Stolen Kingdom Entertainingly Documents the Dark Subculture of Disney Theme Park Theft and Trespassing
The Walt Disney Company has, for decades on decades, cast an outsized shadow over the landscape of American entertainment and popular culture–an aspirational ideal of sanitized Americana that ardent fans have always seen as an escape from the drudgery of a decidedly less magical real world. Much of the company’s mystique is maintained by a tight-lipped form of secrecy that permeates it from top to bottom: Disney is famously private, proprietary and litigious in both its product development and theme parks, guarding its secrets and aggressively defending its IP even when the circumstances seem absurd. The flip side to the company’s inherent shroud of mystery and cloak-and-dagger operations, though, is an inevitable, burning curiosity among a specific type of people who care about this sort of thing: The more you hide details from a Disney obsessive, the more they want to do anything to look behind the curtain. And that’s where the urban explorers and outright thieves profiled by Stolen Kingdom enter the equation.
Stolen Kingdom is a new, bite-sized (a mere 75 minutes) feature documentary currently available via the Slamdance Film Festival, which revolves entirely around the subculture that has grown up around dredging up cast-off Disney theme park ephemera. Sometimes these items are obtained and preserved simply out of adoration for the company and its aesthetic, kept alive by fans who can’t let go of discontinued rides or experiences. The urban explorers who break into abandoned sections of the parks refer to these more idealistic explorers as “pixie dusters,” the contingent of true Disney fans who believe the company can do no wrong. And of course other times, items go missing because there’s serious money to be made in selling the right items to the right, equally obsessive collectors. This is of course a black market that can only exist on the back of the so-called “Disney Adults”–affluent and often childless people who spend large amounts of money on Disney fandom. You or I might not be able to imagine spending $20,000 on mothballed animatronic costumes that once graced The Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean, but because that person most definitely exists, there will always be an incentive for criminality.
With that said, the “pioneers” of the field, as profiled in Stolen Kingdom, tended to be the more earnest devotees of the Disney aesthetic, or appreciators of the arcane work of the Imagineers who bring those rides to life. Many were, in fact, employees of the parks, which really shouldn’t be too surprising–the most basic of security badges could give access practically anywhere that enforcement was lax. This was certainly the case for former employees like Dave “Hoot Gibson” Ensign and Ed “Chief” Barlow, who worked at Disney World in the 1990s, and decided to take it upon themselves to document every inch of Epcot’s Horizons ride when they heard it was scheduled to close in 1999. Leaping out of the cart during the ride and cavorting among the sets to take photos and video of all the ride’s elements, the pair ran amok while the ride operators were totally unaware of the dangerous hijinks unfolding. The photos and video they collected sat in stasis for the next decade before they began to publish their footage on a blog in the late 2000s, discovering a rabid fascination with closed Disney properties in the process. That documentation is ultimately almost all that remains of a ride like Horizons today–without their (irresponsibly dangerous) rule-breaking, there would be far less publicly available knowledge about how the ride once operated. Explorers like “Hoot and Chief” were subsequently lionized by books like Leonard Kinsey’s 2011 offering The Dark Side of Disney, which is theorized to have led to a rise in superfan trespassing on Disney theme park properties.
But where the first generation of Disney backstage explorers/trespassers were likely to operate with at least some level of a “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” ethos, without an obvious way to monetize their weird hobby, subsequent waves took on a much more nakedly profiteering mindset. The growth of the internet and Disney collector fandoms fueled the black market for Disney theme park ephemera, enabling collectors who never would have the guts to break into Disney World on their own to still pick up those pieces while pretending to not have any idea how how they were obtained. And this in turn incentivized employees-turned-explorers like Stolen Kingdom’s heavily profiled Patrick Spikes to turn their interests increasingly in the direction of grand larceny.
The story the documentary weaves about Spikes, a 20-something Disney employee who in the mid-2010s began generating large amounts of cash by selling stolen Disney props and costumes, is connected at the hip with the film’s anchor story: The disappearance of a large animatronic called “Buzzy” who once anchored Epcot’s Cranium Command attraction. In the years after Cranium Command closed and was effectively abandoned by Disney–because it’s often cheaper to let attractions sit in stasis rather than actively dismantle them–it had become a popular visiting site for urban explorers who wanted to poke around the relatively intact attraction. It was only after Buzzy disappeared in 2018 that the public took a greater interest, ironically making the character far better known than he ever had been when the attraction was actually in operation. And suspicion fell squarely on Spikes, who flatly admits to huge amounts of theft as he’s interviewed in Stolen Kingdom, acting as if he’s somehow forgotten entirely that he’s on camera. In particular, he admits to having stolen the clothing from the Buzzy animatronic with an associate, but denies stealing the extremely heavy animatronic itself.
None of that prevented Spikes from eventually being arrested and charged with various thefts–Stolen Kingdom presents particularly humiliating footage of the now 30-year-old having a panic attack or meltdown in a police interrogation room after being confronted with obvious proof of his guilt, which clashes amusingly with the confidence and bravado that Spikes attempts to project in his interview. And despite saying in the film that he had taken more than $200,000 worth of goods while working as a Disney employee, Spikes is eventually given probation rather than jail time, and ordered to pay back a relatively small percentage of his thefts in restitution. That, and the obligatory lifetime ban from Disney properties, still ends up feeling like getting off light, all things considered. One wonders if Spikes will object to the rather clueless and pathetic way he comes across here.
Stolen Kingdom is effectively an introduction into this bizarre subculture, one that can feel like we’re really just skimming the surface of all the stories that are waiting to be told. Its level of access to each source is impressive, but it feels somewhat incomplete without a deeper context of how Disney perceives these people, or how even Disney fans view this behavior. At 75 minutes, it does feel like we could be excavating more deeply with additional sources, but the behaviors depicted are so fascinating (and entertaining) that it’s easy to forgive a relative lack of depth.
Frankly, it’s impressive just how much law-breaking the filmmakers of Stolen Kingdom manage to get these various figures to confess on camera in the course of its tidy runtime. Some, like Hoot and Chief, engender sympathy for antics that were relatively without any kind of malice, although Dave Ensign readily notes just how easily he could have been killed by taking a wrong step while jumping out of a moving theme park attraction. But we also see the full extent of how genuine mental illness or deluded, clout-chasing conspiracy theorist YouTube culture has played into the urban explorer demographic in recent years, including one sequence in Stolen Kingdom where we’re seeing footage both from the perspective of a delusional YouTuber on the run from the cops after making an expedition to Disney World’s abandoned Discovery Island, and simultaneous footage from the police themselves as they hunt for a trespasser who may or may not be dangerous. It puts you in the headspace of a harried park administrator–though Disney offered seemingly no interviews or cooperation on the film–who is forced to deal with such an irrational fandom, and it’s hard to imagine how one would get through the day with crazed yahoos jumping fences with no apparent care for life and limb.
With advances in security technology, a greater awareness of urban explorers and the Disney black market, and a younger YouTube demographic that is increasingly willing to step over any traditional boundaries of decorum, it’s perhaps no surprise that the veteran Disney backstage explorers interviewed in Stolen Kingdom largely perceive the era of urban Disney exploration to have ended. They chide the thefts, reminiscing on an earlier era when they were driven more by the thrill of discovery than the promise of reward. For guys like Dave Ensign and Ed Barlow, climbing the rafters of the Hall of Presidents to watch the show from above was its own, bizarre and esoteric reward. But as long as there are Disney Adults out there, willing to drop $300,000 on Hitchhiking Ghost animatronics from The Haunted Mansion, you have to imagine that the House of Mouse will never really be able to rest easy.
Directors: Joshua Bailey
Release date: Feb. 16, 2025
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.