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Thus Thrills Tonight, I want you to imagine Disneyland after midnight.
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The main street is still glowing, but the music has stopped.
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The crowds are gone. The boats inside Pirates of the
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Caribbean are sitting motionless in black water. Somewhere beneath the attraction,
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behind a steel door that ordinary guests will never see,
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an industrial machine gives off a low, steady hum, and
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inside a frost covered chamber is Walt Disney himself, not buried,
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not exactly dead, just waiting waiting for medicine to catch
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up for the right year, for somebody to open the
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tank and tell him that the future he spent his
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life imagining has finally arrived. That is the legend, and
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it's also completely fake. But don't get comfortable just yet,
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because the truth leaves us with something almost better, a
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rumor born at the exact moment human cryonic preservation became real.
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A secret chamber supposedly hidden beneath one of the world's
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most famous attractions, and a theme park that now invites
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visitors into a dark theater to watch Walt Disney move
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and speak again. This is Thursday Thrills. A quick weekly
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ride into the creepy stories, haunted places, weird obsessions, and
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eerie little corners of the world worth talking about. I'm
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your host, Enriquecuto, and tonight we're taking the coldest possible
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trip to Disneyland. You've probably heard some version of the story.
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I know I heard a bunch of them growing up.
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Walt Disney knew he was dying, but he believed technology
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would eventually conquer death, so instead of being buried or cremated,
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he arranged to have his body frozen. Some versions say
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his entire body was preserved, but when I was growing up,
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I always heard it was only his head, which is
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usually the point where the story stops sounding like a
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corporate secret and starts sounding more like a rejected Futurama episode.
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The hiding place also changes quite a bit. Sometimes it's
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a private laboratory, other times it's a vault somewhere on
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Disney property. But the best known version puts him right
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underneath Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland in California, sealed
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in liquid nitrogen, while boats full of tourists float above him,
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singing Yoho. And I understand why that version won the
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Urban Legend Olympics If you're going to hide the frozen
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body of America's most famous dreamer, you don't put him
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in a warehouse beside some boxes of old parade decorations.
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You put him beneath a dark ride filled with skeletons,
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secret tunnels, underground water, and extremely convincing mechanical corpses. The
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ride practically writes the rumor for you. But here's what
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actually happened. Walt Disney died at Saint Joseph's Hospital in
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Burbank on December fifteenth, nineteen sixty six. He was sixty
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five years old and had been battling lung cancer. Two
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days later, his remains were cremated and his ashes were
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placed at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. His
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daughter Diane later wrote that there was no truth to
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the claim that her father wanted to be frozen. In fact,
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she doubted that he had even heard of cryonics. If
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I buy that one, because he was a futurist after all,
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but I digress. That should end the story. There is
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a death certificate, there was a cremation, There is a
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real memorial site. The family denied it, so case closed.
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Everybody go home, except urban legends don't need an open case.
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All they need is an open feeling, and Walt Disney
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left behind exactly the right feeling. He was associated with Tomorrow,
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Tomorrow Land, experimental cities, robots, monorails, new forms of animation,
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new ways of building worlds. He appeared on television explaining
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technologies that most families had never seen, and he sold
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the future as a place that would be cleaner, brighter,
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more exciting, and somehow just around the corner. Even his
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original idea for Epcot was not simply another theme park.
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It was supposed to be an experimental prototype community of
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tomorrow eh Epcot see a living city where new technology
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and urban planning would constantly reshape daily life. So when
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a man like that dies, people don't imagine him choosing
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an ordinary ending. They imagine one more invention, and the
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timing could not have been more perfect. Cryonics was becoming
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a real public obsession in the nineteen sixties. The basic
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idea was that after a person was legally dead, the
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body could be cooled and presume deserved at extremely low temperatures.
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Supporters hoped that future medicine might one day repair the
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disease that killed them, fix the damage caused by preservation
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and somehow restore the person to life. Nobody preserved through
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cryonics has ever been revived at this time. Today it
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remains an enormous scientific gamble. But in the nineteen sixties
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it sounded like tomorrow had arrived a little ahead of schedule.
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Robert Ettinger's book The Prospect of Immortality helped popularize the
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idea in nineteen sixty four. Then on January twelfth, nineteen
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sixty seven, less than one month after Walt Disney had died,
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doctor James Bedford became the first person pryonically preserved with
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the intention that he might someday be revived. Think about
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how neatly those headlines would collide in people's minds. Walt Disney,
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the famous futurist, dies in December. A man is frozen
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for the future in January. The public doesn't need proof,
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It only needs to connect two dots that were never
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actually connected. Then the tabloids supplied the spooky details. One
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early version of the legend told of a reporter who
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disguised himself as a hospital orderly slipped into a forbidden
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storage room and saw Walt Disney's body suspended inside a
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metal cylinder. Now, is that a trustworthy eye witness account?
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Absolutely not. Is it a nearly perfect urban legend scene? Hell? Yes,
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You have the unnamed insider, the disguise, the locked room,
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the shocking glimpse of something powerful people do not want
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you to see. Then the witness escapes and tells the world,
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but somehow never produces a photograph, a document, or anything
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else that might ruin a perfectly good story. From there,
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the rumor needed a permanent home. Pirates of the Caribbean
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was still under construction when Walt died. It opened at
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Disneyland on March eighteenth, nineteen sixty seven, just a few
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months later, and it was one of the final attractions
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whose development he personally oversaw that made it irresistible. People
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already knew that theme parks had backstage corridors, control rooms,
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maintenance areas, and entire pieces of architecture hidden from the guests.
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Disneyland was designed to make you wonder what existed beyond
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the painted wall, behind the false storefront, or underneath the track.
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So why not a cryogenic chamber, Why not a secret
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room beneath the Pirates? Why not one final hidden attraction
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with an audience of exactly one. The Frozen Waltz story
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might have faded into old playground gossip, but the Internet,
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of course, gave it fresh layers. One of my favorites
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is the conspiracy theory about Disney's twenty thirteen film Frozen. Yeah,
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you get where this is going. According to that theory,
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the company did not choose the title simply because the
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movie involves a woman who can control ice. No, the
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title was supposedly selected so that anyone searching Disney Frozen
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online would get pages of Elsa Oloff songs, toys, and
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movie clips instead of stories about Walt Disney's frozen body
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or severed head. There is no credible evidence that this
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was the plan, but it is a beautiful example of
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how urban legends protect themselves. Search for Disney Frozen, and
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you see Frozen. A believer can point at the search
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results and say, see it worked. The absence of evidence
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becomes evidence of how powerful the cover up must be.
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That is conspiracy theory, judo. And then Disneyland did something
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that feels as if it was designed by a folklore
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professor with a dark sense of humor. On July seventeen,
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twenty twenty five, Disneyland opened Walt Disney a Magical Life
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inside the Main Street Opera House. The attraction begins with
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a film about Walt's life, Then the experience culminates in
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a recreation of his office featuring the first audio animatronics
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figure of the man himself, Walt Disney, ever to be created.
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The figure moves, it speaks, using Walt's words assembled from
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recordings made across decades. It gestures in the office while
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visitors sit in the dark and listen to the founder
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of Disneyland address them once more. To be clear, this
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is a tribute, right, it's not sinister. Disney imagineers spent
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years trying to create something respectful, inspirational and recognizably human,
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but place it beside the old legend and it becomes
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brilliantly uncanny. For nearly sixty years, people claimed Walt Disney
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had used futuristic technology to preserve himself until he could return.
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Disneyland's response, intentionally or not, was essentially, we didn't freeze him,
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but we did build him again. No secret laboratory was required,
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no miracle cure, no thawing process, just archival recordings, painstaking design,
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advanced robotics, and the storytelling technology. Walt himself helped pioneer
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the legend, promised that Walt would come back when the
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future was right for him. Now, a mechanical Walt stands
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inside the only Disney park he ever personally walked through,
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telling new generations about his life and his ideas. While
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that may not be a resurrection from the back row
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of a dark theater, it gets close enough to make
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the hair on your arms stand up. And maybe that's
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why the Frozen Walt rumor has lasted so long. It
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was never really about whether someone could produce a cremation record.
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It was about the strange way Walt Disney became inseparable
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from the company he created. Most famous people die and
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leave behind their work. Walt left behind a world that
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kept expanding in his name. His voice remained on film,
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His signature stayed over the castle. His face appeared in documentaries, exhibits, statues,
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TV specials, and corporate history. The parks kept presenting themselves
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as extensions of his imagination. Every new attraction could be
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described as something Walt would have loved, wanted, approved of,
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or dreamed about. The company didn't need to preserve his body.
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It preserved the idea of him. In a way, Disneyland
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itself became the cryogenic chamber, a sealed, carefully maintained environment
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where the past is repaired, repainted, updated, and sent around
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the track one more time. The attractions grow older, but
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they're not allowed to die normally. They close, reopen, receive
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new faces, new voices, new machinery, and another chance to perform.
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And I don't mean that to be criticism, honestly. In
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a way, it's part of the magic. But it's also
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a little spooky when you really sit down and think
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about it. So, no, Walt Disney is not frozen beneath
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Pirates of the Caribbean. There is no hidden tank humming
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under the boats, no emergency thaw date circled on a
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calendar in some underground control room. The truth is much simpler.
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Walt Disney died in nineteen sixty six. He was cremated,
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his ashes were interred in Glendale. But the story people
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wanted from the legend has finally happened. In its own
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peculiar way. Technology advanced, Disneyland opened the curtain, and Walt
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began speaking again. So the frozen Walt Disney myth, in
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many ways, came from a company an entertainment powerhouse that
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simply would never let him die. That's actually a lot
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creepier than the idea of a human popsicle under the
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pirates of the Caribbean, if you ask me. In a way,
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maybe they're simply prodding the idea of his corpse every
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day to get a little more cash and a little
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more excitement for the audiences. Until next time, drive safe,
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keep your headlights on, and be very suspicious of any
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cold air coming from behind a door marked Cast members
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only come back tomorrow for more fear. Until then, lock
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your doors as if that will help.