Besides a horse-drawn hearse being purchased for the Indy show, none of this ever came to pass.
The ‘90s would be a long decade for losing. Euro Disneyland scorched the bottom line in 1992. Major additions now seen as wins started as compromises, with Animal Kingdom ditching an entire land and California Adventure opening as a rough draft. Smaller projects around the world got nickled, dimed, and bankrupted outright. Eisner quietly stopped making so many televised appearances.
Despite programs like this softly assuring visitors to the contrary, The Walt Disney Company was no longer a boutique business run by people who knew the name above the door. For the first time since rumblings of that hostile takeover a decade prior, the paying customers knew too much - they knew they were paying, and not necessarily for pixie dust. Despite its best efforts, The Walt Disney Company was unmistakably corporate.
The Disneyland announcements feel eerily similar to the Epcot announcements from 2019. Major attractions overhauled. Major attractions added. Every last one of them branded, one way or another. It seemed the very identity of the park would forever nipped and tucked away, even with assurances to the contrary.
Without the websites to record such things, it’s hard to say what the contemporary response was to the announcements. But then again, without the websites to record such things, who’d really go to Disneyland six years later and ask Guest Services what happened to the Dick Tracy ride?
The gift of forgetting no longer exists. The wider internet and outlets like this one will always have the coverage available, exciting as the day it was announced. It’s the reason Disney no longer needs TV specials like The Disneyland Story to get the point across - there’s a captive audience happy to do that legwork now.
It also might be the reason The Walt Disney Company has once again assumed monolithic status, no longer a corporation, but an all-encompassing lifestyle. Annual passholder Facebook groups are full of fans taking every melted Mickey Bar as a betrayal of their relationship with the Mouse. A bakery opened at Disney Springs last weekend and immediately racked up an 11-hour wait, despite there being another location of the same bakery a mere thirty minutes away. All social media circa March 2020 is lousy with the grief of visitors unsure when they’ll hug Chip or Dale again.
The intention of this comparison, Disneyland’s 35th to Walt Disney World’s 50th, is not condescension. That would defeat the purpose of it appearing on ThemeParkTourist.com.
The point is perspective.
Disney is now one of the largest media conglomerates in modern history, promoting that rank by default back to the dawn of man. Thanks to the unprecedented wrench in the gears that is the novel coronavirus, the parks are in worse shape than they ever were during the Disney Decade. Given the forced departure of so many Imagineers, the future’s looking stagnant, too.
It’s all the more frustrating in the bigger picture. Last December, shares of The Walt Disney Company reached an all-time stock market high of $170 a share. The massive asterisk is that for the first time since Eisner, theme parks aren’t pulling the cart. Disney is in the streaming business now, Country Bears and cast members be darned.
The lesson is that every cancellation, delay, and modification has a reason. It’s fair to express disappointment, but only when the deeper costs are factored in. More than a few life-long fans are bemoaning the loss of Disney’s annual pass program for its west-coast parks. But that’s not personal. It cuts costs, controls crowds, pushes tickets, etc. It’s one more move from an unfathomably large entity designed to mint money. Identify it as such, make peace with it, and save the tears for Splash Mountain crew instead of Splash Mountain wildlife.
Despite no announcements of festivities, passes for the Magic Kingdom’s 50th anniversary on October 1st sold out by January 12th. There will still be complaints about the Tron coaster and the Guardians ride and the Star Wars hotel by then and, in all likelihood, no further updates.
Where’s the Dick Tracy ride? is now a valid question. Anybody can bring up a dozen reported variations of the same press release on their smartphones. But the ease of access, the volume of information makes the human factor behind it all even harder to spot.
Take The Disneyland Story as a cautionary tale and magic trick.
No announcement is set in stone. There’s a reason Disney doesn’t promise much until shovels hit dirt.
All company lore should come pre-packaged with a boulder of salt. Archival footage may not lie but editing can. Not all of the Walt quotes they hang on construction walls are actually Walt quotes. The signature two-finger Disney wave probably has more to do with the aforementioned cigarettes than it does grace.
Most vitally and most deceptively, the people who make the magic happen are not just as important as the audio-animatronics - they’re more important. In fact, they’re all that matters. Any attempt to blur that line is just propaganda.
So whenever the next refurbishment gets pushed or another attraction closes without any planned replacement, click on the expected coverage, but remember The Disneyland Story. Try to name all, if any, of the five announcements that came to nothing and how much their absence mattered in the long run. Then consider the anonymous people written off with “After Midnight” and yelled at by cartoon characters in the literal trenches of Disneyland.
The Walt Disney Company is more corporate and more vague about that fact than ever. There’s no Walt, no Eisner to point at as a steadfast ambassador. It owns too many superheroes, space pilots, and studio catalogs to worry about that now. Who wants to think about another 30,000 employees losing their jobs when there are thirty new shows coming to Disney+?
Now that customer service is a legitimate biohazard, the PR conflict between people and magic has never been muddier, but the difference needs to be absolutely clear.
The real one only gets a few minutes of screen time in The Disneyland Story. But fingers-crossed for that Dick Tracy ride.
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