Park Characters and Mascots

[darklingscribe]

I just thought it might be fun to have a little park character catchall discussion thread.

 

What gave me the idea is looking through old family photo albums and seeing photos of me and my sister at Disneyland as small children with Mickey and Tigger(who was my favorite as a kid) and wondering how those mid 80s costumes would look compared to the ones worn today at Disney Parks.

 

I wonder how often do they update the look and design of them?

 

If you worked at a park sometime in your life, did you ever find yourself asked to put on the costume and what was it like?

 

I'd also like to take an informal poll about people's feelings of costumed characters as kids. No check boxes to click, just write your opinion of them from the point of view of your earliest memories.

 

I ask this because as far back as I can remember into my childhood I never really thought any of them were the characters themselves from the cartoons. This made my general feeling about them weird ones, because everyone seemed to insist that they were, but I knew that cartoon characters didn't look fluffy on saturday mornings and I always was a bit put off by the fact that most of them refused to speak.

 

Of course now I can see it was supposed to be all in good fun, but to my child brain it definitely made me feel strange to be asked to go up to them for a photo by my parents. Ever since then I have wondered how many kids really bought into this charade between the parents and park characters to insist they were the real deal.