Walt Disney: The Ultimate Innovator - Case Study Example

Walt Disney: The Ultimate Innovator Perhaps one of the nation’s greatest innovators is the legendary Walt Disney. Often overlooked because of his association with children’s entertainment, seemingly making him somehow not important, Walt Disney has helped millions of Americans define what it means to them to be American through his innovative use of newly emerging technology and his unique perspective on the business model. While he managed to gain his fame and wealth primarily through the cartoon characters he brought to life, it is his concept of combining these entertaining characters with the concept of an amusement park in the form of Disneyland that he deserves recognition as a true innovator. The original Disneyland theme park opened its gates in Anaheim, California in 1955, introducing an entirely new approach to entertainment and marketing that had no true precedent. Since its opening day, the park has proved to be a strong tourist attraction for young and old alike. Designed as a new innovation in tourism travel, the theme park as it was created drew from several ideas already on the market, but offered visitors a combination of things to do that had not previously been packaged together in quite such a fashion or to quite such a high degree. Through this unique packaging and detailed attention to the small elements of design, Walt Disney literally remade the American ideals of urban Main Street and the small country village even as he presented his own conceptions of future ideals and means of expression. Disneyland had its origins in Walt Disney’s desires to create a world of his own, in which people could enjoy the good life and live, if only for a day, in a world of fantasy (Hunt & Frankenberg, 1990). Disney, a consummate entertainer, wanted to find a way to make his filmic creations come to life for his audiences, giving them a chance to live in the world of fairy tale. At the same time, he wanted to provide families with a vacation destination that was cleaner and safer than the types of amusement parks that were available elsewhere (King 1981). Disney’s dream was to create a park that reinforced and validated middle class values and a connection to the nostalgic past through the properties of play. In putting together his own amusement park, it can be determined that Disney built off of the concepts of other parks but struggled to eliminate those elements that were already considered undesirable or questionable as a means of appealing more to the middle class. To a large extent, Disneyland is derived from its primary forerunners, Coney Island and Riverside parks. Both of these locations were designed to provide thrills and excitement to visitors through the medium of fast rides, exotic attractions and games of chance and challenge. One of Disney’s goals in creating Disneyland was to “replace the risk-taking, sense of danger, commercialism, salaciousness and morbidity associated with the amusement parks’ standard ‘thrill rides,’ barkers, concession stands, games of chance played for prizes and sex and freak shows, with safety, wholesomeness, patriotic and educational values”(King, 1981: 119). In other words, he wanted to provide all the positive elements of the amusement park atmosphere without any of the dangers, degradations or criminal activity more commonly associated with these earlier parks. A great deal of the attraction of these types of parks was the opportunity it provided the visitors to escape the daily routine of their lives and loosen the strict bounds of social correctness for a little while (Moore, 1980). These earlier parks were themselves based upon the success of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago and the 1939 World’s Fair in New York (Zukin, 1991). With no entrance fees and the ability to enjoy the attraction with little investment, the World Fairs were open to wealthy and poor alike, an attribute that Coney Island and Riverside both retained in their development. This opened up the possibility for unsavory elements to enter the amusement business as sideshow attractions that preyed on the gullibility of the less educated. However, the earlier world’s fairs had contained ingredients that Coney Island and Riverside missed. These fairs included four types of attractions that were synchronized to provide a total package presentation. These included amusement parks and rides, stage representations of appropriate architecture for the theme, the use of the most updated high technology and the presentation of an ideal urban community (Zukin, 1991). In the transfer from World Fair to local amusement venue, neither Coney Island nor Riverside managed to key in on this concept of the theme approach. Instead, they focused more upon providing the greatest variety of attractions possible in the available space. In developing his own park, though, Disney made this concept of the theme the central element of his park, adding other elements to the central idea rather than throwing together the elements and hoping they’d entertain. Another idea Disney ‘borrowed’ from these predecessors was the concept of presenting small shows or theaters that depicted other cultures or ways of life depicted on stages that were in keeping with the national ‘vernacular’ architecture (Zukin, 1991). The World Fairs offered exhibits of the newest available or shortly to be available technologies, which Disney incorporated both directly in the form of exhibitions and indirectly as elements of his rides and other attractions. Finally, the overriding theme of the park was designed around the World Fair attempt to provide an idea of the ideal urban community. With these basic foundations in place, Disney then began making customizations to his approach. Taking the fun elements of the carnival atmosphere and the multiple forms of attractions exemplified in the world’s fairs, Disney added the elements of historic forms of entertainment such as the tableaux and the holiday camp as a means of more appropriately reflecting his vision of America at its best (MacCannell, 1999). For example, the astounding President’s show in Frontierland is said to be largely inspired by presentations that had been a tradition in ages past. “They descend, in part, from the patriotic dioramas, tableaux vivants, and waxworks of the nineteenth century. Disney upgraded the technology … but the red-white-and-blue spirit remained much the same” (Wallace, 1985: 39-40). While Disney had generally stayed clear of covering historical subjects individually, there is a clear, deliberate and unmistakable effort to ensure history was included at Disneyland, which was later transplanted to Disney World. Wallace (1985) suggests this is a result of amusement parks that were already in existence when Disney began building his first park. Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village were both already in existence as parks dedicated to preserving a particular period in American history. While they were heavy on historical fact and re-enactment, they are both short on thrill rides and other forms of entertainment. Another popular form of amusement park, the holiday camp provided an atmosphere of family vacation location offering many of the same comforts of home without any of the same responsibilities. The basic premise was to provide a home atmosphere while allowing the mother, the one most responsible for the care and upkeep of the family on a daily basis, a chance for an equally relaxing vacation (Bandyopadhyay, 1973). The primary draw to these types of camps was the intimate familiarity the guests felt with the staff. From the moment of their arrival, guests were at once directed through the provided activities while feeling in complete control of the situation because of the degree of personal service (Davidson & Spearitt, 2000). Again, it can be seen that Disney took the fun elements of these parks, the historical reference, nostalgic atmosphere and sense of participation and worked to overcome the more negative elements. Disneyland works on the desire of the modern consumer to escape the uglier realities of life today and escape back into a more perfect and innocent past. One of the most important desires Disneyland works on is the desire for nostalgia, or a return to childhood as a time we think of as innocent and carefree. “As Kant, in his Anthropologia, suggested, it is really another time, not another place, that we want to re-experience; we want to recapture childhood” (King, 1981: 131). To accomplish this effect, Disney presented an idea of the past recreated and improved to reflect the type of happy past the dominant culture would like to envision for itself. “Disneyland skips over those portions of portrayed history that have a tendency to cause controversy or stress among people of that period or in times since” (Wallace, 1985: 36). Neglecting any suggestion of racism, slavery, war or other unpleasant memories, Disney provides his visitors with entrance into the park only through the main avenue of Main Street USA. This street presents Disney’s impression of the idealistic quintessential small Midwestern town, distorted just enough to bring the visitor, regardless of age, into a child’s perspective while remaining fully functional as shops and other attractions (Burgin, 1982). The way in which he does this is immediately evident for one who seeks to find the answer as it becomes realized that the upper stories of the buildings are built to a different scale than the fully functional ground floors, but remains elusive for those who wish to live the fantasy. Another one of the ways that Disney attempted to ‘clean up’ the amusement park image was by reducing the visibility of the capitalist system. Rather than exchanging cash for rides or games at the point of service, Disney sold a single ticket as entrance into the park and allowed visitors to jump on rides or attend different shows as they wished. By doing this, he was able to invoke a sense of happier times when money wasn’t the base of all pleasant activity. The only cash required within the gates is confined almost exclusively to the gift shops and food vendors, which would be difficult to manage in any other way. In addition to the reduction of modern-day commercialism within the park, “the playful, romanticized tone of false-front buildings and props create an atmosphere of total theater ‘which exceeds the wildest dreams of avant-garde dramatists’” (King, 1981: 127). Visitors to the park are able to experience a number of differing themes and environments with themselves playing a central role in the action. Through this process, they are able to do just what was desired, escape from the cares and worries of today into a world of fantasy, history and future technology. “That Disneyland significantly departed from the dominant fantasy landscape of the time was dramatized when Disney failed to arouse enthusiasm in a convention of amusement park owners that previewed plans for the park in 1953” (Zukin, 1991: 222-223). Potential investors were familiar with other amusement parks that had been constructed around the country and criticized the paltry number of rides Disney would offer potential visitors by comparison. They argued that Disney was wasting a great deal of his valuable real estate in useless prosaic parkland while the types of rides and attractions offered would require significant extensive and expensive maintenance staff and materials just to keep the park up and running. In each case, the investors failed to understand the tremendous degree to which Disney would incorporate entertainment in every element of the park. “Visitors to Disneyland paid for a variety of entertainment experiences linked by the narrative of the different themes. These in turn provided a narrative for different program segments on the Disney Studio’s weekly television series. Combining narrative with serial expectations, each visual product of the Disney Company fed into the others. Although commercial spin-offs were not a new creation, this commercialization was the most extensive to take place under a single corporate sponsor” (Zukin, 1991: 223). Even in this early design phase, Disney demonstrated another area in which his park would differ from others planned or already in existence. This innovation was in his planned use of robotics and other cutting edge technology as a means of providing the park with a sense of magical unreality while keeping it necessarily couched in actual reality. “This ‘animation in the rough,’ ‘the grand combination of all the arts – using sculpture, painting, drama, theatre and film, combined with advanced electrical and engineering skills – made possible lifelike replicas of humans and animals capable of complex programmed motion and sound” (King, 1981: 119-120). This discovery of new uses for available technology in keeping with the overall themed area became one of the major challenges tackled by Disney and his design team. In order to give the technology a sense of unreality, futurism or even a concept of realism, it was necessary to incorporate it in entirely new ways that hadn’t been considered before by incorporating elements of human perception into the design of the robot and thus adopting a postmodern approach to design (Eco, 1986). Postmodernism was an artistic movement that was just beginning to take hold at the time Disney was designing his park (Lyotard, 1979). Without this innovation, Disney was certain his park would not present itself as something new and different to the public. “The originality of these custom-made rides has given the parks a reputation for technical expertise and progressiveness as much as for entertainment” (King, 1981: 120). Ideas that emerged from this innovation approach include the swivel cars and Circle Vision used as integral elements within several of the rides as well as the monorail and skyrides used to transport guests around the park easily, noiselessly, pleasurably and without damaging the park environment. Disneyland has often been criticized as being too commercial, plastic and artificial in its total presentation and deliberate design elements. In some ways, this was exactly what Walt Disney had in mind – presenting the world with a playground of fantasy and nostalgia that could not be rivaled. This playground was completely false in that such a perfect world was not thought to be possible, but Disney brought it to life by making it life-sized, enabling children and adults to return to their childhood in ways they did not expect. This is primarily through his appeal to a widespread common value system that existed in the hearts and minds of the typical Midwest American Protestant. In recreating the positive elements of the amusement parks and giant fairs of Coney Island and the World’s Fair, Disney improved the design by including more of the attractions that delighted visitors at the World’s Fairs and excluded some of the more disagreeable elements of Coney Island. He incorporated an approach to the concept of the whole theater, in which audience and actors worked together to create a unified experience of playtime pleasure. By tracing through the various design elements that contributed to Disneyland’s development, it can be discerned that Disney employed a postmodern approach in building his amusement park that has largely escaped the developers of similar parks in other areas of the world. In its many paradoxes, Disneyland presents a unique experience unparalleled by others. Works Cited Bandyopadhyay, Pradeep. “The Holiday Camp.” Leisure and Society in Britain. Michael A Smith et al. London, 1973. Burgin, Victor. Thinking Photographically. New Jersey: Humanities Press Intl, 1982. Davidson, Jim and Peter Spearritt. “Origins.” Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, 2000. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. London: Picador, 1986: 39-48. Hunt, P. and R. Frankenberg. “It’s a Small World: Disneyland, the family and the multiple representations of American childhood.” Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. A. James and A. Proust (Eds.). London: Falmer, 1990. King, Margaret. “Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form.” Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 15, N. 1, 1981: 116-140. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press, 1979. MacCannell, Dean. “Staged Authenticity.” The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999: 91-107. Moore, A. “Walt Disney World: Bound ritual space and the playful pilgrimage centre.” Anthropological Quarterly. Vol. 53, N. 4, 1980. Wallace, Mike. “Mickey Mouse History: Portraying the Past at Disney World.” Radical History Review. Vol. 32, 1985: 33-57. Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley, CA, 1991. Read More