An Interview with Paul Pressler, Part Two
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Pressler and the Disney Wonder cruise ship
(c) Disney
LP: One of the things I hear often is people want a West Coast version. Is that in the future?
Pressler: Yeah, we want to continue to watch the overall performance of the business and the industry. There’s still a lot of cruise ships to come online in the next couple of years in the industry overall. So we want to make sure the demand is there. But ideally, someday we would love to take our cruise lines to California. We’d love to see them in Europe. We’d love to see them in Asia. So its just a matter of time and really watching to make sure that our success sticks.
LP: There have been lot of rumors about things going on at Walt Disney Imagineering. That there’s a shift in Imagineering, more things are going to be outsourced. Is there a shift going on with the role of Walt Disney Imagineering?
Pressler: Nope, that would not be accurate statement. I think that what is true is we have now come off the single biggest growth period in the history of the parks and resorts for the Walt Disney Company. We’re coming off of Animal Kingdom, we’re coming off of Disney’s California Adventure, we’re coming off of Tokyo DisneySea. All of this created an enormous amount of work for which we had to staff up. And, as it always has been throughout the history of WDI, a lot of work was performed by outside contractors, whether they be construction folks, or designers or project managers and so on and so forth.
So we have to be careful not to mix-up what is really the true size of WDI with a change in philosophy or approach to what we are doing. We are passionate about our artisans. We still have our great artisans there. There are clearly things that we have always traditionally outsourced that will continue to be outsourced. There’s very talented people around the world. But the essence of the idea and the essence of the craftsmen who are doing the work for us like our great agers and our great painters and our incredible folks who do our rock sculpting and the folks who are doing our media and theme park productions, those are core elements to Imagineering.
LP: Theme park safety has been a big issue recently. Attractions that seem to have been going along great for years all of a sudden are having to be changed. Do you think there’s going to be a shift in doing more to protect guests from themselves?
Pressler: First, I’d like to clearly say we have the safest attractions and they are getting safer and safer. I think it’s a misconception to think that for some reason there are more incidents today than there were in the past. There are occasions where there are incidents that occur on attractions, many of which do occur because of rider error, and I think that’s a challenge. What we have done and will continue to do is think about the design of our attractions. We try to anticipate as best we can all the possibilities that can happen at a theme park, but it is unrealistic to think that you can think of all the possibilities.
LP: What goes into a decision like - obviously Roger Rabbit is a special case, but, for instance, to make Alice in Wonderland even safer or make Pinocchio even safer as opposed to something like the train where anyone can get up and walk off whenever they want to?
Pressler: We have incredibly talented engineers and technical designers who go through this. They are my safety advisors trying to help in researching in terms of how we can help design safety into our attractions. Some of it’s done based on historical knowledge -what are the incidents. We know some attractions have been there for 46 years so we watch and carefully monitor those. Sometimes we look forward and say "is there a way for us to come up with an idea that enhances a ride’s safety?" like Thunder Mountain. I’ll remind you, we hadn’t had an incident associated with people standing in the queue line, but we’ve added gates just because we believed that we should reinforce the notion you need to stay behind the yellow line. So there’s always ideas that our engineers are coming up with.