The Queen as Mickey Mouse?

June 15, 2002 5:17 PM

The Queen as Mickey Mouse? A look at Britain's Royal Family as a tourist attraction with the Queen as its figurehead akin to Mickey Mouse and Disneyland in the US.
posted by percine (3 comments total)

Prince Charles == Dumbo?

Nah, too easy.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:32 PM on June 15, 2002

Oh. My. God.

This takes me back twenty years, to a Tony Hendra & company production called The 80s: A Look Back, which is their 1979 book produced after they planned a 1970s retrospective, and realized they didn't want to remember any of it. So they made up a decade.

One of the "predictions" was the financial collapse of the United Kingdom, after which it merged with Disney, becoming the United Magic Kingdom. (It's actually the first thing mentioned in the sole review @ Amazon!) There was a hilarious doctored photograph showing the Queen on her horse with all the royal guardsmen, accompanied by Prince Philip and Mickey. (I've always assumed they put Mickey's head on Charles's body; would that be correct for a birthday review?)

If you ever see this book in a flea market, buy it. Not every item is a gem, but there are thousands of items, even sometimes Onion-style sidebar one-offs (my favorite in that genre: Mexico issued a formal protest with the United Nations that other countries were using diagonal drilling to steal its oil reserves. Seventy-nine nations indignantly denied the charges. There's a surreal rift on future domestic politics, as another Constitutional "Convention" was held, portraying the conventioneers as -- well -- conventioneers, rewriting the document to better serve middle-aged drunk white guys, after which Congress became populated by embezzlers and thieves, to the point that President Carter (he returned to office after Ted Kennedy was elected, but somehow during the inaugural parade his presidential limousine flipped off a bridge ....) cut short his State of the Union Address because some congressmen were trying to steal his limo's hubcaps; they drove down the Capitol steps, machine-guns blazing, and the Washington Post's story predictably began: Relations between the White House and Congress hit a new low today ....

Anyway. United Magic Kingdom. Any E-ticket rides? The Dome would not count.
posted by dhartung at 10:10 PM on June 15, 2002

Not just about tea-swilling businessmen or the Royal Family, England, England lovingly and wittily exploits England as the butt of a big joke: Call it "Cruel Britannia." A savvy and snotty fop of an entrepreneur decides to build a theme park on the Isle Of Wight that condenses all of what makes England England into an easily digested, readily accessible, and highly profitable hodgepodge of architecture and history.
posted by riviera at 6:39 PM on June 16, 2002