Word: riding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that isn't going to go pro, then how can you pass up the Ivy League education?" says Yale Assistant Coach Garry Mantel. "We lost a kid this year to a full ride at Michigan, but we're also recruiting someone who has turned down a lot of big-time offers to play Ivy League basketball. That doesn't happen every day, but it happens enough to make us feel good about our situation...
...long ago, America's beloved Disney empire seemed destined for an unhappy ending. After an uninspired decade or more, Disney had fallen prey to takeover artists who wanted to break up the company like a rusty old carnival ride and sell its pieces to the highest bidders. But someone at Disney must have wished upon a star -- maybe all 30,000 employees did. After sliding within a cricket's whisker of defeat in 1984, Disney has come chirping back. Cheerleading a staff of go-team-go executives, Chairman Michael Eisner, 46, and President Frank Wells, 56, have pulled...
...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, a $32 million thrill ride that opened in January 1987 at Disneyland. The ride employs the technology of flight simulators, the devices used for training pilots and astronauts. Hydraulically powered, the StarSpeeder 3000 cabin shakes, rattles and rolls its 40 passengers at angles up to 35 degrees as they watch a 4 1/2-minute spaceflight film...
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...
...most dramatic innovation was the theme park, a spiffy, sanitized version of the old amusement park. Disneyland, and later Walt Disney World, were dazzling essays in salesmanship. The rides (such as Peter Pan's Flight and Snow White's Scary Adventures) promoted the films. The Disney characters strolling through the parks served as free commercials for the Mickey Mouse back scratchers, Goofy bikinis, "Totally Minnie" fashions and Donald Duck notepaper (with the warning READ MY LIPS) on sale in the parks' stores. And in creating roller-coaster rides with a story line, Disney helped shape the course of movie narratives...