Yet another disappointment from our beloved company! Read and see.....
Current plans show China park looking like the latest on-the-cheap disappointment
By Jim Douglas
Note: All of the information about Hong Kong Disneyland contained in this article can be found at the Disney-maintained website: http://www.disney.com.hk/hkdisneyland/english/information.html.
Visiting Disney's California Adventure and seeing a theme park filled with cheap, pre-fabricated rides and sparsely visited film-based "attractions" is discouraging.
Spending a day at The Walt Disney Studios in Paris, where cost-cutting is apparent everywhere (but crowds are not) is heart-rending.
But based on the designs and information released to the public about Hong Kong Disneyland, the worst may be yet to come.
Information found at the Hong Kong Disneyland website and in news articles about the development indicate that Disney's cost-cutting has quite possibly reached a new low.
Although Disney claims the park "is modeled after the original Disneyland in California," nervous finance types have ensured that the park will lack virtually all of the charming rides and attractions that have made Disneyland so successful, and which have since become staples in California, Florida, Paris and Tokyo.
There will be no "Haunted Mansion" or "Pirates of the Caribbean." With one exception ("Winnie the Pooh") there will be no Fantasyland dark rides like "Peter Pan" or "Snow White's Adventures."
There will be no Matterhorn. No "Big Thunder." No "Autopia." No "Star Tours" or "Submarine Voyage" (not a surprise after the removal this popular, but expensive-to-operate, ride from Disneyland and Walt Disney World.)
Most astonishingly for a project that brings a little bit of American culture to China, there will be no "It's a Small World."
Yes, there will be a "Space Mountain." It's not the enormously influential and imaginative re-thinking of the ride found at Disneyland Paris. Instead, Hong Kong's sole Mountain will be similar to the 27-year-old ride found at Disneyland in California.
Then again, two entire lands found at the U.S. parks are missing: Frontierland and Toontown. Not just a couple of attractions - entire lands.
The entire project, including infrastructure and surrounding areas, is budgeted at $3.2 billion. That's about the same amount that the Oriental Land Company paid Disney to design and build the wildly successful Tokyo DisneySea. In Hong Kong, though, majority of the expense is being spent on a "Downtown Disney"-style shopping district and two themed hotels. One of those hotels looks just like the Grand Floridian in concept drawings, the other appears to be a carbon copy of the Ambassador Hotel at Tokyo Disneyland.
Indeed, the Hong Kong Disneyland website draws at least as much attention to the hotels and shops that will open in 2005 as it does to the park itself. In Anaheim, that "strategy" has proved to be a costly mistake.
After the financial disasters that have befallen Disney's California Adventure and The Walt Disney Studios in Paris, you might imagine Disney would have learned a valuable lesson: You can't sell the public cut-rate merchandise, charge them full price and still keep your good name intact. And if you try, the public's not going to buy it for very long. It's a basic rule of selling any product, but Disney has either forgotten or flagrantly ignored the concept.
(An aside: The Disneyland Paris park itself has never been a disappointment and has been a tourist draw since Day One. The Euro Disney Resorts continuing financial woes stem from a decision made in the early 1990s to open six large resort-style hotels just 30 miles away from central Paris, where many guests prefer to stay.)
Physically, Hong Kong is only 1,800 miles from Tokyo - but in Imagineering terms, the two couldn't be further apart.
The multi-billion-dollar Tokyo DisneySea continues to draw visitors from around the world who have heard tales about the extravagance and beauty of the park. It shows what Disney Imagineers are capable of doing when told to be creative first and worry about budgets later.
Since opening Tokyo DisneySea, Oriental Land Company has reaped rewards. Its growth has outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average by nearly 15 percent in the past year; the two parks attract an average of 70,000 visitors a day; and annual attendance has grown by an astonishing 43 percent since the Sept. 2001 opening of Tokyo DisneySea. (Yes, Japan lives in the same world of terrorist threats and economic woes that Michael Eisner claims have kept Disney theme park attendance down in the U.S.)
One reason for those profits: Tokyo Disneyland doesn't have large areas of its parks languishing. Unlike American parks - where entire sections of parks are shut down or left virtually empty - Tokyo Disneyland keeps its crowds flowing through impeccably maintained attractions.
There are even plans to build more hotels near the Tokyo Disney Resort. Wisely, though, those hotel rooms will open only after the park has enjoyed several years of consistent success.
Perhaps the planning and dedication to creating truly memorable experiences that OLC has demonstrated explains why Disney has sold most of its Japanese operations to the company - and why OLC's value has risen so sharply while Disney's has languished.
Of course, Hong Kong is not Tokyo. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear it will even be Anaheim or Lake Buena Vista.
No one has a crystal ball. Hong Kong Disneyland could surprise. But the detailed designs, plans and renderings that Disney has publicly presented show a cheaply built, poorly conceived park that merely capitalizes on, not expands, the Disney name.
By building its first Chinese theme park on the cheap, Disney's future growth in that nation - as well as its continued good will around the world - may be in even more serious jeopardy than anyone imagines.
