Usually when I see somebody’s video from Disneyland on social media, my prevailing emotion is one of jealousy. Because if I’m not at Disneyland on any given day, I wish I were. However, the most recent viral video from the happiest place on earth has generated an entirely new emotion in me, burning fury.
Last night a guest at Disneyland was capturing video of the excellent Paint the Night parade, when they caught a guest who apparently decided he needed an extra special photo op, and jumped into the parade route to get a photo while he sat on the parade float of Mack from Cars. Check it out.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
This video absolutely infuriates me. I can abide some amount of guests having fun in the parks that might bend the rules slightly, but this is obviously one of those things that we all know we shouldn’t be doing. What’s more, these sorts of actions have the potential to cause real problems. There was no way to know the float could even handle this sort of activity, and damage to the float would have, at the very least, ended the parade for the night... or possibly longer.
Disneyland Guests Behaving Badly Cause A Lot Of Problems For The Park
I recently attended a business update at Disneyland Resort where one of the interesting pieces of information was that, in any given year, somewhere between 10-15% of unsheduled attraction closures are due to the behavior of guests.
The parade completely stops after the guest jumps on the float, and we see a Cast Member walk over. After a few moments, the float begins to move again. As somebody who especially loves the Paint the Night parade, I really hate to see this happen to it. If something happened that forced the parade to be cancelled, even temporarily, that would be heartbreaking.
The good news is that this transgression did not go unpunished. The post has a comment from somebody else who was apparently in the crowd, who says Disneyland security dealt with the individual shortly after their special photo. They probably thought that the parade crowd and the darkness worked to their advantage, but the fact is that hiding from Disneyland is nearly impossible.
While what happened is unknown, I feel confident that being banned from Disneyland was in his future. People have received lifetime bans for doing stuff in the parks that is arguably less egregious than this. The only question would be whether the ban was temporary or permanent.
From Cast members getting doxxed by fans to angry guests swearing up a storm to people getting into fistfights in ToonTown, there’s seemingly no limit to the guests behaving badly at Disney Parks. If the only people who had their day ruined by these actions were the people themselves, that would be one thing, but these sorts of actions impact the people around them. Can we all just…not?
