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When you're running a small business, sometimes there are no words. But if you're looking to protect your small business, then there are definitely words that can help. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. And just like that, a State Farm agent can be there to help you choose the coverage that fits your needs. Whether your small business is growing or brand new, your State Farm agent is there to help. On the phone or in person. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Accomplishments? Oh my God, that's embarrassing. I'm Phil Simms. I'm 68 years old now, played the NFL for 15 years, was fortunate enough to be part of two Super Bowl winning teams. In 1987 and 1991, Phil Simms took the New York Giants to the Super Bowl. He was the team's quarterback, and he was a good one. But he's also famous for something else. I'm just going to guess it was probably on the Monday before the Super Bowl. My
My agent, David Fischhoff, came and told me all that was going on. Back in 1987, Sims' agent had a deal for him to consider from Disney. The company wanted whoever ended up winning the Super Bowl that year to film an ad for Disney World. Right after the game, right there on the field. If you win, and I said, no, I'm not doing it.
Were they trying to jinx him? But his agent kept pushing and pushing, and by Friday, Sims was too exhausted for superstition and relented. Fine, he'd sign the deal.
Fast forward to Super Bowl Sunday. It was the Giants versus the Denver Broncos. And the Giants played great. They won. It was the team's first Super Bowl title ever. Franchise history. Right as the game—I'm telling you within five seconds the game is going to be over—
I can't remember her name. I get punched on my left side and they go, Phil, don't forget we're doing, I'm going, you're going to Disney World. I went, oh my gosh. You know, I was like, I can't believe this. I can't believe I'm doing a commercial within 30 seconds when the Super Bowl is over.
The commercial aired within hours of the game. First, When You Wish Upon a Star played over footage of Sims' best moves. Then, it cut to him on the field. Bill Sims, you just won the Super Bowl. What are you doing next? I'm going to go to Disney World. The final shot is, of course, Disney's castle framed by fireworks. What's hilarious about it
that I did play a really good game. We did win the Super Bowl. And the next day, all anybody wanted to talk about was that commercial. Sims would never stop hearing about that commercial. Because from 1987 on, a version of it has run after almost every Super Bowl.
I'm Going to Disney World has extended into other sporting events like the Stanley Cup, the NBA Finals, the Olympics, even American Idol, if you consider singing a sport. And I do. I'm very glad I did it. And of course, being the first one to ever do it, it's a little bit of a badge of honor.
To be honest, I didn't even know the whole I'm going to Disney World thing was an ad. I always thought it was what winners did, like kissing a trophy, like dumping Gatorade on a coach's head. This Disney ad has become a tradition in itself. Which makes perfect sense, because slipping so seamlessly into American tradition and culture...
That is what Disney does. Disney's business is memory making. Disney's business is tradition, specifically American memory making and American tradition. And so they're woven into the very fabric of who we are.
Over the decades, Disney has attached itself to our emotions, memories, even our identities. And the parks are critical to that mission. Disney World, Disneyland, places of celebration, optimism, and fantasy come true. These are weapons-grade emotion and memory-making machines. Plus, they make so much money.
In 2023, the Disney division encompassing parks accounted for 70% of the company's operating income. By contrast, the entertainment division — that's movies and TV — provided 11%. So, the parks carry the entire company's profits. You could very well argue that today, Disney is a theme park company. This is Land of the Giants.
I'm Rebecca Alter. I'm a staff writer for Vulture, covering all kinds of pop culture, including theme parks. Today, the story of how Disney's parks became so powerful, how they became the purest distillation of the Disney brand, and how the company learned to wield them accordingly. We'll start with where Disney's brand came from in the first place. An early character from the company,
I'll give you two seconds to guess. It's Mickey Mouse. So Mickey comes on the scene in the 1920s and becomes incredibly popular. Bethany Bemis is a historian at the Smithsonian. Around the time Mickey made his debut, Disney the company was in trouble. In 1923, a 21-year-old Walt Disney and his brother Roy had opened up shop in L.A. with the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio.
Five years later, the company was close to bankruptcy. But thankfully, it had started work on a new character, Mickey Mouse. Though Mickey was less of a mouse and more of a lab rat. Because Walt decided to use him in an experiment. In the 1920s, we're just starting to see the rise in popularity of films with synchronized sound.
Most movies at the time were silent films, with a score disconnected from what was happening on screen. Walt realizes that this is his opportunity to set his animation apart from that that's already being done. So Walt goes to New York, which is where most of the sound companies are based. He found a batch of musicians to score the cartoon, and since the company was broke, he
He sold his car to pay them. He had bought this moon roadster that he really loved. He courted his wife in it. It was like one of his first big purchases. It was a worthy sacrifice. The cartoon was an innovation. You could hear the steamboat engines puff air. You could hear the steamboat engines puff air.
You could hear Mickey whistling and blowing raspberries. The short got rave reviews. Mickey Mouse was a star. And he did something very important for Disney's brand. He becomes an American symbol almost immediately, within the first few years of his invention.
It's not not what Disney was going for. After Steamboat Willie, the company purposefully sketched Mickey as an all-American hero. For example, in 1932, there was the short Mickey's Good Deed, where Mickey, impoverished by the Great Depression, buys toys and food for an even poorer family of cats. Aww.
America ate that shit up. In 1933, a journalist for the LA Times wrote, Mickey Mouse is an epic of your soul, my soul, the plumber's soul, and of course, the soul of Walt Disney. Mickey is everyman. He is little David who slays Goliath. That soul of Walt Disney was also important to the company's brand.
Walt, like Mickey, was one of Disney's most powerful original characters, his own all-American hero. I don't know exactly what it is that makes Walt love America so much, but he always does.
Walt was a Midwestern boy. He grew up on a farm in Missouri, close to the Santa Fe Railway. Then in Kansas City, where he worked an early morning newspaper route with his brother. He is a teenager during World War I. And in fact, he's too young to enlist in the military. But he realizes that the Ambulance Corps is taking younger teenagers. He's still not old enough to join the Ambulance Corps, but he says he is.
Walt joined the cause any way he could. He also drew patriotic cartoons for his high school's newspaper, doodles of soldiers serving their country overseas. Walt loved America, and America loved him back, baby. I mean, he was America's favorite kind of success story. A kid who worked hard, who chased his dreams, who pursued innovation over riches. And got rich anyway.
So with Walt as his soul, Mickey was a proud product of the American dream. He also quickly becomes the most identifiable symbol
with the Disney name and the Disney brand. If Mickey does this, then Disney also does this. Which, according to Bemis, inspired Disney to change Mickey a bit. Because in his earliest cartoons, he could be kind of a little shit. So in the 1930s, then they invent the character of Donald Duck.
whose entire personality is based on his anger, right? And his irascibility. I mean, that's what, if you know one thing about Donald Duck, you know that he's always angry about something. And so they push some of those more aggressive personality traits onto Donald Duck so that Mickey Mouse can really shine as this
pure icon of goodness, of happiness, of optimism. Mickey was also an icon you could bring into your home because soon after his first smash hit, Disney started licensing the mouse's image for merch. It was apparently the spark for the company's marketing biz, which, spoiler alert, absolutely exploded.
It wasn't just toys, either. By the late 30s, you could do your chores with some Snow White-branded bleach and then chow down on Snow White ham and bacon. Disney made so much money, so much, that it might have helped plant an important idea in Walt's mind.
Clearly, people wanted to be surrounded by the worlds and stories that Disney had to offer. There are a lot of different stories about how Walt came up with Disneyland. The most popularly recognizable one is that he would take his daughters to a local park, Griffith Park, on the weekends.
He would watch them ride the carousel, but it was made for children. He couldn't really participate. He was bored sitting on the bench, and he thought, you know, I could do this better. I could create a place where families can have these experiences together, sort of in the same role that he created these films that he thought families could watch together. Walt had also been thinking, at one point, about ways to open the Disney studio lot to visitors so they could see inside the magic. But
By now we're in the late 1940s, when Walt's relationship with his animation studio was complicated. In 1941, Disney animators went on strike. Walt was not sympathetic. He tried to fire a key union organizer, and the whole thing dragged on for months. As one writer put it, he acted like a colossal capitalist jackass. So, when he watched his daughters ride the carousel at Griffith Park...
Perhaps he was also a bit disillusioned with moviemaking and looking for another kind of project. And as the story goes, he began to imagine a grand Disney park, a theme park for children and adults.
Thing was, Disney, the company, was not in the position to imagine much of anything new at this point, let alone a big, risky project. World War II had just ended, and the studios weren't bringing in a lot of money. The company was in rough financial shape.
So Walt had to do his imagining on his own time. And so secretly, he uses his own money, he calls in life insurance policies, so that he can bring some of the people that work at the Disney studio onto his own payroll. FEMA says they worked in secret on a plan they could take to Walt's brother Roy to try and get him on board. And it worked.
Roy went to New York City to pitch investors on funding Disneyland. One of those potential investors was none other than the American broadcasting company, ABC. Coincidentally, ABC needed a hit show and thought it could find one in Walt. So they came up with an incredible business proposition. Host a TV show with us and we'll give you the credit line you need to build your park.
And that is how, in October 1954, ABC debuted a show called Walt Disney's Disneyland. Here is how Walt introduces the first episode, standing underneath a framed picture of Mickey Mouse. Welcome. I guess you all know this little fella here. It's an old partnership. Mickey and I started out the first time many, many years ago. We've had a lot of our dreams come true. Now we want you to share with us our latest and greatest dream.
We cut to an aerial view of a patch of land, 160 acres of what used to be Walnut and Orange Groves in Anaheim, California, which Walt promises will turn into something incredible. We hope that it will be unlike anything else on this earth. In fact, a place of hopes and dreams, facts and fancy, all in one.
It's quickly clear that America will be the star of this new, amazing place. When you come in the main gate, past the railroad station, down the steps and across the band concert park, straight ahead lies the heartline of America, an old-fashioned Main Street, hometown USA, just after the turn of the century.
From hometown USA, you could then visit four different lands, all of which represented some piece of American history or an American value. Frontierland, tall tales and true from the legendary past. Tomorrowland, promise of things to come. Adventureland, the wonder world of nature's own realm. Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of them all.
Each of these lands would inspire episodes of the show. Audiences would learn about the process of building them, the rides they promised, and the stories they told. And if this all just sounds like a big ad for Disneyland, yes indeed. It was a very long, episodic ad that millions of Americans watched and loved. Early evidence of Disney's knack for turning its commercials into defining moments of popular culture.
Here's a wild example of how much of a hit this show became. In March 1955, it aired an episode called Man in Space, all about the latest plans for man's newest adventure.
That's how Walt put it. And they brought in actual scientists. They brought in Wernher von Braun to talk about how it might be possible to put a man on the moon. Small but not insignificant note, Wernher von Braun was a Nazi. Like, in the 30s and 40s, he'd worked for the Nazi Party in Germany. But by the 50s, he had come to America and was on Walt Disney's Disneyland. Now, here's a model I designed for a four-stage orbital rocket ship.
Von Braun would later work for NASA and help put actual people on the moon. In this episode, he worked with Disney artists to accurately animate his rocket ship. Watching it feels a bit like science class, but over 40 million Americans did.
And incredibly, after the episode aired, the company got a call from President Eisenhower. According to legendary Disney producer and animator Ward Kimball, the president wanted a copy for his staff to watch. And there was another request for Disney's blueprint for space travel. This one by mail from a Soviet space official.
We're not saying Disney had any impact on the Cold War, but historian Bethany Bemis did tell us that Walt made quite the impression with American audiences. He has been credited with really making the entire country believe that space travel was a real possibility. And listen, very few people were actually going to go to space.
But at Disneyland, you'd be able to get on a ride that made you feel like you were. So people are really invested before it's even built in the success of this place. And they already want to see it before it even exists. And in July 1955, they could. When Disneyland opened to the public, ABC broadcast the event live with 29 cameras. The park was barely ready.
Women's heels stuck to the undried asphalt on Main Street, and the Mark Twain steamboat filled with so many people, it almost capsized. But the asphalt eventually dried, and Disneyland found its groove. A month in, it was hitting over 20,000 visitors a day. By 1957, it beat out the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite as a tourist attraction. ♪
With the opening of Disneyland, Disney cemented a core business strategy it still uses today. Exhaustive integration. That's what Roy Disney called it in a 1958 puff piece by the Wall Street Journal titled, Roy said, quote,
Integration is the key word around here. We don't do anything in one line without giving a thought to its likely profitability in other lines. In other words, no Disney hit would live in a vacuum. A film might spin off an album release or a TV show. It would definitely become merchandise. And it would most definitely come to life in the park. As Roy put it, quote, "...our product is practically eternal."
When that article came out, Disneyland was just one of the few impressive lines of business for Disney to flex. But since then, as noted, the division has grown into the line of business, arguably the key to upholding Disney's financial and cultural strength. It has also literally grown beyond Disneyland. Because, of course, every good idea deserves a sequel, right?
In 1971, Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida. And starting in the 1980s, Disney went international. Now there are parks in Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Disney's even conquering the seas. They've got five different cruise ships that are basically floating Disneyland's, and they travel to different Disney private islands.
What was once an idea that Disney needed ABC to fund has become a global phenomenon. These places are more than theme parks. They've resonated with generations of people across the world for decades. They're where you go when you win the Super Bowl. What is going on inside these parks that makes them so enduring? And how does Disney plan to make sure things stay that way? That is after the break.
On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
Hey, Sue Bird here. I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days, and there's so much to talk about. So Megan and I are launching a podcast where we're going to deep dive into all things sports, and then some. We're calling it A Touch More.
Because women's sports is everything. Pop culture, economics, politics, you name it. And there's no better folks than us to talk about what happens on the court or on the field and everywhere else too. And we'll have a whole bunch of friends on the show to help us break things down. We're talking athletes, actors, comedians, maybe even our moms. That'll be a fun episode.
Whether it's breaking down the biggest games or discussing the latest headlines, we'll be bringing a touch more insight into the world of sports and beyond. Follow A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. The word aspiration.
literally covers all the lands of Disneyland. Eddie Sato is an expert in what makes Disney's parks so magical. Because for years, it was his job to maintain that magic. Sato is a former Disney Imagineer and current character at Disney World, if you listen closely enough on the steam train. That's true. Now arriving from a grand circle trip around the Magic Kingdom with stops at Fantasyland, Frontierland...
And the land of the giants, Laskal.
You have to add reverb to that and it'll sound just like the Disney ride thing. Yeah. No, I've done a few voicemails for people, you know. Before Sato was a Disneyland professional, he was a very big fan. Well, I remember going to Disneyland. My father told me this story that after the fireworks, I was so small, like five or six. He goes, do you like Disneyland, Eddie? And I go, dad.
I like Disneyland. And then to make sure he really knew it, I pulled on his sweater again and said, I like Disneyland. You know, hopefully that wasn't the Norman Bates of theme parks, but I was a little bit excited by all of that.
Okay, for the nerds, that would make him the second Norman Bates of theme parks, after the one on the Universal Backlot Tour. But you get the idea. Eddie Sato fell into a deep obsession. So deep that at around 11 or 12 years old, he asked his dad to call Disney and ask for the blueprints to Disneyland. And basically pretended to be sick out of school for quite some time and made a paper model of the entire park.
Sato jokes that it was his destiny to work for Disney. And I'm convinced. Because even as a kid, he seemed to understand the most powerful thing about Disney's parks. That they are designed to be their own self-contained, complete worlds. Disneyland was the first virtual reality. Think of it. In the 1950s, they didn't have computers. But you could be immersed in this reality.
realistic world and the sky is 360 degrees. It's there. Everything around you reinforces that you're in a world of fantasy. You literally pass a plaque on your way into Disneyland that says, here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.
So to keep the VR metaphor going. This is when you're putting the headset on. You're walking away from it. Forget everything, you know, from this moment on. It's a movie in reverse where the seats are not in the theater. And where you're the main character. For example, Sato says when he worked on Disneyland Paris, he picked a very specific tempo for the background music on Main Street.
He wanted it to be the same tempo as the cadence of horses clopping down the street, since this was supposed to be a 19th century world. So it's deeply psychological. You come to Disneyland and all of these things, yeah, there's thrills there. But if you're a little seven-year-old girl and you look up at the Matterhorn,
And you ride that, you really don't go to the top of the mountain. You're never at risk. My formula for theme park thrill rides was fear minus death equals fun. I mean, we're going to make you terrified. Something's going to happen, but it's okay. You know you're okay. You know, there's rails under you. You've got a safety belt. You still, but at seven, you look up at that mountain and say, I did that.
So all of these things are comings of age, see? These are the secret ingredients that make these things repeatable. Future Disney adults are forged in the icy depths of Mount Matterhorn. Sato's Point. It's the park's overwhelming immersion that helps turn them into such potent memory machines. ♪
And they're memories you can pass down. Disneyland and Disney World have been around for decades, long enough for rides like the Matterhorn to become a generational experience. The Disney visit is the American rite of passage. Bethany Bemis again, historian at the Smithsonian. We don't have a communal religion. We don't have these communal sort of ceremonies by which we mark time together.
And yet we do have this Disney visit that we sort of assume if your family could afford it, you did. Right. At some point. And even if your family couldn't afford it, that you might have figured out a way to make it happen. That's how important it is. This sense that the Disney parks are not just a personal experience, but something closer to family obligation and national religious pilgrimage is
That can't be entirely explained by all the worlds-building Sato described. Disney's parks have taken up this position in the American collective identity because Walt set them up to. You know, I think that you can think of...
maps of Disneyland and maps of Walt Disney World, like maps of America, like maps of American imagination. Walt designed the original Disneyland as an idealized vision of America's past, present, and future.
Like his high school doodles, like Mickey Mouse, Disneyland was Walt's homage to his country. But it was Walt's vision of America, reflecting the nostalgia and wonder and conservatism of a white Midwestern kid born at the turn of the 20th century. Not the kind of vision that ages well. And if you compared a map from...
the 1950s and a map of today, you would actually see a lot of changes that you can track with sort of the way America thinks about itself differently, right? There used to be an Indian village where, you know, American Indians would actually put on performances and sort of pretend to be part of this frontierland culture.
In the 60s, when the civil rights movement is rising, Disney decides, hmm, not going to do that anymore. By 1972, Disneyland's Indian Village had become bear country, a different view of the frontier. To Bemis, little pivots like this reveal a strategy on Disney's part to build from the foundation Walt set up to continue to tug on American nostalgia, whatever nostalgia is appropriate for the times.
Mirror, mirror for us all. That's how Bemis has put it. Though unlike Snow White's magic mirror, the Disney parks reflect a distortion, an edited view of American history. And that edited, Disney-fied view, it is so seductive, even the American government has played right into it. At times you could even say magnified it.
Did you know that a presidential inauguration happened at Disney World? So Ronald Reagan's second inauguration, it's supposed to take place, of course, in the dead of winter in Washington, D.C., and it is so cold that it was deemed unsafe to have an outdoor ceremony. So everything is canceled. In January 1985, more than 50 high school bands set to perform in Reagan's inaugural parade were robbed of their moment in the national spotlight.
Or so they thought. Walt Disney World decides that they are going to invite all of the high school bands that were slated to perform in the inaugural parade down to Walt Disney World. And they're going to put on what they call the President's
inaugural bands parade or something close to that. Basically, Disney World cast itself as an understudy to the U.S. Capitol and elbowed its way to center stage. And so Memorial Day of that same year, in the morning, Ronald Reagan wakes up and he goes and he lays a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier in a very classic American symbolism moment.
flies down to Walt Disney World and has his inaugural bands parade at Epcot. It was minus 20 degrees at the inauguration. It's 85 here today. Here's Michael Eisner, then CEO, celebrating this beautiful moment of capitalist synergy. Even though this isn't the official, it's the unofficial inauguration parade. It's the first time since 1789 it has not been in Washington. I just want to say that Walt Disney, were he alive today, would be proud
to be standing here in my place with the President of the United States, and I welcome him with Mrs. Lilly and Disney, his widow, to our great, wonderful company here. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.
It's so telling that Eisner invoked Walt like that and invited his widow, along with Reagan, as the guest of honor. And Walt would have probably been proud of Eisner's sly move to immediately place this unofficial inauguration in the historic timeline of official ones.
This is not the only time Disney has been used as political prop. In 1973, Richard Nixon gave his famous Watergate speech, the I am not a crook one, from Disney World's Contemporary Resort. And in 2012, for a speech all about tourism, Barack Obama sat up in front of Cinderella's castle and said this. Ultimately, that's how we're going to rebuild an economy where hard work pays off, where responsibility is rewarded.
and where anybody can make it if they try. That's what America is all about. And a place like Disneyland represents that quintessentially American spirit. This image is something that's recognized all around the world. This image, as in the castle behind him, a huge, protruding symbol of America at its best.
To use Eisner's trick of semantics, Disney's parks aren't officially American monuments. But aren't they?
I'd argue Disney parks are even more revealing than a lot of monuments. One, because they make millions and millions of dollars for a giant corporation, which is actually peak Americana. And two, because they're this evolving reflection, this story, of what exactly has captured the American childhood imagination over decades.
What begins to happen is, because this is just the nature of time itself, is the things that people are nostalgic for are creations that Disney itself owns. This is Kevin Pergerer, better known to his nearly 2 million followers on YouTube as Defunctland. Pergerer started as a documentarian of exactly what it sounds like, the defunct parts of Disneyland. But now he's expanded into covering all things Disney.
Nostalgia has always been the park's currency. But Pergerer points out that as time has gone on, as Disney has grown, the nostalgia has shifted more and more inward. So people are no longer nostalgic as Walt Disney was for the turn of the century when the Walt Disney Company didn't exist. But people's childhoods were Disney. When Disneyland first opened in the 1950s, the company only had so much IP to pull from for rides and exhibits.
Feature-length animation as an art form hadn't even turned 20 yet. Dumbo, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, they were mostly confined to Fantasyland, and the rest of the park was a blank canvas, with room for Walt and his Imagineers to look beyond the worlds his own company had already created. But now, Disney's archive is deep. I think every generation has two or three Disney films that
that really define them. Davy Crockett, right, in the 50s. That's huge. And I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so that sort of Belle Ariel...
run of princesses, Lion King, those are sort of my Disney films. In America, fairy tales aren't folktales. They're Disney movies. If you were born in the 80s or later, Little Mermaid isn't a Hans Christian Andersen story that ends in her dissolving into seafoam. Little Mermaid is about a redhead getting terrorized by a tentacled drag queen. And when you hear the word genie, you probably think of a blue guy voiced by Robin Williams.
Bethany Bemis may not be able to turn back time and revisit her childhood, but she can literally go somewhere and take pictures with Belle or ride in a giant clamshell and meet Ariel. She can bring her childhood to the present, to a physical place, to a Disney park. That tie of having enough...
good films for a generation to remember them through the rest of their lives, right? And then having that be something that they see when they go to the parks is crucial. As Roy Disney put it, the product becomes eternal.
Since the parks are such an incredible tool for the company to immortalize its own assets, to make what has already been lucrative on the studio side even more lucrative, over the years, they've just become way more self-referential. They own the thing that they're nostalgic for and now can protect it, utilize it, exploit it.
Exploit it, they do. At this point, Disney's parks are stuffed to the brim with IP, IP, and more IP. And Disney has assimilated even more pieces of huge pop culture into its Borg. Its biggest acquisitions, Star Wars, Marvel, The Muppets, that stuff's all shown up in the parks too. The result?
Visit Walt Disney World today, and you could ride three different Star Wars rides and four different Toy Story rides. You could queue for rides based on Guardians of the Galaxy, Ratatouille, Snow White, Frozen, and Tron for some reason.
You could watch the Indiana Jones epic stunt spectacular or Muppet Vision 3D. And then grab lunch at a quick service restaurant themed after an ABC network commissary with posters for shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live. You can literally go scuba diving in a Finding Nemo themed research aquarium. Magic Kingdom even has a cult favorite tangled themed restroom with Flynn Rider wanted posters outside the stalls.
Why not? IP exploitation is not surprising. It would be frankly dumb of Disney to not do it. And the company practically boasts about how calculated its decisions are when it comes to what to plant in the parks. It said it opened Zootopia Land in Shanghai specifically because the movie did so well in China years ago. Integration.
As we know, this is not a new strategy. But something about Disney's use of the parks now feels different to experts like Kevin Pergerer. As we've seen, I think, in the corporate landscape over the past 10 years is because it focuses so much on...
growth, profits, acquisitions from a business level. And because, especially for the past 10 years, major studios in Hollywood have basically been role-playing as tech companies. They then treat their properties, their characters, their stories as assets rather than stories or characters.
Disney is more data-driven than ever, Perjurer says. It is 2024, after all, so it knows with better precision which Disney stories resonate with people the most, which ones people would pay the most to experience. And Disney is monetizing accordingly.
Sometimes with a level of crassness that feels uncomfortable, even to Disney's most engaged fans. So on March 1st, 2022, the Walt Disney Company opened their newest experiment in themed entertainment, an immersive multi-day adventure set in the Star Wars universe. This is Jenny Nicholson, a YouTuber who went viral in May for her four-hour review of Disney's failed Star Wars hotel.
Officially called Star Wars Galactic Star Cruiser, this was a Disney experience that opened to massive fanfare and hype in 2022. It was an interactive Star Wars resort where you could live the story. It felt like something that couldn't possibly fail. It was Disney's ship of dreams. But less than two years later, it closed.
Nicholson, a Star Wars and theme park enthusiast, delivered a fair but scathing assessment. She compared the experience to flying Spirit Airlines, where you're so nickel-and-dimed it feels like a scam. What was supposed to be an immersive, premium Disney experience, Nicholson argued, was prohibitively expensive and paywalled.
Her feelings resonated. In the span of three weeks, almost 8 million people watched the four-hour review. Who says attention spans are dead? This made news, which is telling. When people go to the Disney parks, they're paying to visit a world of fantasy, to make new memories, to feel like they're letting go of real life.
And of course they know this all feeds back into Disney's larger business strategy. Of course they know their emotions are being leveraged for dollars. That's what entertainment is. They just got something out of it too. But I think the wild success of Nicholson's video is a sign that that balance is out of whack, that some of Disney's park guests feel exploited.
It's not giving world of fantasy. It's giving paywall. On the other hand... I mean, the parks are more crowded than they've ever been. So, you know, you can only pound your fist as much as you want and get mad because something's working internally. And Disney plans to keep it working. The company has announced it will spend $60 billion expanding and developing its Parks and Experiences division over the next 10 years. This is the big bet.
This is the company leaning into its identity as a theme park company. But the power of those parks is in their memory-making. And to keep that power, those memories need to be good. Disney can only afford so many memories tainted by tantrums, waiting in lines, being disappointed, being broke, if they want today's Disney babies to turn into tomorrow's Disney adults.
These parks may feel like immovable pieces of American culture, but they rely on a delicate balance. And it's up to Disney to maintain that balance. Speaking of, next on Land of the Giants, animation.
This is another thing the parks rely on. Generation after generation getting hooked on Disney content. After some studio stumbles and a dry upcoming slate of franchises, sequels, reboots, rehashes, and warmed-over leftovers, will Disney still be able to spark that connection with the next generation? I think that the moniker of Disney is less powerful, and I don't know if the world cares that this is a Disney movie anymore.
Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma is produced by Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Kinane produced this episode. Charlotte Silver is our lead producer. Julie Myers is our editor. Claire Cronin is our fact checker. Brandon McFarland composed the theme and mixed and scored this episode.
Neil Janowitz is the editor-in-chief of Vulture. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. And I'm Rebecca Alter. If you liked this episode, tell a friend and follow us to hear our next episode when it drops next Wednesday.
