happened there.

Disney owes its past stewardship rather than obedience, and perhaps we owe our own memories something similar. They deserve to be carried with us, not placed in charge.

What comes next has to belong partly to people who are not yet old enough to be nostalgic for it. Some of them will encounter a character, attraction, film or place that means far more to them than its creators could possibly predict. Years later they may return to discover that it has changed, and they will have their own opinions about what was lost, what improved and what nobody should ever have touched.

By then, perhaps we will have learned enough to recognize ourselves in them without requiring them to become us.

Growing old is inevitable. Growing up is a choice. Done well, it leaves us wiser and more discerning without requiring us to become impossible to please. It lets us criticize something we love without allowing criticism to become the principal way we engage with it, and remain fiercely fond of something without mistaking that affection for an obligation to approve.

Most importantly, growing up need not cost us our sense of whimsy. Knowing how the trick works and knowing why the trick matters are different kinds of knowledge.

Every now and then, we can still let the magician have the room.

Perhaps that's enough to make a Disney Adult.

— Walter B. Good