Disney Look updates, Splash Mtn and lightbulb maintenance, Dumbo pics, Exotic Driving: http://miceage.micechat.com/kevinyee/ky012412a.htm
Disney Look updates, Splash Mtn and lightbulb maintenance, Dumbo pics, Exotic Driving: http://miceage.micechat.com/kevinyee/ky012412a.htm
In many visible ways, Walt Disney World is doing a better job of regular upkeep. This is the season for refurbs, and there are themed scrims galore in the Magic Kingdom. I continue to appreciate the mega-bucks they spend on printing directly on the scrims, so they aren’t just plain colored canvas. But that doesn’t mean they are doing the best job possible. There is always something more that can be done.
So I struggled with how to present this next segment. Should I go the sarcastic route? I could load you up with quotes from Walt about the quality of Disney parks. Or parrot back the same quotes today's Disney park executives use to tout their preventative maintenance.
Or, I could do the more serious thing, and build up the argument for how "declining by degrees" eventually leads to "declining by leaps and bounds." After all, if no one notices the problems or stops spending money with Disney, surely that's a sign for the clueless executives to keep cutting costs, right? Or, I could rail about the buildup of a million tiny problems. The auctioneer's broken neck on Pirates this Sunday (he was talking only to the nearby goat), for instance. One wonders if the geyers on the river will be working when Big Thunder comes back from rehab.
In the end, I decided that all of the above introductions apply (and thus, ironically, none of them was truly "right"). So let me just jump to the video: (snip)
This is how Splash Mountain looked at 5pm and again at 8pm on 1/22/12. Talking with others online, I understand now that this has been a common and recurring problem at Splash Mountain for several weeks. The standard answer given is that maintenance knows about the problem, but is waiting for parts.
"Waiting for parts"? That kind of excuse would barely fly iat a $25/day carnival park - but $90/day for the Magic Kingdom? The world's most-visited theme park? Disney earned its market-leading reputation through decades of hard dedication to things like cleanliness and upkeep. They have been eroding that reputation slowly, but every so often, the erosion gives way to a big chunk. Maybe like the calving of a great glacier... slowly at first, then CRASH!
Back to those old-school standards. The "Four Keys" to Disney's success are, in order: Safety, Courtesy, Show, Efficiency. New Cast Members are supposed to drilled in this belief. Nothing from the 'lower' realm should interfere with the upper one. Thus, you should never sacrifice Show in favor of efficiency.
Maybe it's just me, but it looks like they aren't using those same rules. Keeping the ride running with that much broken looks like prioritizing efficiency over show. One hesitates to ask "What would Walt do?" since the question seems impossible to answer most of the time, but I really do wonder if this is what Walt Disney had in mind.
Disney World is spending a billion dollars to bring us NextGen initiatives. Many of them look promising (I have good things to say about Sorcerers in the Magic Kingdom in a future update). But if these improvements come while the rest of the park crumbles around it, isn't that like painting the Titanic's hull a different color after striking the iceberg?
