Eddie,
Out of curiosity when you were working on DLP did you hear about or see a park in Germany called Phatasialand? I grew up on with the park(20 min from my grandmothers house) In hindsight it was a straight Disney rip off. They had a Chinese Rickshaw ride in the style of Haunted Mansion, a mine train coaster, a flume ride, western saloon show with themed area. a small monorail, a jungle cruise type ride, an indoor space coater, a a main street that had a Brandeberg gate replica at the end, they also had a fantasy forest that these little areas where you would insert a coin and an animatronic show would tell a short version of different fairytale s. I am curious on your take if you saw it and on whether there were every any discussions @ Disney about these type of copycat parks in other countries. (Looking at their website now much of what I remember from 20 years ago has been changed but the still do a fair amount of theming.)
Yes. I have been there. In fact, when I worked at Knott's Berry Farm, the daughter of the owner, Britta, was sent to work with me in my office for a week or so to learn about American Theme Parks (also worked at DL). She was really kind, and gave me a souvenir guidebook, (then I was shocked at what a ripoff it was) but I did not see it till I was at Disney.
During the construction of DLP, I was invited (to represent WDI) to travel with Eisner,Wells and their families across Europe to visit many competing theme parks. With the core design team we had been to most of them prior to design including Phantasialand, but this time we would see Michael's take on it. He was not pleased. He remarked that they had alot of guts to actually be proud of how well they copied things and wanted to show those works off! They steal your ideas and then ask for an autograph! We were all treated like celebrities by these parks, amazing.
I think our visit to PL included a big lunch at some beer garden and we seldom had time to see all of the shows, in that they wanted him to autograph books for their kids and do photo ops. Weird. All these parks saw his visit as an endorsement of what they had done. We did go to Europa Park which has "Europa Mouse" as it's mascot. They made Eisner take a picture with their "Rat Fink" of a mouse. So funny and you could tell he hated doing it, but smiled just the same. He was super gracious to all of them, but inside was fuming because they had copied so many Disney rides that he worried that the public (who may have not seen our parks) might think the reverse when they arrive,
that we had copied them! Can't Disney think of anything new? So we did, and got the right to change things a bit. Losing the JC was not a bad thing in that so many parks copied that sort of thing. I wish I could recall the exact notes from those visits.
When he visited Tivoli, I think I recall someone puking and it landing on his shoe or something. This kind of reinforced his preference against heavy booze in the parks. Not sure.
The thing about ripoffs, is that you can't do anything about it, but in fact Disneyland is a ripoff in itself. Tivoli Gardens gave Walt the pastoral inspiration behind DL being so lush and the twinkle lighting everywhere. It's more of a "park" and so is DL with it's flowers and gardens to enjoy. A big inspiration. In fact, on one trip to Tivoli with Tony, he and I rode some dark ride where you spin the car like a teacup, then and there we decided that idea was coming to DL, and that mode of movement ended up as "Roger Rabbit's Cartoon Spin".
