Word: disney
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Main Street U.S.A at the new Hong Kong Disneyland looks exactly like the one most Americans remember from their childhood, but it won't taste the same. The classic Disney thoroughfare of quaint buildings and gas streetlights has been lovingly re-created from the original theme park Walt Disney built in Anaheim, Calif., which opened 50 years ago this week. But Walt's vision of idyllic small-town America now has a surprisingly un-Midwestern twist. Inside one Victorian building is Main Street's first Chinese restaurant, the Plaza Inn, crafted as a stylish tea shop from early 20th century...
Hong Kong Disneyland is taking the Walt Disney Co. to a new place: the wonderful world of China. The $3.6 billion park, scheduled to open Sept. 12, is Disney's boldest attempt to make Mickey Mouse as well known as Chairman Mao in the burgeoning Chinese market. With 1.3 billion increasingly wealthy people--290 million of them under 14, Disney's prime audience--China is the Magic Kingdom for a consumer company, and Disney wants to sell them everything from Mickey Mouse toys to animated movies to kids' magazines. "We know we have an addressable market just crying...
...Disney is no stranger to China. The company debuted there in the late 1930s, when the cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was screened in Shanghai. Today Disney sells Mickey Mouse gear through 1,100 Disney Corner outlets, and it wants to double that number over the next year. Disney movies and TV programs, like the popular Dragon Club series, appear on local television. With 24 hours of programming a week, Disney claims to be the largest foreign provider of films for Chinese TV. Disney's wholesome fare has given the company a leg up on getting its movies...
...impressive list but still a Jiminy Cricket-- size business. Bureaucratic red tape and rampant piracy in China have stymied much of the profitmaking potential of the Mouseketeers. Disney has been unable to bring in its Disney Channel because of restrictions on media ownership. Legitimate Disney DVDs cost up to 10 times as much as knock-offs, restricting sales to a trickle. A hot title like Finding Nemo sold a scant quarter of a million or so genuine DVDs in China. (By comparison, Nemo sold nearly 15 million DVDs in the U.S. and Canada during its first two weeks alone...
...Disney has also had the occasional misstep in China. In 1996 Beijing blocked the company's films after Disney backed Martin Scorsese's Kundun, which dramatized the life of the Dalai Lama and China's invasion of Tibet. (Beijing considers Tibet an integral part of China.) Mulan, which tells the story of a girl who fought in the Chinese emperor's army in place of her crippled father, was originally rejected for showings in China. Hollywood executives saw that as retaliation for the political incorrectness of Kundun, but an anonymous Chinese official quoted by the country's Xinhua news agency...