I aspire to be you, oh Disney Master

"I've not been to Disneyland Paris as much...only about 20 times. But Tokyo is my favorite. I have an annual pass. When in doubt, always buy an annual pass." 

This fan lives in Dubai, and also has an annual pass to Disney Hong Kong. 

Guns, picnics, and organized crime

It's always really fun to me to see what's a big deal in other cultures. Pointing at someone with one finger, leaving chopsticks sticking up in a rice bowl - perfectly innocent things for me might be a total no-no for you.

Which makes the Disney rules fun to compare. Looking at the standard set of park rules in the US yields the standard set of prohibitions: no alcohol, no weapons, no inline skates, no swearing at the park attendants no matter how many hours you'll need to wait to see Elsa. None of these look interesting to me, although I wonder what foreign tourists think of our list of rules.

When I look at other countries though, it's kind of surprisingly fun. For example in Tokyo Disneyland:

From the Tokyo Disneyland Pamphlet

You got it, no organized crime at Disneyland. Not in the Mouse House.

I've heard of the yakuza - the transnational organized crime syndicates - in Japan, but in three years of going there, I've only ever seen it once. Maybe, if I use my imagination. Walking down a busy street in Shibuya there was a man going down the sidewalk in a double-breasted suit. The Tokyo crowds literally parted for him, people bowing a bit with respect and perhaps a little fear. He might have been yakuza, or maybe he was just known for randomly beating people up. I wasn't about to find out but watched from a safe distance.

Yeah, you in the double breasted suit. No Haunted Mansion for you!

When I was preparing for my Disneyland Paris trip, I saw a dozen questions online asking whether guests should even bother bringing food into the park, or if it will be confiscated. In any Disney park, bringing snacks is a good strategy, as the counter service the park is eye-wateringly expensive and especially, surprisingly for Paris, distressingly inedible. But Parisian Disneygoers are greeted with this sign:

Sign outside Disneyland Paris entry

Considering that the word "picnic" has its roots in French (pique-nique - original meaning lost, possibilities include picking at your food, or bringing your own wine to a meal), it seems particularly unfriendly. But also considering that the French like to bring giant picnic hampers for leisurely, hours-long meals on beautiful days, the park planners probably feared hoards of people staking out turf in front of the Sleeping Beauty Castle. Instead they created large picnic areas outside, to leave an authentic park experience inside, free from picnickers sampling cheese who might make you think that a day in Disneyland was for enjoying with family instead of stampeding from ride to ride.

So there you have it. Leave your guns at home in the US, your mafia uncle at home in Japan, and by no means bring a large, overstuffed picnic hamper to Disneyland Paris.

(PS - if you're going to Paris, go ahead and bring your chips and granola bars. Those are actually okay.)

Hmmm...

Here's a concept sketch of Disney Hong Kong, taken from a display at Disneyland Paris. I'm not sure how I feel about these very slanty eyes. I'm not all indignant, but I do wonder if a Chinese person actually drew this. Or someone who ever met a Chinese person.

Disneyland Tokyo and the Single Rider Line

When Radiator Springs Racers opened at Disney’s California Adventure it was a total boon for my niece and me. Rather than the rope drop crowd of hundreds stampeding to Toy Story Mania with us, they were making a beeline into Cars Land, leaving us to a relatively line-free first three trips through the Toy Story midway. The line for Radiator Springs would suck people up all day, keeping them in line and away from other rides.

180 minutes. A good day for Toy Story Mania.

When lines get that long, park visitors often hop into the single rider’s line. This line allows cast members loading the ride to make sure every car goes out at full capacity. So Radiator Springs Racers with its 3-seat-per-row configuration often accommodated a family of 4 (in 2 rows of 2) and 2 single riders, one per row. Awesome. If you didn’t mind sitting with another group you could significantly cut your time in line, and plenty of people – particularly teenagers – did just that, hanging out in the single rider line with their friends, riding with strangers, and regrouping at the end of the ride to go their merry way.

1/3 the wait. All of the fun. 

When I was at Disneyland Tokyo on Halloween this year they sold out of tickets by noon. It was THAT crowded. I headed towards Splash Mountain because it’s always a hoot to hear Zippity Doo Dah in Japanese. The line was 150 minutes long. Fortunately, there was a single rider line so I headed down.

Here is the single rider line at Splash Mountain, just before boarding:

Don’t see it? Right. Too dark.  Here it is lightened up, and I’ll point out the line with an arrow.

Still don’t see it? Oh, right that’s because there ISN’T anyone waiting. Not a SINGLE PERSON. That guy at the end, that's a cast member. With an over two-hour wait, no one wants to ride alone in Japan, and no one wants to ride with strangers. You ride with the friends you came with, or you don’t ride at all. It’s kind of a wonderful sentiment.

And if you look at the ride photos of everyone screaming on the Splash Mountain final drop, you’ll that almost every single car has at least one empty seat. 

To be fair to Tokyo Disneyland, I think they realize this, because Splash Mountain has the only single rider line in the entire park, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped using it entirely. No one wants to be a single rider in Japan.

I’ve spent the last two and a half years working here to try to bridge Western and Japanese efforts towards sustainable seafood, and one of the things I’ve repeatedly stressed to the Westerners I work with is the need to belong to your group.  Breaking from the pack and doing something different or doing something alone is a pretty big deal, and asking for it to happen a pretty big non-starter. So for now there's a lot of conversation about the topic, and not much doing of anything. To my thinking this is okay. Because at some point if you can get the group to agree, when they do something, they do it together and they do it en masse.  This gives me a tremendous amount of hope for Japan, and when I see that completely empty single riders line it does feel like Disneyland Tokyo is the happiest place on earth.

Red Hot Frozen

Every once in a while an unexplained cultural phenomenon hits us. In my childhood it was Cabbage Patch Kids: ugly, expensive, wearing impossibly unfashionable clothes. In the 90's there was Tickle Me Elmo, with its creepy unending giggles that made you think you may wake up one night to see it holding a knife.

By now it's no news that Disney's Frozen is the unprecedented phenomenon of the decade. Even without any kids in the house, I'm aware of this, from the Facebook posts to the Disney blogs to the sudden appearance of Frozen Sing-Along movies at my local theater.

Going to Walt Disney World is like heading to Frozen central. It's completely CRAZED. Disney does a good job in keeping the chaos contained. The Princess Fairy Tale Hall is indoors, so I didn't see how many thousands of people are packed inside, but families can wait FIVE HOURS to meet Anna and Elsa.

Why yes, I will wait 300 minutes to meet some college girls wearing princess dresses.

While the Bippity Boppoty Boutique is churning out hundreds of little princesses a day, there's not a single Elsa coming out of the Disney boutiques because they simply can't keep the costumes in store. A few times I did catch glimpses of an Elsa skipping through the park - those lucky kids had parents who thought ahead to hunt down the costumes on eBay prior to visiting the park.

She doesn't know how lucky she is.

Nope, Frozen isn't just for little girls either.

The whole franchise is so popular now that in all the Disney shops there are Frozen sections with tags telling potential customers that they are limited to five items per person unless otherwise specified. Of course, with the feeding frenzy from other Frozen fans it's likely that your five items will be Frozen frosted cookies and Olaf t-shirts, rather than Elsa costumes or dolls.

Last week, I ducked into every princess store I passed without seeing Elsa dolls or costumes. On the last day, bingo! An entire wall of Elsa dolls, recently arrived that morning. The cast member estimated they got a thousand dolls, and would be sold out by early afternoon. Customers who were interested in buying it but wanted to come back later in the afternoon so they didn't have to carry it all day were advised to buy it now and put it in a locker.

Don't let her Snow White dress fool you: she really wants to be Elsa too.

I'm now hunting down references to just what Frozen has accomplished in real terms. So far, I've discovered that Elsa is the most profitable princess. Tourism in Norway is up: 152% more searches for flights to Norway, triple the normal visits to the Norwegian tourism web site. And more "Let It Go" covers than you can shake a stick at. 

I can't for the life of me figure out why it's all so popular. If you have any ideas, let me know. Or maybe I should just let it go too.

Welcome Home

When I spent three weeks in Tokyo on my own last year I got pretty lonely. Not only was I away from all of my friends and family, but being in a completely different environment where I couldn't even say "good morning" to the Seven-11 clerk became thoroughly depressing. So I went to Tokyo Disneyland, looking for familiarity, for a little bit of America in the middle of Japan. It was as close to home as I was going to feel until I managed to land back in San Francisco. Somehow, even though the Country Bears sang "On the Road Again" in Japanese, it made me feel like I was home.

Lately I've started talking to people about their connection to Disney, and have been surprised how often this word "home" is used. They don't even need to go on rides, or meet familiar characters. Sitting on a bench on Main Street, watching the crowds go by, is all the experience they need to feel like they are home again.

For some people, particularly in southern California where it all originated, it's not just their home but a familial home, kind of like Windsor Castle for the British royals. (And like Windsor Castle, tourists visit your home all the time, but it's still your home.) I've spoken with people who are now into building fourth-generation memories in the Disney Park home. Their parents were at Disney when it opened. They visited with their parents as kids, and when they had their own kids, brought them to the parks to share their own special memories and build new ones. And now their grandkids are layering on that emotional attachment to the family home.

And this is where the Disney understanding of its brand power comes in for the kill. With products like Disney Vacation Club and the Disneyland annual passport (as well as the Premier Passport for both Parks), the Disney Company invites people to come back to Disney parks again and again, every year, for the $98/day park tickets and $4 bottles of water that keep the shareholders happy. And with every trip and with every new generation, the parks become more of home, the attachment stronger.

I know there are other places people think of as "home." It's usually somewhere familiar, where they've spent happy times over repeated visits. For me it's also Las Vegas (particularly Circus Circus) and Hawaii and the Dish hike in the Stanford foothills. It's even something more intangible like Star Trek and the smell of dried California chaparral. But I've yet to find a place that so systematically builds on this product of home.

At the entryway of Animal Kingdom Lodge.

When Disney created the park he was inspired by his weekly visits with his daughter to the local park. He wanted something bigger, that the whole family could enjoy together. I wonder if he could see into the future at the parks that have grown out of his dream, what he would have thought.

"How tall IS he, anyway?"

Just a short and quick observation. When you're at any of the Disney parks, there are handy boards around that tell you how long the wait time is for each ride. This saves you from trekking across the length of the park only to find that the wait for Space Mountain is 2 hours.

If you hang around these boards you can hear how people plan and negotiate with each other. Which I was doing in Anaheim, when a family came by with their son. "Oooo, Splash Mountain is 55 minutes! David would like that." David, maybe 4 or 5 years old, nods vigorously. Then "Minimum 40 inches. Is he 40 inches? How tall IS he, anyway?" Parents look at each other blankly.

40" - 46" - 54" - who really knows how tall their kid is?

Because, of course, neither parent decisively knew. Kids that age sprout like bean stalks, and the last time you measured could have been 2 inches ago?

Once you get to the ride, the cast members have sticks to measure your kid. But if you're doing your planning at the board, it's a lot harder. It's actually impossible, because you can't measure at the board.

Easy experience design upgrade: measuring post located at all attraction boards, and everywhere else where people commonly stop to figure out their next ride.