JeffJewell
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2000
...for a couple main reasons; first, that it takes the worst of Disney's history and uses it as a benchmark of current performance. It's a dangerous business move to ask no more than the worst anyone's ever done at the job, whatever that job might be. Also, in another sense, it's dangerous to compare specific business decisions from two different periods of time because there are too many external factors operating to make a legitimate comparison possible."And it's an extremely dangerous argument to justify today's shortcomings by claiming they are no worse than yesterday's shorcomings." Why?
Speaking for myself anyway, I've always compared business philosophies rather than specific decisions; again, different times make the specific decisions too dissimilar to meaningfully compare.When the reason the shortcomings of the past are generally brought up is in direct response to those who criticize Eisner/current management by comparing them to the past.
To me, the key difference is in that "had to." True, Walt opened Disneyland, and WDW, for that matter, in a state less complete than he envisioned, because he was still a relatively small businessman blazing some new trails. This is one of those cases where no meaningful comparison can be drawn to the decision to cut corners while you're dropping $5 billion on a cable network. Hell, the _refund_ Eisner got off of that deal would have made an impressive addition to Animal Kingdom.He admittedly cut corners when he had to.
Trying to compare Eisner's corner-cutting decisions to Walt's completely falls apart when looked at in context. Walt gave us Dumbo because he "had to;" in the sense that he needed more capacity and simply couldn't afford to buy anything more. Eisner gave us DinoRama because he "had to;" in the sense that everyone was complaining that there was nothing to do in his park and the place was a ghost town after lunchtime. Two entirely different business philosphies.
While I'm certainly glad you enjoy what's open so far, I think it's a little early to declare categorically what effect DinoRama as a whole has had on Animal Kingdom (I know it's equally anecdotal evidence as yours, but my sister, her husband, and their two-year-old daughter were flying point for our carvan coming out of Tarzan Rocks, came to the point where a superflous rope in the exit path turned all Tarzan escapees directly toward DinoRama, saw TS, and decided it was time to go to Magic Kingdom for Dumbo again).DinoRama helps AK further fit that bill.
Well, I can agree that AK has some great _parts_, but it's clearly a flawed and incomplete "theme park," by any business standard (and apparently, most vacationers' standards), so the trends don't seem strange, at all. And besides, Eisner is still treating people like lemmings, just lemmings who must want spinners, spinners, spinners.AK is a great Park and while attendance is down and customer disatisfaction seems high, does that really seem strange to you? After all America is full of lemmings and the current trend is coasters, coasters, coasters
Actually, Walt was against a live animal park. Well, perhaps "against" is the wrong word, he did orignally want live animals on the Jungle Cruise, but the business reality of the expense of keeping live animals made Jungle Cruise an AA showplace. Live animals made it difficult to turn a profit, and Disney ended up not doing it, back then.AK is a high quality Park full of the type of things Walt would be proud of, DR included.
And although I do agree that Walt might have been proud of DinoRama, that would have been in the late sixties... an appropriate time to be excited about managing to "plus" some carnival rides enough to have something vaguely worthy of being put in your fledgling park. Three decades later, with (I find myself compelled to point out again) $5 billion worth of jack lying around, I believe Walt would have been made ill by such a suggestion.
We were talking about DinoRama and got to this? Are you saying DinoRama is clearly of Disney quality because it fails to make WDW, as a whole, a less preferred destination than IOA/USF?How many people prefer IOA/USF over WDW - compare total package to total package.
You appear to set your sights eye-poppingly low, my Captain.
Jeff