"Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure."
- Earl Nightingale
Yes, I know...
Some of you think I hate the Suits and love the Creatives. You're half right...
While I do love the Creatives, I don't hate Suits. I simply hate it when they overstep their boundaries. I've seen and heard too many stories where a project that started out good or even great evolved into nothing more than a mess of incomprehensible proportions. In Hollywood in particular, and entertainment in general, everyone looks for a meaning to why they're given such large salaries. To justify the lifestyle they live they tend to believe they have powers beyond those of mortal men(or Suits). An executive for the Mouse or some other company will ask for a plot point/character to be changed so that he may take credit when the film is a hit, a bean counter will ask for a cut from a particular scene on a film or lower the budget needed to add an addition AA figure so that he can show his boss he was able to contain cost, and on and on it goes. I've got a friend that actually sold a script about a bunch of older priest involved in a supernatural thriller. The executive said to loose the old guy(the lead character in the script) and add some sexy, hot nuns(there were no women in the story). They proceeded to turn his script which was quite good into something unrecognizable. Something like this goes on all the time in the entertainment business. Sometimes it's films... other times it's theme parks...
As I said earlier, there are good Suits, most that I know are a hybrid of Suit/Creative. That said, there are also good Suits that are in no way Creatives. Bob Iger is one of these. In fact, he's the primary one of these. My favorite Suits tend to be the hybrids, the ones that are equal parts Suit and Creative. John Lasseter is this, although he is a little more Creative than Suit... he tends to have great organization skills. The great thing about Iger is his ability to know where the limits of his creativity end and he doesn't overstep them. He knows when to hand off the responsibility to others.
Unfortunately, there are still people within the company that still have the pre-Eisner mentality. Jay Rasulo is the primary Suit that needs to be removed, but he's not the only one. Some of the executives in charge of Parks and resorts still haven't gotten a clue...
The most notorious examples of this are in Florida at Walt Disney World. It's distance and notoriety insulate it from the scrutiny that it deserves. For several park managers its almost a fiefdom that control without the prying eyes of Burbank looking over their shoulders. Sure, there are bright spots. The new head of Epcot has so far been a pleasant surprise. Hopefully, he'll get the ability to let this park blossom again. My main problem with the Little Mermaid attraction cloning for this park stems from these Suits and many of their middle management. Instead of trying to find things that make WDW different from the other parks it tries to emulate them(Disneyland in particular). Like a bigger, younger brother that is always jealous of the attention his sibling gets, the Suits at WDW are constantly trying to imitate it's Anaheim counterpart and also trying to force it at times to bend to the marketing and promotions it uses for Florida. The problem there is that the guests that enter Florida are different than those that wind up going to California. You can't operate these parks as if they were built with a cookie-cutter no matter how much Rasulo would like.
The reasoning behind TLM ride's planned addition to Fantasyland in the Magic Kingdom is cost. They justify it as spreading it across two or sometimes three parks. From a shortsighted perspective it makes sense. But if you look at the opportunity it provided to get travellers to come to WDW for the unique experience an original attraction would offer, it would be better to focus on a long term strategy. Imagine if WDW had built that Western River Expedition and it was only available in Florida? Think of the foreign travellers, not to mention Californians that would decide to make the trek east to experience what could only be experienced in WDW. This is only one of many, many attractions that WDI has proposed that have been waved aside over the last two decades. Granted, there have been several projects that made it through. Mission: Space and Expedition Everest being the primary examples... but trust me when I say there were many more that would have given you thrills and wonder beyond any experience you've had with these rides. I'm not complaining that they're there, I like them quite a bit. But the Suits at the Magic Kingdom have had plenty of opportunity over the last two decades to add E-tickets only to hid the E-Stop on plans based on soulless projections by bean counters. The same people that would have told Walt his plan for a park in Anaheim was going to be a bust...
When executives only look at the bottom line they don't see the attendance lines. The ones people stand in to ride these things they build. Several attractions that have been constructed over the past two decades... mostly C and D-Tickets haven't gotten the lines or projections they've expected. This is where my "If You Build It, They Will Come" philosophy comes into play. Both Winnie the Pooh attractions are a result of this. Particularly the one here in California, but Florida's as well. When you deliver an experience that is adequate the amount of guest riding it also turns out to be adequate. When you go on Pooh's Hunny Hunt in Tokyo, you get a genuinely "Disney" experience... and next year when Monster's Inc: Find and Seek opens up it'll be another case of a totally immersive "Disney" experience. Just not in the American parks... and most certainly not in the Florida Project that Walt envisioned.
As long as Suits remain unimaginative and just scream and whine that they want what Disneyland has then the parks won't be independent destinations that people can plan so as to enjoy all the different experiences each location has to offer. A variety of individuality will create more reason to go to more parks, not less... Instead of building what Disneyland has... built something that Disneyland would want. Create some envy back in the opposite direction.
Now wouldn't that be a change?
