i hate disney. movies, toys, gated communities, you name it.

Goddammit, I said yesterday I didn't want to see any more of this shit!!!

You know, 6 months ago I would have said that it is just a childhood phase and that these girls would grow up and want more for themselves. And then I went to theknot.

Branding. Branding, branding, branding.

Also: we are all being brainwashed by the Walt Disney Company to obey the intelligent robots who will someday try to force us all to take monorails to work in our Experimental Prototype Communities of Tomorrow.

Sarah Vowell wrote an awesome short story on Celebration that's in her book "Take the Cannoli," which evokes a lot more of the poignancy about the way girls loved Disney when they were little.

i think when you're 3 and 6 you're still allowed to want to be a "pwincess". well, maybe at 3, by 6 you should be able to roll your r's and if you can do that, then you should pick a real career.
at 6 i wanted to be a fashion designer or an archaeologist.

I went to a VERY liberal arts college in Westchester and lets say majority of students were OUT there, but there was this one kid in the Dance conservatory who was beyond STRANGE. Turned out he was from Celebration and the description of his life was terrifying. SIDENOTE: The prissy blonde girl on "So You think your kids a star" on VH1 is also from Celebration, so that should explain the types who want to live in a planned community adjacent to the "happiest place on earth".

When I was a little girl my answer would have been "cowgirl"...not sissy princess.

I wanted to be a knight-princess when I was a little girl. I liked the poofy dresses but wanted to use a sword.

Disney has many a flaw...but the films were products of their cultures. We just need a few more Mulans (and preferably without the cultural ignorances and Eddie Murphies) and we can totes let our proverbial daughters into the world of Disney.

Dude, nowhere is this more out of hand than in Tokyo, where women pay ridiculous sums of money to be married at Tokyo Disney and have Disney characters in their wedding party. The whole "princess" thing is totes out of hand there.

WTF, you have some awesome shit, Tokyo, you don't need our crappy merchandise taking over. Come to think of it, we don't need it either.

I love disney. But I still wanted to be an anaesthesiologist. Until I learned how hard it was to spell and that I could kill people.

Now I want to be a princess, but instead I'm a pauper. Sigh.

I have to say I really like New Urbanist design. At first, it is totally unsettling - the Stepford quality to the quasi-towns. Especially the totally planned communities like Celebration. But, after a little while, it is really pleasing. Maybe this isn't a feminist issue at all but rather about how we are raised to feel more comfortable with conformist/homogeneous boundaries.

My parents didn't let us watch Disney, and so far I've kept my kid away their evil influence. Any yes, she thinks she is a princess, but she wants to be a mechanic and work on trucks when she grows up. I'm happy enough.

when i was four, i wanted to be (in order):

1) a princess
2) princess leia (which was very different from an actual princess)
3) a pioneer
4) a vet (although i soon discovered i didn't actually *like* animals, just my own dog)

kids is kids, people. disney or no, they all go through weird phases. just as along as you don't let that stick around too long (ie expose them to something else along with disney) they'll be FINE.

@ineffable.me: I wanted to be a Solid Gold dancer.

@blackbirdfly: Oh, or a cowgirl. I went back and forth between those.

Hello phallus! That movie theater is like the poster/VHS cover for the Little Mermaid with the penis "hidden" in the underwater castle. Good to know Disney is staying true to their roots.

@blackbirdfly: baha, that's awesome. I assume you put on outfits and music and danced in front of the mirror all the time... right? no? oh it was just me then. with a bottle of deodorant as a microphone :(

I grew up just a few miles from Celebration, and that place is creepy as hell. Too quiet, clean, and clone-like. For fall, they import leaves in from the north and spray them out over downtown each night. And for winter, they have snow-making machines on the roofs of the buildings, when it's still 80 degrees outside. Disney doesn't care about your damn seasons, Disney makes its own seasons.

Up until the age of ten my friends and I were outside imaging that we were (our favorite) Ariel. I think that it's more up to the parents. Turn off the tv and tell the kids to go play outside. That's what we did, and while we were obsessed with the princesses, it was never the getting married part that was our favorite, it was the running jumping (swimming) adventure part. I think that the unreal expectations are tacked on by adult women, when you're little, you just don't think about it that way. It's not that Ariel found her perfect prince, it's that she got to go off on her own and have adventures.

@ineffable.me: Shit, I still do that. Y'all think I'm kidding, too.

@blackbirdfly: I wanted to be a baseball player. And then a hockey player. My parents may have been a little too "free to be you and me"

@BAngieB: Mine would have been "bird".

@blackbirdfly: i wanted to be princess leia AND a solid gold dancer. hahaha

Isn't it kind of like McDonald's? They start you at a young age and you can't get away. The wonderful happy sights, smells and sounds hook you for life!

That said, Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast are my fave's. Mostly because of the backup characters. Gus Gus! Mrs. Potts!

What? No. I watched all of this shit when I was a kid, but I never thought that I would actually grow up to be a princess. How stupid do people think kids are? I once told my mom that I wanted to be a professional china duster and go to everyone's houses, take their china out of their china hutches, dust it, and put it all back. That's what's fun about being a kid. Having really awesome ideas about what you want to do in life. It's called an imagination, fuckers.

@Artful Slinger: DETAILS pls (about growing up in celebration).
@lolacat: yeah, not very. i consider neighborhood associations to be a form of incarceration.

For the record, I wanted to be a fish when I was 4, because you know, they can breathe underwater and stuff.

When I was four, I was too busy being a kid to give a hoot at what I wanted to be when I grew up.

My college roommate was a Disney employee, and she got hired to "walk a dog around Celebration for an hour with a random group of people and pose as a family." Apparently, this isn't an uncommon job: to walk around with a group of people you've never met and pretend to be an all-American, still married, happy family with 2.5 kids and a dog.
Also, Disney weddings are supposedly a huge cultural deal in Florida. It takes four years in advance to book one, and I've heard of girls booking dates every year and then canceling when they hadn't landed a man in time.

@blackbirdfly: Me too! And then I moved on to bigger aspirations -- to become a Fly Girl.

I'll admit to liking Disney. I like the park, I like the movies, I like the princesses. I am not 12. Disney has become a marketing giant, and very successful at getting people buy what they're selling. I just don't think I can work up enough hate for something run by a giant mouse.

When you look at it this way, Disney kind of makes Barbie look good. Sure, Barbie is unrealistically proportioned, but she's a doctor sometimes!

@Rhody: I also went through a phase where I wanted to be a fighter pilot, and later an astronaut. But I'm pretty sure the fighter pilot thing was because of Top Gun. I begged my mom to let me paint my room black and do a big solar system mural thing. She was not about to let that happen.

Eh, it's such a phase to want to be a princess. And it's certainly not a given if you watch a lot of Disney as a kid. I worshiped at the altar of the Mouse until about 6, but I always answered, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with Catwoman, an astronaut, or a veterinarian. Go figure.

When asked to pick a famous American that he admired for his second grade school project, my son picked Walt Disney. His second choice was Optimus Prime.

I know adults who go there on vacation. These are people without children, mind you. Adults who want to sleep in the Princess' Castle...and wear mouse ears...(not that there is anything wrong with that given the right circumstance. :-) )

I even know a couple who went there for their honeymoon. Nothing says hot sex like carton characters and a roller coaster.

@blackbirdfly: hell fuckin yea!

Also, my parents went to Disney on there honeymoon. Because they're fucking weirdos.

The closest I ever got to wanting to be a princess was a phase where I wanted to work at Disneyland. But I wanted to be in a Pluto suit, not dressed up as a princess.

I have a friend who is completely and totally obsessed with everything Disney. She's paying like $5000 for a 3-day vacation there this summer. I don't get it. I've always found pretty much everything Disney kind of boring, and have never once had any desire to go to Disney World.

@blackbirdfly: ambitious! forever i wanted to be a hotdog vendor on the street. like for years. my mom started to panic slightly.

@blackbirdfly: oh god, i always wanted to be an astronomer (i figured my asthma would never let me be an astronaut), shit, actually, i regret not having gone to college to study astronomy. but i am a girl so i am not good at teh mathz :(

@BAngieB: Did you get the blues? Ba dum dum. I hate myself.

I blame Disney for giving me what seemed like a perfectly reasonable excuse not to eat apples--or, by extension, any fruits or vegetables, natch--for fear I'd end up in a glass coffin surrounded by dirty coal-mining dwarfs. Worst fights with my mom ever. Until puberty.

No matter where or when, some people are always going to want to take the easiest path to happiness, even if it's nothing but vapidly shoving into their gaping laws what anyone else tells them will make them happy. Sounds a little Brave New World meets Pleasantville to me, but what do I know? I make myself happy by thinking, for chrissakes.

@tallyhoe: You still in the area? I'm in Polk County.

And I totally wanted to study sharks when I was a kid. Until I hit 12, my dad offered to take me to scuba classes, and I realized studying sharks meant being in the water with them. Then I wanted to design racecars.

i grew up overseas, so i didn't get the disney commercial-consumer-crap overload, but i also grew up during the great disney movies---little mermaid, lion king, aladdin, beauty and the beast. they are all fantastic, a real joy.

princesses have been around way before disney (think andrew lang's fairy books)--at least they make them "headstrong" instead of pale and wispy.

i never really played princesses--- i had an obsession for orphans and runaways, and when i grew up i wanted to be a poet and a high-diver.

@karnett: my boyfriend claims that optimus prime is like a second father to him. and he remembers sobbing when optimus dies in the movie. SOBBING.

@Artful Slinger: What up, Sarah Lawrence! We used to have swim meets there in high school. It wasn't until I was applying to colleges that I realized it was a co-ed school :)

@ForeverBlueGirl: I grew up on Disney films (the good ones though like The Jungle Book...) in a country that didn't get McDonalds til I was 14.

If Disney did shit for hangovers I would still embrace it...but that's McDonald's role...

@blondegrlz: Yeah, I'm with you. I just can't work up the hate. My parents started taking me to Disney World when I was a fetus (they even let my mom on Space Mountain at 5 months preggers) and we went as a family pretty much every year or so. I grew up watching the movies and yet I never wanted to be a princess. I have zero desire for a Disney wedding. I think the bottom line, if you're kid is talking about being a princess through their preteens and has no concept of reality, there's a bigger problem in your house than a movie about a mermaid.