An Interview with Paul Pressler, Part One
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Al Weiss, Mickey Mouse and Paul Pressler light Spaceship Earth
to kick-off the Millennium Celebration at Walt Disney World in 1999

LP: Getting to a specific park - can you talk a little bit about what we can expect in the 100 Years Celebration at Walt Disney World later this year?

Pressler: We can’t forget that at the roots of our company, ultimately, is Walt Disney. And it’s kind of interesting, as much as Walt would say don’t forget it all started with a mouse, we sit around and say don’t forget it all started with a man and his mouse. And that really is something that is terribly important to us. So this opportunity, because of his anniversary, gives us a way to pay homage and to celebrate his traditions and his heritage. So I think that’s good. And I think it is going to be fun for all of us to do. For us to go back and revisit and re-look at Walt the man. In this process we’ve gotten a tremendous amount of insight into what made him tick. We share a lot of that with our guests who visit Walt Disney World and we kick it all this off in October. I won’t give you all the details, but what better thing to celebrate than Walt’s contribution to this company?

LP: For those that can’t make it to Walt Disney World, will there be anything at Disneyland to celebrate Walt’s birthday?

Pressler: Yeah, Cynthia will soon begin to announce a bunch of stuff. Clearly, not unlike the Millennium, Walt Disney World will be the primary focus of the 100 Years of Magic Celebration, but there’s a couple of things that Cynthia will specifically announce for the Disneyland Resort.

LP: Recently Al Weiss at, I believe, a town meeting they had for Cast Members mentioned that they’d be adding a new land and a new E-Ticket attraction to Animal Kingdom in 2004. Is there anything you can say about that?

Pressler: Um, I can’t say anything about that other than I’ll confirm what Al said (laughs). We are looking at a new E attraction for the Animal Kingdom.

LP: And looking further into the future, is a fifth park going to eventually open down there?

Pressler: You know what? The answer is yes. The question is whether or not it will occur in Al’s lifetime or mine. (laughs) It’s a little hard today to sit here and think there is a fifth park within the next three to five years. But that’s based on what we know today. Three years from now things could change again. I think we would probably have to see significant growth in international tourism to justify a fifth park in Orlando. So today the immediete answer is no, but certainly we have the land and we have the desire. There’s plenty of creative ideas to go do lots of incredible things, so it’s just a matter of time.

Roy E. Disney and Paul Pressler at the opening of Disney's California Adventure

LP: Moving on to California - Disney’s California Adventure. Has it met the company’s expectations?

Pressler: The answer is yes, unequivocally yes. We are very proud of the park. We think that there are a lot of things that are new and unique. For example, the way we tell the animation story. We plussed the Animation attraction it is as good if not even better than what we did in Florida. So I think we did a lot of great work. I also think it is fair to say that we set - and we do it to ourselves - we set an unbelievable expectation for the opening of this park from day one. And if you go back in history and if you take a look at everything we’ve done …from the cruise ship, to Epcot to the Magic Kingdom in Florida, even to Walt’s original park in 1955, these things take time to ramp up. It takes time for our guests to get familiar with and embrace the product. Most important today is the notion that Disney's California Adventure will become part of their vacation planning cycle, which means it takes almost a year to get this new product on their radar screens.

So I think that the disconnect - I say "disconnect" because our audience expectations certainly were higher in the first couple of months than what we acheived - was certainly related to over-ambitious expectations on our part for how long it was going to take for Disney's California Adventure to be fully embraced by our guests. Our history tells us that new products like Disney's California Adventure need time to ramp us.

We have, and what I’m most proud of that we’ve done as a company, is that we’re always listening to our guests and we’re always looking for ways to improve the park. And I hearken back to 1955 with Walt - he made adjustments in that second month after opening. In fact, I heard he lowered the price of the Carousel from 25 cents to 10 cents because his guests had said, "wait a minute I don’t think that’s a reasonable price." So I know that people are anxious - they’re anxious to judge and I know that it is incredibly challenging when you have 46 years of etched memories of going to the Magic Kingdom, Disneyland. It is very hard to do anything new that people aren’t going to compare to what already exists. But I think that we are proud of what we’ve done and we are learning from our experience. We added the electrical parade, we added more Disney character exposure. We have new attractions that we’re adding. We have the Millionaire show going in which is a huge success down in Florida. And we will continue to add as we did at MGM Studios, as we do at Animal Kingdom, as we did in Paris. The Disney Cruise Line is a also similar example of the need to ramp up because it didn’t start out of the box the way we anticipated. It took us six or nine months to really get people to understand what the Disney difference was and get them to experience our ships, and now it is very successful.