You know what Universal is really, really good at right now that seems like a lost art at Disney? Effectively pandering to fans. There are lots of examples, but to pick the most immediately relevant one, last year HHN fans picked out a single Jack O'Lantern in a vast web of carved pumpkins in a distant corner of the park and made it the subject of memes and endless conversation in fan communities. This year, that pumpkin is the icon of the event, plastered on every kind of merchandise and featured prominently in multiple locations throughout the parks. This is part of a much larger trend of Universal seeming to "play along" with fans. Yes, its crassly commercial, yes, the ultimate goal is merchandise sales, yes, their is something exploitative in corporations coopting fan production - but quite frankly, all of that is baked into the theme park experience at a fundamental level. The trick is to hide the less savory parts of the interaction, to let things be fun, to allow guests to think someone, somewhere in the Comcast corporate labyrinth actually LIKES theme parks in the same way fans do.
Disney used to know all this, to be good at the game of profiting from guests while also letting them feel like they were something more then consumers and that someone at Disney actually enjoyed being part of the world's leading theme park company. When you look at what Disney has put forward for the resort's 50th and EPCOT's 40th, you realize that its not simply that Disney doesn't care about pretending to care anymore, its that they fundamentally don't know how - they've lost so much institutional knowledge that they couldn't effectively correct course if they wanted to. Disney no longer understands the basics of how theme parks should relate to guests.
www.wdwmagic.com
www.shopdisney.co.uk
