Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [0]
CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT
America’s most original voices
tackle today’s most provocative issues
CARL HIAASEN
TEAM RODENT
How Disney Devours
the World
“Revulsion is good. Revulsion is healthy. Each of us has limits, unarticulated boundaries of taste and tolerance, and sometimes we forget where they are. Peep Land is here to remind us; a fixed compass point by which we can govern our private behavior. Because being grossed out is essential to the human experience; without a perceived depravity, we’d have nothing against which to gauge the advance or decline of culture—our art, our music, our cinema, our books. Without sleaze, the yardstick shrinks at both ends. Team Rodent doesn’t believe in sleaze, however, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America’s values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company, and not the other way around.”
Also by Carl Hiaasen
Stormy Weather
Strip Tease
Native Tongue
Skin Tight
Double Whammy
Tourist Season
Lucky You
Basket Case
Hoot
The Library of Contemporary Thought
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1998 by Carl Hiaasen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hiassen, Carl.
Team rodent : how Disney devours the world /
Carl Hiassen.—1st ed.
p. cm. — (The library of contemporary thought)
eISBN: 978-0-307-76488-1
1. Walt Disney Company. I. Title. II. Series.
PN1999.W27H53 1998
384’.8’0979494—dc21 98–16565
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Ready to Drop
Insane Clown Michael
Bull Run
Republic of Walt
The Puppy King
Fantasy Fantasy Island
Future World
Whistle While We Work
Jungle Book
About the Author
Acknowledgments
For their assistance I am indebted to the intrepid
Liz Donovan and the daring Jennifer Dienst.
Ready to Drop
DATELINE: TIMES SQUARE, November 1997. Deloused and revitalized Times Square, home to MTV, Condé Nast, Morgan Stanley, the world’s biggest Marriott hotel, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, and soon a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.
And Peep Land. From its doorway on West Forty-second Street one can see the glittering marquee of the new Disney Store at Broadway. More importantly, from the Disney Store one can clearly see Peep Land: a scrofulous, neon-lit affirmation of XXX-rated raunch.
Sleaze lives.
It lives and it beckons, though less garishly than either the Disney Store or its rococo neighbor, the New Amsterdam Theater, where golden breeze-furled banners advertise The Lion King, a musical based on a cartoon movie. Both the cartoon (which grossed $772 million worldwide) and the stage show (which will most likely be the most successful production in Broadway history) were created as exemplary family entertainment by the Walt Disney Company, which also lavishly restored the New Amsterdam at a cost of $38 million.
In this way Disney audaciously has set out to vanquish sleaze in its unholiest fountainhead, Times Square; the skanky oozepot to which every live sex show, jack-off arcade, and smut emporium in the free world owes its existence. For decades, city and state politicians had vowed to purge the place of its legendary seediness, in order to make the streets safe, clean, and attractive for out-of-town visitors. New Yorkers paid no attention to such fanciful promises, for Times Square was knowledgeably regarded as lost and unconquerable; a mephitic pit, so formidably infested that nothing short of a full-scale military occupation could tame it. As recently as 1994 Times Square swarmed unabashedly with hookers,