The magic is fading for Disney, but for its customers, it's just beginning.

This morning, after announcing that theme park bookings fell off a cliff in the last month and corporate income was down 13% last quarter, Disney's stock dropped 6.1%. Hotel bookings at the Walt Disney World resort are down 10% from what they were a year ago, profits are down from last quarter, and they're only going to get worse.

So Disney, which runs nine of the ten most-attended amusement parks in the world, has sprung into action and is doing something it never does: It's giving stuff away. After years of turning up its whiskered nose at discounting, suddenly it's scrambling to draw customers back to Orlando. Disney is going all-out to fill its parks again.

The biggest score was just announced. If you book by December 20, you can get a seven-day vacation for the price of four days. That means that if you buy four nights in one of its hotel rooms plus four days of park tickets at the full price, Disney will give you another three nights and three days theme park tickets--free. The buy-four-get-three-free deal, equivalent to a 34% discount, also comes with another astonishing gimme from January through March: a free $200 gift card, which can be used to buy food and souvenirs.

What? Disney is giving away money? What's next-- talking fairies?

While the nubile talents in the High School Musical franchise have gotten all the attention lately, the pixie brand, based on a nymph dating to the Cold War, has been bubbling for a few years, and today, merchandise from the fairies outsells HSM by a margin of three to one. All this fuss is over Tinker Bell, the sprite from Disney's animated version of Peter Pan, which came out in 1953. While Zac Efron pumps up his biceps to look prettier, Tinker Bell is still dressed in those nifty, hip-hugging dresses popular when Janis Paige was a star.

The royal Disney product category remains the Princesses, which rakes in some $4 billion a year, but the Mouse is working hard to boot up another girly franchise, which so far has raked in $800 million. In 2005, Disney dusted off the old duster and began releasing a series of books based on Peter Pan's testy sidekick. Taking a page from the comics, Disney gave Tink a story that began before Peter, and teamed her up with a few new fairies bestowed with X-Men powers, such as the ability to control water. Once kids were versed in these new, ethnically mixed Disney characters (Silvermist, Fawn, Iridessa, and Rosetta), rare in that they weren't launched on the silver screen, a successful line of Pixie Hollow toys followed.

And just in time. On Oct. 7, Merrill Lynch downgraded Disney stock, saying that economic woes will dent its profits, and now the race is on to put some solid infrastructure behind the Tink craze. That includes an array of profile-pumping "Disney Fairies" exercises including a website and a tie-in with the U.S. Department of Energy. On Oct. 28, a new computer-animated DVD movie starring Tinker Bell was released. No longer mute, the old gal, who has been AARP-eligible for five years, now talks with a cadence and a vocabulary that recalls that other Disney character with magical profit abilities: Miley Cyrus.

Okay, I'll start by admitting that I've been to Walt Disney World a couple of times. Before our first visit, my sisters and I pored over pictures of the Hall of Presidents, the Haunted Mansion, the Disney Castle, and other attractions, plotting the perfect routes to every ride, the ideal sequence of events to maximize the power of our Disney vacation. To the park's credit, it managed to live up to even my incredibly high childhood expectations. In fact, the only down side was my parent's barely-concealed weariness after a few days of wandering around.

A few years later, with my sisters a little older and Epcot offering more mature attractions, my parents agreed to revisit the Magic Kingdom. After a couple of days, I began to understand why Mom and Dad had dragged their feet on our first trip. As my youngest sister led us on a death march tour of Mickey's gulag, I found myself asking if we really needed to take yet another whirl on the teacup ride, once again ride shotgun with Mr. Toad, and be reminded that it's a small world. Standing in line, baking under the brutal Florida sun, I found myself suffering from an existential crisis, doubting the promise that, indeed, Captain Nemo's submarine adventure was really the pinnacle of human experience.

Don't miss the rest of our series on Overrated people, places and things!

The Jonas Brothers are no doubt a teen singing sensation. The three young men, ages 15 to 20, boast sold out concerts, chart-topping records and throngs of adoring fans.

They get heaps of credit for playing their own instruments and writing their songs (isn't that what most professional musicians do?). But unlike most professional musicians, they are noted for wearing purity rings and promising to remain chaste.

They make gobs of money -- estimated at $12 million in 2007 by Portfolio.com -- and will soon have their own show on Disney's cable channel.

But are they overrated? Of course they are. I heard a radio announcer compare them recently to the Beatles. Now, that's overrated.

Don't miss the rest of our series on Overrated people, places and things!

Their songs are catchy, but forgettable pop tunes. Camp Rock, their debut movie was terrible. The acting of the overly made-up Joe was wooden. The other brothers appeared only briefly and their acting was even worse. I'm predicting the brothers' upcoming Disney program will be unwatchable.

Looking over the Grammy winners of yesteryear, one thing becomes crystal clear: the true mark of musical greatness isn't records sold, stadiums filled, or awards given. While these baubles are often benchmarks on the way to immortality, the big steps aren't given by fans or colleagues. The true leaps are a little grander, a little harder to come by, a little sweeter.

One of the big steps may be when you get paid a really gargantuan sum of money to sell out your edgy roots and write music for a kid's movie. For Elton John, this moment came in 1994, when Disney wrote him a huge check in return for his collaboration with Tim Rice on The Lion King. The pair followed this up by writing a version of Aida for Disney in 1999 and penning the songs for Dreamworks' The Road to El Dorado in 2000.

Perhaps the big step is when the establishment that once despised you invites you to join their super-special club. For Elton John, this might have happened when he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1995, joining former rebels Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey, the Bee Gees, and Rod Stewart in being embraced by the society that they once rebelled against. It undoubtedly came when he was knighted three years later. Sir Elton John, once a fringe-dweller who wrote racy songs about gay hustlers, was now an official member of the establishment to end all establishments: British nobility.

Something was still missing: John had yet to join rock legends The Greatful Dead and Phish in what might be the most meaningful tribute of all: becoming a Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor. This week, however, that last step to immortality has been granted to the British wordsmith with the arrival of Goodbye, Yellow Brickle Road. Simultaneously a hefty source of carbs, a nod of appreciation for John's first concert in the Green Mountain State, and a tip of the hat to his 1973 breakout album, the ice cream flavor will be available in Ben and Jerry's scoop shops from July 18th to July 25th. Proceeds from the sale of the dessert will go to the Elton John AIDS foundation.

What's next for the young man in the 22nd row? With a carload full of gold records and Grammys, an endless legion of fans, a knighthood, and a freezer full of his signature ice cream, one could argue that he has reaped all the awards that Western Society has to offer. After all, after Ben and Jerry's, a Nobel prize for literature can't help but seem a little cheap and tawdry!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. Someday, he's hoping to have a Chef Boy-Ar-Dees pasta named after him. That or a presweetened cereal. Maybe Brucie-O's.

The most recent Marvel Comics-based movie, The Incredible Hulk, is getting a lot of attention and it hasn't even hit theaters yet. The movie is scheduled for opening on Friday the 13th, and it is said that movie goers are in for a treat. Sheldon Liber, blogger and analyst at Bloggingstocks, was lucky enough to view an advanced screening of the movie and he stated: "... it is a superb blend of movie technology magic and the passion of the cast and crew."

Sheldon indicates that the movie is rich in emotion and well produced, with superb star casting, acting and cinematography. He does give a hint that the movie may be a little too raucous for tykes and seniors, but for main stream viewership, Sheldon suggests, "Marvel has another hit on its hands."

You may read further review by The Hollywood Reporter, via this Reuters News Service link.

This post is part of our series ranking the top 25 bygone products and trends we'd like to see return.

The drive-in movie was born in the 1930s on a residential driveway in New Jersey, where Richard M. Hollingshead developed a workable combination of projection, screen, sound and vehicle position. The website www.driveintheater.com states that the very first drive-in theater opened on Tuesday, June 6, 1933, showing the movie "Wife Beware." By the end of the decade, 18 drive-in theaters were in operation in the U.S.. By 1958, nearly 5,000 drive-in theaters were in their twilight entertainment glory.

As a little kid, I saw my first movie on the big screen at the 41 Outdoor Theater on the outskirts of Appleton Wisconsin. It was there that I was introduced to the antics of Herbie in The Love Bug. I also thrilled to Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, and fell immediately in love with her. I watched Kurt Russel grow up under Disney's watchful gaze in movies such as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. As I grew older, the outdoor still offered thrills such as Clint Eastwood's "B" westerns in the open air. Some of the first entries to the "slasher" genre also debuted on drive-in screens, including the first version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which far outclassed the recent remake of that film).

If I lived close enough to one of the few drive-in theaters still operating or a new one that has opened, I can assure you that I'd be attending it a few times a year. You see, although the viewing experience may be a bit shy of that which is offered in today's multiplexes, there's just something about sitting in the womb of your car with a big tub of popcorn and your best girl at hand that can't be achieved through any other means. In fact, it's my theory that the drive-in movie theaters were possibly the single largest contributor to the baby boom. Maybe you should find a drive-in theater near to you and see if my theory is right.

What coming of age joys would you like to see revived?

When I was fourteen or so, my family and I spent almost a month tooling around Europe. Apart from certain miseries associated with putting six people in a cramped BMW and the fact that my sister Ella had a terrible smell for the whole summer (we later discovered that she'd jammed a piece of sponge up her nose), we had a great time. We were exploring foreign lands, the dollar was really strong, and the U.S. government was footing a big chunk of the bill, as my dad was officially there on business. What's not to like?

In retrospect, I guess I was something of an ugly American. While I've since learned to become a little less obvious when wandering abroad, my pictures from that summer show a scrawny kid with a too-short haircut, too-high kneesocks, ugly shorts and loud Hawaiian shirts. Although I remember being very easygoing and polite, it's likely that my sisters and I spent much of our time bitching about everything. After all, we were all in our teens, we were spending way too much time together, and, well, we're American.