California [Mis]adventure
Disney is spending another billion dollars to re-reimagine its strugglingAnaheim theme park. Will the company finally get it right?
By Patrick J. Kiger / Illustration by Gary Locke"What do I have to do to make you people laugh? Pull off my ear?"Mr. Potato Head is surrounded by visitors to Disney¹s California Adventure in Anaheim. The loquacious 5-foot animatron from the "Toy Story" movies proceeds to pull off his ear with an "Ouch!" and wave it around to the delight of onlookers.That's no simple trick. Mr. Potato Head cost $1 million to develop, and his seemingly intimate banter with park visitors is accomplished with the help of several computers, a dozen video cameras, and an unseen human operator who scans the crowd and chooses appropriate words and phrases from a database of recorded utterances by comedian Don Rickles, who also provided the voice for the animated movie character. As miraculous as he is, Mr. Potato Head does have his imperfections: YouTube clips show him occasionally dropping his ear. The ersatz tuber remains a work in progress‹as does the
venue in which he toils.
California Adventure, the long-struggling 55-acre theme park that sits in the shadow of Disneyland, is one of the rare disappointments in the Walt Disney Co.'s long and mostly successful history. Since the park opened in February 2001, it has yet to get even close to the 7 million mark in annual attendance that Disney officials confidently predicted for its first year. In 2008, attendance slid to 5.57 million, a 2 percent decline from the previous year, according to figures compiled by the Themed Entertainment Association industry group, and the Economic Research Associates consulting firm. While that was good enough for California Adventure to be ranked eighth in attendance among North American theme parks, California Adventure has never quite developed into the game-changer that Disney executives envisioned in the 1990s when they spent $1.4 billion to build the park and the surrounding retail-and-hotel complex. They predicted it would be a "hipper and edgier" attraction, in the words of then-Disney design manager Timur Galen, that would provide a more adult-oriented complement to Disneyland and entice visitors to stay longer and spend more money in Anaheim. While Disney officials insist that goal has been achieved, California Adventure has yet to develop into a stand-alone attraction comparable to the legendary park next door.But Disney hasn¹t given up on turning California Adventure into another of its customary triumphs. Since the 2001 opening, Disney has spent $300
million on additional attractions to broaden the park's appeal, and the company now is in the midst of an even larger makeover that reportedly will cost more than $1 billion‹more than it spent to develop the first version of California Adventure. The do-over, slated to be completed in 2012, will tinker with the park"s original theme‹a generic celebration of California landmarks and culture by giving it a distinctively Disney-centric reinterpretation. The modified California Adventure will focus on the Southern California that company founder Walt Disney discovered when he arrived here in the 1920s, complete with a Red Line trolley and a
painstakingly detailed replica of the long-ago demolished Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, where "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" premiered in 1937.To hedge its bet on nostalgia, Disney also is building a ride based on its 1989 hit "The Little Mermaid," upon which it reportedly is lavishing $100 million, and erecting Cars Land, a 12-acre section of thrill rides and live entertainment based on the animated 2006 Disney-Pixar hit "Cars." This
spring, California Adventure will unveil the World of Color, an elaborate light-and-music show on the park's lagoon to evoke memories of the 1960s TV
series "Walt Disney¹s Wonderful World of Color" and, the company hopes, become a popular nighttime attraction.Like other Disney officials, Bob Weis, the executive vice president of imagineering who is leading the project, prefers to call it an "expansion" rather than an overhaul. But he makes it clear that Disney is sparing no expense this time. "Every piece of it, we're doing at an exceedingly high level of quality, characters, technology, and storytelling," he says.In a recent interview with the industry publication Fun World, Jay Rasulo, chairman of Disney parks and resorts, described the reboot as "a kind of reorientation more toward a fantasy experience than [California Adventure] started out originally."Shelling out such a gigantic sum to radically re-invent a theme park is a bold move and possibly a risky one in the midst of a brutal economic downturn, which has hit the entertainment industry particularly hard. (In July, Disney reported that third-quarter revenue from its parks and resorts was down 9 percent. Undaunted, in November it announced plans to develop a $3.5 billion park in Shanghai, China.) And critics question whether California Adventure¹s new antiquarian motif will prove any more appealing to vacationers than the old one."The concept [of California Adventure] only makes sense on a spreadsheet," says David Koenig, a longtime Disney observer who has written several books
on the company¹s inner workings. "People don¹t plan to come all the way to California for a vacation and then stay in a theme park that's a fake version of California. It might make sense on paper, but it doesn¹t in real life. That¹s a problem that Disney is still coping with."
On the other hand, if a California Adventure makeover succeeds, it'll be an almost unprecedented achievement for Disney‹in movie terms, the equivalent
of a box-office dud such as "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience" spawning a blockbuster sequel.
The ill-starred saga of California Adventure began in August 1995, when Michael Eisner, then the chief executive of the Walt Disney Co., summoned
several dozen of the company's top executives to a three-day retreat in Aspen, Colo., according to several newspaper accounts. (Eisner did not respond to an interview request made through the public relations representative for his current company, Tornante, which invests in online video and other entertainment media.) After an evening of singing TV theme songs while gathered around the piano, they got down to business: the Anaheim dilemma.Granted, to most companies, it wouldn't have seemed like a problem. Anaheim was the location of Disneyland, the flagship property in the Disney empire, an institution whose opening in 1955 revolutionized the amusement park industry by infusing it with animated movie and TV tie-ins. Decades later, Disneyland still drew more visitors than any other park in the nation, except for the newer Walt Disney World resort near Orlando, Fla.But times had changed. The big push in the theme-park industry was to turn the parks into vacation destinations, where families would visit not just for the day, but for the week, and spend even more money on hotels and restaurant meals. Walt Disney World, a 40-square-mile endeavor with four theme parks, two water parks, five golf courses, 32 hotels, and a shopping-dining entertainment complex, had transformed Orlando from an agrarian backwater into one of the top travel spots in the world. Disneyland was a tourist attraction too; about half of its 13 million annual visitors were from outside Southern California. But under perpetual pressure from Wall Street to increase revenues, Disney needed to draw more people to Anaheim and cajole them into putting more dollars into its pocket.The company had been trying to expand its Southern California footprint for a while. In the early 1990s, Disney considered building an ocean-themed park in Long Beach, before discarding that notion in favor of a proposal to build Westcot Center a clone of Walt Disney World¹s Epcot Center in Anaheim, next door to Disneyland. [See below.] But the project's $3 billion price tag ultimately unnerved a company that also was struggling with cost overruns and lagging attendance at its new Euro Disney park outside Paris, for which the company had borrowed a staggering $3.4 billion to build. In early 1995, Disney pulled the plug on Westcot.Looking for a lower-cost alternative, Eisner organized his executives into brainstorming teams, each equipped with an artist to produce sketches of their proposed theme parks. With his German shepherd at his side, he sat and listened to pitches for parks with themes such as ecological wonders of the world, a cross-country trip along Route 66, and the history of sports.Then, one group pitched a park devoted to the California mystique. Eisner was transfixed. "People come to California seeking something that is more and more elusive," he reportedly said. As he later recalled in a 2000 Los Angeles Times interview, the CEO scribbled "POP" on his legal pad. That was short for Pacific Ocean Park, a defunct late-1950s seaside amusement park in Santa Monica that had an antique carousel, an old-fashioned house of mirrors, and a roller coaster styled as a sea serpent. The park, ironically, had been vanquished by competition from Disneyland, but it remained a bit of classic Californiana. Eisner wrote down other phrases "California at play," "Beach," "La Brea Tar Pits," and "Hollywood.""The überconcept was that anyone from out of state who was taking a California vacation saw Disneyland as an important stopping point," explains a former Disney executive who asked not to be identified. "The idea of California Adventure was to make Disneyland into the destination. Instead of spending a night in San Francisco or wherever, you could just see most of California right there in Anaheim."Not quite a year later, Disney formally unveiled its plans for California Adventure, which would be built on two-thirds of Disneyland's parking lot. The blueprint included the 750-room Grand Californian hotel; a replica of a Hollywood studio back lot; and California-themed attractions such as the mile-long California Screamin' roller coaster, and Soarin' Over California, a simulated hang-gliding flight over the Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite Valley, and other state landmarks. The development also included a 200,000-square-foot retail, dining, and nightlife district. "There is something very alluring about the California dream," then-Disneyland
President Paul Pressler said at the time. "This is the place where people feel everything is possible."
Well, not everything. In the late 1990s, Wall Street investors increasingly were putting Disney under intense pressure to boost sagging profits, and Eisner was compelled to slash expenses to keep them happy. The project's $1.4 billion budget less than half what Westcot would have cost was in line with that new reality. But of that amount, less than half $650 million actually was to be spent on the theme park portion. California Adventure would have one roller coaster and one water ride; by contrast, a new park that Universal Studios was building in Orlando had three of each. The new park would have 23 attractions, including exhibits on farming and tortilla making‹a third as many as Disneyland next door.The former Disney executive criticized the penny-pinching approach: "At the same time Disney was building California Adventure, it was also building its park in Tokyo, and the two were completely different economic models. Tokyo was done right people call it the handmade park, incredible on every level. California Adventure was the Kmart model, the least they could get away with."One cost-saving strategy, critics say, was to recycle attraction concepts originally developed for other parks, such as Disney's America, the historical theme park Disney tried to build in Virginia in the early 1990s before being thwarted by local opposition. The hangars at California Adventure's Condor Flats, which celebrated California aviation history, bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Victory Field attraction at Disney's America, while the Grizzly River Run ride looked an awful lot like the Native America raft ride at the Virginia park. "They have a saying in Disney Imagineering: We never throw anything away," author David Koenig explains. Web columnist Al Lutz, whose MiceAge.com reports on Disney, is blunt: "The actual park is the plan for Disney¹s America. They just renamed it and
retweaked it."What the new park lacked in expansiveness and originality, Disney hoped to make up in panache. The company lavished $750 million more than half of the budget on the opulent Grand Californian, whose Arts and Crafts architectural theme evoked Frank Lloyd Wright, and on Downtown Disney's high-end stores and restaurants. In contrast to Disneyland, California Adventure would be a more adult-oriented park, one where visitors could wander with alcoholic drinks in hand, as they did at Walt Disney World. They could shop the stores at the new Downtown Disney, hang out at a sports bar or a jazz club, or sample wines at vintner Robert Mondavi's restaurant or in the Grand Californian's wine-tasting room. "Edgy" was the buzzword in presentations.In contrast to Disneyland's cavorting Disney characters, California
Adventure would feature a California-themed parade with bungee jumpers
leaping from two miniature Watts Towers and stilt walkers clad in Chinese
food takeout cartons, an homage to San Francisco's Chinatown.
"[Disney] not only wanted to get people to extend their stays, but they also
hoped to bring in a whole new group of people as well honeymooners, young
adults," Koenig explains. "They figured, We can't do the same thing as
Disneyland. We need a companion piece." So they tried to make California
Adventure the opposite of Disneyland in every way fancy shops, alcohol, and
so on. Disneyland would be cheesy and homey and old-fashioned, and the new
park would be trendy and hip."After five years of construction, California Adventure was ready to open
Feb. 8, 2001. It was a near-perfect, sunny Thursday morning, and Anaheim
braced for a massive traffic jam and a crowd of more than 30,000 to descend
on the new park.
Instead, something curious happened. When California Adventure's gates
opened at 8 a.m., only 3,000 people were waiting to get in‹about one-quarter
of what Disney had expected. By day's end, according to an estimate
published by Disneyland expert Lutz, only 14,000 visitors had been enticed
to check out the new park. That weekend was dismal, with Sunday usually a
big day for theme parks‹drawing just 10,000 to 15,000 people, according to
Lutz's estimate.A slumping economy didn't help California Adventure's fortunes, nor did base
ticket prices $43 for adults, $33 for children‹which were as high as
Disneyland's, even though the new park was considerably smaller. But the
real problem was that Disney's effort to make California Adventure a
striking contrast to Disneyland had succeeded all too well."Over the years, the public had developed certain expectations for a Disney
park," says Thor Degelmann, a 30-year Disney veteran who now is chief
executive of LEDO International, a Newport Beach-based leisure and
entertainment consulting company. "California Adventure was a real departure
from that‹no Disney characters, no Disney stories as such. It was a little
bit of a shock to people when they got there. And it was the same price as
Disneyland. Very quickly, the word-of-mouth was: If I'm going to spend that
money, I get better entertainment value at Disneyland.'"Critics also say the attempt to appeal to young adults backfired. Emblematic
of that was California Adventure's original hip-hop-flavored parade. "What
Disney does superbly is family entertainment," says Lutz. "But one thing
they can't do is edgy. You can¹t sing about finding Nemo and grab your
crotch like Michael Jackson."In an effort to boost the park's fortunes, Disney eventually ditched "edgy"
and revived the Electrical Parade, a wholesome march of Disney characters
that had been popular at Disneyland. The company also began discounting
adult admission for local residents by $10 and letting children in free.But the new park soon was hit by another body blow the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, which dampened the public appetite for airline travel and caused a
disastrous decline in tourism. California Adventure suddenly depended on
homegrown visitors many of whom, critics say, were baffled by the
ersatz-California theme. "The original concept was like selling ice to
Eskimos," says Craig Hanna, a Burbank-based theme park consultant.By October, crowds still were so sparse that superstar chef Wolfgang Puck
closed his Avalon Cove café, and vintner Mondavi turned over control of the
Golden Vine Winery to Disney and took an estimated $12 million loss on the
project. By year's end, attendance lagged about 2 million behind Disney's
projections.During the next several years, media coverage of California Adventure
shifted. Shareholders critical of Eisner used the park's mediocre
performance as a cudgel against him. Walt Disney's nephew Roy, who resigned
from the Disney board in December 2003 to lead a campaign to oust the CEO,
accused Eisner of building California Adventure and other parks "on the
cheap." Meanwhile, besieged Disney management scrambled to find a fix. The
company quietly abandoned the adult anti-Disneyland motif and added
attractions such as A Bug's Land, an array of rides for young children based
on the 1998 Pixar hit "A Bug¹s Life," and a Vegas-style minimusical based on
the 1992 animated film "Aladdin." In 2004, the company even cloned a popular
attraction from Walt Disney World, the $95 million Twilight Zone Tower of
Terror ride based on the classic TV series. (In keeping with California
Adventure's frugality, Disney made the Anaheim ride less elaborate and spent
$35 million less than it had on Orlando¹s version.)The added attractions became popular, but even with all that, the attendance
still didn't reach original expectations. "The turning point was when they
added the Tower of Terror," says Koenig, the author and longtime Disney
observer. "It was one of the most popular attractions in Disney World, the
most famous thing we didn't have on the West Coast. When that didn't work,
they saw that they had a problem. It was like: We can keep adding one
attraction a year and spending $100 million here and there, but that¹s not
going to be enough. Something's got to change."
Disney officials insist that by one measure, California Adventure has been a
success. "Before we opened [it], only about 10 to 15 percent of the guests
who came to Disneyland came for a second day," Disney executive Rasulo
explained in his recent Fun World interview. "It was clearly seen as it was
early in its roots, as a single-day destination. When we opened
[California Adventure], we took a quantum leap there and almost doubled the
length of time that people stayed."Nevertheless, after Bob Iger succeeded Eisner as CEO in the fall of 2005, he
reportedly asked Disney's imagineering staff to come up with a more sweeping
remake of the park. Among the possibilities considered, according to a 2007
Wall Street Journal report, was merging California Adventure into Disneyland
to create one big Anaheim park, but the cost of transporting visitors around
it would have been prohibitive. Instead, Disney opted for the $1 billion-
plus overhaul. To lead it, in 2007, the company hired Weis, a
former Disney executive who had been the lead designer on the Disney-MGM
Studios park at Walt Disney World, and who, as an Orlando-based consultant,
had worked for clients ranging from the Smithsonian to Graceland.While Weis seems reluctant to spoil Disney's calculated rollout of its new
California Adventure attractions by revealing too many of the technological
or creative details, he does indicate that the company will be going all out
in terms of both. He cites the World of Color light show, which will
premiere this spring. "It's very, very state of the art, in terms of being a
gigantic scalable fountain, the way it will integrate characters and story
and effects," says Weis. He's similarly enthused about The Little Mermaid
attraction, which he says will have some "amazing animation" and "stunning
visuals," and Cars Land "If you watch that movie, it's got very animated,
very energetically talking cars. We are on a mission to create that look
three-dimensionally. It's a huge challenge."Some remain skeptical about the nostalgic Walt Disney-comes-to-California
recasting of the park¹s theme. "I don¹t know why they're sticking with the
California concept," says Koenig. "It's like somebody was clever enough to
figure a way to completely change it and be more like Disneyland, while
still keeping California' in the name."Weis, however, sees the revamped motif as a natural fit for the young family
audience that the park aims to attract, even if the California it depicts is
ancient history to them. "Our audience loves Walt Disney, the person and the
creative legacy," he says. "We've also thought that this park, like any
other, could really never have enough Disney in it." Moreover, "Imagineers
talk to guests a lot, and they¹ve said in many cases that the reason they go
to our parks is to be immersed in another world and be taken there." Rasulo
says that "people will recognize that this is very Disney."Former Disney official Thor Degelmann agrees. "I think that redesigning the
Hollywood street with the 1920s architecture and a more nostalgic feel is
going to create more of an emotional connection, something that California
Adventure has lacked," he says. "That's what they do in Disneyland, where
you attach yourself to Main Street and Fantasyland."Theme park consultant Craig Hanna is similarly upbeat: "The 1920s that's a
great time in L.A.'s history. I think locals will say, Hey, there's a Red
Car!' And tourists will say, That's how I imagined it.'"Even longtime Disney critics applaud the company's determination and
willingness to spend to reboot California Adventure. "Disney doesn't take
failure well," says a former Disney executive. "They will fix it. Two years
from now, or five years from now, the descendent of California Adventure
will be a place we all love to go to."
Patrick J. Kigeris an Orange Coast contributing writer.
World of Color A giant fountain show featuring characters and lighting
effects. Opening this spring.Buena Vista Street A California-in-the-1920s-themed park entrance.Carthay Circle Theater The long- ago demolished movie house where "Snow
White" premiered in 1937.Silly Symphony Strings A rotating swings ride with a revamped theme based on
a classic Disney cartoon.Goofy's Sky Skool A reworking of the Mulholland Madness roller coaster, with
a story line that follows Goofy¹s bumbling attempts to teach novice pilots
to fly.Cars Land A re-creation of Radiator Springs from the movie "Cars."Mickey's Fun Wheel A revamping of an existing Ferris wheel redecorated with
Mickey's face, with gondolas that feature the faces of Disney characters.The Little Mermaid Ariel¹s Undersea Adventure.
TWO THEME PARKS THAT NEVER WERE
Disney's initial Southern California expansion plan was to build an
ocean-themed park in Long Beach, right. After scrapping that idea in
December 1991, it settled on a $3 billion project called Westcot Center in
Anaheim. Disney envisioned that Westcot would draw 13 million visitors each
year, nearly as many as Disneyland next door. After mounting a public
relations campaign to sell Anaheim residents and officials on Westcot and
obtaining a promise of nearly $80 million in federal and state
transportation funding, Disney gradually backed away from the project,
apparently due to cost.