Kenversations™
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Unsettling Changes
At lot changed in the mid 1990s.

The Walt Disney Company became much larger and diversified, especially with the acquisition of Cap Cities/ABC.

Paul Pressler was moved from The Disney Stores to President of the Disneyland Resort, a change from the old guard of managers who had come up through the ranks at Disneyland Park.

WDI and DDC were placed together under the umbrella of Disney Design & Development, and then the whole thing was simply took the name of Walt Disney Imagineering, but the leadership was dominated by DDC executives. Frank Wells, who had been part of a dynamic management team with Michael Eisner, died suddenly in an accident. The ambitious plans for Anaheim were scaled back, Disney’s plans for Long Beach were abandoned, the second park for Disneyland Paris was put on hold, staffing at Imagineering declined.

Disneyland Paris

The situation with Disneyland Paris changed the way Disney did theme parks.

It seemed to some that Disney had moved away from the process of allowing ideas to percolate at WDI, forming into concepts organically, and, if surviving internal politics and feasibility studies and finding favor with the corporate CEO (and thus a budget), it would be built at a Disney park and subsequently marketed. Instead, to these observers, the cart was put before the horse. It seemed as though WDI was now handed statistics to design around, a set of parameters, a few holes to fill in a predetermined template, demographics to meet, a budget to stay in, and thus producing what the parks wanted to market, instead of giving them innovative new additions to market.

Disney abandoned plans for a theme park in Virginia.

Word was out that the EPCOT-style park planned for the Disneyland Resort expansion in Anaheim had been scrapped and replaced with a less ambitious park that had an overall theme Disney hadn’t yet tried, complete with boardwalk "flat ride" elements.

A fourth major park for the Walt Disney World Resort, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, was scaled back and opened in April 1998, with additions subsequently phased in. Major work on the Disneyland Resort finally got underway, including Disney’s California Adventure park.

Walt Disney Imagineering was grouped under the direction of Paul Pressler, who was promoted to overseeing Disney’s theme parks and resorts. Far from the day of when WED Enterprises birthed Disneyland Park and both were the darlings of Walt, WDI was now like the elderly mother being kept in line by her own stubborn offspring, the stern father long since passed away.

Disney management still wanted to add theme parks to existing resorts to increase the number of people taking a full vacation (who tend to spend more money than people just visiting for the day), and to get more people to stay (and to stay longer) in Disney lodging. Also, adding additional "gate revenue" became preferable to adding major attractions or even just increasing the number of attractions in older parks. Unfortunately, Animal Kingdom seemed to mostly cannibalize existing visitors to Walt Disney World Resort, simply shifting tourist money from one park to another instead of bringing in additional money. California Adventure failed to draw enough additional visits from domestic and international tourists, and instead was host largely to annual passholders looking for something new and uncrowded in comparison to Disneyland Park.

DisneyQuest at Walt Disney World

DisneyQuest, WDI’s attempt to do for video arcades what Disneyland Park did for amusement parks, was abandoned as regional entertainment enterprise and retreated to the single location at Walt Disney World Resort.

The entire Disney corporation underwent layoffs, including Imagineering. Plans for a fifth theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort and a third park at the Disneyland Resort were shelved.

A particular bright spot for Imagineering at this point was that the Oriental Land Company was expanding the Tokyo Disney Resort, with the centerpiece of the expansion being perhaps the most elaborate and ambitious theme park ever - Tokyo DisneySea. It was based on the concepts Imagineering had considered for Long Beach, California, and financed through the Oriental Land Company.

Unfortunately for WDI, staff cuts continued. Some key Imagineers were sent packing or left, including in the highly-touted Research & Development staff. Many of the Imagineers who created the wildly successful and well-received Tokyo DisneySea returned to California to find their positions with WDI gone, as The Walt Disney Company was not planning parks of that nature and scale, and the Oriental Land Company didn’t have another project ready to go. For that matter, work at Disneyland Paris was wrapping up on a modest studio park, which was opening in 2002.