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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...
Disney made sure not to repeat those mistakes in Hong Kong. "We've come at it with an American sensibility, but we still appeal to local tastes," says John Sorenson, one of Hong Kong Disneyland's landscape architects. Fantasyland has a garden where photo-happy tourists can always find Mickey, Minnie and other popular characters. Mulan will have her own pavilion in the garden, designed like a Chinese temple. Mickey even has a new red-and-gold Chinese suit to wear. Restaurants boast local fare, such as Indian curries, Japanese sushi and Chinese mango pudding served in containers shaped like...
...park's success isn't a sure thing. Disney faces a special hurdle in China. Until a few years ago, hardly anyone knew Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck even existed. Disney characters were banned for nearly 40 years after Mao's takeover. Now Chinese kids are familiar with the classic characters--in part from pirated DVDs--but their knowledge of Disney lore is limited. "This is the first market where we've opened a park in which we don't have a long-term relationship with our guests," says Rasulo...
...became the phantom of the Royals Stadium training room. Whenever the team was gone, he was there tormenting his patellar tendon, the worst "ball of spaghetti" his doctors had ever restrung. "Occasionally he'd call me up and say, 'I didn't go to the park today,'" smiles Mickey Cobb, the trainer, "but I knew by looking at the room that he went every day." A small, bald man of 44, Cobb began life at 2 lbs. in rural Georgia, polio-ridden and without benefit of physician. He started limping at four. "I couldn't play when my friends were...