The year was 1997.

“Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton dominated the radio waves. Wallet chains and JNCO jeans were red-carpet staples. And plastic? It was fantastic.

Cool Shoppin’ Barbie wasn’t just made of plastic, she was the first ever doll to come with her very own piece of it. She came with a cash register, bar code scanner, credit card reader, and two credit cards—a life-sized cardboard Mastercard for you, and a doll-sized plastic one for her.

In a year where a record 1.35 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy, and the director of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America was warning Americans in the red to “consider spending only what they can afford to pay off in a month or two”—or better yet, “make purchases by cash, check, or debit card”—Mattel, the toy company behind Barbie, used her to sell consumers on the fantasy of limitless shopping. Push a button, and the doll could say the magic words: “credit approved.”

“It’s so a child can really pretend,” said a spokesperson for Mattel at the time, in defense of its partnership with Mastercard International. “We thought it would be fun for her to run the card through the scanner.”

Cool Shoppin’ Barbie had a short run, which now makes her, among a certain set, a collector’s item. But today, the doll best serves as a particularly blunt object in the long history of Mattel’s marketing strategy to sell not the doll itself, but the lifestyle she promises.

In the lead-up to the first-ever live-action Barbie movie, Mattel has drilled this message home again and again, partnering with over 100 brands to sell us everything from Barbie burgers to Barbie toothbrushes. Life, Mattel wants to remind us, is better in Barbie pink. But the biggest way Mattel is signaling this message is through the high-profile summer tentpole itself. The first of Mattel’s new film arm, which can be seen as a feature-length commercial for Barbie, is a big gamble for the toy company. But it’s one that it has made before. From the very beginning, Mattel has made its name, and Barbie an icon, by selling her lifestyle to us directly on the screen.

As the story goes, after World War II, husband-and-wife team Ruth and Elliot Handler and their friend Harold “Matt” Matson began building doll furniture, and then toys, from scraps of leftover wood from their picture frame business. Early on, the company, a fusion of Matt and Elliot’s names, gained a reputation for selling musical toys, like the Uke-A-Doodle, a plastic ukulele. But Mattel really took off in 1955, when it had the opportunity to buy advertising on a new national children’s program, Walt Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club. No one had used a major campaign to speak right to kids before. There had been national ad pushes, with the Erector Set becoming the first to get a major newspaper treatment in 1913. But unlike today, where companies spend nearly $17 billion a year marketing to kids and young adults, postwar marketers were only just beginning to treat children themselves as consumers. Becoming a commercial sponsor for a year would cost Mattel $500,000 upfront, but it meant directly reaching kids all across the country. It was a pricy gamble, but one that paid off big. That October, children tuning into ABC to watch “M-I-C-K-E-Y-M-O-U-S-E” were hit with advertisements for Mattel’s new Thunder Burp toy machine gun. The frenzy that followed created an epoch shift.

As Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus put it in Toyland, their history of American toy companies, “Mattel’s decision to advertise toys to children on national television 52 weeks a year so revolutionized the industry that it is not an exaggeration to divide the history of the American toy business into two eras, before and after television.”

Were it not for The Micky Mouse Club, Barbie herself may never have become a phenomenon. Buyers had expressed little interest when Mattel brought its prototype to the 1959 American International Toy Fair. But the response was completely different when Mickey Mouse Club viewers got their first look at the 11-inch doll. As ad footage of Barbie and her accessories paraded across the screen, a woman’s voiceover said, “Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”

From the start, Barbie, in particular, was selling children not on a doll, but on an idea: You, yes you, could be Barbie. Kids demanded a Barbie of their very own to play out their fantasies, and Mattel sold more than 300,000 dolls that first year.

Mattel continued to find new ways to use television to reach its target demographic. In 1969, Bernard Loomis, a toy developer and marketer at the company, had the idea of looking beyond regular advertising and turning Mattel’s newest toy, Hot Wheels, into a Saturday morning cartoon. The strategy was an early attempt to channel what Loomis later famously referred to as “toyetics”—a media property’s power to create and sell toys.

Loomis understood that companies would one day sell toys through branded, popular entertainment, but he was ahead of the times. After the Federal Communications Commission received a complaint from a rival toy company against the Hot Wheels animated show, it concluded that it was a “program-length commercial,” under the rationale that the programming was woven “so closely with the commercial message that the entire program must be considered commercial.” The FCC required ABC to log parts of the show, including the theme song and audio and video references to the words “Hot Wheels,” as commercial advertising, and the program was soon canceled.

It took until the 1980s for toyetics to be fully unleashed when FCC deregulation opened the doors for what one member of Congress termed the “video equivalent of a ‘Toys-R-Us’ catalog” to hit TV screens. The term toyetics was, at this point, already in circulation. Loomis is said to have coined it while discussing merchandising rights for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’d decided to pass because he said the film wasn’t “toyetic” enough. What was toyetic enough? George Lucas’ new space opera.

Extending the Star Wars experience out of the movie theater and into the toy store opened the door for intellectual property to march its way into Hollywood. And now, with the launch of Mattel Films, Mattel is hoping to use Barbie to try and write the next chapter of this history.

From the dizzying heights of ’90s Barbie mania (Cool Shoppin’ Barbie, incidentally, came out during the year Barbie sales were at their zenith), Barbie’s cultural capital sagged in the 21st century. Like with The Mickey Mouse Club gamble, Mattel is hoping the new Barbie film will directly reach, and sell, a new generation on her story. But this time around, the company is hoping not just kids, but also adults buy into the idea of Barbie. In the long list of promotional collaborations, Mattel has been going after older age groups, partnering with brands such as the dating app Bumble to expand its customer base. The movie, too, is being marketed for all ages. “Everybody can have their own experience, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s kind of for everyone,” Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken, told Reuters, during the L.A. world premiere.

Early reports seem to suggest that Mattel’s bet will once again pay off. According to box office estimates, Barbie is on pace to take in at least $130 million over the weekend. Even in a moment when Americans are spending less, it seems Barbie is still able to sell us on the plastic life.

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How best to fight Mickey Mouse?

There are two schools of strategy for making war with the Burbank-based Walt Disney Company.

One strategy, from Florida, is making national news because it is driven by the culture war and the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The other strategy, from Southern California, is little-known because it’s grounded in local concerns in the city of Anaheim, whose residents have spent decades being outmaneuvered by Donald Duck and friends.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which says that the best defense is a good offense, it’s the Anaheim strategy that is more likely to succeed.

This is, in part, because Florida’s fight resembles nothing so much as Pickett’s Charge, the suicidal, uphill attack that cost the Confederate Army the Battle of Gettysburg.

DeSantis launched media, legal, and political warfare against Disney after the company opposed his legislation, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, that restricts teachers from talking about sexual orientation and gender in Florida classrooms. The bill is part of the governor’s campaign messaging hostile to “woke” progressivism and gender non-conforming people.

The governor seemed to think that a war against Disney would help in the Republican primary polls. Instead, he’s collapsed there. Why? Because he’s launched a cultural attack on the world’s most sophisticated producer of culture. In other words, he took Disney on at its strongest point. Worse still, DeSantis, while seeking the nomination of the party of business, attacked a revered American business.

Meanwhile, DeSantis’ rival, former President Trump, has criticized the governor’s attacks on Disney as excessive. Instead of changing course, DeSantis has revealed himself as a political amateur by digging the hole deeper—moving to strip Disney of control over a local government entity that controls the area around Disney World. Predictably, Disney, one of the world’s richest companies—with better lawyers than the state of Florida—is winning its legal battle with the governor.

But DeSantis’ attacks have been so ham-handed that he has made Disney seem sympathetic, a victim of state persecution.

True to form, Disney, an opportunistic multinational corporation, has moved to exploit that sympathy here in California—and specifically in Anaheim, by seeking to advance an expansion plan called DisneylandForward.

Disney has all but owned the city since the theme park opened there in 1955. Today, it is responsible for one in five jobs and a sizable plurality of general fund revenues. The company has used gifts, investment promises, philanthropy, and raw lobbying and political power to secure a suite of tax rebates and protections, bonds, and public benefits too long to list here. In 2015, the Los Angeles Times estimated the value of Anaheim’s support for Disney over the previous two decades at $1 billion.

But in the previous decade, some civic leaders—most notably former Mayor Tom Tait and former councilmember Jose Moreno—managed to get elected despite Disney’s political opposition to them. And in office, they slowed, and in a few cases reversed, giveaways to Disney. As a result, Anaheim has limited Disney’s geographic footprint to where it stood in the 1990s.

The Anaheim strategy most closely resembles Foreign Service Officer George Kennan’s approach to global communism—containment. Politicians avoided frontal assaults or hot rhetorical battles with Disney. In fact, they tried to deemphasize Disney controversies—and emphasize the needs of local neighborhoods, prioritizing the “children of Anaheim” over the “children of tourists,” in Moreno’s formulation.

In the process, they managed to quietly contain Disney’s more aggressive expansion ideas. (In this, Anaheim may have saved Disney from itself, especially considering that its most high-profile addition to Disneyland, “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge,” has been called a flop.) Indeed, when the House of Mouse first proposed DisneylandForward in 2021, it went nowhere, with city officials unwilling to prioritize it.

But the door to expansion has been reopening. City government has been in turmoil and transition because of an FBI corruption investigation, involving the proposed sale of Angel Stadium that ensnared “a cadre” of political leaders, including Mayor Harry Sidhu. At the same time, Disney-backed candidates have been winning recent elections.

Now, DeSantis’ culture war has made the company politically sympathetic, offering an opportunity to revive DisneylandForward. Even Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has come to view Disney as an ally in his own rhetorical war against DeSantis and other culturally conservative governors, has publicly supported the venture.

Newsom’s logic here is clear—the enemy (Disney) of my enemy (DeSantis) is my friend. But the governor’s support of Disney (he’s even touting a company-funded economic study) is a mistake, one that may make it harder for Anaheim leaders to negotiate a fair deal with the theme park.

DisneylandForward would give Disney far more control over what happens inside the resort area. That would allow it to squeeze in new attractions like “Frozenland,” a theme park rendition of Zootopia, or a TRON rollercoaster.

But the plan is modest in other ways, reflecting the company’s recognition that it no longer has the sway it once had in Anaheim. DisneylandForward specifically rules out any additions to the company’s Anaheim footprint, for example. The plan is also full of detailed promises of what the House of Mouse will do for the city and its workers—union contractors for future development, local hire rules, a new workforce development program focused on Anaheim’s young people, and company support for affordable housing projects (which Disney has opposed in the past).

To win support, Disney is doing far more than internal lobbying—it is appealing directly to the community. This summer, Disney is hosting community meetings in city parks—the free kind, with green space and playgrounds and pools—all over Anaheim.

Even with all this effort, DisneylandForward is no sure thing. Patient containment is a winning strategy. And Anaheim is much tougher than Ron DeSantis.

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I doubt it.

While this now-concluding decade has seen autocrats rise and democracy decline around the globe, no unelected ruler of the 2010s has set as seductive an example of unaccountable authoritarianism as Queen Elsa, the monarch at the center of the Frozen franchise.

For all its lovely images and irresistible songs, Frozen celebrates the illogic of monarchs from Louis XIV to Trump: l’etat c’est moi, or “the state is me,” reflecting the idea that a society is defined by the feelings and needs of its rulers.

Sadly, the blame for this animated attack on democratic values falls on our fellow Californians—specifically, Disney executives, writers, and animators. They are the most powerful players in the great California-based enterprise of exporting narratives that capture children’s imaginations, and thus shape the future of culture and politics worldwide. Unfortunately, these creative Californians—who live in a state built on the promise that you can live like a king—prefer tales of princes, princesses, and other pretty people whose power is not derived from the consent of the governed.

I’m sorry if this sounds overwrought, but I’ve suffered under the Frozen tyranny personally. My three kids are among the hundreds of millions of people who loved the original Frozen film, an animated tale of a young Scandinavian queen named Elsa, who has the magical voice of Idina Menzel, the power to create ice with her hands, and a loyal-to-the-death sister, Anna (Kristen Bell).

But the overwhelming success of that 2013 film—$1.2 billion in global box office and two Oscars—has become a form of cultural oppression. The film’s best-selling soundtrack, its ubiquitous swag, its endless YouTube fan videos have made Frozen inescapable, so visible and audible in our lives as to raise questions about whether Disney marketers are violating the Geneva Convention. The torture is worst for parents; by my rough count, I’ve seen the movie 25 times—not once of my own free will.

I would compare Frozen’s cultural tyranny to that of the sloppy neo-authoritarians—Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Duterte, Orbán, Erdoğan—who now dominate media and politics worldwide. Except that Disney is a more effective, disciplined, and ambitious demagogue than any of these guys. Here in America, Frozen’s dominance of the media has lasted six years, while Trump has monopolized the headlines for only three.

To be fair, the filmmakers clearly intended their 2013 movie as a celebration of loyalty and familial love. We are meant to identify with Elsa, who becomes queen of the kingdom of Arendelle when her parents are lost at sea. She can’t control her ice-making powers, so, after setting off an epic winter freeze, she flees to an ice castle in the mountains. Anna chases after her. Eventually—after adventures including a scary monster, a reindeer, romance, and trolls who mercifully aren’t on Facebook—love and magic conquer all, and Elsa and Anna return to Arendelle to continue their monarchical rule.

The seeming villain of this piece is Anna’s boyfriend Prince Hans of the Southern Isles, who is left in charge of Arendelle when Elsa abandons her post. Hans is portrayed as the bad guy because he doesn’t really love Anna and because he seeks to retain power when Elsa returns to reclaim her throne.

But I don’t think he’s the real villain. After my first half-dozen-or-so forced viewings of the film, I began to see Hans—voiced by the Tony Award-winning actor Santino Fontana, the Stockton-born son of a schoolteacher and an agronomist—as the film’s flawed and tragic hero.

While Elsa and Anna are unelected rulers consumed with their own personal dramas, Hans is the only character in the movie who thinks about the needs of Arendelle’s traumatized citizens, who barely register in the film.

When Elsa leaves her people in total darkness after a disaster of her own making (who does she think she is—PG&E?), Hans steps in to comfort the public, hand out blankets and food, and try to find some way to end the winter. He, unlike the narcissistic and irresponsible Elsa, sees climate change as a real emergency.

So I, for one, find it hard to blame Hans when, upon Elsa’s return, he tries to slay a tyrant who effectively abdicated her throne during a national crisis. His action would seem to qualify both as a good-faith defense of Arendelle’s national security, and as a brave application of the Jeffersonian principle that the people possess the right of revolution against dictators.

Of course, this is a film for young people, who, as the political scientists Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk have shown, are turning against democracy. So Hans is thrown into a dungeon without trial. Meanwhile, Elsa melts all the ice she created. Then, instead of rallying her administration to respond to the dangerous flooding that such a sudden melt would produce, she holds a party outside her castle—thus establishing the emergency response model followed by the federal government after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.

For the sequel, I’d been hoping to see Arendelle’s residents rise up against the monarch, free the political prisoner Hans, and turn their kingdom into another robust Scandinavian social democracy. Alas, Frozen 2’s plot is instead an imperial adventure about an enchanted forest and the royal sisters who continue their undemocratic rule.

By this point in the column, you may say that we shouldn’t worry about a computer-animated fantasy. But mass entertainment has a huge impact on how we think and feel. Animated films from the Disney empire have inspired major social shifts—most notably Bambi, which spawned the environmental movement, not to mention a population explosion of deer. And Disney has never been more powerful than it is right now, with the corporate bullies from Burbank having bought up Marvel and Star Wars properties to form a veritable cartel of fantasy.

So, while our current civic problems are rightfully pinned on white supremacy, economic dislocation and digital disruption, Frozen shouldn’t entirely escape blame.

It’s understandable that frustrated parents, given the difficulty of finding childcare, might use this film to distract their kids temporarily with sweet songs. But I worry about the long-term effects of these movies. One question: If we’re going to teach our children to sing along with an unaccountable autocrat like Elsa, how will we ever muster the social consensus to remove real-life authoritarians from office?

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Though Disney Parks today are well-established cultural icons, the Walt Disney Company’s start as an interpreter of American history and ideals began long before it opened the gates of Disneyland or Disney World (1955 and 1971, respectively). From its creation in 1923 as “The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio,” the Disney operation was producing films that echoed Americans’ ideal version of themselves. Often set in a glorified 19th century rural American heartland, these animations featured a hero (usually the indomitable Mickey Mouse) whose strong work ethic and bravery in the face of risk always found the “little guy” and “common man” triumphant over his foe. Such optimistic sentiment held great appeal in the country’s Depression years, and most certainly led Mickey and company to become household names.

Promotional poster from Life Magazine for Disney World’s 1987 celebration of the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution.

By World War II, the company was cementing its association with the “American Way” by producing propaganda films and war-related goods that served the U.S. cause. Disney characters appeared on war bonds, posters, and on more than a thousand military unit insignia. They also appeared in short patriotic cartoons: The Spirit of ’43 has Donald Duck expounding on the importance of paying taxes; Donald Gets Drafted, shows, as expected, the irascible cartoon waterfowl getting drafted. Donald Duck in particular became so well recognized as an American symbol during the war that in February, 1943 The New York Times called him “a salesman of the American Way.” For their promotion of wartime allegiance and good citizenship, Mickey Mouse and friends joined the ranks of the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam as faces of our nation.

This narrative of upholding American values continued at the brand’s theme parks, where Walt Disney translated it into a physical experience using American folk history. “Disneyland,” he said at the park’s grand opening, “is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America.” Visitors are made to feel as if they are stepping into carefully curated moments of history, ones chosen to fit a tidy narrative that highlights the nation’s past and future commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It celebrates a simple story that tells us that through hard work—and perhaps a bit of pixie dust—any American can make their dreams come true.

Main Street U.S.A.’s manicured small-town charm and bustling shops boast of American optimism and enterprise. The colonial-themed Liberty Square teems with symbols of the nation’s commitment to independence, even when it requires a fight. Its centerpiece, the Hall of Presidents, provides a stirring homage to our government and its illustrious leaders. And while Frontierland’s cowboys and pioneers harken back to the rugged individualism of the Old West, Tomorrowland’s space age attractions point ahead to America’s constant eye to a better future and the conquest of new challenges. American heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, and Davy Crockett—whose legends are repeated to us in childhood—are brought to “life” here through Disney magic.

The pocket map, “The Story of Disneyland with a complete guide to Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Frontierland, Main St. U.S.A.” from 1955.

Visitors not just from all over the country, but from around the world, can find themselves standing amidst Disney’s version of America’s past, creating a sense of collective memory in all who visit. It’s perhaps telling that the parks have been popular destinations for not only four sitting U.S. presidents over the decades (Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Obama), but also foreign heads of state—from Prime Minister Nehru of India to the Shah of Iran to Khrushchev (who was famously barred from visiting)–hoping to get insight into American culture.

Fittingly, in 1976, as the nation celebrated the 200-year anniversary of Independence Day, the Disney Parks staged a 15-month bicoastal extravaganza of Americana, “America on Parade,” which Disney dubbed “America’s Biggest and Best Bicentennial Party.” The festivities included special touches such as television programs, books, and records.

The stars of the show were the parks’ daily parades—50 floats and more than 150 characters representing “the people of America”. They were seen by an estimated 25 million park visitors, making it one of the largest shared celebrations across the nation (and were even designated “official bicentennial events” by the U.S. government). The grand show helped solidify the theme park’s place in the minds of Americans as spaces not only for family-friendly vacation destinations, but as ones where they could come together to share cultural and historical heritage.

WWII aircraft worker’s pin featuring Mickey Mouse, from the Lockheed Martin Aircraft Plant in Burbank, CA.

To be sure, Disney’s unique ability to appropriate and transform American history in its own nostalgia-tinged image—what has come to be called “Disneyfication”— has drawn significant criticism. Its idealized imaginings of the country’s past can certainly strip out its more complicated, controversial, and unsavory elements in favor of a simpler, sunnier story.

But when it comes to collective memory, it must be noted that the past can be remembered one way and exist factually in another, and that many different versions can have their place in the American mind. For many park visitors, the value of “Disneyfied” history is not in its factual accuracy—or lack thereof. The importance of “Disney’s American history” is in how it gives life to a folk history we would like to have, one that gives us a sense of optimism and unity. It makes easily accessible a version of American history that shows visitors less the nation that we have been than the nation that we want to be, and, indeed, hope that we are.

Even as characters change and Tomorrowland becomes an artifact of yesterday, Disneyland and Disney World continue to be touchstones of American collective memory. From annual Fourth of July celebrations to contemporary additions to the Hall of Presidents, from a 1987 celebration of the Constitution’s bicentennial, to the swearing in of new citizens on Main Street, U.S.A., the parks have established themselves as places to celebrate shared memories and civic pride—and allow it to evolve and expand.

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These contradictory responses suggest the lingering strength of the Bambi myth, the lasting legacy of Walt Disney’s 1942 cartoon about that big-eyed fawn. Seventy-four years later, Bambi’s worldview still animates debates over animal rights and environmentalism: Should we save Bambi or save the earth?

Bambi didn’t start as an American environmental fable. Written by an Austrian author with the pen name Felix Salten for adults in 1928, Bambi: A Forest Life, recounts the story of a fawn who grows up to be the prince of the forest alongside his royal father. But his rise to power comes only after the death of his mother and near loss of his mate Faline. While hunters are a problem for these deer, so are animals: In the forest, owls eat mice, crows eat a friendly rabbit, and a fox eats a duck. Early reviewers considered the book an anti-fascist fable and more recent writers have speculated that the story was an allegory about the plight of Jews in Europe. All of Salter’s work was eventually banned in Nazi Germany.

By 1942, when Disney released the film, Americans were processing their shock at the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entrance into a world war, which is reflected in the film’s simplified portrayal of deer living in an idealized forest where predators and prey play together and fear only a shadowy character called “Man,” who is equipped with guns and fire.

The emotional punch of Disney’s Bambi is heightened by its artistry, which combines gorgeous natural realism with cartoonish animals, their exceptionally large heads, small noses, and wide eyes resembling human children. Disney gave Bambi playful friends like the rabbit Thumper and the skunk Flower, in contrast to the more melancholy, quarrelsome animals of the book. Even though these cartoon animals frolic to the tune of “Little April Shower,” Disney paid special attention to the details of the forest, sending artists to sketch foliage in Maine’s Baxter State Park and shipping two fawns to the studio as artist’s models. This uncanny mix of cuteness and terror and fantasy and realism has led some to call it a horror film.

When it was released in 1942, Bambi the movie was surprisingly controversial, but not for the same reasons as the book. Hunters in particular saw it as an ideological threat. Outdoor Life editor Raymond J. Brown called the film “the worst insult ever offered in any form to American sportsmen,” and even asked Disney to correct slurs against hunters, according to anthropologist Matthew Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History. Disney claimed sportsmen were not the targets because Salten’s story was about German hunters. In 1988, Field and Stream urged “hunters to start protesting against the “Bambi-killer jokes” they sometimes encountered.

Bambi had fans too. In a July 1942 issue of Audubon Magazine, naturalist Donald Culross Peattie “hotly denies” that Bambi “misrepresented anything.” That same year the National Audubon Society compared the cartoon’s consciousness-raising power for the environment to what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the abolition of slavery. New York Times reviewer Theodore Strauss claimed Disney films “teach us variously about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism.”

When it was first released, Bambi lost money, but subsequent re-releases in theatres and video rentals brought in close to $300 million by 1988 as the film became a rite of childhood. And over the years that “emotional groundwork,” took hold in the form of “The Bambi Factor,” a sentimental anthropomorphized view of wildlife, especially deer.

One of the first people bitten by the Bambi Factor was, ironically, early environmentalist Aldo Leopold. In 1943, Leopold encouraged Wisconsin to institute an antlerless deer season that would have allowed hunters to shoot does and young bucks to thin the overpopulated herd. Leopold was interested in the good of all life as part of an ecosystem, not just special animals. In his Sand County Almanac, Leopold extends ethics to include nonhuman animals, as well as the plant life that sustains them. For Leopold, “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,” and those parts include all elements of the natural environment, from soil and plants to “Bambi.” A graduate of the Yale forestry school, Leopold promoted game management, evolutionary biology, and ecology, rather than sentimental anthropomorphism. To maintain a diverse ecology, Leopold supported regulated sport hunting, including shooting a limited number of Wisconsin’s does with the aim of keeping the herd size smaller. But his Wisconsin proposal was shot down—the public, according to scholar Ralph H. Lutts, was outraged at the idea of culling any of Bambi’s child-like creatures.

But there’s another environmental ideology hidden in Bambi that’s at odds with reality. Bambi’s underlying message is that “Man” and deer can’t co-exist. Only Man disrupts the pristine view of nature in the Bambi cartoons. “Why did we all run?” Bambi asks after a gun shot sounds. “Man was in the forest,” his mother replies. A later gunshot is the last we know of Bambi’s mother, hiding the violence that is heightened by her absence. Other hunters go on a chilling rampage, wounding Bambi and causing a final eco-disaster when their campfire explodes into the woods and destroys the animals’ home. The fire effects light the scene in oranges and reds, in the spirit of the “Burning of Atlanta” scene in Gone with the Wind. In the context of Disney’s film version of Bambi, humans and their vicious dogs are shadowy harbingers of death destroying an idealized paradise.

Disney focuses almost entirely on a human-free world of the forest. Unless a spectral man appears, animals of all species live without fear in a “paradise” untouched by human hands. Even owls act like vegetarians! In Disney’s natural world, interaction with humans ends only in death or suffering, so the only real choice is a complete separation between the two worlds.

As academics, Bambi’s worldview interested us: Did the “paradise” view of the forest precede the more modern idea of the ecosystem in popular culture? We were surprised to find that it didn’t. Just a few months before Bambi came out, audiences went to see the Fleischer Brothers’ animated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). Instead of contrasting conflicts between humans and idyllic nature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town demonstrates how lowland bugs and humans can live interdependently in a human couple’s urban garden in the center of Manhattan. Despite the anthropomorphism on display, Mr. Bug’s focus on interdependence connects with more realistic views about wildlife management and interconnected communities of plants, bugs, animals, and human animals. While Mr. Bug was modeled on sophisticated Hollywood comedies of the time, Bambi reflects Disney’s focus on emotionally convincing yet traditional folktales meant to appeal to broad audiences.

Contrary to the Disney story, of course, deer are all too comfortable with “Man,” “Woman,” and “Cars,” not to mention our delicious gardens, lawns, and infant trees. By 2015, predictably, protests against the Bambi Factor started to come from drivers and organic gardeners as the deer population grew dramatically. The National Traffic Safety Administration estimates that deer cause 1.5 million roadway accidents per year with 150 human fatalities and 10,000 personal injuries, as well as $1 billion in property damage. On Internet gardening forums, gardeners grouse about deer invasions.

Bambi lovers want to protect the deer even when the deer are sick. As recently as 2012, naturalist Valerie Blaine blamed the Bambi Factor for the North Rutland Deer Alliance’s opposition to killing deer even to test for chronic wasting disease. According to Blaine, the group felt any herd reduction would spoil their “deer watching experience” in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs.

The Bambi Factor encourages sentimentalized views of wildlife that romanticize nature without accepting its messier aspects. With its vast and varied ecologies, America’s myth is that it is both a frontier to be conquered and an Eden to be preserved, but there’s more to living on this planet than choosing between paradise and a parking lot. Bambi presents us with a powerful vision that is in a sense a false choice. Instead of looking for a paradise that separates us from wild nature, we need to find a new vision that stresses how to live together, balancing habitat preservation with wildlife management. Bambi is, after all, just a movie.

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I’ve been reminded of that conversation watching Trump and Carly Fiorina attack each other’s business record in recent weeks. And on this issue, if on little else, both candidates are absolutely correct: The other’s business record shouldn’t inspire confidence among voters.

Trump has made a lot of money as a charismatic real estate promoter, but failed at the casino and lodging business and, worst of all, boasts that others who invested in him (such as creditors to his serially bankrupt casino company) didn’t fare well, even when he did. Fiorina, meanwhile, did hold a position that offers more meaningful experience for a would-be president, running Hewlett-Packard, a multinational, public company with many constituencies and product lines. Trouble is, she didn’t do a good job of it, and has shown little willingness to acknowledge that fact and learn from her mistakes. It’s clear in retrospect, and was clear to many at the time, that betting Hewlett-Packard’s future on a pricey merger with Compaq, the computer maker, was a doomed strategy.

To be fair, Trump and Fiorina have been successful in life; it took considerable smarts and drive for them to have achieved what they did, and to have become as wealthy as they did. But they wouldn’t appear on a list of folks you’d come up with under the heading: “Hey, these CEOs have been so good in the business world, imagine what they could do as president.”

I find myself wishing we had someone from that list in the race. I do agree with the Trump-Fiorina premise that a successful stint as the CEO of a global company is a compelling credential for a presidential candidate. There was a time in our nation’s history when Americans believed successful generals should automatically be considered presidential material, even if they were outsiders to the political process. We should think of our most successful CEOs in such a manner today.

There have been a number of presidents with business backgrounds, including Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and both Bush presidents, who admittedly don’t stand out among the all-time greats. And we’ve also had other successful business leaders make serious runs for the office, including Mitt Romney and Ross Perot. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York who built an information conglomerate that bears his name, may decide one of these presidential cycles to run for the White House.

But no one who has been the successful CEO of a major, publicly traded multinational corporation has gone on to be president. Much of the criticism of past business leaders in politics (including some of those previous presidents) is centered on the incompatibility between the insular world you rule when you run your own business and the consensus-driven, diplomacy-requiring realm of politics. But being CEO of a large company that is owned by shareholders (a key distinction), and involved in many different industries and geographic markets, is an inherently political job, demanding many of the same skills the White House requires. It is more akin to being president than to being the dictator of a business you founded and own.

So allow me to nominate Bob Iger, the chairman and CEO of Disney, for your consideration. He’s the type of businessman I wish we could throw into the mix. First, think of the job he’s held since 2005. Disney, like the country as a whole, is a fabled entity with a strong identity and story about itself—as the ultimate storyteller—that Iger is merely entrusted with for a time, before he passes it on to future generations. As an important player in the sports, retail, technology, travel, news, and entertainment businesses with operations in dozens of countries, Iger is forced to set a long-term strategic vision, communicate it effectively, manage complexity, and navigate daily between competing interest groups that include shareholders, customers, employees, regulators in a variety of industries, and foreign governments.

Then look at how he has performed in the job. Since he took over Disney in 2005, the company’s stock price has nearly quadrupled. Instead of resting on Disney’s considerable laurels, Iger reinvigorated the company with a series of bold acquisitions—Pixar, Marvel, and LucasFilm—that strengthened the company’s claim to be the greatest curator of America’s pop culture canon. Each one of those deals has enhanced Disney’s bottom line and required deft diplomacy to pull off—not everyone could have persuaded Steve Jobs, Isaac Perlmutter, and George Lucas to willingly let go of their prized possessions and trust they would be in good hands. Even more remarkable in the often poisonous, ego-rich world of Hollywood is the fact that most of the talent that came over to Disney with these companies continues to thrive. Indeed, Iger himself rose to be Disney CEO after the company he’d made his career at (ABC’s holding company) was acquired by Disney in 1996.

Clearly this is a leader who can get people from different factions and cultures to adapt to change and move forward together under a common vision. Unlike his predecessor, Michael Eisner, Iger keeps a relatively low profile, allowing his talent and stories to take center stage. We’ll know by the end of the year whether he’s wrecked or resurrected the Star Wars franchise, but assuming it’s the latter, he’d have my vote for president any day. But if you aren’t moved by my nomination from the Magic Kingdom, go ahead and nominate another CEO who’d be an intriguing candidate. Jamie Dimon (J.P. Morgan Chase), Ginni Rometty (IBM), and Mark Zuckerberg (though Facebook’s founder is still too young, absent a constitutional amendment) have been mentioned by colleagues.

But who are we kidding? These people, like most successful people outside of politics, have no appetite to do what Trump and Fiorina relish—to spout off the most outrageous things to attract attention and fringe voters, and to pander for months on end to idiosyncratic primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

And so I am forced to downgrade my own expectations. Let’s nominate Iger to be the next president’s chief of staff.

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When I was growing up in the 1980s and early ’90s, Disneyland was so reliably empty on the day before Christmas that it became a family tradition to spend December 24 in the “Happiest Place on Earth,” often along with a visit to my grandmother, who lived in Anaheim. When my uncle, a Disney freak and expert park navigator, came down from Northern California to join us, we could ride every attraction in eight hours. Tickets got more expensive each year, but they didn’t break the bank; in 1989, adult admissions for one day, without any discount, were $23.50, and kids ages 3 to 12 were $18.50.

Today, I have three little kids, the oldest of whom is 6, but I wouldn’t think of taking them to Disneyland. Disney—via special events and the invention of holiday attractions—has all but eliminated any notion of an off-season. Christmas week is now so busy that ticket sales are sometimes cut off as Disneyland and its sister park, Disney’s California Adventure, reach capacity. This year, you’ll probably find the worst holiday traffic in California on Main Street U.S.A.

And the expense of taking the kids would be hard to justify. Disney has hiked the cost of a one-day ticket to visit just one of its two Anaheim parks to $96 for anyone 10 or older. For children ages 3 to 9, it’s $90. Throw in gas money and another $17 to $22 for parking, and for a family of five, we’re talking $500 just to walk in the gate, before we eat or drink a thing.

That’s enough to raise the question of whether the average Californian—median annual per capita income in the state is a tick under $30,000—can afford to visit this most iconic of California places. Even worse, admission inflation seems to outpace other inflation gauges—one-park, one-day admission has gone from $63 to $96 since 2006, despite the Great Recession. Remarkably, attendance to the park increased over the same time period.

True to California life, Disneyland has become overcrowded as a result of the combination of its popularity and underinvestment in infrastructure (which is to say, not enough new parks). The company manages this problem by raising prices–and making it harder for Southern Californians to come to the park. This latter move feels like a betrayal of the community that helped put Mickey on the map.

Disney has suspended sales of the Southern California Annual Passport that many locals bought in order to visit frequently throughout the year. (Those who have the passes can renew them, according to the Disneyland website, but no new passes are being issued.) Disney does offer a “select” Southern California pass, but it works on fewer than half the days of the year; neither brand of local pass gets you into the park during the height of the summer or the weeks of Christmas and New Year’s.

Now, there are probably a few people reading this who do not see our diminishing access to Disneyland as an issue as serious as access to, say, affordable healthcare or high-quality public education. But for those Californians who understand that a visit to Disneyland is an essential California cultural experience that should be denied no one, it’s obvious we face a statewide crisis that cries out for a forceful response.

What could that be? As Walt Disney once promised: “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” So here’s what I’m imagining, to fulfill Uncle Walt’s vision: a state constitutional amendment that guarantees every child born in California one free visit to Disneyland before he or she turns 18. For the record, I’d insert this new birthright in Article X, which already guarantees the right of every Californian to access our coast.

Such a right is easily justified by history; we launched the Disney park empire in California in 1955. Certainly Disney and other capitalists might object to the cost of all those free admissions, but wouldn’t there be considerable long-term public relations value in making Disneyland one of the rare experiences all young Californians share?

With fewer than 500,000 native Californians born a year, we’re talking about less than $50 million annually in new financial commitments. If Disney or the state generously wanted to open the program to every California resident under the age of 18 right now (9 million people according to the census), we’d still be talking a less than $1 billion hit, spread over many years, for a company with annual revenues approaching $50 billion.

I must admit there are two issues with a Disneyland-for-all-kids constitutional amendment. The first is practical: This new right could create even more crowds in the short run.

The second issue is constitutional. One of California’s finest legal scholars has informed me that, despite all the crazy things already in the state constitution, this measure forcing a private company to provide free goods to the citizenry might be blocked as an unconstitutional “taking”—unless the right comes with “just compensation” for Disney.

Both issues are easily handled—with one stroke that would solve the problem of Disneyland access and a few other California quandaries.

Here it is, Mickey! The state should acquire and give Disney a piece of land, with all environmental approvals and entitlements in place, large enough to build another park in California. Where? Disney could build a third park on a large piece of land next to its Anaheim resort, but hasn’t moved to do so. (One reason: The city of Anaheim is not nearly as friendly to Disney as it once was.) Land on the coast would cost too much, so it should be inland. And to leverage corporate welfare, the land should be tied to another public project that is already acquiring large amounts of land.

The perfect location: something close to the planned high-speed rail station in Fresno.

Talk about Tomorrowland! A new Disney Fresno could draw crowds large enough to make high-speed rail economically viable—especially if Disney focused the park on exploiting its newly acquired rights to the Star Wars empire of George Lucas, himself a son of the San Joaquin Valley. Heck, if the California drought lasts a couple more years, the landscape surrounding Disney Fresno might be passed off on park patrons as the desert planet Tatooine, where Luke Skywalker grew up.

Far-fetched? Maybe, but when has that deterred Disney? As Uncle Walt liked to remind people, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

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Up until about six months ago, Bob Baker—who’s 90—performed his signature act for my tour groups. It featured a special marionette he made in 1939 of tap dancer Bill Robinson.

Since 1961, people have been coming to the theater on the outskirts of downtown L.A. to be entertained by Bob Baker’s one-of-a-kind marionettes. Sometimes they visited as children and then return as adults with their kids or even grandkids.

When a fund was set up recently to raise money for Bob Baker’s in-home hospice care, there was an outpouring of love for him and comments about the joy and magic he brought to so many people.

When I first visited the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in 1999, I was completely swept away by everything about the place. The building doesn’t look like much from the outside as you pass it on Glendale Boulevard. The years have unraveled some of its original whimsy. But once you step inside, you enter a time warp.

The theater is so honest and unpretentious. On my first visit I noticed the beautiful and well-worn red velvet curtain and the handmade decorations hanging next to light fixtures made from coffee cans. Then the show began and I was even more awestruck by the marionettes themselves. They had so much character and were so beautifully dressed. Watching them move across the stage right in front of me, they almost seemed like they were alive. Each one is a work of art and has been performing for decades.

When I finally had the privilege to meet Bob, I had so many questions and he was happy to answer them. I was so impressed by his photographic memory of growing up in Midtown Los Angeles.

This is a man who found his life’s work at age 6 and began performing professionally at 8! He told me his first puppet came from Bullocks Wilshire, where he learned puppeteering from the woman who ran the puppet department. By the time he was 19 in 1943, he was manufacturing and selling his marionettes to the finest toy stores in the United States.

Not only is Bob a master puppeteer—he is a master puppet maker. One of his experienced puppeteers once told me that working a Bob Baker marionette must be what it feels like to play a Stradivarius, referring to their craftsmanship and how well they move.

Bob Baker’s marionettes were even sold on Main Street USA at Disneyland. Bob told me he made a handshake deal with Walt Disney in 1955 to produce a line of Disney character marionettes. Up until about 10 years ago, you could buy a Bob Baker original at the theme park.

His marionettes also appeared in many television shows, from Bewitched to Star Trek, and movies, from GI Blues with Elvis Presley to A Star is Born with Judy Garland. In the early part of his career, he provided entertainment for children’s parties at the homes of Hollywood stars like Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford, and Ronald Reagan.

Once I got to know Bob, I asked if we could put on a big retrospective show. My goal was to feature more of his puppets than any show he’d ever created. In 2005, we produced Bob Baker This is Your Life. I presented film clips and slides that told the story of Bob’s life and theater. The puppet show was an extravaganza and featured more than 200 marionettes, including many of my favorites: the flying purple people eater; the fly-apart, glow-in-the-dark skeletons; the dancing dodo birds dressed as 1920s flappers; and the enormous ostrich that lays an egg, which hatches a baby bird that stumbles across the stage. Just like every show at Bob’s theater, the performance was followed by cake and ice cream in the colorful party room.

Bob’s work has touched so many lives. Since he opened the theater in 1961 with his late business partner Alton Wood, there has been a performance almost every day. He and his troupe of puppeteers have also performed at countless fairs, festivals, pageants, parades, and parties.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater has survived against all odds for more than 50 years. But nothing lasts forever. A developer who purchased the theater last year is now threatening to build an apartment complex on the site. But for now, and for as long as I can, I will continue to thrill my tour groups by bringing them to the Fantasyland that is Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater.

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The two of us had just returned to Los Angeles from a 10-week nationwide tour in support of the debut album that we released independently to showcase our minimalist sound. (We describe it as “cello rock.” Others may call it folk rock.) Boxes full of CDs from our ambitious first pressing were stacked in the corner of our rehearsal space. We sat there brainstorming ways to sell them in an effort to fund our next album. Before we left for our tour, Ed was working as a marketing manager for an independent record label and Ken was doing HTML layout design for a dot-com. We quit those jobs to go on our cross-country adventure with no intention of getting them back.

Ed went to get lunch–and some advice—from his former boss at the label in Santa Monica. Ed returned with an idea: street performing. At first it seemed a little crazy, and we certainly didn’t think that we would be able to support ourselves as buskers, people who perform in public places for donations. But the more we talked about it, the more interesting it became. The Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica wasn’t Carnegie Hall, but it would be a place we could play our music and hopefully make some money doing it.

The first week of January, we sauntered into the Santa Monica courthouse with our passport photos and $75 in hand. The permitting system for busking on the promenade is fairly simple: All you need are photos, a valid driver’s license, and your Social Security number. The city wants to keep track of who is playing at the promenade, and a promenade manager walks the street on the even hours to check permits.

The following Saturday we drove the 13 miles from the apartment we shared in Koreatown to Santa Monica. We parked our Honda Element four blocks away from the promenade and loaded our two carts with a deep cycle marine battery and a power inverter (because you can’t plug your system into a wall outside), two massive speakers, four boxes of CDs, and leftover T-shirts from the tour. With cello and guitar slung across our backs, we began the first of what would become countless treks down Colorado Boulevard to the Promenade.

We picked the first spot that looked available, not even noticing the trash-can-playing drummer who was planning to set up right next to us. The designated performance areas on the Promenade are only 40 feet apart from one another. When you set up an acoustic guitar and a cello right next to Animal, the maniacal percussionist from the Muppets, you are bound to have a bad set.

We soon learned that the most important elements of street performing for a musician are a quiet location and a large amount of foot traffic. In order to prevent any one performer from monopolizing a particular spot, the Promenade requires that you change positions every two hours on the even hours—i.e., 2 p.m., 4 p.m., and so on. The seasoned buskers would finish their noon set at 2 p.m. and head over to a different spot right away to wait for the 4 p.m. slot. You couldn’t say you’ve got “dibs” on any spot unless you were physically standing there with your gear … or wanted to get into a fight. On any given Saturday you could wait up to four hours to play at the most desirable location. We quickly discovered what would become the majority of our busking experience: waiting.

By our first summer, we had learned the ropes of street performing and were frequenting the Promenade up to five days a week. Any more than that and we might have gone crazy. We had two 45-minute sets of material at this point and would cycle through them during the day. This meant a lot of repetition. We were definitely getting our chops up and had to learn some covers to spice up the set.

But we were thrilled to have discovered a way to support ourselves with art. The actual amount we earned on any given day varied—as little as $30 and as much as $1,000. If it rained we would have to pack up our stuff as quickly as possible and accept a loss for that day. Our persistence averaged out our income to a fairly consistent amount. We were paying ourselves $300 a week and putting the rest in the bank account. It wasn’t a lot of money to live off of, but we were used to scraping by. Armed with savings and practice, we were able to record our second album with veteran rock producer Duane Baron at Banyan Tree Studios in Hollywood.

The Promenade had its dark days, of course. We were the literal new kids on the block, and the other performers did not always share in the joy of the large crowds we were drawing and the money changing hands. One day, we were performing near a clown making misshapen balloon animals for children. Apparently clowns don’t like folk music. In the middle of our set he angrily approached us screaming, “You suck! Go home!” He then proceeded to spit in Ed’s direction without regard for the large crowd watching us perform. We stopped mid-song to talk to the clown, who only backed down when the crowd began jeering for him to leave us alone. Once we learned how to ignore the haters and stopped caring that most people were there to shop rather than listen to us, we quickly learned that busking opened up incredible opportunities.

One Saturday afternoon, we were finishing our signature upbeat song, “Analog Girl” when we noticed a familiar-looking man watching us. Dustin Hoffman approached us and introduced his wife and child. He told us how interesting our sound was and asked if we had seen the movie Once about Irish street performers. He urged us to go see it. We did and were inspired.

In 2009, we received an e-mail from the Shirai family, who had been organizing tours to California for Japanese nationals. Mrs. Shirai had seen us at the Promenade in 2006 and purchased 20 of our CDs, which she brought back to give to friends. The family expressed interest in setting up a month-long tour of Japan, offering to cover our travel and housing expenses while booking shows for us throughout the main island.

We ended up completing two successful tours of Japan in 2010 and 2011. The last show of our 2011 tour was the day of the Great Honshu earthquake. Needless to say, we canceled that show and spent the day with our host family about 50 miles from the Daiichi power plant in Fukushima. We huddled around the TV watching footage of the tsunami and the nuclear power plant burning and running outside after each aftershock. When we got home, we organized fundraisers to bring the Shirais to the States. They came here in the summer of 2011 and stayed as long as their visas would allow. It was too complicated for them to immigrate here, so they ended up settling in New Zealand. In 2012, they booked us for a three-week tour down there.

During the 2009 recession, we started to notice that our CD sales were slowing down, along with the economy. We had been performing at the Promenade for years and had sold our albums to most of the locals who were interested in our style of music. Maybe we hit market saturation. A lawyer friend of ours tipped us off to a possible alternative: Downtown Disney in Anaheim. After calling and e-mailing the Disney talent manager almost daily for six months, we were finally called in for an audition. We got the gig.

When we first started, we just sold CDs and were not paid for our time. After three years of playing in Anaheim we encountered a similar problem to the promenade: Our CD sales were in a slump. Working for free at a company as large as Disney started to seem unfair to us, so we e-mailed management and told them that November 2013 would be our last month playing the Downtown Disney district. Almost immediately, we heard back: They asked us to reconsider and told us they would look for some money in the budget to pay us. Now we are independent contractors for Disney and invoice them for each gig at a set price of $400 per show. It’s the closest thing to a steady job in the world of busking—and we still perform there to this day.

It is harder and harder to get noticed these days. Anybody with a laptop can have a band, and the market is crowded with acts. Music labels seem to want to invest less in developing artists, and music studios around L.A. are closing. So busking is one of the few outside-the-box avenues available to make music careers possible. For anyone considering taking up the challenge of busking for a living, we would encourage you wholeheartedly.

Just don’t take our spot.

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We’re back at Disney’s El Capitan Theatre. If only for a Sunday matinee, the Gershwin family is trading in our DVDs and streaming video for a day at the movies, relishing our proximity to old Hollywood glamour (we are only several decades and a 15-minute drive away from the glory days). El Capitan opened in 1926, and Disney’s lovely restoration of the theater provides a living link to our community’s cinematic roots. Like Disney’s theme parks, El Capitan is as much an exercise in soothing nostalgia for grown-ups as it is a wondrous novelty for kids.

Also soothing here is that tickets for mom, dad, and daughter can be had for less than the price of a single children’s ticket to that little amusement park in Anaheim with the long lines where it costs $15 to park.

But do those bargain prices still get our family that Disney “magic”? Absolutely. It’s unmistakably here, starting with the live musical performance by Rob Richards on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ, 2,500 pipes strong–easily the most complex musical instrument ever created. Those rodents for whom we didn’t call Terminix, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, are perfectly played by cast members no doubt delighted to trade a day at the park for a day at the movie theater–especially one featuring a stunning, intricate, East Indian interior.

My wife and I are amazed–our daughter a bit less so–by the 1933 Mickey Mouse cartoon short that opens the program. We’re watching Mickey flee Minnie’s house after a misunderstanding over what should or shouldn’t have been in a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates. I’m in awe imagining how this was made without the benefit of computer-generated images or offshore animators: the painstaking, incremental work of the artists who drew the cartoon cells depicting a row of picket fence posts being uprooted in perfect succession by Mickey’s oversized foot. After it’s discovered that Pluto surreptitiously exchanged Mickey’s gift of chocolates for a dog bone, Mickey and Minnie make up. In a G-rated way, of course.

After a few previews (hey, what’s Disney without a little product placement?), it’s time for the main event: a re-release of Lady and the Tramp (1955), replete with a Peggy Lee soundtrack, looking as fresh as ever. The first animated feature ever to be produced in CinemaScope, Lady and the Tramp is visually stunning enough to engage our daughter in that unmistakable movie stare. Instead of picket fence posts, it’s the images of raindrops in a puddle that inspire awe here. And the cute puppies, our daughter would surely add.

I miss some of the film’s finer plot points, stepping into the lobby to secure enough provisions–popcorn, M&Ms, and apple slices–to get us through the performance. I make sure to sample the M&Ms to ensure they are fit for family consumption (they are). On my way back in, an army of helpful Disney cast members ensures that I don’t spill my food purchases in the aisle, not only opening the door for me but shining a flashlight onto the steps to show me back to our seats. We may be watching a movie, but at the El Capitan, you’re at the theater.

Our daughter has decided to choose this particular outing as the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how well she has become potty-trained, so we miss some more of the movie in the process. Even though she’s accustomed to pausing any onscreen performance for similarly pressing breaks at home, she knows that’s not possible at the movies. She’s already developed a solid appreciation for the communal movie-going experience. Had we started her out at the multiplex, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be the same cinephile-in-waiting we’re sitting with today.

The feature presentation is over, and after our daughter gets a Lady and the Tramp-themed double-share twisty straw as a parting gift, it’s time to head back out into the midday sun on Hollywood Boulevard. We see legions of tourist families with their own children seeking the same magic of Hollywood, diluted a bit by the legions of aggressive, semi-amateur street performers and unlicensed movie characters. Still, it’s hard not to be taken in by the moment. After we pause at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to peek at the handprints in concrete, I’m almost surprised we can drive back home instead of to a hotel.

We still haven’t told our daughter about the occasional pre-movie Disney character breakfast shows. We have to draw the line somewhere on the magic, at least for now. That’s another $20 a person on top of the movie, and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. As it is, our outing to El Capitan has already made her day–her week, rather. And my wife and I are perfectly happy to have seen first-class entertainment in a beautiful setting on one of the most famous streets in the world.

Besides, I’m not a big fan of dining with rodents at the breakfast table.

David Gershwin, a Los Angeles-based public affairs consultant and Zócalo Public Square board member, is eagerly awaiting an El Capitan-screened revival of his personal Disney favorite, The Apple Dumpling Gang.

*Photo by David Gershwin.

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