Note to Eisner: Spend Money on Top Players

The stretch limos delivered their beautiful people, the less fortunate had their BMWs valet-parked beneath swaying palm trees and 17,174 of Orange County’s most disposable incomes settled in Friday night to see just how Disney was going to do this hockey thing.

They saw skating cheerleaders huddle around Lumiere, the singing candlestick from “The Beauty and the Beast,” before dramatically ripping off French maid uniforms and breaking into a sequined dancing frenzy while purple spotlights panned the crowd and fireworks burst overhead.

They heard Disney’s rousing hockey anthem, a reworking of its omnipresent commercial theme, “Be Our Guest,” which consists of such stirring lyrics as “We’re gonna blaze a trail/Score some goals/And kick some tail.”

They watched a Zamboni from Space Mountain transport some obnoxious guy in glitter denim and lavender face paint--they call him “Iceman”--around the ice while he urged the crowd to sing along with the throbbing sound system.

They saw the Mighty Duck mascot--an overgrown platypus in goalie pads--drop from the sky, a la Tinker Bell, to the booming strains of “Carmina Burana.”

They watched dozens of pee-wee pucksters skate out to form a receiving line for the hockey-playing Ducks and their coach, Ron Wilson, who gamely suited up in purple-and-green warm-up togs and skated--yes, skated--to center ice, where he stood for several dumbfounded moments with his fellow skating assistants.

Then, once the dueling Zambonis had cleaned up the mess and the arena lights went back on, Wilson exhaled and the three Duck coaches shook hands.

They and their fledgling team had survived.

They had withstood the onslaught of a $450,000-plus “Disney extravaganza.”

Now, it was on to the undercard--the hockey game against the Detroit Red Wings.

Had Wilson known then what he knows now, he’d have requested the lights be kept off.

Disney’s hockey team lost to Detroit’s, 7-2. It was worse than the final score indicated. Duck goaltender Guy Hebert, armed with nothing more than a piece of wood and a wire head cage, was pummeled by 20 shots in the first period. Miraculously, he stopped 17 of them.

The rest of the Ducks spun circles on the ice and didn’t attempt a shot on goal for more than seven minutes. They managed seven in the period, 25 for the game, and beat the Red Wings’ third-string goalie, Peter Ing, only twice--once in the first 51 minutes.

For $450,000, the Ducks could have bought themselves a pretty fair hockey player. Sergei Fedorov, for example. Fedorov, the Detroit center who scored the third goal of the night and 34 others last season, will make $295,000 this season. Fedorov creates fireworks when he shoots--and doesn’t require the presence of a fire marshal when he does.

But with Disney, it’s Entertainment before Hockey, in case there were any lingering doubts before 7:40 p.m. Friday. If it was intended to be a diversionary tactic, it was only partly successful.

By the break between the second and third periods, with the Ducks down, 5-1, the natives were growing restless enough to boo the ever-crooning Iceman off the ice.

Orange County has more serious hockey fans than Michael Eisner might have imagined.

Certainly, 7-2 doesn’t play in Anaheim, even if it was the first game for this rag-tag collection of fourth-liners and potential maybes, even if it was against one of the more talented outfits in the NHL.

The first period left most press box observers shaking their heads, mostly in sympathy. One Canadian columnist, flown in to record this piece of hockey history, noted that the Ducks appeared to have “only three players with any skating ability--(Patrik) Carnback, (Terry) Yake and (Joe) Sacco.”

But on the bright side, he did say the Ducks looked better than Ottawa did in its rookie season.

The irony of “Be Our Guest” couldn’t have been lost on Hebert. The Red Wings made themselves comfortable, all right, camping in the Ducks’ zone for most of the first two periods, making themselves feel right at home.

The over-ice scoreboard asked, as one of its “Trivia Questions,” “When is a hockey team on the power play?”

To poor Hebert, it must have seemed like from the opening faceoff on.

For the record, Sean Hill scored the first goal for the Mighty Ducks, and Troy Loney added another, long after it mattered. Aside from those two isolated moments, the Anaheim Arena audience reserved its loudest cheer for a bit of scoreboard animation entitled “Victory Through Duck Power,” in which a squadron of bombardiering ducks pound an opposing goaltender to smithereens.

It was a flight of fantasy, which is what Disney does best.

But the reality, as of late Friday night, is that no amount of high-priced, high-tech razzle-dazzle is going to mask the fact these Ducks are paupers in a league where the best skaters wear helmets, not sequins.