Disneyland and Social Engineering

For being the happiest place on earth, Disneyland is an interestingly restrictive place. In the early 1990's, during a hiring wave to populate Euro Disneyland, this article appeared in the New York Times about the hubbub:

"A certain kind of underwear?" he asked. "There's a limit, and that's going too far." (that's just my favorite line from the article)

Disney (-land and the company) is such an interesting thing to read about--it's an ubiquitous part of American culture, and I'm not sure I ever really thought how it shapes culture apart from a plethora of films that cross lines (I know someone has already posted this, but The 9 Most Racist Disney Characters from cracked.com)

Apart from the movies, however, there are places like Disneyland, which are billed as an ideal destination...every child should go, and every child should want to go to a place that not only has a history of racism in what it considers entertainment, but has a bizarre and whitewashed vision of the ideal employee populace (in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila makes the salient observation that Disneyland's ideal employee is a particularly bland Aryan ideal).



I know Kendra already posted videos from Celebration, Florida, but they bear repeating, if only to emphasize how far Disney goes in terms of social engineering:



It makes me wonder exactly to what degree Walt Disney understood the power of his company--there's a facebook group more or less dedicated to one example of how that power is deployed: Disney Gave Me Unrealistic Expectations About Love.

Altogether, it makes me wonder how Disney's power is used in shaping expectations, from the ideal employee (no hair past the collar for men, no long fingernails for women...and apparently regulated underwear) to how we think about interpersonal relations?