After the Mouse.com

Leaving Disney, the hardest thing for me as a Cast Member to do.

Almost five years to the day since I cut my ID in half and handed in my second best name tag I put pen to paper about my life After the Mouse.

Working for Disney is undoubtedly special, there is a feeling you only get from being a part of the Disney Cast Member family. What comes After the Mouse is the real challenge. In this article I intend to look back at my own journey since working in the Parks and Resorts and what legacy has Disney left me.

The Story of how a Disney Guest became a Disney Cast Member.

Is the rot setting in with Disney's Magic Kingdom's Cast Members?

As many of you know I am a keen user of twitter the social network and “pulse of the Planet” A while ago I asked a cross section of Disney fans and former Cast Members on twitter to tell me what they thought was important at Disney. To my surprise this answer represents a large percentage of the replies.

The names Disney And Mickey Mouse As Pejoratives.

Whilst I was writing the piece about Alnwick Castle looking for a senior Disney Cast Member I came across the quote from Sir Roy Strong "However much it brings distaste to my lips, it is a question of survival." He was talking about looking at how Disney runs it’s business and how these techniques could be used in the culture sector.

Being a Jungle Cruise Skipper is one of the most desired Cast Member rolls at Disneyland

Out of all the jobs sought after at the Disneyland Parks, the role of being a Jungle Cruise Skipper is one of the most desired. A few years ago the OC Register did an opinion poll with the local readers to see what their dream Disney jobs were. The results of poll showed being an Imagineer was the most desired. Immediately below that was the roll of a Jungle Cruise Skipper. Now who wouldn't want to get paid to go around in circles and say some of the puniest jokes around?

Who are the Disney Cast Members seen with VIP Guests?

Possibly one of the most demanding and high profile of jobs in the theme parks is that of the VIP Hosts. If your the Cast Member taking a sporting hero or a film star around the Magic Kingdom then in the eyes of the world you must be a step apart.

For me Working Christmas morning at Disneyland Paris was always special. It was a time for the giving and receiving of gifts, making Disney dreams come true, natural disasters and being suspected of terrorism.

A look at Guest safety at Disney, what can be learned from 9/11?

Theme parks make a big part of their business out of scaring people with abandoned hotel elevator drops, high speed roller coasters, haunted houses and all manner of thrills and spills. But people feeling genuinely scared of going to a public place like a Theme Park is a major worry for people like Disney. One that they have worked hard to counter.

This last weeks news out of New York has brought terrorism in the United States to the forefront of peoples minds again. The public, Disney’s paying Guests start to worry about their safety, spurred on by the media and I think it may be worth while looking at the lessons Disney learned from the past.

A history of the Disneyland Paris resort - The Disney resort that nearly closed

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.”
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities:

This is one of…if not the very best, opening lines to a story ever, Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” it also echoes the early years of Disney’s European resort.

There were times in the early 1990s that the fledgling Euro Disney’s fortunes were looking as bleak as any Dickensian story. After the grand opening on April 12, 1992 was blighted by the French Press and the local labor unions the future was looking gloomy.

In part two of our look at the opening of Disneyland Paris, or Euro Disney as it was called in the early 1990s we’ll look at what went wrong.

In the third part of my story of Disneyland Paris we bring the story up to the time I left the resort.

The first signs of the new development were a Planet Hollywood restaurant and a multiplex, Gaumont Cinema, were added to the Festival Disney entertainment complex located next to the Magic Kingdom. At the same time, a couple of miles down the road, closer to Paris and near the town of Serris, groundbreaking for the ambitious Val d’Europe project started. Disney worked with the town to build what would one day become a huge shopping mall, outlet shopping village, thousands of new housing units, and two partner hotels. These additions were built on the edges of the property. Years after the plans were laid, the property goals were coming through.

Eight tips from the Disney customer service play book.

Undoubtedly Disney is one of the foremost names in the world of customer service. Hear are a few I learned a lot from in my years with the Mouse!

A Guests eye view of Disney's Special Dietary Needs service.

This is an unusual article for me to publish here on the site, in that it is not written by a Cast Member but by a Guest. When I read this I thought it was well worth reprinting as it shone a light on a little known dietary service offered by Disney. It also tells of the way Cast Members go the extra mile to make Guests with special needs stays just as special as everybody else's vacation.

Thank you to Sunny Hall for your permission to reprint this article - it is much appreciated.

Disney Cast Member looks at his counterpart the Disney Guest

The Cast Members who have died working at Disney

In 1974, eighteen year old Deborah Gail Stone was a new Cast Member at Disneyland. She had recently graduated from the nearby Santa Ana High and was working over the summer as an attractions hostess at "America Sings" to earn money in preparation for her departure to college in the fall. To her friends she is remembered as an outstanding student and athlete, a member of the high school yearbook. To the rest of the world she is remembered as the first Cast Member to die whilst working at Disney.

Our guest blogger writes about being a Disney College Program Cast Member.

I am proud to introduce a new contributor to After the Mouse.com. Amanda Kelley. Having read Amanda’s forum post how to cope with the separation from Disney I encouraged her to give us her story of what having been a College Program Cast Member meant to her. Please read on...

Mr. Mouse Administrator asked me to write a story about how my life has been since I have left Disney and obviously I have agreed.

In 2009 Disney laid off thousands of Walt Disney World Cast Members, These are their story's.

In March 2009, the Orlando Sentinel’s Jason Garcia announced the news Cast Members at Walt Disney World had dreaded;

Opening Crew '92 the story of being a Cast Member at the opening of EuroDisney.

The opening of any Attraction, Resort, or Them Park – even an envelope – with the Disney name on it is an event. In 1992 I was a part of the biggest event going, the opening of EuroDisney. For the sake of posterity I am trying to record the events as I remember them. Bear in mind that this is written with a scary 17 year delay so please excuse any errors or omissions.

Waht is it like to be a Disney Cast Member who moves from Disneyland Paris to Walt Disney World?

After the Mouse member Kay Mitchell has submitted this, our first true contribution to the site. Like Myself Kay had worked in the early days of EuroDisney but Kay then went on to work at Walt Disney World. This is her account of here experiences in Florida.

What is it in the much loved Disney name that poeple can hate so much?

Hate – Verb; to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest: to hate the enemy; to hate bigotry.

Hate is a strong word with a powerful meaning, so why do so many people hate Disney? I loved my time with the Mouse. Okay, like some parents of young children I do have issues with Disney’s commercialism, my son loves a trip around the Disney Store, my wallet is perhaps not as keen - but on the whole I don’t think of Disney as the Evil empire. Which is possibly the reason I find so much of the research I did for this post so fascinating.

Roy Edward Disney - A brief Biography

Roy E Disney died at the Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, California December 16, 2009. He had been ill with stomach cancer for the past year.

The unexpected benifits of being a Disney Cast Member

Pixie Dust Moments, the magic of being a Cast Member.
Every Christmas throughout my childhood I head one refrain over and over again - "it is better to give than to receive" well for Disney Cast Members when it comes to spreading a little pixie dust it seems like it might just be.

Driving Walt Disney's Steam Trains at Disneyland Paris

There are a couple of generations of English boys who grew up wanting to be Engine drivers. I think it had a lot to do with Dr Beaching’s decimation of British Rail in the 1960’s. My father for one remembers the last days of main line steam engines, and always had a hankering to drive one. I on the other hand never saw a live steam train on the rails until I went to work for Disney.

There is a magical hour in Disney's Magic Kingdom When a Cast Member walks alone

Imagine one of the world's most famous streets, Regent Street in London, the Champs Elysee in Paris, or perhaps 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Take away all the people, every last one. Get rid of all the unpleasantness; the trash in the gutter, the billboards selling you things you don’t need and the newspaper vendors telling you things you don’t want to know. Now, just add sparkling lights and a jaunty tune or two and you too can recreate my best Cast Member moments.

When Disney needed Cowboys for their new show they went west.

The small town of Cody, Wyoming, situated on the banks of the Shoshone River at the Eastern extreme of Yellowstone National Park has long been a symbol of the old American West. Every Independence Day holiday since 1919, Cody has hosted one of America’s largest rodeos, the “Cody Stampede Rodeo.” The stampede has long been a Mecca for many of the world's top cowboys and rodeo fans.  In 1991 Disney took a look too - after all the town is named for Buffalo Bill Cody.

The Disney Monorail: An appriciation of the ‘Trains of Tomorrow'!

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things…” Walt Disney once said in reference to how he encouraged his creative teams to work. This became especially evident with Tomorrowland at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. On June 14, 1959 Disney added multiple new attractions to the land including what is now referred to as the Disneyland Monorail, the first daily operating system of its kind in the western hemisphere.

There is a school of thought that says that the Name Tag is Walt Disney's finest gift to his Cast Members

When Walt Disney made each of his Cast Members identifiable with a badge he revolutionized customer service at a stroke. The early badges were heavy, made of brass and didn’t even have the Cast Members name on them - just their ID numbers - as name tags went they were pretty useless, not even technically living up to the name but when five years later names were added they were the start of something big.

How Disney brought Buffalo Bill & his Wild West Show back to Paris.

William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody was born on February 26, 1846 in Iowa. During his lifetime he was a soldier, a bison hunter, showman, Medal of Honor winner and one of the most colorful figures of the Old American West. Still today he is known as the man who took the Old West to the rest of the world.

Disney is more than another kingdom it is another state of mind

The British often talk about customer service and how the Americans do it so much better, “The polite staff, few queues, and it’s so clean…” Of all of the bastions of good service in the new world Disneyland is often hailed as the home of the craft.