THE EDITORIAL BOARD – Like a child who has spent the better part of a year living in a landfill of his own making, only to finally shove the dirty laundry under the bed and demand applause for “cleaning his room,” Disney strode onto the D23 stage last night and proudly announced that it has rediscovered the radical idea of maintenance.
The biggest applause lines of the evening? They have finally decided to fix the Yeti in Expedition Everest — an animatronic that has been broken for roughly seventeen years — and they are “exploring” the possibility of someday reversing the thirty-year-old Imagination pavilion catastrophe that turned a once-charming attraction into a gutted corporate afterthought. At least this time it didn’t take an actual fire for the company to notice something classic needed restoring.
The rest of the “news” consisted of naming projects that had already been announced, vaguely promising to “reimagine” Spaceship Earth and Disneyland’s Tomorrowland with the same level of detail one uses when promising to “get in shape this year,” and watching Neil Patrick Harris sing and dance like a man contractually obligated to distract the audience from the fact that nothing of substance was occurring.
And the Disney blogosphere? They ate it up with the same uncritical enthusiasm usually reserved for limited-edition popcorn buckets. Within minutes, the internet filled with breathless recaps treating the belated repair of a seventeen-year-old broken robot as if Walt himself had returned from the grave holding a wrench and a five-year capital plan.
One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from the fan accounts: “See? They’re listening! They’re fixing things!” Never mind that the Fountain of Nations — once the literal centerpiece of EPCOT — remains a barren Mad Max wasteland of dead LEDs, abandoned desert biome brush, and crumbling concrete. Never mind that the systematic gutting of Future World has left large stretches of the park looking like a forgotten construction site. Never mind that restoring something as fundamental as Disneyland’s PeopleMover would require actual infrastructure investment rather than sticking Bluey’s face on a themed dance party.
That kind of work is, apparently, a bridge too far for the current regime. Far easier to put a celebrity on stage, have him belt a few show tunes, announce that a previously announced thing now has a slightly more official name, and watch the blogosphere declare the night a triumph of visionary leadership.
Disney has not rediscovered excellence. It has merely rediscovered that if you ignore something long enough, eventually fixing the most embarrassing broken piece of it will be treated as innovation. The bar has not been raised. It has been lowered into a shallow grave and then celebrated when someone finally remembered to put a small marker on top.
The fans will keep cheering, of course. They always do. After all, NPH does have talent.
