Let’s face it, millennials believe everything was better in the 90s. And as a millennial, I can confidently say that idea isn’t wrong. So how about Disney World?
The 90s are known as the Disney Decade to fans of the company because of the massive amount of growth seen during that ten year span. The first real modern hit of the Disney Decade was The Little Mermaid in 1989 that started the whole thing, then it was followed by a block of massive hits: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), The Lion King (1994), A Goofy Movie (1995), Pochantas (1995), Toy Story (1995), Hercules (1997), A Bug’s Life (1998), Mulan (1999), Tarzan (1999), and Toy Story 2 (1999). While this isn’t the entire Disney collection from the 90s, these movies made up the foundation of what we see modern Disney as today.
With the movies at an all time high in terms of quality and fan reception, it was only natural that the president of Disney at the time, Michael Eisner, decided to make a massive push in the parks. While Eisner was not universally loved, he was undeniably a creative force when it came to coming up with and ideas and quickly turning them into a high quality reality. He was very “Walt Disney like” in that way, but unfortunately his creative drive (and lack of a realistic view on how to spend the companies budget) caused him to be overly confident to an impossible level in a lot of decisions. His push to bring Disney to the level of global powerhouse ultimately led to overconfidence in the product, and what many consider one of the worst decisions in Disney history (at the time), Euro Disney; or Disneyland Paris as it is called today – more on that later. But what about the domestic parks? The world wasn’t nearly as globalized in the 90s so while in modern day we see Disney distributing its budget to its parks around the globe, leaving the domestic parks with a smaller fraction of that (or so it seems), the 90s gave us the bulk of the quality upgrades right here in the American parks which is something that just doesn’t happen anymore.
When comparing ride quality, it’s a no-brainer that modern rides are going to take the crown just based on the technological advancements over the last 30 years. It’s when you start to look at the qualities of Walt Disney World that make the resort unique that you start to see some cracks in their company narrative. Put bluntly, a majority of what you can find at Disney World you can now find fairly easily at other theme parks, and that will be even more true when Universal Studios opens their third theme park, Epic Universe. The Disney difference still exists, but it’s not the same “Disney difference” that it gave us in the 90s.
Cast Member Service & Park Cleanliness
Disclaimer: Cast members still provide excellent service, do not go into reading this without storing that detail away somewhere. Disney still stands apart from the crowd when it comes to service, but it is much different then what it used to be.
Most of this is anecdotal considering I was in elementary school during the 90s, and while I went to Disney I was not subconsciously judging the cleanliness of the bathrooms or the friendliness of servers back then. But let’s face it, whenever you read about how service used to be “back in the day” the only logical conclusion you can draw is that the service is no longer the lone gold standard and is now much more on par with other well ran tourist destinations. This is because: Disney is larger and much more complex to manage, and is much more susceptible to scrutiny than it was thirty years ago.
Let’s go to some common complaints from today:
Bathroom cleanliness: Let’s just admit it, on Disney forums and Facebook groups you see frequent complaints about the bathrooms. I chose this as an example because it’s as baseline as it gets and I can personally comment on it from using the park bathrooms myself. If we’re being fair upfront, the parks actually do a great job of keeping the bathrooms relatively clean, considering the park foot traffic. However, you still do see toilet paper on the ground, water spills, dirty toilet seats, etc. While it is not nearly as frequently as you see at a Six Flags or Cedar Fair location, Disney bathrooms still do reign supreme by comparison. But is this because Disney does it that much better, or has the bar for the entire industry fallen as a whole? From what I can tell, long time park goers on forums/videos/etc. all echo each other that the bathrooms were always kept in “near perfect” condition back in the 90s. Whether this is because the lowest level cast members cared more back then or it was just easier to maintain is something I won’t comment on since I can’t prove something like that either way, but it’s worth giving some thought to.
Restaurant servers: I can personally attest to this: Disney table service restaurants can have hit or miss service depending on the restaurant and when you go. Typically speaking across the board you will get good to great service as long as your reservation are between the hours of 8am and 11am or 5pm and 8pm. From my own personal experience, almost any table service on Disney property will provide excellent service during these windows. It’s when you start going to the reservation times outside those windows where the successful rate drops significantly. The worst service I ever had while on vacation was an 8:30 pm reservation for Ohana in the Polynesian, while at the same time some of the best service I’ve ever had was at Ohana in the Polynesian.
If you go back and read reviews from thirty years ago, you never hear about service issues at restaurants. The table service restaurant quality is one of the reasons the resort was put on such a pedestal in the first place. My personal take on this, from working in restaurants myself, if that the beginning and the end of the shift is the hardest to manage because of everything else that goes along with it, and Disney restaurants also fall victim to that. The time I had “bad” service at the Polynesian was still bearable because I could tell it wasn’t the servers fault. The restaurant as a whole seemed like it was having hiccups as we were the only table in the section so there just seemed to be a front of house dining room management misfire. Something that probably wouldn’t have happened at 6 pm with a full dining room. Not the worst scenario, but also not the best. I personally believe that this kind of thing has always happened, but now in 2024 we have many more soap boxes that we can stand on to let others know. This is an idea I will be talking much more about in a couple paragraphs.
Value for What You Pay: Let’s just be honest, Disney is not cheap. The number one complaint you hear about Disney World vacations is the price, or somehow pertains to something being overpriced. And the real kicker? Disney knows this and they just keep relentlessly raising prices. Yes, it’s 2024, and yes, it’s a luxury theme park destination, but we’re now at the point that we as a Disney community have gotten so used to price increases we’ve been forced to accept them as an inevitability of going to visit the mouse. My personal take on this is, “sure, that’s fine. But what are we getting for these price increases?”
And to be fair, that’s where Disney falls short sometimes. Price increases are going to happen as the parks get busier and inflation continues to be a thing. But wait a minute, how come the hot dogs at Casey’s corner went up 20% and we no longer have free liquid cheese to dip it in? That’s a small example that echoes a much larger complaint: Disney raises prices frequently but the accommodations don’t always go in the same direction. If we’re paying more, we expect more. Bottom line.
New attractions do not go up nearly as quickly as they should for a company as “resource heavy” as Disney. Over 5 years to build Tron? You already had the blueprints from Shaghai. Just wild. And the Epcot “overhaul”? They walled off the majority of the park, raised the prices like four times, ripped out the center of the park for benches and cell phone chargers, and called it a day. They also put in the Moana water exhibit, but did we really need to shut down half the park for years for that? Okay, so maybe everything I just said is a little on the Karen side of descriptions but you get what I’m trying to say. We do get upgrades and more for our buck, but it’s not fluid or consistent. We get an announcement for a price increase, then we get some plans for new rides coming in ten years, then half those plans don’t even amount to anything while the prices continue to go up. I love Disney, but this is not sustainable.
Let’s put this into perspective: Epic Universe coming to Universal Studios took the same amount of time to build that Tron did. Disney got one roller coaster done in the time in took Universal to install a massive, fully fledged theme park. I don’t know what Universal is on right now, but Disney should really start looking into whatever it is. If Disney would take their park ideas and resources and adopt Universal’s decisiveness and efficiency, there would be a LOT less negative sentiment towards the parks as a whole. Announce something, deliver it, prove it was successful, then you raise prices proportionally and appropriately. Rinse and repeat. The parks in the 90s were much more streamline with their plans, their delivery, and their proportional price increases. Your typical guest decades ago perceived they were getting a lot more for the money they paid than your typical Disney guest does now. But this begs another question pertaining to the parks: does that mean the magic is gone?
Is the Magic Gone?
I personally believe the magic is not gone, it’s just different. The magic in the 90s was more of the, “how did they do that?” type of actual wonder when it came to the parks operations, technology, visual effects, etc. Now we have the internet and if we wanted to figure out how Imagineers did this or that, we could Google it and have an answer in five minutes time. That just wasn’t possible in the 90s. There was a much larger buffer between the Disney Bubble and reality than there is now. Before the 2000s, most people didn’t even know about the underground tunnel systems and now you can find hundreds of videos about utilidors on YouTube. Disney can still deliver the same magic and wonder they always used to, but now it’s not about, “how did they do that” in terms of creative engineering, it’s all about, “how did they do that” in terms of technology. And while it might seem like the ideas are one and the same, putting an advanced animatronic at the end of a ride like Navi River Journey and then just not building the second half of the attraction is not okay. Especially when you introduce even more advanced animatronics at Tokyo Disneyland like two years later. Yes, we want to see advanced animatronics, but that is not ALL we want to see.
Don’t get me wrong, rides like Rise of the Resistance and Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind continue to raise the bar of attraction quality, but instead of being new and innovative they’re and just bigger and more intricate versions of things we already have. And while that’s okay, it leaves much to be desired. Let’s compare apples to apples for a second: Tron in Magic Kingdom vs Hagrid’s Motobikes at Universal. I have ridden Tron and never ridden Hagrid’s, and I can already tell you just by watching ride through of Hagrid’s that it’s just an overall better ride. And while that may have just been copying the original Tron in Shanghai, what made Disney think that taking 5 years to reopen the ride that (probably) inspired Hagrid’s in the first place was a good idea? The money invested in Tron could have (and should have been) allocated to something new and groundbreaking for Tomorrowland. Not a clone of a rollercoaster that already has a better version down the interstate at another park. I’m not a hater, Tron is fun, but I am realistic.
Parks in the 90s were about technological advancements, but that wasn’t it. It was about standing out. Yes, Pirates of the Caribbean was a bunch of pirate robots but that alone isn’t what made the ride what it was. It was the story, it was the details, and it was the lore that the ride created. It was completely immersive, and the movies had not come out until the 2000s so before then the rides defined the property. You had to come to the parks specifically if you wanted to see Pirates of the Caribbean, and while I see the benefits of Disney using their existing IP they are missing a huge piece to the puzzle by ignoring new and creative ideas. I’m not saying make original rides and then make movies based off of that IP, because that defeats the purpose as well. I mean going back to the days of original stories in the parks. Original ideas that you can’t get just streaming on Disney+. Disney parks need the “destination factor” again and while it is intrinsically built in to Disney World it is not nearly as prominent.
I’m also not saying stop using existing IP in the parks, but work in a healthy mix. Not only will original story ideas give the park unique reasons to visit, I personally believe it will help spark new creative ideas for rides on how to use the IP. Instead of going the cookie cutter route by picking an existing IP and an existing ride idea, combing and tweaking them, start with a completely blank slate new idea and build from there. What works for that specific IP? If they went about it from that perspective I truly believe that we would see some really cool new ideas. Then, the execs could finally justify all those price increases.
So, Are the Parks Better?
Yes and no. They are better in terms of more selection, more options, size, scale, and everything that could be superficial. However they are severely lacking in heart and imagination, specifically heart. I’m not saying there isn’t heart in the company, but they no longer wear it on the sleeves of the parks. Imagination is also present, but I don’t believe there is enough heart being put into the decision making process on display that imagination. Lands like Pandora and Galaxy’s Edge are larger, more detailed, and more immersive than ever, but it comes off as a blatant way to sell related merchandise and guests see that.
Give us something not attached to a gift shop item. Give us something that an imagineer has wanted to present to the world for decades but has never been able to. Give us new, creative, and dare I say risky projects? Not every project needs to fit that criteria, but also not every project should be created from the same cookie cutter mold. Disney has never been known for their consistency with their announcement follow through, but now with everything being as interconnected as it is everyone is aware the minute it happens. Disney needs to figure out a way to take the infrastructure we have now and present themselves in the same magical, curious was they did decades ago. I love Disney for nostalgia, but I want to love Disney again for their innovation.
Disney has done better in some departments – food, merchandise, etc. but all those quality increases come hand in hand with price increase and make it obvious they are doing it exclusively to increase their bottom line. From a consumer stand point, it feels like Disney used to ask, “how can we fix this problem or accommodate this guest and turn it into something profitable?”, instead of, “we need to increase this bottom line so let’s invent something we can attach a price tag to”. One attitude comes from the brain, the other from the heart. My opinion on the main difference between the parks can be summed up like this: the parks used to be ran by the heart while using the brain to figure out how to do it, and now it’s being ran by the brain first with the heart somewhere off to the side (but still on call) for when the parks need to justify some of their decisions. I hope that makes sense, but it does to me and I feel like if you view the parks the same way I do then it probably does to you too.