From the earliest days of the American fantasy-industrial complex in the 1850s, snooty critics used Barnumized as a term of disparagement—in 1854 The New York Times called a celebrity conductor’s concert of classical music attended by forty-five thousand New Yorkers a Barnumized spectacle; in 1922 a movie director was said to have Barnumized classic works of literature. A few decades ago we coined the successor synonym: Disneyfication, to denote how urban America had started to resemble theme parks.
