Roy Disney: DCA is "half a park"

Yep, look how bad Disney is doing now. The entire company is caving in and we'll slowly see it disappear into oblivion. ;)

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/031203/media_disney_record_1.html

Disney Pictures had their best year ever in 2003, which isn't surprising at all with the success of Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean, Bringing Down the House, Freaky Friday, Brother Bear, Haunted Mansion, Open Range, and much more. In general, they're very high quality films, so there's more proof that quality will be the thing that gets good word of mouth and will win out.

I think the theme parks, especially Animal Kingdom and DCA (one of my top 10 parks mind you and I went in 2001) are getting on track with the additions of the new coaster and Tower of Terror. The rest of the US parks are generally excellent parks for the audience they're looking for at each IMO.

-Danny

I Think that one of DCA's problems was all the high expectations for the park.

If anybody remembers the plans for WestCot,(The park that was going to be built where DCA is)you will think of a huge, DisneySea-ish park that was going to be Disney's greatest entertainment venue yet. It quite possibly would have been the Islands of Adventure for the west coast, and have ground-breaking rides and theming. The Centerpiece of the park was a huge Spaceship Earth like Ball, but it was going to be twice the size and painted metalic gold.

But then, Eisner began to think that WestCot was going to be too expensive to build, and slowly the project morphed into Disney's California Adventure, a park with normal rides that are just heavily themed.

Another thing is DCA lacks the things that people expect from Disney parks, and are most known and popular for: Spectacular submersive heavily themed dark rides/attractions with Animatronics. The 1 dark ride in the whole park was the laughing stock of the industry, it was soooo bad! Wonder how long it'll be before we see the Whoopie and Cher puppets on Ebay!

Building basically a heavily themed SF like 1/2 park next to the classic DL, with only 3 or 4 major rides, while charging the same admission as DL, was a recipe for disaster from the start. Like others have already said, for what DCA is and offers, they should be charging alot less for admission. The fully realized Westcot that Dukeis#1 described above on the other hand would have been a much better choice to compliment the world class Disneyland Park.*** This post was edited by jomo 12/4/2003 9:48:03 PM ***

Slightly OT but it has to be said - not often you see a sensible and serious discussion about something on here!!!

I think we can all agree that we all feel passionately one way or the other about this issue, and we all have our own take on what's happened/happening/is going to be.

For the tone to be this serious, some people must sure love the house of mouse. (myself included)

I'm more of an 'outsider' as i live in the UK and have only ever been to WDW - I've got no viewpoint on DCA or DL as I've never been, but i do agree that Eisner has done a lot of good for the company until Frank Wells' death - he was a brilliant right-hand man/string-puller (however you want to see it) and Eisner has slowly taered the company down, piece by piece.

But, to be fair, there are new attractions going in WDW (partly because of the competition) that carry a high price tag. Can we attribute those to him, or was somebody else making that decision?

All of the above is IMO, naturally.

Baz

Disney has done very well in the movie department this year, and I don't think a lot of people saw it coming.

Finding Nemo is one of the most breathtaking films I've ever seen, and as far as I'm concerned, Pixar are the most exciting film makers to come around in a long, long, long time. No problem here.

Pirates, before the release, had "disaster" written all over it, seeing as its....a fricking Pirate movie! lol. While the movie itself is pretty awful in general (this just one opinion from one hardcore movie fan) its one of the few movies that really appealed to the whole family this year, that wasn't 100% unwatchable. And Johnny Depp is the best actor of his generation, he saved the thing single handedly.

Same with Bringing Down the House. From all critical accounts (including mine) this is one of the worst, most pandering films of the year, but it was a huge hit, and nobody saw that coming.

No knocks on Disney, the box office numbers don't lie, but I'm attributing a lot of Disney's drawing power this year to the lack of high quality movies with wide ranging appeal from the other studios. Look what happened to the Matrix. Look what happened to Hulk. Look what happened to Charlie's Angels. In a lot of ways there just wasn't anywhere else for your average movie goer to turn. But as long as the trend keeps going Disney's going to have the numbers they want.

I would imagine that kissing Pixar's booty is going to be integral to all of this, too, in the future.

Compared with the Paris Disney Studio park, DCA looks like a masterpiece. If you want to see 1/2 a park...no wait..make that 1/8 a park, go to Paris and see what they have tried to pawn off as a second gate there. I guarantee DCA will look better to you.

That being said...DCA is not without it's problems. It is laid out really bad. They didn't take full advantage of the theme (for instance, where's the earthquake or runaway cable car ride in the frisco section? How cool would something like that have been?), the park has WAY too many rides that are off the shelf or already at another Disney park (The same old Muppet show? Why?) and not enough unique attractions of it's own.

Bottom line is that the park is okay for what it is, but not for what it could have been if they had only put the needed talent, time, money and creativity into the project like they should have. Band-aids like Tower while great, do nothing to fix the underlying problems that will saddle this park...well forever... until it's massively remodeled or torn down.

You make a good point. I am not going to travel out to Californian from Florida to ride attractions I can already ride here (Tower, Muppets). An earthquake ride may not have worked since it has been done at Universal but the idea of a runaway cable car is a great one.

They should have put a "collapsing pier" attraction in the bay. That would have been cool too. I like the name Malibu Mudslide. That could have been an interesting ride too.