Michael Eisner officially stepped down from his post as Disney’s CEO on September 30, 2005. He would go on to become a “Disney Legend” (the company’s highest honor) in 2011, but suffice it to say that at time of his departure, Eisner was a controversial figure. How couldn’t he be? The precipitous highs of his 21-year tenure saw the tired and rusted remnants of Walt Disney Productions transformed into the international media conglomerate that the Walt DIsney Company is today! But the staggering lows of a frugal and frustrated Eisner that defined the company post-Paris led to decaying relationships with partners like Pixar, faltering quality standards across the company, and of course, three theme parks whose foundational fixing would cost billions.
Enter Eisner’s replacement – former President and COO Bob Iger – who swiftly set about his own creative resurgence for the company. With an almost prescient understanding of the “Content Wars” to come, Iger would go on to oversee Disney’s acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century, creating a company tailor-made for today. But first, he had to begin to contend with the albatross of underbuilt parks…
Bonus features
As anyone who knows the story of Disney California Adventure will agree, the first plan of attack at the underbuilt parks of the early 2000s was basically a cash infusion through what we might call “piecemeal” or “Band-aid” solutions – small, medium, and large capital projects that were each meant to basically give their respective problem park a step increase in attendance – and ideally, esteem.
It’s also worth remembering that this mindset was still passed through a lens of proportionality. In other words, parks with more potential were the first afforded additions. So it’s really no surprise that California Adventure’s “Band-aid Era” had come and gone (to be replaced by the next strategy – total foundational reimagining) by time the Band-aids arrived at Walt Disney Studios…
Modest in scale (for a park modest in size, and whose long-term prognosis was still modest at best), the first change to come to Walt Disney Studios was an expansion to Animation Courtyard. The meager plaza that had once dead-ended in the Flying Carpets Over Agrabah would be “transformed” (in the loosest sense) into TOON STUDIO. In theory, the idea is that Walt Disney Studios would be home to a sort of third Toontown concept after the original in California, and the County Fair version in Florida. Here is where Toons would come to earn their paychecks – a frivolous if fitting frame story to make sense of the “backlot” stylized Magic Carpets and the two new additions…
It was 2007, after all, when Iger mended Disney’s fractured relationship with Steve Jobs’ by purchasing the Emeryville, California-based studio entirely for $7.4 billion – a risky investment for the fresh CEO. So it’s no surprise that 2007’s first notable expansion in Toon Studio was an all-call to use the assets Pixar brought across Disney Parks. Toon Studio, therefore, would be made of two relatively modest additions: Cars Quatre Roues Rallye (a turntable-switching spinner; essentially a pint-sized version of Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree) and Crush’s Coaster (an indoor wild mouse spinning family coaster with a brief dark ride section at its start).
That year, in December 2007, the park received its first certifiable E-Ticket addition: The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Allegedly, this version of the ride – with its modified, efficiency-minded ride system – was actually designed to drop into Walt Disney Studios earlier, but had been diverted to Disney California Adventure once that park turned out to be the most in need of immediate reinforcement.
The addition of the “Hollywood Tower Hotel” looming over the park’s “Hub” (and technically in “Production Courtyard”) brought about some pleasant placemaking, too: blocks of faux (but attractive) facades echoing the hotel’s “pueblo deco” architectural style, which fairly convincingly give way to a forced perspective block of flats so that the Studio Tram Tour’s entrance was reclad as the Figueroa Street Tunnel beneath a flat of the Hollywood Hills. It was a first indication that Disney recognized a need to infuse more visual warmth, greenery, and romantic, historic architecture into the park – ideally, by covering the industrial and metallic modernism.
The park’s next sizable attraction boost came in 2010 with the opening of TOY STORY PLAYLAND – a first new land for the park, and crucially, a first addition to the park that diverged from the “studio” framing. Though we’re always reluctant to call Toy Story themed lands “Living Lands” (on the same scale and scope as, say, Cars Land or the Wizarding World), the point remains that Toy Story Playland offered an escape from the blacktop expanses of Walt Disney Studios…
… and perhaps just as importantly, more to do by way of three new rides. Sure, like all Toy Story Lands, Paris’ collection is a fairly innocuous set of “off-the-shelf” family flat rides – RC Racer (a low-capacity Intamin half-pipe coaster), Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop (a toy-themed classic parachute tower amusement), and Slinky Dog Zigzag Spin (a “Music Express” style spinner). It’s hard to count Toy Story Playland as a triumph given that the land is certainly “cheap and cheerful” at best, but at least the relatively low effort yielded a shaded green space and brought the park’s ride count to nine.
Say what you will, but attendance at Walt Disney Studios Park nearly doubled from 2.6 million in 2008 (the first year of Tower of Terror, mind you) to 4.7 million in 2011, suggesting that the “cheap and cheerful” Toy Story Playland had done its job…
Place de Rémy
As far back as 2008, rumors had suggested that Disney Imagineers were working to develop an attraction themed to 2007’s Pixar hit Ratatouille – a film set, conveniently enough, in a lovingly historic and idealized version of Paris. It seemed almost too good to be true. Just as Disney California Adventure’s transformation had hinged upon bringing to life historic, reverent, romantic Californian locales in the idealized tradition of Disneyland, it stood to reason that Walt Disney Studios needed a little more rose-colored warmth… and that Ratatouille‘s slightly-stylized Paris could feel like a perfect fit.
It took until March 2013 for Disney to announce Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy (a pun for French speakers given that “L’Aventure Totalement Toquée” translates to “Totally Crazy Adventure,” while “toque” is also the word for a chef’s hat) – a $200 million addition that would surely be the largest investment in Disneyland Paris’ history, and nothing short of transformational for a park like Walt Disney Studios.
Sure, the Ratatouille attraction would bring to Walt Disney Studios what was then-unthinkable: a genuinely unique, cutting-edge trackless dark ride, born in the wake of fans’ jaws dropping at the capabilities of the Modern Marvel: Mystic Manor. But far, far more important than the ride itself would be its wrap…
Spectacularly, L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy would be placed in a whole new cul-de-sac of Walt Disney Studios – Place de Rémy. Even for what is effectively a “mini-land” at best, it can’t be overstated how unthinkable the concept art here was… That Walt Disney Studios – Walt Disney Studios – would end up with a cobblestone Parisian courtyard; a place with streetlights, and fountains, and cafés, and by God, little warm lamps in second story windows…!
Walt Disney Studios was a park so starved of warmth and authenticity and texture that the presence of a Ratatouille ride (and accessory, table service restaurant) was practically a secondary celebration. The real victory was in the notion that against all odds, Walt Disney Studios might end up with a space that people actually wanted to inhabit; to linger in.
Said Bruce Vaughn in Iwerks’ The Imagineering Story:
“In no other place do you see such an evolution of the design aesthetic of a Disney theme park. The studio park was an attempt to take people behind the scenes in Hollywood. What we’ve learned over time is that that sense of artifice actually doesn’t resonate well with our guests. So when we went on to create Ratatouille, we decided to not show how the movie is made or behind the scenes. We said, ‘We want to take you to the place’ – much like we did with Cars Land at California Adventure. [We will] take you into this world of Ratatouille.“
It’s almost embarrassing to now have to tell you that Place de Rémy and the resulting ride – 2014’s Modern Marvel: Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy – technically nested under Toon Studios in the park’s very confusing land timeline. (And for that matter, Ratatouille also gave the park its 10th ride. If you can believe it, that officially gave 2014 Walt Disney Studios Park an unthinkable twice as many rides as the original Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida had the same year – even if the Paris studios’ contents were surely much less grand on average).
And while arguably the ride itself didn’t hold up spectacularly well given its reliance on screens (and because its trackless ride compatriots include Mystic Manor, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance), there’s no question that for Disneyland Paris, Ratatouille was a very-much-needed show of investment. In 2015 – the first full year with L’Aventure de Remy, Walt Disney Studios Park crested 5 million visitors for the first time – still the lowest attended Disney theme park by a very wide margin, but the unexpected beginnings of a potential turnaround…
the strangest thing about this whole project to me is the fact that paris didnt attempt to fight or even redesign arendelle so they weren’t left with the worst of the three lands as its lynchpin 2 years after the others opened.
For most people who’ve visited both the consensus seems to be hong kong has the vastly better land while tokyo has the vastly better ride. Then Paris is coming along and getting hong kong’s lesser ride and half of the land it has and nothing from tokyo. I know that guests are overwhelmingly local but still youd think paris would want something unique about their arendelle but instead they seem to be basing the expansion off of half of hong kong’s land.
the whole strategy here just seems so weird
Absolutely true. Even from the earliest artwork of the park’s big expansion, people were zooming in and going, “Wait, it’s only half of Galaxy’s Edge, too?” That artwork has what would typically be the Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run half of the land, but with an X-Wing instead of the Falcon, so it was like, “Okay, so… it’ll be Black Spire Outpost, but with Rise of the Resistance?” I really do this that was their M.O. here the whole time – basically “sampler” versions of the “Living Lands” designed for other parks.
It’s not like the Sliding Sleighs ride in Hong Kong is a masterpiece, but yes, it’s totally nonsensical that Frozen Ever After – Frozen Ever After! – is what awaits at the end of the literal and metaphorical journey for this park. Even when that ride debuted at EPCOT and all the talk was about how Frozen was too new to have a permanent ride in a park (that “mindset” at Disney feels ancient now…) I said that Frozen definitely deserved a ride… it just deserved a better ride than even the best makeover of Maelstrom could produce. And now we see that ride recreated two more times by choice, which is wild… As you said, especially because Tokyo’s exists. I don’t think Disney is at all interested in paying for that (not to mention, OLC probably has a multi-year exclusivity window), but even so, it is somewhat depressing that at the end of this, Walt Disney Studios’ multi-billion-dollar makeover took seven years to result in… (checks notes) Web-Slingers, Flight Force, two flat rides, and Frozen Ever After.
yeah i can accept lesser rides (very very likely that OLC does have an exclusivity clause) but usually id prefer them to be paired with more developed lands. Like HK’s arendelle isnt winning awards for its rides but its arguably the best “land” either Disney or universal has put out in decades just because its absolutely overflowing with everything else that makes a living land
Im concerned these ‘sampler’ lands simply wont be immersive enough. Like HK’s arendelle isnt that big despite how packed it is and its twice the size with you being able to look over the harbour at more land. Pride lands is barely more than a ride with an immersive outdoor queue.
They already tried the “sample disney and if you like it go to a better disney” with original HK and it failed miserably, i hope they dont go that route again
Agreed. In my mind, it’s because the intentional strategy was to get “mini-lands” rather than full copy-pastes from elsewhere. (The early concept art seemed to be signaling that their Galaxy’s Edge would be just the “village” half, but with Rise of the Resistance instead of Smugglers Run.)
Theoretically, when this all sums up in fifty years, that would’ve created “sampler” sized” lands comprised of 1 ride, 1 restaurant, and 1 shop each, so you could cram four, five, or six of those around the lagoon whereas the more sprawling Frozen land in Hong Kong or a full sized Galaxy’s Edge would mean you could only ever amount to having two or three.
Again, I have no reason to know that was the intention, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with to explain why – to your point – they’d build all of that to conceal what’s ultimately a copy of the mediocre boat ride. I think the land itself is phenomenal, but surely even the quality-starved visitors in Paris will get off Frozen Ever After and go “Oh… that’s… that’s it?”