Everyone wants a souvenir from Walt Disney World. When I was a kid, I got a hat that looked like Goofy’s head. I loved that thing. On another visit, my parents bought me a stuffed animal of Figment, the purple mascot of Epcot’s Imagination pavilion.
But some adult Disney fans these days want Disney memorabilia of a slightly more exotic variety. On eBay and in other less-well-traveled corners of the internet, obsessives buy and sell bits and pieces of Walt Disney World and Disneyland. Props, costumes, manuals — anything, really, that people can get their hands on. Quickly searching eBay while I prepped this piece, I found a registration sign from Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel for sale for $650 and a room number from Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort for $1,000. Someone’s even got a cardboard box that was supposedly displayed at the Emporium in the Magic Kingdom. A cardboard box!
If people will pay for literal garbage like that, you can imagine what they might fork out for pieces of actual Disney history. The new documentary Stolen Kingdom explores this world of obsessive Disney fanatics along two distinct but somewhat interconnected tracks: The “urban explorers” who pioneered the practice of sneaking into abandoned spaces on Disney property, and then the people, typically Disney employees (now mostly former Disney employees), who took things even further and began swiping bits of the parks during their exploration they could sell to collectors on the black market.
Director Joshua Bailey’s eclectic cast of characters includes, ”Hoot and Chief,” two buddies who began sneaking backstage at Walt Disney World and then, when they discovered that the park planned to close their beloved Horizons ride at Epcot, started exiting the Horizons vehicle on its glacial procession through the attraction to walk inside its elaborate futuristic displays to document its components up close. Years later, Hoot and Chief began sharing their photographs on their own blog, prompting a renewed wave of interest in the long-defunct attraction.
Hoot and Chief mostly did all of this for their own amusement. But others in their wake had more mercenary ambitions. That includes Patrick Spikes, a Disney World worker who used his status in the company to gain access to areas other explorers couldn’t — and then to auction off what he found to the highest bidder.
Spikes is a documentarian’s dream: A crook (Spikes’ Twitter handle is “PatTheThief”) who loves to brag about what he’s done. I’m not sure what the statute of limitations in Florida is on Spikes’ activities, but he’s brazenly honest about swiping manuals for attractions to sell to an interested party on eBay, and about faking an asthma attack while in police custody so they would send him to a hospital where he could place a phone call to one of his confederates in order to ensure authorities didn’t find his ill-gotten items.
White Lake Productions
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The earliest wave of these Disney explorers predated the internet, but the subsequent generation largely documented their actions in order to share them online. That was probably not the wisest decision in terms of legal jeopardy, but it makes great background footage in Bailey’s doc. Spikes and other subjects’ iPhones and GoPros bring viewers along as they barge into forgotten areas of Walt Disney World, like the defunct and now heavily overgrown water park River Country, and the shuttered Wonders of Life pavilion at Epcot — which Disney closed in early 2007 and still sits, derelict and unused, all these years later.
The images of Wonders of Life in Stolen Kingdom are particularly arresting because Disney left the area basically untouched when they closed it. When explorers found it a decade or more later, it remained fossilized in its original state, the way an abandoned town might if all of its residents packed up and moved out in the middle of the night. Disney even left Buzzy, the animatronic star of Wonders of Life’s headliner attraction, Cranium Command.
But not long after Spikes and his ilk discovered Buzzy, Disney reported the animatronic missing to local police, sparking an investigation that uncovered the wider practice of reselling backstage Disney items. (Note to self: You can be an effective criminal, stealing things under cover of darkness, or you can be an effective content creator, documenting interesting forgotten places. It’s pretty hard to do both at once.)
White Lake Productions
Running a brisk 74 minutes, Stolen Kingdom sneaks into and out of this strange Disney world before its inhabitants’ arrogance about their behavior and their callous attitude toward private property can wear out its welcome. The documentary offers just the right amount of this strange Disney world for more casual fans of the Happiest Place on Earth, a place they love to visit and might want to take a piece home of … if they can find it at the right price.
Stolen Kingdom is available for rental on Letterboxd Video Store. Starting this weekend, the film is also touring movie theaters around the country. You can find screening dates at the movie’s official website.
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