Interview with Bob Iger about the Parks

[TwilightZone]

Gonna take a big leap here and guess that it's because, despite its flaws and its need for improvement, Epcot is neither boring nor irrelevant and in most areas is not even particularly dated.

Or because most people go to orlando for a disney vacation not a universal one.
Plus there's two distinct disadvantages.
The first is people without know how don't know there's two parks of harry potter, not just one.
The second is people with know how know that Universal Orlando is chock full of simulators and doesn't have many unique rides compared to disney world.

 

[Sneezy62]

I'm not sure if he was intentionally calling out Expedition Everest, a bit of a weird thing to say, unless he thinks there's some other coaster out there that's cheaply done (??) Disney execs usually don't try to bad-mouth their own attractions, even if they don't like them.

I don’t think his “nondescript coaster maybe set in India” comment was about Everest. Am I wrong in thinking this? Everest is anything but nondescript. I think he’s just saying Disney does storytelling better than a Six Flag attraction that is just plopped there.

If he can’t describe it synergistically with a movie title, it’s “non-descript”. Wo betide Harambe and Anandapur.

 

[larryz]

Remarkable people don't have these same criticisms of Universal parks. Reeks of an agenda.

Is that you, Doc?

 

[TrojanUSC]

Can't argue with success.

And why do Iger's critics praise Uni for the same approach?

Universal was a movie studio first, whose tagline for the first ten years of the park operating in Florida was where you could "Ride the movies!" That's all the ever were. Disney parks were always about something bigger. Sure synergy was always a part of it, but there were themed lands/experiences that you couldn't experience anywhere else, that didn't require knowledge of a franchise to understand the experience, that transported you to another place, time or location.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

It's a remarkably specific example for it not to be Everest.

Wasn't Everest the last major ride green-lit by Eisner? Comes across a bit like "what a dummy he was for building rides not about movies".

 

[Animaniac93-98]

Universal was a movie studio first, whose tagline for the first ten years of the park operating in Florida was where you could "Ride the movies!" That's all the ever were. Disney parks were always about something bigger. Sure synergy was always a part of it, but there were themed lands/experiences that you couldn't experience anywhere else, that didn't require knowledge of a franchise to understand the experience, that transported you to another place, time or location.

I've said this before, Disney is copying Universal's business model.

And they think they're brilliant for doing so.

 

[WondersOfLife]

To be more accurate, they didn't know Universal would do Harry Potter "with success".

Potterland opened in 2010, a year after they'd already broken ground on Cars Land. And Cars Land set the bar even higher for how successful an IP Land can be, but it was already designed and under construction when Potterland opened and proved that Disney's hunch was right.

Wellp. The more you know! I always forget about cars land and immediately think of avatarland first every time.

 

[WondersOfLife]

I don't know but I've bought more than a few yeti items and nothing slinky dog. Lol My kids had to have a yeti plush.

That’s cool. I don’t have any evidence backing me up, it’s just an assumption that I believe to be true. Do with that as you will.

 

[DisneyCane]

He really only sees parks as an extension of the film side of the buisness. No big surprise there.

Wasn't Walt's original DL vision to have the park be cross tied with the film/TV studio? Granted, there were at least some things unique vs. Iger's one giant "ride the movies" vision.

 

[FigmentJedi]

Don't you all realize that Disneyland was THE ORIGINAL movie studio IP theme park? Not Universal. Disneyland. Disneyland opened with IP-related attractions ON DAY ONE and continued to build them from 1955 onward. Look at the original list of opening day attractions that were, in fact, directly tied into Disney produced movies, such as Snow White's Adventure, Peter Pan's Flight, Mad Tea Party, and on and on. This was followed by regular IP-related attractions added during Walt's time and beyond including everything from the Matterhorn (yes, based on a Disney movie), to the Swiss Family Treehouse, and eventually Star Tours, Indiana Jones, and more - all well before Iger's time. Yes, some legendary attractions were not IP-based but a large chunk have always been, and right from the beginning!

And most of what you described from the Walt days was contained in Fantasyland and other then Swiss Family Treehouse, most attractions that did take inspiration from movies did just that: inspiration. There is no James MacArthur animatronic in the Matterhorn Bobsleds, it's just there because Walt felt compelled to put the mountain in his park while visiting the location shooting. There was no giant paintbrush or Winston Hibler in Nature's Wonderland or the Jungle Cruise, just an old prospecting coot and some guys that quickly started making puns about the animals guiding us through those respective wildernesses. Now you might ask, what about Frontierland and Davy Crockett? Davy Crockett's TV serial was created to promote the park. Disney didn't have any Frontierland-ish content to fill those slots on the television show (like they had to serialize So Dear to My Heart and Treasure Island of all things as Frontierland content before Crockett was ready), so they had to make something new. Same thing with Tomorrowland.

Finding a balance between original content and IPs, using the parks to inspire new projects, or transforming film concepts into entirely new ideas has been part of things from the beginning, but now everything's starting to tip towards needing everything to be movie character-driven. And when Disney is primarily concerned with pushing only a handful of franchises in a limited selection of genres in a very specific manner, things stagnate. And Disney Animation has known this before, hence why the late 90s/early 2000s started branching out into different territories. Atlantis was specifically imagined as "We need an Adventureland movie after spending so much time making Fantasyland movies" by the directors. People are drawn to park-original attractions because very often, they're rare examples of Disney playing around with a certain genre or setting.

 

[Sharon&Susan]

Don't you all realize that Disneyland was THE ORIGINAL movie studio IP theme park? Not Universal. Disneyland. Disneyland opened with IP-related attractions ON DAY ONE and continued to build them from 1955 onward. Look at the original list of opening day attractions that were, in fact, directly tied into Disney produced movies, such as Snow White's Adventure, Peter Pan's Flight, Mad Tea Party, and on and on.

And how many of the rides outside of Fantasyland were Disney Ip related? Davy Crockett is from a TV show based off Disneyland.

This was followed by regular IP-related attractions added during Walt's time and beyond including everything from the Matterhorn

How were guests in 1959 supposed to associate The Matterhorn with Third Man on the Mountain (Trivia Books printed in 2005 don’t count)? Does it have anything to do with the film other than it being a Swiss Mountain? Is It’s a Small World an IP based because it has Mexico in it and The Three Caballeros has Mexico in it and both have Mary Blair designed children?

 

[Jenny72]

The early IPs (Snow White, Peter Pan, Mr. Toad, etc.) were also very different than IPs such as Guardians or Toy Story. They were based on public domain classic literature/fairy tales and broad ideas that focused on games that children play. I don't doubt that some notion of "synergy" was part of the equation, but I always think it's odd when people compare IPs like Peter Pan to IPs like Guardians of the Galaxy. To me they are nothing alike. It's one of the reasons that injecting IP feels different now. I knew who Snow White was before seeing the movie. Groot is not featured in Grimm's fairy tales, though.

 

[Jenny72]

I think you're missing my point. (As for the fairy tales, yes, they were translated and made gentler--but that happened before Disney, when they were translated into English. Obviously the movies also made adaptations of course.) But my argument is not that people didn't come to see Mickey Mouse and Snow White, etc. Of course they did. I'm saying that those IPs are bigger, broader, more public, more in the common imagination. Snow White and Peter Pan are more timeless than, e.g., Guardians of the Galaxy. There is a different feel to an IP that has been around for centuries, where I can read it in various languages, and an IP with Chris Pratt and snarky jokes. Hey, I enjoyed Guardians. But it's a different kind of IP.

 

[FigmentJedi]

LOL. History is your friend... look it up. Davy Crocket aired in 1954 (and continued into 55 - that's before Disneyland opened.) Third Man and the Matterhorn were basically done at the same time. You can't have more tie in than that...

And Frontierland existed in Disneyland's earliest planning phases ever since 1951, before Disney even went into television.

And again, there is a difference between inspiration and adaptation and Third Man on the Mountain's influence on Matterhorn is much more the former.

 

[Sharon&Susan]

LOL. History is your friend... look it up. Davy Crocket aired in 1954 (and continued into 55 - that's before Disneyland opened.)

And Davy Crockett aired on a show called Disneyland and within the first episode of Disneyland explained Disneyland the place and also announced that the life of Davy Crockett would be serialized on Disneyland the show. Would you call a Golden Book based off The Lion King that was released a few months prior, the inspiration for The Lion King?

Third Man and the Matterhorn were basically done at the same time. You can't have more tie in than that...

Cat From Outer Space and Disneyland’s Space Mountain were being developed around the same time. You can’t have much more tie in than that..

 

[TwilightZone]

Would you call a Golden Book based off The Lion King that was released a few months prior, the inspiration for The Lion King?

We all know the real inspiration is Kimba

 

[TrojanUSC]

Not sure I get the difference.. my point is that tying studio-developed stories (regardless of whether it's TV or Movie or Comic Book) and theme park attractions together = IP and this has been what Disney has been about since 1955....

Yes, but for every IP-based attraction they have always developed a good amount of non-IP stuff. A nice mix of offerings. Today not one single thing even gets close to being greenlit without tying into a franchise. The one thing they did (Rivers of Light) was a bad show and is now used as an example of why you need IP in every nighttime show.

 

[FigmentJedi]

Not sure I get the difference.. my point is that tying studio-developed stories (regardless of whether it's TV or Movie or Comic Book) and theme park attractions together = IP and this has been what Disney has been about since 1955....

What part of the Matterhorn Bobsleds adapts the story of Rudi Matt's climb up the mountain that killed his father? There have been mountain climbers at Disneyland for years, but I think they only ever referred to them as Hans and Uter or something. And keeping in mind that it was in the original '59 plans for the ride, but ended up being shelved for budget, what part of Third Man on the Mountain involved an Abominable Snowman chasing people? The movie's theme song "Climb that Mountain" isn't even featured in the queue, just endless yodeling. If Matterhorn was meant to sell a movie first and be a ride second, it's not really doing its job.

My point is that there's quite a bit of early non-animated IP use at Disneyland that was more about taking concepts and recycling/recombining them into new experiences that functionally have broken off completely from their sources and become their own thing. And also that arguments like the "1955 Frontierland was just Davy Crockett Land" thing are vast oversimplifications and Disneyland's early history and the interaction between the park and film/television in those early years and the park's identity in general was more complex then Disneyland being just a three-dimensional walkthrough billboard.

 

[FigmentJedi]

Yes, but for every IP-based attraction they have always developed a good amount of non-IP stuff. A nice mix of offerings. Today not one single thing even gets close to being greenlit without tying into a franchise. The one thing they did (Rivers of Light) was a bad show and is not used as an example of why you need IP in even nighttime shows.

Rivers of Light itself is an IP show, repurposing DIsney Nature film footage into its new narrative, just as Jungle Cruise and Nature's Wonderland repurposed bits and pieces of the True Life Adventures to create new experiences that become entirely new entities. People miss this because Nature Documentary Animals are not Marketable Brand Characters. You don't go on the Jungle Cruise and say "Look, it's the African Lion from the film "The African Lion"".

 

[FigmentJedi]

Meanwhile, just posted on Joe Rohde's Instagram...