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I am having an awesome time at Disney – we did Epcot on Tuesday, including Spaceship Earth, Ellen’s Energy Adventure (I wonder if Bill Nye feels bad about or if he was just like BILL NYE GOTTA GET PAID YO, SCIENCE AIN’T CHEAP) and like at least three times on Mission To Mars or whatever it’s called where simulated G-forces make you feel like your ribcage is eating your internal organs. Also we went on the new Frozen ride, which is spectacular but also very, very short. You do go down a waterfall backwards in a simulacrum of a viking longboat, however.
Yesterday we went to Magic Kingdom where I made everyone go on the Haunted Mansion twice in a row because it’s my favorite ride maybe in the history of ever, and we went on the Mine Train and the big log flume ride, but kids.
Siblings.
Ancestors.
We as a culture – nay, we as a species – need to talk about the Country Bear Jamboree.
I have developed a theory about the Country Bear Jamboree. My theory about the Country Bear Jamboree is that it is both a necessary and a terrifying exorcism ritual which protects the Magic Kingdom, and perhaps all of humanity, from suffering the wrath of dark, dire forces.
Stay with me. Country Bear Jamboree bills itself as an animatronic concert filled with bears who sing and dance and play various down-country style instruments. Grand Ole Opry with animatronic bears. That’s not the mystical part.
At one point, about two thirds of the way into the performance, a soloist bear on a guitar comes out and sings a forgettable country song about something, but right at the end, after he’s taken his “bow”, you hear sudden drumbeats, and green light begins to flash rhythmically behind him. There are no other drums in any of the performances. The bear begins to sway to the drumbeats, and then the curtain falls quickly.
It’s very weird.
But then another bear appears, with a very out of tune blues guitar, and he sings a song. It’s a song that may actually exist in folk music canon; I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it before and may have sung it at some folkie get together or other. The song is about how there was blood in the water, blood in the sand, blood all around, blood on the ground. I think it’s about an old-timey murder.
It’s just one chorus or verse. But it’s very unsettling. There is nervous tittering from the audience, including me. Between the drumbeats and the song about OH MY GOD SO MUCH BLOOD, my ears were pricking a little and my what the hell alarm was going off.
Then the concert just…continues.
UNTIL, at one point, SERIAL KILLER BLUES BEAR comes back to SING THE BLOOD SONG AGAIN and literally every other bear in the performance appears out of whatever animatronic locker they keep them in, and all the bears all sing their individual songs to drown him out in a cacophony of country crooning.
And that’s the grand finale!
We walked out of the Country Bear Jamboree wide-eyed, and I immediately turned to my companions and went, “The fuck was that?” Only it was Disney so in concern for The Children I said “The heck was that?”
But I’ve worked it out.
Everyone who works at Disney is super cheerful and I think the vast majority of them actually mean it, which is a little bewildering to me. People clearly don’t HAVE to wish me happy birthday when they see my IT’S MY BIRTHDAY button, but they do. And so many of them, at eleven at night, seemed joyous to stand on the sidewalk and wave us goodbye as we left. People seem to love to work at Disney and while I don’t think that in itself is weird, the level of good cheer in what must be a very frustrating customer service job is startling. I commend them for it, I’m just confused by it.
So I have a theory. And my theory is this: Country Bear Jamboree is a swirling vortex of evil. The extra darkness, the crankiness, the ill-humor that normally one would develop working at Disney, and indeed perhaps some of the exhausted ire and weariness that people might develop just attending the Disney parks (Meltdown Hour is apparently around 6:30 for toddlers) is sucked down into Frontierland. It seeps through the dusty streets of a fake frontier America, and it enters the Country Bear Jamboree. It is absorbed into this one, brave, robot bear, who takes the evil into himself and sings his mournful song. And then, with drumbeats and singing, the evil is drowned out by the other bears, banished to some ether, an other-world whose only glimpse into ours is through the parks of the Wizard, Disney, whose fierce hairy country-folk guardians forever keep it locked away.
Woe betide us should the Country Bear Jamboree ever leave the Magic Kingdom. Misfortune unto us should the bears fall silent. The bears must sing, or God or Disney must have mercy on our souls.
What did you uncover in the swamplands, Walt?
Explain Disneyland then lol
I’m pretty sure the death of Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland is the explanation for the horror that is 2016.
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