Big, Fat Flops: 6 Disney Experiments OUTSIDE The Parks That Crashed & Burned

By Brian

Tuesday, December 28, 2021 - 21:55

Failure – debilitating, humiliating failure – probably isn't something you associate with Disney... Sure, sometimes a movie flops hard. In the parks, once in a while, we chronicle the embarrassing story of an embarassing attraction. But it's not often that Disney ends up with a mistake you can't help but hear about...

Today, we're chronicling six very big experiments Disney undertook outside of its theme parks... and the spectacular crash and burn each produced. Hidden in these six flops are six lessons that we hope the Walt Disney Company took the time to learn... and six very interesting ideas that could still have legs if they're done right...

Pleasure Island

Image: Disney, via D23

At least for some Disney Parks fans, the late 1980s and early '90s were an unmatchable heyday for Walt Disney World. In retrospect, it's easy to see why. With then-new CEO Michael Eisner at the helm, Disney was gutsier than it had ever been before. Michael Eisner had big plans for how to use the company's 40,000 acres in Florida, and among the most spectacular was Pleasure Island.

The thinking is simple: in the '80s, Disney was viewed largely as a "family" destination with little appeal to adults. Even EPCOT Center's valiant effort to reinvigorate the "Vacation Kingdom" was falling on hard times. Meanwhile, dance clubs and bars in Orlando – like the famous Church Street Station complex – were brimming with young adults paying cover fees and buying drinks. It's no surprise that Eisner decided to capture the market himself with a new expansion of the Disney World Marketplace (today, Disney Springs) that would cater to adults, keeping them dancing into the night.

Image: Disney

Pleasure Island opened May 1, 1989 – the same day as the Disney-MGM Studios. As you might expect from the "Ride the Movies" era of Imagineering, the island's clubs, bars, and restaurants were all stylized as reclaimed industrial warehouses once owned by a mysterious adventurer named Merriweather Pleasure, with clues across the complex telling his backstory. By far, Pleasure Island's most famous inhabitant was the Lost Legend: The Adventurers Club, a living theater, restaurant, walkthrough, and bar packed with surprise special effects and actors.

Image: Disney

WHAT HAPPENED: When Pleasure Island opened, a ticket was required to cross onto the island, and right out the gate, the complex failed to meet attendance projections. In 1997, the bright, buzzy "West Side" opened, coinciding with the entire complex (the Marketplace, Pleasure Island, and West Side) joining together as "Downtown Disney." It didn't make sense for Pleasure Island – smack dab between two family entertainment zones – to be a hard-ticketed, 21+ experience that families had to detour around. Then, in 1999, Universal's CityWalk debuted up the road, arguably capturing the sleek, cool, entertainment zone / young adult hang out vibe in a more modern way.

In 2004, the Island itself was opened to the public with each individual club charging entry fees instead. Even then, the era of '90s "dance clubs" was well in the past. Disney must've recognized that makes far more money charging premium rent to outside vendors rather than operating and staffing venues of their own. The last clubs closed in 2008, leaving the path between the Marketplace and West Side pretty vacant.

Image: Disney

Plans announced in 2010 would've transformed the island into "Hyperion Wharf," but allegedly, vendors didn't race to fill Disney's planned redesign... so the island sat empty. Pleasure Island was a problem, and clearly a much more aggressive redesign would be needed to lure vendors to the property.

In 2013, the entire Downtown Disney complex was redesignated Disney Springs. Pleasure Island became an upscale neighborhood called "The Landing" – one of several aesthetic upgrades to the property to attract a more sophisticated range of retailers. Now, CityWalk is Orlando's spot for music, dancing, and entertainment while – for better or worse – Disney Springs is content being an upscale outdoor shopping mall.

ESPN Zone

In 1996, Eisner's Walt Disney Company made one of the brashest purchases in American entertainment history to that point: they purchased Capital Cities/ABC Inc. for $19 billion (worth nearly $34 billion today – more than Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm put together). It's that acquisition that left Disney in charge of a broadcast network (ABC) and began the company's growth into the international media conglomerate we know today. As part of the purchase, Disney also inherited majority ownership of ESPN, a leading cable sports channel.

It was reported Disney Parks and Resorts vice president Art Levitt who suggested leveraging the ESPN brand on a wider scale. Given his one-time role as CEO of Hard Rock Cafe International, Levitt was just the man to oversee the operations of a whole new subsidiary at the company called Disney Regional Entertainment. (Pleasure Island and later, Downtown Disney, was retroactively nested under this banner, too.)

Levitt reportedly had difficulty selling the concept to ESPN leadership but managed to squeak out the EPSN Club at the brand new Disney's BoardWalk entertainment complex in 1996 as a proof of concept. It worked.

In 1997, ESPN Zones were announced for across the country – Disney Regional Entertainment's first foray into bringing the company closer to home. Ultimately, nine opened: Atlanta, Anaheim (at Disneyland's Downtown Disney), Baltimore, Denver, Chicago, Las Vegas (at the New York, New York), Los Angeles, Times Square in New York City, and Washington, D.C.

Each ESPN Zone was essentially an ornate "Bar & Grill" with hundreds of television screens. Placemats were printed daily to include the previous day's scores and the current day's sport match-ups, and the restaurant staff was subject to daily briefings so they could keep patrons updated on results. Most locations also included private screening rooms, plus a 10,000 square foot arena. All locations were also set up for live broadcasting, sometimes including full radio studios for live commentary.

Image: Disney

WHAT HAPPENED: Starting in 2009, ESPN Zones started dropping like flies. Disney cited the "economic environment" during the Great Recession as the reason that Denver and Atlanta's closed within six months of each other. By the next summer, just two locations remained: Disneyland and Los Angeles. Even then, Disney officially sold off the management rights, washing their hands of the concept.

The L.A. location closed for good in 2013, while the lone survivor in Disneyland's Downtown Disney held on till 2018, only closing to make way for a hotel that never came. (The building is used for occasional promotional events, but is expected to be torn down as part of a wider Downtown Disney redevelopment in California.) However, the prototype ESPN Club remains at Disney's BoardWalk Resort! It's currently closed as part of the resort's slow re-opening, but its closure is still expected to be temporary.

Meanwhile, back in Florida...

Disney Institute

Image: Disney

The Disney Institute was a very, very bold idea that sounded interesting... of course, by nature of being on this list, it didn't work.

Like with so many of his wildest and most revolutionary ideas, Michael Eisner's plan for the Disney Institute came by way of outside inspiration. As the story goes, Eisner spent a week with his family at New York's historic Chautauqua Institute – a sort of residential summer camp of new age philosophical learning where visitors get to take classes, develop new skills, and learn from esteemed educators in a safe, inspiring, and supportive setting.

Eisner bet big that a concept of just the same type could literally redefine Walt Disney World, turning it into an international destination where guests would skip the theme parks completely and instead follow their far-flung passions. Eisner oversaw the conversion of a rental-neighborhood-turned-resort near the new Downtown Disney into a picturesque retreat of bungalows and treehouses meant to evoke upstate New York – a place for visiting families to live, learn, and lounge – amid a pastoral, pastel campus of clapboard buildings, theaters, studios, and classrooms.

Image: Disney

At least in theory, the Disney Institute looked and sounded like a very clever idea! But as tended to be the case with Eisner's flights of fancy, things changed quickly... In fact, we wrote a full, in-depth history of the Disney Institute for those who want to dig deep into this weird '90s experiment.

WHAT HAPPENED: Eisner's plans for a residential, educational retreat just didn't gel. Guests who were interested in the Institute largely avoided staying on-site in its refurbished '70s bungalows, instead either opting for Deluxe accommodations or Value motels. Management's insistence that the concept be taken seriously kept its leaders from bundling Institute classes with park admission, or even leaning into Disney's in-house specialties. Pretty quickly, expert educators were replaced by in-house cast and prices were slashed, lowering the perceived value of the Institute's classes.

In 2000 – after just four years – the Disney Institute stopped offering classes. The program itself became today's Disney Institute – a corporate training program that holds classes to teach business leaders how to be more Disney-like in their guest service. The physical location was transformed into Disney's Saratoga Springs Resort – a DVC hotel that retains the Institute's upstate New York Chautauqua aesthetic.

DisneyQuest

Image: Disney

DisneyQuest is such an absolutely absurd, unbelievably odd, unapologetically '90s artifact of Disney lore, it would be hard to convince anyone born after 2000 that it existed at all... except for the fact that it survived until 2017!

Another outing by Art Levitt's Disney Regional Entertainment, DisneyQuest had a pretty clever conceit: bringing the Disney Parks experience closer to you. More than just a "family entertainment center" or an "arcade," DisneyQuest was a massive "indoor theme park" defined by its surprisingly ambitious, technologically advanced experiences. At least, for 1998...

Image: Disney

Inside the massive, mysterious blue cube in the middle of Downtown Disney's iconic West Side, DisneyQuest was the Mouse House's equivalent of International Drive's WonderWorks – a captivating, unusual icon that begged to be explored. After handing over a hefty admission fee, guests boarded a "Cybrolator" that carried them into the VenturePort – a central balcony from which guests could explore four "Zones" across as many floors, surrounded in a dark wood, brass, ancient symbols, celestial astrolabes, and wacky pomo design.

DisneyQuest indeed looked like the answer to Disney Regional Entertainment's prayers. A second location opened in downtown Chicago in 1999 – the first in what would've been a nationwide and global expansion effort, bringing the concept to metropolitan areas from Philadelphia to Baltimore and beyond... Yet for all the potential riding on the concept, Chicago's location closed after just two years, and further DisneyQuest plans were abandoned...

WHAT HAPPENED: The real problem is what didn't happen. DisneyQuest displayed pioneering virtual reality and simulation technology; it was a testing ground for Imagineering ride systems; it was, in short, a very strange and formative place for a generation of '90s kids, with the kind of chutzpah we'd love to see from Disney today. But there was one very, very big problem...

TECHNOLOGY. As anyone will tell you, the graph of technological progress over the last 20, 50, or 100 years has seen a vertical climb no one could've expected. Who would've believed in 1998 that by 2021, 3D TVs would've come and gone; limitless storage would follow us on "the cloud"; virtual reality would be accessible from our own homes.

The DisneyQuest that closed in 2017 looked... well... almost exactly like the one that opened in 1998. Seriously. DisneyQuest was an attraction built for Nokia phones living in the age of the iPhone 8. The same experiences that were groundbreaking in the late '90s looked laughably bad and comedically clunky by the late 2010s. Yes, on one hand, late-stage DisneyQuest was "so bad it's good." On another hand, the fact that Disney was still charging people nearly $40 to see what was inside is downright criminal.

Of course, not nearly as criminal as what it became...

5. NBA Experience

Image: NBA / Disney

DisneyQuest's 100,000 square foot facility was demolished in fall 2017. In its place rose the NBA Experience – a two-floor, 44,000 square foot facility (about the size of an ESPN Zone, ironically) custom-built to cater to an emerging relationship between Disney and the National Basketball Association.

Image: Disney / NBA

The NBA described the endeavor as a "one-of-a-kind" attraction developed by Walt Disney Imagineering that would "immerse" visitors in the "heart-pounding action and excitement" of the NBA, creating a "destination for basketball fans from all over the world." Despite the bluster, few Disney fans weren't sold on the attraction's early promise of featuring trivia games, replay videos, and photo opportunities as its major offerings... Turned out, they were right to be worried.

The NBA Experience opened in August 2019, and the early word from Cast Members, reviewers, and the usually-glowing press was... well... mixed. It turned out that the NBA Experience – Disney's hugely-marketed new attraction that replaced the nostalgically-beloved, cult-classic DisneyQuest – was the dud fans expected.

Image: Disney

Inside, guests could practice dribbling basketballs by mirroring footage on video monitors, watch replays of famous NBA moments, tour a locker room museum to take selfies with trophies, use slingshots to launch dodgeballs into basketball hoops, and play NBA2K19 on a bank of XBOX 360s. Probably the coolest experience was the chance to "shoot hoops" while a projected audience cheered... and guests queueing behind you watched impatiently.

Maybe if the NBA Experience had been marketed as an NBA-themed "pop-up selfie museum" with a handful of interactive experiences for kids, fans would've at least had the right expectations going in. It probably also would've been better if the NBA Experience was marketed as an "NBA Visitors Center" open to the public... for free.

But after handing over $34 per person? $136 plus tax for a family of four?! With negative reviews spreading and Disney fans' schadenfreude growing, the NBA Experience went into triage mode pretty quickly.

Image: Disney

WHAT HAPPENED: By late August 2019, NBA Experience Cast Members were dispatched into Disney Springs to dribble with families and drum up interest in the attraction – a very bad thing to need weeks after opening. Though perhaps unfair, fans seemed to relish in the obvious underperformance of the NBA Experience – a flop that everyone except Disney saw coming a mile away.

In September (just a month after its debut), the NBA Experience started offering free admission to Disney Cast Members. In November, admission was dropped to $19 for Annual Passholders. In February 2020, the Park Hopper Plus ticket add-on gained a new perk: free admission to the NBA Experience. That might've been enough to get people in the door. We don't know, because in March 2020, Walt Disney World shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disney Springs reopened in May 2020... but the NBA Experience didn't.

In fact, it wasn't until August 2021 – a year and a half after its pandemic closure – that Disney quietly confirmed that the NBA Experience would never reopen. With just a six month lifespan, it's one of the shortest-lived "permanent" experiences at Walt Disney World... and certainly among the most costly flops the resort has ever seen.

6.    Club Disney

Image: Disney

Another doomed outing from Disney Regional Entertainment, "Club Disney" was a short-lived foray into the "family entertainment center" business dominated by another rodent: Chuck E. Cheese.

The first Club Disney opened in February 1997 in Thousand Oaks, California. A pay-one-price entry fee permitted a family into a playground of experiences like play-places, Disney karaoke, animation classes, a computer lab called ‘The Mousepad,’ the Applaudeville Theater, arcade games, dance stages, and more.

Subsequent installations (in West Covina, California; Chandler, Arizona; Lone Tree, Colorado; and finally Glendale, Arizona) would feature uniquely-themed play structures and one-off attractions like a Tarzan-themed zipline and “Herc’s Gym” themed to Hercules. Families could also purchase Annual Passes to the "Club," signing up for family fitness classes, computer classes, and other unique offerings.

WHAT HAPPENED: Unlike his much more esteemed competitor (whose roots in the business trace back to the '70s), Mickey's attempt to enter the market came a little too late, as evidenced in the definitive telling of the story by our longtime friends at Defunctland. All five locations closed on November 1, 1999 – the first failure of Disney Regional Entertainment. Today, it's wild to imagine the Walt Disney Company – worth an estimated $270 billion – even trying to make strip mall family play centers work, but in the '90s, anything was possible...