Entering Another Dimension

First published December 16, 2003

By C. W. Oberleitner

C. W. Oberleitner returns after a prolonged absence from JHM with a few observations about how things have changed in the world of Disney over the past two weeks.

Shortly after turning in my last column for JimHillMedia, I received a telephone call from an old friend telling me that his partner of 28 years, and my dearest friend of nearly 30 years, had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. Instantly my priorities changed. The comings and goings of the movers and shakers in the entertainment industry no longer seemed that important. I juggled my schedule and made plans to attend my friend’s memorial service, held the weekend after Thanksgiving in the San Francisco Bay Area. I virtually cut myself off from almost all forms of news media until my return. I go away for two weeks and all of the sudden the world gets turned upside down.

Back in the Game Again

Upon my return from the Bay Area, I dove into my e-mail and checked out all of the media sites bookmarked in my browser. Coming as it did late on the afternoon the day before Thanksgiving, I was expecting to see an ongoing debate about the timing of the release of the California Department of Occupational Safety and Health report on the Big Thunder Mountain accident. Instead, I found a major battle had broken out, at the highest levels, for control of The Walt Disney Company. Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew and sole remaining member of the Disney family still at the company, and his long time business partner, Stanley P. Gold, had resigned from WDC’s board of directors and were calling for the head of company CEO, Michael Eisner.

I now find myself about to say something that in my wildest dreams I never thought I would be saying:

Welcome Mr. Disney. Welcome to the Internet.

In case you haven’t heard, as part of their program to enlighten and inform the investment community as to the effects of Mr. Eisner’s stewardship of The Walt Disney Company, Mr. Disney and Mr. Gold have launched their own website, SaveDisney.com. And, they’ve been kind enough to include JimHillMedia in their list of related websites of interest for readers who want to learn more about workings of the WDC.

As if this very public battle between the two men most widely seen as being responsible for bringing Michael Eisner to Disney in the first place and Eisner himself were not enough, try to imagine my surprise while reading MiceAge.com last Tuesday, December 9. Long time Disney watchdog and critic, Al Lutz—a man known to be able to find a dark cloud in the most silver of linings when it comes to news of the Disneyland Resort—was virtually falling all over himself singing the praises of newly appointed DLR President, Matt Ouimet, and his Team Disney Anaheim management group.

After almost ten years being run like a GAP store it appears that saner heads are prevailing, and some of the old ways the park used to be run by are making a long awaited comeback… get ready to read some good news for a change about the Happiest Place on Earth.

Clearly, sometime during the return trip from San Francisco I had entered another dimension. All of this must somehow be related to the pending opening of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney’s California Adventure. Al Lutz thinks things are going well at the Disneyland Resort, and Roy Disney and Stanley Gold are using the Internet to tell the world that Michael Eisner is taking Walt’s company to hell in a hand basket? Who would have thought leaving town for a few days could wreak such change?

Reality, of course, must lie somewhere in the middle of this muddle. Let’s go back to where I began this journey, with the release of the California Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) report on the Big Thunder Mountain (BTM) accident. By now the findings of the state investigators into the causes of the BTM accident have been well reported, even if they’ve become over shadowed by the events coming out of the Disney boardroom. There are, however, a couple of items from that report that didn’t receive a lot of press that I think are worth re-visiting.

To begin with, I, like thousands of fans of the creative efforts of Walt Disney Imagineering, was very glad to read the following item from the report’s conclusions:

There is no evidence that the design of the Big Thunder Mountain attraction is unsafe.

Big Thunder Mountain comes from a time when WDI had more freedom to concentrate on the entire guest experience while creating an attraction. Then, as now, cost was a consideration; however, unlike the mindset of the current administration of the WDC, cost was not the overriding consideration when designing BTM. It’s good to know that the hard work and effort put into Big Thunder Mountain’s design by Imagineer Tony Baxter and his creative team at WDI played no part in this tragedy.

It was also good to learn from the DOSH report that even the often-criticized TDA management team assembled by former Disneyland presidents Paul Pressler and Cynthia Harriss could learn from their mistakes and improve as well. Following the December 1998 Sailing Ship Columbia accident when a cleat used to dock the Columbia tore lose and struck the head of Luan Phi Dawson, 33, of Duvall, Washington causing his death Team Disney Anaheim was severely rebuked by officials for failing to promptly inform authorities and for attempting to stage-manage the scene of the accident.

The DOSH report on the Big Thunder Mountain accident, like the Anaheim Police Department investigative report before it, went out of its way to credit TDA’s handling of events immediately after the tragedy.

The emergency response of the employees and medical assistance after the accident occurred was proper, and assistance occurred as soon as possible.

Disneyland Resort properly secured and preserved the Big Thunder Mountain attraction and the secured site where train #2 was relocated throughout the Division’s comprehensive investigation.

The Pressler/Harriss administrations of the Disneyland Resort received a lot of criticism, most of it deserved, for their sloppy handling of Disneyland Resort policies and procedures. It was interesting to learn that they could do things right when they had to. It was a shame that two people had to die in two separate accidents to call attention to their lack of attention to detail and their fixation on saving money by cutting corners.

This brings us back to the new management team running the Disneyland Resort. The good news coming out of Anaheim is that Mr. Ouimet and his team want to run the DLR like the Florida property with its emphasis on Disney traditions. The bad news coming out of Anaheim is that Mr. Ouimet and his team want to run the DLR like the Florida property with its emphasis on Disney traditions.

Why, you may ask, is running the Disneyland Resort like Walt Disney World a bad thing? Because it’s the primary reason that the expansion of Disneyland into the Disneyland Resort has been met with mixed results. The prolonged and somewhat underwhelming acceptance of Disney’s California Adventure is one example of this.

It’s no secret that guests visiting WDW in Florida tend to spend more per visit at a wider variety of shops and eateries than guests visiting the Disneyland Resort. The WDC has long wanted to increase the per-cap spending of Disneyland Resort visitors. Their solution as to how to accomplish this has been the Disney "Worldification" of Disneyland.

Shortly after construction began on DCA, Paul Pressler, then chairman of Disney Theme Parks and Resorts, told the press that it was their intention (The Walt Disney Company’s) to extend the average guest stay at Disneyland by one to two days. In so doing, it would replicate the success the company had in Florida by creating two world-class resorts, one on each coast. It was the mid 90s, the economy was booming, and Walt Disney World was setting attendance and sales records. Something Mr. Pressler gladly accepted full credit for.

Mr. Pressler and Disney Theme Parks and Resorts got their way and the new Disneyland Resort did turn out much more like Walt Disney World than Disneyland. Like Disney World a great deal of emphasis was put on shopping and dinning. DCA featured the Mondavi Winery and Wolfgang Puck restaurants. The no-admission fee required entertainment and shopping district Downtown Disney was melded into the concourses between the various Disney hotels and the two theme parks.

On paper all of this looked great. That was until you held the Anaheim plans up against those of the Florida property. Even with the addition of dozens of acres of land once littered with kitschy motels, RV campgrounds, and strawberry fields, the New Disneyland Resort is still less than one-fifth the size of its Florida counterpart. And, unlike the Florida property, a sea of humanity surrounds the Disneyland Resort. There are over 19 million people living around the Disneyland Resort. Conversely, the nearly 43 square miles that house Walt Disney World are miles away from the Orlando metropolitan area, which only has a population of just a little over 463,000.

From its earliest days of operation, Disneyland, and now the Disneyland Resort’s mix of guests, has been 60% single day guests who drive in for all or part of the day and 40% overnight guests who stay for one or more days either in a Disney or nearby hotel. At Walt Disney World the mix of guests is almost exactly the opposite.

Single-day Walt Disney World visitors don’t have a lot in common with their Disneyland Resort counterparts either. It’s estimated that there are over 400,000 Disneyland Resort annual pass holders—Disney does not publish sales figures. The majority of whom live within 150 miles of the resort and visit one or both of the theme parks at least ten or more times a year. Because they have so many opportunities to buy Disney merchandise there’s little reason to buy something every time they visit. Because of the travel required reaching WDW, single-day visitors there visit one or more of its parks less than half as frequently as Disneyland pass holders and subsequently spend more per visit when they do.

Unlike Walt Disney World, which is so large guests have to drive to or be shuttled from theme park to retail complex to entertainment district, the Disneyland Resort is a dense complex of shopping and dinning venues all within walking distance of one another. Between the Disneyland Hotel and the main gates of the resort’s two theme parks, guests walk past nearly a dozen restaurants and almost twice as many shops. Faced with this abundance of competition, both the Mondavi and Wolfgang Puck restaurants, whose guests first had to purchase admission to DCA, closed within a year of opening.

Virtually every piece of Disney merchandise to be found in either Disneyland or Disney’s California Adventure can be found in either the hotel gift shops or the giant World of Disney store located between the parks and hotels. Thereby negating the need to buy merchandise inside the parks and schlep it back to a hotel room. Instead of raising per-cap guest spending, the result of the Disney Worldification of Disneyland has been to fractionalize it to the point that per-cap guest spending at Disneyland is down. Both attendance and spending at DCA have never lived up to original projections.

Disney Theme Parks and Resorts, now under the direction of Jay Rasulo, acknowledges the down trend in per-cap spending at the DLR but tends to attribute this to broader trends in the nation’s economy. Instead of retreating and regrouping from the Disney Worldification of the Disneyland Resort, Mr. Ouimet and his team—many of whom come from Walt Disney World—seem to be embracing it. Among the Disney World procedures they have begun to introduce at the DLR is the use of Priority Seating at The Blue Bayou and Goofy’s Kitchen in the Disneyland Hotel.

Priority Seating means that 100% of the available seating in these two restaurants will be by reservation only, the same as with Disney World full service restaurants. Seasoned Disney World visitors often make their dinning reservations months in advance. Local area single-day Disneyland Resort visitors tend to decide where to eat once at the resort. In the past, both of these popular Disneyland dining venues set aside as much as 40% of their available seating for walk up guests.

As previously mentioned, 60% of the Disneyland Resort’s average daily mix of guests is comprised of single-day visitors, the majority of whom come from the surrounding Southern California area. If they are anything like my friends and I, many of those visits are rarely planned out more than a week ahead of time and many are spontaneous. It remains to be seen if regular DLR guests will embrace Priority Seating at these two popular DLR restaurants or if this latest example of the Disney Worldifciation of Disneyland will be just one more attempt to apply the same solution to a problem while hoping for a different outcome. Sounds crazy to me.

C’ya real soon!