Small World creator Carlson dies - at last, says Bill Kay

The stupid fucking cow who invented Disney’s It’s A Small World ride is dead. Thank God for that, and good riddance. Cancer got her in the end, but a knife between the shoulder blades about, ooh, 50 years ago would have been much better.
I always imagined that IASW had been invented by some Disney ‘imagineering’ committee – ‘imagineering’, isn’t that enough on its own to make your flesh creep, as if a million slugs, cockroaches and worms were sliding all over your skin at the same time?
But, no, it wasn’t like that. Someone – it turns out to be Joyce Carlson from Santa Monica High School, came up with the idea and persuaded the organizers of the 1964 New York World’s Fair to take it, and Disney took it from there.
As the photo with her LA Times obit shows, she looks like one of her IASW dolls, which look like characterless cousins of Cabbage Patch dolls, which says a lot.
Carlson’s family moved from Wisconsin in 1938 and in 1944 she started off in the mail room of the Disney Burbank offices. She submitted a sample of pen-and-ink sketches, which were enough to get her a job in the ink and paint department. I dread to think what those early sketches looked like, but they must have been sugary enough for Walt Disney to see a ghastly potential.
Carlson became “lead ink artist” for Lady and the Tramp, moving to the newly created Imagineering department in 1960. Surely, couldn’t someone have stabbed her with a pen by then, or at least poisoned her coffee?
She was the first woman to work 50 years at Disney and was clearly a rare example of a female paedophile. The obit notes: “She enjoyed sneaking backstage at Walt Disney World and watching children as they road the boats through IASW. [my initials] ‘You watch them going through and they’re just all eyes’, she told the Orlando Sentinel.” Aaaah.
When Carlson retired in 2000, aged 77, she was officially designated a Disney Legend. One of the windows in the Florida theme park’s Main Street reads: “Dolls by Miss Joyce, dollmaker for the world.” A brick, anyone?
The saccharine still makes me want to puke, all of 27 years since I was first exposed to IASW. The sheer small-town folksiness of it still brings back memories of how smug and small-minded Americans can be, not only in creating this rubbish but also in appreciating it and encouraging their children to appreciate it and pass it on to their children, and so on.
Happily, she must have been hell to work for. Patrick Brennan, Disney’s director of show design, (wouldn’t you just guess they’d dream up such a pompous job title?) said: “Joyce influenced a whole group of us about the importance of detail.” So she was a control freak as well as a pervert and corrupter of young minds.
Like the Jack Nicholson character in Get Schultz, after she retired Carlson kept poking her nose in at Disney under the cover of mentoring. Sounds like an excuse to keep perving the kids at Disney World.