Going behind the scenes at Disney World

Trash is a big deal in a place that moves a couple of Super Bowls' worth of people through every day. On our first backstage stop, a utility area behind Pirates of the Caribbean, Matthew points out a rubbish compactor the size of a four-unit apartment building. Remarkably, before the garbage is sucked here from around the park by a Swiss-built network of pneumatic tubes, it's sorted by hand to pull out recyclables and all the wallets and cameras people toss by accident. The combustibles are burned to generate a third of Disney's electricity.

To get backstage, we cross the steam-train railroad tracks, walk around a bend in the road and finally pass through a secluded gate. When we step over a bright yellow "sight line" on the road, Matthew declares us out of any possible view of guests in the park.

"Now, what do you really want to know?" Matthew asks.

Only now will he give us out-of-character answers to certain questions. That cable that stretches from the top of Cinderella's Castle? Inside the park, he'll only say it's where Cinderella hangs her laundry. But on this side of the sight line, he comes clean on the magic behind Tinkerbell's nightly "flight" from the castle. The performer in the Tink suit must weigh no more than 95 pounds; she wears nearly 70 pounds of harnesses and lights; she makes actors' equity wages plus hazard bonuses, and she gets paid for eight hours whether she flies or not.

"Tinkerbell is well taken care of," he says.

The park is open now and filling rapidly. But our group bypasses the long queue for the Jungle Cruise to step aboard a boat of our own. Matthew takes the microphone from the pilot and substitutes the usual corny spiel with some delicious state secrets. He points to a spot on the fuselage of a "downed" airplane where three small metal disks make a familiar mouselike shape. This is our first Hidden Mickey, one of dozens of such built-in winks scattered throughout Disney parks that devotees pursue with "Da Vinci Code" intensity. Matthew points out another an hour later during our private ride through the Haunted Mansion. (Okay, okay. It's on the dining room table, a dinner plate flanked by two saucers underneath the waltzing ghosts.)

Our capacity for this stuff is infinite. I've never seen such an attentive tour group, peppering Matthew with questions over lunch in a private part of the Columbia Harbour House restaurant, and finally in the super-secret underground tunnels that lace the Magic Kingdom.

If you're really lucky, you might see Goofy schlepping to his shift, head in hand. But mostly this is just a wide utility hallway filled with beeping carts and exposed plumbing (and a display of killer, never-published photos of Disney's construction phase). But by this time, we're so drunk with insider scoop, even the sewage pipes hold us rapt.

Backstage Safari, Animal Kingdom ($65, 4 hours)
Animal care is a daybreak affair, and the first shift is almost half over when we pass through an unobtrusive gate by Animal Kingdom's Rainforest Cafe. We board two vans and pass huge stretches of Florida pastureland now planted in willow, acacia, bamboo and other greens suited to exotic palettes. Food techs cut tons of it every morning before the sun comes up, and now, as we pull up to the massive elephant barns, a couple of pachyderms are happily tucking in to piles of the stuff.

A female munches away as our tour guide, Paul -- a retired biology teacher from Michigan -- recounts the challenges of elephant sex in cringing detail. Animal Kingdom is a fully accredited, state-of-the-art zoo, active in wildlife breeding programs around the world and clearly committed to top animal care. And its backstage tour, popular with critter lovers, is heavy on true-fact science.

But even in the nonpublic technical areas, the creative hand of Walt is obvious. Paul points out a lone, tall pine rising behind the employee commissary. "That's a Nextel tower," he says. "It was visible from a few spots within the park, so they turned it into a tree."

We drive slowly along the high earthen berm that encircles the park (more sightline management). An electric fence runs along one side of the lane (to keep out deer, mostly), and animal holding areas line the other. We see off-duty cheetahs, rhinos and giraffes taking the shade.

At the rhino barn, a keeper explains care and feeding, and we're allowed to stroke the thick hide of a young female white rhino as she scarfs alfalfa on the other side of the bars. Later, during a bathroom break in the administrative building, a keeper joins us for brownies with a breathtaking spectacled owl on her arm.

At the vet clinic, they're scraping a callus off a goat. And in the nutrition center, they're cutting up restaurant-quality fruits and vegetables and packing individual plastic bins with the next day's meal for more than 300 species. For the big cats, techs measure out horse meat at a separate station. For the littler carnivores -- reptiles and raptors -- a row of frozen dead rodents thaw on a counter, from bald newborn pinkies to full-grown white mi . . .

"We try not to use the M word," Paul says. "Mickey gets upset."

But the tour isn't all biology. Good old human smugness kicks in when Paul leads us into a private holding area within the park for the popular Kilimanjaro Safari (essentially, the ride through the zoo section of Animal Kingdom). Paul even invites us to twist the knife a bit, smiling and waving at those who have been waiting for more than an hour as we drive by.

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