Even the most magical place on Earth has a dark side.
In 2018, one or more miscreants invaded the Mouse House’s flagship Florida resort, Walt Disney World, under the cover of night. Making their way to the Epcot area of the storied theme park, the not-at-all goofy thieves entered the long-shuttered Wonders of Life Pavilion and used their noggins to access Cranium Command — a defunct theater show that celebrated the human brain with a full cast of animatronics. When they emerged, they had one of those animatronics in their clutches: Buzzy, the bespectacled young recruit that guides visitors through their cranial adventure.
It wasn’t the first time that Buzzy had been targeted for theft. In the months before the whole animatronic went missing, the plucky character’s headphones, hat, and jacket were also swiped, and likely earmarked for the lucrative black market of illegally obtained Disney memorabilia. Because Cranium Command had been long closed to the public — shut down in 2007 along with once-popular pavilion attractions like Body Wars and Goofy About Health — there were no cameras or other security measures in place to catch the robbers mid-heist. To this day, Buzzy’s exact whereabouts remain a mystery.
Eight years later, Joshua Bailey‘s new documentary, Stolen Kingdom, offers some answers about how Buzzy was spirited away from Epcot and features an extensive interview with the prime suspect: Patrick Spikes, a former Disney World employee and the content creator previously known as BackDoorDisney, which once flooded YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms with photos and video footage of what lay behind the magic Mouse House curtain.
After a run on the festival circuit last year — with stops at Slamdance, Sidewalk, and the Florida Film Festival, among others — the scruffy feature is coming off of a roadshow tour of select U.S. theaters and is available now on VOD services, including the Letterboxd Video Store.
“Ultimately, everything Patrick ever did was for attention, so he’s been cooperative throughout this entire process,” Stolen Kingdom‘s director tells Gold Derby, adding that Spikes has joined the filmmaking team at screenings and stuck around to take questions from the audience afterwards. And while the film makes it clear that the man formerly known as BackDoorDisney had the particular set of skills required to boost Buzzy from his home — not to mention one telling piece of evidence (more on that later) — Spikes is careful not to offer a full confession… at least not a serious one.
“We have a deleted scene where we asked him if someone were to steal Buzzy, how would they go about it, and he gave quite the detailed response,” Bailey teases, confirming that dropped scene was inspired by the notorious O.J. Simpson tome, If I Did It. “He had something to do with it — but there are a lot of scenarios for what could have happened.”
The buzz begins
It should be noted that Bailey had the inside track for securing Spikes’s involvement in Stolen Kingdom. The two already knew each other from the director’s past life as a Disney World urban explorer who ventured into theoretically inaccessible sections of the park and documented what he saw for social media posterity.
“I first met Patrick in 2018, two months before Buzzy was stolen,” Bailey says, crediting another explorer interviewed in the film, Matt Swonsa, with making the introduction. “I had sent him a video I made for my own YouTube channel, and that gained his trust. I remember we drove around Disney World together one night, and we were with him when he stole stuff, so maybe we’re accomplices to a crime!”
By that point, Spikes was already a well-known pilferer of Disney World items, but that was a bridge too far for Bailey, who was mainly taken with using urban exploration as a way of living out his childhood fascination with theme parks.
“I’ve always loved them as an extension of filmmaking,” he notes. “The original Disney Imagineers who worked on the parks were all filmmakers, and they were making these dark rides and environments. And growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s was an incredible era for that kind of themed entertainment; if you look at places like California Adventure or Tokyo DisneySea, those places are filled with attractions that really are art.”
But that fascination had largely run its course by the early 2020s as Bailey grew to feel that Disney World — and Walt Disney as a whole — had changed and not for the better. “I’m a reformed Disney Adult,” he says now, listing his frustrations with the current status quo at the parks, which include limited parking to, rising costs, overcrowding, and more restrictive visiting policies. “I have no interest in going to the Disney parks anymore unless they’re in Japan or another country I haven’t been to.”
Still, the Buzzy kidnapping case tickled the part of his brain that was still plugged into Disney. In Bailey’s mind, it wasn’t just a good hook for a documentary; it also spoke directly to the increasingly adversarial relationship he’s noticed between the minders of the Disney parks and a certain segment of fandom that feels possessive of the attractions — like Cranium Command — that have been jettisoned over the years.
“They feel that the metaphorical kingdom that was stolen from them was the Disney World IP,” he explains. “People feel ownership over it because Disney’s become bigger than a company. Meanwhile, the literal stolen kingdom is stuff like Buzzy.”
In 2021, Bailey reconnected with Spikes, who had been through two years of legal trouble after being identified as a person of interest in the Buzzy-napping — as well as other acts of Disney World theft — by Orlando authorities. Tried in 2019, he took a plea deal the following year that sentenced him to 10 years probation, 250 hours of community service, over $25,000 in restitution and a lifetime ban from all Disney properties.
“We filmed our first interview with him in April of 2021, and he didn’t want to put his foot in his mouth too much then since he was still on probation,” Bailey recalls. “Then we did another interview a year later when his probation was almost up, and he was a very different person.”
Hat trick
Besides Spikes’ temperament, you can tell the two interviews apart in the film by setting and his personal style. In his first conversation with Bailey, Spikes is positioned in front of a shelf filled with Disney memorabilia clad in a slightly rumpled button-down shirt. In the second, he’s in a generic workspace-like environment casually clad in a Super Mario graphic tee. That’s the interview where he candidly outlines his evolution as a Disney thief, starting off with bottles of water and FastPasses before descending down a “slippery slope” to stealing and selling items like character clothing and attraction design manuals directly to collectors.
For the right price, he would also steal requested items for his anonymous buyers. As he recounts in the film, his biggest potential payday was a $75,000 offer to liberate the famous “Redhead” animatronic from Pirates of the Caribbean. (He turned that down after weighing both the logistical challenges and the potential jail time.) That leads Spikes into recounting his first brush with Buzzy, and he claims that his companion — an unidentified female urban explorer — was responsible for swiming the animatronic’s hat, jacket, and headset. Some of those items were later sold to a collector who turned out to be former NBA player Robin Lopez
But as Bailey notes, an official police report about the theft features an alternate version of events. “The report from the other person details Patrick climbing up on the animatronic and taking the items himself,” he says. “A lot of people assume that something similar happened with the animatronic, and that Patrick masterminded the theft.”
In Stolen Kingdom, Spikes sticks to his story about not being involved with the Buzzy heist. But Swonsa recounts his former friend saying that he’d received a $50,000 offer to boost the forgotten character well before the theft. Spikes laughs that bit of testimony off, but crucially doesn’t deny it. Despite that seemingly incriminating reaction, Bailey says he’s a little reluctant to consider the case closed.
“It fees like Patrick knew better than to steal Buzzy himself,” the director says. “But did he inform someone how to take it? There’s a whole circuit of black market thieves out there so maybe he told one of them that he’d been offered $50,000 and they decided to do it themselves and cut him out. I think it’s fun to leave it unsolved in this cut of the film.”
Still, Bailey does offer a kind of tell — one that’s hidden in plain sight during Spikes’s first interview. Just as he gets up to leave, the camera tilts upwars to the toy shelf behind him and settles on a hat — a hat that’s the spitting image of the one that disappeared from Buzzy’s head. That strongly implies that Spikes may still have other Buzzy-related items in his possession or, at least, knows their current whereabouts. That last clue is treated as a cinematic Easter egg that recalls the final scene of The Usual Suspects or, for the art house crowd, the ending of Michael Haneke’s Cache. Bailey smiles when we cite the latter movie.
“The hat’s there the whole time,” the director says of that crucial piece of evidence, crediting his cinematographer, Brandon Pickering, for placing it in the frame with Spikes’s full awareness and approval. “It came as a complete surprise to us, because we didn’t know he had it. Then he told us this whole story about how he came to have it, which is suspicious because there’s a hat that was returned to Orange County and put in the Walt Disney archives. Maybe there’s two hats out there, and one of them is real and one of them’s not.
“That final shot never changed throughout our four years editing the movie,” Bailey adds. “Patrick loves cheeky stuff like that. Ultimately, all of the evidence was always going to point to him — whether he did it or not.”
Park life
The question that Bailey is asked repeatedly at Stolen Kingdom screenings — and one we naturally couldn’t help repeating — is how the Mouse House feels about his film. And naturally, the Disney answer is, “What film?” That’s a playbook that company has employed whenever anyone tries to take a camera off the beaten path at its theme parks.
The most famous example remains Escape From Tomorrow, Randy Moore’s black-and-white surrealistic horror film that he filmed guerilla-style at Disney World in 2012. That movie also played the festival circuit, even premiering at Sundance’s 2013 edition, before opening in limited theatrical release. These days, Escape From Tomorrow has largely vanished from view, unavailable on any streaming platforms with only out of print DVDs and Blu-rays available from re-sellers. Through that movie’s life cycle, Disney declined to give it any additional oxygen, and Bailey says that’s been the case with Stolen Kingdom as well.
“It’s fun to be in the same conversation as Escape From Tomorrow,” the director says. “It’s an exclusive club to be in. And I’m not banned from the Disney parks. I may be on a list — but I’m not banned… yet.”
While Bailey doesn’t have any plans to conclusively solve the Buzzy mystery, he does have footage for another Disney project sitting in a folder on his computer. “It’s called ‘Disney Black Market,'” he teases. “For me, Stolen Kingdom was never really about Buzzy; it was about the extremes to which fans can go and a catalyst for exposing this entire black market for Disney stuff. But no one wants to talk about that because it gets so sticky and some of the buyers are celebrities.”
A more lucrative idea could exist in the Disney urban explorer videos that are still garnering views on YouTube years after creators like Spikes, Swonsa, and Bailey have stopped making them. Watching the camera navigate those eerie, empty spaces immediately brings to mind Backrooms, the YouTube phenomenon-turned-blockbuster horror movie directed by viral video mastermind Kane Parsons.
“There’s this whole sub genre of horror involving liminal spaces that’s going mainstream, and there are lots of liminal spaces in Stolen Kingdom,” Bailey acknowledges. “I love that stuff is making hundreds of millions of dollars in theaters now. My goal is to move into narrative stuff, so to see creators like Kane Parsons or Markiplier succeed is beneficial for all of us. Maybe I’ll meet one of them one day and thank them for making my life easier to get a narrative movie made!”
Call it Escape From the Buzzyrooms.
