The Lost Ranger...

Hi ho, low thinking...






Today was an example of the repercussions of good/bad business...

Good for DreamWorks Animation and bad for the Disney corporation. Not totally bad for them, but an example of what can happen when you are short sighted in your business concerns. And to that I have to thank Michael Eisner for not being able to see over the next hill. Disney California Adventure's birth and squandered first decade for identity aren't the only mistake he made. Now, I'm not using this to say that he's wrong on everything (he wasn't), but I am using it to show how he lost the rights to something that he could have used to expand the already large collection of Disney properties. What am I blathering on about?

The Lone Ranger.

Sure, next year the Mouse will put out a film that will have cost around a quarter of a billion dollars on a property that it doesn't own, but once did. That's correct, the Masked Man was owned by Disney and was sold for a song. And it will now have to pay more for a license to a property that it could have used for free. If you've read Blue Sky regularly then you probably know this because I've mentioned it in the past.

Back in the late Eighties when the Walt Disney Company was looking to expand the Disneyland park into the Disneyland Resort, there were several things they had to do and wanted to do. One of those was reacquire the rights to the "Disney" name and property from those that owned The Disneyland Hotel. That's right, the Disney Company didn't own the rights to the hotel or the use of it's name until it bought them in the late 80's. Back when Walt Disney was planning on opening the park, he knew he would have to have a hotel for them to stay in, but being as he had all his money invested in building the park, he didn't have the cash to build it. So he turned to Jack Wrather, a friend and businessman to build it. In exchange for him building the hotel, Walt gave Jack the exclusive rights to build hotels in California with the name "Disney" for a 99 year lease. He only built one thankfully, or it would have been a much more tangled mess to unravel.

So back to the story. As Eisner and company moved forward to expand the park to a resort and add hotels, he wanted to purchase the Disneyland Hotel. The company played hardball with the company when they weren't really looking to sell. They were going to increase the lease for the Monorail stop at the hotel to a point where it would be excessively cost prohibitive for them to use. Can you imagine how angry guest would have been to stay there and see the Monorail go on by and not stop to allow guests to take it into the park. Well, the negotiations works. But in a different way, because the company that owned the hotel may not have been willing to sell the hotel back to Disney, but it was willing to sell itself to Disney: the entire company.

So, to get the property and name back, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase the Wrather Corporation. It was more than just that hotel you see. Now, being as Michael Eisner didn't like having to pay so much for other parts of a business he didn't want, he had the company get rid of part it didn't (he felt) need or want. There were good things that came from this, and bad things as well. You see, Tokyo DisneySEA's seed was planted when this happened, because one of the things that Wrather's company had the rights to was the Queen Mary. And when Disney was looking at making Disneyland into a resort, it also wanted to see what other opportunities were available as well. With this newly acquired area in the Port of Long Beach, Eisner set the Imagineers at WDI to task with finding a way to exploit it. And that is how "Port Disney" came to be. The Long Beach Project as it was known internally had a resort with 5/6 hotels, a shopping district, ports for the Disney Cruise Line and a theme park called Disneysea. Although it wasn't fully formed, it was the fetus that became Tokyo DisneySEA a decade after the American project was cancelled.

But there were other properties that Wrather owned also. And one was the Lone Ranger. It was sold in a fire sale to try to make back some of the millions that were spent on the purchase of the iconic hotel. No thought was given to mining the classic character for television like was done with the Zorro property that Disney didn't own. No thought was given to creating a movie for such a well known character. No thought was given to the merchandising profits that could have been had with Disney's marketing behind them. It was just something to get rid of. Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but fans of pop-culture would see the opportunity that this American character represented to an American institution like Disney. A company known as Classic Media bought the rights to Kemosabe. Let's hope that the rights to the character are locked for a long time if this film is successful. Perhaps Disney's lawyers were forward thinking and included the rights to possible television series as well, otherwise Jeffrey Katzenberg's company could have a DreamWorks television series up on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon to take advantage of the new Disney film. Don't thing that could happen?

Then you've never heard the story of Antz...

How Much For A Room?

Twenty years ago today, the Walt Disney Company finally got hold of something even Walt Disney couldn't get. What was that you ask?

The Disneyland Hotel.

Wait a minute... it's the "Disneyland" hotel, right? How could they not own their own hotel? Well, if you're a normal Disney Geek/Fan then you may know this, if not, then please bare with me.

It is surprising to people when you tell them that the Disneyland Hotel wasn't always owned by the Mouse. You see when Walt Disney built Disneyland back in 1955, well he spent all the money he had on its construction. He borrowed against his home, he got his brother Roy to get other investors and then had the ABC Network inject a significant amount of cash in return for airing a new show on its fledgling broadcast called, ironically: "Disneyland." Getting a filmmaker like Disney was a premiere feather in their cap. That show, as readers of this blog may have read, is really the worlds first infomercial as it was a primary way for Walt to advertise the coming park that he was building.

Anyway...

Now he put all he had into this place, but he didn't have enough money to build a hotel. Walt knew that there were no hotels with a reasonable distance that would support enough people who came to see his park. So he asked his friend, Jack Wrather to build a hotel near by. Wrather reportedly refused. Disney told rather that if he would build a hotel in Anaheim, he would give him the right to use the Disney name on it... and any other hotel he built in California. And then he sweetened it more by telling Wrather it would be a 99 year contract. And so the Disneyland Hotel was born...

Wrather built a very nice 50's style hotel that was right next door to the theme park. After the 1959 expansion of Disneyland was completed, Walt instructed the Imagineers to draw up plans for the monorail to pull right up to the hotel so that guest could ride straight into the park. A couple years later he did just that. Wrather never built any other hotels in California with Disney's name on them even though he had the right to. And so it went for decades...

Now when Michael Eisner became the Top Cheese at the Mouse he started exploited the properties in Walt Disney World that had been underdeveloped and underused. He started building hotels on the property and planning new parks to take advantage of the enormous potential of the Florida Resort. As he did so, Eisner saw that there was more growth for Disney World's older sister in Anaheim and started WDI working on a plan to expand the property. He was surprised to learn that the Disneyland Hotel was not owned by the company... just like many of you. He had Disney representatives inquire about the property and the Wrather Company, which owned it was not interested in selling. At least not to Disney...

The Mouse soon learned that Wrather was indeed in talks to sell the property, but to a foreign company. Eisner didn't want this to happen and got the company lawyers at work on trying to find a way to stop this. It just so happened that the monorail contract with Disneyland was going to be coming up for renewal soon and Disney's Suits and lawyers used this as it's main leverage. They told the Wrather Company that the license renewal was going to be expensive. Much more expensive.

This through a wrench into Wrather's plans to sell the hotel... once the buyer examined all the books and would discover how costly it would be to have the monorail contract renewed it would be a very unattractive deal. Exactly what the Mouse wanted. Once they announced this the Wrather Company found that prospective buyers were going to be hard to come by...

Except for the Walt Disney Company.

And so they started negotiations to sell the Disneyland Hotel. But the deal that Wrather had been setting up wasn't just for the hotel, but also for his entire company. By the time the deal was done, the Walt Disney Company purchased the Wrather Company and got a lot more than just the Disneyland Hotel that it wanted.

Several properties that came with the first Disney hotel were the Queen Mary in Long Beach and a certain Masked Man that rode a white horse riding throughout the West searching for justice. Now with this out of the way, Michael Eisner began with his intention of expanding the property in Anaheim to a full resort like the one in Florida, albeit a bit smaller. He got the Imagineers to start designing what would eventually be proposed as "WestCOT" for the new Disneyland Resort. But while he was doing this, he also turned his attention to that new property the Mouse owned in Long Beach. He asked the Imagineers to come up with something that could be used there. Possibly some kind of new park right where the Queen Mary was. This was known internally at WDI as the "Long Beach Project" that eventually became the proposed "Port Disney" Resort, that was the inspiration for "Tokyo DisneySEA." Eisney's plan would serve two-fold, it would be a potentially new park in the Southern California area and it would be used as leverage against Anaheim in his plans to build a new park there. He could in essence put both cities against one another to get the best deal possible.

As we all know, WestCot didn't happen. Port Disney didn't happen. The Disneyland Resort did happen. It was built on a vastly smaller scale that the grandiose plans that Eisner and the Imagineers had envisioned though. While WestCot was to be a 3 billion dollar project(in 1990 numbers, my friends) and Port Disney was a 2 billion dollar project(in 1991 numbers), the new Disneyland Resort was an expansion of 1.6 billion dollars(in 1998 dollars). While Anaheim got it's new resort... it was decidedly smaller because of the financial mess that came from Euro Disneyland. Eisner's grand plans crumbled under this burden and the resulting parks and resorts over the next decade would be much more frugal and underwheming. The Disneyland Hotel which was to get a fourth, new tower and massive retheming would instead get a modest makeover. Instead of WestCOT, we got Disney's California Adventure. Built for 650 million, this park was intended to be a modest one, able to make a profit from day one and not having to endure all the headaches Eisner had dealing with Euro Disneyland. First, he dreamed too big and then too small... but that is a story for another day.

Now the Disneyland Resort is in the middle of an expansion that will bring it closer to the original vision that the Imagineers had... not the exact same one, but one that in a decade could be just as lovely. Only a couple decades after it was supposed to be realized. Progress comes, but slowly my friends. The Disneyland Hotel should get that massive makeover that was planned back in the 90's. By spring we should see some form of an announcement and by the end of the decade the hotel will greet visitors with a brand new face... a brand new look.

Now, what became of the other properties. The Queen Mary, well it's still there... but that fabulous resort that was to be constructed around it is now Tokyo Disney Resort's Second Gate. Eisner had the company sell off all the other assets it bought from the Wrather Company to help justify its cost. Even the Lone Ranger was sold to another company. This character that could have joined may others like Peter Pan and Jack Sparrow... but the Masked Man was not wanted. Until now... It appears that Jerry Bruckheimer will be mounting a large scale, big budget version of the character. And since his production deal is with Walt Disney Studios, well guess how costly that is going to be for the Mouse? They're going to be charged many, many times what they sold him for. Oh and that expansion of DCA which is going to cost around 800 million for the First Phase is costing many times what the Suits originally thought it would when they opened the park back in 2001. Now over in Japan, where a version of the Port Disney concept came about... they're not doing any major construction. There's no need... it was built right the first time. They didn't make the mistakes the Mouse did. But they did profit from them. They got the fruit of the Imagineer's labor. California? It got the backlash of Euro Disney.

You have to ask yourself about that. In hindsight, with all this stuff about Michael Eisner wanting to purchase the Disneyland Hotel back from Jack Wrather...

How much did it actually cost for one of those rooms?