Make Sure Your Tinkerbell Costume Is Not ‘Too Good’ When Going to Disney World
via Disney makes ‘Tinkerbell’ change clothes | From Click Orlando:.
WALT DISNEY WORLD, Fla. -
April Spielman wanted her boyfriend’s first trip to Walt Disney World to be memorable, so she planned to do something special — dress up like Tinkerbell.
“My makeup took two hours, my hair took another hour, and then I had to spray my body in glitter and paint my nails,” said Spielman, 15, who had purchased a Tinkerbell costume online.
Spielman said she and her boyfriend, who was dressed as Peter Pan, had no problem getting into Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park on Sunday. But when they tried to visit Disney’s Animal Kingdom later, Spielman said security officers stopped them at the front gate.
“They said I looked too good,” said Spielman, referring to how closely her costume resembled Disney’s official Tinkerbell theme park character who poses for photographs with visitors and signs autographs.
Duh.
You’re not allowed to dress like a park employee.
If she was signing the autographs as simply “Tinkerbell,” then she was also acting like a park employee. Since that particular Tinkerbell trade dress is Disney’s, that’s a big no-no.
Presumably, she paid the cost of admission to WDW and a Disney licensing fee to the retailer when she purchased the costume . . . and she still gets detained by security? She should demand (and get) a refund on both!
“Disney park officials gave Spielman a free T-shirt to wear instead of her costume. The company also provided her family with FastPass tickets, which enabled them to skip the lines on rides they missed while the teenager was changing clothes.”
A T-shirt and Break-in-Line tickets. Yeah, that should repair the psychological damage of getting detained by security for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I’m guessing these security officers are TSA rejects.
You just want to find fault with WDW, right?
Psychological damage? Really? Good grief.
“April Spielman wanted her boyfriend’s first trip to Walt Disney World to be memorable…”
I stopped reading there, I have a weak heart.
*shrug*
I might think it a lame way to treat an entusiastic cosplayer but it’s their park so they have a right to say what goes down within it and what doesn’t. It’s not as though they were gratuitously mean about it since they do have a point and they did try to compensate her for her inconvenience. If she’s typical of a lot of the cosplayers I’ve known she may have made the costume herself which would have made this doubly frustrating from her point of view so she does have my sympathy to that extent. But once again it *is* their park and they do have the right to say what happens within it.
Disney sells costumes for Tinkerbell and various other characters in the gift shops, although only in child sizes. It is not unusual at all to see little girls dressed as a princess or little boys dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow. It is also not unusual to see a bride in her wedding dress, accompanied by the groom in a tux, and her bridesmaids, strolling around the theme parks.
And my God, have you ever seen how some people dress in the theme parks? Note: spandex is a right, not a privilege.
This particular young lady was escorted by her boyfriend, who was dressed as Peter Pan. Both costumes were hand made by the young lady. It looks like they were having a good time until someone in Security decided they were dressed “too” well.
I think Disney just needs to be consistent. I’m a rather large person, and whenever my family goes to a Disney park, I am invariably grabbed out of the crowd to be an ogre, monster, or some other buffoonish character. Once I was Sir Shmedwick (sp) and was given a ridiculous floppy hat to wear for a street play, and had to speak with an absurd British accent. After the play, the actors let me just keep the hat, since several parkgoers asked to have a picture with me. I kept the hat on for the rest of the day. We were greeted with “Good day, Sir Shmedwick!” and picture requests everywhere we went.
So if Disney can use me as a hatrack for the amusement of other parkgoers, why can’t those 2 kids have some fun as Peter Pan and Tinkerbell?
They are consistent.
First of all, you will never see a bride and groom in a Disney park because it isn’t allowed! I know, I was married in Disneyworld and that was on of the first things they told us.
Second, she didn’t make the costume she bought it on-line.
Third, you have never been pulled from a crowd to play a character is a Disney skit, because Disney doesn’t do that.
And finally, is there really anyone who doesn’t understand the reason behind this policy? Except of course, a spolied 15 year old girl.
A bit of clarification that’s not in the article: The likely reason she was allowed into Disney Hollywood Studios but not Animal Kingdom in costume is because it was Star Wars Weekend at DHS on that day. For Star Wars Weekends, anyone’s allowed to be in costume as long as they don’t try to act like characters–usually those are Star Wars characters, but I guess they didn’t want to discriminate by character fandom there. Animal Kingdom had no special event, so she wasn’t allowed in as Tinkerbell.
The issue isn’t offensiveness or too much skin or anything like that; it’s that Disney doesn’t want kids to be confused by Disney characters in the parks who aren’t employees. That’s all. The girl overreacted quite a bit to a perfectly reasonable and well-known policy.
I salute them for being careful. The dangers are rather obvious when you have visitors dressing EXACTLY like the official characters. Furthermore, Miss Spielman really looked the part (as opposed to the sort of ludicrous, whale-proportioned types you see dressed up at the cons). Anyone who perfectly resembled the official character could cause all sorts of dangerous confusion if they didn’t feel the need to measure up to the costume.
By the way, has anyone besides me noticed the utter lack of Disney scandals in the years since Eisner was given the boot? Remember when reports of drunks and child molesters wearing the Goofy suit, people getting hurt or killed on the rides and flamboyant perverts-on-parade in DisneyWorld were an almost weekly occurrence?
Actually, no, I don’t remember that.
I’m having a really hard time working up sympathy for a 15 year old who dresses up as Tinkerbell…
I felt a little sorry for her because she was only 15, made a big project of it, then got shut down. 15-year-old girls do cry easily when disappointed; it’s not a big character flaw for her to do so.
BUT it’s too bad she didn’t know about the rule, it’s a sensible rule, and they were right to enforce it. The employees that are dressed as characters are trained to interact with the children visiting the park and (I presume) have background checks. If random adults also dressed like that and wandered around the park, the kids could approach a non-employee, trusting to be treated properly, and have a bad experience–bad for business for the park, and potentially unsafe for the kids.
The park did give her clothes so she could still be there, and apparently gave her some other compensation, too, so they did their best.
She’s learning some un-fun but inevitable life lessons about how rules can interfere with your plans, how things don’t always turn out the way you thought they would, and how to live with disappointment. A good night’s sleep, some time and perspective, and she’ll get over it.
She is 15???
Weird story…. but then I remember as a college student I was “detained” at the Busch Gardens safari park in Tampa Florida for wearing a khaki bush jacket that allowed me to unknowingly stroll “backstage” where only employees were allowed. I got a snapshot of a security guard picking his nose and golf cart ride back to the parking lot for my trouble. No free t-shirt.