Television seems to me to be a much more menacing cultural Chernobyl.

Then came Mickey Mouse, prompting talk of a "cultural Chernobyl" at Euro Disney.

If that sum is cut nearly in half, as the proposed budget calls for, it will be a "cultural Chernobyl," said Robert T. Buck, the museum's director.

And that's a cultural Chernobyl.

The leftist Paris daily Liberation recalled that some had described the arrival of the first park as a "cultural Chernobyl."

The prospect of a Disneyland has aroused little debate, unlike in Paris, where it was derided as a cultural Chernobyl before opening in 1992.

The park was filled even as French intellectuals derided it as a "cultural Chernobyl."

Yet the scoffers, who nicknamed the Disney company "Uncle Scrooge" and denounced the park as "a cultural Chernobyl," provided free publicity.

(It was she who branded Euro Disney a "cultural Chernobyl.")

Once derided as a "cultural Chernobyl," the theme park is now France's top tourist attraction, drawing 12.2 million visitors last year.