The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Monsieur Mickey, 25 years young
The unlikely pairing of Paris and Disney has proved to be a winning formula, says Matthew Hampton
Year-round sunshine, a can-do attitude, a willingness to be goofy… indeed, Goofy: was there ever a city less suited to Disney than Paris? As recipes for disaster go, Disney’s European adventure – 25 years old next month – didn’t have any of the right ingredients, let alone the pot to cook them in.
A European Disney had been on the cards since the early Seventies, although it took years to narrow down the location. Sunny Barcelona seemed the most obvious choice, following its phenomenally successful Olympics – a detail not lost on the owners of PortAventura, a rival park that opened on the Costa Dorada in 1995.
In fact, France seemed the least logical choice – not least to the French themselves. French intellectuals denounced the American invasion as a “cultural Chernobyl” that would foster a rise in commercialism in France – and the park became a symbolic stand-in for the US embassy: farmers blocked school buses from entering EuroDisney the year it opened to protest against American agricultural policies.
But geography and economics trumped snobbery: the 5,000-acre site in rural Marne-la-Vallée is a midway-point for much of Western Europe and the French gradually came around, lured by the 55,000 jobs it provided. And a quarter of a century on, it has not only survived but thrived. Nearly 15 million visitors passed beneath its ornate iron gates last year – half of them French and more than one in six British. After a lacklustre start, where did it all go so right? Dropping the original name helped: EuroDisney had the pungent whiff of an EU department – the one responsible for Eurovision and twin towns. Disneyland Paris has been the official moniker since 1995. A direct service on Eurostar was the other game changer. From London to the park gates in two hours 40 minutes: for many Britons, that’s easier than a trip to Alton Towers. And it was on this very train that my children were anticipating their first Disney experience. While eightyear-old Ava and Miles binged on films using the on-board app – and their mum, Crush’s Coaster is one of the few whiteknuckle rides exclusive to Paris. It’s Finding Nemo themed, and given that that’s a horror story in disguise (boy’s mother is murdered; boy has to befriend an amnesiac stranger on journey to find his abandoned father) the waltzer/ coaster mash-up could be more dizzying than it seems. The galaxy far, far away is closer to Paris than anywhere else. The big attractions are at least two years away across the Atlantic – but coming this month across the Channel. Unlike the futuristic monorail that glides around Orlando and Anaheim, an actual steam train ferries guests from kingdom to kingdom in Paris. Perhaps more than elsewhere, the park feels like a vintage cartoon writ large. Pink lends a fairytale feel to Sleeping Beauty’s castle, but the main reason for the colour scheme is it stands out better against a grey northern European sky – not a challenge Disney’s “imagineers” had previously encountered. Claire, did the same – all I could do was twiddle with the free Wi-Fi and hope for the best.
Checking in at the Disneyland Hotel was a good start. The fanciest of the six on-site options is an ersatz slice of Victoriana – what Americans call Queen Anne style and the rest of the world calls kitsch.
Getting into the park was easy, too – astonishingly so, if you’ve ever seen the French queue for a ski lift. With pre-booked tickets, we wafted straight into the spectacle of Main Street USA, which is like being miniaturised and placed inside a model of a turn-ofthe-century American town. It’s not some tatty plastic toy, but the real deal; the sort of thing an eccentric hobbyist would spend years crafting out of wood and illuminating with fairy lights.
Under steep tiled roofs sit clapboard facades, boasting soda fountains, general stores, western outfitters and a barber shop. Even if those pretend stores mostly turn out to be expensive gift shops and restaurants, it is hard not to be impressed.
And when a marching band strikes up, beating to that syncopated rhythm so typical of the American songbook, well, you certainly don’t get that at Alton Towers.
There are a few things you won’t even find at other Disneys. First, Sleeping Beauty’s Castle is more