New Yawk Times.

Over the weekend, I spoke with Finn-Olaf Jones, a reporter for the New York Times. He had contacted me to ask piratey, Disneyish questions, as the release date of POTC 3 draws nigh. Interestingly, he's writing a piece on fans of the ride, rather than fans of the crazy-popular films.

There have been a number of times that I've been contacted by regional press - such as the Orlando Sentinel and the LA Times - about Disney-park-related topics, but the New York Times... well, this is nice. Once this article hits the streets, I suppose I can claim to be a world-renowned expert on the Pirate ride at the Disney parks (though that's assuming I'm not left on the cutting room floor.)

I'm being facetious, of course. I'm pretty sure my interview will be boiled down to a sentence or two in Jones' article. So we'll see how it goes. These feature writers all typically ask the same thing - how can you explain the fandom behind - well, amusement park rides. The simple answer is nostalgia, of course, but I'm always looking for different, colorful ways to describe that nostalgia. And Jones seemed to be distinctly intrigued by the subject, rather than amused by it, which is a nice change from the norm. Some excerpts from my comments to the Times:

I'm not really certain of the size of the fan base for the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction itself, which is significantly different from the Pirates movies' fan base. Sometimes it's hard to discern where the boundaries lay when defining a "fan" - I mean, who wouldn't consider themselves a "fan" of one of the most popular Disney theme park rides?

Of course, the Disney parks are doing their best this year to really blur the line between fans of the movies and fans of the attraction itself. This is most evident in the addition of Johnny Depp to the ride - but also shows itself in the extraordinary merchandising going on at the parks, and the wandering live entertainment (which I'd say takes a cue more from the films than the ride.) The Mickey pirate ears were flying off the shelves last year - and the latest just-released version, with velvety-flocked brown ears, replicates costuming found in the third installment of the Pirates franchise, as it's adorned with an asian coin and beads...

I think it's interesting to note that a "Disney pirate," including the movie characters but especially the characters in the ride, are basically fun-loving drunkards - basically, what every teen and twenty-something wants to portray themselves as on their myspace pages. Even though the lyrics to the theme song everyone hums along to include "we kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot," the characters just seem like they wanna have fun. A few years back, Disney even removed the scene of a pirate who seems to have "ravaged" a young woman, as if riders of the attraction would sense that Disney pirates don't do such things. So you see, it's quite easy to be a Disney pirate fan...

I think the appeal of this attraction - to Boomers, in particular - lies with the heavy dose of nostalgia that comes from a visit to a Disney park. Pirates is the last attraction Walt Disney personally oversaw, and it marks what is arguably the most significant example of Disneyland's use of space-age robotics, which they call "audio-animatronics." It was a serious all-encompassing physical experience to behold when it first opened in 1967, and to ride through an attraction that likely made such a major impact on a child's memory some 40 years later to see it virtually unchanged is, in a sense, time travel. Sometimes, a trip to Disneyland is the closest thing to riding in a way-back machine that we'll ever experience.

I'll keep you all posted, if and when the article hits the newsstands. Yo ho!