After Disneyland opened, Walt could relax in the blissful knowledge that his theme park would be a success. But of course he couldn't relax, because new challenges arose constantly: two of the earlier ones were capacity and competition.

Soon after Disneyland opened, Walt knew that his biggest fear—that it would prove a bust—would not be realized. But now, he had to deal with other, in some ways equally challenging, issues. We might think of these issues as the two “Cs” of Disneyland’s first decade of operation. The first “C” was capacity. In the first months of operation, Disneyland’s attendance ran 50 percent over projections. So Walt had to figure out how to add attractions, quickly. The second “C” was competition, as Disneyland’s success swiftly brought imitators. Walt had never wanted Disneyland to be just another amusement park; he wanted it to be something different, and far superior. He recognized that to stay ahead of the competition, he would have to keep introducing bigger and better things to Disneyland.

The desperate need for extra capacity required the employment of creative strategies to add attractions quickly. After the massive success of the three Davy-Crockett-themed episodes of the Disneyland television series, Disney realized its mistake in killing off their hero at the Alamo so soon. They quickly created two “prequel” episodes, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race”, which aired in November 1955, and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates”, which aired the following month. These episodes featured a comic foil for Crockett named Mike Fink. Based, like Crockett, on a real historical figure, Fink was the most famous runner of keelboats, or small boats used to transport cargo, on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the early nineteenth century. Walt had the Gullywhumper, one of the two boats that had been used in the episodes, brought over to Disneyland. Dropped into the Rivers of America, it was turned into a ride called the Mike Fink Keel Boats, which opened on Christmas Day 1955.

There was a limit, however, to the number of attractions that could be created from television props. In January of 1956, Walt met with the Disneyland Merchants’ Association in the Red Wagon Inn on Main Street, U.S.A. to tell them about his future plans. Although he was pleased with the park’s initial success, he announced that he intended to spend $1 million over the next six months to make it even better. The first two new attractions were already in the works, as they could be bought “off-the-rack” rather than having to be designed and built from scratch. A spinning ride called the Roto-Jets was purchased from a German company and given a space-themed makeover. Renamed the Astro-Jets and placed in Tomorrowland, it made its debut on April 2, 1956; it holds a place in Disneyland history as the first major new ride to be added after opening day. Another new attraction also came from Europe. Walt had heard of a new gondola lift, or sky ride, that had opened in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1954, and he was eager to bring a similar attraction to Disneyland, where it could serve as both a ride and mode of transportation across the park. Walt purchased a used model from Von Roll, the same company that had built the sky ride in Zurich. The Skyway opened at Disneyland on June 23, 1956. Fantasyland got a new attraction in 1956 as well: the Mickey Mouse Club Theatre, which showed a compilation of three-dimensional animated shorts called the 3D Jamboree, the first of many 3D films to be shown in Disney theme parks.

The same meeting with the merchants’ association also provides a fascinating glimpse into 1950s gender stereotypes. Walt expressed concerns that Tomorrowland was lacking in attractions that would interest female guests. “Tomorrowland has many things for the men,” he said, “but very little for the women.” To remedy this deficiency, Walt contracted with the Crane Plumbing Company to build the Bathroom of Tomorrow, which featured gold-plated fixtures and a posture-improving toilet seat. The following year, the House of Tomorrow, sponsored by Monsanto, was built near the entrance to Tomorrowland. Walt told the merchants’ association that the House of the Future “should create a great deal of interest for [women] as the kitchen will have the most elaborate utilities and fixtures that can be imagined”. Shaped like a plus-sign, the house consisted of four modules extending from a central core, with everything made out of new materials created by Monsanto’s plastics division. The house was full of futuristic gadgets, including intercom, video phones, and a climate-control system that not only pumped in warm or cool air but also suffused the rooms with fragrant smells.

The next several years saw more additions. In June 1957, Disneyland got its fourth train, the Viewliner, a futuristic train that looped around a figure-eight-shaped track on the edge of Tomorrowland, and the following year an Alice in Wonderland dark ride arrived in Fantasyland. It was Frontierland, however, that saw the biggest changes. The WED team had fiercely debated the question of what to do with the island in the middle of the Rivers of America. One proposal was to make it Mickey Mouse Island, as Mickey’s presence in the park was as yet minimal. Another was for it to contain models of famous America buildings such as Mount Vernon and West Point, or replicas of nineteenth-century river towns such as New Orleans, Natchez, and Mobile. Yet another was for it to be Treasure Island from the 1950 Disney pirate film. In the end, however, it was decided to link the island to the Mark Twain riverboat that sailed around it. Tom Sawyer Island opened in June 1956. It has a unique distinction in Disney history, as it was the only attraction that Walt himself designed. This was because, when Marvin Davis presented Walt with the first concept drawings, he was not satisfied. He took them home and worked on them for hours in the red barn in his backyard where he tinkered with the Carolwood Pacific Railroad. The next day, he slapped the drawings on Davis’s desk, and said, “Now, that’s how it should be.” His plans included a treehouse, a fort, caves, and bouncy pontoon and rope bridges. Several Imagineers, including Vic Green, Herb Ryman, and Claude Coats, then set about transforming Walt’s ideas into reality.

A month after Tom Sawyer Island opened, the Indian War Canoes, real canoes that were paddled by guests, joined the traffic on the Rivers of America. Also opening in July 1956 was the Rainbow Caverns Mine Train, the most elaborate of the new attractions, so much so that it required the creation of a new “D”-ticket. Built at a cost of $500,000, the train circled through the same Western landscape as the pack mules, the Conestoga wagon, and the Rainbow Mountain stagecoach, but only its passengers passed through the Rainbow Caverns, a cave in which black light illuminated multi-colored waterfalls. Two years later, Frontierland saw the arrival of the Sailing Ship Columbia, a replica of the first American ship to sail around the world in 1790.

Another addition to Disneyland in 1958 was an example of something that Walt referred to as plussing. He was always aware of the need to keep improving Disneyland, but it was not until he overheard a mother talking to her daughter that he began to think specifically about the need not only to add new attractions but also to upgrade existing ones. As he stood near the Jungle Cruise, the daughter asked her mother if they could go on the ride. The mother said no, because they had ridden it the last time they were at Disneyland. Walt realized from this conversation that, at a time when guests had to use individual tickets for each attraction, he had to offer them new things to entice them onto the same rides over and over again. He referred to this as plussing the attractions. In 1958, he decided to add a diorama depicting the Grand Canyon to the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad. Inspired by the Oscar-winning Disney documentary short film Grand Canyon, the diorama contained rocks, plants, and taxidermy animals, which were displayed in front of a 306-foot-long painted backdrop by scenic artist Delmer J. Yoakum. It cost $367,000, more than most new rides at the time.

Continued in "Magic Kingdoms"!

Building Euro Disney (later Disneyland Paris) made all the sense in the world. Europeans loved Disney films and characters. But Euro Disney became a spectacular flub that scorched the company for years after its opening.

Michael Eisner’s personal taste also played a role in the design of Euro Disney. A Europhile, Eisner believed that Europeans would not tolerate cheap replicas. In a country filled with real medieval castles, it would not do to have a fake one made of plaster and fiberglass. Euro Disney’s castle thus became the only Disney castle to be built from real stone and to have handcrafted stained-glass windows. Because he and the park’s designers believed that the French saw American culture as shallow, they crammed Euro Disney with details intended to convey depth and sophistication: everything was decorated with art and props, and the fiberglass and synthetic fabrics used in other parks were replaced by real wood, bricks, and canvas. Elsewhere in the resort, the world’s most prominent architects were commissioned to design buildings: Frank Gehry created a shopping and entertainment complex called Festival Disney, while the Hotel New York was designed by Michael Graves, the Newport Bay Club and Hotel Cheyenne by Robert A.M. Stern, the Sequoia Lodge by Antoine Grumbach, and the Hotel Santa Fe by Antoine Predock. As a result of decisions like these, and of France’s high labor costs, the expense of building Euro Disney soared. At the same time, the project fell further and further behind schedule, and when Eisner insisted that it meet its April 1992 opening date, costs rose even higher due to the enormous amounts of overtime that Disney had to pay. In the end, Euro Disney cost a staggering $5 billion, almost four times the original estimate, leaving Disney with $3.5 billion in debt.

Euro Disney opened on April 12, 1992. Prospective visitors were warned about chaos on the surrounding roads, as a poll taken by the French government indicated that as many as 500,000 people might try to attend. But by midday, only 25,000 people had entered the park. This did not particularly dismay Disney executives, who were relieved not to have to deal with a massive crowd, but although attendance picked up somewhat over the ensuing months, it fell off again when the weather turned colder. Pre-opening research had predicted 60,000 visitors a day, but Euro Disney drew an average of only 25,000, forcing estimates of annual attendance to be reduced from 11 million to 9 million. And a lack of attendance was not the only issue; so were different patterns of guest behavior from what Disney was accustomed to in America. Europeans got more vacation time each year than did Americans, but this meant that they had less money to spend per day. This was problematic for Euro Disney, which relied on guests paying a premium to stay in Disney-branded hotels and buying expensive food and souvenirs. Euro Disney’s hotel occupancy rates hovered at around 50 percent, instead of the predicted 85 percent, as many guests opted to stay in Paris and only come to the park for the day. Even those who did stay in Disney hotels often only stayed for a single night; the turnover was so rapid that Disney had to install extra computer terminals to handle the number of people checking in and out. European guests also spent far less per person in the parks than their American and Japanese counterparts did.

It quickly became apparent that, given the interest on the park’s massive debt and an economic recession that hit Europe in 1992, there was no way for Euro Disney to turn a profit. In December 1993, Disney announced a net loss of $308 million for the fiscal year, which meant that the resort was losing almost $1 million per day. This came as a shock to Disney’s leadership team. “We had a generation of executives who had never been around failure,” Eisner recalled. “We had this momentum that never seemed to end… Even I got kind of used to it and comfortable with it.” In the company’s annual report to its stockholders, who had seen the value of their assets decline sharply as a result of Euro Disney’s problems, Eisner admitted that the project was “our first real disappointment” and gave it a grade of “D”, for “dreadful”.

Things did not improve quickly. Euro Disney’s losses in the first quarter of 1994 were a third higher than they had been the previous year. In March 1994, Disney issued an ultimatum that the debt had to be restructured or else it would no longer provide sufficient operating funds to keep the park open. “Everything is possible today, including closure,” said Eisner in an interview with the French magazine Le Point. The banks had little choice: if the park closed and Euro Disney SCA declared bankruptcy, they would be left with an empty theme park, 5000 acres of nearly worthless real estate, and $4 billion in unpaid loans. They thus agreed to write off the next sixteen months of interest payments and to postpone repayments of the principal for three years. For its part, Disney agreed to forego its annual management fee, which was supposed to be 6 percent of net revenue, until 1999, and after that to reduce it to only 1 percent. Disney also forgave $210 million that it was owed in service fees. This was embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as having Euro Disney declare bankruptcy.

In the mid-1990s, Euro Disney finally began to turn an annual profit in some years. Its improving finances allowed the long-delayed second gate in France, the movie-themed Walt Disney Studios Park, to open in March 2002, though its budget was slashed from the original $2.3 billion to a mere $500 million. A modest sixty-two acres in size, with most of its attractions imported from other parks, it currently attracts only 4.5 million guests a year, the lowest total of the eleven Disney theme parks. That same year, Disney renamed the original park Disneyland Paris. Disney CEO Michael Eisner said at the time that for “Americans, the word ‘Euro’ is believed to mean glamorous or exciting. For Europeans it turned out to be a term they associated with business, currency, and commerce. Renaming the park ‘Disneyland Paris’ was a way of identifying it with one of the most romantic and exciting cities in the world.” This explanation for the change of name was a tacit admission of just how much Disney had failed to understand in opening its first European park.

There are several reasons why Euro Disney / Disneyland Paris struggled so mightily. First and foremost was the massive debt that has burdened the park from the beginning, which has made it difficult to fund major improvements and expansions and at times even basic maintenance. Second was the culture clash between European and American patterns of leisure, which Disney failed to understand or take into account. Third was that Euro Disney, more than any other Disney park, required Disney to appeal to a wide variety of nationalities and cultures. Tokyo Disneyland, the first international park, attracted a homogenous urban and Japanese audience, but Euro Disney had to find ways to appeal to people from all over Europe. The failure to solve these problems accounts for the park’s early difficulties, not any failings with the park itself, which contains some of the most beautiful and distinctive work the Imagineers have ever done.

The scale of Euro Disney’s problems became apparent just as Disney was reformulating its plans for the second gate in Anaheim. Suddenly, the company’s entire philosophy about theme park construction rotated 180 degrees. Instead of sparing no expense to build the best park possible, the idea was now to build on the cheap, or not at all. In late 1993, Eisner declared, “I don’t even know if there’s going to be a WestCOT. We’re at a real crossroads. We had a very big investment in Europe and it’s difficult to deal with. This is an equally big investment. I don’t know whether a private company can ever spend this kind of money.” New Disney parks would have to be built quickly and efficiently, and without incurring large amounts of debt, so that they would be profitable from the day that they opened.

Continued in "Magic Kingdoms"!