Aladdin to Take Flight as Park Show : Disneyland Hopes Dinner Attraction Will Persuade Its Visitors to Stay Put

Disney’s ragtag street urchin Aladdin, having already captured the box office, record charts and retail shelves, is now trying to corner the dinner-show market.

For years, Disneyland officials have watched thousands of visitors cap off a day at the park with a trip to Buena Park for dinner shows at Medieval Times or Wild Bill’s Wild West Dinner Extravaganza, watching knights joust or cowboys hurl tomahawks.

At $20 to $30 a head, that adds up to millions of dollars being spent outside the Magic Kingdom.

So on July 2, Disneyland will open Aladdin’s Oasis, a Persian palace in Adventureland. Guests will be able to feast on shish kebabs, tabbouleh and other Middle Eastern dishes while Aladdin, Jasmine and Jafar perform songs from the hit movie.

“We think ‘Aladdin’ is a classic, just like ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ” said Ed Sotto, the “imagineer” who designed the project for parent Walt Disney Co. “This is going to be a total integration of entertainment and food service that will appeal to all ages.”

The Oasis will feature eight one-hour shows a day, with the first seating at 11 a.m. and the last at 10 p.m. With space for about 250 guests at each show, the Oasis could accommodate as many as 2,000 patrons daily. Dinner prices will be $24.50 for adults and $19.50 for children--about what Wild Bill’s charges and 20% less than Medieval Times’ tab. Lunch shows with smaller food portions will be $5 less.

The Oasis will not be Disneyland’s first dinner theater. In fact, it will replace the Tahitian Terrace, which for 35 years had offered Polynesian food and a show featuring dances from various Pacific Islands. Audiences’ enchantment with the South Pacific, however, has waned.

“The popularity of the show has been declining over the past several years,” Mike Marx, Disneyland’s operations manager, said. “When it opened 35 years ago, a trip to Tahiti was considered exotic, and you had to be pretty rich to go. Now you just pay $300 or $400 and hop on a plane.”

Aladdin’s Oasis is a marketing dream that is expected to ride the coattails of the animated film that appealed to a wide audience. The movie, released in 1992, grossed $206 million last year at U.S. theaters alone and is expected by Disney officials to surpass merchandise sales tied to its earlier hit film “Beauty and the Beast.”

The Oasis will be heavily marketed in the park’s advertising materials and may be packaged with other Aladdin features, such as the twice-daily Aladdin’s Royal Caravan Parade, Marx said.

“We may have an Aladdin enchanted weekend where guests will stay at the Disneyland Hotel, have dinner at Aladdin’s Oasis and see the parade.”

The challenge from Disney could hardly have come at a worse time for Medieval Times and Wild Bill’s. Both attractions have seen revenues decline significantly during the recession. Though officials of those shows insist that there is enough business for all, they acknowledge that Disney is a formidable competitor.

“Many tours give visitors the option to go to Disneyland or Knott’s (Berry Farm) during the day and then come to Medieval Times at night,” Celeste Clark, a spokeswoman for Medieval Times, said. Many patrons watch the jousts wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Goofy T-shirts, she said.

“But when Disney has so many things like Fantasmic”--Disneyland’s nighttime pyrotechnic extravaganza--”more people stay there.”

She would be more concerned, she said, if dinner at the Oasis could be booked without paying the entry price for admission to Disneyland. But Disney will offer the dinner show only to park guests.

Nor is Wild Bill’s circling the wagons as Aladdin approaches.

Disney “will definitely be a competitor, but we think people will still be looking for things to do after several days here,” Ed Beaver, vice president of sales and marketing for Wild Bill’s, said. “If there are 50,000 or 60,000 people going to Disneyland every day, that’s still only 2,000” who can be served at the Oasis.

Some analysts, however, speculate that Disney may have a broader expansion in mind.

“Disney is putting another toe into the water, and the deeper they find that market, the farther they will go,” said Lee Isgur, an analyst who follows Disney for the brokerage Volpe, Welty & Co. in San Francisco. Isgur notes that Disney dinner shows without the draw of Aladdin have proved popular at Walt Disney World in Florida and at the Euro Disneyland park that opened near Paris last year.

Disneyland officials insist that the Oasis is part of no greater scheme.

“This was just a fun idea,” Sotto said. “In January we were discussing master planning for Disney, and someone said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do this instead of Tahitian Terrace?’ By the end of the meeting, we had a pile full of sketches.”