babble

Okay, remember the whole point behind the last fatty-hating article i posted about? The one where the guy was all cheesed off because they’re closing down the “It’s A Small World” ride for repairs, supposedly caused by the zomg obesity epi-panic?

Heh.

Well, thanks to blusilva for the heads up on this one:

The original article’s premise is wrong from the second sentence.

“Disneyland will soon revamp “It’s a Small World” so that its boats can accommodate more plump passengers.”

No, the flumes are being re-dug to add a couple of extra inches so the boats don’t “bottom out” in places. The official reason given for this is that over the years, the patching of the flumes has created areas of “buildup” that are now causing problems. A particularly vitriolic Disney watchdog website was the one who started this whole “it’s the fatties making the boats sink”, and the mainstream media has picked up that meme.

OH HO IS THAT SO?

So i decided to look into this a bit more. I may have to start making phone calls, because people are all up in arms about this ride’s repairs for a myriad of reasons… some people say it’s to commercialize it, to make it more modern, to repair it because of the fatties, to make Unca Walt spin in his grave and otherwise promote evil in a stuffed mouse costume. It took me a while to find a news source for this that wasn’t specifically a Disney watchdog site.

Here’s where it gets just brilliant in that media-induced aneurysm kind of way. On msnbc.com, there’s an article entitled Disney’s ‘Small World’ gets an upgrade: After 41 years, Disneyland’s most popular ride to get supersized retrofit. The term “supersized” has come to be a popular part of the anti-fat rhetoric, because of its awesome efficiency at calling us fat AND implying just how we supposedly got that way… all in one word! Y’all, it’s so much shorter than, oh, say, Fatty Fatty Meat Beast, or Fatty Patty McFastFoodersons.

But i digress. So, the title of this article i linked would seem to indicate that Disney is having to change it’s historical ride because of fat, right? Well, the first damn paragraph of the article has this to say about it:

Disneyland will shutter the popular “It’s a Small World” attraction for a supersized retrofit next year, but insists the upgrade has nothing to do with the expanding girth of park patrons.

Okay, so if it’s got nothing to do with the zomg teh fatz, why call it supersized? There must be more to this.

But Disneyland, which plans to add an inch of depth to the water and construct lighter boats, said overweight tourists aren’t to blame.

The boats get stuck because “layers and layers” of fiberglass have built up where maintenance teams have patched and re-patched problem areas, Disneyland Resort spokesman Bob Tucker said.

“The only thing that’s true is that we are going down in January and it’s for 10 months and it’s to replace the flumes,” he said.

I wanted to find out more about the history of the ride for this post, and let me just say that this has been a fascinating and eye-opening experience for me. Do you know that most of the sources i could find for information regarding this stuff are Disney gossip sites? That there are, as far as i can tell, feuds and rivalries between several of these sites? And that people spend lots of time arguing and theorizing about the Machiavellian schemings of what i’ve actually seen referred to as Mouschwitz?

Okay, well, maybe that should be enough perspective for you. People obsessed with the mouse are all a bit touched.

No, for real, back to the story here. The IASW ride was originally designed for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and was later moved to Disneyland after the fair was over. After 44 years of patch jobs, and they’re just now getting around to fixing it? Yeesh.

So again… no real reason for msnbc to jump on the fat-hating terminology bandwagon when, holy shit Batman, it’s got jack all to do with fat. Even better? Is the way the article ends:

In recent years, Disneyland has redesigned many of its costumes and started stocking them in larger sizes to accommodate ever-expanding waistlines.

Adult men and women are about 25 pounds heavier than they were in 1960, and 65 percent are considered overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The changes to the ride have, as has been said several times already, jack and shit to do with zomg teh fatz, and YET! We just can’t end the bloody article without some random obesity epi-panic scare statistics. After all, just because the repairs to the ride have, yanno, nothing to do with obesity, doesn’t mean they can’t get a nice jab in here and there.

It’s a good thing that fat is, yanno, so societally acceptable. That there’s noooooo fat discrimination or fat hatred out there. Yep. That would really suck if those things actually existed. Totally. For real.

… *blink*

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 7:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.