THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF DISNEY

Christian Caryl fears that a great

American company may be slipping into terminal decline

Orlando OUR DAY half over, my girlfriend sighed philosophically. As part of our carefully thought-out strategy for taking on Walt Disney World during its peak season, we had made a point of arriving well before the gates opened. But no sooner had we entered the park than a sullen engineer, poised behind a rope that blocked access to the afflicted area, informed us that Space Mountain, a particularly exciting roller-coaster in the dark, had been shut down indefinitely for repairs.

When I asked about another ride, a widely touted affair with the promising name of Alien Encounter, he informed us — with a trace of disappointment, I thought — that it was indeed working properly. 'But not for long,' he added tri- umphantly. 'They'll be shutting that one down in three weeks or so.' The runaway mine train, the Jules Verne submarines, the Country Bear Jamboree — all hors de combat, it turned out. To be sure, we had a passably good time with the attractions that worked, but even then it was impossi- ble to ignore the odd prop or robot that failed to gyre and gimble with the rest.

Thus forewarned, we decided, while there was still time, to tackle Alien Encounter whose imminent demise had been predicted by our helpful guide at the beginning of the day. Now a posted wait of 35 minutes had dragged into an hour as the public address system droned on about additional delays. Natasha laughed in the way I remembered so well from our days together in the collapsing Soviet Union. 'This is just like amusement parks at home,' she said. 'You stand in line for hours and then you get the announce- ment, "Dear comrades, this attraction is being closed for technical reasons."' There was a time when bringing a Rus- sian friend to the Mouse Republic would have been to enact a quaint ritual of cul- tural superiority. We all know how Nikita Krushchev insisted on touring Disneyland when he visited California in the 1950s. Small wonder: theme parks, in their potent fusion of technocratic arrogance and unbridled hedonism, are just about the most quintessentially American insti- tutions around — a fact unchanged by their exportation, like so much other Americana, to foreign countries. But have we tried looking at it the other way around?

After all, Walt Disney World in Orlan- do, Florida, also happens to be a hermeti- cally sealed territory with a totalitarian gov- ernment, rigorous press censorship, and an unconvertible currency called 'Disney Dol- lars' (though it goes without saying that hard currency is also accepted). All this is based on a contrived but seamless ideology symbolically underpinned by the omnipresent deeds and sayings of an age- less mascot whose portrait can be pur- chased at every souvenir stand. (Surely it's no coincidence that Vladimir Lenin and Mickey Mouse are two of the most widely parodied icons in the world.) Also, it is eerily tidy and there's little overt evidence of petty crime — just like the old Soviet Union. According to at least one biogra- pher of Walt Disney, his employees in the 1930s coined a phrase to describe the tight control he maintained over their lives: Waltalitarianism'.

Until now, of course, the salient differ- ence has been that the Disney territories worked. The Disney corporation, as we have all heard by now, is the embodiment of the capitalist efficiency so cherished by its founder, an image reinforced by its membership among the elite companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average (and perhaps also by Walt Dis- ney's pathological hatred of Reds and unions and his freelancing for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI). Now, after a few rough patches in the 1970s and 1980s, the Disney studio is once again churning out its hits — less films than multimedia merchandising extravaganzas like The Lion King, where the original feature becomes lost in an ambient vapour of spin-offs, run-offs, gim- micks, product twists, and high-concept marketing strategies. Disney's profits last year came to well over a billion dollars, suggesting that the ideology's appeal con- tinues to transcend borders. Millions of people still visit both the original Disney- land in Anaheim and its various versions around the world each year.

Don't forget, though, that many well- informed analysts also gave the Evil Empire high feasibility ratings right up to the end. And some indicative cracks have been appearing in the Disney edifice of late. EuroDisney's financing problems have made it a standard gag on both talk shows and bourses. A recent shake-up in senior management leaves Disney ill-equipped to negotiate its way through incipient upheavals in the media industry. Then there was the well-publicised controversy surrounding Disney's plans for an Ameri- can history theme park in Virginia, an issue which managed to unite both sundry live white male Europeans (who feared triviali- sation of the American legacy) and the politically correct (who feared trivialisation of touchy themes like slavery). This week, Bob Dole, the American presidential can- didate, has even called a new Disney film a 'nightmare of depravity' (it portrays a homosexual priest).

Far less has been written about a creep- ing crisis that may dwarf the rest: the mas- sive investment decisions facing Disney as it reviews the crumbling infrastructure of its parks. In the United States, notorious 'rust-belt' industries like automobiles and steel have been forced to take on the information revolution by completely rethinking the very act of production. Meanwhile, attractions at Disney theme parks that date back 20 or 30 years are showing their crow's-feet.

Unlike a General Motors assembly line, a theme-park ride is inherently resistant to lean management or just-in-time produc- tion: here the assembly line is the point of the enterprise and the scope for modifica- tion is correspondingly limited. Nowadays, the waits are literally built in. Newer rides are inaugurated complete with elaborate waiting pens: thousands of feet of ropes and chains to manage the long flow of incoming visitors. One can deduce from the resulting stockyard effect what park planners must think about their customers. Judging by the griping I overheard in queues during our visit, though, most of the visitors are less than bovine; I haven't heard so many queue complaints since my last trip to Yaroslavl. 'This ride lasts, what, three minutes and forty-four seconds?' one man said to his wife after 45 minutes of shuffling.

One wonders what percentage of EuroDisney's woes stem from the bitter emotions conjured up by long periods of immobilisation under the soupy skies of northern France. In any case, feeling duped by queues — not to mention by astronomical prices for admission and con- cessions — has been a requisite part of the theme-park experience ever since the Dis- neyland opening was plagued by similar complaints right back at the beginning in 1955. Yet theme parks have gone right on harvesting the hard currency, mainly since there have been few alternatives to the specific forms of entertainment they offered — until now, at least.

The problems facing the next theme- park generation are typified by the most pretentious part of the Walt Disney World complex in Orlando: Epcot, which stands for 'Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow'. In elaborate plans he put on paper before his death in 1966, Walt Disney dreamed of one-upping his own parks in the form of a Buckminster Fuller high-tech village, continuously on display, without crime, slums, or poverty.

Disney's much less imaginative heirs — above all his plodding brother, Roy — rejected this vision, less because of its resemblance to the ideas of Fourier or Lenin than for its sheer flakiness. They scaled it down tO a kind of permanent world fair, one section of which presents a vision of the rest of the world viewed through the small end of suburban Ameri- ca's telescope. Germany, Japan, Canada, Britain and other foreign countries are represented by stereotypical souvenirs and those cutely costumed party activists known in Disneyspeak as 'cast members'. Here the sanitised view of the world even extends, with telltale consistency, to the People's Republic of China, whose pavil- ion depicts the place as one big happy Chi- natown, unblemished by gerontocratic psychopaths. One wonders what Uncle Walt would have thought of this gratuitous collusion between his 'imagineers' and the professional propagandists of the Main- land.

The other section of Epcot — America versus the rest of the world — features pavilions crammed with gee-whiz gadgetry underwritten by various American corpo- rations — including, tellingly enough, General Motors. (This attraction would have struck George Orwell with its taped background mantras of the subliminal message, 'It's fun to drive, it's fun to drive.') Unfortunately, as anyone who has bought a personal computer in the past few years will be painfully aware, we now live in an age of instantaneous hardware Obsolescence.

Displays that presumably looked snazzy and impressive when Epcot was inaugurat- ed now recall the props in the dusty back rooms of science museums that have long since been outpaced by the speed of inno- vation. In the Kodak pavilion I watched as children tried to paint cartoon faces on primitive computer terminals (half of them dysfunctional). This would have been revolutionary fun ten years ago, I mused. A mother completed the thought for me as she snatched her kid away from a nearby terminal. 'Honey,' she said, 'let's go ahead now. You can do that on the com- puter at home.'

She was right — and it won't be long before we can do the rest of the attractions there too. Just a few years down the road we will have an alternative to theme-park tyranny: why wear out your soles in Orlan- do when you can ride Space Mountain on the virtual reality machine in your living- room? The prospect is much closer than most of us, including some Disney execu- tives, seem to realise. Some would argue, presumably, that virtual reality roller-coast- ers don't pose a threat to Disney Parks sim- ply because they can• never replace the reality. Which, of course, completely misses the point: what reality?

Disneyland has never pretended to be anything but a simulation. It was ambitious artificiality (in the guise of once touted `animatronics', for example) that always separated the glamorous theme park from its scruffier cousins, the humble county fairs and Coney Islands. So why not hand in the inconvenient, aggravating simulation for a more convenient and potentially more satisfying one? Competitive technologies will have a dramatic effect on the theme- park business, as soon as people realise that there's no need to make the trip to Orlando (or Paris or Tokyo, for that mat- ter) once a comparable experience is avail- able at their neighbourhood mall Then again, 'comparable' may not be the proper word. Given the choice between a ride where the visitor makes a passive jour- ney past a series of tableaux and an interac- tive attraction where the visitor can adjust the experience to taste and then actively participate, most customers (especially younger, more impatient, computer-literate ones) will pick the latter. Eurodisney's problems may be only just beginning.

One could respond that Disney has been a software company from the very begin- ning, and that its founder's visions of per- fect communities represent an adventurous spirit that has never left the company. When the company was foundering back in the 1980s, Walt's heirs certainly did have the presence of mind to bring in a man with an eerie physical resemblance to Gorbachev himself. Since then, Michael (Mikhail') Eisner, whose first act in office was a massive purge, has proven his mettle as a movie-maker. Yet one does hear gossip from disgruntled computer gurus within the company who say that its leaders still haven't understood the nature of the entertainment revolution that is on the way, and who criticise a top- heavy hierarchy for investing in short-term technologies that will please stockholders but may fall fatally short in the end.

All of which should come as no surprise, for entrepreneurial talents of the type crazy enough to develop virtual-reality attractions are by nature little inclined to work for corporate giants; right now the Walt Disney of the 21st century is probably slogging along as a programmer some- where in Silicon Valley, his (or her) head filled with manic dreams. However Chair- man Eisner copes with the coming chal- lenges, his gigantic hardware inventory will come to weigh heavily on the company's position sooner or later.

According to Disney's 1994 annual report, the operating income in the com- pany's entirely healthy Filmed Entertain- ment and Consumer Products divisions was 'partially offset by Theme Parks and Resorts results, which declined $62.8 mil- lion' — an 8 per cent drop from the previ- ous year. The two theme parks in Florida and California had to absorb 'the 114 mil- lion dollar impact of lower attendance' for 1994 — whatever that means, for the actu- al attendance figures remain a state secret. A Disney PR official told me that Mr Eis- ner issued a ukase in 1990 that banned their publication. This leaves Disney- watchers, somewhat like ICremlinologists, to wonder what unpleasantnesses the com- pany could be trying to hide. But it's hard to imagine Disney sloughing off its theme parks, increasingly outmoded symbols of prestige, to the highest bidder once their untenability becomes apparent. Like Ukraine, it will probably just have to lug them along into insolvency.