Originally Posted By Dr Hans Reinhardt Or the Disney Family Museum. The have the mechanical innards of one of the original Lincolns in there already.
Originally Posted By Bob Paris 1 "As to the posting of new ideas by insiders. Disney's big brother is working to catch and fire insiders who are doing this." This might explain where Leemac has gone.
Originally Posted By Bellella Guys in charge, please take better care of your attractions. What if something really serious happens, and people's safety becomes an issue? You've got to stay on top of it all if you want to stay at the top! And please don't take away Mr. Lincoln.
Originally Posted By FerretAfros Proportionally for the size of the theater, Lincoln plays to a similar size audience as The American Adventure at Epcot. While it doesn't get huge numbers, it does seem to get fairly consistent crowds throughout the course of the day (which is more than I can say for EO, MuppetVision, and ITTABAB). From my understanding, it's living up to its realistic expectations.
Originally Posted By HMButler79 ""Who is "they"."" The Disney/Meg-bots who sit all day in Celebration Place, having fake accounts on that,,,umm...other MAGICal website and contradicting everyone there with thier pro-Disney/The Company can do no wrong/WDW has never been better posts.
Originally Posted By Manfried Not my understanding at all Ferret. Some might be happy, but I know the financial folks are saying wait a minute.
Originally Posted By Bob Paris 1 "His identity wasn't anonymous, though, was it?" Ummmmmmm......not if you actually know his real name, which I thought was WIDELY well known here. Let's just say your name was "Mark MacPherson" and you posted here as "Markmac". Wouldn't be too hard to deduce, right? Now just swap "Pherson" for the name of a famous Disney character and you may be onto something.
Originally Posted By CDF2 IMO there seems to be little doubt that the management of the parks no longer has the charter to make sure things are 100% perfect all the time - while that is the reported standard that Walt himself held for Disneyland the current management seems much more of the 80/20 rule where as long as most of the park features are there you can let some things slide by. On the other hand, if you take something like Expedition Everest where the absolute centerpiece of the attraction is not working, you have a real test of what management feels are the important aspects of the park in terms of the guest experience. One might argue that the designers reach exceeded their grasp in the effort to provide a spectacular finale to the EE ride - the amount of technology involved in the big AA Yeti is cutting edge and from the sound of it may not, when working properly, be a mechanism that can be counted on to perform reliably unless there is consistent maintenance or perhaps even a redesign. So is it a good design if it can't hold up over time? Again, the only way to measure the impact of either neglected maintenance or features not working because of maintenance or design problems would be in park attendance - if paying customers feel the guys down the road provide a more satisfying and entertaining product, then that may be the only message that Disney park management folks will hear that moves them to action.
Originally Posted By danyoung CDF2, you make a good case. I've always found myself somewhat on the fence on this argument. On the one hand, I'd love it if the true spirit of Walt was still alive in park management, and an attraction would be totally shut down if there was a problem like on Splash or with the yeti on Expedition Everest. But on the other hand, Everest is one of my favorite coasters ever, and my enjoyment of it is not dependent on the yeti character working or not working. I'm sure Disney is counting on this. Otherwise they would have shut it down soon after the yeti stopped working, and even if they had to tear out half of the mountain they wouldn't have opened it again until there was a fully working and reliable character there. Now, when you look at that last scene on Splash, it is much more of an integral part of the show aspect of the ride than the yeti is. And I am very disturbed by Disney continuing to allow this very bad show to continue even a day. So there's a fine line between what's acceptable and what's not, and that line is different for every person. And when you add in the financial aspect, the fact that the decision makers have to answer to their stockholders, that line gets blurred (or lowered) even further. It's a sad reality that people like me will continue to visit the parks (and GASP!!! - even have FUN!) while things are broken or trashcans are too full or a CM or two isn't as good at customer interaction as they should be. The Disney parks are still pretty good places to visit. Could the Disney company do better? Yup. Should they? Absolutely. Will they? The jury's still out . . .
Originally Posted By skinnerbox <<It's a sad reality that people like me will continue to visit the parks (and GASP!!! - even have FUN!) while things are broken or trashcans are too full or a CM or two isn't as good at customer interaction as they should be. The Disney parks are still pretty good places to visit. Could the Disney company do better? Yup. Should they? Absolutely. Will they? The jury's still out . . .>> As long as park visitors like you continue to visit and "GASP!!! - even have FUN!" then Disney won't do better. I used to visit every year, sometimes twice a year, but no more. The costs kept going up while the overall quality kept going down. I haven't been to WDW in over four years, and frankly, I don't really miss it. There's been nothing new that's compelling enough to justify a return trip. I'm gladly spending my money elsewhere. This company has proven time and time again to be reactionary. The proactive business practices from the Walt era are gone, and have been for decades. Not until major pain is felt in Disney's wallet will these problems like bad maintenance and failing infrastructure be corrected. I've said it before and I'll say it again: THANK HEAVEN FOR THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER!! It's the only thing that has consistently made a dent in Disney's revenue stream, enough to get them sweating about their future. And that's a very good thing for the rest of us.
Originally Posted By danyoung > Not until major pain is felt in Disney's wallet will these problems like bad maintenance and failing infrastructure be corrected.< I don't exactly agree with this. You can't say that Disneyland was feeling any kind of pain when Matt Ouimet came in and cleaned things up for the 50th. What's needed is new management in Florida, as well as some monumental reason (MK's 50th?) to make things better. I do agree that as long as the bottom line is stable and even growing there won't be much incentive to do it better.
Originally Posted By gardenrooms Does the Yeti work sometimes now as an earlier post makes it sound? I assumed it was still broken with no plans to fix it. Hopefully I was wrong - have a once in every few years trip coming up and would love to see it as it's supposed to be - or at least have a chance to.
Originally Posted By danyoung The yeti is still down, and there have been no leaks of plans to fix it. That doesn't mean that WDI doesn't have something in mind. But if they do, they aren't sharing.
Originally Posted By SpokkerJones This was Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland circa late-90s. No one took a video at the time, but someone compiled a text file of all of the things that were broken and it's probably sitting around on a hard disk somewhere around here. The last few times I went to Disneyland, it was clear how much improved the upkeep was, even though I disagree with some recent artistic decisions. What's there is kept well-maintained. Judging by reports and now this video, the same cannot be said for the Magic Kingdom.
Originally Posted By SpokkerJones Having thought about it more, this seems like a good opportunity to use social media for good rather than evil. Let's say there is a "parts problem." It's kind of silly at face value but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. If the official blog wasn't such a shill propaganda machine, they could address the problem head on. You could document the initial attempts to fix the animatronics, even take photos of happy little engineers diligently working in the wee hours of the night to get the attraction running on all four cylinders. Offer some insight into what parts are needed and how it all works. Use it as an opportunity to communicate some of the difficulties in keeping a Disney theme park up and running 100%. Of course, this assumes they are working hard to fix the problem and not just kicking the can down and road and hoping nobody notices. Using some insights from the public transportation sector, people have a good deal of tolerance for problems if and only if they feel the agency is communicating with them. If you give a reasonable and timely explanation for a problem, people are going to be much more likely to react positively. Interestingly enough, and this may be something more organizations might want to think about, but the local transit agency in my area actually hired the transportation reporter from the Los Angeles Times, a real journalist, and put him in charge of their official Metro blog. There's a fair amount of fluff, of course, but they actually get out in front of controversial stories. They aren't afraid to publish negative Tweets and comments about the services they offer. Is this something Disney would be interested in doing? Probably not, but it's a strategy. But it only works if you don't muzzle the person you hired. In this hypothetical, it's something the Disney blog could get out in front of and address before anyone else did. It doesn't have to be a formal thing but something like, "We noticed some problems on Splash Mountain and we hope to get it to 100% soon." It might demonstrate that someone cares about something more than Eli Manning's trip to Disney World. I just looked at 5 pages of that blog and there isn't anything remotely interesting about it.
