WHAT WAS THE LAST Walt Disney film Walt Disney made sounds like a trick question because it feels like he’s still making movies somehow. He isn’t alive anymore, but His name continues to echo, each story in the growing collection a new chapter in the same bible, that long shadow of His existence. And what with all the churches, I mean temples, I mean amusement parks built in His honor, you’d swear He never died.
The rumor that His body was powered down into a state of suspended animation is an apple too tempting to refuse: it’s too perfect. Walt Disney is still alive – or so we tell ourselves – just sleeping for a while, floating in a cloudy solution in a vat in the bowels of Disneyland. Surely He’s a regular skeleton somewhere, bones in a bed of dirt. Surely Santa Claus is some senior citizen I have sat on at the mall.