While it may seem a simple task to have actors wandering around in character suits at a theme park, these following stories prove otherwise.
Tigger back to work after trial
Earlier this year, a Walt
Disney World employee was charged with fondling a 13-year-old girl, when
dressed as Tigger at the park. Michael Chartrand, has recently been acquitted,
coming back to work on August 15. The Big Cartoon DataBase reports that
Chartrand says he doesn't expect to be "back in the employee rotation for
at least two weeks." Because of Chartrand's arrest and prosecution, Disney
has introduced new guidelines for costumed characters.
The trial for Chartrand took three-days, and only one hour of jury deliberation, to find Chartrand not guilty. Chartrand's defense attorney probably set a first in the history of world courts, when he wore a Tigger costume in protection of his client. The unusual process was an attempt to show jurors the difficulty of seeing and moving around in the outfit.
This isn't the first time Disney costumed character actors have been falsely accused of such crimes. A quick search of snopes.com, an amazing repository of urban legends, will turn up multiple instances of characters trying to scare kids, or characters "beheading" themselves in public. People just think they'll get a large settlement from an image-protecting Disney, and try to take down the image of what is one of the most extremely clean, safe and secure places on earth.
Pluto actor killed, OSHA makes post-incident
inspections
A Disney cast member, Javier
Cruz, was killed earlier this year at the Magic Kingdom theme park in The
Walt Disney World Resort. Cruz was run over by a float in a daily parade,
while acting as Pluto. Cruz was supposedly not where he was supposed to
be on the route when the incident happened. The Walt Disney Company has
been fined $6,300 by The Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
an American federal agency. The Orlando Sentinel says that Disney has until
this Friday to show the OSHA that it has made changes, so that such an
workplace accident would never happen again.
Interestingly enough, before Cruz, no one had ever died in a Disney theme park. While people have passed on from heart attacks and the like, they are always declared dead at the local hospital, or at least when the patient is en route to the hospital. The only reason Cruz is registered as dying on site is that the death was nearly instantaneous. Also, Disney does have much better reaction time to emergencies, compared to other theme parks, so generally people are
Go To Page: 1 2
