Chapter 21: A Cultural Shift in Mouseville
Excerpt from In the Service of the Mouse: A Memoir, by Jack Lindquist
Oh boy, 1985! Prior to this date you could argue that things in Disney were stuck in 1958! Now, I’m an old-fashioned guy, but it was clear even to me that the world was a very different place in 1985 and had been since the late 1960s, possibly earlier. There was a long running joke at the parks that the grooming standards at Disneyland and Disney World were so strict that Walt Disney himself couldn’t get a job there. They were right! Mustaches were forbidden under these standards. As to Jim Henson…well, forget it! The only reason Jim ever got to play a walkaround was by becoming an executive!
(Image source “parkology.com”)
Needless to say, Jim was not too enthusiastic about the standards. It certainly didn’t help that he and his son John occasionally got stopped by security when they visited the parks! “Gosh, Jack and Dick,” he said to us one day, “how can I tell someone with a beard like mine or a mustache like Walt’s that they can’t visit the park or sell ice cream at Disneyland?” It wasn’t just Jim either. The Muppets Department, the Animation Department, and even Imagineering were chock-a-block with facial hair, long hair on men, short hair on women, and even piercings or tattoos here and there. For Jim it was more than just hypocritical, it was patently unfair.
Now, he certainly got pushback on that one, let me tell you! But he persisted. The truth was that part of what was making Disney so “uncool” in the eyes of anyone over 7 and under 70 was that it didn’t really look like America. He managed, somehow, to convince Ron Miller and the board to relax the standards, albeit gradually. “Look,” he said one day to Dick Nunis, “I’m not saying that we need to hire the Hells Angels to run the Matterhorn. I’m just saying that someone with Luke Skywalker hair or a Magnum PI mustache probably isn’t going to shock the guests into thinking that Disney has gone pure Maleficent.”
Eventually he broke through. The standards were slowly relaxed. If you had a neatly trimmed mustache or beard or your hair was a little long, we weren’t going to kick you out the gate. With the growing number of foreign tourists visiting the parks we also started to add more people who spoke other languages or who represented different cultures or religions. “Disney Diplomats” we called them. Need someone who speaks Spanish, or German, or Japanese? Just look for the flags on their lapels! Jim insisted that we live up to our Equal Opportunity promises more fully and hire more broadly from more races. I mean, we were doing very well there already, I thought, but he insisted that we make a conscious effort to check our biases, whatever they might be.
He also pushed back on our food service. Concessions were a major profit center, but Jim was upset at the junk food that made up the bulk of what the visitors, particularly children, were consuming. Sesame Place had always only provided healthy snacks and Muppetland too, to a point, but he was hoping to totally purge junk food from the parks. It was a battle he ultimately lost, the money was just too good selling popcorn, Coke, and candy, but he did manage to increase the number of healthy options available, particularly for kids.
Of course, the 1980s were on the edge of an even bigger cultural shift and one of the biggest changes came from a simple origin: a dance club. With the rise of Teen Culture in the 1980s and a growing need for safe outlets for teenagers in the Greater LA Basin, the opportunity for Disney to step in became apparent. Disney had not been popular with teens since the 1960s. Dick and I hoped to change that and Jim and Ron were with us. Knott’s Berry Farm had already launched two teen dance clubs: Cloud 9 and Studio K. Someone proposed that the old Fantasyland Theater could be converted. The name Club Galaxy was floated around. Jim, as always, had a different idea: Club Cyclia[1].
He’d had the idea for years: a nightclub where images were projected upon faceted walls or dancers in white leotards. Clearly it was all late ‘60s psychedelia and not really hip for the day, but the idea was incredible, we just needed to give it an ‘80s update with Memphis Design, MTV-inspired visuals, music video clips, and other ‘80’s things. Club Cyclia was born[2], with different times and days for teens, young adults, and even young children during the day. And it was more than just a dance club, in true Imagineering spirit was an immersive experience, a fantastic new world of color and sensory input that put standard discotheques to shame.
Club Cyclia Interior; imagine this, but “like Totally ‘80s” (image source “muppet.fandom.com”)
Cyclia became a smashing success, with live appearances by hot music acts, but strangely became a place of controversy pretty quickly. Disney maintained a “no touch dancing” policy. More controversially, it had a “no same sex dancing” policy. Gay Rights organizations threatened to sue, but it turned out to be about more than just the homosexual guests. Young women in particular liked to dance in groups for “safety”. There was a lot of pushback from management, but Jim and Frank Wells both lobbied to just not fight it. We’d keep the “no touch” rule, but end bans on same-sex dancing. We’d slowly end enforcement of same sex PDA bans as well. By 1995 Disney parks were largely considered safe spaces by the gay and lesbian communities.
Today, Walt Disney Entertainment is seen as a paragon of equal opportunity. Just because our culture and values have changed in the decades since Walt’s untimely passing, it doesn’t mean that Walt’s central vision of Disney as “The Happiest Place on Earth” should not apply to everyone.
[1] Remember Cyclia, the psychedelic night club Jim almost launched in the 1960s? Check it (and some crazy films for it) out at
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Cyclia
[2] Under Einser this became Videopolis and tons of TV monitors playing MTV videos became the attraction.
