by Martin Sklar
From the beginning there were compelling successes, and abject failures: The candy store in the World Bazaar is one of Japan’s most profitable stores on a square-footage basis. Expanded multiple times through the years, the candy store exceeds $100 million in revenue yearly.
A major “defeat” occurred when, to ensure that the park could meet the guidelines of the Japanese Education Ministry for school excursions, we created “Meet the World” in Tomorrowland. Based on the historical experiences of foreign visitors (that is Admiral Matthew Perry) and their interaction with the Japanese homeland, the show foundered on its presentation of the empire of Japan’s aggression in World War II—avoiding as much of the actual story as possible. A true failure, “Meet the World” was finally closed in 2002 and has been replaced by a very popular Pixar-based show: Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek.
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A successful project has many fathers, and Tokyo Disneyland (and its sister park, Tokyo DisneySea, opened in 2001) have been unequivocal successes. At one time in the 1990s, before Florida’s Magic Kingdom reclaimed the record, Tokyo Disneyland became the first park ever to exceed seventeen million in a single year’s attendance—equaling the original 1977 projection that Disney found to be “astonishing.”
Following his leadership in successfully managing the negotiating efforts necessary to realize the project, Frank Stanek was appointed by Disney’s Executive Committee as vice president, Tokyo Disneyland. He led the Imagineering team truly responsible for building Disney’s first international project: John Zovich and Don Edgren, engineering; Orlando Ferrante, production and manufacturing; Edgren and Tom Jones, project management; Dick Kline, design (although the original concepts for a park based on the Florida Magic Kingdom were under the direction of Bill Martin); and John Hench, Imagineering’s senior vice president of design, and overall design aesthetic.
Two others were also key project executives. Hideo Amemiya, who had grown up in Japan and become a Walt Disney World hotel executive, came “home” to become general manager of a new company, Walt Disney Productions—Japan. His efforts during the later negotiating phase for the agreement provided an important link in bridging the cultural divide between East and West. Hideo went on to become one of the most respected Disney hoteliers before his untimely death in 2001.
The second was a key Disneyland leader. Dick Nunis, the Disney parks’ operating chief, assigned Jim Cora to manage the preopening operations efforts. That included hands-on training of ninety-five key OLC staff members for up to nine months at Disneyland. One of them, Noboru Kamisawa, became a skilled leader of the Tokyo Disneyland operating staff, and a trusted contemporary for both the Imagineers and the Disney operating teams. (Another large group of Japanese employees trained at WED and its manufacturing subsidiary, MAPO, preparing for show installation and maintenance.)
The Grand Opening of Tokyo Disneyland took place on April 15, 1983—six months after the opening of Epcot at Walt Disney World. At this opening, some two hundred Disney team members helped assist and direct the OLC team that met the first guests entering Tokyo Disneyland.
The park was an instant success. Five weeks and four days after opening to the public, the one-millionth guest passed through the turnstiles, on the way to a first year attendance of 10.4 million.
A few weeks before the Grand Opening, Frank Stanek had a new assignment to begin on his return home: investigate a location on the Continent for the first European Disney park and resort.
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I never read Robert Ringer’s 1973 book, Winning Through Intimidation, but I suspect it was required reading for the leaders of Richard Nunis’s operations teams. By the time Epcot Center and Tokyo Disneyland had opened in the early 1980s, intimidation as a means to an end was high on the list of the Disney operators’ “SOP”—Standard Operating Procedures. And Dick was the master.
We all recognized and accepted the fact that Dick Nunis was the elite operator in the park business. He had paid his dues to learn the Disney business as Walt wanted it run in the late 1950s and 1960s. A neck injury in a surfing accident had ended Dick’s football career at the University of Southern California, but through his USC teammate Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law, Dick joined the original Disneyland team, working with the man responsible for the highly respected training program at the park, Van France. Dick soon became one of the top operations leaders, and a favorite of Walt Disney.
After Walt’s death in December 1966, Dick seemed to sense that there was a void to be filled, and he aggressively championed his own move up the Disney ladder, ultimately becoming chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Attractions. When Walt Disney Productions became the target of a takeover attempt in 1984, he even turned on his former teammate, Ron Miller, supporting his ousting as Disney’s president. (It took twenty-six years for them to engage again, for a program I organized to celebrate Disneyland’s fifty-fifth birthday, at The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.)
One of Dick’s major objectives was the “takeover” of the Imagineers. His goal was to make WED subservient to the operators, thereby controlling planning, design, and the selection of new attractions for the parks—a scenario that Walt Disney, Card Walker, and later Michael Eisner and Frank Wells all resisted—but not without continuous diligence. (Walt, and Michael Eisner for much of his tenure as Disney’s chairman, believed the tension between the passion and creativity of the designers and the experience and knowhow of the operators was healthy in working to achieve the best Disney product for the public.)
Dick’s “assault” on the Imagineers began soon after Walt’s passing. One of his principal targets was Richard Irvine, WED’s design chief, handpicked by Walt as the design leader for park development in 1952. Irvine held the position until a heart attack during construction of Walt Disney World in 1971 prompted his retirement. A widely shared story illustrated the tension. In a meeting taking place shortly after Walt’s death, in the office of Joe Fowler, chairman of the Disneyland Operating Committee, Nunis provoked Irvine until the design chief stormed out of the meeting, slamming the door behind him. After several seconds, however, the door opened again, and Dick Irvine emerged, still furious, but now also embarrassed, from Fowler’s closet.
Nunis’s attempt at a “takeover” of design direction for Epcot Center caused so much confusion (“Who’s in charge?” our team wanted to know) that WED’s president, Carl Bongirno, and I, as executive vice president of Creative Development, finally demanded a meeting of the two of us and Nunis with Card Walker. We had to have corporate clarity, as well as top management’s backing in order to complete the concepts we had worked years to bring to fruition.
Fifteen minutes before the meeting, Card walked into my field office at Epcot Center. “We’re almost there, Marty,” he said. “Make it work.” That was it; Card left. As good soldiers, we did “make it work.” I told the Imagineers that our hand over to the operators would take place in October. Until then, we were in charge…even when Dick rode around the site in his golf cart, wearing his favorite construction hard hat. While our hard hats were marked “MARTY,” “JOHN,” and “BOB,” Dick’s was labeled “SOB1.”
Dick was so busy stirring things up in Epcot Center—at the opening, he told one of Imagineering’s top art directors, Disney Legend Fred Joerger, “I couldn’t have done it without you, old-timer” (Fred was still stifling his laughter years later)—that he almost missed the opportunity to take credit for Tokyo Disneyland (TDL). But in the six months between the openings of Epcot Center in October 1982 and TDL in April 1983, Nunis began campaigning to discredit WED’s team with Chairman Walker. In the end, he succeeded, convincing Walker that too many WED executives were “freeloading” at the Grand Opening—even those who had spent as many as three years in Japan building the project. When Stanek, Zovich, Ferrante, Cayo, John Hench, and myself—those truly responsible for creating the project (or who, as in my case, had assigned a top-drawer creative design team, despit
e Epcot’s demands)—were not invited to the opening, I went to Disney president Ron Miller and convinced him we deserved to be there. Ron agreed, and the conflict was joined.
As the Imagineers left for home, and Nunis’s operating team under a respected leader, Jim Cora, moved in, it was clear that “management by intimidation” was at work. The next test would come with the tsunami in corporate management—the arrival of Michael Eisner and Frank Wells as Disney’s new leaders.
THE ELASTIC E:
“I’VE BEEN KNOWN TO CHANGE MY MIND.”
Saturday, September 29, 1984, was one of the most important days in the history of WED Enterprises/Walt Disney Imagineering. The date marked the second visit of Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to WED’s Glendale headquarters, but the first as a working session to review new ideas. Their first official visit had taken place earlier that week, when the Imagineers gathered to meet the new Disney chiefs for the first time.
They were driven the three miles from Disney’s Burbank Studio to the Grand Central Industrial Park in Glendale by Ray Watson, the Disney board member who had just relinquished the chairman’s position to Eisner. The new team was late because Watson got lost on the three-mile drive. That seemed illustrative of his appreciation for Imagineering. Not long before, Watson had proposed reducing WED’s staff to three hundred and buying most of the design work on the outside; he had worked that way with Orange County (California) with architects and engineers on housing developments and shopping centers for the Irvine Company, where Watson had built his reputation. That did not sit well with the Imagineers, who knew the difference between building shopping centers and designing theme park attractions.
Obviously, we were hoping for better days; all the news for weeks had been about the potential takeover of Walt Disney Productions by the infamous corporate raider Irwin Jacobs. In fact, along with Jack Lindquist, I had been sent to New York City to assist President Ron Miller and the outside lawyers as they met with potential saviors (we had one meeting with the financial staff of General Motors) who might invest in Disney and thus help fend off the predators. We were all fish out of water; the Disney side seemed not to know what to do. But the Bass family of Texas came riding out of the West to rescue the corporation; together with Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, they brought Eisner and Wells into the Disney picture.
Now just one week after becoming chairman/chief executive officer and president/chief operating officer, respectively, Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were at Imagineering to review ideas that we had been working on for the Disney parks. At the time, there were four parks—Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom and Epcot Center at Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland. Michael and Frank were accompanied by a very welcome fourteen-year-old, Michael’s son, Breck.
We knew that we were in the hot seat; with their motion picture and television backgrounds, Michael and Frank had no idea who we were or what we were capable of doing. “When I was at Paramount, I didn’t know there was such a group at Disney,” Michael later admitted about the Imagineers. So we Imagineers treated the meeting like it was a final exam. We loaded up a huge open space in one of WED’s model shops with a show of creativity that reminded some of us of that over-the-top Epcot presentation to General Motors in Michigan: three-dimensional models, artwork big and small, and storyboards loaded with sketches and ideas filled the space. All the key creative talent at Imagineering was on hand to present their projects—in fact pitch their projects, which set the actual tone of the meeting.
I was very proud of our team. They were down but not out, with a long list of achievements “after Walt”: WED had designed and built Walt Disney World and its Magic Kingdom, Epcot Center, Tokyo Disneyland, and the just-opened new Fantasyland in Disneyland, the first major upgrading in Disneyland since 1969. Yet we were still outsiders in the studio world Eisner and Wells had inhabited. Most of us understood and accepted Walt’s premise that you are only as good as your next project.
We were fortunate that Breck Eisner had accompanied his father. Breck (who later became a director of advertising commercials, television shows, and motion pictures) was a big Disneyland fan. He was so excited about Tony Baxter’s concept for a log flume ride called “Zip-a-dee River Run” that before we left the meeting, it had become one of the first new project commitments of the “Michael Eisner Disney Park Era”—a twenty-one-year period that would add seven new theme parks, two water parks, a sports complex, and thousands upon thousands of overnight accommodations around the world, from the swamplands of Florida to the beet fields of France, and the watery depths of Tokyo Bay and Hong Kong Harbor to the desert that is Southern California.
From day one, we learned about Michael Eisner’s creative instincts. The Zip-a-dee River Run log flume ride became “Splash” to promote the DVD release of the Ron Howard-directed movie starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah, which had been released theatrically that year by Disney’s new Touchstone Films division. And a Disney park tradition in nomenclature was extended and enthusiastically endorsed by the CEO: in the wake of Matterhorn Mountain, Space Mountain, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Zip-a-dee River Run became Splash Mountain. It was soon to be followed not only by the proliferation of these popular thrill rides around the world, but by new adventures such as Mount Gushmore in the Blizzard Beach water park, Expedition Everest (The Forbidden Mountain) in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and Mount Prometheus, site of Journey to the Center of the Earth in Tokyo DisneySea.
The “Elastic E” in Eisner—“I’ve been known to change my mind”—also came to the fore that first day with the Imagineers. Before the meeting ended, the five-year design and construction time frame for Splash Mountain caused the new Disney bosses to turn to George Lucas to collaborate with the Imagineers on another concept pitched by Tony Baxter and Tom Fitzgerald. It became the popular Tomorrowland simulator adventure, Star Tours. And when Eisner learned that even this show would take three years to complete, he enlisted a singer-dancer named Michael Jackson to work with Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola to create a 3-D fantasy called Captain Eo (more on this later). It opened at Disneyland on September 18, 1986—less than two years after that first meeting with the Imagineers.
Aside from his impatience with new park attraction time frames, Michael Eisner’s instincts often amazed me—and sometimes caused significant issues in keeping talented designers motivated. When our Typhoon Lagoon water park in Florida was a major hit (it’s still the number-one attended water park in the world), Imagineering was challenged to create a second, separate water park for Walt Disney World. Our teams brainstormed three exciting concepts, each with a distinctive and compelling theme. For the meeting with Michael, we set up the three concepts side by side along one wall in a conference room. My plan was to have each team present its idea, giving each one an equal opportunity to sell their concept. I was all set to give a preamble to the meeting, but Michael walked in, took one look at the wall filled with dozens of sketches, and before I could say a word, pointed to one drawing and said, “That’s it!” Meeting over.
I must admit that the Blizzard Beach water park was one of those no-brainers, but we never did get to present the conceit to the boss. The big idea:
A freak storm dumped tons of snow on Central Florida. An entrepreneur rushed to build a ski resort, complete with chairlifts to the highest peak (“Mount Gushmore” of course). But before he could get the ski resort completed, the snow had melted—so the enterprising entrepreneur turned his ski-resort-to-be into a water park.
Its nomenclature tells the story of what quickly became the second most attended water park in the world. There’s “Melt-Away Bay,” “Runoff Rapids,” “Summit Plummet,” “Slush Gusher,” a kid-sized mountain and slides called “Tike’s Peak,” a snack stand named “Avalunch,” and just one character icon named “Ice Gator.”
Writer/story-creator extraordinaire Kevin Rafferty has described part of the Imagineering approach:
Our best stories are the ones that have a parallel universe�
��something guests can relate to. They know what a ski resort is, so that allows us to turn the notion on its ear by saying, “What happens to a ski resort when the tropical sun returns, and all the snow starts melting?”
Blizzard Beach is the answer.
My problem was not with this uniquely Disney concept; it was with the two teams that had also conceived excellent concepts that were not even presented to Michael Eisner. But in the creative world the Imagineers live in, no idea can become so precious that its failure to be selected is the end of your career. As John Hench taught me, “It’s not an I business; it’s a we business.” So many hands touch an attraction that no one can say, “I did this.”
That’s why I always stressed this to all the creative talent at Imagineering: There is only one name on the door at Disney, and that is still Walt Disney. “If you want your name in lights,” I told them, “you are in the wrong organization.”
“Eisner’s eye” could also pick out the holes in a story. One instance led to the creation of an innovative 3-D theater experience that has thrilled guests in three parks.
Very late in the design of the Animal Kingdom, it was decided that the park’s icon, The Tree of Life, should become more than just a visual statement. Not much more than a year before opening, we decided to create a show inside the tree. The architects and engineers raced to complete their drawings for the contractors and Disney field staff. At the same time, Tom Fitzgerald, Kevin Rafferty, and Joe Rohde struggled with the concept for the new theater’s show, also working against a daunting deadline…and, of course, seeking Eisner’s approval as they presented their ideas. Not satisfied with the latest concept, Michael left the meeting, only to duck back in moments later with a question: “Do bugs live in trees?” he asked.
