Originally Posted By Indigo Well let's just say it was a chicken and the egg problem. Without the negative vibe they might have tried to fix the parade. But the negative vibe was cause in large part by the things that were costing the most. The APs claim they shut this thing down. But theirs was just one blow. The thing really drowned from its own weight (in cost and bad planning).
Originally Posted By Socrates That was new information for me, too. I'd always thought a major advantage of a "streetacular" format was to keep the park from being cut in two for a long period, like during the MSEP. Wouldn't the cost of maintaining an entire parade route be more than just two or three performance sites? Socrates "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Originally Posted By Indigo The problem isn't with the streetacular cutting the park in half. It's when the people who would normally line the whole parade route are corralled into two 'performance corridors', one of which blocks the entrance and exit of the park. Guests now have to wait for hours for a seat to experience the night time parade when before they could walk up 30 minutes before and get a second row seat. When guests are waiting they're not shopping or eating or otherwise spending money. (Well except for ODV, but you can only make so much money selling cheap plastic crap as current park management has found out by running the numbers.) Other guests are now routed backstage into the smelly ugly areas of the park in order to get around the bottleneck of the performance corridor. Both sets of guests come away dissatisfied by the experience (one had to spend too much time for a good, but not amazing, show ( I liked it enough to write the internet FAQ for it) and the other had a less than positive experience backstage and also bypassed all the shopping on main street taking the $50-300 they would have spent on souvenirs home with them instead. Clerks in the emporium sat on their hands for 3 hours every night while hundreds of thousands of dollars passed behind them backstage still in the pockets of guests being directed out the park gates, do not pass go, do not shop on main street. So not only did Light Magic cost upwards of $60 million in construction, labor, and guest control. It also cost untold amounts of lost revenue and bad will from guests who had a less than stellar experience either seeing or being routed around the show. The true costs are probably impossible to figure out. But as a rule of thumb they figure a positive trip report home to the friends and neighbors has the potential of bringing in five more people to the park. A negative one will scare off 20 from even planning a trip. To run Light Magic in the manner that park management did, under Paul Pressler’s lead, is a prime example of the sorts of business decisions contrary to the logical operation of a themepark that led many fans of the park to believe in regime change as the best policy to safeguard the future of Disneyland. Have we affected that sort of regime change now? It remains to be seen. But we should know fairly shortly after May 5th if all the talk about running a themepark the way it is supposed to be run is just talk or if they can put it into action and restore some of the sheen that previous managements have rubbed off the magic.
Originally Posted By Socrates What I meant was the MSEP used to cut the park in half. I saw in Light Magic an attempt to keep the east-west traffic flowing. I remember seeing Light Magic twice, and I don't remember anyone being routed backstage. I would've thought that if the Main Street sidewalks were crowded, people would be forced to walk through the shops. But maybe the solution is an arcade behind Main Street, like Disneyland Paris? Socrates "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance."
Originally Posted By Indigo Even when MSEP used to cut the park in half they allowed crossing breaks. You had to wait a few minutes, but you could cross. With a streetacular (or the new shorter parades with no breaks like they do here in WDW) there is no crossing during the performance. Nighttime parades like MSEP and Spectromagic also serve two very important purposes. First to keep families in the park past the dinner hour spending money on food and merchandise. Second when you run the last parade of the night from town square toward the back of the park it serves as a gentle release of people from the park onto the trams and busses. This makes for a more pleasant experience for the guest. When 15K people try to leave the park at the same time trams lines get long, people get jostled, and kids get impatient. Guests are now left with that unpleasantness as their last memory of their Disney Vacation.
