Behind the Scenes at Disney World

On the Epcot Seas Aqua Tour, one of Disney World's behind-the-scenes excursions, visitors become part of the Living Seas exhibit. (Photos © The Walt Disney Co.)

We meander up Main, a gas-lamp ideal of small-townness. Matthew, speaking to us through the radio headsets we all wear, points out how the buildings' second floors are actually about one-eighth smaller in scale than the ground floors. It's an old movie trick known as forced perspective that makes the set look taller.

Disney's whole theme park concept was to put visitors inside a cinema experience, Matthew says. Every part of the park has its own constant soundtrack (all in the same key and on the same beat to make for smooth transitions), and there's always a popcorn smell wafting by the entrance. He points to the second-story windows. "And those are our opening credits."

Turns out those old-timey ersatz business names feature real people who helped build the park. You'll find Roy Disney above the confectioner's shop (Walt's brother and partner). And above the ice cream parlor at the far end, "Walter E. Disney -- Graduate School of Design & Master Planning."

Matthew ladles out cool factoids as we move about the park. For example, did you know there's a trash can in Disney every 30 to 50 paces because Walt himself reportedly handed out candy at Disneyland and then counted the number of steps before people would drop the wrapper?

Trash is a big deal in a place that moves a couple of Super Bowls' worth of people through every day. On our first backstage stop, a utility area behind Pirates of the Caribbean, Matthew points out a rubbish compactor the size of a four-unit apartment building. Remarkably, before the garbage is sucked here from around the park by a Swiss-built network of pneumatic tubes, it's sorted by hand to pull out recyclables and all the wallets and cameras people toss by accident. The combustibles are burned to generate a third of Disney's electricity.

To get backstage, we cross the steam-train railroad tracks, walk around a bend in the road and finally pass through a secluded gate. When we step over a bright yellow "sight line" on the road, Matthew declares us out of any possible view of guests in the park.

"Now, what do you really want to know?" Matthew asks.

Only now will he give us out-of-character answers to certain questions. That cable that stretches from the top of Cinderella's Castle? Inside the park, he'll only say it's where Cinderella hangs her laundry. But on this side of the sight line, he comes clean on the magic behind Tinkerbell's nightly "flight" from the castle. The performer in the Tink suit must weigh no more than 95 pounds; she wears nearly 70 pounds of harnesses and lights; she makes actors' equity wages plus hazard bonuses, and she gets paid for eight hours whether she flies or not.

"Tinkerbell is well taken care of," he says.

The park is open now and filling rapidly. But our group bypasses the long queue for the Jungle Cruise to step aboard a boat of our own. Matthew takes the microphone from the pilot and substitutes the usual corny spiel with some delicious state secrets. He points to a spot on the fuselage of a "downed" airplane where three small metal disks make a familiar mouselike shape. This is our first Hidden Mickey, one of dozens of such built-in winks scattered throughout Disney parks that devotees pursue with "Da Vinci Code" intensity. Matthew points out another an hour later during our private ride through the Haunted Mansion. (Okay, okay. It's on the dining room table, a dinner plate flanked by two saucers underneath the waltzing ghosts.)

Our capacity for this stuff is infinite. I've never seen such an attentive tour group, peppering Matthew with questions over lunch in a private part of the Columbia Harbour House restaurant, and finally in the super-secret underground tunnels that lace the Magic Kingdom.

If you're really lucky, you might see Goofy schlepping to his shift, head in hand. But mostly this is just a wide utility hallway filled with beeping carts and exposed plumbing (and a display of killer, never-published photos of Disney's construction phase). But by this time, we're so drunk with insider scoop, even the sewage pipes hold us rapt.