A 15 year old girl dressed as Tinker Bell was denied entry into Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park on Sunday with her boyfriend who was dressed as Peter Pan.
Walt Disney World has a dress code, clearly stated on their website, that “adult costumes or clothing that can be viewed as representative of an actual Disney character” is inappropriate theme park attire that “may result in refusal of admittance.” This is in effort not to confuse the thousands of visitors as to who is the who inside the park.
April Spielman was asked to change her outfit at the gates on Sunday because her outfit was too close to the actual Tinker Bell who greets guests inside the theme park. She was offered free clothes from Disney officials to make to make the change. The teen purchased her costume online and reported her makeup took two hours, her hair took another hour, and then she had to spray her body in glitter and paint her nails to complete the look. Earlier in the day, the duo was permitted past the gates at Disney Hollywood Studios and they didn’t see a problem going to Animal Kingdom.
Incidents like this at DAK have happened in the past. There’s this one woman from Radford, England who faced the same problem. She wore an old wedding dress from a secondhand store and her daughter wore an old bridesmaid dress to Disneyland Paris. The latter was permitted in because she was under 10 but the woman wasn’t. She denied the fact it was representative of a Disney character and it didn’t look like a princess clone. (I have to say that she looked a bit like Giselle from Enchanted because of her dress.) So this is nothing new.
Source: Alfonso, Tiffany J. L. “What Not to Wear – No Adult Costumes at Disney Parks” Trifter. Triond. 7 July 2010. https://trifter.com/practical-travel/travel-with-kids/what-not-to-wear-no-adult-costumes-in-disney-parks
This is hilarious. Anyone upset by this rule is insane. Are you allowed to go into Best Buy wearing a Best Buy uniform? NO. You really think it’s ok for you to look like someone who works at a theme park who is trusted with the safety of millions of innocent children? Disneyland does NOT need random strangers looking like the real characters wandering around. Too much liability if one of these people is rude to a child who believes they are the real character and tarnishes that child’s experience forever (or worse…using the costume to lure in kids to molest or kidnap them. We live in a sick world). On top of that, Disney works REALLY HARD to maintain a sense of reality in their “magic.” If Mickey is seen walking around main street, he won’t be in ANY other part of the park at the same time (not even in a show or at his house in Toon Town) because they want children to believe in the character, and no person can be in two places at the same time. If you had multiple characters standing right in front of a child, you might as well scream in that kid’s face “SANTA CLAUSE ISN’T REAL EITHER.” Get over it. These rules are common sense. The only sense you people seem to have is your sense of entitlement.