By Working for the Mouse
creator Trevor Allen

My Disney daze. In the summer of 2005 I was contacted by Tyler Gray for an article he was working on for the relaunch issue of Radar magazine. It was a dirt-filled exposé on the sordid lives of the denizens of Disneyworld, the massive theme park down in Orlando, Florida. He was particularly interested in focusing on the behind-the-scenes lives of the actors portraying the costumed characters. Even though I only worked as a character at Disneyland in Anaheim, California in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, he had heard of my stage play and felt that some details from my four years in the LA mouse house would be a welcome addition to his article. After a couple of extensive, detailed and wide-ranging phone interviews where I ran through some of the more graphic episodes of life as a “Casual Seasonal Pageant Helper” (aka Character) in the Magic Kingdom, he concluded the interview with a roar of laughter and assured me that I would “like the article.”

A few weeks later, while working at my nonprofit day job, I was contacted by an anonymous fact checker from the magazine who needed to “confirm the veracity of a statement attributed to me.” When she repeated the statement, I confirmed that what I had said was the truth and that although the actor inside the Winnie-the-Pooh costume was not me (I was Pluto that day) I had, in fact, witnessed the incident firsthand. There was a pause on the other end of the phone. She cleared her throat and asked me again. I confirmed that, yes Pooh had been on drugs when he tripped and fell down those stairs, but the actor hadn’t been dismissed since the whole thing had been put down to “heat stroke.” She thanked me and assured me that the article would indeed be coming out soon and told me when I could expect to see it on the newsstands. The date came and went. Since no complimentary copy of the long awaited relaunch of Radar was forthcoming, I finally went out and bought a copy of the newly minted glossy rag. I searched for and finally located the piece. The editors had obviously done some trimming. Although the article itself was rather verbose in its excoriating assault on character life at Disneyworld, my own copious contributions had been narrowed down to the following, mostly harmless, sentence:

“Trevor Allen, a former Disneyland Pluto who wrote a play called Working for the Mouse, relates an incident when Winnie the Pooh dropped acid, went on set, literally tripped, and rolled down a flight of stairs onto Disneyland’s Main Street USA.” p. 128 Radar Magazine, summer 2005

Oh well, at least they spelled my name correctly and more importantly, they got the title of my play right. I was one of the only ex-mice willing to go on record in the article with a name. Others were still working “under the fur” and were often listed as “sources” or an “unnamed Goofy.” It was a funny piece, but it was really just about Disneyworld. I just shrugged and thought nothing more of it.

The next day I was contacted by a certain motion picture company. Not Disney, for obvious reasons, but rather an indie subsidiary of one of its competitors who wished to obtain a copy of my play. I immediately obtained some legal advice and registered the script with the WGA. Armed with a registration number and the knowledge that if they tried anything nefarious, I had the whole of the Writer’s Guild of America to back me up, and then I sent them a copy of the script with a DVD. Weeks went by. They finally got back to me and said that while the play was charming, original and certainly “had legs” (yes, they actually used that phrase), they weren’t sure that it was quite right for their studio and they decided to pass on a green light development deal. Further conversations along these lines with others informed me that the original interested parties at the studio had since taken jobs elsewhere and no one could confirm the whereabouts of the original script or the video of the live stage show. So, somewhere in Hollywood, there is at least one bootleg version of the show making the rounds of those few Disney aficionados who, like me, were perhaps a little disillusioned by the multimedia monster that the Mouse has morphed into. People who wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the day-to-day life of its minimum-wage-earning, costumed character actors. The ones who actually “make the magic happen.” But for what it was worth, the one good piece of advice I was given was “Kid, don’t wait for someone to tell your story, just sit down and write it yourself.” This sounded like a good idea, even coming from “movie people” who lie to playwrights for a living. So, now I am. I hope you enjoy it.