Ever heard of the Disney theme park for adults called “Pleasure Island”? No? Well now you have - sorry! Disney has always been understood as a company for children. But Pleasure Island closed in 2003, and people are having babies later and later (if ever at all), and so now the Disney theme parks have become a veritable playground for a whole new group of fans: grown ups. In this episode, Hannah and Maia talk about Disney adults - their malignment by the general public, their strange religiosity, and their unabashed love of a conglomerate that routinely tramples on the rights of its workers. But, after all, Disney was designed to be a a nostalgic teet from which lost adult souls may suck. So why is it that when adults like Disney, we hate them for it? Tangents include: Hannah’s dm correspondence with Deux Moi, and Maia’s millennial rights advocacy.
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Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills:
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SOURCES:
Johnny Oleksinski, “Sorry, childless millennials going to Disney World is weird.” The New York Post.
Zach Gass, “Pleasure Island: The Origins of Disney’s Nightlife” Inside The Magic.
Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland” Design Quarterly (1992).
Sarah Marshall, “The Magic Kingdom: The dark side of the Disney dream” The Baffler (2019).
Xavier Guillaume Singh, “Becoming A ‘Disney Adult’ Might Be Cringe, But It Saved My Life” Huffington Post (2023).
EJ Dickson, “How ‘Disney Adults’ Became The Most Hated Group On The Internet” Rolling Stone (2022).
Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Don’t judge Disney adults. Try to understand them.” NBC (2022).
Hannah Sampson, “Childless millennials are passionately defending their Disney fandom” The Washington Post (2019).
K.J. Yossman, “Confessions of Disney Adults: Mouse House Superhans Talk Splurging on Merch, Keeping Execs in Check” Variety (2023).
Todd Martens, “In defense of Disney adults” Los Angeles Times (2024).
Amelia Tate, “The ‘Disney adult’ industrial complex” The New Statesman (2024).
Lia Picard, “It’s Not Enough to Love Disney. They Want to Live Disney” The New York Times (2023).
Savannah Martin, “We interviewed the genius girl behind DisneyBound - and she’s just as magical as you’d expect” Hello Giggles (2015).