Gambling on Personality

My wife gave birth to our second child in early January. After a couple days of recovery in the hospital, she went home and began her 12 weeks of maternity leave, during which time she did what happened when she was on maternity leave after delivering our first child: getting obsessed with streaming or binging shows and other nonsense. In both situations, she’s had a couple of major obsessions, including Gordon Ramsay-hosted cooking shows. But this time around, she got fixated anew on something both she and I like to watch from time to time: theme-park vloggers.

Please note: while I enjoy watching theme-park personalities on YouTube, even typing the word “vloggers” causes my fingers to revolt ever so slightly. Calling them “personalities” makes more sense to me, especially now, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, during this leave (one which ended up being truncated because my wife’s a teacher and is now doing virtual teaching with her students), she became hooked by a couple of theme-park personalities in particular. The Tim Tracker and Magic Journeys. While watching one of the former’s videos, I noticed that one of the closing image cards emphasized that he would have one new video every day. Now, Tim Insert Last Name Here (he uses “Tracker”, but a cursory Internet search states that this is a fake name used for obvious reasons) and his wife live in the Orlando area, where there are theme parks aplenty. And Magic Journeys — which is manned by a young man and his girlfriend — is located in Southern California, where there are theme parks aplenty.

But a video a day is a big ask, even in a regular world in which we are not suffering through a pandemic. Last night, after my wife and I spent most of the day deep-cleaning our kitchen (because listen, what the hell else are we going to do?), I wanted to relax by watching something un-challenging. We were scrolling through YouTube, and I found a video from another YouTube channel we sometimes watch, but one which relies on parks being open. It was this video, in fact.

The hourlong video is mostly just a string of ride-POV clips, with the narrator providing a bit of color, as much as possible. Like a number of theme-park YouTubers, he usually makes list-based videos, yet the attempt at injecting personality was, for me, a letdown. But I couldn’t stop thinking, as I watched one ride after another, about how YouTubers who talk about the theme parks are now reliant on their personalities.

For The Tim Tracker, this is evident. All he and his wife are doing now is what I believe would be dubbed “lifestyle videos” such as this one. I have nothing against these videos. But I am as old-fashioned as you can be about theme-park YouTube videos; I am watching them for the theme parks, not the people talking about the theme parks. Because when the parks aren’t open, all you get are…the people.

Over at Magic Journeys, the young couple have been unearthing videos that never made the light of day for one reason or another, essentially digging through a virtual attic to see what might stick. (Magic Journeys makes less frequent new videos to begin with, and they’ve yet to lean entirely on doing lifestyle videos. Either way, I like them a bit more. Your mileage may vary.)

And at the All Ears YouTube channel (related to the website, which is best known in the theme-park community for being a great repository for Disney theme-park menus), they’re doing their best to act like everything is normal even when things are…not. (Maybe not the best photo to choose as the thumbnail for that one, but what do I know.) Doing frequent videos is fine, but there’s a sense that Molly, the woman in the video below, is pulling as much content as possible from before the parks closed in the hopes of keeping engagement up. We’ll see.

Last, over at the Disney Food Blog site, the proprietor is treating things like…well…

The Disney theme parks are the very definition of non-essential businesses, unfortunately for the thousands of Cast Members who bring those parks to life for guests every day around the world. But if they’re non-essential, then what of the theme-park vloggers whose daily lives revolve around those parks being open? It’s an interesting struggle to watch play out, at least to someone who’s watched enough of these videos to fill a few days. When the parks aren’t open, there are plenty of ways I can relive them through YouTube videos. Personalities…aren’t enough.

Your Recommendation for Today

In the same vein as yesterday’s post, I wanted to highlight something you probably won’t be able to find on the Disney+ homepage: The Adventures of Spin and Marty. This 25-episode show is technically just the first season’s worth of serialized, 11-minute installments directly from The Mickey Mouse Club itself.

Spin and Marty was a title I’d heard of before this past weekend. I knew of the show, but not really much about it directly. After finishing up the binge-watch this morning, I can at least recommend the serial as a kind of modern Frontierland-like show that predates 90s-era nostalgia fests like Nickelodeon’s Hey Dude. Set at the Triple R Ranch, Spin and Marty introduces us to a group of campers (all boys, to note) who are going to have tons of fun and learn a few life lessons together one summer. Spin is a longtime camper, while Marty is a newbie, a snooty rich kid who just might learn to appreciate the less refined things in life.

Yes, this is not a terribly surprising program. But it’s a calming, relaxing black-and-white dive into true nostalgia. It’s not surprising to me that this show was revived for both the second and third season of The Mickey Mouse Club. Its easy charms, low-key tone, and inoffensive qualities are both very Disney-like, and very unlike what the Disney Channel makes now. I wouldn’t rewatch the show instantly, but there’s a kind of fascinating-curio quality to something like this. (And coming off a binge-watch of Columbo episodes, I was delighted to learn that the writer of this show wrote many episodes of the Peter Falk detective drama too.)