Disney Guests Imagineering Own Profits

Steve Carll hopes to make some bucks with the click of a Mouse.

As light crowds milled through Disney’s new California Adventure on Thursday morning, Carll, 55, skipped the rides and went straight for the souvenir shops, where he spent about $1,000 on opening-day trinkets and mementos he hopes to peddle to Disney buffs over Internet auction sites.

“I took a chance on some of that stuff,” Carll said as he reviewed his inventory of $195 lithographs, $125 watches and $60 pin sets.

Carll, a Caltrans worker from Walnut, might have taken a bigger chance than he thinks. Experts say the market for such souvenirs can be more volatile than the Nasdaq, and speculators seeking a quick profit might find themselves with a bunch of dust-collecting knickknacks.

But if the speculators are lucky, the experts said, a flurry of interest in what is known as Disneyana might lead to a quick price spike.

“This stuff might double or triple [in value] over the next month or two, and then it will calm down,” said Bob Crooker, a Wakefield, Mass., dealer in Disney memorabilia. “Once the park’s open and the stuff’s on the market for a while, it loses its value real fast. And then it will take another 20 years for the initial value to come back.”

California Adventure trinkets actually made it to the memorabilia market before the park opened. Vendors began hawking framed opening-day tickets, event pins and other items on the EBay online auction Web site over the past few weeks. By Thursday afternoon, more than 260 California Adventure items were posted for sale.

Martha Howse, managing editor of the Disneyana Exchange newsletter in Orlando, Fla., said the early-market items usually come from Disney workers with employee discounts underselling speculators.

Howse said the Disneyana Exchange, which brokers memorabilia, probably won’t list California Adventure items for three months, letting the initial flurry of interest subside. Even then, she said, prices will be wide-ranging. And unpredictable.

“It will affect the whole [Disney] collectibles market,” Howse said. “It will settle in about 18 months and then it will gradually start going back up.”

Kolby Kirk, 25, a self-described “dot-com casualty” from Santa Monica, hoped to turn a profit sooner rather than later.

After Thursday’s opening ceremony, Kirk scraped up yellow vinyl shreds from burst balloons and photographed the area to authenticate the material. He planned to post the burst balloons and the photos on the Internet to see what they might bring in.

“There are people from all around the world who wish they could be here,” Kirk said. “In a way, I’m helping them out. . . . These people who grew up under Disney are now doctors and lawyers, and they have money to spend.”

Kirk then hit the Treasures Paradise shop, where he hoped to buy low and, later, sell high. But there was no buying low.

“You don’t know how many of these [commemorative pins] Disney made,” Kirk said, dropping out of the line. “If they made 2,000, it’s a good deal. If they made 20,000, that’s another story.”