The Eisner era is really a Jekyll and Hyde thing. LOL @ “ZEETHER”. Those were the days.

Whenever I rag on Eisner I think of your old videocamera with the pre-programmed captions “EISNER SUCKS” and “TIME FOR SCOTCH” hahaha..

Geeez.

Seriously, Michael, get an EDIT option…it is not that hard

But…let’s face facts. The central Florida area has ALWAYS drawn theme park competitors, ever since The Mouse took root. The weather is perfect for it, and the land is cheap compared to other ideal areas. A Universal park was destined to happen. And, let’s face it, it Disney would do would what they NEED to do, it would be just another side attraction, as it was just a few years ago. During the 1990′s-the late 2000′s, Universal was an also-ran, at best. Granted, they attracted some talent, but even today, with all of their Harry Potter trediness, they are still a second rate destination that capitalizes on what Walt build.

Yes, Eisner made mistakes (GO.com, the ZEETHER, cutbacks, Wide World of Sports, ABC Family) but honestly…really…Disney World is still kicking ass in America. Can you tell me somewhere else you would rather spend 10 or 12 days???

HPX

The idea of a Universal park in Florida had been around since Walt announced Project X. A lot of companies jumped in hoping to ride Disney’s coattails. And most of them flopped. Only Sea World saw some minor success. It’s also true that there was a bitter feud between Disney and Universal MCA…although from my point of view it was really Eisner’s ego that drove most of it. And the announcement of Universal Studios Florida was a primary cause of the tiff, not a result of it.

What Eisner really did was, temporarily; change the expectations for what a “Major Mojo Media Company” was. In the early years, the primary source for Disney’s huge revenues and profit was the massive price hikes at the theme parks. He didn’t really want to admit that, and so he talked about ‘synergy’ and how the all aspects of Disney could leverage off each other – like how the theme parks could “synergize” the latest animate release.

Now the best Wall Street analyst understands less about Disney than a typical member of the ‘Pretty Princess and Fairies” discussion board – so they took Eisner at his word. Every studio had to be “synergized” to be a damn. And since Hollywood is the least creative of all American businesses – that meant everyone tried to be exactly like Disney.

So Paramount went around and bought parks, Warner Brothers snuggled up to Six Flags. No one knew what ‘synergy’ was supposed to do or what it looked liked, but everyone knew if you just had to name your next roller coaster after ‘Batman’.

Universal, which was being largely left behind in the corporate takeover of Hollywood, figured it ought to have a leg up in the theme park race. A deal with Spielberg was supposed to guarantee the most synergistic of synergies. How Universal was supposed to increase ratings for ‘Murder She Wrote’ was never really figured out…and the rest is history.

There are some great ideas in there!

Just the transportation ideas would have been good enough.

If all this had happened, I believe that WDW would still draw just as many people.

Question: Would Universal have been built regardless of Eisner?

It’s still difficult to say what would have happened had all of that not happened. The following is based on the concepts and ideas that were fairly well-developed at the time, some of them we already in advanced stages of design (as well as accounting for failing memory of my old age). Some of these plans date back to the original master plan, but had been put on hold by the economic horrors of the Carter era.

On the hotel front, plans for a major expansion of the resort’s accommodations were already well along. The Cypress Point Lodge was already designed for the spot where the Wilderness Lodge now stands. Connecting the new resort to Fort Wilderness would have been a “Western Town” moderate resort – take a look at the Hotel Cheyenne at Disneyland Paris for an idea. The stretch of shoreline on Bay Lake would have had a outdoors, frontier theme in keeping in the Magic Kingdom motif of the resorts. You can also see a major difference in the philosophy of the resorts. The “old” concept was to provide multiple price-points at the same resort. The Garden Wing(s) of the Contemporary were along this line. This “inclusive” concept was abandoned for the current class-based resort system.

The Mediterranean Resort would likely have been built between the TTC and the Contemporary – the spot originally identified for the Venetian Resort. Look at the Hotel Mira Costa at Tokyo DisneySea for the basic concept. There were several concepts for a hotel on the pad for the old Asian resort on the west shore of the Seven Seas Lagoon, the place where the Grand Floridian now sits. If memory serves, most of these ideas were focused around a “Main Street Hotel” concept.

By now you’re probably seeing a pattern here. Ideas at Disney stick around a long, long time. An idea that’s “new” has probably existed in one form or another for decades. This was true for a lot of Eisner-era projects.

Disney wanted to design and run the “guest hotels” on property as they were considered a key part of the overall “themed experience” they wanted to present at Walt Disney World. However, management also knew that WDW was attracting a large convention business. That business was also necessary to offset the seasonality of the tourist trade. Yet Disney didn’t know how to cater to 3,000 plumbers showing up to oogle the latest pipe fitting techniques, and they didn’t want to either. So they were partnering up with outside companies to build and operate a large convention center to be built near EPCOT Center. This is similar to the Hotel Plaza arrangement – in the late 1960s Disney knew there would be a demand for moderate priced rooms, but Disney wasn’t interested in that business. So they let other companies, who would be better at providing that service to guests, lease space and create their own hotels but still be on Disney Property.

Naturally, all those conventioneers would be looking for places to blow their expense accounts and Disney did not want to see them drive off to Church Street Station. Initially, a second gate into EPCOT Center would have been created so that World Showcase could be used to host dinners and convention events. But a large nighttime entertainment district was also in the works. I personally don’t know of any concepts that made it past the initial idea concept, but there were lots of them out there.

All areas of the resort would have been connected by an expanded monorail system. The current TTC-Epcot line would have extended down to the Disney Village and the Hotel Plaza. The current “loop” in Future World would have been broken with the beam exiting the park, appropriately enough, passing on either side of The World of Motion. A second, “southbound” station would have been built at EPCOT Center – for a mental image take the current station and build its mirror image on the other beam…you can see how the initial design called for this kind of symmetry.

EPCOT Center would also be the resort’s major transportation hub. Disney was already planning for stop on a rail line to Orlando International Airport – the days when 85% of guests drove to WDW were over. The idea was for a large “reception area” to be built. You would step off the maglev from the airport and check into your hotel at a central desk. While you were prancing to the parks, your luggage would be taken to your hotel. Day guests would have been directed to a large central parking facility so they could just park once for the day and then use Disney Transport to take them to all areas of the resort.

Other plans for WDW called for additional water parks (River Country was already doing a booming business and Disney knew it had a good deal going) and other recreational facilities. Disney’s goal had always been to keep guests on property, so Disney wanted to bring all those activities “in-house” as well.

At the time, one third of WDW property had been set aside as a permanent conservation area. One of the ideas that went back to even Walt’s time was a “True Life Nature” tour through the Kissimmee Creek area. That idea kept popping up and probably would have been acted on. Sadly, the entire Conservation Area was destroyed so Eisner could build Animal Kingdom.

The idea for a studio tour had been around for decades. The idea for Disneyland itself started as small spot next to the Disney Studios in Burbank that Walt could open up to the public. But the idea for making a Universal Studios type theme park…no one was really interested. Watching people make movies is not all that interesting and, besides, what could you do at a “studio” theme park that you couldn’t already do better at the Magic Kingdom?

In short, you probably would not have seen additional theme parks being built. Instead there would have been a mixture of “secondary venues” (like the water parks, entertainment centers, Discovery Island and Kissimmee Creek) along with large expansions to the Magic Kingdom and EPCOT Center. These would have been well known projects like Thunder Mesa and Discovery Bay at the Magic Kingdom; the initial concepts for ‘Space’ and ‘The Incredible Journey Within’ at EPCOT along with about six or seven additional countries (you certainly would have seen Equatorial Africa built). Disney knew that the Magic Kingdom was due for a major uplift to keep pace with the developments at EPCOT Center. And the sponsorship agreements at EPCOT required a complete rehab of each pavilion every ten years. The “other guys” knew that the future always had to kept fresh and they had planned for that from the very beginning. By now we would have been well past the second round of re-imaginings and be looking forward to the start of the third.

All of these were just plans and ideas. There were lots of others as well. It’s impossible to say what WDW would have looked like ten years into an Eisner-free era, much less the quarter century it’s been since he took power.

Good or bad….what would orlando and Disney world for that matter be today if it were not for Eisner’s rampant rape and explosion of expansion.

WOuld it still be a laid back destiantion or would something similair have happened that we see today?