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?

That left Frank Wells to really manage that part of the business. Frank had been running the business side of Warner Brothers Studios for a long time and knew when to let movie people alone and when to step in. He applied that same technique to the parks. Dick Nunis and the staff were left in place – no one knew how to run the parks better. Frank also – and I think this is best word to describe it – fell in love with Disney. We marveled at the parks, learned all the ins and outs. He loved nothing better than sneaking into Disneyland with his wife on the weekends. The highlight of his year was driving the fire engine up and down Main Street during the employee Christmas Party. He was, in my opinion, the last Disney executive to really understand “Disney”.

Within the parks themselves, it was like a bottle had been uncorked. People forget that recessions and oil crises basically covered the entire period from the opening of WDW until the opening of EPCOT Center. It wasn’t that the management didn’t want to do anything; most of the decade was spent just trying to survive. A better economic climate was key, but the burst of creativity from animation was also a huge boost. Suddenly, after all those Glen Campbell and Clinker television specials, Disney was cool again. EPCOT Center had also made WDW a destination for adults. Attendance soared. Suddenly everyone had the resources and the drive to get all those old ideas done.

There were occasional bumps. The Disney/MGM Studios was driven by a desire for cheap production facilities and (mostly) as part of Eisner’s personal feud with Sid Sheinberg of Universal (then part of MCA). But still Disney tackled that ill-founded project and tried to make the most of it. Elsewhere, the hotels bloomed, entertainment centers and waterparks were created, the parks grew…and WDW became the resort it was intended to be in the first place.

But then, things turned.

After several years, all of the accolades and fawning press coverage went straight to Eisner’s head. He really did begin to see himself as a Suuuuuuper Genius and the source of all great things at Disney. He had always liked to dabble in the minutia of the business when something peaked his interest – sometimes it was changing dialogue in a script, other times was picking out the carpet for the Dolphin resort. But over time, these bits of micromanagement became an obsession. Soon Eisner was selecting which paint scheme to put on the busses at WDW and Mrs. Eisner was designing new costumes for the monorail cast at Disneyland. Those that tired to resist soon understood the meaning of “wrath” – and there soon too many of them for Wells, Katzenburg, Nunis and the others to shelter.

It all came to head with Euro Disney. Here was his chance to prove himself a Master of International Business. Here was a chance to be courted and fuffled after by the biggest name architects, all of whom trying to get a piece of the largest commercial project in Europe. Here was a chance to out do that dead guy by creating a place of class, sophistication and style that was bound to be the toast of the all the glittering Better People of Europe. And Eisner, having spent a semester in Paris, was uniquely qualified to guide this project because of his deep understanding of French and Continental culture (seriously, that’s what he said).

But in an even worse development, Eisner’s mindset started to creep throughout the company. Let’s just say that certain designers and others – those that had always thought of themselves as Suuuuper Geniuses who had been criminally undervalued by “the old guys” and their “stupid” shows like ‘America Sings’ saw this as their opportunity to prove their superiority and gain their rightful spot on top of the pedestal.

There is nothing worse than ambition without constraints, and that’s basically the story of Euro Disney.

After reading it, it seems clear to me that there was a watershed moment in 1991 when the the execs convened in the Rockies to try come to grips with/explain to Eisner that due to the enormous debt/interest of the Eurodisneyland project, it would be impossible for that venture to be anything less than a disaster. It was the first major failure of the Eisner era, began a riff between Eisner and Wells that would never heal, which in turn gave Katzenberg an opening to set his sights on the 2nd in Command position, etc, etc.

But before that moment, one can’t help but admire Eisner – perhaps driven by egotistical intellectualism – consorting with Tony Baxter and the imagineers to build an extraordinary park outside of Paris. Eurodisneyland raised the bar on theme park design/materials/craftsmanship so high that by comparison MK’s castle looks like a cheap, fiberglass mock-up.

You wrote that “I always thought that Eisner’s biggest problem was that he expected this kind of exponential growth to continue, well, exponentially”. That is somewhat true, but biggest problem was that Disney lost the talent that really could keep it growing. It’s true you couldn’t just keep raising theme park prices and grow 20% a year. And just to prove the point, Disney HAS been raising theme park prices and hasn’t seen any growth (just a huge drop-off in attendance). That’s why Disney needed to look to new businesses for its growth.

That had been true of the company from the inception. Walt moved from shorts to features, from animation to live action, from theatrical to television. Disneyland itself was a huge move into a new business. But there was a spine that kept all of the businesses together – entertainment creation. Disney made shows and presented them to the public. In the Eisner/Wells era, that understanding was still around. Disney first and foremost was a creative company. That’s reason behind the Arvida comment (and the sale was not Eisner’s idea, but it’s complicated).

Unfortunately, Frank Wells was the last Disney executive to really understand that. So as Eisner became less and less controllable Disney began to loose focus. Big projects had less and less to do with growing the business and more to do with Eisner’s personality. The Disney/MGM Studios was all about “beating Sid” over at MCA-Universal. The Grand Floridian Beach Resort was a great and needed addition – but the Swan/Dolphin & Yacht/Beach was all about Eisner’s quest to become the Doge of Architecture. Eisner’s yearning for a network was all about his “being taken seriously” as a Major Big Swinging **** Media Mogul.

But even worse, moves into new businesses that really could have expanded Disney were hugely mishandled. The late 1980′s and 1990s were a boom time for new business models, for new technologies, for areas for growth. The biggest is, of course, the Internet – a medium even more revolutionary than television was back in the early 1950′s. But neither Eisner nor his orcs could figure it out. In the process they spent billions of dollars on GO.com trying to be like everyone else – first like Yahoo, than a “portal” and then who knows what.

Disney has no presence in video games except as a licensor of Princesses and Pooh. In the meantime, game sales generate more revenue than theatrical motion pictures do. Disney has a few good early efforts (anyone remember ‘Stunt Island’), but they died from corporate disinterest. Imagine the coin Disney could have made had it released ‘Modern Warfare 2′ instead of ‘Disney’s Christmas Carol’ this week.

The Disney Channel was hugely popular from the start. But it remained one channel – at first trying to be all things to all people, and then targeted to braces and training bra set. In the meantime, companies like Discovery were showing how to reach a huge audience through a suite of channels. Each channel with a specific market, all adding up to huge profits. While Disney has started that recently, the channels only appeal to the pre-high school set. But image what a suite that included Disney Classics, Disney Nature, Disney Features would be like.

The point here is not so much to rag on Eisner (although that is both necessary and enjoyable), but to say there were plenty of ways for Disney to continue to grow. It would have taken talent, imagination, guts and skill. Sadly those were all elements that Eisner lacked, abilities he squeezed out of his executive team.

There are a lot of posts out there that try to blame Disney’s problems on the forces of nature, the “but Disney is a business” excuse for whatever cut they dream up next. That somehow what we see today is something must accept because it was simply inevitable (and we’re evil, less-magical people for believing other wise). That somehow a bunch of lights on archways at EPCOT is now “technically obsolete” and there’s just not a damn thing Disney could have done about it.

That’s wrong.

Everything that happens is the result of people at Disney making decisions. Disney chooses its fate, whether by its actions or its failure to react to outside forces.