Chris Mitchell

"Despair didn't exist here. Neither did gloom or desperation or sad endings. Inside the impenetrable fortress of Disney World, fairies, genies, and mermaids were real; parking tickets, dead batteries, and blurry photographs were make believe" (p18).
And for someone who is trying his damnedest to run away from his problems, Disney World's manufactured perfection is a Godsend. Chris lives through hilarious incident after hilarious incident, peppered with unbelievable situations for variety, show more during his time as an employee or Cast Member of the Magic Kingdom.

While I would guess that this will be a fun read for a lot of people, readers who have crossed the threshold into "Cast Members Only" territory, or even have grown-up visiting a Disney attraction on a regular basis, will find this unbearably funny. show less

Cast Member Confidential: A Disneyfied Memoir
by Chris Mitchell

Disney Trash. 4 ½ stars out of 5.

Whenever you can read a fun and trashy book regarding the Mouse, sex, drugs, naked Disney characters, lots of fetish fur, NASCAR, and Guerilla Philanthropy, how can you not like this book?

True, it did take me a while to get used to the narrator’s sarcastic voice, which did bother me for the first hour or two of reading, until the story became more interesting than the voice.

The down side: show more this is ‘memoir’ which signals to the reader that somewhere, there is some lesson that the narrator will confront and make some kind of decision. But really, nothing bad really happens to the narrator. Sure there is cancer, which the narrator is running from, of course, but as a tool, this memoir is less about dealing with the tragedies of life than Disney’s rules to maintain a certain experience for children. This is less memoir and more exposé. A memoir is about a person experiencing a change of life and benefiting from the shared change. This is not what happens here: In Cast Member Confidential, we learn how Ariel the Mermaid is a lying slut, outside of her fins and that gay orgies are the standard and not exception.

Overall? Entertaining. Take this book with you on your next Disney cruise. It’ll make you look at Winnie the Pooh in an entirely different way. show less

While I enjoyed the down and dirty look behind the escapades of Disney cast members, I found the author to be self-indulgent and almost unlikeable. This made me question how much of this was true versus him being a jerk. After awhile the stories started to sound similar. I found the rules Disney had for costumed characters the most interesting part of the book, as well as how there were castes within the casts.

I was slightly misled about this book – and I take the blame. Everything I chose to read about this book (the blurbs, etc.) made me think this would be a book about backstage Disney (in this case, Disney World) in the vein of Koenig’s Mouse Tales books. (As I look back at what is written about this book, I realize I read it with certain blinders on. Again, the misleading was my own fault.) I dove into the book and found myself learning about the life of the author. Then the book went on show more with a mixture of backstage experiences and the life of the author. Immediately, that means the book did not meet my expectations. And, if you are going into this book primarily for the backstage revelations, then you will probably be similarly disappointed. The events in here might be shocking to those (and I’ll bet there’s a whole slew of them) who naively believe that the world behind Disney World is a happy continuation of the park, but for the rest of us these are stories which confirm what we already knew.

So, let’s back up and re-evaluate this book on its own approach. What we have here is actually an autobiography/essay combined with revelations about Disney. The author sets a decent arc for the story – disillusionment, cynicism to Disney, go beyond the cynicism and believe in the Disney pixie dust, and then get another dose of reality and return to real life. Not a bad arc. But, it is in the telling that the story falls apart, and I left this book not that thrilled with the story, not that thrilled with the author, and feeling as though the author’s cynicism infected the entire story. (This is a tough to say. It appears the author has really put it all out there. But, as an author, that is the chance you take; that your skill may not be up to the challenge.)

And, I think my final complaint, the thing that really set me off this book, is the feeling the author is not really being genuine with me. In the introduction he says, “The events in this memoir really occurred. The incidents that happened to me, I describe as accurately as possible.” Good. If you are going to do this kind of “tell-all”, you have to be true to what happened. However, in the preceding sentence he states, “In some instances, I have combined characteristics of people I met and created composite character.” Later he states, “I have ascribed folkloric episodes to actual (or composite) persons for ease of storytelling.” And there we have the crux of the problem. As a reader, how am I to tell when something has been changed to help the “story”? This only matters if, in the reading, I start to suspect that the truth has been stretched. And that suspicion reared its ugly head right away, when I read the author’s description of his first day at Disney World. Can this much really happen to one person in one day? And how were so many details so specifically remembered? We are asked to believe the author is telling us exactly what happens, he then qualifies it, and then the content of the story makes us question what we see.

Throw in a few literary devices that just don’t work (three of the “folkloric” stories are placed in the text as if they were separate Penthouse letters - and I use that analogy advisedly) and the final result is disappointing. And that disappointment exists whether you are expecting a behind-the-scenes picture of Disney World or you are looking for an engaging, first-person narrative. show less