Word: disneyland
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...owned 3% of the company. "I remember thinking that if that pattern went on much longer, the company would become a museum in honor of Walt," says Roy, now 58. "Movies were the fountainhead of ideas, the impetus for all the rest. Without Fantasia and Snow White, Disneyland couldn't have been built." Yet Disney's management rejected Roy's advice and privately disparaged him as Walt's "idiot nephew...
...operating earnings during fiscal 1987. One reason is that the company has raised ticket fees dramatically over the past four years, sending the cost of one-day passes for adults from $18 to $28 at Florida's Disney World and from $14 to $21.50 at California's Disneyland. Attendance boomed anyway, pushing revenues...
...famed Walt Disney Imagineering group, a department of artists and engineers that Walt first assembled in 1952 to build Disneyland, had been sharply cut back before Eisner came aboard. He promptly revived the Imagineers, but with a difference. The group began to collaborate with the hottest show-business talent available, a strategy that 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...
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...
Since 80% of the Florida park's 26 million annual visitors live outside the state (in contrast to 50% of Disneyland's 12 million), the company is aggressively building hotels to capture the business of guests who previously lodged outside the park. In January, Disney announced plans for a $375 million twin-hotel complex designed by Architect Michael Graves, a postmodernist who has playfully topped one building with two five-story-tall dolphin sculptures and another with two four-story swans. Eisner, who wants Disney to become known for its architecture, says grandly, "They're going to be important monuments...