The neighbor lady who works at TDA and is well connected, who has often given me gossippy scoops, came by late this morning to bring back some serving utensils she borrowed for Easter brunch. (She's a fan of my Danish Modern stuff) She returned them with a jug of fresh squeezed orange juice from her trees, and since she's taken this week off from work we sat and got caught up over OJ and muffins.
She let me know that the plan is to reopen the Blue Sky Cellar later this month with an exhibit about Pixar Pier. This is all rather rushed because TDA thinks no one cares about Pixar Pier and thinks it's just getting a paint job and a temporary overlay. They are reinstalling a big TV screen to show Imagineering videos about Pixar Pier. I wouldn't expect John Lasster to appear in any of those videos.
Apparently this new Josh gentleman who is the new Disneyland President is a real go-getter and wants stuff done faster and better. He's also very, very smart.
She also told me that the Disneyland Resort has been making money by the bucketfuls for the past couple years, blowing out all financial targets, while WDW has struggled for several years and has only very recently improved to simply meeting their lowered targets for customer spending this year. Anaheim's financial performance is accelerating further in 2018, and is the financial engine behind the Parks division improved performance, while WDW is still not firing on all 8 cylinders. The way Disney reports out the financials each quarter is purposefully designed to be able to mask an under-performing property, and WDW has been underperforming for years now. Chapek's new Parks structure, where a Western Region exec will now reside in SoCal and be in charge of Anaheim and Orlando, was an acknowledgement of that financial reality.
Chapek thinks the Orlando management is clumsy and sloppy. And when they are told to think outside the box they come up with dumb ideas like party tents rented by the hour in Tomorrowland that flop immediately. And then those Orlando managers point fingers at each other and can't figure out why it didn't work.
Chapek didn't want the Parks run out of Orlando any longer because they just haven't been good at it for the past five years, while Disneyland hits it out of the park financially and culturally. There's an acknowledgement that Disneyland in the late 2010's has really tapped into the hipster cultural zeitgeist of the younger generations, while still maintaining its traditional nostalgia with middle aged and older people. The Western Region exec will be tasked with cutting the bloated salaried workforce in Orlando, and use the lean and mean and hipster Disneyland model as the example. The Western Region exec is a lady named Catherine who is European, has been in charge of Paris most recently, and is very stylish, very smart, and loves SoCal and is thrilled with her new role here.
Also, the OJ was delicious. The first of the spring oranges in Villa Park were a good batch this year.
She let me know that the plan is to reopen the Blue Sky Cellar later this month with an exhibit about Pixar Pier. This is all rather rushed because TDA thinks no one cares about Pixar Pier and thinks it's just getting a paint job and a temporary overlay. They are reinstalling a big TV screen to show Imagineering videos about Pixar Pier. I wouldn't expect John Lasster to appear in any of those videos.
Apparently this new Josh gentleman who is the new Disneyland President is a real go-getter and wants stuff done faster and better. He's also very, very smart.
She also told me that the Disneyland Resort has been making money by the bucketfuls for the past couple years, blowing out all financial targets, while WDW has struggled for several years and has only very recently improved to simply meeting their lowered targets for customer spending this year. Anaheim's financial performance is accelerating further in 2018, and is the financial engine behind the Parks division improved performance, while WDW is still not firing on all 8 cylinders. The way Disney reports out the financials each quarter is purposefully designed to be able to mask an under-performing property, and WDW has been underperforming for years now. Chapek's new Parks structure, where a Western Region exec will now reside in SoCal and be in charge of Anaheim and Orlando, was an acknowledgement of that financial reality.
Chapek thinks the Orlando management is clumsy and sloppy. And when they are told to think outside the box they come up with dumb ideas like party tents rented by the hour in Tomorrowland that flop immediately. And then those Orlando managers point fingers at each other and can't figure out why it didn't work.
Chapek didn't want the Parks run out of Orlando any longer because they just haven't been good at it for the past five years, while Disneyland hits it out of the park financially and culturally. There's an acknowledgement that Disneyland in the late 2010's has really tapped into the hipster cultural zeitgeist of the younger generations, while still maintaining its traditional nostalgia with middle aged and older people. The Western Region exec will be tasked with cutting the bloated salaried workforce in Orlando, and use the lean and mean and hipster Disneyland model as the example. The Western Region exec is a lady named Catherine who is European, has been in charge of Paris most recently, and is very stylish, very smart, and loves SoCal and is thrilled with her new role here.
Also, the OJ was delicious. The first of the spring oranges in Villa Park were a good batch this year.
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