Where Do All Those Bad Ideas Come From?
The Fall of Walt Disney Imagineering, Part One of Two
By Tom Morrow
How is it possible that the same people who created EPCOT Center, Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure and Tokyo Disney Seas, also created Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios Paris, DinoRama, and Journey into YOUR Imagination? The answer is simple...they didn't. There was a severe power shift at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) in the early-90s, which completely changed the creative landscape. The best ideas no longer made it into the parks, and WDI fell victim to the kind of personal politics and rampant cronyism that is often associated with Hollywood studios. Many talented Imagineers were laid off or put out to pasture, while finance executives were given the power to make creative decisions.
It helps to have a historical perspective.
1984 to 1992 - Michael & Frank
For his first eight years, Michael Eisner enjoyed a very positive relationship with the creatives at WDI. He and Disney President, Frank Wells, visited the WDI facility in Glendale frequently. They had the final say over which projects made it into the parks and which were destined never to leave the drawing board.
It should be noted that during those years, it was always Michael and Frank. Michael clearly looked to Frank for guidance. Although technically the CEO, Michael was younger and less experienced then Frank. And Frank reported directly to the Company's Board of Directors-not to Michael. They were true partners; Michael Eisner made no important company decisions without Frank's blessing. One of his most valuable qualities was the ability to look beyond the numbers on the spreadsheet, and make a decision based on the creative merit of an idea. It was this type of thinking (on the part of both Michael and Frank) that lead to the creation of attractions like Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure and Fantasmic! (often over the objections of the newly created Strategic Planning group).
1992 to 1993 - The beginning of the end
In 1992, the Walt Disney Company unveiled another masterpiece of imagination, Euro Disneyland (later re-named Disneyland Paris). The park was beautiful and complete with all the lavish detail and meticulous theming you'd expect to find in a Disney theme park. Financially, it flopped. Decisions made on the corporate level (the location of the park, an excessive number of hotel rooms, and few concessions to local culture) doomed the project, but the blame was placed on Walt Disney Imagineering. Michael Eisner decided that the creative folks in Glendale were spending too much money and would need to be controlled.
Unwilling to admit that the failure of Disneyland Paris was his, Eisner began ten years of enforcing tighter and tighter restraints over Walt Disney Imagineering. The first step in this process involved the Disney Development Company (DDC). At the time, DDC was separate from WDI. DDC was responsible for everything "outside the berm." They built hotels, office buildings, and golf courses-conventional construction. Eisner decided to merge the two units into one. He placed the former DDC executives (lead by Peter Rummell) over the WDI creative executives (lead by Marty Sklar). Convention over innovation. From this point onward, WDI would not be run by the apprentices of Walt's original creative team, it would instead be lead by land developers.
In 1994, WDI lost one of its biggest supporters, Frank Wells. The one-two punch of the financial failure of Disneyland Paris and the death of Frank Wells would set WDI on a course that would lead to its creative demise.
1994 to 1998 - The pendulum starts to swing
Walt Disney Imagineering has always been a difficult organization to run. Managing artists is a lot like herding cats. In the early-90s, the chief cat herder was Mickey Steinberg. Steinberg wasn't always well liked by the creative folk, but he respected the specialized nature of their work...and it showed in the results. He presided over successful projects like the Magic Kingdom's Splash Mountain and the Disney-MGM Studios' Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. But Steinberg would receive a quasi-demotion when Peter Rummell and his land development executives arrived. Mickey Steinberg would eventually choose to leave. Marty Sklar, the long-time President of WDI, would receive a very real demotion and find himself subordinate to Rummell. Sklar would stay; his authority diminished. Marty Sklar would become the head of the "Creative Development" department-the core creative group at Imagineering.
Rummell's mandate was clear; to deliver projects on budget and on schedule. Obviously, this is a necessary goal for a division of a public stock company. But because WDI is an organization whose success is founded on innovation and nurtured by a pioneering spirit, those who establish the limits of schedule and budget must be equally innovative and pioneering in nature. In other words, conventional estimating and scheduling practices don't apply. Keep in mind, almost every attraction WDI has created throughout its 52-year history has been a prototype. Managing the design and construction of a fairytale castle or 180-foot geosphere requires a different set of principles then building tract housing or a string of Taco Bells.
During this same time, a drastic role-reversal took place. WDI was forced into taking a subservient role to Park Operations. Local park management became the "owners" of the parks. WDI must now be "hired" to make additions or modifications to the parks (the money would reside with Park Operations). From this point forward, the parks and WDI would operate as independent companies. Today, the parks contract the WDI design firm the same way you would hire a plumber to fix your leaky pipes. This puts the parks in a power position and leaves the old WDI Creative Development department with three different bosses, each with a different agenda...Peter Rummell and the land developers, the Park Operations executives, and the Strategic Planning department.
1998 - Disney's Animal Kingdom
The pendulum reaches its halfway point but doesn't stop swinging.
Disney's Animal Kingdom opened at a unique time in the history of WDI. The creative culture was still strong enough that it was not willing to compromise on quality-just quantity. If you've been to Disney's Animal Kingdom, you've seen it first hand. The park is beautifully themed, with the quality guests have come to expect from Disney. The attraction roster, however, is short. No problem, thought the Imagineers, attractions can be added after opening-so long as the park concept is sound and the existing attractions are up to the high Disney standards. After all, Disney-MGM Studios was skimpy on attractions when it opened too, but within a few years, enough had been added to bring it up to the level of the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. Disney's Animal Kingdom, the Imagineers thought, would do the same.
But no new attractions would be developed for Animal Kingdom for several years. The visionary Park Operations chief that had championed Disney's Animal Kingdom, Judson Green, had fallen out of favor with Michael Eisner. His replacement would have a very different agenda.
1999 to 2002 - The Pressler Years
Let's break from the WDI timeline briefly to get the backstory on Paul Pressler...
Paul Pressler was the president of the Disney Stores from 1992 to 1995. He gained the position when Steve Burke, the founder of the stores, was moved over to rescue the ailing Euro Disney project. Burke once described the Disney Stores as "little out-posts of Disney culture." He wanted to limit the number of stores in order to keep them special in the eyes of the public. Paul Pressler did not share this philosophy. He was fortunate enough to gain his position as head of the Stores at the same time that Walt Disney Feature Animation was going through its new renaissance. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Lion King were on top of the box office, and merchandise from those films was in demand. Pressler seized this opportunity, and the short-term gains were tremendous. He added new stores as fast as possible-fulfilling the very high (and very temporary) demand for Disney character merchandise. In the long-term, the results were disastrous. Without the demand for Disney merchandise (a direct result of the missteps of Animation-synergy works both ways) the Disney Stores would lose their luster and collapse under their own weight. But none of this blame would land on Pressler. In 1995 he jumped ship to become the President of Disneyland. He openly admitted not being fond of theme parks, but he was the golden boy of the hour and received the much-coveted job.
From 1995 to 1999 he squeezed every penny out of Disneyland, making dramatic budget cuts and focusing attention on merchandise promotions and suggestive-selling programs. Hard selling was never the Disney way-in fact it was the antithesis of Walt's philosophy. Just like at the Disney Stores, Paul Pressler would impress his bosses by achieving short-term gains and the expense of the long-term health of his business unit. Stores became more important than attractions.
Some of Disneyland's classic attractions would be shuttered to save costs, among them Skyway and Submarine Voyage, both closed without replacement. The 1998 redesign of Tomorrowland would also be impacted by budget cuts, even as the project was underway. Warnings from the traditional Imagineers went unheeded and the resulting Tomorrowland proved a disaster with both guests and operations (with its signature attraction, Rocket Rods, closing within two years).
Many of the most significant budget cuts effected Disneyland maintenance. The financial price of these decisions is being paid today. Disneyland, long regarded for its cleanliness and efficient maintenance practices, is being forced into a dramatic refurbishment program to bring the park up to its old standards-including a 28 month refurbishment of one of it's signature attractions, Space Mountain. But the price wasn't only financial. Paul Pressler would later be quoted in the LA Times as saying, "We have to ride these rides to failure to save money." The article was prompted by an accident on Big Thunder Mountain that was the result of maintenance failures. The accident took the life of a young man who was visiting the park with friends.
This brings us back to 1999 and catches us up with our WDI timeline...
In 1999, Paul Pressler became the President of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and shortly afterwards would be named Chairman. He was given a more powerful role than any other Parks & Resorts chief in history. He wasn't only supervising Park Operations, he was put in charge of Imagineering as well.
Paul Pressler was already well known to WDI by 1999. As President of Disneyland, he had been intimately involved with the design and development of Disney's California Adventure. Pressler helped shape the concept and determined the budget for the park. It was reported that the overall expansion of the Disneyland Resort was well over one billion dollars. Most of that money did not go into California Adventure; in fact, the park received less then half of the investment. Most of the money went into the new parking structure, Downtown Disney, and especially the Grand Californian Hotel. The park designers would have to work with crumbs. But Paul Pressler wasn't just the guy holding the purse strings anymore, as Chairman of Parks & Resorts he had creative approval as well. For the first time in Disney history, a moneyman was dictating "creative" changes to the artists at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Paul Pressler had convinced everyone on the Parks & Resorts team that Disney's California Adventure would be an unparalleled success. In the days leading up to the opening of California Adventure, the Director of Attractions at Disneyland, Paul Yeargin, openly discussed his concerns that Disney's California Adventure would fill to capacity every day. He thought the resort's biggest problem would be disappointed guests, who, after traveling a great distance to see California Adventure would have to settle for Disneyland instead. Yeargin and other Disneyland executives made decisions based on this premise. Including a now infamous decision by Disneyland Resort President, Cynthia Harriss, to restrict Annual Passholders from using their passes at Disney's California Adventure for the first few months after opening. This decision only served to anger the already disgruntled 400,000 passholders who provide a significant amount of revenue for the resort. Harriss and Yeargin, like many of the Disneyland executives, had followed Pressler over from the Disney Stores and had no previous theme park experience.
Then in February 2001, the world saw what had been festering behind closed doors at WDI for the past several years. Disney's California Adventure opening in the old Disneyland parking lot. It was a mix of off-the-shelf carnival rides and film-based attractions. When Walt's close friend and long-time Imagineer, John Hench, saw the park for the first time he said, "I liked it better as a parking lot." WDI would try to fix California Adventure any way they could. They threw attractions at it left and right...Who Wants to be A Millionaire, a bug's land, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, even the Main Street Electrical Parade would come out of moth balls. None of it worked, of course.
All these projects were subject to the same approval process as Disney's California Adventure. Park Operations (Paul Pressler) would need to approve the concept and budget for the new attraction. The Strategic Planning department would then determine if the project were economically feasible. Then if the project were approved, it would be supervised by Project Management to make sure the creatives didn't try to improve the attraction after it was in production. Of course, all these new systems of control came with a price tag, which drove up the cost of the projects. The Walt Disney Company was spending more money on bureaucracy and less on the attraction itself. In the end, the paying guest got shortchanged.
At WDI, it was taboo to suggest that there was something wrong with California Adventure or the any of the new attractions. At first, WDI management said that the weather was to blame. When the weather cleared up, they blamed the economy. Then they used the new standby...people were scared to travel after September 11th. None of these excuses were valid because Disneyland continued to have much more respectable attendance figures (it's hard to image the weather or economic conditions could be so drastically different ninety feet to the south).
It would seem that WDI could sink no further, but in March of 2002, Pressler (along with former strategic planner Jay Rasulo) opened the only Disney theme park less impressive then California Adventure...Walt Disney Studios Paris. The park failed so miserably, it forced Disneyland Paris into a debt re-structuring plan that currently threatens the future existence of the resort. The pendulum had swung to the other extreme. Walt Disney Studios Paris is the total opposite of Disneyland Paris. It is a theme park by the numbers-designed with a spreadsheet instead of paint and brush.
In Part Two, Tom looks at today's WDI and its burdensome bureaucracy.
The Fall of Walt Disney Imagineering, Part One of Two
By Tom Morrow
How is it possible that the same people who created EPCOT Center, Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure and Tokyo Disney Seas, also created Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios Paris, DinoRama, and Journey into YOUR Imagination? The answer is simple...they didn't. There was a severe power shift at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) in the early-90s, which completely changed the creative landscape. The best ideas no longer made it into the parks, and WDI fell victim to the kind of personal politics and rampant cronyism that is often associated with Hollywood studios. Many talented Imagineers were laid off or put out to pasture, while finance executives were given the power to make creative decisions.
It helps to have a historical perspective.
1984 to 1992 - Michael & Frank
For his first eight years, Michael Eisner enjoyed a very positive relationship with the creatives at WDI. He and Disney President, Frank Wells, visited the WDI facility in Glendale frequently. They had the final say over which projects made it into the parks and which were destined never to leave the drawing board.
It should be noted that during those years, it was always Michael and Frank. Michael clearly looked to Frank for guidance. Although technically the CEO, Michael was younger and less experienced then Frank. And Frank reported directly to the Company's Board of Directors-not to Michael. They were true partners; Michael Eisner made no important company decisions without Frank's blessing. One of his most valuable qualities was the ability to look beyond the numbers on the spreadsheet, and make a decision based on the creative merit of an idea. It was this type of thinking (on the part of both Michael and Frank) that lead to the creation of attractions like Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure and Fantasmic! (often over the objections of the newly created Strategic Planning group).
1992 to 1993 - The beginning of the end
In 1992, the Walt Disney Company unveiled another masterpiece of imagination, Euro Disneyland (later re-named Disneyland Paris). The park was beautiful and complete with all the lavish detail and meticulous theming you'd expect to find in a Disney theme park. Financially, it flopped. Decisions made on the corporate level (the location of the park, an excessive number of hotel rooms, and few concessions to local culture) doomed the project, but the blame was placed on Walt Disney Imagineering. Michael Eisner decided that the creative folks in Glendale were spending too much money and would need to be controlled.
Unwilling to admit that the failure of Disneyland Paris was his, Eisner began ten years of enforcing tighter and tighter restraints over Walt Disney Imagineering. The first step in this process involved the Disney Development Company (DDC). At the time, DDC was separate from WDI. DDC was responsible for everything "outside the berm." They built hotels, office buildings, and golf courses-conventional construction. Eisner decided to merge the two units into one. He placed the former DDC executives (lead by Peter Rummell) over the WDI creative executives (lead by Marty Sklar). Convention over innovation. From this point onward, WDI would not be run by the apprentices of Walt's original creative team, it would instead be lead by land developers.
In 1994, WDI lost one of its biggest supporters, Frank Wells. The one-two punch of the financial failure of Disneyland Paris and the death of Frank Wells would set WDI on a course that would lead to its creative demise.
1994 to 1998 - The pendulum starts to swing
Walt Disney Imagineering has always been a difficult organization to run. Managing artists is a lot like herding cats. In the early-90s, the chief cat herder was Mickey Steinberg. Steinberg wasn't always well liked by the creative folk, but he respected the specialized nature of their work...and it showed in the results. He presided over successful projects like the Magic Kingdom's Splash Mountain and the Disney-MGM Studios' Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. But Steinberg would receive a quasi-demotion when Peter Rummell and his land development executives arrived. Mickey Steinberg would eventually choose to leave. Marty Sklar, the long-time President of WDI, would receive a very real demotion and find himself subordinate to Rummell. Sklar would stay; his authority diminished. Marty Sklar would become the head of the "Creative Development" department-the core creative group at Imagineering.
Rummell's mandate was clear; to deliver projects on budget and on schedule. Obviously, this is a necessary goal for a division of a public stock company. But because WDI is an organization whose success is founded on innovation and nurtured by a pioneering spirit, those who establish the limits of schedule and budget must be equally innovative and pioneering in nature. In other words, conventional estimating and scheduling practices don't apply. Keep in mind, almost every attraction WDI has created throughout its 52-year history has been a prototype. Managing the design and construction of a fairytale castle or 180-foot geosphere requires a different set of principles then building tract housing or a string of Taco Bells.
During this same time, a drastic role-reversal took place. WDI was forced into taking a subservient role to Park Operations. Local park management became the "owners" of the parks. WDI must now be "hired" to make additions or modifications to the parks (the money would reside with Park Operations). From this point forward, the parks and WDI would operate as independent companies. Today, the parks contract the WDI design firm the same way you would hire a plumber to fix your leaky pipes. This puts the parks in a power position and leaves the old WDI Creative Development department with three different bosses, each with a different agenda...Peter Rummell and the land developers, the Park Operations executives, and the Strategic Planning department.
1998 - Disney's Animal Kingdom
The pendulum reaches its halfway point but doesn't stop swinging.
Disney's Animal Kingdom opened at a unique time in the history of WDI. The creative culture was still strong enough that it was not willing to compromise on quality-just quantity. If you've been to Disney's Animal Kingdom, you've seen it first hand. The park is beautifully themed, with the quality guests have come to expect from Disney. The attraction roster, however, is short. No problem, thought the Imagineers, attractions can be added after opening-so long as the park concept is sound and the existing attractions are up to the high Disney standards. After all, Disney-MGM Studios was skimpy on attractions when it opened too, but within a few years, enough had been added to bring it up to the level of the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. Disney's Animal Kingdom, the Imagineers thought, would do the same.
But no new attractions would be developed for Animal Kingdom for several years. The visionary Park Operations chief that had championed Disney's Animal Kingdom, Judson Green, had fallen out of favor with Michael Eisner. His replacement would have a very different agenda.
1999 to 2002 - The Pressler Years
Let's break from the WDI timeline briefly to get the backstory on Paul Pressler...
Paul Pressler was the president of the Disney Stores from 1992 to 1995. He gained the position when Steve Burke, the founder of the stores, was moved over to rescue the ailing Euro Disney project. Burke once described the Disney Stores as "little out-posts of Disney culture." He wanted to limit the number of stores in order to keep them special in the eyes of the public. Paul Pressler did not share this philosophy. He was fortunate enough to gain his position as head of the Stores at the same time that Walt Disney Feature Animation was going through its new renaissance. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Lion King were on top of the box office, and merchandise from those films was in demand. Pressler seized this opportunity, and the short-term gains were tremendous. He added new stores as fast as possible-fulfilling the very high (and very temporary) demand for Disney character merchandise. In the long-term, the results were disastrous. Without the demand for Disney merchandise (a direct result of the missteps of Animation-synergy works both ways) the Disney Stores would lose their luster and collapse under their own weight. But none of this blame would land on Pressler. In 1995 he jumped ship to become the President of Disneyland. He openly admitted not being fond of theme parks, but he was the golden boy of the hour and received the much-coveted job.
From 1995 to 1999 he squeezed every penny out of Disneyland, making dramatic budget cuts and focusing attention on merchandise promotions and suggestive-selling programs. Hard selling was never the Disney way-in fact it was the antithesis of Walt's philosophy. Just like at the Disney Stores, Paul Pressler would impress his bosses by achieving short-term gains and the expense of the long-term health of his business unit. Stores became more important than attractions.
Some of Disneyland's classic attractions would be shuttered to save costs, among them Skyway and Submarine Voyage, both closed without replacement. The 1998 redesign of Tomorrowland would also be impacted by budget cuts, even as the project was underway. Warnings from the traditional Imagineers went unheeded and the resulting Tomorrowland proved a disaster with both guests and operations (with its signature attraction, Rocket Rods, closing within two years).
Many of the most significant budget cuts effected Disneyland maintenance. The financial price of these decisions is being paid today. Disneyland, long regarded for its cleanliness and efficient maintenance practices, is being forced into a dramatic refurbishment program to bring the park up to its old standards-including a 28 month refurbishment of one of it's signature attractions, Space Mountain. But the price wasn't only financial. Paul Pressler would later be quoted in the LA Times as saying, "We have to ride these rides to failure to save money." The article was prompted by an accident on Big Thunder Mountain that was the result of maintenance failures. The accident took the life of a young man who was visiting the park with friends.
This brings us back to 1999 and catches us up with our WDI timeline...
In 1999, Paul Pressler became the President of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and shortly afterwards would be named Chairman. He was given a more powerful role than any other Parks & Resorts chief in history. He wasn't only supervising Park Operations, he was put in charge of Imagineering as well.
Paul Pressler was already well known to WDI by 1999. As President of Disneyland, he had been intimately involved with the design and development of Disney's California Adventure. Pressler helped shape the concept and determined the budget for the park. It was reported that the overall expansion of the Disneyland Resort was well over one billion dollars. Most of that money did not go into California Adventure; in fact, the park received less then half of the investment. Most of the money went into the new parking structure, Downtown Disney, and especially the Grand Californian Hotel. The park designers would have to work with crumbs. But Paul Pressler wasn't just the guy holding the purse strings anymore, as Chairman of Parks & Resorts he had creative approval as well. For the first time in Disney history, a moneyman was dictating "creative" changes to the artists at Walt Disney Imagineering.
Paul Pressler had convinced everyone on the Parks & Resorts team that Disney's California Adventure would be an unparalleled success. In the days leading up to the opening of California Adventure, the Director of Attractions at Disneyland, Paul Yeargin, openly discussed his concerns that Disney's California Adventure would fill to capacity every day. He thought the resort's biggest problem would be disappointed guests, who, after traveling a great distance to see California Adventure would have to settle for Disneyland instead. Yeargin and other Disneyland executives made decisions based on this premise. Including a now infamous decision by Disneyland Resort President, Cynthia Harriss, to restrict Annual Passholders from using their passes at Disney's California Adventure for the first few months after opening. This decision only served to anger the already disgruntled 400,000 passholders who provide a significant amount of revenue for the resort. Harriss and Yeargin, like many of the Disneyland executives, had followed Pressler over from the Disney Stores and had no previous theme park experience.
Then in February 2001, the world saw what had been festering behind closed doors at WDI for the past several years. Disney's California Adventure opening in the old Disneyland parking lot. It was a mix of off-the-shelf carnival rides and film-based attractions. When Walt's close friend and long-time Imagineer, John Hench, saw the park for the first time he said, "I liked it better as a parking lot." WDI would try to fix California Adventure any way they could. They threw attractions at it left and right...Who Wants to be A Millionaire, a bug's land, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, even the Main Street Electrical Parade would come out of moth balls. None of it worked, of course.
All these projects were subject to the same approval process as Disney's California Adventure. Park Operations (Paul Pressler) would need to approve the concept and budget for the new attraction. The Strategic Planning department would then determine if the project were economically feasible. Then if the project were approved, it would be supervised by Project Management to make sure the creatives didn't try to improve the attraction after it was in production. Of course, all these new systems of control came with a price tag, which drove up the cost of the projects. The Walt Disney Company was spending more money on bureaucracy and less on the attraction itself. In the end, the paying guest got shortchanged.
At WDI, it was taboo to suggest that there was something wrong with California Adventure or the any of the new attractions. At first, WDI management said that the weather was to blame. When the weather cleared up, they blamed the economy. Then they used the new standby...people were scared to travel after September 11th. None of these excuses were valid because Disneyland continued to have much more respectable attendance figures (it's hard to image the weather or economic conditions could be so drastically different ninety feet to the south).
It would seem that WDI could sink no further, but in March of 2002, Pressler (along with former strategic planner Jay Rasulo) opened the only Disney theme park less impressive then California Adventure...Walt Disney Studios Paris. The park failed so miserably, it forced Disneyland Paris into a debt re-structuring plan that currently threatens the future existence of the resort. The pendulum had swung to the other extreme. Walt Disney Studios Paris is the total opposite of Disneyland Paris. It is a theme park by the numbers-designed with a spreadsheet instead of paint and brush.
In Part Two, Tom looks at today's WDI and its burdensome bureaucracy.
