On February 7th, 1985, newly minted CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner, made an announcement to Disney shareholders that the company would be opening a third gate at their Florida resort: Disney-MGM Studios — a park that resembled, in no small way, Universal Studios’ own Hollywood experience as well as the new venue that the motion picture studio had been trying to get off the ground a few miles down the road from Disney World. Not only did Eisner plan to beat them to the punch in Florida, but it was suspected that he pulled some strings in the Florida legislature to stop them from granting Universal/MCA a loan to get the project to completion (though Eisner denies this).
This might have been the biggest mistake the Disney Company could have possibly made at the time:
“This is not the same as two companies competing for a movie or TV slot. The studio tour business had been something we had developed over 25 years. This business doesn’t exist anywhere else in America to my knowledge.” (Universal CEO Sidney) Sheinberg said, “When it came to our horrible realization that they (Disney) were going to do what they were going to do, there was a horrible sense of personal and corporate betrayal.” — Gennawey, Sam. Universal versus Disney: The Unofficial Guide to American Theme Parks’ Greatest Rivalry
The war was on, and Universal had no Jiminy Cricket telling them they couldn’t fight dirty.
MCA/Universal, now Comcast/Universal, seeking revenge over the course of four decades for what they considered a slap in the face (and if the reader thinks this is an exaggeration, I urge you to read Mr. Gennawey’s book quoted above) might seem like a big problem, but what may loom even larger is how Disney’s attempts to remain dominant in the theme park industry have come to look less like Disney leaning into their core strengths and more like the Mouse chasing Universal’s tail.
It’s as if Disney-MGM was not just a singular show of force — an attempt to cut a competitor out of a new market — but that it was a cloak that Disney had decided to wrap itself in.
The charming, comforting, welcoming Disney parks (“Disneyland freaking hugs you and kisses you” — Early Imagineer Rolly Crump) began, more and more, to embrace “brash” and “loud;” trying to match it’s glitzy Hollywood competitor explosion for explosion. A lot of great features and attractions came out of this war of escalation, but with each Cosmic Rewind (2023) or Rise of the Resistance (2019), Disney seemed to be trading pieces of their identity for Universal’s.
It’s been a costly way for the Mouse to do business, leaning on ever larger, expensive capital expenditures in order to keep the flash a little brighter while trying to match the movie giant blow-for-blow. (Is there any doubt that Galaxy’s Edge is an answer to the Wizarding World? They shared much of the same DNA in lead designer, Scott Trowbridge.) And the question of whether these tactics have been successful is becoming a serious discussion.
Universal Studios Japan in Osaka has been climbing in attendance for the last decade and now nips at the heels of both Disneyland and Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom as the most attended theme park in the world with its attendance rising almost 60% in the last decade while Disney World’s Magic Kingdom and Disneyland have remained close to stagnant. (COVID, of course, complicates these numbers.) Universal’s long-anticipated major third gate, Epic Universe, is scheduled to open this year, as is their permanent horror installation in Las Vegas: Universal Horror Unleashed. A smaller kid-oriented park is scheduled for the town of Frisco, Texas. They are building a second gate to their park in Beijing and are eyeing property in Europe as well.
Universal has gone all in, and in an industry that may have reached audience saturation in many areas, this is very bad for Disney, which, while they still have a very successful theme park business, has been struggling to stabilize and maintain profits across the rest of their sprawling portfolio.
“The story old as time is that additional parks bring additional guests to the market and ‘all ships rise on the tide.’ I believe that to this point, the story has generally proved to be non-fiction.” — Matt Ouimet, Former Disneyland President and Former President of Cedar Fair Entertainment.
Universal has a vibrant, brash, and aggressive group of theme parks. The Disney Parks have been, historically, something very different, but the lines between the two approaches have become increasingly blurred with both companies taking cues from the other’s technology, theming, and operating procedures. The question then becomes, which company can afford to compromise on its core beliefs? It doesn’t take much consideration to come up with the answer: Universal can.
Universal’s philosophies were forged working within and at the pleasure of a fickle and chaotic movie industry. The Hollywood park, especially, simply forced its way into film productions and got patrons to pay for the privilege. This isn’t to say that the Universal team, after becoming an established success, hasn’t built stunning themed environments; they certainly have. The point is that the thematic integrity of their parks has never been all that critical to their success.
They are a delicious bagel, but they are an everything bagel: a bagel with no limits and few taboos.
Disney doesn’t have this luxury. The Disney Parks represent something more holistic as far as the guest experience goes, and seven decades of absolute dominance in the theme park field have begun to feel surprisingly insecure as guests deeply immersed in the “Disney Way” have shown up to visit theme parks which no longer FEEL quite right.
The Disney Parks are still wonderful places to visit and much, if not most, of the sense of warmth that coalesced in Disneyland during its founder’s life, and then formed the basic tenants for each subsequent gate, can still be found there, but a tipping point may be approaching: a tipping point where the Disney Parks feel less “Disney” and more like… something else.
It would be too easy to call the “step too far” a removal of a certain central river and island in Florida’s Magic Kingdom, though that certainly doesn’t bode well, but the elements that make Disney “Disney” are far more complex and subtle. The parks have proven over and over that singular dramatic changes don’t destroy the Disney mystique, until enough patches and repairs, ostensibly to keep the theme park ship sailing, alter its structure so fundamentally that it begins to look like a car.
If Disneyland and Walt Disney World, and the other Disney-branded parks around the world intend to remain the default destinations for theme park families, they might want to take a long, hard look at what made them the leader in the industry in the first place.
It All Begins With Story
Disney reps are fond of saying that, for all divisions of their company, “It always begins with story.” And indeed it does. With motion pictures and television programs, it should begin and also, end with a good story well told, but what is the story’s role in a theme park attraction? Punting the idea of business synergy (an idea that we can’t run away from in the 21st century) down the field, the first basic tenant of theme park design is that the company has an intellectual property that they’ve made/bought/commandeered, or there is a genre — westerns/science fiction/jungle adventure — that they’ve played around with; and they would like to translate it into a live experience.
So, how do both companies do that?
Universal has an identity that defines the method overtly; they are going to let you “ride the movies!” They are going to put you in the plot or production of a movie and tell a story, very quickly, with a beginning, middle, and end. Often it will be a sequel to a movie the audience has seen — E.T. goes to the Green Planet/Harry and Ron want to skip class and go to a Quidditch match — or it will be an adventure within the behind-the-scenes technical production of what they’ve seen — help Jessica Fletcher solve a mystery/this is how we make a warehouse burn — but whatever it is, there will be a thrill to it at some point (something will probably “go wrong!”) and it will, most assuredly, be loud.
This is who Universal is. They do it very well.
Disney, historically, goes about this sort of thing differently. They have a rich catalog of movies that are often known for their deep emotional resonance with an audience. Prior to their 21st century acquisition-mania, when you thought of a Disney movie, it was with a sense of warmth: a comforting, enveloping sense of well-being that could verge on euphoric. When Walt Disney began leveraging these films in order to build the first American theme park, it wasn’t via a slavish devotion to retelling the stories verbatim; it was, instead, an atmospheric book report about the stories; or, more accurately, a tactile poem about how the story made us feel.
The attractions were there to remind you of how much you’d enjoyed the films, or how much you enjoyed westerns, or how much you enjoyed adventure movies, with a few deft poetic visuals and a novel sense of physical motion to maybe stir that feeling up a bit.
Rarely did a 20th-century Disney attraction stretch its credibility with details, likely figuring that the audience already knew the narrative and simply wanted to recapture its feeling. Often, hints at a more complex story, such as the re-appearance of the raven in every scene in The Haunted Mansion (1969), were presented as tantalizing tidbits that would fire an inquisitive guest’s imagination, without the need of or desire for follow-through.
Enter Lucasfilm.
George Lucas is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, and the deal that led to attractions like Star Tours (1987) and the Indiana Jones Adventure (1995) seemed to nudge the narrative scope of those attractions towards an almost Universal Studios level of intricacy. The good news is that these attractions worked whether you could follow the story or not (So why did we turn INTO the chamber where the big idol we are not supposed to look at is? And how did we end up at the Death Star?), yet an innocence was being lost. The poetic nature of the Fantasyland story-gestures, or the delight of running across a terrain where Tom Sawyer once had been, or the thrill of being in a reckless rocket shooting through blackness and stars was being replaced with a script outline and mandatory plot beats.
No longer was it deemed safe for an audience to be dropped into a mood piece to let their experience be an intuited emotional response spurred on by the ride. Disney was beginning to nail down what the guest was supposed to be thinking and with that, comes a mental burden for the guest to hold up their side of the bargain.
If following a story — or, heaven help us, participating in a story (looking at you, Rise of the Resistance!) — becomes a part of enjoying an attraction or show or environment, the guest suddenly has the possibility of failing in their prescribed role. That is a mental load on the brain that can be a stimulating and emotionally powerful experience, of course, but it might not be what guests are looking for in one of Disney’s parks.
Modern theme park design wisdom suggests that interactivity is the future, but often what the guest is really looking for is immersion instead. Interactivity and the complication of story requirements can cut two ways: they can fortify immersion, but they can also threaten the emotional safety of the environment that the guest is immersed in.
And, in a Disney Park, that safety is paramount.
Disney is NOT Cool!
Universal Studios is modern. It’s sexy. Its initial mission was to pull the veil back and let the audience be in the know how movies were made. So much about those parks is meant to make the audience feel like they’re the cool kids making their way through the most front-facing — often teen-oriented, elements of popular culture.
Their parks turned the thrills up to high, weren’t afraid to frighten the patrons, and were often pretty cynical. If you saw behind the scenes — even if you weren’t explicitly meant to — well guess what, kid, this is Hollywood baby! It chews you up and spits you out!
Universal Studios wants to be, and is, cool.
Sure, Universal has nostalgia as well — the parks started with a tram tour that dated back to the 1920s after all — but classic horror is easy to tweak for modern sensibilities and bawdy, chaotic, sexy, early Hollywood is timeless.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Walt Disney saw himself as something of a pop artist. He was working in a new medium, playfully twisting jazz and popular music around strange new images that made people laugh and, occasionally, cry. His studio was a rowdy, low-rent affair where a bunch of passionate people were inventing a new art form.
Two things squashed the cool out of Walt: the box-office failure of his most ambitious piece, Fantasia (1940), and the studio strike just before America’s entry into World War II. After these two events, Disney — still a great artist — shifted his personality towards something folksier.
America’s first theme park was going to be a portrait of popular, hokey, delightful Americana, and “cool” wasn’t invited.
The argument Walt Disney made — and he was right, proof is in the pudding — was that his park wasn’t going to be like the rowdy, crime-ridden amusement parks and carny shows that roamed around the country tempting the innocent. His park was going to be clean, respectable, and, most of all, safe. Safe from crime. Safe from temptation.
It was going to be safe from all the things that, especially to teenagers in mid-century America, would make it cool. And this was okay. The string of performative social tension that ran from kid to kid — still does today — was cut by a trip to Disneyland and a visit to the park became an acceptable celebration of the part of all of us that still enjoys being kind of a dork, and appreciates hanging out with other dorks; even with the dorks that are our parents!
Especially coming into the more fractious sixties and seventies, having a place where one could leave the noise of the world and its politics behind and revel in some innocence, even for a short while, was quite a balm.
By the early-’80s, when the resorts were beginning to incorporate arcades and put some weight behind films like Tron (1982), Disney had started toying with the idea of teasing out what was popular with modern kids. For the most part, the attempts were so ham-fisted as to be about as cool as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), but, occasionally, they struck a chord.
The problem was that when features of the park actually did start to click with teenagers, things could slip horribly out of gear. It is almost incomprehensible to consider Walt Disney’s original theme park having to close an attraction due to repeated incidents of gang violence, but that’s what happened to the dance club, Videopolis (1985), and, while this is an extreme example, rarely did aggressively hip Disneyland feel natural. It felt like the outside world had penetrated the bubble of emotional calm that made the Disney parks such unique places.
Nevertheless, ignoring this cautionary tale, Disney continued to chase pop culture. Sometimes they knocked it out of the park (Galaxy’s Edge) and sometimes much less so (Avengers Campus). Whatever the result, Disney seemed to think that the steady increase of alcohol sales across the parks would blur the guests’ vision enough that they would skate right past the awkward calls for modern cultural relevancy that now peppered the parks.
The Architecture of Reassurance
“You can use images in a literate way. And Walt sensed what you could do with entertainment. Entertainment is usually thought of as an escape from problems, an escape from responsibility, but as far as I know he had an original idea — and there are some practicing psychiatrists that happen to agree with us, that what we are selling is not escapism but reassurance.” — John Hench, New West Magazine 1978
Walt Disney was many things, and one of them was a canny observer of urbanism. His intuition on the subject was strong and, being tempered by the masters of painting, design, and stagecraft, which made up the designers of the first few decades of Disneyland, he created something remarkable.
It is trendy to revisit the construction of Disneyland and suggest that the philosophies of its place-making were developed through trial and error and then described later, but this would be a disservice to the understanding that Walt and his staff brought to the project.
Reading interviews with legendary Imagineer John Hench, the intricacy of the thought process becomes apparent: curves rather than angles in buildings and walkways, sizing of structures that give both a sense of scale and intimacy, reduction of visual noise as well as of overwhelming numbers of choices for the guests. Most importantly, though, was an absolute dedication to the removal of “visual contradictions.”
Oft-repeated stories about Walt becoming irritated at seeing a helmeted spaceman walking through Frontierland are part of this standard, yes, but it is far more complicated than that. Visual contradictions might include a building style incongruent with another nearby building style.
“Things seem to know each other. One side of Main Street is aware of the other side.” — John Hench
Visual contradictions might also include visible trusses for area or attraction lighting, or a noticeable speaker popping out of a planter: anything that might tax the credibility of the experience. If the guest’s brain has to work to discount an element contrary to the planned environment or attraction, their reassurance in the validity of the experience they’re having is also taxed.
This is not to say that humans are not capable of extremes of compartmentalization and leaps of faith, but Disneyland, as well as most of the other Disney Parks, has promised a liberation from that kind of heavy lifting for a short time.
The reason that a 50-year-old certified public accountant will happily buy a pair of Mickey Ears — something that will become literally useless in a few hours — and wear them without self-consciousness is that nothing in the experience that the person is having contradicts the idea of doing so.
Universal is, again by its nature, a different beast. The Universal parks deliberately mount up contradictions; not everywhere, of course — as their race with the Mouse has become more competitive, areas like their Wizarding Worlds have often achieved a Disney-esque level of thoroughness — but even in the more strictly themed areas, their tongues often seem firmly stuck in their cheeks.
The Disney Parks have a much more delicate tightrope to walk. They can’t accurately represent history or the future, but must give a sense of truth to their caricatured versions of both and must bring all of the elements together in a way that is, somehow, comforting.
“Main Street, of course, has the Victoria feeling, which is probably one of the great optimistic periods of the world, where we thought progress was great and we all knew where we were going. This form reflects that prosperity, that enthusiasm. Walt wanted to reassure people. There’s some nostalgia involved, of course, but nostalgia for what? There was never a Main Street like this one. But it reminds you of some things about yourself that you’ve forgotten about.” — John Hench
Given the constraints of space and money, and time, The Mouse has done a remarkable job of this. Even with the shoehorning in of lands like Galaxy’s Edge, Avengers Campus, Pandora, or even New Orleans Square, Imagineers have usually found ways to preserve the consistency of the experience and to eliminate visual contradictions. (The transition from Bayou Country to Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland is one of the most masterful pieces of theme park engineering ever designed.)
Still, if several of the American Disney Parks have mostly held to their visual philosophies — those core beliefs having so much gravity — several others are beginning to slip from their initial orbits. The Future World area of EPCOT (now World Celebration/World Nature/World Discovery) has lost its sense of identity. Its inconsistency lies in that the architecture, while being pleasant enough, doesn’t identify itself — it doesn’t tell its guests what it is. A visitor can no longer understand, visually, what they are supposed to be experiencing — they can’t rest their minds, assured that they’re doing the experience as intended — and thus their minds can not feel secure that they are visually “safe.”
Disney California Adventure has matured into a lovely theme park, but it is struggling to hold its consistency with the introduction of awkward placemaking like Avengers Campus, the bereft Hollywood Land, and, very likely soon, Pandora West. As a cautionary tale, DCA should consider the state of its closest cousin, Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida. The visual transitions between areas in the Studios have begun to resemble searching for a double-A battery in a junk drawer.
Standing on Hollywood Boulevard at the Studios is to be in a maelstrom of inconsistent visual signals, and subsequent touring through the park rarely offers any relief. A guest may have an immersive experience in Galaxy’s Edge or Toy Story Land, but the transition between them is a shock, and to walk down Sunset Boulevard is like trying to wrap your head around a ball of yarn after it has been unraveled by a cat.
The park has some of our favorite attractions, but the success of individual rides or lands does not equal the success of those rides or lands as thematic support for the parks they’re in. We expect to be protected from visual disruptions because that helps us to feel safe. When we don’t feel safe, we don’t feel like we’re in a Disney theme park. We might as well be at Universal Studios.
The Final Line of Defense
It happens again and again. A Disney Parks guest is having a rough day — things have gone wrong with scheduling, or the crowds are overwhelming, or a favorite attraction is closed — and a Disney Cast Member steps in to save the day. It might be someone dressed as Peter Pan who takes a child on a brief adventure around Fantasyland, or it might be someone serving ice cream who gives a guest an extra scoop, or it might be (and this happened to your author) the ragtime piano player on Main Street U.S.A. finishing his set and saying, “Come with me and we’ll watch the fireworks together. I know the best spot.”
Disney Cast Members are the hardest-working, most underappreciated people in the industry. They can make or break a guest’s day, and a very high percentage of the time, they make it.
The cracks are beginning to show, however. Disney staff are extremely overburdened. The park reservation system has allowed Disney management to keep the margin between the amount of staff needed to keep a park functioning and those on hand razor-thin. An effective cost-cutting measure, this leaves park employees little room to extend themselves for a guest. Likewise, the escalating complication of newer attractions — often a favoring of novel technology over elegant design — has placed an increased operational burden on the staff.
It’s stressful to be a Disney cast member these days, and the stress is starting to show as frustration and, even, a bit of Universal-like cynicism.
When Disneyland opened, and for its first few decades, Walt Disney would insist that his managers and designers go into the park as patrons and experience it as the guests did. No skipping lines, no preferential treatment; they just would have a day at the park as any guest would. They would feel what a guest feels. It wasn’t theoretical to the managers that guests might wait 45 minutes in the blazing hot Anaheim sun without anything over their heads to shield them; it was palpable.
From this, adjustments were made, staffing was redistributed or increased, and trees were planted. Guest comfort became a priority when an Executive Vice President had to endure guest discomfort.
This has not been the practice at Disney Parks for many decades now. When park officials want to study something, you’ll see them. They’re the ones in a clump carrying clipboards. They watch crowd patterns. They watch people’s reactions. They count burned-out lightbulbs. But they don’t have to experience the discomfort, impatience, and frustration personally. Guest dissatisfaction, being less quantifiable than the MBA’s might have one believe, is often allowed to fester. This leads to problems that the Cast Members are expected to mitigate, with next to no authority to do so.
- Take The Servility Out of Service. We take pride in our service profession. Whatever work is done is important. If you insist on calling a ”Food Service Hostess” a “Dish Up Girl,” you’re on the wrong team.
- Give Personal Dignity to People. If you happen to be a supervisor, you (unless you are unusual)…enjoy your little status symbols. Do you feel those in your crew are any different? Hell, no! They want pride and dignity in their work just as much as you do.
- Don’t be a Snoopervisor. You’re a leader, not a snooper who hides behind corners looking for faults.
- Be a “Work With” Type of Leader. Walt Disney World is a gigantic team effort. This means that everyone…EVERYONE…must work together to open successfully on time. Team work…”working with”…people means working with your own crew. This is not an “Officers and Men” operation. It’s a joint venture. — Van France prior to the Opening of Walt Disney World
They had some authority once. Ever since the park operating structure was codified by the founder of the Disneyland training program, Van Arsdale France, a strong system of Attraction and Show Leads — guest-facing operating staff with authority over attractions that they knew like the back of their hand — gave Cast Members a sense of ownership and responsibility over their respective territories. In the late ’90s, Paul Pressler, former President of the Anaheim park, began eliminating ride Leads and allowing managers, who had not done their time working the attractions, to be in charge. Even though the role eventually returned, it marked the point in Disney Park history where the ground staff and management no longer seemed to belong to the same team. There were the Cast Members who took instructions and management who gave them, and the singularity of purpose that had previously tied the groups together had been made vague.
As recently as the late ’80s, an ice cream scooper like young Tony Baxter could work his way up to Imagineering. Someone directing crowds on Main Street could find themselves in an executive, decision-making position. A kid could work an attraction long enough to become an acknowledged authority on it and have enough cache to influence the guest’s experience for the better. By the end of the next decade, this was unheard of. What was, in Walt Disney’s time, potentially a full-time job that could lead to a healthy career had become, mostly, a part-time gig for teens.
Disneyland and Walt Disney World certainly have full-time, long-term positions, but no longer is there a career track from Cast Member to decision maker. No one was taking a retirement package after a long career at the Disney Parks who didn’t start as an MBA and enter on an executive track.
With the high stress, lack of respect from management and almost non-existent career possibilities, it is a miracle indeed that so many Cast Members go so far out of their way to make the guest experience so magical, but in spite of being berated by guests, disregarded by management and wondering how they’re going to pay their electricity bills that week, they still so often do.
To quote the founder of Disney University:
“You can’t have a happy show without a happy crew” — Van Arsdale France
How Can Disney Find Its Inner Disneyland?
The denizens of the C-Suite have exactly one goal: to raise a company’s stock price. That’s the point of a publicly traded company. If the CEO is not making moves towards raising the stock price of a company, that CEO may not be CEO for long. The problem that the Disney Company is facing is that they saw almost $200 shares not more than four years ago, and yet they sit at close to half of that value currently.
It means very little to shareholders to tell them that the $200 was probably unrealistic or that there may not be, with the diminishing returns of the film industry and the over-saturation of major theme parks, much room to move up from the just past $100 per share that the price sits at today. The shareholders demand a rise in price, and it is Bob Iger’s job to get it by hook or by crook.
The theme parks have been consistently the most steady profit center for the Walt Disney Company — the division that is so consistently profitable that it covers other divisions’ losses — and it is an intuitive and relatively safe move to lean into those parks with changes that will excite the purchase of shares.
Quick fixes may help for a time, but the company will need another one, and an expensive one, soon. If you are cold, you can light a fire that people will assuredly cluster around for warmth until the tinder is gone. But maybe you should’ve used the wood to build a shelter instead?
Universal Studios has spent a considerable amount of time and money building shelters for itself. The company benefits from both not having as rigid of an identity to adhere to as Disney and from generally avoiding the kind of social and political scrutiny that the Walt Disney Company receives. They have built strong foundations for their future, and the payoff seems imminent.
So, what does Disney do now?
They could do the flashy thing of taking a stab at beating Universal at its own game with a Freakier Friday looping roller coaster (Look ma! New IP!), or trying to build a brand new Mediteran-errr-Bavarian(?)-influenced resort with theme park lands based on whatever films Irwin in accounting said did best with the fifteen to twenty-five year old demographic over the last six quarters.
They could do that, and they might get a few stock bumps with each new announcement.
Or perhaps they could consider embracing the values and aesthetic of the Disney Parks of the mid-20th century? Perhaps Disney should consider embracing the idea of being Disney again?
Could Disney revisit their relationship to telling stories through theme park attractions by not getting mired in complexity and the industry buzzword “interactivity?” Could they lighten up on the story beats and bear down on the immersion and emotional resonance? Perhaps a reassessment of the value of design over the value of technological escalation might be in order?
Design is usually cheaper, and the payoff — consider how many pictures of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle get taken every day — can flow forever.
And could they embrace their own dorky nostalgia? What if hokum like The Golden Horseshoe Review and the Tomorrowland Spaceman and Spacewoman were back in the parks? What if Figment and Dreamfinder came back to talk to us about using our imagination?
Disney’s sense of timelessness has been exploited by their competitor, leaving them seeming out of step with the times, but How to Train Your Dragon will fall out of favor eventually, and yet, Fantasyland will still be the most popular area of any theme park.
Could the parks, once again, give us back the permission to stop acting cool?
Could the company, piece by piece, start toning down and eliminating visual contradictions again? What if they hired folks to take another look at each individual theme park land and to redefine, or clarify, what it is meant to be, or, perhaps more importantly, what it is meant to do for a guest?
Could they narrow down the area’s meaning and then start returning what reinforces that meaning and cutting away at what doesn’t?
What if Disney’s sense of placemaking rededicated itself to reassurance?
And could they, once more, give the Cast Members of the Disney parks the opportunity to be something more than just temporary employees? Could they become, again, to use Van France’s terminology, “Disneylanders”: people who are encouraged to build careers centered around their love of the parks; people with ownership and competitive salaries and voices that are heard up to the C-Suite once they’ve garnered the experience and respect of the folks they work with?
Cast Members are the park’s greatest asset. Isn’t it time Disney recognizes that and bolsters them?
These ideas fly in the face of modern MBA practices — long-term and somewhat subtle moves with expenses that can’t always be promoted in a McDonald’s Happy Meal — but wasn’t the Disney Company BUILT on not doing what standard business practices suggested?
Walt Disney shouldn’t make cartoons in color.
Walt Disney shouldn’t make cartoon features.
Disneyland is a huge mistake and will destroy the company.
Walt is spending money on things that no one can see.
The Florida Project is insanity.
And wasn’t the company built on making investments that took time to pay off?
Pinocchio lost money.
Fantasia lost money.
Sleeping Beauty lost money, and the central icon of Walt’s theme park was based on it!
And didn’t they pay off in the end? Disney may find themselves tweaking Smuggler’s Run every few years, but touch that castle and it’s torches and pitchforks time. If any company should be looking at preserving its identity for the long game, it’s this one.
Imagine, if you can, walking into your favorite Disney Park with the kind of calm serenity you remember from the parks as a kid. Imagine stepping into your favorite area of the park and feeling — really feeling in your bones — that you know where you are and that it feels like what your heart wants it to feel like.
You look all around you, and it all looks right. Maybe it is crowded and maybe it is not, but it doesn’t really matter. You’ve arrived. You’re home.
Do you even care about the newest attraction? Or are you just happy to be there? Just. Happy.
Whatever it took to get the place back to that point, wouldn’t that be a good investment?
“Budgets, schedules, reports, more reports, union negotiations, training programs, meetings … more meetings, handbooks, cover-your-ass memos and the endless things which take up your time are of no value unless they end up producing A HAPPY GUEST.” — Van Arsdale France
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
