Some people loathe Disney World, and I understand why. The artificiality, all those people gnawing on turkey legs, the standing in line, that infernal “It’s a Small World” song looping and looping — I get it.
The opposite extreme was always more of a mystery. Some people love Disney theme parks so much that routine visits to Disneyland in California or the Magic Kingdom in Florida are simply not enough. Some people also make it a mission to visit Disneyland Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland. And Epcot and Typhoon Lagoon and California Adventure. There are 13 Disney parks worldwide and the hardest of the hard-core Disneyphiles have visited them all.
What motivates men and women (usually traveling without children) to spend their time and money this way? It can’t just be that they really, really love Pirates of the Caribbean and the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. What kind of person, having already ridden Space Mountain a few dozen times in Florida, flies to Paris and spends an afternoon riding Space Mountain? Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Deranged.
Or so I thought. Confession: Having visited all 13 parks, I am now a full-fledged member of this obsessive Mickey Mouse Club.
It happened almost before I could help myself. All of a sudden, there I was munching on “milk tea"-flavored popcorn at Tokyo DisneySea, a park with an extravagant nautical exploration premise, and pretending to understand the Mandarin-speaking Jungle Cruise skipper at Hong Kong Disneyland. I even attempted an ill-advised whoosh down the 12-story Summit Plummet at Disney’s Blizzard Beach water park in Florida. (Tip: Tie the drawstring on your bathing suit tighter than I did.)
Like many people, I visited Disney parks as a boy. I had the time of my little life, but I also never completely bought in. Mouse ears? Over my dead body. When I was in the fifth grade, I wrote a persnickety letter to Disneyland complaining that my pair of purple 3-D glasses at “Captain EO” had been missing a stem. Pout.
By 2007, when The New York Times hired me to professionally scrutinize the Walt Disney Company, I had not laid eyes on Cinderella’s Castle in about a decade. But assignments quickly took me inside Disney parks on both coasts, and I began to notice a rabid breed of visitor — people like Tony Spittell and his son, Andrew, who visited all six of Disney’s major North American parks in a single jet-setting day, or Roger Yamashita, a California engineer who had been to all 13 properties.
In 2012, two Disneyland annual pass holders made news by going to the Happiest Place on Earth every day in a row for 366 days.
What would possess them to do that?
“Some probably really do just love the experience that Disney offers,” said Mark Duffett, a cultural studies professor at the University of Chester in England and author of the book “Understanding Fandom,” when I called to pick his brain. Mr. Duffett also noted that human beings, on a very basic level, like to collect things. Instead of compulsively searching for Hummel figurines or Honus Wagner baseball cards, “these people, like all travelers, are collecting experiences,” he said.
Still, there is a line between collecting and hoarding, and societal and behavioral factors seem to push some people to the extreme. One clinical psychologist I interviewed theorized that obsessive niche travel — visiting all the capitals of Europe or every wonder of the natural world or, yes, every Disney theme park — fulfills a need to feel superior. And Facebook is happy to lend a hand: Having a blast at Disney’s Animal Kingdom! Aren’t you a loser for sitting at home!
Mr. Yamashita, 53, cited completion anxiety. “Once I had done California, Florida and Japan, I started to really want to finish my dance card,” he told me. “It was like, ‘Well, I’ve come this far.” Mr. Yamashita, a gold member of D23, the official Disney fan club, added, “Disney is also very good at keeping you hooked.”
Ah, yes. Good old-fashioned marketing. Nobody does it better than Disney. Attendance at the company’s 13 parks last year totaled 132.6 million, a 5 percent increase from 2012, according to the Themed Entertainment Association.
I relate to Mr. Yamashita’s addict-like thinking — more, more, more — but my 13-park adventure was primarily rooted in reportorial curiosity. Disney haters have long criticized the company’s overseas parks as products of cultural imperialism: the evil Mickey Mousification of the globe. But Disney has aggressively dismissed that criticism as unfair and outdated.
“We made some mistakes early on, but we learned from them,” a senior Disney executive once said to me. “How can you judge us without seeing for yourself?”
So on a 2011 trip to Paris I persuaded my partner, Joe, to skip Sacré-Coeur and instead go to Marne-la-Vallée, a suburb of Paris where two Disney parks now sprawl across former sugar beet fields. I wanted to see if Buzz Lightyear had really learned to blast off with a proper French accent.
The place certainly smelled French. Arriving around lunchtime, we decided to have a glass of Champagne at the ornate Disneyland Hotel, which is perched near the park gates like a pink and white Victorian bauble. Lovely. But the interior smelled as if it had been hosed down with Jean Patou perfume. “I think I’m getting a chemical burn inside my nose,” I whispered to Joe, who rolled his eyes. (A Disney spokeswoman said the hotel no longer uses that scent.)
We were slack-jawed upon entering the main park. To compete with the splendor of Paris, Disney spent lavishly to open the resort in 1992, and its ornate landscaping has only improved with age: Austrian black pines, endless rhododendrons, pathways that hug serpentine streams. Of all the Disney castles, the one here is the most extravagant. “Even I thought that was pretty cool,” a normally nonplused Joe said after a peek at an animatronic dragon residing in the dungeon.
There was a lot of familiar Disney iconography that wasn’t particularly adapted for Europe, from Frontierland to Main Street U.S.A. But there were also some wonderfully unique newer attractions, like Crush’s Coaster, an indoor-outdoor “Finding Nemo” -themed thrill ride with spinning cars. Another first-of-its-kind offering, Remy’s Totally Zany Adventure, themed after Pixar’s Paris-set “Ratatouille,” opened here in July. (Riders are “shrunk” to the size of rats and sent on a 3-D chase through Gusteau’s restaurant.)
As Joe sipped a beer in Fantasyland — alcohol was initially banned, in keeping with Disney’s practice elsewhere, but the French recoiled and Disney relented — I began to wonder about the company’s newest park, Hong Kong Disneyland. I associated it with a cultural misfire: A few months after it opened in 2005, a miscalculation during the Chinese New Year led to an overcrowding debacle. But maybe that was an isolated incident. Hmm.
“Don’t even think about it,” Joe said.
I hauled him to Hong Kong Disneyland by way of Tokyo Disneyland. At the end of a long trip to Japan last fall, I slipped in a day at the seaside Tokyo Disney Resort, which comprises two parks and a half-dozen hotels connected by a monorail. The excursion turned out to be a surprise highlight of our time in Tokyo.
Along with that popcorn — other flavors include soy sauce and curry — we stuffed ourselves with chocolate “Toy Story"-themed mochi dumplings. The gift shops overflowed with oddball items you would never find in Orlando, making shopping a delight. (There are apparently a lot of adult men in Japan wearing Winnie the Pooh boxer briefs.) And one of the two parks, Tokyo DisneySea, offered a parade-on-water called Legend of Mythica that left us speechless: fireworks, dancing fountains, lasers calibrated to thundering music, acrobats, a Jet Ski ballet, floats with massive motorized serpents and griffins.
Tokyo Disneyland may have the single best attraction in the entire Disney empire, but you won’t find it on a park map. Disneyphiles privately call it the Running of the Bulls, and it takes place every morning on the entrance plaza. When the 20 gates open, roughly 40,000 people stampede through them in the first hour and a half (at least according to a Tokyo Disneyland employee) in an effort to beat the lines. And I do mean stampede.
Joe was nearly mowed down by two young women in Chip and Dale costumes. “Retreat!” he shouted, taking refuge behind a pillar. I was too busy happily soaking up the mania to offer a response. (If you stay at a Disney hotel you can enter the park 15 minutes early and secure a good observation spot.)
Hong Kong Disneyland was next. It was at this point that I started to wonder if I had gone too far. But the lines were short as a result of pouring rain, and we took cover inside the “enchanted” Mystic Manor, a twist on Disney’s Haunted Mansion that leaves out the ghosts (because the supernatural is viewed differently in Chinese culture, we were told). We loved it so much we rode it twice and picked up T-shirts adorned with the ride’s mascot, a fez-wearing monkey named Albert, on the way out.
By afternoon the weather had improved to a gloomy gray. Stuffed with dim sum shaped like Disney characters (we liked the “Chicken Little” lotus seed purée buns), we waddled over to Tomorrowland to find Space Mountain, the classic Disney roller coaster. We had realized by now that all the Space Mountains are a little different. In California the ride is smooth and pitch black inside, while the jerkier Orlando version isn’t quite as dark inside, inadvertently allowing you to see parts of the track. Space Mountain in Paris goes upside down, the one in Tokyo has a funky hyperspeed tunnel, and as we soon discovered, Hong Kong’s edition shoots riders past glowing planets.
After taking in a few more attractions — the “Festival of the Lion King” stage show, Toy Story Land — Joe got that look on his face. He was ready for more authentic corners of Hong Kong. I steered us toward the exit.
On the subway ride back to Wan Chai, the bustling neighborhood where we were staying, I thought about what visiting the 13 parks had taught me about how Disney operates, particularly overseas. Far from monolithic, the company’s theme park empire is full of quirky surprises. Yes, the notion of Disney as a cultural bulldozer needs to be retired — especially as it builds a 14th park in Shanghai that will be the first to do away with a Main Street-style entrance. (Instead there will be a vast garden that will accommodate Chinese cultural festivals.)
But Disney is Disney is Disney: Dumbo and Pinocchio and the “Frozen” princesses will always be there. At the end of the day, what makes a Disney park unique are the people who occupy it.
In France visitors stroll along those glorious garden paths — no rushing to the rides. Disney World in Florida is a melting pot endurance test, while the original Disneyland in California relies less on tourists than on annual pass-holding locals. Tokyo visitors, once completing that initial sprint, stand politely and quietly in tidy lines; Hong Kong attendees from mainland China show little interest in personal space, even leaning on one another in the ride queues, and go gaga for simple go-in-a-circle rides that would bore most Americans.
It was also cool to notice a similarity: No matter which park we were visiting, there were smiley people enjoying one another’s company and, for a few hours at least, forgetting the pressures of the outside world.
“What did you get out of it?” I asked Joe as we reached Wan Chai.
“A bunion,” he responded dryly.
Remind me to leave him at home when Shanghai Disneyland opens next year.