Word: disneyland
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...operating earnings during fiscal 1987. One reason is that the company has raised ticket fees dramatically over the past four years, sending the cost of one-day passes for adults from $18 to $28 at Florida's Disney World and from $14 to $21.50 at California's Disneyland. Attendance boomed anyway, pushing revenues...
...famed Walt Disney Imagineering group, a department of artists and engineers that Walt first assembled in 1952 to build Disneyland, had been sharply cut back before Eisner came aboard. He promptly revived the Imagineers, but with a difference. The group began to collaborate with the hottest show-business talent available, a strategy that enabled Disney to give its theme parks an immediate injection of Hollywood hipness. Enter Michael Jackson, who was recruited by Eisner to help write and star in Captain Eo, a 17-minute, $17 million movie musical in 3-D. Even more spectacular is Star Tours...
More pixilation is on the way. At Disneyland, stonemasons are now building the facade for the $35 million Splash Mountain, in which passengers will ride replicas of hollowed-out logs down huge slides and through tableaus populated by 101 robotic characters like Br'er Rabbit from Disney's 1946 film Song of the South. "We can control how much the passengers get wet, depending on the time of year," Eisner points out mischievously...
Since 80% of the Florida park's 26 million annual visitors live outside the state (in contrast to 50% of Disneyland's 12 million), the company is aggressively building hotels to capture the business of guests who previously lodged outside the park. In January, Disney announced plans for a $375 million twin-hotel complex designed by Architect Michael Graves, a postmodernist who has playfully topped one building with two five-story-tall dolphin sculptures and another with two four-story swans. Eisner, who wants Disney to become known for its architecture, says grandly, "They're going to be important monuments...
Then TV arrived, and Walt really revved up his marketing genius. He named his first prime-time series Disneyland -- a recurrent plug for the Anaheim theme park -- and filled it with old cartoons and his avuncular presence. When a Disneyland serial about Indian Fighter Davy Crockett stoked a brief frenzy for coonskin caps, the studio quickly sutured the three episodes together and released them as a theatrical feature. Minimal expenditures, more revenue. Then Disney launched an afternoon program, The Mickey Mouse Club, which introduced the Mouseketeers, a troupe of child stars who cavorted like stagestruck Cub Scouts and intoned...