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Oh come on. They were asking for it: Episode VII The Eternal Copyright 10 years after the universally despised prequels, the Star Wars franchise has returned in CEO Bob Iger's latest pursuit of financial gains. Due the success of the Marvel buyout, Iger has purchased LucasFilm with the...

Good thing I got on the trial of the new MyMagic+ masks.

Investment is an absolutely terrible gauge for the success of a project. Problems below: 1. NextGen is not Disney. Parks and Resorts is insignificant relative to ESPN. DIS is floated on Marvel, ESPN, and (to lesser extents) Pixar and LucasFilm. 2. Investors don't know everything. See Enron...

That's nice. Except for the fact that the movie was set in the past.

Problem: attendance means absolutely jack nothing. What matters is whether your 17 million guests spend what they used to. To understand exactly what I'm driving at, here's Disney's game plan (since Eisner took power, really): -Build hotels like crazy so people stay on property -Build extra...

I'm sure he'll bring Figment back, or something.

Not true. The mean guest gains wait time due to the logistics of FastPass slowing queues down. FastPass creates new inefficiencies for well-informed guests to exploit, and they reap the benefits. FastPass opens up a lot of ways for less knowledgeable guests to screw up and add to their wait...

Spending $1.2 billion on infrastructure makes sense if you get $1.2 billion worth of infrastructure. Disney didn't get $1.2 billion worth of infrastructure. A big part of NextGen is RFID, which I have (in the weaker form of NFC) sitting next to me right now. Another big part is a website to...

Not a good way to motivate. That sends a signal of "play conservative, or you're gone." The message you want to send is, "Take risks and innovate." That aside, he's already making cuts. Pixar just laid off something like 2% of its staff. Wasn't forced by Burbank, but it was almost certainly...

Exactly. The stock market, unlike the customer, is always right. Just ask Enron's shareholders. Stocks don't mean jack. The market can be wrong, and it usually is. It is very well possible that other sports networks increase competition and wreck ESPN in the coming years. It is very well...

Flash pictures. Those spirits are frightfully sensitive to bright lights.

Jumping in: I'm 100% for a Jules Verne-inspired Tomorrowland. Otherwise, Tomorrowland either is redundant or has a major identity crisis. To some extent, this is what they did for Paris. The plans were far more elaborate than what was actually built. Still, there's some retro-futuristic...

NextGen is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ordinarily, I'd tell you that I wouldn't FastPass Haunted Mansion. Between the longer wait and the interactive queue which totally does not exist, an FP+ is now a reasonable proposition in my eyes.

I feel like Main Street gets overlooked because it isn't a ride, but the rows of small shops at Disneyland really are a huge step up from the homogenized, Emporium-dominated Main Street at Magic Kingdom. Maybe they can use some NextGen technology and get us a Magic Shop.

I'd argue that, paradoxically, Disneyland also has the blessing of size. WDW is spread out and a bit obnoxious. Yes, there are more parks; yes, there's 99 holes of golf; however, there are also 99 problems, and transportation is most of them. Getting to Magic Kingdom is a royal pain, and...

So it's happening. This is the kind of decision-making I was promised many months ago when George K. showed up. I'm used to hearing about refurb budgets getting cut, not tripled.

They do, but not creatively. The most they can do is shoot down ideas or botch them with budget cuts. Or let the division get so out of hand that they seemingly work at twice the budgets that Universal manages to work with. There's a difference between designing a ride and paying for it, is...

Rasulo and Staggs are executives, so they really don't matter in terms of Imagineering. For Rhode, I'd get a book on Animal Kingdom, since he did almost all of the park. The Imagineering Field Guide was pretty good, I thought. Martin might have a few solid tribute videos for parts of AK as...

I'm with you here. I'm all for holiday overlays, but only where they make sense. Country Bear Jamboree, it's a small world, those are attractions where I can easily understand the point of an overlay. With the Haunted Mansion, it's combining one of the best rides ever constructed with a...

There's been a lot of talk about new pavilions, but at the end of the day, I'd much rather enjoy a nice bathroom break than spend my money at a Brazilian steakhouse anyway. Only one question remains: when are the Phase 3 restrooms coming?