“Walt Disney World” and “scandal” are two topics that don’t often go together. Disney World and long lines? Of course. Disney World and churros? Absolutely. But that term above doesn’t crop up much for the park And yet, about five years ago, the biggest story in the theme park world, which CinemaBlend covered extensively at the time, was about a string of thefts at the most magical place on earth and a still missing-in-action audio-animatronic. With that, CB recently spoke to the director of a new doc about the wild tale.
Stolen Kingdom is a new documentary film that explores the trend of urban exploring at closed parts of Walt Disney World, and its connection to the black market for all things Disney. This includes the case of Patrick Spikes, a YouTuber who stole and sold the clothes belonging to the audio-animatronic known as Buzzy from the defunct Cranium Command attraction.
What makes the story even crazier, however, is that at some point after Buzzy’s clothes were stolen, Buzzy himself disappeared. Since then, the exact whereabouts of Buzzy have been unknown. Stolen Kingdom does not have any “smoking gun” regarding Buzzy’s whereabouts so, when I recently had the chance to chat with the film’s director, Joshua Bailey, I asked him, having now spoken to many people potentially involved, what he thought had happened to Buzzy. Bailey’s answer was quite honest…
I confidently don’t know. I think there’s two great possibilities, and one of them might be impossible, and it’s that maybe it was a misunderstanding and that Disney does have him, it would require them to come out and admit this, and I don’t know if that’ll ever happen. I guess I lean a little towards that he was stolen. But if he was stolen, I genuinely do not know where he could be at this point. He could be anywhere.
Patrick Spikes, while admitting to stealing Buzzy’s clothes, which he sold to NBA star and noted Disney fan Robin Lopez, has continued to claim that he did not steal Buzzy. Stolen Kingdom indicates that Spikes may have been offered money for Buzzy at some point but, even if that’s the case, it only proves there was somebody who wanted Buzzy, who may have been just as willing to pay somebody else to get what they wanted.
But, as Bailey says here, it’s also at least possible that Buzzy isn’t missing at all. It’s possible that, following the theft of the clothes, in order to prevent the animatronic from being stolen, Disney simply removed it from its location in the closed Disney World attraction.
Despite that, though, there are still questions. If Disney World removed Buzzy, fans don’t know what state the audio-animatronic is in. He might have been taken down in one piece and put in a corner of Walt Disney Imagineering’s warehouse, where things sometimes get lost for decades. The character may, however, as Joshua Bailey suggests, have been destroyed as part of the removal. Bailey told me…
An unfortunate theory that I think some of us have considered is that he was sort of taken apart because of everything that happened, or hopefully, he was just, you know, locked away In a storage unit somewhere, just so he’s been hiding. But, yeah, I’d lean a little towards that he was, in fact, stolen.
If Buzzy was stolen at the behest of a private collector, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know. Perhaps Buzzy could turn up years from now, but the animatronic’s fate just may become an unsolvable theme park mystery.