So I suppose I shouldn't mention that one time, when my parents and I were were walking through Toon Lagoon at IOA, a few days after the grand opening of Hogsmeade, and we ran into Tony, Kevin Kidney, Jody Daily and some other person and chatted about what they thought of it. And then when my Dad asked if they saw the projections in the Three Broomsticks, and they all went "NO!" and then had to wander back off in the direction of the land.
While I would much rather have lived through the original years of Disneyland or WDW and have seen those changes, I realized after posting that I am in a rather unique position of being one of the few who is still around that got to experience the evolution of the Disney Fandom. Starting in 1996, I can remember when the DIG and Al was mostly a poster on ADD and a small website on AOL. When Deb's site was WDWIG. Bartender Sam and the Save Toad movement. I am the oldest, still active poster on LaughingPlace.com (I used to say non-staff, but since Dave, Doobie and Rebekah don't post anymore I feel like I can drop the non-staff...although I do mostly hit and run posting on all sites, so active is a relative term). I started posting on the Rumors & News board on the DIS not that long after Another Voice showed up (I saw someone bring up his Twitter posts recently, met him twice in person), lived through the various crashes and board upgrades while Pete was growing his business by leaps and bounds A bunch of us Rumors & News folks all ran off from the DIS and had our own little world for several years. We all used to make fun of this site for the too much Pixie Dusting. But being off in our world, most of the celebrity blogging and tweeting missed us by.
I ended up coming here, because a family medical crisis in 2014, meant I was in Orlando a lot more, and I had to figure out all the MyMagic nonsense. I went to the DIS, and was completely astonished by what I was reading in terms of customer service, technological failures, etc. I needed some place that would delve beyond the "vacation implications" and I knew this was where the Spirit had run off to after basically leaving LaughingPlace.
Everyone has a role they play within the fandom, and I have always fessed us to mine being the Librarian. But I kind of wish I had been a psychologist or sociologist, because watching all of this has been an interesting study and would make a fabulous real world case study. Could have actually done something useful with it, vs being able to come up with questions for Bob Iger that can generate quite a few likes.
