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smuggling and corruption throughout the commonwealth; Gorda Cay was listed as one of the favorite stopovers for international dope runners.
    The island’s notoriety presented no serious public-relations hurdle for Disney, which merely changed the name after buying the place. It’s a small illustration of how Team Rodent untarnishes reality, acquiring and recasting to its own designs. Be certain that the company’s security forces scoured Gorda Cay and left no coconut unturned, in case Mr. Barber and his colleagues had stashed some goodies prior to their departure.Beachcombing tourists in Fort Lauderdale are excited to stumble across the occasional scuttled bale, but in a Disney biosphere there’s no place for such surprises. I’ll bet a new past is being ghostwritten for “Castaway Cay”—a past richly populated with conquistadors or perhaps shipwrecked pirates, whom Disney copywriters would regard as more colorful and less menacing than modern smugglers of cocaine and bootleg methaqualone.
    Escape is what most ordinary folks want and deserve—escape from the threat of dope, guns, crime, poverty, pollution, random violence, urban unrest. So why not a carefree Castaway Cay? What’s the harm? Maybe none. Be assured that the flora and fauna of the former Gorda Cay never received such tender loving care as they do now under Disney.
    Still, there’s something offensive to the spirit about taking a perfectly interesting little island and giving it a movie-style makeover to amuse the visiting sightseers. Trim the trees, groom the beaches, add a fleet of Jet Skis and a row of “massage cabanas”—hey, mon, you be jammin’! Commercializing paradise is a tradition nearly as old as the tropics, but Disney has pushed it into an insidious new realm. At least in Nassau or Kingston or even Key West you can poke around and find backstreets and alleys that aren’t on the tour, real neighborhoods with real people instead of “cast members.” But on a Disney island you get only Disney adventure; everything you see and do is part of the show. So on Castaway Cay there’s no chance of coming across a native fisherman mending his nets and cussing up a storm. On the other hand, there’s also no chance of getting nicked by a pickpocket or groped by a hooker.
    That trade-off is acceptable to millions of vacationers who don’t mind the fake, as long as it’s fun and safe. And nobody provides a safer, more closely supervised brand of carefree than Team Rodent. Whether you’re on a Disney ocean liner or a Disney log flume or the eighteenth fairway of a Disney golf course, you can be pretty sure nobody’s going to sneak up and stick a real .45 in your back. That’s not just a perception, it’s a fact—and one reason that Disney’s image as a benign enchanter-protector is now embedded in the collective parental psyche. It also helps explain why anyone would sign up for a
lottery
to purchase a house in a Disney-designed subdivision: They probably remember how happy and secure they feel inside the Magic Kingdom.

Future World

    O NE OF WALT DISNEY’S unfulfilled dreams was a model city of the future, which he called Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). It would be home to twenty thousand residents and offer never-before-seen technology for ultramodern family living. After Walt’s death, the company scrapped the original idea for Epcot. Only the name was saved, given to a futuristic-looking wing of the Orlando theme park, where the attractions are sponsored by General Motors, AT&T, and other major U.S. corporations.
    A few years ago Disney dusted off the concept of a functioning tomorrowland and called it Celebration. (The name, it’s not surprising to learn, was selected by Michael Eisner and his wife.) Waltmight recognize the place, though not as his futuristic bubble of a community. With its neat, narrow streets and neotraditional architecture, Celebration invokes nothing so much as a small-town neighborhood