Progress City, U.S.A.

Yes, what about that, Mr. Eisner?

With all the fooferall surrounding recent rumors of a fifth gate (or 4th and a half gate) in Florida, I’ve been reminded of an odd period in Disney history when, from 2000 until 2002, Disney operated a website called thirdthemepark.com. Occasionally when I make joking reference to the site as a generic verbal stand-in for any gross instance of managerial hubris, I find that Disney fans don’t remember or were not aware that this page once existed.

Click to enlarge

Thirdthemepark.com is a fairly interesting piece of Disney theme park lore, especially for those interested in the NeverWorld of lost park concepts. While the site itself is long gone (its URL is currently owned by an individual in Colorado), one can still view elements of it courtesy of the Internet Archive. So lets travel back, forty thousand years (or, say, seventeen), and take a look at this mysterious website and the process leading up to its creation.

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The tiki gods have been debating lately whether to pass along the latest rumors from Jim Hill regarding the possibility that Imagineering was dusting off the long-dormant plans for EPCOT’s Russia pavilion. Initially, the royal we decided to let these rumors pass for now, until such time as other sources became available. Then yesterday, Screamscape posted a rebuttal of Hill’s piece containing a tidbit that grabbed my attention enough that I thought it worthy to comment.

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“Every day, a diverse and unlikely society, made up of every culture and race on earth, is working together to build a great nation. We have a single vision - a new order based on the promise of democracy.

Our resources for building this nation are a rich mixture of land, family and beliefs - which we apply with our own fiety brand of spirit, humor and innovation.

As the nation has grown and changed, we are constantly reminded of how impossibly far we’ve come - and how far we still have to go.

DISNEY’S AMERICA celebrates these qualities which have always been the source of our strength and the beacon of
hope to people everywhere.”

- Disney Promotional Material, 1994

As we in the States gather around the table today to gorge ourselves on unreasonable amounts of lethargy-inducing slather, I thought it would be good to take a moment and reflect on what we have to be thankful for. Then I ran out of those, and started thinking about things I’m not thankful for. Namely, the year 1994 and Michael Eisner’s complete creative and personal meltdown that began the disastrous eleven-year stretch that wrapped up his career at the Disney company. If not for the year 1994 and a number of factors both controllable and not, I would be able to spend my turkey day a few hours away in rural Virginia enjoying Disney’s tribute to American history, Disney’s America.

Just over fourteen years ago, on November 11th, 1993, Michael Eisner and other Disney officals gathered in Haymarket, Virginia to announce the Disney’s America project. The announcement was rushed, as Disney had been forced by press leaks to move the press conference up and thus try and get ahead of the story. Secrecy had allowed Disney to either purchase or option 3,000 acres of property in the area, but made them unable to quickly respond to area critics who were both well-connected and very well funded. Nearly a year later, in September of 1994, Disney would announce that they were no longer seeking to build the park in Prince William County. While the story of Eisner’s ‘year of hell’ and the political and business machinations that helped torpedo the park are significant, what’s really important here is the park we missed out on. So let’s take a look at the process that brought us the park, and specifically what we’re missing on this Turkey Day.

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As stated by Tangaroa so eloquently in his previous blog, Disney has gone overboard in promoting their parks as one identity, and we could really give two cents. In fact, it strikes me as uncreative and cheap (although I like the pictures). When Walt Disney World opened, Disney realized that a bulk of their guests were first-timers, and marketed to them. Disneyland was always much more the regional park of the two, with tons of locals coming in over and over again.

Strategies for promoting these parks became quite different even before WDW became the younger sister to its Aneheim predecessor. Imagineers wanted to make the parks different - vast spaces and soaring spires in the Magic Kingdom versus intimate detail at Disneyland, but also entire new attractions and lands. Fantasyland dark rides based on Peter Pan, Snow White, and The Wind in the Willows (Mr. Toad) were to be replaced by Mary Poppins, Sleeping Beauty, and Sleepy Hollow (Ichabod Crane), respectively. That plan was cut early by Roy O. Disney due to budget concerns. Gone was New Orleans Square, as New Orleans itself was clearly too close to Florida to be seen as exotic, as was its defining attraction, Pirates of the Carribean. In its place went Liberty Square, another detailed land with its own Haunted Mansion and a completly different feel.

The Pirates equivalent of course was supposed to be the Western River Expedition, a part of the giant Thunder Mesa complex that made it onto park maps at one time, but never off the drawing board. Brian Martsolf has an interesting site dedicated to Walt Disney World in postcards, and pre-opening the marketers at Disney decided to bet on difference from Disneyland to push their product. There are postcards of watercraft on giant bodies of water (in relation to any at Disneyland), resort hotels, and recreation.

Looks fun. As for the theme park equivalent of Disneyland, there were only three postcards for the Magic Kingdom. Of course there had to be one with the castle, but this painting by Herb Ryman emphasises the scale difference of this castle to Sleeping Beauty’s. Note the procession in front of the castle, and the distance used as per the standard view of Disneyland’s castle. Disneyland guests are always shocked at the scale of not only the castle itself, but the breadth of the hub in general, and this picture clearly captures it.

As for the other two postcards, there’s one with the new land Liberty Square (not exactly a blockbuster attraction pictured here).

The other? A view from a Tom Sawyer raft of Thunder Mesa, which made it onto park maps and postcards but never off the drawing board. The folks at Disney must have been pretty sure that this was going to make it, and if you’re interested about why it didn’t, you should read this Jim Hill article about the long process of this attraction’s death.

Regardless, the folks at Disney were not that eager to rely on touchstones for their marketing for WDW. In fact, it appears quite the contrary - that they looked for a different product to promote and new challenges to tackle.

Unfortunately, in the post-Walt era, this thinking vanished for the most part. Tokyo Disneyland was in large part a copy of the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, and though the dream of Disney lived long enough to make EPCOT anew as a respectable theme park, and Eisner built Euro Disney with an eye for quality, this form of thinking does not seem to have much legs at Disney anymore.

Eisner wanted every property to be a “resort” like WDW, including hotels and second gates. The Disney Studios and California Adventure show the budget cut agenda, cutting corners on quality while taking wholesale attractions from other parks, namely the Disney MGM Studios. Recent popular attractions, such as the Tower of Terror, Buzz Lightyear, Pooh, even the mountains Splash, Space, and Big Thunder have been sent around the world in near identical versions.

Now, with the Disney Parks ad campaign, it is clear that the folks at Disney marketing want to consolidate even further, refusing to admit the difference in the Resorts’ drawing power and demographic, and the differences and advantages of each particular resort. Obviously they are trying to establish more “brand essence,” Disneyspeak for a corporate image. But perhaps for once, they should develop more individual resort identities.