Chris Mitchell by Cast Member Confidential: A Disneyfied Memoir

Minnie, a couple came forward for what I assumed was a regular autograph signing. There were hugs and smiles, and suddenly, the guy dropped to his knee and proposed to his girlfriend.
    My first instinct was to shoot the whole process from beginning to end, but the mice stopped me. According to the Rules, a Cast Member had to stand aside and patiently wait until the girl either accepted or declined the proposal. If she accepted, we were allowed to gush and congratulate the happy couple. If she declined, we were meant to fade away into the background. As in all things Disney, negative imagery wasn’t allowed to taint the Magic.
    The way Mickey and Minnie kept the guests moving was a ballet of efficiency. A hug, an autograph, a photo, then send them on their way. To help keep everything flowing, the characters had assistants, called greeters, who stood in the kiosk and helped orchestrate the process. On average, they cranked through one family per minute, sometimes more. But it never appeared rushed. Everybody left with a smile.
    Up close, I got a real sense of just how difficult it was to be a good character. A performer could only see out of fine black screens that covered the nose and mouth of the character head, so there was no peripheral vision. Since every kid who approached a character came in below the performer’s sight line, Tigger, for example, had to move slowly and carefully, a characteristic that was difficult to maintain when you were trying to be a bouncy, fun-loving tiger. Signing autographs in costumes like Tigger was especially difficult because the performer had to make it look natural as if the character was really looking at what was being written when actually the book was resting on the tiger’s nose, on top of the performer’s head. You had to hope the pen was facing the right way and the book was turned to a blank page or else Tigger looked like an ass.
    For other characters, like Donald and Pluto, performers could see out of the eyes as well, but no fur was equipped with ideal visual range. Visibility was so limited in some heads that performers were forced to adapt to do their jobs. In Goofy, for instance, a Cast Member could only see out of the mouth, giving him a perfect view of the guest’s feet and some very small children. But in order to see a bigger child or an adult, he had to tip the head back, giving the impression that Goofy was gazing up at the sky—believable for a moment, but not for any extended length of time. Pooh faced a similar conundrum. The performer could see out of the mouth and a little bit through the nose, but between the two, there was a huge blind spot. The performer got a perfect view of the guest’s feet and face, but nothing in the middle. Somebody could hand Pooh an autograph book or a carrot or a stick of dynamite, but the performer had no way of knowing what the item was until the guest put it up to the bear’s nose. *
    To overcome these problems, the entertainment department developed character-specific movements to enhance the visual range. Goofy bobbed his head up and down like an autistic dog. Pooh swayed back and forth like a blind musician keeping rhythm with a song in his head. Baloo jitterbugged, Mushu did tai chi, Rafiki invoked the elements with his voodoo staff, and so on through the roster. These actions provided a sweeping motion that eventually summed up every guest interaction.
    As a side effect of character blindness, the performer’s other senses became keenly acute. Inside a head, a performer could hear people talking from halfway across the park. Thick accents were easily identifiable. A child’s scream was earsplitting. I used to think the characters were immune to the smells of the outside world, but, in fact, it was exactly the opposite. Any scent that drifted into the head stayed in the head: cigarette smoke, perfume, garlic breath. Passing gas inside a costume was to be avoided at all costs. The stench was trapped inside the body until