SharkBoy, Stitch and Dead Robot

Never punch a Disney park character in the face.

I’ll expand on that in a moment.

I am shy when it comes to meeting celebrity. This extends to theatre people in big plastic and foam rubber heads. I don’t know if I was shy or if it was just blind bad luck but SharkBoy and I didn’t pose with any of the park characters until our 4th day at DisneyWorld, and by that time we were at Animal Kingdom. The first Disney character we posed with was Stitch, the blue alien from Lilo And Stitch. I was nervous as hell for some reason, not because there were 30-50 people watching us get our picture with this ‘star’, no pressure to be clever, no, I was honestly star struck and didn’t want to look like an ass. I knew Stitch would not be able to respond to any of my questions or compliments other than an overly dramatic pantomime of “hello”, so my approach towards him was fraught with internal monologue: do I say hello? Do I gush like a common pleb and say how much I loved him in his last couple of movies? Do I ask if he knows Mickey? Do I just say “Lets get this over with…”

My first character encounter went something like this:

Me: “I… loved your movie.” And I thrust my hand towards Stitch in greeting.

Stitch did a panto move of “Aw Shucks.” I guess his big blue furry head hid the cast member’s line of sight to my outstretched hand. I was left hanging with my hand out in front of everyone.

The photo isn’t that bad. I’m genuinely excited as you can see. Somehow Stitch got us to do half of a Cowabunga hand sign thing. I was too excited but embarrassed to know how he got us there.

SharkBoy is well practiced with character greets. Our last trip we got our picture with the Evil Queen from Snow White. As we were finishing up, he leaned in and conspiratorially whispered “You’re my favorite…” to which she responded sternly, loudly, without missing a beat “Of course I am.” He also claims that one of the Tweedledee (or dum…?) touched him inappropriately but I don’t believe that. Regardless, in all our pictures, he looks great and is always doing something different.

So getting back to not punching a Disney character.

Our last trip to Disneyland in California we were around the back end of California Adventure early in the morning. We came upon Goofy and his handler, literally alone since barely anyone was at that end of the park. I asked SharkBoy to take my picture with Goofy (PROTIP: purchasing the photopass CD *before* leaving for Disney saves you a ton of cash) and I ran up beside him. I didn’t see what he was doing but I went into my signature YAY! pose which is me with both arms thrust up in the air, like I just won the Special Olympics. As I shot my hands up, I made contact with the Goof’s big plastic snout. I knew instantly I had disturbed something innocent.

As I looked at Goofy to see if he was ok (he had started to mime being punched in the face) I immediately started to blubber my apologies. Holy crap I punched Goofy… Then the handler was upon me. The handler was going to say something and judging by the look on his face, it wasn’t going to be offering me a discount at the gift shop. More like a FastPass ticket to the front gates. Before he could say anything however, Goofy righted his head, and gently put his hand on the handler’s arm. All was smoothed over within that moment.

The actual picture I got is there on the right. I think his head is still a bit askew in that shot.