Is Epcot’s World Showcase in Need of a Cultural Update?

Over the weekend, I went with my girlfriend and her family to Epcot, one of the four Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in Orlando. Anchored by the iconic, golf-ball shaped ride Spaceship Earth, Epcot seems to bill itself as a futuristic and multi-cultural experience. I’ll admit that I see it mostly as a day of face-stuffing and beer drinking.

I’m especially fond of the idea of treating Epcot’s World Showcase—a stretch of pavilions that “showcase” 11 countries—as an epic beer crawl, though to be fair, I’ve not yet sampled the beer from all 11 countries consecutively. But I’ve tried a lot of them. OK, enough about the beer, but the point is this: I’ve been quite a few times. A glance at a DVD in one of the Epcot gift shops gave me a new perspective on one of the Disney empire’s most interesting parks.

But before I go into that, I want to make it known that I’ve had a long and complicated relationship with Disney. I, like many children worldwide for generations, grew up on classic Disney films The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Peter Pan. And, also like many children worldwide, I was too young to perceive the problematic representations of culture in such films, such as having an ape sing a song about how he wants “to be a man,” but can’t.

Or how another favorite, Peter Pan, seems to stereotype Native Americans as “savages.” I didn’t know that the original cut of Aladdin opened with a song that portrays the Arab world as a place “Where they’ll cut off your ear / If they don’t like your face / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” (The lyric was later changed to “Where it’s flat and immense / And the heat is intense” after some Arab-American groups protested. The “barbaric” line remains to this day.)

I could go on, but an illuminating 2001 documentary called Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power has already examined these aspects of Disney films in depth. In this documentary, educational theorist Henry Giroux, whose numerous works includes the book The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, recounts that after the book’s release commenters would often react with hostility to his claim that Disney is political.

It seems that Disney’s patented “magic” had obscured any political context that its films might have. But, as a ubiquitous storyteller for children, Disney films and the messages within, become an ever-present factor in how children construct notions of reality in early age. Looking back on my own childhood, I can see how these constructions happen: some of my first images of the East undoubtedly came through Disney films. And then these Disney-fied depictions of unfamiliar cultures become internalized in early age and come to represent those cultures.

And it’s the naivety of childhood that makes depicting the Arab world as a land of magic carpets, or Tarzan’s jungle as an Africa without Africans, seem unproblematic. That’s political.

So where does Epcot factor into all this? Well, I had never stopped to ask, what is an “Epcot” anyway? And the DVD (which I didn’t buy, by the way) that I had mentioned earlier spelled it out on the back cover: Epcot is an acronym of “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.” Indeed, the park is inspired by Walt Disney’s concept for a planned community in which, in Disney’s words, “there will be no landowners and therefore no voting control.”

The community would be a  “showcase for American industry” with full-employment, and thus “no retirees.” Regardless of what one thinks about Walt Disney the urban planner, his vision puts Epcot’s Future World and World Showcase into context. Also, it shows how, to validate Dr. Giroux, Epcot may be the most lucid example of exactly how political Disney really is.

And the same problems of cultural representation that are present in some Disney films can be found in Epcot’s World Showcase. Despite representing, on the surface, a gesture of a new global cooperation, many of the depicted countries heavily draw from a rather shallow stereotyping, especially via food. France becomes a land of pastries, Germany, a land of beer and sauerkraut, Mexico, a land of margaritas, sombreros and, well, Donald Duck.

Even the American pavilion, which sells funnel cakes and fried ice cream, feels a bit shallow. But the point isn’t whether Epcot’s pizza and spaghetti accurately represent Italy. Rather, does such a reduction of complex nations to a set of American-centered stereotypes really help work towards a new order of global community?

When I imagine, for instance, what a Norwegian must think of Epcot’s viking-dominated depiction of Norway, I can only answer no. Instead, Epcot reinforces what Disney already is: a multinational media conglomerate with an enormous power to dictate  cultural representation worldwide.

And with such power comes the ability to rewrite or reinterpret history, whether its glossing over the contentious historical aspects between the countries represented in Epcot pavilions, or a Disney film like Pocahontas, which (as described in Mickey Mouse Monopoly) reframes the history of Native American genocide as a mutual misunderstanding between natives and colonizers.

But the fact remains that Disney could stand to be more conscious of how it represents difference cultures and its political consequences.

And if someone berates you for suggesting that Disney is political, just spell out Epcot’s acronym.

Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michaelangelorumore@gmail.com.