chase the light

I’ve had a few of these cast member badges over the years (see below). They sent out badges to every Disney employee around the world. Weird how 100 years doesn’t seem that long ago anymore. Only 34 years before I was born. That would be 1989 for someone born today. The very beginning of the Disney Company. Oof, mortality. I do like shifting timelines though as a mind exercise. Such as shifting The Beatles to where we are today. If they were to release their last album Let it Be today, that would mean the whole of The Beatles catalog would have been released between 2016-2023. The Beatles would have come and gone in the time I’ve lived in Vancouver. That’s messed up, and quite frankly astonishing. How about this one? Thriller is closer in time to Elvis Presley releasing his very first recording than we are from Thriller’s release. How is that possible?! Or how about Cleopatra timeline that sometimes gets posted about? She is closer in time to us than she was to the building of the pyramids. Even she thought the pyramids were ancient. How about that Kurt Cobain has now been dead longer than he was alive? Oh, here’s a good one I came up with. The movie Grease came out in 1978. It was depicting a time only 20 years before, 1958. That’s like a movie being released today about 2003. Here is a thing I recently read. The tortoise that Charles Darwin brought back from the Galapagos to study and come up with his theory of evolution only died in 2006! That tortoise saw Charles Darwin! And it died at the Australia Zoo owned by Steve Irwin. There are pictures of Steve Irwin with Darwin’s tortoise! WTF. That also plays into the crazy fact that none of the founding fathers of the U.S. knew what a dinosaur was. Yet we cling to the second amendment that was written during the time of muskets. Things change people. Especially fire power. I knew I could get politics in here somewhere. Feel the Bern. Also, one of the Wright Brothers got to see planes destroy Pearl Harbor and drop the bombs on Japan. So that plays right into this thought. The debut of MTV is closer to Pearl Harbor than we are to MTVs debut. Well, I’m glad we had this conversation about my badge.

Some things of note. Dinosaur is included in that image above. Aladar on the right in back towering above everyone. Dinosaur was very controversial when it was being worked on and some didn’t consider it part of the Disney Animation oeuvre. We were even in a different building deep in the bowels of Burbank. So, glad it’s in there. Also, Peter Pan is riding on the back of Pete’s Dragon. Get it?