WoolyBully7, Eco

After finishing the article, I felt like a kid again I can’t even lie. It brought back a lot of childhood memories, as I’m sure it did for many others. You see, when you’re a child, everything seems so much bigger, better and more entertaining. A quick example of this was when I watched a Star Wars movie when I was younger; I thought it was the coolest, most amazing thing I had ever seen. I watched it again just a few years ago on TV and I really wasn’t that impressed by it. It didn’t seem nearly as incredible or interesting as it once did. There wasn’t as much realism as I once thought there was. Now I know Star Wars doesn’t represent anything real (or does it?) but it still lost its original effect on me.

While I agree with everything Eco is referencing as far as the reconstructions represented in Disneyland, is the whole establishment as imaginative as we think it is? Some of the Disney characters such as Snow White or Peter Pan may be products of the imagination but almost everything else is “fake”. The imagination in the truest sense of the word is gone. The first four paragraphs outline over a dozen of these fake cities and how they represent past themes and events. The creativity ends after the characters and stories behind the characters. I think these representations of past eras are the exact same thing as the Johnny Rockets example from the other day. Disneyland and World are portraying the past with pirates and wild west gunfights, and Johnny Rockets with the faultless 1950s. At least in Johnny Rockets’ case, there are still people alive now who were alive in the 50s and this is not true for the pirate ships and wild west gunfights with Native Americans.
“The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it.” -Eco