Some Light Bathroom Reading

So here we are. again.

Is anyone even going to find this section of the website? I mean, assuming that people actually find this site in the first place.

I can honestly say this isn’t even our first attempt at a website. This is our second, and I am damn determined to make this work.

Our first attempt was horrendous. It was rushed. It was messy. It was scattered all over the place. We had a mission for CastCandids, but it seemed like we didn’t have a direction on what our site was going to be about. We had tons of ideas. and I mean TOOOOOONS. Notebooks were scattered everywhere, Bujo journals were started… then abandoned… then brought to life again. Drawings of ideas took place. Post-Its stuck on the computer monitors. And accounts were opened to make these ideas come to life. At the end of the day we did get the website project launched. Were we happy? Ya kinda. But deep down, we knew the product wasn’t exactly what we wanted. We deserved better. The cast members deserved better. And the community we had created for the past year and a half deserved better.

After just a month of having a live website, and only ONE trip to Disney, we scrapped the whole idea. We shut down the website even though we had already paid for the domain and for the website services for a full year already. Failure? No. Learning experience? Definitely. A wise man by the name of Jeff Stein told us years and years ago that “You will NEVER fail as long as you are learning something”

At the end of the day, we weren’t prepared. We didn’t know what to expect and we didn’t do the proper research on what to expect and how to provide the necessary things that were needed to follow our mission. Did we have some cool things on the site? Absolutely! Was it sustainable? Probably not. Did we bite off more than we can chew? Yup.

To get a better understanding of where we are today, I feel like we should probably talk about how we got here to begin with. How did CastCandids start? What have we learned along the way? What were our learning moments and what would we do differently if we could start over again?

It was 2023, on our last day of our nearly 2 week vacation at Disney. Typically, on the last day of our vacations, we go to Magic Kingdom and just do our “Final Stroll” and just kind of take in the scenery and reminisce about how quickly the time has gone and when we would be back again. It was a bright and sunny day, typical Orlando, with blue skies and 85 degree weather as we took a stroll through Main Street USA. We took our time going through The Emporium and seeing if there was any last minute merchandise we wanted to pick up or snacks through the Confectionery as we made our way up Main Street. It was only a matter of time before we reached the hub and took the usual touristy castle pictures. At this point we had gone to Disney dozens and dozens of times but STILL insisted that the castle would look better if I just took just another set of pictures of it. As we hung out on the hub, we noticed a group of 4 custodial Cast Members just doing their assigned work and answering questions for guests who happened to pass by. I am not really sure why but something drew me to them and before I knew it, I had asked them if I could take a picture of them with my camera. Initially, they thought I was asking if they could take a picture of me and offered to take my camera, but I told them no, I wanted a picture of THEM instead. The looks on their faces was something I will never forget.

“Who us? Really??” they asked in astonishment

“Yes! Everyone! You all look wonderful and we are so thankful for everything you do” I replied

“But nobody ever wants to take our pictures. They think we just clean the streets and trash cans. Why do you want to take our picture??”

And it was at this moment that I realized that nobody should ever think that about their job. Everyone is an integral part of this Disney machine that runs so smoothly. So many cast members help create dreams and memories for the thousands of people they see every day, and they seldom get the recognition they deserve. From the merchandise CMs, to the photopass photographers, to character attendants, to attractions, and yes even Custodial. You all deserve to be recognized!

“If nobody has told you yet today…” I said “You are truly appreciated and what you do makes a HUGE difference”

The smiles on their faces were bigger than the fireworks that day. My heart felt so full. I showed them the picture I had taken and offered them a digital copy and prints if they wanted. And at that moment, I knew something had to be done. The amount of joy and self worth and just positive vibes from that interaction alone left us thinking that this needs to happen more often. As we walked towards Adventureland, we looked over our shoulders and could see those Custodial CM’s still smiling and talking about what just happened. And, even though we didn’t see it first hand, I would bet that they took that amazing feeling and passed it on to the next guest that asked them for help or directions. And that’s how our pay-it-forward project began….

The next day we were at MCO waiting for our flight to board. Then, we got delayed. Then delayed again. And Again. Before we knew it, we were now going to board nearly 7 hours after we initially were supposed to. What were we supposed to do at this airport to kill all this time? Typically, I don’t even look through my camera roll until I’m back home. It’s an awful habit I have. But today, I had hours to kill so I was looking through some of my shots I took on the last day. Our custodial friends came up. And so did a few more cast members who’s candids shots we took as they interacted with guests. Some we asked to smile for the camera, others we just took candidly and in the moment. A lot of the shots were just so intimate and full of joy. It made me think about my time as a cast member when I did the college program. It was my first real time away from home, living by myself, paying rent and trying to be an “adult”. It was my pride and joy to tell people I worked for Disney. I was proud. The pay sucked, not gonna lie, but it was some of the best times of my life and I met some of the most wonderful people in my time there. Many of them I STILL talk to today. But one thing I regretted the most was not having enough pictures of me in costume or candid photos of me doing what I loved most, which was helping others have their best day ever.

Now you can see the gears winding in my brain. They might’ve been rusty, but they wanted to get those engines going. I leaned over to Heather and was like “hey, do you think cast members would be interested in someone taking their pictures while they’re making magic? Or is that like weird?”. She looked back at me, in the most loving way and said “yeah, I can see how that would be a little weird if people didn’t know what you were doing. But I think it would be really cool to do— Why don’t you reach out to some of your cast member friends and see what they think?”

So I did.

And they responded with an astonishing YES! But, like they typical skeptic that I am, I just assumed that they were only saying that because that’s what I wanted to hear.

Hmmm… where else can I ask? Who else can I ask? Who wouldn’t be afraid to hurt my feelings if this idea is stupid. FACEBOOK.

So since I had time to kill, I joined a couple of Facebook CastMember and DCP groups and asked. I didn’t even have any uploaded pictures at that time, so they had to settle for me taking pictures of my camera’s display screen with my phone and posting it. Full disclosure, I was scared out of my mind because I didn’t want to get completely destroyed by a bunch of internet trolls and people who didn’t know me. I fully expected people to say it’s creepy and that I shouldn’t do it and it’s just an overall bad idea. But, something told me to just post it and let it be. So I did.

Now it was after midnight and we were boarding. I told myself I wouldn’t even check the the post until after we landed. Of course, my mind was wandering and I had so many thoughts about if people even read what I wrote. When we landed, I couldn’t load facebook fast enough on my phone and HOLY MOLY. There were hundreds of likes and people commenting about how they wished this was a thing. In addition to that, we got countless messages saying to do it and it would be awesome to start something to dedicate to the hard working cast.

In typical Arnold fashion, I went ALL IN. I’m not even sure if I got any sleep that night because so many thoughts were going through my head. What were we going to call it? We need it to be catchy. Something we could hashtag. What colors are we gonna pick? How are we gonna stand out from other photographers? What makes these popular bloggers like Tim Tracker and Mr. Morrow so successful? Do we need a website? How about an email? Do we need our own dedicated phone number? Do we tell people when we’re going to Disney or keep it a surprise? How can people get a hold of us? What other questions should we answer? How do we get the word out? Lets make stickers! Lets make magnets! Lets give stuff out for free to thank CM’s! on and on and on, my mind was spinning. One thing I knew for sure though was I wanted to start this ASAP.

Within that first week, we had finally came up with a name and established a mission to bring some positivity into a world that was still struggling to come back to “normal” from Covid-19. But how do we get the word across? Admittedly, I was not much of a facebook user anymore. I mean I still had an account, but I didn’t use it much aside from keeping in contact with some family outside of the US and occasionally wishing some birthdays when it would send me a reminder. I did however still have my Instagram account that I seldomly used. I think at that point it was maybe 3-4 years since I last made a post. I’d have to relearn this whole thing over again, but I guess that shall be our vessel. We created the account and its all been history since. The growth and support has been way more than we could have ever imagined. We started with 341 followers. I was ecstatic when we reached 500. Then I thought it was unbelievable when we broke the 1,000 followers mark within the first couple of months. Now, as I write this, it still seems like a dream that we just broke 11k followers and just launched this site. We OFFICIALLY now own the domain to castcandids.com. Our first site was CastcandidsMedia.com because we couldnt get the ownership of it, but now it just feels like a much better fit and a lot easier to roll off the tongue.

It really is such a humbling feeling when people tell us they’ve waited for us to come visit. Or see us as celebrities. Who us? No way! We’re literally the most normal (and sometimes really odd people) who just want to bring some light into the days of other people. We still remember it like it was yesterday, our first trip back to Disney as “CastCandids” was focused on taking some pictures of the cast. At that point we had been active on Instagram for maybe 1.5 months. We had a following of maybe 1000 people. At this point we had thought we already reached our peak. We arrived at Animal Kingdom and naturally, the first Cast Members we saw were the Parking attendants aka “The Banana Fam”. We were minding our own business, taking photos and all of a sudden a tram passes us and these three guests in the back scream out “OMG!! It’s CastCandids!!! We follow you on Instagram!!!!”. We were literally in utter shock as we stood there and waved and had no idea what to say back. We kinda just looked back at each other like “did that really just happen?? People know us??”. And we waited until like nobody else could see us as we celebrated and jumped up and down and gave each other hugs and high fives. “THAT WAS SOOOOO COOOOOOL!!!”