Disney’s New Park Calculated to Thrill Wall Street Investors

As construction workers rush to finish the newest family escape in Anaheim, the company that originated the Magic Kingdom doesn’t plan to unveil the most extravagant theme park in the world, or even in the neighborhood.

This new park isn’t a showcase for cutting-edge amusement-ride technology or white-knuckle thrills--a remarkable admission for the heirs to legendary creative genius Walt Disney and the people responsible for pushing the industry to new heights. With 22 attractions and shows, Disney’s California Adventure will offer only one-third the experiences of Disneyland.

In an industry obsessed in recent years with intense competition to build the fastest, tallest and most technologically advanced attractions, Walt Disney Co. is playing it safe with the companion park to Disneyland.

Disney’s strategy is to create a park that is good enough to elevate its Anaheim property from a day hop to a destination resort where tourists spend several nights--all at a cost designed to please Wall Street.

Indeed, Disney’s newest offering could be called California for Dummies. Visitors will get a tour-bus view of the Golden State, from its Native American roots to Hollywood glitz, from the Sierra to seaside amusement piers. Disney is stuffing California Adventure with fine restaurants and chic stores--Wolfgang Puck cuisine replaces Mickey Mouse chicken nuggets.

This expansion of what is now called Disneyland Resort includes California Adventure, the 750-room Grand Californian luxury hotel and the 20-acre Downtown Disney shopping area. All are scheduled to open by Feb. 8.

The project’s cost, $1.4 billion, is about half what Seagram Co. spent last year--roughly $2.5 billion--on the similarly scaled Islands of Adventure expansion of Universal Studios Florida in Orlando. Islands won raves for its body-wrenching coasters, lush look and technical daring, but cost overruns and flagging attendance have made the park a financial disappointment.

Disney learned that lesson once before, overspending at Disneyland Paris. So, after killing a much larger plan for a companion project for Anaheim’s Disneyland in 1995, the company’s theme park designers trimmed, cut, nipped and tucked every ounce of excess out of California Adventure. Still, it is in keeping with the number of attractions operating at the opening of both Disney’s Animal Kingdom and Disney/MGM Studios at Walt Disney World.

“We had to work very hard to get our people to understand the dynamics of investment and what they had to achieve,” said Marty Sklar, vice chairman of Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s creative arm, and the last remaining active employee to have been present at the opening of every Disney park. “It was different.”

Different is risky. California Adventure will operate in a region that is second only to Orlando in competition for theme park visitors.

Southern California, where there are five competing parks within an hour’s drive of California Adventure, recorded more than 30 million theme park visitors last year. That’s almost triple the number who attended a major-league sporting event in the region.

Disneyland tallied more than 13 million visits, but that includes multiple, discounted trips by roughly 200,000 annual pass holders. Disney projects that California Adventure will attract about 7 million people annually.

Though most tourism analysts expect California Adventure to increase theme park attendance in the region, it is not clear whether the new park will cannibalize visits to other theme parks, including Disneyland.

Disney is gambling that visitors will pay full freight--at least $41 for an adult one-day ticket--for a park with fewer and more modest rides and less-spectacular attractions. Disney is counting on its brand name and track record for delivering family entertainment to make up the difference.

The rest of the industry doesn’t have that luxury. Just down the road in Buena Park, Knott’s Berry Farm went on a spending binge as Disney broke ground for its new park. During the last year, it paid almost $65 million for a 13-acre water park, the nation’s tallest flume ride and a 320-room hotel. That came on top of the $22 million it spent the previous year on GhostRider, a wooden roller coaster regarded as one of the best nationwide, and the $10-million Supreme Scream, the tallest drop ride on the West Coast.

By contrast, the Maliboomer ride at California Adventure is less than two-thirds as high. The otherwise nearly identical rides are made by the same manufacturer.

For theme park fans, especially those accustomed to the 45-year-old Disneyland and the other parks in the competitive Southern California market, that means less of what they have come to expect.

“We’ll have to reserve judgment until it opens, but from everything that the professionals have seen, California Adventure is a theme park built by budget rather than by a great creative idea,” said Gary Goddard, chairman of Landmark Entertainment Group in North Hollywood and a former Disney designer.

Built on 55 acres of former Disneyland parking lot, California Adventure is less than two-thirds the size of its older sister. Disney could have made the park 30 acres larger--about the size of Disneyland--but decided to hedge its bets and leave room for expansion.

When the first visitors enter California Adventure, they will meander through three themed areas. The Golden State, anchored by a granite-like grizzly-bear head atop the Grizzly River Run raft ride, evokes California wilderness. Paradise Pier, with its large roller coaster and Ferris wheel, looks like a beach-side amusement park. Hollywood Pictures Backlot focuses on movie making and culture.

Whereas Disneyland’s Main Street offers a long panorama capped by the famous Sleeping Beauty’s Castle that carries visitors into a world of fantasy, California Adventure’s entrance is condensed. Retail shops extend around the garden-like hub area, leading to a giant titanium-and-bronze California Sun that will loom above a breaking-wave-shaped fountain as the park’s central icon.

Watching Plants Grow

The new park will offer some thrills--including Soarin’ Over California, a simulator ride providing a hang glider’s view of the Golden State’s natural wonders. And there will be the mundane, including the Bountiful Valley Farm, where children can climb on parked tractors supplied by sponsor Caterpillar Inc.

Several of the attractions are remarkably passive by theme park standards. Park-goers can literally watch plants grow at an experimental crop exhibit in the farm area.

Though visitors will see much that is familiar--classic amusement rides found at dozens of other parks nationwide--there will be fewer of the signature Disney attractions such as Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World and the Haunted Mansion that set the adjacent Disneyland above all imitators.

The company’s top executives say the park will open with enough attractions to satisfy the legions of Disneyphiles looking for a West Coast version of Walt Disney World. And they say that both Soarin’ Over California and the river rapids attractions have the potential to become the type of franchise rides that anchor the company’s other theme parks.

“The product has to be compelling,” said Paul Pressler, chairman of Disney’s parks and resorts division. “It has to have the right stuff to get people to come in.”

Certainly there will be several popular Disney attractions, including the It’s Tough to Be a Bug and Muppet Vision 3-D films from the company’s Florida parks.

Bugs and Muppet work well in the new Disney formula. They are crowd pleasers, and their hefty development cost has already been covered by other Disney parks. To add them to California Adventure, all Disney needed were some relatively inexpensive film prints and the buildings. That’s in contrast to the hardware-heavy $95-million Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney-MGM Studios park in Orlando that was considered--and rejected--for the opening of the California park.

California Adventure, with less than half a dozen new Disney ride systems, stands in contrast to Tokyo DisneySea, which will offer more than 20. The difference is who pays the bills. Disney is building the $3-billion Tokyo park for Oriental Land Co. and will be paid royalties. In Anaheim, Disney is spending its own money.

Goddard and others in the industry wonder how the demanding customers of the region’s theme parks will react to a scaled-down Disney venture. “If anyone else built it, you would say it is a pretty good effort, but this is Disney,” Goddard said.

Nonetheless, evidence of Disney’s storied magic in theme park building is evident even as workers rush to complete the project.

The company spent more than $500,000 on 136 smog-resistant Aptos Blue and Soquel redwoods from the Santa Cruz area to give portions of the park an authentic forest look.

On a recent day in the Condor Flats area, themed like an aging flight test center, workers knelt on the gray concrete, screwing metal-ringed airport runway lights into the cement next to the rusty blue Rite-Flite Fix-Center, actually a restroom station.

Disney’s Imagineering team also ordered work redone that didn’t fit its vision for the park. A row of lights lining the walkway of the Grizzly Peak area was replaced after a contractor installed fixtures that looked new, standing out next to the “aged” look of surrounding hardware.

“Our creative resolve has not changed,” Pressler said. “We have that same desire to tell stories in a compelling way through the use of our technology and to provide a range of experiences for our guests.”

The question for Disney is whether the scaled-down experience the company will offer in California Adventure will be good enough to turn Disneyland Resort into a profitable multi-day destination closer to the model of Walt Disney World in Orlando.

“This really is a length-of-stay game we are all playing,” Pressler said.

Universal’s Expensive Lesson

Seagram’s Universal Studios and its partner, Hard Rock Cafe owner Rank Group, tried the same game in Florida with Islands of Adventure. They spent far more than necessary, it turns out.

Opening with half a dozen $50-million-or-more rides, Universal and Rank strove for a theme park that would be as richly detailed and have as imaginative attractions as Disney World. Universal believed it would become a tourist magnet and fill the hotel rooms and restaurant tables at its Orlando resort.

The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man attraction at Islands of Adventure may be the best theme park ride in the world, melding story and technology in a way that surpasses Disney’s top efforts. But Islands has become a cautionary tale for the rest of the industry. Rank bailed out of the project earlier this year, selling its 50% interest in Islands, the adjacent Universal Studios park and CityWalk for $275 million plus its half of about $1.6 billion in debt to Blackstone Capital Partners of New York.

The deal gives the entire resort, including the previously existing Universal Studios park, a value of about $2 billion, roughly 60% of its estimated development cost, according to industry analysts.

“Islands of Adventure burst the theme park bubble, and now people are scaling back,” said Tom Ruzika, whose Irvine lighting company is a major theme park subcontractor.

He said other theme park companies looked at the Islands of Adventure experience and opted for more outdoor thrill rides such as roller coasters, Ferris wheels and spinners rather than special-effects-laden attractions.

“That’s much of what you are seeing at California Adventure, though there will be a Disney twist on the rides that will make them better than the standard fare,” Ruzika said.

Regional parks such as Six Flags Magic Mountain will still push the edge on fancy metal thrill rides, which have become its stock in trade. But even then, less will be spent on the traditional theming and story used to give these attractions identity.

But it is such themed attractions as Haunted Mansion and Indiana Jones Adventure that placed Disney at the industry’s forefront. These rides are packed with special effects--everything from dancing ghosts to menacing animatronic snakes--that give the feel of a three-dimensional ride into a movie.

And these rides are often the most expensive. The two most acclaimed show rides, Islands of Adventure’s Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man and Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure, each cost in the neighborhood of $100 million, about the price tag for a blockbuster Hollywood film.

Relying on the Disney Mystique

California Adventure has one such ride, Superstar Limo. It takes visitors on a mad dash through Southern California on the way to a Hollywood premiere in which they are the stars. People familiar with the attraction say it will have a high capacity, meaning that Disney will be able to move more than 25,000 people through the ride each day, but that the effects are modest by Disney standards.

Disneyland, by comparison, has nearly a dozen special-effects rides.

Most people will see California Adventure’s attractions as true “Disney” rides, Disney Imagineering’s Sklar said. King Triton’s Carousel, for example, is a standard merry-go-round system purchased from D.H. Morgan Manufacturing in La Selva Beach, south of San Francisco. But, Sklar noted, an Imagineer designed each of the California sea animals that replace horses on the carousel.

“It’s now something that is one of a kind in the world,” Sklar said.

Pressler hopes the lesson for the industry will be that “like in the animation business, it’s very hard to do what Disney does.”

Even when Disney does it on a budget.

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Disney’s California Adventure Strategy

Disney isn’t aiming its California Adventures theme park, opening in February, at thrill seekers.

The coasters aren’t the fastest...

Six Flags Magic Mountain’s Goliath: 85 mph

California Adventure’s California Screamin’: 55 mph

...the free falls aren’t the farthest...

Knott’s Berry Farm’s Supreme Scream: 312 feet

California Adventure’s Maliboomer: 196 feet

...and the price isn’t the lowest...

Legoland adult admission: $34

All others: $40 to $41

California Adventure’s expected adult admission*: $41

...but, hey, you get the Disney pixie dust.

No one else has Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Mickey Mouse and the Disney experience.

* Based on Disneyland’s current price

Sources: Theme parks

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* SPECIAL REPORT

This article, related charts and previous articles in this series are available at https://www .latimes.com/themeparks.