Transcription
Walk around a Disney park today, and you'd expect to see excited children dragging their parents from ride to ride. Instead, you'll see adult enthusiasts running everywhere, screaming, driving around on mobility scooters, documenting every inch of their experience on Tik Tok. These are Disney adults. And here they are in their natural habitat, riding scooters around at just 20 years old because they can't walk. Eating about five desserts in one day to the tune of 10,000 calories, crying at random stuff in the streets.
Childless adults now outnumber families at the parks. Some visit hundreds of times a year. Some even quit their jobs and relocate to Orlando to go every single day. And it might just be funny on the surface. It might just seem like some stupid, immature people, but it all begins to fall into place when you realize that Disney is an empire. One that spread its roots further and wider than any other company in history. It's consumed some of the most beloved franchises in modern culture: Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, The Simpsons, Indiana Jones, and swallowed up media giants like 20th Century Fox, ABC, ESPN, National Geographic, and Hulu. All absorbed into one giant corporate ecosystem. They also operate 12 theme parks worldwide, a fleet of cruise ships, and an entire planned residential community in Florida. Its combined properties attract over 150 million visitors a year, more than any other major attraction on the planet by an order of magnitude.
Even if you don't realize it, you barely go a single day without encountering something Disney owns: the films and programs we stream, the shows that kids everywhere watch in the morning, the merchandise in the shop window, the theme park advert on your feed. And like every empire, Disney has its castles, and most importantly for its survival, its subjects. Because the most valuable thing that Disney owns can't be found on their balance sheet. Instead, it's the loyalty of millions of adults who don't just enjoy Disney, but embrace it with every fiber of their being, where Disney has truly become their religion.
Now, the analogy of Disney adults as the subjects of the empire works so well because this is a fantasy universe manufactured for subservience. And if you want to make anyone subservient to your brand, rich, generally middle-class adults without any religion are usually the holy grail. The overwhelming majority of Disney adults are just white, college-educated North Americans. Many of whom spend up to $10,000 a year on just Disney alone. And a lot of the time, most are spending considerably more. It's going to be up about $4,000 for 2 days. >> Um, about $35,000. >> You can easily burn through $1,000 in a single day at the parks without even doing anything extravagant. A Disney cruise can set you back more than a fortnight in Southeast Asia. And yet, for most, it's the only holiday they take. So, think about what that really means. These are people with the money and freedom to go anywhere in the world to explore different cultures, try new experiences, and see things that might genuinely challenge or change them. But instead, people just seem to come again and again to the same place again and again. Not because they've weighed up their options, but because nothing else even occurs to them. Some would even go into huge debt to maintain their Disney addiction, even when their salaries don't stretch far enough to cover it. >> So, the passes were $2,000 >> for the both of us. Both of us. >> For what? You spent $1,000 on just being at Disney on here? $1,000 just on the Disney crap. >> I mean, >> for a day, for one day. >> Some don't just visit regularly. They restructure their entire lives around proximity to the parks. From there, you can visit every day if you want, and some people practically do. >> How does visiting nearly 3,000 times sound? Well, that has been done by this man, Jeff Wrights. He started visiting the park every day in 2012.
Think about how the rulers of ancient empires made their money. They owned the land, controlled the culture, and dictated traditions and rituals. And the subjects paid for the privilege. Disney has achieved something remarkably similar in our world, and it's getting stronger every single year. Disney adults naturally date other Disney adults through dedicated dating sites because who else would understand? >> Didn't we find a Disney adult dating site? >> We did. We did. I mean, that shows you that you can find somebody in this world. >> You can get married in front of the castle. You can get married in the Haunted Mansion. And instead of a traditional tiara, some Disney adults choose bespoke pieces to get married in, like these Mickey Mouses made in collaboration with some of the world's most premium brands like Vera Wang. Honeymoons, also Disney, or maybe a Disney cruise. And if you're now thinking this must be as far as it goes, then you haven't heard of Golden Oak. Golden Oak is essentially for the boss-level Disney adult. It's the most extreme form of constructing your life around Disney. It is a community within Disney World itself, made up of eye-wateringly expensive mansions that start at around $10 million. Homes are built to Disney spec with statues and paintings of characters in the gardens and on the walls, floors, and ceilings. So now we have homes, holidays, and relationships all inside the Disney universe.
So what's left? Identity itself. Disney doesn't actually allow adults to wear full costumes to the parks. That's reserved for children. So employees dressed as characters remain the only real versions. So Disneybounding means dressing to evoke a character without technically being in costume. Now, the word means that these people are bound for Disney, headed that way to evade the costume police, but it portrays a deeper truth. These adults are both bound by Disney, a soft, comfortable cage that poses no challenges. And they are bound to Disney. They assue individual identity and bolt themselves onto these characters instead.
And then there's the most disturbing ritual of all, one that came to light through horrified employees. As you can see throughout this video, we use a lot of stock footage. And one thing that never really gets talked about with video creation is just how much time gets burned finding the right assets. Not just the editing, but hunting for the footage, the music, the sound effects, graphics, all across different sites. Which is why I'm proud to say this video is sponsored by Storyblocks. We've been using them throughout all of these videos for years. Because Storyblocks gives you unlimited downloads of really high-quality stock media with just a simple monthly subscription. There's no per-asset fees, no surprise licensing issues, just access to everything in one place. And that includes 4K and HD video, music, sound effects, images, templates, and motion graphics. All created by real artists, not just generic filler content, which is why the footage actually feels authentic, not like stock you've seen hundreds of times before. And because it's unlimited, you can browse through and collect interesting footage that helps you tell compelling stories like we've been doing in this video you're watching right now. With Storyblocks, you can try different edits, test ideas, swap music, change pacing without ever worrying that every download costs extra. It also just saves you a ton of time if you make videos. The Storyblocks members save an average of 3.5 hours a week, especially with things like pre-made templates and motion graphics, you can drop straight into Premiere Pro or After Effects. And everything you download from Storyblocks is royalty-free and fully licensed, so you're protected forever. Which is why if you need unlimited stock media at one set price, head to storyblocks.com/moon or click the link in the description below.
Disney adults often choose Disneyland as the final resting place for the remains of their loved ones. Employees have taken to social media to admit that they regularly have to go and clean the ashes of a dead person. >> One custodian told the Journal the Haunted Mansion probably has so much human ashes in it that it's not even funny. Now, custodians told the Wall Street Journal that the job requires a special vacuum cleaner, which comes out at least once a month. >> Disneyland is now recognized as one of the most popular places on Earth to scatter ashes. Employees receive special training on how to clean ashes. The company even has a special code word, "grunar," to alert employees that more ashes need to be cleaned. While it's quite morbid for us to think that these people's ashes are being vacuumed up by a 17-year-old on minimum wage and dumped in a bin with leftover turkey drumsticks, for Disney adults, it's a fitting end to a Disney life. So, from birthdays to weddings to death, every stage of life channeled through the same corporation.
The psychoanalyst Eric From called this automaton conformity. The idea that people escape the anxiety of freedom by adopting prepackaged identities. You don't have to figure out who you are if someone's already done it for you. You don't have to face the terror of choice if the choices have already been made. This is exactly what Disney offers: a full identity off of the shelf. Your character, your aesthetic, your community, all handed to you in a gift shop bag. They go so far as to engineer the physical environment to make sure it sticks. The parks use patented scent cannons called "smelletes" hidden in walls and vents, firing specific fragrances at you hundreds of times a day. The old factory system, meaning your sense of smell, connects directly to the brain regions for emotion and memory, which is exactly why Disney invested so heavily in scent engineering. There are also over 30,000 unique paint colors across the parks, including a shade called "go away green," specifically designed to make infrastructure invisible to guests. The background music in the morning is fast and exciting. Evening music slows down to make you linger in shops.
So, the brainwashing extends from the physical environment and parks, which still constitutes the vast majority of Disney's profits, to its sprawling digital empire of content and franchises. They started handing each film to a different director with a different vision and no shared outline. For Star Wars, they spent two films building up the villain Snoke, then killed him off with no explanation and then patched it over with, "Somehow Palpatine returned." A line so lazy it became a meme as soon as the credits rolled. Then there was the infamous Snow White, which we've made tons of videos on before. Hundreds of millions were spent on a remake where the lead called the original weird and the princess stalker >> um with a guy who literally stalks her. Yeah, >> weird, weird. >> So, we didn't do that this time. >> While the romance was gutted in favor of "go boss" leadership arcs nobody asked for, where the dwarfs were replaced with CGI and it completely bombed and everybody hated it, completely desecrating the original loved one. There's a pattern across everything Disney touches now where ideology takes priority over storytelling. We've seen it with the conflicts in politics in Florida with just the parks alone, but also in movies and TV. Characters are constantly rewritten to represent something where villains have become straw men for whatever ideological message the writers want to push. The old Disney movies at least told universal stories about love, loss, courage, and fear that could touch everyone. Now, even Boba himself had to publicly admit that Disney had been putting "quote messaging over storytelling" and that he would finally no longer tolerate it. When the CEO of a company is saying that out loud, you know the rot has gone deep.
But Disney adults, as visible and extreme as they are, only represent the most obvious layer. They're the ones who wear their loyalty openly. But many of us contribute, too, and often without realizing we're doing it. Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar fans didn't sign up for Disney. Disney just comes for all of us. If you probably watch anything on TV, it's coming for you. When Disney buys these companies, it acquires fandoms. Entire generations of people who had built deep emotional connections to these franchises suddenly found themselves at the company's mercy. And in some cases, the result has been nothing short of vandalism, as we saw with the failed Star Wars movies and series. All the constant Marvel reruns that seem to get worse and worse and worse, let alone all the countless other franchises ruined in the blatant crusade of profit extraction. Now, you might roll your eyes at a grown woman sobbing over Goofy or Mickey Mouse, but Disney is an all-consuming beast that might destroy something you love eventually. We've mentioned it many times with films like Snow White, as this all tells us the most insidious thing about how the company operates. It isn't purely extrinsic, something bottled onto modern culture from the outside. It's intrinsic to our memories, our feelings, our sense of what safety and happiness mean. A company whose influence has grown inside of us since childhood. And it starts with something most of us completely underestimate. I mean, just think about some iconic Disney moments. Different films, different decades, different characters, but the same feeling: that warmth in your chest, that tug backwards to somewhere safe and simple. And don't get me wrong, in many cases, there is great cinema with Disney. The mere existence of Disney Adults doesn't negate everything Disney has ever done. This is a company that captures something universal about childhood: the wonder, the safety, the simplicity, the beauty, the innocence, and put into words and pictures in a way nobody has ever done before. And that turned out to be the recipe for insane success. It allowed America's soft power to expand across the world.
And there's a word for the feeling Disney films try so hard to create, and it's older and more powerful than most people ever realize: nostalgia. And it comes from two ancient Greek words: "nostos," meaning to return home, and "algos," meaning pain. It was actually coined as a medical diagnosis in the 17th century to describe the crippling homesickness of Swiss soldiers fighting abroad who longed for their homeland so desperately that some became physically ill. Nostalgia isn't happiness. It's closer to a kind of grief, a yearning for something you once had or think you had that you can never fully return to. And that's what makes it so commercially potent. If the feeling were wholly satisfying, you'd experience it once and move on. But nostalgia pulls you back again and again because it never quite delivers what it promises. Disney enthusiasts are suspended in that nostalgia cycle, and it's highly addictive. We will probably reminisce about childhood or when we were young and nothing mattered. But Disney positioned itself to capitalize on that wistful emotion. Of course, Disney didn't invent nostalgia, but they were the first to understand how essential it is to our human experience. They recognized it as an unresolved need. And if you could make yourself the answer to its calling, you'd make people dependable. The fertile ground for this was childhood. That's where our deepest emotional connections are formed. And for a company whose long-term survival depended on those connections lasting well beyond childhood, their work had to start there. So Disney invested enormous resources into understanding how children form emotional bonds, psychological research into their emotional drivers, how they interpret symbols, what feels authentic versus manufactured. They used those findings to calibrate their films with specific color palettes, certain music intervals, and certain narrative beats, all to create maximum emotional renaissance in developing brains. We associate a lot of this work with big tech, but Disney, funnily enough, was there first. Before the '90s and 2000s, the big commercial problem was still that children's films, even the most successful ones, don't turn a company into a conglomerate. Disney's parks were making the serious money. But while you can hook children in with films while they're young, they aren't the ones with money to spend at the parks. They needed to tap into their adult money. And look at Walt Disney himself explaining this. >> Were your films principally designed for children? >> Well, no. You have to appeal to the adult or, uh, well, the adults have the money, the children don't have any money. >> So they had to crack adulthood. And luckily, an early Disney movie, Peter Pan, provided the perfect solution: "You have to stop people from growing up." Disney later summed up the strategy in two words: age decompression. And it comes into its own in the last 10 to 20 years. We've been sold the idea that adulthood is a rude awakening. And of course, it feels like that sometimes: work, bills, rent, stress, disappointment in friendships, relationships. In this real world, people don't burst into song on the street unless they're intoxicated or going through some sort of mental crisis. Strangers glare at you for making eye contact. You spend your days in cramped flat shares, walking concrete streets, working in glass offices. Not extraordinary places bursting with color and life. This isn't what you were promised throughout childhood: you're a princess, a prince, a chosen one just waiting to be discovered.
But the problem is that when you treat adults like children long enough, they start to behave like them. The infantilization of culture is now endemic to society. "It's my safe space. I'm protecting my energy. This is my self-care." We've built an entire vocabulary around retreating from challenges and wrapped it in the language of mental health, which makes it impossible to question. If someone says Disney is their safe space, what are you going to do? Tell them that their feelings are wrong? Attacking their coping mechanism? You'd sound like a monster. And that's the shield. Corporations love this because a customer who believes they need your product for their emotional well-being and life is a customer for life. So, what do you do when adult life just does feel too intense? Well, you go back to your safe place. Now, we all turn to our favorite form of escapism when we're in a rough patch. Some play the video games they played as kids or cook food they had as kids. It's okay to escape occasionally, but when manufactured on an empire, global corporate level, escaping becomes a trap. Rapid subjects willfully live in because the alternative is too frightening. Ever since childhood, they've been made long-term, lifelong consumers. The psychoanalyst Eric From called this automaton conformity. The idea that people escape the anxiety of freedom by adopting prepackaged identities. You don't have to figure out who you are if someone's already done it for you. You don't have to face the terror of choice if the choices have already been made.
So, in this sense, escapism might be the biggest misnomer of the century. People are going to the same place, consuming the same stories, riding the same rides, wearing the same ears year after year. There's no true exploration, just the illusion of exploration mirrored in a form that feels safe and easy. You might have heard of Plato's allegory of the cave, which is one of the world's oldest thought experiments. Inside the cave, the prisoners are chained up, facing the wall, watching shadows flicker in the firelight. They've never been outside to see the real world, and the shadows are all they know. So, to them, the shadows are the real world. The important bit is what happens when one prisoner finally gets dragged outside. The sunlight is blinding. The real world is overwhelming, confusing, and just too much to process. You might feel like this when you're about to start a real adventure. You might step off the train, plane, or bus in an entirely new place and feel anxious yet excited trepidation. It could also be something like starting a new job, going to a new school, or heading to university for the first time. It's uncomfortable by definition. This isn't your comfort zone. This is what makes it an adventure, and eventually, you become more comfortable. These are the moments where life happens. But when someone feels thrown into the unknown, their first instinct tends to be that they want to go back. Disney manufactured a fake representation of adventure that keeps people cocooned inside their cave. And honestly, it's kind of evil genius. For the most extreme followers, it made the cave so beautiful, so emotionally optimized, so perfectly calibrated that the real world just could never compete at all. But Plato's point wasn't that the cave is evil. It's that the prisoner who stays there will never know what they're missing. You can't miss a sunset you've never seen. You can't long for depth you've never experienced. The cave doesn't feel like a cage. That's the deeper problem.
And this is where this whole video stops being about a story on Disney adults and becomes a story about all of us. Because making us feel comfortable with the cave is the dominant strategy behind social media, behind every streaming service, and lately, generative AI. Every app on your phone is designed around the principle to keep it simple, keep it rewarding, keep them coming back. Swipe right, swipe left, like, subscribe, follow. Don't make anyone think too hard. Don't make anyone wait. Don't make anyone uncomfortable. Reduce every interaction to its simplest possible form and repeat it infinitely. They create environments where the content is familiar, the rewards are predictable, and the outside world with all its friction and ambiguity starts to feel like too much effort. Disney has been pioneering this model for 100 years, targeting psychological engineering at children, building an empire driven by profit extraction at a level that puts people into more depth than substance abuse, brainwashing you since you're a child to always stay a lifelong Disney consumer. And the greatest trick they played was making the fake world feel like enough, making the fake experience feel like a life. That's what makes the cave feel so complete that the prisoners never even think to look for the door. But don't be fooled into thinking this is some far-flung issue situated inside a theme park in Florida. You might find yourself or someone you know sitting right there with them, watching the shadows dancing on the wall. And thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Make sure to check them out using the link in the description below.