/ Blog / / Blog /It’s inevitable. Whenever I meet someone for the first time, it will come up that I love Disneyland and visit the parks at least once a month. And their question is always about when it all began for me.
So I show them this photo. That’s me, when I was a baby.
The answer is that it’s always been a thing. I think my mom made sure of it!
When I recently asked her for some more photos from my birthday trip in 1992, one thing really stood out. It’s this shot of me standing in the doorway of Goofy’s Clip Joint in Mickey’s Starland at the Magic Kingdom.
Mickey’s Starland was a precursor to Toontown, which was replicated in both Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland. But this Clip Joint photo stuck out because Shanghai Disneyland has an area named Mickey Avenue, merging concepts of Main Street and Toontown, with its own Clip Joint.
That version contains several pieces that I illustrated for Walt Disney Imagineering. I’m immensely proud to say that these pieces (and many others) have been living at Shanghai Disneyland for ten years now. I might never have got there had it not been for my mom who made me a Disney kid.
Thanks, mom.
You can read more about that project in my post about Shanghai Disneyland.